Barack Obama: 'Creature of timing'

by Mark Silva

Remember when Gwen Ifill, the Public Broadcasting Service moderator, caught all that flak for moderating a debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin at a time when she was writing about black politics and the rise of the senator from Illinois, Barack Obama?

Book's out.

And Obama's in office.

Ifill, author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, made an appearance in the Situation Room today on CNN.

"Why did Obama break through when other black politicians before him running for the presidency didn't?'' CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked.

"The truth is that Barack Obama is a creature of timing, in much the same way that this book is a creature of timing,'' Ifill said. "People were willing to hear. It didn't hurt that the economy was in a tough space and the message of change helped him a lot more.

"But it also mattered that you had a candidate who for the first time - a black candidate who for the first time was running in a broader, more coalition-based kind of campaign,'' she said. "Appealing to whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians and telling them that his election would make him less different from them than they thought. That he could solve all their problems. And people heard that and that and connected to that.

"And more importantly, a whole new generational cohort of people his age and younger really connected with that in a way that none of the previous breakthrough candidates, at least for the presidency, have been able to pull off,'' the author said.

See the rest of the interview here, courtesy of CNN:

BLITZER: I know you interviewed General Colin Powell for the book. Could he have done it had he decided to run in '96 when he was thinking about it?

IFILL: He was thinking about it, true. But you know what? I did talk to him about it and he didn't think he could have done it. He thought there were still some racial barriers. His wife thought there were some security barriers. And in fact he described it - he didn't have the fire in the belly to run for president in 1996 and if you know anything about presidential candidates, you and I, Wolf, have covered our share, is you've got to really want to do it. You've got to have the audacity in order to break through and if he didn't have it, it wasn't going to be the success he had hoped.

BLITZER: Barack Obama certainly has that audacity of hope as all of us know.

Let me read to you from the book, "The Breakthrough." "Once he won in Iowa, Obama began regularly collecting 80 and 90 percent of the black vote. Black voters decided Obama could win once white people did, only then did his candidacy catch fire."

Because before Iowa, he was - and Hillary Clinton was basically splitting the African American vote.

IFILL: That's true. And you know, in that he had a lot in common with the other breakthrough candidates I talked to in the book. You look at Duval Patrick, who shared campaign ...

BLITZER: The governor of Massachusetts.

IFILL: ... advisers with Obama. The governor of Massachusetts. Only seven percent of Massachusetts was black. So he wasn't relying only on black voters to get him elected. He found a way to appeal to white voters as well. As did Barack Obama.

You look at someone like Artur Davis, the congressman from Alabama who wants to run next year for governor of Alabama, which when you think about that is a pretty audacious idea. But he also has to find a way to appeal to voters in Huntsville as well as Birmingham. Statewide.

The earlier generation of elected black officials more often relied on coming from congressionally - from small districts which were majority black which had been carved out in a way to enhance their chances of getting elected. This new breakthrough generation, not so much.

BLITZER: And including some of the mayors who were elected in predominantly African American cities.

Let me read another line because this jumped out at me when I read it in "The Breakthrough." "When given the chance to talk about race in the ways most expected to hear, he," referring to Obama, "resisted. Race was worth talking about, he thought, but only in the context of broader issues. You would never catch this black man with his fist in the air."

All right. I want you to elaborate.

IFILL: Yeah.

That's so true. When you think about - think back to Invesco Field when he accepted the nomination in Denver. It was the 45th anniversary of the march on Washington. No one would have held it against him if he had made great connections to how far we had come, how Martin Luther King had stood and spoke on behalf of the dream.

In fact, his only reference to King that night was to talk about the Georgia preacher. He didn't bring any attention to that. I was struck the other night with his interview with al Arabiya where he talked about his Muslim - not his upbringing but his background. The fact that his father had been born a Muslim, that he had family members who were Muslim. He didn't talk about that during the campaign, either. And he didn't talk that much about his childhood - not his childhood but his heritage in Kenya.

And part of the reason he didn't do it is because as all politicians, he was trying to narrow the differences between him and the people he was asking to for him. So as far as he was concerned, it was obvious that he was African American. He had written about it in his books with far more conscientiousness than most of us ever apply to thinking about our own race. And so he didn't feel the need to talk about it anymore than that because that would only expand the gulf between him and the people he was hoping to vote for him.

BLITZER: What about the first lady, Michelle Obama. Is she similar in that respect as part of this breakthrough generation you describe in the book?

IFILL: She is similar in a different way. Michelle Obama like Barack Obama went to law school, Ivy League, very accomplished, had her own career. In that respect she is a lot more like Hillary Clinton than she is like her own husband. Because women breaking through is a little slightly different thing. Especially in such kind of a hidebound and well-defined institution as first lady.

So people will be watching very carefully to see what kind of tightrope she manages to walk, mostly because the first lady's job has always been defined as visiting schools and reading to children and picking the china. And one can suspect that Michelle Obama has different ways of putting that together.

But that said, she is a breakthrough in that like these other - like these breakthrough candidates in politics, she took advantage of doors that were open for her by an older generation, her parents, people who marched in civil rights marches, what the Obama's call the Moses Generation. And they see themselves as the Joshua Generation, the people whose job it is to take the risks because their parents made the sacrifices.

BLITZER: Moses led the Children of Israel out of Egypt but never reached the Promise Land. That was for Joshua and his generation to do that.

Gwen Ifill is the author of "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama." Congratulations once again, Gwen, on this new bestseller.

IFILL: Thank you, Wolf.