Across the Divide

Sometimes, the middle ground doesn't hold between black and white, and Obama's innate sense of caution and compromise can look like weakness. Just before his big announcement outside the old state capitol in Springfield—where Lincoln delivered his "house divided" speech—Obama abruptly changed plans and asked his pastor not to deliver the invocation prayer. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is the man who gave Obama not just spiritual direction, but also his signature phrase, which became the title of one of his books, "The Audacity of Hope." But in the days before Obama officially launched his campaign, Wright was also caricatured as a "radical" for his Afrocentrism and his focus on black issues—a strange criticism, perhaps, of a preacher on the South Side. (The Reverend Wright is considered mainstream among African-American church leaders; Ebony magazine once named him one of the top 15 black preachers in America.) "Fifteen minutes before Shabbos I get a call from Barack," a clearly perturbed Reverend Wright told The New York Times. "One of his members had talked him into uninviting me."

Obama says he was just trying to shield his pastor from harsh media attention. But the effect was to look like he wanted to distance himself from his own spiritual leader and community. "It's conceivable that I might have been overprotective, and probably didn't anticipate that he might feel hurt by it," Obama concedes. "So we had a discussion about it and everything is fine at this point." (Wright declined to talk to NEWSWEEK.)

No matter how he positions himself on the campaign trail, when Obama returns home to his wife and two daughters in Chicago, there's no ambiguity about identity. To Michelle, the persistent questions about Obama's roots are not about him. "We as a black community are struggling with our own identity and what it means to be black," she tells NEWSWEEK. "We see what is shown of us on TV but we also know that is not the full picture. So what is the picture? We're figuring it out. It's a conversation that needs to take place." There are times when the conversation turns in ways Obama cannot control, especially under the bright lights of the presidential campaign. In March, he traveled to Selma, Ala., to mark the Bloody Sunday march of 1965—a turning point in the civil-rights struggle. There, Obama delivered a powerful speech about the need for his generation to overcome its apathy and take action in politics. But he also went too far in suggesting a personal connection to Selma, saying his parents "got together" because of the march, when he was actually born four years earlier, in 1961. A few blocks away, Obama's main Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, was making her own pitch for the African-American vote, drafting her husband's public help for the first time in the campaign. Obama tells NEWSWEEK that his error was simply the result of "testing lines" without forethought; he denied with a wry smile it had anything to do with pressure from the Clintons and a heated competition for black voters.

Four months later, Selma has become the rousing end to Obama's stump speech. Now he makes it clear that he was a young boy at the time of Bloody Sunday, but he says the marchers fought for the rights of children just like him. "They did that for me and now we've got to do it for the next generation," he said last week in front of an ivy-covered barn in southeastern Iowa. "When I went back to Washington [from Selma], some people slapped me on the back and said, 'That was a wonderful celebration of African-American history.' I said, 'You don't understand: that was a celebration of American history.' Because at every juncture in American history, that's how change happens—by people coming together and deciding we're going to have a better America."

It was the week of July 4, and all across Iowa, presidential candidates were wrapping themselves in the flag. Yet none could have delivered that line quite like Barack Obama. He might have been too young to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, but he sees himself as part of that broad struggle—and in ways his forebears could hardly imagine, he's still got his eyes on the prize.

© 2007