More on Inmus Outrage

Imus Is Snoop's Frankenstein Monster
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on April 13, 2007,
Now that Imus is officially out, the question is will Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the civil rights leaders, black professional and women's groups march on say a company such as Koch Records and demand that they pull Snoop Dogg's forthcoming album, The Big Squeeze?

They should, and that means ignoring Snoop's loud protest that he's no Don Imus. He's not, he's worse.

While Imus's "nappy headed hos" slur has been plastered all over creation, the "B" "H," and expletive-laced rant that Snoop unleashed against Imus, has barely got a squint of mention.

His R rated words are so vile they can't be printed in adult company. But here's the gist of what he said. He gave veiled praise to the Rutgers women basketball players as ladies of distinction.

But that's only a ploy. To him, they're the rare exception among black women. Most are Bs and Hs, poor, hood dwelling, rank-losers. In one grotesque sentence in his knock against Imus, Snoop managed to get in all the ancient stereotypes about black women.

Now this is the same Snoop that strolled out of a courtroom moments after copping a no contest plea, being slapped with five years probation and community service on felony drug and firearm charges. He then delivered his self-serving Imus and I "are-two-separate-things" rant.

This is the same Snoop that in the next few weeks will hit the road and promote, The Big Squeeze with such good housekeeping titles as "We Came to Bang Out," "Pop Pop Bang," and "F----in is Good for U."

The album features some Snoop's rap buddies and rivals and gives them a chance to be heard and of course bought. And you can be assured that these rap maestros offer a generous sprinkling of B's and H's and other endearing references to black women.

You can be assured that Snoops's corporate owners will bank millions off it. Unlike the 350,000 MSNBC viewers and the few hundred thousand more CBS radio listeners that cackled with and at Imus's inane trash talk, millions of young and not so young persons will dance to, talk up, and delight in the rapper's skewed descriptions of black women. That talk will be embedded even deeper in the youth and adult lexicon.

Snoop called Imus, and other shock jocks that spew their on-air slurs, tired old white men. Imus paid the price and got canned for it. That wouldn't have happened if civil rights leaders, black professional and women's groups, as well as legions of blacks picketed CBS, threatened sponsor boycotts, and dumped mountains of enraged postings on Internet websites.

Within hours after Imus ladled out his bile against the Rutgers women, my mailbox filled up with these postings demanding his scalp. Yet, I have not received one angry email since Snoop made his B and H dig against Imus.

I haven't heard any outraged calls for Koch Records to pull the album, or threats of a boycott if they don't. I have heard no denunciations from Sharpton, Jackson, the National Association of Black Journalists, and not a peep from women's groups about it and him.

A few years ago the NAACP got called on the carpet for nominating some of the most vile rap women bashers for image awards. The last draw was when the NAACP nominated R. Kelly, who was accused of sex crimes against underage girls.

Though the NAACP voters back peddled fast, and tightened the reins on who got nominations and awards, it set a subtle tone that it's better to ignore gangster rap groups than mount a full court attack on them.

Imus was a different matter. And many blacks have gone through tortured gyrations during the Imus furor to make a Snoop like defense that his offense was different. But Imus on his own would not have slurred the Rutgers women with the pejorative term "nappy headed ho's." He would have demeaned them with something like this, "They're some rough looking broads" or "They're some funny headed chicks."

That would have drawn few squeals. But "nappy headed hos?" That line is beeline straight from the rapper's playbook. The day after Imus was officially canned by MSNBC, the shock jocks that daily feast off on-air bashing and trashing minorities, gays, women, and Muslims, ran wild.

They relentlessly played lyrics from the gangster rappers. This was damage control, and their insidious point was to cancel out the furor over Imus and deflect the finger of guilt for trash talk from them.

In a perverse sense, though, they got it right. Imus paid the price for his bile. On the other hand, Snoop and his buddies simply have upped the price for their records, and profit from them. As long as the outcry from civil rights groups, and blacks remains feeble, scattered, and disjointed, they will continue to jingle the cash registers while self-righteously defying anyone to compare them to Imus.

Imus demeaned a basketball team; Snoop and his pals have demeaned a whole generation of young blacks, and especially young black women, and blacks have let them get away with it. That's why Imus is their Frankenstein.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the book, The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and the GOP's court of black voters

OBAMA Speaks Out about "Imus in the Morning"

MSNBC Drops Simulcast of Don Imus Show
By , MSNBC.com
Posted on April 12, 2007, Printed on April 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50473/
MSNBC said Wednesday it will drop its simulcast of the "Imus in the Morning" radio program, responding to growing outrage about the radio host's racial slur against the Rutgers women's basketball team.

"This decision comes as a result of an ongoing review process, which initially included the announcement of a suspension. It also takes into account many conversations with our own employees," NBC news said in a statement.

Talk-show host Don Imus triggered the uproar on his April 4 show, when he referred to the mostly black Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos." His comments have been widely denounced by civil rights and women's groups.

The decision does not affect Imus' nationally syndicated radio show, and the ultimate decision on the fate of that program will rest with executives at CBS Corp. In a statement, CBS reiterated that Imus will be suspended without pay for two weeks beginning on Monday, and that CBS Radio "will continue to speak with all concerned parties and monitor the situation closely."

MSNBC's action came after a growing list of sponsors -- including American Express Co., Sprint Nextel Corp., Staples Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and General Motors Corp. -- said they were pulling ads from Imus' show for the indefinite future.

NBC News President Steve Capus said he made the decision after reading thousands of e-mails and having countless discussions with NBC workers and the public, but he denied the potential loss of advertising dollars had anything to do with it.

"I take no joy in this. It's not a particularly happy moment, but it needed to happen," he said. "I can't ignore the fact that there is a very long list of inappropriate comments, of inappropriate banter, and it has to stop."

NBC's decision came at a time when Imus' program on MSNBC was doing better competitively than it ever has been. For the first three months of the year, its audience was nearly identical to CNN's, leading CNN to replace its morning news team last week.

'He's crossed the line'

Calls for Imus' firing from the radio portion of the program have intensified during the past week, and remained strong even after MSNBC's announcment. The show originates from WFAN-AM in New York City and is syndicated nationally by Westwood One, both of which are managed by CBS Corp. MSNBC, which had been simulcasting the show, is a unit of General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal.

Bruce Gordon, former head of the NAACP and a director of CBS Corp., said before MSNBC's decision Wednesday he hoped the broadcasting company would "make the smart decision" by firing Imus.

"He's crossed the line, he's violated our community," Gordon said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "He needs to face the consequence of that violation."

Gordon, a longtime telecommunications executive, stepped down in March after 19 months as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the foremost U.S. civil rights organizations.

He said he had spoken with CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves and hoped the company, after reviewing the situation, would fire Imus rather than let him return to the air at the end of his suspension.

"We should have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to what I see as irresponsible, racist behavior," Gordon said. "The Imus comments go beyond humor. Maybe he thought it was funny, but that's not what occurred."

A CBS spokesman, Dana McClintock, declined comment on the remarks by Gordon, who is one of at least two minorities on the 13-member board.

The 10 members of the Rutgers team spoke publicly for the first time Tuesday about the on-air comments, made the day after the team lost the NCAA championship game to Tennessee. Some of them wiped away tears as their coach, C. Vivian Stringer, criticized Imus for "racist and sexist remarks that are deplorable, despicable, abominable and unconscionable."

The women, eight of whom are black, agreed to meet with Imus privately and hear his explanation. They held back from saying whether they'd accept Imus' apologies.

Stringer said late Wednesday that she did not call for Imus' firing, but was pleased with the decision by NBC executives.

She said the meeting with Imus was never designed to call for his removal but to give the women on the team the opportunity to meet with him and for him to see the people he had so publicly hurt.

"The young ladies and I needed to put a face behind the remarks... He needs to know who these young ladies are that he hurt," Stringer said.

Imus has apologized repeatedly for his comments. He said Tuesday he hadn't been thinking when making a joke that went "way too far." He also said that those who called for his firing without knowing him, his philanthropic work or what his show was about would be making an "ill-informed" choice.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said in New York that he would put pressure on CBS but that the issue was larger than Imus.

"I think we also have to have now a broad discussion on how the music industry allows this to be used," Sharpton said. "I don't think that we should stop at NBC, and I don't think we should stop at Imus."

Jackson wants more black show hosts

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he planned to meet with CBS and NBC executives on Thursday with a delegation of other civil rights activists and lawmakers to discuss the Imus situation and diversity in broadcasting.

"Imus is on 1,040 hours a week and yet they have virtually no black show hosts. That is true for other networks as well," Jackson said. "We must raise the ethical standard for all of them."

At the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, N.J., about 300 students and faculty rallied earlier in the day to cheer for their team, which lost in the national championship game, and add their voices to the crescendo of calls for Imus' ouster. One of the speakers was Chidimma Acholonu, president of the campus chapter of the NAACP.

"This is not a battle against one man. This is a battle against a way of thought," she said. "Don Imus does not understand the power of his words, so it is our responsibility to remind him."

Before the announcement was made, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) had appeared on the MSNBC program "Hardball," where host David Gregory asked the senator and presidential candidate if he thought Imus should be fired.

"I don't think MSNBC should be carrying the kinds of hateful remarks that Imus uttered the other day," Obama said.

He went on to note that he and his wife have "two daughters who are African-American, gorgeous, tall, and I hope, at some point, are interested enough in sports that they get athletic scholarships. ... I don't want them to be getting a bunch of information that, somehow, they're less than anybody else. And I don't think MSNBC should want to promote that kind of language."

Obama went on to say that he would not be a guest on Imus' show in the future.


© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

The Price of Being Black of any Shade in the World

April 9, 2007
Editorial Observer
For Obama, Estranged in a Strange Land, Aloha Had Its Limits
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Reporters have been shuttling across the Pacific lately in search of the early chapters of Senator Barack Obama’s life story. Their guidebook is his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” in which he describes his adolescence in Honolulu — where he was born and lived through high school, except for a few years in Indonesia — as a difficult time marked by drug use, disaffection and a painful search for identity.

The New York Times listed the ingredients of his young psyche as “racial confusion,” “feelings of alienation” and “disquietude.” The Los Angeles Times suggested that it was not just angst, but boiling angst.

Sounds oddly bleak, doesn’t it? Angst boils up in most people at some point in life, but if there were any place the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan could have fit in, wouldn’t it have been Hawaii? If there is a heaven, it probably looks a lot like Oahu, and the happy souls in it probably go around talking like our national spokesman for racial relaxation, Senator Obama.

So who was this brooding Barry, taking lessons in African-American swagger from a black high-school buddy, Ray, studying black nationalism and going to black parties on Army bases?

His struggle may seem strange in that setting, but the setting itself was strange. Hawaii, where I also grew up in the 1970’s, is famously mellow about race and ethnicity. It’s what you would expect from an ocean crossroads populated by Polynesians and early-20th-century plantation immigrants from across the globe. But tolerant is not the same as oblivious. Hawaii is acutely conscious of — you could say hung up on — racial, ethnic and cultural differences.

People in this motley state, less a melting pot than a tossed salad, invented a host of slang terms for themselves. A pidgin English field guide would list buk-buks, pakes, buddaheads, katonks, mokes, titas, popolos, yobos, blalahs, haoles and portagees. These labels can be affectionate or angry, though they are usually used neutrally or with just mild rudeness, often in the kinds of ethnic jokes that passed out of polite favor on the mainland long ago.

Hawaii’s fixation on social taxonomy is also seen in the local habit of linking identity to diploma. The first question locals ask one another is where they went to high school. Implicit in the answer are a lot of assumptions about ethnicity and class, whether the school is Punahou (elite white and Asian), Iolani (elite Japanese), Farrington (working-class Filipino and Samoan) or whatever.

There is, in this crowded paradise, a slot for everybody.Or almost everybody.

For Mr. Obama, fitting in at Punahou could have been hard, given its reputation as a cliquish school dominated since missionary days by the rich white people who founded it. Mr. Obama, a scholarship student, wasn’t rich and didn’t look white.

Beyond that, his parents — University of Hawaii graduate students — and his Kansas grandparents, who helped raise him after his father returned to Africa, had no roots in the local culture. He lived in a state that, then as now, had a minuscule African-American population. He seems to have been surrounded by people who knew just enough about black America to be stupidly insensitive, and his family couldn’t help him.

“I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” he wrote. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

In one sense, he wasn’t alone. Being black isn’t common in Hawaii, but being biracial is. There’s a Hawaiian word for it — hapa, or half — that traditionally refers to combinations of white with Hawaiian or Asian, though many use it for any racial blend. Being hapa is hardly cause for discrimination in mixed-up Hawaii, but it can be problematic. Dwelling on it can tie a person in knots. It can be disorienting to feel forced to choose between identities when you are both and neither. It can be infuriating to be stared at by people trying to puzzle out what you are.

Vexations like these, felt by growing numbers of multiracial Americans, have helped to spur a blossoming of hapa awareness on the mainland. People are trying out the idea of a hapa culture that is greater than the sum of its parts. There are hapa conferences, hapa college clubs and hapa Web sites. More and more people consider the pursuit of hapaness to be the answer to the paradox of bifurcation. Certainly, it is powerful evidence of the irrepressible yearning for identity. So is Mr. Obama’s story, his restless searching for a solace that Hawaii could not offer.

I asked him recently about that search. He described a long process of pulling together the parts of his life before finding a skin he could live in. The multitudes that he contains — Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, Harvard, Illinois — could have been arranged in infinite ways. But he settled in long ago as an African-American in Chicago, a professor turned politician in one of the most segregated cities in America.

The first thing he asked me was what high school I had gone to.

Martin Luther King Real Message to America Hidden

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, AlterNet
Posted on April 4, 2007, It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with "alacrity and generosity," while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Jeff Cohen is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media."

Why Blacks are Hesitant about Barack

Jesse's Nod Won't Help Obama
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on April 3, 2007, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama beamed as he sat beside Jesse Jackson as Jesse announced that he was formally endorsing Obama's candidacy. The idea was that Jackson's endorsement would give Obama a rocket boost with black voters.

It won't. And there are two glaring reasons why.

The first is Jackson himself. While some polls show that Jackson is still popular among many blacks, he's not the Jackson of a decade ago or even four years ago. That Jackson could instantly heat up a crowd with a timely slogan, catchy rhyme, or well-timed phrase and he had the instant ear of presidents and heads of state.

However, the taint of sexual scandal and his fade from the headlines has wiped much of the luster off of his racial star. Jackson belongs to the older civil rights generation, and he's found it tough sledding trying to sell his civil rights pitch to upwardly mobile, younger blacks that have little inkling of past civil rights struggles.

Jackson hinted at that in his little talk endorsing Obama, when he said that it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of black politicians. That was self-serving and disingenuous. Jackson has no intention of passing any torch on now. He will continue to do everything he can to micromanage a role for himself on the national political scene. In the next breath he boasted that he'd work with whichever Democrat ultimately emerges on top and that he is talking to the other Democratic contenders about his agenda.

The second problem is Obama. Even if Jackson was a rock solid Obama man, and still had the sheen on his leadership badge, he wouldn't be much help to him. A Democratic presidential contender must not be afraid to dump strategies on the nation's public policy table to combat the astronomical high black unemployment rate, soaring incarceration for black men, the HIV/AIDS plague, and failing public schools, as well as a plan for drug and criminal justice system overhaul.

These are the issues that stir the political juices of most blacks. Obama hasn't as yet stirred them on these issues. Obama is a good liberal with a commendable record on some issues. The problem is there's just not enough of a record to gauge his effectiveness as a presidential possibility, or even as a good Senator at this still very early point in his jump to the national political stage.

Black voters, indeed all voters, crave and deserve a candidate with a proven track record or at least a defined plan for dealing with the crucial issues. The initial reluctance of many black voters, top black Democrats, civil rights leaders, and that includes Jackson for a while; to leap on the Obama bandwagon is due to the freshman Senator's paper thin legislative record.

As Obama's rock star allure fades in the gruel and heat of the presidential campaign, the questions will loom bigger about his plan for an exit from Iraq, nuclear proliferation, stimulating the economy, battling inflation, environmental and labor problems, campaign finance reform and the always explosive minefield of racial relations.

The contrast between Obama and his Democratic presidential rival John Edwards on the issues has been glaring. Edwards was a full term senator, a seasoned presidential ticket campaigner in 2004, and in the years since the election has barnstormed the country talking and listening to labor and health care advocates about working conditions and the urgent need for affordable health care for the estimated fifty million uninsured Americans.

Blacks and Latinos make up a significant percent of the uninsured. He's crafted a thoughtful and detailed comprehensive plan for national health care and has talked it up at campaign stops in Iowa and New Hampshire. At a Democratic presidential candidates forum in Las Vegas in March he spelled out the plan.

Obama has detailed no plan on health care, and stumbled badly when asked about it at the Las Vegas confab. Obama backers counter that the knock that their candidate lacks political seasoning and a firm handle on the issues is unfair. They say that Bush was equally inexperienced in national and international problem solving before grabbing the Oval Office.

That's a lame counter. The White House is no place for on-the-job-training. Voters, and even top Republicans, should have demanded more of candidate Bush. They didn't, and his towering public policy fumbles, initially on the war on terrorism, and on Iraq, Social Security and Tax reform has been nothing short of disastrous, has cost taxpayers dearly, and has caused much political and public rancor and division.

When the presidential campaign turns torrid in next year's primaries, Obama will have to spell out clearly where he stands on the hot-button issues, and tell how he'll make things work in the White House if he gets there. The voters will and should demand that much of him as well as the other candidates. Jackson can't and won't help Obama there.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the book, The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and the GOP's court of black

Right Questions to ask Obama and Clinton

Hillary and Barack: Right Candidates, Wrong Question
By Gloria Steinem, Women's Media Center
Posted on April 4, 2007,

This commentary is reprinted from a column published in The New York Times, February 7, 2007, and updated on the Women's Media Center, March 20th, 2007.

Even before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking which candidate are Americans more ready for, a white woman or a black man?

With all due respect to the journalistic dilemma of reporting two "firsts" at the same time -- two viable presidential candidates who aren't the usual white faces over collars and ties -- I think this is a dumb and destructive question.

It's dumb because most Americans are smart enough to figure out that a member of a group may or may not represent its interests. After all, many African-Americans opposed the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 because they were aware of his record -- and the views of his conservative supporters.

Similarly, most women weren't excited about Elizabeth Dole as a presidential candidate for the 2000 election because she seemed more attached to those in power than those in need of it. Indeed, Elizabeth Dole even got support from people who opposed women making their own reproductive decisions. (If Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decides to run for president, I imagine that she would face the same fate.)

The question is also destructive because it's divisive. In fact, women of all races and men of color -- who together form an underrepresented majority of this country -- have often found themselves in coalition. Both opposed the wars in Vietnam and Iraq more and earlier than their white male counterparts. White women have also been more likely than white men to support pro-equality candidates of color, and people of color have been more likely to support pro-equality white women.

It's way too early to know which candidate will earn trust or survive Swift-boating, but forcing a choice between race and sex only conceals what's really going on. In February polls, about 60 percent of African-American Democrats supported Hillary Clinton, while only about 20 percent supported Barack Obama. These surprising numbers probably had less to do with Senator Obama himself than with whether people felt he'd been around long enough to trust, whether the name "Clinton," with its associations of racial inclusiveness, was a better bet, and whether a member of one's own group -- a group that has endured a history of discrimination -- could win anyway. (This disease of doubt plays a big role: 81 percent of black voters tell pollsters that a white man will get the Democratic nomination, while only 58 percent of white voters do. Such doubt also helps to explain why women are more likely than men to support Hillary Clinton, but also more likely to say she can't win.) Sure enough, by mid-March, after both candidates had spoken at the civil rights celebration in Selma on March 5, the polls shifted, with Obama leading Clinton among African American voters 44 to 30.

Still, the larger question is: Why compare allies and ignore the opposition? Both Senators Clinton and Obama are civil rights advocates, feminists, environmentalists and critics of the war in Iraq, though she voted early and wrong, and he spoke out early and right. Both have resisted pandering to the right, something that sets them apart from any Republican candidate, including John McCain. Both have Washington and foreign policy experience; George W. Bush did not when he first ran for president. Indeed, Hillary Clinton has something no presidential candidate in history has been able to claim: eight years of on-the-job training.


But the greatest reason for progressives to refuse to be drawn into an irrelevant debate about Senators Clinton and Obama is that it is destructive. We can accomplish much more if we act as a coalition. Think, for instance, of the powerful 19th-century coalition for universal adult suffrage. The parallels between being a chattel slave by race and chattel as a wife, daughter or indentured worker turned abolitionists into suffragists, and vice versa. This coalition against a caste system based on race and sex turned the country on its head -- until it was divided by giving the vote to its smallest part, Negro men.

Sojourner Truth famously warned that this division would cripple the movement for decades to come -- and it did. Only a half-century later did white and black women get the vote, by then tarnished by the racist rhetoric of some white women and diminished by racist restrictions and violence at polls. And only decades after that, in the 1960s, did the civil rights movement start a new wave of equality that spread into feminism, the Native American movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and much more.

But those activists were reinventing the wheel. They were rediscovering Gunnar Myrdal's verdict of the 1940s that "the parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life, for together they form the unpaid or underpaid labor on which America runs."

This time, we could learn from history. We could double our chances by working for one of these candidates, not against the other. For now, I've figured out how to answer reporters when they ask if I'm supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

I just say yes.

Gloria Steinem is co-founder of the Women's Media Center.

How Obama built his Donor Network

Obama Built Donor Network From Roots Up
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and MIKE McINTIRE
CHICAGO — When Barack Obama announced to friends over brunch in 2002 that he planned to run for the United States Senate, one of their first questions was how he could possibly raise the necessary millions.

After all, two and a half years after he had taken quite a “spanking,” as he put it, in his bid to unseat an incumbent congressman, he was still struggling to pay off a $20,000 debt, eking out donations of $1,000 here, $2,000 there.

Improbably, Mr. Obama, running as something of an outsider, wound up raising $15 million and winning that 2004 Senate race. Now that he is running for president, his fund-raising prowess has helped make him the chief rival to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

[Aides said Monday that he had collected more than $20 million in donations in the first three months of the campaign, enough to ratchet up the anxiety in the Clinton camp, which announced it had raised $26 million. Mr. Obama’s campaign has yet to release precise information on its total donations or contributors.]

A look at his 2004 Senate race shows how he laid the foundation for his current fund-raising drive. Even as he cultivated an image as an unconventional candidate devoted to the people, not the establishment, he systematically built a sophisticated, and in many ways quite conventional, money machine.

Interviews and campaign finance reports show Mr. Obama drew crucial early support from Chicago’s thriving black professional class, using it as a springboard to other rainmakers within the broader party establishment. Soon he was drawing money — and, just as valuable, buzz — among wealthy Chicago families like the Crowns and the Pritzkers, as well as friends from Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago, where Mr. Obama taught constitutional law and his wife worked in community relations. As his popularity surged after his rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004, big fund-raisers on Wall Street and in Hollywood hopped aboard, and grass-roots contributions began pouring in as well.

Mr. Obama has written that at the beginning he felt uncomfortable asking for money, but he developed a skill at cultivating donors, often with the same disarming directness he uses on the campaign trail.

“I met him on the first hole,” Steven S. Rogers, a former business owner who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, recalled recently about a golf game in 2001. “By the sixth hole, he said, ‘Steve, I want to run for the Senate.’ And by the ninth hole, he said he needed help to clear up some debts.”

Mr. Obama’s breakthrough in the 2004 Senate race was also made possible by a new wrinkle in the election laws. Faced with a self-financed opponent in the Democratic primary, Blair Hull, who pumped more than $28 million of his own money into the race, Mr. Obama was able to accept up to $12,000 from each donor, or six times the limit at that time.

As a result, nearly half of the more than $5 million that Mr. Obama raised in the primary came from just 300 donors. In a stroke of luck, he had just enough money to pay for a television advertising blitz in the final weeks as Mr. Hull’s campaign crumbled amid accusations that he had abused a former wife.

Some longtime Obama donors said they were glad to be able to exploit the financing loophole to help him.

James S. Crown, a senior member of the Crown family, said that despite the “formidable competition” in the Senate primary, he was so impressed after meeting Mr. Obama for breakfast in early 2003 that he quickly lent his support.

“I was just taken with his sensibility, his intelligence, his values and how he conducted himself during that campaign,” said Mr. Crown, who is Mr. Obama’s chief presidential fund-raiser in Illinois.

Mr. Obama appears to have such a firm hold on so many of Chicago’s big donors that Mrs. Clinton, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, did not even have a fund-raiser here during the crucial first quarter of this year. At the same time, Mr. Obama’s campaign says its grass-roots support is expanding rapidly, in part through $25-a-ticket fund-raisers designed for a new generation of donors.

Mr. Obama declined to be interviewed for this article. But in his book “The Audacity of Hope,” he sounded prescient about the dangers of the money chase, noting that he could not assume it “didn’t alter me in some ways.” At the simplest level, he wrote, it “eliminated any sense of shame” about asking for donations.

But, he added, he also worries that spending so much time courting wealthy donors has caused him to spend “more and more time above the fray,” away from the concerns of ordinary voters.

Mr. Obama, who grew up mostly in Hawaii, began making political contacts in Chicago as a community organizer in the 1980s. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, he returned to Chicago and led a drive that registered more than 100,000 voters for the 1992 elections.

Mr. Obama asked John R. Schmidt, a lawyer who was co-chairman of Bill Clinton’s Illinois fund-raising operation, to raise money for the voter drive. Mr. Schmidt said he invited donors to meet Mr. Obama over lunch at the University Club of Chicago, and he and some of the others later became major donors to his political campaigns.

But perhaps Mr. Obama’s most crucial early support came from the city’s longstanding cadre of highly successful black executives and entrepreneurs.

John W. Rogers Jr., chief executive of Ariel Capital Management, which oversees $16 billion in investments, played basketball with Mr. Obama’s brother-in-law at Princeton University. Quintin E. Primo III, who made a fortune financing commercial real-estate deals, and Louis A. Holland, an investment manager, have also contributed to nearly all the senator’s races.

Under its first black mayor, Harold Washington, the City of Chicago had expanded its contracts with minority business in the 1980s. But, Mr. Rogers said, the state “was not as open and inclusive as it could be.” As a state senator, he said, Mr. Obama pushed to open up more contracting and to give minority investment companies a greater stake in managing state pension funds.

When Mr. Obama decided to run for Congress in 2000 against the former Black Panther Bobby Rush, he used a $9,500 personal loan to help finance the campaign. When he lost, he found himself broke and fielding questions from the Federal Election Commission about his campaign finances. He later had to lend his campaign committee $11,100 more to cover refunds to donors who had inadvertently given too much.

It took him two years to repay his own loans, mostly with small checks from black executives who agreed to help him prepare for another run.

Robert D. Blackwell Sr., a management consultant whose family contributed a few thousand dollars to Mr. Obama then, said that after the House race, it would have been natural for some supporters to hesitate.

“But Barack has almost devout followers who are people of action,” Mr. Blackwell said, “and they rallied behind him.”

When Mr. Obama told his closest friends about his Senate plans, Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago businesswoman who led his finance committee, said: “Our initial reaction was, ‘It’s too soon. You just lost, and if you lose again, where are you?’ ”

Ms. Jarrett said Mr. Obama replied that he was willing to gamble all on one more shot. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s strategist for his Senate and presidential campaigns, said Mr. Obama believed that if he polled well among blacks and white liberals, he would have a chance.

At least initially, few donors seemed to agree. Besides Mr. Hull, a former securities trader, another opponent was the state comptroller, Dan Hynes, whose father had been a major Illinois political figure.

After three months of calling longtime supporters and other Democratic donors, Mr. Obama had raised only $250,000. Even some Harvard friends were wondering if the race made sense.

David B. Wilkins, a Harvard law professor and friend of Mr. Obama, recalled, “I held one of his first fund-raisers here in Cambridge, and I had to beg people to come, because they said: ‘What is this? This guy thinks he’s going to win? Come on.’ ”

At first, only a handful of Obama supporters took advantage of the increased contribution limits, newly available under a so-called millionaire’s amendment to federal campaign laws.

From his Chicago circle of black professionals came John Rogers, who gave $11,000. Among the other investment managers, Mr. Primo and his wife gave $18,000. And Mr. Holland, his wife and two of his partners donated a total of $35,000.

At Harvard, Mr. Wilkins helped tap into professors and alumni, including George Haywood, an investor who, with his wife, Cheryl, contributed $12,000 in April 2003.

Mr. Haywood and Mr. Obama became friends, and it was Mr. Haywood whom then-Senator Obama turned to in early 2005 when he needed a broker to help manage money from a book deal. Mr. Haywood’s broker later invested $100,000 of Mr. Obama’s cash in two speculative stocks that Mr. Haywood owned.

Antoin Rezko, a Chicago businessman who was later involved in a land deal with the Obamas, gave $10,500.

Mr. Obama’s support also widened among Chicago’s business elite. Members of the Pritzker family, which founded the Hyatt Hotel chain, donated $40,000; Penny Pritzker is now the senator’s national finance chairwoman.

Mr. Crown, whose family’s investments include a major stake in the military contractor General Dynamics, said family members normally avoided taking sides in a primary, in part because it was not good for business. But with Mr. Obama, they made an exception, with 10 family members giving a total of $112,500.

“I was just so personally impressed with Barack that it was worth the risk,” Mr. Crown said.

Mr. Obama also attracted major national Democratic donors, including George Soros and members of his family, who gave a total of $60,000.

Other major donors included executives at a Texas-based securities firm, Tejas Inc., who gave $56,000. Its chairman, John Gorman, told The Austin American-Statesman in 2004 that he had been introduced to Mr. Obama by Vernon E. Jordan Jr., the Washington power broker.

Though he helped raise money for Mr. Obama in 2004, Mr. Jordan, a longtime Clinton friend and confidant, is now aligned with Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. In fact, many people who once backed both Mr. Obama’s Senate campaign and the Clintons are now having to choose sides.

Some traditional Clinton supporters, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, David Geffen, the Hollywood mogul, and Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive, have migrated to Mr. Obama.

And Chicago has become almost completely an Obama town. Though Democrats here still express respect for Mrs. Clinton, "if she’s raising any money in Chicago, I don’t know who’s doing it," said Mr. Schmidt, the lawyer who was once co-chairman of President Clinton’s fund-raising here.

Letter begs Blacks to give Barack Obama a Chance

On Barack: An Open Letter and Invitation to Thoughtful Brothers and Sisters In America
By Bacardi L. Jackson, BlackProf.com
Posted on April 2, 2007,
This is the text of an open email widely circulated among the Black community online that has prompted a discussion about the standards by which Barack Obama is being held by other Black leaders.

From: Bacardi L. Jackson

Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 2:31 PM

Subject: On Barack: An Open Letter and Invitation to Thoughtful Brothers and Sisters In America

As I and my husband sat watching The State of Black America 2007, presented by Tavis Smiley, we were awe struck, motivated, inspired, filled with pride and edified by the broad ranging views of the impressive collection of black intelligencia represented on the stage. Following each of the richly-crafted commentary from rapper Chuck D to astronaut and engineer Mae Jemison to Professor Cornel West to poet Sonya Sanchez to one of my innovative classmates Omar Wasow (just to name a few), I ooohhed and ahhhed out loud as each broke it down, laid it out and spoke truth to power.

But then it happened ... my enthusiasm came to a screeching halt! Here we go again ... that same gratuitous question mainstream media outlets across America seem to be commissioning ambitious black folk to answer and justify: Is our brother, Barack Obama, down enough with the cause to deserve our support?

I just knew this panel of amazing minds and deep souls would once and for all stop the madness and give a resounding, "we're not falling for another Rove-ian mindtrick to sidetrack us from the substantive issues at hand to debate your historical lies and give credibility to your ignorance." I just knew this conscientious crew would cite to Obama's academic excellence and obvious intelligence, his outstanding achievements, his proven commitment to our community through his life's work, his impressive legislative record, his coalition-building skills and political experience. But instead, Malcolm's proverbial crabs started grabbing, pulling, pinching and reaching for dear brother Barack's neck. I was mortified.

Seeming to come to his aid, one of my longtime heroes, Professor Olgetree, pointed out that Barack, Michelle Obama and others of his students had not only been impressive students at Harvard, but had dedicated their lives and careers to public service. But, (damn it), he added, he can't take our vote for granted.

Then, Brother Cornel (whose audio version of [the book] “Race Matters” I listened to so many times I almost committed chapters to memory) chimed in, not to save Brother Barack, but to highlight his absence from the State of Black America panel to be (how dare he) at some other event to boost his Presidential candidacy when he knew about Tavis' event more than a year ago. While Professor West did mention that his questions about the depths of one's love for the people were relevant for all candidates everywhere, they, unfortunately, were explicitly asked only of Obama.

Finally, our fearless leader and host, Tavis, who, by his own admission, knew Barack before he was "Barack Obama" sealed the tomb. He assured the audience that, the night before, he got a call from an apologetic Barack who was unable to attend, but "really wanted to be here." As if completely cued in by the tone in Brother Tavis' statement, the audience gave a loud and unambiguously sarcastic "Aaawwww." Adding salt to the wound, dear friend Tavis responded, "well, that's what he told me" in that familiar I-know-he-sounds-like-he's-full-of-it-but-I'm-going-to-pretend-to-be-his -brother-anyway delivery.

Now, I don't point out the dynamics of this dialogue to take away from the amazing legacies of Brothers Ogletree, West or Smiley. They've all made important and lasting contributions to our community and will likely continue to do so, but I do question why they, and we as a community, tend to be so uncharitable toward our own, but inexplicably benevolent to others.

For example, how does a white man who signed the deeply disparate crack-cocaine bill into law, introduced a devastating crime bill that further entrenched the prison industrial complex at the expense of black communities and black political power everywhere, oversaw the murder of more people on death row during his presidency than any president in the history of our country, completely dissed and dismissed our sister Lani Guinier, who would have been an amazing Attorney General for our country and for our community, purely for the sake of political expediency, get to be donned the "First Black President"?

Is our loyalty so easily spawned because one acts like a "pimp," plays the saxophone and visits a few pulpits? I am absolutely amazed at the absence of critical black analysis about Clinton's performance in office while Brother Barack has to be hyper-analyzed, criticized and have his thumbnails extricated for DNA samples before we'll believe he's one of "us." There is no other candidate in this or any other Presidential race (save Shirley Chisholm who, in her day, was hung out to dry by the Black Caucus) who has had to work so hard despite an extraordinary track record to show us that he or she is about the business of making the country better for black people and thereby making the country better for all people.

Al Sharpton, you are absolutely right that everyone who looks like "us" is not one of "us" - at least to the extent that you mean not all black people work for what's in the collective best interest of black people (that is, if such a collective interest still exists - which is another discussion altogether) - but when did you become the blackometer? And, why raise a question of loyalty when you have no substantive evidence of disloyalty? Just to hear yourself talk? Because he's getting more press than you? I'm not suggesting for a minute that Obama and every political candidate not be held accountable for their voting records, their political past, or even their personal judgment, but to question Obama's blackness simply because he is black is the ultimate irony and a dumb distraction, for which Republicans and racists everywhere are cheering us on. And, to question Obama's loyalty simply because he didn't make an appearance at this week's forum hosted by the black gatekeeper flavor of the month is sheer idiocy.

I think a more relevant question is what do the black commentators who make the television and radio appearances to raise and answer the question of Barack's blackness have to gain? It certainly provides them with more face time before the American public and cushions their backsides with a blacker-than-thou throne (even if only in their own minds). I think a more relevant question to our so-called black leaders and academicians is what (other than a supersized ego or potential profits) gets in the way of their unequivocal support of the only person in the race who has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to implementing policies that best serve black people?

To be sure, there may be valid critiques of Obama, but his absence from a forum, his failure to be stereotypically "black" or the fact that he is black are not valid or even useful critiques. So, forgive me for being just a bit skeptical of those black politicians (who reside in key states - e.g., Brother Al and South Carolina State Senator Robert Ford) whose primary critiques are that Barack just may not be black enough or, even better, that America's just not ready for a black President, so they can gain the political spoils and spotlight press of selling out a brother early and often.

If I had the technological saavy, I would jump off this page with all the passion, hope, rage and volume of Spike Lee's Dap and tell you, brothers and sisters everywhere, please please please WAKE UP!

The best thing Barack can do for us is to win, not show up at yet another black forum simply to prove he's one of us by placating the egos who believe Barack should clear his calendar for their "ultimate black" event! There are plenty of other candidates (and so-called leaders) who warrant our scrutiny and skepticism - not to mention a host of misogynistic lyricists, child molesting musicians, and other unaccountable black-community-made millionaires. Barack, however, has proven with his excellence, his achievements, his commitments, and his life's work that he warrants our support.

Rather than using his credentials and connections to build his personal wealth, Obama chose to pursue careers like providing job training for residents of poor neighborhoods, directing voter registration drives and fighting for civil rights. Unlike other candidates in the race, Obama has been consistent in speaking against sending our black babies to murder, and to be murdered by, brown people in the Mesopotamia for the sake of multinational corporate interests. He has successfully forged coalitions with people across racial and political lines to introduce a host of legislation that would, among other things, get guns off our streets, reduce greenhouse emissions, and limit the influence of special interest lobbyist on Capital Hill.

As for whether Barack's black enough, let us not forget that race exists in America not in our biology, genetic code or even our phenotype, but rather by the institutionalization of the economic and social construct of chattel slavery and its vicious offshoots. Under that regime, "a dab'll do ya." Whiteness equates to economic and social privilege and that privilege fades as it traverses the racial spectrum. Anyone who has any black ancestry living in this country, whether for a day or for generations, will experience the vestiges of slavery and the consequences of white privilege, making the question of whether one is descended from enslaved Africans or colonized and oppressed Africans irrelevant. It is not simply the experience of that oppression, however, that demonstrates loyalty to our community and that deserves our community's loyalty, but rather recognition of the injustice of it and actions taken to dismantle it. Clearly, Obama has met this test!

Let the record of each candidate speak for itself. But, for the sake of our ancestors and, more importantly, our descendants, do not inadvertently become a pawn of white privilege by demanding that Obama's record be scrutinized more closely and meet a higher standard than his white counterparts simply because some narcissistic crab in a barrel didn't find himself at the top.


Sincerely,

B.L. Jackson

A Sister Who Unequivocably And Without Apology to Hillary, Bill or Al Supports Barack Obama for President And Invites Other Thoughtful Brothers and Sisters To Do the Same

More about Obama from his Narrator

April 1, 2007
Obama’s Narrator
By BEN WALLACE-WELLS
I.

When Barack Obama decided in January that he would run for president in 2008 and quietly began calling up his staff members and close supporters to tell them so, the choice had many effects, but one of the most immediate and parochial was that it sent Obama’s chief political and media adviser, a Chicago consultant named David Axelrod, into his editing studio. For four years Axelrod has had camera crews tracking virtually everything Obama has done in public — chatting up World War II vets in southern Illinois, visiting his father’s ancestral village in western Kenya — and there were days when the camera crews have outnumbered the civilians.

In the second week of January, Axelrod went down to his editing studio, a raw, whitewashed loft space, and began to sort through all of this tape to put together a five-minute Internet video for the initial announcement of Obama’s campaign, which would come the following Tuesday, Jan. 16. Political observers tend to dismiss bio pieces as fluff. But for Axelrod they supply a coordinating presence, a basic story to wrap the campaign around. There is precision in the fluff. Axelrod says he believes that Obama is something different: a “trailblazing” figure who “represents the future.” And indeed, so far Obama’s campaign has been steeped in his biography. This is, after all, a 45-year-old man who has written not one but two memoirs. Most of the raw videotape Axelrod has is the banal, worn imagery of politics — Obama speaking from a podium, with the familiar, angled hand gestures, or seated and listening intently, elbows on knees — and somehow from this he had hoped to wring transcendence. There was a clip he found from the early stages of the 2004 Senate campaign of Obama, microphone in hand, introducing himself to a small group of voters at a coffeehouse on Chicago’s North Side; when the candidate told them about his work in the early 1990s as a community organizer, there was a spontaneous, sustained applause. “I remember that!” Axelrod told me a few days later as we watched the finished product in his office the morning it was released to the public. “You know, we hadn’t thought that was an important part of his bio, but people really responded to the fact that Barack gave up corporate job offers to work in the community.”

Axelrod has the political operative’s BlackBerried, wearied demeanor, at once somewhat more and somewhat less than fully awake. His conversations are staccato, 90-second affairs, affirmations and advice. The day the video was released, he had six TV news crews lined up to interview him for segments they were putting together on Obama’s announcement. The Fox cameraman started hooking up his wires. He told Axelrod he had just walked past the subway station, and a worker, seeing the TV cameras, asked whom the crew was going to interview: “And I say David Axelrod, and she just screams, ‘Obama’s running!’ That’s all I had to say!”

“Yeah?” Axelrod replied, BlackBerrying, happy. He turned the video back on. Axelrod says he loves man-on-the-street interviews, and while digging through the tape the week before, he found one he did with a young Hispanic guy. “He gives you a — a sense of hope,” the young man says, squinting past the camera, swaying slightly. “Uh, at a time when, you know, things in this country are not going so well.” It’s a good message for Obama, and a good messenger, but what Axelrod likes are the stutters, the verbal hiccups: “That kind of authenticity is how you cut through.”

Axelrod says viewers are more likely to be arrested by shots that look rough, like “a hybrid, part political commercial, part news.” He found a grainy, C-Span-style shot of Obama talking about homelessness on the floor of the State Senate, which Axelrod now uses to establish Obama’s prior political experience. The consultant picked out a lingering, distant shot of Obama walking down a sunny southern Illinois road with his long arm around an older, short white farmer. He says this was intended to convey his candidate’s case with conversation, his cross-cultural capability. The completed announcement video would begin and end with Obama’s keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, and it would include two full minutes on his early life — his father’s background, his mother’s, his grandfather’s, the times he moved when he was a little boy. When you finish watching the video, you don’t have a particularly good sense of Obama as a politician (you might be able to say that he’s for change), but there is an intimacy — you have been drowned in his life, and you feel as if you know him.

There are a variety of problems of political communication that the industry’s operatives spend their time obsessing over. One, which obsessed James Carville, is persuasion: How do you persuade people who believe one thing to believe another? A second, the big one for Joe Trippi, is commitment: What motivates your party’s loyalists to go to the polls in larger numbers? But Axelrod has become animated by a more basic challenge of political communication, the problem of breaking through, of sounding different and new. Axelrod says that the way to cut through all the noise is to see campaigns as an author might, to understand that you need not just ideas but also a credible and authentic character, a distinct politics rooted in personality. (“David breaks them down,” Peter Giangreco, a Chicago direct-mail consultant who often works with Axelrod, told me. “Who is your mother? Who is your father? Why are you doing this?”) This, Axelrod says, is what Karl Rove understood about George W. Bush. “One of the reasons Bush has succeeded in two elections,” Axelrod says, “is that in his own rough-hewn way he has conveyed a sense of this is who I am, warts and all.” For Obama, because of Senator Hillary Clinton’s far-greater experience and establishment backing, this is a particularly essential project. “If we run a conventional campaign and look like a conventional candidacy, we lose,” Axelrod says.

When the first major profile of Axelrod appeared in Chicago magazine in 1987, three years after he left a high-profile job as the lead political reporter for The Chicago Tribune to work as a political operative, the article (“Hatchet Man: The Rise of David Axelrod”) began by comparing him to an “exotic rodent.” Two decades later, there remains the matter of the comb-over and the damp mustache, but his looks seem less important now. In the last four years, Axelrod has helped steer campaigns for fully four of the Democrats now running for president — Obama, Clinton, John Edwards and Chris Dodd — and one who dropped out (Tom Vilsack); framed the messages for the new young governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick; and served as the chief political adviser for Representative Rahm Emanuel when the congressman helped orchestrate the Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives last fall.

Axelrod, who is 52, is lumbering, sardonic and self-deprecating, and he still has the old Chicago street-fighter belief that you can see what matters about politics most clearly when you’re slumming in the wards. His bookshelves are filled with Abe Lincoln biographies, but what he says he admires about Lincoln isn’t just his philosophy but his political effectiveness, the Great Emancipator’s secret shiv. Professional opinions of Axelrod in this pitted, rivalrous field vary, but Axelrod, working from Chicago, has become perhaps the consultant with the tightest grip on his party’s future. “So many consultants are fighting the last war, but David is fighting the next one, and that makes him very, very dangerous,” the Republican consultant Mike Murphy told me.

After the consecutive presidential losses of Al Gore and John Kerry, patrician candidates who ran ill-fitting “people versus the powerful” campaigns designed for them by the consultant Bob Shrum, many Democrats began to suspect that part of what was wrong with the party was its formulaic consultants. The party has suffered, Axelrod says, from a “Wizard of Oz syndrome among Washington political consultants who tend to come to candidates and say: I have the stone tablets! You do what I say, and you will get elected. And they fit their candidates into their rubric.”

Axelrod’s is a less grand, postideological approach, and his campaigns are rooted less in issues than in the particulars of his candidate’s life. For him, running campaigns hitched to personality rather than ideology is a way of reclaiming fleeting authenticity. It is also, more and more, the way of the Democratic Party. Its 2006 Congressional campaign strategy — run by Axelrod’s close friend Emanuel, with the Chicago consultant acting as principal sounding board — did not depend on any great idea of where the party ought to go, like the last political cataclysm, Newt Gingrich’s 1994 House “revolution.” As they have reclaimed power, the Democrats have done so not by moving appreciably to the left or the right; rather, they have done so by allowing their candidates to move in both directions at once. “What David is basically doing — and this is somewhat new for Democrats — isn’t trying to figure out how to sell policies,” says the Democratic media consultant Saul Shorr. “It’s a matter of personality. How do we sell leadership?”

II.

It seems bizarre to consider now, but there was a time, just about three years ago, when Barack Obama was a pretty obscure black candidate for statewide office, and his political fortunes seemed to obey the regular, racialized rules of urban politics. The campaign needed to find a way for him to add white progressives from the Chicago suburbs and lakefront to his expected base among black voters. “When you’re breaking barriers and asking voters to do something they haven’t done before — vote for an African-American for governor or senator — it’s very helpful to have third-party authentication, newspaper endorsements or institutional support, to encourage them to go there,” Axelrod told me. His first choice to vouch for Obama was his old client Paul Simon, the bow-tied, progressive, retired U.S. senator and a beloved figure in their target demographics. But just as Axelrod was trying to fix dates, Simon was taken to the hospital for heart surgery; he died the next day. Paul Harstad, the campaign’s pollster, told me that Axelrod was adamant that Simon had been the perfect proxy. So he sought out the closest substitute he could find and cut a commercial featuring the senator’s daughter, Sheila, a member of the Carbondale, Ill., City Council. Sheila Simon made an ad for Axelrod linking Obama’s legacy and her father’s, saying they were “cut from the same cloth.” When the cash-strapped campaign put the ads on the air and then followed up with another ad linking Obama to Harold Washington, the late, beloved, liberal mayor of Chicago, “that was it,” according to Mark Blumenthal, who was running tracking polls for the opposing Senate campaign of Blair Hull. “The ads did something rare in politics, which was make Obama seem like a historic candidate,” Blumenthal told me. “They helped move his numbers from 30, 35 percent up to 53 percent, and it became a landslide. You could just about see this whole Obama wave beginning.”

Axelrod has known Obama longer than any of his other close political advisers and, other campaign officials say, is now Obama’s chief strategist and someone he “trusts implicitly.” Axelrod has been intimately involved with the staffing of the campaign (David Plouffe, who was a partner in Axelrod’s consulting firm, is now Obama’s campaign manager), with its strategy and pacing and with the scrubbing of its message and language. Because of the vastness of the operation, Axelrod has had to hire other media consultants to help him develop commercials; his own role, he says, will be as “keeper of the message.” One senior campaign adviser told me: “Barack is a no-drama kind of guy. He’s not looking for a person or a group of people that bring their own set of dramas to the operation. What [Obama] gets from David is no nonsense.”

Axelrod met Obama when the senator was 30 years old and coordinating a voter-registration drive in Chicago and Betty Lou Saltzman, a doyenne of progressive politics in Chicago, suggested that the two get to know each other. In the 15 years since, Axelrod has worked through Obama’s life story again and again, scouring it for usable political material, and he believes that some basic themes come through: that he is “not wedded to any ideological frame or dogma,” that he is “an outsider rather than someone who’s spent years in the dens of Georgetown,” that he is an “agent for change” and has the optimism and dynamism of a fresh, young face. Axelrod knows that each of these characteristics has its flip side — optimism can be read as naïveté, independence as ideological unmooredness, unjadedness for a lack of experience and bipartisanship as an instinct to avoid necessary combat.

In his office back in Chicago, Axelrod’s walls aren’t covered with bookcases but with political images, candidates Axelrod has worked for on winning election nights, their hands thrust up, their grins wide, the newspaper headlines behind them. There are the black mayors of Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago. There is a charming, signed shot of Obama underneath a print of Muhammad Ali knocking out Sonny Liston. Signed thanks from Harold Washington. It is a museum of a particular kind of history — not just the evolution of the modern political left but also the ascendance of a particular kind of charismatic, reformer African-American candidate — and you get the sense that this is how the consultant sees himself, as a curator of this history. Electing Obama president would be “something you could really be proud of for the rest of your life,” Axelrod told me in early January. “It would really change politics in a very positive way.” When he talks about his own ideas, Axelrod has a habit of substituting anecdotes not from his own life but from Obama’s, or Deval Patrick’s, as if his is a compounded, and cultivated, existence.

With Obama’s candidacy, Axelrod is placing a gaudy bet: that the symbolic significance of race has now begun to flip. An underlying message of the campaign is that African-American candidates can symbolically represent the future. I asked him if he thought that Obama’s race would be a detriment. “I don’t think of it as a detriment,” Axelrod said. “I know that there are people who wouldn’t vote for a black candidate, but I don’t know if they would vote for a Democratic candidate anyway. But I think that in a sense Barack is the personification of his own message for this country, that we get past the things that divide us and focus on the things that unite us. He is his own vision.”

Every veteran political operative has his batch of lessons learned. From his experience running the antic, aggressive Emanuel’s campaign for Congress, he realized that the way to deal with your client’s perceived flaws is to embrace them and not run from them. When he ran Tom Vilsack’s campaign for governor of Iowa, he learned that the smoothest way to beat back a staunch social conservative message is to attack not the content but “the over-the-top negativism” that often accompanies it. From some advisory work he did for Bill Clinton during the 1996 campaign, when he wrote the memo that introduced the phrase “Bridge to the 21st century” into the political vernacular, Axelrod learned that for a Democrat the future always trumps the past. He says he also learned from Clinton that a pol’s biggest task is “to narrow the distance between the people and government.” From a distance, he watched Karl Rove help George Bush win two terms as president by “understanding that every election is a reaction to the last president” and then in 2004 by “figuring out how to make Bush’s stubbornness into a political virtue.” During the 2004 convention, he stood with Senator Chris Dodd, who told Axelrod that Democrats “were making a mistake by turning the whole thing into a giant V.F.W. convention and not mentioning the failure of the Bush administration on a wide variety of issues.” The lesson he took was that the party shouldn’t get too wrapped up in the issue of the moment. Most of all, from campaign after campaign, and particularly in 2004 from the Dean and Edwards campaigns, Axelrod took the lesson that the problem with failed candidacies isn’t usually that the message wasn’t shrewd but that “unless a message authentically reflects the messenger, it’s likely to fail.”

Axelrod says that his model for the Obama campaign came last year when Deval Patrick ran for governor of Massachusetts. There are many ways in which Patrick’s run and Obama’s are similar: the optimism, the constant presence of the candidate’s biography, the combination of a crusading message of reform with the candidate’s natural pragmatism, the insistence that normal political categories did not apply, even the same, unofficial slogan, shouted from the crowds — “Yes. We. Can!” But most essential is the way in which both of these campaigns came to use the symbolism that accompanies their candidates’ race, not by apologizing for it or ignoring it but by embracing the constant attention paid to the historic nature of the candidacy itself. The Democratic media consultant David Eichenbaum, whose candidate, Chris Gabrieli, lost to Patrick and Axelrod in Massachusetts, told me: “What they were able to do in the Patrick campaign was similar to what they’ve been able to do with Obama. The campaign managed to energize the grass roots, but there was a sense of idealism and hope and being able to break that historic barrier that was very unifying and reached out beyond liberals or the base. It became a movement that took on a life of its own.”

At the beginning of January, on a sunny day in the middle of the Northeast’s strange extended warm spell, Axelrod traveled to Boston for Patrick’s inaugural. Recounting it for me afterward, he said, “I really thought a lot about this Obama thing, and I thought, You know, these are really the moments you work for, and I thought, how amazing would it be to be not at the Massachusetts Statehouse but at the U.S. Capitol for that.”

III.

We were in Chicago in January, and it was absurdly unpleasant outside, the sun hanging high above the wind and the chill like a taunt. Axelrod was on a man-in-the-street shoot, a campaign commercial for Axelrod’s old friend and client Richard M. Daley, and the first scheduled interviewee, a retired Irish firefighter, had been mocking Axelrod’s crew for dressing wrong. “You need the layers in this cold,” he announced. “You need this wickywack stuff.” (“Gee,” Axelrod deadpanned, “I wonder if I’ll be able to draw him out.”) This is Axelrod’s Chicago, the old ward Democrats, and he started bantering with the guy. The firefighter asked Axelrod about Obama: “Everybody’s raving about him, this new black guy, but he doesn’t have any experience. Not everyone’s in love with him, you know.” And the guy grinned, confrontationally, and it just kind of hung there, like race sometimes does in Chicago, somewhere between tolerance and menace.

This has been Axelrod’s career, an eternal return to Chicago and to the politics of race. Axelrod and his sister, Joan, grew up in Manhattan, the children of two Jewish liberals — a mother who worked as a journalist at PM, a left-wing newspaper of the 1940’s, and later ran focus groups for an advertising firm, and a psychologist father. He went to college at the University of Chicago. He found the city familiar-feeling and married a business student named Susan Landau, whom he met while playing co-ed basketball. He has been there ever since.

Axelrod wasn’t the most attentive student; he took so many incompletes in college that he ended up having to finish a quarter of his credits in his last semester. When he was 19, a junior, his father, divorced and living in a Manhattan studio, killed himself, and Axelrod was notified as next of kin. The consultant still has tacked to his wall a fierce self-portrait his father drew in his 20s. Axelrod threw himself into journalism, working after classes at a tiny paper in Hyde Park and covering, among other things, Chicago’s roaring, pitted racial politics; he knew who all the aldermen in the city were by the time he graduated. The Chicago Tribune took him on right out of school, sent him to the night desk for a couple of years of hardening and then turned him loose on City Hall. It was 1979, Axelrod was 23 and the whole politics of the city were caught up in the race thing. Axelrod was inclined toward the reformers, even after his great hope, a white mayor named Jane Byrne, turned out to be a hack and a dud. “I should have known,” he says. In 1984, Axelrod decided to get into politics himself. He signed on with Simon’s senatorial campaign as communications director, became campaign manager and, after Simon won, opened his own shop.

Axelrod can be a fussy bag of liberal tensions and conflicts. He says he hates the idea that he might become the kind of media-hogging consultant who overshadows his client, but he appears on television in Chicago so frequently that construction workers and subway conductors recognize him on the street. He drives, charmingly and humbly, a Pontiac Vibe, but he also has a vast weekend house in Michigan that makes the reporters who talk to him jealous. This basic tension goes beyond personal style; it runs through his career, and it’s the tension of the modern Democratic establishment, caught between its reform origins and the compromises necessary to win power. And it’s the conflict of the Daley circle, a bunch of reformers who brought about a restoration of the machine with its attached pathologies.

“David Axelrod’s mostly been visible in Chicago in the last decade as Daley’s public relations strategist and the guy who goes on television to defend Daley from charges of corruption,” Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who is now chairman of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me. Axelrod sees it a little differently. He says that Daley’s election was necessary as a “moment of racial healing” and that he is “proud of the mayor’s progressive record.”

Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it was clear that it was a contest between two people: the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign. About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story. They note that before signing on with Obama, Axelrod interviewed with Hull. They also point out that Obama’s TV ad campaign started at almost the same time. Axelrod swears up and down that “we had nothing to do with it” and that the campaign’s television ad schedule was long planned. “An aura grows up around you, and people assume everything emanates from you,” he told me.

Today, as Axelrod basks in his profession’s highest glory — shaping a historical presidential campaign — he is experiencing one of its nastiest turns: in a tiny and ideologically promiscuous world, you often need to go to war with your friends. (If Obama hadn’t run, Axelrod says, he would have sat out this presidential race, and he says he told all of his other former clients that early on; he hasn’t had much interaction with them since.) There is Dodd, and there is Edwards, but perhaps most poignantly, there is Hillary Clinton. It’s a matter of epilepsy. David and Susan Axelrod have three children in their late teens and early 20s. Their eldest, Lauren, has developmental disabilities associated with chronic epileptic seizures and now lives in a group home in Chicago. But for years her illness required enough of her parents’ time that it kept Susan Axelrod out of the work force and kept David from moving to Little Rock during the 1992 presidential campaign. Susan and two other mothers of children with epilepsy started a foundation, Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy (CURE), which Susan runs, to promote research and raise funds for a cure. Because of David’s political work, they have had political celebrities do fund-raisers: Bill Clinton, Tim Russert, Obama. But few have done as much for the foundation as Hillary Clinton.

It was January 1999, President Clinton’s impeachment trial was just beginning in the Senate and Hillary Clinton was scheduled to speak at the foundation’s fund-raiser in Chicago. Despite all the fuss back in Washington, Clinton kept the appointment. She spent hours that day in the epilepsy ward at Rush Presbyterian hospital, visiting children hooked up to machines by electrodes so that doctors might diagram their seizure activity and decide which portion of the brain to remove. At the hospital, a local reporter pressed her about the trial in Washington, asked her about that woman. At the organization’s reception at the Drake Hotel that evening, Clinton stood backstage looking over her remarks, figuring out where to insert anecdotes about the kids. “She couldn’t stop talking about what she had seen,” Susan Axelrod recalled. Later, at Hillary Clinton’s behest, the National Institutes of Health convened a conference on finding a cure for epilepsy. Susan Axelrod told me it was “one of the most important things anyone has done for epilepsy.” And this is how politics works: David Axelrod is now dedicated to derailing this woman’s career.

“Life can be tragic,” Axelrod told me by phone from Chicago the day before Obama officially announced his candidacy, “but it is important to focus on the moments when it is rapturous.” Political consultancy is often understood, from a distance, as a science of cynicism, but from up close it can look instead like a ruthless form of love.

IV.

On the second Saturday in February, David and Susan Axelrod drove down to the old Statehouse in Springfield, Ill., to watch Obama officially announce his candidacy for president, giving a speech he had sent to Axelrod for edits at 4 in the morning, two nights before. There was a crowd of more than 15,000 in the square, it was freezing out and Obama looked even skinnier than usual in his big wool coat. Axelrod’s cameras roamed through the crowds, interviewing Illinois locals with mustaches and rural accents, who talked about how Obama is “different,” “inspiring.”

The historic overtones of the speech were unguarded and blunt. Obama mentioned Lincoln half a dozen times. His central theme was the promise of the future, of himself: “Let’s be the generation,” he said over and over again, that meets the big challenges of the day — poverty, energy independence, the environment. “What’s stopped us from meeting these challenges,” he said, “is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics.”

Axelrod says that Obama wrote nearly all of the speech, but there were distinct echoes of Axelrod’s previous clients: not just Patrick but also John Edwards’s campaign for president in 2004 — Axelrod was his chief media adviser. Edwards and his message never really took hold. One rival Democratic media consultant told me, “What I’d like to know about David Axelrod is, What the hell happened with the Edwards campaign?” Axelrod says the Edwards campaign didn’t falter because of the message, “which was pretty good, it got us pretty far.” Instead, he points to Edwards: “I have a whole lot of respect for John, but at some point the candidate has to close the deal and — I can’t tell you why — that never happened with John.”

But the lingering lesson of the Edwards campaign may be that presidential campaigns are wide open and unpredictable things, dozens of different actors pouring their political convictions into a single vessel, with convictions of his own, and they can slip out of the media consultant’s control. In early March, for instance, a minute-long commercial appeared on YouTube attacking Hillary Clinton as a drone out of “1984,” showing her speaking on a giant screen in front of a group of zombielike followers — mimicking the famous Apple commercial — and purporting to come from the Obama campaign. Close to two million people watched the ad in two weeks, and it moved the Obama message in ways Axelrod hadn’t planned. (It later emerged that the ad’s creator worked for a company that contracted for the Obama campaign, though the campaign itself wasn’t involved.) The spot made Axelrod cranky. “I didn’t think much of it,” he told me.

The ad incident came just a month after the campaign’s first disruption, when the Hollywood mogul and liberal Obama fund-raiser David Geffen gave an interview to Maureen Dowd, the Times columnist, in which he said that the Clintons lie “with such ease, it’s troubling.” The Clinton campaign immediately called on Obama’s team to repudiate the comments, but they refused, and afterward the two camps volleyed barbs back and forth for a day or so. It was one of those early campaign spats that get endlessly analyzed for who won some minor tactical advantage, but to Axelrod it was a mistake, a self-induced undermining of the transcendent character he spent so long helping to cultivate. The Geffen episode was “a good object lesson about how easy it is to slide into the morass,” he told me. “I’m mindful of the responsibility not to lose our way, not to disappoint, not to sink into the conventional and lose our soul in the process. There are enormous pressures to conform. And to fight a small tactical battle.”

His friends put it more bluntly. “What David is going to learn in the course of this presidential campaign,” Emanuel told me, “is the economic efficiency of the four-letter word.”

Ben Wallace-Wells writes about national affairs for Rolling Stone. His last article for the magazine was a profile of Tony Snow, the White House press secretary.