by Joy-Ann Reid
When the full video was finally posted to the NAACP website, it had become horrifically clear that the organization, and Sherrod’s employers in Washington, had made a grave mistake.
Jealous quickly reversed course. A new statement was released, saying that after viewing the entire speech, the organization believed they had been “snookered by Fox News and Tea Party activist Andrew Breitbart” into promoting a false tale that upended the meaning of racial bias. Breitbart was still defending himself Tuesday night, saying he was simply hitting back against NAACP charges of tea party racism.
“I could care less [sic] about Shirley Sherrod,” Breitbart told Sean Hannity. “This is not about Shirley Sherrod.”
By Wednesday, Sherrod was fielding apologies, from Vilsack, from the NAACP, in qualified fashion from Bill O’Reilly, and eventually from then CNN correspondent Roland Martin, who, before the full tape was released, had also joined in the condemnation—and from the White House. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, in the daily briefing, declared: “I think without a doubt Ms. Sherrod is owed an apology. I would do so certainly on behalf of this administration.”
Vilsack publicly took the blame for the firing, indemnifying the White House and offering to bring Sherrod back. She didn’t accept.
By Thursday, the full judgment of the media descended on the White House, with the New York Times declaring: “The Obama administration has been shamed by its rush to judgment after it forced the resignation of a black midlevel official in the Agriculture Department who was wrongly accused of racism by the right-wing blogosphere.” And Sherrod herself told NBC’s Today show that she’d like to “have a conversation” with the president, “to help him understand the experiences at the grassroots level.” The conversation came that night, when Obama telephoned Sherrod.
For some in the African American community, the Sherrod affair revived the sting of Lani Guinier’s ouster during the Clinton years. Worse, it seemed to bespeak a troubling reflex within the White House to protect itself so thoroughly on racial matters, and to distance itself so instantaneously from racial conflict, that it would sooner jettison a black woman accused of racial offense than take the time to find out who she was, or to confirm what she supposedly had done. Black critics of the White House said the incident had exposed the administration’s Achilles’ heel: a dearth of personal contacts within the wider body of black politics, and an unwillingness to reach out to those old hands who might help the president and his staff know more.
“They didn’t know who [Sherrod] was,” one civil rights leader lamented. “What you had were junior staffers who heard snippets of her comments, taken out of context, and reacted based on what they heard without a clear impression. They went for the bright, broad bait.”
They should have called someone, the lament would go. They should have called John Lewis, or Vernon Jordan, who was from Georgia and had been the NAACP field director there in his younger days, or David Scott, who sat on the House Agricultural Committee. They should have picked up the phone before throwing Shirley under the bus.
But if the administration had been too quick to act and too slow to consult, so, too, had the NAACP.
Jealous flew to Albany, Georgia, and with a contingent of NAACP staff met Sherrod in the lobby of the Hilton hotel. He apologized without reservation, saying he had acted before receiving all the information.
“He pretty much came out of the NAACP president role and became a humble man,” said Larry Nesmith, head of the Coffee County, Georgia, NAACP branch, which had hosted the event at which Sherrod spoke. “He said, ‘I made a mistake, I’m sorry.’ He did it with emotion, because he knew the damage that had been done. He apologized to not only her, but to her husband as well. I really respected him for that.”
For Sherrod, forgiveness came right away. The group shared lunch at Old Times Country Buffet. They talked about fishing.
AS THE 2010 MIDTERM ELECTIONS APPROACHED, THE WHITE HOUSE was being battered by serial storms: a deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April, WikiLeaks’s July release of tens of thousands of classified documents on the war in Afghanistan, an ongoing humanitarian crisis following a devastating earthquake in Haiti, and a pernicious, worldwide flu pandemic in August. The last thing the Obama administration needed was a march on Washington.
Still, that’s just what the NAACP and dozens of labor and civil rights groups—the SEIU, AFL-CIO, and United Auto Workers unions, the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, the Sierra Club, the National Council of La Raza, and others—had been planning since August. They scheduled an October rally on the National Mall that they dubbed “10-2-10.” It was the kind of ground-level activism Ben Jealous hoped would propel the NAACP out of the boardroom and onto the front lines.
In some ways, the White House seemed almost to be at war with parts of its own base, or at least with what spokesman Robert Gibbs derided as the “professional left” in an August 10 interview with the Hill. A chorus of liberal critics were battering the administration over the president’s stated personal opposition to gay marriage (which few liberal activists believed was genuine), his refusal to order the military to stop enforcing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on open military service for gays and lesbians, the lack of a public option in the health-care law, and the failure to close the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. The fact that Congress had authority over the latter two matters did little to deter Obama’s critics on the left, who, Gibbs sneered, “will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare, and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.”
Gibbs charged that those comparing Obama to George W. Bush “ought to be drug tested. I mean, it’s crazy,” he said.
But the critics, led by liberal libertarian bloggers, many of whom had opposed Obama from the start, were undeterred. They charged that Obama had not earned the continued support of liberal voters. He hadn’t done enough or fought Republicans hard enough.
The vitriol “was what I expected from the Right,” said one prominent African American leader. “I didn’t expect it from some of the liberal whites. It always amazes me, how under pressure a lot of people you thought were our friends would be the first ones to jump ship, and do it with hostility.”
Some progressives occasionally pointed out that the president’s pragmatism was necessary in an atmosphere in which Republicans had vowed total obstruction. But the story line of liberals angry with the progressive president was almost irresistible for the D.C. media.
As the election approached, it became increasingly clear that the threat of electoral rout was real. Democrats up for reelection were fleeing from the health-care law, and from the president. Conservatives, emboldened by the Shirley Sherrod dustup and leaning more aggressively than ever into the charge that the president and his allies were the embodiment of true racism, with white Americans the victims of a “gangster” president, even launched a “Rally to Restore America,” held provocatively on the date of the forty-seventh anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. Right-wing host Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Alveda King, a niece of Dr. King and an ardent conservative, declared themselves and the tea party to be the true “people of the civil rights movement.”
As Sharpton, Jealous, Marc Morial, Avis Jones-DeWeever, who had succeeded Dorothy Height at the National Council of Negro Women, Martin Luther King III, and others, flanked by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, led a five-mile “Reclaim the Dream” march from Dunbar High School in Northwest Washington in outraged response, Glenn Beck boldly declared of his 9/12 movement: “We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights, justice, equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice. We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement. They are perverting it.”
And while the president appeared on black media outlets, and while he and the First Lady barnstormed the country in the late summer and fall, calling on African Americans and women to vote to defend the gains of the previous year and a half, it was apparent that the election of 2010 would be not
hing like 2008.
Speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference gala on September 18, President Obama acknowledged that “a lot of people may not be feeling that energized or that engaged right now,” but he implored the members and their constituents to “go back to your neighborhoods, to go back to your workplaces, to go to churches, and go to the barbershops, and go to the beauty shops, and tell them we’ve got more work to do.”
The White House enlisted Bill Clinton to rally support among Democrats, too, and the former president dutifully hit the road, but it wasn’t enough.
Democrats suffered a fulsome defeat, made to sting more by the fact that it was a census year, with not just the legislatures and governorships and congressional seats on the line, but also a decade of redistricting, with its power to cement Republican House and statehouse majorities for a decade.
Republicans retook the House, picking up sixty-three seats and snatching the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi’s hands. In the Senate, Republicans grabbed five seats, leaving Democrats with a slim majority. Republicans grabbed a half dozen swing state governorships, including Florida and Ohio, and the GOP finally completed its takeover of every southern legislature.
House Democrats lost white voters by 24 points, where their losing margin had been just 4 points in 2006, at the nadir of George W. Bush’s popularity. Winning 9 in 10 black voters, 7 in 10 Hispanics, and 6 in 10 Asian Americans was not enough in a shrunken midterm electorate that was all but devoid of the younger, more racially diverse voters who helped put Obama in the White House.
Instead, facing a smaller, older electorate, Democrats posted their worst performance with white voters since World War II.
For African Americans, the election was tantamount to political Armageddon. As David Bositis, then the lead researcher on the black electorate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, would later write, the election ushered in the “resegregation of southern politics,” all but completing “the 46-year transition from a multiracial Democratic political dominance to a white conservative Republican political dominance.”
Racially polarized voting meant that, particularly in the South, white voters, even those who called themselves Democrats, voted overwhelmingly Republican—just as overwhelmingly, it turned out, as African Americans supported Democrats, with both giving 9 in 10 votes to their preferred party.
For black state legislators, 98 percent of them Democrats, that meant near-total isolation in the minority party across the South for the first time since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
The defeats meant a complete loss of control, or even influence, over the coming redistricting process. And as Columbia University journalism professor Thomas Edsall would point out, “Republicans in control of redistricting have two goals: the defeat of white Democrats and the creation of safe districts for Republicans. They have achieved both of these goals by increasing the number of districts likely to elect an African American. Black voters are gerrymandered out of districts represented by whites of both parties, making the Democratic incumbent weaker and the Republican incumbent stronger.”
In Washington, the loss of black electoral power was nearly as thorough. Black Democrats who had swept into power with Bill Clinton and were now elder statesmen in the House had held an unprecedented number of chairmanships, including the gavels of the powerful House Judiciary and Ways and Means committees, wielded for years by John Conyers of Michigan and Charlie Rangel of New York, plus the Homeland Security chairmanship held by Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. Now all were gone, along with a dozen subcommittee chairmanships. For Rangel, Waters, and other Black Caucus members, ethics trials would replace committee hearings during the coming lame duck session.
Black voters in 2010 shed 3 percent from their share of the 2008 electorate, a performance that was stronger than the other Democratic constituencies, who ignored the midterms in droves. What sank the party’s prospects was the staggering decline among white voters, who if they didn’t stay home, coalesced to drive the Democrats from power in the House.
Obama described the election as a “shellacking,” but during the lame duck session in December, Democrats made the most of their remaining time in power: passing a full repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; extending unemployment benefits to beleaguered Americans; belatedly compensating first responders who toiled at the base of the destroyed World Trade Center in 2001; and ratifying a new nuclear START Treaty with Russia. The session led political scientist Larry Sabato to declare, via Twitter: “It’s official. Like it or not, this lame-duck session is the most productive of the 15 held since WWII.”
More triumphs for the administration would come in the new year, when on May 2, President Obama announced that a U.S. Navy SEAL team had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Celebrations erupted outside the White House at the news.
But the president’s war with parts of his base would linger, as Cornel West told Tavis Smiley on Smiley’s Public Radio International program within days of the bin Laden announcement: “You and I take seriously the legacy of Martin Luther King. . . . It means then that we must be dissenting voices in the middle of a moment of such self-celebration and self-congratulation, to say quite explicitly that justice does not come out the barrel of a gun.”
Smiley and West were mounting a growing crusade against the president, accusing him of paying insufficient attention to the poor, and to African Americans. Fourteen days after the bin Laden announcement, West called the president a “black mascot of Wall Street” and a man who has “a certain fear of free black men.”
West was roundly condemned for the comments, including by longtime friends, who privately wondered if the eccentric professor had lost his mind. West claimed, in his own defense and echoing Smiley’s own complaints, that he had been shut out by the White House; he said his calls went unreturned and invitations were not forthcoming. According to friends and a former White House staffer, West was even nursing a grudge over Obama’s inauguration: A bellman at his Washington hotel had received tickets to stand on the platform and West’s tickets were “merely” for the front row. (His repeated complaints eventually annoyed the president enough that Obama confronted West, as the professor stood on a rope line at the 2010 National Urban League annual meeting. According to a former staffer, “Obama said, ‘I can’t believe you keep telling these lies. You know I personally sent you and your mother inaugural tickets.’ Then the president and a couple of people with him walked to the back, and Obama spat out, ‘Did you hear him? This is why I don’t deal with these people.’ ”)
It was a bizarre and increasingly personal descent into demagogic warfare that led some of West’s fellow black public intellectuals, including MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, who like West was a former Princeton professor, to deride West in her column in The Nation as “President Obama’s silenced, disregarded, disrespected moral conscience,” and to label his lamentations a “self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness.”
The irony of West’s critique is that it echoed a small but growing body of black thought that saw the president as not sufficiently forward-leaning on matters of race and woefully inattentive to African Americans who remained locked in a cycle of unemployment and economic want. Still, the president had his defenders, who were determined to stand between him and his fiercest critics on the left and the right.
“Obama is not the president of Black America,” Marc Morial of the Urban League said. “He’s not a civil rights leader. That job is taken, by the leaders of groups like the NAACP, the Urban League, and the National Action Network.” It was a view that Sharpton repeated often, including in sharp ongoing clashes, on camera and off, with West.
The rumblings of discontent came as the president prepared to hold his second formal meeting with the Black Caucus, on May 13, and as caucus members prepared to launch a multistate summer tour to dramatize the African Americ
an joblessness crisis. At the White House meeting, the members again pressed for economic policies targeted toward black communities, and the president continued to resist, insisting that his overall policies on education and health care would produce the most meaningful solutions for black economic progress.
Obama had his friends in the caucus, and he had his detractors. His staff worked closely with some members, and not with others. The caucus pushed hard on some issues, like revising administration education policies to avoid harming historically black colleges, and gave the White House a wide berth on others.
To White House aides, the narrative of African American critiques of the president became overly reductive and simplistic when translated by the D.C. media. “It’s either, we love him or we hate him,” a former staffer said, adding, “with any leader, particularly the first black president, it’s going to be complicated. Yes we love him and by and large most people see areas where they want him to shift and do things differently. He has tremendous respect for” the caucus members, “but he’s not going to agree with them every time and he has other stuff on his plate.”
In the end, the president’s conflict with members of the African American community was less daunting than what was taking place outside of Washington, where the Right was successfully building a racial narrative designed to drive a wedge between the president and white Democrats. Even members of the Black Caucus who were critical of the president’s policies said that dynamic informed the way they talked about the president and his administration.
One member of the caucus commented that though the members were unhappy about some things not being done, “[w]e’re not going to aid and abet the haters, because the moment we jumped in it would be used by the extreme right to further dismantle the legitimacy of this president.”