The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Glenn Loury, a prominent black economist, who grew up in Chicago, said, "It wasn't that he was wrong or off base, nor was it a washing of dirty linen in public, but I thought that he was talking over the audience to the rest of the country and using the fact of his 'courage' to say these things to convey to the rest of the country that he shares our values despite the doubts we might have had about him."

  On July 6th, Jesse Jackson, who had been fairly quiet during the long campaign, was preparing to appear on Fox television when an open mike recorded him criticizing Obama for his "faith-based" speech on Father's Day at Apostolic. Speaking softly to another guest, Jackson also said that Obama had been "talking down to black people." He made a slicing gesture with his hand and said, "I wanna cut his nuts out."

  What seemed to irritate Jackson and many others was the potential for a double discourse, the way that Obama's rhetoric was being overheard by white audiences that might understand it not as brotherly sympathy but, rather, as lofty reproach. "Barack would go to various groups and spell out public policy," Jackson told me. "He'd go to Latino groups and the conversation would be about the road to citizenship and immigration policy. He'd go to women and talk about women's rights, Roe v. Wade. But he'd gone to several black groups talking about responsibility, which is an important virtue that should be broadly applied, but, given our crisis, we need government policy, too. African-Americans are No. 1 in voting for him, because he excited people, but we're also No. 1 in infant mortality, No. 1 in shortness of life expectancy, No. 1 in homicide victims."

  Fox played the tape on the air, and Jackson came in for a few days of comprehensive bashing. The ritual played itself out: Jackson apologized. This, in turn, allowed Obama to accept the apology. Jackson looked petty and jealous. Obama looked magnanimous. Once more, a distance between the two men was established.

  "I was shocked by the language, but I knew Jesse had the feeling that Obama played to white Americans by criticizing black Americans, for not doing enough to help ourselves," Julian Bond said. "Whether he intended it, I don't know, but I am sure Jesse provided Obama that sort of Sister Souljah moment."

  Even many of Obama's early critics acquired a grudging respect for his cool strategic sense, his tactical agility. Tavis Smiley, who went on attacking Obama for "pivoting" on issues like gun control and the death penalty and who absorbed enormous criticism for doing so, was among those who now saw the promise in him. Throughout the campaign, Smiley, like his mentor Cornel West, kept in touch with Obama. "Each time Obama and I talked during the campaign, maybe a half-dozen times on the phone," he said, "we aired our positions and differences, but it always ended with him saying, 'Tavis, I gotta do what I gotta do and I respect the fact that you have to do what you have to.' We confirm our love for each other and then we hang up." Obama did not, and could not, represent the prophetic tradition: he was not Frederick Douglass or Bishop Turner, Dr. King or Malcolm X. He could borrow their language, he could take inspiration from their examples, but he was a pragmatist, a politician. To change anything, he needed to win. The romancing of Tavis Smiley was a small part of that effort.

  The acrimony inside the Clinton campaign never eased. The enmity between the chief strategist, Mark Penn, and Harold Ickes was only the most vividly bitter relationship in a thoroughly dysfunctional organization. Ickes, a liberal with a decades-long relationship with the Clintons, resented Penn for his centrist politics and big-business ties and viewed him as incompetent; Penn was convinced that Ickes contributed only back-biting and rancor to the campaign. At one point in the campaign, Hillary Clinton had presided over a regular strategy meeting at her house on Embassy Row, on Whitehaven Street, in Washington. Around fifteen senior advisers were seated at a long table, with Clinton at the head, Penn at her side. Toward the end of the meeting, she said with frustration, "O.K., then, what's my message?"

  The question seemed shocking to some in the room, but Penn forged ahead, rambling on about "Right from Day One" and other rubrics of the campaign. No one else had much to offer.

  "Suddenly, Hillary got this sad, faraway look," one of the advisers recalled. "And she said, almost plaintively, 'Well, when you figure it out, someone give me a call.' She felt let down, betrayed, and there was good reason for her to feel that way. But she hired every fucking one of us, and it was one of the weakest political staffs I've ever seen." Throughout the campaign, Clinton expressed frustration with each of her leading aides, and had to fire her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, but the adviser was right--she had chosen every one of them.

  By June, 2008, the long battle between Clinton and Obama was over. Clinton, for her part, tried, fitfully at first, to reconcile herself to reality and move forward--possibly at the side of her antagonist. In some private meetings, however, she revealed her lingering sense of injury. Both her campaign and her husband had failed to perform with any consistency. She was angry with the press, which, she felt, had valorized Obama and punished her for their own weariness with the Clinton saga since 1992 and for every misstep in the campaign, real or perceived. She even made clear to some people that her team had early knowledge of Jeremiah Wright's sermons and Obama's extraordinarily close relationship with the preacher. What if she had had such a friendship? What would the press have said about her? And yet, she said with some bitterness, she got no credit for holding back. Only her husband's sense of umbrage was greater.

  Sometimes Hillary Clinton's anger could quiet a room with its intensity, but as the weeks passed that sense of outrage turned to a desire to survive in the new order. It was no secret to Clinton that she was being considered for Vice-President or a top Cabinet position.

  It took a while longer, however, for the top aides on both sides to cool down. "The Obama people were so angry at us, they thought that we had gone too far, that there had been race-baiting," one Clinton aide said. "I thought that enmity would last a really long time. I was angry and so were a lot of other people about how we were treated. There was no sense immediately afterward of 'Good game, well played.' No, it was 'We really took those fuckers down. We retired the Clintons to the trash heap of history.'

  "Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama took a lot longer to get over it," the aide continued. "They are protective, competitive spouses, and for them to get over these compounding slights wasn't easy. Michelle clearly had a generalized feeling by the end of the campaign that we had run a race-baiting campaign. I don't think Obama himself did--or not nearly as much."

  David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, admitted that he had been furious, in the latter stages of the primaries, that Clinton seemed to live in an "alternate universe" in which she still thought victory possible. Plouffe continued to be resentful long after the contest was over. "I'm a warrior, so it was hard for me to put down the sword," he said.

  The relatively relaxed period of the summer of 2008 allowed that enmity to exhaust itself, and, by late August, when the Democratic Party gathered in Denver for its Convention, a sense of comity, be it sincere or forced, was in place. The Clintons both gave conciliatory, supportive speeches in favor of the nominee and Obama was free to concentrate on kicking off his national campaign against John McCain and the Republicans.

  On the afternoon of August 28th Obama was rehearsing his acceptance speech in a modest meeting room on the nineteenth floor of the Westin Tabor Center, the hotel where he was staying in Denver. In a few hours, he was to appear under the lights at Mile High Stadium. Obama has always preferred to work in the nest of a very small circle of aides and now his audience was three: his political strategist, David Axelrod; the speechwriter, Jon Favreau; and a teleprompter operator. The rehearsal was mainly an exercise in comfort, in making sure that there were no syntactical hurdles left in the text, no barriers to clarity. Obama was never spirited in rehearsal, but he wanted to make sure he had a firm grasp of the rhythm of the sentences, so that when he looked at the teleprompter he would be like a well-rehearsed musician glancing at the score.

  As a piece of rhetori
c, the Convention speech was more of a ramble and a litany than what Obama usually favored; the text carried the burden of presenting a bill of particulars, a case, as Favreau put it, "of why yes to Obama and no to John McCain." Obama could not just inspire; he had to answer detailed questions of policy and difference. Late in the speech, however, the rhetoric shifted to the historical uplift and significance of the campaign. In the rehearsal session, Obama came to a passage paying homage to the March on Washington, forty-five years earlier to the day, when tens of thousands of people gathered near the Lincoln Memorial to "hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream." Obama chose not to mention Martin Luther King, Jr., by name in the text, and, later, some black intellectuals would say that he had done so for fear of appearing "too black," of emphasizing race in front of a national audience. And yet even as he rehearsed the passage, there was a catch in Obama's voice and he stopped. He couldn't get past the phrase "forty-five years ago."

  "I gotta take a minute," Obama told his aides.

  He excused himself and took a short, calming walk around the room. "This is really hitting me," he said. "I haven't really thought about this before really deeply. It just hit me. I guess this is a pretty big deal."

  His eyes filling with tears, Obama went to the bathroom to blow his nose. Favreau thought that the only time he had ever seen or heard of Obama being this emotional was back in Iowa when he addressed a group of young volunteers who were caucusing for the first time. Axelrod agreed. "Usually, he is so composed," he said, "but he needed the time."

  "It's funny, I think all of us go through this," Favreau recalled. "We've gone through this whole campaign and, contrary to what anyone might think, we don't think of the history much, because it's a crazy environment and you're going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And so there are very few moments--and I think it's the same with Barack--when he stops and thinks, 'I could be the first African-American elected President.'"

  Obama returned to the room and practiced the paragraph a couple more times to make sure he could get through it without interruption. Although the passage did not mention King by name, the references were unmistakable.

  Early in the evening, before the motorcade left for the stadium, Obama called Favreau in his room to go over some stray detail in the speech about science policy.

  "I'm just being nervous, aren't I?" Obama asked him.

  Sometime after five, Obama left the hotel in a motorcade. The drive lasted about fifteen minutes and all he could see through the window was faces, crowds, signs, people ten deep cheering and yelling, and the roar grew louder as he pulled into the stadium to deliver his acceptance speech to eighty thousand people and a television audience of more than thirty-eight million Americans.

  Part Five

  Your door is shut against my tightened face,

  And I am sharp as steel with discontent;

  But I possess the courage and the grace

  To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

  --Claude McKay, "The White House" (1922)

  This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

  --James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

  Chapter Sixteen

  "How Long? Not Long"

  In the traditional rhythm of American presidential politics, the general-election drama begins after the Democratic and Republican Conventions and the Labor Day weekend. But that nicety was abandoned by both parties long ago. John McCain and his spokesmen spent much of the summer sniping at their putative opponent, laying the groundwork for a campaign that questioned, again and again, the worth and credentials of Barack Obama. Is he ready? Is he trustworthy? What has he ever done?

  From the start, McCain salted legitimate contention with dubious insinuation. On October 6th, at a rally in Albuquerque, after suggesting that his opponent had taken "illegal foreign funds from Palestinian donors," McCain asked, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" When his aides charged--falsely--that Obama had willfully "snubbed" wounded American veterans at a base in Germany while making his triumphant summer visit to Europe, they stood their ground even after the charge had been disproved. They told a reporter for the Washington Post that they were intent on creating a "narrative" about Obama's supposed "indifference toward the military"--just the sort of meme, they thought, that would work for McCain, who had been shot down and wounded in Vietnam and spent nearly six years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Obama, one McCain ad said, "made time to go to the gym" in Europe but not to visit the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan in a German hospital.

  When Obama told the St. Petersburg Times that McCain was trying to "scare" voters because "I don't look like I came out of central casting when it comes to Presidential candidates," McCain, affecting startled offense, charged reverse racism. "His comments were clearly the race card," McCain said. And yet as McCain spoke, his hesitant speech and body language betrayed his own ambivalence. McCain's most painful memory from the 2000 Presidential campaign was of the Bush machine smearing him and his family during the South Carolina primary; pro-Bush operatives used robo-calls and flyers to spread rumors that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock and that he had been a traitor in Vietnam. After McCain lost that race, he told his supporters that he wanted the Presidency "in the best way--not the worst way," and that he would never "dishonor the nation I love or myself by letting ambition overcome principle. Never. Never. Never." Now, in 2008, it seemed obvious that McCain felt distaste, or worse, for what he himself was doing in the name of electoral advantage. He paused uncomfortably and then seemed to sputter when he talked about Obama's supposed dealing of the race card. His moral resolve had receded in the face of ambition, and the internal struggle was both pitiful and visible.

  The story is not simple. McCain did tell his advisers that it would be wrong and counterproductive to try to use Jeremiah Wright against Obama. But his instructions were circumscribed. Conservative surrogates of all kinds, ranging from right-wing authors to McCain's own Vice-Presidential nominee were only too pleased to do the dirty work--the sort of work that McCain had denounced eight years before.

  In the summer weeks leading up to the Conventions, the No. 1 New York Times nonfiction best-seller was a scurrilous exercise called The Obama Nation. The author was Jerome R. Corsi, who, in the previous election cycle, had won a measure of fame as the co-writer of a highly effective piece of hardcover anti-Kerry propaganda called Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. In Vietnam, Kerry had won a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts before coming home to speak out against the war in Congress and in the media, and yet the book managed to discredit him for many voters as a military fraud. Meanwhile, George W. Bush, who avoided Vietnam, sat back and watched the results add up in his electoral column.

  Corsi, by any fair accounting, was a bigot, a liar, and a conspiracy theorist. Online, he had called Hillary Clinton a "fat hog" and "a lesbo," branded Islam "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion," denounced Pope John Paul II as a "senile" apologist for "boy buggering," and charged that the World Trade Center towers had actually been destroyed by means other than hijacked airplanes. The Obama Nation was the kind of pernicious, unhinged production that was once the specialty of the John Birch Society. Such books, however, long ago went mainstream and insinuated themselves into the blogosphere and cable television where, of course, Corsi was a frequent guest. In a tendentious pseudo-scholarly tone, he marshaled clippings and bogus evidence to "prove" that Obama was a corrupt, unpatriotic, foreign-born, drug-dealing, Muslim-mentored non-Christian socialist elitist, who plagiarized his speeches, lied about his past, and found his closest associates among dangerous former Communists and terrorists. Corsi's subtitle was "Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality." Corsi advertised the fact that he had a doctorate in political science from Harvard--his byline is "Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D."--and so he must have known that the phrase "cult of personality" was not something from "Entertainment Tonight"; it was the phrase that N
ikita Khrushchev had used to denounce Stalin for the purges and for the murder of millions of Soviet citizens.

  Corsi was not a basement-dwelling marginal. He had mainstream backing. His publisher was Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster whose chief editor was Mary Matalin, a Bush-family confidante and a former aide to Dick Cheney; Matalin had also been chief of staff to Lee Atwater when he ran the Republican National Committee.

  Corsi was not alone in his efforts to reduce Obama to an alien figure with a shadowy background and pernicious intentions. Similar descriptions and "evidence" were everywhere on right-wing Web sites, talk shows, and news shows, particularly on Fox. Opinion polls showed that an alarming percentage of the American public believed at least some of it, particularly the idea that Obama was lying about his religion.

  The Obama campaign countered the myths and lies on its Web site with a running feature called "Fight the Smears." But the corrosive effect of these untruths on public opinion was impossible to ignore. In mid-July, during the pre-Convention lull in the campaign, The New Yorker published a cover parodying the libels against Obama with the aim of making them ridiculous; the cover image, by Barry Blitt, showed the Obamas in the Oval Office with an American flag crisping in the fireplace, a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the mantel, Michelle dressed as a sixties-era militant, and Obama as a turbaned Muslim. For years, Blitt had been drawing covers mocking the Bush Administration--he and the magazine itself were clearly unsympathetic to the conservative right--but the Obama campaign declared that the cover was in "bad taste" and thousands of people wrote to the magazine, and to me, its editor, in protest. Most of the people who wrote expressed the opinion that while they, of course, understood the intent of the image, they were worried that it could inflame the bigoted sentiments of others and hurt Obama.