by Joy-Ann Reid
Jarrett was from the rarefied upper echelons of black Chicago, linked by birth to three of the city’s storied black families: the Dibbles, the Bowmans, and the Taylors. Her father, James Edward Bowman, was a renowned geneticist. Her mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, was a University of Chicago trustee whose father, Robert Rochon Taylor, once managed the historic Rosenwald Building on Forty-Sixth Street and South Michigan Avenue. It was built in the 1920s by Sears, Roebuck & Company president Julius Rosenwald as affordable apartments for middle-class black Chicagoans in the segregated city, and was once frequented by the likes of W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Quincy Jones, who as a child lived in the building, where his mother became the manager, and his father was a carpenter. Taylor rose to become the first African American to lead the Chicago Housing Authority, lending his name to what would become a notorious sprawl of housing projects on the city’s South Side. Jarrett’s great-grandfather Robert Robinson Taylor, the son of a white slave owner and a black mother from Tuskegee, Alabama, was the first black graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her cousin Ann Dibble is married to civil rights icon, Clinton friend, and urbane elder statesman Vernon Jordan.
A veteran of the Daley and Harold Washington administrations in Chicago, Jarrett, as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s deputy chief of staff, had in the early 1990s hired the then Michelle Robinson, who brought her fiancé, Barack Obama, along to their first dinner to size Jarrett up. She became a friend and mentor to Michelle, and increasingly an adviser and friend to Obama as well. She introduced the couple to Martha’s Vineyard, the summer vacation haunt of upper-middle-class black families for a century, where their children could escape the world of segregation and isolation and be together on Inkwell Beach in quiet Oak Bluffs, among their racial and social peers.
The Obamas built their own alliances in Chicago, to be sure. “Michelle Obama’s friendships and connections got that man into power,” one close observer of the couple said. Among her circle were the children of Rev. Jesse Jackson and John W. Rogers Jr., who was the son of Jewel Lafontant and Tuskegee Airman John Rogers Sr., ex-husband of the first family’s social secretary, Desiree Rogers, and a key Obama fund-raiser and friend. And Barack Obama had, over time, cultivated a multiracial circle that included judges and professors at the University of Chicago, his state senate mentor, Emil Jones, and elements of Chicago’s moneyed class. Judge Abner Mikva, a former legal counsel to President Clinton, tried to hire Obama out of law school; Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker became a friend when her children played basketball at the YMCA where Michelle’s brother was the coach; and Bettylu Saltzman, the daughter of a shopping mall tycoon who was also part owner of the Chicago Bulls, sought Obama out after meeting him as he stumped for Project Vote, while she was volunteering on Bill Clinton’s campaign. Saltzman believed he had what it took to become the first black president and she financially supported his subsequent runs for office.
But Jarrett opened the door to a wider world of important Hyde Park donors and political advisers who were key to Obama’s success once he decided to run for office. She became a key adviser on his presidential campaign, where she was placed in charge of “constituency groups”—a political euphemism for the minorities, the LGBT community, and other out-groups inspired by the Obama project, but who often found themselves on the back burner in Democratic campaigns that for decades had placed more emphasis on winning over blue-collar white Democrats and independents. Black, Latino, and gay staffers relied on her to intervene with the senior staff in Chicago when their complaints that the senior leadership was too reticent to take the campaign into the heart of the black community or to spend money with black media and political consultants fell on deaf ears.
She arrived in Washington as senior adviser to the president, and the one member of the administration with equal influence in the East and West Wings. Other top staffers, including Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s new chief of staff, and later William Daley, his successor, were made to understand in no uncertain terms that, to paraphrase one former Obama cabinet member, Valerie reported to no one but the president. “She’s a family member. She’s not a staffer,” the former cabinet member said. “And I think people underestimate her.”
Jarrett occupied a rare space, as both friend and gatekeeper, “testing the waters” for Obama on policy matters and enjoying the couple’s complete trust. The position didn’t always make her popular inside the White House, particularly with Emanuel, a fellow veteran of Chicago’s bare-knuckle politics whose irascible manner made for caustic moments in the West Wing and on Capitol Hill. Jarrett’s closeness to the family even confounded some longtime political insiders in Chicago, who groused that Jarrett was more Daley acolyte than consummate insider within traditional black political circles, and that in her role as granter and denier of access, she was freezing out Obama’s black Chicago allies, too.
Even people who had been close to Obama in Chicago and to the campaign were being told, including by Barack Obama, “if you need anything, just call Valerie.” In addition to her policy portfolio, Jarrett was tasked with interacting with the governors and with black political, media, and civil rights leaders. Said one longtime Obama ally from Chicago of the indirect route to conferring with the new president: “It was a waste of time.”
If the arrangement was painful for some of Obama’s old allies, it proved helpful for some of the new. Sharpton, whose bona fides with the new president, and with Jarrett, were solid, and black media figures such as D.C. radio veteran Joe Madison and then CNN host Roland Martin, the former editor of the black Chicago Defender weekly newspaper, quickly found a comfortable seat at the table. But others, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, felt frozen out. They had waited more than a decade for the Democrats to return to the White House, and many never believed they’d see a black president in their lifetimes. Jarrett was often the first point of contact for Black Caucus staffers, and sometimes the last, as entreaties for face time with the president went nowhere. Emanuel was viewed by many as dismissive and the president as distant. The new White House was viewed as opaque by many on Capitol Hill, and in particular by Black Caucus members and civic leaders who had sided with Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.
Worse, for some, was the fact that while the administration was filling up with veterans of the Clinton administration, including people like Rice, Gaspard, and Holder, who’d broken ranks with the Clintons during the Democratic primary, black Clintonites who’d stuck with the First Lady were being passed over.
“The perception was that the white Clinton people were brought in, while the black Clinton people felt that they were given a scarlet letter,” said one prominent African American civic leader. “They felt that the white Clinton people—Larry Summers, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel—a whole host of these people got . . . well . . . absolution.”
The Obama team saw it differently, believing that early tensions with the Black Caucus and with black civic leaders stemmed not from presidential snubs, but from a dearth of personal, staff-level relationships.
“None of them really knew our camp,” one former Obama adviser said. “It was a challenge managing expectations from the community and elected leaders and influencers because their reference was always the Clintons and how good they were at team building.”
Others on the Obama team viewed the frayed relationship as stemming from lingering resentment toward, not from, the incoming administration, particularly among members of the Black Caucus.
“The first year in the White House, they didn’t seize the moment in the way that I thought they could have,” said another ex–White House staffer, referring to Hillaryites within the Black Caucus. “There was never a coherent approach to how they handled the Obama moment, to how they pivoted as a group.”
Indeed, with a handful of exceptions, members of the caucus felt an untenable distance from the new president, and that caused them to be alarmed about issues that were front and center in their d
istricts—from the alarming rates of black poverty and unemployment in black communities to gaps in educational attainment and racial profiling by police. Many believed they were confronting the ultimate historical irony: that even with a black president and a euphoric black body politic, African Americans in Congress had precious little influence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Washington veterans began to suggest to the new White House team, and to the president, that they reach out to caucus members, but the entreaties seemed to go nowhere. And members complained that Emanuel showed open disdain, not just for the Black Caucus, but for Democrats on the Hill, and particularly the party’s liberal wing. This new administration appeared uninterested in the hand-to-hand grappling with Congress that Bill Clinton had so reveled in, and that had produced important legislation that could be felt on the streets.
Part of this simply was the president’s personal style. Obama had no intention of going out of his way to court the denizens of Capitol Hill. The days of frequent golf outings with members and dinner invitations to the White House or to Camp David, common in the Clinton years, were not going to be repeated. The kind of glad-handing that fuels Washington politics was just not in Obama’s personality. “And that filters down to the staff,” said one former staffer. “No one wants to be the skunk at the garden party pushing him to do these things, even if at the end of the day it would help to get the work done.”
The Black Caucus met for the first time with the new president in late February 2009. It would be a year before the major national civil rights leaders would do the same, though Jarrett’s office continued to be a valve for contact. Some significant donors to the campaign found their calls going unreturned.
“I talk to a lot of people who gave a lot of money” to the Obama campaign, one D.C. insider said. “And they tell as many tales of woe, of giving a whole bunch of money and not being able to get on the phone, not being able to get a picture with [the president], not being invited to the White House, never being invited to a State Dinner . . . the stories just go on and on. Take the chair of the Democratic Party of—pick a state—and you run into them and they say, ‘I haven’t been in the White House since Bill Clinton left.’ ”
Left most conspicuously on the outside were Obama’s harshest critics during the campaign, most notably Rev. Jesse Jackson. Some blamed the rift on the older man’s tic of criticizing Obama’s approach to African Americans during the campaign. Others said Jackson had been reluctant to acknowledge Obama’s ascendancy as a genuine movement. Sharpton surmised that civil rights leaders might get to have a special relationship with just one president. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter had their parries with Woodrow Wilson over the scourge of lynching; Walter Francis White, T. Arnold Hill, and Mary McLeod Bethune engaged with Franklin Roosevelt; Dr. King and other civil rights leaders had their jousts and collaborations with Kennedy and Johnson. For Jackson, for better and for worse, his presidential relationship had been with Bill Clinton.
And though Obama held a level of respect for Jackson, aides said he simply didn’t give the relationship much thought, though they said others, including Jarrett, did keep accounts.
“Valerie is very much a protector of Obama’s dignity,” a former staffer said. “And so with Jesse Jackson, where some folks would want to say, ‘let’s let him back in,’ she’s like, ‘no, you can’t say you want to cut his nuts off and then come in.’ ”
The Obama team was not anxious to make peace with critics who they didn’t think had a broad enough standing to move significant masses of African Americans away from Obama or who they felt had been disrespectful or extreme. That left black critics like Cornel West and Tavis Smiley on the outside, too.
Bill Clinton’s approach toward them would have been very different, former aides to both presidents said. He would have told them off in colorful fashion and then listened to what they had to say. But according to one early adviser, “The new-school way is deafening silence. In the new-school way, nobody talks to Tavis.”
The administration had little time to worry about hurt feelings. They’d inherited an economy in free fall, including collapsing housing and banking markets, and an opposition party that was determined from the beginning to undermine the new president at all costs, and to cut short the nation’s euphoria at having crossed a key Rubicon in its racial history. Vice President Joe Biden would later say that more than a half dozen Republican colleagues told him, as early as the transition, that their marching orders from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell were specific and damning: no cooperation with the administration, on anything, ever. Biden recounted to writer Michael Grunwald that Republican friends had described it as “our ticket to coming back.”
The administration spent most of the first year focused on two goals: wresting the economy from the depths of the Great Recession and getting a universal health-care bill through Congress; the latter goal was met with deep skepticism by Emanuel but fully supported by Jarrett, who viewed it as key to Obama’s governing as the man he’d run to be.
But health care and the economy were not destined to be the president’s only first-year legacies. It wouldn’t be long before the new president and the country would be reminded that the notion of a “post-racial” America, and one in which the first black president’s race was incidental to the conduct of his office, was a beautiful delusion, one that had been exposed long before Barack Obama and his family moved into the White House.
DATING BACK TO THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE CAMPAIGN, A DARK vein of resistance to Obama’s candidacy due to his race arose periodically. There was former Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro’s comment that Obama would never have been in a position to defeat Hillary Clinton had he not been black. Republican congressman Geoff Davis of Kentucky said, “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.” A California Republican women’s group issued gag currency they called “Obama bucks”—food stamp send-ups with Obama’s head on the body of a donkey, surrounded by spare ribs, Kool-Aid, and fried chicken. And Buck Burnette, a University of Texas Longhorns lineman, updated his Facebook status after the election to declare: “All the hunters gather up, we have a nigger in the whitehouse [sic].”
Michelle Obama, so celebrated in the national press, was subjected to the basest racial distortions. She was depicted in online memes as an unfeminine brute and beast, derided in conservative columns as a dangerous, “whitey”-hating, America-loathing radical. The term “Obama’s baby mama” was used on Fox News, and National Review called her “Mrs. Grievance.”
The attacks didn’t end with the election, and even the Obama girls, just seven and ten years old when their father took the oath of office, wouldn’t be spared. But the new president found himself under a microscope calibrated to detect any hint that he was reacting to the slings and arrows of national politics from the perspective of a black man. The attacks on him and his family had to be borne with a special type of dignity. Every president before him had borne some measure of ridicule, parody, and hatred, the reasoning would go. Why not him? Why should attacks on him be especially scrutinized for racist intent?
Barack Obama had burst onto the national stage by “transcending” race and by practicing consistent and convincing racial ecumenism. The onus was on him and his African American first family to represent America’s racial progress and to be the Cosby Show Huxtables in real life. Even Mrs. Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, who in 2009 moved from her Chicago home to the White House to help care for the couple’s young daughters, a move not without precedent, from the mother-in-law of President John Tyler to the father-in-law of Benjamin Harrison to multiple family members of Andrew Jackson, was under constant scrutiny.
One false policy move, untoward word, or flash of anger would snap the hair trigger of skepticism about whether the real first black president truly did represent all Americans, and not just “his own people.” Any black politician elected outside a safely black district knew “the Rules” for stayin
g racially neutral. They had been around for decades, though this was the first time they were being applied to a president of the United States.
One month into the nascent administration, Eric Holder broke the Rules.
On February 18, a cartoon in the New York Post lampooned the nearly $1 trillion economic recovery package, rejected by Republicans and passed almost entirely by Democrats. The Post cartoon referred to the horrific news story of a Connecticut woman who had been mauled by a pet chimpanzee. In the cartoon, two police officers stand over the body of a blood-spattered, dead primate. “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” the caption read.
The cartoon drew immediate outrage as it flew across the Internet. Rev. Sharpton issued a statement denouncing it as “troubling at best, given the historic racist attacks [on] African Americans as being synonymous with monkeys.” New York governor David Patterson called on the paper to explain. The Post, owned by conservative mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose international media empire includes Fox News, was a longtime opponent of Democrats, local and national, and had sparred with Sharpton for decades. Its editor vigorously defended the comic as mocking the stimulus package and not the president. But for African Americans, it read as the kind of bestializing that black men and women had been subjected to for centuries, written off as comedy to many on the right, but touching a deep vein of ugly historic memory in black minds and souls.
On the day the cartoon ran, Holder was giving his first Black History Month address to the staff at the Justice Department. His speech touched on historic memory, too, and on the inability of black and white Americans to confront it equally.
Holder, a former judge and deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, had joined other Clinton veterans, such as David Wilhelm, Susan Rice, and Patrick Gaspard, in choosing Obama over Hillary in the Democratic primaries. He became a senior legal adviser to the campaign of a man he’d met roughly a year before.
