In The Breakthrough, veteran journalist Gwen Ifill
surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the
impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential victory and
introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging
a bold new path to political power.
Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the
Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and
women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the
1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent
leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval
Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama all
interviewed for this book, and also covers numerous up-and-coming
figures from across the nation. Drawing on exclusive interviews
with power brokers such as President Obama, former Secretary of
State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, his
son Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., and many others, as well as her
own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as
generational conflict, the race gender clash, and the "black
enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in
American history.
The Breakthrough is a remarkable look at contemporary
politics and an essential foundation for understanding the future
of American democracy in the age of Obama.
關於作者：
GWEN IFILL is moderator and managing editor of Washington
Week and senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer. Before coming to PBS, she was chief congressional and
political correspondent for NBC News, and had been a reporter for
the New York Times, the Washington Post, the
Baltimore Sun, and Boston Herald American. She lives
in Washington, D.C.
目錄：
Introduction
1. BREAKING THROUGH
2 . THE GENERATIONAL DIVIDE
3 . BARACK OBAMA
4. THE RACE-GENDER CLASH
5 . ARTUR DAVIS
6 . LEGACY POLITICS
7 . CORY BOOKER
8. THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
9. DEVAL PATRICK
10. THE NEXT WAVE
CONCLUSION
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
內容試閱：
INTRODUCTION
I learned how to cover race riots by telephone. They didn''t pay
me enough at my first newspaper job to venture onto the grounds of
South Boston High School when bricks were being thrown. Instead, I
would telephone the headmaster and ask him to relay to me the
number of broken chairs in the cafeteria each day. A white
colleague dispatched to the scene would fill in the details for
me.
I''ve spent 30 years in journalism since then chronicling stories
like that – places where truth and consequences collide, rub up
against each other, and shift history''s course. None of that
prepared me for 2008 and the astonishing rise of Barack
Obama.
It is true that he accomplished what no black man had before, but
it went farther than that. Simply as an exercise in efficient
politics, Obama ''08 rewrote the textbook. His accomplishment was
historic and one that transformed how race and politics intersect
in our society. Obama is the leading edge of this change, but his
success is merely the ripple in a pond that grows deeper every
day.
"When people do something that they''ve never done before, I think
that makes it easier to do it a second time," David Axelrod, the
Obama campaign''s chief strategist, told me just days after Obama
won. "So when people vote for an African American candidate, I
think itmakes it easier for the next African American
candidate."
The next African American candidates – and a fair share of those
already in office, subscribe to a formula driven as much by
demographics as destiny. When population shifts – brought about by
fair housing laws, affirmative action and landmark school
desegregation rulings – political power is challenged as well. It
happened in Boston, New York, Chicago and every other big city
reshaped by an influx of European immigration. It is happening
again now in Miami and Los Angeles, in suburban Virginia and in
rural North Carolina, where the political calculus is being
reshaped by Latino immigrants. With African Americans, freighted
with the legacy of slavery and the pushback from whites who refuse
to feel guilty for the sins of their ancestors, the shift has been
more scattered and sporadic – yet no less profound.
Boston was awash in the sort racial drama that foreshadows
dramatic change when I began my journalism career at the Boston
Herald American in 1977.
While I was attending Simmons College, the Federal courts
demanded that the city''s very political school committee fix the
city''s racially unbalanced education system.
The solution, imposed by U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur
Garrity in 1974, seemed pretty straightforward. Send white children
to black neighborhoods and black children to white neighborhoods.
It came to be known as forced busing.
The idea was to impose balance where it no longer existed. The
optimistic reasoning was that the resources -- teachers, textbooks,
shared experience -- would follow. But history now shows us busing
– moving 20,000 students to and fro in search of quality education
was, in fact, a far more radical notion than originally envisioned.
It struck at the heart of neighborhood and racial identity in
cities all over the nation, most memorably so in Irish South Boston
and black Roxbury.
White residents of insular neighborhoods railed – sometimes
violently – against the incursion into their neighborhood schools.
Black residents in Roxbury railed right back.
As I walked to my college classes in Boston''s Fenway neighborhood
that fall, I saw the result with my own eyes -- Boston''s finest in
riot gear stepping in to prevent clashes at English High School. It
was a scene that played out again and again all over the city, all
over the country.
"The white kids don''t like black kids and black kids don''t like
white kids," one white student said after one of the melees I
covered by phone. "All of it is prejudice. All I know is that no
one''s getting any education."
"It''s a perfect example that forced desegregation and forced
busing does not work," Elvira Pixie Palladino, an anti-busing
member of the school committee told me at the time.
White students fled the city schools during those years, so many
that the majority-white city''s education system became majority
black within a decade. By 2000, only a quarter of the city''s
children were white. Drastically fewer – under 14 percent – were
enrolled in the city''s elementary schools.
It took some years, and a more sophisticated understanding of how
race and poverty intersect, for me to begin to understand that what
I saw in Boston was about more than just black and white kids not
liking each other. It was the beginning of a power shift that was
defined by, but not limited to, race.
I moved to Baltimore in 1981, where the tipping point I had
witnessed taking shape in Boston was a little farther along. When I
arrived, the city''s leaders were still mostly white, but 56 percent
of the city''s residents were already nonwhite, a number that grew
to 64 percent by 2000.
On the surface, Baltimore''s political vibe was less charged than
Boston''s, but the power shifts were no less significant. The city''s
paternalistic mayor, William Donald Schaefer, had revived downtown
with a national aquarium and a Disney-like harbor development that
brought tourists in droves. Twin baseball and football stadiums
were poised to sprout on downtown''s southern edge. Gleaming
condominiums and hotels replaced what had been rundown waterfront
docks. Schaefer was hailed in national magazines as an urban
savior. Howard Cosell told a Monday Night Football audience that
Schaefer was "the genius mayor."
But not far from the glittering downtown development most
convention visitors saw, the picture was more complicated. Crime
was climbing. The schools were sliding. And change was in the
offing.
Schaefer, an unmarried curmudgeon used to getting his own way,
was suspicious of change. And he was doubly suspicious of any call
for change that seemed rooted in racial claim. That meant that he
would also be suspicious of me, a black woman whose job it was to
ask him questions he did not like. As he growled and snapped at me
– and, honestly, at most other reporters too – I came to realize
what I was witnessing: the friction that is a necessary byproduct
of sandpaper change.
In 1983, Billy Murphy, a black judge and scion of a prominent
local family decided to use the sandpaper. Schaefer was still
immensely popular, but he was also aware that new minority
majorities had recently swept black mayors into office for the
first time in cities like Atlanta, and that the barrier was about
to fall that year in Philadelphia as well.
In the end, Murphy turned out to be a pretty inadequate
Democratic primary candidate, disorganized and unfocused. Even
though then-Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, Martin Luther King 3rd and
comedian and activist Dick Gregory came to town to campaign for
him, Schaefer still managed to snare fully half of the black vote,
in a majority black city.
Even in defeat though, Murphy''s challenge was enough to open some
eyes to the possibility that the "mayor for life," as Schaefer had
been dubbed, might be displaced. Perhaps it was time for a
candidate who looked like most of the people who lived in the city.
Schaefer hated this line of reasoning, openly detested Murphy and
refused to speak his name aloud. Still, he saw the handwriting on
the wall.
Four years later, Baltimore did get its black mayor when, after
16 years in charge, Schaefer was elected governor and selected a
successor to fill his unexpired term. Clarence "Du" Burns, the
affable City Council president who rose to that position from
humble beginnings as a locker room attendant, was only too happy to
claim a job he may never have been able to win outright. "I got
standing ovations at churches," Burns marveled years later. "I
hadn''t done anything for them, but I was the first black mayor,
y''understand?"
Burns, who learned the ways of city politics behind every closed
door at City Hall, ended up spending 17 years there, but only 11
months as mayor. The first time he ran for the job outright, Burns
was defeated by a younger, politically unannointed Yale and
Harvard-educated attorney, a black man with the unlikely name of
Kurt Schmoke. Schmoke, had abandoned a prestigious post in the
Carter White House to return home to Baltimore. "I thought why did
he give up working in the White House?" said his former White House
colleague Christopher Edley Jr. "What''s going on? And he said, I''m
going to indict a few bad guys, make some connections in the
corporate world and run for office."
That is exactly what Schmoke did, first winning election as
state''s attorney before making the run for City Hall. Even though
he was up against the well-oiled Schaefer machine, Schmoke defeated
Burns by 5,000 votes by capturing the imagination of Baltimore
voters – black and white – in a way neither Murphy nor Burns, with
their old-school ties and backroom ways, could not.
"I was kind of the beneficiary in a way of a change sparked by
the latter end of civil rights movement," said Schmoke, who is now
the dean of the Howard University School of Law, which produced
Thurgood Marshall, L. Douglas Wilder and Vernon Jordan. "The voting
rights act, which opened up so many opportunities throughout the
country, started to hit its stride by 1980, and people built on
that."
That trend was also in evidence about 40 minutes down the
interstate highway in Prince George''s County, Maryland. By 1984, I
had taken my unintentional road trip through sandpaper politics to
this Washington suburb, where --- between 1980 and 1990 – the
African American population spurted from 37 to 50 percent. During
that same period, nearly 77,000 whites moved elsewhere – a loss of
nearly 20 percent of the county''s white population.
The county''s power structure was in the midst of a corresponding
shift from mostly white to mostly black when I was covering it for
the Washington Post. As occurred with S...
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