Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  As had been true of the Ohio and Texas primaries, the results had little impact on our delegate lead. But there was no denying we’d taken a serious hit. Political insiders speculated that if the results of the next two big contests (Indiana, where Hillary had a solid lead, and North Carolina, where we were heavily favored) showed any further erosion in our support, superdelegates might start running scared, giving Hillary a realistic chance of wresting away the nomination.

  Such talk grew appreciably louder several days later, when Jeremiah Wright decided to make a round of public appearances.

  I had spoken to him only once after the video came out, to let him know how strongly I objected to what he’d said, but also to say that I wanted to shield him and the church from any further fallout. I don’t remember the details, just that the call was painful and brief, his questions full of hurt. Had any of these so-called reporters bothered to listen to the full sermons? he asked me. How could they selectively edit a lifetime of work down to two minutes? Listening to this proud man defend himself, I could only imagine his bewilderment. He’d been a sought-after speaker at America’s leading universities and seminaries, a pillar of his community, a luminary within not just Black churches but many white ones as well. And then, in what felt like an instant, he’d become a national object of fear and derision.

  I felt genuine remorse, knowing this was all because of his association with me. He was collateral damage in a struggle he’d played no part in choosing. And yet I had no meaningful way to salve his wounds, and when I made the practical—if transparently self-interested—suggestion that he lie low for a time and let things blow over, I knew he felt it as just one more affront.

  When it was announced that Reverend Wright would be giving an interview on Bill Moyers’s show and then a keynote address at a Detroit NAACP dinner and then an appearance before the National Press Club in Washington, all just ahead of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries in early May, I fully expected the worst. As it turned out, the first two appearances were notable mainly for their restraint, with the reverend coming across as more theologian and preacher than provocateur.

  Then, at the National Press Club, the dam broke. Strafed by questions from the political press and flustered by their unwillingness to consider his answers, Reverend Wright unleashed a rant for the ages, gesticulating as if he were at a tent revival, eyes glistening with righteous fury. He pronounced America racist at its core. He suggested that the U.S. government was behind the AIDS epidemic. He praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. The attacks on him were all racially motivated, and my denunciation of his earlier statements he dismissed as just “what politicians do” in order to get elected.

  Or, as Marty would later put it, “he went full ghetto on their ass.”

  I missed the live broadcast, but watching the replay, I knew what I had to do. The following afternoon, I found myself sitting on a bench in a high school locker room in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with Gibbs, staring at walls painted industrial green, the stale smell of football uniforms wafting about, waiting to deliver the press statement in which I would permanently sever my relationship with someone who had played a small but significant part in making me the man that I was; someone whose words had once served as a tagline for the speech that put me on the national stage; someone who, for all his now inexcusable blind spots, had never shown me anything but kindness and support.

  “You okay?” Gibbs asked me.

  “Yep.”

  “I know this can’t be easy.”

  I nodded, touched by Gibbs’s concern. It wasn’t the norm for the two of us to acknowledge the pressure we were under; Gibbs was a warrior first, a prankster second, and on the road we usually opted for easy banter and profanity-laced humor. But perhaps because he’d grown up in Alabama, he understood better than most the complications of race, religion, and family, and how good and bad, love and hate, might be hopelessly tangled in the same heart.

  “You know, I’m not sure Hillary’s wrong,” I told him.

  “About what?”

  “About me being damaged goods. I think about it sometimes, how this isn’t supposed to be about my own ambition. It’s supposed to be about making the country better,” I said. “If the American people can’t get past this Wright thing, and I stagger my way into the nomination, only to lose the general, what good have I done?”

  Gibbs put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re not going to lose,” he said. “People are looking for something real, and they’ve seen it in you. Let’s just get this shit behind us once and for all, so we can get back to reminding them why you should be president.”

  My brief statement, in which I unequivocally denounced and separated myself from Reverend Wright, served its purpose. If it didn’t fully allay voter concerns, it at least convinced reporters I had nothing further to say on the matter. Back on the campaign trail, we refocused our attention on healthcare, jobs, the war in Iraq, unsure of exactly how things would all play out.

  Then we got some help from an unexpected quarter.

  Throughout the spring of 2008, gas prices had been skyrocketing, mostly the result of various supply disruptions. Nothing got voters in a bad mood like high gas prices, and eager to get out ahead of the issue, John McCain had proposed a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax. Hillary immediately endorsed the idea, and the team asked me what I wanted to do.

  I told them I was against it. While it had some superficial appeal, I knew it would drain an already depleted federal highway fund, leading to fewer infrastructure projects and jobs. Based on my experience as an Illinois state senator, where I’d once voted for a similar proposal, I was sure that consumers wouldn’t see much benefit. In fact, gas station owners were just as likely to keep prices high and boost their own profits as they were to pass the three-cents-a-gallon savings on to motorists.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Plouffe and Axe agreed. In fact, Axe suggested that we highlight my opposition as more proof that I was willing to be straight with voters. The next day, I stood outside a gas station and made my argument before a gaggle of reporters, contrasting what I considered a serious, long-term energy policy with the typical Washington solution that both McCain and Hillary were proposing. It was a bit of political posturing, I said, designed to give the impression of action without actually solving the problem. Then, when both Hillary and McCain tried to paint me as out of touch and unconcerned with what a few hundred dollars might mean to America’s working families, we doubled down, shooting a TV ad on the issue and running it nonstop throughout Indiana and North Carolina.

  It was one of our prouder moments, taking a tough position without the benefit of polls and in the face of pundits who thought we were crazy. We began seeing signs in the polling data that voters were buying our argument, though none of us at this point—not even Plouffe—fully trusted data anymore. Like a patient awaiting the results of a biopsy, the campaign lived with the possibility of a bad outcome.

  The night before the primaries, we held an evening rally in Indianapolis featuring a performance by Stevie Wonder. After my stump speech, Valerie, Marty, Eric, and I parked ourselves in a small room, enjoying the music, some beer, and a cold chicken dinner.

  We were in a reflective mood, reminiscing about the joys of Iowa, the heartbreak of New Hampshire, volunteers we’d met and new friends we’d made. Eventually someone brought up Reverend Wright’s appearance at the National Press Club, and Marty and Eric began taking turns acting out some of the more excruciating lines. Whether it was a sign of exhaustion, or anxious anticipation of the next day’s voting, or maybe just us recognizing the absurdity of our circumstances—four longtime friends, African Americans from the South Side of Chicago, eating chicken and listening to Stevie Wonder while waiting to see if one of us would become the Democratic nominee for president of the United States—we all started to laugh and couldn’t stop, the kind of deep, tear-induci
ng, falling-out-of-your-chair laughter that’s a kissing cousin to despair.

  Then Axe walked in, wearing his most forlorn look.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, still laughing and trying to catch my breath.

  Axe shook his head. “I just got our overnight numbers…had us down twelve in Indiana. I just don’t think we’re going to make it.”

  For a moment, everyone grew quiet. Then I said, “Axe, I love you, but you’re a downer. Either grab a drink and sit down with us or get the fuck out of here.”

  Axe shrugged and left the room, taking his worries with him. I looked around at my friends and raised my beer in a toast.

  “To the audacity of hope,” I said. Clinking our bottles, we started to laugh as hard as before.

  * * *

  —

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, in a Raleigh hotel room, Gibbs read me the election results. We’d won North Carolina by fourteen points. More surprisingly, we had pulled out an effective tie in Indiana, losing by just a few thousand votes. There would be six more contests before the official end of the Democratic primary season, and a few weeks would pass before Hillary’s belated but gracious concession speech and endorsement, but the results that night told us that the race was basically over.

  I would be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

  In my speech that night, I began the pivot to the general election, knowing there wasn’t a minute to waste, telling our audience that I was confident that Democrats would unite to prevent John McCain from continuing the legacy of George W. Bush. I spent some time talking to Axe about potential running mates and then phoned Toot to tell her the news. (“It really is something, Bar,” she said.) Well past midnight, I called Plouffe back at our Chicago headquarters, and the two of us went over what we needed to do to get ready for the convention, less than three months away.

  Lying in bed later, unable to sleep, I took a silent inventory. I thought about Michelle, who had put up with my absences, held down the home front, and overridden her reticence about politics to become effective and fearless on the stump. I thought about my daughters, as lively and cuddly and engaging as ever, even when I didn’t see them for a week. I thought about the skill and focus of Axe and Plouffe and the rest of my senior team, how they never gave any indication of doing what they did for money or power, and how in the face of unrelenting pressure they’d proven loyal not just to me and to one another but to the idea of making America better. I thought about friends like Valerie, Marty, and Eric, who’d shared my joys and eased my burdens along every step, asking nothing in return. And I thought about the young organizers and volunteers who’d braved bad weather, skeptical voters, and their candidate’s missteps without wavering.

  I had asked something hard of the American people—to place their faith in a young and untested newcomer; not just a Black man, but someone whose very name evoked a life story that seemed unfamiliar. Repeatedly I’d given them cause not to support me. There’d been uneven debate performances, unconventional positions, clumsy gaffes, and a pastor who’d cursed the United States of America. And I’d faced an opponent who’d proven both her readiness and her mettle.

  Despite all that, they’d given me a chance. Through the noise and chatter of the political circus, they’d heard my call for something different. Even if I hadn’t always been at my best, they’d divined what was best in me: the voice insisting that for all our differences, we remained bound as one people, and that, together, men and women of goodwill could find a way to a better future.

  I promised myself I would not let them down.

  CHAPTER 8

  ENTERING THE SUMMER OF 2008, our campaign’s first order of business was unifying the Democratic Party. The prolonged and bruising primary had left hard feelings between Hillary’s staff and mine, and some of her more ardent boosters threatened to withhold their support unless I put her on the ticket.

  But despite speculation in the press of a possibly irreparable breach, our first post-primary meeting, held in early June at the Washington home of our colleague Senator Dianne Feinstein, proved to be courteous and businesslike, if not without tension. At the outset, Hillary felt obliged to get a few things off her chest, mainly having to do with what she considered unfair attacks by my campaign. As the winner, I felt obliged to keep my own complaints to myself. But it didn’t take long to clear the air. The bottom line, she said, was that she wanted to be a team player—for the good of the Democratic Party, and for the good of the country.

  It may have helped that she sensed my sincere admiration. Although I would ultimately decide that having her as a running mate posed too many complications (including the awkwardness of a former president roaming the West Wing without a clear portfolio), I was already considering a different role for her in an Obama administration. How Hillary felt about me, I couldn’t say. But if she harbored any doubts about my readiness for the job ahead, she kept them to herself. From our first public appearance together a few weeks later, in a small New Hampshire town called Unity (corny, but effective), until the very end of the campaign, both she and Bill did everything we asked of them with energy and a smile.

  With Hillary on board, the team and I got busy designing our broader electoral strategy. Like the primaries and caucuses, a presidential general election resembles a big math puzzle. Which combination of states do you need to win to get the requisite 270 electoral votes? For at least twenty years, nominees of both parties had come up with the same answer, assuming that the majority of states were inalterably Republican or Democratic, and therefore concentrating all their time and money on a handful of big battleground states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

  Plouffe had a different idea. One happy by-product of our interminable primary was that we’d campaigned in every nook and corner of the country. We had battle-tested volunteers in a number of states Democrats had historically ignored. Why not use that advantage to compete in traditionally Republican-leaning territory? Based on the data, Plouffe was convinced we could win western states like Colorado and Nevada. With a big boost in turnout among minority and younger voters, he believed we even had a chance in North Carolina, a state that hadn’t gone Democratic in a presidential election since Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Virginia, which hadn’t gone Democratic since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Broadening the electoral map would give us multiple paths to victory, Plouffe argued, and would also help down-ballot Democratic candidates. At a minimum, it would force John McCain and the Republican Party to spend resources shoring up their vulnerable flanks.

  Among the various Republicans who had competed for the presidential nomination, I had always considered John McCain to be most worthy of the prize. I had admired him from afar before I got to Washington—not only for his service as a navy pilot and the unimaginable courage he’d shown during five and a half harrowing years as a POW, but because of the contrarian sensibility and willingness to buck Republican Party orthodoxy on issues like immigration and climate change that he’d shown in his 2000 presidential campaign. While we were never close in the Senate, I often found him insightful and self-deprecating, quick to puncture pretension and hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle.

  McCain did enjoy being something of a press corps darling (“my constituency,” he once called them), never passing up a chance to be on the Sunday morning news shows, and among his colleagues he had a well-earned reputation for volatility—quick to explode over small disagreements, his pallid face reddening, his reedy voice rising at the first sign of a perceived slight. But he wasn’t an ideologue. He respected not only the customs of the Senate but also the institutions of our government and our democracy. I never saw him display the race-tinged nativism that regularly infected other Republican politicians, and on more than one occasion, I’d seen him display real political courage.

  Once, as the two of us stood in the well of the Senate waiting for a vote, John had con
fided to me that he couldn’t stand a lot of the “crazies” in his own party. I knew this was part of his shtick—privately playing to Democrats’ sensibilities while voting with his caucus about 90 percent of the time. But the disdain he expressed for the far-right wing of his party wasn’t an act. And in an increasingly polarized climate, the political equivalent of a holy war, McCain’s modest heresies, his unwillingness to profess the true faith, carried a real cost. The “crazies” in his party mistrusted him, they considered him a RINO—Republican in Name Only—and he was regularly attacked by the Rush Limbaugh crowd.

  Unfortunately for McCain, it was precisely these voices of the hard Right that were exciting the core GOP voters most likely to vote in presidential primaries, rather than the business-friendly, strong-on-defense, socially moderate Republicans McCain appealed to and was most comfortable with. And as the Republican primary wore on, and McCain sought to win over some of the very people he professed to despise—as he abandoned any pretense of fiscal rectitude in favor of even bigger tax cuts than the Bush tax cuts he’d once voted against, and hedged his position on climate change to accommodate fossil fuel interests—I sensed a change taking place in him. He seemed pained, uncertain—the once jaunty, irreverent warrior transformed into a cranky Washington insider, lassoed to an incumbent president with an approval rating around 30 percent and a hugely unpopular war.

  I wasn’t sure I could beat the 2000 version of John McCain. But I was increasingly confident that I could beat the McCain of 2008.

  * * *

  —

  THAT’S NOT TO say I thought the race would be easy. In a contest against an American hero, the election wouldn’t be decided on issues alone. Indeed, we suspected that the central question was likely to be whether a majority of voters could get comfortable with the idea of a young, inexperienced African American senator—one who hadn’t previously served in the military or even an executive office—filling the role of commander in chief.