by Obama Barack
It’s hard to overstate how these words fortified me, coming as they did almost a year before our Iowa victory; what it meant to have someone so intimately linked to the source of my earliest inspiration say that what I was trying to do was worth it, that it wasn’t just an exercise in vanity or ambition but rather a part of an unbroken chain of progress. More practically, it was thanks to the willingness of Dr. Moss and other former colleagues of Dr. King’s—like Reverend C. T. Vivian of Atlanta and Reverend Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—to lay their proverbial hands on me, vouching for me as an extension of their historic work, that more Black leaders didn’t swing early into Hillary’s camp.
Nowhere was this more evident than in March 2007, when I attended the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, that Congressman John Lewis hosted each year. I’d long wanted to make the pilgrimage to the site of Bloody Sunday, which in 1965 became a crucible of the battle for civil rights, when Americans fully realized what was at stake. But my visit promised to be complicated. The Clintons would be there, I was told; and before participants gathered to cross the bridge, Hillary and I were scheduled to speak simultaneously at dueling church services.
Not only that, but our host, John Lewis, had indicated that he was inclined to endorse Hillary. John had become a good friend—he’d taken great pride in my election to the Senate, rightly seeing it as part of his legacy—and I knew he was tortured by the decision. As I listened to him explain his reasoning over the phone, how long he had known the Clintons, how Bill’s administration had supported many of his legislative priorities, I chose not to press him too hard. I could imagine the pressure this kind and gentle man was under, and I also recognized that, at a time when I was asking white voters to judge me on the merits, a raw appeal to racial solidarity would feel like hypocrisy.
The Selma commemoration could have turned into an uncomfortable political spectacle, but when I arrived, I immediately felt at ease. Perhaps it was being in a place that had played such a large role in my imagination and the trajectory of my life. Perhaps it was the response of ordinary people who’d gathered to mark the occasion, shaking my hand or giving me a hug, some sporting Hillary buttons but saying they were glad I was there. But mostly it was the fact that a group of respected elders had my back. When I entered the historic Brown Chapel AME Church for the service, I learned that Reverend Lowery had asked to say a few words before I was introduced. He was well into his eighties by then but had lost none of his wit and charisma.
“Let me tell you,” he began, “some crazy things are happening out there. People say certain things ain’t happening, but who can tell? Who can tell?”
“Preach now, Reverend,” someone shouted from the audience.
“You know, recently I went to the doctor and he said my cholesterol was a little high. But then he explained to me that there’s two kinds of cholesterol. There’s the bad cholesterol, and then there’s the good cholesterol. Having good cholesterol—that’s all right. And that got me thinking how there’s a lot of things like that. I mean, when we started the movement, a lot of folks thought we were crazy. Ain’t that right, C.T.?” Reverend Lowery nodded in the direction of Reverend Vivian, who was sitting onstage. “That there’s another crazy Negro…and he’ll tell you that everybody in the movement was a little crazy…”
The crowd laughed heartily.
“But like cholesterol,” he continued, “there’s good crazy and bad crazy, see? Harriet Tubman with the Underground Railroad, she was as crazy as she could be! And Paul, when he preached to Agrippa, Agrippa said, ‘Paul, you crazy’…but it was a good crazy.”
The crowd began to clap and cheer as Reverend Lowery brought it home.
“And I say to you today that we need more folks in this country who are a good crazy….You can’t tell what will happen when you get folks with some good crazy…going to the polls to vote!”
The churchgoers rose to their feet, and the pastors sitting next to me onstage chortled and clapped me on the back; and by the time I got up to speak, taking the words Dr. Moss had offered me as a point of departure—about the legacy of the Moses generation and how it had made my life possible, about the responsibility of the Joshua generation to take the next steps required for justice in this nation and around the world, not just for Black people but for all those who had been dispossessed—the church was in full revival mode.
Outside, after the service was done, I saw another colleague of Dr. King’s, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a legendary and fearless freedom fighter who had survived the Klan bombing his house and a white mob beating him with clubs, chains, and brass knuckles, and stabbing his wife as they attempted to enroll their two daughters in a previously all-white Birmingham school. He had recently been treated for a brain tumor, leaving him frail, but he motioned me over to his wheelchair to talk, and as the marchers gathered, I offered to push him across the bridge.
“I’d like that just fine,” Reverend Shuttlesworth said.
And so we went, the morning sky a glorious blue, crossing the bridge over a muddy brown river, voices rising sporadically in song and prayer. With each step, I imagined how these now elderly men and women must have felt forty-some years earlier, their young hearts beating furiously as they faced down a phalanx of armed men on horseback. I was reminded of just how slight my burdens were in comparison. The fact that they were still engaged in the fight and, despite setbacks and sorrow, hadn’t succumbed to bitterness showed me that I had no cause to be tired. I felt renewed in my conviction that I was where I was supposed to be and doing what needed to be done, that Reverend Lowery might be right in saying there was some kind of “good crazy” in the air.
* * *
—
TEN MONTHS LATER, as the campaign shifted to South Carolina during the second and third weeks of January, I knew that our faith would again be tested. We badly needed a win. On paper, the state looked good for us: African Americans made up a large percentage of Democratic primary voters, and we had a great mix of veteran politicians and young activists, both white and Black, in our corner. But polls showed our support among white voters lagging, and we didn’t know whether African American voters would turn out in the numbers we needed. Our hope was to move toward Super Tuesday with a win that didn’t break down strictly along racial lines. But if the Iowa effort had displayed the possibilities of a more idealistic kind of politics, the campaign in South Carolina ended up being decidedly different. It became a brawl, an exercise in old-style politics, set against a landscape heavy with memories of a bitter, bloody racial history.
Some of this was the result of the tight race, rising anxieties, and what seemed to be a sense within the Clinton camp that a negative campaign worked to their advantage. Their attacks, on the air and through surrogates, had taken on a sharper tone. With voters from around the country increasingly paying attention, all of us were aware of the stakes. Our one debate that week turned into an absolute slugfest between me and Hillary, with John Edwards (whose campaign was on its last legs and who would soon drop out) rendered a spectator as Hillary and I went after each other like gladiators in the ring.
Afterward, Hillary left the state to campaign elsewhere, but the intensity hardly let up, the campaigning on their side now left to a feisty, energized, and omnipresent William Jefferson Clinton.
I sympathized with the position Bill was in: Not only was his wife under constant scrutiny and attack, but my promise to change Washington and transcend partisan gridlock must have felt like a challenge to his own legacy. No doubt I’d reinforced that perception when, in a Nevada interview, I said that while I admired Bill Clinton, I didn’t think he’d transformed politics the way Ronald Reagan had in the 1980s, when he’d managed to reframe the American people’s relationship to government on behalf of conservative principles. After all the obstructionism and sheer venom that Clinton had had to contend with throughout his
presidency, I could hardly fault him for wanting to knock a cocky young newcomer down a peg or two.
Clinton clearly relished being back in the arena. A larger-than-life figure, he traveled across the state offering astute observations and emanating folksy charm. His attacks on me were for the most part well within bounds, the same points I’d have made if I’d been in his shoes—that I lacked experience and that if I did manage to win the presidency, Republicans in Congress would have me for lunch.
Beyond that, though, lay the politics of race, something that Clinton had navigated deftly in the past but proved trickier against a credible Black candidate. When he’d suggested ahead of the New Hampshire primary that some of my positions on the Iraq War were a “fairy tale,” there were Black folks who heard it as a suggestion that the notion of me as president was a fairy tale, which led Congressman Jim Clyburn, the majority whip—South Carolina’s most powerful Black official and someone who until then had maintained a careful neutrality—to publicly rebuke him. When Clinton told white audiences that Hillary “gets you” in ways that her opponents did not, Gibbs—himself a son of the South—heard echoes of Republican strategist Lee Atwater and dog-whistle politics and had no qualms about deploying some of our supporters to say so.
Looking back, I don’t know that any of this was fair; Bill Clinton certainly didn’t think so. But it was hard in South Carolina to distinguish what was true from what was felt. All across the state, I was met with great warmth and hospitality from Blacks and whites alike. In cities like Charleston, I experienced the much-touted New South—cosmopolitan, diverse, and bustling with commerce. Moreover, as someone who had made Chicago his home, I hardly needed reminding that racial division wasn’t unique to the South.
Still, as I traveled through South Carolina making my case for the presidency, racial attitudes seemed less coded, blunter—sometimes not hidden at all. How was I to interpret the well-dressed white woman in a diner I visited, grimly unwilling to shake my hand? How was I to understand the motives of those hoisting signs outside one of our campaign events, sporting the Confederate flag and NRA slogans, yelling about states’ rights and telling me to go home?
It wasn’t just shouted words or Confederate statues that evoked the legacy of slavery and segregation. At the suggestion of Congressman Clyburn, I visited J. V. Martin Junior High School, a largely Black public school in the rural town of Dillon in the northeastern section of the state. Part of the building had been constructed in 1896, just thirty years after the Civil War, and if repairs had been made over the decades, you couldn’t tell. Crumbling walls. Busted plumbing. Cracked windows. Dank, unlit halls. A coal furnace in the basement still used to heat the building. Leaving the school, I alternated between feeling downcast and freshly motivated: What message had generations of boys and girls received as they arrived at this school each day except for the certainty that, to those in power, they did not matter; that whatever was meant by the American Dream, it wasn’t meant for them?
Moments like this helped me see the wearying effects of long-term disenfranchisement, the jaded filter through which many Black South Carolinians absorbed our campaign. I began to understand the true nature of my adversary. I wasn’t running against Hillary Clinton or John Edwards or even the Republicans. I was running against the implacable weight of the past; the inertia, fatalism, and fear it produced.
Black ministers and power brokers who were accustomed to getting payments to turn out voters complained about our emphasis on recruiting grassroots volunteers instead. For them, politics was less about principles and more a simple business proposition, the way things had always been done. While campaigning, Michelle—whose great-great-grandfather had been born into slavery on a South Carolina rice plantation—would hear well-meaning Black women suggesting that losing an election might be better than losing a husband, the implication being that if I was elected, I was sure to be shot.
Hope and change were a luxury, folks seemed to be telling us, exotic imports that would wilt in the heat.
* * *
—
ON JANUARY 25, the eve of the primary, NBC released a poll that showed my support among white South Carolinians had fallen to a paltry 10 percent. The news set the pundits spinning. It was to be expected, they intoned; even high African American turnout couldn’t make up for deep-seated white resistance to any Black candidate, much less one named Barack Hussein Obama.
Axelrod, always in catastrophe mode, relayed this to me while scrolling through his BlackBerry. He added, unhelpfully, that if we lost South Carolina, our campaign would likely be over. Even more unhelpfully, he went on to say that even if we eked out a win, the paucity of white support would lead both the press and the Clintons to discount the victory and reasonably question my viability in a general election.
Our entire team was on pins and needles on primary day, aware of all that was on the line. But when evening finally arrived and the returns started rolling in, the results exceeded our most optimistic projections. We beat Hillary by a two-to-one margin, with nearly 80 percent of a massive Black turnout and 24 percent of the white vote. We even won by ten points among white voters under forty. Given the gauntlet we’d run and the hits we’d taken since Iowa, we were jubilant.
As I walked onstage in an auditorium in Columbia to give our victory speech, I could feel the pulse of stomping feet and clapping hands. Several thousand people had packed themselves into the venue, though under the glare of television lights, I could see only the first few rows—college students mostly, white and Black in equal measure, some with their arms interlocked or draped over one another’s shoulders, their faces beaming with joy and purpose.
“Race doesn’t matter!” people were chanting. “Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter!”
I spotted some of our young organizers and volunteers mixed in with the crowd. Once again, they’d come through, despite the naysayers. They deserved a victory lap, I thought to myself, a moment of pure elation. Which is why, even as I quieted the crowd and dove into my speech, I didn’t have the heart to correct those well-meaning chanters—to remind them that in the year 2008, with the Confederate flag and all it stood for still hanging in front of a state capitol just a few blocks away, race still mattered plenty, as much as they might want to believe otherwise.
CHAPTER 7
WITH SOUTH CAROLINA BEHIND US, things once again seemed to start breaking our way. In a New York Times op-ed on January 27, Caroline Kennedy announced her support for me, generously suggesting that our campaign had made her understand, for the first time, the inspiration young Americans had once drawn from her father. Her uncle, Ted Kennedy, followed suit the next day, joining me for an appearance before several thousand students at American University. Teddy was absolutely electric, summoning all the old Camelot magic, batting down the argument of inexperience once used against his brother and now directed toward me. Axe would call it a symbolic passing of the torch, and I could see what it meant to him. It was as if, in our campaign, Teddy recognized a familiar chord, and was reaching back to a time before his brothers’ assassinations, Vietnam, white backlash, riots, Watergate, plant closings, Altamont, and AIDS, back to when liberalism brimmed with optimism and a can-do spirit—the same spirit that had shaped my mother’s sensibilities as a young woman, and that she had funneled into me.
The Kennedy endorsement added poetry to our campaign and helped set us up for Super Tuesday, on February 5, when more than half the nation’s delegates would be determined in a single day. We’d always known that Super Tuesday would present an enormous challenge; even with our wins in Iowa and South Carolina, Hillary remained far better known, and the face-to-face retail campaigning we’d done in the early states was simply not possible in bigger, more densely populated places like California and New York.
What we did have, though, was a grassroots infantry that expanded by the day. With the help of our veteran delegate expert, Jeff
Berman, and our tenacious field director, Jon Carson, Plouffe developed a strategy that we would execute with the same single-minded focus that we’d applied to Iowa. Rather than trying to win the big primary states and spend heavily on TV ads there just to mitigate our losses, we instead focused my time and our field efforts on the caucus states—many of them small, rural, and overwhelmingly white—where the enthusiasm of our supporters could produce relatively large turnouts and lopsided victories, which would translate to big delegate hauls.
Idaho was a case in point. It hadn’t made sense for us to send paid staff to such a tiny, solidly Republican state, but a determined band of volunteers called Idahoans for Obama had organized themselves. They’d spent the past year using social media tools like MySpace and Meetup to build a community, getting to know my positions on issues, creating personal fundraising pages, planning events, and strategically canvassing the state. When, a few days before Super Tuesday, Plouffe told me that I was scheduled to campaign in Boise instead of putting in an extra day in California—where we were rapidly making up ground—I confess that I had my doubts. But a Boise State arena filled with fourteen thousand cheering Idahoans quickly cured me of any skepticism. We ended up winning Idaho by such a large margin that we gained more delegates there than Hillary got from winning New Jersey, a state with more than five times the population.
This became the pattern. Thirteen of the twenty-two Super Tuesday contests went our way; and while Hillary won New York and California by a few percentage points each, overall we netted thirteen more delegates than she did. It was a remarkable achievement, a testament to the skill and resourcefulness of Plouffe, our field staff, and most of all our volunteers. And given the questions that both pundits and the Clinton campaign continued to raise about my potential appeal in a general election, I took extra satisfaction in having run the table across the so-called red part of the country.