by Joy-Ann Reid
“He never got as giddy as the rest of us about beating the Clintons,” said a former senior aide and longtime friend. “He understood that he was a black guy with an African name, running to make history in this country, and that it would get harder and not easier. And though sometimes he can make his political job harder than it needs to be by holding people at arm’s length, in that period he knew that he had to pull people in. And he wanted to sue for peace immediately, and that filtered out through the leadership of the campaign, and folks got that we had to have a different tone.”
With the fights over delegates behind them, the Obama campaign prepared to welcome Hillary Clinton and the former president to Denver. They had not yet seen President Clinton’s speech, and they wouldn’t until just hours before it was delivered. The delay punctuated the nervous energy in the convention center, but the campaign anticipated a moment of clarifying unity for their party.
On August 27, Hillary Clinton interrupted the delegate roll call to place Barack Obama’s name into nomination by acclamation, a dramatic touch meant to heal the party by sheer force of theatrical will. Earlier that day she had formally released her delegates to vote for the Illinois senator.
“On behalf of the great state of New York, with appreciation for the spirit and dedication of all who are gathered here, with eyes firmly fixed on the future, with the spirit of unity,” Senator Clinton announced, bathed in a sea of supporters who flanked her at close quarters, nearly drowning her small frame in bodies and news cameras, “let’s declare all together with one voice right here and right now that Barack Obama is our candidate, and he will be our president!”
She was seconded by Nancy Pelosi, who’d broken a glass ceiling of her own as the first female Speaker of the House. The convention hall broke into chants of “Yes we can!” while the O’Jays’ “Love Train” exploded from the loudspeakers inside the Pepsi Center.
That night, Bill Clinton lauded Obama in his speech to the convention, declaring that “everything I learned in my eight years as president, and in the work I have done since in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job.” As a report in the London Telegraph exclaimed: “The Bill Clinton who had called Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war a ‘fairy tale,’ who had belittled his success among African American voters, was gone. The venerated Democratic elder statesman was back.”
And yet the former president remained personally bruised by the just-ended primary gauntlet. He had lost something tangible during the campaign, and he wanted it back. And he was keenly aware that fully supporting the Obama project—and being seen to do so robustly—was a key step along the path. If Obama was going to lose the White House, it would not be because of the Clintons.
Two days after the convention, the Clintons and Obama were together again, sharing the stage at Stephanie Tubbs Jones’s funeral. Given the campaign’s rancor, the invitation by Tubbs Jones’s family was a further sign of a party yearning to repair its greatest breech since Teddy Kennedy challenged the sitting president, Jimmy Carter, to a primary showdown in 1980.
The service stretched on for four hours. Besides the Obamas and the Clintons, the sanctuary was filled with luminaries of the Democratic Party: Jill and Joe Biden, now the vice presidential nominee; Congressman Kendrick Meek, for whom Tubbs Jones had been like a godmother; Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson; and the legendary Louis Stokes, whom Tubbs Jones had succeeded in the House of Representatives.
Obama spoke of Tubbs Jones’s hard work and unfinished business in the Congress, and praised her “grace and compassion.” But he also alluded to Tubbs Jones’s stalwart support of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president. Obama said that when he’d met her on the trail, the congresswoman said simply, “ ‘This is what it means to be a friend for me.’ And all I could say is, ‘I understand.’ ”
Hillary described Tubbs Jones as a fierce legislator, a proud member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, and a woman she wistfully remembered as “a real girlfriend” and sister, with whom she’d expected to share diet tips, recipes for southern cooking, and laughter as they both grew old.
Bill Clinton talked about Tubbs Jones’s skill at cards, and at politics; but he also gave a nod to the history Obama was set to make in November. He spoke of a little boy, all of six years old, whom he’d met in Cleveland during the campaign. The boy had expressed surprise that Clinton could be a president and still be alive.
“I mean, you know, he thought the president was George Washington, Thomas Jefferson—he thought the president was a dead white guy,” Clinton said, turning to Obama. “Thanks to you, Senator, no one will ever think that’s the definition of a president again.”
The assembled crowd cheered them all: the Clintons and the Obamas. The mourners stood on their feet as each one took the stage.
When the service was over, Hillary Clinton and Obama embraced, and he planted a kiss on her cheek.
Obama and Bill Clinton would meet again on September 11, for a tense lunch arranged by a Washington éminence grise whose connection to the elder man was as a friend, and the younger as a would-be mentor. The lunch consisted mostly of small talk, and a thick veil of tension hung overhead. As men, Clinton and Obama couldn’t be more different. Obama seemed to revile the forced intimacy of politics—the constant gamesmanship, false joviality, and political glad-handing. Clinton reveled in it. As one mutual acquaintance put it, “If you play a round of golf with President Obama, at the end of the game you’ve played a round of golf. If you play a round with Bill Clinton, at the end of the game you’ve signed on to a whole bunch of policies, and promised to vote for things you hadn’t even thought about when you got on the green.”
Fundamentally, Obama couldn’t give Clinton what he wanted most: a vow of public absolution from any taint of racism, on his part and Hillary’s, for comments during the primary. Though Obama assured Clinton that neither he nor his supporters believed the former president was a racist, the senator, still flush with the thrill of the convention, wasn’t sure Clinton could give him anything at all.
Clinton, celebrated as his generation’s most able campaigner, had entered his wife’s campaign unprepared for the age in which it was being fought. “I think [it was] because he was rusty,” a former aide said. “He hadn’t been in a national campaign in a full-time way since 1996, and campaigning had changed so much. . . . But now with Facebook and Twitter and the Internet and talk radio,” one verbal slip and “it’s all over the country. Just the speed and the velocity were unfamiliar to him.”
And the Clintons, Bill Clinton in particular, were not prepared to wage a political fight against the very African American base that since his days as Arkansas governor had been endemic to the success of white Democratic politicians, particularly in the South. The percentage of registered black voters in the southern states had been growing at an increasing velocity since 1965, from 46 percent in the year the Voting Rights Act passed, to 66 percent by the time Jimmy Carter got elected in 1976, accelerating further after the massive voter registration campaigns of 1984 and 1988, and reaching just under 70 percent by 2008, second only to non-Hispanic white voters at 73.5.
“I think there were things that he said that were racially tinged that were more about the emotion of the moment, that kind of got away from him just because of the vortex he was in,” the former aide, who is African American, said. “One thing I’ve never seen with Bill Clinton was any sense of second-class status about black people. But sometimes the language just gets away from you.”
Friends said the Clintons took the attacks on African Americans who supported Hillary personally and were angered that longtime African American friends didn’t feel free to stand by their preferred candidate without reaping retribution from within the black body politic, once it was clear that Obama was viable. And Bill Clinton in particular blamed the Obama campaign for fanning the flames of black anger against him.
But for all the pain and divisiveness of the cam
paign, people who knew both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama thought they had more commonalities than differences. Aides to both men believe they view the world from fundamentally similar vantage points, where pragmatism outweighs ideology, and that they cleave to the same formula for moving the country beyond its historic racial and class differences. “I think had Hillary not run, Bill Clinton would have been one of [Obama’s] biggest supporters,” the former Clinton aide said. “Obama was the embodiment of everything he wanted his own legacy to be.”
The Clinton-Obama lunch resolved little between the two men, but both came away from it confident that they could get past their personal feelings to fight the real battle in November. Clinton wanted the victory almost as badly as Obama himself.
THE 2008 GENERAL ELECTION WAS THE CULMINATION OF THE demographic forces that had been reshaping the political parties since the 1960s, especially in the South.
In defeating Republican John McCain, Obama won a commanding 95 percent share of African American voters, a larger percentage than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson claimed 94 percent in 1964, and far exceeding the mandate delivered by black voters to Bill Clinton in 1992. Black and Hispanic voter turnout was historic, setting records not seen since 1996.
Obama’s triumph with black voters vindicated fifty years of civil rights organizing and dogged voter registration, fulfilling the great expectations of a community that had widened its gaze with every electoral advance, from Fannie Lou Hamer’s rejection at the hands of the party of LBJ to Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 convention gains to Clinton’s multiracial bridge to the twenty-first century.
But Obama’s sweep of African American votes was deeply rooted in his early success with white Democrats during the primaries. “He ended up getting solid black support after Iowa,” voting rights expert David Bositis said. “He wouldn’t have gotten the nomination without the strong black support that he got. But where he really defeated Hillary, was that he went in to the totally white caucus states—Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, where Hillary and her people thought, ‘There’s no black people there, he’s not going to win.’ ”
Obama’s performance in the general election with white voters exceeded expectations for a Democrat. He won a larger share of white voters than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976, even as he fell well short of a majority, losing white voters nationwide, by 12 points—55 percent to 43 percent. But that deficit wasn’t universal and it reflected the new, great racial cleavage in the electoral map. Obama won a majority of white voters in nineteen states, and got 30 percent or better in Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, and Florida, where he received 42 percent. Obama’s candidacy was soundly rejected in the states of the Deep South. He got just 10 percent of the votes of white Alabamans, 11 percent in Mississippi, 14 percent in Louisiana, and between 22 and 26 percent in Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina.
And yet, for Democrats, even that was an improvement. Obama had outperformed John Kerry and Bill Clinton with white voters overall. But white voters were slowly shrinking as a share of the total electorate, making it increasingly possible for a Democrat to win the White House without a majority of them. (Obama himself would be able to regain the White House four years later without meeting his own high-water mark with the white electorate, and while losing catastrophically among white voters in the South.)
“Every four years the country as a whole becomes two percentage points less white working class,” Bositis said. “So not only do you have the white population declining relative to the minority population, you have an increasing number of college-educated whites as opposed to working-class whites. So that the group that was dominant in the 1950s, who made up sixty percent of the vote, the white working-class voters, that percentage keeps getting smaller and smaller.”
Indeed, in the four years since George W. Bush’s reelection, 5 million new voters had gone to the polls, 2 million of them black, 2 million Hispanic, and 600,000 Asian. Obama got 8 in 10 of their combined votes. Meanwhile, the white voting population remained unchanged.
Obama’s campaign also benefited from extraordinary support from an energized swell of young voters, those ages 18 to 29, a group already more ethnically diverse than any of the generations before them. They gave Obama 66 percent of their votes compared to 32 percent for John McCain. Those ages 30 to 44 chose Obama over McCain, 52 to 46 percent. And Obama even edged McCain among voters ages 45 to 64.
And despite all of the hand-wringing about the ultimate fate of Hillary stalwarts, particularly after McCain selected a woman, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, as his running mate, Obama triumphed with women, besting McCain 56 percent to 43 percent. The votes of women had been both overwhelming and decisive, since women made up 53 percent of the electorate. It was a stronger performance with women than by any presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984. The gender gap with McCain was on par with John Kerry’s performance in 2004 and larger than McCain’s advantage among whites.
Obama’s victory was broad and deep. In the end, 69.5 million Americans voted for Obama, nearly 10 million more than chose McCain. Obama won a majority of independents, and nearly 10 percent of Republicans. The Democratic ticket won more than 70 percent of gay and lesbian voters and more than 70 percent of Latinos. Obama won surprise victories in North Carolina and conservative Indiana, whose proximity to his home media market in Illinois paid dividends. And he won the crucial swing states of Florida and Ohio, thanks in part to a flood of early votes. No Democrat had won a simple majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter. (Bill Clinton won three-way contests in 1992 and 1996.) And Obama bested John McCain by a decisive 7-point margin.
The election had turned on the nation’s weariness with the Iraq War, the panic over the spiraling economic recession, and widespread fatigue with the Bush administration. The opportunity to elect the nation’s first black president, who vowed to heal the divisions of North versus South, black versus white, and red versus blue, ultimately redounded to Obama’s favor. The raw venom coursing through the McCain-Palin campaign rallies, where the name of the Democratic candidate was spat out like a curse—Barack . . . Hussein . . . Obama—and where accusations by Palin that the senator from Illinois was “palling around with terrorists,” amid shouts of “traitor!”, “off with his head!”, and even “kill him!” repulsed white suburban voters, leading Time columnist Joe Klein to denounce the “sewage” emanating from the Republican campaign.
IN 2008 HILLARY CLINTON HAD SEEN HER POLITICAL DREAMS, and those of millions of women who had supported her, deferred. But Obama’s victory had, in some sense, been hers, too, and Shirley Chisholm’s, and Fannie Lou Hamer’s; it was built on a foundation of hope and civic ambition that each of them had helped to build.
But the sense of euphoria, among Democrats and among some in the media, that the nation had turned an historic corner in its racial history, toward a post-racial future, was premature at best. Obama’s moment in the sun of seeming racial reconciliation would be brief, and the transition to the darkness of racial division would be wrenching for the new president, for his party, and for the country.
CHAPTER 8
Post-Racial
The irony of Barack Obama is this: He has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear . . . and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 2012
THE OBAMAS ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON TO A CRUSH OF EXPECTATIONS and excitement not seen in Washington since the Kennedys and the Reagans. The Washington press seized on the parallels to Camelot—from the couple’s young children to the fashion designers clamoring to dress the new First Lady and the way black women adored and related to Michelle to the couple’s celebrity friendships (George Clooney! Oprah! Jay-Z and Beyoncé!). But the media also fixated on echoes of Lincoln, on whether the “team of rivals” approach that brought Hillary Clinton int
o the cabinet as secretary of state would yield cooperation or conflict, and whether Obama’s entry into the White House marked the beginning of the “post-racial” future that Lincoln’s bold stroke of emancipation was supposed to have set in motion so long ago.
Placing Hillary in such a powerful role sent a strong signal to women in the United States and abroad, and brought the public narrative of bitterness between Clinton World and Obama World to a close. But a sense of cynicism ran deep within parts of the Clinton camp. “He was brilliant for picking her,” said one Clinton ally, calling the choice “from Obama’s standpoint one of the smartest decisions he ever made,” while adding sardonically, “What better way to shut down Bill Clinton for the next four years so he couldn’t criticize you?” Friends cautioned the former First Lady to keep her eyes open. “Make sure you know him well enough that you can trust him, that he’s not gonna throw you under the bus,” one old Washington friend and longtime Clinton hand recalled telling her. “But boy, what a great opportunity to do good.” Apparently, Bill Clinton had given her the same advice.
Hillary’s ascension as a loyal member of the Obama cabinet brought an end to any lingering public anger at the former president among African Americans, who soon shifted their focus to the new administration and the possibilities it held for reversing the intense economic suffering of the country, which was being felt even more acutely by communities of color. For African Americans, the start of the new administration seemed like the beginning of a golden age.
Obama came into office with high approval ratings, across the racial divide. He installed a handful of African Americans in prominent, “first in history” positions in his administration. Patrick Gaspard was named political director; Susan Rice, the Clinton-era State Department official and a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, was appointed United Nations ambassador; and Eric Holder was nominated as attorney general. But no one in the administration would have more influence than Valerie Jarrett.
