"There was a school of thought in our campaign that felt it was hard to believe that Senator Obama, who was long associated with that church and pastor, didn't know about Wright's statements," one senior campaign adviser said. "It strained credulity. By contrast, the Obama campaign was very adroit at turning such attacks against him around and saying that they were racially motivated." Ruefully, Hillary Clinton wondered aloud what the public reaction would have been if her pastor in Little Rock had made similar statements. The sense of persecution, the sense of a slanted press and a tilted playing field, deepened in her camp. Some aides held out hope that rumors of a tape showing Michelle Obama castigating "whitey" would save the campaign. The tape did not exist. The atmosphere of dark frenzy and frustration was so deep that the Clinton team fastened onto any notion that the Obamas were anti-white or were subtly dealing the race card.
"If Jeremiah Wright had dropped in January, it would have been over," another Clinton aide said. "We sent someone up to Chicago to check it out but we found too little to make anything of it. The ABC stuff was not from us. With Wright, we sensed blood in the water--those of us whose job it is to sense blood in the water--but Hillary refused to let us go after it more. She didn't want it to go away, mind you, and she was really troubled by what Wright said and the whole relationship between him and Obama, but she knew that if we touched it too explicitly it would turn to poison."
In fact, the report did have a toxic effect on the Obama campaign and threatened to kill it. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, a professor of African-American studies at Vanderbilt, wrote astutely about the threat of Wright's rhetoric for the Obama campaign. "Wright's homiletics had the effect of coloring Obama in a bit too darkly; his damning of American racism and genocides at home and abroad diminished Obama's averred gift of 'second sight' into both black and white worlds, marred his claim to authenticity and a new politics," she wrote. "Jeremiah's jeremiads imperiled the currency of the 'O' brand of politics, one that shunned partisan political attacks as well as dicing up the electorate into so many factions." This might have been putting it too fancily. More bluntly, the sermons associated Obama with an angry radicalism that could potentially alienate countless voters--and not only white voters.
There was, Wright's friends and supporters contended, a context for "God damn America" and for his most radical rhetoric. Wright saw himself as--and Obama understood him to be--an inheritor of a tradition of protest from the pulpit, not an accommodationist, and hardly a politician. His Sunday-morning sermons were meant to rouse, to accuse, and to help people shake free of their apathy and dejection. Wright's faults were obvious--his outsized ego and his pride, his tendency to mistake conspiracy theory for reality, his unwillingness ever to find fault in leaders like Louis Farrakhan or Muammar Qaddafi--but at his best he was part of a tradition well known to millions of churchgoing African-Americans. Certainly, his devotion to his community was immense. He poured enormous energy and resources into education and into helping single mothers, addicts, alcoholics, and the homeless. But that would never be explained adequately on cable television. The Obama campaign knew that voters would see those videotapes and be encouraged to wonder about the candidate's associations and allegiances. Underneath Obama's cool yet embracing demeanor, was he a cartoon version of Wright, full of condemnation and resentment? Damage control, in the form of sound bites and surrogate interviews, would not work.
As Obama's political career grew more intense and his children got a little older, he and Michelle did not spend quite as much time at Trinity as they had when they were first together. Sometimes, on Sundays, Obama might go to Trinity, but he also went to other churches, for political reasons, or skipped church entirely. Nevertheless, he had certainly sat through enough radical sermons by Wright--and without protest--so that it would be folly to start trying to make fine distinctions. He knew that that sort of hairsplitting would mean nothing, not after he had repeatedly, in his book and in public remarks, praised Wright as a minister and a personal adviser. As recently as January, 2007, he had been quoted in the Chicago Tribune saying, "What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He's much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics."
Obama's aides were not deluded, either. For months, they had tried to keep race in the background of the campaign, but they realized that Wright's sermons intensified it in the worst way possible and could even bring down Obama's candidacy. Jon Favreau, the lead speechwriter, learned the news about Wright and felt sick. Favreau channel-surfed for a while, and when he hit on the Wright clips, he thought, Oh, Jesus, this is going to be bad. The campaign put out a statement distancing Obama from the sermons but it was obvious that a more concerted effort was needed.
On Friday, the day after the ABC broadcast, Obama called David Axelrod and said that he wanted to give a speech on race. He had been thinking about it for months and had been talked out of it by the staff. Now it was an absolute necessity. In the meantime, though, he could not cancel a pair of trying appointments: he was scheduled to meet with the editorial boards of both the Tribune and the Sun-Times to talk about, and distance himself from, the developer Tony Rezko, who had been his friend and early campaign contributor and was now under indictment. At the Tribune session, Obama admitted that it had been "boneheaded" of him to go in on a deal with Rezko to buy his house when Rezko was so clearly mired in corruption. At the same session, Obama claimed that he hadn't been in church during the "offensive" sermons that had been excerpted on the air, and would have objected "fiercely" if he had been. Neither explanation was especially winning. The Wright situation was only going to fester.
"On Saturday morning we had ten people on a strategy conference call," Favreau said. "Axelrod said I should get started on something and I was like, no, I couldn't do it without [Obama]. But he was campaigning till ten-thirty that night. I went to the office and I was so panicked. I brain-stormed and met Ax there. We talked about what might be in the speech. And Ax said what he always says: 'He'll come up with the right thing and we'll have it.' Barack called me at home at ten, ten-thirty. I said, 'How are you?' and he was, like, 'You know, I've had better days, but, this is what you deal with when you run for President. I should be able to tell people this and explain what happened and say what I believe. And if it goes right it could be a teaching moment.' He said, 'I have thoughts, and I will tell them to you stream of consciousness and you type and you come up with a draft.' Well, his stream of consciousness was pretty much a first draft. It was more than he had ever given me before for a speech. He is known as an inspiring writer, but the lawyer in him was there, too. First this, then that: the logic of the speech was all there. And we talked about the ending, the story we told him about Ashley and the relish sandwiches. He had used it already at Ebenezer, Dr. King's church. We went back and forth on it, and we decided that even though he had used it before, it was too perfect. I worked all day Sunday on the structure, adding lines. At six, he e-mailed me and said he was going to put the girls to bed, he would send me something at eight. He was up until two or three and told me Monday that he made good progress and needed one more night and e-mailed it to me. He sent the speech to me, Valerie, Ax, Gibbs, and Plouffe. He said, 'Favs, if you have rhetorical or grammar stuff, O.K., but the rest of you, no substantial changes. This is what I want.' I had no idea how it was going to play, but I had never been so proud to be on this campaign."
On Tuesday, March 18th, Obama delivered his speech, "A More Perfect Union," at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, on a stage adorned by a row of American flags. At stake was the candidacy of a man who, until this moment, had had an excellent chance to become the first African-American President.
African-American history is distinguished, in no small part, by a history of African-American rhetoric--speeches given at essential moment
s. In 1852, Frederick Douglass gave his Fourth of July speech at Corinthian Hall, in Rochester, New York, and his mood was one of defiance, an insistence that the majority population see the injustice staring it in the face: "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." Obama, who used to speak so admiringly of Douglass's rhetoric in his classes at the University of Chicago, could not now speak in the key of outrage. His tone had to be one of unity and embrace; he had to speak to, and reach, everyone--otherwise, his run for the Presidency was, quite possibly, at an end.
To begin, Obama called once more on his own biography as a form of authority in addressing the problem of race: "I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.... I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners--an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins, of every race and every hue." He gave his credentials. Now his capacity as a cultural linguist, a man who had lived in both worlds, white and black, and can speak to those worlds without a foreign accent, was to be tested.
After repeating his condemnation of Reverend Wright's sermons "in unequivocal terms," Obama tried to broaden the country's understanding of Wright's activities as pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ: Wright was a former Marine, he reminded the huge television audience, who had built a large and passionate ministry that represented "the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gangbanger." Obama disagreed with Wright's most inflammatory, indefensible remarks, which represented "a profoundly distorted view of this country." In his view, despair, the Biblically unforgivable sin, was at the heart of Wright's mistake. And it was a generational despair, the rage of an older man who failed to account for the way the racial situation had changed, at least to some degree, in America. Wright's "profound mistake," Obama said, was that "he spoke as if our society was static, as if no progress had been made." This is a gesture that the philosopher Richard Rorty discussed in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country (the title comes from a phrase of James Baldwin's). The idea is that there is hope and inspiration to be found in the American past, not merely shame, and that hope is located in the evidence of our capacity to mobilize political and social movements to overcome grave injustice. Wright sees a static condition of outrageous oppression, while Obama sees one of progress and promise. He signals to the national audience that Wright is entangled in his own anger, though he refuses to condemn him outright:
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. 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.
Obama was engaged in a high-stakes rhetorical balancing act. He empathized not only with his embittered preacher but also with the embittered white workers who have seen "their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor" and cannot understand why their children might be bused across town or why a person of color has a leg up through affirmative action "because of an injustice that they themselves never committed." Obama indicated to all sides that he heard them, that he "got it." He spoke as a kind of racial Everyman. A white Southerner, even Bill Clinton, could not dare to do that in a speech on race, and Jesse Jackson, whose tradition had been more about the rhetoric of grievances and recompense, never would have chosen to. Obama's ability to negotiate among the sharply disparate perspectives of his fellow citizens was at the heart of his political impulse and his success. Perhaps when people spoke of Obama's "distance," they meant just this capacity to inhabit different points of view--a mastery that sometimes seemed more anthropological than political. Obama said that black anger about past and present wrongs was counterproductive, even a form of post-traumatic stress; he also pointed to the way that American politics had been shaped since the Nixon era by the exploitation of white anger in the South and elsewhere.
Finally, the speech was about the "unfinished" character of the American experiment and the need for unity--racial, religious, and generational--to fight injustice and move forward. To close the speech, he relied once more on the story of Ashley Baia, her trials as a girl, her idealism, and her unlikely recruitment of an elderly African-American to the campaign. ("I'm here because of Ashley.") That "moment of recognition," Obama said, "is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two hundred and twenty-one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins."
Obama's speech won praise in the leading newspapers (the New York Times editorial called it a "Profile in Courage"; the Washington Post labeled it "an extraordinary moment of truth-telling"). The right wing's response was equally unvaried: Rush Limbaugh sneeringly compared Obama to Rodney King; Newt Gingrich called it "intellectually, fundamentally, dishonest"; and many more, from Fred Barnes to Karl Rove and Joe Scarborough, adopted the trope that Obama had "thrown his grandmother under a bus."
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., told me the speech not only rescued the Obama candidacy, it made him think of Obama as a "post-modern Frederick Douglass":
For anthropologists, the mythical "trickster" figure reconciles two irreconcilable natures through mediation, like an animal joined with a man. Frederick Douglass is the figure of mediation in nineteenth-century American literature; he, the mulatto, mediates between white and black, slave and free, between "animal" and "man." Obama, as mulatto, as reconciler, self-consciously performs the same function in our time, remarkably self-consciously. And the comparisons don't stop there: they both launched their careers with speeches and their first books were autobiographies. They spoke and wrote themselves into being: tall, elegant, eloquent figures of mediation, conciliation, and compromise. Douglass launched his career as a radical no-holds-barred combatant against slavery. As he aged, however, he grew more conservative. He certainly believed in the basic class structure of American capitalism; and he believed in a natural aristocracy and that he was a member of it--just like Obama.
The only thing radical about Obama is that he wanted to be the first black President. In the race speech, he was performing the very opposite of "radical." He distanced himself, quite deftly, from radical black nationalism and embraced cosmopolitanism. He is certainly proud of his ethnic heritage, but in the manner of a "bourgeois nationalist" (as Eldridge Cleaver liked to say), the kind of person who hangs a Romare Bearden print on the wall and owns the complete Coltrane, but he doesn't want to be confined or defined entirely by his or her blackness. When he juxtaposes, rhetorically, his white grandmother with Jeremiah Wright as two examples of the wrong approach to race, he is doing this to show that he is our ultimate figure of mediation, standing tall above quarrels that most of us assume to be irreconcilable. And he does this for a larger political purpose. Like Douglass, he is a very gifted rhetorician; form and content are inextricably political for Barack Obama, from start to finish.
Further to the left, Cornel West, whom Obama had called an "oracle," was privately irritated with the speech, thinking that it was politically effective but "intellectually thin." He was especially angry that Obama had equated the oppression of blacks with white resentment. "I can understand that, the white moderates need that nice little massage and so on, but it has nothing to do with the truth, at all," West said many months later. "Do they have grounds for being upset? Absolutely. There have been excesses of affirmative action and so forth and so on, but Jim Crow de
facto is still in place.... Who are the major victims of that? Poor, disproportionately, black and brown and red. You got to tell the truth, Barack. Don't trot out this shit with this coded stuff." But even West, who had promised Obama that he would be a "critical supporter," held his fire in public. "It was a very delicate moment," he said.
The speech was overall a success in the polls. Obama enhanced his stature while achieving the more immediate aim of putting distance between himself and his pastor. "The speech helped stanch a real frenzy," Axelrod said. "Barack turned a moment of great vulnerability into a moment of triumph. He said, 'I may lose, but I will have done something valuable.' He was utterly calm while everyone was freaking out. He said, 'Either they will accept it or they won't and I won't be President.' It was probably the most important moment of the whole campaign."
As important as the message was the tone of the messenger. Obama's personality served him well. The civil-rights-era activist Bob Moses, one of Obama's heroes, said, "His confidence in himself--and his peacefulness with himself--came through in a way that can't be faked. You are under too much pressure to actually adopt a persona. You can't do it under that pressure and not have it blown away. People said he couldn't afford to be the angry black candidate, but the point is that he is not angry. If he were angry, it would have come out." Indeed, in the sixties Moses, leading voter-registration drives in Mississippi, was known for those same qualities--his intelligence and his even temper.
Studs Terkel, who compiled oral histories about race and the Depression and was, at ninety-six, a Chicago institution, recalled the Philadelphia speech just a week before he died, in October, 2008, telling me that Obama's political calm under pressure reminded him of Gene Tunney, the heavyweight champion of the mid-nineteen-twenties, who used craft, more than brawn, to defeat Jack Dempsey. "The guys on the street, the mechanics and shoe clerks, saw Tunney as an intellectual, but he won," Terkel said. "Obama is like that. He's one cool fighter."
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 69