The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  Valerie Jarrett was backstage at Grant Park when Obama arrived; she had not seen him since the networks had called the race. Her eyes too welled up with tears. “I looked at him and he looked at me and he kind of shrugged and I kind of made a face. And we never said a word,” she said. “I gave him a hug and that was it. And I’m so glad we didn’t say anything because I couldn’t have possibly found the right words to describe how I felt. And the look on his face, he was obviously struggling for what to say to me as well and it was just best to not say a word. I will always remember the look on his face. What I thought—it was, well, it actually worked.”

  In Arizona, about twenty minutes after the election was called, McCain and Palin came onstage to concede. McCain displayed none of the anger or frustration that had flashed at times during the campaign. His speech was eloquent, gracious, and uplifting, acknowledging the significance of Obama’s election. “In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance,” he said. “But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving. This is an historic election, and I recognize the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight. . . . A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to visit—to dine at the White House—was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on earth.”

  Palin also had a speech prepared, written by Matthew Scully on his own initiative. Her desire to give it led to one last point of friction between her camp and McCain’s. Schmidt was particularly irritated. He believed McCain’s concession speech was part of an orderly constitutional process, to acknowledge the opponent’s victory and help bind the country. Palin’s desire to speak would be highly inappropriate. The misunderstanding—no one in the McCain-Palin operation seemed to have resolved her role for that night in advance—rankled a number of McCain’s most senior advisers and created an uproar that night and for days after.

  Just before midnight Eastern Time, Obama came onstage in Grant Park, accompanied by Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” he said. “I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington; it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charles-ton. It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to the cause. It drew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy, who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep. It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. This is your victory.”

  He spoke of the challenges ahead. “The road ahead will be long,” he said. “Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term, but, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you: We as a people will get there. . . . There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president, and we know the government can’t solve every problem. . . . What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change.”

  He closed with the story of Ann Nixon Cooper, age 106, from Atlanta, who had cast her ballot for him that day. “She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons, because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin. And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America: the heartache and the hope, the struggle and the progress, the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.”

  The words echoed in the urban landscape in Chicago and rippled across the country, the rallying cry that had seen him through difficult days, crushing setbacks, and soaring victories. “Yes, we can!” He spoke of what America had overcome during the century of Ann Nixon Cooper’s life, of wars hot and cold, recessions and depression, of moments of inspiration and fear. “And this year,” he said, “in this election, she touched her finger to a screen and cast her vote, because after one hundred six years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes, we can.”

  In Grant Park, another huge roar went up from the people: “Yes, we can!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Interlude

  “What was remarkable . . . about our campaign was we never really changed our theory.”

  —Barack Obama, six weeks after his election

  “I think the whole election was a novel,” Barack Obama said six weeks after his election. He was seated in his transition office on the thirty-eighth floor of the federal building in downtown Chicago. Next to him on a couch were a football and a basketball, with an “Obama 08” insignia. Other basketballs sat on a bookcase behind his desk. Bulletproof panels had been placed along floor-to-ceiling windows on the side of the office looking out at the city.

  The president-elect was welcoming and upbeat, although later that day he would learn during a meeting with his economic advisers that the economic crisis was even worse than they had believed. He appeared refreshed after the long campaign, loose, open, confident. As he escorted us toward his office, he paused to talk to his newly designated chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, then expressed mock dismay at the mess around the desk of his personal assistant, Reggie Love. Eyeing an open bag of potato chips and papers strewn on the floor, he exclaimed that this was no way for the president-elect’s office to look. “Reggie!” he shouted, but Love was nowhere to be seen. Once seated, Obama drank bottled tea and munched on almonds.

  So how would the writer and storyteller that he was before becoming a politician tell the story of his election? we asked. “I don’t think I was the most interesting character in the election,” he said. “If you think about it, you’ve got the first African-American with a chance at the seat, first woman with a chance at the seat. You’ve got this aging—scratch aging, because I don’t want to offend John [McCain]—but I mean you’ve got this war hero. You have a whole cast of characters at the beginning who are fascinating in their own right, in some ways compelling just from a human perspective: John Edwards, Huckabee. And then comes the general election [and] you get Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. You’ve got Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers. It’s a pretty fascinating slice of Americana.”

  He gave a broader perspective. “The way I would tell the story would really have to do with what this campaign said about America and where we’ve traveled,” he said. “The fact that just a little over forty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act that I can run. That just a few decades after women were admitted to professions like law or medicine in any meaningful numbers, that Hillary could run in a credible way. The generational changes between John McCain’s era and
our own, and sort of the vestiges of Vietnam, the shift that’s taken place in the salience of some of the culture wars that emerged in the sixties that really were the dominant force in our politics, starting with Ronald Reagan, and how that had less power. Which, by the way, includes why the issue of Reverend Wright or Bill Ayers never caught as powerfully as it might have fifteen or twenty years ago. The way the Internet served our campaign in unprecedented ways.”

  All that indicated a shift to a new country, one “rooted in our deepest values and traditions, but one that points to what this country’s going to look like twenty, thirty years from now.”

  Did he believe his election marked the end of the Reagan era? He took another handful of almonds, rubbing the salt from his hands. “Sorry, I’m starving,” he said apologetically before answering.

  “What Reagan ushered in was a skepticism toward government solutions to every problem, a suspicion of command-and-control, top-down social engineering,” he said. “I don’t think that has changed. I think that’s a lasting legacy of the Reagan era and the conservative movement, starting with Goldwater. But I do think [what we’re seeing] is an end to the knee-jerk reaction toward the New Deal and big government. I think what you saw in this election was people saying, ‘Yes, we don’t want some big, bureaucratic, ever-expanding state. On the other hand, we don’t want a state that’s dysfunctional, that doesn’t believe in its mission, that can’t carry out some of the basic functions of government and provide services to people and be there when they’re hurting.’ And so, I think what you’re seeing is a correction to the correction, right? What we don’t know yet is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government, [but is] more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government.”

  And what had he learned about the American people from his campaign? “I have to tell you,” he said, “and this is in no way an indication of overconfidence, I was not surprised by the campaign. I felt that, and I said this on the stump, I felt vindicated in my faith in the American people.” Drawing on his legal background, he offered “a theory of the case” that he said guided his campaign. “For at least a decade, maybe longer,” he said Americans have been “frustrated with a government that was unresponsive; that their economic life was becoming more difficult despite the surface prosperity; that wages and incomes had flatlined and that in this new globalized world people were feeling more and more insecure; that we had never replaced or updated the structures for security that the New Deal had provided with something that made sense for this new economy; that people were weary of culture wars as a substitute for policy; that people were tired of only focusing on what divides instead of what brought us together; that the fifty-plus-one electoral strategies that were generally pursued in national elections were completely inadequate to solve big problems like health care and energy that would require a broader consensus; that people were embarrassed by the decline in America’s standing in the eyes of the world and that that would have political relevance to voters who normally might not care that much about foreign policy; and that the American people were decent and good and would be open to a different tone to politics. So that was the theory that we started with. What was remarkable in my mind about our campaign was we never really changed our theory. You could read the speech we gave the day I announced and then read my speech on election night and it was pretty consistent.”

  He turned to the question of race. His experience in Illinois when running for the Senate in 2004 gave him confidence that America was ready to elect its first black president. “Illinois’s a pretty good microcosm of the country and when I started my U.S. Senate race, everybody said a guy with your name, African-American, can’t win a U.S. Senate race. And we won,” he said. “And my approval ratings I think when I announced for the presidency here in Illinois were like seventy percent. So I thought to myself, If I’m in a big industrial state with twelve percent African-American population and people seem to not be concerned about my race and much more concerned with my performance, why would [that not hold true] across the country?”

  He never lost confidence he could overcome racial barriers, though the Reverend Wright episode had severely tested that belief. In the primaries, his best results were in states with few African-Americans and in those with a high percentage of black voters. His greatest struggles came in states where the racial composition more closely mirrored the national averages. “Our view was never that we had a white working-class problem,” he said. “Our view was that we had an age problem. States where there were older white voters, where that was a disproportionate portion of the electorate, were going to give us problems.”

  As for his campaign itself, he gave a candid assessment of his main competitors. “I was sure that my toughest race was Hillary,” he said. “Hillary was just a terrific candidate, and she really found her voice in the last part of the campaign. After Texas and Ohio she just became less cautious and was out there and was working hard and I think connecting with voters really well. She was just a terrific candidate. And [the Clinton campaign] operation was not as good as ours and not as tight as ours, but they were still plenty tough. Their rapid response, how they messaged in the media was really good. So we just always thought they were our most formidable challenge. That isn’t to say that we underestimated John McCain, it’s just that we didn’t think that their campaign operation was as good. And one of the hardest things for me, during the primary, was finding differences with Hillary. I mean a lot of the differences between us, substantively, were pretty modest. . . .

  “Going into the general election, I just felt liberated because there was such a stark contrast between John and myself. . . . They made a strategic decision early on to flip on the Bush tax cuts, and in fact double down on them, which locked them into a domestic agenda that was very difficult to separate from George Bush’s domestic agenda. So that just gave us a lot of running room on the issues.”

  It was time to leave, but not before raising one last subject. Obama started his campaign in the shadow of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, we recalled, where Lincoln had delivered his famous “House Divided” speech. Now, as he prepared to return to Washington, his campaign had announced plans for him to follow the last part of Lincoln’s train ride to Washington before his inauguration. We wondered how Lincoln, the Illinois lawyer with little national experience, affected Obama’s thoughts about his own presidency as another young Illinois lawyer with limited national experience soon to take his presidential oath.

  “Lincoln’s my favorite president and one of my personal heroes,” he answered. “I have to be very careful here that in no way am I drawing equivalence between my candidacy, my life experience, or what I face and what he went through. I just want to put that out there so you don’t get a bunch of folks saying I’m comparing myself to Lincoln.”

  He paused. “What I admire so deeply about Lincoln—number one, I think he’s the quintessential American because he’s self-made. The way Alexander Hamilton was self-made or so many of our great iconic Americans are, that sense that you don’t accept limits, that you can shape your own destiny. That obviously has appeal to me given where I came from. That American spirit is one of the things that is most fundamental to me and I think he embodies that.

  “But the second thing that I admire most in Lincoln is that there is just a deep-rooted honesty and empathy to the man that allowed him to always be able to see the other person’s point of view and always sought to find that truth that is in the gap between you and me. Right? That the truth is out there somewhere and I don’t fully possess it and you don’t fully possess it and our job then is to listen and learn and imagine enough to be able to get to that truth.

  “If you look at his presidency, he never lost that. Most of our other great presidents, there was that sense of working the angles and bending other peop
le to their will. FDR being the classic example. And Lincoln just found a way to shape public opinion and shape people around him and lead them and guide them without tricking them or bullying them, but just through the force of what I just talked about: that way of helping to illuminate the truth. I just find that to be a very compelling style of leadership. It’s not one that I’ve mastered, but I think that’s when leadership is at its best.”

  The 2008 election was more than an endurance test for the candidates; it was a test of the American people and their institutions. Now that it was part of history, what lessons could be learned from it?

  The first, most obviously, involves race.

  Since 1619 when a battered Dutch privateer beat around Cape Henry, tacked slowly up the James River, and dropped anchor off Jamestown to deposit the first African-American slaves on the continent, race relations have affected the character of the United States more than any other factor. Black slaves laid the cornerstones for the White House and the Capitol, were sold like chattel in a huge slave market that stood on the site in Washington where the National Archives now houses the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and became the source of bloodshed, civil war, discord, and discrimination that plagued the nation throughout its history, dishonoring its professed democratic principles of equality. Whatever happens in Barack Obama’s presidency, his election as the first African-American will always form a proud chapter in the American story. For millions watching the election returns, the spontaneous celebrations that erupted in urban neighborhoods that night, the tears in Grant Park, the lines of citizens, most of them African-Americans, trying to buy newspapers the next morning, all testified to a public sense that something shattering—and positive—had occurred.