Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Barack took the next evening off to go trick-or-treating with his daughters in Hyde Park, a Halloween mask disguising his identity from most passersby. Old CCRC colleague Bob Klonowski nonetheless recognized him, and Barack jokingly explained, “it’s the only way I can go out now.” The Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet mounted an insistent effort to find out what had become of Barack’s state Senate records that had been discarded three years earlier, but a far bigger milestone was Barack’s energetic performance at Iowa Democrats’ all-important Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on November 10. “Fucking home run,” David Axelrod told David Plouffe.

  On Meet the Press the following morning, Barack seemingly bragged about his friendship with billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who “made $46 million last year” while acknowledging that “money is the original sin in politics and I am not sinless.” Host Tim Russert asked him about the discarded state Senate records and about Tony Rezko, whom Barack said he had not spoken with since his indictment. Talking with a writer for Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine who was profiling Michelle, Barack explained, “I’m more easygoing than she is” and “I don’t get as tense or stressed. I’m probably more comfortable with uncertainty and risk.” He also expressed pleasant surprise at how much campaigning Michelle was doing. “She has been much more enthusiastic than I expected, much more engaged and involved.” Michelle’s friend Cindy Moelis agreed, noting what a change it was from Barack’s previous races. “This is the first time in all these elections that I’ve seen her be as passionate and committed as she has been.”

  In a long interview on MSNBC, Michelle talked about how well her daughters were doing thanks to their grandmother Marian Robinson. “This wouldn’t be possible without her,” and the girls were happy “to stay in their world, in their lives. They want to be with their friends, and we allow that to happen.” For Michelle and Barack, “we always wonder whether politics changes people, and one of the things we’ve desperately tried to do is not to allow our political lives to change who we are fundamentally.” Michelle also stressed that “the point isn’t winning, it’s changing the country, it’s changing America, it’s changing the way you live. It’s throwing this game out, shaking it up and throwing it out the window, because it’s not just playing it better than the people who played it before.”

  Michelle also spoke about the pervasiveness of black self-doubt. “There’s always that doubt in the back of the minds of people of color . . . deep down inside you doubt that you can really do this because that’s all you’ve been told is ‘No, wait.’ That’s all you hear and you hear it from people who love you, not because they don’t care about you and because they’re afraid. . . . I would not be where I am” and “neither would Barack if we listened to that doubt. . . . There are a lot of kids who I know aren’t pushing themselves or going for what they know they can do because of that doubt.” But “Barack has been doing stuff he’s not supposed to, I’m doing stuff that people told me I wasn’t supposed to do—that’s my whole life!”11

  A few days before Christmas, Barack answered a question from CBS’s Harry Smith by explaining that the “last thing I do at night, I say a prayer. I say a prayer. I ask that my family is protected and that I’m an instrument of God’s will.” With the all-important Iowa caucuses less than two weeks away, on January 3, Barack felt confident that David Plouffe’s all-Iowa strategy was building toward an upset victory. Barack stepped away from the campaign trail for just thirty-six hours to celebrate Christmas at home in Chicago, with his sisters Maya and Auma and their daughters plus Maya’s husband joining the Obamas for a non-Hawaii gathering. On Christmas morning they invited Barack’s Secret Service detail in as the girls opened presents, and following dinner at a downtown hotel they played their annual game of Scrabble. Maya described to NPR how Barack won a come-from-behind victory, “which was maddening, and then he gloats.”

  Barack returned to Iowa on December 26 with all of his relatives in tow. On New Year’s Eve, Michelle told a crowd in Grinnell that “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics,” and on Thursday evening, January 3, an “extraordinary turnout” of Iowa Democrats—239,000 voters as compared to 124,000 in 2004—carried Barack to a decisive 38 percent victory. John Edwards barely edged Hillary Clinton for second place, 29.8 to 29.5 percent. Barack gloried in his triumph. “Thank you, Iowa . . . they said this day would never come. . . . But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. . . . We are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come . . . to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger that’s consumed Washington.” Barack vowed to be “a president who finally makes health care affordable and available to every single American, the same way I expanded health care in Illinois, by bringing Democrats and Republicans together to get the job done,” a claim that prompted double takes by Illinois reporters. “My journey began on the streets of Chicago” and “sometimes, just sometimes, there are nights like this, a night that, years from now,” when America is “a nation less divided and more united, you’ll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began. . . . This was the moment. Years from now, you’ll look back and you’ll say that this was the moment, this was the place” for people “who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”12

  Forty-eight hours later, during a Democratic debate, Barack told Hillary Clinton, “You’re likable enough,” a choice of words that led many commentators to criticize what one called Barack’s “dismissive condescension” toward the female front-runner. Two days later, on ABC’s Good Morning America, Barack told Diane Sawyer, “I’m doing this stuff not for me, but for something bigger than me. There’s an aspect of politics that’s about me, but then there’s an aspect of politics that is larger than me. And you have to have a certain amount of megalomania to think that you should be president of the United States, but I think you have to cross a certain threshold when you say this is not about my ambition and it’s about something bigger.” Responding with irritation to Clinton’s assertions that he was too inexperienced to be president, Barack used a basketball analogy in telling Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe that “at some point people have to stop asserting that because I haven’t been in the league long enough I can’t play. It’s sort of like Magic Johnson or LeBron James—[they] keep on scoring thirty, and their team wins, but people say they can’t lead their team because they’re too young.”

  Nonetheless, when New Hampshire Democrats went to the polls on January 8, Clinton squeaked by with a surprising seventy-five-hundred-vote win over Barack, defeating him 39.1 to 36.5 percent, with Edwards a distant third. Clinton likewise won a narrow victory in Nevada’s caucuses, while Barack triumphed in South Carolina, and with Edwards’s exit from the race the Democratic contest moved toward the twenty-three states that would select 1,681 Democratic convention delegates on “Super Tuesday,” February 5. In a pair of interviews with religious periodicals, Barack spoke of “the sacredness of sex” while distancing himself from Jeremiah Wright, who was scheduled to give his final pre-retirement sermon at Trinity on February 10. “Sometimes he’s provocative in ways that I’m not always comfortable with and in ways that I deeply disagree with occasionally.” Yet “I am proud of Reverend Wright and what he’s done in his life.” Michelle spoke similarly, saying “there are plenty of things he says that I don’t agree with, that Barack doesn’t agree with.” But “your pastor is like your grandfather,” she added. “You can’t disown yourself from your family because they’ve got things wrong.”

  After Hillary Clinton brought up Barack’s long relationship with Tony Rezko during a televised debate, Barack faced a new gauntlet of questions about their friendship. “Nobody had any indications that he was engaged in wrongdoing” while he was still interacting with Tony, Barack claimed, yet both Chicago newspapers had beg
un publicizing Rezko’s dubious dealings in mid-July 2004, months before the Obamas’ purchase of 5046 South Greenwood. In late January the Tribune endorsed Barack for the Democratic presidential nomination while nonetheless stating that Barack’s account concerning Rezko “strains credulity.”

  On Super Tuesday, the two Democratic finalists battled to a tie, with Barack and Clinton each winning over eight hundred delegates. Throughout a dozen mid-February primaries and caucuses, Barack won modest but consistent delegate gains over Clinton. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warned that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,” and in the Washington Post Robert Samuelson observed that Barack “seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation’s major problems,” for in actuality “the contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark.” When Tony Rezko’s criminal trial began on March 3, questions again intensified, and Barack ended one tense press conference that campaign manager David Plouffe called “a disaster” by saying, “we’re running late.”13

  On March 4, Hillary Clinton bested Barack in both Ohio and Texas, and the two candidates remained neck-and-neck in the delegate race with the next big primary, in Pennsylvania, seven weeks away. Then, early on March 13, ABC News reported that Jeremiah Wright’s videotaped sermons that were available for purchase at Trinity Church included both his September 16, 2001, one in which he had said that the 9/11 attacks reflected how “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” and his April 13, 2003, one declaring “God damn America.” Barack first learned of that quotation during a phone interview with a Pittsburgh reporter. “I haven’t seen the line” and “I profoundly disagree,” but this is “what happens when you just cherry-pick statements from a guy who had a forty-year career as a pastor.” Back in Chicago, campaign manager David Plouffe was aghast. “We were seeing the clips for the first time” and the campaign’s failure to research what the public might learn about Wright “was unforgivable,” Plouffe realized. By Friday morning, more and more attention was focusing on the Wright tapes, but Barack was scheduled to have a pair of hour-plus meetings that afternoon with first the Tribune and then the Sun-Times to finally answer each and every question the newspapers wanted to put to him about Tony Rezko. Barack gave each paper a set of documents detailing the purchase of 5046 South Greenwood, and he told the Tribune group that his campaign has “a mentality of let’s be very protective of information.” With the Sun-Times journalists, Barack recalled Tony as “a very gracious individual,” but Barack’s willingness to respond to every question the two papers asked about Rezko represented a major turn in the road. “Obama should have had Friday’s discussion 16 months ago,” the Tribune editorialized, and Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown observed that “Obama can be too obstinate when he feels under attack.”

  Soon after Barack left the Sun-Times, his campaign had a comment, “On My Faith and My Church,” up on Huffington Post. “I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn” Wright’s statements, and “I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country.” The two video clips “were not statements I personally heard him preach” or “utter in private conversation.” That evening, Barack spoke with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, Fox News’ Major Garrett, and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, emphasizing that same point: “they were not statements that I heard when I was in church.” But “I would not repudiate the man,” and “one thing that I hope to do is to use some of these issues to talk more fully about the question of race in our society.” Barack had long been wanting to deliver a major speech about race, and with campaign manager David Plouffe realizing that the I-wasn’t-there-that-day explanation “was a woefully inadequate response,” he and David Axelrod reluctantly concurred when Barack later that evening said the time for that speech had come. “Wright will consume our campaign if I can’t put it into a broader context,” Barack told Plouffe, who responded that time was of the essence. With Barack campaigning in Pennsylvania in advance of that state’s April 22 primary, Plouffe recommended Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, on Tuesday morning—just four days hence. Barack would have to devote every offstage moment to crafting the speech.14

  In front of a small audience of supporters and against a backdrop of eight American flags, Barack stressed that Wright “has been like family to me,” saying “I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother . . . a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” Seeking to place both Wright and Madelyn Dunham in the broader context of America’s painful racial history, Barack painted a broad canvas of resentment and reconciliation. Immediate praise came from former Democratic presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden, who termed the address “an important step forward in race relations.” Laudatory editorials quickly followed, with the Washington Post calling the speech “compelling,” “eloquent,” and “an extraordinary moment of truth-telling.” The New York Times labeled it “powerful and frank,” reflecting “an honesty seldom heard in public life.” Obama’s “eloquent speech should end the debate over his ties to Mr. Wright,” the Times opined, and “it is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better.”

  The political impact of Barack’s address suggested that the speech had remedied the controversy that had threatened to torpedo his campaign, but listeners in Honolulu did not share the Post and Times’ enthusiasm. Maya Soetoro-Ng declined comment to a reporter, but a family friend explained that “she was furious” over Barack’s comments about their grandmother. His characterization of her “seemed completely gratuitous, even cruel,” one critic rightly thought, and one of the late Stanley Dunham’s close friends acidly remarked, “I have a far better opinion of both Stan and Madelyn than I have heard from Barry’s speeches.” His anger was shared by “the people who worked for Madelyn” during her years at the Bank of Hawaii, who thought Barack’s “disgusting” remarks represented “absolute pandering.” To them, Barack represented the utter fulfillment of Stan and Madelyn’s dreams. “When folks look at Barack Obama, most people see a black man running for president. I see Stan Dunham,” his friend Rolf Nordahl explained.15

  Barack created a minor controversy when he called Madelyn “a typical white person” during a Philadelphia interview while denying that “my grandmother harbors any racial animosity.” Then remarks that Barack made at a private fund-raiser in San Francisco drew criticism because he had cited “bitter” Pennsylvanians who “cling to guns or religion.” In Pittsburgh, Barack asserted that as a community organizer, “block by block, we helped turn those neighborhoods around,” a claim that no one in Roseland or Altgeld Gardens would affirm. To ABC’s Terry Moran, Barack confessed that “during the course of campaigning” “sometimes you lose” your “core truthfulness” and “it becomes a performance,” as it had that day in Pittsburgh. Now half empty, Altgeld “reeks of decay, fear and despair,” one journalist wrote, and Hazel Johnson’s daughter Cheryl stated that “Obama left no real legacy behind.”

  In early April, Barack reached out to Jeremiah Wright and got a blistering reception. “I cussed him out. ‘You pronounced judgment on my sermon and you never heard the sermon. You don’t know what the sermon was about ’cause you didn’t hear it.’” Barack asked to speak with Wright in person at a “secure location,” and on Saturday, April 12, Barack went to Wright’s home in suburban Tinley Park. It was “just Barack and me. I don’t know if he had a wire on him,” but the reason for Barack’s visit soon became clear: he told Wright, “I really wish you wouldn’t do any more public speaking until after the November election.” Wright had upcoming engagements in Detroit and Washington, and he dismissed the request: “How am I supposed to support my family? I have a daughter
and a granddaughter in college whose tuition I pay. I’ve got to earn money.” Barack was insistent. “I really wish you wouldn’t. The press is going to eat you alive.” Barack left empty-handed, but before long Wright received an e-mail from Barack’s close friend Eric Whitaker, also a Trinity member, offering Wright $150,000 “not to preach at all” in the months ahead. Wright refused and mentioned the offer to his friend Father Mike Pfleger, and “when Father Mike went off on Eric, Eric went back and told Barack,” Wright explained.

  On April 16, just hours before the final televised debate preceding Pennsylvania’s April 22 vote, Barack’s campaign released his and Michelle’s 2007 Form 1040, showing that he had received more than $4 million in royalty income the previous year. The Obamas had upped their charitable giving to a total of $240,000, including $26,270 to Trinity Church, and owed the IRS $1,059,000. At that night’s debate, ABC News moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos pressed Barack about his “bitter” and “cling” remark, and repeatedly about Reverend Wright, before asking Barack what his relationship was with long-ago Weather Underground bomber turned education professor Bill Ayers. Barack called Bill “a guy who lives in my neighborhood . . . who I know,” who’s “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” Ayers had “engaged in detestable acts forty years ago, when I was eight years old,” but the implication that that “somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George. The fact is, is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions. Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements? Because I certainly don’t agree with those either.”16

  Fortunately for Barack, his comparison of Senate colleague Coburn to the now-controversial Ayers, similar to his pairing of Madelyn and Wright in his Philadelphia speech, attracted little press comment, and Barack called Coburn to apologize. “I said, ‘Fine with me,’” Coburn recalled, but he still wondered, “Why answer a question by throwing a friend under a bus?” Come April 22, Hillary Clinton easily won Pennsylvania, defeating Barack 55 to 45 percent, but a more ominous problem loomed when Jeremiah Wright returned to the public stage on April 25. Speaking with sympathetic television host Bill Moyers, Wright argued that “we have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians” and complained that the media “paint me as some sort of fanatic” who is “un-American” and has “a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. . . . I felt it was unfair. I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue,” but it was being disseminated to millions of Americans “who know nothing about the prophetic theology of the African American experience.” When Moyers asked about Barack’s Philadelphia speech, Wright answered that Barack “does what politicians do,” a comment that Barack felt impugned his motives. “How could he say that about me?” Barack asked Valerie Jarrett. “He knows that’s not true. He knows I wasn’t being a politician.”