How 'blackness' has figured in the Obama campaign
E-Mail Article
Printer-Friendly
3-Column Format
Translate
Share Article
Text Size
WASHINGTON: It was November 2006 when Senator Barack Obama first gathered friends and advisers at the offices of a Washington law firm to brainstorm about what it would take for the African American senator from Illinois to win the presidency. Those who attended the meeting said the mix of excitement and trepidation at times felt asphyxiating, as the group weighed the challenges of such a long shot.
Would Obama be able to raise enough money? What kind of toll would a campaign take on him and his family? What kind of organization could he build?
Halfway into the session, Broderick Johnson, a Washington attorney and informal adviser to the senator, spoke up. "What about race?" he asked.
Obama's dismissal was swift and unequivocal. He had been able to navigate racial politics in Illinois, Obama told the group, and was confident he could do so across the nation. "I believe America is ready," one aide recalled him as saying.
The race issue got all of five minutes at that meeting, setting what Obama and his advisers hoped would be the tone of a campaign they were determined not to define by the color of his skin.
Today in Americas
As he heads into a fresh round of mid-Atlantic contests Tuesday in a tight rivalry with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and an impressive record of victories across the country in which he drew significant white votes and overwhelming black support, he claims to have accomplished that goal.
Some South Carolina supporters summed up his broad appeal and message about transcending differences in a chant: "Race Doesn't Matter."
Glimpses inside the Obama campaign show, though, that while the senator had hoped his colorblind style of politics would lift the country above historic racial tensions, from day one his bid for the presidency has been pulled into the thick of them.
While his speeches stay focused on unifying voters, his campaign has learned the hard way that courting a divided electorate requires reaching out group by group.
Instead of following a plotted course, Obama's campaign has zigged and zagged, reacting to outside forces and internal differences between the predominantly white team of top advisers and the mostly black tier of aides below them.
The dynamic began the first day of Obama's presidential bid, when white advisers encouraged him to withdraw an invitation to his pastor, whose Afro-centric sermons have been construed as anti-white, to deliver the invocation at the official campaign kickoff.
Then, when his candidacy was met by a wave of African-American suspicion, the senator's black aides pulled in prominent black scholars, business leaders and elected officials as advisers.
Aides to Obama, who asked not to be identified because the campaign would not authorize them to speak to the news media, said he stayed away from a civil rights demonstration and rarely visited black churches when he was struggling to win over white voters in Iowa.
When Representative John Lewis's endorsement of Clinton set off concerns about black voters' ambivalence toward Obama, the campaign sprinkled his stump speeches with African-American idioms and deployed his wife, Michelle, whose upbringing on the South side of Chicago was more similar to that of many blacks than Obama's biracial background.
The campaign's early-state strategy left Obama vulnerable with Latinos, which hurt him in California and could do the same in the Texas primary March 4. Faulted by Latino leaders for not being visible enough and understanding what issues resonated with immigrants, the campaign has been trying hard to catch up, scheduling more face-to-face meetings with voters, snaring endorsements from Latino politicians and fine-tuning Obama's message.
Obama has resisted any attempt to suggest that his success is a black-only phenomenon or that presidential primaries are breaking along racial lines.
"There are not a lot of African-Americans in Nebraska the last time I checked, or in Utah or in Idaho, areas where I probably won some of my biggest margins," he said Sunday in an NPR radio interview. "There's no doubt that I'm getting more African-American vote, but that doesn't mean that the race is dividing along racial lines.
"You know, in places like Washington State we won across the board, from men, from women, from African-Americans, from whites and from Asians."
David Axelrod, the chief strategist of the Obama campaign, said in an interview that although he and Obama did not map out a detailed strategy for dealing with race when plotting a presidential run, they were well aware it would weigh on his campaign.
Latest News
