The
Joshua Generation
Race and the campaign of
Barack Obama
This is a fabulous, informative, and insightful piece by David Remnick about the role of race in the election of our 44th
President. Barack Obama is different
from the leaders of the Civil Rights movement who paved the way for his
historic victory; and they, like Moses, are not the ones who were destined to bring
the dream to fruition. It is, instead,
the next generation, who, like Joshua, carry the dream forward into the
Promised Land.
Remnick says of Obama near the end of the piece,
Having cast himself in
Perhaps he can lead all of us into the “Promised
Land” of the fulfillment of the American dream.
The Joshua Generation
Race and the campaign of Barack Obama.
by David
Remnick
November 17, 2008
Speaking at a church in
1
Barack Obama could not
run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the
heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and
Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on language, on the expression
of a country’s potential and the self-expression of a complicated man who could
reflect and lead that country. And a powerful thematic undercurrent of his
oratory and prose was race. Not race as invoked by his predecessors in
electoral politics or in the civil-rights movement, not race as an insistence
on tribe or on redress; rather, Obama made his biracial ancestry a metaphor for
his ambition to create a broad coalition of support, to rally Americans behind
a narrative of moral and political progress. He was not its hero, but he just
might be its culmination.
In October, 2005, two months
after Hurricane Katrina, Rosa Parks died, at the age of ninety-two, in
“That funeral was so long that I
can hardly remember it!” Bishop T. D. Jakes, the pastor of the Potter’s House,
a
Obama, the sole African-American
member in the United States Senate, had also been invited to speak. As he sat
in the pews awaiting his turn, he writes in his book “The Audacity of Hope,”
his mind wandered back to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina: the news
footage from New Orleans of a body laid near a wall, of shirtless young men,
“their legs churning through dark waters, their arms draped with whatever goods
they had managed to grab from nearby stores, the spark of chaos in their eyes.”
A week after the hurricane, Obama had accompanied Bill and Hillary Clinton and
George H. W. Bush to Houston, where they visited the thousands of refugees from
New Orleans who were camped out at the Astrodome and the Reliant Center. One
woman told Obama, “We didn’t have nothin’
before the storm. Now we got less than nothin’.”
The remark was a rebuke, Obama felt, to Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush
Administration officials who had given him and fellow-legislators a briefing on
the federal response to the hurricane; their expressions, he recalled,
“bristled with confidence—and displayed not the slightest bit of remorse.” In
the church, Obama thought of how little had happened since. Cars were still
stuck in trees and on rooftops; predatory construction firms were winning
hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts, even as they skirted
affirmative-action laws and hired illegal immigrants for their crews. Obama’s
anger, which is rarely discernible in his voice or in his demeanor, ran deep.
“The sense that the nation had reached a transformative moment—that it had had
its conscience stirred out of a long slumber and would launch a renewed war on
poverty—had quickly died away,” he wrote.
And yet when Obama got to the
lectern at Parks’s funeral he betrayed no emotion, raised
no words of protest. He was restrained and brief, as if taking pains to say
nothing to compete with the Clintons, who had forged a close bond with the
African-American community over the years, let alone the older organizers,
activists, and preachers. Obama was still a relative stranger to the audience
in
“In terms of operating in the
space of African-American politics, people hadn’t seen him much,” Mark Morial, a former mayor of
It was only on March 4, 2007, a
few weeks after he announced his candidacy for President, that Obama explicitly
inserted himself in the time line of American racial politics. At the
In Selma, Obama evoked a
narrative for what lay ahead, and in that narrative Obama was not a patriarch
and not a prophet but—the suggestion was distinct—the prophesied. “I’m here
because somebody marched,” he said. “I’m here because you all sacrificed for
me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.” He described the work that lay ahead
for the Joshua generation and implicitly positioned himself at its head, as its
standard-bearer.
And yet Obama embarked on a long,
exhausting quest for the Democratic nomination, determined to avoid making race
a singular theme of his day-to-day campaigning. His issues were
On August 28th, just hours before
his speech at Mile High Stadium, in
“There was a catch in his voice,”
Axelrod recalled.
Obama excused himself and took a
short, calming walk around the room. “This is really hitting me,” he said.
Obama told Axelrod and Favreau that he was coming to
realize what a “big deal this is.”
“Usually, he is so composed, but
he needed the time,” Axelrod said.
“It’s funny, I think all of us go through this,” Favreau recalled. “We’ve gone through this whole campaign
and, contrary to what anyone might think, we don’t think of the history much,
because it’s a crazy environment and you’re going twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week. And so there are very few moments—and I think it’s the same
with Barack—there are very few moments when he stops and thinks, I could be the
first African-American elected President.”
2
Long before he ever had
to think through the implications, racial and otherwise, of running for
President, Barack Obama needed to make sense of himself—to himself. The memoir
that he published when he was thirty-three, “Dreams from My Father,” explored
his biracial heritage: his white Kansas-born mother, his black Kenyan father,
almost completely absent from his life. The memoir is written with more
freedom, with greater introspection and irony, than any other by a modern American
politician. Obama introduces himself as an American whose childhood took him to
As a young man, Obama was
consumed with self-doubt, trying always to reconcile the unsettling
contradictions of his history. His parents married in 1960, when interracial
marriage was still prohibited in almost half the states of the union. As Obama
entered adolescence, in
“Privately, they guess at my
troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image
of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds,” he writes, with the wry
distance of the older self regarding the younger.
Obama’s mother was an earnest and
high-minded idealist, “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for the
New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” With Barack’s father gone,
she emphasized, even sentimentalized, blackness to her son. She loved the film
“Black Orpheus,” which her son later found so patronizing to the “childlike”
characters that he wanted to walk out of the theatre. She’d bring home the
records of Mahalia Jackson, the speeches of Martin
Luther King. To her, “every black man was Thurgood
Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer
or Lena Horne. To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a
special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.”
As a teen-ager in
But there was no escape to
be had. In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept
finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony
nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even Du Bois’s
learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its
corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each
man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into
the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them
exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels. Only Malcolm X’s autobiography
seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke
to me.
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”
did not turn Obama into a black nationalist or a street preacher, but it did
provide a literary and personal template: the story of the young black man who flirts with dissolution and, through reading and
determination, realizes his potential. It is the template of many such books,
including Claude Brown’s “Manchild in the Promised
Land.” “Junkie. Pothead,” Obama wrote. “That’s where
I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.”
Obama, of course, never suffered
like the young Malcolm Little or Claude Brown;
Sometimes, as one reads “Dreams
from My Father,” it’s hard to know where the real angst ends and the
self-dramatizing of the backward glance begins, but there is little doubt that
Obama was at sea, particularly where race was concerned. To ease that pain, to
“flatten out the landscape of my heart,” he would do what kids sometimes do: he
drank, he smoked grass, and, in his unforgettably offhand formulation, he did
“a little blow” when he “could afford it.”
What Obama did learn in those
days was the strategic benefit of a calm and inviting temperament. When his
mother came to his room one day, prepared to remonstrate with him about his
weak performance in school and the hazy direction that his life was taking, he
flashed her, as he recalls, “a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told
her not to worry.” He didn’t get his back up, he didn’t yell. People, he was
learning, “were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no
sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved—such a pleasant
surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the
time.”
The historian David Levering
Lewis, who has written biographies of King and Du Bois, told me that after
reading Obama’s books he had the sense of a young man almost alone in the
world, trying to find a place. “The orphanage of his life compels him to scope
out possibilities and escape hatches,” he said. “This very smart mother was
somewhat absent, and certainly the father was, and the grandfather marched with
Patton, but he was not a rock. Obama is in the world almost solo and he learns
to negotiate.”
When he arrived, in 1979,
as a freshman at
After Obama graduated from
Methodically, Obama went about
meeting important members of the older generations on the South Side,
African-American elders who could advise him and, subtly, approve of him. Timuel Black, an activist in his late eighties who has
published oral histories of the black migration from the South, told me that
Obama came to him eager to soak up everything he could about the politics,
churches, and neighborhoods of the city. But, even as Obama found his way as a
community organizer, working for tenants’ rights and job training at the Altgeld projects, on the far South Side, he never quite
stopped seeing in the faces of young black men reminders of his own past, and
the direction he might have taken:
One of them could be me. Standing there, I try to remember
the days when I would have been sitting in a car like that, full of
inarticulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the world. . . .
The swagger that carries me into a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my
teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath, just daring them to say
something.
Obama went to
As Kennedy followed Obama’s
career, he was struck by the uniqueness of his background and how it may have
affected both his temperament and his public appeal. “He’s operating outside
the precincts of black
David Levering Lewis told me that he read the
memoir as if Obama were a densely layered character in a coming-of-age novel.
“To say he is constructing himself sounds pejorative, but he is open to the
world in a way that most Americans have not had the opportunity to be,” Lewis
said. “That is something that outsiders have to do. But, as he evolves, the
African-American pathway is the pathway to service, to success, and to a more
complete self-definition.”
3
For Obama, the politics
of race took on a less abstract cast once he returned to
A measure of self-regard is also
part of the
Over all, the neighborhood is
liberal—Jesse Jackson says that the area has been a nexus of “social activism
and also progressive, multiracial, multicultural politics for as long as I’ve
been here, since 1964”—and that quality has made it an occasional target for
conservative disdain. An article in The Weekly Standard observed that
Obama’s neighbors looked “like NPR announcers.” And yet there are complexities
within liberal
Running in 1996 from the South Side,
Obama won a seat in the Illinois State Senate, but three years later, when he
tried to take on Bobby Rush, a four-term Democratic incumbent in the House of
Representatives, Obama got a lesson in Chicago politics. The First
Congressional District included not only Hyde Park but far less affluent
neighborhoods like
Rush did not hesitate to mock
Obama as inauthentic—and, by inference, insufficiently black. “He went to
Harvard and became an educated fool,” Rush told the
“I was completely mortified and
humiliated,” Obama told me while he was still only considering a Presidential
run. “The biggest problem in politics is the fear of loss. It’s a very public
thing, which most people don’t have to go through. Obviously, the flip side of
publicity and hype is that, when you fall, folks are right there, snapping
away.”
An essential part of what revived
Obama’s political prospects was a Hyde Park-centered circle of younger black
businesspeople who held him close, advised him, and helped to support his
future campaigns. The circle includes John Rogers, Jr., who knew Michelle
Obama’s brother, Craig, when they played basketball at Princeton; Valerie
Jarrett, the former board chairman of the Chicago Stock Exchange and a close
adviser; and Marty Nesbitt, the president of the Parking Spot, a major
parking-lot company.
“We all have dinner together, we
take vacations together, play golf and basketball together, our kids go to
school together,” Nesbitt told me. It is a circle linked in the way of boomer
and post-boomer American élites: intersecting paths at top colleges and
professional schools; crisscrossing wires of mutual professions, friends,
charities, Little League teams. Nesbitt’s wife, Anita Blanchard, is an
obstetrician who delivered Obama’s two daughters. Michelle Obama worked for
Jarrett. And so on. The business friends saw in Obama the kind of intelligent,
idealistic, yet moderate politician who represented them in a way that the
older generation of
In 2004, Obama won a seat in the
U.S. Senate. By the time he published his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,”
two years later, he’d been a sensation as the keynote speaker at the Democratic
Convention and sparked talk of a Presidential run. “Audacity” is a more conventional
and careful book than “Dreams from My Father.” It is a largely programmatic
text, a reasoned manifesto rather than a memoir, but it does manage to reveal
that Obama’s sense of identity had broadened and found its level; he presents
himself as a mature man settled on a sense of mission. He writes that he has
known the slights experienced by any black man in America—the couple who toss
him the keys outside a restaurant, thinking that he is the valet; the police
car that pulls him over for no reason—and is under no illusion that a
“post-racial” world is imminent. And yet he also sees the profound Americanness of his complex origins, even their political
potency.
“As the child of a black man and a white woman,”
he writes, “I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis
of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.” His was not a typical
African-American identity or experience, but it described someone who could
conceive of becoming President of the
4
Despite the small number
of African-Americans holding office since Reconstruction in districts and
states where blacks were not in a majority, there has always been talk—at times
derisive or farcical; at times quixotic, even messianic—of a black President.
As early as 1904, George Edwin Taylor, a newspaperman born in
Some of those candidacies had
concrete results—Chisholm introduced the reality of a viable black candidate;
The realm of popular culture,
meanwhile, provided a shifting register of the attendant yearnings and
anxieties. In Irving Wallace’s Johnson-era best-seller, “The Man,” Douglass Dilman, a black senator from the
In the seventies, Richard Pryor,
when he was hosting a variety show on network television, took on the subject
as a matter of comic flight: once a black man was in office, would he be loyal
to his race or to his country? Elected the fortieth President of the
Before the country could realize
a black Presidency, it seems, popular culture conceived it—first as comedy,
then as commonplace. Morgan Freeman, as President Tom Beck, prepares the world
for an all-destroying comet in “Deep Impact”; in “24,” President David Palmer,
played by Dennis Haysbert, wards off nuclear
attack—and after he is killed, his brother becomes President. In
In 2006, David Axelrod, a
former political reporter for the
In November of 2006, at the
offices of a
Obama replied, “I believe
“I don’t think Barack’s candidacy
was like any other candidacy,” Axelrod said. “He was the first African-American
to come along as a legitimate contender whose candidacy was viewed in the
broadest terms.” In his Senate race, Obama had campaigned hard and successfully
in southern-Illinois towns nearer to
Even black leaders who were
initially wary of him came to recognize his advantages. “His background
helped,” Al Sharpton said. “He had a primary
understanding of peoples that we may not have had. He could meet with me and
then with a representative from
On January 21, 2007, Obama
attended the N.F.C. championship game between the
Chicago Bears and the New Orleans Saints, at Soldier Field, in
Three weeks later, on the steps
of the Old State Capitol building in
Axelrod, who had been the successful
strategist for black mayoral candidates in
In a gesture that signalled that Obama was going to be a cautious and highly
disciplined candidate, not least on race, he and his advisers decided to
disinvite Jeremiah Wright, his friend and pastor at the Trinity United Church
of Christ, on the South Side, from delivering the invocation. Wright is a
pivotal character in “Dreams from My Father,” a welcoming elder who exerted a
powerful spiritual influence over Obama. He’d been essential to Obama’s
education in Christianity, in social issues, in race, and in the ways of the
South Side. Although few people knew yet about Wright’s penchant for incendiary
rhetoric in his sermons, he had already been quoted in the press in ways that
Axelrod and Obama knew might alienate voters in, say, Ames, Iowa, or
Manchester, New Hampshire.
Curiously, Obama’s initial
support did not come from African-Americans. There were obstacles, especially,
in the black establishment. “Barack came to my kitchen,”
In the early days of the primary
campaign,
With some exceptions, most
civil-rights-era leaders and politicians, including John Lewis and Andrew
Young, were lining up behind
The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a
co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a leader of the
1965 march from
The dilemma was plain. “These
were people who knew Bill and Hillary and thought well of them and couldn’t
quite believe this young guy with a foreign name had a chance to get elected,”
the civil-rights activist Julian Bond said. “After two
Obama was disappointed that black
leaders did not rally to him in greater numbers, but in
Obama was extremely careful about
racial politics. He spoke out on a prolonged and ugly racial conflict in
On January 3, 2008, Obama won
You know, they said this
day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this
country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a
common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history,
you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. . . . We are one people. And
our time for change has come.
An astonishing rhetorical move:
Obama calls on the familiar cadences and syntax of the black church. He
gestures toward what everyone is thinking about—the launching of a campaign
that could lead to the first African-American President. “This was the moment when we tore down barriers that have divided us for
too long,” he says. “When we rallied people of all”—wait for it—“parties and
ages.” The displacement is deft and effective. We know that he means racial barriers—we
can feel it—but the invocation is more powerful for being unspoken. The
key pronoun is always “we,” or “us.” The historical fight for equal rights
comes only at the end of a peroration on national purpose:
Hope is what led a band of
colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to
free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit
at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through
The civil-rights struggle is
deftly recast in terms not of national guilt but of national progress: the rise
of the Joshua generation. What the African-American left once referred to as
the “black freedom struggle” becomes, in Obama’s terms, an American freedom
struggle. African-Americans watched Obama’s victory speech in
“
Until that moment, how many
African-Americans—how many Americans—allowed themselves
to believe that a black President was possible? Had the world
really changed that much? Still, some African-American politicians
believed that Hillary Clinton’s win, five days later, in
Obama won overwhelmingly in
5
Don Rose, a Chicago
political strategist who is close to David Axelrod, is sure that the Obama
campaign intended to deal with race the way his client Jane Byrne dealt with
gender in her campaign for mayor, in 1979. “We never once said anything about
her being a woman,” Rose said. “I had her dress as plainly as possible. She had
bad hair, which had been dyed and dried over a lifetime, and she sometimes had
it fixed twice a day. We had her wear a dowdy wig to look as plain as possible.
We discouraged feminist organizations from endorsing her. I didn’t want the
issue of her being a woman to come up in the least. We knew that women who
would identify with her, the gender-centric vote, would come our way without
anyone raising it. You don’t have to highlight what’s already obvious.”
It was not by accident that
Sharpton, for one, says that he
understood that Obama was “trying to build a bipartisan, ecumenical coalition”
and did not try to force himself on Obama. In fact, when Sharpton
first encountered him, Obama was running for the Senate. They met before
appearing at a session of the black caucus of the Democratic National Committee
and divided up their rhetorical responsibilities. Obama said that he was making
a straight policy speech that night, and Sharpton
replied, “Tomorrow night, I’ll take care of the brothers and sisters.”
Once the Presidential campaign
accelerated, Obama explicitly addressed the subject of race mainly when it was
demanded of him. While he was campaigning at a town meeting in
“Let’s get down to brass tacks
here,” she said. “We have never elected a black man in our country.”
“Yes, that’s a good point,” Obama
said, wryly. “I’ve noticed that.”
Then Obama normalized the
question, somehow, and thus normalized the prospects of his winning. “Will
there be some folks who probably don’t vote for me because I’m black?” he said
to Tews. “Of course, just like there’d be some people
who won’t vote for Hillary because she’s a woman or wouldn’t vote for John
Edwards because they don’t like his accent. But the question is, can we get a majority of the American people to give us a
fair hearing?”
A fair hearing became far more
difficult with the release, in March, of videotapes of Jeremiah Wright in full
denunciatory mode: “Not God bless
There was, of course, a context
to “God damn
According to Axelrod, Obama had
wanted to give a speech about race in
For three days, Obama campaigned
by day and then dictated and wrote the speech until the early-morning hours. “I
slept well, because I knew that Barack knew exactly what he wanted to
say,” Axelrod recalled.
In his speech, Obama began by
trying to broaden the country’s understanding of the Reverend Wright’s
activities as pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ: he was a former
marine, he said, who had built a large and passionate ministry that represented
“the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gangbanger.”
Obama disagreed with Wright’s most inflammatory and indefensible remarks, which
represented “a profoundly distorted view of this country.” In his view,
despair, the Biblically unforgivable sin, was at the heart of Wright’s mistake.
But he refused to condemn him outright:
I can no more disown him
than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my
white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and
again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world,
but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the
street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic
stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a
part of
Obama was in the midst of a
high-stakes rhetorical balancing act. He empathized not only with his
embittered preacher but also with the embittered white workers who have seen
“their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor”
and cannot understand why their children might be bused across town or why a
person of color has a leg up through affirmative action “because of an
injustice that they themselves never committed.” Obama signalled
to all sides that he heard them, that he “got it.” A white Southerner, even
Bill Clinton, could not dare to do that in a speech on race, and Jesse Jackson,
whose tradition had been more about the rhetoric of grievances and recompense,
never would. Obama’s ability to negotiate among the sharply disparate
perspectives of his fellow-citizens was at the heart of his political success.
Perhaps when people speak of Obama’s “distance,” they mean just this capacity
to inhabit different points of view—a mastery that can seem more
anthropological than political. Obama allowed that black anger about past and
present wrongs was counterproductive; he also pointed to the way that American
politics had been shaped since the Nixon era by the exploitation of white anger
in the South and elsewhere.
Just as important as the message
was the tone of the messenger. Obama’s distinctively cool personality continued
to serve him and his candidacy. The civil-rights-era activist Bob Moses told
me, “His confidence in himself—and his peacefulness with himself—came through
in a way that can’t be faked. You are under too much pressure to actually adopt
a persona. You can’t do it under that pressure and not have it blown away.
People said he couldn’t afford to be the angry black candidate, but the point
is that he is not angry. If he were angry, it would have come out.” Indeed, in
the sixties, Moses, as he led voter-registration drives in Mississippi, was
himself known for those same qualities—his intelligence and even temper.
“The speech helped stanch a real
frenzy,” Axelrod said. “Barack turned a moment of great vulnerability into a
moment of triumph. He said, ‘I may lose, but I will have done something
valuable.’ He was utterly calm while everyone was freaking out. He said,
‘Either they will accept it or they won’t and I won’t be President.’ It was
probably the most important moment of the whole campaign.”
Studs Terkel,
who compiled oral histories about race and the Depression and was, at
ninety-six, a
The speech in
6
Obama has proved to be
not only a skilled campaigner but a lucky one—a requirement for victory. In
July, good fortune, in the person of Jesse Jackson, handed him an incident that
would provide him some useful distance from the past.
According to black leaders who
know both men well,
Obama’s talk about responsibility
was the kind of thing that black preachers across the country spoke of on
Sunday mornings. What seemed to irritate Jackson was the double discourse, the
way that Obama’s rhetoric was, by design, being overheard by white audiences
that might understand it not as brotherly sympathy but, rather, as lofty
reproach.
“Barack would go to various
groups and spell out public policy,”
Fox played the tape on the air,
and
“I was shocked by the language,
but I knew Jesse had the feeling that Obama played to white Americans by
criticizing black Americans, for not doing enough to help ourselves,” Julian
Bond told me. “Whether he intended it, I don’t know, but I am sure Jesse
provided Obama that sort of Sister Souljah moment.”
Even many of Obama’s early critics acquired a
grudging respect for his strategic sense. The broadcaster and author Tavis Smiley, who has a huge African-American audience, had
persistently criticized Obama for “pivoting” on issues like gun control and the
death penalty and had warned him against “selling his soul or surrendering his
soul” to get elected. And yet, Smiley told me, “Each time Obama and I talked
during the campaign, maybe a half-dozen times on the phone, we aired our
positions and differences, but it always ended with him saying, ‘Tavis, I gotta do what I gotta do and I respect the fact that you have to do what
you have to.’ We confirm our love for each other and then we hang up.” Obama
did not represent the prophetic tradition: he was not Frederick Douglass or
Bishop Turner, Martin or Malcolm. He was a pragmatist, a politician.
7
In 1995, Colin Powell,
after his reputation was burnished by the first Gulf War—and long before his
reputation was tarnished by the second—was uniquely positioned to become the
first African-American President. His reputation as a soldier and as an adviser
to Presidents had been unimpeachable, and his life story, as he described it in
his autobiography, “My American Journey,” was no less appealing, if less
tortured, than Obama’s in “Dreams from My Father.” Powell put himself forward
in the old-fashioned way: the man of accomplishment “who just happens to be
black.”
For a few weeks, as his book sat
atop the best-seller list, Powell discussed a run for the 1996 Republican
nomination with his family and his inner circle of aides and friends. Bill
Clinton, political tacticians told them, lacked Powell’s particular strengths:
his maturity, his solidity in foreign affairs; in a center-right country, the
scenario went, Powell might beat the incumbent.
“Some in my family, in my circle
of acquaintances, were concerned that, as a black person running for office,
you’re probably at greater personal risk than you might be if you were a white
person,” Powell told me. “But I’ve been at risk many times in my life, and I’ve
been shot at, even.” Powell thought about the question for a few weeks and
then, he said, he realized, “What are you doing? This is not you. It had
nothing to do with race. It had to do with who I am, a professional soldier,
who really has no instinct or gut passion for political life. The determining
factor was I never woke up a single morning saying, ‘Gee, I want to go to
Since leaving the Administration
of George W. Bush, in 2005, after serving as Secretary of State, Powell has
showed his political hand with care, sometimes through background interviews
with favored journalists, sometimes through former aides. But in the past year
he could hardly avoid mention of the Presidential race. Powell said that he had
watched the campaign closely and met with both Obama and John McCain within a
week of each other, in June. “I told them the concerns I had with each of their
campaigns,” Powell recalled, “and I told them what I liked about them. I said,
‘I’m going to be watching.’ ”
Over the summer, Powell saw the
campaign unfold and, increasingly, he was dismayed by the ugly rhetoric on the
Republican side. “It wasn’t just John,” Powell said. “Frankly, very often it
wasn’t John; it was some sheriff in
“John knew what my concerns were
with respect to the Party and with respect to continuing, without much change,
the policies of the Administration,” Powell said. His endorsement of
Obama—precise, eloquent—came as no surprise to McCain. “He knew all of my
concerns,” Powell said. The endorsement was, for some conservatives, like
Kenneth Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s last chief of staff, “the Good
Housekeeping seal of approval.”
In the days that followed, the
calls, letters, and e-mails that Powell received were mostly positive. The
Pakistanis in his local supermarket appreciated what he had to say about the
use of “Arab” or “Muslim” as a pejorative. Some critics said that his
endorsement of Obama was an act of “disloyalty and dishonor.” Rush Limbaugh was
only the loudest of the right-wing voices to denounce him. Limbaugh felt no
compunction about saying that Powell’s only reason for endorsing Obama was
race. “The Rush Limbaugh attacks and other attacks from the far right generate
a lot of heat but not much light,” Powell said. The racist letters he’s
received are generally unsigned and with no return address. “But I’ve faced
this in just about everything I’ve ever done in my public life,” Powell said.
“It’s there in
Powell said that Obama had run a
completely new kind of campaign when it came to race. “Shirley [Chisholm] was a
wonderful woman, and I admire Jesse [Jackson] and all of my other friends in
the black community,” he said, “but I think Obama should not be just—well,
‘They were black, and he’s black, therefore they’re his predecessor.’
“Here’s the difference in a
nutshell, and it’s an expression that I’ve used throughout my career—first
black national-security adviser, first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
first black Secretary of State. What Obama did, he’s run as an American who is
black, not as a black American. There’s a difference. People would say to me,
‘Gee, it’s great to be the black Secretary of State,’ and I would blink and
laugh and say, ‘Is there a white one somewhere? I am
the Secretary of State, who happens to be black.’ Make sure you understand
where you put that descriptor, because it makes a difference. And I faced that
throughout my career. You know, ‘You’re the best black lieutenant I’ve ever
seen.’ ‘Thank you very much, sir, but I want to be the best lieutenant you’ve
ever seen, not the best black lieutenant you’ve ever seen.’ Obama has not
shrunk from his heritage, his culture, his background, and the fact that he’s
black, as other blacks have. He ran honestly on the basis of who
he is and what he is and his background, which is a fascinating background, but
he didn’t run just to appeal to black people or to say a black person could do
it. He’s running as an American.”
I asked Powell if Obama’s election would signal
the rise of a “post-racial” period in American history. “No!” he said. “It just
means that we have moved farther along the continuum that the Founding Fathers
laid out for us two hundred and thirty-odd years ago. With each passing year,
with each passing generation, with each passing figure, we move closer and
closer to what
8
A few weeks before
Election Day, as Obama widened his lead over McCain, I visited
Obama had pledged to run a
fifty-state campaign, but even his enormous war chest would not pay for
futility.
One night, I went out for a beer
with Wendell Pierce, a New Orleanian who made his
name as an actor playing the homicide cop Bunk Moreland on the HBO series “The
Wire.” Pierce is in his mid-forties. His parents’ neighborhood,
Yet you also heard from many
people a great wariness, a kind of defense against white self-congratulation or
the impression that somehow Obama’s election would automatically transform the
conditions of
“Obama winning the Presidency
breaks a historical rhythm, but it does not mean everything,” Smith said. “His
minister did not lie when he said that the controlling power in this country
was rich white men. Rich white men were responsible for slavery. They are
responsible for unbreakable levels of poverty for African-Americans. Look at
this bailout today, which is all about us bailing out rich white men. And there
are thousands of children from this city who have gone missing from
“Obama is the recipient of
something, but he did not stand in the Senate after he was elected and say that
there is a significant absence in this chamber, that he was the only
African-American and this is wrong. He is no Martin Luther King, he is no
Fannie Lou Hamer”—who helped found the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party, in 1964. “He is a man who can be accommodated by
Smith was angry but, as an
activist contemplating a mainstream leader, not entirely misguided. It’s
inevitable that euphoria will fade. The commemorations will fade. And what will
remain is a cresting worldwide recession, wars in
Colin Powell said that, after a
prolonged period in which American prestige abroad has dwindled,
Obama would have a “honeymoon period,” which will give him an opportunity to
“move forward on a number of foreign-policy fronts.
“That is also something that will perish or
diminish over time, as he faces problems and crises,” Powell continued. “If the
excitement of the first black President is great, it’ll diminish if he doesn’t
do something about the economy, or the economy worsens,
or if we suddenly find ourselves in a crisis. As Joe Biden inarticulately said
the other day, ‘Something’s coming along.’ No one knows what it is. . . . The
next President will be challenged, and how the President responds to that
challenge will be more important than what his race happens to be at that
moment. But, for the initial period of an Obama Presidency, there will be an
excitement, an electricity around the world that he
can use.”
9
Forty-nine years ago, a
young woman named Charlayne Hunter graduated third in
her class from
Over the past four decades, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, as she
has been known for many years, has worked at this magazine, at the Times,
for PBS, and for NPR, for which she is now a reporter living in
Just a few minutes before eleven
last Tuesday night, when Barack and Michelle Obama and their daughters walked
out on the stage at Grant Park, and everyone around was screaming, chanting,
and waving flags, the long campaign came to an end. Joy was in the faces of the
people all around me, there was crying and shouting, but Obama seemed to bear a certain gravity, his voice infused not with jubilation but
with a sense of the historical moment.
“If there is anyone out there who
still doubts that
Obama had done it one last time. Having cast
himself in