Fracture

by Joy-Ann Reid

  UNLIKE OBAMA, WHO PROCEEDED ON MATTERS OF RACE WITH cautious deliberation, Holder, the son of Barbadian parents who raised their two boys in the mostly black, middle-class suburb of Elmhurst, Queens, had the bearing of an activist. Ten years older than Obama and with a New Yorker’s pugnaciousness, he often recounted the time he was stopped by police while sprinting through an upscale neighborhood with a friend, trying to make the start of a movie. At the time, he happened to be a federal prosecutor.

  Holder’s Justice Department speech was expansive, touching on the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, integration, affirmative action, and the broad civil rights movement. He spoke of his late sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, one of the two black students to face down Governor George Wallace to integrate the University of Alabama in 1963. And he talked about the need to heal communities long scarred by crime and mistrust with police. But Holder began his speech with a damning assessment of the state of interracial dialogue; it landed like a fully armed rocket when it reached the national media.

  “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” the attorney general said, “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

  Holder went on to explain that unresolved issues of race remain front and center in America’s politics and culture, though “we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and given our nation’s history this is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

  Within hours, conservative blogs were denouncing Holder and trying to use his presence as the attorney general and Obama’s as president—and even Martin Luther King Day—as proof that the nation had paid its racial debts. But these were some of the same voices insisting that a monkey cartoon lampooning the first black president was just a monkey cartoon.

  The White House was caught off guard by the outcry over Holder’s speech. The new administration had no intention of wading into racial conflict, preferring to keep the president focused on the needs of all Americans, and principally on the economy. Anything that “racialized” the Obama presidency was unwelcome in the West Wing.

  Asked about Holder’s comments by New York Times reporter Helene Cooper in early March, Obama said that had he been advising his attorney general, “we would have used different language.” Obama concurred with the underlying point of Holder’s speech, saying, “We’re oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race until there’s some sort of racial flare-up or conflict,” and as a country, “[we] could probably be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.” But Obama was quick to pivot to a focus on the nation’s progress. “I’m not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions,” he said. “I think what solves racial tensions is fixing the economy, putting people to work, making sure that people have health care, ensuring that every kid is learning out there. I think if we do that, then we’ll probably have more fruitful conversations.”

  WHATEVER THE PRESIDENT’S ANNOYANCE OVER THE BLUNTNESS of the attorney general’s words, Holder had exposed a truth that to black Americans seemed both obvious and glaring: their countrymen too often ease their discomfort over racial disparities by ignoring the subject of race altogether, except on those occasions when it sputters and spills out in ugly e-mails and Facebook posts, gag food stamps with Barack Obama’s picture on them, ugly rally signs, and unfortunate newspaper cartoons. His speech earned him widespread acclaim among African Americans, who quickly took notice of the attorney general. And Holder had strong supporters inside the White House, including Gaspard and Jarrett and the president himself. He had no intention of walking his comments back. On the contrary, Holder would continue to be a lightning rod.

  From the start, the new attorney general had stated his determination to revive the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which had become moribund and dispirited under the previous administration. There had been large numbers of resignations as pressure mounted to pursue mythic voter fraud and what many longtime division lawyers viewed as politicized, partisan cases. Holder put an end to that quest in a bid to revive what he saw as the department’s original mission: safeguarding voters from impediments to access to the polls, vigorously responding to alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act as the country headed toward a new census and a fresh round of federal and state gerrymandering. An admirer of Nicholas Katzenbach—Robert Kennedy’s successor who as attorney general brought federal troops to Alabama and personally faced down Governor George Wallace to break the infamous “stand at the schoolhouse door”—Holder saw his role as grounded in Katzenbach’s example: protecting vulnerable citizens from the caprice of state power by bringing federal authority to bear.

  Holder had his critics on the left who thought he and the president did not vigorously pursue the titans of Wall Street who had brought about the collapse of the economy. They also blamed him for not surmounting congressional opposition to the closing of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, and for his failure to secure federal prosecution for accused terrorists imprisoned there. Those criticisms were a source of deep frustration for Holder, who determined early on that there were no strong cases to bring against Wall Street bankers. But for civil rights leaders, he was an immediate friend.

  By the summer of 2009, Democrats had claimed their sixty-vote majority in the Senate, after resolving the seat in Minnesota, where a lawsuit by his opponent forced Al Franken to wait until July 7 to take his seat, and once Biden and Obama’s seats in Delaware and Illinois were filled (the latter ended in the indictment of the state’s governor). However, Republicans had honed their strategy of total obstruction, calling upon the same device segregationist Democrats once used in order to stall civil rights legislation: the filibuster. It was in those months that the health-care bill—an Obama priority since the campaign—was making its way, slowly, painfully, and publicly, through the Senate.

  The president’s opponents soon had the perfect vehicle to exploit the tortured process for political gain.

  The day after Holder’s “nation of cowards” speech, a former hedge fund manager and commodities trader from Chicago, Rick Santelli, launched into an extended rant on CNBC, denouncing what he saw as Obama’s mortgage bailout, in which the financial industry would be forced to write down the amounts due on mortgages that had ballooned far beyond the value of the homes they were tied to. The policy, called “cram down,” had been a key request of the administration from progressive and civil rights groups. The big banks, not surprisingly, were vehemently opposed.

  “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise your hand!” Santelli raged, vilifying “deadbeat” homeowners. “President Obama, are you listening!?”

  The rant went viral, punctuated by Santelli’s call for a July Fourth “Chicago tea party.” The swelling opposition from the Right to everything the president was doing, from financial reform to health care, now had a name. And while the origins of the “tea party movement” had roots in Chicago’s libertarian movement dating back to 2002, Santelli popularized it and aimed the laser straight at Obama.

  Coincidentally, the president’s chief economic advisers, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, were counseling the White House away from the actions the financial industry was so up in arms about, and as a result the president was getting heat from the Left because he seemed to avoid progressive solutions to the housing crisis. Liberals were learning that they may have underestimated the extent to which Obama’s pragmatism outweighed his idealism.

  As the White House and Democrats in Congress mov
ed toward passage of the health-care bill, the road got increasingly ugly as town hall meetings turned raucous. Tea party protesters claimed the president was secretly planning “death panels” to discard the elderly and disabled, cried “socialism!” and carried homemade signs equating Obama with African witch doctors and Adolf Hitler.

  In the midst of it all, the president followed Holder into the thicket of racial outrage.

  On July 16, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., an Obama friend and the head of Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies. Gates had accidentally locked himself out of his home and was attempting to gain entry when a neighbor called 911 to report a possible break-in. Gates became angry when Sergeant James Crowley didn’t believe he lived in the home and removed him from his porch in handcuffs. And though the Cambridge Police Department later dropped disorderly conduct charges against the professor, the officer refused to apologize, saying he had followed proper procedures. The local police union stood firmly behind Crowley, even as Gates threatened to sue.

  At a July 22 prime-time press conference, Obama responded to a question about the incident. “Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”

  President Obama was speaking off the cuff, and as Gates’s friend. But he had broken the rules of comportment, particularly for a man who had billed himself as a practitioner of racial healing, not racial confrontation. His comments set off an immediate firestorm. Conservative commentators accused the president of race-baiting and of an outrageous attack on law enforcement. For the first time in his political career, Barack Obama was discovering what it was like to be Al Sharpton.

  The speed and vehemence of the uproar shocked the White House. They had come to Washington prepared to fight on the familiar ground of spending and taxation, and to engage in the battles that were necessary to pass health-care reform. But Obama had not intended to light any bonfires on race as president. In an attempt at healing, a “summit” was hastily arranged for the next week, in which Crowley and Gates would sit for a photo opportunity in the Rose Garden with the president and Vice President Biden, who during the fall campaign served as a key validator for Obama with white, blue-collar voters. The goal of this “beer summit,” as it came to be known, was to create a patina of national healing. The “teachable moment” was punctuated by exhortations about “disagreeing, without being disagreeable.”

  As political theater, it was pure Barack Obama—the very picture of midwestern moderation and probity. But the damage was already done. A Pew poll taken five days after the press conference showed that Obama’s approval rating among white Americans had slipped from 53 percent to 46 percent, while the approval of nonwhite and/or Hispanic Americans climbed 11 points, from 63 to 74 percent.

  African Americans thought Obama had spoken truth to a power many found onerous and omnipresent: the police. He’d also exposed the reality of racial profiling, even of a man who’d done everything right, becoming educated and successful and affluent. And Obama had done the exposing from the pulpit of the presidency, which gave his exhortations a power they had never known. It was cathartic, particularly coming from a man who up to this point had been so measured in his public pronouncements on race.

  The Pew poll also found that white Americans blamed Gates more than Crowley for the incident by 7 percentage points, and overwhelmingly disapproved of the president’s handling of the incident, by a margin of 2 to 1. Of those white Americans who heard a lot about the incident, the level of disapproval was 70 percent versus 23 percent approval. It was just six months into his presidency, and Obama’s racial honeymoon was over. His opponents on the right felt this proved that Obama was no racial healer. He was just another “race hustling” divider, who never had any intention of being everybody’s president.

  The White House team absorbed a lesson that Bill Clinton had learned a generation earlier with the uproar over his “apologies” during his African trip: For even a “post-racial” president, touching the electrified rail of race bears exquisite peril. It was a lesson that would reverberate within the administration for years to come.

  ON AUGUST 26, 2009, SENATOR EDWARD “TED” KENNEDY DIED, ending a life and career that were the stuff of Greek tragedy and Democratic Party legend. The last of the Kennedy brothers, whose every movement had enthralled the national press for fifty years, he had been preceded in death by his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, by just two weeks. With his death, Democrats lost a portion of their collective soul.

  Kennedy had been perhaps the most important of Obama’s endorsers during the campaign, draping the young senator in the mantle of Camelot so badly desired by the Clintons and making a triumphant appearance at the Democratic convention to reprise his most famous words from the gathering in 1980: that “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” Kennedy had long been a champion of the kind of universal health care Obama was seeking. Now, as president, Obama would give the eulogy at the seventy-seven-year-old’s funeral mass in Boston. Earlier that month Obama had awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the man deemed the Lion of the Senate, with the honor received by Kennedy’s daughter on his behalf.

  Kennedy’s funeral mass was grand, attended by four presidents: Obama and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter. The Obamas and Clintons sat together, as they had at Walter Cronkite’s funeral a month before. And Barack Obama was seen wiping away a tear as he stood outside Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Boston, where he had taken a private meeting with the senator’s widow, Victoria.

  Most observers believed that when Kennedy was at full vigor, he would have been able to will this health-care reform through the upper house. But in Obama’s Washington, where he was the object of almost otherworldly scorn by the Right, Kennedy’s loss did nothing to tamp down the opposition. Two weeks after Kennedy’s death, at a massive tea party “march on Washington” led by Fox News host Glenn Beck, some protesters mocked the late Senator with preprinted signs supplied by the anti-abortion American Life League that read: BURY OBAMACARE WITH KENNEDY. Beck had already declared on his Fox News program that Obama was a “racist,” who “hates white people, and the white culture.”

  The health-care fight had taken on racial as well as class dimensions, with wealthy talk show hosts causing their fans to believe the reform’s main tenets involved stealing the tax dollars of the successful and redistributing the proceeds—free medicine, free doctor’s visits, and a new, insidious form of welfare—to minorities and “illegal immigrants” who refused to work. Back in February, radio host Rush Limbaugh had told his audience the health-care bill involved “income redistribution” and was “a civil rights bill” that included “reparations.”

  On September 9, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, making a national pitch for health-care reform before an audience of 32 million television viewers.

  “I am not the first president to take up this cause,” he said, noting a century of trying that began with Theodore Roosevelt and continued through Bill Clinton. “But I am determined to be the last.”

  But as the president sought to refute the claim that illegal immigrants would benefit from the proposed law, the words “You lie!” rang out from Republican congressman Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson, of South Carolina. At various other points in the speech, there were other shouts of “Not true!” as the president vowed that no federal health-care funds would fund abortions, and there were other cries of “Shame!” and “Read the bill,” along with
derisive laughter. Texas congressman Louie Goehmert wore a sign that said, WHAT BILL?

  Wilson’s eruption, punctuated by the word lie, drew particularly scathing condemnation. Few could recall a similar display during a presidential address to Congress, and Wilson was roundly denounced by his colleagues, Democrat and Republican alike: including Minority whip Eric Cantor, fellow South Carolinian Jim Clyburn, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont was fuming as he left the chamber, and told reporters that in his thirty-five years in the Senate, he had never heard such an outburst. Even Obama’s recent opponent, Republican John McCain of Arizona, said the eruption was “totally disrespectful.” Wilson soon apologized and even telephoned the White House and delivered his apology to Emanuel. But by the next day, Wilson was using his status as a conservative folk hero for fund-raising.

  For African Americans, the “you lie” moment spoke to a fundamental lack of respect for the black man who now held the White House, and put a coda on the summer of angry tea party rallies over health-care reform. Wilson’s words, which he called spontaneous, were read by African Americans as a robbery: of the stature normally afforded a president, of a moment granted by tradition and design to the country’s sole, nationally elected leader, and of the political norms that had been in place before the election of the forty-fourth president.

  On March 20, a warm Saturday in the nation’s capital, tea party groups held one of their most vociferous public protests against the proposed health-care law as the House prepared to debate a revised version of the bill. As Democratic House members, including Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and House Whip Jim Clyburn, along with several black lawmakers, including Emanuel Cleaver and John Lewis, were entering the Capitol for the final vote, they were forced to walk past a gauntlet of angry hecklers screaming, “Kill the bill!”