The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  The speech in Philadelphia did more than change the subject. It not only gave a context to the Jeremiah Wright affair--at least, for those who were willing to be persuaded--but also positioned Obama himself as a historical advance, the focal point of a new era, embracing America itself for all its tribes, for all its historical enmities and possibilities. In effect, it congratulated the country for getting behind him. Wright, Jesse Jackson--they were leaders of the old vanguard. Obama would lead the new vanguard, the Joshua generation.

  "He leaned in, and that's always kind of his tendency: if you see something coming at you, lean in," Valerie Jarrett said. She would have preferred that he not have had to give the speech, but, she said, "The American people listened more carefully, because we were in the midst of a crisis. I think if he'd given that same speech earlier, we probably wouldn't have had every single news outlet cover it and talk about it for the following five news cycles."

  The crisis had not come at the worst time: the next primaries were not until April 22nd, in Pennsylvania (Hillary was favored to win), and May 6th, in Indiana and North Carolina. The speech stabilized Obama's standing in the polls.

  It did not, however, stabilize the mood of Jeremiah Wright. Wright had known all along that his relationship with Obama would, at best, be tested by the campaign. But he deeply resented what had happened to him, to his family, and to his church. The media, he complained, had reduced his decades of sermons and work for social justice to an ugly caricature, portraying him as an "anti-American, radical, homo-loving, liberal-whatever minister that [Obama] sat under for twenty years." His e-mail was clogged with obscene and abusive messages. His office received death threats. The church received bomb threats. Police cars had to be parked outside the church, his house, his daughters' houses.

  When Obama gave his speech in Philadelphia, Wright was with his wife, five children, son-in-law, and three grandchildren on a long-planned Caribbean cruise--a "cruise from hell," he called it. For the entire trip, cable news was looping reports about Wright. "Many of the white passengers on the boat were livid with me, saying ugly things to me and around me," Wright said after the election. "'You're unpatriotic, you oughta go back to Africa.'" Some people at the dining table next to Wright's asked to be moved. "I started staying in my cabin most of the time," Wright recalled, "except for dinner at night with my family, because to be out was going to invite comments that I didn't want my grandkids to hear." When the ship docked in Puerto Rico, Wright picked up a copy of the New York Times in which Maureen Dowd called him, indelibly, a "wackadoodle."

  Wright was not at all shocked by Obama's speech, saying that it was what he had to do, as a politician, to stay in the race. But the idea that Obama was not "disowning" him was disingenuous. "You already did disown me," Wright said as if Obama were in the room. "And you're being forced into saying things that I would not say--but I'm not running for public office."

  Obama, Wright said, sent him a text message wishing him a happy Easter. That hardly eased his upset with the speech, and its denunciation of his sermons. "I said to him, as soon as I got back, 'Not only haven't you heard the sermon, Barack, you're responding to news clips being looped on television,'" Wright said, recalling an hour-long private meeting with Obama at Wright's house. "You didn't read the sermon, that's certainly been in print since 2001. And it seems to me that the Harvard Law Review editor would at least read a sermon before he makes a pronouncement about it." Wright says that Obama apologized: "He said, 'You're right, I hadn't read the sermon, or heard it. And I was wrong.' But, I said, 'You're apologizing in my living room. You're busting me out internationally--over something you had not heard or read.'"

  Wright's presumption was that his meanings had been radically distorted by the clips of his sermons that appeared on ABC and in the rest of the media, that somehow Obama and everyone else, if they only read or heard the full version, would share his wisdom. The truth is that while those sermons were, of course, more nuanced than any five-second excerpt could represent, Wright's rhetoric and his ferocious tone, on the subject of 9/11 and much else, were not something that the Obama campaign would put in a commercial.

  According to Wright, Obama said he would greatly prefer that Wright stay at home and keep quiet through the rest of the campaign rather than continue to preach in Chicago and on the road. "He said, 'You know what your problem is, is you've got to tell the truth,'" Wright said. "I said, 'That's a good problem for me to have.' That's a good problem for all preachers to have.... He said, 'It's going to get worse if you go out there. It's really going to get worse.' And he was so right."

  At around the same time, Wright said, he was getting messages from Joshua DuBois, a Pentecostal minister and the Obama campaign's religious affairs director, and from other aides and supporters, asking him not to preach and give interviews until after the election. One Obama supporter--"a close friend of Barack's," Wright claimed--even offered to send Wright money if he would only be quiet. Wright refused. He was retired now and needed to earn a living and help support grandchildren in college. "Where's the money going to come from?" he said. "I'm just going to be quiet until November the fifth? I'm not supposed to say a word? What do I tell these people who have invited me to preach? All of these dates between April and November? So, no, I didn't cancel engagements, and I didn't cancel what I was supposed to be doing."

  Wright was simply not going to apologize for what he said were "snippets" taken out of proper context, and he resented deeply the media's "attempts to use me as a weapon of mass destruction."

  "I'm not running for office," he said. "I don't have to win. I don't have to compromise in terms of trying to appease this faction to get their vote."

  Any notion that the Jeremiah Wright affair had settled down died on April 28, 2008, when he accepted an invitation to speak at the National Press Club in Washington. Three nights before, in an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, he had been calm and reasoned; a speech in Detroit was harsher, but got little attention. Wright was in Washington for the annual Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a gathering of leaders of the black church. Before taking the stage at the National Press Club, he stood in a circle holding hands with six or seven close friends and colleagues, including Cornel West and the Reverend James Forbes, Jr., the pastor of Riverside Church in New York. Forbes prayed that Wright would perform well and keep his cool.

  Wright began with a prepared speech about the history, thought, and diverse strands of the black church--the long history stretching from Africa to slavery, from Jim Crow to the present day. He talked about the prophetic tradition, with its roots in the book of Isaiah, the voices of protest during slavery and segregation and the black-liberation theology of James Cone. After completing his survey, Wright talked about his own church's tradition of protest against apartheid and other instances of injustice, as well as its support of programs for victims of H.I.V./AIDS, drug addicts and alcoholics, and troubled young people.

  When Wright finished, Donna Leinwand, a reporter for USA Today and the vice-president of the National Press Club, had the unenviable task of reading to him written questions from the audience. The first question she read was about Wright's post-9/11 line that "America's chickens are coming home to roost."

  "Have you heard the whole sermon?" Wright said.

  Leinwand, of course, had not asked the question so much as relayed it, but Wright used her as his foil. When she asked a question about his patriotism, Wright, not without some justification, began to unwind:

  "I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"

  Wright's demeanor began to change: he became more combative, more sarcastic, and started to perform in the broadest sense, clowning, rolling his eyes, preening for his friends and the camera. Applause rolled in from his colleagues and friends, including a number of ministers, the former Washington mayor Marion Barry, and Malik Zulu Shabazz, of the New Black Panther Party. Cornel West, for one, thought that Wright had begun we
ll but now was starting to "disintegrate."

  Asked about Louis Farrakhan, Wright said, "Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."

  More and more, Wright played to his supporters and mugged for the camera. The calm he had displayed with Moyers was gone; he clearly felt that the questions were unworthy and foolish and he answered in kind. When he was asked about the notion that the H.I.V. virus was invented as a weapon to be employed against people of color, Wright didn't deny it. Instead, he recommended Emerging Viruses, a self-published book by a conspiracy theorist and former dentist named Leonard G. Horowitz, who suggests that H.I.V. originated as a biological-weapons project. "Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country," he said, "I believe our government is capable of doing anything."

  From the Obama campaign's point of view, Wright's performance at the National Press Club was catastrophic. It was broadcast live and in full; there could be no complaints that Wright had been reduced to edited "snippets." Wright said that he was "playing the dozens" with people who had somehow shown him no respect, and yet it was obvious that his tone of contempt and mockery would do Obama no good. Wright, at this point, did not seem to care.

  "We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said he would never get elected," Wright said at the Press Club. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.... I do what pastors do, he does what politicians do. I'm not running for office." Then, as if to add an acid punctuation to his performance, he joked that maybe he would be Vice-President.

  * * *

  Obama had been campaigning in North Carolina when Wright appeared at the National Press Club. After being briefed, but without having seen the tape, Obama made a statement about Wright--"He does not speak for me"--at the Wilmington airport. Late that night, he watched Wright on cable television and realized that it had been even worse than Valerie Jarrett and other aides had suggested. Obama was devastated and felt a deep sense of betrayal.

  "I don't know if we could have designed something as destructive" as Wright's appearance at the National Press Club, David Plouffe recalled. "It was like living in a 'Saturday Night Live' parody. I remember I was on the phone with Obama, describing what had happened, and we were both just very quiet. It was hard to believe that this was happening. It was emotionally very difficult for him."

  As usual, Plouffe had taken the late-night call from Obama in the bathroom so that he wouldn't wake his wife. Finally, after a long, agonized conversation, Obama said that he would speak out. "I know what I need to say," he said. "You guys don't worry about it."

  The next day, in Winston-Salem, Obama followed a town hall meeting with a pointed press conference. Looking stricken and grave, he said that Wright had offered a "different vision of America"--one that he did not share. He pronounced himself "outraged" by his pastor and his "divisive and destructive" comments, adding that they did not accurately represent the black church, much less his campaign. "And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well," Obama said. "And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either."

  Lost in the furor was a clear picture of Jeremiah Wright himself. Intelligent yet given to conspiracy thinking, devoted yet erratic, he was many things at once: ambitious, compassionate, volatile, egocentric. Here was a man who had been at a pinnacle of his South Side domain. He was preparing for a triumphant retirement, handing over the leadership of a church that he had built from eighty-seven congregants to six thousand, just as his most famous parishioner was, quite possibly, headed toward the White House. He had done a great deal for a great many. Now he was demonized on television, with reporters asking him rude questions, strangers insulting him and harassing his family; and now, too, Obama was through with him. Wright's pride did not allow him to be silent until the end of the campaign; he did not think that he should have to. What had he ever done to Barack Obama except advise him, teach him, embolden his soul? That was how he saw it, anyway. Wright was wounded and weary. ("I'm a tired bastard," he said.) He knew well that he would forever be known for those moments on television, not for his good works. There was no way out of such a hole. And he could not help it if his view of Obama fluctuated from the tender to the furious, from the proud to the patronizing.

  "Your children mess up, your children make mistakes, your children listen to bad advice--you don't stop loving your children," Wright told me. "Barack was like a son to me. I'm not going to stop loving him. I think he listened to the wrong people and made some bad choices.... As I said, he may have disowned me; I didn't disown him, and I won't disown him, because I love him. I still love him. I love him like I love my kids."

  But the humiliation was deep. Northwestern University rescinded an honorary degree. Some speaking invitations were withdrawn. Wright said that the media hounded his youngest child at her senior prom and again when she moved into her dormitory at Howard University. "That's one of the reasons there's still the rawness and the pain," he said.

  And yet he continued to make strange, sometimes hate-filled statements and speeches. Speaking at an N.A.A.C.P. dinner, Wright gave a pseudo-scientific disquisition on the genetic differences between African-American "right-brain" and European "left-brain" learning styles. At the point where he started talking about the different ways black people and white people clap their hands, their varying rhythmic capacities, it became possible to see a once-respected pastor coming undone. Interviewed by Cliff Kelley on WVON after the election, Wright revealed the depths of his hurt and resentment. He talked not only about the sins of the mass media but also recounted the names of the hip-hop artists and comedians who had criticized him. His hurt was palpable. "You've not only dissed me ... you have urinated on my tradition," Wright said. "You've urinated on my parents, my grandparents, and our whole faith tradition. I feel like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man."

  During the primary debates, Obama had said that under the right conditions he would talk to any foreign leader--Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il--"but he can't talk to me," Wright said ruefully to Kelley. Even though Wright said that he had not disowned Obama, he now felt free to mock him. One of Obama's assets in the race had been his comfort in the church; now his pastor criticized him for his lack of devotion. "He doesn't have a church," he said. "He has a health club he goes to every morning, but he doesn't have a church he goes to every week. He's sort of churchless. He's taking care of his body."

  Wright never seemed to get over his wounds, and, when he failed to watch himself, which was increasingly often, he said hateful things. As late as June, 2009, he bitterly told a newspaper in Virginia, the Daily Press, "Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office." He also said that Jewish voters and "the AIPAC" vote were "controlling" Obama; they were persuading him not to send delegations to a conference on racism in Geneva because "they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is." With these flourishes, Wright made it a great deal more difficult to see, or care about, the complexity of his drama. His subsequent half-apologies betrayed only his regret that he had not used more euphemistic language. His parishioners, for the most part, would not stop loving him, they would not forget all the good he had done, but the rest of the world moved on.

  For a few weeks after Wright's National Press Club appearance, Obama worried about the campaign's survival. He joked with his aides that he could always make speeches for money--he'd make as much as Bill Clinton!--and he could keep hanging around with his friends from the campaign. The gallows humor was understandable. The polls in North Carolina and, especially, Indiana, were not promising. Would Wright's behavior, his unwillingness to swallow his pride and stay quiet, be the end of the Obama campaign?

  In the
end, however, Obama won North Carolina by fourteen points, and he lost Indiana by just two points. The race for the Democratic nomination remained close to the end, but Obama never fell behind. That night, on NBC, Tim Russert declared, "We know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it." George Stephanopoulos, on ABC, and Bob Schieffer, on CBS, soon followed suit. Because Obama had proved his resiliency through the Wright affair and the balloting in North Carolina, the decisive super-delegates started to commit themselves to voting for him at the Convention. For a while, Hillary Clinton ignored reality and soldiered on.

  In mid-June, Obama went to his friend Arthur Brazier's church, on the South Side, the Apostolic Church of God, and delivered a Father's Day speech. Thematically, Obama was repeating himself. Speaking both as a politician and as the child of a fatherless household, he had talked many times to audiences and journalists about the importance of family, responsibility, and fatherhood.

  African-Americans, in general, welcome such sermons, and Obama was well received at Brazier's church, but, to some black intellectuals and activists, Obama was patronizing his audiences and minimizing the themes of institutionalized racism. The critique of Obama on this subject was similar to the critique of the comic Bill Cosby, who for many years had angered some black intellectuals with his lectures on black self-empowerment, families, fatherhood, and self-discipline. Michael Eric Dyson wrote in Time that while Obama had cited a Chris Rock comedy routine about black men expecting praise for things like staying out of jail, "Rock's humor is so effective because he is just as hard on whites as on blacks. That's a part of the routine Obama has not yet adopted." The novelist Ishmael Reed pointed out that the polls now showed Obama with a fifteen-point lead over the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain. "It's obvious by now that Barack Obama is treating black Americans like one treats a demented uncle, brought out from his room to be ridiculed and scolded before company from time to time," Reed wrote, adding that the Father's Day speech was "meant to show white conservative males," who had failed to vote for him in the primaries, "that he wouldn't cater to 'special interest' groups, blacks in this case."