Obama’s advisers had “talked him into disinviting me,” and that Obama had told him, “You can get pretty rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out in public.” Obama was miffed when he saw Wright’s comments, but decided not to break with him then and there. “He was retiring; I had a strong commitment to the church community … My instinct was to let him stay out of the limelight and not make a bigger deal out of it,” Obama recalled to the reporter. However, Obama said that he had told his staff: “Let’s pull every single sermon that Wright made, because it could be an issue, and it could be attributed to me, and let’s at least know what we’re dealing with.” He added: “That never got done.”
The normally careful Obama team dropped the ball. Axelrod told the NEWSWEEK reporter, “I had been asking” for a “readout of all his sermons,” but “I didn’t get it.” (He blamed himself for not following up.) Instead, the campaign watched with growing dismay on the evening of Thursday, March 13, 2008—less than two weeks after the Texas and Ohio primaries—as ABC News aired video clips of the Reverend Wright, delivering a sermon on the Sunday after September 11 declaring that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” for its own acts of “terrorism” and fulminating, “God damn America … that’s in the Bible! For killing innocent people! God damn America!”
As it happened, Obama was in the middle of another potential mess, dealing with questions about his relationship with Tony Rezko, a Chicago fixer convicted of extorting bribes from lawmakers. In 2006, Obama had bought a small piece of property next to his Chicago home from Rezko—nothing illegal; the Obamas had paid a fair price—but as Obama acknowledged, any personal financial dealing with an influence peddler like Rezko looked bad, especially for a would-be political reformer. That Thursday night in March, as the Reverend Wright story was exploding on cable TV—an endless loop of video clips of Wright ranting—Obama was scheduled to go to the Chicago Tribune offices the next day and spend “as long as necessary” answering questions about Rezko. During his nearly three-hour grilling at the Tribune building on March 14, Obama patiently answered questions, in a thorough if lawyerly way, until there were no more.
Obama was worn out, or should have been. But that same night, he announced to David Axelrod, “I want to do a speech on race.” Axelrod’s own instinct was to get as far away from the Reverend Wright as possible. Other top staffers were also wary of making any broad statements about race. Obama’s top staffers avoided the topic of race, not only publicly, but in their internal deliberations. Only one of the top staffers, Valerie Jarrett, was black. She would occasionally push the campaign to be more race-conscious, insisting that Obama’s ads in Iowa include some photos of blacks as well as whites. But other top staffers saw Obama’s racial ambiguity as an asset. If black voters wanted to claim him as the black candidate, fine. If voters wanted to see him as biracial or post-racial, that was fine, too. David Plouffe thought that race was mostly a distraction—his eye was always on the numbers, on racking up the delegates. He did not want Obama in any way to be defined by racial politics.
Obama himself had an intuitive sense of when to emphasize his blackness, and when not to. When he was speaking to crowds of black voters, he would use a deeper voice and seem more casual and instinctive; with whites, his voice would become flatter and more nasal, his attitude more deliberate. He had a way of telling his black supporters to just shrug off racial innuendo. He used a phrase borrowed from Malcolm X to warn black voters to ignore Internet rumors (like the one that he had taken an oath of office by swearing on a Qur’an). “They’re trying to bamboozle you,” Obama said at one event in South Carolina in January. “It’s the same old okie-doke. Y’all know about okie-doke, right? … They try to bamboozle you. Hoodwink ya. Try to hoodwink ya.” He seemed to catch himself: “All right, I’m having too much fun here,” he said, and changed the topic. Obama knew when to distance himself from black nationalists. Over Valerie Jarrett’s objections (she was afraid he would alienate black voters), he had denounced the Rev. Louis Farrakhan during a debate in the fall.
Wright’s rants needed to be answered. But how? There was no great internal debate within Obama’s staff, in part because no one really knew what to do. But Obama did. Although, back in November, he had breezily told Donna Brazile and her “Colored Girls” group that he would not bring up race, in fact his own search for his racial identity was central to his being, and he knew that sooner or later he might have to broach the subject with voters. For several months, he had been thinking about giving a broader speech on the subject of race, and now the moment had arrived. Obama had his own sense of timing and purpose. He knew that Wright’s remarks could stir racial fears that could become a cancer on the campaign unless some steps were taken to cut it out, and that he was the only one skillful enough to attempt the operation.
Obama spent much of the next three nights working on the speech, which he essentially wrote himself. Delivered at an appropriate setting—a museum devoted to the U.S. Constitution in Philadelphia—his half-hour address was a tour de force, the sort of speech that only Barack Obama could give. He had taken some saccharine but sincere advice from his mother—to judge not, to always look for the good in people—and internalized a true sense of tolerance. He had the ability to empathize with both sides— to summon the fear and resentment felt by blacks for years of oppression, but also to talk about how whites (including his grandmother) could fear young black men on the street, and how whites might resent racial preferences for blacks in jobs and schools. He ended with a moving scene, a story of reconciliation between an older black man and a young white woman.
When he walked backstage at the Constitution museum, he found everyone in tears—his wife, his friends and his hardened campaign aides. Only Obama seemed cool and detached. The speech was “solid,” he said, as his entourage, tough guys like Axelrod and former deputy attorney general Eric Holder, choked up. The candidate had seemed unflappable the whole weekend, his late nights notwithstanding. He was, from time to time, given to moments of mild amusement. While the Obamas and their aides were dining the night before, Marty Nesbitt, Obama’s close friend and basketball buddy, called Obama on his cell phone and said, “Man, look, this is like a blessing in disguise.” Obama held the phone away and said to the table, dryly, “Nesbitt says this is a blessing in disguise.” On the other end, Nesbitt could hear the laughter. “Really,” Nesbitt spluttered, […continued on page 6]