I equate it to that aunt or that grandmother that bought all that new furniture--spent her life savings on it and then what does she do? She puts plastic on it to protect it. That plastic gets yellow and scratches up your leg and it's hot and sticky. But see grandma is just trying to protect that furniture--the problem is that she doesn't get the full enjoyment, the benefit, from the furniture because she's trying to protect it. I think folks just want to protect us from the possibility of being let down--not by us but by the world as it is. The world, they fear, is not ready for a decent man like Barack. Sometimes it seems better not to try at all than to try and fail.
We have to remember that these complicated emotions are what folks who marched in the civil-rights movement had to overcome all those decades ago. It's what so many of us have struggled to overcome in our own lives. And it's what we're going to have to overcome as a community if we want to lift ourselves up. We're going to have to dig deep into our souls, confront our own self-doubt, and recognize that our destiny is in our hands, that our future is what we make of it. So let's build the future we all know is possible. Let's prove to our children that they really can reach for their dreams. Let's show them that America is ready for Barack Obama. Right now....
I want you to dream of that day--the day Barack Obama is sworn in as President. Imagine our family on that inaugural platform. America will look at itself differently. The world will look at America differently.
The message, conveyed in language far more emotionally raw than her husband ever allowed himself, was unmistakable. Just as Coretta King had no fear and, finally, no regrets, Michelle Obama had no fears--or at least no fears that held her back from supporting her husband. Her message was homey and direct. He will be O.K. He wants what you want. Now is the time. And he can win. Michelle Obama appeared before larger audiences--her speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver reached many millions of people, not a few thousand--but she never gave a more direct racial appeal. In Orangeburg, she asked black men and women to focus on the intersection of emotion and historical imagination; that was the sweet spot of her speech and the campaign was banking on it to work.
In the days before the primary, the voters of South Carolina did not provide much clarity in the polls. The black leadership in the state was still divided. One state senator, Robert Ford, a civil-rights veteran who had worked for King during the Poor People's Campaign, told a reporter that Obama's chances of getting the nomination were "slim," and that if he were to head the Democratic ticket "we'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything.... I'm a gambling man. I love Obama, but I'm not going to kill myself." Ford stayed with Hillary. The situation among white voters seemed even more in doubt.
On January 20, 2008, a week before the South Carolina primary, Obama went to Atlanta to speak in honor of Martin Luther King's birthday at Ebenezer Baptist. The speech was reminiscent of the speech in Selma and several thereafter--until the end, when he told the story of Ashley Baia and the elderly black man in Horry County who said that he had been won over by her:
By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough to change a country. By itself, it is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children. But it is where we begin. It is why I believe that the walls in that room began to crack and shake at that moment.
And if they can shake in that room, then they can shake in Atlanta. And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in the state of Georgia. And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together, if we see each other in each other's eyes, we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down.
Once more, the story and the cadences of the civil-rights movement were extended to meet the story of the Obama campaign--and all in a resonant place. With time, Obama's confidence regarding the black vote and the question of authenticity increased. When, in a South Carolina debate, a reporter asked him, "Do you think Bill Clinton was our first black President?" Obama smiled and risked playing the role of a wry arbiter of blackness. Suddenly, he was no longer the cautious candidate but a man unafraid to parade his ethnic pride. "I would have to investigate more of Bill's dancing abilities," Obama said, "before I accurately judge whether he was, in fact, a brother."
In the same debate, a brutal encounter that took place on Martin Luther King Day at the Palace Theater, in Myrtle Beach, Hillary Clinton tried to emphasize her own presence in the Presidential race as a triumph of the civil-rights movement. "I'm reminded of one of my heroes, Frederick Douglass," she said, "who had on the masthead of his newspaper in upstate New York, The North Star, that right has no sex and truth no color. And that is really the profound message of Dr. King."
The Myrtle Beach debate was the nastiest of the entire campaign, with the candidates exchanging barbs over Obama's relationship with the "slum landlord" Tony Rezko and Clinton's advocacy as a corporate lawyer for Walmart. It was such a charged evening that as Clinton walked off the stage, she told her team, "I'm sorry, but he was such an asshole." Obama told Jarrett, "I probably went a little too far but she did, too."
After months of underestimating Obama's campaign, the Clintons now recognized the threat. "We were running against a very talented man," one of their top aides said. "In South Carolina, we didn't understand what to do. After we lost Iowa, the African-American vote was draining out of us so fast, like there was a hole at the bottom of the swimming pool, and you could just watch the tracking polls and see it evaporate. In New Hampshire we had won, even though we'd been down as much as sixteen points. It was unbelievable. We were so unprepared to win that we had to throw Howard"--Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director--"on TV, unshaven. The press decided that because we won by three [points] and the polls had shown her down eight, there was something back in play called the Bradley effect. Reporters were convinced that had to be the explanation. It undermined, it delegitimized, our win, and now it was out there, a new element being discussed coming into South Carolina, where so much of the Democratic vote is black."
On January 26th, Obama far exceeded expectations in South Carolina, winning overwhelmingly. In a three-way race with Clinton and John Edwards, he took fifty-five per cent overall to Clinton's twenty-seven. Obama lost only two of the state's forty-six counties. Edwards, who came from neighboring North Carolina, drew a weak eighteen per cent of the vote and, four days later, withdrew from the race. Obama won eighty per cent of the African-American vote, and he continued to win at least that for the rest of the campaign. In a three-way race, Obama also won a quarter of the white vote; he even came in first with white voters under the age of forty. It was the calculus of the 2004 Illinois Democratic primary campaign taking shape on the Presidential level--a near sweep of the black vote combined with a healthy percentage of white progressives and some centrists.
"South Carolina was incredibly emotional," Cassandra Butts, Obama's longtime friend and aide, recalled. "Sitting in the boiler room and watching the returns, we realized that we had done exactly what we needed to do. Afterward there was the victory rally and people were chanting 'Race Doesn't Matter! Race Doesn't Matter!' Intellectually, I know that isn't the case, but these people were so moved by this candidate that they were willing to suspend disbelief."
African-American leaders now started to reconsider their loyalties as their constituents abandoned the Clintons. "I had an executive session with myself," John Lewis said. His constituents in Atlanta were behind Obama, and Lewis, for the first time in many years, was facing possible opposition in what had long been a safe district. He sensed that Obama was leading a campaign that was an electoral echo of the movement that had shaped his own life. Politically and emotionally, he was left with no option. He phoned Bill and Hillary Clinton to tell them that he loved them but that he was going with Barack Obama. "I realized that I was on the wrong side of history," Lewis said.
Until South Carolina, the Clintons thought that their history and relationships would assure them of a large percentage--even half--of the African-American vote. "Our whites on the staff, like Harold Ickes, had tons of experience with race," one Clinton adviser said. "Ickes had lost a kidney when he was beaten by whites at a civil-rights demonstration in Louisiana and had worked for Jesse Jackson. So when the time came that we lost John Lewis, Ickes said that it was like a kick in the nuts. He said, 'I can't believe this is happening.' But the Clintons understood that John Lewis had to move."
The South Carolina primary also revealed something about the Obama campaign. Although it was run mainly by a very tight circle of aides--David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and other white men--there was a diversity of opinion at work that gave the campaign greater versatility. Valerie Jarrett, Cornell Belcher, Cassandra Butts, and, on a local level, people like Anton Gunn and Stacey Brayboy were able to shape tactics.
"I don't think there was ever a Presidential campaign before with a lot of people who looked like me," the pollster Cornell Belcher, said. "I wasn't sitting at just the smaller table dealing with the black shit. There was a lot of back-and-forth conversation about these subtle racial issues--a lot of conference calls, for instance, about Orangeburg. We had to really deal with the fact that there were African-Americans, older ones, who remember people dying. We had to win their confidence."
The conventional wisdom was that Iowa was the key: once blacks in South Carolina saw that whites would vote for Obama, they believed he had a real chance to win. Anton Gunn and Cornell Belcher, however, were among those who thought that there were limits to that analysis. "To say that Iowa broke it open and made black people support him is close to being racist," Belcher said. "Obama's numbers popped everywhere after Iowa. It wasn't just that his black numbers popped, it was everywhere."
Obama's increasing success as a national candidate, Belcher went on, was based on the fact that Obama was judged as an individual. "Because of who he is, he was inoculated from the stereotypes, the idea that somehow African-Americans don't share your values or are more morally loose or less intelligent," he said. "There were things about Barack, whether it was his family or his educational credentials, that made him able to individuate himself. What were the X factors? Does a biracial family heritage figure in? His Ivy League education? The image of a strong family man speaking out about personal responsibility?
"South Carolina was revealing," Belcher continued. "So much unfolded there about where we are, racially and culturally. Obama didn't start off winning black people in America or in South Carolina. That took effort. What went down was that he became an authentic, credible voice in the African-American community to such an extent that he wasn't just winning black voters; he was blowing Hillary away. She didn't break fifteen per cent of the African-American vote. He completely dominated a core Democratic constituency. No one could compete with him in North Carolina, Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi, or Alabama. Think about if Hillary could have won twenty, twenty-five per cent of the black vote in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia--it's a different race."
The nomination battle between Obama and Clinton lasted for four and a half more months. After the breakthrough victory in South Carolina, Obama won a dramatic endorsement from Edward and Caroline Kennedy, but he emerged from Super Tuesday, on February 5th, with a projected lead of just fourteen delegates--a virtual dead heat. What Obama had done, however, was to prove that Clinton was not inevitable and that her campaign was weak, unfocused, and disorganized. It was absolutely impossible to overstate the friction inside the Clinton campaign, its resentment of the press, the sense of wounded pride. For the rest of the race, Obama never relinquished his lead, and, despite the fury in her ranks, Clinton was tenacious and, arguably, she defeated Obama in the majority of their debates. At one campaign event, Obama told an old Chicago friend, "Do I have to drive a stake through her heart? She just will not die!"
No small part of the drama of this seeming hundred years war was the racial dynamic, those not infrequent moments when a candidate or a surrogate said something that could be interpreted as a racial appeal. One early sign that the 2008 race would feature this subtext came when Joseph Biden, an early candidate for the nomination, said, in January, 2007, that Obama was the "first mainstream African-American [candidate], who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Anyone who knew Biden assumed that he was being his usual self: syntactically undisciplined and oblivious of the resonance of terms like "articulate" and "clean." But, unlike older black leaders, including Jackson and Sharpton, who condemned Biden for the remark, Obama was initially unfazed. He brushed it off, saying that Biden "didn't intend to offend" anyone; "I have no problem with Joe Biden." Obama wanted to appear to be the opposite of hypersensitive--I'm not the guy who sees racism everywhere--but, when the criticism of Biden continued, he issued a statement that Biden's comments "obviously were historically inaccurate."
The mood among Obama's aides was less forgiving when one of Clinton's campaign co-chairmen in New Hampshire, Bill Shaheen, told the Washington Post that Obama would come under extra scrutiny from the Republicans for his use of drugs as a youth: "It'll be 'When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'" Shaheen's comment echoed one of David Axelrod's memos to Obama, but in this context it seemed like a poisonous insinuation. At first Hillary Clinton was delighted with the statement and urged her aides to amplify it, but then when her campaign realized that it was playing terribly in the press, Shaheen apologized and resigned. Clinton herself met with Obama on the tarmac at Reagan Airport, in Washington, D.C., to apologize--a meeting that quickly turned sour when the two started exchanging recriminations.
In the course of the campaign, the slights (real or imagined, depending on the listener) began to mount. There was Robert Johnson, the African-American media mogul and Hillary supporter, saying that while the Clintons were working hard for blacks and the public good, "Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood--and I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in his book." The reference, of course, was to Obama's self-described drug use as a young man.
There was Hillary Clinton saying, in January, "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a President to get it done." To a Hillary supporter, she was merely stating the historical fact: King rallied public opposition to racism, but to change policy in Washington required Johnson and the power of the Presidency. To some Obama supporters, however, Clinton was slighting the heroism, the struggle, and the suffering of the movement. "The perception was that she was discounting the prophetic voice, diminishing the role that Martin Luther King played--and by extension diminishing Barack and his ability," Cassandra Butts said. "This goes to the critique of Barack as a lightweight, that he wasn't the hard worker that Senator Clinton was. It wasn't in isolation." In a conference call with reporters, Obama said that Clinton "made an unfortunate remark, an ill-advised remark."
The day before the New Hampshire primary, with polls promising a victory for Obama, Bill Clinton had told an audience, "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." To those who heard or read the line in isolation, Clinton seemed to be referring to Obama himself as a "fairy tale," an enchantment boosted by a smitten press. What he was saying, however, was something quite different--it was that Obama's opposition to the war was a "fairy tale." The Clintons kept hammering home the message that after Obama became a senator, his votes and his rhetoric on Iraq were much the same as Hillary Clinton's. This, too, was arguably true--and echoed one of Mark Penn's themes--but it was not racial. Clinton also referred to Obama as a "kid," a throwaway moment of condescension that some Obama supporters, like the prominent Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, cited as another term "for being uppity, it's a way of saying 'Who is he?'" Donna Brazile, who had been a campaign aide to President Clinton in 1992 and 1996, said, "I will tell you, a
s an African-American, I find his tone and his words to be very depressing."
When it seemed that Obama was going to win in South Carolina, Bill Clinton, who had campaigned hard in the state, remarked to reporters, "Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in '84 and '88. And he ran a good campaign and Senator Obama has run a good campaign here. He's run a good campaign everywhere." To many in the Obama campaign, it seemed that Clinton was trying to yoke Jackson and Obama together as black candidates running implausible, can't-win campaigns.
"I don't think there was a racial strategy behind it, but I think it was delivered trying to diminish the win," David Plouffe said. Jackson himself saw nothing racist in Clinton's remarks, and, later that year, Clinton, while he was traveling in Africa, made clear his resentment of commentators who said that such remarks had hurt his wife's campaign.
"Do you personally have any regrets about what you did campaigning for your wife?" the ABC correspondent Kate Snow asked Clinton.
"Yes, but not the ones you think," he said. "And it would be counterproductive for me to talk about it. There are things that I wish I had urged her to do, things I wish I had said, things I wish I hadn't said. But I am not a racist, I never made a racist comment. And I didn't attack [Obama] personally.
"The South Carolina thing," Clinton continued, "was twisted for deliberate effect by people who weren't for Hillary. It was O.K. with me, but, you know, these people don't have an office in Harlem. They haven't lived the life I have lived."
Mark Penn, the most senior of Hillary's aides, says, "The Clintons had been like heroes in the African-American community. They had never done anything in their lives that would have allowed their comments to be misconstrued. And the treatment of the Clintons by the press was fundamentally unfair."
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 67