The irony of Barack Obama is this: He has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear . . . and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches.
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” 2012
THE OBAMAS ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON TO A CRUSH OF EXPECTATIONS and excitement not seen in Washington since the Kennedys and the Reagans. The Washington press seized on the parallels to Camelot—from the couple’s young children to the fashion designers clamoring to dress the new First Lady and the way black women adored and related to Michelle to the couple’s celebrity friendships (George Clooney! Oprah! Jay-Z and Beyoncé!). But the media also fixated on echoes of Lincoln, on whether the “team of rivals” approach that brought Hillary Clinton into the cabinet as secretary of state would yield cooperation or conflict, and whether Obama’s entry into the White House marked the beginning of the “post-racial” future that Lincoln’s bold stroke of emancipation was supposed to have set in motion so long ago.
Placing Hillary in such a powerful role sent a strong signal to women in the United States and abroad, and brought the public narrative of bitterness between Clinton World and Obama World to a close. But a sense of cynicism ran deep within parts of the Clinton camp. “He was brilliant for picking her,” said one Clinton ally, calling the choice “from Obama’s standpoint one of the smartest decisions he ever made,” while adding sardonically, “What better way to shut down Bill Clinton for the next four years so he couldn’t criticize you?” Friends cautioned the former First Lady to keep her eyes open. “Make sure you know him well enough that you can trust him, that he’s not gonna throw you under the bus,” one old Washington friend and longtime Clinton hand recalled telling her. “But boy, what a great opportunity to do good.” Apparently, Bill Clinton had given her the same advice.
Hillary’s ascension as a loyal member of the Obama cabinet brought an end to any lingering public anger at the former president among African Americans, who soon shifted their focus to the new administration and the possibilities it held for reversing the intense economic suffering of the country, which was being felt even more acutely by communities of color. For African Americans, the start of the new administration seemed like the beginning of a golden age.
Obama came into office with high approval ratings, across the racial divide. He installed a handful of African Americans in prominent, “first in history” positions in his administration. Patrick Gaspard was named political director; Susan Rice, the Clinton-era State Department official and a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, was appointed United Nations ambassador; and Eric Holder was nominated as attorney general. But no one in the administration would have more influence than Valerie Jarrett.
Jarrett was from the rarefied upper echelons of black Chicago, linked by birth to three of the city’s storied black families: the Dibbles, the Bowmans, and the Taylors. Her father, James Edward Bowman, was a renowned geneticist. Her mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, was a University of Chicago trustee whose father, Robert Rochon Taylor, once managed the historic Rosenwald Building on Forty-Sixth Street and South Michigan Avenue. It was built in the 1920s by Sears, Roebuck & Company president Julius Rosenwald as affordable apartments for middle-class black Chicagoans in the segregated city, and was once frequented by the likes of W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Quincy Jones, who as a child lived in the building, where his mother became the manager, and his father was a carpenter. Taylor rose to become the first African American to lead the Chicago Housing Authority, lending his name to what would become a notorious sprawl of housing projects on the city’s South Side. Jarrett’s great-grandfather Robert Robinson Taylor, the son of a white slave owner and a black mother from Tuskegee, Alabama, was the first black graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her cousin Ann Dibble is married to civil rights icon, Clinton friend, and urbane elder statesman Vernon Jordan.
A veteran of the Daley and Harold Washington administrations in Chicago, Jarrett, as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s deputy chief of staff, had in the early 1990s hired the then Michelle Robinson, who brought her fiancé, Barack Obama, along to their first dinner to size Jarrett up. She became a friend and mentor to Michelle, and increasingly an adviser and friend to Obama as well. She introduced the couple to Martha’s Vineyard, the summer vacation haunt of upper-middle-class black families for a century, where their children could escape the world of segregation and isolation and be together on Inkwell Beach in quiet Oak Bluffs, among their racial and social peers.
The Obamas built their own alliances in Chicago, to be sure. “Michelle Obama’s friendships and connections got that man into power,” one close observer of the couple said. Among her circle were the children of Rev. Jesse Jackson and John W. Rogers Jr., who was the son of Jewel Lafontant and Tuskegee Airman John Rogers Sr., ex-husband of the first family’s social secretary, Desiree Rogers, and a key Obama fund-raiser and friend. And Barack Obama had, over time, cultivated a multiracial circle that included judges and professors at the University of Chicago, his state senate mentor, Emil Jones, and elements of Chicago’s moneyed class. Judge Abner Mikva, a former legal counsel to President Clinton, tried to hire Obama out of law school; Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker became a friend when her children played basketball at the YMCA where Michelle’s brother was the coach; and Bettylu Saltzman, the daughter of a shopping mall tycoon who was also part owner of the Chicago Bulls, sought Obama out after meeting him as he stumped for Project Vote, while she was volunteering on Bill Clinton’s campaign. Saltzman believed he had what it took to become the first black president and she financially supported his subsequent runs for office.
But Jarrett opened the door to a wider world of important Hyde Park donors and political advisers who were key to Obama’s success once he decided to run for office. She became a key adviser on his presidential campaign, where she was placed in charge of “constituency groups”—a political euphemism for the minorities, the LGBT community, and other out-groups inspired by the Obama project, but who often found themselves on the back burner in Democratic campaigns that for decades had placed more emphasis on winning over blue-collar white Democrats and independents. Black, Latino, and gay staffers relied on her to intervene with the senior staff in Chicago when their complaints that the senior leadership was too reticent to take the campaign into the heart of the black community or to spend money with black media and political consultants fell on deaf ears.
She arrived in Washington as senior adviser to the president, and the one member of the administration with equal influence in the East and West Wings. Other top staffers, including Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s new chief of staff, and later William Daley, his successor, were made to understand in no uncertain terms that, to paraphrase one former Obama cabinet member, Valerie reported to no one but the president. “She’s a family member. She’s not a staffer,” the former cabinet member said. “And I think people underestimate her.”
Jarrett occupied a rare space, as both friend and gatekeeper, “testing the waters” for Obama on policy matters and enjoying the couple’s complete trust. The position didn’t always make her popular inside the White House, particularly with Emanuel, a fellow veteran of Chicago’s bare-knuckle politics whose irascible manner made for caustic moments in the West Wing and on Capitol Hill. Jarrett’s closeness to the family even confounded some longtime political insiders in Chicago, who groused that Jarrett was more Daley acolyte than consummate insider within traditional black political circles, and that in her role as granter and denier of access, she was freezing out Obama’s black Chicago allies, too.
Even people who had been close to Obama in Chicago and to the campaign were being told, including by Barack Obama, “if you need anything, just call Valerie.” In addition to her policy portfolio, Jarrett was tasked with interacting with the governors and with black political, media, and civil rights leaders. Said one longtime Obama ally from Chicago of the indirect route to conferring with the new president: “It was a waste of time.”
If the arrangement was painful for some of Obama’s old allies, it proved helpful for some of the new. Sharpton, whose bona fides with the new president, and with Jarrett, were solid, and black media figures such as D.C. radio veteran Joe Madison and then CNN host Roland Martin, the former editor of the black Chicago Defender weekly newspaper, quickly found a comfortable seat at the table. But others, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, felt frozen out. They had waited more than a decade for the Democrats to return to the White House, and many never believed they’d see a black president in their lifetimes. Jarrett was often the first point of contact for Black Caucus staffers, and sometimes the last, as entreaties for face time with the president went nowhere. Emanuel was viewed by many as dismissive and the president as distant. The new White House was viewed as opaque by many on Capitol Hill, and in particular by Black Caucus members and civic leaders who had sided with Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.
Worse, for some, was the fact that while the administration was filling up with veterans of the Clinton administration, including people like Rice, Gaspard, and Holder, who’d broken ranks with the Clintons during the Democratic primary, black Clintonites who’d stuck with the First Lady were being passed over.
“The perception was that the white Clinton people were brought in, while the black Clinton people felt that they were given a scarlet letter,” said one prominent African American civic leader. “They felt that the white Clinton people—Larry Summers, Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel—a whole host of these people got . . . well . . . absolution.”
The Obama team saw it differently, believing that early tensions with the Black Caucus and with black civic leaders stemmed not from presidential snubs, but from a dearth of personal, staff-level relationships.
“None of them really knew our camp,” one former Obama adviser said. “It was a challenge managing expectations from the community and elected leaders and influencers because their reference was always the Clintons and how good they were at team building.”
Others on the Obama team viewed the frayed relationship as stemming from lingering resentment toward, not from, the incoming administration, particularly among members of the Black Caucus.
“The first year in the White House, they didn’t seize the moment in the way that I thought they could have,” said another ex–White House staffer, referring to Hillaryites within the Black Caucus. “There was never a coherent approach to how they handled the Obama moment, to how they pivoted as a group.”
Indeed, with a handful of exceptions, members of the caucus felt an untenable distance from the new president, and that caused them to be alarmed about issues that were front and center in their districts—from the alarming rates of black poverty and unemployment in black communities to gaps in educational attainment and racial profiling by police. Many believed they were confronting the ultimate historical irony: that even with a black president and a euphoric black body politic, African Americans in Congress had precious little influence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Washington veterans began to suggest to the new White House team, and to the president, that they reach out to caucus members, but the entreaties seemed to go nowhere. And members complained that Emanuel showed open disdain, not just for the Black Caucus, but for Democrats on the Hill, and particularly the party’s liberal wing. This new administration appeared uninterested in the hand-to-hand grappling with Congress that Bill Clinton had so reveled in, and that had produced important legislation that could be felt on the streets.
Part of this simply was the president’s personal style. Obama had no intention of going out of his way to court the denizens of Capitol Hill. The days of frequent golf outings with members and dinner invitations to the White House or to Camp David, common in the Clinton years, were not going to be repeated. The kind of glad-handing that fuels Washington politics was just not in Obama’s personality. “And that filters down to the staff,” said one former staffer. “No one wants to be the skunk at the garden party pushing him to do these things, even if at the end of the day it would help to get the work done.”
The Black Caucus met for the first time with the new president in late February 2009. It would be a year before the major national civil rights leaders would do the same, though Jarrett’s office continued to be a valve for contact. Some significant donors to the campaign found their calls going unreturned.
“I talk to a lot of people who gave a lot of money” to the Obama campaign, one D.C. insider said. “And they tell as many tales of woe, of giving a whole bunch of money and not being able to get on the phone, not being able to get a picture with [the president], not being invited to the White House, never being invited to a State Dinner . . . the stories just go on and on. Take the chair of the Democratic Party of—pick a state—and you run into them and they say, ‘I haven’t been in the White House since Bill Clinton left.’ ”
Left most conspicuously on the outside were Obama’s harshest critics during the campaign, most notably Rev. Jesse Jackson. Some blamed the rift on the older man’s tic of criticizing Obama’s approach to African Americans during the campaign. Others said Jackson had been reluctant to acknowledge Obama’s ascendancy as a genuine movement. Sharpton surmised that civil rights leaders might get to have a special relationship with just one president. DuBois and William Monroe Trotter had their parries with Woodrow Wilson over the scourge of lynching; Walter Francis White, T. Arnold Hill, and Mary McLeod Bethune engaged with Franklin Roosevelt; Dr. King and other civil rights leaders had their jousts and collaborations with Kennedy and Johnson. For Jackson, for better and for worse, his presidential relationship had been with Bill Clinton.
And though Obama held a level of respect for Jackson, aides said he simply didn’t give the relationship much thought, though they said others, including Jarrett, did keep accounts.
“Valerie is very much a protector of Obama’s dignity,” a former staffer said. “And so with Jesse Jackson, where some folks would want to say, ‘let’s let him back in,’ she’s like, ‘no, you can’t say you want to cut his nuts off and then come in.’ ”
The Obama team was not anxious to make peace with critics who they didn’t think had a broad enough standing to move significant masses of African Americans away from Obama or who they felt had been disrespectful or extreme. That left black critics like Cornel West and Tavis Smiley on the outside, too.
Bill Clinton’s approach toward them would have been very different, former aides to both presidents said. He would have told them off in colorful fashion and then listened to what they had to say. But according to one early adviser, “The new-school way is deafening silence. In the new-school way, nobody talks to Tavis.”
The administration had little time to worry about hurt feelings. They’d inherited an economy in free fall, including collapsing housing and banking markets, and an opposition party that was determined from the beginning to undermine the new president at all costs, and to cut short the nation’s euphoria at having crossed a key Rubicon in its racial history. Vice President Joe Biden would later say that more than a half dozen Republican colleagues told him, as early as the transition, that their marching orders from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell were specific and damning: no cooperation with the administration, on anything, ever. Biden recounted to writer Michael Grunwald that Republican friends had described it as “our ticket to coming back.”
The administration spent most of the first year focused on two goals: wresting the economy from the depths of the Great Recession and getting a universal health-care bill through Congress; the latter goal was met with deep skepticism by Emanuel but fully supported by Jarrett, who viewed it as key to Obama’s governing as the man he’d run to be.
But health care and the economy were not destined to be the president’s only first-year legacies. It wouldn’t be long before the new president and the country would be reminded that the notion of a “post-racial” America, and one in which the first black president’s race was incidental to the conduct of his office, was a beautiful delusion, one that had been exposed long before Barack Obama and his family moved into the White House.
DATING BACK TO THE EARLIEST DAYS OF THE CAMPAIGN, A DARK vein of resistance to Obama’s candidacy due to his race arose periodically. There was former Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro’s comment that Obama would never have been in a position to defeat Hillary Clinton had he not been black. Republican congressman Geoff Davis of Kentucky said, “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.” A California Republican women’s group issued gag currency they called “Obama bucks”—food stamp send-ups with Obama’s head on the body of a donkey, surrounded by spare ribs, Kool-Aid, and fried chicken. And Buck Burnette, a University of Texas Longhorns lineman, updated his Facebook status after the election to declare: “All the hunters gather up, we have a nigger in the whitehouse [sic].”
Michelle Obama, so celebrated in the national press, was subjected to the basest racial distortions. She was depicted in online memes as an unfeminine brute and beast, derided in conservative columns as a dangerous, “whitey”-hating, America-loathing radical. The term “Obama’s baby mama” was used on Fox News, and National Review called her “Mrs. Grievance.”
The attacks didn’t end with the election, and even the Obama girls, just seven and ten years old when their father took the oath of office, wouldn’t be spared. But the new president found himself under a microscope calibrated to detect any hint that he was reacting to the slings and arrows of national politics from the perspective of a black man. The attacks on him and his family had to be borne with a special type of dignity. Every president before him had borne some measure of ridicule, parody, and hatred, the reasoning would go. Why not him? Why should attacks on him be especially scrutinized for racist intent?
Barack Obama had burst onto the national stage by “transcending” race and by practicing consistent and convincing racial ecumenism. The onus was on him and his African American first family to represent America’s racial progress and to be the Cosby Show Huxtables in real life. Even Mrs. Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, who in 2009 moved from her Chicago home to the White House to help care for the couple’s young daughters, a move not without precedent, from the mother-in-law of President John Tyler to the father-in-law of Benjamin Harrison to multiple family members of Andrew Jackson, was under constant scrutiny.
One false policy move, untoward word, or flash of anger would snap the hair trigger of skepticism about whether the real first black president truly did represent all Americans, and not just “his own people.” Any black politician elected outside a safely black district knew “the Rules” for staying racially neutral. They had been around for decades, though this was the first time they were being applied to a president of the United States.
One month into the nascent administration, Eric Holder broke the Rules.
On February 18, a cartoon in the New York Post lampooned the nearly $1 trillion economic recovery package, rejected by Republicans and passed almost entirely by Democrats. The Post cartoon referred to the horrific news story of a Connecticut woman who had been mauled by a pet chimpanzee. In the cartoon, two police officers stand over the body of a blood-spattered, dead primate. “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” the caption read.
The cartoon drew immediate outrage as it flew across the Internet. Rev. Sharpton issued a statement denouncing it as “troubling at best, given the historic racist attacks [on] African Americans as being synonymous with monkeys.” New York governor David Patterson called on the paper to explain. The Post, owned by conservative mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose international media empire includes Fox News, was a longtime opponent of Democrats, local and national, and had sparred with Sharpton for decades. Its editor vigorously defended the comic as mocking the stimulus package and not the president. But for African Americans, it read as the kind of bestializing that black men and women had been subjected to for centuries, written off as comedy to many on the right, but touching a deep vein of ugly historic memory in black minds and souls.
On the day the cartoon ran, Holder was giving his first Black History Month address to the staff at the Justice Department. His speech touched on historic memory, too, and on the inability of black and white Americans to confront it equally.
Holder, a former judge and deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, had joined other Clinton veterans, such as David Wilhelm, Susan Rice, and Patrick Gaspard, in choosing Obama over Hillary in the Democratic primaries. He became a senior legal adviser to the campaign of a man he’d met roughly a year before.
UNLIKE OBAMA, WHO PROCEEDED ON MATTERS OF RACE WITH cautious deliberation, Holder, the son of Barbadian parents who raised their two boys in the mostly black, middle-class suburb of Elmhurst, Queens, had the bearing of an activist. Ten years older than Obama and with a New Yorker’s pugnaciousness, he often recounted the time he was stopped by police while sprinting through an upscale neighborhood with a friend, trying to make the start of a movie. At the time, he happened to be a federal prosecutor.
Holder’s Justice Department speech was expansive, touching on the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, integration, affirmative action, and the broad civil rights movement. He spoke of his late sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, one of the two black students to face down Governor George Wallace to integrate the University of Alabama in 1963. And he talked about the need to heal communities long scarred by crime and mistrust with police. But Holder began his speech with a damning assessment of the state of interracial dialogue; it landed like a fully armed rocket when it reached the national media.
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” the attorney general said, “in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”
Holder went on to explain that unresolved issues of race remain front and center in America’s politics and culture, though “we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and given our nation’s history this is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”
Within hours, conservative blogs were denouncing Holder and trying to use his presence as the attorney general and Obama’s as president—and even Martin Luther King Day—as proof that the nation had paid its racial debts. But these were some of the same voices insisting that a monkey cartoon lampooning the first black president was just a monkey cartoon.
The White House was caught off guard by the outcry over Holder’s speech. The new administration had no intention of wading into racial conflict, preferring to keep the president focused on the needs of all Americans, and principally on the economy. Anything that “racialized” the Obama presidency was unwelcome in the West Wing.
Asked about Holder’s comments by New York Times reporter Helene Cooper in early March, Obama said that had he been advising his attorney general, “we would have used different language.” Obama concurred with the underlying point of Holder’s speech, saying, “We’re oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race until there’s some sort of racial flare-up or conflict,” and as a country, “[we] could probably be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.” But Obama was quick to pivot to a focus on the nation’s progress. “I’m not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions,” he said. “I think what solves racial tensions is fixing the economy, putting people to work, making sure that people have health care, ensuring that every kid is learning out there. I think if we do that, then we’ll probably have more fruitful conversations.”
WHATEVER THE PRESIDENT’S ANNOYANCE OVER THE BLUNTNESS of the attorney general’s words, Holder had exposed a truth that to black Americans seemed both obvious and glaring: their countrymen too often ease their discomfort over racial disparities by ignoring the subject of race altogether, except on those occasions when it sputters and spills out in ugly e-mails and Facebook posts, gag food stamps with Barack Obama’s picture on them, ugly rally signs, and unfortunate newspaper cartoons. His speech earned him widespread acclaim among African Americans, who quickly took notice of the attorney general. And Holder had strong supporters inside the White House, including Gaspard and Jarrett and the president himself. He had no intention of walking his comments back. On the contrary, Holder would continue to be a lightning rod.
From the start, the new attorney general had stated his determination to revive the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which had become moribund and dispirited under the previous administration. There had been large numbers of resignations as pressure mounted to pursue mythic voter fraud and what many longtime division lawyers viewed as politicized, partisan cases. Holder put an end to that quest in a bid to revive what he saw as the department’s original mission: safeguarding voters from impediments to access to the polls, vigorously responding to alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act as the country headed toward a new census and a fresh round of federal and state gerrymandering. An admirer of Nicholas Katzenbach—Robert Kennedy’s successor who as attorney general brought federal troops to Alabama and personally faced down Governor George Wallace to break the infamous “stand at the schoolhouse door”—Holder saw his role as grounded in Katzenbach’s example: protecting vulnerable citizens from the caprice of state power by bringing federal authority to bear.
Holder had his critics on the left who thought he and the president did not vigorously pursue the titans of Wall Street who had brought about the collapse of the economy. They also blamed him for not surmounting congressional opposition to the closing of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, and for his failure to secure federal prosecution for accused terrorists imprisoned there. Those criticisms were a source of deep frustration for Holder, who determined early on that there were no strong cases to bring against Wall Street bankers. But for civil rights leaders, he was an immediate friend.
By the summer of 2009, Democrats had claimed their sixty-vote majority in the Senate, after resolving the seat in Minnesota, where a lawsuit by his opponent forced Al Franken to wait until July 7 to take his seat, and once Biden and Obama’s seats in Delaware and Illinois were filled (the latter ended in the indictment of the state’s governor). However, Republicans had honed their strategy of total obstruction, calling upon the same device segregationist Democrats once used in order to stall civil rights legislation: the filibuster. It was in those months that the health-care bill—an Obama priority since the campaign—was making its way, slowly, painfully, and publicly, through the Senate.
The president’s opponents soon had the perfect vehicle to exploit the tortured process for political gain.
The day after Holder’s “nation of cowards” speech, a former hedge fund manager and commodities trader from Chicago, Rick Santelli, launched into an extended rant on CNBC, denouncing what he saw as Obama’s mortgage bailout, in which the financial industry would be forced to write down the amounts due on mortgages that had ballooned far beyond the value of the homes they were tied to. The policy, called “cram down,” had been a key request of the administration from progressive and civil rights groups. The big banks, not surprisingly, were vehemently opposed.
“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise your hand!” Santelli raged, vilifying “deadbeat” homeowners. “President Obama, are you listening!?”
The rant went viral, punctuated by Santelli’s call for a July Fourth “Chicago tea party.” The swelling opposition from the Right to everything the president was doing, from financial reform to health care, now had a name. And while the origins of the “tea party movement” had roots in Chicago’s libertarian movement dating back to 2002, Santelli popularized it and aimed the laser straight at Obama.
Coincidentally, the president’s chief economic advisers, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, were counseling the White House away from the actions the financial industry was so up in arms about, and as a result the president was getting heat from the Left because he seemed to avoid progressive solutions to the housing crisis. Liberals were learning that they may have underestimated the extent to which Obama’s pragmatism outweighed his idealism.
As the White House and Democrats in Congress moved toward passage of the health-care bill, the road got increasingly ugly as town hall meetings turned raucous. Tea party protesters claimed the president was secretly planning “death panels” to discard the elderly and disabled, cried “socialism!” and carried homemade signs equating Obama with African witch doctors and Adolf Hitler.
In the midst of it all, the president followed Holder into the thicket of racial outrage.
On July 16, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr., an Obama friend and the head of Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies. Gates had accidentally locked himself out of his home and was attempting to gain entry when a neighbor called 911 to report a possible break-in. Gates became angry when Sergeant James Crowley didn’t believe he lived in the home and removed him from his porch in handcuffs. And though the Cambridge Police Department later dropped disorderly conduct charges against the professor, the officer refused to apologize, saying he had followed proper procedures. The local police union stood firmly behind Crowley, even as Gates threatened to sue.
At a July 22 prime-time press conference, Obama responded to a question about the incident. “Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”
President Obama was speaking off the cuff, and as Gates’s friend. But he had broken the rules of comportment, particularly for a man who had billed himself as a practitioner of racial healing, not racial confrontation. His comments set off an immediate firestorm. Conservative commentators accused the president of race-baiting and of an outrageous attack on law enforcement. For the first time in his political career, Barack Obama was discovering what it was like to be Al Sharpton.
The speed and vehemence of the uproar shocked the White House. They had come to Washington prepared to fight on the familiar ground of spending and taxation, and to engage in the battles that were necessary to pass health-care reform. But Obama had not intended to light any bonfires on race as president. In an attempt at healing, a “summit” was hastily arranged for the next week, in which Crowley and Gates would sit for a photo opportunity in the Rose Garden with the president and Vice President Biden, who during the fall campaign served as a key validator for Obama with white, blue-collar voters. The goal of this “beer summit,” as it came to be known, was to create a patina of national healing. The “teachable moment” was punctuated by exhortations about “disagreeing, without being disagreeable.”
As political theater, it was pure Barack Obama—the very picture of midwestern moderation and probity. But the damage was already done. A Pew poll taken five days after the press conference showed that Obama’s approval rating among white Americans had slipped from 53 percent to 46 percent, while the approval of nonwhite and/or Hispanic Americans climbed 11 points, from 63 to 74 percent.
African Americans thought Obama had spoken truth to a power many found onerous and omnipresent: the police. He’d also exposed the reality of racial profiling, even of a man who’d done everything right, becoming educated and successful and affluent. And Obama had done the exposing from the pulpit of the presidency, which gave his exhortations a power they had never known. It was cathartic, particularly coming from a man who up to this point had been so measured in his public pronouncements on race.
The Pew poll also found that white Americans blamed Gates more than Crowley for the incident by 7 percentage points, and overwhelmingly disapproved of the president’s handling of the incident, by a margin of 2 to 1. Of those white Americans who heard a lot about the incident, the level of disapproval was 70 percent versus 23 percent approval. It was just six months into his presidency, and Obama’s racial honeymoon was over. His opponents on the right felt this proved that Obama was no racial healer. He was just another “race hustling” divider, who never had any intention of being everybody’s president.
The White House team absorbed a lesson that Bill Clinton had learned a generation earlier with the uproar over his “apologies” during his African trip: For even a “post-racial” president, touching the electrified rail of race bears exquisite peril. It was a lesson that would reverberate within the administration for years to come.
ON AUGUST 26, 2009, SENATOR EDWARD “TED” KENNEDY DIED, ending a life and career that were the stuff of Greek tragedy and Democratic Party legend. The last of the Kennedy brothers, whose every movement had enthralled the national press for fifty years, he had been preceded in death by his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, by just two weeks. With his death, Democrats lost a portion of their collective soul.
Kennedy had been perhaps the most important of Obama’s endorsers during the campaign, draping the young senator in the mantle of Camelot so badly desired by the Clintons and making a triumphant appearance at the Democratic convention to reprise his most famous words from the gathering in 1980: that “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” Kennedy had long been a champion of the kind of universal health care Obama was seeking. Now, as president, Obama would give the eulogy at the seventy-seven-year-old’s funeral mass in Boston. Earlier that month Obama had awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the man deemed the Lion of the Senate, with the honor received by Kennedy’s daughter on his behalf.
Kennedy’s funeral mass was grand, attended by four presidents: Obama and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter. The Obamas and Clintons sat together, as they had at Walter Cronkite’s funeral a month before. And Barack Obama was seen wiping away a tear as he stood outside Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Boston, where he had taken a private meeting with the senator’s widow, Victoria.
Most observers believed that when Kennedy was at full vigor, he would have been able to will this health-care reform through the upper house. But in Obama’s Washington, where he was the object of almost otherworldly scorn by the Right, Kennedy’s loss did nothing to tamp down the opposition. Two weeks after Kennedy’s death, at a massive tea party “march on Washington” led by Fox News host Glenn Beck, some protesters mocked the late Senator with preprinted signs supplied by the anti-abortion American Life League that read: BURY OBAMACARE WITH KENNEDY. Beck had already declared on his Fox News program that Obama was a “racist,” who “hates white people, and the white culture.”
The health-care fight had taken on racial as well as class dimensions, with wealthy talk show hosts causing their fans to believe the reform’s main tenets involved stealing the tax dollars of the successful and redistributing the proceeds—free medicine, free doctor’s visits, and a new, insidious form of welfare—to minorities and “illegal immigrants” who refused to work. Back in February, radio host Rush Limbaugh had told his audience the health-care bill involved “income redistribution” and was “a civil rights bill” that included “reparations.”
On September 9, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, making a national pitch for health-care reform before an audience of 32 million television viewers.
“I am not the first president to take up this cause,” he said, noting a century of trying that began with Theodore Roosevelt and continued through Bill Clinton. “But I am determined to be the last.”
But as the president sought to refute the claim that illegal immigrants would benefit from the proposed law, the words “You lie!” rang out from Republican congressman Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson, of South Carolina. At various other points in the speech, there were other shouts of “Not true!” as the president vowed that no federal health-care funds would fund abortions, and there were other cries of “Shame!” and “Read the bill,” along with derisive laughter. Texas congressman Louie Goehmert wore a sign that said, WHAT BILL?
Wilson’s eruption, punctuated by the word lie, drew particularly scathing condemnation. Few could recall a similar display during a presidential address to Congress, and Wilson was roundly denounced by his colleagues, Democrat and Republican alike: including Minority whip Eric Cantor, fellow South Carolinian Jim Clyburn, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont was fuming as he left the chamber, and told reporters that in his thirty-five years in the Senate, he had never heard such an outburst. Even Obama’s recent opponent, Republican John McCain of Arizona, said the eruption was “totally disrespectful.” Wilson soon apologized and even telephoned the White House and delivered his apology to Emanuel. But by the next day, Wilson was using his status as a conservative folk hero for fund-raising.
For African Americans, the “you lie” moment spoke to a fundamental lack of respect for the black man who now held the White House, and put a coda on the summer of angry tea party rallies over health-care reform. Wilson’s words, which he called spontaneous, were read by African Americans as a robbery: of the stature normally afforded a president, of a moment granted by tradition and design to the country’s sole, nationally elected leader, and of the political norms that had been in place before the election of the forty-fourth president.
On March 20, a warm Saturday in the nation’s capital, tea party groups held one of their most vociferous public protests against the proposed health-care law as the House prepared to debate a revised version of the bill. As Democratic House members, including Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and House Whip Jim Clyburn, along with several black lawmakers, including Emanuel Cleaver and John Lewis, were entering the Capitol for the final vote, they were forced to walk past a gauntlet of angry hecklers screaming, “Kill the bill!”
On the balconies overhead, Republican self-declared “tea party congressmen,” led by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, whipped up the crowd below as they waved KILL THE BILL signs and screamed venom. One protester warned Pelosi, “You’re going to burn in hell!”
As the black lawmakers passed through the raucous crowd, Cleaver noticed he had been spat upon, and wiped the spittle from the side of his face. An ordained minister, the congressman first appeared ready to roll up his sleeves and fight, as he turned to confront the man who’d spat on him, and who was continuing his angry tirade. But Cleaver moved past instead, sending a Capitol Police officer in his place. In the end, Cleaver declined to press charges, but he, Clyburn, and Lewis would recall hearing the word nigger hurled at them from the crowd. Clyburn said it was language he hadn’t heard since his days as a young civil rights organizer in South Carolina.
Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who entered the House in 1981 and eight years later survived a humiliating sex and prostitution scandal to become one of just two openly gay members of Congress at that time, reported being called a “faggot” as he entered the Capitol vestibule. It was a frenzied week. At least ten members of Congress sought added police protection, and more than a hundred Democratic lawmakers in the House held a closed-door meeting with the Capitol Police and the FBI, citing serious concerns for their safety. Around the country at Democratic congressional offices, bricks and rocks thrown through windows left shattered glass and shattered nerves among staffers.
When a brick was thrown into the Niagara Falls, New York, office of Democratic congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter, a “threatening voice-mail message referring to sniper attacks” was also left there. Bart Stupak, the conservative Democrat from Michigan whose last-minute negotiations to reinforce the ban on abortion funding through health-care reform helped secure the bill’s passage in the House, received a fax with a drawing of a noose and an anonymous voice mail saying, “You’re dead. We know where you live. We’ll get you.”
Tea party supporters, including Republican members of Congress, angrily distanced themselves from these acts, as did conservative media. But the anti-health-care protests were building to a seemingly uncontrollable fever pitch.
The voice mail at John Lewis’s district office was filled with hateful messages, including one he released in April that denounced “that goddamned nigger” in the White House and warned, “Don’t tell me I gotta get some goddamned health insurance, I ain’t payin’ no goddamned fine” and “I ain’t gettin’ no goddamned mandatory health insurance.” The angry caller railed against the “niggers” and “white trash honkeys” who voted for “that nigger Obama,” and dared the president, presumably, to “come and put my ass in jail if he don’t like it.”
John Boehner, the House minority leader, went on Fox News and said, “Violence and threats are unacceptable. That’s not the American way. We need to take that anger and channel it into positive change. Call your congressman, go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, make your voice heard—but let’s do it the right way.”
On March 21, 2010, in that climate of chaos, anger, and fear, the House passed the reconciled health-care bill. Every Republican voted against it. In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid forced passage of the final bill with just 51 votes, using a parliamentary procedure called reconciliation. Republicans denounced the maneuver as “Chicago-style politics” and vowed repeal even though reconciliation had been used before, including to pass Republican George W. Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.
On March 23, President Obama signed his signature health-care bill. As he repeated his left-handed signature twenty-two times so he would have a pen for each special guest, he was surrounded by a group of lawmakers including a beaming Pelosi, Reid, Vice President Biden, Clyburn, Rangel, and John Dingell, the longest-serving U.S. senator, who had seen many attempts at creating a universal health-care plan come and go. Also present was Senator Max Baucus, who had managed the ugly and unenviably public process in the Senate Finance Committee, Ted Kennedy’s son Patrick, then a congressman from Rhode Island, and the late senator’s widow, Victoria. Also there was an eleven-year-old African American boy, Marcellus Owens, who’d lost his mother to cancer for lack of insurance, and whom the White House had made a symbol of the importance of the bill.
Barack Obama had achieved his party’s century-old dream of enacting comprehensive health-care reform, however flawed the process and bitter the road.
For Bill and Hillary Clinton, it was a moment to give Obama his due. Soon after the signing ceremony, President Obama took two congratulatory phone calls: from Hillary, who had labored so hard, and in vain, to craft a health-care bill in the early days of her husband’s administration, and from Bill, who understood like few others what a hard-fought and rare achievement it was.
“One of the great things about Clinton,” said a longtime Clinton adviser, is this: “I’m sure he recognized that Obama did something that he couldn’t do, in the health-care space.” He understood it as a genuine accomplishment—and he was glad it had gotten done.