The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  And yet, another close aide to the Clinton campaign said, "Bill Clinton sometimes forgets he's a former President and he behaves like a history teacher, and he'll say something that is historically true but rings the wrong way coming from him. We were not sensitive enough. Remember, we were exhausted. All we were hearing from the press was how much we sucked, how Obama was heading a change movement, how our crowds were smaller than his--and this pisses you off, it beats you down. In eight days, you go from having no conversation about race at all to having it be a huge subject. You don't quite feel it happening because of everything else going on. It's the fog of war. You are like a frog in boiling water. You don't quite sense the life being drained out of you until it's too late."

  Some of Clinton's friends watched what was happening with a mixture of dismay and sympathy. "All through the Bush years, black America and liberal America really loved Bill Clinton," one longtime friend said. "Bill could go out and, without a speech in his hand, be brilliant on so many topics. But I think after Obama showed up it was really hard on him not to be the cool guy anymore, not to be the smart guy, or the liberal guy or the black guy."

  Bill Clinton's frustration was so deep, and his lack of discipline so striking, that he told a Philadelphia radio station, "I think they played the race card on me." And later, when he was asked about the remark, he denied having said it.

  The Obama people knew that their best political move was to step back and watch. Meanwhile, on black radio stations, one could hear African-American voters saying that they were dismayed with the Clintons, that they were now crossing over to Obama. "Until Bill Clinton's comments in South Carolina, there were still a lot of black people who weren't convinced Barack could succeed and we were still hearing that old 'Is he black enough?' stuff," said Mona Sutphen, a former aide in the Clinton administration, who became a foreign policy adviser for Obama and ended up as deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House. "When Clinton linked him to Jesse, ironically, he made him black enough.... The dustup turned black folks off. You can't out-black a black man, was the common refrain. If you try to go down that road, it's going to be a disaster."

  In the wake of Super Tuesday, Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton and a Clinton supporter, wrote an angry article in The New Republic saying that reporters' adoration of Obama, together with their notion of the Clintons as sleazy and power-hungry, had allowed them to take innocuous remarks and turn them into racial appeals. "To a large degree," Wilentz wrote, "the campaign's strategists turned the primary and caucus race to their advantage when they deliberately, falsely, and successfully portrayed Clinton and her campaign as unscrupulous race-baiters." Wilentz called such tactics "the most outrageous deployment of racial politics since the Willie Horton ad campaign in 1988 and the most insidious since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, praising states' rights." Wilentz even compared Bill Clinton's situation to that of Coleman Silk, the tragic hero of Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain. Silk, a light-skinned black man who is a professor of classics and who has passed for white all his life, is ruined when, preposterously, he is accused of making racist remarks in his classroom during a period of hyper-vigilant political correctness on campus. Wilentz was not part of the campaign, but he certainly reflected the feelings of the Clintons, who thought that Obama and his advisers were expertly exploiting the charges of race for their political benefit. At the same time, however, Hillary wished her husband would tone down his attacks; they were not helping her. The problem was, she could not bear to confront him herself.

  Not long after Wilentz's article appeared, Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 1984, told the Daily Breeze, a newspaper in Torrance, California, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." A week later, after Ferraro had been heavily criticized and the Clinton campaign failed to embrace her remarks, she told the New York Times, "I am livid at this thing. Any time you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack."

  Privately, Hillary Clinton was deeply frustrated by these eruptions. They were distractions and did her no good. "Her reaction to the President's Jesse Jackson comment in South Carolina was 'Oh no!'" one aide recalled. "She loves him, but she knows what kind of game this is. She remembers that when she said that thing, in 1992, about staying home and baking chocolate-chip cookies, you get burned. That's the environment. And these blips, these moments--people believed that we were engineering them, that we were trying to paint Obama as the 'black candidate.'"

  Hillary Clinton had not adopted Mark Penn's advice to isolate Obama as a "foreign" candidate. The comment of hers that smacked most of rank desperation, however, came in May, 2008, before the Kentucky and West Virginia ballots. "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she told USA Today. She cited an article and polling information in the Associated Press "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how the, you know, whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There's a pattern emerging here." Again, the statement was literally true--white working-class Democratic voters mainly favored her--but the phrasing was so maladroit (to be charitable) and the racial sensitivities so heightened, that Clinton came in for another round of criticism. This time, she was the culprit, not her husband. Charles Rangel, the New York congressman, who was one of her leading black supporters, told the New York Daily News, "I can't believe Senator Clinton would say anything that dumb."

  Mona Sutphen, who became deputy chief of staff for Obama, was among those in Obama's camp who were beginning to see that race was helping far more than it was hurting his candidacy. "The diversity of Barack's background, not that he was African-American per se, was essential," she said. "He was doing well in the places where the electorate was younger, and, the younger the electorate is, the browner it is, the more diverse. He sums up, he is, the embodiment of American diversity. In the end, that played really well for him."

  * * *

  With time, political campaigns tend to be viewed through the triumphalist prism of the winner. Obama's campaign is of such historical importance that it is easy to forget just how close the race actually was. Obama was far from an inevitability. We tend to forget that, if Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency, she, too, would have broken a historical barrier. What's more, Clinton was arguably on the receiving end of more condescension ("You're likable enough, Hillary") and bigoted remarks in the media and on the Internet; along the way, she was compared to everything from a "hellish housewife" to a castrating Lorena Bobbitt.

  One afternoon, months after the election was over and the emotions of the campaign had cooled, a veteran Clinton aide told me about the way he and his colleagues--and the Clintons themselves--had experienced their run against Barack Obama:

  We knew we were walking in a racial minefield--the "racial funhouse," the President called it. It would now be an issue that, no matter what our history, we were white and they were black. By the way, Obama didn't seem to want this, either. But the racial arbiters, it seemed to us, were mainly Northeastern liberals, who had very little contact with African-Americans in their lives--the press.

  The conversations we were having in the campaign were chaotic, confused. Everything was turned on its head, everything was distorted and flipped and skewed. Some people inside thought we should address it. More thought that no, this was never supposed to be part of the campaign. We lived and died by the presumption that we were geniuses, that everything we did and everything that happened was by design and was brilliant. Remember, for sixteen years the Clintons were the big dogs of the Democratic Party. We knew how to win. Who else did? But the Obama campaign was running a Clinton operation--but better than us, cooler, more disciplined. Believe me, the Obama people p
ushed every bit as much opposition research stuff at the press as we did, but their reputation in the press was that they were ... nice. We had the reputation of "the War Room," the tough guys. And, if you are a jewel thief and walk into a jewelry store, all eyes are going to be on you. If you are perceived to be making a false move, you get arrested.

  We still believed that we'd get the benefit of the doubt, that these two people, with their history in civil rights, with a largely African-American management team, were not running a race-baiting campaign. The conventional wisdom, though, was that we were. In the same way that Barack didn't want to be the black candidate, Hillary didn't want to be the female candidate. She made an emotional speech at Wellesley but we got kicked for it, for playing the woman card!

  Both campaigns discovered an old political reality: that exquisite interpretation is a constant in Presidential campaigns--especially when race and gender are such enormous factors. Politics becomes a spectacle of exhausted candidates and their exhausted aides trying to calibrate their words and, no matter what their talents, they cannot hope to be received in some ideal way that assumes their good intentions. The crosscurrents of competition, calculation, malice, frenetic communication, and indiscipline practically guarantee an atmosphere of ongoing crisis, mistrust, and mutual rage. Never mind that the amount of truly intentional malevolence on either side during the 2008 Democratic primary race was, in the light of many earlier campaigns, minimal. This spectacle is a large part of what is called, in the cliche of the time, the "narrative" of politics. Indeed, both Obama and Clinton usually went out of their way not to accent their sense of injury as a means to win sympathy and votes.

  "We did a video," a Clinton aide recalled, "called 'The Politics of Pile-On,' which made her seem like the victim, and she was so mad about that. She said, 'I've spent a long time convincing moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats that I am capable of being a commander-in-chief, I've kicked the shit out of the boys on defense and security issues in these debates, and now you want me to be the victim?' Vogue wanted to do a story by Julia Reed with pictures by Annie Leibovitz. Even though Vogue had done a spectacular rehab job, a cover, after Monica, and probably the most flattering pictures ever taken of Hillary, she said, 'After spending years getting people to take me seriously as a commander-in-chief, a glamorous photo shoot in Vogue doesn't strike me right.'"

  In the end, Clinton's aides realized that their campaign was less agile and cohesive, less romantic than Obama's. Their theme of reliability was the wrong one for the time. "Early on, there was an idea to make her a change candidate, too, and it was even suggested that we'd get a million women to give twenty-five dollars apiece. But by the time we thought to do it, it was decided that it would look desperate," one of her aides said. "We never pivoted successfully from 'strength and experience' to a sense of the person. People always just assumed Hillary was power-hungry, an in-fighter, robotic, and we never got across the sense of her as a devoted public servant. She was badly served by us. We never made her a three-dimensional person, a person with a rich history. We began with the most famous woman in the world and we didn't do enough with it."

  Clinton's aides, like Clinton herself, came to respect the way Obama had played the game they thought that they had mastered above all others--Democratic Party politics. But, despite that respect, the Clintons and their advisers felt an overpowering sense of grievance and resentment, as if the rules of the contest had been written in Obama's favor.

  "Throughout the whole campaign, it felt like we were playing as the visiting team at Soldier Field in Chicago," one aide said. "Every time they did something, the place went wild. Every time we won something, there was silence. Obama was new and he was hopeful and he projected change. And he had a better narrative. Of course, we thought the narrative was full of shit. We didn't understand why his politically calculating chameleon nature was never discussed. We were said to be the chameleons, but he changed his life depending on who he was talking to. He melded himself according to what the situation was."

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Book of Jeremiah

  On March 13, 2008, nine days after Obama lost the Ohio and Texas primaries to Clinton, ABC's "World News Tonight" broadcast video clips of Jeremiah Wright preaching at Trinity United Church of Christ. This was more than a year after Wright had been quoted in Rolling Stone and he was asked not to give the invocation at Obama's announcement speech, in Springfield. Shockingly, neither the Obama campaign nor the Clinton campaign had bothered to do the obvious--dig deeply into recordings of Reverend Wright's sermons, many of which were on sale in the church gift shop. It was a ludicrous oversight. "It's not like we ignored it completely, but what we didn't do is to have people like me say, 'I want to watch all of the tapes,'" David Plouffe recalled. "I didn't do that. Ax didn't do that.... We live in a visual world. The moments in the campaign that really exploded were those that were on video. We failed the candidate in that regard." If a network had found the sermons on the eve of the Iowa caucuses or another early pivotal moment, Obama might have been knocked out of the race in a single stroke.

  Brian Ross, the ABC journalist who put together the report, had been asked by the producers of "Good Morning America" to look into Jeremiah Wright. The job was not especially urgent, Ross felt, but, in mid-February, after a request for an interview was turned down by Wright, he and a couple of assistants went online and, for about five hundred dollars, ordered twenty-nine hours of Wright's sermons on DVD.

  "The Clinton people pushed opposition research but not about Wright," Ross recalled. "We started watching these sermons. They were entertaining enough, but they were endless. It was a low-priority project. But then we started seeing things that were of interest." One day, while he was doing a couple of other things, Ross glanced up at the video of Wright giving a fiery sermon about 9/11. "I thought, Oh, gee. This is something," Ross said. "It had been background noise. What I had really been looking for was a panning shot of Obama in the congregation. Given the efficiency of the Obama operation and how the Tribune and Lynn Sweet at the Sun-Times worked, I figured someone had already gone down this road."

  Once he had assembled the clips of Wright, Ross called one of Obama's spokesmen, Bill Burton. The campaign told Ross about Wright's career in the military, about his importance on the South Side and as a national figure in the black church, but said little about the sermons. Ross and his producer started to prepare a report, including the excerpts from Wright's sermons and some footage of congregants at Trinity praising him.

  The clip on the ABC broadcast that had first caught Ross's attention came from a sermon called "The Day of Jerusalem's Fall," delivered on September 16, 2001--the first Sunday after the Al Qaeda attacks on Manhattan and Washington. "We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon--and we never batted an eye!" Wright shouted angrily. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens! Are coming home! To roost!" The last formulation would have been known to anyone in that church; it was a direct quotation of what Malcolm X said a week after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the remark that led Elijah Muhammad to suspend Malcolm from the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X also charged the U.S. government with complicity in the murders of Medgar Evers, Patrice Lumumba, and four black girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.

  Viewers also saw Wright condemning "the U.S. of K.K.K. A.," castigating Condoleezza Rice for her "Cond-amnesia," and saying, "No, no, no! Not God bless America. God damn America" in a sermon delivered on April 13, 2003, called "Confusing God and Government."

  "When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed," Wright said. "She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put the
m in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest-paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives [young black men] drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no! Not God Bless America. God damn America--that's in the Bible--for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human." In this case, Wright claimed to me, he was quoting not only Biblical injunctions against murder but also William James, who wrote in a letter, "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles."

  The ABC report also showed Wright endorsing an ugly conspiracy theory: "The government lied about inventing the H.I.V. virus as a means of genocide against people of color."

  Within hours, the clips of Wright's sermons were all over the airwaves and the Internet. The day after, the Obama campaign removed Wright from the largely ceremonial African-American Religious Leadership Committee.

  Fox played the clips in a constant cycle and the tabloid New York Post called Wright "Obama's Minister of Hate." But it was not just the right-wing media and Web sites that were attacking Wright. Some liberal and left-wing black journalists were also deeply critical, finding the 9/11 speech heartless and the conspiracy mongering outrageous. Bob Herbert, in the New York Times, called him a "loony preacher"; Patricia Williams, in The Nation, called him a "crazy ex-minister."

  Clinton's operatives had done a cursory review of Wright as early as September, 2007, but the campaign, led by Hillary Clinton herself, decided that pursuing the story too aggressively and attempting to push it to the media was a foolhardy tactic. At first, in their overconfidence, they felt they didn't need to take Obama seriously enough to warrant a risky opposition-research strategy. Then, as Obama's campaign became a greater threat, the Clinton people thought that pushing the story could backfire. If it ever got out that they were behind a leak, they believed, the campaign could be branded as racist. In retrospect, some aides regretted their lack of focus on Wright.