I wrote a short email to Jonathan Alter immediately after he wrote about the Obama win in Iowa and how African-Americans were sitting on the fence. He wrote about how the race was "Obama's to lose." He echoed other political pundits and news media who were saying the same thing. Never did they say it might be a fluke. Nonetheless, my email predicted that the Clintons would use race, in particular, to marginalize Sen. Obama from his broader support. I didn't expect it to be as transparent as it was. I thought the tricks would be more under-handed, more surreptitious. I actually expected bold-faced lies. What they used were media-spin distortions of Obama's words. Either way you cut it, I think the Clintons have succeeded in making Obama "just the usual black candidate running for President" instead of the biracial candidate who had put it all together, the money, the message, the look. And, as we've seen with the numbers from Nevada, they have used their political muscle to make the black Democratic voting bloc a useless monolith that becomes the death knell for Obama's "Americans all" theme.
The country may not be ready for a black President or a biracial President. But we can all thank Mr. Obama for planting the seed of "color-blindness" and "content of character" that are the underpinning of our Bill of Rights...equal access to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The Iowa victory--and the team who believes in these ideals enough to back Obama--have moved us forward, regardless of the outcome of this nomination battle. History will show that we will become a better nation because of Mr. Obama's "audacity."
His campaign is not about black or African-American progress, it is about America's progress. As a former political reporter, I hope my former colleagues recognize the significance of the Obama factor in this election and rise to a deeper analysis than I have seen thus far.
The Editor’s Desk
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Last Friday afternoon, only hours after winning the Iowa Democratic caucus, Barack Obama was sitting in a teacher's small office at Concord High School in New Hampshire when Richard Wolffe arrived for an interview. "His senior aides David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs stood to the side working their BlackBerrys," Richard says. "Obama was nursing a big steel travel mug full of tea. He couldn't have slept more than three hours, and his voice was even scratchier than it was when I saw him with Michelle on his bus on Wednesday evening in Iowa."
A word about the decision to put Obama on our cover. Weekly magazines like ours have traditionally worried about looking stale or out of sync if the candidate we are featuring loses a different primary early in the week we publish. We suffered from that perennial concern until Thursday night. Then, when Obama's victory— 8 points over John Edwards, and 9 over Hillary Clinton—became clear, so did the cover decision. Barack Obama has made not only news but history.
In an election to choose a successor to an unpopular incumbent at an hour of danger, an African-American candidate for president convincingly won a state that is virtually all white; a 46-year-old first-term senator defeated two more seasoned national politicians; an insurgent is roiling the stately party establishment Bill Clinton built as the first two-term Democratic president since FDR. No matter what happens going forward, in New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond, the Obama win—a vote for a viable candidate of color in a nation in which the issue of race has been called simply "the American dilemma"—is a new chapter in our long national story.
Part of the message from Iowa, whatever one's politics, is that we are one step closer to judging our politicians, and one another, in the classic King formulation, not by color but by character. "I've said from the beginning I had confidence in the American people," Obama told Richard. "Race is no doubt still a factor in our culture. But people want to know who is going to provide health care that works, schools that work, a foreign policy that works. If they think you can do the work, I think they are willing to give you a chance."
This is at once a confusing and exhilarating moment in American politics, which is explored in this issue by Jonathan Alter, Holly Bailey, Karen Breslau, Eleanor Clift, Sarah Elkins, Howard Fineman, Sarah Kliff, Matthew Philips, Andrew Romano, Suzanne Smalley, Evan Thomasand Richard Wolffe—with photographs by Christopher Anderson,Khue Bui,Charles Ommanney and Jonathan Torgovnik. (And on NEWSWEEK.com, including video from Tammy Haddad and Jennifer Molina).
If Senator Clinton ultimately loses the nomination to Obama, historians should study Charlie Rose's December 2007 interview with Bill Clinton as evidence of the Clintons' anxiety about and anger at the Obama challenge. "If you listen to the people who are most strongly for [Obama]," Clinton told Rose, "they say, basically, we have to throw away all these experienced people because they've been through the wars of the 1990s … and what we want is somebody who started running for president a year after he became a senator because he is fresh, he is new, he has never made a mistake and he has massive political skills. And we're willing to risk it."
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