Fracture

by Joy-Ann Reid

  On the balconies overhead, Republican self-declared “tea party congressmen,” led by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, whipped up the crowd below as they waved KILL THE BILL signs and screamed venom. One protester warned Pelosi, “You’re going to burn in hell!”

  As the black lawmakers passed through the raucous crowd, Cleaver noticed he had been spat upon, and wiped the spittle from the side of his face. An ordained minister, the congressman first appeared ready to roll up his sleeves and fight, as he turned to confront the man who’d spat on him, and who was continuing his angry tirade. But Cleaver moved past instead, sending a Capitol Police officer in his place. In the end, Cleaver declined to press charges, but he, Clyburn, and Lewis would recall hearing the word nigger hurled at them from the crowd. Clyburn said it was language he hadn’t heard since his days as a young civil rights organizer in South Carolina.

  Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who entered the House in 1981 and eight years later survived a humiliating sex and prostitution scandal to become one of just two openly gay members of Congress at that time, reported being called a “faggot” as he entered the Capitol vestibule. It was a frenzied week. At least ten members of Congress sought added police protection, and more than a hundred Democratic lawmakers in the House held a closed-door meeting with the Capitol Police and the FBI, citing serious concerns for their safety. Around the country at Democratic congressional offices, bricks and rocks thrown through windows left shattered glass and shattered nerves among staffers.

  When a brick was thrown into the Niagara Falls, New York, office of Democratic congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter, a “threatening voice-mail message referring to sniper attacks” was also left there. Bart Stupak, the conservative Democrat from Michigan whose last-minute negotiations to reinforce the ban on abortion funding through health-care reform helped secure the bill’s passage in the House, received a fax with a drawing of a noose and an anonymous voice mail saying, “You’re dead. We know where you live. We’ll get you.”

  Tea party supporters, including Republican members of Congress, angrily distanced themselves from these acts, as did conservative media. But the anti-health-care protests were building to a seemingly uncontrollable fever pitch.

  The voice mail at John Lewis’s district office was filled with hateful messages, including one he released in April that denounced “that goddamned nigger” in the White House and warned, “Don’t tell me I gotta get some goddamned health insurance, I ain’t payin’ no goddamned fine” and “I ain’t gettin’ no goddamned mandatory health insurance.” The angry caller railed against the “niggers” and “white trash honkeys” who voted for “that nigger Obama,” and dared the president, presumably, to “come and put my ass in jail if he don’t like it.”

  John Boehner, the House minority leader, went on Fox News and said, “Violence and threats are unacceptable. That’s not the American way. We need to take that anger and channel it into positive change. Call your congressman, go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, make your voice heard—but let’s do it the right way.”

  On March 21, 2010, in that climate of chaos, anger, and fear, the House passed the reconciled health-care bill. Every Republican voted against it. In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid forced passage of the final bill with just 51 votes, using a parliamentary procedure called reconciliation. Republicans denounced the maneuver as “Chicago-style politics” and vowed repeal even though reconciliation had been used before, including to pass Republican George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

  On March 23, President Obama signed his signature health-care bill. As he repeated his left-handed signature twenty-two times so he would have a pen for each special guest, he was surrounded by a group of lawmakers including a beaming Pelosi, Reid, Vice President Biden, Clyburn, Rangel, and John Dingell, the longest-serving U.S. senator, who had seen many attempts at creating a universal health-care plan come and go. Also present was Senator Max Baucus, who had managed the ugly and unenviably public process in the Senate Finance Committee, Ted Kennedy’s son Patrick, then a congressman from Rhode Island, and the late senator’s widow, Victoria. Also there was an eleven-year-old African American boy, Marcellus Owens, who’d lost his mother to cancer for lack of insurance, and whom the White House had made a symbol of the importance of the bill.

  Barack Obama had achieved his party’s century-old dream of enacting comprehensive health-care reform, however flawed the process and bitter the road.

  For Bill and Hillary Clinton, it was a moment to give Obama his due. Soon after the signing ceremony, President Obama took two congratulatory phone calls: from Hillary, who had labored so hard, and in vain, to craft a health-care bill in the early days of her husband’s administration, and from Bill, who understood like few others what a hard-fought and rare achievement it was.

  “One of the great things about Clinton,” said a longtime Clinton adviser, is this: “I’m sure he recognized that Obama did something that he couldn’t do, in the health-care space.” He understood it as a genuine accomplishment—and he was glad it had gotten done.

  CHAPTER 9

  Backlash

  The dream was not to put one black family in the White House, the dream was to make everything equal in everybody’s house.

  —Rev. Al Sharpton, May 2, 2010

  FOR THE PRESIDENT AND HIS PARTY, THE CELEBRATION OVER health-care reform’s passage was short-lived. Anger on the right over the Affordable Care Act had not ebbed, and Republicans were preparing to use it as a battering ram in the midterm elections, which were just six months away. And some of the president’s supporters worried that even as the outcry over health care took on an outwardly racial tone, the president and his team either couldn’t or wouldn’t see it, and worse, were refusing to take it on.

  The vilification of health care, the hysteria over it in some quarters, seemed to be summed up in a sign hung on the door of a Mount Dora, Florida, urologist in April that read: “If you voted for Obama . . . seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.” The doctor who hung it, Jack Cassell, was fifty-six years old, white, and relatively affluent, and as such was in the demographic median of the tea party movement. His hostility to health-care reform, and to the president who pushed for and signed it, was replicated across a wide swath of voters, including a growing majority of white baby boomers and New Dealers, who in another era would almost certainly have been Democrats. And that’s what Barack Obama’s party feared the most.

  Republicans were portraying health-care reform as just another extension of LBJ-style welfare that would be abused by shiftless minorities and illegal immigrants, robbing the successful and the thrifty and consigning seniors to a bleak future by allegedly cutting Medicare (which while untrue, was particularly potent). Polls showed the narrative was having an effect. One month after the bill passed, a rising star in the Republican Party, Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia, kicked off April by reviving the state’s celebration of Confederate History Month, with nary a mention of slavery as the driving cause of the Civil War. McDonnell recanted after an uproar by the state and national NAACP, but the denunciation of health care was reflected in rising hostility toward the man in the White House, and not just in the states of the former Confederacy.

  Vulnerable Democrats, rather than touting a legislative victory that had eluded their party for nearly a century, began a wholesale retreat away from both “Obamacare” and Obama himself.

  Among the president’s African American supporters, some worried that the White House, flush with victory over health care and preparing to move on to the next item on the president’s agenda—a comprehensive budget agreement that would raise taxes on the wealthy and bolster the slowly rebounding economy—was ignoring the headlights of the electoral locomotive barreling toward the Democrats in November.

  Ben Jealous was among those who were worried. At thirty-five, he was the youngest NAACP president in the organization’s histor
y. Prior to holding the position, he had been many things: an NAACP voter registration volunteer, a Rhodes scholar, a reporter at a black weekly newspaper in Mississippi, the head of the black newspaper publishers association, an investment manager and prodigious fund-raiser, and at every turn, an activist.

  The son of a prominent, white New England family on his father’s side and the descendants of slaves on his mother’s, Jealous could be impatient, and he was leading an organization beset with problems in need of patience, from its staid reputation and tendency toward bureaucratic responses to local crises, to an aging, dwindling membership.

  He’d made his public debut as head of the NAACP at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church a month after Barack Obama’s inauguration, telling the congregation and its pastor, Rev. Calvin Butts, “I’m here like most of you with my head in the clouds of January 20 . . . but with my feet firmly planted in January 21. My generation was told that all the great battles were over. And we emerged the most murdered people in the country, and the most incarcerated group on the planet.”

  Jealous, Marc Morial of the National Urban League, and Rev. Al Sharpton held their first formal meeting in the White House with the president in February, as a record snowstorm shuttered the Capitol. (Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Height, age ninety-seven, was to attend but could not make the trip due to the storm. Obama would eulogize her two months later, at Washington’s National Cathedral. He noted that Height, in her trademark brightly colored hats, had visited the White House twenty-one times and met with every president since Dwight Eisenhower.)

  The three civil rights leaders had come armed with an agenda: to focus the administration on the plight of black communities, rural and urban, who were continuing to struggle, even though the nation had passed through the worst of the Great Recession. Jealous in particular believed it was imperative that the president be seen to overtly and visibly combat the economic crises facing black communities, both as a moral matter and to ensure that the president’s most ardent supporters didn’t become dispirited and disengaged, with a census year midterm looming. Though Jealous now led a nonpartisan organization, those close to him said he was a political animal, and he privately voiced frustrations to colleagues that the new president was ignoring his black and liberal base.

  Black unemployment had spiked to 16.5 percent by April, even as the overall jobless rate had dropped to a still high 9.9 percent. The stimulus was beginning to work its way through the economy, but for black communities, the foreclosure and jobs crises were continuing to spiral out of control. The unemployment rate for black men that month was 20.2 percent, versus 9.6 percent for white men, so high that a coalition of advocacy groups, including the National Employment Law Project, submitted an April complaint to the United Nations.

  The president surprised and perplexed some aides at the February meeting by striding into the room in a casual shirt and khakis, while his three guests were decked out in suits and ties. But Jealous, Morial, and Sharpton found his presentation was formal indeed. He firmly opposed the kind of racially targeted programs the activists and their allies in the Congressional Black Caucus wanted. Obama explained during the hour-long meeting that he believed his economic plans, including health care—which was to be broadly distributed to all struggling Americans—would especially aid black households due to their disproportionate suffering. That had been his stance since the start of his term, despite growing criticism from black writers and thinkers, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus. And he maintained it now.

  Jealous, colleagues said, came away from the meeting unsatisfied, though afterward, Sharpton told the reporters assembled outside the White House, “I think he [Obama] was very clear that he was not going to engage in any race-based programs. But at the same time, he was determined that going forward we can correct some of the structural inequalities that are currently in place.” Jealous confirmed that the conversation focused less on race than on the many economically hard-hit areas of the country. “The reality is that poverty has been greatly democratized by this recession,” he said. “What all Americans have in common is that they are hurting and struggling and want to see the pace of progress quicken.”

  No photos were released, however, because some African American White House aides were worried the president’s casual attire would send the wrong impression to black communities. Friends said Jealous was particularly frustrated, not by what the president wore, but by what he viewed as a lack of urgency on the president’s part, to confront either the specific economic ills of black communities or the conservative fringe that even a month before the health-care bill was signed were massing to kill it and to blunt the impact of the historic 2008 election.

  If the White House wouldn’t be proactive, Jealous determined that he would, and he began pushing the NAACP, through protests and direct action and online, to do more to confront the tea party head-on—particularly after they held their second annual “tax day” rallies in April, with more than a thousand protests nationwide.

  On July 10, the NAACP opened its 101st annual meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, with the delegates calling on the tea party movement to repudiate the racism within its ranks, including the offensive signs at rallies and ugly statements directed at the president online and in conservative media. Also listed were the taunts, spittle, and epithets directed at black and gay members of Congress during the ugly last walk to passage of the Affordable Care Act back in April.

  In his address to the more than two thousand assembled delegates, Jealous declared that the tea party movement “must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions.”

  The St. Louis Tea Party immediately responded by passing its own resolution: “We settle our disputes civilly and avoid the gutter tactic of attempting to silence opponents by inflammatory name-calling.” Also, “The very term ‘racist’ has diminished meaning due to its overuse by political partisans, including members of the NAACP.”

  Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate, and a favorite of tea party groups, lashed out at the NAACP on Facebook, writing, “the charge that Tea Party Americans judge people by the color of their skin is false, appalling, and is a regressive and diversionary tactic to change the subject at hand.”

  Four days later, on the morning of July 19, firebrand conservative political commentator Andrew Breitbart posted two heavily edited videos titled “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism—2010.” It claimed that Shirley Sherrod, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Georgia Office of Rural Development, had admitted, during a speech at the Georgia NAACP’s 20th Annual Freedom Fund dinner on March 27, four days after President Obama signed the national health-care law, that she had discriminated against a white farmer, deciding that he should get help from “one of his own kind” and referring him to a white attorney.

  The clip was immediately picked up by right-wing media, online, on talk radio, and on Fox News. The Right reveled in the opportunity to accuse an Obama administration official of hypocrisy and “reverse racism.”

  The Obama administration found itself in an untenable position. With the midterms just four months away, they could ill afford to hand the tea party and the Republicans ammunition in the form of a federal staffer who appeared to have endorsed discrimination against whites, particularly with the tea party whipping up a frenzy among white voters, and particularly white seniors, over health care. And the administration had been made hypersensitive to race-related incidents by the increasingly racialized debate over the Obama presidency, from the “beer summit” to “you lie.”

  Alarms were going off inside the White House personnel office. Fox News producers were calling for comment, and aides were preparing to brief President Obama on the Sherrod affair the next day. Taking no chances, and doing no due diligence, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, through staff, let Sherrod know she should resign, immediately, in the hopes that her resignation would blunt th
e controversy.

  As news of Sherrod’s resignation broke, Speaker Newt Gingrich, during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News, praised Vilsack in loaded terms: “You know, you can’t be a black racist any more than you can be a white racist.”

  The phones at the NAACP national headquarters were ringing off the hook, too. Jealous, having mounted high profile attacks on the tea party for which he and his organization were reaping the whirlwind, joined Vilsack in acting too soon. When word of Sherrod’s resignation came, with the videotape of her full remarks still making its way from Georgia to Washington via FedEx, and without speaking to her himself, Ben Jealous fired off a blistering statement joining in the condemnation of the now former USDA employee. The statement was quickly posted to the NAACP website and mailed to several journalists, and Jealous tweeted it under his personal Twitter handle.

  Sherrod was angry at the Agriculture Department, at the NAACP, and at the president and his administration, whom she believed had been frightened into submission by Fox News and the right wing. She began accepting requests to be interviewed, including by CNN, where she recounted her biography and explained the full context of her remarks. Sherrod recalled growing up in Baker County, Georgia, where when she was seventeen years old, her father, a Baptist church deacon, was shot to death in 1965 by a white farmer over a livestock dispute. An all-white grand jury declined to indict the farmer, and Sherrod noted that the circumstances of her father’s death and the lack of justice that it entailed had made her initially reticent to aid the white farmer and his wife, but that she soon realized that what was important was not race, but taking the opportunity to help a fellow human being. The farmer in question, Roger Spooner, appeared on the cable network, too, with his wife, Eloise, calling Sherrod a lifelong friend who had truly saved their farm. The story had been one not of racism but of redemption.