American Stories: Tales of Hope and Anger

By Michael Brissenden

From the desolate coal-mining hollers of West Virginia to Washington, DC’s ghettos and the Mormon communities of Utah, this engrossing journalistic account travels the country with unprecedented scope to grapple with political issues and to tell the stories of the players, the hopeful true believers, the skeptics, the winners, and the losers. Following the long and fractious political process that will either deliver Barack Obama a chance to be a truly transformative president or place him alongside one-term leaders such as Jimmy Carter, this chronicle also observes the Republican Party tear itself apart to find a fitting opponent for Obama. It analyzes whether America’s first black president will meet the enormous expectations of his voters and the rest of the world. With wry humor and cutting insight, this book explores an extraordinary moment in United States history and shares tales of people, identity, and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780702248450

Book preview

Currently ABC Correspondent in Washington, Michael Brissenden has been a political journalist and a foreign correspondent for the ABC since the 1980s. He has reported from Russia, the Middle East, South East Asia, Europe, the Pacific and the Americas and has covered many of the biggest international stories from all corners of the globe. From 2003 to 2009 he was political editor for The 7.30 Report.

For some years Michael was a regular contributor to Matilda.com. He has written for the Bulletin and has been a food and wine critic for the Canberra Times. He has also contributed to two published collections of essays: Travellers Tales 1 and The Science Minister and the Sea Cow – Thirteen essays on the nature of choice. His political analysis features regularly on ABC Online.

Contents

Prologue

1 Winning the race

2 Dancing with the city

3 Tea Party

4 America’s Muslims and the mosque at Ground Zero

5 Wild politics

6 Arizona brewing – Guns, God and Mexicans

7 The whole enchilada

8 Little Havana – Big influence

9 ‘Too close to the United States, not close enough to God’

10 Elvis has left the building

11 California screaming

12 Tales from the Motor City

13 West Virginia – Songs in the hollers

14 Obamacare

15 Mitt Romney’s magic underpants

16 ‘It’s still the economy, stupid’

17 Election 2012

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Barack Obama is younger than I am. Okay, only by two months, but it’s a defining moment when you realise you’re older than the president of the United States, the ‘leader of the most powerful nation on earth’ as the old cliché has it – certainly the politician with more power and influence than any other. This can change the way you view yourself and your place in the grand scheme of things. Suddenly the world seems different. Does it suggest new possibilities and challenges? Or is it just another reminder of how fast everything is slipping by? Perhaps I should have got to a few of my challenges by now. What it does say to me, at the least, is that a profound generational shift has occurred and, well, that got me thinking, didn’t it? I mean, policemen stopped looking old years ago but until Obama came along presidents always did. And when this shift happened it seemed even more impressive or potent because it coincided with the election of the first black man to the job.

Obama’s election was, of course, a significant moment for the whole world. American elections are always watched closely but this one attracted an unusual frenzy of international attention. By 2008 the world was mightily sick of George W. Bush, sick of the wars, sick of the bullying ‘you’re either with us or agin us’ foreign-policy approach, and worried about the unpredictable consequences of the overreaching corporate greed, the subprime loan crisis and the unregulated and reckless lending by banks at the heart of American capitalism, all of which had caused the biggest crisis in global capital markets in decades; a global financial crisis that still hasn’t run its course. In the face of this the world seemed to be inspired by the candidacy of the first Black American likely to make it through one of the greatest democratic tests.

It’s one of those truisms about the United States that, although none of us foreigners can vote in the elections, we all have to live with the outcome. American elections and politics are still more consequential than any others in the democratic world and, perhaps like the day John F. Kennedy was shot, most people with an interest will remember where they were and what they were doing when Barack Obama was elected to the White House. While he and I were both probably squashing our rusks into the shag pile or fast asleep the day JFK was whacked, if we had been out of nappies with even a passing interest in the world beyond the playpen we’d have known how significant that moment was. Forty-four years later I certainly know where I was the historic day the Hawaiian-born African American was elected: the US Embassy-sponsored festivities at The Press Club in Canberra, with a Budweiser in one hand and a hamburger in the other, watching the mixed emotions of the senior consular staff as they took in the full impact of the news.

Changes of government are always momentous occasions but the ramifications for Americans are swifter than most. Within minutes of it becoming obvious that Obama had won, the US ambassador to Australia, Robert McCallum, was on his feet announcing his resignation. As he made clear in the impromptu doorstop, it had nothing to do with his relationship with George W. Bush – a relationship that stretched back to when both men were teenagers – it had to do with his lack of relationship with either Barack Obama or John McCain, the Republican nominee. Dressed as always in a sober suit and tie and surrounded by a feverish media pack, McCallum seemed almost relieved to be announcing his departure.

‘Whoever is elected president needs to have certain ambassadorships filled by individuals that are members of their team and given the unique close relationship between the US and Australia I feel very strongly that should be the case . . . It’s very important for an ambassador to Australia to be able to plug into the oval office itself,’ he said.

There was nothing flashy about Robert McCallum. A conservative – almost uptight – mate of George W’s, he’d always seemed rather media shy; an unusual public persona from a nation made up of extremely literate media performers. He was nothing like his predecessor, Tom Schieffer, the baseball-loving extrovert who regularly hosted lunches at the embassy for the media and who would always make himself available to defend the policies of his friend in the White House. During the early stages of the Iraq War, for instance, Schieffer became a regular contributor to the debate in Australia and openly engaged with domestic political arguments. McCallum tried hard but he just wasn’t that sort of guy. He didn’t come across all that well on television and didn’t seem as naturally convincing. On this day, though, Robert McCallum was doing his best to play his part for the Australian media but, as he acknowledged, the ambassador in Canberra is always the president’s man and so, if the president goes, that’s it for him.

Back inside the club emotions were running high. By the way some of the more senior diplomats seemed genuinely conflicted it looked as if it was going to be curtains for a number of them as well. This was a great moment in their political history but they were almost certainly all Bush Administration appointments. The junior staff, on the other hand, seemed overwhelmingly Democratic, and somewhat overwhelmed. For the most part this crowd was white, and some of them were in tears, swept up by the power of the moment. As the footage of the cheering, weeping crowds across the United States beamed in on CNN proved, the emotion in this room was nothing to that being felt at that moment by African Americans – one can only imagine what would have happened if Obama had lost. But it was clear he’d won, the Bush era was being swept away, and renewal had begun.

This was a real generational change. Nothing at all like the shift we experienced here just a year earlier from John Howard to the younger Kevin Rudd. For a start Rudd modelled himself on John Howard and presented to the electorate as a conservative, Howard-like figure, without the electorally unpalatable bits like Work Choices. Barack Obama, though, presented himself as a real point of political and philosophical difference on almost everything and successfully sold himself and his ideas to the conservative American electorate. It seemed the nation wanted change. But even then, in the euphoric glow of history in the making, it was obvious the expectations were going to be bigger than the challenges themselves, and what a story that would be. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

I’d been thinking about a change in my own life for some time and I was aware that there were opportunities coming up in the next year or so in the ABC’s office in Washington, but this was the moment that sealed it for me. Having covered federal politics as the political editor for The 7.30 Report for more than five years it was time to think about moving on. The pressure and the grind of producing seven minutes of television almost every day in the insular political hothouse of the Canberra press gallery was starting to wear me down. My family probably thought so too – my mid-life crisis was becoming impossible to ignore. Just six months earlier, when we’d packed off to the south of France for an extended holiday, we resolved that if an opportunity to shake things up arose we would do it. The thought of getting out from behind the desk again and covering the United States and this president at this time in history was an extremely appealing prospect. There would probably never be another moment in my lifetime when the world would be facing such huge challenges.

The global financial crisis had proved yet again that what happens in the United States moves the rest of us on this planet in a way that no other country’s circumstances can. If the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon can cause a storm in China it’s not hard to imagine what havoc is wreaked on the world by the American economy going belly up. Some go as far as to suggest that what we’re witnessing is the end of empire; I’m not so sure about that. One thing that is pretty clear is that none of the diplomatic, economic, environmental or political problems the world faces at any moment can be resolved without engaging America. For a journalist it is a story almost impossible to resist. All I had to do was secure a job.

There are four correspondent positions in the ABC’s Washington bureau and three of them were turning over at about the same time. Presidential elections are also turning points for correspondents as it makes sense to stay on for a full term, to see the election and the inauguration through to the end, and then think about moving on. Of the three jobs that were on offer the one I was most interested in was the television current affairs round. It is the last remaining job of its kind in the ABC’s international stable and is almost exclusively a features-rich, long-form reporting job. Just as it’s a rare job at the ABC, it is an even rarer opportunity in the current contracting media environment. This was a job I figured would, for much of the time, allow me to roam free of the daily news agenda and really put time and effort into the reporting. The interviews for the position were held and a few months later the phone call came and the job was mine. That same day, General Motors filed for bankruptcy and a few days later Barack Obama travelled to Egypt and apologised to the Muslim world for the mistakes of the West, promising a new relationship with the United States.

The last time I was in the United States there was no talk of mistakes and the relationship was a very different one. Two hours after the first plane hit the twin towers cameraman Ron Ekkel and I headed to the airport from the ABC office in Brussels and began one of the most circuitous trips ever undertaken by an ABC correspondent. As the world closed down the airspace around us, the trip to New York took several days and we travelled via London, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Tijuana, San Diego, Chicago and New Jersey. Two days after we left Brussels we drove into the United States from Tijuana. The border had been closed since the attacks and a sign of just how shocked everyone still was at that time can be seen in our passports. Although it was September 13 our arrival stamps say it was September 11 – the immigration officers still hadn’t got around to changing the date.

Ron and I sat it out the next few days in San Diego in a hotel full of bored and bewildered travelling businesspeople and sales reps, stranded by the airline shutdowns. Lingering over the free breakfast of packet waffle mix and weak American coffee, we filled in the time watching the anger grow on the endless cable news coverage. When the planes did start flying again, they did so tentatively, understandably nervous. The backlog of passengers and the new, hastily arranged and still unfamiliar security arrangements were causing massive disruption. On the first leg of our journey, to Chicago, an air stewardess straight out of central casting in Hollywood greeted us. This was a woman born to be in uniform, even if the only one she’d managed to get into at that stage was from TWA. She was a big-breasted blonde with a thick southern drawl and hair piled high in an extraordinary gravity-defying beehive. Having concluded that we were a news crew from Australia she proceeded to tell us how we needed to get the message out that now America ‘was gonna kick some Ay-Rab butt’.

On the next flight, from Chicago to New Jersey, uniformed airport officials escorted two vaguely swarthy but well-dressed passengers of what might only just have been described as ‘middle eastern’ appearance off the flight. The two were obviously deeply offended by this but the pilot told the rest of us that they had been asked to leave for ‘security reasons’. The remaining passengers applauded. In contrast, protests were underway in Manhattan calling for ‘restraint’ and ‘peace’ – proof once again that New York can sometimes feel like a different country. Even so, out in the rundown areas of Queens a young Muslim mother later told me how she was now afraid to leave her apartment because she was being abused, threatened and spat on.

Almost eight years later here was Barack Obama telling a crowd in Cairo that he’d come to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world:

One based on mutual interest and mutual respect. And one based on the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. And I consider part of my responsibility as president of the United States is to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam, wherever they appear.

How many of his countrymen and women felt that way?

On almost every level the Obama era held out to me the promise of a fascinating ride and so far it hasn’t disappointed. What follows is not meant to be a definitive historical assessment of what will obviously be seen as an important part of American history and the American experience; rather it is a snapshot of some of the issues, challenges, places and people that make up this diverse and complex country at this particular time. While I realise there is a certain conceit in writing about this country at such length and with such detail after just over three years of living here, one thing you do realise very quickly in this world is that, because it is what it is, there are so many experts on the life, politics and economics of the United States. But in the relatively short time I’ve been here I have had the opportunity to travel through a great deal of the country and confront and dissect many of these issues. And so each of the following chapters deals with specific aspects or places that help illustrate the challenges for the people living in the United States. This book is overwhelmingly a story about people, identity and culture: American stories of hope and anger. What is captured is, I hope, a moment of change and transition in a country that has already been through so many transformations but has never confronted a set of circumstances quite like the one it faces today.

1

Winning the race

The shopfronts in the notorious Los Angeles neighbourhood of South Central present a defiant face to a hostile world. Pawnshops and white goods repairers mix it with the legal hockshops offering ‘bail bonds’. The windows and doors are barred, but peek through the security grilles and you’ll see on every counter and every legal loan shark’s desk a framed black-and-white etching of Barack Obama. The picture on display in this part of LA is a unique regional product but the sentiment is echoed across the country in black businesses, workplaces and homes. From the hairdresser on P Street in Washington who displays photos of the president and the first family’s two daughters on the mirror he works in front of every day – and still hopes that real change will mean security guards won’t pick him out in a crowded department store and follow him into the DVD aisle just because he’s young, male and black – to the art dealer in New Orleans with a shelf full of Obama paraphernalia and full-sized posters of the first family beaming down from behind his desk. These are just a few of the Black Americans who turned out to vote in 2008, and 95 per cent of them backed Obama.

There are some big expectations as you might imagine, but for these citizens the symbolism of Obama’s election victory is overwhelming – the colour barrier has finally been broken. His election has allowed a whole generation of black men and women to dream in ways their parents and grandparents never could. The United States is built on the belief that there’s nothing an individual can’t achieve; that the State won’t stand in your way and that opportunity is there for the taking provided you’re prepared to work hard enough. But until now there has been no demonstration that a person of colour could rise to the heights of president. The most powerful political position in the most powerful nation in the world has always been occupied by a white man but Obama’s victory finally demonstrates that America is consistent with its creed that all people are created equal and that everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive and grow and even become the head of state. But it is also more than that. The fact that this son of a white mid-western woman and an African immigrant could reach the highest office in the land is an important piece of symbolism for white America as well. Yes, blacks, Latinos and minorities of all sorts were motivated to vote for the first African-American candidate. But in 2008 Barack Obama also received more white votes than either Al Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004. For a nation with a history of racial discrimination, disparity and even violence this was a sign that the country is moving on.

Obama treads carefully around the race issue because more than most he knows its power. As senator, Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency at Springfield in his home state of Illinois. Springfield has a special place in American history. It was the town Abraham Lincoln called home and, in 1908, it was also the scene of an infamous race riot that left at least seven black people dead and numerous homes and businesses of African Americans burned to the ground. This event lead to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, so Springfield has a special place in Black-American history. Just as JFK was the first and last ‘Catholic president’ Barack Obama is right now the first and the last ‘black president’. This carries with it the burden of history.

*

We arrive in Washington DC on a steaming July day in 2009. Just off the long flight from Sydney, with two tired kids in tow, we push out into the foetid humidity that is a constant during summer in the US capital. I locate our ten suitcases stuffed with clothes for all environments and herd the family and the luggage into the van sent by the office to transport us to our new life, the first glimpse of which is the relatively antiseptic Marriott Residence Inn in Bethesda.

An upper middle-class, white, suburban area on the fringe of DC, Bethesda has all the preoccupations of similar neighbourhoods just like it the world over. This is the epicentre of what’s known in this town as the ‘funnel of affluence’ – a strange introduction to one of the most significant ‘black’ cities in the United States. Like many places in this country race and class are intertwined. There are exceptions, of course, but it becomes quickly apparent to even the greenest of new arrivals that, on the whole, segregation is still a reality as the unspoken barriers of wealth and education prove more resilient than the formal legal segregation struck down decades ago.

On this day the front pages of the papers are plastered with news of ‘The Beer Summit’. Two weeks earlier a policeman in the Harvard University town of Cambridge in Massachusetts had responded to a 911 caller’s report of men breaking and entering into a house in an upper-crust neighbourhood. It turned out one of the men was the celebrated Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, who had just returned from a trip to China only to find that he was locked out of his own house. The other man was his driver. Gates responded angrily to the police officers’ questioning and was subsequently arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. For many African Americans this was hardly a surprise. Henry Louis Gates Jr may be a well-respected international figure, he may have published dozens of books and made widely acclaimed TV documentaries but, when it’s boiled down, the professor was racially profiled just like any other African American.

The new black president’s response that the police officers ‘behaved stupidly’ was enough to set off a storm of debate and media attention that proved, despite all the advances, America is still not ready to have the ‘big discussion’ about race – and if Obama does try to have one, it will prove to be an all-consuming distraction. And so he held The Beer Summit: a quiet afternoon on the White House lawns in front of the nation’s media, a carefully crafted image designed to take race out of the political equation. Gates and the police officer, Sergeant James Crowley, sat down with the president and the teetotal vice president, Joe Biden, that day aware that this was an important moment. Obama, we were told, drank Bud Lite. Biden had non-alcoholic Buckler. Gates went for Samuel Adams Lite and Crowley chose Blue Moon. They must be well stocked for choice up at the White House.

‘I have always believed that what brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart,’ Obama said. ‘I am confident that has happened here tonight, and I am hopeful that all of us are able to draw this positive lesson from this episode.’

But it was Gates who summed it up best that day when he wrote:

Sergeant Crowley and I, through an accident of time and place, have been cast together, inextricably, as characters – as metaphors, really – in a thousand narratives about race over which he and I have absolutely no control. Narratives about race are as old as the founding of this great Republic itself, but these new ones have unfolded precisely when Americans signaled to the world our country’s great progress by overcoming centuries of habit and fear, and electing an African American as president. It is incumbent upon Sergeant Crowley and me to utilize the great opportunity that fate has given us to foster greater sympathy among the American public for the daily perils of policing on the one hand, and for the genuine fears of racial profiling on the other hand.

For all that, Bethesda seemed unmoved. Was it any different in Anacostia? I wondered. Or any of the other neighbourhoods just a few blocks away from the White House that are some of the most underprivileged in the country? No doubt some there were watching this unfold with more than a passing interest. One of the striking things about Washington DC is just how black the city is. Of the 700,000 people who live in the city, 50 per cent are African American. In the 1970s it was around 70 per cent. On a per capita basis this is one of the blackest cities in the United States of America.

I found the whole African-American expectations surrounding Barack Obama interesting, complex and politically charged, but I needed something to bring it alive in my reports – a hook to hang the issues on – and the characters to tell it. As any newly arrived correspondent would be, I was keen to get started. Flushed with naïve eagerness I thought it might be a good idea to talk to Henry Louis Gates Jr. I pulled his email address off the Harvard website and wrote to him.

Dear Professor Gates,

My name is Michael Brissenden and I am the Washington correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, responsible for our television current affairs coverage here in the USA. I am currently working on a piece looking at the significance of the Obama Administration for race relations in America and discussing the expectations and aspirations many African Americans have of his presidency. I realise that you may well have been inundated with interview requests in recent times but I would obviously be very grateful if you could give me some of your time for a considered sit-down interview to be included in our story.

A reply came back a few days later: ‘This account has been permanently disabled.’

Obviously a few others had been trying to get to him as well.

*

Because the District of Columbia –