Trailblazing journalist Gwen Ifill died Monday, a stalwart whose career spanned the New York Times, PBS and several presidential campaigns. She was one of the earliest female reporters to cover a presidential race full-time, part of a small sorority nicknamed “the girls on the bus.”
After President Barack Obama’s first election, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution interviewed Ifill about her then new book about his campaign and its potential impact on the nation. As a new administration prepares to take the reigns, we are republishing our interview with her.
Veteran journalist and Washington insider Gwen Ifill knows how to lob a tough question. But right now she’s fielding them as she talks about her book “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” The book deals with the nation’s new generation of African- American politicians (not just President O). In researching the book, Ifill spent quite a bit of time in Atlanta interviewing veterans such as Andrew Young and new guard leaders such as state Sen. Kasim Reed and City Council President Lisa Borders. Ifill will speak to the Atlanta Press Club on Tuesday as well as at Agnes Scott College. Here she talks about objectivity, the challenge of change and Queen Latifah.
Q: Reading the book, it’s apparent that you’ve got a Rolodex to die for. So did the idea for this spring up organically from a career of notebooks?
A: Unbeknownst to me, I was gathering string my whole career to write this book. Actually, the publisher wanted me to write a book about Barack Obama and I didn’t. I didn’t think he was going to get elected, to be honest.
Q: You didn’t?
A: No, I was late to that party. I also didn’t think Bill Clinton was going to be elected. I’m always the last on the bandwagon.
Q: Complete journalist.
A: That’s part of it —- you’ve got to purposely hold yourself apart from the story. But I also thought that there was a more interesting story that was going to be true, whether Barack Obama won or lost. There was this whole generation of new politicians that were doing it a different way, who were taking advantage of all the laws that were enacted for their benefit and were now moving beyond that. As it turned out, Barack Obama provided the best peg to hang it on.
Q: Because otherwise all you’ve got is a “state of the civil rights movement” book.
A: Part of the assumption at the beginning of this book was that I was going to write about the post-civil rights generation. And then I realized —- thanks to Joseph Lowery biting my head off —- that there was really no such thing as post-civil rights, it was just how you defined civil rights. So there was an opportunity to see it for what it was, which was something evolving which spoke to the maturity of black politics and black politicians.
Q: You term this a breakthrough moment for the nation, an important one to not simply acknowledge but dissect. But people want to talk about the economy now, not race. Seems to me that nobody wants to discuss the effects and impact of race except black people.
A: What the Obamas of the world are counting on, is that you can talk about race without talking about race. You can say, “I will fix health care or find jobs, ” understanding that the people who benefit disproportionately, if you find that fix, are the people who suffer from health-care disparities or who are the first ones to get fired or the last ones hired. Those are people of color. So what he is doing, what they all are doing, is speaking to the broader audience knowing that the issues that they address, if they address them effectively, will benefit people of color. Instead of coming at it where race is the driver, race becomes the beneficiary.
Q: Even though you took some pains in the book not to portray the old civil rights guard as such, a lot of them came off as resentful of or a little bitter over President Obama’s success.
A: I think it’s possible for folks to hold more than one thought in their head at a time. People, surprisingly, asked me a lot about Jesse Jackson’s reaction on election night when he was captured crying. My thing is, it’s possible that he looked at that, in fact it would have been kind of improbable that he wouldn’t look at that and think, “Wow, that could have been me.” But at the same time, be able to look and say, “I’m proud of the brother up there on the stage.” I think both of those things could happen in his head at one time. Andy Young, who had such a complicated problem with Obama in the beginning, afterward just admits that he missed the boat.
Q: Up front you deal with the controversy that arose on the eve of the vice presidential debate, surrounding you and this book. People wondered if you could be an objective moderator. Do you still consider that a much-ado-dust-up-about-nothing?
A: Very much so. And the proof is, everyone stopped talking about it the day after the debate.
Q: Some people said you were too reserved, that you should’ve gone off script, broken the debate rules.
A: To do what? My job was no different after they attacked me than it was before they attacked me, which is to see if I could find a way to moderate a debate that would give people at home, who were attempting to make a decision, some information. That didn’t involve me chasing anybody around the table, that didn’t involve me shaking my finger at Sarah Palin, or Joe Biden for that matter, no matter how much people wanted me to.
Q: Some journalists don’t vote, saying it allows them to be truly objective. Do you vote?
A: Absolutely.
Q: Did you vote?
A: Absolutely.
Q: Who for?
A: Not gonna tell ya. Most of the people who have this debate about journalists voting are not people who anybody got hosed for.
Q: OK, well what did you think of Queen Latifah’s portrayal of you on “Saturday Night Live” after the debate?
A: I thought it was hilarious because if you don’t have a sense of humor about yourself, you’re pretty silly. And second of all, what was my other choice? Kenan Thompson playing me in drag?
Q: Describe the style of the post-integration candidate.
A: These are people who didn’t spend all their time obsessed about what they didn’t have, so they’re confident. They had no problem stepping up and taking things before they were offered them. They are conscious of their race, they don’t deny their race, but they don’t see it as a limitation. Very different from just a generation before.
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