Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (37 page)

The plane ride back to Chicago was as quiet as any we had ever taken. Barack and Michelle were glum and unsmiling. As we were leaving the plane, he said, “I am going to want to meet with the team at the headquarters.”

That afternoon, we approached the meeting with all the enthusiasm of convicts heading into a sentencing hearing. Barack walked in the conference room after us, the now-familiar yellow legal pad under his arm. It had been a frustrating couple of weeks, for sure. The missiles we had launched at Hillary had fallen short, and by firing them, so had we. We were disappointed in the results and in ourselves. The future looked bleaker than it had a few days before. Obama’s vulnerabilities among older, working-class white voters had been further exposed—and these voters would dominate the next major primary seven weeks ahead in Pennsylvania, a state James Carville once described as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with the state of Alabama wedged between them.

There were a number of reasons for our bad day, the biggest of which was that we had put far too much time and resources into Ohio instead of doubling down on Texas, where we had a better chance to win. We also had gotten careless, taking cynical shortcuts that undermined Obama’s message and brand. That, I felt, fell on me. Though Plouffe was the campaign manager and leveraged great influence and authority over the apportionment of resources and the overall direction of the campaign, I was the strategist with ultimate responsibility for the media and message. In my haste to go in for the kill, I felt I had made some poor judgments.

Whenever campaigns stumble, all fingers tend to point at the message and the message keeper. That comes with the territory, and while our long friendship and close collaboration were generally assets, Barack seemed to feel freer to criticize me, because I was not just the message maven but the most familiar member of his team. On this day, however, it was quickly clear that Barack was not there to brood on our failures or assign blame.

“We all know we had a bad day yesterday,” he told the twenty or so senior staff in the room. “I can think of a dozen things I personally could have done better. And I bet each of you could do the same. So I’m not here to point fingers. We’re all in this together. What I want to do is discuss what we’ve learned from it, and whatever changes we need to make so we can do better next time.” Barack’s prologue immediately lifted the pall that had hung over the room, and kicked off a productive two-hour discussion, during which we worked through a number of issues and everyone got a chance to share his or her observations.

As he was leaving, Barack turned to reassure his team. “Now I want you to know I am not yelling at you guys.” After a few more steps, he added a parting thought: “Of course, after blowing twenty million bucks in two weeks, I could yell at you. But I’m not yelling at you.” With that, he smiled and walked out the door.

It was a graceful, uplifting moment. We had come in deflated and anxious, and Barack had picked us all up. Everyone in that room would have run through a wall for him—which was a very good thing, because we were about to hit a big one.

I
T
COULD
HAVE
BEEN
called “
W
right’s
G
reatest
H
its,” a carefully edited video of some of the reverend’s most incendiary sound bites.
T
hree decades of his sermons were mashed into a few explosive minutes of outrage, a missile directed right at the heart of our campaign.

With losses in Ohio and Texas, and another tough battle looming in Pennsylvania, the jarring video was an unwelcome intrusion in a race that already had become a grinding slog.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye . . . and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards,” Wright thundered, in one of the most incendiary clips, recorded after the 9/11 attacks. “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

In another, he railed against the historic injustices African Americans had faced.

“. . . God Bless America? No, no, no, not God Bless America. God
damn
America—that’s in the Bible—for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.”

It was sharp, provocative language of the sort that might be heard from pulpits of many black churches. Yet this wasn’t just any church or any pastor. It was Obama’s church and the pastor whom he had portrayed as a central influence in his life. Whether these selected moments of rage and indignation reflected the central message in the sermons from which they were plucked, let alone the entirety of Reverend Wright’s life or ministry, was immaterial. There was no room in this heated presidential campaign for interpretation or nuance or allowances for ministerial hyperbole. It was trouble.

Videos of Reverend Wright first started appearing on the Fox News TV show of right-wing shock jock Sean Hannity, who had made Reverend Wright a focus throughout the campaign. Two days after the Mississippi primary, however, the story went mainstream when Brian Ross, an investigative reporter for ABC News, ran the now infamous tape on
Good Morning America
. I was convinced it had been leaked to Ross by an opposing campaign. Later, Ross disclosed that, having been denied an interview with Reverend Wright, he was informed by the church that DVDs of all Wright’s sermons were available for purchase. It was a good investment for ABC. The condensed reel Ross put together from the videos sent the political world into an immediate uproar.

When Obama first announced his candidacy, there were many in and out of the media who questioned whether the country was ready to embrace the idea of an African American president. Now the Wright tapes had rekindled those questions, threatening to undermine Barack’s image as a positive, unifying figure. In his writings, Barack had introduced the world to Reverend Wright as the pastor, mentor, and father figure who brought him to Christ. The “audacity of hope” was a line inspired by one of Reverend Wright’s sermons. But here he was, from the same pulpit, delivering fiery jeremiads filled with bitterness and vitriol and anti-American slanders.

No one needed to be told we were now in crisis mode.

At headquarters I ran over to our research department. After the blowup in
Rolling Stone
on announcement day, I had asked them to collect any existing videos of Reverend Wright so we could anticipate potential problems. I never received a report and was too preoccupied to follow up. Now I wanted to hear the sermons from which these outrageous remarks had been lifted, in the hope that they had been distorted or used way out of context. With Wright having preached at Trinity for three decades, it was a labor-intensive project, and our young research director sheepishly acknowledged that the initial project had fallen through the cracks.

I responded with a few comments that made Reverend Wright’s seem tame.
Someone
had found time to cull through these sermons and to blindside us with a tape that could potentially take down our campaign. If we had known about these jeremiads, we certainly would have encouraged the church to remove the tapes from their gift shop. We might even have encouraged the Obamas to remove themselves from the church. At the very least we would have been prepared for the onslaught we now faced.

There wasn’t a heck of a lot of time that morning to dwell on this lapse, however. We had our hands full fielding a flood of obvious but fair questions. Was Barack in the church when Reverend Wright delivered any of these broadsides? If so, did he challenge Wright in any way? If he missed these particular sermons, had he seen the tapes? What did he think about them? Will he continue as a member of Trinity? The subtext of all the inquiries, though, was the biggest challenge: How could Barack reconcile the bitterness and contempt for America exhibited in the stinging language of his pastor with the healing message of his campaign?

Within hours, the storm was raging, but Barack wasn’t quite up to speed on its impact. He had been busy all day in Washington, with a flurry of Senate votes that would run past midnight. We had talked only briefly on the phone—just long enough to ascertain that he did not recall hearing any of those particular salvos from Reverend Wright. We had made much of Barack’s church membership, in part to reassure those who questioned his faith. Yet like many Americans, he was more of an Easter and Christmas worshiper than a regular attendee. “The truth is—and I don’t know how we want to handle this—I wasn’t there every Sunday. I was there for holidays and some Sundays, but not every Sunday. Rev. could get torqued up sometimes. I mean, he’s a
preacher
. But I would have remembered hearing
these
.” With Barack mired in Washington, a fuller discussion would have to wait until his return to Chicago the following day.

 • • • 

As if this flap weren’t problematic enough, a separate controversy was bubbling up at the same time, about another provocative figure in Obama’s life.

Tony Rezko had been one of Obama’s early political patrons, a fund-raiser and conduit to some of the entrepreneurial players in Chicago’s black community, where Rezko had extensive real estate dealings and political connections. Now Rezko was on trial, having overplayed his hand as one of Blagojevich’s top fund-raisers, and reporters were drilling down into the nature and extent of the reform-minded Obama’s relationship with an accused extortionist and bagman. The Chicago papers were particularly focused on a curious set of real estate transactions in which Rezko bought a small lot next to Obama’s Kenwood home and later sold a sliver of it back to Obama for a side yard.

It was a rare and foolish misjudgment on Obama’s part to enter into the transaction with Rezko, as he publicly and privately acknowledged. Yet the
Tribune
and
Sun-Times
editorial boards had more questions for Obama, and in a spectacularly unlucky piece of timing, we scheduled the meetings for the day he returned from Washington.

Having been tied up in the Senate into the early morning hours, Barack didn’t arrive at campaign headquarters until the afternoon—and with the Wright story cascading out of control, there was little time to prep for the Rezko probe. The land deal was an embarrassing story, but the Wright tapes had unleashed the raw fury of race. Obama spent an hour rewriting a draft statement about Wright’s sermons, making sure to condemn the offensive words, but also putting them in the context of Wright’s history as a former marine and widely regarded clergyman.

Even without the prep, Obama emerged from two long editorial board sessions on Rezko relatively unscathed—but not from cable TV interviews later that evening, in which he got a full blast of the frenzy that the Wright tapes had touched off.

Late that night, Barack called me.

“I want to do a speech on Wright and the whole issue of race in America,” he said. “We have to try and put this in a larger context or it’s just going to go on and on.” Barack had been eager to give a speech on race during the campaign in Iowa, but we strongly discouraged him. Race was not inhibiting our support, I had argued, so why bring it up? Now circumstances had changed dramatically. Obama wasn’t calling to discuss
whether
he should give the speech, but
when.
“I want to do it no later than Monday or Tuesday. And I’ll have to write it.”

I didn’t argue. As I had sat there watching the Wright tapes recycling hour after hour on cable, I hadn’t come up with any better plan. Yet it was approaching midnight Friday, so the timing seemed impossible. Obama was scheduled to campaign in Indiana on Saturday. We had a film shoot around Chicago on Sunday that we absolutely needed for advertising and a long day of campaigning in Pennsylvania scheduled on Monday. When would he have time to write a speech of such importance and magnitude? “Just set it up,” he said. “I can work with Favs. I know what I want to say.”

The next morning, I shared the plan with our senior staff and advisers. It was the first Favs had heard of it, and the color quickly drained from his face. He was ghost white. “Are you shitting me?” he said. He and I huddled that afternoon to talk about the speech, but quickly realized that this was not one we could map out ourselves. Barack had spent much of his life wrestling with the issue of race. This speech had to flow from his head and heart. We couldn’t proceed without him.

Late Saturday night, after returning from Indiana, Barack spent more than an hour on the phone with Favreau, conveying his thoughts. “What was most impressive wasn’t the language,” Favs said later. “It was the power of the argument, as he laid it out, point after point, off the top of his head. He had clearly thought it through.”

On Sunday, while we were shooting ads at the closed steel mill near the South Chicago neighborhood Barack had helped organize as a young man, Favs sat in a Starbucks banging out a preliminary draft. That evening, after putting his kids to bed, Barack finally began to work in earnest on perhaps the most critical speech of his life. He sent back partially completed revisions in the middle of the night. We were leaving for Philly in about five hours.

After a full day of campaigning, we arrived at our hotel in Philadelphia at 9:00 p.m., just fourteen hours before the speech. Working on little sleep, Barack headed to his room to write, and I headed to the hotel bar to drink. It was filled with reporters who had descended on the city like buzzards, circling to see if our campaign would survive. In truth, I wondered that, too. I had believed from the very start that Barack’s race would not prove to be an insuperable barrier; that he would be judged by the majority of voters on the basis of his character, his capabilities, and his authentic message of change. Now Reverend Wright’s fulminations had put those assumptions—so fundamental to the entire campaign—to the test.

I woke up at about three o’clock on the morning of the speech and reflexively checked my BlackBerry. Just a few minutes earlier, Barack had sent his final draft. I stood there in the dark, completely blown away. In the intervening hours, under an extraordinary array of pressures, Barack had polished and pruned and pulled together all the necessary strands, weaving them into what would be one of the most thoughtful, honest, and inspiring speeches on race ever delivered by an American political leader. Normally, I had edits and quibbles. This time, I only sent him a brief reply: “This is why you
should
be President!”

What stood out most, however, were the candid and deeply personal passages about his relationship with his pastor, the church, his family, and the African American community. It occurred to me, in reading them, that having spent so much of his early life struggling to find his racial identity, Barack could not and would not renounce it now, even if the price he paid was the chance to be president of the United States. So even as he would separate himself from Wright’s bitter words, he refused to disavow the man or deny the complex realities of race in America.

The next morning, Barack’s supporters anxiously filed into the auditorium at the Constitution Center, as the cable networks prepared to carry his remarks live. Four days earlier, this speech wasn’t even scheduled. Now it was a major national event, with astronomical stakes. Yet the man at the center of the drama was completely at peace with the moment.

“Hey, this is how I feel,” Barack said, as we stood in the greenroom, waiting for the signal for him to move toward the stage. “I’ll give this speech, and people will either accept it or they won’t. And if they don’t, I won’t be president. But at least I’ll have said what I felt
needed
to be said. And that, in itself, is worth something.”

Yet the speech and the speaker proved as big as the moment. In riveting language, Barack told the story of America’s historic struggle with race, and spoke honestly about his own journey. He explored the corrosive legacy of discrimination at the core of his aging pastor’s rage, and the resentment felt by some whites over programs meant to redress “an injustice that they themselves never committed.” While Barack spoke bluntly about the work Americans, black and white, had to do to repair the breach, he also celebrated the meaningful progress in American society that Reverend Wright had ignored.

“The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society,” Barack said. “It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country—a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino, Asian, rich, poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. What we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”