by Mark Silva
President-elect Barack Obama's closest campaign advisers suggest that one of their successes was not becoming obsessed with any question of race, CBS News' 60 Minutes will report Sunday evening.
"Not getting obsessed about Barack Obama's race was one of the secrets'' of a campaign that will deliver the first African American president to the White House, aides tell CBS's Steve Kroft. The president-elect's four top campaign aides, political advisors David Axelrod and Anita Dunn, Campaign Manager David Plouffe and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, spoke with Kroft on election night for 60 Minutes this weekend.
Answering Kroft's question about whether race was a part of planning the campaign, Plouffe replies, "No, honestly, you had to take a leap of faith in the beginning that the people will get by race. And I think the number of meetings we had about race was zero.''
Axelrod tells Kroft: "The only time we got involved in a discussion of race was when people asked us about it. It was a fascination of the news media...the political community. But internally, it was not an obsession of ours."
The only time that Obama's race became a campaign issue for them was when the media began playing video of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, excoriating America's treatment of blacks from his pulpit, they say
"That was a terrible weekend," Dunn remembers. "The excerpts were endlessly looped on television." Then, said Axelrod, "[Obama] said 'I'm going to make a speech about race and talk about Jeremiah Wright and the perspective of the larger issue...And either the people will accept it or I won't be president.''
"There wasn't discussion [on whether he should make a racial speech]," remembers Gibbs. And it's a good thing, says Dunn: "If there had been a discussion, we've often joked, probably most of the people in the campaign would have advised against it,.
Yet the speech was crucial, Plouffe believes: "It was a moment of real leadership. I think when he gave that race speech in Philadelphia, people saw a president...out of the ashes really, he rose as the candidate.''
Comments
Was under the impresion the Obam Campaign used the "Race Card " against Bill Clinton and tha gave Obama the edage-
Posted by: Inky | November 7, 2008 7:57 PM
Don't tell me anyone, even a Swamp reporter, believes Axelrod et al had no discussions about race!
Lie number 1 of the president-elect's staff. The first of many.
Posted by: Regime Change in 2012 | November 7, 2008 11:19 PM
I'm sure, early on, the issue of whether or not Obama should be even photographed playing basketball, noted in the Swamp, was never penciled in, and his concern for wearing a helmet on a bike was never penciled in. BUT, there he was quoted and fearing that he would be thought of as too white or too black, in the Swamp. Nope, no Ecko Red-type marketing was scheduled to target young black audience through black entertainers. Will I Am is white. No extra effort was scheduled to get out the black community to vote. No time was scheduled to discuss the Jena 6. No Jesse Jackson. Just poor Rev. Wright. No time was penciled in to remember to tell the young black folk to pull their pants up in the speech he gave. According to Team Obama here we are to believe that a black man ran and that he ran without actually running. He was colorless the whole entire time and not a minute was spent on addressing all the racial issues this campaign has had to face running a black man to the top of the ticket. The Swamp was just inventing stuff related to race all this time--because they were obsessed with it. Yes, I can certainly imagine that there were zero meetings surrounding the issue of race with a black man running. Given Michelle's fiery speeches "he's not white enough, not black enough" early on on the campaign trail or her more memorable "first time I was proud of my country" or maybe even the subliminal way in which she went from front and center to backdrop surely indicates that there were meetings where race might not have been the central issue but had consistently come up--especially since Obama responded by indicating others should keep off his wife. BUT no TEAM OBAMA want their cake and they want to eat it too. I look forward to the next four years.
Posted by: No way. | November 8, 2008 1:35 AM
Inky--give it a rest. He did what he had to do to WIN.
And now, it's our job to figure out how best to make sure we get the WAR ENDED, the bombings of civilians STOPPED, the VA funded or vouchers given to vets to walk into ANY HOSPITAL THEY WANT like Phil Hare suggests, health and dental and mental care for all, and, oh yes, the economy back on track.
I'm hoping Hillary will be a Supreme Court Justice soon. We know SHE"s been vetted. And she has the same hawkish bonafides as Rahm so who can object?
Posted by: Geraldine "Hussein" Too saying some women in non-token positions might be nice too | November 8, 2008 5:13 AM
And then flipped HIllary off in a 'numbers' style riff right after the 'race' speech.
Okay, so that's how he won.
NObody said politics was anything but a filthy sport.
I don't think journalists should be focusing on the PR PEOPLE. Now's the time to look a what things we can fix and should. And only Katrina Van Den Heuvel's done that.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/381701
Posted by: But that's just me. | November 8, 2008 5:59 AM
Bill Clinton was the first to mention race after South Carolina: 'He played the race card on me." (AND BILL WASN'T EVEN THE ONE WHO WAS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!)
Posted by: Dawson | November 8, 2008 9:57 AM