sight of Obama at the start of the December 11 ABC broadcast of Monday Night Football. Besuited, looking solemn, seated behind a desk, an American flag to his left, Obama began, “Good evening. I’m Senator Barack Obama. I’m here tonight to answer some questions about a very important contest that’s been weighing on the minds of the American people. This is a contest about the future. A contest between two very different philosophies. A contest that will ultimately be decided in America’s heartland . . . Tonight, I’d like to put all the doubts to rest. I’d like to announce to my hometown of Chicago and all of America that I am ready.” With that, Obama placed a Chicago Bears hat on his head and continued, “For the Bears to go all the way, baby!” Then, with a mile-wide grin across his face punctuating a performance of unchecked charisma, he chanted the descending opening bars—“Dah, dah, dah, DAH!”—of the Monday Night Football theme.
TO MANY, ESPECIALLY THOSE in the Clinton camp, Obama’s early-December itinerary was proof positive that he was running. But for all the outward signs to the contrary, Obama was still undecided. In Washington, he’d met with a group of his old friends from Harvard. They chewed over the prospect for a while, weighing the various points and possibilities. Eventually, someone observed, We’ve been in this room for two hours talking about why you should run, and no one has mentioned that you’re black.
While it was true that Obama had rarely considered, or let himself consider, his skin pigmentation as a possible impediment to his running (or winning), race was never really absent from his thinking. Now, spontaneously, and quite unexpectedly, he found himself speaking passionately about what it would mean to women in black churches who had worked so long and so hard to see their kids grow up safe and have big dreams in inner-city communities.
He returned to that motif on December 13, when he and his advisers gathered again in Axelrod’s conference room for a final meeting before the Obamas took off for Hawaii. “What exactly do you think you can accomplish by getting the presidency?” Michelle asked him pointedly.
“Well,” Obama said, “there are a lot of things I think I can accomplish, but two things I know. The first is, when I raise my hand and take that oath of office, there are millions of kids around this country who don’t believe that it would ever be possible for them to be president of the United States. And for them, the world would change on that day. And the second thing is, I think the world would look at us differently the day I got elected, because it would be a reaffirmation of what America is, about the constant perfecting of who we are. I think I can help repair the damage that’s been done.”
Like Obama, his nascent campaign brain trust rarely brought up the subject of race during the deliberations over whether he should run. In part, that was because of a combination of discomfort, confidence, and hope: discomfort in that almost all of them were white and felt presumptuous addressing the issue; confidence in Axelrod, who had a well-earned reputation for steering black candidates across the country to victory with significant white support; and hope that the post-racial appeal that Obama already exhibited would prove to be durable, even transcendent.
Yet the near-silence on the topic also owed something to Obama’s combination of optimism and fatalism about it: either the country was ready now for an African American president, he said, or it wouldn’t be in his lifetime.
Obama’s advisers had entered the room still dubious that he would run. But now it was clear that the probabilities had shifted. For one thing, Michelle’s opposition had eased; that much was obvious. At one point, when Barack went outside to have a smoke, someone brought up again the issue of his personal safety. “Well, I’ve already gone out and increased our
TO MANY, ESPECIALLY THOSE in the Clinton camp, Obama’s early-December itinerary was proof positive that he was running. But for all the outward signs to the contrary, Obama was still undecided. In Washington, he’d met with a group of his old friends from Harvard. They chewed over the prospect for a while, weighing the various points and possibilities. Eventually, someone observed, We’ve been in this room for two hours talking about why you should run, and no one has mentioned that you’re black.
While it was true that Obama had rarely considered, or let himself consider, his skin pigmentation as a possible impediment to his running (or winning), race was never really absent from his thinking. Now, spontaneously, and quite unexpectedly, he found himself speaking passionately about what it would mean to women in black churches who had worked so long and so hard to see their kids grow up safe and have big dreams in inner-city communities.
He returned to that motif on December 13, when he and his advisers gathered again in Axelrod’s conference room for a final meeting before the Obamas took off for Hawaii. “What exactly do you think you can accomplish by getting the presidency?” Michelle asked him pointedly.
“Well,” Obama said, “there are a lot of things I think I can accomplish, but two things I know. The first is, when I raise my hand and take that oath of office, there are millions of kids around this country who don’t believe that it would ever be possible for them to be president of the United States. And for them, the world would change on that day. And the second thing is, I think the world would look at us differently the day I got elected, because it would be a reaffirmation of what America is, about the constant perfecting of who we are. I think I can help repair the damage that’s been done.”
Like Obama, his nascent campaign brain trust rarely brought up the subject of race during the deliberations over whether he should run. In part, that was because of a combination of discomfort, confidence, and hope: discomfort in that almost all of them were white and felt presumptuous addressing the issue; confidence in Axelrod, who had a well-earned reputation for steering black candidates across the country to victory with significant white support; and hope that the post-racial appeal that Obama already exhibited would prove to be durable, even transcendent.
Yet the near-silence on the topic also owed something to Obama’s combination of optimism and fatalism about it: either the country was ready now for an African American president, he said, or it wouldn’t be in his lifetime.
Obama’s advisers had entered the room still dubious that he would run. But now it was clear that the probabilities had shifted. For one thing, Michelle’s opposition had eased; that much was obvious. At one point, when Barack went outside to have a smoke, someone brought up again the issue of his personal safety. “Well, I’ve already gone out and increased our
Similar Books
![Hagen, Lynn - Maverick's Mate [Brac Pack 1] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove)](https://fs.ageofbook.com/478712/thumbs/152x264/hagen-lynn-mavericks-mate-brac-pack-1-siren-publishing-everlasting-classic-manlove.jpg)
