Game Change by John Heilemann

Author:John Heilemann
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-04-10T16:58:27+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Obama Agonistes

THE OBAMAS ATE BREAKFAST in silence at their hotel in San Antonio the morning after Ohio and Texas. Their friends Jarrett and Whitaker tried to cheer them up, but it was no use. Bad vibes suffused the table.

Michelle was especially out of sorts—which is to say, pissed off. She’d been that way the night before, too, but her mood had worsened with the new dawn. She was tired, very tired, and she missed her girls. She was no campaign strategist, but she knew her husband’s operation had poured $20 million into Texas and Ohio. And what had all that dinero yielded? Two big, fat losses. Michelle felt she was wasting her time on the road, spending countless days away from home, and yet failing to help her husband. She was unhappy with her schedule. Unhappy with her stump speech. Just unhappy. On the flight home to Chicago, she plugged her iPod headphones into her ears and spoke to no one.

Checking out was no option for Barack, but he was just as displeased as Michelle. He wanted the race against Hillary to be over. He still desperately needed some sleep.

But by failing to put Clinton out of her misery, Obama had all but guaranteed himself another three months of this hell. A seven-week chasm stretched out before him until the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, which, given its older and whiter demographics, he was virtually certain to lose. Many of the contests after that would be no picnic, either; the calendar, which had been his friend in February, was now his enemy. Meanwhile, the press was starting to treat him as what he was: the front-runner. Obama didn’t much like it. At a press availability two days earlier, when reporters nagged him about Tony Rezko, he’d whined, “C’mon, guys, I just answered, like, eight questions”—and then stalked off, cutting them short. For more than a month since South Carolina, Obama had been in the catbird seat. Now he braced for his turn in the barrel.

No amount of girding, however, could have prepared Obama for what he saw on his TV screen eight days later. On March 13, ABC News aired a story about his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Using excerpts from videotapes of Wright’s sermons that were for sale at his parish, Trinity United Church of Christ, the story painted a picture of a preacher unhinged. In one clip, Wright railed about the treatment of African Americans: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes the three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no! Not God bless America—Goddamn America!” In another, he referred to America as the “U.S. of KKK A.” In still another, from a sermon delivered after 9/11, Wright bellowed, “We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki! And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and

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