By the time Jim Clyburn, the 79-year-old South Carolina congressman, arrives for dinner at Halls Chophouse, I have been waiting almost 30 hours.

We had originally planned to have lunch at a Baptist church in Columbia, the state capital. But the Democratic majority whip in the House of Representatives — and the highest-ranking African-American in Congress — had remained in Washington to vote on the first piece of legislation passed to help citizens struggling economically due to coronavirus. So we settle instead for dinner a day later.

After pulling up in a black SUV, Clyburn greets me with “Hello buddy.” It is a Saturday, and most of the US has not yet been locked down. We shake hands, before his communications director gives us a subtle hint. We both smile and greet again — this time with an elbow bump.

Dressed casually in a maroon sweater and matching baseball cap, Clyburn leads the way past the long, crowded bar to our table overlooking the South Carolinian State House. The waiters and seemingly half the patrons salute him, and he greets them back by name.

After we sit, our waiter, another pal, comes to chat. The congressman is not yet hungry, so we start with drinks. I opt for an Oregon Pinot Noir. Clyburn signals for his usual, and is soon nursing a Jack Daniel’s with Diet Coke. His aide orders a Cabernet Sauvignon.

I met Clyburn for the first time shortly before last month’s South Carolina primary, where his endorsement of Joe Biden almost single-handedly saved the former vice-president’s campaign. The 14-term lawmaker would not say then which candidate he was going to endorse. But he had told some people at his accountant’s funeral the previous week — because, he says confidently, “they would never betray Jim Clyburn”.

As we sip our drinks, I ask him when he told Biden. The pair met on the USS Yorktown, an old aircraft carrier turned museum, six days before the primary. He delivered the good news, but included a stern warning to his friend to stop reading speeches from a script.

“Here’s what I said to him,” Clyburn tells me. “You know these issues well enough not to be reading from a text . . . People can’t feel you when you read it.”

Using lessons he learnt from his father as a “PK” (preacher’s kid), he gave Biden some advice. “There’s a reason that preachers preach in threes,” Clyburn recalls saying. “I want you to answer every question in three ways: here is what my presidency will mean to you, here’s what it will mean to your family, and here’s what it will mean for your community.”

Was Biden receptive? “I’m older than Joe. I’m his senior,” he says with a hearty laugh. (Biden is 77.) “He said, ‘I got it.’”

It seems he did. And the day after the debate, Clyburn endorsed Biden in an emotional speech in which he said there was “nobody” his late wife Emily, to whom he was married for 58 years and who died in September, had loved more as a leader.

Shortly after the event, Clyburn was rushing to his car to get to the airport when he heard shouting. “Biden was running behind me,” he explains. Literally running? “Yeah!” he replies, understanding why I might be sceptical. “I stopped and I turned around and tears were just streaming down his face.”

Armed with Clyburn’s backing, Biden won in a landslide; according to the exit polls, 61 per cent of the voters said the endorsement influenced their decision. That dramatic victory then propelled Biden to win in a slew of states the following week, earning him clear frontrunner status over the leftwing Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

Clyburn is used to having power in his state. For the past three decades, he’s hosted a fish fry during the Democratic primaries which has become virtually mandatory for would-be candidates to attend. In the course of the 2008 primary, Clyburn criticised Hillary Clinton; on the day that Barack Obama beat her in South Carolina, Clyburn remembers Bill Clinton phoning him at 2.15am, bellowing, “If you bastards want a fight, you damn well will get one.”

Did he ever think his endorsement of Biden would have such an impact? Clyburn says that people underestimated the latent support for Biden — before proudly adding that two women approached him after the primary to say, “Thank you for saving the Democratic party.”

Clyburn has come a long way since his youth in Sumter, a city near Columbia. In his 2014 memoir, Blessed Experiences, he recalls how his high-school band was asked to participate in the Sumter Christmas parade in 1955, the year after the Supreme Court struck down the segregation of public schools. But he and his black bandmates were forced to march at the end of the parade, behind the horses.

As a boy growing up in Jim Crow’s South, did he ever dream he would be so successful that he would one day be friends with US presidents? “No, never,” he says, but adds that his mother had faith in him and his two brothers. “My mother would tell me we would be [successful].”

Clyburn’s life has been filled with strong women. He recalls how his mother took out two loans without telling anyone and ended up owning a brace of beauty shops employing 16 staff.

She wanted to go to college, however. So when her husband was offered several jobs as a preacher, he took the one in Sumter, where a local college would accept them. His mother finished the four-year programme in three years, while running her shop and raising three small boys.

I joke that she was two years quicker than Clyburn, who repeated a year in college because of his grades. “That’s right,” he chuckles.

Clyburn says his mother hung her degree on the wall and never used it, which was puzzling. “I even asked her one time, ‘Mom, why would you go to college and not do anything with it?’

She says: ‘You know I make twice the money in this beauty shop than any of those people out there.’ I looked at her and she said, ‘I’ll tell you something else. Unless the IRS puts somebody outside this door, they’ll never know how much money I make.”

You never accept racism. You just make adjustments . . . If you accept it, you will resign yourself to its existence. I never resigned myself

Perhaps alerted by our laughter, our waiter returns to the table. Clyburn goes for the “Seafood Tower”, a platter of oysters, shrimp and lobster tail. I gladly accept the invitation for another round. “Are you sure we can’t tempt you?” I ask Clyburn. “I might have another one,” he says.

My multifocal contact lenses fail me in the dimly lit room, so the waiter loans me his reading glasses. I choose the New York Strip steak and mashed potatoes.

I want to ask Clyburn about race. As a young man during the civil rights movement, he was jailed in 1960 for taking part in a march in Orangeburg. He was fined $50 by the court, but the silver lining was that he met a “cute, 92-pound co-ed” outside the courtroom who gave him a sandwich and later agreed to become his wife.

How did he deal with racism as a young man? “You never accept it. You just make adjustments in the things you do, and the things you say. If you accept it, you will resign yourself to its existence. I never resigned myself.”

How much did it hurt? “I don’t know that I ever had anything I would call hurt. You grow up with this, you know what the boundaries are, and you chip away,” he explains. “I don’t get overly excited about anything.”

He says he lives by an adage from John F Kennedy, which goes something like: “I never get mad, but I will get even.” I joke that Oscar Wilde said it first, with “revenge is a dish best served cold”. Clyburn breaks into a smile: “Kennedy stole a lot from other people, he might have stolen that line.”

Clyburn says his father taught him to control his emotions, so I take the opportunity to ask about their relationship. His father once cast the final vote against himself in a deadlocked church election. When Clyburn asked why, his father said it would be impossible to oversee such a divided group, but that they would ask him to return the next year — which is what happened. “I will always believe that incident in that church that day is the reason that I am majority whip right now.”

Has he ever used a similar strategy? Yes, he says. He stepped down from the appropriations committee in 1999 to make room for a Republican who had switched parties. It was a bold move in an era when members of the panel that controlled the purse strings were able to appropriate money for their district through “earmarks”. Clyburn made the move after the members vowed to look after his priorities.

“I got every earmark I wanted, didn’t have to go to a single meeting,” he says, smiling, before adding that it let him focus on his role as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.

While he says that his mother was more of a risk-taker than his father, he clearly got the gene from both parents. He made extra money as a young man by betting in bowling alleys — on himself. He still bowls “occasionally,” but prefers golf these days. He stresses that he has not played with Donald Trump.

We are 90 minutes into dinner when our food arrives. I offer to share my potatoes, but am met with silence until I joke that there is clearly only one Irish person at the table. Clyburn seems impressed and bemused with his dish, which, as advertised, is a platter of seafood placed for some unknown reason on a tower-like structure.

As Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz greats play in the background, we discuss everything from Usain Bolt, the retired sprinter, to the polarised soundbite politics that has made Democrats and Republicans less likely to socialise with each other.

Halls Chophouse 1221 Main Street, Columbia, SC 29201 Seafood on the Rocks $49 New York Strip $58 Fresh Catch $38 Mashed potatoes $10 Jack Daniel’s x 3 $30 Glass Four Graces Pinot Noir $15 Glass KenWright Pinot Noir x 2 $32 Glass Simi Cabernet x 2 $30 Total (inc tax and service) $360

But inexorably the conversation is drawn back to Biden. Clyburn says he would restore civility in politics. For instance, he says, Biden shuns the “bombastic” approach taken by the “Bernie bros” — the moniker for the most radical wing of Sanders’ movement.

Centrist Democrats worry that, should Biden win the nomination, Sanders will hold back from actively campaigning for him. Clyburn does not sound confident that Sanders will help unite the party, or rally his supporters behind Biden. “What’s that old mafia saying — that fish rots from the head.” As he slowly knocks off his crustaceans one by one, he has a warning for one famous supporter of Sanders.

“When I say, ‘I don’t get mad, I get even’, there’s one person who is going to hear from me. His name is Michael Moore,” Clyburn says. The film-maker and longtime Sanders supporter claimed after Biden’s victory in South Carolina that the state was “not representative” of the United States. “I don’t want to say much but I’m going to have a lot to say.”

Come on, I press, and he happily obliges. Reminding me that Biden won more than 60 per cent of the black vote in South Carolina and bigger percentages in Alabama and Mississippi, he says: “According to Michael Moore, South Carolina doesn’t matter because here’s what ‘the people’ want.” He says Moore is dismissing the voices of the most important segment of the Democratic electorate — black voters.

I ask whether Clyburn thinks Biden will pick Stacey Abrams, 46, the African-American former minority leader of the House in Georgia and rising Democratic star, as his running mate to help woo younger voters in November.

“I doubt it,” he says. “There’s something to be said for somebody who has been out there.”

Clyburn does want to see a black woman on the ticket, though. And some Democrats believe that Biden, who has vowed to pick a woman, will also be under heavy pressure to repay Clyburn for his critical endorsement.

Clyburn says there has been a lot of talk about Kamala Harris, the California senator who struggled in the Democratic primary. He says a “sleeper” in the race is Susan Rice, who served as national security adviser to Barack Obama. But he also stresses that “the bench of black women is much deeper than people think”.

While he believes Abrams does not have enough experience, he has his eyes on another Georgia politician. “There is a young lady right there in Georgia who I think would make a tremendous VP candidate, and that’s the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms.”

It’s getting late, so we secure “one for the road”. I ask the former history teacher how he sees America’s place in the world. “We’re where Germany was in 1933 after the election of Adolf Hitler,” he warns. But he adds a note of optimism, saying that African-Americans can lead the charge against Trump. He cites as inspiration a hero of the 1930s: Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

How does Clyburn rate the way that Trump is handling the coronavirus crisis? Does he see any parallels with the way that George W Bush handled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where he was accused of being slow to get to grips with the crisis?

“Absolutely, absolutely, no question,” says Clyburn, who tells me he is reminded of the moment when Bush flew over a stricken New Orleans in Air Force One. An official photograph of Bush looking down at the flooded city was widely seen as reflecting how out of touch he was.

We are four hours in, but the restaurant is still buzzing. I venture that Clyburn could have his choice of job in a Biden administration. Would that tempt him? “Absolutely not. No, no, no. I would never work in the Biden administration,” he says, adding that most cabinet secretaries have little power.

Not even an ambassadorship, I press? Giving me a big, beaming smile, he replies: “I might be ambassador to the PGA.” He seems in no hurry to change jobs, but after three decades of serving his district, I have a feeling he may be serious.

Demetri Sevastopulo is the FT’s Washington bureau chief

Follow Demetri Sevastopulo on Twitter: @dimi

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