Fracture

by Joy-Ann Reid

  The level of mistrust among voters of color was profound. An October 2006 Pew poll found that only 3 in 10 African Americans believed their vote would count in November, a view only 8 percent of whites shared.

  Obama spent fall 2006 on the road, drawing large crowds as he rallied Missouri Democrats for Claire McCaskill’s Senate bid, Florida voters for gubernatorial hopeful Jim Davis, and Bay State throngs for Deval Patrick’s historic bid. He was the party’s star attraction, more sought after even than former president Clinton. Obama had a new, bestselling book, The Audacity of Hope, and the rapt attention of the national media. He was viewed as a singularly unifying figure, who enthralled the largely white audiences of party activists who yelled “we love you!” as the young senator spoke to the country’s most idyllic possibilities. Obama frequently overshadowed the candidates he’d come to stump for.

  Anytime it needed to drum up the enthusiasm of the party’s liberal wing—the labor organizers and old New Dealers, and left-of-center stalwarts—the Democrats sent in Barack Obama. But when it was time to rally African Americans, the party sent Bill Clinton to town. Obama was still largely unknown among African Americans, while the former president was the singular draw.

  ON THE DAY AFTER THE 2006 MIDTERM ELECTIONS, OBAMA HELD his first formal meetings with a small group of advisers to explore the possibility of running for president. He’d been hearing talk about his running while he traveled the country. And the next presidential election would be an open contest, with no incumbent in place, and a deeply unpopular Republican exiting the White House.

  Hillary Clinton had been exploring a run, too, and polls showed her with a commanding lead over any other political figure, Democrat and Republican. Her team knew she could raise the money and put together the organization, and her husband, the former president, stood proudly offstage as she delivered the keynote speech at the DLC convention in December. Still, some of her staff wondered if they could really be sure the candidate field was closed, since repeated calls to recruit key potential staffers like David Axelrod and Patrick Gaspard, whose union’s endorsement would be key to any campaign and whose closest friend had run Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign, were going unanswered. Some top aides suspected they knew why. But most in Hillary’s inner circle didn’t know that Axelrod already had a candidate, and that, according to close associates, Gaspard had decided not to work for Clinton the day she voted in favor of war with Iraq.

  On January 16, 2007, the top aides’ suspicions were confirmed when Obama announced that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee. In a video on his website, Obama railed against the “smallness” and bitter partisanship of the politics he’d encountered on Capitol Hill. He lit into the Iraq War—Hillary’s Achilles’ heel—and set his official announcement date for the following month.

  Many in the Clinton camp were stunned, including the former president and the senator herself. Hillary’s intentions had long been known. She was the party’s natural heir, and Bill Clinton was its centripetal force. The former first couple were aware of the glow around Obama, and they had even heard the siren calls for him to enter the race, but, according to a former aide, “Hillary, and Bill Clinton particularly, were thinking, ‘There’s no way he’s gonna run.’ ”

  Four days after Obama’s announcement, the Clinton team released a video in which she declared, “I’m in it to win it!” She announced the start of a “listening tour” with her supporters, reminiscent of the launch of her Senate bid at Pat Moynihan’s New York farm. She vowed to “renew the promise of America” after eight years of George W. Bush. She would seek “the right end” to the war in Iraq, which had cost Bush’s party so dearly in the midterm elections of 2006. It would cost Mrs. Clinton much more.

  ON THE EVE OF THE 2000 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION in Los Angeles, former BET anchor Tavis Smiley, a onetime aide to Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, launched the State of the Black Union, modeled on the 1972 National Black Political Convention. The event would be televised each year on C-SPAN and brought together prominent black scholars, journalists, authors, political leaders, and civil rights activists from around the country to discuss black America’s communal health in the areas of politics, economics, and social welfare.

  This year, 2007, it was set for February 10, and invitations to the event at Hampton University in Virginia had been sent to all the major Democratic presidential hopefuls. Hillary Clinton’s campaign quickly confirmed her attendance. Though she had a commanding lead in the polls, including a 2-to-1 advantage over Obama with African Americans, the campaign was taking no chances.

  The Obama campaign declined. February 10 had been fixed as the date for his official presidential announcement in Springfield, Illinois, and they were expecting a capacity crowd.

  Smiley’s team pressed and kept pressing. They had assembled a who’s who of the black intellectual and civic elite: Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Cornel West, former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder, Radio One founder Cathy Hughes, Marian Wright Edelman, actor Tim Reid, radio host Tom Joyner, and even Chuck D, founder and leader of the legendary rap group Public Enemy. More than eleven thousand people had registered for the daylong Q&A session, and the organizers believed that Obama, whose star had risen largely in the D.C. political media, ought to tell African Americans who he was, and why they should support him over Senator Clinton for the White House.

  After days of back-and-forth, Obama picked up the phone and called Smiley, offering to come to Hampton after his announcement. Smiley declined. Obama next suggested sending Michelle, who knew his political platform better than anyone, and whose legal and intellectual pedigree was as impressive as his own. Michelle had been a standout at Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Her family had ties to Chicago’s storied political machines: Her father was a Democratic precinct captain, and her former boss, Valerie Jarrett, worked in Richard M. Daley’s City Hall. She’d even grown up in the orbit of Rev. Jackson, whose daughter Santita was a friend and high school classmate. The Obamas sometimes socialized with Jesse Jr. and his wife, even attending each other’s weddings. And though Junior viewed Obama as both a rival and an ally, the younger Jackson had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of Obama’s Senate campaign. Michelle Obama would not only ably represent her husband, the candidate; she’d be coming home.

  Again, Smiley rejected this offer, and when Obama suggested that he send a detailed letter laying out his reasons for running for president, the negotiation was at an end.

  Smiley was no incidental figure. He had risen in stature as a social commentator, from BET to a weekly platform on Tom Joyner’s top-rated morning radio show. He’d produced bestselling books based on the State of the Black Union series, which proposed a national agenda for black America, and a plan of action to arrest the political, economic, and social ills of black communities. Smiley and Obama had a passing friendship, as two members of a rising black intellectual elite. But Obama had risen on tracks defined by racial reconciliation, whereas Smiley had done so through a talent for confrontation.

  Now Smiley would direct that talent toward a sharp debate over Obama’s claim to national leadership and his place in black America.

  Four days before the conference was to start, on February 6, the Virginian-Pilot ran an interview with Smiley in which he was asked if he thought America was ready for a black president. He responded: “The question is, is Barack Obama the right person? Obama has not had the quintessential black experience in America—raised in Hawaii, spent time in Indonesia, biracial family . . . Barack Obama is no Shirley Chisholm. When Shirley Chisholm ran in ’72, when Jesse ran in ’84 and ’88, they had long-standing relationships with the black community.”

  Smiley’s challenge to Obama’s “black experience” was rich with irony. Chisholm had positioned herself as precisely the kind of hybrid candidate Obama was attempting to be—declaring that she wanted to empower not just blacks but also “women, young, Spanish-speaking peoples” and “all of
those forces in America that have never had any real input into who’s going to be the chief executive of this land.” Like Obama, Chisholm had neither the consent nor the support of the black political and intellectual elite, who dismissed her campaign because, in their view, she put the aspirations of women ahead of the cause of racial justice.

  Obama, like Chisholm, the immigrants’ daughter, had an upbringing framed by an international context but lived in brown skin in America. And the defining feature of the “black experience”—whether in Hawaii or Chicago’s South Side—was simply being black and experiencing the social consequences.

  And so, Obama and his team saw no need to genuflect before the black elite at Smiley’s conference or anywhere else.

  Instead, despite the five-degree temperatures in Springfield, the Obamas and their young daughters were greeted at 10 A.M. by an enthusiastic, and overwhelmingly white, crowd of sixteen thousand. After an introduction by Illinois’s senior senator, Dick Durbin, who had encouraged him to mount a presidential bid, Obama bounded onto the stage to a U2 anthem: “City of Blinding Lights.”

  “I know it’s a little chilly, but I’m fired up!” he told the crowd, borrowing a riff from an old NAACP call-and-response chant, which he would use often on the campaign trail: “Fired up, ready to go!”

  The night before, Obama had reluctantly sidelined his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was to give the invocation, but who instead prayed privately with the family and Durbin before the announcement. The decision followed the publication of a Rolling Stone article that called Obama’s association with Wright “as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much as Malcolm X, as Martin Luther King Jr.,” citing one of Wright’s sermons, in which the preacher declared that “racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run,” saying of Americans, “we believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”

  The article cited the men’s long relationship: Obama’s consecration of his Christian faith at Wright’s church, and Wright’s role not just as the man who married the Obamas and baptized their children, but as a “sounding board” for the candidate to ensure he kept a level head. The Rolling Stone piece followed a January 21 profile of the 8,500-member Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago that was arranged by the Obama campaign, to combat the insinuations rippling through conservative media that he was a Muslim, an insinuation that in one fell swoop exploited anti-Muslim prejudice, while reminding the more closed-minded among white voters of Obama’s black, foreign father and his cross-cultural, blended family. Despite the candidate and his team’s best efforts, suspicion about Obama’s identity was going to be a feature of the campaign.

  While this was going on in Springfield, Cornel West was onstage in Hampton satirically laying the blame for Obama’s absence on his white senior staff. “Look, Obama is a very decent, brilliant, charismatic brother, there’s no doubt about that,” West said, as Smiley looked on. “The problem is he’s got folk who are talking to him, who warrant our distrust.”

  West speculated that Obama “going to Springfield the same day Brother Tavis has set this up for a whole year” was by design, and that Obama being in Springfield “is not fundamentally about us, it’s about somebody else! He’s got large numbers of white brothers and sisters . . . who have fears and anxieties, and he’s got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm’s length—enough to say he loves us but doesn’t get too close to scare them away.”

  The audience jeered Obama, as West, his voice rising from just above a whisper to just below a shout, asked rhetorically of the absent Obama: “I want to know how deep is your love for the people, what kind of courage have you manifested in the stances that you have and what are you willing to sacrifice for. . . . I don’t care what color you are. You see you can’t just take black people for granted because you’re black. We want to know what your record is. Where’s your courage, what are you willing to sacrifice!”

  The boos for Obama rained down as Smiley read “Brother Baracks’ ” regrets and announced that the candidate would appear in a 60 Minutes broadcast that night.

  A Los Angeles Times article that same day questioned whether Obama would be a “black president” and featured skeptical reviews of his candidacy by black political activists, including a former Obama nemesis from Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University professor Conrad Worrill, who was quoted as saying: “When white folks begin to put their arms around a black person, there’s always suspicion.” Worrill added a comment reminiscent of Bobby Rush’s indictment of Obama when Rush and Obama were electoral rivals: “The question is: Will this generation of new, college-trained beneficiaries of the black political power movement in America fight for black political interests?” It was an almost exquisite irony. Barack Obama was catching hell for not being “black enough” while at the same time his political enemies were preparing to savage him as exotically, radically black.

  That Sunday evening, Obama rebutted these critiques with trademark understatement in his 60 Minutes interview, as he addressed the growing fascination with his racial identity.

  “If you look African American in this society, you’re treated as an African American,” he said flatly. “It’s interesting, though, that now I feel very comfortable and confident in terms of who I am and where I stake my ground.”

  But Obama had other patches of ground to take. He needed to conquer the territory occupied by the black political establishment in Washington, which didn’t know him and which saw itself as the political gatekeeper for black America, and he needed to take and hold the political battlefield littered with black America’s doubts and prove to black voters that he, with or without the blessing of their traditional leaders, could fulfill their wildest political dreams.

  A week before Springfield, Emil Jones, Obama’s political mentor, traveled to the Democratic National Committee’s winter caucus in Washington, D.C. All of the major candidates were there, pressing the flesh at the Washington Hilton, at a time when Bill and Hillary Clinton were burning up the phone lines looking to lock down Hillary’s African American political support base. Hillary already had endorsements in hand from a third of the Congressional Black Caucus, many of whose members had long personal ties to the Clintons and believed Mrs. Clinton’s victory to be a foregone conclusion. Few of them knew Obama well.

  At the caucus meeting, Jones listened patiently as DNC staffers talked about the party’s bounty of candidates and said they all intended to stay neutral.

  “I’m a member of the DNC, and I’m not neutral,” Jones blurted to the room when it was his turn to speak.

  He then launched into his pitch, taking particular note of the front row, where Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, and other Democratic political veterans sat quietly. Many in the room owed long and valuable careers to the Clintons. Some had already committed to Hillary’s campaign—Moore as its director of African American outreach. Others were on the verge of doing so.

  Undaunted, Jones spoke on behalf of Obama, whom he thought of as a son and who he believed had a real chance of becoming the first black president of the United States.

  “Each of us at one time has gone around to all these schools and talked to all these black youngsters and encouraged them to stay in school, and told them you can be anything you want to be,” Jones thundered to the room. “And now is the time.” Jones argued that Obama had the characteristics to lead the country. “He’s young, he’s articulate, he knows the issues,” he said. “We as a caucus should be behind Barack Obama.”

  And then Jones leveled the unkindest cut of all.

  “We don’t owe anybody anything,” he said. “What Clinton did for the blacks he did because he was supposed to do it. He got our votes, so we were entitled to everything we got. He didn’t do us any favors. We don’t owe anybody anything.”

  His words had the sting of accusation. And many in the room felt duly
accused. As Jones finished, Moore stood and walked out of the room.

  Some in attendance resented what they viewed as Jones’s attempt to lecture and manipulate the caucus on the basis of race. Others simply felt they could not afford the psychic luxury of another exciting but ultimately doomed black candidate for president when they believed a second Clinton presidency would mean tangible benefits for their communities. They were incredulous that with the White House finally in reach, the party’s most faithful base was being asked to gamble on the almost unthinkable possibility that just forty years after Dr. King was laid in the ground, a black man from Hawaii with the middle name Hussein could become president of the United States.

  The men and women who had fought hostile forces to have a place in the Democratic Party and had painstakingly built black political machines, from Atlanta to Chicago to Detroit—men like Alabama Democratic Conference chairman Joe Reed, who tirelessly rounded up black votes for the Humphrey ticket in 1968 and was now Hillary’s point man in the South—were less interested in symbolism than in the practical impact of having an ally, meaning a Democrat, in the White House for the next four years.

  “You don’t have all these gymnasiums and things named for Joe Reed because he was interested in symbolic stuff,” political scientist David Bositis said. “He was interested in jobs and roads and highways.”