The Bridge_The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Part Four
If you don't have enough self-awareness to see the element of megalomania involved in thinking you should be President, then you probably shouldn't be President. There's a slight madness to thinking you should be the leader of the free world.
--Barack Obama, November 1, 2007, ABC News
Are you going to try to be President? Shouldn't you be Vice-President first?
--Malia Obama to her father at his swearing-in as U.S. Senator




Chapter Twelve
A Slight Madness
After accepting the last words of congratulations for his landslide election to the Senate, Barack Obama slept for two hours. Then he woke to answer questions about his prospects for running for President of the United States. This was now the velocity of his life.
Obama had agreed to a morning-after meeting with reporters at his campaign headquarters downtown--a tradition of winning politicians and fighters. The questions dwelled little on the campaign, for all its low comedy. Instead the reporters focused almost solely on one subject: Was he going to run for the White House in 2008? Obama had not spent five minutes in an office higher than that of an Illinois state legislator and he had never really been in a close competitive election, yet this was not an entirely disingenuous line of inquiry. At the Convention and afterward, Obama had hardly shunned media attention--his advisers scheduled as many national broadcast and print interviews as he could handle. In all those interviews, he was described as a new "hope" or "face" for the Democrats. When he was asked about running for President, Obama shyly dismissed it as absurd conjecture. But his novelty and glamour resided partly in the fact that he was asked the question in the first place.
Obama knew the rules. Even to hint at an interest in the White House would be unseemly. Election Night, 2004, had been misery for the Democrats. George W. Bush won back the White House. John Kerry's inability to rebuff the smears on his character and his record--particularly the attacks on his war record by the well-funded group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--had cost him dearly. The Democrats also lost four seats in the Senate, including their leader, Tom Daschle, of South Dakota.
Obama had many qualities; he would have to work at modesty. Come January, 2005, when he was to be sworn in, he would be a junior senator in the minority party and, as he knew from his backbench years in Springfield, there were strict limits to such a position. At least on this November morning, Obama needed to appear the awed and eager apprentice of the Senate. The hype about the Presidency needed to be "corrected," as he put it. Each time the question was asked, with slight variation, Obama's level of irritation rose:
"I am not running for President. I am not running for President in four years. I am not running for President in 2008."
"Come on, guys, the only reason I am being definitive is because until I am definitive, you will keep asking me this question. It's a silly question."
And then: "Guys, I am a state senator. I was elected yesterday. I have never set foot in the U.S. Senate. I have never worked in Washington. And the notion that somehow I am going to start running for higher office, it just doesn't make sense. My understanding is that I will be ranked ninety-ninth in seniority. I am going to be spending the first several months of my career in the U.S. Senate looking for the washroom and trying to figure out how the phones work."
Obama got especially irritated with Lynn Sweet, a persistent veteran reporter for the Sun-Times. "Lynn, you're dictating the answers as well as the questions," Obama said wearily. "Let me move on to the next question." Later, he guided her out to the hall to admonish her further.
Obama and his aides said that he was tired after campaigning. And, of course, it was true: he'd been at it, non-stop, for well over a year. In order to be a decent legislator, he would have to learn to parcel out his time and be discriminating with the national press and the constant invitations to give speeches around the country. Michelle, Malia, and Sasha were going to remain in Chicago; Obama rented a one-bedroom apartment near the Capitol in a high-rise near Georgetown Law School and shuttled back home for the weekends to see his family and meet with constituents. One of Moseley Braun's many mistakes as a senator was to spend too much time in Washington and grow remote from her constituents; Obama was determined not to do the same. In his first year, he held thirty-nine town meetings in Illinois.
At the Convention, Joe Biden had advised Obama to "go slow" in Washington. Obama knew that he had at least to seem unhurried. He would have to balance his tasks as the sole African-American senator and as a newborn political celebrity with his straightforward role as an institutional plebe. He had to avoid at least the appearance of placing national celebrity before sincere rookie effort.
"It's going to be important for me to say no, when it just comes to appearances, wanting to be the keynote speaker at every N.A.A.C.P. Freedom Fund dinner across the country," he told one reporter. "You know, those are the kinds of things where I'm just going to have to explain to people that there are limits to my time. I've got a family that I've got to look after. But when it comes to speaking out on issues that are of particular importance to the African-American community, I don't think that's a conflict with my role as an effective legislator for the people of Illinois."
After the press conference, Obama went to Union Station to be filmed thanking voters. But there, too, he spent time answering the same question again and again. David Axelrod put out the deflecting message, even if the reporters were not willing to accept it. "I don't think we're trying to dampen expectations, we're trying to douse them," he said. "We're trying to pour as much water as we can find on them. We don't want even a smoldering ember when it comes to this."
But, despite his modest words about wanting to be a good apprentice, to learn the craft of legislation and the customs of the institution, Obama was acutely aware that, as a rookie, his most powerful leverage in the Senate would be the force of his celebrity and his importance as the only African-American in the chamber. He did not have to wait to go slowly up the seniority ladder to gain a public platform. In the last week of November, Obama went to New York for a publicity tour to help plump sales for the paperback re-issue of Dreams from My Father--a publishing phenomenon, ignited by the Boston speech, that lasted for years; the book helped to spread word of his story and forever eased his family's financial concerns.
The tour, of course, was a strange way to correct the hype and put an end to outsized expectations. In a matter of hours, Obama was everywhere, and the questioning was not exactly rigorous. On ABC's daytime show "The View," Meredith Vieira predicted that Obama would be a "huge force in this country for the better"; not to be outdone, Barbara Walters put Obama in the same sentence with Nelson Mandela.
"I didn't spend twenty-seven years in prison," Obama solemnly reminded Walters.
Obama agreed to interviews with Charlie Rose, Wendy Williams, Leonard Lopate, Don Imus, and David Letterman. On Letterman's show, Obama seemed ready for admission to the Friar's Club:
LETTERMAN: The thing about your name, it's easy to pronounce and it's cool.
OBAMA: Well, that's what I think, that's what I think. You know, there were some advisers who told me to change my name.
LETTERMAN: Really?
OBAMA: Yeah, and somebody suggested "Cat Stevens," for example....
LETTERMAN: NOW, was there a guy running for Senate, maybe an incumbent, maybe not, I think a Republican, and he had a problem because he and his wife would go to strip clubs and have sex.
OBAMA: Well, that was--
LETTERMAN: Did I dream that? Does any of this ring a bell?
OBAMA: There were some issues, some allegations.
LETTERMAN: (laughs) Yeah.
OBAMA: But we didn't touch that stuff.
LETTERMAN: I see.
OBAMA: We took the high road, and--
LETTERMAN: Now is this who you were running against, or he dropped out, right?
OBAMA: Yeah, he dropped out--yeah, the Republicans, you know, they seem to have a lot of fun given all their moral values stuff. They enjoy themselves.
LETTERMAN: It sounded like fun to me.... Have you met the President? You must know the President?
OBAMA: Well, you know, he called me. He was very gracious. After the election, he gave me a call and we both agreed that we'd married up, and then he invited me over to the White House and we had breakfast with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, and it was a real fun time.
LETTERMAN: Yeah, it sounds like Mardi Gras.
A couple of weeks later, Obama was in Washington. He had not yet been sworn in, but he was a headline speaker at the Gridiron Club. Adopting a tone of flagrant self-deprecation, he admitted that he was now so overexposed that he made "Paris Hilton look like a recluse."
"I figure there's nowhere to go from here but down," he said. "So, tonight, I'm announcing my retirement from the United States Senate."
There is no underestimating the importance of Dreams from My Father in the political rise of Barack Obama. After the 2004 Democratic Convention, his increased prominence had caught the attention of Rachel Klayman, an editor at Crown. She was inspired to re-issue the paperback version of Dreams after she read an article on Salon.com, by Obama's Chicago friend the novelist Scott Turow, touting him as "the new face of the Democratic Party." Obama was pleased by the sales of the re-issue, but he now realized that if his agent, Jane Dystel, had acted more quickly to regain the rights and spark an auction, he could have made even more money. He decided to end his business relationship with Dystel and to have Robert Barnett, an attorney at Williams & Connolly, in Washington, handle his literary affairs. Obama had met Barnett at the Democratic Convention and not long afterward Barnett prepared a debate-prep memorandum for Obama. Not only was Barnett far better connected than Dystel--he has negotiated book deals for everyone in the Washington establishment, from Bob Woodward and Alan Greenspan to the Clintons--he was also less expensive. As an attorney, Barnett charged up to a thousand dollars an hour--a hefty fee--but, in the end, far less than the normal fifteen-per-cent fee of an agent. Woodward once called him the "last bargain in Washington."
Two weeks before Obama was sworn in as a senator, Crown, a division of Random House, announced that he had signed a contract to write three books; the deal was for just under two million dollars. The press release was a model of diplomacy, saying that the agreement had been "initiated" by Dystel but "negotiated and concluded" by Barnett. Since that time, Dystel has avoided talking to reporters.
"Obama showed a kind of dry-eyed practicality by getting rid of Jane to get Barnett," Peter Osnos, the former head of Times Books, which had originally published Dreams from My Father, said. "I have to admit that even though it is common practice in Washington now, it startled me that practically the first thing that Obama did after being elected to the Senate was to sign a contract for two million dollars with Crown." Obama's contract called first for The Audacity of Hope, an account of his first year in the Senate and his thoughts on various issues, from religion and race to foreign policy. There was to be an illustrated children's book (with the proceeds going to charity), and the third book would be determined later. Unlike members of the House of Representatives, who are not permitted to accept book advances, only royalties, senators have no such restrictions, and, with the contract, Obama, like Hillary Clinton, who also signed a huge book deal before taking her Senate seat, transformed his financial life. It did not go unnoticed that The Audacity of Hope was to be published in the fall of 2006, a tight deadline, and just in time to ignite a round of publicity and further speculation about a run for the White House.
Although Peter Osnos counted himself an admirer of Obama, he later wrote an article for the Century Foundation in which he said of Obama's book deal, "I just wish that this virtuous symbol of America's aspirational class did not move quite so smoothly into a system of riches as a reward for service, especially before it has actually been rendered."
But even if Osnos was right and Obama's decision to sign a three-book deal was a hasty move to capitalize on his political celebrity and provide a tool for the next Presidential campaign, that celebrity was not something that he could control. Not long after the Convention speech, Eli Attie, one of the writers and producers for NBC's hit television series "The West Wing," was starting to flesh out a character to succeed President Josiah (Jed) Bartlet, the wry and avuncular head of state played by Martin Sheen. Although the series, the creation of Aaron Sorkin, first went on the air during the Clinton years, many Democrats watched it during the Bush Presidency as a kind of alternative-reality show. Bartlet, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a devout Catholic with liberal values, was, for that audience, everything that Bush was not: mature, curious, assured, skeptical, and confident of his own intelligence.
Attie wanted the new character to be no less a liberal ideal, but this time he wanted someone of the "post-Oprah" generation, as he put it, someone black or Hispanic, but not an older figure closely tied to the rhetoric of the civil-rights movement and identity politics. Attie had serious political experience. He had written speeches for the former New York mayor David Dinkins, and had been an aide to Richard Gephardt in Congress, and to Bill Clinton in the White House; he was Al Gore's chief speechwriter through the 2000 Presidential campaign. When he watched Obama, he thought he saw the model for his character, Matt Santos: a young urban progressive with dignified bearing, a "bring-the-electorate-along-slowly candidate" who was neither white nor focused on race. "Faced with the task of fleshing out a fictional first-ever and actually viable Latino candidate for President, I had no precedent, no way to research a real-life version," he said.
Attie called David Axelrod, whom he had known from Democratic political campaigns, and asked him dozens of questions about Obama's history and psychology. Axelrod talked with Attie about the change in Obama's life after the Convention speech, the crowds that surrounded him everywhere he went, the incredible expectations people had for him even before he went to Washington. Santos, like Obama, wasn't an orthodox liberal, of the Edward Kennedy mold; instead, Attie came to see Santos the way Axelrod saw Obama and the way Obama saw himself--as both a progressive and a cautious coalition-builder.
"Those early conversations with David turned out to play a huge role in my shaping of the character," Attie said. "One of the main things was Obama's attitude about race, his almost militant refusal to be defined by it, which became the basis for an episode I wrote called 'Opposition Research,' in which Santos said he didn't want to run as the 'brown candidate,' even though that's where all his support and fund-raising potential were. Also, there was Obama's rock-star charisma, the way people were drawn to him and were pulling the lever for him even though they didn't exactly think he'd win."
In the final two seasons of "The West Wing," which aired in 2005 and 2006, Matt Santos, played by Jimmy Smits, runs for President against a Republican from California named Arnold Vinick, played by Alan Alda. Press-friendly, winningly acerbic, and unusually independent, Vinick is suspicious of the religious right and positions himself to the left of his Party on a variety of issues. At least in his ideological flexibility and outspokenness, Vinick resembled John McCain--particularly the self-fashioned maverick who ran in 2000 against George W. Bush for the Republican nomination.
A couple of years later, those seasons of "The West Wing" proved so eerily prescient that David Axelrod sent Attie an e-mail from the campaign trail reading, "We're living your scripts!" And yet, while he was making those shows, Attie thought there was "no way" that the real character, Barack Obama, could go much farther than the Senate. "I just didn't think he could be the President of the United States in my lifetime, given the color of his skin," he said.
Just before Obama's Senate swearing-in ceremony, in January, 2005, Newsweek put him on the cover as the future of his Party and a unifying figure for the country. Printed across the photograph of Obama was the headline "Seeing Purple," a play on his rhetoric of red-blue convergence in Boston.
Obama was thrilled to learn that one of the previous occupants of his assigned desk on the Senate floor had been Robert Kennedy. As the junior senator from New York, Kennedy occupied the seat for just over three years, before entering the 1968 race for the Presidency.
Obama could not have been more junior in the Senate, and he understood that he needed a first-rate chief of staff who knew the people and ways of the Senate thoroughly. His old law school friend Cassandra Butts, who had worked as policy director for Gephardt's 2004 Presidential campaign, arranged a meeting for him with Pete Rouse, a thirty-year veteran of Capitol Hill. Rouse, a stout, phlegmatic workaholic in his late fifties, had been thinking about retiring on his government pension; he had lately been chief of staff for the Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle, who had lost his seat by a few thousand votes. Rouse had been so influential in the Senate that he was known around the Capitol as "the hundred-and-first senator." He met with Obama at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where Obama had been attending an orientation session for the freshmen of the 109th Congress, and, after the two had talked for an hour or so about the process of getting started in Washington, Obama asked him if he would be interested in being his chief of staff. Like anyone involved in politics, Rouse had heard a lot about Obama, but he hadn't focused on him--he hadn't even seen the Convention speech. But, after some long thought over the next couple of weeks, he agreed to Obama's offer. Rouse, in turn, helped staff Obama with refugees from Daschle's office.
"I know what I'm good at, I know what I'm not good at," Obama told Rouse at the beginning. "I know what I know and I know what I don't know. I can give a good speech."
"Oh yes, you can," Rouse said. "We all agree with that."
"I know policy," Obama continued. "I know retail politics in Illinois. I don't have any idea what it's like to come into the Senate and get established in the Senate. I want to get established and work with my colleagues and develop a reputation as a good senator, and we'll see what happens." This was precisely the approach that Hillary Clinton had taken when, in 2000, she won her seat in New York: undercut the image of a celebrity senator with hard work and deference to colleagues and the institution. The attention would come without asking for it.
Obama asked Rouse to help him assemble a staff that was made up of both Washington insiders and independent experts who could bring some intellectual heft to the office. Obama had also hired Robert Gibbs, who had long experience as a press aide on Capitol Hill and became Obama's protector during the campaign. He told his staff that he would rather have "some extraordinary people for a shorter time than ordinary people for a long time." In April, Obama met at a Capitol Hill steakhouse with Samantha Power, a journalist who, in 2002, published A Problem from Hell, a study of modern genocide and American foreign policy that had won the Pulitzer Prize. Obama did not strike Power as a liberal interventionist or a Kissingerian realist or any other kind of ideological "ist" except maybe a "consequentialist." In foreign policy, Obama said, he was for what worked. He hired Power as a foreign-policy fellow in his office.
Diversity was also a priority for Obama. More than half the staff of about sixty were people of color, including ten of the top fifteen salaried aides. Obama told Rouse that while he was perfectly aware that he was the only African-American in the Senate, a position that bore special responsibilities, "I don't want to be a black senator. I want to be a senator who happens to be black."
Rouse took on the assignment sensing that Obama could have a big future but certain that a national race was not imminent. He planned to help Obama set a direction for himself, and then, he recalled thinking, "We'll see what happens. I'll be in my rocking chair when he runs [for President] in 2016 or whatever." With Gibbs and Axelrod, Rouse drafted a document called "The Strategic Plan." The plan was about mastering the craft, procedures, and courtesies of the Senate; it was about building relationships with colleagues, including Republicans, and demonstrating an emphasis on Illinois.
In his first year, Obama carried out the plan with single-minded determination. He traveled extensively among his constituents in Illinois and even had his office keep in close contact with African-American leaders to his left. "He was worried that they would attack him on WVON," Dan Shomon, who stayed on Obama's payroll until 2006, said. "All that stopped when everyone fell into line when he ran for President."
In Washington, Obama worked on legislation that had particular impact on the state, including bills on highway construction, alternative energy, and ethanol. It was more important, his advisers felt, for him to work quietly to gain the confidence of his colleagues and desirable committee posts than to step forward and speak out on national issues like the war on Iraq.
As Rouse had predicted, the glitz took care of itself. Oprah Winfrey declared him "more than a politician. He's the real deal." Vanity Fair published a two-page spread on Obama, a rarity for any senator, much less a rookie. The magazine Savoy had a cover feature on Obama with the headline "Camelot Rising." At times, Obama's celebrity definitely had an erotic edge to it: the character Grace on the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" dreamed that she was in the shower with the new senator from Illinois--and he was "Baracking my world!"
Obama did not ignore the attention, but he made a point of emphasizing his freshman learning and rituals. One of the first books that he read after his election was Master of the Senate, the third installment in Robert Caro's multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson. (He didn't want to be seen reading the book during the campaign; now he made a point of mentioning it.) The book, in addition to covering Johnson's career in the Senate in bountiful, dramatic detail, opens with a long history of the institution and then an intricate set piece on Johnson's mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia. Russell served in the Senate from 1933 until 1971, when he died, and was the dominant figure in the conservative Southern faction that controlled the Senate until the rise of the civil-rights movement and the Kennedy assassination. Russell had supported Roosevelt's New Deal legislation but he was also an unapologetic proponent of Jim Crow. A virtuoso of Senate procedure and cloakroom persuasion, he blocked civil-rights legislation by whatever means available, including the repeated use of the filibuster. Nevertheless, Obama told Jeff Zeleny, the Tribune reporter who chronicled his career on the Hill most closely, that he was especially taken with Caro's passages about Russell's years in the Senate. Much of Obama's self-confidence resided in his belief that he could walk into any room, with any sort of people, and forge a relationship and even persuade those people of the rightness of his positions. Jim Cauley, Obama's Senate campaign manager, said he thought Obama believed that he could win over a room of skinheads. "All of us are a mixture of noble and ignoble impulses, and I guess that's part of what I mean when I say I don't go into meetings with people presuming bad faith," Obama has said. Now he seemed to think that he would have had a fighting chance with Russell: "Had I been around at all in the early sixties and had the opportunity to meet with Richard Russell, it would have been fascinating to talk to somebody like that. Even if you understood that this enormous talent would prevent me from ever being sworn in to the Senate."
When Obama paid a visit to the Senate elder Robert Byrd, of West Virginia, who as a young man had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he listened sympathetically as the old man described the sins of his youth as "the cross around my neck." It was the Rorschach effect all over again: Byrd saw in Obama a welcoming, forgiving face. And Obama, who was a gifted reader of other people, replied soothingly to Byrd, "If we were supposed to be perfect, we'd all be in trouble, so we rely on God's mercy and grace to get us through."
Obama knew that if he made enough of these respectful visits, if he made enough gestures of modesty and obeisance to the institution, he could go a long way toward forming alliances and ease any jealousies. Obama tried to make these conspicuous shows of humility and the transcendence of political history a hallmark of his way of doing business. He did not hesitate to advertise them.
Meanwhile, the true voice of sustained humility in Obama's life was his wife, who was back home in Chicago. Michelle Obama regarded the unending clamor and sycophancy that now attended her husband with a bracingly astringent bemusement. At the swearing-in ceremony, she observed all the commotion and said, "Maybe one day he will do something to warrant all this attention."
In his three years as an active senator, Obama proved a reliable Democrat, voting with his Party more than ninety-five per cent of the time; at one point, he even earned the rating of "most liberal" from relatively uncontentious arbiters like The National Journal. And yet he sought, above all, to emphasize his flexibility and pragmatism. "Over the next six years, there will be occasions where people will be surprised by my positions," he told Zeleny. "I won't be easy to categorize as many people expect."
Obama voted against Bush's nominee for Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, but he supported Bush's second-term nomination for Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, offering the rationalization that despite her unquestioning involvement in the planning of the Iraq war, a war that he had judged "a dumb war," Rice was a committed and intelligent diplomat and the President was not likely to nominate someone less conservative if she was rejected. He did not vote to punish. He also voted against a defense appropriations bill that would have included a firm date for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Despite lobbying by John Kerry, Obama supported the White House on legislation capping payoffs in class-action lawsuits. He voted for bills strengthening environmental protection and free trade. He voted consistently for abortion rights.
Obama had wanted an appointment to the Commerce Committee, in order to be able to get some pork for his constituents in Illinois. He had hoped that his campaigning for Democratic candidates in the 2004 elections--which he had been able to do because his own race was not in doubt--would be enough to gain him the appointment. The Party leadership placed him instead on the committees for Environment and Public Works, Veterans Affairs, and Foreign Relations. At committee sessions, Obama, as the most junior senator, was eighteenth in line to ask questions; the committee room would often be all but empty when his turn at the microphone came. During Rice's confirmation hearings in the Foreign Relations Committee, Obama grew increasingly bored during one of Joe Biden's bloviations. Finally, Obama leaned back in his chair and handed one of his aides a note. The aide was excited to receive his first serious communication from the Senator. The note read, "Shoot. Me. Now."
Obama's closest friend in the Senate was his Illinois colleague, Richard Durbin. For Obama, Durbin was a link to the glory days of Illinois liberalism. When Durbin was an undergraduate at Georgetown, he'd served as an intern in the office of Paul Douglas; as a young lawyer, he was counsel to Paul Simon when he was lieutenant governor. Durbin was elected to the House in 1982 and to the Senate in 1996; for Obama, he was a teacher unthreatened by the younger man's glossy public image and boundless prospects.
Richard Lugar of Indiana, a Republican who was the longtime chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and an advocate of tighter control of nuclear-and conventional-weapons stockpiles, also tutored Obama. Lugar had worked with Sam Nunn, of Georgia, on the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to secure weapons stockpiles across the former Soviet Union. Obama had made a name for himself by opposing the invasion of Iraq, but there was not much he could do on the Foreign Relations Committee about Iraq. He thought he could make a concrete impact, with Lugar's help, by becoming an active voice on proliferation issues.
In August, 2005, as a member of a congressional delegation that also included Lugar, Obama went to Russia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan to meet with officials and inspect various weapons-storage facilities. He had traveled fairly widely in Asia, Africa, and Europe, but this was his first trip to the former Soviet Union. The folkways of political missions to Moscow were alien to him. Faced with the prospect of mutual, and repeated, toasts, Obama asked to have his shot glass filled with water instead of vodka. Obama experienced what Lugar had many times before: rides in rickety buses to secret weapons sites; the dismantling of aging rockets; interminable briefings from officials telling partial truths. In Kiev, Obama went with Lugar to a dilapidated laboratory that had been used in the old Soviet biological weapons program. "So we enter into the building," Obama recalled for an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington a few weeks after the trip. "There are no discernible fences or security systems. And once we are inside, some sort of ramshackle building, there were open windows, maybe a few padlocks that many of us might use to secure our own luggage. Our guide, a young woman, takes us right up to what looked like a mini-refrigerator. And inside the refrigerator there were rows upon rows of test tubes. She picked them up, and she's clanking them around, and we listened to the translator explain what she was saying. Some of the tubes, he said, were filled with anthrax and others with plague. And you know, I'm pretty close and I start sort of backing off a little bit. And I turn around ... and say, 'Hey, where's Lugar? Doesn't he want to see this?' And I turn around and he's way in the back of the room, about fifteen feet away. And he looked at me and said, 'Been there, done that.'"
Lugar had made countless such trips, but, for Obama, it was a revelation. He had studied arms-control issues at Columbia; now it stunned him to see the weaponry up close. "When you are there you get a sense of the totality of the nuclear program and the stockpiles of conventional arms," Mark Lippert, Obama's foreign-policy adviser, said. "It made an incredible impact on him to see the industrial complex behind it all. When we were in Ukraine, we went to a factory where they were disassembling conventional weapons. There were just piles and piles of shells. They told us that, working at the rate they were working, it would take eighty years to disassemble them all. At one chem-bio plant, we saw a freezer for the pathogens kept closed by just a string."
Three months after the trip, Lugar and Obama published an article on the Washington Post's op-ed page called "Junkyard Dogs of War," warning against the spread of loose conventional weapons from the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, "particularly shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that can hit civilian airliners." Lugar and Obama introduced legislation to gain the cooperation of other nations and tighten control of arms caches in the former Soviet Union that were being routinely plundered, and whose contents were being used to make improvised roadside bombs in the Middle East and to fuel civil wars in Africa. The legislation helped strengthen systems to detect and intercept illegal shipments of materials used in chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
Obama's work with Lugar was not the only instance of his cooperating with Republicans and Democratic centrists. He worked with Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida, on immigration reform, and with Tom Coburn, a right-wing Republican from Oklahoma, on legislation to bring greater transparency to government contracting. He was getting along with his own Party and with his colleagues in general.
"I am sure it was in the back of my mind that he would run for President someday," Lippert said, "but he felt we had to be serious and map out very particular policy issues where we could be heard. Obama's basic mantra is, You figure out the policy and I will figure out the politics."
During his term, Obama also called on journalists like Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek, and Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, of the New York Times, to talk about policy. Obama was comfortable with them, eager to exchange ideas and, at the same time, playfully aware of the game of mutual seduction. When Brooks, a moderate conservative, wrote a column attacking the Republicans in Congress on fiscal issues and then added an additional attack on the Democrats, Obama sent him a friendly e-mail saying, "If you want to attack us fine, but you are only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better." Brooks felt caught out. "He was calling me to my better nature," Brooks said, wryly. As a conservative, Brooks was disappointed that Obama was such "an orthodox Democrat," but impressed with his intellect and the collective intelligence of the people whom he appointed.
Obama struck journalists as a voracious reader, deliberative, versed in policy and political philosophy. He could talk Reagan and Burke with Brooks and foreign policy with Zakaria and Friedman, all with the politician's gift of making his guest feel that he agrees with him. They were all struck by his charm and lack of neediness, his intelligence and what one called "his gargantuan self-confidence"--a freshman senator who was convinced he could get in a room with foreign-policy realists and idealists and somehow transcend the battle and reconcile the two sides. Their conversations started from the assumption that Obama had read their books and articles and he spent nearly all of the meetings listening.
As a law professor, Obama used to say that he had to know Antonin Scalia's side of arguments as well as Scalia did in order to win the debate. But for all his talk about seeing both sides of a question and occasionally siding with the opposition, Obama was, ideologically, squarely in the center of the post-Bill Clinton Democratic Party. His views, foreign and domestic, were generally progressive, but their expression was more analytic and deliberative than passionate. Passionate moralism would never be his dominant key. He could admire Edward Kennedy's ferocious advocacy of universal health care or the strong human-rights orientation of some of his other colleagues, but he was wary of what he saw as emotional absolutism. This was especially true for foreign policy.
"The sense I got from him then was that his fundamental view of the world was rooted as much in the struggle for development and economic growth as it was in missiles and the Cold War," Zakaria recalled. "I think this came first from his mother and Indonesia. His first memory of a foreign-policy event was not of Vietnam or of the Soviet Union but of life on the ground in Jakarta. The struggle for survival and development--that's the prism through which he sees the world. That is why the neocon agenda or even the recent formulation of the liberal internationalist agenda is not something he leaps toward immediately. It's not because of some coldness about democracy, but rather because he understands that, for the vast majority of the world, there is first a basic struggle for dignity and survival. I think that view comes from the Kennedy era, even though Kennedy was a cold warrior: the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, the age of Pell Grants, aid to Africa, the Green Revolution in India. His mother was absorbed in that and so is he.
"Obama is a kind of practical idealist," Zakaria went on. "He told me that he admired George H. W. Bush's diplomacy, his careful management of the end the Cold War and his emphasis on productive relations with the world's other major powers. I can't think of many Democrats then who said that. He writes in his book about reading Fanon and other leftists when he was young, but it seemed to me that, in his view of the world, he moved beyond that. He is a sober type. And part of that seems to come from another influence: the University of Chicago. He was steeped in the atmosphere of law and economics. He may not have taken on their arguments, but something rubbed off in his view of the world--the realism and the logic."
In late August, 2005, Hurricane Katrina submerged much of the city of New Orleans, the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and, it seemed, the Bush Presidency. The storm overwhelmed the levees and emergency systems of New Orleans, and the public officials at the center of the tragedy--the mayor, Ray Nagin; the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco; the chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown; and most of all, President Bush--underperformed to such a degree that countless people caught up in the tragedy, along with millions who witnessed it on television, blamed those officials almost as if the hurricane had been an act of pure human agency rather than a force of nature. Bush's clueless fly-over detachment in the first days of the tragedy seemed to many a domestic version of his arrogance and deceit during the run-up to the war in Iraq, his hapless management of its prosecution, and his blithe indifference to the reports of torture. In Katrina's wake, the facts and images of incompetence, mismanagement, and callousness became as indelibly fixed as the images of the storm itself. The Bush Presidency was now, like the Lower Ninth Ward, underwater.
For eight months, Obama, even as he was ubiquitous on magazine covers and on television programs as a political celebrity of certain promise, had been a mild presence in the national debate. He had shied away from out-of-state speaking engagements and the Sunday talk shows. He avoided controversy. This studied reticence was part of the first stage of the plan that Rouse and his team had drafted for him. Obama had not wanted to get ahead of himself and seem like a preening show horse, the least desirable breed in the Senate stable. But as the sole African-American in the Senate, he could not avoid speaking out about Katrina.
Among Democrats, at least, there was not much debate about the performance of the President and the local government officials; the question for Obama was what tone to adopt. Jesse Jackson, and also black intellectuals like Cornel West, compared the images of crowds of African-Americans herded into the Superdome or left to broil on highway overpasses without food or water to Africans in previous centuries being herded onto slave ships. White Democratic Party leaders, including Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton, joined in the criticism, accusing the Administration of acting so slowly because of lingering racism.
When the hurricane made landfall, Obama had been in Russia, but the week after the storm he went to the Gulf Coast with former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Obama stood silently with Hillary Clinton as the two ex-Presidents spoke to reporters at various disaster sites. Then, appearing on ABC's Sunday morning talk show "This Week," with George Stephanopoulos, Obama criticized the government response, but painstakingly, without attacking anyone directly. His tone was many degrees less fierce than that of Jesse Jackson or Cornel West. "Whoever was in charge of planning was so detached from the realities of inner-city life in a place like New Orleans," Obama said, "they couldn't conceive of the notion that [people] couldn't load up their S.U.V.s, put a hundred dollars' worth of gas in there, put some sparkling water, and drive off to a hotel and check in with a credit card."
Obama's initial response was calibrated to express a sober awareness of reality--"It was apparent on the first day that blacks were disproportionately impacted"--not a sense of outrage or blame. In an interview with the Tribune, Obama was almost as hard on the Democrats as he was on Bush. "It is way too simplistic just to say this Administration doesn't care about black people," he said. "I think it is entirely accurate to say that this Administration's policies don't take into account the plight of poor people in poor communities and this is a tragic reflection of that indifference, but I also have to say that it's an indifference that is not entirely partisan. We as Democrats have not been very interested in poverty or issues relating to the inner city as much as we should have. Think about the last Presidential campaign: it's pretty hard to focus on a moment on which there was any attention given."
Even if Obama was privately outraged by the Bush Administration's early indifference to the suffering on the Gulf Coast--an outrage that he did express later--he clearly saw that his job as a senator was to forge a broader political consensus for reform rather than embody the popular anger. This rhetorical tact was partly a matter of temperament, and partly indicative of a generational shift. It was hard to imagine many older African-American legislators or mayors using the rhetoric of calm conciliation in Katrina's wake. Obama said that the "encouraging thing" about Katrina was that "everybody" was generous to the victims: "white suburban Republicans as well as black liberal Democrats."
"The burden is on us as Democrats, the burden is on me as a U.S. senator to help bridge that gap," he said.
Although his votes in the Senate were more predictably liberal than he advertised, Obama felt it was essential to show that he possessed a distinctive equanimity and cool. Conciliation was his default mode, the dominant strain of his political personality. After witnessing the partisan political wars that stretched from Watergate to the Clinton impeachment trial and the battles now being waged over the Bush Presidency on the Internet and cable television, Obama insisted on a rhetoric of common ground. He was instinctively wary of ideology, and sometimes this left even sympathetic colleagues and critics frustrated and wondering what he really believed in, what was essential to his view of the world. This had been his way since Harvard when he extended a hand to conservatives even at the cost of disappointing some fellow liberals.
In the fall of 2005, Obama and his Democratic colleagues were faced with the Bush Administration's nomination of John Roberts, a conservative federal judge, to succeed William Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Obama held long discussions with his staff over how to vote. As in the case of the nomination of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State, Obama knew that the Administration was not likely to put forward a less conservative nominee if somehow the Roberts nomination failed to gain approval from the Senate. Obama admitted that Roberts had a good legal mind and that if he were President he would not want his nominees rebuffed for ideological reasons, either. Obama's mentor at Harvard, Laurence Tribe, had testified against Robert Bork during the Reagan years and, in July, 1987, Edward Kennedy had insisted on the floor of the Senate that in "Robert Bork's America," women would be forced into "back-alley abortions," blacks would return to "segregated lunch counters," writers and artists would be "censored at the whim of the government," and "rogue police" making "midnight raids" could break into the homes of citizens. Was Roberts really Robert Bork's ideological twin? What good would it do to attack him? Perhaps, relying on the same rationale as he had when he voted for Rice, he should vote for Roberts. Eventually, Pete Rouse brought the discussion down to earth and into the realm of politics. He told Obama that he was not engaged in a moot-court exercise at Harvard Law School. There were real-life political implications to his decision. He told Obama that a vote in favor of the Roberts nomination could prove crippling among Democratic voters in a future Presidential primary.
As he had proved in Cambridge, Chicago, and Springfield, Obama could be shrewd when balancing the impulse of principle and the realities of politics and career. In a statement, he said that he had just spoken with Roberts the day before; he complimented him as "humble," "personally decent," and respectful of precedent in "ninety-five percent of the cases that come before the federal court." The problem, he said, came with the other five per cent, with cases involving affirmative action, reproductive decisions, and the rights of the disabled. Roberts, Obama said, told him that it was hard for him to talk about his values, except to say that he "doesn't like bullies" and views the law as a way of "evening out the playing field between the strong and the weak." In the end, Obama said that Roberts, in his work in the White House and the Solicitor General's Office, "seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination." With "considerable reticence," he was going to vote against Roberts.
Obama's demurral hardly matched Kennedy's ferocious denunciation of Robert Bork; such rhetoric was not his style or his political way of being. The final tally was seventy-eight to twenty-two in favor of Roberts; nearly all the votes against Roberts came from blue-state Democrats. On similar grounds, Obama also voted against Samuel Alito, Bush's second nomination to the Supreme Court. In order "to send a signal" that the President "is not above the law," Obama also voted against Bush's nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General Michael Hayden.
Some combination of Obama's very real objections to Roberts's record and Rouse's hardheaded political logic had won the day. Obama was not reluctant to compliment his chief of staff for his prescience. "Pete's very good at looking around the corners of decisions and playing out the implications of them," Obama said, two years after the Roberts vote.
But the Roberts story did not end there. Some Democrats--Patrick Leahy, Christopher Dodd, Carl Levin, Russ Feingold, and Patty Murray--had voted for Roberts, and, as a result, they were being excoriated on many left-leaning Web sites, including the popular collaborative blog Daily Kos. In his speech on the floor, Obama defended Leahy, especially, against these "broad-brush dogmatic attacks." He took the occasion of that fierce criticism of his colleagues to send a letter to Daily Kos that in many ways could be read as a kind of manifesto for his conciliatory temperament, which he clearly regarded as an essential element of his politics and of his appeal.
The letter was entitled "Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party" and was posted on September 30, 2005.
After apologizing for failing to follow blogs "as regularly as I would like," Obama wrote that he wanted to address "friends and supporters":
There is one way, over the long haul, to guarantee the appointment of judges that are sensitive to issues of social justice, and that is to win the right to appoint them by recapturing the presidency and the Senate. And I don't believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position. I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.
According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists--a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog--we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.
I think this perspective misreads the American people. From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don't think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don't think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don't think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib, which violate our ideals as a country.
In a style of insistent reasonableness--the same tone that he employed the next year in his book The Audacity of Hope--Obama argued that most people saw the debate over the Roberts nomination through a "non-ideological" lens and that to argue in less than civil terms is to risk alienating most Americans and, worse, to endanger the creation of a progressive coalition. His rhetorical approach was to acknowledge the virtues of both sides, caution against moral equivalence, but insist on courtesy and respect. Obama insisted that civility need not come at the cost of rigor or principle. Some critics argued that Obama's emphasis on civility was a form of delicacy, an escape from rigor and principle. But Obama was convinced that his argument would resonate with voters weary of the yowling on cable news and the most profane battle scenes of the Web.
Obama asked Daily Kos readers to see that some Democrats (if not Obama himself) were concerned that a floor battle over Roberts would be "quixotic" and endanger the Party's attempt to win back the majority in the coming elections. In other words, there were valid reasons for liberal Democrats like Leahy to vote for Roberts. Similarly, Obama asked that the readers of Daily Kos not attack the motives of Richard Durbin or himself for failing to call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq despite their early opposition to the invasion. Durbin, Obama said, "may be simply trying to figure out, as I am, how to ensure that U.S. troop withdrawals occur in such a way that we avoid all-out Iraqi civil war, chaos in the Middle East, and much more costly and deadly interventions down the road." In his letter, Obama aimed at assuring the readers of Daily Kos, and liberals in general, that they were his natural allies, but cautioned them against a rhetoric that alienates all but true believers. Without a broader coalition, progressives will not be able to overhaul health care, lift people out of poverty or "craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism while avoiding isolationism and protecting civil liberties." The arguments for belligerent, unilateral foreign policy, the dismantling of a social safety net, and a politics of "theological absolutism" are relatively easy to make, Obama said. Liberalism is hard and demands nuance and exchange. Obama's argument was not for reflexive centrism or caving in to conservative opponents but, rather, for a flexibility of mind and tolerance in argument to gain liberal ends.
"This is more than just a matter of 'framing,' although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required," Obama wrote. "It's a matter of actually having faith in the American people's ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter."
Afterward, Obama used a favorite phrase to describe the Roberts vote and his letter. He called it a "teachable moment." The letter was not, however, a wholly pedagogical gesture. Obama's desire was to position himself and the Party as being beyond the old arguments of the centrists of the Democratic Leadership Conference (a major influence in the Clinton Administration) and the "old-time-religion-Ted-Kennedy-die-hard types." The danger of the D.L.C., Obama said, was its impulse to "cut a deal no matter what the deal is," while the danger for traditional liberals was to be "unreflective" and "unwilling to experiment or update old programs to meet new challenges."
"And the way I would describe myself," Obama said, "is I think that my values are deeply rooted in the progressive tradition, the values of equal opportunity, civil rights, fighting for working families, a foreign policy that is mindful of human rights, a strong belief in civil liberties, wanting to be a good steward for the environment, a sense that the government has an important role to play, that opportunity is open to all people and that the powerful don't trample on the less powerful ... I share all the aims of a Paul Wellstone or a Ted Kennedy when it comes to the end result. But I'm much more agnostic, much more flexible on how we achieve those ends."
Obama's desire for civility did not always succeed. Early in his second year in the Senate, in February, 2006, he had his first public run-in with a colleague. His adversary was the senior senator from Arizona, John McCain, and, by the decorous standards of the Senate, the incident was notably ugly.
In the wake of the arrest of Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist-conman who had worked with officials both in the Bush White House and on Capitol Hill, McCain organized a bipartisan group--seven Republicans and three Democrats--to work on reform of the rules governing lobbyists on the Hill. McCain thought that he'd got a commitment from Obama to work with his task force on the problem, but, when Obama sent him a note saying he had decided that a task force would delay action on the issue and, at the request of the Democratic leader, Harry Reid, he was joining a Democratic plan for reform, McCain was furious. Returning to Washington from a conference in Germany, he sent Obama an acid letter, accusing him of bad faith and callow ambition. McCain supported a bill that called on lobbyists to make public any gifts given to members of Congress; members of both the House and the Senate would have to wait two years, not one, to become a registered lobbyist. The Democratic version of the legislation, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, added more restrictions, banning meals and gifts from lobbyists. McCain, who was first elected to Congress in 1982 and had plenty of close relations with Democrats, thought that the freshman had been grandstanding and he let him know it:
Dear Senator Obama:
I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership's preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won't make the same mistake again....
You commented in your letter about my "interest in creating a task force to further study" this issue, as if to suggest I support delaying the consideration of much-needed reforms rather than allowing the committees of jurisdiction to hold hearings on the matter. Nothing could be further from the truth....
As I explained in a recent letter to Senator Reid, and have publicly said many times, the American people do not see this as just a Republican problem or just a Democratic problem. They see it as yet another run-of-the-mill Washington scandal, and they expect it will generate just another round of partisan gamesmanship and posturing. Senator Lieberman and I, and many other members of this body, hope to exceed the public's low expectations....
As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party's effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn't always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.
Sincerely,
John McCain
United States Senate
This seemed to be vintage McCain: he was known among his colleagues as much for his volcanic temper as for his intelligence and flashes of humor. In fact, the letter was drafted by his close aide, speechwriter, and alter ego, Mark Salter, who co-authored McCain's autobiography, Faith of My Fathers. The letter was meant to be both funny and stinging, a welcome-to-the-majors brushback pitch, to use McCain's words of instruction to Salter. "I obviously beaned him and wrote too sharp a response," Salter recalled. In no time at all the letter was e-mailed around Capitol Hill with a one-word subject line: "Wow."
Obama responded in a tone of polite bewilderment. He said he had "no idea what has prompted" McCain's two-page outburst and answered with a "Dear John" letter of artful restraint and righteous politesse:
During my short time in the U.S. Senate, one of the aspects about this institution that I have come to value most is the collegiality and the willingness to put aside partisan differences to work on issues that help the American people.... I confess that I have no idea what has prompted your response. But let me assure you that I am not interested in typical partisan rhetoric or posturing. The fact that you have now questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable, but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you nor my willingness to find a bipartisan solution to this problem.
After the epistolary exchange and a brief telephone conversation to cool things off, McCain told reporters, "We're moving on. We're still colleagues. We're still friends. I mean, this isn't war." When a reporter asked if he regretted the tone of his letter, however, McCain said, "Of course not."
Obama's words of reconciliation were similarly contingent. "The tone of the letter, I think, was a little over the top," he said. "But John McCain's been an American hero and has served here in Washington for twenty years, so if he wants to get cranky once in a while, that's his prerogative."
On the third and final day of the drama, Obama and McCain, who were both preparing to testify before the Senate Rules Committee, posed with their fists cocked at each other like a couple of publicity-hungry middleweights at a weigh-in. Before they testified, Obama said, "I'm particularly pleased to be sharing this panel with my pen pal, John McCain."
In June, 2006, Obama went a step further in trying to expand his own Party's political base. He accepted an invitation to speak from Jim Wallis, a white liberal evangelical Christian. Wallis's organization, known as the Sojourners, opposed the policies of the religious right and spoke out for social justice. Obama was among those in the Party who were eager to prove that the evangelical movement was far more diverse than the political class in Washington, New York, or Los Angeles believed, that religious Christians were as capable of independent thought and politics as any other seemingly cohesive voting bloc. Obama talked about his own church--Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, on the South Side--and the way it viewed religious faith as commensurate with a belief in political liberation and compassion. Again, Obama asked his audience to step outside the accustomed barricades. He denounced both the intolerance of the religious right and the failure, often, of the secular left to respect the value of religious faith in the lives of others.
What I am suggesting is this: secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King--indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history--were not only motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Moreover, if we progressives shed some of these biases, we might recognize some overlapping values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of "thou" and not just "I," resonates in religious congregations all across the country. And we might realize that we have the ability to reach out to the evangelical community and engage millions of religious Americans in the larger project of American renewal.
Obama criticized leaders of the religious right, like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who had been at the forefront of the Reagan revolution, and those liberal secularists who are wary of any and all religious appeals. At the same time he paid tribute to preachers like Tony Campolo, Rick Warren, and T. D. Jakes, who had been active on issues like the genocide in Darfur, poverty, H.I.V./AIDS, and Third World-debt relief. It was a speech that recognized how ruinous was the divide between the Democratic Party and evangelicals. Obama was attempting to reconcile the constitutional requirement for separation of church and state with recognition of sincere religious impulse for the social good:
The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a constitutional amendment to ban it. Religious leadership need not accept such wisdom in counseling their flocks, but they should recognize this wisdom in their politics.
But a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation--context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase "under God." I didn't. Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs--targeting ex-offenders or substance abusers--that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems.
So we all have some work to do here. But I am hopeful that we can bridge the gaps that exist and overcome the prejudices each of us brings to this debate. And I have faith that millions of believing Americans want that to happen. No matter how religious they may or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool of attack. They don't want faith used to belittle or to divide. They're tired of hearing folks deliver more screed than sermon. Because in the end that's not how they think about faith in their own lives.
One conceit of the Obama narrative, as told by his inner circle, is that the discussions about running for President did not come to the fore until the fall of 2006, with the publication of his second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the explosion of media interest that attended the publicity tour. Obama, the narrative continues, was moved less by the attention in the media (he was already accustomed to that) than by the crowds of ordinary people who came to get their book signed and pleaded with him to run. The emotional experience of hearing those pleas and stories of dissatisfaction and despair, at one venue after another, from coast to coast, hastened and intensified Obama's notion that there was, in the wake of the failed Bush Presidency, a hunger for integrity and newness, for change, that the presumed Democratic candidates, particularly Hillary Clinton, could never satisfy. Then, after long thought and intensive consultation, the Obama family went to Hawaii that Christmas, talked it through, and returned to Chicago unified in the decision to campaign. This was the story.
It's not a false narrative, but it is not a complete one, either. It's hard to say when Obama started thinking about running for President or what importance to attach to those "thoughts." Obama's sister, Maya, says that she and their mother used to tease him about running for President, if only to puncture his desire to win dinner-table debates. Many sources interviewed for this book and for countless other publications were eager to say that upon meeting Obama they knew, just knew, that he could be the first African-American President. Valerie Jarrett says that Obama "always" wanted to be President. And Obama himself has admitted that, when he arrived at Harvard and sized himself up against all the intelligent young men and women--a bracing encounter with a nascent ruling class--he felt that he could pursue high office. "I thought these will be the people who will be leading at some point," Obama recalled. "And, you know, I feel comfortable within this group, being able to lead."
Although Pete Rouse says he believed, initially, that Obama would not run until 2016, he saw the possibilities in the more immediate future. The first year had been one of establishing a sense of diligence in the Senate, of making no enemies. The second phase entailed raising Obama's profile, having him give speeches for fellow Democrats and extending favors, which would help him nationally should he want to run. On January 16, 2006, Rouse sent a memorandum to Obama saying, "It makes sense for you to consider now whether you want to use 2006 to position yourself to run in 2008 if a 'perfect storm' of personal and political factors emerges in 2007.... If making a run in 2008 is at all a possibility, no matter how remote, it makes sense to begin talking and making decisions about what you should be doing 'below the radar' in 2006 to maximize your ability to get in front of this wave should it emerge and should you and your family decide it is worth riding."
Events like the insurgency in Iraq and the revelations of torture in Abu Ghraib prison, the faltering economy, and the mismanagement of the rescue and reconstruction efforts on the Gulf Coast would make life very difficult for any Republican in 2008; what was more, although Hillary Clinton would enter a primary season bolstered by a well-financed, experienced campaign machine, she would be weighed down by the voters' overall weariness with familiar politicians. Clinton was far from a sure thing. Obama had to start considering the future, if only to think it through and come up with a coherent version of "not yet."
The Clintons had a vast network of operatives and fundraisers at their disposal--a machine developed over decades--while Obama had nothing like it. Still, the Clintons thought through the decision to run with no less deliberation than the Obamas did. "At the end of 2006, Hillary and Bill took a Caribbean vacation together and they were out on a boat together, nearly alone, and they swam to an island," one top Clinton aide recalled. "They sat on the beach and talked for about three hours and they talked about the pluses and minuses. Until then, they had set things up so there would be a turnkey campaign operation. She had to decide whether she wanted to go through the rigors of the campaign. And she loved the Senate. Finally he asked her, 'There is really one question to answer, and that's whether do you think you'd be the best person out there to be President?' After that, the staff got phone calls saying she's in. They set an announcement for January 20th.
"We were very confident, sometimes bordering on arrogant, and sometimes passing over the border," the aide went on. "At first, there was a low-grade worry about Obama, that's all. I remember hearing a phone call on the plane and Bill and Hillary were talking about Obama. And the tone of the conversation was of him reassuring her. Believe me, there were no phone calls reassuring her about Tom Vilsack or John Edwards. He was saying, 'If you sit around and worry about him, you'll be off your own game.'"
Part of Obama's calculation had to do with the job he already occupied. The truth was, David Axelrod told me, "Barack hated being a senator." Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. "He was so bored being a senator," one Senate aide said. "It's picayune, it's small-ball everywhere. And he is restless. He was engaged with the big issues, like what to do about Iraq. What interested him was policy, strategy, not bills ... His frustration was obvious to everyone in the office." An aide who was devoted to Obama nevertheless described how his offices at the Hart Building seemed "unlived in" and temporary, "as if he never really thought he would stay for long."
His friend and law colleague Judd Miner said, "The reality was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate, I think, he was struggling; it wasn't nearly as stimulating as he expected. He felt there was very little opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue, certainly with Republicans. The amount of time spent on creative or constructive policy debates was so limited. I remember one day he was really glowing when someone raised an issue about health care and he didn't know much about it. He discovered that the most valuable perk was that if you call someone, they call you back fast. He had contacted some people and got the names of five or six thinkers and got on the phone to hash it out. Lo and behold, all of them flew to Washington and spent the entire day with him." Similarly, he convened experts on everything from health care to voting rights, but those days, Obama was seeing, were the exception.
The one project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week. "This was not your average senator writing a book," one aide said. "His whole soul went into it, so it meant that there was less of him to go around elsewhere. In the office, he was distracted. He wasn't thrilled to be living the life of a senator, even on the best of days. The job was too small for him--not because he was arrogant but because his mind was on systemic change, not on votes.
"So he was punching the clock during the day and then coming alive at night to write the book," the aide went on. "The book was about a mortgage and cashing in on the success of the first book. And the book was a way to think through who he was and what he stood for. It was a culmination of thinking and refinement. He created a mechanism where he was chained to the mast and had to figure out who he was to meet a book deadline."
Obama also spent a lot of time now raising money for his political-action committee, Hopefund, and for his political colleagues. Eventually, Hopefund would become a bulwark for a Presidential campaign, accumulating money and a vast computerized list of contacts. As a fundraiser, Obama had uncommon capacities, especially for a Senate freshman. He could call on Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Oprah Winfrey, and George Soros and ask for their support. Like a traditional pol, he spent hours making cajoling calls to potential donors, but, because of his celebrity, he could also do things quickly. On a single night, he drew a crowd of more than a thousand and raised a million dollars for the Arizona Democratic Party. With a single e-mail appeal, he raised eight hundred thousand dollars for Robert Byrd. When he went to Omaha, he won the glowing endorsement of Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, and his daughter, Susie. Obama was completely at ease with financial barons like Buffett, and they, it seemed, saw something promising in him. "He has as much potential as anyone I've seen to have an important impact over his lifetime on the course that America takes," Buffett said of Obama.
In order to increase the sense of connection between himself and his donors, Obama, in late October, 2005, had invited a hundred people who had given at least twenty-five hundred dollars to Hopefund to a conference in Chicago to discuss policy and spend time together socially. Peter Bynoe, an African-American entrepreneur who helped build a new stadium for the Chicago White Sox and owned a chunk of the Denver Nuggets, thought Obama had become such a gifted fundraiser that he started calling him "Money." "When his name pops up on caller I.D. on my cell phone, I know it's going to cost a lot more than two cents a minute, but I'm compelled to take the call," Bynoe told one fund-raising audience. "I pride myself on saying no to politicians, but I can't say no to 'Money.'"
Ever since Obama's election to the Senate, his staff had been planning an official visit to Africa for him. They set the trip for August, 2006, after he completed the manuscript of The Audacity of Hope but before its publication. Obama could justify the trip--to Kenya, Djibouti, Chad, and South Africa--as an important fact-finding mission for a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of the subcommittee on Africa. There were myriad issues for a legislator to discuss: H.I.V./AIDS, Darfur, extreme poverty, development, terrorism, the proliferation of conventional arms. It was hardly a cynical trip. Gibbs, Axelrod, Rouse, and Obama knew that the two-week journey would provoke an emotional reaction in Kenya and in the American press, not least among African-Americans who had not yet learned much about Obama. They did not realize the extent of the reaction: the huge crowds, people watching from balconies, children perched in the branches of trees.
Traveling with his wife and daughters and just two aides, Mark Lippert and Robert Gibbs, Obama visited a refugee camp in Chad to highlight the slaughter in Darfur; received a briefing from U.S. military officials at a base in Djibouti; and met with officials in South Africa. He made some policy pronouncements along the way, including a sharp denunciation of corruption and tribalism in Kenya that echoed his father's deepest political concerns and a critique of the South African leader, Thabo Mbeki, for his bewildering and dangerous beliefs about the source of AIDS. In Kenya, Obama made sure to travel beyond Nairobi. He visited Wajir, in the northeastern region of Kenya, near Somalia, which had experienced famine and drought. As a gesture of hospitality, the local Somali Kenyans took Obama to a camel auction and gave him the robes of a Somali elder. (During the 2008 Presidential campaign, right-wing Web sites published a photograph of Obama wearing the robes to suggest that he was, in fact, a Muslim.) Near Kisumu, where his father was born, he took an AIDS test to reduce the stigma of testing, which is especially prevalent among African men, and visited "Granny" at her modest concrete house in Kogelo.
"The happiest I've seen him, maybe, is when he saw his grandmother," Lippert said. "He truly has a relationship with her. You could see his reaction when he spotted her in a sea of people--it was so deep and genuine." Obama spent nearly two hours in his grandmother's house talking with relatives and eating a traditional stew. He also paid a visit to the raised, tile graves of his father and grandfather, who are buried near the house.
The extraordinary reception Obama received seemed to demonstrate the effect he could have in altering the battered image of America that had taken hold all over the world during the Bush Administration. The trip certainly reignited the media's infatuation. The networks ran clips, magazines had new pictures and cover stories, newspapers carried news of each event and venue--Obama's team was not disappointed.
* * *
Just a couple of weeks after returning from Africa, Obama accepted an invitation to speak at a venue that was very different from Kogelo. It was an invitation to appear at the Warren County Fairgrounds, in Indianola, Iowa. The occasion was Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry, at which more than three thousand people paid twenty-five dollars to eat fantastic quantities of food, stroll around the fairgrounds, and then settle on the grass or in lawn chairs to listen to a few speeches. The headliner in 2003 had been Bill Clinton and, in 2005, John Edwards. Obama had initially been reluctant to come to the event, but now he was willing to attract the attention and speculation.
To help guide Obama in Iowa, a trip that only the dense would fail to see as an exploratory mission for the 2008 caucuses, Pete Rouse called on a friend, Steve Hildebrand, who had run Al Gore's campaign in the state six years earlier, and had worked for Daschle, too. "I thought, let's have a little fun with this," Rouse said. "I wanted to create a little buzz." Much of the buzz was within the Clinton and Edwards camps; they, too, had hoped to hire Hildebrand. Harkin, a liberal who had taken a brief run at the Presidency in 1992, introduced his guest to the crowd by saying, "I really tried to get Bono this weekend. I settled for the second-biggest rock star in America."
Dressed in standard steak-fry garb for visiting Washingtonians--shirtsleeves and khaki pants--Obama was in good form. He began with his well-honed description of his family background (my mother is from Kansas, he said, "which is where I got this accent"), then he moved on to a description of the troubled state of the nation. If the country didn't change course soon the next generation would find life "a little bit meaner and a little bit poorer than the one we inherited from our parents." But he did not come to Iowa intent on attacking the President, or not personally.
"I don't think George Bush is a bad man," he said. "I think he's a patriotic person and I don't think that the people who work for him are stupid people. I think a lot of them are smart in their own way. I think that the problem is that they've got a different idea of America than the idea we've got."
In the simplest terms--terms that he had been rehearsing for a long time, terms that became the center of his stump speech in the months ahead--Obama provided a homey, deeply affecting vision of a liberal American idea:
They believe in different things. They have a sense that in fact government is the problem, not the solution, and that if we just dismantle government, piece by piece, if we break it up in tax cuts to the wealthy and if we just make sure that we privatize Social Security and we get rid of public schools and we make sure that we don't have police on the streets, we hire private security guards and we don't have public parks, we've got private parks and if we just break everything up, then in fact everybody's going to be better off--that in fact we don't have obligations to each other, that we're not in it together but instead you're on your own. That's the basic concept behind the ownership society. That's what George Bush and this Republican Congress have been arguing for the last six years. And it's a tempting idea because it doesn't require anything from each of us.
It's very easy for us to say that I'm going to think selfishly about myself, that I don't have to worry that forty-six million people don't have health insurance and I don't have to make any effort to deal with the fact that our children don't have any opportunities to go to college because student loans have been cut and I don't have to worry about the guy who just lost his job after working thirty years at a plant because his plant's moved down to Mexico or out to China, despite the fact that he has been producing profits on behalf of that company this whole time and that he's lost his health care and he's lost his pension as a consequence. I don't have to worry about those things.
But here's the problem. The problem is that idea won't work because despite the much-vaunted individual initiative and self-reliance that has been the essence of the American dream, the fact of the matter is that there has always been this other idea of America, this idea that says we have a stake in each other, that I am my brother's keeper, that I am my sister's keeper, that I've got obligations not just for myself, not just for my family but also for you, that every child is my child, that every senior citizen deserves protection. That simple notion is one that we understand in our churches and our synagogues and our mosques and we understand in our own families, in our blocks, in our own workplaces, but it also has to reflect itself in our government. You know, nobody here expects government to solve all our problems for us. We don't want government to solve our problems but what we do expect is that government can help. That government can make a difference in all of our lives and that is essentially the battle that we are going to be fighting in this election ... a battle about what America is going to be.
Yet again, Obama was extending a hand to moderates, to voters who saw a black senator from Chicago and required complex forms of reassurance. In phrase after phrase, Obama emitted signals about religion, the economy, race, and much else, saying, in essence, Even if you don't agree with me on everything, I will listen to you, you are heard. It was the rhetoric, once more, of moderate liberalism and inclusion.
What besides Obama's skills as a speaker and politician could have given him and his circle of aides the idea that he could run for President, and run not foremost as a black candidate, but as a candidate with a chance to win? Millions of whites, Hispanics, and even African-Americans were not going to be easily convinced that Obama, or the country, was ready for this. What beyond the generally adoring press coverage and standing ovations provided a foundation for a Presidential candidacy?
First, there was the mood of the electorate, which was increasingly frustrated with, even despairing of, its leadership. "George Bush was instrumental in the rise of Barack Obama," Cornell Belcher, one of Obama's pollsters, said. "Quite frankly, before George Bush, who so screwed things up, we could not have had a Barack Obama. After Bush's election there was talk of a permanent Republican majority. Their Party structure was that strong and was built on the sense that their values were more in line with the values of regular Americans. And that was tied to security: 'I trust your values, therefore I trust you to keep us safe.' But George Bush undermined the Republican brand and created an environment in which people were hungry for something fundamentally new. By 2006, 2007, the country was positioned for something that didn't look like what had come before. There was deep-seated anger and anxiety, a monumental drop-off in voters' trust in politics as usual. Hillary is brilliant, but for a lot of people she couldn't answer that call because of her history. Everything about Barack Obama--the very name!--spoke of change."
But how much had the country really changed? Obama's experience running for Senate had been essential to his team's core of optimism--an optimism not only about the candidate and his qualities but also about the country and its deepest emotions about race. Obama's victories in white suburbs and rural counties had convinced his circle that he had the capacity to run extremely well not only among African-Americans and white progressives; he could also win votes in areas of the country which had once been bastions of racial animosity.
Much of the empirical basis for Obama's confidence about his prospects rested on persuasive evidence of generational change. First of all, the country was growing much more diverse. The whitest part of the American population was the oldest. Among people over sixty-five, the population was around eighty-per-cent white; the population under twenty-five is about half white. And the white population, even among older and middle-aged people, was susceptible to change in their attitudes. In the nineteen-thirties, thirty-seven per cent of the American people told pollsters from Gallup that they would be willing to vote for an African-American for President; now the percentage was ninety-five per cent. Other polls had somewhat lower numbers, but the trend was clear. When Colin Powell flirted with running for President in 1996, polls showed that the number of people who would not vote for him based on race was negligible.
The Obama team watched with keen interest as Harold Ford, Jr., the House member from Tennessee and a friend of Obama's in the congressional Black Caucus, ran an incredibly tight race in 2006 for Senate against the Republican, Bob Corker. It had been unthinkable that an African-American could beat a white opponent in a statewide race in the South. Ford ended up losing by just three points, and the reasons had far less to do with race or ideology than with the fact that, not long before the vote, one of Ford's relatives was indicted. Ford, like Obama--like Artur Davis, in Alabama, or Cory Booker, in Newark, Deval Patrick, in Massachusetts, and Michael Nutter, in Philadelphia--was a Joshua generation politician. He had attended the University of Pennsylvania, not seminary or a historically black college. His rhetoric was not that of struggle, of opposition to white oppression, but rather of mainstream American politics. The electorate seemed welcoming.
The country was also changing in terms of class and education, factors that could also have an impact on an Obama candidacy. Ruy Teixeira of the Brookings Institution and Alan Abramowitz of Emory University studied demographic trends and saw a dramatic decline in the primacy of the traditionally defined white working class and the rise of what they call a "mass upper-middle class." Simply put, in 1940 three-quarters of adults twenty-five and over were high-school dropouts or never made it to high school at all. Decade after decade, education rates rose so that by 2007 more than half the population had at least some college education. Similarly, in 1940, about thirty-two per cent of employed Americans had white-collar jobs as managers, professionals, or in clerical or sales positions. By 2006, that percentage had nearly doubled; there were now nearly three times as many white-collar Americans as manual workers. What was more, many white working-class voters had not permanently and entirely abandoned the Democratic Party; many had grown despairing of a broken health-care system, a failing economy, and the seemingly endless war in Iraq. Teixeira and Abramowitz did not discount the continuing importance of white working-class votes, especially in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, but their study was one of the best among many that made clear how much the country was changing.
In the fall of 2006, Mark Alexander, a professor of constitutional law at Seton Hall University, in New Jersey, wrote a memorandum about a potential Obama campaign for the Presidency. The five-page memo, which was titled "It Can Be Done," gave a positive assessment of Obama's chances based on a variety of shifts in the demographic and racial landscape of the country. Alexander reviewed Obama's policy positions; the scale and organizational strength of the black church and historically black colleges; promising trends in the census and voter lists, particularly the huge number of unregistered black voters in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia. Alexander knew Obama; his sister, Elizabeth, was a poet and had been a professor at the University of Chicago, where she got to know the Obamas. (Their father, Clifford Alexander, was counsel to Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter's secretary of the Army.) Mark Alexander had first met Barack and Michelle at Elizabeth's wedding, in 1997; he held on to Barack's cell-phone number. He'd worked for a string of liberal Democrats: Howard Metzenbaum, Edward Kennedy, Bill Bradley, and, most recently, Cory Booker; in Obama, he saw someone who could win the ultimate political prize. When he called Obama in 2006, he told him, "You may believe my memo or you may not believe my memo. But don't run unless you really believe it can happen." Obama took Alexander's advice so seriously that he eventually made him his campaign-policy director.
Alexander and other analysts were right in thinking that the country had changed. The old electoral map of Southern strategies, a dominant, monolithic religious right, and other post-Voting-Rights-era obstacles for the Democrats was in flux. In addition to overwhelming dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration, the very nature of how most Americans understood basic issues like race was shifting in ways that could only be encouraging to Obama and his circle. Virginia had elected a black governor, Doug Wilder, as long ago as 1990. The South was no longer monolithic. Mississippi was still at the bottom of the nation in education and it was nearly impossible for a black politician to run statewide. But Virginia and North Carolina, with their centers for high-tech jobs, had attracted educated workers who were ready to vote for black candidates.
Obama's team believed it was possible that race could be, on balance, an asset. Nearly a quarter of the Democratic primary vote is African-American. In 1980, Jimmy Carter retained the Democratic nomination after a strong challenge from Edward Kennedy not least because Carter secured more of the black vote; in 2000, Al Gore defeated Bill Bradley largely because of Gore's popularity among black voters. The Clintons had long been popular among African-Americans, but Obama could capture that vote if he could prove that he was a serious, and not a symbolic, candidate.
Still, for an African-American, no matter how skilled, no matter how intelligent and popular, a run for the Presidency was a weighty thing to consider.
Despite the small number of African-Americans who, since Reconstruction, have held office in districts and states where blacks were not in a majority, there has always been talk--at times derisive or farcical; at times quixotic, even messianic--of a black President. As early as 1904, George Edwin Taylor, a newspaperman born in Arkansas, accepted the nomination of the all-black National Liberty Party, but even much later in the century the prospect of a black President was almost always a discussion held in the spirit of a dream.
"We'd wonder, How long?" Don Rose, Martin Luther King's press secretary in Chicago, recalled, in an echo of the old movement chant "How long? Not long!" In 1967, members of the National Conference for New Politics tried to persuade King to run on a national ticket with Benjamin Spock. Scores of American soldiers and Vietnamese were dying every day. King had made speeches at Riverside Church, in New York, and at other venues across the country, calling not simply for peace negotiations, as Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy had, but for immediate withdrawal from a lost war. With eloquence, bravery, and cunning, King had led the most important social and political movement in the history of the United States, rallying countless blacks and whites to the cause of civil rights. Now there were people who, desperate about the antiwar movement's seeming inability to have a similar effect on government, saw King as a savior figure, the one man who, as President, would end the Vietnam conflict. "One emotional student told him not to rule it out, that it was a matter of life or death," Taylor Branch, the author of a three-volume biography of King, said. Vietnam and poverty, as well as race, would have been at the center of his agenda as a politician, and King thought about it for a while. But in the end he refused entreaties to run. He knew that he was unlikely to win and, more important, that he might undermine his role as a prophetic voice of protest if he joined the stream of conventional politics.
Since that time, a number of black men and women had run for President, but none with serious prospects of winning and a few for purely symbolic reasons: among them were the comedian and writer Dick Gregory and the Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, in 1968; the Brooklyn congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, in 1972; King's follower Jesse Jackson, in 1984 and 1988; Dr. Lenora Fulani, a developmental psychologist, who, as the leader of the New Alliance Party, got on the ballot of all fifty states in 1988; Alan Keyes, in 1996 and 2000; and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, in 2004.
Some of those candidacies produced concrete results. Chisholm, who ran under the slogan "Unbought and Unbossed," introduced the reality of a mainstream black candidate. At the Miami Beach convention that put George McGovern's name forward as the Democratic nominee, she had a hundred and fifty-one delegates; Chisholm saw herself as a trailblazer. "The United States was said not to be ready to elect a Catholic to the Presidency when Al Smith ran in the nineteen-twenties," she said. "But Smith's nomination may have helped pave the way for the successful campaign John F. Kennedy waged in 1960. Who can tell? What I hope most is that now there will be others who will feel themselves as capable of running for high political office as any wealthy, good-looking white male." Chisholm, who died in 2005, was also quick to remind people of a fact that would have interested Hillary Clinton; she said, "Of my two handicaps, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black."
Jesse Jackson's two runs at the Presidency have largely receded from memory, eclipsed at times by his penchant for grandstanding, but he made a powerful mark. Jackson spoke of a multicultural "rainbow coalition," a rhetoric of unity, but even his most passionate supporters saw him as a man of the civil-rights generation, a politician who had begun his career in protest against white supremacy. "My constituency," he once said, "is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised." Jackson was a wounded, fatherless man from Greenville, South Carolina, whose extraordinary energies and compassion, as well as his undeniable gift for black-church oratory, was sometimes overwhelmed by his vanity--a vanity that dismayed even Martin Luther King. And yet Jackson forged historical results. In two national races he won a total of fourteen primaries and caucuses and came in second in thirty-six, including in white states such as Maine and Minnesota.
Jackson, like King before him, and like Malcolm X in his speech "The Ballot or the Bullet," reminded African-Americans of the enormous potential power of the black vote in American political life and pleaded for that potential to be used properly. At rallies in the South, Jackson made the case that Ronald Reagan had won in 1980 "by the margin of our non-participation." He had taken eight Southern states by a hundred and eighty-two thousand votes, "while three million blacks there were unregistered." Jackson was right. Increased black registration, bolstered by Jackson himself, helped bring a series of white Democrats into statewide office who had failed to win white majorities: Wyche Fowler, Jr., in Georgia; John Breaux, in Louisiana; Alan Cranston, in California; Terry Sanford, in North Carolina; and Richard Shelby, in Alabama.
The spectacle and passion of Jackson's speeches at the 1984 and 1988 Conventions was enough to alter the sense of what was politically possible. "Nothing will ever again be what it was before," James Baldwin said of Jackson's 1984 race. "It changes the way the boy on the street and the boy on Death Row and his mother and his father and his sweetheart and his sister think about themselves. It indicates that one is not entirely at the mercy of the assumptions of this Republic, of what they have said you are, that this is not necessarily who and what you are. And no one will ever forget this moment, no matter what happens now."
Richard Hatcher, an ally of Jackson's who, in 1967, was elected the first black mayor of Gary, Indiana, used a metaphor familiar to Barack Obama to describe his friend's accomplishment. Not only did Hatcher's language anticipate Obama's; he even anticipated a political figure like Obama and the emotional impact that he would have on the older generation. Jackson, Hatcher said, was "like Moses, he's been allowed to see the Promised Land but will never be able to get there himself. He cannot be Joshua, going on over with the people into Canaan. Ironically, that could be some person very different from Jesse, who, in what he represents and wants to do, will irritate fewer whites, will be more acceptable to them, because they will see him as more like themselves--'O.K., I think I can get past the color thing and vote for him, because I know in my heart that in his heart he's just like me. He's proven that.'... While Jesse has hastened the day when there will be a black President, Jesse himself will never become President. In a way, there's a sadness in that."
Before the country could realize an African-American in the Presidency, it seemed, popular culture helped conceive it--first as comedy, then as commonplace, providing, over time, a clue to the shifting yearnings and anxieties connected to race and the highest political office.
In a twenty-one-minute film called "Rufus Jones for President," directed, in 1933, by Roy Mack, Ethel Waters tells her young son, played by Sammy Davis, Jr., "You's goin' be President!"
"Me?"
"Sure. They has kings your age. I don't see no reason why they can't have Presidents. Besides, the book says anybody born here can be a President." And as Ethel Waters dreamily sings "Stay on Your Own Side of the Fence," she and the boy fall into a reverie in which they see his black political supporters carrying signs reading "Down with the Reds, Put in the Blacks" and "Vote Here for Rufus Jones, Two Pork Chops Every Time You Vote." Rufus is elected and promises that he will change the national anthem to "The Memphis Blues." Then Waters sings another song:
There's no fields of cotton, pickin' cotton is taboo;
We don't live in cabins like our old folks used to do:
Our cabin is a penthouse now on St. Nicholas Avenue,
Underneath a Harlem moon.
Once we wore bandannas, now we wear Parisian hats,
Once we went barefoot, now we're sporting shoes and spats,
Once we were Republicans but now we're Democrats,
Underneath a Harlem moon.
This sly, yet cringe-inducing ditty ends with young Rufus waking from his improbable dream of political success to the reality of his dismal surroundings and the smell of his mother's burning pork chops. In 1933, the idea of a young black boy dreaming of the Presidency was a form of tragic comedy.
In Irving Wallace's Johnson-era best-seller, The Man, Douglass Dilman, a black senator from the Midwest, becomes President through a freakish accident. The incumbent, the Vice-President, and the Speaker of the House all die. Dilman is full of self-doubt ("I am a black man, not yet qualified for human being, let alone for President"); he gets impeached and eventually wins acquittal by a single vote.
When, in the seventies, Richard Pryor was hosting a variety show on network television, he took on the subject as a comic flight: once a black man was in office, would he be loyal to his race or to his country? Elected the fortieth President of the United States, President Pryor opens his first press conference calmly and with only a hint of racial pride. Before long, though, he allows that he will consider appointing the Black Panther leader Huey Newton as director of the F.B.I. ("He knows the ins and outs of the F.B.I., if anybody knows") and intends to get more black quarterbacks and coaches into the N.F.L. It's the same gag about Black Power and white anxiety that's at the center of "Putney Swope," the 1969 Robert Downey, Sr., film in which a seemingly mild-mannered black advertising executive is accidentally elected to chair the board of a white-run firm, whereupon he throws out all but one token white, replaces them with black militants, and renames the firm Truth & Soul, Inc.
More and more, a black President was an ordinary sight--on the screen, at least. Morgan Freeman, as President Tom Beck, prepared the world for an all-destroying comet in the 1998 science-fiction film "Deep Impact"; in the television series "24," President David Palmer, played by Dennis Haysbert, fends off a nuclear attack--and after he is killed by a sniper his brother becomes President. In Hollywood's imaginings, a black President had become an incidental plot point, a casting choice.
Few politicians, no matter how young or self-aware, could have resisted the incessant encouragement, inquiry, flattery, and adulation that were now coming Obama's way. In Africa, he had been greeted day after day with rapt attention and ecstatic cheering. At the Harkin steak fry in Indianola, the testing ground for Presidential hopefuls, he had won an enthusiastic ovation and the plaudits of local and national columnists. And now, as he toured the country to promote The Audacity of Hope, his days began and ended with talk of a Presidential run. The Audacity of Hope was not nearly as introspective as Dreams from My Father. There were personal moments in it, but the book was purposefully, cautiously political. It was a shrewd candidate's book, tackling in moderately liberal terms the issues of domestic policy, foreign affairs, race, religion, and law. Like Obama's letter to Daily Kos and his speech before the evangelicals, it established a tone: cool, polite, insistent on refusing the mud and assaults of the cable shouters and Internet haters, intent on winning over everyone. For such a consistent Democrat, Obama wrote a book that seemed not so much to straddle the ideological divide as to embrace the entire landscape of political opinion all at once. Joe Klein, writing in Time, said he had toted up at least fifty instances in which Obama provided "excruciatingly judicious" on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand formulations. ("The tendency is so pronounced," Klein wrote, "that it almost seems an obsessive-compulsive tic.") And David Brooks, the conservative Times columnist, wrote, "He seems like the kind of guy who spends his first 15 minutes at a restaurant debating the relative merits of fish versus meat." And yet, Klein was not exasperated with Obama for long; his piece, like his coverage, was largely admiring. And Brooks wrote that Obama's deliberative nature was "surely the antidote" to the Bush Presidency; his column, which ran in mid-October, was headlined "Run, Barack, Run."
Some critics argued that by insisting on civility as an essential virtue in politics, Obama risked acting superior to politics itself. Obama's equanimity, his critics seemed to suggest, was a form of vanity, a lack of real conviction. The Democratic left wondered what it could make of a politician who expressed admiration for Ronald Reagan; internationalists and hawks wondered whether Obama, reacting to the disaster in Iraq, hadn't fashioned a liberal rationale for isolationism. The Audacity of Hope was an intelligent book but an elusive one. And yet many readers and potential voters embraced Obama, not least for his message of a new tone in political discourse. Timing was the crucial factor; the book came along just as the Bush Presidency--marked by an obstreperous partisanship, an obsession with secrecy and absolutism--was reaching its nadir.
More and more, it seemed obvious that the "perfect storm" that Rouse had talked about as a possibility in January, 2006, was now forming. There would be no incumbent or sitting Vice-President in the 2008 race. The Republicans were in a state of real collapse; not only was Bush himself profoundly unpopular, but the Party itself, which had instigated a prolonged conservative era beginning with Ronald Reagan's 1980 election, now seemed starved of ideas, save a tired insistence on tax-cutting free-market absolutism. Hillary Clinton was the putative frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, but her family legacy had ineradicable negatives that she would have to contend with. And here was Obama, a potential candidate with a slender political record but an appealing character and life story, clean hands on the issue of Iraq, and a rhetoric of change that was exciting liberal Democrats more than anyone since Robert Kennedy. Finally, there were the historical trends and polling numbers that indicated that an African-American--in particular, this African-American--could succeed in a national election.
The voices for caution in Obama's camp argued that the majority of the electorate would want him to pay his dues in the Senate and slowly accumulate more political credibility and experience. But that argument was fast losing its appeal. More and more, people who had known Obama since his Springfield days told him that such moments do not come along twice in the life of a politician. What would he gain by waiting? Would he really be in a better spot if Hillary Clinton won? When would a chance even half as propitious come again? Obama might end up regretting his own reluctance or hesitation for the rest of his life.
At a magazine convention in Phoenix on October 23, 2006, I interviewed Obama in front of an audience of hundreds of editors and publishers. The publicity tour for The Audacity of Hope was in full swing and he was groping his way toward running. In January, Obama had kept Pete Rouse's "perfect storm" memo to himself, and had told Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he would absolutely serve out his term in the Senate and not run for President; the day before my interview with him, he altered his tone, telling Russert that he had "thought about the possibility." While he hadn't made any decisions, the unmistakable and well-calibrated message was that he was in the water, waist-high. Obama came to Phoenix prepared to deal with the most obvious question--of experience.
"There's a hotel, I think it's the Capitol Hilton, in Washington. And downstairs, where there are a lot of banquet halls, there's a whole row of all the Presidents," he said. "You walk by the forty-three that have been there and you realize there are only about ten who you have any idea what they did.... I don't know what exactly makes somebody ready to be President. It's not clear that J.F.K. was 'ready' to be President, it's not clear that Harry Truman, when he was elevated, was 'ready.' And yet, somehow, some people respond and some people don't. My instinct is that people who are ready are folks who go into it understanding the gravity of their work, and are able to combine vision and judgment." Vision and judgment: down the line these would be terms of great use to Obama--the first to indicate a sense of intellect and youthful vigor, the second to underline his opposition to the war in Iraq.
What also seemed interesting about Obama that day was his capacity for straight talk on religion, a subject that Democrats had often handled as if it were a hand grenade with the pin out. Rare for a politician, he talked about the role of skepticism in his psychology and spiritual life. His own faith, he said, "admits doubt, and uncertainty, and mystery."
"It's not 'faith' if you are absolutely certain," he said, adding, "Evolution is more grounded in my experience than angels."
Obama's book tour was reminiscent of Colin Powell's experience when, in September, 1995, he was promoting his autobiography, My American Journey; he was constantly peppered with questions about running for the Republican nomination to face Bill Clinton in the general election. Like Obama, Powell was lauded as the political version of Oprah Winfrey--an iconic person of color readily accepted by audiences of all races. "It's a modern phenomenon," says Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "You heard it about Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods before his problems: 'Oh, he's not black. He's famous.'" For a Time cover story published in October, 2006, Joe Klein asked Obama about the comparisons. "Figures like Oprah, Tiger, Michael Jordan give people a shortcut to express their better instincts," Obama said. "You can be cynical about this. You can say, It's easy to love Oprah. It's harder to embrace the idea of putting more resources into opportunities for young black men--some of whom aren't so lovable. But I don't feel that way. I think it's healthy, a good instinct. I just don't want it to stop with Oprah. I'd rather say, If you feel good about me, there's a whole lot of young men out there who could be me if given the chance."
Throughout the autumn of 2006, Obama cast around for advice, and even took some old allies by surprise; it seemed they had barely adjusted to his fame beyond the South Side. He called Ivory Mitchell, the chairman of the Democratic organization in the Fourth Ward who had helped him win his seat in the State Senate just ten years earlier. "I was in the hospital for a knee replacement, just coming out of anesthesia, and my cell phone is ringing," Mitchell recalled. "'Hey, Ivory, this is Barack. I think I want to run for President.' I was seven hours out of surgery and I said, 'Barack, we just sent you to the Senate!'"
In David Axelrod's Chicago office in the River North neighborhood, just after the November, 2006, midterm elections, Obama met with Axelrod, Gibbs, Jarrett, Rouse, Steve Hildebrand, the strategist David Plouffe, Obama's close friend Marty Nesbitt, and his scheduler and aide, Alyssa Mastromonaco. The office walls are covered with framed newspaper pages announcing the victories of Axelrod's many clients. Rouse had prepared a background memo that included questions like "Are you intimidated by the prospect of being leader of the free world?"
Which made Obama laugh.
"Someone's got to do it," he said.
In this and other early meetings that fall, Obama and his staff discussed all the obvious political ramifications. Was it really time? Was Obama prepared for the rigors of non-stop travel and scrutiny, the constant atmosphere of BlackBerry urgency, brushfires from early morning until late at night? Did he want to spend month after month in the first four primary states--Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina? Would he ever be able to catch up with Clinton, who was thirty points ahead, in terms of fund-raising and field organizations? Was Obama willing to endure the inhuman effort that a Presidential race demanded when the chance of winning was so remote? "We thought he could win," Plouffe said, "but it was a small possibility ... Barack had never been through the crucible. He'd never had negative ads run against him. So, the question was, could he deal with the intense scrutiny and the attacks that would come. It was an open question. It was going to be grueling. You'll never be home, it's lonely, you're going to be a huge underdog. You've just come off this book tour where you got all this adulation and pretty soon you're going to be in Iowa talking to twenty people, and none of them are going to be for you."
The Democrats had just achieved a majority and so life in the Senate for Obama might become more satisfying, as it had when the Democrats took the State Senate in Illinois. At home, he talked with his wariest constituent: Michelle Obama. For a long time, Michelle had held their family together, taking care of the girls, working at the university, managing what needed doing as a political spouse. A run for the Presidency would mean two years of constant campaigning, of an absent husband and father, a brutal process of public exposure and unpredictable turns. Obama's books were best-sellers. The family was financially secure. Was this life so bad? Did they really want to endure the separations and risks of a Presidential race? As late as Thanksgiving, some members of Obama's inner circle would have put the odds against his running, despite his now public admission that he was thinking it through.
The public adulation was extraordinary. One afternoon Abner Mikva waited for Obama at a famous German restaurant in the Loop called the Berghoff, which was just around the corner from Obama's Chicago office. "He was just a few minutes late but he pulled up in his black S.U.V. He hadn't walked, and I teased him about it," Mikva recalled. "Barack said, 'If I had walked, I would have been an hour late.' As it was he couldn't even eat. So many people came to the table just wanting to shake his hand. He said, 'It's getting more and more like this all the time.'"
Mikva's friend Newton Minow had had similar experiences of Obama-mania. Throughout the summer he had been wary of Obama's running so soon for the Presidency--until he turned on C-SPAN and watched Obama's speech in Indianola. "I said, by God, he is Jack Kennedy all over again." On October 26th, Minow published an op-ed article in the Tribune headlined "Why Obama Should Run for President."
Obama read the article and asked to meet with Minow and Mikva. The three men assembled at Minow's office downtown. Obama began by telling them that Michelle was extremely reluctant; they were both concerned that he would be away from his daughters for nearly two years if he ran.
"Between Abner and me, we have six daughters, and they've all turned out pretty well," Minow replied. "Mine are all lawyers, Ab's are a rabbi, a judge, a lawyer, and we learned that a father's biggest role was when they are teenagers."
Barack wrote down a few notes and said that he wanted to mention that to Michelle.
"Then Abner was tough on him on security," Minow said. "We told him that there was a strong likelihood that someone would take a shot at him. And he said, 'You sound like Michelle.' He didn't seem rattled by it, though. He seemed less concerned than we were."
Obama talked about his chances and said that, if he lost, at least he would learn a lot about the country and have a good shot at the Vice-Presidency.
Back in Washington, Obama's confidant in the Senate, Richard Durbin, argued that greater seniority in the Senate could prove a liability. The two modern senators who went directly to the Presidency, Warren Harding and John Kennedy, had done so after short careers in the Senate. John Kerry had spent a lot of his time in debate in 2004 defending the many controversial votes he inevitably racked up over two decades on Capitol Hill. "I said to him, 'Do you really think sticking around the Senate for four more years and casting a thousand more votes will make you more qualified for President?'" Durbin recalled. Tom Daschle, who gave up a chance to run for President and then lost his seat in the Senate, had become another of Obama's mentors, and at a long meal, Daschle told him that his lack of experience was an asset, not a drawback. "I argued that windows of opportunity for running for the Presidency close quickly," Daschle recalled. "He shouldn't assume, if he passes up this window, that there will be another." The longer he stayed in Washington, Daschle told Obama, the harder it would be to present himself as a candidate of change. Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, and Kerry were just a few of the senators who, as Presidential candidates, suffered from an image of institutional calcification; their experience was, for many voters, offset by years of stentorian debate and stultifying compromise. Even the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, privately told Obama that he should at least consider running. Reid, as a Democratic Party leader, could obviously not show his hand, but he, too, was worried about Hillary Clinton's negatives.
There were, however, admirers of Obama's who worried that, like a college athlete who jumps into the professional ranks before graduation, he could do himself irreparable damage. Harry Belafonte, who had been deeply engaged in the civil-rights movement while he was on the rise in show business, was in contact with Obama and he worried about him. "Because I do see in him something so terribly precious and I see in him such a remarkable potential, I would rather think of him as a work in progress," Belafonte said. "We are prone to push people beyond their time. We are so eager to devour our young. I think Senator Obama is a force, and I think he needs to see a lot about this nation and he needs to go to a lot of places. We've seen so many others who have come to high places and have failed so miserably. I think he could be our exception to the rule."
In November of 2006, at the offices of a Washington law firm, Obama held one of a series of secret brainstorming sessions about his chances. His friends and advisers asked if he could overcome the charge of inexperience. Could he challenge the Clinton machine? After the meeting had gone on for a while, Broderick Johnson, a prominent Washington lawyer and lobbyist, asked, "What about race?"
Obama replied, "I believe America is ready," and little more was said on the subject. Obama could not run a campaign like Jesse Jackson's, which had relied heavily on a black base; instead, he would aim at a notionally limitless coalition organized around a center-left politics.
At around the same time, Obama had a telephone conversation with one of his African-American fundraisers. The fundraiser told Obama that he wasn't sure it was the right time, that Obama was vulnerable on the question of experience, that he had never run a state office or a large business. Obama answered that if experience necessarily led to good judgment then Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would be supreme. "But look where that got us," he said.
The two men talked some more--about the Clintons, about the Republicans, and, most of all, about the barriers that Obama would face. Finally, the fundraiser said, "It's funny you call. I've taken my own plebiscite and there is an interesting divide."
Obama cut him off and said, "Yeah, yeah, I know. The white folks want me to run. And the black folks think I'm going to get killed."
That was it, exactly. The donor, who was older than Obama, had keen memories of the assassinations of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. When King was shot in Memphis, Obama was six years old and living in Indonesia. The older man felt that there was an emotional and temporal divide. "If you are brought up in that experience and heard the things you've heard, then the idea of a black guy running for President was a little scary," he admitted later. As both a candidate and then as President, Obama would make jokes about "getting shot" in order to put friends and visitors at ease; he and Michelle had made their peace with this new reality and were determined not to feel its weight.
Finally, Obama concluded that while he was not yet committed to running, it wasn't worthwhile to be consumed in speculation about the readiness, or not, of the American people for a black President. "If they're not ready now," he said more than once, "they won't be ready in my lifetime."
Mike Strautmanis, who had first met the Obamas when he was a paralegal at Sidley Austin, where Michelle was working, had become chief counsel in the Senate. Even though he was younger than many of the black political advisers and fundraisers talking to Obama and expressing their anxieties, he, too, felt angry at times with the white liberals for pushing so hard. "They weren't seeing the United States and remembering its history clearly enough for what it was," he said. In his most pessimistic moments, Strautmanis believed that "once again their ideals would lead to something terrible, and it was my friend who was going to pay the price."
And yet it calmed him to watch Obama sort through his options. "I remember a meeting in November, 2006," he recalled. "I'd heard from Pete Rouse how Barack and Michelle were going through this process, the questions they were asking. I realized that Barack had been thinking about this for a very long time. He'd been thinking about the political moment we're in for at least ten years. He was testing, seeing how all the pieces fit together. Would the pieces be there? The money? The ability to create a national political organization and a loyal team? And the pieces meant nothing unless you understood the political moment and how to meet it. He had a very sophisticated view of that. He'd been making a detailed, layered analysis of national politics for a long time."
Obama's view, Valerie Jarrett said, was that "he would not lose because he's black, and, therefore, let's not dwell on the fact that he's black. Because if you dwell on it, and you make race an issue within the campaign, then it will become an issue." Jarrett, who was personally closer to the Obamas than anyone in his political circle, said that once they had been assured of the professionalism of the Secret Service, their anxieties eased. "I can't let that paralyze me," Obama said.
"There were so many opportunities for him to be afraid along this path and to turn back," Jarrett recalled. "You know, when you were talking about the brothers saying, don't run because you might lose? They weren't worried about him. They were worried about themselves. They didn't want to be embarrassed."
Around Thanksgiving of 2006, John Rogers and others in Obama's circle went to see "Bobby," a film written and directed by Emilio Estevez. The film was set in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy and many of his supporters were staying at the time of the 1968 California Democratic primary. These were what turned out to be the last hours of Kennedy's life. What moved Rogers and his friends was not the bloody climax of the film, but, rather, the way that the film's many ordinary characters--a retired doorman, a soldier, a beautician, a black kitchen worker, two Mexican busboys, the campaign donors, and the long-haired volunteers--were swept up in the promise of Kennedy's campaign, the way that they represented a multi-ethnic coalition. The film suggested, once more, R.F.K.'s campaign in 1968 as a model of idealism. In the wake of emotional events like the Africa trip and his meetings with crowds of people during his cross-country book tour, Obama and his circle were arriving at the conclusion that he could run and, if things broke the right way, win the Presidency.
"We were talking about this sense of passion and energy and love for Bobby and he was experiencing it in his life," Rogers recalled. "It's a rare thing to generate that kind of passion. You could just tell that it clearly affected him, what he was experiencing on the road. People were pushing him. I had had the sense he was going to push it off for the next time but when I met with him that November, December in the office here, you could sense that he was pretty well there. He was taking it really seriously and he was going to go to Hawaii and think about it. But reading body language, I had the strong feeling that he was going to move at warp speed."
Rogers, who had played basketball with Michelle's brother, Craig, at Princeton, had been a big supporter of Bill Bradley's political career. He told Obama that one of Bradley's problems was that he had waited too long to make his run; that, by the time he did, his moment had passed. Rogers also described watching Hillary Clinton, who had been in Chicago to speak at the Economic Club downtown. It was a dull spectacle that gave him hope. "There wasn't a chuckle or smile in the hour," he said. "It was drab, facts and figures and numbers and policy points. And I thought Hillary wouldn't capture the imagination of the American people."
On November 28, 2006, David Axelrod wrote Obama a tough-minded memorandum to force the issue. The memo asserted that Obama, because of his youth and non-partisan image, was the ideal antidote to the Bush Presidency: "You are uniquely suited for these times. No one among the potential candidates within our party is as well positioned to rekindle our lost idealism as Americans and pick up the mantle of change. No one better represents a new generation of leadership, more focused on practical solutions to today's challenges than old dogmas of the left and right. That is why your Convention speech resonated so beautifully. And it remains the touchstone for our campaign moving forward." Hillary Clinton's strategy, he said, will be "to suggest that she has the beef, while we offer only sizzle." She would, however, have a difficult task "escaping the well-formulated perception of her among swing voters as a left-wing ideologue." Axelrod did not discount John Edwards. He had worked for Edwards in his 2004 Presidential campaign--an experience that ended unhappily when, among other factors, Edwards's wife, Elizabeth, lost faith in him and helped to push him off the team. Edwards was ahead in Iowa, but, Axelrod said, that was because he was a "relentless campaigner and debater."
Echoing the advice of Durbin and Daschle, Axelrod counseled against waiting for a moment when Obama was more seasoned: "You will never be hotter than you are right now." A longer voting record could hang "from your neck like the anchor from the Lusitania."
There was no getting around the difficulties. "This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience. It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don't know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much [about] what is written and said about you. You don't relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched."
It was a shrewd memo, one written not only by a cunning political consultant attuned to the political moment but also by a friend who had the capacity to provoke Obama, purposively, preventatively. He made sure to finish on a note of idealistic purpose. "All of this," Axelrod wrote, "may be worth enduring for the chance to change the world."
Not long afterward, Obama was speaking with the Reverend Alvin Love, from the Lilydale First Baptist Church, on the South Side, an old friend from his organizing days. The two men were talking about Obama's decision when, finally, Love said, "You know, my father always said you have to strike when the iron is hot."
Obama laughed. "The iron can't get any hotter," he said.
Finally, Rogers and Jarrett, as well as wealthy allies like Penny Pritzker, thought that his growing appeal could be leveraged to raise enough money to make him a serious candidate. Pritzker, who had first met the Obamas in the mid-nineties when Craig Robinson coached her child in a summer Y.M.C.A. basketball league, became Obama's national finance chairman; her brother Jay did the same for Hillary Clinton. "I knew Barack would be able to raise the money," Rogers said. "He was always very disciplined about making his calls and building the relationships. Barack was the Michael Jordan of the political world. Jordan came into the N.B.A. as a gifted player, but he worked at getting better. Barack had all the skills but he also worked at getting better and better. He knew how to organize a team."
In mid-December, Obama told his inner circle that he had moved "past the fifty-fifty mark," but he wanted to spend the holidays in Hawaii with his family and think it through to the end. The day before he left, he even told David Plouffe that he was "ninety per cent certain that I am running" and would give the "final green light" when he got back. Plouffe's concern was that the normalcy and fun of the trip with his family would awaken Obama to the many pleasures of private life that he would be giving up.
Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, had been teasing Obama about running for President for years. At Christmas in 2005, she bought some "Obama '08" T-shirts from one of the draft movements and put them under the Christmas tree. Obama had just laughed and rolled his eyes. By Christmas of 2006, she said, "It felt less funny. It felt like people had been waiting for him." In Hawaii, as their daughters played in the sand, the Obamas talked through their last concerns--security, the loss of privacy, the effect on Malia and Sasha.
When Obama came home after the New Year, he said, "Well, I've decided to do it, but I want to go home just this one last weekend to make sure I don't have buyer's remorse." He did not. He was sure. Late at night, on January 6th, Obama called Plouffe and said, "It's a go. You can start hiring some core people quietly but swear them to secrecy."
On January 21, 2007, Obama attended the National Football Conference championship game between the Chicago Bears and the New Orleans Saints, at Soldier Field, in Chicago. Invited to the suite of Linda Johnson Rice, the chairman and C.E.O. of Ebony, Obama mingled with other guests, including Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League and the former mayor of New Orleans. Obama admitted that he was moving toward a run for President--by then it was an open secret; on January 16th, two years after his swearing-in at the Senate, he had filed the necessary papers for an exploratory committee--and, when Morial asked him what his plan was, Obama said that he had to win the caucus in Iowa, an almost entirely white state.
"If I do that," he said, "I'm credible."