The Black History of the White House (50 page)

Scholars will be analyzing and reinterpreting the Obamas
for a long time to come. That it took the nation and world by surprise and by storm is an understatement. Despite King's optimism, seen in the epigraph above, perhaps only the most imaginative science fiction writer could have predicted in 2001 that in less than ten years the United States would have its first black commander in chief and that that individual would be an unknown junior senator from Illinois with the unusual Middle Eastern–sounding name: Barack Hussein Obama.

One question will vex traditional Democratic and Republican strategists for the rest of their lives: How was Obama able to defeat both the powerful Clinton political machine and the entire Republican Party operation? Obama won for three reasons: he had a compelling message, he had a compelling strategy, and he had a compelling personal narrative. None of these variables by themselves would have sufficed, but their confluence proved victorious in the atmospherics of 2008.

A Compelling Message: Change People Wanted to Believe In

Throughout his fight for the White House, Obama's strategic brilliance was to turn his principal negative into his most expressed positive. There was simply no way he could compare his experience and political history with that of his main Democratic or Republican rivals (not counting the ill-chosen, ignorant, shallow, and untested Sarah Palin). He had been in the U.S. Senate less than three years before jumping into the race. However, his timing was fortunate as the country became increasingly irritated with both Republican and Democratic leaders. Thus, he used their experience against them. His call for change was in sync with the mood of the nation. His straightforward message became a pledge for “a change you can believe in.”

In one sense, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the excesses of their administration prepared the way for Obama's victory.
In the days following September 11, 2001, Bush achieved the highest rating for a president since such data has been recorded. By the time he left office, he had fallen to one of the lowest levels of popularity in U.S. history. On nearly every possible issue, the American public gave the Bush White House failing grades. Bush had started two wars, both of which spiraled out of U.S. control, killed untold thousands, and became vastly unpopular. While the nation and the international community had supported the response of the United States to attack al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that supported it, the war was deprioritized and lost focus after the December 2001 Battle of Tora Bora failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his top leadership.

Bush and Cheney then focused on Iraq and built a case to invade based upon alleged intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War quickly evolved into a deadly affair with mounting Iraqi and U.S. deaths despite global opposition and the revelation that the premises for going to war were false. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Long a foe of the United States, Saddam Hussein had been contained by a wide range of international and U.S.-led political, economic and military punishments. While he periodically rattled his saber, his rash and murderous behavior was reduced to the harm he brought to the people of his own country. Nevertheless, despite public protest, the Bush administration invaded Iraq in February 2003.

Obama had been part of a handful of Democratic leaders who spoke out against the war. On September 15, 2001, in the ultra-paranoid days immediately following the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Representative Barbara Lee, an African American legislator from the Bay Area in northern California, was the only member of Congress to vote no on
Bush's war powers measure. The motion she voted against gave the president virtually unlimited license to exercise “all necessary and appropriate force” on anyone associated with the terrorist attacks, authority the administration would exploit to the fullest. The resolution passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House of Representatives.

By 2002, when Obama began thinking about running for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, the Bush administration's fear-mongering PR machine pushed the notion that links existed between Iraq and al Qaeda in order to drum up public support for launching a second war. Obama, however, embraced the opposition and gave a speech at an antiwar rally in Chicago on October 2, declaring, “I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”
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Although his position was deemed risky politically at the time, it would be the votes cast in support of the invasion by Senator Hilary Clinton and Obama's other Democratic presidential opponents (excluding Rep. Dennis Kucinich) that would become liabilities. By the beginning of 2008, despite the military escalation known as the “surge” that desperately tried to halt and reverse its losing trend, popular opinion had turned against the war and, to a degree, against Democrats and Republicans who had supported it.

Obama's clarion call for change resonated on many other fronts as well. Bush and Cheney's record of unresponsiveness to the economic and social calamities faced by millions of Americans also undermined support for their administration. The
ineffective, insensitive, and inadequate response to the devastation wrought in New Orleans and elsewhere in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was symptomatic of his administration's real and perceived callousness. The image released by the White House of Bush flying over the devastated areas was meant to show his concern, but the photo op only cemented the perception that he cared little about low-income and working-class people across racial lines.

A third decisive issue was the economic collapse that Bush policies facilitated and then ineptly addressed in a belated and controversial manner. He pushed through tax cuts while not only fighting two wars but also creating the largest government agency in U.S. history—The Department of Homeland Security. When Bush won the White House in 2000, Clinton was overseeing a budget surplus of $236 billion. Bush inherited a surplus of $128 billion. In his first year, Bush doled out $630 billion in tax cuts to the richest 1 percent of Americans and the transition to a spiraling deficit began. By July 2008, he was projecting a budget deficit of $482 billion.
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While Obama's Republican rival, John McCain, engaged in unproductive stunts such as dramatically suspending his campaign to fly back to D.C. in superhero mode to rescue the economy, or stating one day that the economy was fine and the next that it was not, or being unaware of how many houses he owned, Obama appeared steady, rational, deliberate, and presidential. It was impossible not to blame the Republicans for the state of the economy, given Bush's eight years in office and his party's control of Congress for six of those years. In the final months of the campaign, McCain desperately and unsuccessfully attempted to distance himself from Bush.

Hillary Clinton finally realized in the primary campaigns, and McCain in the general election, that a message of change
carried a lot more credibility than declaring one's long experience within a political system widely viewed as corrupted, mismanaged, and illegitimate, but their tardy embrace of a rhetoric of change was too little, too late.
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The eight years of Bush and Cheney's political perfidy, economic mutilations, cowboy foreign policy, and social divisiveness opened the door for an outsider.

A Compelling Strategy: States of All Colors

Although Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama became rivals during the 2008 campaign and since, the latter arguably owes his electoral success to the former. As noted in Chapter 8, Jackson's effort to make the Democratic Party more democratic after his 1984 campaign had created a critical rule change that would be a decisive element for Obama's campaign 24 years later.

Just as he was forced to choose a message that drew a clear distinction between himself and his rivals, Obama also needed a strategy that could beat the Clinton political juggernaut and all that the Republican Party would throw at him. For nearly twenty years, the Clintons had controlled much of the Democratic Party machinery. The conventional wisdom in 2007 was that Clinton, with overwhelming support from blacks and women, would win the nomination with relatively little difficulty. The primaries and caucuses were merely the rituals by which she would be anointed the candidate. As writers Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser point out, the Clinton camp was so confident of her eventual nomination that she never made a formal announcement of her entrance in the race or gave a clear reason why she was running.
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Clinton opted to run a traditional strategy of campaigning in the primaries in the large states and paying scant attention to the small states and caucuses. Her campaign also
felt there was little to gain by campaigning in states where the Democrats were likely or sure to lose in the November election. To some degree, Clinton's approach was driven by limited resources, as the campaign ran into financial troubles at critical stages in the race and was forced to streamline. In an ordinary year against an ordinary candidate, it probably would have been a winning strategy.

Obama evolved two-prong tactics: put energy and resources into winning the smaller and Republican Party-oriented states in the primaries and caucuses, and make a competitive showing in the larger states that were going to be difficult if not impossible for him to win. Since the advent of the modern system of primaries and caucuses as the main means by which the major parties select their candidates for the presidency, with the convention serving as a crowning more than anything else, strategies for winning have followed the Electoral College math. Serious Democratic candidates tend to focus their energies on a few swing states, giving token appearances in states the party is likely to win in the fall campaign and completely ignoring states they are likely to lose. Republicans follow a similar path. What this means is that much of the country is marginalized and the sense of political polarization deepens.

Obama stated from the beginning that he wanted to run in all fifty states plus the District of Columbia. While his team's fund-raising proficiency gave him the resources to carry out his pledge, it was the underlying philosophy that was emphasized publicly. Consistent with his message of one nation was the idea of taking his campaign to every community. While the Iowa caucus win was a decisive step in giving his campaign leverage and momentum, it was just the beginning. Obama won all the caucus states and accumulated a strategic reserve of delegates.

While Hillary Clinton's name was on the ballot in every state, her campaign clearly gave priority to the larger states that would figure significantly in the general election. By getting ahead of herself, she got behind. The problem she faced was that her strategy worked. She did win nearly all the big important Democratic and swing states. She won California, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, among others. And she lost many small states that Democrats were unlikely to win that November, which also turned out to be correct. Unfortunately, that strategy misread the mathematics and technical rules of first winning the Democratic nomination.

In the 1980s, in a crucial rule change, the Democratic Party instituted proportional delegate distribution. With a threshold of 15 percent, candidates would receive delegates based on the percentage of the vote they won. If a candidate won 40 percent of the vote in a state, he or she would get roughly 40 percent of the delegates, even if they lost the state. While the media and the Clinton campaign focused on who “won” the big states, they initially paid little attention to the delegate accumulation numbers until Obama had built an insurmountable edge.

In the general campaign, Obama's strategy to some degree reverted to a traditional swing-state focus, but not totally. He had campaign offices across the country, and their activism, even in states where Obama could not win, benefited other Democrats who were on the ticket. Having those offices also forced the McCain campaign to play defense, to some degree. In the end, Obama won a number of states that Bush had carried in 2004, including Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Much was made of the fact that the map of states that voted for John McCain fit neatly over the map of Confederate states that attempted to secede from the United States in 1861. While
the map shows the general racial voting patterns of the South, there is much it does not show. There is no question that the region was the least supportive of Obama, even among Democrats and independents. In nearly every Southern state covered by the Voting Rights Act, with the exception of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, Obama fared worse than or the same as John Kerry had with white voters. (See Table 1.)

Table 1
States covered by the VRA