The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Gunn then tried calling the Chicago office of Obama's nascent campaign. He left a similar message on the answering machine: "I may not know a lot about politics, but I know South Carolina. South Carolina is an early primary state. If you want to run for President, you need to have me involved."

  That day, Obama himself called Gunn, expressing interest and saying that he was going to have Steve Hildebrand, the deputy national campaign director, get in touch. A few weeks later, Gunn went to Washington to talk with Hildebrand, who was planning the strategy for the early primary states, and David Plouffe, the campaign manager. They discussed Gunn's ideas for grassroots organizing in South Carolina. Plouffe, the most important figure in the development of Obama's campaign organization, knew something about working with black candidates; he had helped Axelrod run Deval Patrick's successful 2006 gubernatorial run in Massachusetts. But Gunn had special experience to offer, especially in the subtle racial politics of South Carolina. Gunn described how, as a neophyte, he had run for the state legislature, in 2006, in the majority-white, Republican stronghold of Richland and Kershaw Counties, which had never elected an African-American. He lost by only two hundred and ninety-eight votes.

  At the time, the Obama campaign was still a minimalist operation. It had just a few people starting to work in Iowa and precisely no one in South Carolina, whose primary, on January 26, 2008, followed the Iowa caucuses by just twenty-three days. The Obama team hired Gunn as its South Carolina political director--its first employee in the state. During the next few weeks, Gunn began to set up a proper office. The Obama team also hired Stacey Brayboy, an experienced campaigner and aide on Capitol Hill, as state director, and Jeremy Bird, a Midwestern labor advocate and divinity student, as field director. Brayboy and Gunn are black; Bird is white. Together they built a structure based on community-organizing principles.

  The Clinton campaign set up a fairly traditional organization in South Carolina, with an emphasis on acquiring the endorsements of local civic and religious leaders and handing out "walking around money" to them to help hire canvassers and poll watchers. At first, the Obama campaign tried to match the Clinton organization at this game. It offered a five-thousand-dollar-per-month fee to Darrell Jackson, a state senator who was the pastor of a church in Columbia with more than ten thousand congregants, and his public-relations firm to help turn out the vote. Reverend Jackson, who had gained a reputation for being able to get thousands of people to the polls, earned three times that amount in 2004, when he worked for John Edwards in the state. He finally accepted a competing offer from the Clinton campaign and, according to the Wall Street Journal, earned a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars between February, 2007, and September, 2007.

  With the backing of the Chicago headquarters, Gunn, Brayboy, and Bird decided to rely more on the grass roots-organizing style of their candidate. They knew that South Carolina was different from Iowa, where the caucus-goers are motivated civic activists. South Carolina is a primary state, and African-Americans form a large core of the potential Democratic Party vote. Obama's team wanted to register and reach African-Americans who had never gone to the polls before. In order to emphasize the campaign's universalist message, they also intended to make serious gains among white voters.

  The campaign team quickly discovered that many African-Americans in South Carolina not only didn't know Obama's political positions but they had no idea who he was--or even that he was black. Those same voters knew a great deal about the Clintons and, in the main, admired them. To reach black voters, the Obama team had volunteers make repeated calls on churches, barbershops, and beauty salons, handing out a poster with a picture of Obama getting his hair cut in a South Carolina barbershop. If they were lucky, they won the endorsement of the proprietor, who would thereafter wear an Obama button. At churches, they targeted not the pastor, necessarily, but the informal community leaders. "Sometimes we'd rather have 'Miss Mary,' the woman everybody talks to, supporting us than the pastor himself," Anton Gunn said. They organized gospel concerts in Charleston and Florence where the only price of admission was to provide an address or e-mail contact. "We captured six or seven thousand people that way," Gunn said.

  Early in the campaign, Gunn called the campaign offices in Chicago and said that the buttons and bumper stickers they were getting were inadequate. "We told David Plouffe, 'You can't keep giving out these buttons--they don't mean anything to anyone,'" Gunn said. "'Design a button with his picture on it and say "Obama for President" so people can see this is a black man named Obama running for President.'" Gunn was a hip-hop fan, and he knew how performers marketed themselves by passing out free mix tapes and posters on the street. Gunn informed headquarters that the campaign had to give away, not sell, "chum," the term of art for T-shirts, stickers, leaflets, and buttons. The campaign responded with new campaign literature that featured pictures of Obama: some with him and his family, some with him preaching in a church. New volunteers, like novice organizers, got rigorous training and guidance, and passed out the new chum at churches, fish fries, beauty salons, barbershops, ball games, public-housing projects, medical clinics, and political rallies.

  Long before the Iowa caucuses, Obama's campaign drew young volunteers who were willing to uproot and devote themselves to a long-shot candidacy. In South Carolina, one of those volunteers was a twenty-three-year-old woman from Venice, Florida, named Ashley Baia. Ashley Baia was white. She moved to Horry County, South Carolina, in June, 2007, and for the next six months campaigned in the beauty salons and barbershops of Florence and Myrtle Beach. For months, whites spurned her, sometimes saying bluntly that they would "never vote for a nigger"; blacks frequently told her that they wouldn't vote for Obama because they feared that something would happen to him or because he "didn't have a chance." Baia joined the campaign, she told her friends, because she saw in Obama someone who understood the problems of the sick and the poor. She had firsthand experience of those problems. When she was nine, her mother, Marie, was diagnosed with uterine cancer. Marie lost her job and her health insurance and she and her two daughters fell into bankruptcy. To make her mother feel better about their meager dinners, Ashley told her that she really did love relish sandwiches. Marie worked jobs--sometimes two or three jobs at a time--that did not provide health insurance and all the while, she did not know if she was going to have to leave her daughters to fend for themselves. "I didn't know if I was going to live or die," she said later. She did secretarial work, waited on tables, delivered newspapers in the middle of the night. To stretch out her prescriptions, she cut her pills in half. "All those nights I thought she didn't hear me cry, she did," Marie said.

  After a year, Marie began to recover and Ashley became a political idealist. When she was a student at the University of South Florida-Sarasota/Manatee, she canvassed for John Kerry, and, two years later, she became the vice-president of the Florida College Democrats. In May, 2007, after finishing school, she went to work for Obama in South Carolina recruiting voters and volunteers. The organizers and volunteers in South Carolina and elsewhere called on the techniques of community organizing, not least to strengthen the bonds among them. Obama had interviewed church and community leaders about their "stories"; the volunteers told their own stories to each other at roundtable sessions. At one such session, in the late fall, with Valerie Jarrett present, Ashley described how her mother's suffering and the government's incapacity--or unwillingness--to do much for her had led her to politics. She wanted to "help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents, too." As Ashley spoke, Jarrett was in tears and was unable to give her own speech. Instead, she asked people to give the reasons that they had come to work for Obama.

  "A lot of people talked about health care or some other issues," Ashley Baia recalled. "Then it came the turn of an older black man, a retired man, whom I'd been calling on over and over. He'd been very reluctant, though, to support Obama." The old man said that after having been visited by Baia so many
times he had a simple reason for supporting Obama.

  "I'm here because of Ashley," he said.

  Valerie Jarrett was so touched by the encounter that she told Obama about it. He was so moved that he started thinking of that "moment of recognition," as he called it, that alliance between a poor white girl and an older black man, as emblematic of his own hopes for the campaign. For Obama, the stars were lining up in ways both big and small. He thought that he might use Ashley's story one day, perhaps in a speech.

  In mid-October, 2007, with the South Carolina primary three months away, the New York Times ran a story that reflected the anxieties of many African-Americans in the state, particularly women. Clara Vereen, a sixty-one-year-old hair-stylist in the small town of Loris, said, "I've got enough black in me to want somebody black to be our President." But, she continued, "I fear that they just would kill him, that he wouldn't even have a chance." Miss Clara, as her friends called her, was considering not voting for Obama just to protect him. "We always love Hillary because we love her husband."

  Black women made up twenty-nine per cent of the Democratic primary electorate in South Carolina, and they were not the only ones who felt as torn as Clara Vareen did. Obama made frequent trips to the state, and not only to black counties and neighborhoods. In June, 2007, he traveled to Greenville--the home base for Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham--and thirty-five hundred people, blacks and whites, turned out.

  In early November, Obama was in South Carolina and gave speeches at two different N.A.A.C.P. dinners in a single night. He also gave a speech in the town of Manning, on the steps of the Clarendon County Courthouse, the site of a desegregation case that became part of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Clarendon is one of the poorest counties in the state. Manning sits along a strip of Interstate 95 so destitute that it is called the Corridor of Shame. Ernest Finney, the first black State Supreme Court justice in South Carolina since Reconstruction, introduced Obama, saying that he had dreamed of a black President when he was growing up in the segregated South, and now one "could be on the edge of winning."

  From the staff in South Carolina, Obama had been hearing about the reluctance among some African-Americans to vote for him because of his youth and relative inexperience or because they feared for his safety. The level of threat was such that the Secret Service provided protection for Obama in May, 2007, sooner than for any other candidate except Hillary Clinton, who, as a former First Lady, had a detail with her from the start. In Manning, Obama had to respond to these anxieties, and, in the car, on the way to the speech, he kept fiddling with the text. When he arrived, he spoke directly to black voters:

  I've heard some folks say, "Yeah, he talks good. We like his wife. He's got some pretty children. But you know we're just not sure that America is ready for an African-American President." Y'all heard that before. You've heard the same voices you heard fifty years ago. "Maybe it's not time yet, maybe we need to wait. America is not ready." So I just want y'all to be clear: I would not be running if I were not confident I was going to win.

  I'm not interested in second place. I'm not running to be Vice-President. I'm not running to be secretary of something or other. I'm a United States senator already. Everybody already knows me. I already sold a lot of books. I don't need to run for President to get on television or on the radio. I've been on "Oprah." I'm running to be President of the United States of America....

  So the brothers and sisters out there telling folks I can't win, don't defeat ourselves. Get that out of your mind that you can't do something. I don't believe in you can't do something. Yes, we can do something. What kind of message are we sending to our children, you can't do something?

  This was the richest accent and the most direct form of rhetoric that Obama could summon. The speech was widely covered, but it still did not quite do the job; it did not completely erase the fears. "People were still talking about how the last time someone was as good as Barack was Bobby Kennedy or his brother John, and we saw what happened to them," Anton Gunn said. "There was general fear."

  As the attacks on Obama began to accumulate on the Internet and cable television--attacks that tried to portray him as foreign, as a Muslim, as a covert radical in a business suit--the candidate summoned a vernacular that would not have worked in the cornfields and diners of Iowa. Speaking to a largely African-American crowd in Sumter, Obama rebuffed an e-mail barrage claiming that he was Muslim. "Don't let people turn you around because they're just making stuff up. That's what they do. They try to bamboozle you, hoodwink you." Similar lines are spoken by Malcolm X, in Spike Lee's biopic. Played by Denzel Washington, Malcolm warns a gathering of blacks about being "bamboozled" by "the white man." ("I say, and I say it again, you been had. You been took. You been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amuck. This is what he does.") Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, solemnly informed the press that he didn't really know if the candidate knew the language was inspired by Lee's film about Malcolm X, but it was impossible to believe that he didn't.

  Obama had still not wiped away all resistance to his candidacy. Anton Gunn admitted with some trepidation that in South Carolina it would help Obama if African-American voters saw that he had not married a white or a light-skinned black woman. "Like it or not, that stuff matters to people here," he said. ("I don't think Obama could have been elected President if he had married a white woman," Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a political scientist at Princeton who regularly attended Obama's church when she lived in Chicago, said. "Had he married a white woman, he would have signaled that he had chosen whiteness, a consistent visual reminder that he was not on the African-American side. Michelle anchored him. Part of what we as African-Americans like about Barack is the visual image of him in the White House, and it would have been stunningly different without Michelle and those brown-skinned girls.")

  The campaign decided to send Michelle Obama to South Carolina to speak a few days before Thanksgiving. The site they chose was Orangeburg, a town of thirteen thousand that, from the start of the civil-rights movement, had been the scene of school desegregation battles, hunger strikes, protest marches, commercial boycotts, and, in February, 1968, a violent confrontation between police and demonstrators from South Carolina State University, a nearby black college who were protesting at a segregated bowling alley. The police fired into the crowd, killing three protesters and injuring twenty-eight; the incident is known as "the Orangeburg Massacre." The campaign scheduled the speech on the campus of South Carolina State.

  Michelle Obama began by describing a meeting with Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006. "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," she said. She recounted all that Coretta Scott King had suffered, and reeled off the names of her heroic predecessors: Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Dorothy Height, Shirley Chisholm, C. Delores Tucker, Mary McLeod Bethune. "These were all women who cast aside the voices of doubt and fear that said, 'Wait,' 'You can't do that,' 'It's not your turn,' 'The timing isn't right,' 'The country just isn't ready.'"

  Michelle Obama made countless appearances on the campaign trail, but the Orangeburg speech was her Joshua-generation speech--a pivotal direct address to the African-American community. The campaign, in general, had been so careful not to overdo the theme of race for fear of putting off white voters; this speech was one of the exceptional moments. Michelle Obama was sure to pay tribute to the generation of the past--"I am standing on their shoulders today"--before asking for the confidence and the support of the voters. She made plain her family history. She was like them. She was descended from slaves who lived in the state. Her grandfather was from Georgetown, South Carolina. She had the love of her parents, teachers, and pastors, but she also recalled the voices of classmates "who thought a black girl with a book was acting white." She had learned to put aside "that gnawing sense of self-doubt that is common within all of us." She described her path from t
he South Side of Chicago to Harvard Law School, but quickly showed that she was aware that "too many little black girls" don't have the chances that she did. These were girls who were routinely held back by poverty, unsafe and inadequate schools, crime, and racism. Her husband, she said, "is running to be the President who finally lifts up the poor and forgotten in all corners of this country." He should be President "not because of the color of his skin, it is because of the quality and consistency of his character"--an echo of King's "content of their character." Finally, she addressed the fears that so many black South Carolinians had expressed to Obama's earnest young volunteers--the fear that he was not ready, the fears for his life:

  Now, I know folks talk in the barbershops and beauty salons, and I've heard some folks say, "That Barack, he seems like a nice guy, but I'm not sure America's ready for a black President." Well, all I can say is we've heard those voices before. Voices that say, "Maybe we should wait," and "No, you can't do it." "You're not ready"--"You're not experienced." Voices that focus on what might go wrong, rather than what's possible. And I understand it. I know where it comes from, this sense of doubt and fear about what the future holds. That veil of impossibility that keeps us down and keeps our children down, that keeps us waiting and hoping for a turn that may never come....

  And I want to talk not just about fear but about love. Because I know it's also about love. I know people care about Barack and our family. I know people want to protect us and themselves from disappointment, failure. I know people are proud of us. I know that people understand that Barack is special. You don't see this kind of man often.