David Remnick's bridge to Obama

In the Washington offices of The Times where I worked in 1992 there was a cupboard of cardboard clippings files about American politicians in whom British readers might just possibly show some interest. It was not a big cupboard. Even amongst those with presidential ambition, there were few outside George H.W. Bush’s government who much excited the newsdesk in London - and even fewer of those who had time in their fund-raising schedules to spend with British reporters whose readers could neither vote in nor pay for their elections.

Among the file-labels for secret Ku Klux Klansmen and gabby tycoons, was one on a woman from Illinois called Carol Moseley Braun; she had just won a Senate Primary backing the feminist side in the then notorious pubic-hair-on-my-coke-can row over Clarence Thomas's nomination to the US Supreme Court. This promising subject, potentially the first black, female Senator, was someone who ticked the boxes marked 'race', 'sex' and 'first' on which so much journalism depends. And after her victory, her file slowly filled out a little more, with the usual bits and pieces about financial scandal, unauthorised meetings with a Nigerian dictator, defeat in 1998 to a Republican who paid $14 million for the privilege, and the prospect of a re-run in 2004.

That last prospect by Moseley Braun was one which, according to David Remnick in his masterful study, The Bridge,  Barack Obama was studying much more closely than were we. In 1992, the future President  was little more than a Chicago lawyer still waiting for ‘his public life to begin’. Not even the most optimistic and determined foreign correspondent in Illinois was then going to find an outsider from Hawaii and Harvard, Kenya and Kansas who, in the local argot of Democrat politics that forms the heading for one of the finest chapters of , was a 'somebody nobody sent'. Newcomers in Chicago were supposed to wait their turn, 'like in the Chinese Communist Party'.

 After four years, he had attracted only a little more attention, finding enough support to 'send' him into a State Senate seat made open by an under-age sex scandal further up the political ladder. An attempt to move up into a national Congressional seat four years later was blocked by a former Black Panther leader who refused to be pushed aside by someone who, amongst his unforgivable failings of pushyness and impatience, was also possibly just 'not black enough'. But then in 2003, just when Moseley Braun had seemed about to run to reclaim her Senate seat, she chose a doomed bid for the White House instead, leaving the fortunate Obama free to wow the 2004 Democrat Convention and to ride into the Senate himself over various weaker rivals led by a man called Blair Hull, a card-counting casino gambler and vastly wealthy abuser of cocaine. While Moseley Brown returned to Chicago and a career in law and organic food production, the media had suddenly a much better story, one that added a bright new twist to those still essential ingredients of glamour, race and novelty.

Remnick’s Chicago chapters come half way through what is not so much a conventional biography as a 600 page essay on the 44th President of the United States. This is a sophisticated attempt to explain a meteor in America’s political waters whose ripples are still fast extending. The Bridge is a meditation on the moulding of a different kind of political story in a culture where the old stories are always the best. He includes racial lessons from Africa and the Pacific, critical reveries on American fiction and the occasional stern call for those who are not concentrating to wake up and answer a few questions. Yet the more conventionally told details of his Chicago campaigns are important too. They show the snakes and ladders and rolling dice around which any political career must be made to happen, however inevitably and peculiarly linked to the yoke of history this one has now been made to seem.

Barack Obama was undeniably fortunate in his opponents. With $40 million to spend against the future President, even a hot-house numerologist with a blackjack fixation like Blair Hull might have taken that 2004 Senate Primary had he not been exposed as a garden-variety sex and drug abuser. The Republican candidate in the race itself might have profited handily from his marriage to a Star Trek voyager and ‘former Borg drone named Seven of Nine from the home planet of Tendara Colony’ if his divorce records had not showed a predilection  for displaying his wife to sex club audiences. As Jay Leno put it: ‘That’s the difference beween Republicans and Democrats on family values.  Democrat politicians cheat on their wives. Republicans cheat too – but they bring the wife along too. Make it a family event! Bring the whole family!’. Remnicks’ extended account of the years between law school and the White House is a story of Obama’s expanding ability to be liked, to be respected, to appeal to whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives and, most of all, to make the best of his magical luck.

Throughout its more than 600 pages this book is, however, a cumulative reminder of how little distance has yet been travelled in the trajectory that Obama has set. At the beginning and end we are on ‘The Bridge’ of the title itself, the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River at Selma where state troopers in 1965 fired on protesters attempting to take a murdered colleague’s casket to the state capital. Martin Luther King’s words when he reached Montgomery eleven days later began with the question of how long it would take to win ‘the friendship and understanding’ of the white man; and they ended with the answer ‘not long’ – ‘because no lie can live forever. . because you shall reap what you sow. . because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice’. Although this last refrain, Remnick writes, became ‘Barack Obama’s favourite quotation’, the struggle away from slavery and oppression in the American South was not Obama’s own narrative. No one whose personal story was that alone had ever come close to the Presidency, not Jesse Jackson, certainly not Carol Moseley Brown. In 1996, 2004 and in 2008 Obama had to win the votes of those who cherished Dr King’s dream while bending and moulding a much broader story. Remnick’s aim is to set out the lines for explaining how that was done and what it might still mean.

The Bridge does not add hugely to what was already known about Obama’s background, his absentee Kenyan father, his frequently absent Kansas mother, whose anthropological researches in Indonesia are however given detailed attention,  and the grandparents in Hawaii where he spent much of his youth. Obama has told the story himself in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father which, while it is ‘a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention and artful shaping’ does not depart in important respects from the version as researched here. Haters of Obama, and those who argue that he is not even American-born, will say that Remnick, the white liberal editor of The New Yorker, was hardly going to challenge his subject except around the periphery. But the ‘birthers’ are far from supporting their obsession and Remnick does not dignify them with any direct riposte.

His art is to focus his readers’ minds on the vast context in which even a provisional estimate of Obama must be seen. Some critics have objected to his history lessons on colonial Kenya and pre-American Hawaii. But Tom Mboya, the once famed leader who persuaded rich Americans to defy the British and fund the scholarships that brought Barack Obama Sr to America, is now mostly forgotten. The racial nuances of Hawaii are little seen by those who paddle and spear fish in the footsteps of Elvis Presley. This is not a quick read but neither is its subject a subject for quick study. The impact of Obama on American politics has barely begun. It can be seen in the continuing incomprehension of the man at home and abroad, the puzzling about how he has driven his opponents so far and fast to the Right. This is a particularly relevant issue for newspaper reporters in Britain this week where our own rare and dramatic election result has produced an initial euphoric calm, some quiet claims of coalition and harmony and a profound uncertainty about precisely how massive an event has taken place and where its ripples will end.