Fracture by Joy-Ann Reid

Author:Joy-Ann Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062305275
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

ON AUGUST 20, A WEEK BEFORE THE OPENING DAY OF THE DEMOCRATIC National Convention, word reached Washington that Stephanie Tubbs Jones was dead. She had been spotted by a police officer the evening before, driving erratically through her Cleveland Heights neighborhood. When her car finally stopped, a police officer found the congresswoman breathing, but unconscious, behind the wheel. She had suffered an aneurism, causing her brain to hemorrhage. She died the next day at Huron Hospital in her beloved Cleveland, as a stream of stunned political and religious leaders made a pilgrimage to the bedside of the fifty-eight-year-old firebrand.

Statements of shock and sympathy poured in, from Ohio governor Ted Strickland, from Tubbs Jones’s fellow members of Congress, from the House leadership on both sides of the aisle, and from former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Tubbs Jones’s death was especially hard on Hillary Clinton, for whom the Ohioan had been a stalwart, fierce combatant for her campaign, but for far longer than that, a dear and faithful friend.

The convention was set to begin in Denver, and the Obama campaign was working assiduously to court Clinton supporters, and in the words of one senior campaign operative, “to make it easy for them to come home.” Issues of women’s representation and Hillary’s voluminous campaign debt swirled around the negotiations, as did what roles she and Bill Clinton would play at the convention. There was little time for immediate mourning.

Even after Hillary’s concession in June, when Obama returned to Washington with a small contingent of staff to meet with his colleagues in the Black Caucus, the mood had been tense. Obama had opened his remarks by suggesting it was time to get over the campaign and whatever raw feelings it had left behind and pull together toward November.

“Get over it?” Diane Watson of California, a Hillary supporter from early in the primary, shot back. “With all due respect, Senator, don’t come in here telling me to get over it.”

Obama aides said Tubbs Jones was among the most recalcitrant, with one attendee describing the congresswoman as “addressing Obama like her houseboy.”

“We were stunned by the attitude,” said one Obama aide. “We walked into that meeting, where ninety percent of the members who attended had been for Hillary and not for us. But the attitude in the room was not ‘Oh, hey, you’re the first black major party nominee, let’s go off and make history together.’ It was more, ‘What are you gonna do to get our support?’ ” As for Obama, the aide said, “He didn’t say it out loud, but his attitude was like, wait a second . . . ninety percent of your constituents just voted for me—why exactly do I need y’all?”

A sharp contrast was Obama’s growing bond with John Lewis, whom a former Obama aide called “a statesman throughout” the campaign. “I thought that he handled the transition from the Clintons to Obama expertly,” the former aide said. “And I think his humanity always came through, in every interaction.

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