by Peter Slevin
Barack told worried campaign advisers that he had attended Trinity much less frequently in recent years and did not recall hearing the most inflammatory statements. He nonetheless attempted to explain them, describing Wright’s performances as bits of set-piece theater familiar to black congregants across the country. From the pews, he said, worshippers felt free to pick and choose from the rhetorical offerings, just as the faithful do in any religious denomination. “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons,” Barack said, “simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.”
Despite the uproar and the pain, Barack said in Philadelphia that he would not dissociate himself from his pastor. “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” he said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world. But a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me and they are a part of America, this country that I love.” Looking ahead, he counseled the African American community to accept “the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past.” He urged the white community to acknowledge that “what ails the African American community does not just exist in the minds of black people, that the legacy of discrimination, and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past, are real and must be addressed.”
The speech was widely viewed as a political success. It stanched the bleeding caused by the Wright sermons and, for voters willing to be reassured, it offered reason to be so. In Barack’s circle, Nesbitt was photographed in the audience, watching silently, a tear trickling down his cheek. Michelle said what Barack “did in his speech was give voice to every emotion I have.” She knew better than anyone how Barack had lived the words he spoke, and how he had arrived at them. “I was incredibly proud of what he said. Everything he said spoke to me in so many ways. Every word that he uttered was clarifying and wise and kind and unifying.” She predicted that the speech was “only the beginning of a long dialogue that we have to have,” and that Barack would lead it, “unlike many before who have just shied away from it because it’s hard.” Her own view, she made clear: “I’m not afraid of the conversation. I’m desperate for us to have it so that we can move beyond it.”
THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN WHEEZED its way, exhausted and disheartened, through the predicted loss in Pennsylvania. The night after the defeat, the high command met around the dinner table at the Obamas’ Hyde Park house to focus anew. Still leading in the Democratic delegate count, they saw a new chance in North Carolina and Indiana to do what they had repeatedly failed to do, all the way back to New Hampshire, and put Clinton away. Just as they were building momentum, however, Wright resurfaced with a batch of virulent statements bordering on the bizarre. Barack realized he needed to say something more. He called the performance “appalling” and a “spectacle.” It “contradicts everything I’m about and who I am,” he said. “I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That’s in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding.” He said Michelle was “similarly angered.” Feeling wounded, betrayed, and mystified, they resigned from Trinity. Barack continued to campaign intently through the firestorm, as did Michelle, who finished a punishing stretch of solo appearances with a speech lasting nearly an hour in Gary, Indiana, late on the night before polls opened. She then jetted to Indianapolis for a final rally with Barack that included a morale-boosting appearance by Stevie Wonder, whose music she had first cherished as a young girl, more than thirty-five years earlier.
Voters in North Carolina broke Barack’s way, as did enough Indiana voters to put him within a whisker of a victory there. He did particularly well among African American voters and young people, many of them newly registered. At the end of the night, NBC newsman Tim Russert declared, “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be.” The remaining half-dozen primaries were a formality. Clinton had won an estimated 18 million votes and pushed the Obama campaign to the limit, but she could not catch up. On June 3, with voters going to the polls in South Dakota and Montana and so-called super delegates flocking to his candidacy, Barack clinched the nomination. He spoke from a stage in Minnesota, clearly moved by the victory and, he said later, a dawning sense of obligation to win in November.
After the celebration, Michelle flew back to Chicago to be home when Malia and Sasha woke up. The girls were half asleep the next morning when they crawled into bed with her and learned that Barack was going to be the Democratic nominee. “And they’re like, ‘Ooh, this is a big night for Dad!’ ” Michelle recalled. “I said, ‘Well, do you guys realize what a big deal this is? Do you realize there has never been an African American that has been a presidential nominee?’ ” Malia answered, “Well, yeah, I can believe that. Because black people were slaves and they couldn’t vote for such a long time and of course this is a big deal.’ ”
TRIUMPH ASIDE, the months after the “proud” comments were difficult for Michelle. For all of the accolades from friends and supporters as she emerged on the national stage, she felt misunderstood, at best. The tone of the debate was hurtful and at times hateful. It frustrated her and shook her confidence. More than anything, she told friends and staff, she could not bear the thought that she might be harming Barack’s chances. A bevy of reports emerged, fueled by her Wisconsin remarks, that Michelle’s campaign trail tone was too negative, too edgy—that she appeared to be, as the simplistic and pernicious stereotype would have it, an angry black woman. Her natural style, some members of the campaign staff thought, was becoming a liability to a black candidate who would need white swing voters to win in November. Strategists concluded that she needed to modify her delivery, but no one wanted to be the bearer of that news. “They were afraid they were going to be shot,” said Forrest Claypool, a political adviser involved in the discussions. In the end, several staff members met with her to talk things over. She was furious, but not for the reasons they had anticipated. If her delivery was a problem, she demanded to know, why hadn’t someone told her sooner? “She was angry that everyone was tiptoeing around the candidate’s wife,” Claypool said, recalling that she told them, “I can adapt. I want to be an asset to the campaign.”
The end of the grueling primary season gave the campaign time to reconsider Michelle’s approach, with an eye toward an August relaunch on the grand stage of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Michelle worked hard at it, following through on her promise. She had never been asked to perform on a stage this big in a moment this important, but her ability to nail a performance had already impressed campaign consultants. Earlier in the primary season, Claypool and John Cooper coached Michelle as she worked through her stump speech. They met in the conference room of the Axelrod firm’s headquarters at 730 North Franklin in Chicago. After she delivered the speech, they suggested perhaps two dozen specific improvements in her delivery, such as slowing down in one place or adding emphasis to a particular syllable. “I know that’s a lot to absorb. We’ll break it out into pieces and we’ll go through it,” Claypool told her reassuringly. “Okay, let me try it again,” Michelle replied. When she finished, Claypool was stunned by how thoroughly she had absorbed the critique and incorporated the changes. “It was flawless. John and I just looked and each other and said, ‘I think we’re done here.’ I’ve never seen anything like it, ever. She’s a pro’s pro.”
DURING THE LULL after the primaries, Michelle spent more time back in Hyde Park, where the girls finished their year at Lab School and went to after-school activities and sleepovers as Michelle fought to retain a sense of normalcy. Slipping into the rhythms of ordinary family life was next to impossible, not only because of her fam
e and the demands on her time, but also because of the Secret Service agents who shadowed her around the clock. They set up a command post outside the house. They stationed themselves at school. They organized caravans to ballet classes and soccer matches and kept outsiders at bay. Sasha, who turned seven that year, called them “the secret people.”
Michelle had long feared that Barack’s prominence could make him a target. Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. all fell to assassins’ bullets. “It only takes one person and it only takes one incident. I mean, I know history, too,” she said. She had met King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, a few years earlier. “What I remember most was that she told me not to be afraid because God was with us—Barack and me—and that she would always keep us in her prayers.” In agreeing to the presidential race, Michelle made clear to Barack that she expected him to get Secret Service protection. She also wanted to maintain her income and her professional reputation in case he died, given that national politics put him in what she called a position of “high-risk.” While there would be “great sympathy and outpouring if something were to happen, I don’t want to be in a position one day where I am vulnerable with my children,” she told writer David Mendell. “I need to be in a position for my kids where, if they lose their father, they don’t lose everything.”
Early in the campaign, Barack’s staff printed a sheaf of incendiary material that was circulating on the Internet and delivered it to Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and member of the Senate leadership. Durbin relayed the information to Senate majority leader Harry Reid, starting the process that would establish the Secret Service presence. In May 2007, eighteen months before the general election, Barack began operating behind the cordon, yet it was hard not to fret. He was the target of hatred—sometimes threatening, sometimes merely vile. Many African American supporters, especially, shuddered to think of the instant they would learn that he had been shot. Television newsman Steve Kroft asked Michelle whether she had considered the possibility. “I don’t lose sleep over it because the realities are that, as a black man, Barack can get shot going to the gas station,” she said. “So, you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren’t raised that way.” The Secret Service became part of the Obamas’ lives. Barack’s code name was Renegade. Michelle’s was Renaissance.
DESPITE THE BARRICADES and restrictions, Hyde Park was a haven, the community where the Obamas felt most at home during the never-ending campaign. The neighborhood spoke to their desires and their values. It also, perhaps inevitably, became a symbol to Republican critics of what was wrong with them. No American president had been elected from a place quite like Hyde Park, home to a university famous for intellectualism, a pair of 1960s Weather Underground radicals famous for being unrepentant, and a bloc of voters famous for choosing John Kerry over the victorious George W. Bush by 19 to 1. Judging by the demonization, the Obamas might as well have lived at the corner of Liberal and Kumbaya. Republican strategist Karl Rove placed Hyde Park alongside Cambridge and San Francisco in a triad of leftist tomfoolery. The Weekly Standard recalled Barack’s description of former Weatherman Bill Ayers as merely “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and asked who lives in a neighborhood like that.
In real life, the area more properly described as Hyde Park–Kenwood could not be so easily typecast. The political ethic was proudly progressive on matters of race and social justice, yet the community was anchored by the University of Chicago, an incubator of some of the nation’s most prominent conservatives, from Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia to Nobel Prize–winning free marketeer Milton Friedman. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan lived within four blocks of the Obamas’ $1.6 million home, as did Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a fellow former radical. Yet so did Richard Epstein, a prominent libertarian law professor quick to say that he was friends with Scalia and Ayers and had once tried to hire Dohrn.
To be a Hyde Parker, dozens of residents explained, was to choose to live in a community that considered variations of race, creed, wealth, and politics to be a neighborhood selling point, like bicycle paths or broadband. “I grew up playing with the children of welfare families and the children of Nobel Prize winners and you don’t think anything of it,” said Arne Duncan, superintendent of Chicago Public Schools and later U.S. secretary of education. “You grow up very comfortable and confident around people who don’t look like you and are from very different backgrounds.” Mainstream, as mainstream was commonly defined in statistical terms, was not Hyde Park. The average white metropolitan resident in the United States lived in a neighborhood 80 percent white and only 7 percent black. Census tracts in the exurbs and the countryside were often even whiter. By contrast, the 2000 census found that 43.5 percent of the 29,000 residents of Hyde Park proper called themselves white, 37.7 percent black, 11.3 percent Asian, and 4.1 percent Hispanic. Another 3.4 percent answered “other.” In economic terms, there was an abundance of six-figure earners, yet one in six residents lived in poverty. The median household income was about $45,000, roughly 10 percent lower than the national average. It was also surely the rare place in the country where an academic and his wife, going through a divorce, would include a clause splitting future winnings if he won the Nobel Prize in economics. One professor and his ex-wife did just that. He won, and sent her $500,000.
The house on Greenwood Avenue that Barack and Michelle bought in 2005 had a lineage that suited the community’s modern-day reputation. For seven years in the mid-twentieth century, it was owned by the Hebrew Theological Academy, which ran a Jewish day school there. In 1954, the Hyde Park Lutheran Church purchased the mansion with its four fireplaces and made it the local headquarters of the Lutheran Human Relations Association of America. The Reverend George Hrbek called it home from 1966 to 1971, directing a project designed to counteract racism, principally by raising the consciousness of young white people who visited the house or lived there. At any given time, as many as twenty people bunked in the building, some for weeks, some for years. Hrbek estimated that three thousand people, including waves of divinity students, took part in the training. “If you wanted to deal with racism,” he said, “you had to deal with the white community.” During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, members of the Chicago Seven stayed in the house. In 1971, four firebombs did minor damage to the outside of the building. When Hrbek learned after the 2008 election that Barack and Michelle owned it, he sent the president a letter saying that their house was “filled with good spirits.”
It was nonetheless true that Hyde Park’s twentieth-century history had an ugly side even before the University of Chicago’s investment in white neighborhood committees and urban renewal. Phoebe Moten Johnson, mother of LaVaughn Robinson and great-grandmother of Michelle, lived in Hyde Park during a paroxysm of harassment and violence intended to terrorize black residents. Between 1917 and 1921, when Phoebe and her family lived at 5470 South Kenwood—six blocks from where Michelle and Barack would live ninety years later—bombs struck fifty-eight homes owned by black families or the white men who sold homes to black people. One week when violence struck her neighborhood, Phoebe was frantic. She mixed water and lye in a kettle and heated it on a wood-burning stove, ready to throw it in the eyes of any white marauders who broke down her door. Friction continued. In the 1940s, it was restrictive covenants. In the 1950s, it was urban renewal. By the 1960s, when some people actually did sing “Kumbaya,” the economic divide in Hyde Park prompted a joke that the community, for all of its pride in racial integration, was really a case of “black and white together, standing shoulder to shoulder against the poor.”
Author Blue Balliett based her inquisitive, multicultural twelve-year-old protagonists in Chasing Vermeer on students at Lab School, where she had taught. Justice John Paul Stevens earned his high school degree there and Langston Hughes had once been artist in residence. “It’s a place where you can be who you are and bring any kind of diversit
y to the table and be celebrated for it,” Balliett said of the community. “Kids really can grow up in Hyde Park and never hear a negative conversation about those differences. My son used to say, ‘How come we aren’t at least Jewish and Christian?’ ” When he was a boy, social activist Jamie Kalven lived in a third-floor apartment in a home owned by Manhattan Project chemist Harold Urey. At various times, the house was also owned by prizefighter Sonny Liston and jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. Muhammad Ali once lived nearby. In an outdoor cage, he kept a pair of lions given to him by Mobutu Sese Seko, the corrupt ruler of Zaire. Kalven spoke of the presence in Hyde Park of a roughly equal number of blacks and whites “for whom the fact of living together is no big deal.” Which was, in a sense, the big deal.
For Barack, who wanted to be seen during the campaign as distinctive but unthreatening, his chosen turf represented political eclecticism and a sense of possibility that came to be called, with insufficient reflection, post-racial. But the narrative cut both ways as Republicans pushed the argument that the erudite Barack was overly exotic, elitist, and naive. He bodysurfed in Hawaii, he ordered green tea ice cream in Oregon, he wrote his own books, and his name was Barack Hussein Obama. “This is not a man who sees America as you and I do, as the greatest force for good in the world,” said Alaska governor Sarah Palin after she became the Republican vice presidential nominee. Valerie Jarrett, who had lived much of her life in the community, begged to differ. “Hyde Park is the real world as it should be,” she said. “If we could take Hyde Park and we could help make more Hyde Parks around our country, I think we would be a much stronger country.”