by Peter Slevin
“Hope is making a comeback,” Michelle had said that morning in Milwaukee, “and, let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but I think people are hungry for change.” For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country. Fourteen words that would be repeated over and over on the airwaves, dissected by commentators and held aloft by Republican critics as proof positive that Michelle was not the good and decent American patriot that she pretended to be.
The next day, Cindy McCain, wife of Republican candidate John McCain, volunteered, “I’m proud of my country. I don’t know about you, if you heard those words earlier. I’m very proud of my country.” On Fox News, anti-Obama commentator Sean Hannity told his audience, “To think your country is mean and you have nothing to be proud of, I think that’s a big issue.” Some critics read into her remarks the idea that she was only proud because Barack, whom she had publicly called “the answer,” was winning. Others demanded to know how she could not be proud of a country where she could graduate from Princeton and Harvard, earn a small fortune, and stand a decent chance of taking up residence in the White House. “We’ve grown up and lived in the same era. And yet her self-absorbed attitude is completely foreign to me,” wrote conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, the Oberlin-educated daughter of parents from the Philippines. “What planet is she living on?”
Michelle Obama’s remarks that day were not accidental or ad-libbed. She made the same point twice, using nearly identical language several hours apart. Moving from Milwaukee to Madison, the state capital, she said, “Hope is making a comeback. And let me tell you something. For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic, common issues and it’s made me proud. I feel privileged to be a part of even witnessing this, traveling around states all over this country and being reminded that there is more that unites us than divides us, that the struggles of a farmer in Iowa are no different than what’s happening on the South Side of Chicago, that people are feeling the same pain and wanting the same things for their families.”
To Michelle’s staff and many in her audience, what she said was a commonplace—not remarkable, not meriting the firestorm that followed. What, they wondered, was the big deal? No less respected a figure than Colin Powell, the first African American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had written in his autobiography, My American Journey, a dozen years earlier, “The army made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws.” Paul Schmitz, Michelle’s former Public Allies colleague, happened to be in the front row in Milwaukee, his video camera rolling. “No one who was there thought they had heard a gaffe. No one leaving there thought, ‘Oh, boy, we’ve got a problem,’ ” said Schmitz, a white man. “It all made absolute sense. I could have said the same thing. How many people do you know who said, ‘A guy with the name Barack Hussein Obama? There’s no way. It can’t happen.’ That was a normal conversation at that time. I think that was common knowledge, that the country really had shown that it had grown up.”
Back in Chicago, historian Timuel Black thought nothing of it, certain that Michelle was “expressing a feeling that millions and millions of African Americans feel.” Lawyer James Montgomery, who like Black had tasted prejudice, did not think Michelle had misspoken. “That was vintage truth: ‘Here I am, my husband is running for president. He is black. And Iowa has just given him a resounding victory,’ ” said the former civil rights attorney, who lived two doors north of the Obamas in Hyde Park. “I think it really says that deep down in her innards, she had doubts about whether or not a white majority would elect a black president. In her day, she has seen a lot of reasons in Chicago not to be proud of her country.”
Inside Chicago headquarters, however, the campaign leadership uttered a collective “Uh-oh.” They focused on a broad electorate needing to be persuaded that Barack was safe and sufficiently mainstream. Seen through that prism, Michelle’s remarks were unhelpful, to say the least. The damage control started quickly. “What she meant,” Burton wrote to reporters, “is that she’s really proud at this moment.” Barack came to his wife’s defense, pointing out her longtime skepticism about politics. He said the comment was misunderstood. “What she meant was, this is the first time that she’s been proud of the politics of America. Because she’s pretty cynical about the political process, and with good reason, and she’s not alone,” he said.
At her next public event, two days later in Rhode Island, Michelle herself tried to explain. “I’m proud in how Americans are engaging in the political process,” she said. “For the first time in my lifetime, I’m seeing people rolling up their sleeves in a way that I haven’t seen.” A reporter asked whether she had, in fact, always been proud of her country. “Absolutely,” she said. Reflecting on the episode after the caravan had moved on, adviser Robert Gibbs said he was just glad the moment had occurred early in the campaign, and not on the eve of the November election.
REACTIONS TO MICHELLE’S REMARKS exposed a divide in what people were prepared to believe about her. To her fans, she was speaking truth to power, being authentic, keeping it real. She saw problems and identified solutions, using her own narrative of renewed hope to reassure the skeptical and rally the tuned-out. To her foes, she was a naysayer, an ingrate, and a snob who failed to appreciate what the country had done for her and her black Icarus of a husband. The budding anti-Michelle narrative suggested that she was not only divisive, but quite possibly dangerous, maybe treasonous. Her Princeton thesis would be invoked to support that view and so would her membership in Trinity United Church of Christ, with its “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian” credo. Juan Williams, a black commentator for Fox News, would say later that Michelle has “this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going.” When Michelle greeted Barack onstage at campaign events with a fist bump, a Fox personality asked rhetorically if it was a “terrorist fist jab.” Unfounded reports lit up the right-wing blogosphere that Michelle had said bad things about a country run by “whitey.”
Michelle dismissed the increasingly fantastical allegations as pre- posterous, and The New Yorker spoofed the emerging caricature on its cover. The cartoon depicted Michelle as an Afro-wearing jihadist in combat boots, a Kalashnikov slung over her shoulder, fist-bumping Barack in the Oval Office. The artist, Barry Blitt, said he was trying to reveal the criticism “as the fear-mongering ridiculousness that it is.” The line of attack reached the ears of Malia, who turned ten on July 4, 2008. She asked Barack one day, when Michelle was within earshot, why people on the news were saying that “Mom doesn’t love her country.” Barack explained that sometimes people in politics say mean things. Malia replied, “Yeah, that’s nuts.”
Looking for explanations, Michelle’s law school friend Verna Williams pointed to the relative novelty in national politics of an accomplished, assertive, professional black woman. She said the critics, so quick to turn to stereotypes, were essentially asking, “How can Michelle Obama be First Lady when she’s no lady at all?” Through generations of American history, ladyhood was the province of white women alone. The model political wife in popular memory was obsequious, not to mention white. Making news for anything other than glowing encomiums directed toward the candidate was never the goal. As Marjorie Williams once wrote of Barbara Bush, the tart-tongued wife of George H. W. Bush, “It is one of the chief requirements of her job that she say as few genuinely memorable things as possible.” Wives were not expected to say, as Michelle had said already, that the country had gone to war in Iraq because U.S. leaders “were not willing to tell us the truth,” or that it would be nice to have someone in the White House “who understands the Constitution, particularly as we ha
ve seen it obliterated.” In Michelle’s case, partisan pushback that might have greeted any assertive political spouse was reinforced by disdain grounded in racial prejudice. The vitriol pooled and eddied in countless Internet comments sections, demonstrating that Michelle was becoming a target in her own right. “You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be,” she told The New York Times. “I mean, ‘whitey’? … Anyone who says that doesn’t know me. They don’t know the life I’ve lived. They don’t know anything about me.”
With decisive victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii on February 19, Barack had won ten contests in a row by an average margin of thirty-four percentage points, leaving Clinton ever further behind in the delegate chase. But as she steered toward friendlier ground in Texas and Ohio, the New York senator showed no inclination to quit, telling voters that she was the known quantity, the one who had been close to power, the one they could trust. “This is the choice we face,” she said. “One of us is ready to be commander in chief in a dangerous world. One of us has faced serious Republican opposition in the past. And one of us is ready to do it again.” Indeed, Clinton would win the Texas and Ohio popular vote, sending the Obamas and much of Barack’s high command into a funk as they trudged toward certain defeat seven weeks later in Pennsylvania. Before the Pennsylvania vote, things would get worse, in the shape of the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and the sound of his sermons looping through the mediaplex. The eruption prompted Barack to give his most explicit speech yet on race and racism in American society, a shoal his political strategists had hoped to skirt.
WHO WAS Jeremiah Wright? Barack described him as an inspirational and insightful South Side figure, a deep-thinking pastor who “helped bring me to Jesus and helped bring me to church.” He cared about social justice, supported the HIV/AIDS community, developed a church mission in Africa, and delivered the sermon that inspired the title of Barack’s second book, The Audacity of Hope. Something of a mentor to Barack during his early Chicago years, Wright married Barack and Michelle and baptized Malia and Sasha. On the campaign trail, Michelle would often begin her remarks to African American church audiences by offering greetings from Pastor Wright. But the theatrical, dashiki-wearing character who emerged during the campaign hardly resembled Barack’s early portrait. Even allowing for the speedy reduction of Wright to media caricature, it was hard to square Barack’s initial description with the shotgun sprays of anti-establishment, anti-government bombast in Wright’s sermons.
The campaign staff knew in February 2007 that Wright’s presence in the Obama camp created a quandary. He was due to deliver the invocation at Barack’s presidential announcement in Springfield, but advisers argued that newly published details of a Wright sermon could swamp coverage of the speech. “Fact number one, we’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college,” Wright preached, according to Rolling Stone. “Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run! We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional killers.… We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.” Alerted to the magazine article, Barack reluctantly informed Wright that he would not have a speaking part on announcement day. He invited the minister to pray beforehand with the family, which he did.
It was on March 13, 2008, nine days after Barack’s draining loss in Texas and Ohio, that Wright emerged as a full-blown campaign problem. The source was an ABC News report, three minutes, twenty-five seconds long, that juxtaposed short excerpts from Wright’s sermons with supportive comments from Barack about his twenty years in the Trinity congregation. In a 2003 clip, Wright blamed American authorities for imprisoning excessive numbers of African Americans and expecting citizens “to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no! God damn America! That’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human! God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
In another sermon, from September 16, 2001, five raw days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Wright suggested that the attacks were payback for American violence and misdeeds abroad. He pointed out that far more people had died when the United States dropped a pair of atomic bombs on Japan in an effort to end World War II. “America’s chickens,” he declared, “are coming home to roost.” The ABC piece quoted Barack likening his pastor, who had recently retired, to “an old uncle who sometimes says things I don’t agree with.” It also included Trinity members coming to Wright’s defense. “No, I wouldn’t call it radical,” one woman told the camera crew. “I’d call it being black in America.”
The news about Wright—propelled by the video images that became ubiquitous—prompted a new wave of scrutiny of Barack’s identity and intentions. At a time when the Clinton campaign was trying to paint him as callow and unelectable, skeptics were asking whether a candidate with a preacher like Wright could be trusted with the keys to the White House. Barack had lost white voters by a large margin in Ohio, and now, as the nomination fight dragged on, Pennsylvania was looming, followed by Indiana and North Carolina. Fresh controversy the campaign did not need. Barack released a statement calling Wright’s statements “inflammatory and appalling.” But the statement only took him so far. “What you had was a moment where all the suspicions and misunderstandings that are embedded in our racial history were suddenly laid bare,” Barack later told Dan Balz of The Washington Post. “If we had not handled the Reverend Wright episode properly, I think we could have lost.”
MARTY NESBITT was in Chicago when he got a call from Barack, who was campaigning in Indiana. Barack reported that he was sitting with Eric Whitaker and Valerie Jarrett and they were holding an empty chair for him. Nesbitt had intended to take that campaign swing, but his wife was about to give birth. He had been following the news. “This Jeremiah Wright thing is a blessing in disguise,” he said into the phone. Barack burst out laughing and reported to the others what Nesbitt had said. Nesbitt explained that Wright had created an obstacle, for sure, but one that Barack could remove. He could do it with a speech, often considered by Barack but never delivered, about race in America. Only Barack could give that address, Nesbitt went on, not simply because he identified himself as a black man, but because he had a white mother and a white grandmother and had thought deeply about racial issues for much of his adult life. Nesbitt said that if Barack gave the powerful speech that everyone knew he could give—and that Clinton, as a white woman, could not—it would be “game over.” Barack, who had already alerted his advisers, said, “I guess I have to give the speech, then.”
Michelle, too, saw the Wright conflagration as a moment when Barack needed to step forward. “The conversation that Barack and I had was, ‘This is the opportunity. This is the reason why you’re here. This is why you’re in this race, because there is a perspective, a voice, that you can bring to this conversation that is needed and that no one else can do or say,” Michelle explained. “What I said to Barack was, ‘I know you have it in your head. I know exactly what you want to say to the American people about this and how complex it is.’ And this is what leadership is all about. This is the opportunity, and this is just one example of how Barack will have to lead.”
Once the decision was made to give the speech in Philadelphia, Michelle made a rare call to campaign manager David Plouffe to ask whether an arena with perhaps a hundred seats for spectators, apart from the media, was big enough. “We need energy and fight and passion, not something that will come across as a dry lecture,” Plouffe recalled Michelle telling him. She said Barack needed “to see supportive faces and be boosted.” Plouffe reviewed the situation with his colleagues. The campaign stuck with its plan to hold the event at the National Constitution Center. He explained the reasoning to Michelle, who would travel to Philadelphia for moral support, as would Nesbitt, Jarrett, and Eric Holder, the future attorney general. “Michelle was ver
y good in moments like this,” Plouffe said. “She didn’t raise many questions about the campaign broadly, but when she did, it was with good reason. Once she determined we had worked things through thoroughly, she was generally satisfied, and that was the case now.”
AFTER LABORING DEEP into the night to get the words right, Barack delivered the speech on March 18 against a backdrop of American flags stationed onstage like sentinels. With nods toward Abraham Lincoln, the Constitution, and the guiding purpose of his own political quest, he titled the address “A More Perfect Union.” It was, in many ways, a speech of translation, the work of a thinking man with a window into many worlds, describing black and white to each other. More significantly, it was a speech of explanation, the product of a politician born with brown skin feeling obligated to describe to a white audience what he was not, and what he was. Barack wove his personal history, and Michelle’s, through an account of American history informed by the undeniable fact that an African American man married to a descendant of slaves stood on the threshold of the presidency. The thirty-eight-minute address contained elements of their familiar depiction of the world as it is and the world as it should be, but he added an intermediate step: the world as it was becoming.
There was no doubt, Barack said, that black bitterness and white resentment persisted, fueling mutual anger and a sense of “racial stalemate.” But Wright’s “profound mistake,” he said, was to portray U.S. society as static, as being just as racist as it was when the preacher was coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, when “segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.” Those were the times of Jim Crow, Barack reminded his audience, when black people were excluded from labor unions, police departments, and certain neighborhoods, when banks denied loans to black business owners, and the fabric of black families eroded, partly due to the shame and frustration that flowed from the lack of economic opportunity. Those profound injustices weighed black people down, he said, and still informed the views of men and women of Wright’s generation—a generation that included, not incidentally, Fraser and Marian Robinson. But where Wright went wrong, Barack said, was in his failure to credit evidence “that America can change.”