Barack wanted to get American troops out of Iraq. He wanted to roll back the tax cuts George W. Bush had pushed through for the super-wealthy. He wanted affordable health care for all Americans. It was an ambitious platform, but every time I walked into an auditorium of revved-up supporters, it seemed as if maybe as a nation we were ready to look past our differences and make it happen. There was pride in those rooms, a united spirit that went well past the color of anyone’s skin. The optimism was big and it was energizing. I surfed it like a wave. “Hope is making a comeback!” I would declare at every stop.
I’d been in Wisconsin one day in February when Katie got a call from someone on Barack’s communications team, saying that there seemed to be a problem. I’d evidently said something controversial in a speech I’d given at a theater in Milwaukee a few hours earlier. Katie was confused, as was I. What I’d said in Milwaukee was really no different from what I’d just finished saying to a crowd in Madison, which was no different from what I’d been saying to every crowd for months. There’d never been an issue before. Why would there be one now?
Later that day, we saw the issue for ourselves. Someone had taken film from my roughly forty-minute talk and edited it down to a single ten-second clip, stripping away the context, putting the emphasis on a few words.
There were clips suddenly circulating from both the Milwaukee and the Madison speeches, focused on the part where I talked about feeling encouraged. The fuller version of what I’d said that day went like this: “What we’ve learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback! And let me tell you something, for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country. Not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction, and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud. I feel privileged to be a part of even witnessing this.”
But nearly all of that had been peeled back, including my references to hope and unity and how moved I was. The nuance was gone; the gaze directed toward one thing. What was in the clips—and now sliding into heavy rotation on conservative radio and TV talk shows, we were told—was this: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.”
I didn’t need to watch the news to know how it was being spun. She’s not a patriot. She’s always hated America. This is who she really is. The rest is just a show.
Here was the first punch. And I’d seemingly brought it on myself. In trying to speak casually, I’d forgotten how weighted each little phrase could be. Unwittingly, I’d given the haters a fourteen-word feast. Just like in first grade, I hadn’t seen it coming.
I flew home to Chicago that night, feeling guilty and dispirited. I knew that Melissa and Katie were quietly tracking the negative news stories via BlackBerry, though they were careful not to share them with me, understanding it would only make things worse. The three of us had worked together for the better part of a year at this point, logging more miles than any of us could count, perpetually racing the clock so I could get back home to my kids at night. We’d trekked through auditoriums all over the country, eaten more fast food than we ever wanted to, and shown up for fancy fund-raisers at homes so opulent we’d had to actively keep ourselves from gawking. While Barack and his campaign team traveled in chartered planes and cushy tour buses, we were still taking off our shoes in slow-moving airport security lines, sitting in coach on United and Southwest, relying on the goodwill of volunteers to shuttle us to and from events that were sometimes a hundred miles apart.
I felt as if overall we’d been doing a pretty excellent job. I’d seen Katie stand on a chair to shout marching orders at photographers twice her age and dress down reporters who asked out-of-line questions. I’d watched Melissa mastermind every detail of my schedule, expertly coordinating multiple campaign events in a day, pounding her BlackBerry to squelch potential problems, while also making sure I never missed a school play, an old friend’s birthday, or a chance to get myself to the gym. The two of them had given everything over to this effort, sacrificing their own personal lives so that I could try to preserve some semblance of mine.
I sat under the dome light of the airplane, worried that I’d somehow blown it with those fourteen stupid words.
At home, after I’d put the girls to bed and sent my mom back to Euclid Avenue to get some rest, I called Barack on his cell. It was the eve of the Wisconsin primaries, and polls there were showing a tight race. Barack had a thin but growing lead when it came to delegates for the national convention, but Hillary had been running ads criticizing Barack on everything from his health-care plan to his not agreeing to debate her more frequently. The stakes seemed high. Barack’s campaign couldn’t afford a letdown. I apologized for what was happening with my speech. “I had no idea I was doing something wrong,” I said. “I’ve been saying the same thing for months.”
Barack was traveling that night between Wisconsin and Texas. I could almost hear him shrugging on the other end of the line. “Look, it’s because your crowds are so big,” he said. “You’ve become a force in the campaign, which means people are going to come after you a little. This is just the nature of things.”
As he did pretty much every time we spoke, he thanked me for the time I was putting in, adding that he was sorry I had to deal with any fallout at all. “I love you, honey,” he told me, before hanging up. “I know this stuff is rough, but it’ll blow over. It always does.”
* * *
He was both right and wrong about this. On February 19, 2008, Barack won the Wisconsin primary by a good margin, which seemed to suggest I’d done him no damage there. That same day, Cindy McCain took a potshot at me while speaking at a rally, saying, “I am proud of my country. I don’t know about you, if you heard those words earlier—I am very proud of my country.” CNN deemed us to be in a “patriotism flap,” and the bloggers did what bloggers do. But within about a week, it seemed that most of the commotion had died down. Barack and I both made comments to the press, clarifying that I felt a pride in seeing so many Americans making phone calls for the campaign, talking to their neighbors, and gaining confidence about their power inside our democracy, which to me did feel like a first. And then we moved on. In my campaign speeches, I tried to be more careful about how the words came out of my mouth, but my message remained the same. I was still proud and still encouraged. Nothing there had changed.
And yet a pernicious seed had been planted—a perception of me as disgruntled and vaguely hostile, lacking some expected level of grace. Whether it was originating from Barack’s political opponents or elsewhere, we couldn’t tell, but the rumors and slanted commentary almost always carried less-than-subtle messaging about race, meant to stir up the deepest and ugliest kind of fear within the voting public. Don’t let the black folks take over. They’re not like you. Their vision is not yours.
This wasn’t helped by the fact that ABC News had combed through twenty-nine hours of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, splicing together a jarring highlight reel that showed the preacher careening through callous and inappropriate fits of rage and resentment at white America, as if white people were to blame for every woe. Barack and I were dismayed to see this, a reflection of the worst and most paranoid parts of the man who’d married us and baptized our children. Both of us had grown up with family members who viewed race through a lens of cranky mistrust. I’d experienced Dandy’s simmering resentment over the decades he’d spent being passed by professionally because of his skin color, as well as Southside’s worries that his grandkids weren’t safe in white neighborhoods. Barack, meanwhile, had listened to Toot, his white grandmother, make offhanded ethnic generalizations and even confess to her black grandson that she sometimes felt afraid when running into a black man on the street. We had lived for years with the narrow-mindedness of some of our elders, having accepted that no one is perfect, particularly those who’d come of age in a time of segregation. Perhaps this had caused us to overlook the more absurd parts of Reverend Wright’s spitfire preaching, even if we hadn’t been present for any of the sermons in question. Seeing an extreme version of his vitriol broadcast in the news, though, we were appalled. The whole affair was a reminder of how our country’s distortions about race could be two-sided—that the suspicion and stereotyping ran both ways.