by Joy-Ann Reid
As the controversy rocketed around the blogosphere and the mainstream press, Hillary was being assailed for impolitic treatment of Dr. King’s legacy, for appearing to liken herself to Johnson the “doer,” and Obama to King the “dreamer,” and diminishing both black men in the process.
The Clinton campaign made attempts at damage control, dispatching Hillary’s African American surrogates to defend her. Sympathetic blogs and liberal media watchdogs pointed out that early posts and stories truncated her quote in a manner that distorted its meaning.
None of it helped. Bill and Hillary Clinton suddenly found themselves in an unfamiliar place: at odds with a large body of black Americans, and sharply so.
At a town hall discussion in Hanover, New Hampshire, in support of Hillary’s campaign, a student said to Bill Clinton that “one of the things that Senator Obama talks a lot about is ‘judgment.’ ”
Clinton, leaning with one elbow on the podium, festooned with a blue and white Hillary banner, launched into an aggressive broadside against Obama’s claims of “superior judgment” and his claim to have been against the Iraq invasion from the beginning. A visibly agitated Clinton set down his notes and began to walk toward the questioner, pointing his finger and delivering a stern lecture on “judgment” and his estimation of his wife’s chief rival for the nomination.
“[S]ince you raised the judgment issue, let’s go over this again,” Clinton began, his voice just above hoarse, but rising. “That is the central argument for his campaign.” He mocked Obama’s entrance into the race, boiling it down to “ ‘it doesn’t matter that I started running for president less than a year after I got to the Senate, from the Illinois state senate; I am a great speaker and a charismatic figure, and I am the only one who had the judgment to oppose this war from the beginning, always, always, always. . . .’”
After Clinton went point by point through the lead-up to the war, he challenged Obama’s fundamental claim that he was always against attacking Iraq.
“It’s wrong that Obama . . . never got asked one time, not once, ‘well, how could you say that, when you said in 2004 you didn’t know how you would have voted on the resolution?” Clinton said. “You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war, and you took that speech you’re now running on off your website in 2004, and there’s no difference in your voting record and Hillary’s ever since?”
Clinton ended his tirade with a flourish of exasperation, drawing a patter of applause from the room, where most attendees seemed astonished by what they’d witnessed. “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” the former president said.
If the former president was growing brittle, Hillary’s stress and exhaustion seemed to finally give way, too, as she sat down in a Portsmouth coffee shop with a group of sixteen “undecided” women voters. The weary candidate was sipping coffee and wearing a ready smile. But when the final question came, it was surprisingly personal: As a woman, given how tough it can be “just to get out of the house, how do you do it? How do you stay so upbeat, and so wonderful?” Hillary clasped the microphone and leaned forward on the table, seeming at once relieved and released. “It’s not easy,” she said. “And I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do.”
And then she grew emotional, placing her hand under her chin. And her voice began to crack. “You know I have so many opportunities from this country. . . . I just don’t want us to fall backwards.”
She continued over the gentle applause: “This is very personal for me, it’s not just political. It’s not just public. I see what’s happening and we have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game, and it’s like, who’s up and who’s down. It’s about our country. It’s about our kids’ futures. And it’s really about all of us together.”
This moment would be parsed and mocked by pundits and by opponents. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wryly asked whether Hillary could “cry her way back to the White House,” while others likened her emotion to the glint in Edmund Muskie’s eyes on a cold Manchester day in February 1972 (Muskie’s emotionalism during a speech against the city’s hard-right Union Leader cost him any momentum he had against his Democratic presidential primary rival, George McGovern). But it was clear to those who knew Hillary Clinton, who knew her as the girl who had been moved by Dr. King, as the young woman who admired Edward Brooke, and who had both labored for and disappointed Marian Wright Edelman in her transition from child advocate to First Lady, that even though she had never had the connection to African Americans her husband did, she felt she’d lost something important in New Hampshire.
When the votes were cast, Hillary delivered her own shock to the pundit class by winning the New Hampshire primary. But that night, Obama answered with a speech that in defeat moved a nation and created an iconography that proved unstoppable, even for the Clintons. It called on a refrain he had used on the campaign trail many times before.
“[W]e have faced down impossible odds,” Obama said, calling for a “new majority” that would stretch across political parties to take the nation in a fundamentally different direction.
When we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can. It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can.
Hillary Clinton had won New Hampshire, but she and her husband had done real damage to themselves. On the day of the primary, in an interview on CNN, Donna Brazile, a bona fide Clinton insider and friend, called the former president’s words and tone “depressing” for African Americans to hear.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert slammed the Clintons for “chastising the press for the way it was covering the Obama campaign,” and the former president for his remark about “fairy tales.” He derided the spectacle of “Mrs. Clinton telling the country we don’t need ‘false hopes,’ and taking cheap shots at, of all people, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Wrote Herbert: “We’ve already seen Clinton surrogates trying to implant the false idea that Mr. Obama might be a Muslim, and perhaps a drug dealer to boot.” Hillary had indeed been forced to rebuke campaign surrogates, including chief strategist Mark Penn, for suggestive comments about Obama’s admissions of experimenting with drugs as a young man. Inside the Obama team there was a strong belief that much of the whisper campaign against Obama’s religious faith originated inside the Clinton camp, and from Penn in particular.
But next up was the South Carolina primary, and when Congressman Jim Clyburn of that state publicly declared his disapproval of the Clintons’ tone and the invocation of King to deride the Obama campaign, the Clinton campaign knew that zero hour had been reached.
Clyburn, a tough, gravelly-voiced man with roots in the Gullah low country, had come through the crucible of the civil rights struggle and was now the third-ranking member of the House leadership. He was among the leading politicians, black or white, in a state where 4 in 10 Democratic primary voters were African American. He had not declared for Clinton or Obama, and his support would be critical for winning the Democratic nomination.
Clyburn and Bill Clinton had a long relationship, dating back to Clinton’s first term as Arkansas governor, but the congressman had been agitated by what had happened in New Hampshire. Clyburn had been telling associates that he had his political view and his personal view of who should get the Democratic nom
ination in 2008. He believed, as did many of his colleagues, that Hillary would ultimately prevail, but personally he was for Obama.
He and the Illinois senator had formed a relationship during Obama’s brief time in Washington. Few members of the Congressional Black Caucus had gotten to know Obama, who, like most senators, had only infrequent contact with members of the House. Obama attended Black Caucus meetings sporadically, but when he did, he often sat beside Clyburn, and the two would talk about politics or current events, and the strange alchemy of Washington. Clyburn was among a handful of Washington hands Obama sought advice from as he made the decision to run for president. Thus Clyburn was one of the few members in either chamber not to be taken by surprise when he announced.
Clyburn had been traveling overseas during the New Hampshire primary, but when the New York Times reporter Carl Hulse reached him and read him both Clintons’ comments over the phone, Clyburn was stunned.
“We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” he said. “It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal.”
As to President Clinton’s pronouncements about Obama’s Iraq stance being a “fairy tale,” Clyburn focused not on the war but on the senator’s candidacy itself: “To call that dream a fairy tale, which Bill Clinton seemed to be doing, could very well be insulting to some of us.”
The Times article indicated that Clyburn’s displeasure might shake him out of his neutral stance ahead of the January 26 South Carolina primary, the very thing the Clinton team feared. The campaign quickly scheduled call-ins for the former president on Friday, January 11, to the Tom Joyner Morning Show, the number-one morning show in black U.S. households, and to Rev. Al Sharpton’s syndicated afternoon program, Keeping It Real. Bill Clinton told Joyner the campaign was now “in a genuine fight, and no one should be able to accuse someone like Hillary of being a racist.” He explained to Joyner, and later to Sharpton, that “fairy tale” referred to the Obama campaign’s presentation of the senator’s opposition to the war as unswerving, not to his campaign. “There’s nothing fairy tale about his campaign,” Clinton told Sharpton. “It’s real, strong, and he might win.”
A frustrated Clinton told Sharpton he would respect any black voter who chose Barack Obama over Hillary. But he laid into the Obama campaign for “sowing divisiveness when Obama had vowed to run a different kind of race.”
The Obama team knew a victory in South Carolina would put the campaign in the thick of the delegate race, and as Obama told his senior staff, a defeat could be the end of the game. And key to South Carolina was separating the Clintons from black voters.
The day of the Clinton radio call-ins, Obama’s South Carolina spokeswoman Candice Tolliver told Ben Smith of Politico that Hillary Clinton would have to decide if she owed anyone an apology. A memo went out to reporters under Tolliver’s name that described a series of events that began the previous December, when Hillary’s New Hampshire campaign cochair, Bill Shaheen, spontaneously raised the issue of Obama’s prior drug use; it extended to campaign strategist Mark Penn’s repeated use of the word cocaine on television in reference to Obama, to Hillary’s remarks on Dr. King versus Lyndon Johnson, and to Clinton surrogate Andrew Cuomo, the New York attorney general, who said after New Hampshire that the race can’t be bought or won through TV, that “you can’t shuck and jive.” Cuomo’s spokesman insisted later that the comment did not refer to the Illinois senator.
The memo quickly leaked, causing furious Clinton supporters to charge the Obama team with race-baiting. The Clinton camp deployed their top African American surrogates to respond. Ohio congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones dismissed the idea of a pattern of racial comments out of Clinton World as “ridiculous,” saying, “all of the world knows the commitment of President Clinton and Senator Clinton to civil rights issues—and not only the commitment in terms of words but in terms of deeds.” Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee said “any school child” knows that King’s words “moved people to action.”
Some Clinton advisers said they should simply end the discussion, but the campaign was in no mood to back down. During a January 13 appearance on Meet the Press, Hillary fielded Tim Russert’s first question, which went directly to the ongoing controversy: “First, with respect to Dr. King, you know, Tim, I was fourteen years old when I heard Dr. King speak in person. He is one of the people that I admire most in the world, and the point that I was responding to from Senator Obama himself in a number of speeches he was making is his comparison of himself to President Kennedy and Dr. King. And there is no doubt that the inspiration offered by all three of them is essential. It is critical to who we are as a nation, what we believe in, the dreams and aspirations that we all have.
“But I also said that, you know, Dr. King didn’t just give speeches,” she continued. “He marched, he organized, he protested, he was gassed, he was beaten, he was jailed. He understood that he had to move the political process and bring in those who were in political power, and he campaigned for political leaders, including Lyndon Johnson, because he wanted somebody in the White House who would act on what he had devoted his life to achieving.”
Clinton accused the Obama campaign of deliberately distorting her and the former president’s remarks, referring to news of the leaked South Carolina memo and insisting that she wanted neither race nor gender brought into the campaign.
The Clintons were losing and “they were really pissed-off,” a former campaign aide said. “Not because they were losing to an African American man, but to a man who had been in the Senate all of two years. They couldn’t understand it. It had nothing to do with him being an African American man for crying out loud. I just think the loss in Iowa just really freaked everybody out. . . . That this guy, who was very politically talented, but really, what has he done?”
The attempts at damage control weren’t working, not least due to the ongoing missteps of surrogates, including BET founder Bob Johnson, who on January 13 told a South Carolina crowd that “as an African American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood—and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book—when they have been involved,” adding, “That kind of campaign behavior does not resonate with me, for a guy who says, ‘I want to be a reasonable, likable, Sidney Poitier Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? And I’m thinking, I’m thinking to myself, this ain’t a movie, Sidney. This is real life.”
The bank shot at Obama’s youthful drug use landed like a bottle rocket, and Johnson quickly demurred, saying afterward that his comments were meant to refer to Obama’s time as a community organizer and nothing more. Johnson called any suggestion to the contrary “irresponsible and incorrect.”
At an event in New York on January 14, Senator Clinton received a mix of polite applause and scattered boos when she called on the more than two thousand people there to fulfill King’s unfinished legacy, and drew her strongest applause by praising Barack Obama.
“We may differ on minor matters, but when it comes to what is really important, we are family,” she said. “Both Senator Obama and I know that we are where we are today because of leaders like Dr. King and generations of men and women like all of you.”
Both campaigns were sensing that the war over Dr. King’s legacy was getting out of control. “How race got into this thing is because Obama said ‘race,’ ” Congressman Charlie Rangel told a local news outlet. “But there is nothing that Hillary Clinton has said that baffles me. I would challenge anybody to belittle the contribution that Dr. King has made to the world, to our country, to civil rights, and the Voting Rights Act, but for [Obama] to suggest that Dr. King could have signed that act is absolutely stupid. It’s absolutely dumb to infer t
hat Dr. King, alone, passed the legislation and signed it into law.” The segment had been taped four days earlier, but the timing couldn’t have been worse, coming one day before King’s birthday and a week before the national holiday.
The next day, the Clinton campaign released a statement from Hillary Clinton that said: “Our party and our nation is bigger than this. Our party has been on the front line of every civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, workers’ rights movement, and other movements for justice in America. We differ on a lot of things. And it is critical to have the right kind of discussion on where we stand. But when it comes to civil rights and our commitment to diversity, when it comes to our heroes—President John F. Kennedy and Dr. King—Senator Obama and I are on the same side.”
Obama was in Nevada, but he called a news conference that evening to say, “I don’t want the campaign at this stage to degenerate into so much tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this. We’ve got too much at stake at this time in our history to be engaging in this kind of silliness. . . . If I hear my own supporters engaging in talk that I think is ungenerous or misleading or in some way is unfair, I will speak out forcefully against it. I hope the other campaigns take the same approach.”
Obama called the Clintons “good people” who have “historically and consistently been on the right side of civil rights issues.” He added, “I think they care about the African American community and that they care about all Americans and they want to see equal rights and justice in this country.”
Clyburn weighed in as well, telling PBS host Charlie Rose that he would do his “level best to help get beyond the unfortunate circumstances that we find ourselves in.” Within days, Rangel went on MSNBC to voice his regrets for throwing a grenade onto the field when the candidate he supported was seeking to walk away, and Bob Johnson announced he’d sent a letter of apology to Obama for comments he called a hasty attempt at humor.
