Chapter Eleven
A Righteous Wind
The Illinois Senate race of 2004 did not take place in a political vacuum, of course; that same year, George W. Bush was running for re-election. Bush had come to office in 2000 only after a five-to-four vote of the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended the Florida recount with Bush in the lead. The vote denied the Presidency to Al Gore, who had, by nearly any rational count, won the popular vote both nationally and in Florida. In the race for the 2004 Democratic nomination, John Kerry, the junior senator from Massachusetts, fended off the early challenge of Vermont's governor, Howard Dean, and, after a string of primary victories, was able to start planning for the race against Bush.
One of the best and earliest opportunities that a challenger has to frame his candidacy--to project his political ideas, and his character, to millions of people all at once--is at the nominating convention. Television audiences for the Conventions have diminished over time, but the candidates for President and Vice-President can still make an important initial impression not only with their acceptance speeches but also with speeches and theatrics on the first nights of the Convention.
The Kerry campaign chose Jack Corrigan, a Boston lawyer who was a Party veteran, to help run the Convention, which was to take place in late July at Boston's FleetCenter. Corrigan was in his late forties. As a student, he had taken off so much time to work for various Democratic candidates that his friends joked that he would be on Social Security before he got his law degree. He had been an aide to Edward Kennedy, Geraldine Ferraro, Michael Dukakis, and Walter Mondale, and he had been one of Al Gore's point men in Palm Beach County during the 2000 recount fight. Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, asked Corrigan to play a larger role in the campaign, but he preferred to stay home and take the job of running the Convention: by early spring, he had started working on stagecraft, media arrangements, union contracts, and the list of potential speakers.
"One of the things you have to figure out is a keynote speaker, which is just one domino in a complicated mosaic," Corrigan said. He had done his first serious political work when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and volunteered for Abner Mikva in his 1976 and 1978 congressional races. During those campaigns, Corrigan became friendly with Henry Bayer, a former teacher and union organizer. Whenever Corrigan and Bayer got together they would have five-hour dinners and talk politics. By 2003, Bayer was running the Illinois chapter of A.F.S.C.M.E., the biggest union in the country for public employees and health-care workers. Bayer called his friend and said, "You really have to raise money for this guy, Barack Obama. He's running for Senate in Illinois and he's the real deal."
"Why would I want to get involved in that?" Corrigan asked.
"Because," Bayer answered, "Ab Mikva says he is the most talented politician in fifty years."
Mikva not only came from the state of Douglas, Stevenson, and Simon; he had also worked as White House counsel to Bill Clinton. The best politician in fifty years? This moment of hyperbolic praise caught Corrigan's attention. Corrigan called Elena Kagan, a classmate at Harvard Law School and one of Mikva's former law clerks. He had learned that Obama had been president of the Law Review and thought that Kagan might have known him there. As it turned out, Kagan knew him not from Harvard but because they were both teaching at the University of Chicago. She praised Obama to Corrigan in terms nearly as extravagant as the ones Mikva had used.
So now, Corrigan recalled, "I'm thinking: this is really interesting." He resolved to do something for Obama's Senate campaign, maybe assemble some phone banks and put together a fundraiser at the home of Larry Tribe, Obama's mentor at Harvard. But he was distracted by his law practice and the Presidential race and, by early February, other friends were telling him that Blair Hull was a decent candidate and, using his vast pile of cash, had built a lead over Dan Hynes and Obama.
"I visited Mary Beth Cahill in Washington," Corrigan recalled, "and I said, 'Listen, there is this kid in Chicago who is great and he is about to lose his primary. We should hire him.' Mary Beth nodded and we moved on. This was just one of about ten things I had to tell her." Cahill had also heard encouraging things about Obama.
Corrigan went back to Boston and, after a few weeks, Obama pulled ahead to win the primary. "And so by then," Corrigan went on, "I've got a lot of problems with the Convention. Construction is running behind. The schedule is tight, a lot of headaches. So I thought, Well, Obama could give a speech, but maybe not the keynote. I threw him on a list. When you think about the speakers at a Convention, you have to take a lot of things into consideration: demographics, states that are in play, local races. He was worth thinking about.
"And then," Corrigan continued, "I got a call from an old friend in the Dukakis campaign, Lisa Hay, who'd become a public defender in Portland, Oregon. She was attending a conference in Boston and we had a cup of coffee and she was really on me about how Kerry wasn't strong enough against the war in Iraq. And so I said, 'Lisa, you've got to get with the program and help out.' Finally, she said, 'O.K., I'll help, but I'm saving my money to help my friend Barack Obama.' It turns out she ran against him for president of the Law Review and lost." Hay told Corrigan about the banquet celebrating the new officers of the Law Review at the Boston Harvard Club, and how, at the end of Obama's speech, the black waiters put down their trays and joined in the applause.
"If you really want someone who can speak, he's your guy," Hay told Corrigan.
"The whole story was moving and a little eerie," Corrigan said. "I had a vision in my mind. Lisa's story had reminded me of Mario Cuomo." In the long history of Convention speeches, from F.D.R.'s eloquent endorsements of Al Smith, in 1924 and 1928, to Barbara Jordan's performance in 1976 ("My presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American dream need not forever be deferred"), perhaps none was as exquisitely crafted or as movingly delivered as Mario Cuomo's 1984 keynote, "A Tale of Two Cities." The speech debunked Ronald Reagan's "Shining City on a Hill" as a chimerical and exclusive land for the rich and the lucky. Cuomo talked about "another city"--a city of the poor and the middle class watching their dreams "evaporate." His use of direct address to the sitting President was a solemn yet effective technique: "There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit, in your shining city." Corrigan and Cahill started thinking of Obama as someone capable of speaking in those emotionally memorable terms.
In late May, Corrigan, together with Mary Beth Cahill, put Obama on a list of possible keynote speakers that also included the Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm, Janet Napolitano, of Arizona, and Mark Warner, of Virginia. "We were also thinking about having an Iraq veteran or a teacher," Cahill recalled. "It was a long process and we started looking at videos of all of them."
Cahill and others made calls to get full reports on the possible keynoters; in Obama's case, she spoke to Rahm Emanuel, Richard Durbin, and both Richard and William Daley in Chicago. "The reports on Obama," she said, "were glittering." Obama himself was hardly passive in the process. Axelrod and the campaign's chief of staff, Darrel Thompson, began to lobby for Obama with Kerry's people once they heard that his name was under consideration. Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, and Alexis Herman--African-American women who had played significant roles in the Party during the Clinton and Gore campaigns--also lobbied for Obama to deliver the keynote.
Obama's drawbacks were obvious. Even though he was the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Illinois, he was still only a state legislator. There was also the matter of his outright condemnation of the war in Iraq, which conflicted with Kerry, who, like Hillary Clinton and many other Democrats, had voted, in 2002, to authorize military action. In Obama's favor was his youth, his race, and the Party's desire for a Democrat to win back the second Illinois Senate seat. In April, 2004, Kerry had spent a couple of days campaigning in Chicago with Obama, appearing with him at a vocational center, a bakery, a town-hall meeting, and a fundraiser at the Hyatt downtown. As Kerry watched Obama speak at the town hall and at the Hyatt, his national finance chairman, a Chicago-based investment banker named Louis Susman, whispered to him, "This guy is going to be on a national ticket someday." Kerry told Susman that he was considering him for a spot at the Convention. "He should be one of the faces of our party now," Kerry said, "not years from now."
In the Republican primary, Jack Ryan, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, had defeated a crowded field, but he began the general election lagging far behind Obama, who was starting to attract national attention. The prospect of a young politician of the post-civil-rights era becoming the sole black senator in the midst of a close battle between Bush and Kerry was an irresistible story. In a Profile published in The New Yorker, William Finnegan portrayed Obama as he went to visit A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders in Springfield. In the primary campaign, the union had endorsed Dan Hynes.
"This is a kiss-and-make-up session," Obama told Finnegan as they entered a room of twenty-five white union leaders in windbreakers and golf shirts. He spoke about the jobs lost during the Bush Administration, federal highway funding, non-union companies homing in on big contracts. Finnegan, who was not alone in being struck by Obama's ease in front of all-white crowds, followed Obama to central Illinois and a community center near Decatur, where two major factories had closed. Obama began with his usual riff about his name and then gave a rousing speech about the Bush Administration's instinct to protect the interests of the powerful and abandon the powerless to feed on cliches about self-reliance. As they drove from the rally in the flatlands of central Illinois toward Chicago, Obama said, "I know those people. Those are my grandparents. The food they serve is the food my grandparents served when I was growing up. Their manners, their sensibility, their sense of right and wrong--it's all totally familiar to me."
Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from the northern suburbs of Chicago, told Finnegan that she had recently been to the White House for a meeting with President Bush. As she was leaving, she noticed that the President was looking at her Obama button. "He jumped back, almost literally," she said. "And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was 'Obama,' with a 'b.' And I explained who he was. The President said, 'Well, I don't know him.' So I just said, 'You will.'"
Bush was already aware of Jack Ryan, the attractive Republican candidate. Ryan was as handsome as a surgical resident on daytime television; he was intelligent and financially fixed--a Goldman Sachs partner who made his fortune and then went off to teach on the South Side of Chicago at Hales Franciscan, an all-male nonprofit high school that was almost entirely African-American. He grew up in the suburb of Wilmette and earned graduate degrees in both law and business from Harvard. He was a pro-life, pro-gun, free-market conservative. Ryan said the school where he taught was an example of economic freedom in action--an independent school helping people. And since he was giving his time, not just his money, Ryan radiated credibility; in the era of "compassionate conservatism," he could argue that his was more than a slogan. Although he, too, had helped finance his own race, Ryan was more appealing, and less technocratic, than Blair Hull.
Ryan's fortunes collapsed, however, in late June, when Robert Schneider, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, ruled in favor of the Tribune and WLS-Channel 7 in their lawsuit to unseal Jack and Jeri Ryan's divorce records. Ryan had long maintained that the papers should remain closed to public inspection in order to protect their nine-year-old son. Although the Ryans' divorce lacked the suggestion of violence featured in Blair Hull's documents, it was instant fodder for cable news and the Internet, which unfailingly provided photographs of Jeri Ryan in various states of immodest dress. Smoking Gun and other sites quickly posted Jeri Ryan's testimony:
I made clear to Respondent that our marriage was over for me in the spring of 1998. On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, Respondent insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. These were surprise trips that Respondent arranged. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways.
The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. Respondent had done research. Respondent took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to.... It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. Respondent wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. We left the club, and Respondent apologized, said that I was right and he would never insist I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system.
Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry. I could not get over the incident, and my loss of any attraction to him as a result. Respondent knew this was a serious problem. I told him I did not know if we could work it out.
The documents also quoted Jeri Ryan's mother, Sharon Zimmerman, saying, "Jeri Lynn told me that she was tired of being told what to eat, how to sit, what to wear, tired of being criticized about her physical appearance and told to exercise."
Ryan said in the filing that he had been "faithful and loyal" to his wife during their marriage. "I did arrange romantic getaways for us, but that did not include the type of activities she describes," he said. "We did go to one avant-garde nightclub in Paris which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return." Ryan made it sound as if they had walked out on an underground production of Ubu Roi.
Obama was at a fund-raising dinner in distant Carbondale when the news broke. How to react to a story as strange as a second sex scandal? In April, after his primary victory, Obama had hired a new communications director, Robert Gibbs, a shrewd operative from Alabama, who had worked for Ernest Hollings, of South Carolina, in the Senate and on the campaign trail with John Kerry. In 2002, Gibbs had worked for another Joshua generation politician, former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, who had tried, and failed, to beat John Cornyn for a Senate seat in Texas. Like Cauley, Gibbs was a white Southerner with sharp instincts about the politics of race. The issue now, however, was sex. Obama and Gibbs worked quickly to come up with a suitably dignified, and anodyne, response. "I've tried to make it clear throughout the campaign," Obama told reporters, "that my focus is on what I can do to help the families of Illinois and I'm not considering this something appropriate for me to comment on." (The invoking of "families" was an inspired touch.) Later, Obama would lower his head in embarrassed silence as reporters shouted questions at him like "Do you think a sexual fetish defines a person's character?"
While the Obama campaign stepped back in studied (and stunned) silence as yet another opponent endured a humiliating implosion, Jay Leno weighed in:
In the Senate race in Illinois, the Republican candidate Jack Ryan just went through an ugly divorce and in court papers, his wife accused him of taking her to sex clubs where he tried to make her have sex with him in front of strangers. Aren't Republicans the family-values people? That's the difference between Republicans and Democrats on family values. Democrat politicians cheat on their wives. Republicans cheat, too--but they bring the wife along. Make it a family event! They include the whole family!
For a few days, Ryan seemed to think he could get past the crisis by emphasizing the potential damage done to his son and his outrage at the judge who had released the papers. "A lot of people were saying to me the last three months it's politically damaging to keep these files sealed, just release the files," Ryan told reporters. "But what dad wouldn't do the same thing I did? What dad wouldn't try to keep information about your child, that might be detrimental to the world knowing, private? Even the things moms and dads say to each other, about each other, should be kept away from children." Ryan insisted that he had done nothing illegal. Jeri Ryan followed with a statement that, while not denying the accuracy of her testimony in the divorce papers, underscored that her ex-husband had never been unfaithful or abusive.
"Jack is a good man, a loving father and he shares a strong bond with our son," she said. "I have no doubt that he will make an excellent senator."
Ryan also found support from the man he hoped to succeed, Peter Fitzgerald (who had voted to find President Clinton guilty during his impeachment trial) and from the Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, who said, "Just think about it, any politician or somebody thinking about running for office, if they have an ex-wife who is mad at them or an ex-girlfriend, they are dead, they are toast, because you can make any accusation in the world."
But political endorsements from Jeri Ryan and Bill O'Reilly were not going to sway the state Republican Party organization. At the start of the campaign, Judy Baar Topinka, the Republican chairwoman in Illinois, had asked Ryan if there was anything damaging or embarrassing in the files. He had assured her that there was not. "I consider him an honest man and I take him at his word," she said just before the primary vote. The state Republican leadership now made it plain, on and off the record in the press, that Jack Ryan was no longer a viable candidate. Raymond LaHood, a Republican moderate from central Illinois, was among those who called on Ryan to leave the race. (Obama appointed LaHood to his Cabinet, as Secretary of Transportation, in 2009.)
On June 25th, Ryan complied with his Party's wish, but not without complaining that the Tribune had held him to a "higher standard than anyone else in the history of the United States." One politician who showed some pity for Ryan was Blair Hull. "He is the closest thing to a saint that you can find," he said years later. "He's a kind and generous person. It was sad. It's funny where these turns in life take you. He could be where Obama is right now. He looked like John Kennedy."
Obama continued to keep his rhetoric, and his public face, as impassive as possible. "What happened to him over the last three days was unfortunate," he said of Ryan. "It's not something I certainly would wish on anybody. And having said that, from this point forward, I think we will be continuing to talk about the issues."
At around the time Ryan was enduring his public humiliation, the Obama campaign was hearing rumors that the Kerry team was going to ask him to give the keynote address at the Convention. Both parties often used the keynote address as a way to focus on the next generation of leadership. In 1988, the Democrats called on the Texas state treasurer, Ann Richards, to give the keynote at the Convention nominating Michael Dukakis, and Richards delivered an attack on George H. W. Bush that had more one-liners than a midnight monologue. ("Poor George. He can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.") The speech propelled Richards to victory in the Texas gubernatorial campaign.
To Mary Beth Cahill, the short list for keynoter seemed dull--except for Obama. Everything she had seen of Obama on the video reel that his campaign had sent convinced her that he was a gamble worth taking. Just before the July Fourth weekend, she recommended Obama to Kerry, and Kerry, who was not deeply involved in the details of the Convention, waved it forward. Obama was riding from Springfield to Chicago when he got the call telling him the news. After hanging up, he turned to his driver and said, "I guess this is pretty big."
Obama was able to spend far more time on the speech than if he had had an actual opponent to campaign against. The press was filled with reports that the Republicans were grasping at ideas to replace Jack Ryan: there was Mike Ditka, the celebrated former tight end and coach for the Chicago Bears, and there was Orion (The Big O) Samuelson, a radio broadcaster known for his popular daily spot, "National Farm Report," and his recording of Yogi Yorgesson's "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas." Andrea Barthwell, the deputy drug czar in the Bush Administration, was the favorite of the moderate wing of the nineteen-person Illinois Republican Central Committee, but the conservatives blocked the idea and continued searching for someone who leaned harder to the right. None of the candidates who finished behind Ryan seemed either sufficiently appealing or willing to enter a race that they were likely to lose.
While the Republicans continued their search, Obama worked in Springfield on a first draft of his speech, making notes and sketching passages on yellow legal pads at his desk in the Senate chamber. Sometimes, in order to get away from his colleagues and the budget debates on the floor, he worked in the men's room, near the sinks. In the course of the campaign, Obama had developed a keen sense of what lines and ideas from his speeches played well with audiences, and much of the writing process was a matter of cobbling together a new text out of his stump speeches.
Obama faxed his first draft to Axelrod, who was on vacation in Italy, and to the Kerry campaign. The point person among Kerry's aides for Obama's speech was Vicky Rideout, who had been a campaign aide to Dukakis and the lead speechwriter for Geraldine Ferraro, when she ran with Walter Mondale, in 1984. The Kerry campaign had determined from polling numbers that the public did not want to witness a fusillade of negativity about the Bush Administration at the Convention--especially when the country was at war. Rideout was keeping a careful watch for anti-Bush rhetoric in all the speeches to be delivered in Boston. Some people in the campaign thought this reluctance to attack Bush was foolhardy, that voters routinely told pollsters that they disliked negative campaigning even though it plainly worked, but Robert Shrum, who spoke for the Kerry campaign, prevailed, and so Obama delivered a draft that focused on hope--which was his disposition anyway.
"My distinct impression was that Obama was writing this himself," Rideout recalled. "He e-mailed the draft to me a little late. I was getting nervous because he was a high-risk speaker, no one really knew him, and this was the most important speech outside of the nominees. When I read it I breathed a sigh of relief. I had no idea what to expect from a guy who had been a state senator for a few terms. We didn't want an Ann Richards, vituperative, lashing kind of speech. This was uplifting. The only problem was that it was twice as long as it should have been."
One touch that Obama did not use often on the campaign trail but added to the speech draft was a phrase that was a turn on the title of one of Jeremiah Wright's sermons--"the audacity to hope." This phrase was to be the refrain of the speech's climax, the clarion call to optimism, to vote for Kerry, and to a renewed national spirit.
Working with Rideout and his own aides, Obama went about the work of cutting the speech, which was scheduled for July 27, 2004, the second night of the four-day-long Convention. There is nothing like excessive length to kill the rhythm and effectiveness of a political speech. None of the Kerry people had forgotten Bill Clinton's windy address at the 1988 Convention, which drew its loudest applause when he arrived at the phrase, "In conclusion ..." Obama had a hard time reconciling himself to the cuts at first and despaired of the initial instruction that the draft, which ran twenty-five minutes, be reduced by half. Rideout told Obama that he needed to cut back on the more provincial material about Illinois and "turn up the volume a bit" on the words in praise of John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, and place them earlier in the speech.
Three days before the speech, Obama, Axelrod, and Gibbs boarded a chartered Hawker jet late at night in Springfield. By now, Obama had trimmed the text to twenty-three hundred words and had it more or less memorized. He had practiced in Axelrod's office on a rented teleprompter; he'd never used the machine before. Since the start of his political career, he had worked either from notes, from a full text, or purely from memory. With the teleprompter, he had to work on not squinting or taking on a mesmeric, metronomic rhythm as he shifted reading from the two screens flanking the lectern. He also had to realize that he was speaking both to a packed arena and, more important, to millions of people watching on television. If he shouted, he would come off on television as abrasive, unhinged. In Chicago, he practiced the speech fifteen times or more on the teleprompter. As they flew to Boston, Obama told the story of his miserable, brief stay at the Los Angeles Convention four years before.
"Let's hope this Convention goes a whole lot better," he said.
They arrived at Logan Airport after midnight and went straight to the Hilton Boston Back Bay to get some sleep. But Obama couldn't sleep and, for a while, he just wandered around the hotel lobby. "He'd been at it for weeks," Jim Cauley recalled. "He told me, 'No mistakes. We have got to nail this one.'"
Over the next two days, Obama split his time between rehearsing his speech in one of the windowless locker rooms of the FleetCenter and doing interviews. At rehearsals, he worked with Michael Sheehan, a longtime speech coach for Democratic politicians, who started out as a producer of Shakespeare at the Folger in Washington. Sheehan worked with Obama on various techniques unique to a venue like the FleetCenter. First, he and Obama toured the cavernous, empty hall, just to get a feel for the enormity of the place. Sheehan had been giving these tutorials to Democratic nominees since 1988 and he was accustomed to meeting egotistical politicians who insisted on moving with big entourages; he was struck by how Obama went around with, at most, two or three people: Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and Jonathan Favreau, a speechwriter in his mid-twenties, whom Gibbs knew from the Kerry campaign. Then, once they went down to the basement rehearsal room, Sheehan encouraged Obama to "surf," to speak over applause rather than waiting for it to die down, thereby avoiding a start-stop, start-stop cadence that would have the rhythm of a car in heavy traffic and play poorly on television. They worked on emphases and accents, pauses before punch lines, pacing and timbre. Sheehan showed Obama videotapes of some "counter-examples," like Alfonse D'Amato, the New York Republican, who had botched their speeches with singsong deliveries and clumsy pacing. Above all, he counseled Obama not to bellow or shout, as if he were in a small auditorium or a state fair; he had to let the microphone do the work for him and vary his volume only moderately to indicate a heightening emotional pitch.
"To trust the microphone in a hall like that was a leap of faith," Sheehan said. "It's like that moment in one of the Indiana Jones movies where he comes to a chasm and there is an invisible bridge. You have to have that kind of confidence.... Barack was never nervous. He was all about 'Show me what I need to know.' And then he assimilated it. There is a massive misconception about him that he is totally a community organizer. I look at him and I see the law professor. He studies."
In his interviews with the national press, Obama was asked about everything from his views on Iraq to his own burgeoning celebrity status. If Obama was in the least bit nervous about this deluge of attention, he did not show it. Equanimity was part of his appeal. "I love to body surf," he said. "If you're on a wave, you ride it. You figure at some point you're going to get a mouthful of sand. It doesn't last forever." Obama even felt confident enough to be a little critical of John Kerry's limitations. When he was asked about the nominee's relationship with African-American voters, he said, "There's no doubt John Kerry has not captured the hearts of the black community the way Clinton did. His style is pretty buttoned down. He's not the guy who is going to play the saxophone on MTV."
Obama did so many interviews and rehearsed his speech so often that by Tuesday, the day of the speech, he was feeling a little hoarse. At noon, he was scheduled to speak at a rally assembled by the League of Conservation Voters. He cut his remarks short. Apologizing, he said, "I can't throw out my throat for tonight or I've had it."
Obama was on edge especially when the Kerry campaign, which reviewed all the speeches in order to check for thematic consistency and to avoid overlap, called to say that Obama's extended riff on there not being red states or blue states, only the United States, was a problem. Kerry, they said, wanted to say something very similar. They asked for cuts. "For Obama, this was the emotional peak of the speech, his signature lines--it's what he had been saying for months--and so I wanted to be absolutely sure the Kerry people thought it was a really big deal to do this at the last minute," Vicky Rideout recalled. "I discussed it with the campaign's speechwriters and I approached Obama and said, 'We have a little challenge here.'"
Rideout explained what she'd been told, half-expecting Obama to lose his temper. He was, after all, wound up about the speech and had been working on it for weeks. A last-minute excision of the heart of the text was sure to throw him.
"All he said was, 'Jeez, really?' He was upset but he didn't show that much anger," Rideout said. "It was that temperament--'no drama Obama' all the way. He didn't cheerfully slap me on the back the way Bill Richardson might have but there was no steam coming out of his ears, either."
Perhaps not, but when Obama got in the car afterward with Axelrod and another campaign aide, he was furious, according to an account in Chicago magazine. "That f*cker is trying to steal a line from my speech," Obama said, according to the campaign worker. Axelrod, for his part, did not recall Obama's language but said that Obama, after being upset, eventually cooled off. In a subsequent conversation with Vicky Rideout, Obama asked whether the request to cut the passage was coming directly from Kerry or from a nervous staff member. Rideout checked and was told that Kerry had made the request himself. "In that case, it's John's convention," Obama said, and he pared back the passage somewhat but retained the crucial lines.
At around two that afternoon, Obama rehearsed in a room just under the stage. He was still adjusting to the teleprompter and it was very hard to tell, without crowd noise, without the dual audiences of the arena and the television camera, if he was going to be entirely at ease that night. Network television no longer carried the event live--that was left to the cable stations---but there was no doubt that he would get coverage if he scored or if he bombed. Some politicians, including Clinton, had survived a disastrous performance at a Convention, but not many. Despite all the pressure, the story most frequently repeated in Obama's circles about the day of the speech centers on a moment he had with his close friend Marty Nesbitt. As crowds milled around on the streets and in the hotel lobbies of Boston, asking him to sign autographs or pose for cell-phone pictures, Nesbitt said to him, "You know, this is pretty unbelievable. You're like a rock star."
"It might be a little worse tomorrow," Obama said.
"Really?" Nesbitt said. "Why do you say that?"
Obama smiled and said, "It's a pretty good speech."
Obama called his grandmother Toot in Hawaii and his daughters, Sasha and Malia, who were back in Chicago. Michelle Obama, who had watched one of her husband's rehearsals the day before, had one piece of advice: "Smile a lot." Before the speech, the Obamas waited with Richard and Loretta Durbin in a blue-carpeted holding room backstage. Obama wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a tie that he'd borrowed from Gibbs.
When Obama emerged from behind the curtain, he smiled at the applause and heard the pulsing beat of Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions singing their civil-rights-era hit, "Keep on Pushing." (He was relieved to see five thousand blue and white Obama signs in the hands of delegates. Jim Cauley had hired two college kids to drive a U-Haul filled with the signs from Chicago to Boston and they had broken down somewhere outside of Cleveland; with little time to spare, they got back on the road.) After a half-minute of applause, Obama stepped to the podium and began:
On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deepest gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.
My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that has shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him.
While studying here my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor, my grandfather signed up for duty, joined Patton's army, marched across Europe. Back home my grandmother raised a baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through FHA and later moved west, all the way to Hawaii, in search of opportunity.
And they too had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream born of two continents.
Obama began the speech, as he had begun hundreds of others, with a highly compressed summary of his origins. He didn't stumble, but he was, at the beginning, somewhat ordinary, a little stiff, finding his way. Vicky Rideout and Jack Corrigan stood in the wings and watched Obama. Rideout had spent weeks going through the text with him and his team and thought it was a good speech, a winner, but she could see that there was nothing electrifying about Obama in the opening minute or two. He possessed neither the measured gravity of Mario Cuomo nor the theatrical passion of Jesse Jackson, whose Convention speeches remained embedded in the Party's collective memory.
The speech was structured to go from a passage on autobiography to one connecting the speaker to the diversity and the history of the nation ("I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story"), and then to the stories of specific, emblematic people. And by the time Obama began to talk about the suffering of the people he had met on the campaign trail--the union workers in Galesburg whose plant moved to Mexico; the bright young women in East St. Louis who can't afford college; the people in the collar counties around Chicago angry about waste in both the Pentagon and "a welfare agency"--somewhere in there, Obama began to find his rhythm. This speech was by no means the best he had written and far from the best he ever delivered. To some extent it was a condensed, if more polished, version of a stump speech that he had been honing for nearly two years. But almost no one in the hall or in the television audience had heard it before or had ever seen Obama and his skills, his melding of the professorial and the pastoral. Rideout said that she felt Obama "pull into another gear." His shoulders relaxed, his head was raised up a little higher, his voice took on a greater sense of abandon as he surfed the applause, just as he had rehearsed. From that point on the speech riveted both the hall and, even more, the television audience. "At that moment," Rideout said, "you could see that Obama felt he was meant to be there, delivering this speech--it was what he was meant to do." Watching Obama and the speech take off, as it did, reminded Michael Sheehan of the moment of brightness and fire just before a rocket gathers speed and truly launches.
In the closing flourish, which Obama had trimmed to please the Kerry campaign, he called on familiar themes of common purpose and national unity but put them in such a way that the speech would be talked about for many years to come:
If there's a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child.
If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent.
If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
It is that fundamental belief--I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper--that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as one American family: E pluribus unum, out of many, one.
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America.
The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.
We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?
The applause in this section of the speech was loud and, if it is possible to interpret applause, seemed to reflect years of frustration with the Republican culture wars, partisan warfare, and a political strategy of divide and conquer. Like the 2002 antiwar speech, it served a progressive message in a way that sounded deeply patriotic even to people who might consider themselves Republicans or independents. The speech seemed to many a long-awaited rebuke to the sneering moralism on display at earlier Republican Conventions when figures like Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan took the stage. Obama's speech depended on an audience ready to recognize the demographic and cultural shifts in the country. Nixon's strategy in 1968, with its implicit racial appeals, had been the fulfillment of L.B.J.'s prediction that his support of civil rights and voting rights for African-Americans would hand over the South to the Republicans for a generation. Whether it was a wish or a reality, Obama insisted, in the political and poetical terms of his speech, that the women's movement, gay liberation, immigration, affirmative action, and many other factors and patterns had helped to reverse that reality.
Finally, Obama used that phrase of Jeremiah Wright's--the audacity of hope--to distinguish between "blind optimism" and "something more substantial."
It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill-worker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.
Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: in the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.
I believe that we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity.
I believe we can provide jobs for the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair.
I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs, and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices and meet the challenges that face us.
America, tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do, if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as President. And John Edwards will be sworn in as Vice-President. And this country will reclaim its promise. And out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.
As the camera panned the audience, there was not just the usual orchestrated applause and listless waving of signs. Some of the delegates were crying, some stomping their feet--for a state senator from Illinois. Professionals like Hillary Clinton, who stood applauding, fully recognized that they had been introduced to an extraordinarily talented young politician. "I thought that was one of the most electrifying moments that I can remember at any Convention," she said the next day. "I have campaigned and have done fund-raising for him, and a friend of mine asked who is this Barack Bama?" Clinton said she replied the name was Barack Obama. "It's Swahili for Bubba."
Vicky Rideout, who had been writing and editing speeches for a long time, stood in the arena, as the Curtis Mayfield song revved up again and Obama embraced his wife and waved and the applause kept coming in waves, and she thought she had never witnessed anything like it: "To see an absolute newbie set the place on fire like that? It was astonishing."
Chicagoans who had spent time with Obama might have been the slowest to see what had happened. Will Burns, who had been Obama's deputy campaign manager and field manager for the Rush campaign, was moved by the spectacle but also told friends, "That was a speech he used to give to crowds of ten people!" Eric Zorn, the Tribune columnist, had also seen Obama deliver similar speeches and watched this one from the arena. He thought Obama had done well enough, but he had no idea of the depth of the reaction until he went to the press center where journalists had watched it on television. "What was clear is that, good as he had been live, it was way better on the screen," Zorn said.
The cable anchors all praised Obama and the networks scurried to get video for their late broadcasts and morning shows. Almost instantly, Obama's team was getting invitations to appear on network television. Even the remote sultans of the Chicago and Illinois political organizations set aside their usual studied indifference to embrace Obama. Richard Daley, who had maintained a kingly aloofness during the primary campaign in Illinois, acknowledged that Obama had hit a "grand slam," and the governor, Rod Blagojevich, said of the Senate race, "If present trends continue, Barack Obama is on the verge of getting a hundred per cent of the vote." Even Bobby Rush, who wore his disdain of Obama like a gold watch, had to admit that his old rival was now a bona-fide star: "Do you know what 'Barack' means in Hebrew? It means 'one who God favors.' That's lightning. You don't fool with that." Then he smiled and said, "And besides, some people live a charmed life."
Clarence Page wrote in the Tribune:
A superstar is born. It is difficult for many of us to contain our enthusiasm for Barack Obama, yet we must try. We owe that to him. We should not reward his blockbuster performance last week at the Democratic National Convention by loading his shoulders with the fate of the nation. Not yet, anyway. That can wait, perhaps until, say, his 2012 Presidential campaign?
For the rest of the week in Boston, as Obama went from the Convention floor to various interview appointments, people circled around him asking for autographs, urging him to run for President.
At Logan Airport, where Obama was going to catch a flight back to Chicago with other members of the Illinois delegation, people asked for autographs. It seemed that the only people at Logan who didn't recognize him worked at security. As he went through the security checks, a guard pulled aside Obama, "a skinny black guy with a funny name," for extra screening. Jim Cauley, who was traveling with him, was shocked and wanted to protest as a security guard passed a wand over Obama's arms, legs, and body.
Obama smiled and told his campaign manager, "Dude, it's happened to me all my life. Don't worry about it."
Once they got past security and were walking to the gate, Cauley heard his cell phone ringing. He answered. It was an English-speaking aide to Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow. Gorbachev, who had been running a foundation since stepping down as the Soviet leader, in 1991, had heard the speech and wanted to speak to Obama. The most important foreign leader of the post-war era was on the line: Obama took the call.
Still, people kept crowding around Obama, making it hard to move. Cauley cajoled someone in charge of Delta's first-class lounge to let them inside. Later, Cauley ran into the senior senator from Delaware, Joe Biden.
While Obama spoke on the phone, Biden told Cauley that he was impressed and expected to see Obama soon in Washington.
"He's a good man," Biden said, "but tell him he needs to go slow when he gets to the Senate."
Even before Obama got back to Chicago, his fund-raising accelerated on the strength of his speech; much more was on the way. But Obama's newfound fame also brought an accompanying pang of anxiety, especially among African-Americans old enough to remember what had happened to some of the country's greatest black political figures. As energized as many black men and women in Illinois and across the country were by Obama's rise, many were immediately concerned with his safety. Just a few weeks before, when Obama gave a graduation speech at the Lab School, the private school in Hyde Park that his daughters attended, one of his leading black financial supporters and fellow parents repeatedly heard that anxiety. "A lot of friends of mine were saying, 'You tell that brother to be careful,'" the supporter recalled. Now that anxiety, accompanied by enormous pride, only increased.
In the meantime, the Republicans had still not come up with a candidate to replace Jack Ryan. Rather than rest on his lead against a phantom opponent, Obama embarked on a long-planned statewide campaign binge, hitting thirty counties and thirty-nine cities and towns. The Sun-Times printed one of his daily schedules:
8:30 A.M.: Champaign County rally, Urbana
10:05 A.M.: Douglas County rally, Tuscola
11:45 A.M.: Coles County rally, Mattoon
12:45 P.M.: Cumberland County rally, Neoga
2:40 P.M.: Jefferson County rally, Mount Vernon
3:55 P.M.: Wayne County rally, Fairfield
5 P.M.: Wabash County rally, Mount Carmel
5:45 P.M.: Lawrence County rally, Lawrenceville
6:30 P.M.: Richland County rally, Olney
8 P.M.: Marion County rally, Salem
The problem was that when he came home from Boston, Obama was exhilarated and exhausted. He knew, vaguely, that he and his family were going on an R.V. trip throughout the state, but he thought that there would be plenty of time to spend together--a kind of vacation with a little campaigning thrown in. When he actually checked his schedule and saw that it was a five-day jamboree of non-stop rallies, he called Jeremiah Posedel, his downstate director.
"This was a Friday night and the tour began that Saturday," Posedel recalled. "Barack called me at my house in Rock Island and I could tell he was pissed off. He said, 'What the hell are you trying to do to me? This schedule is out of control. This is a death march.'"
When Obama made a campaign stop downstate in Rock Island County a year earlier, Posedel had made calls to twenty-five counties, frantically trying to gather people for a "rally." Obama drove three hours to the event. Thirty people showed up. "In those days, if you talked to people on the phone and tried to get them interested in Barack Obama, they would say, 'Who is he?' 'What is he?' which was a way of asking about his race. The only reason a few might come is because I worked for Lane Evans, a downstate Democratic congressman who had endorsed Barack early. But even then, they were probably still voting for Hynes. Barack would make a great impression, but a lot of people still said, 'I don't think he can win.' They wouldn't mention race but they used every other excuse in the book."
Now, on his five-day triumphal "death march," in towns where Posedel expected, at most, forty or fifty people at each stop, Obama was drawing hundreds, even thousands. Suddenly, he was working rope lines, shaking countless hands, and speaking in packed auditoriums with parents holding their children up on their shoulders. At each event, he performed well, remembering names, shaking hands, speaking with clarity and enthusiasm, but, back in the car, he barely talked to Posedel. Even at a birthday party that Posedel threw for Obama at his house in Rock Island, Obama was cool to him. Finally, on the last stop of the tour, Obama pulled Posedel into an alley and said, "You did a great job. This trip was unbelievable. It was great." Part of the strategy of the trip was to forever inoculate Obama against charges that he was unfamiliar with, and never visited, downstate Illinois--a charge that had plagued Moseley Braun. In every regard, Obama now had to admit, the journey had been a success. Then he tapped Posedel in the gut with mock menace. "But don't ever f*cking do this to me again!"
Obama recognized that he was now a political phenomenon. The first edition of Dreams from My Father was now an expensive item on eBay. Rachel Klayman, an editor at Crown, the publishing house that had rights to the book, immediately started thinking about a new edition.
Obama did his best to project equanimity about his new life. "This is all so, well, interesting. But it's all so ephemeral," he told David Mendell of the Tribune as they were driving between campaign stops in DeKalb and Marengo. "I don't know how this plays out, but there is definitely a novelty aspect to it all. The novelty wears off, and it can't stay white hot like it is right now."
His campaign staff was also taking on a more big-time national cast. Dan Shomon, who had been by Obama's side since his earliest days as a state senator, was now barely a presence on the campaign. Shomon's mother had just died of cancer and, he said, "I needed a break." As an adviser, his influence was greatly reduced. Shomon had been helpful to Obama since his first years as a state senator, but his experience was limited to Illinois. Gibbs, Cauley, and Axelrod were advisers of much broader experience. As Obama became an increasingly national figure, a handful of Chicago politicians and organizers who were essential to his career in the early days--his alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, for instance--came to resent him and feel that he had grown egotistical, heedlessly casting aside old allies when they were no longer useful to him and cozying up to wealthy patrons farther north in Chicago. "I think he is an arrogant, self-absorbed, ungrateful jerk," one old South Side ally said. "He walked away from his friends." Dan Shomon, however, if his feelings were hurt, kept his counsel and eventually turned his attention to making money as a lobbyist.
Finally, in early August, the Republican Party's central committee settled on a candidate: Alan Keyes. African-American, Catholic, and an official in the State Department and the United Nations bureaucracy during the Reagan Administration, Keyes, on paper, might have seemed an interesting challenge for Obama. He earned a doctorate at Harvard, studying with the political scientist Harvey Mansfield and writing a dissertation on Alexander Hamilton and constitutional theory. He was, briefly, the president of Alabama A&M University. His mentor was Jeane Kirkpatrick. The Republican Party leadership thought that perhaps Keyes might cut into Obama's strength among blacks and win voters downstate.
In reality, Keyes was a stranger to the state and a hopeless choice for the Republicans, a Hail Mary pass for the religious right. Born on Long Island, he had lived in many places in the United States and abroad. Illinois was not one of them. Keyes was the most blatant sort of carpetbagger, a vagabond Quixote of the conservative movement. In 1988 and 1992, he ran for the Senate in Maryland against two popular Democratic incumbents, Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski, respectively, and he lost both races by spectacular margins. In each, he espoused the ideology of the religious right--abortion was his singular issue--and his attacks on his opponents resembled those of a tent-revival preacher reviling the heathen. In 1996, he ran for President, putting on an outlandish performance; he showed up at one debate to which he was not invited and had to be detained by the police. In 2000, he challenged George W. Bush for the Republican nomination; he received fourteen per cent of the vote in Iowa and, in order to keep hammering away at the abortion issue, stayed in the race long past the point of being a laughingstock. Now Keyes, who opposed the Seventeenth Amendment, a product of the Progressive Era that provides for the direct election of U.S. senators, was going to get on a plane to Chicago and rent an apartment in the south suburbs and run--for the U.S. Senate. Strident moralism was again to be his entire candidacy. Within a few weeks he was telling the people of Illinois, "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama."
When Obama learned that his opponent would be Alan Keyes, he could not help but betray incredulous delight.
"Can you believe this shit?" he said to Jim Cauley.
"No, dude," Cauley replied. "You are the luckiest bastard in the world."
On a hot evening in mid-August, a rented Budget truck pulled up in front of an apartment building in the suburb of Calumet City, south of Chicago near the Indiana border. Two young campaign workers unloaded a box spring and a mattress and carried everything up to a two-room apartment on the second floor--Alan Keyes's first apartment in the state of Illinois. Keyes had chosen Calumet City, a victim of deindustrialization, after asking his hastily assembled staff for an appropriately hardworking place he could call home. It was an odd choice for an evangelical candidate. Originally known as West Hammond, the town was once a headquarters for Al Capone, a center for gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging. It became known as Sin City.
Keyes never shed his carpetbagger image. In his announcement speech, he had tried to overcome it by declaring, "I have lived in the land of Lincoln all my life." The media, to say nothing of the voters, remained unmoved by such finesse. One Tribune editorial said, "Mr. Keyes may have noticed a large body of water as he flew into O'Hare. That is called Lake Michigan."
Obama treated the contest with Keyes the way a boxer treats the final round of a fight against a wounded opponent who has a reputation for last-ditch bursts of distemper. He cut back on the number of debates and tried to steer clear of Keyes, somberly acknowledging their differences and engaging him only when absolutely necessary. Neither white suburbanites nor African-Americans showed much interest in Keyes and his constant attacks on abortion laws, welfare, and gay marriage. What was more, Keyes had no money to run a proper campaign. His rhetoric was too excessive, his odds too long, for him to draw serious donors. When Keyes denounced the daughter of the Vice-President, Mary Cheney, for being a lesbian, even the chairman of the state Republican Party, which had put Keyes forward in the first place, denounced him as "idiotic."
By early October, Obama was leading in the polls by a margin of forty-five per cent. He had large reserves of cash to spend on media--sufficient to run against a far more formidable candidate. He spent time out of state, campaigning for fellow Democrats in closer races. Keyes ran a symbolic race in which he was prepared to say almost anything, to inflict whatever damage he felt necessary, to bring attention to his issues.
In a series of debates in October, Keyes was usually even-tempered when the discussion was about Iraq, national security, foreign policy, or local issues. But at times, he would call Obama's policy positions "wicked and evil," Marxist, and socialist. Usually, Obama's strategy was to absorb the blow impassively and, when it came time to speak, answer in a way that, at least subtly, made it clear that, at best, Keyes was to the right of the Illinois mainstream and, at worst, a demagogic fool. In the second debate, a televised session held during the deciding game of the National League Championship Series between the Houston Astros and the St. Louis Cardinals, Keyes reiterated his attack on Obama as a candidate whom Jesus would never support. As he spread his arms far apart, Keyes said, "Christ is over here, Senator Obama is over there--the two don't look the same."
Obama did not wholly conceal his disgust. "That's why I have a pastor," he replied, speaking past Keyes and to the viewer. "That's why I have a Bible. That's why I have my own prayer. And I don't think any of you are particularly interested in having Mr. Keyes lecture you about your faith. What you're interested in is solving problems like jobs and health care and education. I'm not running to be the minister of Illinois. I'm running to be its United States senator."
Keyes would not accept the distinction and said that Obama was putting himself forward as a man of faith only in order to win votes. "At the hard points when that faith must be followed and explained to folks and stood up for and witnessed to," Keyes said, "he then pleads separation of church and state, something found nowhere in the Constitution, and certainly found nowhere in the Scripture as such."
Onstage, Obama tried to mask his feelings about Keyes, but David Axelrod, among others, noticed that these attacks really bothered Obama and, at times, put him on his heels. Keyes was a religious absolutist and Obama, who described his own faith with a sense of ambiguity and doubt, was clearly undone at times by his opponent's attacks. On one occasion, Obama poked Keyes in the chest when they started an impromptu debate at an Indian Independence Day parade; a camera crew caught the encounter and repeatedly showed Obama's irritated gesture in slow motion. This worried Axelrod. He wondered if Obama would be able to absorb the more serious attacks that would inevitably occur in a tougher, closer race. Did he have the stomach for it, the taste for combat--and a capacity for moving on? Keyes was nothing, Axelrod knew. If Obama was going to go further in his career, he would have to learn to fend off far uglier, more effective attacks than Alan Keyes, a marginal candidate, could manage. He needed to be tougher.
In late October, the editorial page of the Tribune, which leaned to the center-right, endorsed Obama. The paper noted elsewhere the incredible dearth across the country of blacks elected to statewide office, pointing to Mississippi, which had an African-American population of thirty-six per cent--"the largest in the nation, yet it has not elected a single black person to any statewide office since Reconstruction."
A few days later, Obama won another endorsement--or at least an implicit one--from the most powerful political institution of all: Richard M. Daley. During the primary campaign, Daley, as usual, did not make an endorsement, but everyone, Obama included, assumed that Dan Hynes, with all his machine connections, had the Mayor's blessing. According to Bill Daley, Obama wrote the Mayor a letter during the Senate primary campaign, saying, "You're with Hynes, I understand that. I just hope that after the primary you can help me if I was to win this thing." Bill Daley, who recounted the letter for James L. Merriner of Chicago magazine, said that Obama's decision to send the note to the Mayor "was a very smart thing to do. I think he did that with a lot of people."
Throughout his political life in Chicago and the state of Illinois, Obama had gone to great lengths to reconcile his desire to be an independent Democrat with the need to maintain friendly relations with City Hall. Obama's detente with City Hall, his ability to maintain his Hyde Park credentials and still forge a useful bond with Emil Jones--"one of the hackiest of the hacks," according to the strategist Don Rose--was, in Chicago, a sign of both skill and ambition. Obama was not alone in this. Among others, Abner Mikva, Richard Newhouse, Harold Washington, Barbara Flynn Currie, Carol Moseley Braun, and Paul Simon were also independents who had made their arrangements with the Daleys in order to achieve their political goals. In later years, Obama said little about the patronage scandals that arose in Daley's administration and, in 2006, he declined to endorse a reformer (and David Axelrod's business partner), Forrest Claypool, over a proven hack, Todd Stroger, an African-American, who was loyal to Daley, for Cook County Board president. What Obama understood from the start of his political career was that a purist, an anti-machine politician like the Hyde Park alderman Leon Despres, might gain a stronger foothold on the path to Heaven but would never advance far on the path to power. Obama could borrow from the cadences of King, he could advertise his genuine admiration for the civil-rights movement, but he was a politician, not the leader of a movement. And to be a successful politician you had to make a few compromises along the way. Obama rarely failed to make them.
Daley's motives for coming around to Obama were relatively simple: Obama was a Democrat, first of all, and Daley was not about to waver from his party now that the primary was over. In addition, with Obama safely ensconced in Washington, Daley would not have to worry about a strong challenge from an African-American politician who once aspired to be mayor and now happened to be the hottest political celebrity in the country. "There were very few people on the Fifth Floor"--Daley's offices at City Hall--"who had given much thought to Barack until then," Pete Giangreco said. "But the modern Daley world revolved around racial divisions, which are as large and nasty in Chicago as anywhere in the country. It was always No. 1 on their agenda to make nice with black politicians in a way the Old Man"--Richard J. Daley--"never really did." As a Hyde Park independent, Obama had not been one of those state senators who consistently did Daley's bidding in Springfield, but now their interests converged. Obama going to the U.S. Senate was good for both of them.
With a full media contingent, Obama and Richard M. Daley met for lunch at Manny's, a deli on the near North Side. They ate matzo-ball soup and corned-beef sandwiches. They shook hands with everyone in the place and talked long after the television crews had packed up and gone off to the next story.
As the campaign headed into its final weeks, Obama grew accustomed both to the beat reporters who were following him around Illinois and on his travels out of the state, and to the growing blandishments and attentions of the national media. In many ways, the Illinois Senate race was a rehearsal for things to come and these reporters now focused less on the contest with Keyes than on Obama's biography, his rhetoric, his temperament, his staff, and his capacity for organization and fund-raising. The Illinois campaign also raised some of the same complicated discussions about Obama and race that came to the center of the American political debate a few years later. Of the many articles written in print or online, no piece rehearsed those themes more thoroughly during the Illinois campaign than a three-thousand-word article in the Chicago Tribune's Sunday magazine called "The Skin Game: Do White Voters Like Barack Obama Because 'He's Not Really Black'?"
The author of the article was Don Terry, a forty-seven-year-old Chicagoan who had lived in Hyde Park nearly all his life. The parallels with Obama's background gave Terry's piece its resonance. Don Terry's father was black, his mother white; his parents had moved from Evanston to Hyde Park because it was integrated. Like Obama, Terry had a mother who taught him to value and explore his racial identity. She told him that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the "greatest man in the world" and that Paul Robeson "was an American hero with the singing voice of God."
Terry published his article on October 24th when Obama was sure of victory:
At the time, I was on assignment and speeding to a federal prison camp in a green Mercedes. The color of money. The white woman behind the wheel made sure I knew the car was 10 years old. She didn't have to be defensive with me. I know you can't judge a progressive by the car she drives. Besides, I never bite the hand that gives me a lift.
"I love Barack," said the woman, a middle-aged filmmaker, as we zipped past a campaign-style yard sign shoved into the dirt on the edge of a cornfield. The sign proclaimed, "Guns Save Lives."
"He's smart. He's handsome. He's charismatic," she continued. "He has the potential to be our first minority president."
"I hear what you're saying," I said. "But tell me. Why don't you say he has the potential to be our first black president?"
She seemed taken aback by my question and took a few moments to answer. "I guess it's because I don't think of him as black," she said.
Terry was disturbed by this notion--one that had been thoroughly rehearsed by Bobby Rush, Donne Trotter, and many others. He was equally disturbed by an article in The New Republic that said that Obama was "an African-American candidate who was not stereotypically African-American." Terry knew what these people were getting at, however awkwardly. Obama was the son of an African and a white secular Protestant; unlike Terry, he had not grown up around other black people. And yet what was implicit is that if the woman had thought of Obama as black, she would not have felt the same way.
Terry visited Obama at his campaign headquarters on South Michigan Avenue. The office was decorated with framed posters of Abraham Lincoln and of Muhammad Ali, in Lewiston, Maine, in 1965, standing over the prostrate body of Sonny Liston. On his desk was a copy of a book called One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, by Scott L. Malcomson, a journalist who had caught Obama's eye with an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "An Appeal Beyond Race" about his speech at the Convention in Boston. Malcomson, like Terry, was among a growing number of journalists who were trying to make sense of this young politician and how he seemed the embodiment of a new generation.
Obama put his feet up on the desk. He said that as a young man he had written an autobiography of his struggle with the complexities of his racial identity, but now, as a politician, he protested that it was the pundits, and not voters, who were focusing on his identity as an explanation for his appeal. "After the primary, the pundits were trying to figure out my ability to win in black as well as white neighborhoods," he told Terry. "It was easy to attach to the fact that I'm of mixed race. To some degree, my candidacy has been a convenient focal point to try to sort out issues" of ethnicity, assimilation, and diversity. He said that his capacity to succeed in both black and white areas was "not a consequence of my DNA.... It's a consequence of my experience." Obama pointed out that Bill Clinton did well among black voters, and "as far as I know, he doesn't have any black blood in him."
Terry concluded his article by saying that he had recently turned on the television "hoping for a few minutes of distraction from the American Dilemma." He watched "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," and it was clear to him that Sidney Poitier's character, Dr. John Wade Prentice, "a super-qualified, super-handsome, super-dashing doctor living in Hawaii," had a "lot in common" with Barack Obama. Like Dr. Prentice, who had to be extraordinary to win the hand of a "vacant" white woman, Terry wrote, Obama had to be no less extraordinary to confront the challenge of persistent racism and win higher office. "Race," Terry wrote, "still matters."
Terry's article did not engage all the questions that eventually surrounded Obama, but he succeeded in setting forth one of the most essential aspects of his unique appeal: that much of the excitement about him had to do with the beholder, with the anxieties, complexes, and hopes of the American voter. "He's a Rorschach test," Terry wrote of Obama. "What you see is what you want to see."
The urge to see something large in Obama was obvious: he had come along at just the point when American confidence was at a low ebb. The Iraqi insurgency was growing and casualties were rising. In May, 2004, CBS and The New Yorker revealed that Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison had been tortured and sexually humiliated by American soldiers. The emblem of the scandal was a sickening photograph of one prisoner outfitted in a peaked hood and dark caftan and made to stand on a box with electric wires attached to his hands. For millions of people, George Bush was a national and personal embarrassment--an incurious, rash, flippant, pampered, dishonest leader. In Boston, Obama had seemed almost entirely the opposite: intelligent, idealistic, and engaged. Part of his glamour, at least for those inclined to read the Rorschach test this way, had to do with his race, his youth, his African name. As he presented his story--a narrative that said as much about his multicultural family as it did about Harvard or his apprenticeship in Chicago politics--he represented himself as the best of a post-civil-rights America, a fresh start. If his speeches were occasionally salted with platitudes, if his experience and his accomplishments were still slight, well, for so many Americans despairing of George Bush, that was O.K. They studied the Rorschach test that was Obama and they saw the outlines of promise. At the start of the campaign, Obama had won over crowds big enough to fit in Paul Gaynor's backyard in Evanston; now, even before he had faced the electorate of Illinois, he was reaching the country. The odd thing was that Barack Obama seemed to take it all in stride.
"When he won the Illinois primary for Senate, he demonstrated the breadth of his appeal--white folks, black folks everywhere," his law partner Judd Miner said. "He won every suburban district in the primary. He won overwhelmingly in those white districts. And then he carried that forward to the campaign itself for the seat itself. He just gained more and more confidence. People felt he was so different and intelligent. He never thought there was something he couldn't do."
On Halloween night, Alan Keyes held a last get-out-the-vote rally at the Spirit of God Fellowship Church in the Chicago suburb of South Holland, delivering a long disquisition on the need for religious virtue in politics. As he had throughout the race, Keyes denounced the media for trying "to portray me as some sort of inflammatory person." He spoke of going to Washington, but it was clear that he had come with the thought not of winning but of gaining a new pulpit.
On November 2, 2004, Obama voted just after seven in the morning at the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park. As the cameras followed him and his family, Michelle Obama said, "Don't you think he's been on TV enough?"
"I'm waiting for you to be at the top of the ticket!" one resident called out.
By early evening, the Chicago Defender started distributing a special edition with the headline, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington." The Obamas went to a suite at the Hyatt Regency where they watched television and waited for the first vote tallies. A crowd of some two thousand gathered in the ballroom downstairs.
Not long afterward, it was clear that Obama had won the Illinois Senate race in a landslide, defeating Keyes by forty-three points, seventy per cent to twenty-seven. Obama was so far ahead in the closing weeks of the campaign that he'd started giving away money to other Democratic candidates and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He sanctioned many of his volunteers to go and work on other races. Despite the fact that Keyes had said that it would be a "mortal sin" to vote for a candidate who supported abortion rights, Obama won three-quarters of the Catholic vote. He also won ninety-one per cent of the black vote.
Sometime after nine on Election Night, Obama went down to the hotel ballroom to greet his supporters, who were chanting the now familiar phrase: "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!"
"Thank you, Illinois! I don't know about you, but I'm still fired up!" he said. "Six hundred and fifty-six days ago, I announced in a room a little smaller than this ... for the United States Senate. At the time, people were respectful but nevertheless skeptical. They knew the work that we had done ... but they felt that in a nation as divided as ours there was no possibility that someone who looked like me could ever aspire to the United States Senate. They felt that in a fearful nation, someone named Barack Obama could never hope to win an election. And yet, here we stand!"