The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  In early October, Sean Hannity broadcast a multipart series on Fox called "Obama & Friends: A History of Radicalism." Like Corsi, Hannity played an extended game of guilt by association and drive-by character assassination, suggesting that Obama was connected to Louis Farrakhan; a supporter of socialist revolution in the mode of Hugo Chavez; and close to Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern politics whom Hannity characterized as "an allegedly former member of a terror organization." In all, Hannity concluded, "Obama's list of friends reads like a history of radicalism."

  By the fall of 2008, the leaders of the McCain campaign harbored the sense that they were playing in an unfair contest. They felt both wounded and self-righteously furious that McCain no longer won plaudits, as he had in 2000, for candor, wry amiability, and intellectual suppleness. Like Bill and Hillary Clinton, McCain thought of Obama as a talented speaker but a callow politician, serenely entitled, lucky beyond measure.

  McCain's appeal and his sense of himself were based on the values of honor, self-sacrifice, and service. "It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy," he wrote in one of his best-selling collaborations with his senior aide, Mark Salter. The many Democrats, moderates, and journalists who had expressed admiration for him in 2000 pointed both to his unquestionable valor and sacrifice in Vietnam and to his willingness to fight his own party on tobacco, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign finance, secret "earmarks" for local pork projects, and other issues. In those days, he was so independent that he entertained the idea of leaving the Republican Party. After losing to Bush, McCain flirted with a variety of fates: joining the Democrats, creating a third party modeled on Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, and, in 2004, joining his friend John Kerry on the Democratic ticket. He remained a Republican.

  But now the McCain people found to their chagrin that they no longer possessed the non-ideological glamour that had once had columnists aching to ride on McCain's bus, the Straight Talk Express, and that led the novelist David Foster Wallace to write a long admiring profile of McCain as an "anti-candidate" in Rolling Stone. Why had Obama monopolized the affections of the press corps? McCain's people asked. What sacrifices had Obama ever made? When had he ever risked the displeasure of his own Party, much less his own ambitions? They saw Obama as the ultimate Ivy League yuppie meritocrat--young, talented, effete, impertinent, unbruised, untested, and undeservedly self-possessed. Where were the scars? It was a familiar generational dynamic with the added element of race.

  Mark Salter claimed that the press was enamored of Obama because of an urge to participate in the historic narrative of the rise of an African-American President; as a result, he said, it forgave or ignored his every fault and exaggerated McCain's. Salter was especially insistent on telling reporters about McCain's right-mindedness on race. He reminded reporters about how McCain had campaigned in Memphis in a driving rain to address a black audience. The message was: Even if I am not your candidate, if I win, I will be your President. Outside the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was slain in 1968, McCain told voters that he had made a mistake twenty-five years earlier when he voted against making King's birthday a national holiday.

  "We went to great lengths to avoid pushing the rumors about Obama or trying to scare people, but McCain didn't get an ounce of fucking credit for it," Salter said. "The press was smitten with a candidate and was determined to see him win. Where were the investigative pieces? We must have had fifty. Where was the press on Obama or Axelrod? There was nothing! My personal view is that reporters had to rationalize a dislike for McCain that they hadn't had before. They had to conjure it."

  As early as 2006, when McCain accepted an invitation to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, he made it plain that he was no longer looking to run a maverick campaign. In 2000, McCain had called Falwell one of the "agents of intolerance," but now he was assembling a Republican majority and needed the votes of the Christian right.

  Jon Stewart, the host of "The Daily Show," had said in 2000 that he would have voted for McCain had he won the Republican nomination, but now he invited him on the show and said that the speech at Liberty University "strikes me as something you wouldn't ordinarily do. Are you going into crazy base world?"

  McCain paused, smiled, and said sheepishly, "I'm afraid so."

  McCain's sense of injury was even less easy to credit when he nominated Sarah Palin to be his running mate and dispatched her to be an assault-weapon-in-chief. At rallies, Palin raised the specter of one of Corsi's main arguments proving Obama's supposed radicalism--his "relationship" with the former Weatherman Bill Ayers. "Our opponent," she said, "is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."

  It was a brilliantly ominous formulation. Ayers went unnamed, allowing the listener to wonder who exactly these plural "terrorists" were. The phrase "targeted their own country" sounded like some sort of link with domestic sleeper agents.

  Palin was not alone in the effort. McCain himself asked that Obama come clean about his closeness to a "washed-up terrorist." He also questioned his opponent's patriotism, saying that Obama would prefer to "lose a war in order to win a political campaign."

  Ayers wasn't the only weapon in the arsenal. McCain, using the same kind of robo-calls that had been deployed against him eight years earlier in South Carolina, promoted the message that Obama had urged doctors not to treat "babies born alive after surviving attempted abortions." McCain not only hired consultants in the Karl Rove circle; he embraced the universe of the Bush Administration--precisely when it was in the process of imploding. The spectacle of McCain's confusion, his courtship of right-wing evangelists, free-market absolutists, and other conservatives new to his world would have been pitiable had it not been so dangerous.

  After Palin started linking Obama to "terrorists" and McCain, too, did his own part to rub the magic lantern with speeches and television ads, the crowds at rallies began shouting "Terrorist!" and "Murderer!" and "Off with his head!" These were isolated outbursts, yet they so rattled McCain that he finally had to declare that Obama was, in fact, an honorable man. When a woman asking a question at a town-hall meeting informed McCain that Obama was an "Arab," McCain finally interrupted her, saying, "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man." (As if this were the opposite of "Arab.") At a rally in Lakeville, Minnesota, McCain said, "I will respect him, and I want everyone to be respectful." McCain's supporters rewarded him with boos. If McCain ever thought that he could take a middle road, asserting that he was firmly against slanderous appeals but also delegating Palin to rouse the worst suspicions among "the base," he was now disabused of that illusion.

  McCain quickly became used to the criticism of countless commentators and some former military and political allies, but one attack truly hurt. In Why Courage Matters (2004), McCain and Salter had written about the bravery and patriotism of John Lewis, in Selma in 1965, and at many other civil-rights demonstrations. Now, a month before the election, Lewis issued a harsh statement saying that McCain and Palin were "sowing the seeds of hatred and division":

  During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a Presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

  Lewis warned that McCain and Palin were "playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all." McCain issued a statement saying that Lewis's attack was "brazen and baseless," but it was clear to everyone on his campaign bus that he was deeply disturbed by the incident.

  Ayers, for his part, had avoided reporters ever since his name first started appearing in the press during the campa
ign. Now in his sixties, he was unrepentant about his past in the Weather Underground, justifying his support for violence as a response to the slaughter in Vietnam. While Ayers had, for decades, been living an ordinary life as an educator, he had said reprehensible things as a young man. In 1974, for instance, he had dedicated a revolutionary manifesto called "Prairie Fire" to a range of radicals, including Harriet Tubman--but had also added the name of Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. Much of the Chicago academic establishment now showed its support for Ayers--even Richard M. Daley commended him for his good works in education--but Palin and the McCain campaign knew that by linking Obama to Ayers they could cast doubt on Obama's loyalties, his character, and his past. Obama was never remotely a radical; as a student, lawyer, professor, and politician he had always been a gradualist--liberal in spirit, cautious in nature. Obama was disingenuous when he described Ayers merely as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," but the idea that they were ever close friends or shared political ideas was preposterous.

  "I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better," Ayers said, when my colleague Peter Slevin and I talked to him at his house on Election Day. Ayers said that while he wasn't bothered by the many threats--"and I'm not complaining"--the calls and e-mails he received had been "pretty intense." "I got two threats in one day on the Internet," he said, referring to an incident that took place the previous summer when he was sitting in his office at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he has taught education for two decades. "The first one said that there was a posse coming to shoot me, and the second said that they were going to kidnap me and water-board me." During the general-election campaign, Ayers's alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, called him to say the threats were so serious that she would have police squad cars patrol by his house periodically. When he spoke at Millersville University, in Pennsylvania, he was told that there had been threats against him, and police with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled outside the hall.

  Ayers seemed unfazed by what he called "the Swiftboating" process of the 2008 campaign. "It's all guilt by association," he said. "They made me into a cartoon character--they threw me up onstage just to pummel me. I felt from the beginning that the Obama campaign had to run the Obama campaign and I have to run my life." Ayers said that once his name became part of the campaign maelstrom he never had any contact with the Obama circle. "That's not my world," he said.

  One endorsement that the Obama campaign did want was that of General Colin Powell. Just as the Kennedy-family endorsement was a boon during the primary campaign, an endorsement from Powell would help among centrist Republicans and independents. Powell had left the Bush Administration, in 2005, after serving as Secretary of State, and had revealed his political hand discreetly since then, sometimes through background interviews with favored journalists, sometimes through former aides. But in the past year he had been unable to avoid mention of the Presidential race. When Obama was deciding whether to run, Powell had met with him and assured him that the country was ready to vote for a black President. Powell watched the campaign closely and, in June, in the space of a week, met with both Obama and John McCain. "I told them the concerns I had with each of their campaigns," Powell recalled, "and I told them what I liked about them. I said, 'I'm going to be watching.'"

  In 1995, with his reputation burnished by the first Gulf War, and long before it was tarnished by the second, Powell had been uniquely positioned to become the first African-American President. His reputation as a soldier and as an adviser to Presidents had been, for millions of Americans, unimpeachable, and his life story, as he described it in his autobiography, My American Journey, was no less appealing, if less tortured, than Obama's in Dreams from My Father. Powell put himself forward in the old-fashioned way: the man of accomplishment "who just happens to be black."

  For a few weeks, as his book sat atop the best-seller lists, Powell discussed a run for the 1996 Republican nomination with his family and his inner circle of aides and friends. Bill Clinton, a popular President, was running for a second term, but Clinton, political tacticians believed, lacked Powell's particular strengths: his maturity, his solidity in foreign affairs. In a center-right country, the scenario went, Powell could beat the incumbent. But there were considerations that went beyond polls. "Some in my family, in my circle of acquaintances, were concerned that, as a black person running for office, you're probably at greater personal risk than you might be if you were a white person," Powell told me. "But I've been at risk many times in my life, and I've been shot at, even."

  Powell thought about the question for a few weeks and then, he said, he realized, "What are you doing? This is not you. It had nothing to do with race. It had to do with who I am, a professional soldier, who really has no instinct or gut passion for political life. The determining factor was I never woke up a single morning saying, 'Gee, I want to go to Iowa.' It was that simple. So the race thing was there, and I would've been the first prominent African-American candidate, but the reality is that the whole family, but especially me, had to look in the mirror and say, 'Is this what you really think you would be good at? And do you really want to do it?' And the answer was no."

  Powell saw the campaign unfold over the summer of 2008, and, increasingly, he was dismayed by the ugly rhetoric on the Republican side. "It wasn't just John," Powell said. "Frankly, very often it wasn't John; it was some sheriff in Florida introducing--I can't remember who the guy was introducing, whether it was Governor Palin or John--who said, 'Barack Hussein Obama.' That's all code words. I know what he's saying: 'He's a Muslim, and he's black.'"

  Finally, just two weeks before Election Day, Powell chose to accept a standing invitation from NBC and Tom Brokaw. He appeared on "Meet the Press," on Sunday morning, October 19th.

  Powell prepared thoroughly for the appearance. Clearly, Brokaw knew what was coming; he had only to ask the obvious question and sit back. Powell, for his part, had suffered politically. He felt that Bush and Cheney had used him to sell the invasion of Iraq; that he had gone to the United Nations to speak out on Iraqi military capability equipped, as it turned out, with bogus intelligence. With a keen sense of how to deal, publicly and not, with the Washington press, Powell had, for decades, been a master of his own image--his fingerprints were all over Bob Woodward's books going back to the Administration of George H. W. Bush--but now he knew that he had to repair his reputation. His appearance on "Meet the Press" was a matter not only of expressing a preference but of making a comeback in the public eye. In his long, perfectly formed answer--more a soliloquy than a reply--Powell was careful not to alienate Republicans or insult McCain, but was also clear about the future:

  On the Republican side over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party and Mr. McCain has become narrower and narrower. Mr. Obama, at the same time, has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He's crossing lines--ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines. He's thinking about, all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values.

  Powell even questioned why surrogates for the Republican Party were trying to exploit the Ayers "issue," such as it was:

  Why do we have these robo-calls going on around the country trying to suggest that because of this very, very limited relationship that Senator Obama has had with Mr. Ayers, somehow, Mr. Obama is tainted? What they're trying to do is connect him to some kind of terrorist feelings. And I think that's inappropriate....

  So, when I look at all of this and I think back to my Army career, we've got two individuals. Either one of them could be a good President. But which is the President that we need now? Which is the individual that serves the needs of the nation for the next period of time? And I come to the conclusion that because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and h
is rhetorical abilities--and we have to take that into account, as well as his substance; he has both style and substance--he has met the standard of being a successful President, being an exceptional President. I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming into the world, onto the world stage, onto the American stage. And for that reason I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama.

  Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama was, for some Republicans, like Kenneth Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's last chief of staff, "the Good Housekeeping seal of approval." In the days that followed, the calls, letters, and e-mails that Powell received were mostly positive. The Pakistanis in his local supermarket appreciated what he had to say about the use of "Arab" or "Muslim" as a pejorative. Some critics said that his endorsement of Obama was an act of "disloyalty and dishonor." Rush Limbaugh was only the loudest of the right-wing voices who denounced him. Limbaugh felt no compunction about saying that Powell's only reason for endorsing Obama was race.

  Powell received some racist letters, but they were generally unsigned and had no return address. "I've faced this in just about everything I've ever done in my public life," he said to me. "It's there in America, and it can't be denied that there are people like this."