by Joy-Ann Reid
But it didn’t end there. The Clintons were infuriated when Obama implied that Ronald Reagan had fundamentally changed America with his ideas, in a way that Clinton had not; more so when Dick Harpootlian, the colorful former prosecutor and onetime chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, went on CNN to accuse Bill Clinton of launching race- and gender-tinged attacks designed to discourage and suppress black votes, and of inventing charges of voter suppression by Obama campaign operatives in Nevada. Harpootlian called Bill Clinton’s tactics “reminiscent of Lee Atwater.”
Bill Clinton shot back at a CNN reporter, Jessica Yellin, as he exited a campaign event in Charleston three days before the South Carolina primary: “There are still two people around who marched with Martin Luther King and risked their lives: John Lewis and Rev. Andrew Young. They both said that Hillary was right and the people who attacked her were wrong, and that she did not play the race card, but they did. So I don’t have to defend myself from Dick Harpootlian. I will just refer you to John Lewis and Andrew Young. And let him go get in an argument with them about it.”
With the polls slated to close in South Carolina in fewer than twenty minutes, at 7 P.M. in the Saturday election, the former president struggled to contain his irritation as he stood alongside Florida congressman Kendrick Meek, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and other campaign supporters in a parking lot in Columbia, taking questions from a claque of reporters who had chosen that spot to wait for the returns to come in. Hillary Clinton had already headed to Tennessee, leaving her husband to shepherd the final leg of the primary.
Asked if he was proud of what he’d done in South Carolina on his wife’s behalf, Clinton said his role had mainly been to go around the state answering voters’ questions. He then offered that it was “immensely impressive to me to see in the audiences whether they were predominantly African American, predominantly white, or totally integrated, there has not been a great deal of difference in the questions people ask.”
It was an answer to a question that hadn’t been asked.
When ABC’s David Wright asked, “What does it say about Barack Obama that it takes two of you to beat him?” Clinton laughed.
“That’s just bait, too,” he said. “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ’84 and ’88. And he ran a good campaign, and Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here. He’s run a good campaign everywhere . . . he’s a good candidate, with a good organization.”
Clinton’s remarks instantly became the headline for every news outlet, seemingly everywhere. The former president was accused of playing the race card on the popular liberal blog Daily Kos, he was derided as the “big mouth of the South” by the conservative New York Post, and pundits made a meal of him on cable TV, accusing him of indiscipline and classlessness, of botching his wife’s presidential campaign, and worse, of conflating the candidacies of Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama solely because both men are black.
The Obama team couldn’t believe Clinton had stepped so forthrightly into the breach. One top campaign aide said, “Our reaction to the former president was, please keep talking.”
“South Carolina was deeply troubling,” said another. “Everyone understood his passion for his wife, and we always assumed he’d be out there litigating a case for her. And we assumed that if he attacked Obama, he would go after the experience question, which was the natural place to go. We never expected the tone; the ways that he was clearly, utterly dismissive, in the way that frankly we’ve seen too many white people can be about black people with potential, for a long time in our history.” The attacks, the aide said, “really put an ugly shade on the president, and I just think it was unbecoming of him and desperate, and it was hard for us to not see it through the prism of race. Especially given that he was doing it in South Carolina.”
The Clinton team quickly dispatched its top African American surrogates, including Representatives Tubbs Jones and Meek, to contain the fallout, with Meek insisting the former president had been asked a question about historic contests involving African American candidates. Pro-Hillary bloggers seized on the claim, accusing the media of attempting to manufacture a scandal. But the transcripts, released by ABC, didn’t bear it out.
Obama was declared the winner of the South Carolina primary almost immediately after the polls closed, with MSNBC calling the race just after 7 P.M. and the New York Times following suit twenty minutes later. And he’d won in commanding fashion, taking 55 percent of the vote in the three-way race, to Senator Clinton’s 27 percent and just under 18 percent for South Carolina native son John Edwards, who represented the neighboring state. Obama had taken 78 percent of the black vote and a quarter of the ballots cast by whites. His victory, which was much more substantial than the polls or the pundits had anticipated, and the storm of denunciation over Clinton’s remarks in Columbia, seemed to touch a raw nerve for the man once dubbed the “first black president.”
By nightfall, Clinton, who friends said had a longtime habit of calling at all hours, was burning up the phones, reaching out to old friends from the black political community, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, with heated questions: Didn’t they know him? Wasn’t it clear that what was being said about him wasn’t true? It was a plaintive call for support, and for resolve in his defense. He railed not just against Obama but against Clyburn, too, accusing him of taking sides against Hillary.
“It was probably the only argument I’ve had with Bill Clinton,” one longtime Clinton friend said. “I said to him, ‘You’re reading this wrong. Clyburn is not trying to do anything to hurt you.’ ” But Clinton was not in any mood to hear his friend’s assurances that Clyburn had merely assumed that Hillary would win in the end, and “didn’t want the president to do or say anything that alienated black voters so that they weren’t still highly energized to come out and vote for Hillary” when the primary contests were over.
But friends and veteran staffers of the former president said he took the negative reaction to his statements during the campaign, dating back to New Hampshire right through to that parking lot in South Carolina, as a personal affront, and that he was equal parts shocked and enraged at the criticisms, given what he saw as his long-standing commitment to engaging and aiding the African American community, using the power he’d managed to accumulate as a governor, and as president.
Clinton was still angry when he finally reached Clyburn, at close to 2 A.M. on Wednesday, January 27. The former president wasn’t walking anything back. He vowed to fight anyone who meant to question his racial bona fides. It was part warning, part entreaty. Eventually, he also reached Jesse Jackson, who was traveling in India for a commemoration of Mahatma Gandhi. This time he had Congressman Meek on the call as he launched into a vigorous self-defense. Hadn’t Jackson won South Carolina twice? That was a fact, right? And how could anyone construe his remarks to be racist? He blamed the Obama campaign for fanning the flames. Jackson agreed that Clinton’s statement sounded factual, and he would soon say as much to the New York Times.
Rev. Sharpton appeared on ABC’s The View later that day and told the hosts that the country was hearing “race charges” and “race-tinged rhetoric” rather than solutions to real issues. He said of the former president, “I think it’s time for him to just be quiet. I think it’s time for him to stop. As one of the most outspoken people in America, there’s a time to shut up, and I think that time has come.”
It was a great irony that a man who had so shrewdly and flamboyantly used the art of racial rebuke to propel himself into the White House, and his wife, who had traversed the ideological aisle to make common cause with the Kingian ideal that inspired her as a young girl, were now the ones being rebuked. The freighted history of race inside the Democratic Party and in American politics was not what this campaign was supposed to be about. But it was tearing away at Hillary’s campaign.
In 1992, Clinton had scolded Sister Souljah as a way of letting white voters know he would speak up for the interests they believed t
he party had set aside. Barack Obama was now having a “Sister Souljah moment” at the Clintons’ expense. And black Americans were standing up to the “first black president” and exposing the title’s inherent lie, since no nonblack person, however close his ties to African Americans, and whatever tropes of blackness he was believed to display, could ever bestow the achievement of “first black president” on black America. In rebuking Bill Clinton, black America was coming to an unspoken understanding: “We don’t owe the Clintons anything. We can have a real ‘first black president’ of our own.”
ON THE MORNING AFTER THE SOUTH CAROLINA PRIMARY, THE New York Times ran an op-ed by Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy, titled “A President Like My Father,” in which she endorsed Barack Obama for president. News of the endorsement broke just after the polls closed on Saturday night, adding a further blow to the already fraught Clinton campaign. In the spring of 2007, Kennedy and her children had quietly slipped into the audience at the back of the ballroom at the Sheraton hotel in New York to hear the Democratic presidential candidates address the National Action Network’s annual convention. Her children had heard all the excitement over Barack Obama and wanted to hear him for themselves. After the speech, she telephoned her uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, to tell him Obama was worth paying attention to.
Bill Clinton had wanted nothing more for Hillary than an endorsement from Senator Kennedy. He had courted and plied the aging Massachusetts senator, but the Clintons’ behavior in the preceding month had deeply disturbed Kennedy, who found the former president’s statements to be dangerously racially divisive. The day after Caroline’s op-ed ran in the Times, Senator Kennedy formally endorsed Obama as well.
A month later, John Lewis would also endorse Obama.
In Georgia, anger at the congressman’s early endorsement of Hillary over Obama in October 2007 hit a fever pitch after South Carolina, and it grew even stronger after Obama won a commanding victory in Georgia on February 5, 2008. The Illinois senator bested Clinton 66 to 31 percent and won 90 percent of the black vote. In an exclamatory flourish, Obama beat Clinton by a margin of 3 to 1 in Lewis’s district.
Soon afterward, Markel Hutchins, a thirty-one-year-old Atlanta attorney, announced that he would challenge Lewis in the next Democratic primary, slated for June. Hutchins accused the civil rights icon of being out of touch, having rejected the candidacy of the potential first black president. It was Lewis’s first primary challenge in sixteen years.
Hutchins stood little chance against the sitting congressman and civil rights legend. But it was a shot across the bow to Lewis and other black politicians, raising the specter that Jesse Jackson Jr. had warned of in the early months of the campaign. Jackson had phoned fellow Black Caucus members as Obama’s national cochair to warn them of the consequences of falling “on the wrong side of history,” including public ridicule on black radio, particularly Tom Joyner’s popular morning program, and of primary challenges. The warnings aggravated some senior members of the Obama campaign, and the candidate himself, who felt they went too far, but they stuck in the minds of black Congress members.
“The African American community had become so fiercely ‘Obama’ after South Carolina,” said one black Hillary Clinton supporter, “that many of the [Black Caucus members] felt that even if they didn’t know Senator Obama, they were gonna have to switch, because the black community was saying we’re not tolerating anybody who does not support Obama.”
Lewis had begun to waver, telling reporters he was considering switching his support. “In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” Lewis told the New York Times on February 15. “Something is happening in America, and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.” He said he planned to cast his vote for Obama at the August convention.
Lewis made it official on February 27, explaining in a written statement that he wanted to be on the side of the people of his district, and that, “after taking some time for serious reflection on this issue, I have decided that when I cast my vote as a super-delegate at the Democratic convention, it is my duty . . . to express the will of the people.”
Lewis was soon joined in shifting his endorsement by other Black Caucus members from Georgia, Virginia, Ohio, and New Jersey. On February 28, Lewis told a local Georgia TV reporter that his decision to abandon the campaign of his friend Mrs. Clinton was among the hardest things he’d ever done. He compared it to the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. “It was easier to walk across that bridge and face those state troopers and be beaten and left bloody,” Lewis said. “This has been hard. This has been difficult. But there comes a time when you have to make a decision.”
The Clinton campaign quickly issued a statement calling Lewis “a true American hero,” adding, “we have the utmost respect for him and understand the great pressure he faced. And Senator Clinton enjoys incredibly strong support from superdelegates around the country from all regions and races.”
Michael Eric Dyson later said, “There is no question that John Lewis was made to bow in front of the manifest power, will, desires, and agenda of the masses of black people. There was no more clear case of the black masses leading its leaders.”
“To me, there’s a historical consideration in this,” Congressman John Conyers, who had served his Michigan district since 1965, told The New Republic on the day of Lewis’s formal announcement. “How in the world could I explain to people I fought for civil rights and equality, then we come to the point where an African American of unquestioned capability has a chance to become president and I said, ‘No, I have dear old friends I’ve always supported, who I’ve always liked.’ What do you tell your kids?”
In March, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Hillary supporter, was booed in her Texas district at a meeting of Baptist ministers, prompting Dyson, an Obama surrogate, to admonish the audience that the congresswoman had the right to make her own choice.
As the March 4 Ohio primary approached, Stephanie Tubbs Jones began to see prominent pastors and local politicians in her district who’d worked with her for years shifting their support from Hillary Clinton as they felt the rolling tide of black support for Obama’s candidacy.
“The majority of the people of color in her district were very supportive of Obama,” said Tubbs Jones’s longtime friend Marcia Fudge, a former Cleveland-area mayor who succeeded the late congresswoman in the House. “Even those who had before said to Stephanie, ‘If Hillary’s your candidate I’m gonna be with you,’ as the time got closer they were calling her and saying, ‘I know I said I was gonna be with you, but I can’t do it. I’m gonna endorse Obama.’ And that was happening on a fairly consistent basis as the primary got closer.”
TUBBS JONES REACTED BY DOUBLING DOWN ON HER SUPPORT FOR Hillary and by ramping up her public scorn for Obama. She became the campaign’s fiercest attacker on cable news shows, questioning everything from Obama’s experience to his record on the Iraq War. When Will Burns, a promising young former political staffer running for alderman in Chicago, and whose family had been members at Tubbs Jones’s church since he was a child, addressed the congregation from the pulpit and praised Obama, Tubbs Jones refused to speak to him after service. But she also reaped a whirlwind of criticism, which friends termed abuse.
“She was called ‘handkerchief head,’ ‘sellout’ . . . you name it,” said Fudge. “She always held her head up, she never let it get to her, but you could tell that it was wearing on her. At one point we were at a meeting and someone said to her, ‘I hope you die.’ ”
“She was treated like she was treasonous,” said Emanuel Cleaver, who in 1991 became the first African American mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, and who won election to Congress in 2004, eventually becoming the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “But the more she was attacked, the more committed she became. She had had a relationship with the Clintons since she was a prosecutor. And she said, you guys can do what you want to do, but I’m not going to aband
on somebody I’ve had a relationship with for over twenty years. And she didn’t drop back.”
“One of my campaign themes was ‘vote your future, not your fears,’ ” Cleaver added. “And then to have black people so openly saying, if you don’t vote for the black person, you are a handkerchief head . . . it was a tough time, [and] I think African Americans are going to look back on that and say, maybe we were a little thoughtless in what we were doing.”
Obama wanted no part of it and grew increasingly irritated by surrogates who fanned the flames, including Jesse Jackson Jr., who found himself increasingly on the outside of the Obama inner circle. Soon, however, Junior would have another task, one that would grow more difficult over time: managing his father.
IT HAD BEEN JUST OVER A YEAR SINCE THE FIRST ARTICLES ABOUT Rev. Jeremiah Wright appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Rolling Stone. During that time, a steady stream of e-mails had poured into the in-boxes of reporters and voters alike: Obama’s Chicago church “has a non-negotiable commitment to Africa. . . . Notice too, what color you will need to be if you should want to join Obama’s church . . . B-L-A-C-K!!! . . . Doesn’t look like his choice of religion has improved much over his (former?) Muslim upbringing. Are you aware that Obama’s middle name is Mohammed? Strip away his nice looks, the big smile and smooth talk and what do you get? Certainly a racist, as plainly defined by the stated position of his church! And possibly a covert worshiper of the Muslim faith, even today. This guy desires to rule over America while his loyalty is totally vested in a Black Africa!”
As the campaign had picked up steam, so did the volume and outlandishness of the charges: Obama was not just a Muslim radical, he was actually Kenyan born and not a U.S. citizen at all. He was the product of a forty-seven-year conspiracy between his teenage mother and officials in Africa and Hawaii to place a Manchurian candidate in the seat of American power! And Michelle Obama hated white people and wrote as much in her Princeton thesis!
