by Joy-Ann Reid
The same political machines had rejected Jesse Jackson’s long-shot candidacies in 1984 and 1988, when he would have faced a popular, sitting president and his anointed successor. But 2008 would not be 1988. George W. Bush had no heir apparent, and even if he had, Bush’s embrace would have doomed that person. The country was restless, in the throes of an unpopular war and hungry for a change of leadership. A winnable election was at hand, and no Democrat—black or white—wanted to throw it away.
When South Carolina state senator Robert Ford endorsed Hillary, he said of Obama, “It’s a slim possibility for him to get the nomination, but then everybody else is doomed. Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose—because he’s black and he’s top of the ticket. We’d lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything.”
“I’m a gambling man,” Ford added. “I love Obama. But I’m not going to kill myself.”
Ford said it was “humanly impossible” for Obama to win the share of white votes needed to win most states, adding: “Black Americans in the South don’t believe this country is ready to vote for a black president.”
These doubts rang true in millions of African American homes, barbershops, and beauty shops, and on black radio. Obama’s candidacy ignited sharp debates and divided black households, with parents siding with Clinton and children with the Illinois senator. One spouse might favor Barack and the other rally to Hillary. Many black women saw as much of themselves in Hillary as they did in Obama.
Some wondered whether Obama’s audacity was a bridge that simply stretched too far, and whether he was casting his lot too high in attempting to go from the Illinois Senate almost straight to the White House, as a relatively unknown black man. Others feared that if Obama soared too high, an extremist would try to assassinate him, the same way the country had been robbed of JFK, RFK, and Dr. King. Indeed, early on, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid urged Obama to request Secret Service protection, which he and his family received when most presidential candidates were still unbound by onerous security.
Still others saw in Obama’s candidacy a ruse designed to rob black people blind. Cathy Hughes, a pioneer in her own right as the lone black woman to launch a national radio network, derided Obama in near-apocalyptic terms in public and in private conversations, implying that his true aim might be to trick African Americans into sabotaging their own interests. On CNN, weeks after the State of the Black Union, Hughes called the young candidate “a dazzling deception,” pointedly noting that Norman Lear was among Obama’s “big supporters” and adding, “He feels like a Hollywood movie: The movie Wag the Dog.”
Others believed in Obama’s potential but simply thought it was Hillary’s turn. “I want Barack Obama to be president . . . in 2016,” Andrew Young would tell an Atlanta forum in December 2007. “You cannot be president alone. To put a brother in there by himself is to set him up for crucifixion. His time will come and the world will be ready for a visionary leadership.” (That month, Obama would land the endorsement to beat them all: Oprah Winfrey, whose blockbuster announcement before a massive crowd in Iowa was answered by a video endorsement of Hillary Clinton by legendary poet Maya Angelou. Many of Winfrey’s white female fans accused her of abandoning the historic race by a viable woman, while many who admired Angelou were dismayed by her siding against a viable black candidate.)
And some questioned, as Cornel West, Conrad Worrill, and Tavis Smiley had done, whether Obama, with his eclectic background and racially ecumenical themes, had black America’s interests in mind at all.
Obama had a ready answer when he spoke to an enthusiastic, mixed-race crowd of three thousand in Columbia, South Carolina, a week after his announcement in Springfield. He was riffing on state senator Ford’s comments.
“Can’t have a black man at the top of the ticket,” he’d drawled in a preacher’s cadence, as the crowd booed. “When folks were saying, ‘We’re going to march for our freedom,’ they said, ‘You can’t do that.’ When somebody said, ‘You can’t sit at the lunch counter. . . . You can’t do that,’ we did. And when somebody said, ‘Women belong in the kitchen not in the boardroom. You can’t do that,’ yes we can.” The crowd thundered back, “Yes we can!”
And to those who questioned whether he was “black enough,” Obama answered on March 7, from Brown Chapel AME, the historic church in Selma, Alabama, that launched the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, as the major Democratic campaigns converged for the annual commemoration of the 1965 voting rights demonstration that turned into “Bloody Sunday.”
Addressing a gathering that included pastor C. T. Vivian, whom Dr. King had praised as the greatest preacher he’d ever heard; Rev. Joseph Lowery, the aging SCLC leader and an early Obama enthusiast; and John Lewis, the organizer of the commemorative events and the most sought-after endorser from the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama spoke in his characteristically inclusive fashion, saying: “We’re in the presence today of giants whose shoulders we stand on, people who battled, not just on behalf of African Americans but on behalf of all of America.”
Obama was seeking to bring together his all-encompassing vision of an America without borders of identity with the deepest aspirations of African Americans, who needed to see themselves in him.
“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge,” he continued in the chapel, alluding to the Kennedy administration airlift to Africa that brought his father and other young, ambitious intellectuals to the United States in the early 1960s, and his Kansan mother, whose ancestors owned slaves. “So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born,” he said. “So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I’m here because somebody marched!” The speech would be swiftly criticized for jumbling the timeline of his own birth in 1961, four years before the march he was implying inspired his parents’ confidence to pursue an interracial union. But Obama’s task in Selma was not to write a public biography of his family; it was to connect himself to the larger body of African American history, and to inspire skeptical black voters to believe. And he sought to interweave the commemoration of the past with a call to responsibility aimed at black households, complete with admonishments to turn off the TV and help children with their homework, and to get “cousin Pookie” off the couch, out of his “bedroom slippers,” and to the polls, as the correct way to honor the generation that bled on the Pettus Bridge and across the American South. It was a juxtaposition that would serve Obama well on the stump and in the broad main of American politics, but in time it would invite sharp criticism from African American thought leaders.
In June, Tavis Smiley would have his opportunity to quiz Obama on matters of race, as the eight Democratic candidates met at Howard University for their third debate, hosted by Smiley and broadcast on PBS. The debate—held in the wake of a 5–4 Supreme Court decision banning the use of race by school districts in assigning children to public schools to achieve diversity—was ground the media presumed Obama, as the lone black candidate, would take easily. Instead, it was Hillary Clinton who drew the most vigorous applause, for stating “there would be an outraged outcry in this country” if HIV/AIDS afflicted white women at the rates that black women were being infected, and when she declared that “You can look at this stage and see an African American, a Latino [New Mexico governor Bill Richardson], a woman contesting for the presidency of the United States. But there is so much left to be done, and for anyone to assert that race is not a problem in America is to deny the reality in front of our very eyes.” Backstage afterward, Charles Ogletree, Obama’s former Harvard professor, and Senator John Edwards ribbed Obama for getting beaten by a white woman at an historically black college.
Of all the ironies of the Obama rise, none attracted more commentary than his growing friendship with Reverend Sharpton, the bogeyman of racial politics in New York, who had go
ne on to become a radio talk show host, a senior statesman of the civil rights movement, and someone Democratic candidates for president sought for endorsement.
Sharpton and Obama solidified their growing friendship in the winter of 2007, when Rev. Jesse Jackson was becoming increasingly disgruntled with Obama’s campaign, which he saw as insufficiently attentive to his legacy, particularly as he watched them court celebrities like Oprah, while rarely asking him to barnstorm on the campaign trail.
Jackson mounted multiple attacks on Obama in the fall, accusing the candidate of “acting like he’s white,” during remarks at historically black Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, according to the State newspaper. Jackson was chiding the Illinois senator for avoiding strong statements on the Jena Six, a group of black teens charged with felony offenses in Louisiana after a fight that injured a white student from Jena High School, where African American students had discovered a noose hanging from a tree on the “white side” of the yard after a group of black students dared to sit down beneath the tree to get some shade.
The arrests and what many deemed excessive charges against the teens over a high school fight drew tens of thousands of protesters to the small Louisiana town in the fall, including Jackson. As he traveled across South Carolina on a voter registration tour in September, he told the paper, “If I were a candidate, I’d be all over Jena,” calling the young men’s arrests and pending trials “a defining moment, just like Selma was a defining moment.” Jackson later reiterated his support for Obama and said he didn’t recall the “acting white” remark, to which the Obama campaign had responded that the candidate’s statements on Jena were made in consultation with his national cochair: Jesse Jackson Jr.
Jackson took another, more veiled swipe at Obama in October, telling the Los Angeles Times editorial board that the “thing of the hour is . . . who can have the most anti-Iraq policy,” as if Obama’s war opposition, launched at a Chicago rally at which Jackson was the star, was little more than a fad. Jackson added, “Well, the absence of the Iraq war, which is important, is not the presence of reinventing America.”
“I’ve said I would vote for Barack because he’s my neighbor,” Jackson told the State. “I have very strong feelings for Hillary because we’ve worked together 30 years. I’m not really campaigning for anybody.”
The next month, Charlie King, the National Action Network’s executive director and a longtime Democratic Party activist, called Sharpton in his Harlem office to relay an invitation from Bill Clinton, who was flying to his and Hillary’s home in Chappaqua, New York, and wanted to talk.
Sharpton traveled up to the Clintons’ home in Westchester County and the two met for about an hour, during which the former president pressed Sharpton to come out publicly for Hillary. His reasons ranged from their New York connection to what she could accomplish as president for the African American community.
On the drive back to New York City, Sharpton pondered his prospects, between the probability of Hillary and the possibility of Obama, who was soon calling, too, with an invitation to dinner at Sylvia’s soul food restaurant in Harlem.
The dinner on November 29 attracted national media attention, as the “post-racial” candidate dined on fried chicken and corn bread with the civil rights activist, who, having become a vegetarian, had only coffee.
At Sylvia’s, the two talked about Obama’s civil rights agenda, including his vow to reinvigorate the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and Voting Section as president, his support for federal action to combat racial profiling by police, and even his reverence for the late Thurgood Marshall, one of Sharpton’s heroes.
Afterward, Obama headed for a fund-raiser at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, where he told the capacity crowd: “I’m in this race because I’m tired of reading about Jena, tired of reading about nooses. I’m tired of hearing about a Justice Department that doesn’t understand justice!” It was a riff that could have come from Sharpton himself.
On the same night, Hillary Clinton spoke at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church at the invitation of Congressman Rangel. The two events couldn’t have been more different: one staid and driven by Rangel’s political machine, and the other rowdy and full of impatient energy. At the Apollo event, Cornel West, who had been converted from an Obama critic to a campaign surrogate through the lobbying and cajoling of mutual friends, including Charles Ogletree and Michael Eric Dyson, who had arranged personal meetings between the professor and the candidate, congratulated the crowd for being “on the right side of history.” Comedian Chris Rock pointedly added, “You’d be really embarrassed if he won, and you wasn’t with him.” Rock joked in a pained voice: “ ‘I had that white lady. What was I thinking? What was I thinking!?’ ”
Sharpton didn’t attend either event. Instead, he spent the evening at the Havana Club, the private cigar club that had become his nightly haunt. Sitting inside the club’s comfortably appointed rooms, Sharpton decided he would choose Obama. His staff thought he’d lost his mind.
Days after the twin events, Sharpton called Senator Obama, telling him that his support would be genuine, but not entirely public. He wouldn’t go so far out on a limb that Obama would have to saw the branch off to save his support with white voters.
Obama appreciated Sharpton’s support, and would have been happy simply knowing that Sharpton didn’t intend to hurt him with black voters. Sharpton wasn’t even certain Obama had a chance, friends said, but he was mindful of the black establishment’s dismissal of Shirley Chisholm, and of his own 2004 presidential bid. “I’m not going to do to you what some of the older guys have done to us,” he told Obama.
The next month, just days before the Iowa caucuses, the Obama campaign learned that Sharpton had been asked to give the keynote address at a forum planned by one of the Hawkeye State’s few black interest groups. The campaign’s senior leadership was worried because Sharpton’s message would surely be strongly rooted in racial justice, which contrasted sharply with Obama’s message of racial unity. Obama told his staff he would call Sharpton.
During the call, the senator explained his dilemma. As deeply as he believed in racial justice, it wasn’t his campaign’s focus. Sharpton said he’d think about how to handle it, but just over an hour later, he called back to say he was turning down the invitation.
“There’s no way I’m not going to do Al Sharpton,” the civil rights leader said. “So the best thing to do is I just won’t go.”
The men’s relationship grew from there, giving the candidate an invaluable validator among African Americans. But an even more powerful validation was coming to the Illinois senator, and from a most unexpected state.
CHAPTER 6
Hope and Change
We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
—Senator Barack Obama, primary concession speech in Nashua, New Hampshire, January 8, 2008
OBAMA’S VICTORY IN IOWA SENT SHOCK WAVES THROUGH THE black electorate. If Obama could win lily-white Iowa, they wondered, could he fulfill King’s dream and win it all?
The Clintons, meanwhile, for the first time faced the possibility that the Obama moment had broken the spell of Hillary’s inevitability. Obama was claiming the fertile political territory of “hope” and “change,” to which Hillary responded, “We can’t have false hopes. We’ve got to have a person who can walk into that Oval Office on day one and start doing the hard work that it takes to deliver change.”
The Obama campaign had its own response. “False hopes? Did John F. Kennedy look at the moon and say, ‘Ah, thought so, too far. Reality check. Can’t do it’? . . . Dr. King standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking out over that magnificent crowd, the reflecting pool, the Washington Monument [saying] ‘sorry guys, false hope. The dream will die. It can’t be done!’ . . . We don’t need
leaders to tell us what we can’t do. We need leaders to tell us what we can do, and inspire us to do.”
Obama’s frequent invocations of Kennedy touched a nerve in Clinton World. Bill Clinton had idolized John F. Kennedy since he was a teenager and had long cultivated a relationship with Senator Ted Kennedy, whom he was courting to support Hillary’s campaign. The former president believed that the Clintons and Kennedys belonged side by side on the long road of history. But the Kennedy mantle was no easy load to bear. And in New Hampshire, the Clintons discovered how ill-fitting the robes of history can be.
Hillary was asked if she cared to react to Obama’s remarks, including his references to Dr. King.
“I would,” Senator Clinton said, “and I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, [that] the president before had not even tried. But it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality. The power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said, ‘We are going to do it,’ and actually got it done.”
Hillary’s words were not untrue. King and the other civil rights leaders had used the power of protest, and the power of negotiation, to cajole the nation into truly seeing itself for the first time and to move politics along. They’d pressed Eisenhower and Kennedy but ultimately it was Johnson who would spur passage of the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the country’s history.
But Hillary’s words seemed to undercut the importance of John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond and millions of African Americans who had demanded “freedom now,” the manful demands of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, and the womanly cries of Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Diane Nash, and Shirley Chisholm. King’s legacy had a visceral resonance with African Americans that was not to be taken lightly, even by a political friend with the surname Clinton.
