If you ask David Remnick, the irritatingly accomplished 51-year-old editor of the New Yorker and author of The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, Mr. Remnick's hulking new 656-page biography of the U.S. President, how he managed to travel all over the United States to report and write a book about a president and his life and most significant campaign, then sit down to dinner with his wife and three children most nights while also running a high-profile weekly magazine out of Manhattan - well, go ahead, question away.
"I never thought you'd ask," he said the other day, just before the book was published, in a conversation with The Globe and Mail. "I dunno, a gallon of coffee? It's late night, early morning, weekends, trips grabbed here and there, wonderful colleagues. And I haven't done this in 12 years. I haven't written a book in 12 years."
That one was about Muhammad Ali. This one is getting the royal treatment and a first printing in excess of 200,000 copies. "I may not be the best writer," Mr. Remnick says, "but I'm a pretty fast one. A.J. Liebling used to say that he was faster than everybody better, and better than anybody faster."
That's the formal answer to a question a lot of people are asking. The truth is to be found in The Bridge: David Remnick is obsessed with the history of civil rights in the United States, and with the heroic men and women it has produced. He particularly likes the overlap between that history and how it plays out in down-and-dirty political cities like Chicago - still the most segregated megalopolis in America, Mr. Remnick insists, and the hard-nosed town where Barack Obama learned a crucial lesson as a community organizer: that great leaders have to be ruthless political operators as well.
Not that Mr. Remnick openly uses the word "ruthless" to describe a man he clearly admires. But it's there, on many of the book's pages, in the form of Barack Obama's chameleon intellect, his decisive manner, his hard-headed sense of when to fight.
"I think any American who is historically awake knows of the many racial injustices that have existed and exist," Mr. Remnick explains. He speaks quickly, like the New York resident he is. "And to be aware of Amercan life is to be aware of that extremely complex history, and also the beauty of it. Ralph Ellison makes it very clear in his essays that there is no American culture without African-American culture. Whether it's music or literature or politics. This is the wound."
In Mr. Remnick's thesis, the murky details about Mr. Obama's life that plagued his candidacy were the same ones that made his candidacy possible. Who was this newcomer? Where was he from? Was he a Muslim? Did he hang out with black separatists and anarchists? Was he sufficiently black? Was he sufficiently American? (The answers Mr. Remnick hauls back from his dogged investigations are: it's complicated, everywhere, no, not back then, yes, and absolutely.) Eventually they all roll into one question: who is and who is not authentically American, and why? The definition has changed.
The story of Mr. Obama's life that Mr. Remnick tells is well known in outline, from Nairobi to the White House via Hawaii and Harvard. But Mr. Remnick wasn't intimidated. He wanted to dig into Mr. Obama's past, not his present, using his experience as a reporter at Ben Bradlee's Washington Post, where he worked for 10 years, and as the overseer of the famously detailed New Yorker, where he took over from the flashier Tina Brown 12 years ago. Mr. Remnick found and interviewed friends, relatives, lovers, teachers, co-workers, classmates and even enemies from every stage of Mr. Obama's life, from his childhood (and beyond) to the day of his inauguration in January, 2009. The book contains a poem the President wrote, a transcript of (obviously stoner) conversations Mr. Obama and his pals taped as teenagers in Hawaii, as well as lovely set-pieces, such as a history of black employees at the White House, which was built by slaves.
But the intellectual action of The Bridge begins in Selma, Alabama, where on March 4, 2007, Barack Obama gave a speech intended "to nominate himself as the inheritor of the most painful of all American struggles, the struggle of race." Selma was where, 42 years earlier, Martin Luther King and John Lewis and a band of civil rights protesters got to their knees to pray at one end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, only to have the local police put them in hospital and jail. Selma, Mr. Remnick points out, was one of the towns where black Americans were forced to take "intelligence" tests before they could vote. Sample question: "How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?" A local black housing project was named after a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. And that's just in the first three pages of the book.
Why is such an accomplished President so controversial? Mr. Remnick demonstrates that Mr. Obama has been attacked - he even had to wait for the endorsement of John Lewis, the leader of the black caucus in Congress, which at first supported Hillary Clinton - because "he made what I would call an impious challenge. By Chicago standards he's a newcomer, and he didn't step aside. … He didn't bow down before traditional ways and means." The challenge to Hillary Clinton was part and parcel of his quiet toughness. When he told his daughters he was running for president, Sasha asked if he ought not to try to be vice-president first.
What Mr. Remnick finds offensive is any suggestion that Mr. Obama was not "black enough" to call himself a black candidate - a charge levelled at him even by Clinton operatives. "That kind of authenticity-baiting is suspect at best, and really ugly." As for Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News dogs, "Fuck them. They're beyond measure. The fact is that the African-American community is diverse. It's diverse politically, economically, in its genotypes and its genetic makeup. All I'm insisting on, as a journalist," Mr. Remnick insists, "is complexity. Everything is always more complex than the cartoon."
Mr. Obama may have been all about hope, but now he is evidence of change, which in turn leads to the Tea Party. "I think they think they have a vision of what America should be, or an America that is slipping away from them," Mr. Remnick says. But even here he is loath to generalize. "And when that's coupled with economic difficulty it causes great anger and anxiety and sometimes rage and some of the worst instincts can bleed out. So you have the spectacle of John Lewis, after 40 years in the civil rights movement, being screamed at with the worst racial epithets as he goes to Congress to vote on health care. But by no means does that represent the whole movement."
The real question is what Mr. Obama is a bridge to. Not a raceless society: "I don't believe in that," Mr. Remnick says. "Whether he leads to the improvement of the lot of disadvantaged African-Americans or not, that remains to be seen. But clearly in a country where all our presidents have been white Anglo-Saxon males with the exception of one white Catholic for a thousand days, and no women, the ascent of an African-American with an African-sounding name to the presidency is, to quote Joe Biden, 'a big fucking deal'."