The forces that shaped Tim Russert's life and career.
"Hello, brother," the baritone rumbled on the other end of the phone. "I've got a great deal for you." It was Tim Russert, and there was a twinkle in his tone—the kind of twinkle that suggested what was in the offing was anything but a good deal. "Have you read Hitch yet?" My stomach tightened: Christopher Hitchens, the terrific provocateur, had just published a sulfurous attack on religious faith, and I feared what was coming. "You gotta come down and defend the faith, Brother," Russert said. Hitchens was slated to come on Russert's weekend cable show, and Russert wanted a countervailing voice on the program. A devout Catholic, Russert knew I was an Episcopalian, but I had an old rule that I would never debate Hitchens about anything—he is one of the great intellects and wits of the age—since there was no chance I would ever win. I tried to demur, but Russert closed in as though he were cornering a politician on a Sunday morning. "It's the faith, Brother," he said. "I can't do it—I'm the moderator. But it'll be great."
It ' s the faith, Brother: there, in a phrase from the early summer of 2006, was, in a way, the essence of Timothy John Russert Jr., who died of a heart attack last Friday afternoon. In that brief chat the many sides of Russert were on display: he was cajoling and charming, playing it straight, pushing others to be braver and bolder, all in the service of creating an interesting conversation about the things that matter most. I said yes, of course, because if you are in my line of work you always said yes to Russert. (For the record, it was not great, at least for me. Hitchens was kind, but, as I expected, he had the better of the conversation. Russert grinned through the whole damn thing.)
In a capital that can seem soulless and even godless, Russert was a man of faith, cheerfully professing the civic virtues of post-World War II America. He loved his neighbor, honored his parents and cherished his country. The son of working-class south Buffalo, N.Y., Russert moved among popes and presidents with an easy grace, and he was sweetly grateful for, and a little amazed at, his success. He was devoted to his wife, the writer Maureen Orth, and to his son, Luke, who just graduated from Boston College.
It is not sentimental to say that Russert's rise and reign can be best understood in the context of his religion, for his religion was not just a part of his life but his whole life, and his story is a common one for ethnic Roman Catholics of his generation.
To be a certain kind of Catholic in America in the years between, say, the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the election of Richard Nixon (to date it in a way Russert would have liked) was to be immersed not only in a faith but in a consuming culture. Protestants talked about "going to church." Catholics spoke of "the Church." Life revolved around sacraments and the schools, priests and nuns. One Christmas season I asked Russert how much of his childhood had resembled the movie "Going My Way." "Just about all of it," he replied.
Growing up on Kirkwood Drive in Buffalo, "Timmy" Russert attended mass at St. Bonaventure's, where he also went to school. "In the altar-boy world, he was the No. 1 server," recalled Patrick J. Griffin, a neighbor. "They always gave Timmy the prime mass. He got the 10 o'clock mass on a Sunday; we got the 6 o'clock mass on a Sunday. He was a cute little fellow, blond hair and blue eyes, and everybody liked him."
There were crosses above the Russert kids' beds, a portrait of Jesus and his Sacred Heart on the wall and a statue of the Blessed Virgin in the backyard; in May, the month of Mary, the family lit a candle every day. There was no meat on Fridays, and if someone lost something, Mrs. Russert prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, the patron of lost things. On Good Friday they re-enacted the Stations of the Cross. ("I remember, in seventh grade, kneeling in church from noon to three as a form of sacrifice," Russert recalled in his memoir, "Big Russ & Me." "It wasn't easy.") In second grade came first communion and the perils of the confessional. The priest's face was hidden by a screen, and Russert did his homework even then. "We always prepared for confession by thinking of various sins we might have committed," he recalled, "such as being mean to your sister or the always available wildcard sin of 'impure thoughts'." The rhythms and rituals of the church—communion, confession, absolution, catechism—were not exotic to Russert; they were givens, part of the air he breathed.
A nun introduced him to journalism. At St. Bonaventure, he had been a class cutup—boisterous would be the kind description—until one day Sister Mary Lucille, a Sister of Mercy, crooked her finger at him and summoned him to the front of the classroom. "We have to channel that energy, Timothy," she said, and soon she appointed him editor of the school newspaper. At the time there was no school newspaper, so it would take all the more energy to start one up, which he did. (He would still manage to spend a lot of time in detention, which the Catholics called "the jug," from the Latin for "yoke.")
For him, faith and journalism and politics were bound up with one another. Russert's first experience of foreign policy came at the end of Sunday masses during the cold war, when the priest would raise his arms before the congregation and say, "Savior of the world—" to the response from all: "Save Russia." In south Buffalo in 1960, Russert used a paper route to campaign for John F. Kennedy. "I remember him putting Kennedy leaflets in the paper as he delivered them," his older sister Betty said. Part of JFK's appeal was tribal: Russert idolized him, Betty recalled, because "he was young and full of energy and … Catholic." In October 1962, when Kennedy traveled to Buffalo for Pulaski Day, Russert's dad took his son to a strategic spot along the motorcade route and—Russert remembered the time, 3:05 p.m.—Tim, then 12, brushed the president's hand. "I touched him! I touched him!" Russert cried with joy.
The making of the Tim Russert we knew from television began in a brutal ending: Dallas, 1963. When the news came, Russert remembered, the press referred to it as an assassination. In the world he inhabited, they used a different term: martyrdom. The school newspaper produced a special edition and sent copies to President Johnson, Mrs. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. "Some months later we received personal responses from all of them, which changed our lives," he recalled. The thrill of recognition was transformative. On the paper, he had learned "how to report, how to communicate, how to write; and then, on top of all that, people we watched on television, people who were so far removed from our ordinary lives, suddenly acknowledged not only our existence, but our work. From that day forward I was determined that I would have a career in journalism/public service." There, in a distant autumn of tragedy, was everything that would dominate Russert's life: the church, great events, storytelling, a love of life in the arena.
Sister Lucille helped him go to the more competitive Canisius High School, where he worked afternoons manning the St. Michael's rectory switchboard. He answered the phone, emptied the poor box, greeted visitors. In class he learned two things: how to argue and how to be tough. The Jesuits, said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, "do their best to teach their students to think on their feet and defend the truth." A Jesuit ethos was perfect, too, for a Catholic who was to live and try to thrive in a secular world. "Every Catholic order has its own spirit, and the Jesuits have long been known for a restlessness of mind that tends to make them less dogmatic than other groups," Russert wrote.
There was an element of steeliness, too, in the Jesuit world. Father John Sturm, who held the title of prefect of discipline at Canisius, once told him: "Russert, mercy is for God. I deliver justice." He also encountered another perennial element of life for an Irish Catholic of his generation at Canisius: class anxiety. The son of a garbageman who fought in World War II and worked two jobs to provide for his family, Russert was nervous about going to the high school, which he described as "a fancy-pants boys' school on the other side of town." But he won his way in. Early on, he wore clip-on ties to fulfill the dress code, only to be humiliated by a history teacher who ripped the tie from his collar and "held it at arm's length like a dead skunk." Clip-ons, Russert learned in that horrible, sinking moment—a moment he could vividly recall four decades later—did not cut it. He slunk home, and Big Russ taught him how to tie a real Windsor knot, which he used for the rest of his life.
Many people in Washington and New York spend a lot of time, and even more psychic effort, trying to escape their origins, firmly closing the door on where they came from. (A bishop I knew used to say that such insecurity was horribly debilitating, and had a simple commandment for survival: "Remember who you are." When I told Russert that story once, he pumped his fist and shouted, "Amen!") Rather than try to reinvent himself as he grew up and went from worldly triumph to worldly triumph, Russert never lost his sense of place, or his love of tribe.
At John Carroll University in Cleveland, Russert "stayed with the faith, and the rest of us kind of drifted away," said Patrick Griffin. "Even in college he still went to church—and the rest of us were still sleeping." He moved on to work for two of the great Catholic American politicians of the age: New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, before going to NBC News in 1984. His first big get: John Paul II said a private mass that NBC filmed for Holy Week.
He did quiet charity work at St. Ann's home for orphans in Washington, among other causes. "He was a great reporter," said McCarrick, "but he never stopped being a great human being." (It is true that the two can be mutually exclusive.) "As cardinal, I was always having to ask favors of him—could we use his name for this charity, or would he be willing to attend this affair or that affair—and he always tried to be as helpful as he could be."
In a way, Russert was the secular pastor of a circle of Catholic politicians and journalists in the capital. When the priest-sexual-abuse scandal broke a few years ago, McCarrick convened a private meeting of Catholic opinion makers. "It was Russert, James Carville, Cokie Roberts, the late Mary McGrory, Bob Novak, Kate O'Beirne and me," recalled the political commentator Mark Shields. "What a group." But it was Russert's group, and he loved it, and everyone in it. To get a sense of that world, imagine if Allen Drury had written "The Last Hurrah."
Russert was one of the least self-important important people in the capital. Susan Gibbs, the director of communications for the archdiocese of Washington, remembers introducing him to a nun at a Catholic event. The nun had never heard of him, but was intrigued that he worked in television. "You have video cameras?" the nun asked Russert. Yes, he said, he did. "I might need to use them sometime," she said. "How do I reach you if I want to borrow them?" "Call Susan," Russert replied. "She'll know how to reach me."
Because he had to work on Sundays, he liked to go to what he jokingly called the brief "drive-by mass" at Georgetown University Medical Center on Saturday afternoons. On Sunday mornings, there were often visiting priests and nuns watching the broadcast in the studio at NBC News in Washington, and, his work done for the morning, Russert would cheerily pose for photographs and swap stories. (He never quite got over the fact that meatless Fridays had turned out to be a human, not a divine, invention.)
He prepared for broadcasts the way he had prepared for mass back in his altar-boy days. "Part of your responsibility was to be punctual," he wrote. Sometimes he had to go wake the assistant pastor, who liked his sleep; if Russert did not do what he was supposed to do, the service would not happen. "It all seemed so natural then, but when I look back on it, I'm struck by how much responsibility we had," he wrote. "We weren't even in high school yet, but age-old traditions with great meaning depended on our showing up on time and doing the job exactly right."
His imagination was never far from those days, or from the martyred president. Years after he left Buffalo, Russert lunched with Sister Lucille and Dave Powers, JFK's longtime friend and aide. Later, Powers sent Russert a quotation that Kennedy had had inscribed on a silver mug for Powers's birthday: "There are three things which are real: God, Human Folly, and Laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third." Russert loved it.
Just before he collapsed in the NBC News bureau in northwest Washington—he was taken to the hospital by his longtime executive producer, Betsy Fischer—he had sent Sen. Edward Kennedy, who is recuperating from surgery for brain cancer, a set of rosary beads blessed by Benedict XVI. The Hail Mary Russert recited so often ends this way: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death."
Given his successes, it's easy to argue that Barack Obama doesn't need advice. But how he'll handle race going forward is by no means a settled issue. Our open letter.
Race is a difficult subject to talk and write about. Although the blogosphere is rarely shy, mainstream journalists often tread lightly for fear of giving offense or indulging in stereotypes. Political candidates sometimes slyly play the race card, but rarely overtly. Not eager to call attention to race as an issue, the Obama campaign plays it down as a factor in the election. But if an Obama adviser were writing an honest memo to the candidate, here's how it might read:
The good news is that you have all but won the nomination. The bad news, if we are willing to face reality, is that the country—some parts of it, anyway—may not be ready to elect a black president of the United States. It is hard to get a precise fix on the problem. Voters generally deny to pollsters that race is a factor in casting their votes, but when they step into the privacy of the polling booth, their prejudices can sometimes emerge. Probably only a tiny fraction of voters are outright racist. But race is not irrelevant to many others, black or white; exit polls vary greatly by state, but show that 10 to 30 percent of primary voters considered race as they voted (if white, those voters broke overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton; if African-American, they voted for you).
NEWSWEEK pollsters recently created a "Racial Resentment Index" to measure the impact of race on the 2008 election. White voters were asked a series of 10 questions about a variety of race-related topics, including racial preferences in hiring, interracial marriage—and what they have "in common" with African-Americans. About a third of these voters scored "high" on this index; 29 percent of all white Democrats did. Overwhelmingly, these Democrats are the ones most likely to defect to John McCain in the fall. (Among "High RR" white Democratic voters, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, Clinton leads McCain by 77 percent to 18 percent, while you win by only 51 percent to 33 percent.) Many Democratic voters in West Virginia interviewed by a NEWSWEEK reporter on primary night, May 13, did not hide their animus toward you as a kind of exotic alien. Menina Parsons, 45, said she will not vote for Obama in the general election because "I don't think he's real. I don't think he's American."
Some commentators have said that your problem is not with race—it's with geography. The Daily Kos Web site recently posted a map that makes the point: the majority of counties in which more than 65 percent of whites voted for Clinton closely track Appalachia—the mountainous region running from New York into the Deep South, where voters tend to be somewhat less well-off and less well educated than in other parts of the country. These same commentators note that you have done well in other mostly white, rural states like Wisconsin, Iowa and Oregon. That's all true, and it's important not to exaggerate the scale of the problem.
But Appalachia is a big place, encompassing 13 states: southwestern New York, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, West Virginia, western Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North and South Carolina, and northern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. You cannot afford to lose all those states and still win in November. Other pollsters have suggested that the race factor is at least noticeable in a much wider swath of rural America, where 60 million voters reside. One recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll of rural voters in battleground states showed that you are trailing McCain by 9 points (and that Clinton runs even with him). Dee Davis, president of a Kentucky-based advocacy group called the Center for Rural Strategies, points out in a recent article on Salon.com that in June 2004, John Kerry trailed George W. Bush by the same 9-point margin in the same rural battlegrounds.
Your mission is to not wind up like Kerry, who ended up losing the rural vote by 20 points. The "reality," writes Davis, "is that when Democratic candidates run competitively in rural America, they win national elections. And when they get creamed in rural America, they lose."
It's certainly true that race helps with some demographics. African-American voters have been your dependable base; in almost every state you have won 90 percent of the black vote or better. There are 600,000 unregistered black voters in Georgia; bring them out in November and you may break the GOP's hold on the Solid South, or at least partially offset votes for McCain. Many better-educated and younger voters want to cast a vote for a black man who seems to transcend old-style racial politics—and who can project a different face of America to a skeptical multicultural, multiethnic world. You have won over "Obamicans" who admire you, at least in part, as proof that affirmative action is no longer necessary. And you have won millions of voters with a vision of one America created from many.
But the message of change, of a new world order, is unsettling to some voters, particularly older ones. Far from Appalachia, there are some disturbing pockets of fearfulness. A New York Times front-page story last week was headlined AS OBAMA HEADS TO FLORIDA, MANY OF ITS JEWS HAVE DOUBTS. Some whom the Times interviewed suspected that Obama was not sufficiently pro-Israel, while others mentioned the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. fiasco or Michelle Obama's remark that your electoral success made her "for the first time" in her life "really proud" of her country. The article quoted Ruth Grossman, the 80-year-old resident of a gated community, saying, "They'll pick on the minister thing, they'll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color." Grossman told the Times she is thinking of voting for Obama, but said, "I keep my mouth shut." True, only 5 percent of Florida voters are Jewish. But you need them: while Clinton currently leads McCain in Florida, you trail him.
The Internet has been a sluice for lies and distortions about your religion and background. It is widely and falsely rumored that you are Muslim (in the NEWSWEEK Poll, 11 percent of voters believe you are); that you chose to be sworn in to the Senate using a Qur'an rather than a Bible, and that you refuse to place your hand over your heart for the singing of the national anthem because, you are imagined to have said, "the anthem conveys a warlike message." As a recent post on Politico.com points out, there is a "Genealogy of Barack Hussein Obama" making the Web rounds, helpfully illustrated by pictures of your dark-complexioned relatives dressed in African garb. The message is not subtle: it says that Barack Obama is not a "real American."
You must confront this slur, with more force than you have shown so far. If you do not, you will be defined by your enemies and the Web, a dangerous combination. You movingly told your life story in a book that's become a best seller. And lately, you have wisely taken to often wearing an American-flag lapel pin. It would help to be seen venerating your white mother and grandparents as well as your black father. Your mother is a sympathetic figure, fighting to raise a child out of poverty. It is a good thing that this summer you are scheduled to go to the grave site of your grandfather, a World War II vet whose coffin was draped with the American flag when he died in 1992. Voters need to know that he, much more than your father who lived far away, was the man who raised you. Voters need to know that you are definitely not John Kerry, who was raised to wealth and privilege, an Ivy Leaguer educated, for a time, at a French boarding school.
Still, telling your story can be a little difficult. The fact is, your father's family was Kenyan; you grew up, in part, abroad in Indonesia (and Hawaii, which is a foreign land to some), and you went to Harvard. You can't rouse a crowd like Willie Stark did in "All the King's Men," calling them "hicks," knowing that they will love you because you are a hick, too. You cannot pretend to be something that you are not. Your staff is preparing speeches on patriotism; you should have no problem proving your love for a country that has nurtured and rewarded you. Throwing a grand ole Fourth of July barbecue also sends the right message, and campaign aides say you may make a speech about gun ownership, reaffirming your belief in the right to bear arms. But don't overdo it and pretend you love to hunt and fish. Men and women raised in hardscrabble country can spot a phony quicker than a squirrel can spot an acorn.
It's also important for you not to play the race card yourself. You can't imply, or be seen to imply, that anyone who criticizes you is a racist, closeted or otherwise. When you implied that Geraldine Ferraro was racist for saying that you are "lucky" to be where you are in this election, that you wouldn't be where you were if you weren't African-American, she was indignant. It is a good bet that many whites (and maybe some blacks) agreed with her. Whites resent being accused of racism for remarks they regard as innocent or innocuous. It's hard to think of what would turn off whites quicker than playing the thin-skinned victim. One of the strengths of your campaign has been to get past the old-style politics practiced by the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and other "race men" who use skin color as a political tool.
You will never get the real racists to come around. But you have to convince some of your doubters that, whatever your skin color or background, you will be on their side. Most important, you have to convince them that they will be better off during an Obama presidency than a McCain presidency. So far, you have spoken of your hopes and dreams for America in soaring, but somewhat general, or vague, terms. Your message of hope and change has moved many voters. But to win the support of the skeptics, you are going to need to offer more substance—to show how you will make them safer and better off than John McCain will.
You are asking the wary to trust you, so your promises, and policy, must ring true. Your opponents will make gaffes, and you'll be able to capitalize on them. Last week Clinton referred to Robert F. Kennedy's June 1968 assassination in defending her decision to keep her campaign going. (She later said she regretted if her comments were "in any way offensive.") But it's a tricky business. You can't seem petty or muddle your message of running a different kind of campaign. You wisely resisted the temptation to pander on gas prices, to scorn McCain and Clinton for offering a gas-tax "holiday" this summer that would probably not do much to lower gas prices—but could put more greenhouse emissions in the air and loot into the bank accounts of the petro-dictators. But you have much to offer lower-income voters. It is a fact that more poor and uninsured people will get better health care under your plan than McCain's. (McCain has called your plan too expensive and said it would saddle the government with an "entitlement program … that Washington will let get out of control.") The Republican candidate's answer to the vanishing of jobs offshore is to tell voters that, in the long run, free trade is good for them. You can promise to bring those jobs home with tougher trade policies. McCain wants to continue the Bush tax cuts; you will raise taxes on the rich to pay for benefits that will primarily help the middle and lower class.
You need an issue that plays against prejudice or typecasting. Affirmative action is deeply unpopular with white, working-class voters who see African-Americans bestowed with privileges long denied poor whites. You've suggested—obliquely, but nonetheless provocatively—that you might prefer seeing affirmative action for disadvantaged whites rather than black elites, noting that you wouldn't expect your private-school-educated daughters to need an admissions break at college. Taking a stand for affirmative action based on socioeconomic class rather than race would send a powerful signal.
These are not messages that can just be handed down from on high, from network studios or mass urban rallies. Lyndon Johnson went to Appalachia before launching the War on Poverty; Robert Kennedy went into the hollows of mining towns in his crusade against child hunger. You need to go there, too. You can sound a little haughty at times, and it is crucial that you do not condescend to voters who are proud and self-reliant but have not had your breaks in life.
Sen. Jim Webb, the ex-Marine elected from Virginia, noted recently on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that his people, the Scots-Irish who so heavily populate the hills of Appalachia, are like "tortured siblings of black Americans. They both have a long history and they both missed the boat when it came to larger benefits that a lot of people were able to receive." If poor rural whites and African-Americans could sit down together, they would find that they have much in common. When you visit West Virginia and Kentucky, you could begin that conversation with some town meetings. Webb has also observed that the Scots-Irish hill folk are by nature scrappers and fighters. That's one reason they admired Hillary and voted for her. You need to show them you are a fighter, too—and that you will fight for them.
Jesse McGee points to trophies he won in local marathons. He mentions his work with youth and volunteer school programs. He praises his church's efforts to deliver scripture lessons to inmates.
For more than an hour, the 84-year-old church deacon, who is black, chats about his life, largely ignoring the subject at hand: racism.
It isn't until his wife, Warine, sheepishly shares that their son's wife is white that McGee offers a confession: He had been uncomfortable with the union for nearly 30 years — until his Bible study class offered enlightenment.
His story represents a snapshot of how America's racial landscape is navigated daily, often with religion as guidance.
The issue of race drew sharp focus as Barack Obama's contentious split with his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, played out in a national glare. In response, the United Church of Christ and National Council of Churches USA called on 10,000 ministers to initiate a "sacred conversation on race."
"The realities of race have not been addressed adequately," says the Rev. John Thomas, president of the UCC. "Racism continues to demean and diminish human lives in this country."
To listen in on that conversation, Associated Press reporters across the nation engaged pastors and parishioners about their individual experiences with racism.
They talked with a choir soprano whose faith fueled her defiance of racist laws, and with members of an all-white congregation that took the risky move of hiring a black pastor. They interviewed ministers who act as a conduit between the alienated and those who would judge them.
They found personal stories, like McGee's, where religion can soothe a painfully sensitive dialogue and help summon mutual respect.
The conversation, which grew loud and rancorous around the Wright episode, started long before and continues afterward, but in softer tones that show the faithful want to be constructive, want to make progress, want their voices heard. Listen.
Root of McGee's concernsThe picture on the fireplace mantel at McGee's home in Jackson, Miss., shows a young man whose cream-colored skin hints at his mixed-race heritage.
It is far more than the likeness of a grandson — the offspring of the union between McGee's black son and white daughter-in-law. For this grandfather, the picture also is a reflection of a black man's spiritual journey through the painful past of a Jim Crow society to acceptance and love that ended at a church altar.
It was 1972 when McGee's son, James Brooks, told him he had done something that was unfathomable in the older man's mind. Brooks had married a fellow graduate student at the University of Michigan — a native New Yorker, and she was white.
The young couple moved to Mississippi that year to teach at what is now Jackson State University. The campus had been the site of racial violence that left two black men dead in 1970.
From the beginning, McGee was beset with unease.
"I had to work on that one. I was raised here, and that was a no-no. I know what would happen to you here if you just looked at (a white woman)," McGee said. "I've gotten past that now. When we started studying about 'one blood' that was a big help."
Racism institutionalizedAt New Hope Baptist Church, Bible study classes have been reading about the concept that all God's people are connected. In small groups, hovering over Bibles, members were taught that mankind is descended from Adam and Eve and that blood shed by Jesus Christ is a means to salvation for everyone of every race.
The spiritual revelation has not, however, erased the root of McGee's concern.
"In the South, the white man and white woman have always had more freedom than the black man and the black woman," he said.
Jean Brooks understands her father-in-law's feelings. "He's a wonderful, remarkable human being. If you think of his life experiences: ... he's been to war in World War II as an African-American.
"He's had his share as a Mississippian with race. I think their concern about my race was mostly concern about their son. They didn't want their son to get injured by being seen with me," she says.
Racism "prevented him from having opportunities," James Brooks adds. "Racism is institutionalized in Mississippi."
The McGee family embraced Jean Brooks, and they began where differences should begin: with consideration and respect.
'We do not ignore those realities'The victim was an unarmed black man shot 50 times on the eve of his wedding. The police detectives acquitted in the New York case: black, Hispanic and white. Like so many who questioned the outcome, the Rev. Gabriel Salguero wasn't surprised by an e-mail asking what he had to say about racial injustice.
His reply, profound in its brevity: "Love."
Salguero shared his response with the multiracial congregation he has served for nearly three years. His wife and co-pastor, Jeanette, translated his every word — periodically switching between English and Spanish as her husband did.
Another e-mail followed asking what the pastor meant.
"It means you are committed to sitting at the table to hear a different narrative," Salguero said. "Listen."
"Escucha."
Salguero, who has relatives on the police force, negotiates the minefields of racial injustice and reconciliation with thoughtful diligence rooted in experience. He, too, has been stopped for "driving while brown."
Members of his Lamb's Manhattan Church of the Nazarene climb three flights of stairs in a building that once housed a library to hear the bilingual sermons, a feature introduced by the Salgueros. The diversity goes further: Salguero brought in Pastor Shih Fong Wu, who on the first floor simultaneously leads Sunday services in Mandarin to accommodate the large number of Chinese immigrants in the Lower East Side neighborhood.
Outreach ministries at the church, which catered mostly to the homeless when it was located in Times Square, now counsel a group that contends with legal, cultural and financial hardships and alienation daily.
"When we come to church, we do not ignore those realities," Salguero said in his sermon. "Justice demands that we recognize that people are oppressed and that the gospel is the liberating message."
Calling on a MosesWhen San Marino Congregational Church launched a search for a new pastor, it had only one requirement: The candidate needed to fill the pews. The 60-member California church had struggled to recruit new members and was losing some of its most steadfast congregants to old age.
San Marino Congregational needed a Moses. What it found was the Rev. Art Cribbs — a Baptist-raised pastor from South Central Los Angeles. He soon became the church's only black member and its spiritual leader.
It was an unorthodox choice for the Christian church, a tiny, all-white congregation tucked into the quiet, opulent Los Angeles suburb of San Marino — a move so risky, the selection committee polled the congregation about Cribbs by secret ballot despite the church's liberal reputation. The vote was unanimous.
"When we brought it to the congregation, we were definitely very concerned because we didn't know, we really didn't know," said Donald Shenk, a pastoral assistant who chaired the selection process. "Those race questions are often things that when people are given the chance to be anonymous about it, the truth comes out."
Stretching the congregationBefore the 1960s, it was common for properties in San Marino to have a legal stipulation banning sales to blacks and Jews, and until 1989 the city was national headquarters to the ultraconservative, anti-communist John Birch Society.
Yet among the 145 applicants for the job, Cribbs could not be ignored. His audition tape was so powerful, it made Shenk cry.
"It just blew me out of the water. I was sitting there and I just remember thinking, 'Who is that?' I had never heard anybody talk like that," Shenk said. "He speaks from such a truthful place and such a completely heartfelt place."
In the year since he's been pastor, Cribbs has stretched the congregation on topics of social justice and race relations. That's something choir member Holly Ann Burns hoped for when she voted for Cribbs — and it's a perspective she feels will help her understand a hurtful story from her own past.
As a child, Burns' church youth group from the Cincinnati suburbs visited a youth group from an all-black church in the inner-city.
"I was all open and excited and the first thing out of this one girl's mouth was, 'Don't feel like you're doing us a favor by coming down here and visiting us and acting like you care,'" said Burns. "That put a stop to that conversation."
Burns, 56, still thinks of the experience.
"You're getting judged by what you look like," she said. "It really kicked me in the gut. I was really trying to make an effort to understand."
Cribbs doesn't shy from stories like Burns' and sometimes brings up his childhood spent in a housing development in Watts. San Marino's Bible study group is now called Soul Food, Cribbs wears an African jacket instead of vestments and the choir dances in the aisles.
And the congregation? It's grown by nine.
Somebody's wrongAt age 11, Brandon Taylor Sides was caught between two conflicting visions of God.
He spent Sunday mornings with his great-grandmother at a fiercely traditional black church in Chicago that preached homosexuals would burn in hell. Most afternoons, his aunt took him to a church founded by black gays who believe heaven holds a place for them.
He recalls his confusion as he tried to reconcile the two beliefs.
"Somebody has to be wrong," he remembers thinking. "One of these two is wrong."
Taylor Sides, now 21, eventually embraced the message of acceptance that resonated as he discovered his own sexuality. Today, he serves as a deacon at a Christian church that celebrates black gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered parishioners.
Pillar of Love Fellowship Church was founded in 2003 by his aunt's partner, the Rev. Phyllis V. Pennese.
Seeking truthSunday mornings find Taylor Sides transforming a room in Chicago's only gay community center into a sanctuary for the 40 to 120 members and visitors, many of whom fled churches that condemned their sexuality.
"A lot of people have long-term generational ministry; we're first generation," Pennese said. "We're still stuck on getting people to understand that God loves them the way they are."
Pennese, whose mother was black and father was an Italian immigrant, often preaches about race and oppression.
"My very creation was in order to be a bridge" uniting the races, she said.
During her sermon on race, Pennese called on her Christian congregation to speak the truth about their lives and not be silenced by those whites who hate them because of their race and those blacks who hate them because of their sexuality.
Taylor Sides has faced hostility from both groups: white high school students who called him the N-word and black pastors who railed against gays. Surrounded by a multiracial group of friends, he was able to shrug off the taunts and stereotypes, challenging those who ridiculed him: "Do you even know why you feel this way about me?"
Tragic memoriesVirginia Montague recalls the exchange with a police officer 20 years ago that left her shattered.
Richard, her husband of nearly a decade, didn't come home after working the night shift as a New York City cab driver. By midday, with no word, fear took hold and his wife went to her police precinct in Harlem. A white lieutenant was at the front desk.
"While I was explaining, his attitude was ... like, 'So what.' And he was very dismissive," she says, a tinge of anger still in her voice as she recalls his cold words: "Maybe he's with another woman, maybe he left ... there's nothing we can do about it."
She couldn't help but think that his reaction might have been more sympathetic if she and her husband were white.
Richard Montague was murdered. His wife's insistence that police launch a search in those frantic first days after he disappeared were ignored.
"It's always been in my mind that if he were white, would there have been more of an effort" to investigate, says Montague, now 66. "I don't know."
Returning to the churchWhite victims seem to win more empathy — from the police and the media, she says.
The slaying, which remains unsolved, and her painful questions afterward about how race may have obstructed the urgency of an investigation, led Montague back to the religion she abandoned 20 years earlier.
She found friends and healing at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The 212-year-old church offered sanctuary to escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad and it was where Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Paul Robeson found strength from the pulpit. The church has long addressed racial issues openly.
Montague and Versertile 'Versee' Simmons, who is also black, participated in a recent voter registration drive at Mother Zion, where Simmons, 71, was baptized and married. Their discussions naturally turned to the presidential campaign. Both are Obama supporters.
Montague doesn't believe racism will cease to exist in America if a black man were to ascend to the presidency.
Her friend, though, is more optimistic.
"Hopefully, when he becomes president," Simmons said, "the nation will see us in a different light and that we are as capable as (any white person) to hold any position."
Finding assurancesThe choir soprano glances up from her sheet music and scans the sanctuary.
The curved oak pews, hand-carved by former slaves. The vaulted ceiling, outlined by sturdy wooden beams and converging in the center to form a cross, a star and a circle. The stained glass panels in the pointed arch windows, illuminated by the glow of a setting sun.
Antioch Missionary Baptist Church is not just Jacqueline Bostic's church. It's home.
The history of the 142-year-old Antioch, the oldest black Baptist church in Houston, is intertwined with the history of Bostic's family. Her great-grandfather, Jack Yates, whose portrait hangs from a balcony, was the first pastor.
And the strength of Antioch's founders, nine freed blacks who started the church just seven months after slaves were emancipated in Texas, is a strength running deep in this 70-year-old woman. Raised in a segregated Houston, she refused to bow to segregation's rules.
As a young woman, Bostic balked at sitting in the back of city buses and sat where she pleased. On a trip to Birmingham, Ala., she once defiantly strode up bus steps labeled "white," much to the dismay of the driver. No words passed between them, but she could read exasperation on his face.
"I felt this should not be, so why is everybody accepting that?" Bostic recalls, with a look that says she would do it all again. "It was not going to be something I accepted for the rest of my life."
'Very special place to be'The source of her assurance? Family and faith.
Antioch, she says, is "a very special place to be, to be able to worship God in spirit and truth and shut out other things we were confronted with. It reaffirmed my belief that no matter what your challenges are, God gives you the ability to get through it."
One of those challenges was breaking racial barriers during a 32-year career in the U.S. Postal Service.
In 1960, when Bostic first joined the postal service, African-Americans and women were not allowed to rise above entry-level positions. Determined to vanquish those rules, Bostic applied for — and got — higher-level jobs, opening the door for others. She retired in 1992 as a postmaster.
Today, Bostic looks at her four children, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and hopes they will live in a world where they will be judged by their character, not their color.
But, she fears that may never happen. "I'm afraid they will be subject to the same kinds of things I was subjected to. But I always want to have hope that at some point people will accept each other regardless of ethnicity, religious background, or what country they're from, that we will see that we are all people who are blessed to share the earth."
Until then, she will worship — in prayer and in song.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24808091/page/2/
May 23, 2008:
In a Countdown Special Comment, Keith Olbermann reviews how many times Hillary Clinton has referenced Robert F. Kennedy in her campaign – and how the most recent mention of him and his assassination was inexcusable.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/24798368#24798368
Hillary wants to cast Obama as a 'Brother From Another Planet.'
With the exception of such all-Anglos as Monroe, Fillmore, Pierce and Coolidge, none of America's 43 presidents has ever borne a name that ends in a vowel. We traditionally like 'em not just white and male, but plain vanilla. President Barack Hussein Obama would pose a shock to that system.
Opposition to him is not so much old-fashioned racism as fear of the "other," with the subtext not just our tortured racial history, but tangled views of class and patriotism. Fortunately for him, different strains of the American character often work to ease our anxieties: openness, optimism, hope.
Every election of the past four decades has turned on the tension between hope and fear. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won by using fear that Barry Goldwater would blow up the world. In 1968, Richard Nixon used code words like "law and order" to exploit racial fears as part of his "Southern strategy." Four years later, Nixon, who believed politics is about mobilizing resentments, did it again, depicting George McGovern as the candidate of "acid, amnesty and abortion." Jimmy Carter won on hope over Gerald Ford in 1976, then lost in 1980 by trying to stoke fear of Ronald Reagan as out of the mainstream. Reagan, an FDR-like hope candidate, was re-elected in 1984 on a "morning in America" theme.
The elections of the last 20 years show both the potential and the pitfalls of a fear campaign in 2008. George H.W. Bush stumped at a New Jersey flag factory in 1988 to drive home the argument that Michael Dukakis, a Greek-American and the first clearly ethnic politician to head a ticket, was vaguely unpatriotic. It worked. Some Democrats are so spooked by this GOP history of successful slime merchants that they wrongly assume everything thrown against Obama will stick. Floyd Brown, the race-baiter who created the Willie Horton ad that year (depicting Governor Dukakis furloughing a murderer, who struck again), has cut an ad hitting Obama for being soft on "terrorist" gang members because he voted against extending the death penalty to them. This one fails. Similarly, Sean Hannity can't slam Obama for not wearing a flag pin when he doesn't wear one himself.
Hillary Clinton has echoed Fox News's guilt-by-association tactics—linking Obama to people he barely knows like Louis Farrakhan and William Ayers. The sad irony is that these are the same attacks used against her husband in the elections of the 1990s. The GOP tried to destroy Bill Clinton for his relationships (much closer than Obama's tangential connections) with Arkansas crooks, sleazy fund-raisers and unsavory women. But "The Man From Hope," while seen as less honest than Bush or Bob Dole, bet that issues and uplift were more important to voters than his character. He won, though the fears concerning what he had done to "dishonor" the White House helped damage Al Gore in 2000. The first election after 9/11 was, not surprisingly, a fear campaign, as George W. Bush persuaded voters in 2004 to be afraid, very afraid, of "soft on terror" Democrats.
The big question this year is whether voters are sick of fear campaigns. Hillary, desperate to stop Obama, is betting no. That's why she has Osama bin Laden and Fidel Castro in a recent ad. But I'm not so sure the 2004 rules still apply. This fall may be more like Reagan's victory in 1980 or Clinton's in 1992, when scare tactics fell short. Will voters believe that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.'s inflammatory sermons make Obama a dangerous black nationalist? Will they conclude that serving on a board with Ayers (along with many bankers and lawyers) and accepting a campaign contribution from him 12 years ago make Obama into a suspicious radical? Only if Obama fails, as he did in the last debate, to dispatch distractions in a crisp and presidential way.
Or it might be that these stories, even if discredited, offer voters a permission slip to vote against a man they consider, in the title words of a John Sayles movie, "The Brother From Another Planet." This is what the Clintonites have been arguing for months to superdelegates. They note that they don't have a problem with Obama's response to Wright, or to Obama's not putting his hand over his heart during the national anthem in a photo, or to Michelle Obama's views on race in America—but, you know, voters might. They are too susceptible, the argument goes, to GOP-style appeals to make reasonable distinctions between bogus character attacks and the real issues that affect their lives. In the next breath, these same veterans of the Clinton wars have the nerve to call Obama the elitist for a few ill-chosen words, as if their entire rationale for disqualifying him weren't patronizing toward average Americans at its core.
At the same time, there is new research to back up the Clinton argument that the election could be affected at the margins by racially tinged voting. Ever notice how Obama often seems to lose a few points between the final polls and Election Day? Well, when human pollsters call, they can get a slightly more pro-Obama result than when a computer voice greets the same voters. Apparently, some people will confess that they won't vote for Obama more readily to a machine.
Of course, the Clinton forces must argue that this country has a lot of lying voters, because right now Obama polls just as well as Hillary against McCain in every battleground state (including Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania) and leads McCain in five medium-size states where Hillary currently trails the GOP candidate.
John McCain, too, will likely face some tests in this area. The North Carolina Republican Party is already airing an anti-Obama ad featuring Wright. McCain implored the state party not to run it; he worries about a backlash. But McCain failed. When the "527" ads appear in the fall, the story will likely be as much about McCain's inability to persuade his own party to pull an ad (not a good sign for a potential president) as about the hashed-over and nasty content of the ad itself.
The point is, no one knows for sure whether America is ready for Barack Obama, and anyone who says he or she knows is full of it. This leaves superdelegates and voters all facing the same basic dilemma that has animated American politics for so many years. They can vote their hopes or vote their fears.
The greatest mystery in a mystifying campaign: what happened to Bill?
History may record primary day in Pennsylvania as the day Bill Clinton officially became the most tragic figure of the 2008 campaign. As voters headed to the polls to place another comeback in Hillary's hands, her spouse was getting himself into trouble, yet again. When a reporter asked the former president to explain why he felt Barack Obama's campaign had "played the race card" on him in South Carolina, Clinton was wrathfully indignant, denying he'd ever said such a thing. (Never mind the interview he'd given on a Philadelphia NPR station the day before saying exactly those words.) In an instant, the former president had proved himself not just out of step with the Internet and cable news cycles, but even ignorant to the realities of the radio age. By evening, the Clintons were in opposite narratives: Hillary was living yet another survivor's tale, showing she could stay and fight. Her husband, however, was the same story he's been for the whole campaign: off message, old news.
What has happened to Bill Clinton? For months, it's been a great mystery in a mystifying campaign how the most gifted politician of a generation could become an unceasing gaffe machine. Was it the Bubble—had a post-presidency spent with global do-gooders and fawning billionaires made Bubba lose his touch for the common man? Was it Freudian destiny, Hillary's husband subconsciously sabotaging her, breaking her heart yet again? Or was it karma, someone sending the Starr Report to the gods?
In truth, nothing has happened to Bill Clinton, he's just been following the orders given to him at the start of Hillary's campaign. When Hillary launched it last fall, pundits were convinced that Bill would outshine Hillary on the trail. Every day, the thinking went, would be like Coretta Scott King's funeral, where The Natural couldn't help himself and worked the room with a talent Hillary couldn't match.
Hillary's aides were sufficiently concerned about the phenomenon that they kept the Clintons on separate stages for much of the early campaign. But Bill, to the surprise of many, has resisted temptation and let Hillary have the limelight. After 15 months, the campaign belongs to Hillary—Hillary the inevitable, the endangered, the fighter, the fabricator, the star. Bill made the great and necessary sacrifice not to lead, but to follow.
The problem is that second-banana Bill Clinton, stripped of his leader's charisma, is sometimes hard to like. The Clinton tragedy is not, as some would have it, that the former president lets his base desires compromise his enormous talents. Rather, it's that a man of such talents would waste so much time proclaiming himself the victim. Playing the aggrieved party in South Carolina, Bill showed touches of his ugliest self—the man who blamed his staff for the policy missteps of his first term, who blamed the media for obsessing over scandals from Travelgate to Marc Rich, the man who wagged his finger and did not have sex with that woman.
Americans have never loved this side of Bill, but they've tolerated it when it came with a promise of better things. Yes, a good portion of the country agreed that Bill was the victim of a vast, right-wing conspiracy in the '90s. Yet that wasn't why Americans believed in him. They liked him because he fought that conspiracy and won, and in triumph had a smile on his face.
Winning this time, however, is Hillary's job, which sometimes means whining is the only job left for her husband. It doesn't matter that he may have good reasons to complain. His "fairy tale" description of Obama's Iraq policy was not racist. The media are biased against him. The Obama campaign has,at times, played the race card with great effect. But no one will make those points for him. He has no allies in the liberal blogosphere where conspiracy theories about the mainstream media gain great traction. Nor does he seem to have many friends left in the black community. Rep. James Clyburn's comment to The New York Times that Clinton had "incensed" African-Americans caused a stir because of the speaker (Clyburn had heretofore remained neutral in the Obama-Clinton fight), not because of the point he was making. So Bill is left to point out his grievances himself. As a result, he is forever playing Bartleby Bill, the man who cannot move beyond his own victimization, a doomed character in every American myth.
But Hillary can still set him free. After a high-minded, dramatic start, the Democratic campaign has devolved into something vaguely sleazy, often dishonest and increasingly small bore. It is entering an arena, in other words, where The Natural knows how to thrive. Hillary has long since proved which Clinton runs her campaign. Perhaps now, as she looks to the white working class of North Carolina and Indiana to help save her long-shot campaign, she will let her husband, a child of the white, working class, be the star for a little while. Maybe after 15 months, salvation for the Clintons will mean letting Bill be Bill.
BARACK OBAMA'S PLAN TO EMPOWER YOUNG WORKERS
*Paid for by Obama for America
Background: America's Young Workers Need Opportunity to be Restored
For too many young workers today, the American Dream seems further and further out of reach.
Despite the need for education to be successful in a "knowledge economy," our high school and college graduation rates are not growing enough. About one-fourth of our high school students don't obtain a real diploma, while less than a third eventually get a bachelor's degree. Those who grow up in affluent families are likely to attend college, while those in middle and lower-income families are much less likely to attend. In fact, the gaps in college attendance between families with more and less resources are growing larger with time. And those who do attend college, especially from less-affluent families, are taking longer to complete their degrees than ever before.[1]
These trends are driven at least partly by the dramatic growth in the costs of college tuition both at public and private universities. More and more students must juggle taking classes with working part-time or even fulltime. Financial aid is now driven less by need than in the past and the financing of Pell grants for low-income students has failed to keep up with inflation in tuition costs.
For those who never attend college, economic opportunities are diminishing. Employment rates for men with less than a college education have fallen over time. When they work, their jobs are less secure. And their earnings have fallen behind those of young workers with college degrees. At the same time, federal support for job training of these workers has fallen dramatically over time.[2] And with today's economic instab ility, young workers are likely to be the first to become unemployed and the last to be rehired.
These issues are as important in Indiana as anywhere in the country. Each year about 59,000 students here graduate from high school, and 45,000 try to obtain postsecondary education. They struggle each day with rising tuition costs and the challenges of getting more schooling. In the Indiana job market, over 400,000 workers aged 16 - 24 and 1.1 million aged 16 - 34 face a shrinking number of jobs, especially at good wages.
Barack Obama wants to restore meaningful opportunities to young workers and to make the American Dream achievable once again.
Address the Dropout Crisis: Obama will address the dropout crisis by signing into law his legislation to provide funding to school districts to invest in intervention strategies in middle school - strategies such as personal academic plans, teaching teams, parent involvement, mentoring, intensive reading and math instruction, and extended learning time.
Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit: Obama will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Recipients of this credit will be required to conduct 100 hours of public service a year, either during the school year or over the summer months. Obama will also ensure that the tax credit is available to families at the time
of enrollment by using prior year's tax data to deliver the credit when tuition is due.
Simplify the Application Process for Financial Aid: Obama will streamline the financial aid process by eliminating the current federal financial aid application and enabling families to apply simply by checking a box on their tax form, authorizing their tax information to be used, and eliminating the need for a separate application.
Support College Outreach Programs: Obama supports outreach programs like GEAR UP, TRIO and Upward Bound to encourage more young people from low-income families to consider and prepare for college.
Increase Investments in Job Training: Obama will increase funding for federal workforce training programs. He will expand and fully fund apprenticeship programs to help worker get credentials and skills in crafts with middle-class incomes and benefits.
Raise the Minimum Wage: Barack Obama will raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, index it to inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to make sure that full-time workers earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs. This will help raise the earnings of young workers.
Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and Encourage Paid Leave: For young people who must balance work, schooling and parenting, Barack Obama will seek to expand the availability of parental leave. The FMLA now covers only certain employees of employers with 50 or more employees; he will expand the FMLA to cover businesses with 25 or more employees. Obama will also expand the FMLA to cover more purposes as well, including allowing workers to take leave for elder care needs; allowing parents up to 24 hours of leave each year to participate in their children's academic activities at school; allowing leave to be taken for purposes of caring for individuals who reside in their home for 6 months or more; and expanding FMLA to cover leave for employees to address domestic violence and sexual assault. And, as president, Barack Obama will initiate a 50 state strategy to encourage all of the states to adop t paid-leave systems. Obama will provide a $1.5 billion fund to assist states with start-up costs and to help states offset the costs for employees and employers.
[1] James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine, "The American High School Graduate Rate; Trends and Levels," University of Chicago, 2007; and Maria Fitzpatrick and Sarah Turner, "Blurring the Boundary: Changes in College Participation and the Transition to Adulthood," in S. Danziger and C. Rouse eds. The Price of Independence: The Economics of Early Adulthood. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
[2] Harry Holzer and Paul Offner, "Trends in the Employment Outcomes of Young Men," Institute for Research on Poverty Discussion Paper, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003.
