Race To Power

Gwen Ifill on Barack Obama and Footgate


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Published: Feb 24, 2009

As host of PBS-TV’s Washington Week and correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer for the past decade, Gwen Ifill is hardly an unknown. But she reached a new level of celebrity as moderator for the vice presidential debate last October. Curiosity over hockey mom Sarah Palin and the gaffe-prone Joe Biden attracted the second-largest audience of any national U.S. political debate in history as well as conservative reporters and bloggers, who cried “bias” upon learning that Ifill was working on a book about Obama. (Adding to the nuttiness in the 48 hours leading up to the debate: Ifill broke her ankle.)

In the Saturday Night Live skit, Ifill (played by Queen Latifah) hawked her Obama book between questions. That book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (Doubleday, $24.95) is actually about a group of new-style African-American politicians, including Obama, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Philly’s own Michael Nutter, and Ifill has only really been hawking since its Inauguration Day pub date — including in Philadelphia at the Free Library on Saturday and in a phone conversation with us last week.

City Paper: I understand that Doubleday originally approached you to write a book about Barack Obama and that you refused. Why?

Gwen Ifill: To be quite honest it’s because I didn’t think he would get elected. I was wrong on Bill Clinton, too. I wasn’t one of those people who swooned and said, “Oh, it’s America’s first African-American president!” I thought he would run an interesting campaign and could be part of a larger story about this new generation of black politicians that could make a compelling book even if he didn’t win.

CP: So how did Barack Obama do what you didn’t think was possible?

GI: In the past the black politicians who did get elected did it by appealing to a black base — people like themselves. What was surprising about Obama — and what he has in common with the other politicians I write about in the book who’ve achieved big statewide and federal offices — is that he instead built a coalition of people who were unlike him.

CP: To go back to last fall’s vice presidential debate: When did you first realize it was going to be a lot bigger deal than the last one you moderated [in 2004]?

GI: The day Palin was picked was the day the Democratic Convention ended. I was on a flight to the Republican Convention — they were back-to-back — that was filled with reporters and politicos. When we landed in St. Paul, everyone turned on their BlackBerries and said, “Who?”

At that point nobody knew the lightning rod she would be. I just knew there was going to be a whole different level of research involved than what I had done for Edwards-Cheney, with their long records of legislative votes cast and comments made.

CP: So how did you break your ankle? When I first heard I thought, Footgate! — some Republican operative had strung a wire across your driveway.

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GI: I wish it was a better story, but it was just me being clumsy: I was walking down the stairs holding empty water bottles and my debate questions and I slipped on two books.

Fortunately I had just completed my last question, so if the people who started criticizing me the next day were looking for a way to shake me up, it didn’t work. I was too focused on the pain and how I was going to get to St. Louis on crutches.

CP: You talk a lot in Breakthrough about the tension between the civil rights-era black politicians and the younger ones like Obama, epitomized by that picture of Jesse Jackson crying on Election Night. A lot of people wondered if they were tears of joy that an African-American finally became president, or of disappointment that he wasn’t that African-American.

GI: A lot of these younger politicians are quite respectful: They’re not dissing the old guard and their accomplishments at all. But as with any change, any handover of power, somebody has to step aside. It’s hard for people to hand over the gavel.

Michael Nutter is a good example. He was not anointed by the black political machine in Philadelphia at all. He was never going to be invited — he just stepped up and did it.

CP: Like Obama running against Hillary Clinton. And like Obama, Michael Nutter started out with very high popularity ratings. But as you point out in the book, he’s run into some problems with the budget cuts he’s had to propose due to the economic crisis. Do you think gains these young black politicians have made will be stopped or reversed if they can’t fix the unprecedented fiscal problems they face?

GI: I think that might have been more likely in the past. People my age or my parents’ age might think, “If you let the black guy in and he fails, there’ll never be another black guy.” But I don’t think younger people see race as a definer. If these guys fail, I think it will much more likely be attributed to their inexperience or their arrogance.

It’s also true that these politicians got elected because of white and Latino support. Those folks will probably be rooting for them to succeed.

CP: As the moderator of a political reporters’ roundtable, what do you think of the state of political journalism today, when professional journalists are being replaced by hobbyist bloggers, who, as you know from the early reporting on your own book, don’t always get the story right?

GI: I think the state of political journalism on the national level is great. With the Internet, there’s a lot more information and far fewer excuses for not knowing. I am worried about local and foreign political news, though, because of all the foreign and state capital [news] bureaus that are closing. I’m not sure what’s going to replace them or replace newspapers as a vehicle for important, interesting stories that even I wouldn’t necessarily read in the pick-and-choose world of the Web.

Gwen Ifill | Sat., Feb. 28, 2 p.m., $14, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322, freelibrary.org