Fracture

by Joy-Ann Reid

  But if women’s claim on the White House was the current coursing through the Hillary Clinton campaign, the direct message was borrowed from the Democratic Party’s increasingly resurgent Left, which after decades in the political wilderness was driving the agenda in the Senate and in the House after the ranks of the “blue dogs” and New Democrats were depleted in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014. The Obama era had seen the party move leftward, on issues from what Obama termed “middle-class economics” to gay rights, and its most visible leaders were liberals like Massachusetts senator and Wall Street nemesis Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio, Hillary’s onetime campaign manager who was now the very liberal mayor of New York City. To win the White House, Hillary Clinton, the New Democrat, would have to prove to the liberal base of the party that she was one of them.

  The campaign was determined to do so through both its message and constant displays of the candidate’s humility. Hillary didn’t appear on camera until ninety seconds into her two-minute announcement video, naming her run for president as one among the many things ordinary Americans (in the video, mainly women) were preparing to do: buying a home, going back to school, or starting a family. Robby Mook told reporters in background briefings as the Hillary road trip sped toward Iowa that the purpose of her run for president was to “create a better economic future for all Americans.” In Iowa, she met with small groups at coffee shops, at a community college annex in tiny Monticello, and at a family-owned fruit distribution business in Norwalk just outside Des Moines, hoping to create an intimate campaign that allowed Americans to meet Hillary, a public figure for a quarter century, all over again.

  She told a student roundtable in Monticello that her quest for the White House was rooted in her late mother’s struggles. “I’ve been fighting for children and families my entire adult life, probably because of my mother’s example,” she said.

  She had a really difficult childhood—was mistreated, neglected, but she never gave up. She had to basically be on her own at the time she was fourteen, and she just kept going. And my father, who was a small businessman and just believed that you had to work hard to make your way and do whatever you had to do to be successful, and provided a good living for our family. And then I was thinking too about, you know, the lessons I learned from my church. You know, you’re supposed to give back. You’re supposed to do what you can to help others and that’s what I’ve tried to do, and we’ll have more time to talk about that as we go forward.

  Hillary lamented the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, saying she was running for president to be a champion for everyday Americans who’ve been left behind, as the rich have gotten richer during the economic recovery, while many Americans have been struggling to just maintain.

  Would-be Iowa voters responded sometimes with enthusiasm. At Java Joe’s, a bustling coffee shop in downtown Des Moines, a young woman in her thirties, an employee at a hunger-focused nonprofit, crowed that she had admired Hillary Clinton since age six, while a smiling grandmother who was Hillary’s contemporary, gushed about the prospect of a female president. A high school principal in Monticello, who had caucused for Barack Obama in 2008 and even hosted the then candidate in his home—as Iowans, unique in all the country in their retail politics, sometimes got the chance to do—said he was open to Hillary this time, and enjoined her not to forget the small-town people and the issues she heard in Monticello.

  Other times there was skepticism, about the Clintons’ past and what specific policies Hillary planned to put on the table. At Joe’s a pair of men playing Scrabble voiced that dichotomy, as the younger man, in his sixties, ranted about how thoroughly the Clintons had let down their generation, while his octogenarian playing-partner praised Hillary as experienced and ready to be commander in chief.

  One running theme that repeated from Des Moines to Cedar Rapids to the campaign’s subsequent stop in Keane, New Hampshire, was clear, from supporters and detractors alike: If Hillary Clinton were to win and became the first female president, that would be something special indeed.

  Still, some Democratic activists worried that it was all too easy, too neatly gift-wrapped. “It’s unbelievable to me that in this day and age no other Democrat has stepped up to the plate to say the Democratic Party needs someone that doesn’t have the last name Clinton to run,” said a Florida Democratic leader. “And I’m loyal to the Clintons because that’s who I am, but it still amazes me that she’s being given an open runway.”

  And it was indeed an open runway. Polls consistently showed Hillary with a commanding lead over all other announced and potential challengers, including former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley; Senator Jim Webb of Virginia; Independent Senator Bernie Sanders; Joe Biden, Obama’s loyal and jocular two-term vice president; and Elizabeth Warren, who progressives were practically begging to join the primary. All of them polled well below the former senator and secretary of state, rarely getting out of the single digits, while Warren repeatedly insisted that she had no intention of getting into the race. And while the polling against Republicans was close, an unremarkable feature of national politics in a heavily polarized country, the fact of Hillary’s upcoming presidential candidacy, the overwhelming nature of her advantages, both inside the Democratic Party and in the coming general election campaign, was undeniable.

  The next presidential election would take place on a demographic playing field heavily tilted in favor of Democrats, with the nonwhite share of the electorate projected to be higher than those who elected and reelected Barack Obama. The nonwhite percentage of the voting population had grown by 2 percent every four years for a generation, and if the trend continued, the Democratic nominee would face an electoral universe that was 30 percent nonwhite, meaning the Democrat could win the popular vote handily, even with fewer than 4 in 10 white voters siding with them. Women, who have voted at higher percentages than men since the 1960s, represented a tremendous opportunity for a candidate willing to make a direct appeal to them. Single women, who tend to disappear during midterm elections, held the potential to deliver the 2016 election, particularly to a first woman president.

  Meanwhile, as a Pew Research Center survey—culled from twenty-five thousand interviews over the course of 2014 and released in April 2015—pointed out, younger voters gave Democrats a partisan advantage of 15 and 17 percent for younger millennials (ages 18 to 25) and millennials ages 26 to 33, as well as an 8 and 13 percent advantage for younger and older members of Generation X (ages 34 to 41 and 42 to 49). Even baby boomers, who formed the core of the tea party, continued to lean Democratic, by 5 to 8 percent in the Pew poll, leaving only the oldest voters, those ages 69 to 78 (the “silent generation”) who gave Republicans a partisan advantage of 4 percent.

  And though white millennials leaned more Republican than nonwhite young voters, the youngest cohorts of Americans contained far more minority members than their parents’ or grandparents’ generations did. In short, Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn campaign had ample potential targets. Where Republicans found the strongest advantage was among white evangelicals (a +46-point gap), Mormons (+48), white southerners (+21), and white men with some college education or less (+21). Among white voters overall, the GOP advantage held at just 9 percentage points, while Democrats enjoyed an advantage of 69 points with black voters, 42 points with Asian Americans, and 30 points with Hispanics.

  And yet, the candidate did face potential pitfalls on the road to power. Despite the protestations of humility, the notion of inevitability and hubris would be a sword of Damocles over the campaign, since by all appearances Hillary had no serious Democratic challengers. The media and the Right had a long history of skewering the Clintons, the latter in unbridled, sometimes hysterical fashion. As a woman, and a grandmother, Hillary could hardly hope to avoid the kind of sexist attacks that roiled her 2008 campaign, compounded by an undercurrent of age bias especially reserved for women. On the day she announced, the top Google search term related to the coming campai
gn was “how old is Hillary Clinton.” And the head of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, declared at the group’s annual meeting the day before, “Eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough,” a side-swipe at Obama’s race and Hillary’s gender that offered a preview of the tone of the coming contest.

  Republicans were promising to litigate not just Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary of state, but even Bill Clinton’s personal, financial, and sexual affairs dating back to the 1990s. And Hillary was continuing to fend off a March media boomlet triggered by a New York Times story detailing her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state and a Republican-controlled Congress determined to use the story to revive questions about the Benghazi attacks.

  Skeptics of her prospects pointed to the fact that the last person to succeed a two-term president of their own party was George H. W. Bush, while Bill Clinton’s two terms were followed by eight years of Republican George W. Bush, and Bush’s two terms were followed by eight years of Barack Obama. The oscillation of executive power between two-term presidents of opposite parties had become an American habit. And despite the rebounding economy, the fact that the country remained at peace, and the enormous growth in the number of Americans with health insurance and thus access to health care, Obama’s approval ratings remained modest, rising to 48 percent in a May NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. He would be an asset on the campaign trail in wooing African Americans, but Republicans would surely try to use him as cudgel with white voters.

  And Hillary faced the ever-present danger of leaning so far toward inspiring women that she appeared to take other key constituencies for granted, namely African Americans. She and Bill had opted out of the Selma commemoration, and they had taken their time responding to the events in Ferguson.

  She responded more quickly to the death of Walter Scott, a fifty-year-old black man gunned down by a South Carolina police officer who then appeared to fabricate claims that he’d fought Scott over a Taser. The shooting was captured by a bystander on a cell phone camera and showed Scott running away from the officer, who shot at him eight times, hitting him four times in the back. “Praying for #WalterScott’s family,” Hillary tweeted on the day of Scott’s April 11 funeral, which was attended by hundreds of mourners, including both South Carolina senators and Congressman Jim Clyburn. “Heartbreaking & too familiar. We can do better—rebuild trust, reform justice system, respect all lives,” Mrs. Clinton wrote. But members of the Black Lives Matter movement made clear that they intended to hold Hillary to account, even threatening to protest at her events if she did not make clear her stand on police reform.

  Hillary sought to do just that by making criminal justice reform the centerpiece of her first major public speech, which was held on April 29 at Columbia University’s public policy center, named for former New York mayor David Dinkins. The speech came in the wake of yet another death of a black man at the hands of police: Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old man from an impoverished Baltimore neighborhood known as Sandtown. He was arrested by bike patrol officers on April 12 and later that day was taken unconscious from the back of the police wagon. After lapsing into a coma, he died one week later. His spinal cord had been nearly severed at the neck.

  The officers claimed Gray had a switchblade (a subsequent investigation found that he did not), and video of his arrest shows the police handling him roughly, before dragging a wailing Gray, his legs all but dangling, into the back of the transport wagon.

  Gray’s funeral on April 27 touched off a day of violent riots and looting in West Baltimore, drawing national attention to the city’s dire poverty and its history of toxic policing. This includes the old and nationwide scattered practice of “rough rides,” in which the poor, and often black, suspect is driven unbelted in the back of a police transport van, his body tossed around like a rag doll during a deliberately jarring trip. Baltimore—a city with a black female mayor and a black police commissioner—would be the latest American city to erupt in the national conflagration over the policing of black bodies.

  At Columbia, Hillary Clinton said,

  What we’ve seen in Baltimore should, indeed does, tear at our soul. And from Ferguson to Staten Island to Baltimore, the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. Walter Scott shot in the back in Charleston, South Carolina. Unarmed. In debt. And terrified of spending more time in jail for child support payments he couldn’t afford. . . . Tamir Rice shot in a park in Cleveland, Ohio. Unarmed and just twelve years old. . . . Eric Garner choked to death after being stopped for selling cigarettes on the streets of this city. And now Freddie Gray. His spine nearly severed while in police custody. Not only as a mother and a grandmother but as a citizen, a human being, my heart breaks for these young men and their families.

  Hillary’s staff had been hinting for days that this speech would be a centerpiece of her coming campaign, which became clear as she continued,

  We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America. There is something profoundly wrong when African American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts. . . . There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes. And an estimated one point five million black men are “missing” from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death. . . . There is something wrong when more than one out of every three young black men in Baltimore can’t find a job. . . . There is something wrong when trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve breaks down as far as it has in many of our communities. We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance. And these recent tragedies should galvanize us to come together as a nation to find our balance again.

  Two days after Mrs. Clinton spoke—on a Friday, the first day of May, following a week of marches and rallies that had spread to cities around the country, and as three thousand National Guard troops descended on Baltimore—six police officers were charged with crimes concerning Freddie Gray’s death, including manslaughter and second-degree murder. Three of the officers were white; three were black. It was an unprecedented step, taken by a thirty-five-year-old African American woman named Marilyn Mosby. She had been elected just a hundred days earlier to be Baltimore’s state attorney. The city’s black residents, straining under a week-long curfew, erupted in jubilation.

  As for Hillary Clinton, few doubted that if she became the Democratic nominee, she would win the lion’s share of African American votes. Indeed, a May 2015 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed her holding 90 percent of African American voters in a hypothetical matchup against Jeb Bush, compared to 66 percent if the Democrat facing Governor Bush was Joe Biden. But percentages don’t count in elections if they’re not backed up by volume.

  “There can be no assumptions,” said Bertha Lewis, head of the Brooklyn-based Black Institute, which she formed after the collapse of ACORN, the antipoverty organization that registered tens of thousands of minority voters. At its peak, ACORN boasted five hundred thousand members nationwide, only to be shuttered in 2010 when congressional Republicans pushed to strip the group of federal funds in the wake of a soon-discredited “investigation” by a pair of conservative activists linked to Breitbart.com. Breitbart.com was the same conservative media installation that went after Shirley Sherrod while Democrats stood silent and let the organization fall. Lewis declared herself an enthusiastic supporter of Hillary’s candidacy but warned that the candidate couldn’t afford to take minority voters for granted.

  “She’s got to go after this vote and go after it aggressively,” Lewis said. “The challenge is: Can she produce the long lines that Barack Obama produced [at the polls] and have people saying it’s my duty to go out and line up to vote?”

  Still, Lewis and others found the prospect of a woman president tantalizing, as exciting in fundamental ways as Barack Obama’s candidacy wa
s in 2008.

  “I’m quite ready for Hillary because I really do believe there was far more fear of a woman in 2008 than there was of a black male, since at least it was a male,” said Lewis. “And I do want to see a woman in the highest office. It would just so fundamentally change the dynamic of domestic policy and foreign policy. It isn’t just putting pink on it. I just think it’s a whole different mind-set and a different lens of looking at issues.”

  Not everyone shared Lewis’s enthusiasm. Liberal activists were gearing up to challenge Hillary on everything from her support for the Iraq War to her and her husband’s ties to Wall Street to the Clinton Foundation’s expansive list of foreign donors. Many hadn’t forgotten that it was Bill Clinton’s signature on the bill that ended the FDR-era separation of banking and investment speculation and opened the door to many of Wall Street’s worst abuses, or that Bill Clinton’s crime bill had unleashed some of the very police abuses the Black Lives Matter movement, and Hillary, were condemning. To mollify that base, Hillary Clinton would face enormous pressure to keep moving her message, and her campaign, to the left.

  And she would have to carefully calibrate her embrace of the sitting president, since any significant movement away from Obama would risk bringing on the wrath (or worse, the apathy) of black voters, while too close an association put her in potential peril with the white working-class voters who had been the object of the Clinton–New Democrats’ political project since the mid-1980s. Obama declared on Hillary’s announcement day that she would make an excellent president, adding, “I’m not on the ballot.” But in fundamental ways, he very much would be.