AUSTIN, Texas —They are so sorry.
In the course of the primary campaign, and perhaps in a preview of the fall election drama, Sen. Barack Obama has accepted the apologies of three United States senators, a former senator, CNN and various lower-level supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Most of them have apologized for saying something insensitive about Obama’s race, his name or his heritage. And the dynamic of outrage and offense this campaign has proved race to be a much touchier subject than gender. At times, Obama’s campaign has sought to downplay burgeoning outrage. At others, the candidate has stoked it for political advantage.
But most of the flaps ended the same way: with Obama forgiving the alleged offender. Sometimes he’s accepted the apologies graciously, sometimes sternly, but always in line with his message. And that message of reconciliation — often explicitly racial reconciliation — is a central part of his campaign’s appeal. With a general election that appears likely to open him to more Republican attacks, and more line-crossing, the campaign ritual of offense and forgiveness appears likely to be repeated often this year.
The first apology of the cycle set the tone. On Jan. 2, 2007, before Obama’s campaign formally began, CNN aired a story about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden that ran under the headline, “Where’s Obama?”
"We also want to apologize personally to Sen. Barack Obama,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said on air. “I'm going to be making a call to him later this morning to offer my personal apology."
The first Obama rival to stumble was Sen. Joe Biden, who called Obama “clean” and “articulate” in an interview with a New York weekly days before he launched his campaign. The words struck some as racially charged, and Biden spent the first day of his campaign apologizing.
"I deeply regret any offense my remark in The New York Observer might have caused anyone,” Biden said.
"I didn't take Sen. Biden's comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate,” Obama responded.
Later that month, the Clinton campaign staged its first official apology, from South Carolina State Sen. Robert Ford, who said Obama wouldn’t be able to win the White House because he is black.
Then, for months, the offenses and the apologies faded.
But the apology and forgiveness cycle began again as the race heated up in Iowa and New Hampshire in December, and the seminal day for apologies was Dec. 13.
The previous day, Bill Shaheen, a New Hamphire grandee and Clinton’s co-chairman there, had told The Washington Post that Republicans would ask Obama, “Did you sell [drugs] to anyone?'"
On the 13th, Clinton was forced to apologize to Obama on the tarmac at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
“I accepted her apology,” Obama said, adding that he’d told her “that it's important for those of us who are the candidates to send a clear signal down to all of our surrogates that we're going to do things differently."
The two had met on their way to the high-stakes Des Moines Register debate in Iowa, where apology and forgiveness would be, unexpectedly, a theme when Biden’s old remarks resurfaced.
Biden was challenged on a series of statements that had been taken as insensitive, and Obama, unprompted, rushed to his side.
“I’ve worked with Joe Biden, I’ve seen his leadership, I have absolutely no doubt about what is in his heart and the commitment that he's made with respect to racial equality in this country,” Obama said. “So I will provide some testimony, as they say in church.”
It was a moment that seemed to capture the observation of the conservative writer Shelby Steele, who has spoken of a school of black figures whose crossover appeal came in part “by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, 'I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm not going to rub the shame of American history in your face if you will not hold my race against me.' Whites then respond with enormous gratitude. ... And so they tend to be very successful, very popular.”
When the Register debate ended, a spokesman for Clinton e-mailed supporters a statement from Shaheen, who resigned from Clinton's campaign, with a statement that he “deeply regret[ted]” the comments he’d made.
But the apologies continued. A little more than a week later, another top Clinton supporter, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, made an apparently positive reference to Obama’s time as a child in a “secular madrasa.”
Still, he apologized.
“I want to sincerely apologize for the remarks,” wrote Kerrey in an open letter to Obama. He went on, in the letter, to lavish praise on Obama, calling him “among the two or three most talented people I have ever met in politics.”
“Of course Obama accepts his apology,” an Obama spokesman said.
The edgy comments and swift apologies paused for Obama’s surge through Iowa and Clinton’s New Hampshire comeback before restarting in South Carolina, where BET founder Robert Johnson, a Clinton backer, compared Obama’s past drug use to the Clintons’ service to African-Americans.
"I'm writing to apologize to you and your family personally for the uncalled-for comments I made at a recent Clinton event," Johnson said in a statement a few days later.
Later, Clinton herself would apologize for comments made by her husband, including the equation of Obama’s South Carolina victory with that of Jesse Jackson, which gave some offense.
“If anyone was offended by anything that was said, whether it was meant or not, or misinterpreted or not, then obviously, I regret that,” Clinton said in a question and answer session at the State of the Black Union in New Orleans on Feb. 23.
(The one person who has issued no apologies is Bill Clinton himself, whether out of stubbornness or the understanding of what a gift each apology is to his wife’s rival.)
And as the campaign came down to its home stretch in Ohio and Texas, she was still on the defensive on yet another racially charged subject, this time for the allegation floated by the Drudge Report, and adopted by Obama’s aides, that Clinton’s staff had circulated a photograph of Obama in traditional Somali dress.
“That's not the kind of behavior that I condone or expect from the people working in my campaign. But we have no evidence where it came from,” Clinton said.
Obama responded with studied graciousness, just a day after his campaign manager, David Plouffe, had stoked the flames by accusing her campaign of "shameful, offensive fear-mongering.”
“I take Sen. Clinton at her word that she knew nothing about the photo. So I think that's something that we can set aside,” he said
The many instances of accepted apologies have been some of Obama’s best moments and his rivals’ worst. He’s been able to rise not just above the fray but above Clinton and Biden.
“It's simple. He's Teflon,” said Jim Jordan, a Democratic consultant who worked for the campaign of Sen. Chris Dodd. “It goes to his core integrity, the way he projects it, to his political and rhetorical skills, and that’s a quality that’s enormously important.”
For Obama, the general election is still obscured by a hard-fought primary, and he is racing around Ohio and Texas, delivering a message that highlights his rivals’ errors.
“If we would just come together, all of us, across the divisions that have plagued us for so long — black, white, Hispanic and Native Americans, young and old, rich and poor, ... then there would be no problem that we could not solve,” he said in the Dallas suburbs.
The presumptive Republican nominee has already had a taste of a dynamic in which any off-kilter attack on his likely rival could have him begging forgiveness.
On Tuesday, a talk radio host, Bill Cunningham, introduced McCain to an Ohio crowd by attacking Obama and dwelling on his little-used middle name, Hussein.
McCain swiftly responded. “I regret any comments that may be made about” Clinton and Obama, he said. “I will take responsibility in any offense that was inflicted.”
The next day, there was a different culprit, but the same offense: The Tennessee Republican Party sent out a press release dwelling on Obama’s middle name.
And again the spotlight turned to McCain, who was asked about it at a San Antonio press conference.
“All I can say is that I have made my position very clear, and I have made it time after time and I made it yesterday,” he said.
