August 02, 2007 @ 4:42 pm

Barack Obama Q&A (Part One)

by: Jeff Chang

The first half of the interview from our September 2007 cover story, featuring Barack Obama.

American Book Award-winning author Jeff Chang interviewed Senator Barack Obama for VIBE on May 23, 2007. What follows is the first half of the interview transcript from our September 2007 cover story. Check back on Wednesday, August 8, for the second half. For more Obama content, click here. I understand this is a crazy week for you. You have three big bills up - the war supplemental budget aka ''Stay The Course Act of 2007," authorizing $95 billion in additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the immigration reform bill, and a lobbying reform bill—that you're dealing with here. You had a huge set of events in Philadelphia yesterday. How do you balance the working life and your family life?
Well, you know, by its nature, a presidential race is out of balance. Your life is out of balance. Cause you're traveling all the time. You're working all the time. You're not seeing your wife and your kids as much as you would like. What I try to do is to just understand that the work I am doing is important enough that it makes it worth the sacrifices. But you never get over the sacrifice of being away from your family. I was home one day this week and rode bikes with my daughters, went to the dentist last week, took 'em out to dinner. But you know it's hard when you leave and they ask, 'Where are you going, daddy?' And, ''When are you going to be back?' So that's the single hardest thing about politics generally, and a presidential race in particular. There's a brilliant line that your daughter drops on you in the book - daddy, I just want a simpler life.
Yeah. Do you miss that simpler life?
I do. Now I've got Secret Service protection, I can't just jump in a car and drive to the store. Does that affect you at home too?
Yeah. And I've never been an entourage guy. I've always been somebody who pretty much tries to keep things simple. Even during my US Senate campaign, I was driving my own car until about two months before the primary. You know, I have my map, I'm trying to find a parking space. No GPS.
Yeah, and all that has changed. I do miss the freedom of anonymity and the freedom of being able to go where you want when you want without a lot of fuss. But again, I think what you always say to yourself is the work that I'm doing and the potential for changing this country's politics is worth it. But the presidential race is not something where you can't be half in and half out. Once you've made the decision - and me and my wife talked long and hard before we made the decision - but once you're in, it's like climbing a mountain. It's easier to just keep on going up than it is to try to climb back down. You received some support from folks in the industry. L.A. Reid did a big fundraiser for you. You did work with Ludacris in Chicago around AIDS. And you got hammered by the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. They were saying you should give the money back to David Geffen because he funds Snoop Dogg. Any plans to give the money back?
No. Look. A lot of this arose around the issue of Imus, and I think a lot of people tried to play political football with the issue, instead of listening to what I had really said. I was criticized by some in the hip-hop community as if I had targeted them. And I was criticized by more conservative or more mainstream commentators for quote-unquote "being hypocritical." The truth is I stand by exactly what I said, which was that the language, the degrading comments about women that Imus said is language that we hear not just on the radio, not just in music. We hear it on television, we hear it in our barber shops, we hear it in the streets, we say it among our friends, and we are all complicit in, I think, promoting a set of stereotypes or views about women and minorities that are damaging. Minorities themselves. We ourselves perpetrate this, and we all have to take responsibility for that. I've got two daughters and it's a challenge for me every day to make sure that they're getting a positive self-image and that they are not being swept up in some of the negative attitudes about girls generally and Black women in particular. Now the main responsibility is with the parents, and I've never supported censorship as a strategy to deal with this. But I think it's something that we can all talk about. And so I think that some in the hip-hop community immediately assumed, I guess based on press reports they heard, instead of reading my actual statements, that I had targeted them out by themselves, and others assumed that I was trying to score cheap political points. But the fact is that we've got a culture generally - not just hip-hop, but a culture generally that is dynamic and exciting and rich and sometimes negative and coarse and not particularly enlightening. We're all consumers of this culture and there's nothing wrong with us sort of saying, 'You know what? Some hip-hop is terrific and powerful and some of it is junk.' Just like country music - some of it is interesting and powerful and some of it is junk, and the same is true of any musical genre, the same is true of movies, the same is true of TV. There's some TV shows that are violent but actually are powerful and smart and interesting and I think give people insights into the human condition. I watch The Sopranos and I think it's a powerful show. There are other programs that are violent just because they don't really have much else to say and so they are just promoting a bunch of blood and gore to sell tickets. I think that we should be sophisticated enough to be able to make those distinctions. But the important thing that I want to simply say is that we all have some responsibilities in this process and government alone is not going to solve these problems. Targeting Imus alone is not going to solve these problems. We've all got to sort of look inward to see whether we're communicating to our children the kinds of values and ideals that are going to make us stronger. Russell Simmons said that you should work on fixing the problems that cause these lyrics rather than trying to fix the lyrics. Would you agree with that?
I absolutely agree that, in some ways, rap is reflective of the culture of the inner city, with its problems, but also its potential, its energy, its challenges to the status quo. And I absolutely agree that my priority as a U.S. senator is dealing with poverty and educational opportunity and adequate health care. If I'm ignoring those issues and spending all my time worrying about rap lyrics then I'm wasting my time. On the other hand, I think that there's no doubt that hip hop culture moves our young people powerfully, and some of it is not just a reflection of reality, it also creates reality. I think that if all our kids see is a glorification of materialism and bling and casual sex and kids are never seeing themselves reflected as hitting the books and being responsible and delaying gratification, then they are getting an unrealistic picture of what the world is like. And that's true by the way of the most successful hip hop producers and artists. A lot of them work like dogs, a lot of them work hard, a lot of them are very ambitious, a lot of them are thinking about business in sophisticated ways. But that's not necessarily what you see on videos. What you see on videos is they're just hanging out, bunch of girls in bikinis or sort of running around. That gives our youth an unrealistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So yes, my job is to focus on poverty, education, health care, but I think we have to acknowledge the power of culture in affecting how our kids see themselves and the decisions they make. What do you get down to? What's on your iPod?
You know I haven't been buying new music lately. Because I don't have time. Look, I'm impacted by my generation. Most of my iPod probably is either jazz classics - Coltrane, Miles Davis - or it's got the songs of my youth, right? So you know Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind & Fire, Aretha Franklin. But every once in a while I will find something that's out right now that moves me, and then I'll pull that down. So when the Fugees were together, I loved listening to the Fugees. I think OutKast does a lot of interesting work. My fellow Chicagoan Common I think is outstanding. I really dig his stuff. I can't say I keep up compared to my wife and my daughters. They've always got the radio on in their car, so they're a lot more up to speed. You know, the Justin Timberlake and all that stuff... I have a lot of friends who grew up with hip hop, and now they're parents and they won't let their kids listen to the radio.
I'm more sensitive to it than Michelle is. I'll cringe sometimes when I'm listening to some lyrics and I'll try to turn the down radio. She is, I think, a little more relaxed about it than I.

Article tags: Barack Obama, Common, Don Imus, Hip Hop, Jeff Chang, Obama, Politics, Presidential Race, Senator Obama 

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