by Joy-Ann Reid
Barack Obama was on the cusp of securing the Democratic nomination and making history, having fought Hillary Clinton state by state to an insurmountable delegate lead. He had vanquished the party’s most formidable political family and mastered the contradiction between embracing the aspirations of black Americans and avoiding the pitfalls of racialized politics in America, wherein a black candidate was often little more than a candidate for black voters. And there was no turning back.
Smiley and West, and Bob Johnson and Cathy Hughes, and the luminaries that commanded the stage to proclaim the State of the Black Union, had become rhetorical Don Quixotes, tilting at black America’s hopes and dreams. They had, in a very real sense, missed the Obama moment, and now the windmill was spinning on despite them. A prominent civil rights leader later recalled having warned Smiley: “You’re standing on the tracks, in the path of a freight train, brother, and all you’re focusing on is the conductor.”
CHAPTER 7
Father’s Day
How many in this generation are we willing to lose to poverty or violence or addiction? How many?
—Barack Obama, Father’s Day speech at Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, June 15, 2008
BY JUNE 2008, SENIOR STRATEGIST DAVID PLOUFFE HAD CALCULATED that the campaign needed to focus Obama’s attention on swing voters. As one member of the senior staff said, “[Plouffe] figured, ‘We’re going to be ninety-plus with African Americans, so we don’t need to spend much time there. But it was tough to endure going through it, and the residual is still there. It’s why you still have rough going with most of the CBC, the black mayors, legislators, and key influencers around the country who still don’t feel they get that love.”
As a result, black staffers on the campaign complained privately about not being able to make the senator visible, in the barbershops, beauty shops, and black churches, as he’d done in South Carolina. Even in that state, at one point senior campaign adviser Valerie Jarrett had to fly in to mediate the black campaign team’s concerns about access to the candidate for black elected officials, churches, and audiences.
The campaign even faced a minirevolt by black newspaper and radio outlets that complained about scant media buys compared to the outlays for general and Hispanic media. But the senior staff was right not to be worried about a lack of drive among black voters. Black voters were more than energized for the November election. “Our problem,” one senior Florida strategist said, “was how do we get my people, white people, to do the right thing.”
Still, the needed shift to court the electorate outside the coalition of liberal white and black (and increasingly, brown) voters, the candidate’s natural drive toward broad inclusiveness, and his tendency to deliver Old Time Religion to black audiences continued to rankle some members of black academia and media.
Obama’s Father’s Day speech at Apostolic Church of God, on the South Side of Chicago, a church he and his family visited a week after officially severing their ties to Trinity Church, drew a fresh round of criticism from those quarters when he chose to discuss fatherhood. He had been defined, in many ways, by his father’s absence. His first book, Dreams from My Father, was an elongated discourse with a man he barely knew, but whose rejection of family life molded his son in countless ways. Obama was a deliberate, involved father to his daughters and in some ways, a puritan. He spoke from the pulpit about black men, encouraging them to fully embrace the responsibilities of fatherhood, and warned of the social consequences their absence was visiting on black communities.
Ron Walters, a renowned black history scholar and a professor of politics and government at the University of Maryland, flatly replied, “We’re not electing him to be preacher in chief,” and said Obama should “give more speeches about how he would help black communities.” In the online editions of Ebony and Jet, writer Eric Easter accused Obama of making the kind of political calculation Bill Clinton had when he rebuked Sister Souljah.
“By choosing that moment to castigate Black fathers,” Easter wrote, “some worry that Obama gave public voice to what white people whisper about Blacks in their living rooms and cemented his image as a post-racial savior at the expense of Black men. Whether that was Obama’s intention or whether he just figured it was Father’s Day so why not do the absent Father stump speech again is impossible to know, but the event smacked of calculated political expediency that troubled more than a few people.”
Even Michael Eric Dyson was critical, writing in Time magazine, “On father’s day [sic], when Barack Obama assailed absent fathers as a critical source of suffering for black communities, he sought two political advantages for the price of one. He embraced a thorny tradition of social thought that says black families are largely responsible for their own troubles. And he was seen in a black church not railing at racism but rebuking his own race. Obama’s words may have been spoken to black folk, but they were also aimed at those whites still on the fence about whom to send to the White House.”
The campaign was frustrated by the persistence of Obama’s critics, though debates over the causes and cures for black suffering were not new, as in the divide between W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, or the wrangling over the Moynihan Report.
“Clinton got the same grief,” one consultant to the Obama effort said. “As much as there has been tension between these two families, I always felt in 2008 that Barack Obama was more the heir to the Bill Clinton legacy and the product of the Clinton legacy than Hillary was. The things about them: the single mothers in and out of their lives, [being] raised by grandparents. And the politics that [Obama] was talking about—the politics of getting over old divisions, and trying to find a way forward, were very reminiscent of what Bill Clinton was talking about when he ran in 1992.”
But the unkindest cut of all would come from a familiar foil of Democratic campaigns: Jesse Jackson.
On July 9, Al Sharpton was in the middle of his radio show when his cell phone rang. A senior Obama campaign staffer was on the line, asking him to go to break, because the staffer needed to tell him something.
The campaign had a clip of Jackson during a commercial break on Fox News, with a still-open mic, whispering complaints about Obama’s Father’s Day address to Dr. Reed V. Tuckson, a health executive. Jackson could be seen and heard leaning in and telling Tuckson, “See, Barack’s talking down to black people, on this faith-based . . .” and then, after trailing off, “I want to cut his nuts out.”
Tuckson, the brother-in-law of one of the Obama campaign’s legal advisers, Eric Holder (their wives were among the seven siblings of Vivian Malone Jones, who came to the nation’s attention in 1963 as one of two black students to integrate the University of Alabama when that state’s governor, George Wallace, made his infamous “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”), had come to Fox & Friends to talk about the need for African Americans to get health screenings for high blood pressure; a conversation that quickly turned to the role of faith-based versus government institutions. His reaction to Jackson’s words was silence and bewilderment.
The Obama campaign wasn’t worried that Jackson could deenergize black voters, as he’d done to Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. But they weren’t leaving anything to chance and wanted Sharpton to appear on some prime-time shows to refute Jackson’s contention that the senator was belittling black men when he admonished them to be present in their children’s lives.
Sharpton had himself booked on shows with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Fox News’ Sean Hannity, with whom Sharpton at the time enjoyed a surprisingly cordial relationship. While Sharpton was in an SUV on his way to CNN’s studios on July 9, Jackson called: “You know how these mics are,” Jackson said, according to Sharpton aides. Sharpton reminded Jackson that he’d spent nine years hosting his own program on CNN and Sharpton couldn’t understand how the “hot mic” moment had happened to a seasoned TV host.
“What are you doing?” Sharpton asked.
Jackson wanted his onetime protégé to remind people
about his forty years of work in the movement. Sharpton agreed that those years deserved respect, and he had already defended Jackson in this way after it was revealed that Jackson fathered a child out of wedlock. And though people close to Sharpton believed he was tiring of coming to the aid of his onetime mentor, he felt a deep loyalty that endured despite their growing differences. But the comments, and their vulgarity, left little room for explanation.
On CNN, Sharpton defended Obama as “running for president for all Americans, not just African Americans,” and admonished people not to “segregate Senator Obama and impose some litmus test that is unfair and unproductive.”
After CNN, as Sharpton was on his way to his next interview, another call came in, this time from Hannity. “It’s your favorite conservative,” Hannity said, according to Sharpton aides, to which Sharpton replied that he was pulling up to the building and would be on time for the show.
But Hannity wasn’t calling to ask where Sharpton was. He was calling to warn Sharpton not to get out too far on a limb in Jackson’s defense. Only part of the hot-mic tape had been aired by then; Fox would likely release the next part the following week, Hannity warned, and it included Jackson referring to Obama with a racial slur.
Sharpton hung up and called Jackson, an aide said, and repeated what he had just heard. Jackson at first denied it, saying you can’t believe everything you hear on Fox News. Sharpton did the interview, sparring during the show with Maryland’s African American Republican lieutenant governor, Michael Steele, one of the three unsuccessful black statewide Republican candidates in 2006. Sharpton offered Jackson a measured character reference, saying the civil rights leader had “done a lot of great things in his life” and that “I think that anyone would say this is not his greatest moment.” Sharpton staunchly defended Obama’s speech. “I’m glad Rev. Jackson apologized,” he said. “I’m glad Senator Barack Obama accepted. I happen to think that talking about parenting is not talking down to black people.”
Jackson issued a written statement apologizing for the remarks and held a press conference reiterating his contrition. He declared that his support was “wide, deep, and unequivocal” for Obama’s historic campaign, and the campaign publicly accepted his apology even as Jesse Jackson Jr. denounced his father’s words in unsparing terms: “His divisive and demeaning comments about the presumptive Democratic nominee—and I believe the next president of the United States—contradict his inspiring and courageous career.”
But within days, rumors were flying that dovetailed with Hannity’s warning, that there was more to the tape than the outrageous clip already in circulation. Blogs and news websites were teeming with speculation, leaked by unnamed staffers at the conservative network, that producers for Bill O’Reilly’s nightly program had left out of the edited version of the Jackson clip the fact that Jackson had called Obama a “nigger”—perhaps even a “no-good, half-breed nigger.” After nearly a week of speculation, the transcript of the full clip, taken secretly by a production assistant, leaked in full to a media website. The transcript contained the full quote, in which Jackson said Obama was “telling niggers how to behave.”
Jackson was forced to apologize again, and he did so profusely, in multiple cable television appearances and in a phone call to the campaign. He chalked the incident up to “trash talk” and insisted that it hadn’t affected his relationship with Obama, which by that time was already paper-thin, having been damaged by Jackson’s criticism a year earlier of Obama’s reticence to jump headlong into the conflagration over the arrests of the six black students in Jena, Louisiana. Now a fresh controversy cemented Jackson’s isolation from the campaign, which had never thought him particularly necessary, despite the web of history that connected Obama and the Democratic Party to Jackson like an umbilical cord.
Indeed, the legions of black voters activated by Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns directly aided Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, and that voter registration model was in place for Barack Obama to build on in crucial southern states like Georgia, Virginia, and North and South Carolina.
Before Jackson, no black candidate had made a serious run at the presidency or achieved success beyond a small number of heavily gerrymandered congressional districts, plus a pittance of Senate seats. It was Jackson’s showdown with the party, after carrying one-fifth of the popular vote into the 1984 convention but receiving fewer than 10 percent of the awarded delegates under the party’s “winner-take-all” primary system, that made it possible for Obama to bleed away the vaunted Clinton advantage in the primaries and caucuses. Under the new rules of proportionality that he demanded as the price for throwing his full support to Walter Mondale in 1984, Jackson boosted his own take to more than 1,200 delegates four years later—second only to Michael Dukakis—on the strength of a thirteen-state romp in which he garnered nearly a third of the popular vote, an unprecedented achievement for an African American political candidate. Jackson’s gains forced the party to change its very structure, even as his campaigns brought a generation of newly minted African American voters into the Democratic fold, literally creating the math that allowed Obama to overtake Hillary Clinton in 2008 by racking up small-state victories to claim the Democratic nomination despite losing big states like New York, California, and Florida.
Still, whatever his historical debt to Jesse Jackson, Obama had built a solid wall of black voter support without Jackson, and without the political infrastructure of black officialdom. This included local elected officials whose presence had vindicated the aims of the Voting Rights Act, and the political fixers, ward leaders, and voter turnout machines who’d helped elect black mayors in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Kansas City, and Denver; nearly all of them had backed Hillary Clinton. He’d done it without the broad support of the other civil rights leaders of Jackson’s era, and over the objections of much of the black intellectual elite. For Obama, the support from black America had been belated, but it was organic and seemingly unshakable. He didn’t need validation from the traditional wellsprings of black power to retain the loyalty of black voters. Simply by becoming the nominee, and surviving the crucible no black American had come close to traversing, he already had it.
And the campaign and the candidate knew it.
ON AUGUST 20, A WEEK BEFORE THE OPENING DAY OF THE DEMOCRATIC National Convention, word reached Washington that Stephanie Tubbs Jones was dead. She had been spotted by a police officer the evening before, driving erratically through her Cleveland Heights neighborhood. When her car finally stopped, a police officer found the congresswoman breathing, but unconscious, behind the wheel. She had suffered an aneurism, causing her brain to hemorrhage. She died the next day at Huron Hospital in her beloved Cleveland, as a stream of stunned political and religious leaders made a pilgrimage to the bedside of the fifty-eight-year-old firebrand.
Statements of shock and sympathy poured in, from Ohio governor Ted Strickland, from Tubbs Jones’s fellow members of Congress, from the House leadership on both sides of the aisle, and from former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Tubbs Jones’s death was especially hard on Hillary Clinton, for whom the Ohioan had been a stalwart, fierce combatant for her campaign, but for far longer than that, a dear and faithful friend.
The convention was set to begin in Denver, and the Obama campaign was working assiduously to court Clinton supporters, and in the words of one senior campaign operative, “to make it easy for them to come home.” Issues of women’s representation and Hillary’s voluminous campaign debt swirled around the negotiations, as did what roles she and Bill Clinton would play at the convention. There was little time for immediate mourning.
Even after Hillary’s concession in June, when Obama returned to Washington with a small contingent of staff to meet with his colleagues in the Black Caucus, the mood had been tense. Obama had opened his remarks by suggesting it was time to get over the campaign and whatever raw feelings it had left behind and pull together toward November.
&nbs
p; “Get over it?” Diane Watson of California, a Hillary supporter from early in the primary, shot back. “With all due respect, Senator, don’t come in here telling me to get over it.”
Obama aides said Tubbs Jones was among the most recalcitrant, with one attendee describing the congresswoman as “addressing Obama like her houseboy.”
“We were stunned by the attitude,” said one Obama aide. “We walked into that meeting, where ninety percent of the members who attended had been for Hillary and not for us. But the attitude in the room was not ‘Oh, hey, you’re the first black major party nominee, let’s go off and make history together.’ It was more, ‘What are you gonna do to get our support?’ ” As for Obama, the aide said, “He didn’t say it out loud, but his attitude was like, wait a second . . . ninety percent of your constituents just voted for me—why exactly do I need y’all?”
A sharp contrast was Obama’s growing bond with John Lewis, whom a former Obama aide called “a statesman throughout” the campaign. “I thought that he handled the transition from the Clintons to Obama expertly,” the former aide said. “And I think his humanity always came through, in every interaction. He got it. He helped to frame it, even when he wasn’t with us. He’s a special human being.”
Beyond Lewis, bringing the Clinton and Obama camps together was a painstaking process. Below the leadership level, “the contact on the staff level was bitter,” one Clintonite recalls, though that bitterness was rarely on display with the principals themselves.
“Fortunately, every organization gets their conditioning and approach from the top down,” the former Obama aide said. “And though Barack was clearly personally wounded by how he had been treated by the Clintons, he was a pretty big guy. He was magnanimous, and he understood the challenges that were in front of him in the general election.”