There are probably folks on the left who want me to be Paul Wellstone. And I love Paul Wellstone, but I’m not Paul Wellstone. I don’t agree with everything Paul said. And one of the things you come into office and everybody’s projecting—particularly the way I came in—everybody’s projecting their own views onto you.
—BARACK OBAMA
Barack Obama’s inauguration week in January 2005 appeared to be a time of joy for him and his family, although the pressures of his celebrity were not to abate. During his first news conference in Washington, a reporter asked earnestly, “What is your place in history?” But most of the week was about enjoying the spectacle of the moment.
After taking the oath of office, Obama, Michelle and the two girls strolled across the Capitol grounds to the Library of Congress, where he would greet a party of well-wishers from both Illinois and Washington. Taking the first steps out of the Capitol, Obama and Michelle clasped hands. “Congratulations, Mr. Senator,” Michelle said with a soft kiss. “Congratulations, Madame Senator,” Obama responded with a warm smile. With a handful of journalists trailing along to capture the scene, six-year-old Malia looked up at her father and asked, “Daddy, are you going to be president?” It was such an innocent question, but Obama scanned the reporters in his midst and cautiously withheld an answer. Picking up on the cue was Jeff Zeleny, then a Washington bureau reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Zeleny arched an eyebrow. “Well, Senator, aren’t you going to answer?” Zeleny asked. Obama again ignored the question. Back in Obama’s transitional Senate office, Robert Gibbs received word of Malia’s query and made sure to disseminate it to all reporters who might not have heard the potentially clairvoyant anecdote: Obama’s little daughter had asked if he was going to be president!
As Obama reached the Library of Congress, his party guests were waiting in line to gain entrance. People had come from across Illinois and around Washington to fete Obama. His sister Maya and her husband had traveled from Hawaii. Marty Nesbitt and Valerie Jarrett had come from Chicago, along with an assortment of others. Obama ran up to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who enveloped Obama’s thin frame in a bear hug. Obama had lost nearly ten pounds on the campaign trail that year. “I’m not a toy senator. I’m not a play senator!” Obama said. “I’m a real senator now!” Requests for photographs of the real senator came from all around, and he obliged as many as he could. Jackson, always deft when finding a camera to point his way, hoisted a smiling three-year-old Sasha onto a concrete pillar about four feet tall and posed for photographs with his arm around the bright-eyed girl. After the photo was snapped, Jackson stepped away, leaving Sasha standing atop the concrete pillar by herself. Obama saw his three-year-old daughter stranded on the pillar and rushed over to rescue her. He shot a disapproving glance at Jackson, who was oblivious to Obama’s glare and his own lapse in judgment about the little girl’s safety.
Inside, amid the party of several hundred fund-raisers and Obama stalwarts, the senator assured his audience that his mission to create a fairer, more just America had only begun. “We are bound at the hip,” he said. “We are going to be working hard to make sure that every child gets a decent shot at life and to make sure that every senior citizen is cared for, that the diversity of this country is appreciated and to make sure that we create the kind of nation that these children and your children and your grandchildren deserve. I promise you that this is not the end of the road.” The question was, where did that road now lead?
AS A STAR ATTRACTION IN WASHINGTON, OBAMA DREW APPLICATIONS for staff positions from some of the best talent pools available. Gibbs and Axelrod also had a wealth of connections for finding bright people to run his policy office, legislative affairs, speech writing and other jobs. Fortuitously, one of the most well-regarded chiefs of staff inside the Beltway had just become available because longtime senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota had lost his race. Obama hired Daschle’s top aide, Pete Rouse, a Washington veteran for decades, to run his Senate office.
The first order of business for Obama’s team was charting a course for his first two years in the Senate. The game plan was to send Obama into the 2007–2008 election cycle in the strongest form possible. No politician had gained the sort of attention that he had won so quickly, and his advisers knew that he had a shot at being a vice-presidential selection or perhaps an outside chance at running for president as early as 2008. Obama, pressed by the Chicago media the day after his election, flatly denied that he would run for the Oval Office in 2008. But history was full of politicians who had reversed those kinds of denials about career advancement.
“The Plan,” as his team called it, was formalized on a computer file and was consistently updated as events occurred. It was primarily molded by Axelrod, Gibbs, Rouse and Obama. The Plan was broken into four quarters per year, with his first quarter being dedicated to hiring Senate staff, learning the names and faces of Washington, writing his book, launching his own political action committee to raise money and turning down the volume on his publicity machine (“letting the air out of the balloon,” in Obama’s words). Lowering his profile was the hardest of these to accomplish. Obama was a highly sought commodity, receiving hundreds of speaking requests each week. Moreover, the year began with the first issue of Newsweek magazine splashing Obama’s smiling face on its cover with the title “The Color Purple,” a reference to Obama’s desire to blend America’s red-blue politics into a bipartisan hue. Other media also wanted a piece of Obama, and Gibbs spent most of his time turning down interview requests rather than seeking them out. Another problem in tamping down expectations and his media presence was a Tribune effort by Zeleny to chronicle Obama’s first year in office. The Plan called for Obama’s transition to occur with as little media probing as possible, and Gibbs did all he could to thwart Zeleny’s access to the senator. “If Mike Tackett wants to know what it’s like to be a U.S. senator, he should have run himself,” Gibbs said, referring to Zeleny’s boss, the Tribune’s Washington bureau chief. Yet the competitive, indefatigable Zeleny spent the year chasing Obama from event to event and managed to produce a compelling series of stories.
The Plan called for Obama to spend most of the year tending to the home fires of Illinois to make sure his constituents did not feel forsaken. He conducted nearly forty town hall meetings in Illinois in 2005. Most were packed with attendees and gained him positive media coverage in the local community. Obama also took foreign trips in this first year. He had been selected for the Foreign Relations Committee, an excellent spot for a politician with national ambitions to build a foreign policy résumé. He would visit Russia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, including Israel and Iraq. Then, in 2006, Obama would lift his head from the sand to hit the campaign trail in an effort to raise money and the profiles of Democrats across the country in the party’s effort to retake control of Congress. The second half of that year would be capped by a visit to his father’s homeland of East Africa and the release of his second book.
Despite this detailed sketch by some of the sharpest political minds around, Obama’s first year proved as hard as some of his aides had predicted. The first few months were especially difficult. Understandably, Obama wanted to bring Michelle and the girls to live with him in Washington. He had missed them dearly on the long campaign trail and he wanted to get his “house in order.” There was just one problem with this thinking. Nearly everyone counseled him to keep his family in Chicago. Michelle’s life—and Obama’s refuge from the outside world—remained in Hyde Park. Her mother and her closest friends still lived on the South Side. She still worked at the University of Chicago Hospitals, although she had cut back on her hours during the campaign season. Moving the family to Washington would strip Michelle of this village of support, making her totally dependent on Obama and focusing her life solely around him. Besides, Obama would be traveling back to Illinois every week for town hall meetings, which would have meant leaving Michelle and the girls to fend for themselves in Washington. Axelrod saw this problematic future and turned to his friend Congressman Rahm Emanuel for assistance in heading it off. Axelrod scheduled a dinner between the Emanuels and the Obamas, where using their own experience as an example, Emanuel and his wife, Amy, made the convincing case that it was better to keep the family back in the district rather than bring them to Washington. After some time, Obama realized this was the best course of action and he rented an apartment in Washington and spent Tuesday through Thursday nights there while the Senate was in session. He usually had a full schedule back in Illinois on Saturdays, but Sundays would now be devoted to his family.
There was another ink blotch on this sketch. Writing a book is a full-time job in itself. And writing one while stepping into a new job is a recipe for burnout. Obama had a history of taking on an inordinate number of tasks at once. While he was writing his first book, for example, he was running Project Vote in Chicago. Realizing his full schedule and the time pressures on him, I gave him several months of breathing room before I asked for an interview. When I did see him, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in April, I found the less-than-relaxed, short-tempered version of Obama. We met at a Mexican restaurant in Hyde Park. Obama had a full day of events scheduled, beginning with an early-morning radio program, and was an hour late to our lunch. When he stepped through the door, the face of a middle-aged woman sitting at the first table lit up, and she tried to chat him up about Chicago politics. Obama uncharacteristically showed extraordinarily little patience with the woman, curtly telling her that he was running behind. Later, he told me, “I’m writing a book and I just don’t have any time in my life.” Throughout the year, Obama was as visibly fatigued as during his long stretches on the campaign trail. Waiting to deliver the commencement address at a Chicago college-preparatory academy on the South Side, Obama nodded off during speeches by the school administrators, and he nearly did the same during his own. Standing at the edge of the stage, holding a microphone, his eyes fell shut momentarily and his knee buckled while he was talking to the crowd.
Obama had finally succumbed to abiding by a tight schedule that was defined largely by others. His friends noticed a different Obama through this difficult period. “Does he look happy to you?” Emanuel asked me that spring. “I think the job looked better on paper to him.” Dan Shomon, his former Springfield aide, said his old employer was adapting to the less glamorous aspects of being a celebrity politician—overwork, a dearth of leisure time and a stable of aides making decisions about his life. “Barack is his own man, but he is tightly controlled and in some ways he likes that,” Shomon told me in April 2006. “I mean, he has no time for himself and no life. So by being controlled, that does keep people like you away, people who eat up his time. He can’t go play poker or get a beer or get enough time with his family—and that’s the downside, a big downside. His life is over, and I keep thinking, you know, he really didn’t ask for this.” Another aide made a similar observation about the pitfalls of political fame: “The Barack you knew in the campaign, the one you could just bullshit with in the car, he’s gone now. He no longer exists. He has to watch himself wherever he goes. If he goes somewhere, there is a volunteer there waiting for him and he has to watch what he does and says. He doesn’t have time to be himself except when he is with Michelle. He always has to be on.”
Another aspect of The Plan frustrated some of his friends, his legislative colleagues and particularly his devoutly liberal followers. In order to keep himself as unscathed politically as possible, he became even more cautious in his political approach, avoiding controversy at all costs. In Springfield, Obama had been an unabashed liberal, even when toiling in the minority party. But if he had larger ambitions, his team believed he could not be fitted too uncomfortably with a liberal straitjacket. This plan closely resembled the largely successful model that Hillary Clinton had followed when she won a Senate seat from New York. Keep your head down, remain noncontroversial and make sure to tend to your constituents back home. One close colleague in Congress became irritated when Obama declined to co-sponsor a piece of legislation saying it was “too controversial.” “When you find that bill that eighty percent of the people love, you call me,” the legislator told Obama. “They’re doing the Hillary thing, obviously,” the lawmaker said. “And that’s just so Washington. Oh sure, yeah, let’s just follow the Hillary model.”
This aspect of The Plan did present a double-edged sword. In becoming a more conventional Democratic politician, Obama ran the risk of alienating his core supporters on the left. Indeed, he engendered great antipathy in today’s most visible forum of political debate—the Internet blogosphere. Early in 2006, angry liberals flogged him online for not objecting to the certification of presidential ballots in Ohio and for confirming Condoleezza Rice as President Bush’s secretary of state. Here was this leading critic of the Iraq War arriving in Washington and voting to install in a major cabinet post one of Bush’s top advisers through the launch of the war. Obama voted against the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. But when he voted for cloture for Roberts’s nomination and then defended other Democratic senators who voted in favor of Roberts, he was vilified on the liberal blog the Daily Kos. Obama replied in a long post to the blog that pacified some on the left simply by his recognition of their online criticism. But he also reiterated that he is no flame-thrower from the left—it is just not in his temperament or in his civil approach to politics. Obama told me in an interview at the end of his freshman year:
There are probably folks on the left who want me to be Paul Wellstone. And I love Paul Wellstone, but I’m not Paul Wellstone. I don’t agree with everything Paul said. And one of the things you come into office and everybody’s projecting—particularly the way I came in—everybody’s projecting their own views onto you. And so, I think when people are disappointed that I would not certify the objection in Ohio, well, I actually think George Bush won the election. That wasn’t a safe move—it was actually my genuine belief that George Bush won the election. When people were disappointed about me voting to confirm Condoleezza Rice—I genuinely felt on the merits that the president, on most executive appointments, deserves some deference in order to put together his team, and that we weren’t gonna do better than Condoleezza Rice in this administration when it came to foreign policy. And I actually think that it’s proven to be correct, that she is, you know—the bar is low, but she’s been a moderating influence on this administration when it comes to foreign policy. So I think that what you’ve seen are times where I’ve actually done what I think is best, but you know, there may be some folks who disagree and automatically assume that I’ve done it for political purposes. And the one thing that is frustrating about my position, and I think our political culture generally—frustrating but not surprising, and I don’t blame people for having the assumption—is that [they assume] whatever I do is political, that I’ve got my antennae out and I’m making these calculations. And I think we’ve just gotten so immersed in this cynicism about politics, and as I said, oftentimes for good reasons, that people think whatever you do must be motivated by politics.
Despite this, Obama voted with his party 95 percent of the time in 2005, according to Congressional Quarterly; just eight senators voted more consistently Democratic than he did. Of his hundreds of votes during his first year, Obama agonized over a dozen or so. On those difficult matters, he called his top staff into his office and led freewheeling debates about how to proceed. “We have enough strong personalities here that we definitely get two people on opposite sides of the issue,” said his legislative director, Chris Lu. “And he just loves to have us argue it out in front of him.” Lu was one of the moderate voices in this atmosphere of smart young staffers. Robert Gibbs, the pragmatic southerner who considers political calculations foremost, was the other strong voice pulling to the center in these debates. Lu maintained that Obama was his own man when it came to making tough votes. The staff might leave the room thinking he would vote one way, but he could just as easily go the other. Overriding the arguments of Lu and Gibbs, for instance, Obama was one of thirty-four senators opposing the Military Commissions Act, which gave the military special interrogation capabilities when questioning “high-value detainees.” This was consistent with Obama’s history in Springfield of protecting civil liberties, a belief that is rooted in his in-depth study of the Constitution. “If you want to position yourself in the middle, you’d vote for that bill,” Lu said. “But he fundamentally believed that bill was troubling, that it would basically cut out habeas corpus rights for detainees. As a law professor and somebody who understands the role of due process, who understands sort of the historical origins of habeas corpus, it offended him. . . . And so no matter what Robert and I said about the scary world we lived in or how this vote would play out, you know, in some future thirty-second attack ad, he didn’t care.”
THE ENGLISH PLAYWRIGHT SIR TOM STOPPARD ONCE DESCRIBED HIS dance with the press to the New York Times Magazine in this way: “My reticence is a form of conceit, not of modesty. It has to do with not making myself available.” Indeed, Obama’s plan to not make himself available through much of 2005 had the opposite effect, as one might expect. By turning down interview requests from television networks and other major media, as well as ducking the Tribune’s Zeleny, Obama only magnified the media’s pent-up desire. While derided by some of his closest political friends, the decision to maintain a cautious path in his first year turned out to be masterful in keeping his stock high. Obama made sure that his public schedules reflected every speaking appearance in Illinois, but privately, he was also busy raising money for the party and his newly formed Hopefund political action committee, which had nearly two million dollars by the end of 2005. A Tribune poll late in the year found him with an amazing 72 percent favorable rating among his Illinois constituents.
Legislatively, Obama had few major accomplishments in 2005, although he did advance some measures that would gain him a measure of publicity back in Illinois. His lack of seniority in the Senate—he reminded all audiences that he was ranked ninety-ninth out of one hundred—shielded him from huge expectations on this front. After a series in the Chicago Sun-Times described the slow process of government pay for Illinois veterans, Obama jumped on the issue and pushed the administration to equalize funding. On his town hall tours through Illinois, he noted his work to hike the production of ethanol by increasing the number of gas stations that sell the E85 ethanol blend. He also became a leading early voice on the threat of the avian flu pandemic.
Obama’s greatest legislative success was teaming with Republican senator Richard Lugar of Indiana on a bill that expanded U.S. cooperation to reduce stockpiles of conventional weapons and expanded the State Department’s ability to interdict weapons and materials of mass destruction. In the spring of 2005, Obama had traveled to Russia with Lugar to inspect nuclear weapons stockpiles. Robert Gibbs said that his failure to more vigorously publicize Obama’s work on the bill, which was signed into law by President Bush in January 2007, was his greatest public relations failure during Obama’s early Senate tenure. “It was an important law and it was my fault that Barack didn’t get more credit for it,” Gibbs said.
Early on, Obama alienated some colleagues with his desire not to speak out more forcefully against Republican policies, but he wanted to stay true to his mantra: He was a healer, not a divider. In this vein, besides Lugar, Obama reached out to other Republicans by proposing immigration reform with Senator Mel Martinez of Florida and a more rigorous review of government contracts related to Hurricane Katrina with Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Again Obama alienated some colleagues by declining to make phone solicitations during the so-called Power Hour of fund-raising for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, but he made amends by campaigning arduously for Democrats across the country in the 2006 election cycle.
Obama’s two major moments in 2005 came when he did lift his head from the sand.
The first of these was his June 2005 commencement speech at Knox College, a small liberal arts school in western Illinois. A thunderstorm threatened, but the dark sky only sprinkled on the gathering as an admittedly nervous Obama delivered the first major address of his Senate tenure, a speech that would reaffirm his liberal tendencies and encapsulate the heart of his governing philosophy. Citing various moments of American history, with an emphasis on the emancipation of slaves and the civil rights movement, Obama offered his theory as to why America has endured and prospered for more than two centuries. It is not simply the workings of the free market, or the tireless work ethic of the country’s laborers, or immense individual ambition—America’s success is built on “our sense of mutual regard for each other,” Obama proclaimed, and “collective salvation” is the surest way to ensure the country’s continued prosperity. And, Obama added, the best means for looking out for each other is through government—strengthening public schools, providing health care to all citizens, devoting time to community service rather than “focusing your life solely on making a buck.” The global economy is threatening the country’s economic health, Obama said, and the only way for America to continue to compete is to invest in itself:
. . . there are those who believe that there isn’t much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government—divvy it up into individual portions, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, education, and so forth.
In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford—tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job—life isn’t fair. It lets us say to the child who was born into poverty—pull yourself up by your bootstraps. . . .
But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it’s been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It has been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools—that has allowed all of us to prosper. Our economic dominance has depended on individual initiative and belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity—that has produced our unrivaled political stability.
Obama had studied this theory of social Darwinism several times in his life. His influential Occidental professor, Roger Boesche, would see echoes of his political theory class in the speech. The reference to social Darwinism is also found in Mario Cuomo’s keynote address in 1984, when Cuomo attacked Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down principles as cruel to the working class. Obama’s Knox speech was written in conjunction with his staff speechwriter, a young man named Jon Favreau whom Gibbs had recruited on the basis of their time together on the Kerry campaign. In crafting a speech, Favreau grabs his laptop and sits with Obama for about twenty minutes, listening to his boss throw out chunks of ideas. Favreau then assembles these thoughts into political prose. Favreau describes Obama as a master storyteller and a student of history, so Favreau is constantly looking through history books to draw parallels between the past, the present and a vision for the future. Even after a major speech is composed, however, Obama writes comments in the margins and tweaks passages right up until the time of delivery. The night before, he often stays up until the wee hours working on the final draft. As a professional long-form writer and a perfectionist, he can wrestle for hours whittling his elaborate thoughts into fifteen- and twenty-minute speeches. “It’s hard for him to give up words,” Favreau said.
Obama’s Knox address drew almost no immediate press attention, largely because it was delivered at a small school in Illinois on a weekend. Only local press attended the event. But thanks to the power of the Internet, the speech sped through cyberspace, drawing cheers from liberals, who were beginning to worry that their newest prophet was not the one they had originally envisioned. Conservatives, however, looked at this speech and realized that even though Obama patiently gave heed to their arguments, and even though he was an eloquent and inoffensive Democratic voice, he was not one of them.
OBAMA’S SECOND MOST SIGNIFICANT PUBLIC MOMENT OF 2005 occurred in his self-imposed role of racial bridge-builder, a role that can cause deep worry among his cautious aides. Building bridges to Republicans, after all, can win moderate votes; talking too directly about race can alienate both blacks and whites. Yet as an African American, Obama realized that he could not escape the issue; overnight, he had become the country’s highest-ranking black politician.
In September, against the wishes of some of his advisers, most of whom are white, Obama agreed to appear on ABC’s Sunday-morning political affairs show, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, to speak on the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. It was one of only two interviews he granted to major networks in his freshman year. The storm had killed more than a thousand people and left tens of thousands homeless amid the floodwaters of New Orleans and the coast. Traveling with Lugar in Europe at the time, Obama was personally affected by the enduring television images of thousands of mostly black, mostly poor people who had lost their homes and their livelihoods in the storm. As President Bush and local officials dithered and panicked, and as some Democrats and black leaders cried racism, Obama stood out as a voice of subtlety and reason.
Stephanopoulos prefaced his first question with the famous remark from hip-hop artist Kanye West that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” and asked Obama if racism was at the root of the federal government’s seemingly lackadaisical response to the disaster. Obama responded in a typically measured fashion that alienated neither blacks nor whites and yet struck at the heart of the matter. He acknowledged that race was a component in the aftermath of the hurricane, but he did this without using the shrill and angry language that gives whites such great discomfort:
I think that Kanye West expressed a great deal of anger, anguish that exists in the African-American community. I think that the entire country felt shame about what had happened. Now, my general attitude has been that the incompetence by . . . the Department of Homeland Security and by this administration was color-blind, but what I do think is that whoever was in charge of planning was so detached from the realities of inner city life in a place like New Orleans that they couldn’t conceive of the notion that somebody couldn’t load up their SUV, put one hundred dollars’ worth of gas in there, put [in] some sparkling water and drive off to a hotel and check in with a credit card. There seemed to be a sense that this other America somehow was not on people’s radar screen, and that, I think, does have to do with a historic indifference on the part of government towards the plight of those who are disproportionately African-American.
. . . I think that in the African-American community there’s a sense that the passive indifference that’s shown towards the folks in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans or on the West Side of Chicago or in Harlem, that that passive indifference is as bad as active malice, and I think that the broader American community and white America in particular would make those distinctions and those fine lines. I think that the important thing for us now is to recognize that we have situations in America in which race continues to play a part, that class continues to play a part, that people are not availing themselves of the same opportunities, of the same schools, of the same jobs, and because they’re not, when disaster strikes, it tears the curtain away from the festering problems that we have beneath them, and black and white, all of us should be concerned to make sure that that’s not the kind of America that’s reflected on our television screens.
Obama’s careful language was in stark contrast to the anger and frustration vented by black leaders of older generations. The Superdome became a temporary home to tens of thousands of storm evacuees who were stranded without supplies for days. Princeton University scholar Cornel West (ironically a hero of Obama’s) said caustically, “From slave ships to the Superdome was not that big a journey.” The Reverend Jesse Jackson likened the Superdome in New Orleans to the “hull of a slave ship.” Jackson was a close friend and supporter of Obama’s, so I asked him what he thought about their different approaches toward race. The question clearly irritated him. He said he worried that the careful language of younger black leaders would cede ground that had been acquired in the long struggle to equalize the playing field for blacks and whites. (In short, he meant that many of his own crusades for racial justice might be undone.) “Every speaker has the right to use his own style and try to assess his own angle,” Jackson said. “But I was on I-90 in New Orleans when we saw people by the thousands and they were dying in people’s arms. They were putting people in buses by blocks, women here and children there. And I said it looked like the hull of a slave ship. And it did.”
Jackson was particularly perturbed by an editorial in the editorially conservative Chicago Tribune that compared the words of Obama and Jackson. The newspaper harshly criticized Jackson for viewing the tragedy in racial terms while Obama saw the issue not as entirely racial but as a matter of social justice among all economic classes. Jackson’s “racism charge is simplistic and ridiculous,” the newspaper said. “But it also could prove dangerous if it fosters the impression that government emergency plans aren’t what’s really in need of fixing. . . . What played out in New Orleans was more about economic class than race. The Senate’s only African-American understands the distinction—and the need for the nation to address it with more than inflammatory rhetoric.”
Thinking back on the editorial agitated Jackson, who shuffled his feet and wriggled in his chair. Obama “said he didn’t see race, he saw class. I saw race because I was there. It was impossible not to see race if you were there,” Jackson said, his tone growing almost defensive. “The Tribune editorial board took the position that an enlightened young guy saw class, but an old guy saw race. But the whole world saw what it was. It was poor class and black race in the hull of a Louisiana ship.”
Jackson then worried that young blacks who had not gone through a tumultuous racial past might be more immune from seeing racism when it was before them. He also said that the conservative bent of the country since the Reagan era gave black politicians less ability to talk boldly about racial injustice. “I was jailed [for] trying to use the public library. I remember blacks being drafted for World War II and you couldn’t vote,” Jackson said. “I think Barack chooses to walk a very delicate balance, but sometimes it is not your walking that is the issue, it is what is beneath your feet. The right wing radically shifted the earth. It is . . . contract compliance and affirmative action that has made [Obama] possible. When the laws of the last fifty-one, fifty-two years that made his advance possible . . . they are taken away, you have to fight.”
Jackson’s racial anger and Obama’s conciliatory tone represented the debate within the black community about how to approach modern race relations. As Jerry Kellman pointed out, there is no cause that Obama felt more deeply about in his heart than advancing the situation of African Americans. So far, Obama’s political acumen has placed him in the perfect niche of white and black appeal that has eluded almost every black politician before him. Historically, black officials hewing too closely to so-called black issues, such as safeguarding government programs for the poor and challenging the Republican Party commitment to a fairer society, often found themselves losing support among whites. Conversely, black politicians reticent about venting racial anger and who challenge African Americans to study and correct their own deficiencies often lose support in their own community. Obama has followed both of these paths and thrived nonetheless. Thus, in political terms, Obama has struck gold when it comes to race. Instead of being torn asunder trying to please each racial camp, he has strung a tightrope between the two and walked it with precision. Obama shrugged his shoulders when I offered this theory to him at the end of 2005:
I think there is a generational shift taking place in how core values that are important to the African-American community are expressed in a way that builds bridges with other communities. I think there’s a majority in the African-American community who recognize that we have a multiplicity of voices, and not everybody’s going to serve the same role—that Reverend Jackson or Reverend [Al] Sharpton is going to have a different role to play than someone like myself, who’s representing all sorts of people. I just think that I am the most prominent of a new generation of African-American voices . . . [and] I actually have felt very comfortable speaking on issues that are of particular importance to the African-American community, without losing focus on my primary task, which is to represent all the people of Illinois. And I haven’t felt contradictions in that process. I think that on every issue, whether it’s a racially tinged issue or a foreign policy issue or a social issue, if I’m speaking honestly, if I’m speaking what I think, then usually things turn out all right.