by Obama Barack
“The bear is loose!” Reggie and Marvin would shout a little gleefully during such episodes.
But by the winter of 2008, these impromptu outings occurred less and less often. I knew that unpredictability made my detail’s job harder and increased the risk to the agents. And anyway, the tacos didn’t taste as good as I’d imagined when I was surrounded by a circle of anxious agents, not to mention the crowds and reporters that quickly assembled the moment I was recognized. When I had downtime, I found myself spending it more often in my room—reading, playing cards, quietly watching a ball game on TV.
To the relief of his keepers, the bear became accustomed to captivity.
* * *
—
BY THE END of February, we had built what looked like an insurmountable lead over Hillary in pledged delegates. It was around this time that Plouffe, always cautious in his assessments, called from Chicago to tell me what at some level I already knew.
“I think it’s safe to say that if we play our cards right these next few weeks, you will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.”
After we hung up, I sat alone, trying to take the measure of my emotions. There was pride, I suppose, the jolt of satisfaction a mountain climber must feel looking back at the jagged ground that’s been covered below. Mostly, though, I felt a certain stillness, without elation or relief, sobered by the thought that the responsibilities of governance were no longer a distant possibility. Axe, Plouffe, and I found ourselves wrangling more frequently about our campaign platform, with me insisting that all our proposals withstand scrutiny—less because of the need to defend them during the election season (experience had cured me of the notion that anyone else paid close attention to my plans for tax reform or environmental regulation) than because I might have to actually implement them.
Such projections into the future might have occupied even more of my time had it not been for the fact that, despite the math showing I was going to be the nominee, Hillary simply would not give up.
Anyone else would have. She was running out of money. Her campaign was in turmoil, with staff recriminations spilling out into the press. The only remaining chance Hillary had to win the nomination depended on convincing superdelegates—the several hundred Democratic elected officials and party insiders who were given a vote at the convention and could cast it any way they wanted—to choose her when the party convened in August. It was a slender reed to hang on: While Hillary had started with a big early lead in superdelegates (who tended to announce which way they would vote long before the convention), more and more had committed to us as the primary season dragged on.
And yet she soldiered on, embracing her underdog status. Her voice took on a greater urgency, especially when discussing working-class concerns, offering her willingness to campaign to the bitter end as proof that she’d fight just as hard for American families. With upcoming primaries in Texas and Ohio (states populated by older white and Hispanic voters who tended to lean her way), to be followed seven weeks later by Pennsylvania (a state where she also enjoyed a healthy lead), Hillary assured anyone who’d listen that she planned to take our contest all the way to the convention floor.
“She’s like a fucking vampire,” Plouffe groused. “You can’t kill her off.”
Her tenacity was admirable, but my sympathies extended only so far. Senator John McCain would soon wrap up the Republican nomination, and another two or three months of bitter Democratic primary contests would give him a big head start on laying the groundwork for November’s general election. It also meant that after almost eighteen months of nonstop campaigning, nobody on my team would get a meaningful break, which was unfortunate because all of us were running on fumes.
That probably explains how we came to make the one big tactical error of our campaign.
Rather than set realistic expectations and effectively concede Ohio so that we could focus on Texas, we decided to go for the knockout punch and try to win both. We spent massively in each state. For a week, I shuttled back and forth, from Dallas to Cleveland to Houston to Toledo, my voice raw, my eyes bloodshot—hardly looking like a herald of hope.
Our efforts had a modest effect on the polls, but they lent credence to the Clinton campaign’s claim that a victory for her in Texas and Ohio could fundamentally reset the race. Meanwhile, the political press, seeing these primaries as perhaps my final test before securing the nomination and eager to sustain a drama that had proven to be a cable news ratings bonanza, gave more prominent coverage to Hillary’s attacks on me, including an ad she ran contending that I wasn’t ready to handle the “three a.m. phone call” involving a crisis. When all was said and done, we lost Ohio (decisively) and Texas (just barely).
On the flight from San Antonio back to Chicago after the primary, my team’s mood was grim. Michelle barely said a word. When Plouffe attempted to lighten things by announcing that we’d won Vermont, it barely elicited a shrug. When someone else offered up the theory that we had all died and entered purgatory, where we were destined to debate Hillary for all eternity, no one laughed. It felt too close to the truth.
Hillary’s victories didn’t change the delegate count in a meaningful way, but they put enough wind in her campaign’s sails to guarantee at least two more months of bitter primaries. The results also gave her camp fresh ammunition for an argument that seemed to be gaining traction with reporters—that I couldn’t connect with white working-class voters, that Latinos were lukewarm at best about me, and that in an election of this importance, these weaknesses could make me a very risky Democratic nominee.
Just one week later, I found myself wondering if they were right.
* * *
—
IT HAD BEEN more than a year since I’d given much thought to my pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But on March 13, we woke up to discover that ABC News had compiled a series of short clips culled from several years of his sermons, skillfully packaged to fit a two-minute segment on Good Morning America. There was Reverend Wright calling America “USA of KKK.” There was Reverend Wright saying, “Not God bless America. God damn America.” There was Reverend Wright, in living color, explaining how the tragedy of 9/11 might in part be explained by our record of military interventions and wanton violence overseas, a matter of “America’s chickens…coming home to roost.” The video offered no context or history; in fact, it could not have portrayed Black radicalism more vividly, or provided a more surgical tool to offend Middle America. It was like a Roger Ailes fever dream.
Within hours of its initial broadcast, the video was running everywhere. Inside my campaign, it felt as if a torpedo had blown through our hull. I issued a statement, forcefully denouncing the sentiments expressed in the video, while also emphasizing all the good work that Reverend Wright and Trinity did in Chicago. The next day, I appeared at an already scheduled meeting with the editorial boards of two newspapers and then did a round of network TV interviews, each time offering a condemnation of the views expressed in the video clips. But no sound bite could offset the harm. The image of Reverend Wright kept rolling across TV screens, the cable chatter continued nonstop, and even Plouffe admitted we might not survive this.
Later, Axe and Plouffe would fault themselves for not having had our researchers obtain the videos a year earlier, after the Rolling Stone article hit, which would have given us more time to do damage control. But I knew the blame lay squarely on my shoulders. I may not have been in church for any of the sermons in question or heard Reverend Wright use such explosive language. But I knew all too well the occasional spasms of anger within the Black community—my community—that Reverend Wright was channeling. I did know how differently Black and white folks still viewed issues of race in America, regardless of how much else they had in common. For me to believe that I could bridge those worlds had been pure hubris, the same hubris that had led me to assume that I could dip in and out of a compl
ex institution like Trinity, headed by a complex man like Reverend Wright, and select, as if off a menu, only those things that I liked. Maybe I could do that as a private citizen, but not as a public figure running for president.
Anyway, it was too late now. And while there are moments in politics, as in life, when avoidance, if not retreat, is the better part of valor, there are other times when the only option is to steel yourself and go for broke.
“I need to make a speech,” I told Plouffe. “On race. The only way to deal with this is to go big and put Reverend Wright in some kind of context. And I need to do it in the next few days.”
The team was skeptical. We’d booked the next three days solid with events, without any real time to spend on what could end up being the most consequential speech of the campaign. But we had no choice. On a Saturday night, after a day of stumping in Indiana, I went home to Chicago and spent an hour on the phone with Favs, dictating the argument I’d formed in my mind. I wanted to describe how Reverend Wright and Trinity were representative of America’s racial legacy, how institutions and individuals who embodied the values of faith and work, family and community, education and upward mobility, might still harbor bitterness toward—and feel betrayed by—a country they loved.
But I had to do more than that. I had to explain the other side, why white Americans might resist, or even resent, claims of injustice from Blacks—unhappy with any presumption that all whites were racist, or that their own fears and day-to-day struggles were less valid.
Unless we could recognize one another’s reality, I’d argue, we would never solve the problems America faced. And to hint at what such a recognition might mean, I would include a story that I had told in my first book but had never spoken about in a political speech—the pain and confusion I had experienced as a teenager, when Toot expressed her fear of a panhandler at a bus stop—not only because he had been aggressive but because he was Black. It hadn’t made me love her any less, for my grandmother was a part of me, just as, in a more indirect way, Reverend Wright was a part of me.
Just as they were both a part of the American family.
As I wrapped up the call with Favs, I remembered the one time Toot and Reverend Wright had met. It had been at my wedding, where Reverend Wright hugged my mother and grandmother and told them what a wonderful job they’d done raising me, how proud they should be. Toot had smiled in a way I rarely saw her smile, whispering to my mother how the pastor seemed quite charming—although she got a bit uncomfortable later, when during the ceremony Reverend Wright described the conjugal obligations of the newlyweds in terms far more vivid than anything Toot had ever heard in the Methodist church of her childhood.
Favs wrote the first draft, and for the next two nights, I stayed up late, editing and rewriting, finishing finally at three a.m. on the day I was to deliver it. In the holding room at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, Marty, Valerie, and Eric Whitaker, as well as Axe, Plouffe, and Gibbs, joined me and Michelle to wish me luck.
“How you feel?” Marty asked.
“Good,” I said, and it was true. “I figure if it works, we get through this. If it doesn’t, we probably lose. But either way, I’ll be saying what I believe.”
It worked. The networks carried the speech live, and within twenty-four hours, more than one million people had watched it on the internet—a record at the time. Reviews from pundits and editorial writers around the country were strong, and the effect on those in the hall—including Marty, who was photographed with a fat tear running down his cheek—indicated I had touched a chord.
But the most important review came that evening, when I placed a call to my grandmother in Hawaii.
“That was a very nice speech, Bar,” she told me. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
“Thanks, Toot.”
“You know I’m proud of you, don’t you?”
“I know,” I said. And it was only after I hung up that I allowed myself to cry.
* * *
—
THE SPEECH STANCHED the bleeding, but the Reverend Wright situation had taken a toll, particularly in Pennsylvania, where Democratic voters skewed older and more conservative. What kept us from an outright free fall was the hard work of our volunteers, an influx of money from small donors that helped us run ads for four weeks, and the willingness of some key state officials to vouch for me with their white working-class base. Chief among them was Bob Casey, the affable Irish Catholic son of the state’s former governor and one of my colleagues in the U.S. Senate. There wasn’t much upside for him—Hillary had broad support and was likely to win the state—and he hadn’t announced his endorsement when the Reverend Wright video hit the news. And yet, when I called Bob before my speech and offered to free him from his commitment to endorse me in light of the changed circumstances, he insisted on going forward.
“The Wright stuff’s not great,” he said in a bit of world-class understatement. “But I still feel like you’re the right guy.”
Bob then backed up his endorsement with decency and courage, campaigning by my side for more than a week, up and down Pennsylvania. Slowly, our poll numbers began ticking back up. Although we knew a victory was not in the cards, we figured a three- or four-point loss remained within reach.
And then, on cue, I made my biggest mistake of the campaign.
We’d flown to San Francisco for a big-dollar fundraiser, the kind of event that I generally dreaded, taking place in a fancy house and involving a long photo line, shiitake mushroom hors d’oeuvres, and wealthy donors, most of them terrific and generous one-on-one but collectively fitting every stereotype of the latte-drinking, Prius-driving West Coast liberal. We were running late into the evening when, during the obligatory question-and-answer session, someone asked me to explain why I thought so many working-class voters in Pennsylvania continued to vote against their interests and elect Republicans.
I’d been asked a form of this question a thousand times. Normally I had no problem describing the mix of economic anxiety, frustration with a seemingly unresponsive federal government, and legitimate differences on social issues like abortion that pushed voters into the Republican column. But whether because I was mentally and physically worn-out, or because I was just impatient, that’s not how my answer came across.
“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania,” I said, “and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.”
So far so good. Except I then added, “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
I can provide the exact quote here, because in the audience that night was a freelance writer who was recording me. To her mind, my answer risked reinforcing negative stereotypes some Californians already had about working-class white voters and was therefore worth blogging about on Huffington Post. (It’s a decision I respect, by the way, though I wish she had talked to me about it before writing the story. This is what separates even the most liberal writers from their conservative counterparts—the willingness to flay politicians on their own side.)
Even today, I want to take that sentence back and make a few simple edits. “So it’s not surprising then that they get frustrated,” I would say in my revised version, “and they look to the traditions and way of life that have been constants in their lives, whether it’s their faith, or hunting, or blue-collar work, or more traditional notions of family and community. And when Republicans tell them we Democrats despise these things—or when we give these folks reason to believe that we do—then the best policie
s in the world don’t matter to them.”
That’s what I believed. It’s why I’d gotten votes from rural white voters in downstate Illinois and Iowa—because they sensed, even when we didn’t agree on an issue like abortion or immigration, that I fundamentally respected and cared about them. In many ways they were more familiar to me than the people I spoke to that night in San Francisco.
And so I still brood about this string of poorly chosen words. Not because it subjected us to a whole new round of bludgeoning at the hands of the press and the Clinton campaign—although that was no fun—but because the words ended up having such a long afterlife. The phrases “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion” were easily remembered, like a hook in a pop song, and would be cited deep into my presidency as evidence that I failed to understand or reach out to working-class white people, even when the positions I took and policies I championed consistently indicated the contrary.
Maybe I’m overstating the consequences of that night. Maybe things were bound to play out as they did, and what nags at me is the simple fact that I screwed up and don’t like being misunderstood. And maybe I’m bothered by the care and delicacy with which one must state the obvious: that it’s possible to understand and sympathize with the frustrations of white voters without denying the ease with which, throughout American history, politicians have redirected white frustration about their economic or social circumstances toward Black and brown people.
One thing’s for certain. The fallout from my gaffe that night provided my San Francisco questioner a better answer than any verbal response I might have given.
* * *
—
WE LIMPED THROUGH the remainder of the Pennsylvania campaign. There was the final debate in Philadelphia, a brutal affair consisting almost entirely of questions about flag pins, Wright, and “bitter.” Campaigning across the state, an invigorated Hillary touted her newfound appreciation for gun rights—Annie Oakley, I called her. We lost by nine points.
