I, for one, am pleased to discover that Teddy Kennedy had the exact same reaction to the campaign of Hillary Clinton in the early months of 2008 as I did. Kennedy had the added advantage of an ongoing dialogue during that period with former President Bill Clinton. It appears that what Kennedy learned from talking to Bill Clinton was even more damaging than what we all saw in the public sphere.
Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post have an article today that details the evolution of Kennedy’s decision to endorse Obama. It wasn’t an easy decision. Despite the fact that the Clintons and the Kennedys represent two different wings of the Democratic Party, the two families had grown close during the Clinton presidency. Bill Clinton had modeled himself after John F. Kennedy and he’d nominated Teddy’s sister to be the ambassador to Ireland. The Clintons had vacationed with the Kennedys in Massachusetts. Clinton had helped Kennedy win a tough reelection battle in 1994. Hillary Clinton had been a strong ally for Kennedy in the fight to expand medical coverage. And then there was the institutional clout of the Clintons and their strong standing with the voters of Massachusetts. Kennedy had many incentives to endorse Hillary, or to at least remain neutral. Despite the long odds, his best friend Senator Chris Dodd was also a candidate for office.
The Clintons strategy was to stay in close contact, but out of sensitivity to Kennedy’s relationship to Dodd (and to a lesser extent, Biden) to refrain from asking outright for an endorsement. They wanted his endorsement, but they also wanted to prevent him from endorsing Edwards or Obama.
Kennedy was watching the campaign carefully in the fall of 2007, and he was impressed by how Obama was conducting himself. Young members of the Kennedy clan were inspired and impressed by Obama, and that had a major influence on Kennedy’s thinking. But he remained undecided prior to the opening contest in Iowa (a caucus that Edwards had assured him he would win). Obama’s upset victory in the nearly all-white Iowa, and his stunning victory speech that night, made a strongly positive impression on Kennedy. But he was still wavering the next day when he received a call from Bill Clinton.
The day after Iowa, Bill Clinton called Kennedy. The former president believed he had been good to the Kennedys when he was in office, recalling to aides what he had done over the years…
…Kennedy told Clinton that he had talked to Hillary the day before, the day of the caucuses, and that they had had a good conversation. He believed she would do well in New Hampshire because of her strong support in the greater Massachusetts area. Clinton then pressed Kennedy for an endorsement. He had not wanted to bother Kennedy as long as Chris Dodd and Joe Biden were in the race. But now, with their poor showings in Iowa, they were out; Clinton said he and Hillary very much wanted Kennedy’s support.
So far, this move on Clinton’s part made good strategic sense. He had respectfully waited until Iowa knocked Kennedy’s close friends out of the race before asking for an endorsement. Anticipating that Obama suddenly had some momentum, he moved to cut-off a Kennedy defection and lock-down his endorsement. The problem is that the conversation did not go well. When Kennedy was non-committal, Clinton turned fierce:
He hoped to stay in touch, he told Clinton, but he would be very busy in the Senate in the coming weeks. In the course of the conversation, Clinton said something that deeply disturbed Kennedy. He never shared it publicly, but a veiled reference to it showed up days later in a column by Albert R. Hunt of Bloomberg News. Hunt said Clinton had “trashed” Obama.
Whatever Clinton said, from that point forward Kennedy began to interpret much of the Clinton message machine’s product in racial terms. And, so did I.
Over the next 10 days came the events that brought the race issue into the forefront of the Democratic campaign. Kennedy watched closely, and became increasingly bothered by the tone and direction of the campaign.
There was Bill Clinton’s comment that the idea that Obama had been a consistent opponent of the Iraq war was a “fairy tale,” a statement that some African Americans took as a commentary on how Clinton saw Obama’s candidacy. There was Hillary Clinton’s comment in New Hampshire about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and former president Lyndon B. Johnson, which some took as her saying that Johnson was more important than King was in the passage of civil rights legislation.
There was the retired teacher who introduced Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire the day before the primary, saying, “If you look back, some people have been comparing one of the candidates to JFK, and he was a wonderful leader, he gave us a lot of hope, but he was assassinated and Lyndon Baines Johnson actually did all his work and got the Republicans to pass those measures.” There was an unnamed Clinton adviser who was quoted by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian as saying, “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.” There was New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, another Clinton supporter, using the phrase “shuck and jive” in a way that seemed pointed at Obama, though Cuomo insisted afterward that it was not.
Perhaps most significant, there was Robert Johnson, the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television, campaigning with Hillary Clinton and alluding in thinly disguised language to Obama’s youthful drug use and Clinton’s delay in distancing herself from it.
Kennedy was offended by the cascading events. He believed the campaign was sliding into divisiveness, and he held the Clintons principally responsible. He also believed that by invoking King in a comparison to Obama, Hillary Clinton was attempting to draw attention to the fact that Obama was black. He worried that the Clintons were trying to turn Obama into the black candidate — the Jesse Jackson of 2008.
Personally, I wasn’t disturbed by the LBJ/MLK flap, although I saw it as a political gaffe. I wasn’t disturbed by the ‘fairy tale’ comment, even though I thought it was dishonest, petulant, and politically self-defeating. I didn’t agree that those events in New Hampshire were intended to racially polarize the contest. They seemed to me to be an inartful argument in favor of Hillary’s superior experience, in the first case, and an effort to dull the differences over the war, in the second. But the remainder of these events did disturb me, and I began to see a deliberate effort to appeal to white solidarity, white resentment, and to benefit off racism and the fear of racism (and its role in Obama’s electability).
Robert Johnson’s comments suggesting that Obama may have once been a drug-dealer were by far the most obvious of these efforts. They were direct in a way we had not seen before, but the comments reminded me of how Bob Kerrey had damned Obama with faint praise when he said that his education in a secular madrassa was a good qualification for the presidency.
On Jan. 14, the day after Robert Johnson’s appearance with Hillary, Bill Clinton called Kennedy. Kennedy decided not to call him back immediately, preferring to think about everything that had happened over the previous 10 days before talking to him.
Kennedy talked to Obama first and discovered that Obama was taking it in stride while many of his staff and supporters were not. You can read the full account of what happened when Kennedy finally called Clinton back here.
Bill Clinton was defensive about Kennedy’s concerns. He accused David Axelrod of implying that Hillary had been responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Kennedy had the quote at hand and told Clinton that he was distorting it. Then Clinton began complaining that Obama had been just as supportive of the Iraq War as Hillary. He argued that the AUMF-Iraq vote had not been a vote for war. Kennedy didn’t like that.
Kennedy, who had led the opposition to the war, was furious. “It was a vote for war,” he said firmly. “I was there. I said it at the time. That resolution was a vote for war. Everybody understood it.” Clinton continued his litany of attacks the Obama campaign had launched against Hillary until Kennedy tried to cut him off. I don’t know where I’m going to go, he told the former president, but I don’t want to see this get into a pissing match on race. “Let’s get the hell off this thing,” he said.
If Clinton was still trying to win Kennedy’s endorsement at this point, he took a critical wrong turn in what he did next. Rather than heed Kennedy’s warning, he accused Obama of injecting race into the contest. It appears that this was the final straw. The next big debate, as the battle moved to Nevada, was not about race but about Obama’s comments about Ronald Reagan being a transformative president, unlike Bill Clinton. Kennedy does not appear to have cared for the Clintons’ use of that as a hammer in the campaign. When the Nevada caucuses were over, Kennedy was ready to endorse Obama.
When Kennedy finally made the endorsement official at American University, Obama told aides that it was the greatest day of his life.
