The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Still, for an African-American, no matter how skilled, no matter how intelligent and popular, a run for the Presidency was a weighty thing to consider.

  Despite the small number of African-Americans who, since Reconstruction, have held office in districts and states where blacks were not in a majority, there has always been talk--at times derisive or farcical; at times quixotic, even messianic--of a black President. As early as 1904, George Edwin Taylor, a newspaperman born in Arkansas, accepted the nomination of the all-black National Liberty Party, but even much later in the century the prospect of a black President was almost always a discussion held in the spirit of a dream.

  "We'd wonder, How long?" Don Rose, Martin Luther King's press secretary in Chicago, recalled, in an echo of the old movement chant "How long? Not long!" In 1967, members of the National Conference for New Politics tried to persuade King to run on a national ticket with Benjamin Spock. Scores of American soldiers and Vietnamese were dying every day. King had made speeches at Riverside Church, in New York, and at other venues across the country, calling not simply for peace negotiations, as Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy had, but for immediate withdrawal from a lost war. With eloquence, bravery, and cunning, King had led the most important social and political movement in the history of the United States, rallying countless blacks and whites to the cause of civil rights. Now there were people who, desperate about the antiwar movement's seeming inability to have a similar effect on government, saw King as a savior figure, the one man who, as President, would end the Vietnam conflict. "One emotional student told him not to rule it out, that it was a matter of life or death," Taylor Branch, the author of a three-volume biography of King, said. Vietnam and poverty, as well as race, would have been at the center of his agenda as a politician, and King thought about it for a while. But in the end he refused entreaties to run. He knew that he was unlikely to win and, more important, that he might undermine his role as a prophetic voice of protest if he joined the stream of conventional politics.

  Since that time, a number of black men and women had run for President, but none with serious prospects of winning and a few for purely symbolic reasons: among them were the comedian and writer Dick Gregory and the Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, in 1968; the Brooklyn congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, in 1972; King's follower Jesse Jackson, in 1984 and 1988; Dr. Lenora Fulani, a developmental psychologist, who, as the leader of the New Alliance Party, got on the ballot of all fifty states in 1988; Alan Keyes, in 1996 and 2000; and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, in 2004.

  Some of those candidacies produced concrete results. Chisholm, who ran under the slogan "Unbought and Unbossed," introduced the reality of a mainstream black candidate. At the Miami Beach convention that put George McGovern's name forward as the Democratic nominee, she had a hundred and fifty-one delegates; Chisholm saw herself as a trailblazer. "The United States was said not to be ready to elect a Catholic to the Presidency when Al Smith ran in the nineteen-twenties," she said. "But Smith's nomination may have helped pave the way for the successful campaign John F. Kennedy waged in 1960. Who can tell? What I hope most is that now there will be others who will feel themselves as capable of running for high political office as any wealthy, good-looking white male." Chisholm, who died in 2005, was also quick to remind people of a fact that would have interested Hillary Clinton; she said, "Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black."

  Jesse Jackson's two runs at the Presidency have largely receded from memory, eclipsed at times by his penchant for grandstanding, but he made a powerful mark. Jackson spoke of a multicultural "rainbow coalition," a rhetoric of unity, but even his most passionate supporters saw him as a man of the civil-rights generation, a politician who had begun his career in protest against white supremacy. "My constituency," he once said, "is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised." Jackson was a wounded, fatherless man from Greenville, South Carolina, whose extraordinary energies and compassion, as well as his undeniable gift for black-church oratory, was sometimes overwhelmed by his vanity--a vanity that dismayed even Martin Luther King. And yet Jackson forged historical results. In two national races he won a total of fourteen primaries and caucuses and came in second in thirty-six, including in white states such as Maine and Minnesota.

  Jackson, like King before him, and like Malcolm X in his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," reminded African-Americans of the enormous potential power of the black vote in American political life and pleaded for that potential to be used properly. At rallies in the South, Jackson made the case that Ronald Reagan had won in 1980 "by the margin of our non-participation." He had taken eight Southern states by a hundred and eighty-two thousand votes, "while three million blacks there were unregistered." Jackson was right. Increased black registration, bolstered by Jackson himself, helped bring a series of white Democrats into statewide office who had failed to win white majorities: Wyche Fowler, Jr., in Georgia; John Breaux, in Louisiana; Alan Cranston, in California; Terry Sanford, in North Carolina; and Richard Shelby, in Alabama.

  The spectacle and passion of Jackson's speeches at the 1984 and 1988 Conventions was enough to alter the sense of what was politically possible. "Nothing will ever again be what it was before," James Baldwin said of Jackson's 1984 race. "It changes the way the boy on the street and the boy on Death Row and his mother and his father and his sweetheart and his sister think about themselves. It indicates that one is not entirely at the mercy of the assumptions of this Republic, of what they have said you are, that this is not necessarily who and what you are. And no one will ever forget this moment, no matter what happens now."

  Richard Hatcher, an ally of Jackson's who, in 1967, was elected the first black mayor of Gary, Indiana, used a metaphor familiar to Barack Obama to describe his friend's accomplishment. Not only did Hatcher's language anticipate Obama's; he even anticipated a political figure like Obama and the emotional impact that he would have on the older generation. Jackson, Hatcher said, was "like Moses, he's been allowed to see the Promised Land but will never be able to get there himself. He cannot be Joshua, going on over with the people into Canaan. Ironically, that could be some person very different from Jesse, who, in what he represents and wants to do, will irritate fewer whites, will be more acceptable to them, because they will see him as more like themselves--'O.K., I think I can get past the color thing and vote for him, because I know in my heart that in his heart he's just like me. He's proven that.'... While Jesse has hastened the day when there will be a black President, Jesse himself will never become President. In a way, there's a sadness in that."

  Before the country could realize an African-American in the Presidency, it seemed, popular culture helped conceive it--first as comedy, then as commonplace, providing, over time, a clue to the shifting yearnings and anxieties connected to race and the highest political office.

  In a twenty-one-minute film called "Rufus Jones for President," directed, in 1933, by Roy Mack, Ethel Waters tells her young son, played by Sammy Davis, Jr., "You's goin' be President!"

  "Me?"

  "Sure. They has kings your age. I don't see no reason why they can't have Presidents. Besides, the book says anybody born here can be a President." And as Ethel Waters dreamily sings "Stay on Your Own Side of the Fence," she and the boy fall into a reverie in which they see his black political supporters carrying signs reading "Down with the Reds, Put in the Blacks" and "Vote Here for Rufus Jones, Two Pork Chops Every Time You Vote." Rufus is elected and promises that he will change the national anthem to "The Memphis Blues." Then Waters sings another song:

  There's no fields of cotton, pickin' cotton is taboo;

  We don't live in cabins like our old folks used to do:

  Our cabin is a penthouse now on St. Nicholas Avenue,

  Underneath a Harlem moon.

  Once we wore bandannas, now we wear Parisian hats,

  Once we went barefoot, now we're sporting shoes and
spats,

  Once we were Republicans but now we're Democrats,

  Underneath a Harlem moon.

  This sly, yet cringe-inducing ditty ends with young Rufus waking from his improbable dream of political success to the reality of his dismal surroundings and the smell of his mother's burning pork chops. In 1933, the idea of a young black boy dreaming of the Presidency was a form of tragic comedy.

  In Irving Wallace's Johnson-era best-seller, The Man, Douglass Dilman, a black senator from the Midwest, becomes President through a freakish accident. The incumbent, the Vice-President, and the Speaker of the House all die. Dilman is full of self-doubt ("I am a black man, not yet qualified for human being, let alone for President"); he gets impeached and eventually wins acquittal by a single vote.

  When, in the seventies, Richard Pryor was hosting a variety show on network television, he took on the subject as a comic flight: once a black man was in office, would he be loyal to his race or to his country? Elected the fortieth President of the United States, President Pryor opens his first press conference calmly and with only a hint of racial pride. Before long, though, he allows that he will consider appointing the Black Panther leader Huey Newton as director of the F.B.I. ("He knows the ins and outs of the F.B.I., if anybody knows") and intends to get more black quarterbacks and coaches into the N.F.L. It's the same gag about Black Power and white anxiety that's at the center of "Putney Swope," the 1969 Robert Downey, Sr., film in which a seemingly mild-mannered black advertising executive is accidentally elected to chair the board of a white-run firm, whereupon he throws out all but one token white, replaces them with black militants, and renames the firm Truth & Soul, Inc.

  More and more, a black President was an ordinary sight--on the screen, at least. Morgan Freeman, as President Tom Beck, prepared the world for an all-destroying comet in the 1998 science-fiction film "Deep Impact"; in the television series "24," President David Palmer, played by Dennis Haysbert, fends off a nuclear attack--and after he is killed by a sniper his brother becomes President. In Hollywood's imaginings, a black President had become an incidental plot point, a casting choice.

  Few politicians, no matter how young or self-aware, could have resisted the incessant encouragement, inquiry, flattery, and adulation that were now coming Obama's way. In Africa, he had been greeted day after day with rapt attention and ecstatic cheering. At the Harkin steak fry in Indianola, the testing ground for Presidential hopefuls, he had won an enthusiastic ovation and the plaudits of local and national columnists. And now, as he toured the country to promote The Audacity of Hope, his days began and ended with talk of a Presidential run. The Audacity of Hope was not nearly as introspective as Dreams from My Father. There were personal moments in it, but the book was purposefully, cautiously political. It was a shrewd candidate's book, tackling in moderately liberal terms the issues of domestic policy, foreign affairs, race, religion, and law. Like Obama's letter to Daily Kos and his speech before the evangelicals, it established a tone: cool, polite, insistent on refusing the mud and assaults of the cable shouters and Internet haters, intent on winning over everyone. For such a consistent Democrat, Obama wrote a book that seemed not so much to straddle the ideological divide as to embrace the entire landscape of political opinion all at once. Joe Klein, writing in Time, said he had toted up at least fifty instances in which Obama provided "excruciatingly judicious" on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand formulations. ("The tendency is so pronounced," Klein wrote, "that it almost seems an obsessive-compulsive tic.") And David Brooks, the conservative Times columnist, wrote, "He seems like the kind of guy who spends his first 15 minutes at a restaurant debating the relative merits of fish versus meat." And yet, Klein was not exasperated with Obama for long; his piece, like his coverage, was largely admiring. And Brooks wrote that Obama's deliberative nature was "surely the antidote" to the Bush Presidency; his column, which ran in mid-October, was headlined "Run, Barack, Run."

  Some critics argued that by insisting on civility as an essential virtue in politics, Obama risked acting superior to politics itself. Obama's equanimity, his critics seemed to suggest, was a form of vanity, a lack of real conviction. The Democratic left wondered what it could make of a politician who expressed admiration for Ronald Reagan; internationalists and hawks wondered whether Obama, reacting to the disaster in Iraq, hadn't fashioned a liberal rationale for isolationism. The Audacity of Hope was an intelligent book but an elusive one. And yet many readers and potential voters embraced Obama, not least for his message of a new tone in political discourse. Timing was the crucial factor; the book came along just as the Bush Presidency--marked by an obstreperous partisanship, an obsession with secrecy and absolutism--was reaching its nadir.

  More and more, it seemed obvious that the "perfect storm" that Rouse had talked about as a possibility in January, 2006, was now forming. There would be no incumbent or sitting Vice-President in the 2008 race. The Republicans were in a state of real collapse; not only was Bush himself profoundly unpopular, but the Party itself, which had instigated a prolonged conservative era beginning with Ronald Reagan's 1980 election, now seemed starved of ideas, save a tired insistence on tax-cutting free-market absolutism. Hillary Clinton was the putative frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, but her family legacy had ineradicable negatives that she would have to contend with. And here was Obama, a potential candidate with a slender political record but an appealing character and life story, clean hands on the issue of Iraq, and a rhetoric of change that was exciting liberal Democrats more than anyone since Robert Kennedy. Finally, there were the historical trends and polling numbers that indicated that an African-American--in particular, this African-American--could succeed in a national election.

  The voices for caution in Obama's camp argued that the majority of the electorate would want him to pay his dues in the Senate and slowly accumulate more political credibility and experience. But that argument was fast losing its appeal. More and more, people who had known Obama since his Springfield days told him that such moments do not come along twice in the life of a politician. What would he gain by waiting? Would he really be in a better spot if Hillary Clinton won? When would a chance even half as propitious come again? Obama might end up regretting his own reluctance or hesitation for the rest of his life.

  At a magazine convention in Phoenix on October 23, 2006, I interviewed Obama in front of an audience of hundreds of editors and publishers. The publicity tour for The Audacity of Hope was in full swing and he was groping his way toward running. In January, Obama had kept Pete Rouse's "perfect storm" memo to himself, and had told Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he would absolutely serve out his term in the Senate and not run for President; the day before my interview with him, he altered his tone, telling Russert that he had "thought about the possibility." While he hadn't made any decisions, the unmistakable and well-calibrated message was that he was in the water, waist-high. Obama came to Phoenix prepared to deal with the most obvious question--of experience.

  "There's a hotel, I think it's the Capitol Hilton, in Washington. And downstairs, where there are a lot of banquet halls, there's a whole row of all the Presidents," he said. "You walk by the forty-three that have been there and you realize there are only about ten who you have any idea what they did.... I don't know what exactly makes somebody ready to be President. It's not clear that J.F.K. was 'ready' to be President, it's not clear that Harry Truman, when he was elevated, was 'ready.' And yet, somehow, some people respond and some people don't. My instinct is that people who are ready are folks who go into it understanding the gravity of their work, and are able to combine vision and judgment." Vision and judgment: down the line these would be terms of great use to Obama--the first to indicate a sense of intellect and youthful vigor, the second to underline his opposition to the war in Iraq.

  What also seemed interesting about Obama that day was his capacity for straight talk on religion, a subject that Democrats had often handled as if it were a hand grenade with the pin
out. Rare for a politician, he talked about the role of skepticism in his psychology and spiritual life. His own faith, he said, "admits doubt, and uncertainty, and mystery."

  "It's not 'faith' if you are absolutely certain," he said, adding, "Evolution is more grounded in my experience than angels."

  Obama's book tour was reminiscent of Colin Powell's experience when, in September, 1995, he was promoting his autobiography, My American Journey; he was constantly peppered with questions about running for the Republican nomination to face Bill Clinton in the general election. Like Obama, Powell was lauded as the political version of Oprah Winfrey--an iconic person of color readily accepted by audiences of all races. "It's a modern phenomenon," says Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "You heard it about Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods before his problems: 'Oh, he's not black. He's famous.'" For a Time cover story published in October, 2006, Joe Klein asked Obama about the comparisons. "Figures like Oprah, Tiger, Michael Jordan give people a shortcut to express their better instincts," Obama said. "You can be cynical about this. You can say, It's easy to love Oprah. It's harder to embrace the idea of putting more resources into opportunities for young black men--some of whom aren't so lovable. But I don't feel that way. I think it's healthy, a good instinct. I just don't want it to stop with Oprah. I'd rather say, If you feel good about me, there's a whole lot of young men out there who could be me if given the chance."

  Throughout the autumn of 2006, Obama cast around for advice, and even took some old allies by surprise; it seemed they had barely adjusted to his fame beyond the South Side. He called Ivory Mitchell, the chairman of the Democratic organization in the Fourth Ward who had helped him win his seat in the State Senate just ten years earlier. "I was in the hospital for a knee replacement, just coming out of anesthesia, and my cell phone is ringing," Mitchell recalled. "'Hey, Ivory, this is Barack. I think I want to run for President.' I was seven hours out of surgery and I said, 'Barack, we just sent you to the Senate!'"