“this is really a blessing in disguise.” Obama replied, “Yeah, well …” and Nesbitt could hear more raucous laughter.
But it was a blessing in disguise. Wright gave Obama a chance to deal directly with issues that had been the source of whispering or underhanded attacks in the lower precincts of politics, to take the high road on a matter of pressing national importance but on a subject that can be difficult to honestly discuss. He had shown calm good judgment.
Nonetheless, a close reading of the speech suggests more than a hint of personal grandiosity. Obama was giving the voters a choice: they could stay “stuck” in a “racial stalemate.” Or they could get beyond it—by, well, voting for him. “We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day, and talk about them from now until the election … We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will flock to John McCain … We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And then nothing will change.” But if you vote for me—now—this time, Obama strongly implied, blacks and whites could come together and deal with the greater challenges facing the country, of health care and education, want and war. At times like this, Obama seemed to project that he was “the One” that Oprah had rhapsodized about. In the speech, he was careful to be modest (“I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy—particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own”). But the implicit message was: I Am the One, Choose Me—or this historic moment may pass, never to be recovered.
The Clinton campaign was careful not to exploit the Wright imbroglio, or at least careful not to get caught at it. At Clinton headquarters, Harold Ickes took a call from Greg Sargent, a reporter from Talking Points Memo, one of the new generation of bloggers shaking up the old media. Sargent wanted to know, does Wright ever come up in conversations with superdelegates? The superdelegates, party leaders and top congressional Democrats, were Clinton’s last hope as Obama rolled toward a majority of elected delegates. They could, theoretically at least, save her candidacy, though they would have to buck the popular vote to do so. Ickes talked to superdelegates every day, trying to hang on to their support. He told TPM that, yes, the superdelegates were concerned about Wright. He soon received a call from Maggie Williams, the campaign boss. Harold, she said, we don’t need to be talking about the Reverend Wright.
Hillary Clinton believed that Obama’s problems with white working-class voters made him unelectable, and she could be blunt about it when she got on the phone with superdelegates who threatened to switch to Obama. “Bill, he can’t win!” she shouted on the phone to Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico. The Clintons were particularly anxious to cultivate the support of Richardson, who was popular with Hispanics. Bill Clinton had watched the Super Bowl with Richardson; cameras recorded the scene—two slightly overweight middle-aged men catching a ball game but not looking all that comfortable in each other’s company. In the end, Richardson endorsed Obama. James Carville, the Clintons’ favorite hit man, compared Richardson to Judas.
The Clintons’ dream of restoration was dying. Yet, curiously, in many ways Hillary Clinton found her voice in the spring of 2008. At rallies, recalled Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who was brought in in a last-ditch attempt to bring peace and order to the campaign, people would come up to the senator and say, “Don’t give up.” At a debate in Austin, Texas, she gave a very moving closing statement about the people who had it much tougher than she did. Hoarse and bleary-eyed, she bounced around the country (this time in a charter plane with staff and press—no more private business jets), performing with a combination of gumption and grace.
But she undercut her diminishing chances in April by inexplicably boasting that she had come under sniper fire at an airport in the Balkans during her husband’s presidency. She was trying to show that she was a battle-hardened global peacemaker, but since there were videotapes of her being greeted by happy schoolchildren on the tarmac, the press had a field day mocking her. Obama made his own gaffe—telling some rich San Francisco fundraisers that the working-class people in Pennsylvania clung to guns and God out of “bitterness.” There was some truth to Obama’s off-hand remark (the definition of a “gaffe,” columnist Michael Kinsley wrote, is a politician telling the truth). But to many proud and faithful gun-owning members of the working class, Obama was just plain wrong and certainly condescending. The “bitterness” remark risked long-term damage. It opened him to the charge that he was an effete academic snob, out of touch with working-class people.
The campaign drifted into a kind of grinding stasis, with Clinton unable to overcome Obama’s lead but Obama unable to finally clinch the nomination. The low point for Obama came at the end of April, when the Reverend Wright popped up again. First in a sympathetic interview with Bill Moyerson PBS, then in a thumping speech to the NAACP and finally in an over-the-top performance at the National Press Club, Wright did his best to draw the spotlight back on him and on his wide set of grievances. Egged on by a claque of cheering black ministers at the press club, Wright delivered what Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times described as “a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics.” Waiting to go live for the event, MSNBC called David Axelrod for comment on Wright. “He is doing his own thing,” said Axelrod, wearily. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
In Chicago, Eric Whitaker, Obama’s close friend, watched the rebroadcast with alarm. “I called him [Obama] that night and told him that he really needed to watch the video of it,” Whitaker said. “He told me, ‘I don’t know if I can. I think it’s going to be too painful to watch’.”
A week later, with close contests in Indiana and North Carolina looming, Whitaker and two others of Obama’s close friends, Marty Nesbitt and Valerie Jarrett, went to support the candidate as he attended a Stevie Wonder concert and worked a factory late shift in North Carolina. It was a “low period,” Jarrett recalled, as the four of them stood in the drizzle and the mud waiting for the factory workers. Obama was “hurt” and “struggling,” she recalled. Nesbitt found him anxious and fretful, shaken “off his usual steady state.” Obama liked to control his own story, and now he was being “subjected to someone else’s craziness,” Whitaker recalled. The three friends tried to lighten Obama’s mood, joking around about nothing in particular. “We had him laughing for a minute,” said Nesbitt. “But it was laughter to keep from crying,” said Whitaker. Then Axelrod arrived to announce, “The polls in Indiana look really, really bad,” and everyone shouted, “Come o-o-o-o-on,” recalled Jarrett.
But the next night Obama won big in North Carolina even as he was losing narrowly in Indiana. On NBC, Tim Russert, regarded as an oracle by his peers and most of the political world, pronounced, “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it.” It was finally over—except that it wasn’t, quite—not until Hillary Clinton surrendered.
She was determined to campaign to the last, hoping against hope that the superdelegates would come around to her argument that Obama was unelectable. This was not an argument that he wanted to get caught up in. From the headquarters of the “No-Drama Obama” campaign the word went out: do not engage, do not inflame, do not say or do anything that might suggest Clinton did not have the right to finish the campaign. On one conference call, someone said, “We’ve just got to keep biting our lips, biting our lips.” Adman Jim Margolis piped up, “OK, but my lip is starting to hurt.”
Obama shook off his disappointment about Wright and kept on campaigning, though it was obvious that he was not happy burning time and money that could have been spent turning to John McCain. On May 20, the night of the primaries in Oregon (a satisfying win in a liberal state) and Kentucky (another discouraging blowout in Appalachia; he had lost West Virginia the week before by 41 points), he stood off-stage at the Des Moines Historical Society Museum in Iowa. He had wanted to go back to the state of his first great triumph to give a speech unofficially kicking off the fall campaign, even though Clinton officially was still in the race. “That’s an interesting belt buckle,” he said to Michelle, mischievously. She feigned offense and said, “I am interesting, next to you. Surprise, surprise, a blue suit, a white shirt and a tie.” Obama grinned and bent down until he was almost at eye level with her waist. He jabbed a playful finger toward her belt buckle, and let loose his inner nerd. “The lithium crystals! Beam me up, Scotty!” Obama squeaked, laughing at his own lame joke as Michelle rolled her eyes.
On June 3, the last day of the longest-ever primary season, Obama finally secured enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee. It was midnight before the Obama plane was wheels-up out of Minnesota, a state he needed to keep blue in November. The candidate had just given a rousing speech. If ever there was a time to party, this was it. “OK, pretty big night,” Jim Margolis said to Obama. “You just locked up the nomination—how about a beer?” Obama started to say yes, then stopped. “We won’t hit the ground until 3 in the morning, and I’ve got AIPAC first thing—I better not,” he said. “OK, I’ll have two,” said Margolis. Obama was anxious about AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Elderly Jewish voters in Florida—a key swing state in November—were telling reporters that they were leery of Obama, that some of them were not ready to vote for an African-American. The real campaign had begun.
Next: McCain’s inner circle overhauls the campaign, and takes aim at Obama.
[Click here for Part 4]