By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
LIKE A ROCK STAR who prefers to do his new stuff, Barack Obama had not played his greatest hit in several weeks.
At least, Kevin Griffis hadn’t heard it for awhile, not until Sen. Obama “pulled it out” at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D., the week that he sewed up the Democratic nomination.
He rocked the house. Like besotted boomers doing the “na, na, na, na-na-na-na” part of “Hey Jude” with Paul McCartney, the fans sang right along.
Mr. Griffis, 34, who spent much of 2007 here in South Carolina handling the press for the Obama campaign, was there when the hit was born.
You’ve heard the story; Mr. Obama has told it often enough. He went to Greenwood on June 15, 2007 — one year ago today — as a favor to S.C. Rep. Anne Parks. He wasn’t having a great day. As he told the crowd at the Corn Palace:
I feel terrible…. It is a miserable day. Pouring down rain, looks awful. I stagger over to the door and I pull open the door and pick up the newspaper and start drinking some coffee and there’s a bad story about me in The New York Times.
I pack up my belongings and go down stairs and as I’m about to get in the car my umbrella blows open and I get soaked. So by the time I’m in the car I am mad, I am sleepy and I’m wet….
“He really was grumpy there that morning,” said Mr. Griffis. But he did the drill, quietly, doggedly, doing what you do when you’ve promised to show up — working the room, one dutiful handshake at a time. “I wasn’t paying attention,” said Mr. Griffis. Just the usual, numb routine.
Suddenly, this little lady — Greenwood County councilwoman Edith Childs, whom Obama describes as just over five feet tall, 65 years old, with “a big church hat” — starts her patented chant: “Fired up!” The Greenwood folks, for whom this is habit, echo the call, which she follows with “Ready to go!”
The senator would later recall being startled: “I jumped.” Mr. Griffis, a quiet, sober-faced young white guy from Atlanta, reacted this way:
“It really kind of scared me — I didn’t know what was going on.”
And he had no idea how the thing would become a rallying cry. For a long time, neither did the rest of the country.
For the next few months, Mr. Griffis recalled last week, the media narrative was all about how Obama wasn’t catching fire, how he was trailing in the polls among black voters in South Carolina — a self-fulfilling perception.
Then, in the last weeks of the year, the narrative changed. In a Dec. 23 column, David Broder of The Washington Post wrote that “The stump speech he has developed in the closing stages of the pre-Christmas campaign is a thing of beauty… Hillary Clinton has nothing to match it.”
It was the speech that climaxed each time with “Fired up… Ready to go!” Reality matching perception, Sen. Obama rose quickly in the polls, and won the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3.
As the campaign suffered a setback in New Hampshire and moved on to South Carolina, William Safire — former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, and ardent student of words and their power — wrote in The New York Times Magazine on Jan. 20 about the speech and its origins: “That local origin of the inspiring chant, and its familiarity to many voters in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary this week, means a lot to the Obama campaign.”
Jim Davenport of The Associated Press (and formerly of The State) reported that Ms. Childs — who insisted to reporters as her fame grew that she was 59, not 65 — got the “Fired up” routine from Nelson Rivers, NAACP field operations chief, and he got it from the late civil rights activist and Charleston native Jondelle Harris Johnson.
But however it started, Obama has taken the chant to undreamt-of places: Des Moines, Iowa. The Corn Palace in Mitchell, S.D. The Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
Long before he got “fired up,” of course, Barack Obama was a gifted and charismatic speaker, one who could get any Democratic crowd “ready to go.” And he’s going up against a Republican who is not a master of the set-piece speech, as he demonstrated when he tried upstaging Sen. Obama on the night he clinched the nomination, and bombed on national television.
So it was that John McCain challenged Mr. Obama to meet him on his turf — the “town hall”-style meeting. On Friday, the campaigns were squabbling over whether the events would even take place.
I hope they do. I had the chance to see how Sen. McCain connected with voters in small venues in South Carolina last year, during the months that his campaign was down and out, according to conventional “wisdom” at the time.
And as Mr. Griffis said last week in Columbia (where he was getting reacquainted with his 4-year-old daughter, after having been away in Virginia, Ohio, Mississippi, Indiana and South Dakota almost every minute since January), such a format plays to his candidate’s strength as well.
“He’s a remarkably empathetic person,” he said, “and so fiercely intelligent,” he shines when given “the opportunity to put that on display.”
I agree. For the first time in many an election cycle, my first choice in both major parties will be on the ballot in the fall. Each of them got to where he is by pulling away from the polarizing force of his respective party.
The nation deserves to see them interact — repeatedly, if possible — in a setting as free of artifice as possible. That would be something for all of us to get fired up about.
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With Sen. Clinton’s exit coerced by the rigged DNC, the White House and “unity” are a pipe dream for cult leader Obama and the corrupt Democratic Party.
HRC supporters will not surrender in “unity” to the cult powers of Obama. HRC supporters will campaign and vote for McCain in the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida. Obama’s losing any two of these swing states means his defeat in November. I will volunteer and vote for McCain in a swing state. In 2012, Sen. Clinton will be the presidential candidate to put America back on track.
Obama has no legitimacy as the Democratic nominee. He did not get the nomination fair and square. He stole the nomination with Howard Dean’s MI and FL shenanigans and de facto Obama surrogate Nancy Pelosi rigged the nomination for Obama. Cult leader Obama is unqualified, inexperienced, immature, and unelectable as a radical left wing liberal.
Sen. Clinton is the legitimate Democratic nominee with solutions of real change and a change in direction to get America back on track. She is the best qualified and the strongest candidate to win the general election hands down. The corrupt and rigged DNC dashed an easy landslide victory with Sen. Clinton for a crushing defeat with cult leader Obama, who is “still fired up, 12 months on.”
Didn’t exactly risk crawling out onto a limb with your pen this time, did you, Mr. Warthen?
But why bother with the town halls? As much free advertising as the press is giving Obama (more than three-quarters of your snooze above is about him and then there’s that piece in the paper about how black Republicans might vote for him), he can’t lose.
“as free of artifice as possible.” Amen. Wouldn’t it be great to hear these two talk to each other—and to us—as if we were adults? I hope they do arrange a bunch of “debate/conversations” with each other with no moderator, other than maybe just a timekeeper of sorts to make sure that each candidate gets to speak for roughly the equivalent length of time.
When’s a post coming on the recent SCOTUS decision? There can be no greater victory against terrorism than the refusal to be terrified. A great day for freedom and the American way.
Phillip, I totally agree with you about a debate that gave these two a chance to really discuss their ideas with each other, instead of being held to 3 minute or 30 second sound bytes. I depth discussions would be fascinating. Our usualy ‘debates’ usually only allow the candidates to state generalities or to throw brickbats at each other. If they can’t do it on tv, could they do it as a sort of blog, where they responded to each other?
I can see it now, people from opposing parties holding hands, skipping off down the yellow brick road together — bud and Phil Gramm, Chuck Schumer and Lee Muller, Brad Warthen and Mark Sanford, Ted Kennedy and me — all of us picking corn to make ethanol at home.
McCain will pick Hillary as a running mate, Obama will pick Condoleeza Rice, and this party thing will be over, once and for all.
Really, it can happen. If we all keep humming “Imagine” and open up our wallets, eventually we’ll be singing “The Party’s Over” together.
Oh yeah.
You better start laying up provisions for the 4-year Obama Recession.