Fracture

by Joy-Ann Reid

  Indeed, when Obama addressed the caucus’s annual gala in September 2011 and enjoined black voters, “Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” and “shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do!” most of those assembled cheered, even as Emanuel Cleaver, then the caucus president, told McClatchy Newspapers that had Bill Clinton similarly failed to address black unemployment as part of his economic recovery plan, “[w]e probably would be marching on the White House.”

  That reticence rankled some Obama critics among black intellectuals. Columbia University professor and author Frederick C. Harris said that even though African Americans were certain to overwhelmingly support the president’s reelection in 2012, “for those who had seen in President Obama’s election the culmination of four centuries of black hopes and aspirations and the realization of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a ‘beloved community,’ the last four years must be reckoned a disappointment.” Harris, in his book The Price of the Ticket, concluded that the Obama presidency had “already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality.” Harris added, “The tragedy is that black elites—from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members—have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House.”

  Harris and others noted that Obama rarely talked directly about race, and that when he did within the black community, it was often in the guise of a racial scold. At the Congressional Black Caucus gala, Obama rallied black voters to the cause, not with promises of direct aid to black communities, but with an appeal toward the collective responsibility to redeem the history of black struggle for the right to vote. The only concrete promise on the table was that his broad and untargeted economic agenda would lift black Americans, too.

  But many African Americans and some white Obama supporters sensed that if there were those on the right who either couldn’t or wouldn’t fully accept Barack Obama as president, and who sought to mark his time in office with the asterisk of failure; some on the left would remain stubbornly unsatisfied no matter what the president accomplished. “I don’t recall you folks asking Clinton for his black agenda,” Rev. Sharpton, who began hosting a news/commentary program on MSNBC in January 2011, said when confronted by Obama critics like Smiley and West.

  Those who remained in Obama’s corner saw him as a man marching into serial battles with the thinnest rear guard, and they tried to be his guardians, on social media, in fierce online commentary, and soon, at the ballot box.

  ANY DESIRE OBAMA HAD TO STEER CLEAR OF THE ROCKY SHOALS of race and to hold his party’s interracial coalition together ahead of his 2012 reelection came crashing to the shore on February 26, 2012.

  The NBA All-Star Game had returned to Orlando, Florida, for the first time in twenty years, and in Sanford, a small city just twenty-seven miles away from where the big game would be held, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin took a fateful trip to a convenience store in the rain, leaving the gated community where his father’s fiancée lived, to get her ten-year-old son some candy and a drink for himself before the game. He wouldn’t return.

  Instead, Martin, who had been sent to stay with his father for a few weeks after getting into trouble at school in Miami, was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who spotted the teen walking in the drizzling rain, talking on his cell phone. Zimmerman, when questioned by the responding officers, claimed that the teen had attacked him out of nowhere, as he left his truck in the dark and rain to try to spot the young stranger while he called the police nonemergency line. The shooting remained a minor local news story for thirteen days, causing little notice outside of Sanford, whose only previous brush with national renown was as the city that once refused to let Jackie Robinson practice on its segregated baseball fields.

  By March, Martin’s family had hired attorneys to sue the Sanford Police Department and demand the release of 911 calls from the night of the shooting. They held press conferences, demanding Zimmerman’s arrest. As days turned into weeks, with Zimmerman still free and a police department that appeared to be more sympathetic to the shooter than to the victim investigating the case, Martin’s anguished parents traveled to Sanford. They called Rev. Sharpton for help and also contacted Benjamin Crump, a civil rights attorney from Tallahassee who was known for taking cases involving the violent deaths of black men and boys. A storm was gathering over Sanford; age-old racial tensions gripped the town where a railroad line separated the main city limits from Goldsboro, the impoverished historically black neighborhood it once annexed.

  The national rallies began on March 22 as Sharpton organized a march that attracted thirty thousand people to Fort Mellon Park, near Sanford City Hall. The growing controversy over Zimmerman’s continued freedom forced the resignation of the police chief that morning and put the anguish of Martin’s parents on national display.

  Trayvon Martin’s boyish face, forever frozen in time in iconic black-and-white, staring out from a gray hoodie like the one he was wearing when he died on the wet grass, alone, was gaining national attention as young black men took to the airwaves and to online forums, declaring that their lives have value.

  On the day of the Sanford march, Congressman Bobby Rush was escorted off the House floor after walking to the podium to speak and removing his suit jacket to reveal a gray hoodie underneath. The aging congressman, who remained the pastor of a Chicago church, pulled the hood over his head, launching into a protest sermon that began with the words “Racial profiling has to stop, Mr. Speaker. Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum.” He proceeded to recite a biblical verse, Micah 6:8:

  He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.

  And what does the Lord require of you?

  To act justly and to love mercy,

  And to walk humbly with your God.

  Rush ended with a blessing on Trayvon Martin’s soul, as the acting chair, Republican Gregg Harper of Mississippi, pounded the gavel and ordered, “The gentleman will suspend!”

  In the early weeks, the national outrage over Martin’s death was both universal and bipartisan, with both front-runners in the Republican presidential primary, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, calling the shooting “tragic,” and the lack of an immediate prosecution “chilling.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Zimmerman was “clearly overreaching” in his role as a neighborhood watch volunteer, while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and even Florida tea party congressman Allen West made statements calling for an investigations into Martin’s killing.

  Inside the White House, Obama was following the story along with the country. Sharpton’s involvement gave the president and Valerie Jarrett a direct line to what was happening in Sanford, where the local prosecutor recused himself, leading the Florida governor, Rick Scott, to appoint a special prosecutor. The Justice Department dispatched investigators to Sanford to search for any evidence of a hate crime. And the president’s personal circle was percolating with the same questions and concerns as the country at large.

  And yet, for the White House, the politics were deeply uncertain.

  Obama’s previous foray into public commentary on matters of race had met with singular scorn, and immediate backlash. With a reelection campaign ahead, the White House could ill afford to wade into an issue so heavily freighted with questions of gun rights and violence and racial identity. Zimmerman was white and Hispanic. Pro-gun activists were championing his cause. Prosecutors were using Florida’s version of the controversial, National Rifle Association–endorsed “Stand Your Ground” law—which protects an individual’s right to defend his life with deadly force if he feels threatened—in not charging Zimmerman.

  And yet, with the national outc
ry over the case growing, touching off a country-wide conversation about the status of black men and boys in a society that often fears them, the nation’s African American president seemed conspicuous in his silence. Friends said that as a father, Obama was deeply disturbed by Martin’s death. Despite the objections of his senior communications staff, he resolved to speak out.

  And so just after 10 A.M. on the day after the Sanford march, with Hillary Clinton and Tim Geithner standing on either side of the podium in the White House Rose Garden for the announcement of the nominee to head the World Bank, President Obama took a single, expected question.

  “Mr. President, may I ask you about this current case in Florida, very controversial, allegations of lingering racism within our society—the so-called . . . Stand Your Ground law and the justice in that? Can you comment on the Trayvon Martin case, sir?”

  Obama began by noting that as head of the executive branch, and with Eric Holder’s Justice Department in an open investigation, his remarks required care. He called Martin’s death an obvious tragedy and said that when he thought “about this boy, I think about my own kids.”

  Obama said every parent should understand why the case had to be thoroughly investigated in order to prevent future tragedies and called on the nation to “do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” including examining “the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident.” It wasn’t a call to review the nation’s gun laws or for activists to take to the streets.

  And then Obama directed a message to Trayvon Martin’s parents. “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” he said. “And I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

  It all seemed innocuous enough. The president hadn’t mentioned race as a root cause or even a factor in the shooting. He hadn’t criticized the legal process in Sanford, or its police force. Given that he is a black man, it seemed self-evident that if Barack Obama had a son, he, too, would be black, like Trayvon was.

  Conservative media had largely sat out the national conversation on the shooting that was enthralling liberal media outlets and thought leaders. But Obama’s Rose Garden statement gave them a fresh opportunity to draw blood, and by the time he was appearing on Sean Hannity’s 3 P.M. radio show, Newt Gingrich had changed his mind, making a sharp U-turn from his remarks as recently as earlier that day. Now he rushed head-first into the breach, calling Obama’s comments “disgraceful,” accusing the president of dividing the country by race, and asking provocatively, “Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be okay because it didn’t look like him?”

  It wasn’t long before the national shock over Trayvon Martin’s killing turned into a polarized showdown, between black supporters of Martin’s family and a growing number of white Americans who dismissed the marches, news conferences, and demands for justice as merely the latest in a history of racial taunts by Al Sharpton and other black leaders, designed to hold white Americans guilty and black Americans inviolable, forever. In that vein, the “national dialogue on race” that activists were calling for was most unwanted.

  Soon, Trayvon Martin was being demonized in some right-wing quarters as an archetypal “thug”—particularly once attorneys for Zimmerman pushed to make public his text messages, which were filled with a teenager’s bravado. Conservative blogs seized on any kernel of information injurious to the dead teenager and his family, and Sean Hannity taped a sympathetic interview with George Zimmerman, which prosecutors, confounding legal watchers, would play back in lieu of his testimony during a belated trial.

  And just as happened in the Henry Louis Gates incident, polls soon showed black and white Americans, and Republicans and Democrats, decamping to opposite ideological silos as the case hurtled toward a Sanford courtroom and the country headed for another polarized presidential election. The ongoing process of “racializing” Barack Obama had received another gear.

  CHAPTER 10

  Victory

  Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

  —John F. Kennedy, April 21, 1961

  FOR THE 2012 ELECTION, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY PROVIDED Democrats the perfect foil in Mitt Romney, the patrician former venture capitalist and the son of the late, moderate governor of Michigan. As the governor of Massachusetts, Romney signed the progenitor to the Affordable Care Act, derided by conservatives as “Romneycare,” which allowed Romney’s opponents on the left and the right to skewer him as a health-care hypocrite. Meanwhile, Romney’s record as the head of Bain Capital opened him up to a portrayal by his foes in both parties as a job-canceling Simon Legree. The latter image was cemented in September when Mother Jones posted on its website a surreptitiously recorded cell phone video of Romney at a Boca Raton, Florida, fund-raiser, commiserating with the similarly well-heeled about the “forty-seven percent” of Americans who, as government dependents and self-declared victims, would vote for Obama “no matter what.”

  Romney chose as his running mate Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, the author of serial House Republican budgets that proposed to strip away funding for programs aiding the poor, institute vouchers for Medicare, and give generous tax cuts to the wealthy.

  Despite the continued scourge of unemployment, black voters remained incredibly motivated to support the president’s reelection. Polls showed African Americans evincing higher degrees of optimism about the economy than the general public. It was clear that whatever the economic or political headwinds, blacks were determined that Barack Obama’s presidency would be seen as more than a mere accident of history by being consigned to a single term.

  And there was the math, which, as pointed out by veteran journalist Ron Brownstein, suggested that even if white voters didn’t shed another 2 percent of their voter population share (which they did, dropping from 74 to 72 percent of the electoral pool), Obama would triumph so long as he received votes from 80 percent of minorities and just 40 percent from white Americans; on the Republican side, Romney needed an historic 61 percent of white ballots, a performance on the order of Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower.

  By the summer of 2012, Bill Clinton had become the leading surrogate for the Obama reelection campaign. His singular purpose was to go into white, rural, and blue-collar communities and translate the Obama presidency into terms that Reagan Democrats could accept. Clinton at times seemed to desire Obama’s reelection almost as badly as Obama did—a development that delighted the Washington media and triggered the cynicism of some in and around the Clinton orbit.

  “Immediately after the [2008] election, in my view, the Clinton operatives and particularly Bill and Hillary Clinton themselves began looking at 2016,” one longtime member of Congress said. “And what better way to embed your operatives than to go ahead and cooperate” with Obama’s reelection.

  “Hillary and Bill aren’t dumb,” said a former Clinton staffer. “I think they know they had to do that for their own reputations.” Clinton’s administration had been the incubator for key members of the Obama team, from Rahm Emanuel to Eric Holder to Susan Rice. And while Obama’s Chicago branch ran the politics, the Clinton wing was fully represented in the policy arena, from John Podesta at the Center for American Progress, to Leon Panetta at the Defense Department and Hillary Clinton at the State Department.

  Although Obama had undone key Clinton compromises on gay rights, his “evolution” allowed the Clintons to move left on those very issues, with the former president renouncing his signature on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and walking away from the Defense of Marriage Act. The Clinton and Obama wings of the Democratic Party had found an accommodation that could replace the New Democrat ideal and would better position Hillary with young and emerging voters in the future.

  “Lincoln’s team of rivals was the classic example,” the longtime member of C
ongress said. “JFK and Lyndon Johnson couldn’t stand each other,” but Johnson understood that his own legacy was intertwined with Kennedy’s. Friends of the Clintons saw the same dynamic, as Bill continued to plot a political comeback for his wife.

  At the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 5, Bill Clinton took the stage and launched into an expansive defense of the Obama era and the president’s economic policies, leading the forty-fourth president to label the forty-second as the “the Secretary of Explaining Stuff.” Afterward, the two appeared onstage together, seeming with one walk down a prefabricated stage to heal years of Democratic dissonance.

  Clinton declared that he came to Charlotte to nominate a man who was “cool on the outside but who burned for America on the inside . . . who believes with no doubt that we can build a new American dream economy driven by innovation and creativity . . . and by cooperation . . . and who had the good sense to marry Michelle Obama.”

  It was Clinton at his best, and the former president would do more, hosting a series of fund-raisers to “shake the money tree” among liberal Democrats who, by the fall of 2012, were less enamored of Barack Obama, but who, as Democrats, wanted to see him reelected.

  And when Obama was reelected on November 6, the victory was resounding.

  He beat Romney by some 5 million votes—winning every state he’d won in 2008, except North Carolina and Indiana—taking a commanding 332 electoral votes and a 51 percent showing in the popular vote. He had confounded pundits and Republican operatives, who had gone into the election certain that Mitt Romney would be the next president.

  The origins of the victory were clear. Obama was presiding over a party that had fundamentally changed: It was more black, more brown, and more Asian; and those groups now represented a golden share of the presidential year electorate, at 28 percent. Romney had 60 percent of white voters in his corner, but that simply couldn’t get him to a majority without winning more than a nominal share of black and particularly Hispanic voters.