Fracture
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Giuliani’s rambling exit, in which he mused that he hoped to one day discover how he had managed to erect a “barrier” between himself and minority New Yorkers, had in the view of many New York political watchers been an act of preemptive self-rescue. Giuliani’s successor in the Senate race, a prickly young Suffolk County congressman named Rick Lazio, would fare no better.
FOR ALL HER STARDOM, AND HER HISTORY-MAKING SENATE RUN, Hillary Clinton was not destined to remain the only, or even the brightest, Senate star.
In 2004, Barack Obama, freshly elected to the United States Senate from Illinois, arrived in Washington with his young family to the clack of flashbulbs and a crush of media interviews—the Today show, Entertainment Tonight, and CBS News. Interviewers marveled at the senator-elect as he held his six-year-old daughter, Malia, on his lap and Michelle bundled three-year-old Sasha. Invitations and offers of transition help poured in, but the senator and his staff accepted very few. Obama did respond to the kind notes and offers of help with settling in from Hillary Clinton.
The two had their ideological differences. For one, they had been on opposite sides of the Iraq War, which was still raging as Obama came to Washington. Senator Clinton had voted to authorize President Bush’s actions in Iraq; Obama, eight days before, while still an Illinois state senator, had taken the stage at an antiwar rally in Chicago’s Federal Plaza along with Rev. Jesse Jackson and a group of local clergy and civic leaders to protest such an invasion and to express deep skepticism with Bush’s case for war. But the two senators shared a lot in common, including their Illinois ties and, not least, their political stardom. Hillary Clinton was perhaps the one member of the body who fully understood what it meant to have more than sixty news organizations descend on Washington to mark the occasion of one senator’s swearing-in.
With John Kerry’s listless 2004 campaign behind them, and Democrats dispirited over George W. Bush’s reelection—as well as the loss of their Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, whose seat Republicans had claimed as a singular prize—Hillary and her team put their arms around Obama, whose victory was a rare flash of good news.
Obama had been on the Clintons’ radar since he breezed through the Illinois primary. “Part of what both Clintons like to do is to help support up-and-coming political talent,” one former staffer to Senator Clinton said. “It was, ‘you’re a megawatt star, I was a megawatt star,’ so how do you navigate?”
Obama’s national political rise had begun considerably less auspiciously. He parlayed a stint organizing low-income tenants on Chicago’s far South Side in the mid-1980s into the platform for a respectable career in the Illinois Senate a decade later; his brief stardom as Harvard’s first black law review editor had produced the opportunity to write a well-received autobiography in between. But he’d stumbled, too, deciding in 2000 to challenge Bobby Rush, the Black Panther turned congressman, for the seat in Chicago’s First Congressional District, held by some of the city’s most storied black politicians: Oscar De Priest in the 1930s; William Dawson from the early 1940s until 1970; Ralph Metcalfe, a former Olympic sprinter who’d finished second to Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin; Harold Washington, who convinced black Chicagoans they could conquer the world; and now Rush, who had traveled the long trajectory from brash young militant, posing for photos with a pistol in his hand, to a cosponsor of the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban, arguing that the weapons of war being glamorized in hip-hop songs were killing young black men on the streets of the South Side.
It was a bold and risky proposition. Chicago was a city of traditions, a black cultural Land of Oz whose historic pedigree included Ebony and Jet magazines, Katherine Dunham and Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Gordon Parks, and Nat King Cole. It was the place where George Ellis Johnson Sr., born two years before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., came with his parents as a small child from Richton, Mississippi, and grew up to found Johnson Products, which by the 1960s was the leading black hair care company in the country, the facilitator of the sky-high Afro, and the advertising sponsor that brought Soul Train into America’s living rooms. Chicago, and its hybrid black and Jewish Hyde Park elite, took its politics as seriously as its culture (and its food); its political elites took their loyalties more seriously than all three.
In the state senate, Obama operated with the quiet backing of Emil Jones, the powerful senate majority leader, who’d been an Obama mentor since his organizing days, and who worked behind the scenes to help Obama outmaneuver Alice Palmer, the popular state senator who vacated her seat to run for Congress in a three-way primary against Jones and Jesse Jackson Jr. Palmer had promised to support Obama for her state senate post, but when her congressional prospects fizzled and she tried to regain her seat instead, Jones’s staff quietly helped Obama’s team draft the petition challenges that ended her bid. Jones, the affable but tough barrel of a man, who shared a chain-smoking habit with his young protégé, Obama, blithely shrugged off the machinations in conversations with colleagues as a simple case of Palmer not properly informing the Senate leader of her plans ahead of time.
If Obama often deferred to Jones, he rarely did to the state’s black establishment, eschewing their clubbish politics and, with Jones’s encouragement, wooing “downstate” white fellow senators instead, joining late-night card games with Republican members who wielded powerful swing votes. Some of Obama’s black colleagues took an open dislike to the young man from Harvard and Hawaii, whom they derided as an arrogant, overeducated outsider who had “taken” Palmer’s seat. At one point Jones had to separate Obama and another black lawmaker, Rickey Hendon, on the Illinois state senate floor.
There was nothing new about black ambition challenging black power, and Obama was hardly the first upstart politician to take on the African American establishment. Charlie Rangel, after all, won his seat by challenging the legendary Adam Clayton Powell in a Democratic primary in 1970. And John Lewis took on his friend and former SNCC associate Julian Bond in a blistering 1986 campaign for the Georgia congressional seat that then–state senator Bond had helped to draw under the Voting Rights Act, and for which Bond had openly voiced his intention to run. But the Chicago old guard had as little patience for Obama as he had for the glacial pace of legislative politics. They viewed him as a neophyte who hadn’t earned the right to enter the pantheon of the black Chicago elite.
So while Obama’s congressional bid attracted the support of a small network of young black and white Chicago entrepreneurs and a high-profile endorsement from the Chicago Tribune, Bobby Rush had Jesse Jackson; Illinois’s senior senator, Dick Durbin; and the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, in his corner, along with a hundred South Side ministers ready to organize the community.
Obama’s message of cross-ethnic outreach, which had been a standard feature of his public discourse, fell flat on the campaign trail. “We have more in common with the Latino community, the white community, than we have differences,” he would say in sidelong references to Congressman Rush. “[And] it may give us a psychic satisfaction to curse out people outside our community and blame them for our plight, but the truth is, if you want to be able to get things accomplished politically, you’ve got to work with them.”
Rush, along with the third candidate in the race, Donne Trotter, a dapper, silver-haired pol with a family history dating back to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chicago and a particular distaste for his Senate colleague, dismissed Obama as a man who “went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” flaunting an “eastern degree” and dismissing the power of protest politics.
It wasn’t a complete picture. Obama was familiar with protest movements, having joined the anti-apartheid cause as a student at Occidental College and supporting the student movement to diversify the faculty at Harvard Law School. But the point wasn’t missed by black Chicagoans, as Rush barnstormed the churches on the South Side, flaunting his deep ties to a community where he and the Panthers had literally bled in the cause of justice.
“There was no gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over it,” said Finney. “He ran, he lost. As I thought he would.”
Four years later, and after intense lobbying of his wife, Michelle, Obama decided to try one last tilt at Washington, and this time he was aiming even higher: for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald, the man who had removed Carol Moseley Braun from her historic perch in 1998.
Moseley Braun’s original victory had proven that a black candidate could win statewide in Illinois, despite an electorate where just 1 in 10 voters was African American. And 2004, like 1992, was a presidential election year, when the larger voter base meant more black, Latino, and young voters in the mix. And this time, Obama had the Hyde Park machine behind him.
Obama had maintained the fund-raising contacts he’d culled from Illinois Project Vote, which he’d been hired to run after law school ahead of the 1992 campaign (the job he took instead of working for Judge Mikva). And he had in his favor Jones’s tireless lobbying for support from state unions, donors, and political leaders, and sheer, unmitigated luck, as one after another, first his primary opponents, and then his general election foe, Jack Ryan, fell away to personal and sexual scandal, leaving only an out-of-state black conservative iconoclast and sometime cable television gadfly named Alan Keyes standing in his way.
Suddenly Obama was a political star, one who by the summer of 2004 was well on his way to becoming only the third African American ever elected to the U.S. Senate, and the fifth, counting Reconstruction, to serve there. Obama’s senior campaign team secured the coveted keynote for him at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where his message of racial and regional ecumenism played much differently than it had when he was taking on an African American icon in Chicago.
The soon-to-be senator’s call to ignore the “cynics” and the “dividers” and press on toward national healing, his praise of America’s social advancement, and his pronouncement that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” that “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” brought the convention in Boston to its feet, and some in the convention hall to tears.
When it was over, no less a doyenne of the Chicago elite than Oprah Winfrey declared Barack Obama to be “the One,” and serious politicians, including the senior senator from Illinois, began whispering that despite his lack of time on the national stage, his dearth of national political experience, and his name (which was unhelpfully evocative of “Osama bin Laden” and compounded by the middle name Hussein), could one day be the country’s first black president. Even formerly skeptical black Chicagoans embraced the possibilities.
“He was like the brother from another planet,” said Harold Lee Rush, a longtime Chicago radio personality, and Congressman Rush’s cousin. “Nobody knew where he came from, but we claimed him because he claimed us.”
But Obama was not, in the strictest sense, correct about America’s invisibly united status. John Kerry’s running mate, North Carolina senator John Edwards, had made “two Americas” the theme of his primary campaign when he was vying for the nomination. Edwards spoke of the stark divide between the affluent who enjoy excellent schools and the poor communities whose school buildings are crumbling and barely contain decent resources; between the powerful “haves” who enjoy top-notch health care, and whose interests are argued by a phalanx of lobbyists, and the humble “have-nots” just struggling to get by. It was a message reminiscent of Mario Cuomo’s “shining city on a hill” address at the Democratic convention a generation earlier in 1984, in which Cuomo put the lie to the Reaganite vision of a glorious flawless America.
Indeed, the country that was so rapt by Obama’s inclusive message was home to many divides, of class and gender, and along racial lines, with black, Latino, and Native Americans frequently on the wrong side of the statistical tracks, laboring under higher unemployment and poverty rates, living in underresourced communities and grasping more tenuously than their white counterparts for a piece of the American dream. Racial division seethed beneath the surface of American life, even if the fires were no longer burning in the streets.
In Illinois, Obama was running for election in a state with vast reaches of “culturally southern” towns—“sundown towns,” where blacks who found themselves in town after dark could almost certainly expect an encounter with police. Sure, downstate voters might consent to sending an African American to Washington. The trouble might come if the Obamas tried to move in next door. Indeed, Senator Moseley Braun had been only the second black American sent by statewide voters in any state to the Senate, and the first, Edward Brooke, had left Congress in 1979.
Even Chicago, with its vibrant black cultural heritage, remained nearly as segregated in its neighborhoods and public schools in 2004 as it was in 1966, when Dr. King moved into slum housing to dramatize the plight of the city’s poor. Long after the demise of official “redlining,” the bulk of the city’s black residents remained virtually walled off by the Eisenhower expressway, on the city’s south and west sides. Even affluent and liberal Hyde Park had in the recent past seen battles to resist desegregation and busing that were as ferocious as the antibusing frenzy that roiled cities like Boston in the 1970s.
And yet Obama had, by virtue of luck, or rhetorical skill, or simply his upbringing in three worlds—the peculiarly midwestern, pragmatic idealism of his mother’s family, the exotic multiculturalism of Hawaii and Indonesia, and the brown skin that he inherited from his Kenyan father and that he lived in every day—been able to traverse that paradox with no trace of malice or affect. And just as Moseley Braun had triumphed in a campaign that often spoke more to gender and national politics than to race, Obama’s campaign traversed the racial plain largely by setting it aside.
“You know when you’re in a setting where you’re the only black person in a room, and there are tensions there on your part, and their part?” said one longtime Chicago pol who campaigned with Obama in all-white communities during his U.S. Senate campaign. “With Barack that tension doesn’t exist. You know how there’s something you may say, or the way you act, that causes that tension to exist that you’re completely unaware of it? With him it dissipates. It may be because his mother was white, and his white grandparents raised him.”
Obama often said on the stump, “People are really hurting across Illinois. It’s a jobless recovery. Laid-off industrial workers are now competing with their children for seven-dollar-per-hour jobs at Wal-Mart. Fifty-year-old white workers are facing nearly the same future as young African American men from the South Side, fifty percent of whom are out of work and out of school. . . . If I’m elected you get a three-for: you get a Democrat, greater diversity, and someone with backbone who will fight the Bush agenda.”
And in even the sundown towns of Illinois, the message, devoid of explicit racial content, got through.
“So I’m sitting across the table from this little old white lady,” the longtime Chicago pol continued. “And she says, ‘I’m eighty-four years old, and I certainly hope I live long enough, ’cause this young man’s gonna be president one day, and I want to be around to vote for him.’ ”
Whether in downstate Illinois or at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama was speaking to the America that—as Tony P. Hall discovered with his slavery resolution in 1
997 (and again when he reintroduced it in 2000), and which Howard Dean discovered during the primary, when he wandered into the racial and political thicket of “Confederate flags” and “pickup trucks” as shorthand for the white southerners he hoped to win back to the Democratic fold—wants very little to do with the past, other than to point to the glory of its progression and then move on to more productive things. An America that above all, desires from its politicians, white and especially black and brown, a certain benign forgetfulness on the subject of race, which allows the broad strokes of history to be retained, but only as poetic allegory.
A certain ethnic agnosticism, an attractive nuclear (traditional) family, and displays of genteel public (Protestant) piety have long been key to successfully “crossing over” and transgressing the confines of racially or ethnically provincial politics. Thus John Kennedy needed to comfort the nation as to his Catholicism; Republican Ed Brooke became the first nonappointed black senator in 1966 by declaring, to the Washington Post: “I want to be elected on my own ability. Only then do you have progress . . . people should not use race as a basis for labeling me,” only to be defeated after two terms by a Democratic congressman, Paul Tsongas, who declared it “the other side of racism” for Democrats to hesitate in defeating a “symbol” (Brooke had also gone through a bitter and public divorce, and made a second-term glide from the quintessence of moderation to vocal support for busing to desegregate schools). Eschewing explicit racial appeals was how Doug Wilder triumphed as a candidate of economic and not racial reform. And it was why Barack Obama, with his ecumenical racial vision, was well positioned to become the president of the United States.
Obama was not, strictly speaking, addressing the America where black and brown politicians often preside in unmixed communities of color, where the question of “remedies” is very much on the table, and where the purpose of remembering history is to correct it. In communities where ongoing strife is heavily seeded by the lingering sins of the past, forgetfulness is viewed as anything but benign. Almost from the start, many of the political and ideological leaders of that America eyed Obama with suspicion.