Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Walking out onto the thrust stage that almost put speakers among the crowd, Barack shook Durbin’s hand and hugged him before turning to the podium. He repeatedly thanked the audience of five thousand for their cheers and applause before the venue finally quieted. In each cutaway shot, white-on-blue Obama signs bobbed everywhere on the convention floor. Barack began by telling the story of his parents. Jack Corrigan and a “really deathly nervous” Vicky Rideout stood just offstage. She thought Barack “seemed nervous to me at first,” and up in a skybox, Mary Beth Cahill recalled feeling that Barack “seemed quite nervous,” and “he started out a little shaky.” But when Barack mentioned his mother’s Kansas birth, that delegation’s audible reaction made Barack pause. He looked their way, gestured and smiled, and appeared to relax. “I saw a moment where he took a breath, and his shoulders went back,” Vicki recalled. “Then he just hit his stride and got going,” Cahill explained. Up in the Obama team’s temporary box, Terry Link and Darrel Thompson realized it too. “After that, it’s another speech. That’s when the speech takes off,” Darrel remembered.

  Barack explained his African name, asserting that “in a tolerant America, your name is no barrier to success.” The crowd reaction built, and to television viewers, Obama signs were everywhere. “It was awesome,” Tom Lindenfeld remembered. “That’s what we’re doing this whole thing for,” this “big orchestration,” because “without the signs, he would not have had the punch.” Barack declared that “my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.” The crowd erupted in applause, with the TV cameras again showcasing the Obama signs. The crowd’s energy and the speaker “feed off each other,” as Lindenfeld put it, and Mary Beth Cahill recalled that in the arena “it was riveting” with “the people in the hall reacting so viscerally to him.” Barack described Americans’ faith “that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door,” that “we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution.”

  Barack spoke about Illinoisans both downstate and in the collar counties before declaring that in inner-city neighborhoods, “children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” Then he turned to praise the character and courage of John Kerry, stating that Kerry “believes in the constitutional freedoms that have made our country the envy of the world.” The broadcast camera cut away to show Jesse Jackson Sr. standing and applauding. Barack told of meeting a young marine enlistee in East Moline and praised America’s troops, with the next cutaway shot showing Hillary Rodham Clinton standing and clapping. Asserting that Americans are “all connected as one people,” Barack said that “if there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child,” and that “if there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.”

  Barack warned of “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.” As the crowd erupted, Barack’s pace accelerated, and his voice strengthened. “There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America, there’s the United States of America.” The television broadcast again cut away to Jesse Jackson Sr. rising and applauding. “The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them too: we worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.” Barack’s voice had intensified, and the power of his words crescendoed. On the convention floor, Robert Gibbs turned to David Axelrod and asked, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” and Axelrod, standing just behind a pair of broadcasters, heard CNN’s Jeff Greenfield tell ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “This is a great fucking speech!”

  When Barack rhetorically asked, “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?” the crowd immediately answered, “Hope.” Barack sustained that theme, invoking the phrase he first had heard from Jeremiah Wright: “the audacity of hope. In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.” He closed by declaring that if John Kerry was elected president, “out of this long political darkness, a brighter day will come.” The hall erupted as Michelle hugged him and cutaway TV shots again pictured Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jesse Jackson Sr. Dick Durbin and his wife Loretta joined Barack and Michelle onstage as cheers and applause continued.

  On the convention floor, tears flowed freely in the Illinois delegation. “Some of the most hardened politicians that I ever met, people who wouldn’t hesitate to knock their mothers over to get whatever it is they wanted, had tears streaming down their cheeks,” state senator Jeff Schoenberg recounted. “I had tears in my eyes,” Senate president Emil Jones Jr. confirmed. “It was electrifying.” To comptroller Dan Hynes, “it was surreal.”

  Up in the Obama team’s skybox, “almost everybody in the room was crying,” state senator Terry Link remembered, including Valerie Jarrett and Penny Pritzker. When Link’s cell phone rang, it was Republican Tommy Walsh: “Our buddy hit a home run tonight.” Backstage, everyone was ecstatic. For Jack Corrigan, “it exceeded my wildest expectations,” and “right after the speech,” Vicky Rideout turned to Jack to say, “‘We just elected our first black president.’ ‘Yeah, you might be right in twelve years or so,’” Corrigan replied. Then Barack appeared, whom Corrigan had never met. Vicky took the initiative. “I introduced him to Corrigan, and I said, ‘This is the person who selected you for this.’”

  On MSNBC’s live telecast, host Chris Matthews said, “I have to tell you, a little chill in my legs right now. That is an amazing moment in history right there. A keynoter like I have never heard.” Matthews’s guest, Representative Dick Gephardt, agreed. “A star is born.” Matthews concurred: “A star is born,” highlighting Barack’s “strong language” about how black families needed to take responsibility for their children’s education. On CNN, Jeff Greenfield praised Barack’s remarks as “one of the really great keynote speeches of the last quarter century.”

  On the convention floor, a Latina delegate from Nevada spoke to veteran Washington Post reporter David S. Broder. “Look at the energy he brought to this room,” she remarked. “He is definitely a rising star.” Watching Barack’s performance from his nearby home, John Kerry “was rightly blown away,” one aide recalled. Barack’s own team fully appreciated what had just occurred. “I realized at that moment that his life would never be the same,” David Axelrod recalled. Jim Cauley put it similarly: “he was born that night,” as it was “the transformational moment.”

  Backstage, NBC’s Brian Williams asked both Barack and Michelle to join him for a live appearance on Matthews’s MSNBC show. “You are, after all, a state senator from Illinois,” Williams began, “so it’s fair to ask you, when you get up there and see all those signs with your name on them and hear the chant that happens to match your name, what must that feeling be like?” Barack replied that “it’s an enormous honor to be able to address a convention like this, to have the opportunity to speak to the country about the values that I care about . . . and it’s especially nice to do it in front of my wife.” Williams sought Michelle’s reaction. “I was incredibly proud. And I am tough on him. And all I have to say is, honey, you didn’t screw up, so good job!” Michelle said, “I was the bigger ball of nerves, even though I tried to act like I wasn’t,” but Barack �
��was terrific” and “he brought me to tears. . . . He was fabulous.” Williams asked Barack what came next, saying he had “just heard a pundit behind me refer to the White House.” Barack cited a multiday downstate swing his campaign had scheduled. “As soon as this convention is over, we are loading up our kids in an RV. We are traveling around to county fairs, eating ice cream . . . and meeting voters along the way.” The media “is fickle,” and voters want to know “is this a guy who delivers,” who can “actually help my life in some concrete way?” Then Michelle said, “I am just hoping that our kids watched the whole thing.” She had told her mother Marian “they can only stay up as long as they keep it on this channel, and that if they want to see Mom, they have to wait until Dad finishes.”

  Minutes later, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell declared, “the real breakout tonight is Obama,” that “Obama is a rock star,” with Chris Matthews adding, “I’ve just seen the first black president.” Across the nation, any number of TV viewers who had known Barack—or “Barry”—years earlier had trouble grasping what they had just seen. One Haines Annex friend from twenty-four years earlier thought “maybe that’s Barry’s brother.” Phil Boerner’s cousin Pern Beckman, who had shared beers with Barack in Morningside Heights, “watched the entire 2004 convention speech and never made the association. I’d said to my wife, ‘Why isn’t this guy running for president?’” and only long after did Phil tell Pern whom he had seen. “About six months later it turns out that I’ve known him all along. That’s how much of a transformation took place from this shy kid” he had known in the early 1980s. In New York, Business International’s Barry Rutizer was “completely dumbfounded” when he realized who the speaker was. “I practically fell out of my chair.” In Honolulu, Madelyn Dunham called Barack’s cell phone and left a message. “That was a very nice speech, Barack. You did well.” State Senate colleague James Clayborne left an archly congratulatory message recalling their unhappy sojourn to Los Angeles. “Something’s wrong. Four years ago, we were at the convention together, and four years later I’m sitting on my couch watching you give the keynote. Something’s wrong.” In Chicago, most of Barack’s campaign staffers who had not gone to Boston gathered at Trinity United Church of Christ to watch the speech. In Springfield, the man who had done more than any other person to bring Barack to this point in his political career, Dan Shomon, watched the speech at the VFW post on Old Jacksonville Road.82

  Barack’s campaign team had booked a three-hour after-party at a large downtown restaurant, Vinalia, and worries that too few people would show up were proven terribly wrong when a crowd of thousands descended on the venue. “It was mayhem,” Claire Serdiuk recalled, with Jim Cauley and Darrel Thompson having trouble getting Barack inside. “He made some short remarks at that event, even better than on the convention floor,” Illinois delegate David Munar remembered. “He said something like ‘If you’re expecting another speech, I am going to disappoint you. But I am glad I moved you, inspired you, I’m happy with it. I just want to remind you that they’re just words. It is our job to make those words reality. The hard work is not making a speech, the hard work is living up to the speech.’ He was so eloquent and so on point. . . . It moved me more than anything, that he had that self-awareness. He checked himself immediately.”

  Tuesday’s Chicago Tribune commended Barack for “a brilliant, passionate and heartening speech,” and USA Today christened him “a rising Democratic star.” At campaign headquarters, things were “crazy,” with hundreds of people calling to volunteer and tens of thousands of dollars arriving in Internet contributions. “I don’t think any of us had any idea that it would be like it was,” national finance director Susan Shadow remembered. “We were just overwhelmed.” A number of staffers had seen an advance text of Barack’s speech, “but none of us was prepared for the reaction it got,” young press assistant Tommy Vietor recalled. On paper, Barack’s words were “nowhere close to the way he delivered it,” as Vicky Rideout also appreciated. “The words are not amazing in any way. They’re somewhat routine.” What had captivated television viewers was the passionate intensity of Barack’s delivery as he responded to the crowd in the hall. His performance had been rousing, but it was not because of “the words on the page.”

  In Boston, plaudits rained down. Chicago mayor Rich Daley told reporters that Barack “hit a grand slam home run. He had passion and emotion, and that’s what it’s all about.” Congressman Lane Evans told the Journal-Register’s Bernie Schoenburg that “there’s already people talking about Barack being a presidential candidate,” and USA Today quoted a Pennsylvania delegate saying, “I think he could be our first black president.” Even a Republican National Committee spokeswoman acknowledged that “Obama is a rising star,” and she was echoed by Salim Muwakkil, who years earlier had publicized black nationalists’ hostility toward Barack. Now he was “a genuine rising star” who “literally embodies our multicultural future.”

  Just like the night before, Barack took the acclaim in stride while weighing other concerns. “Malia is six, and I can’t believe it, but a third of her childhood is over already,” Barack told David Mendell. How much of her young life had he missed because of politics? “Too much,” Barack answered. By midday Wednesday, Barack was running forty minutes behind schedule, but he took the time to speak to a Massachusetts state capitol gathering of 165 high school students. “We’ve got to call an audible and skip some of these things,” journalists heard him say. “I’ve got to see my wife.” That evening, when the national networks commenced their live coverage, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw told viewers he wondered “who will be remembered most” once the convention ended, “Kerry or Obama?” Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor said Barack “could be one of the most exciting and important voices in American politics in the next half century,” and the Boston Globe understandably noted that he “seemed to have the term ‘rising star’ formally appended to his name.”

  At a Science Monitor–hosted breakfast, Barack again endorsed Bill Cosby’s critique of black America, saying his “underlying premise was right on target,” that Cosby’s “underlying idea . . . that we have young people who aren’t disciplined, that we have a strain of anti-intellectualism . . . is absolutely true.” Barack also cited his own family’s financial worries, saying they had recently taken out a second mortgage on their East View condominium and that the challenge of living in both Chicago and Washington on a U.S. senator’s salary of $158,100 “is a source of concern.”

  Filming an interview with African American broadcaster Tavis Smiley, Barack stressed that “I’m very clear that I’ve got to stay focused on Illinois, and that . . . the worst thing that I could do is start taking all this hype and all this press seriously.” While magazine editor Tina Brown mused in the Washington Post about “Obama-mania” and Barack’s “genderless air,” the drumbeat of “rising star” accolades continued apace, with Friday’s Boston Globe, the Harvard Crimson, and Massachusetts’s black weekly, the Bay State Banner, all adopting the label. On Friday Barack and Jim Cauley headed to Boston’s Logan Airport because the candidate’s five-day downstate tour would get under way first thing on Saturday. At security, the new rock star was selected for an additional pat-down, and then “we had to hide him in the lounge because we couldn’t move him through the airport. It was a little bit Beatle-ish,” Cauley recalled.

  One by-product of Barack’s newfound national fame was an intense spurt of interest in his soon-to-be-reissued Dreams From My Father. Less than forty-eight hours after Barack’s keynote speech, Dreams ranked number 10 on Amazon’s bestseller list, and Crown quickly accelerated its schedule, aiming to get forty thousand copies into stores by August 10 rather than at the end of the month. Editor Rachel Klayman of course called Barack “a rising political star,” and New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams and Crain’s New York Business both reported that Jane Dystel was talking with publishers about what Crain’s called “a mid-six-figure advance” for a new book about Barack’s �
�ideas and beliefs.” Dystel confirmed “we are already talking about it,” adding drily that “this one should make some money.” Within a month’s time, the new paperback of Dreams would appear on the New York Times’ paperback nonfiction bestseller list, remaining there for fourteen of the next eighteen weeks.83

  Only on Friday evening, back home in Hyde Park, did Barack realize just how demanding this downstate tour would be. Thirty-nine stops were scheduled over the next five days. After the rented RV pulled up at East View Saturday morning, the first stop was a Hyde Park event, which would be followed by seven more, with the long day ending four hundred miles later in DeKalb after an evening cookout in the Moline backyard of downstate campaign director Jeremiah Posedel, who remembered that Barack “called my cell phone the night before the tour started and he was very pissed.” Barack’s staff had little sympathy for the candidate’s unhappiness. Chief scheduler Peter Coffey recalled that “Jeremiah put together a great schedule,” one that now was all the more important after Barack’s five-day celebrity circuit in Boston. “He needed to see these towns, he needed to be in these communities,” Peter knew, “to remind him that this is the job he’s running for” on behalf of regular Illinoisans, not broadcast interviewers.