Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  When the Chicago Tribune’s Jeff Zeleny asked Barack how work on his forthcoming book was progressing, Barack answered “slowly,” saying it would be very different from the still-bestselling Dreams. “It will be less autobiographical and be more focused on public policy and the direction I think the country should be going.” Following the September 3 death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and President Bush’s September 5 nomination of conservative circuit judge John G. Roberts Jr. as Rehnquist’s successor, Roberts met privately with Barack and other senators. Impressed with Roberts’s sterling credentials and judicial demeanor, Barack was “sorely tempted” to support his confirmation, telling David Axelrod that “If I become president someday, I don’t want to see my own, qualified nominees for the Court shot down because of ideology.”

  Chief of staff Pete Rouse vehemently disagreed, eventually changing Barack’s mind. “I will be voting against John Roberts’s nomination. I do so with considerable reticence,” Barack said on the Senate floor before Roberts was confirmed by a 78–22 margin, with Democrats splitting evenly for and against. “It was a close call,” Barack told broadcaster Tavis Smiley, because “I do not think that John Roberts is Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas,” the two most conservative justices. Yet Barack objected strenuously to “the sort of broad-brush dogmatic attacks” that interest groups launched against Senate Democrats like Vermont’s Patrick Leahy who voted to confirm Roberts. In a long essay on the progressive Daily Kos Web site, Barack criticized “vilifying good allies” and said he was “convinced that . . . 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.” Most Americans “don’t think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced,” but they are “aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent.” John Roberts was “a conservative judge who is (like it or not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee).” Attacks on Democrats who supported Roberts “make no sense,” because “to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic party, and demand fealty to the one, ‘true’ progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward.” Barack warned that “by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority. We won’t be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate. . . . Whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.” But Barack was no centrist, because “on issues like health care, energy, education and tackling poverty, I don’t think Democrats have been bold enough,” and boldness will “require us to admit that some existing programs and policies don’t work very well” while also appreciating that “the tone we take matters.”

  In early October, Barack spoke on the Senate floor in fervent support of an amendment offered by Arizona Republican John McCain to prohibit torture. “Torture is morally reprehensible” and “the use of torture does not enhance our national security,” Barack declared. “We must make it absolutely clear . . . that the United States does not and will not condone this practice.” In the heavy schedule of often ponderous committee hearings convened by the trio of panels on which he sat, Barack usually exhibited an easygoing manner. While Foreign Relations was far more interesting than Environment and Public Works, Barack also enjoyed a highly active role on Veterans Affairs, partly because of the friendly bipartisan style that chairman Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, and Hawaii Democrat Danny Akaka, the ranking minority member, jointly cultivated. Bantering with one witness, Barack referred to the self-confident Robert Gibbs in joking that “my communications director would insist that he is the most important person in my office.” After Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to give a timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq during a testy Foreign Relations Committee hearing, an unhappy Barack called her responses “entirely unsatisfactory.” When Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Julie Gerberding offered bureaucratic doublespeak when questioned about avian flu preparedness, Barack expressed irritation—“that doesn’t make sense to me”—before becoming even more exasperated by Gerberding’s obfuscatory answers: “I have to say I’m now confused again.”13

  With Barack’s post-Katrina emergence on the national stage drawing no discernible criticism in either Illinois or the Senate, he and Pete Rouse decided that the rigorous self-restraint that had characterized Barack’s first eight months in Washington could be relaxed. But with Barack in D.C. no more than three evenings a week, Rouse realized that Barack was not able to “spend a lot of time building relationships” on Capitol Hill and around town. Barack “was off in Chicago most of the time because of his family,” and while Barack “could have developed much deeper personal relationships” if he was spending “more time in D.C.,” that was difficult “when you’re living in Chicago and that’s not your natural inclination.”

  With Michelle, Malia, and Sasha ensconced in the grand mansion on South Greenwood, Barack was “home more now than when he was running” for the U.S. Senate in 2002–2004, Michelle explained. Yet with town hall meetings and other events all over Illinois, Barack remained “a weekend dad. They see him on Sundays and Saturdays. That’s been what they know.” Michelle recounted that “it’s been all of their lives that it’s rare to have Dad at home for dinner, to see him in the mornings before you go to school, to have him there when you go to bed at night.” Most days she remained a single parent, although now one with more extensive household help and far greater financial resources. When Michelle was in Washington, she refused to stay in Barack’s modest apartment on Massachusetts Avenue NE. “When she came, I had to get a hotel room,” Barack explained.

  But there was no denying that Barack was deeply disappointed by life in the U.S. Senate. Pete Rouse called those feelings “the freshman blues,” but David Axelrod remembered Barack musing that perhaps he, just like Peter Fitzgerald, should give up on the Senate after one term and run for governor of Illinois in 2010. Visiting Springfield to speak to the Illinois Press Association, Barack decried the tenor of D.C. “What you have in Washington all too often are a Fox News version of the world and a New York Times version of the world talking past each other,” he told the Journal-Register’s Bernie Schoenburg. In by far the most revealing of the weekly podcasts he was recording, Barack described life as a U.S. senator to whoever listened in on his Obama.Senate.gov Web site. “Being away from your family” remained “the most difficult” challenge, but in other ways Capitol Hill was a letdown compared to Springfield. “You don’t really have genuine debate in the U.S. Senate in the ways that I had become accustomed to” in the statehouse, where “maybe one out of five, one out of ten bills that came up would actually be modified as a consequence of the debates” on the state Senate floor. “People would start asking the sponsor of a bill questions and maybe as a consequence of those questions the sponsor might withdraw the bill or he might promise to amend it.” Outcomes could be altered, and “it happened frequently enough to get a sense that . . . people were still listening to the merits” of whatever was being debated. In contrast, “here in Washington that doesn’t happen very much,” Barack observed. “I’ve seen a lack of independence on the part of my colleagues . . . on a lot of major issues.”14

  Barack’s Hopefund PAC held an all-day “policy workshop” at the Hyatt Regency Chicago to allow over one hundred donors who had given $2,500 or more to interact with Barack. Two days later Barack flew to Omaha for a private fund-raiser hosted by billionaire investor Warren
Buffett and his daughter Susie. Buffett had been impressed with Barack ever since watching his 2004 DNC speech and told the Omaha World-Herald, “I’m as enthusiastic about him as I am about anybody in political life.” Barack’s “very smart and articulate” and “a natural leader.” Susie Buffett added that “I want him to be president,” and Barack told the Tribune’s Jeff Zeleny that “the wonderful thing about Warren Buffett—similar to my relationship with Oprah—it’s somebody who doesn’t need anything from me.”

  In late October, Barack traveled to Virginia to campaign for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tim Kaine, and two weeks later a family vacation in Phoenix enabled him to appear with a Democratic Senate candidate before a large crowd at Arizona State University. An invitation to speak at civil rights heroine Rosa Parks’s funeral in Detroit preceded an appearance on the Comedy Channel’s Daily Show, where Barack told host Jon Stewart that the most pressing foreign affairs challenge was “how fast can we get our troops home without causing all-out chaos in Iraq.”

  A Kaiser Family Foundation report decrying the extent of “Sex on TV” occasioned an unusual broadside in which Barack decried “a mass media culture that saturates our airwaves with a steady stream of sex, violence, and materialism. . . . As we’re spending more free time immersed in this media culture, the amount of questionable content spilling across our screens is growing by the year.” Barack believed that “mass media is contributing to an overall coarsening of our culture,” and for children “the content of their viewing is not enriching their minds, but numbing them” by “trivializing the important and desensitizing us to the tragic.” Since “mindless violence and macho aggression on television begets the same behavior in our kids,” everyone should “start by turning off the TV altogether.” Particularly “as parents, we have an obligation to our children to turn off the TV, pick up a book, and read to them more often,” as Barack regularly did with his daughters. Yet he wished for a culture “that has a higher calling than simply peddling indecency and materialism for profit.”

  One search for profit that instead produced a $13,000 loss came to a quick end when Barack sold all of his SkyTerra Communications and AVI BioPharma stock, liquidating the “Freedom Trust” that attorney Bob Bauer had created six months earlier to oversee Barack’s holdings. Speaking at a commemoration of Robert F. Kennedy’s eightieth birthday, his widow Ethel called Barack “our next president,” and two days before Thanksgiving, Barack for the first time since his election formally addressed the Iraq war in a lengthy speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. Looking back to 2003, “at the very least, the administration shaded, exaggerated and selectively used the intelligence available in order to make the case for invasion.” Now “we have to manage our exit in a responsible way,” starting with “a limited drawdown of U.S. troops” and adopting “a time-frame” for “a phased withdrawal.” At bottom, “we need to say that there will be no bases in Iraq a decade from now.”15

  Two days before Thanksgiving, Barack devoted his eleventh weekly podcast to describing how this would be the first time his family would celebrate the day at their new home rather than at Marian Robinson’s. His mother-in-law would still take charge of the turkey, mashed potatoes, string beans, and macaroni and cheese. “I try to sneak off with my brother-in-law to watch the football game,” and that evening Barack and his daughters visited old family friend Allison Davis’s home, just two blocks northward. Malia did an impromptu demonstration of what she had learned at ballet class, “and poor Barack just started crying,” Allison remembered. “‘I’m never at home,’ and ‘They’re growing up, and I’m missing out,’” he tearfully complained. When Michelle a few days later consented to a telephone interview with her alma mater’s undergraduate newspaper, she brushed aside a question about Barack’s next step. “Some day, he may take on a more influential role in politics. For now, our future is our kids.”

  Following a quick trip to Montgomery, Alabama, to attend a fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the famous bus boycott, Barack sat down with first the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board and then the suburban Daily Herald’s. He expressed disquiet about Judge Samuel Alito, President Bush’s newest Supreme Court nominee. “There’s an amazing consistency in which he is ruling for the more powerful against the less powerful, across the board. And that concerns me. That makes me suspicious.” With the Daily Herald journalists, Barack explained that in early January he would make a brief visit to Baghdad, with additional stops in Doha, Amman, Jerusalem, and Ramallah. Looking back on his first eleven months as a U.S. senator, “I got more done than I expected,” so “I think this year exceeded expectations.” He had held thirty-nine town hall meetings across Illinois, and his vote against Chief Justice John Roberts was clearly his toughest. “I did not want to put my imprimatur on a set of decisions he’ll be making that I think won’t be good for the American people.” Asked what had changed in his life, “I guess the biggest change is that I’m no longer a private person,” because “I can’t go to a restaurant now with my wife or go to a movie without a majority of the people knowing who you are and then a large portion of the people coming up to you. And everybody has cameras now.” Barack admitted that he was still smoking and unable to quit, but he explained that he thought his remarkable popularity was because people “think that I’m not overly calculating.”

  In The New Republic, Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza published a piece entitled “Why Barack Obama Should Run for President in 2008.” Obama “is the most promising politician in America, and eventually he is going to run for president.” Asserting that “experience is an overrated asset in presidential politics,” Lizza argued that additional years in the U.S. Senate would not benefit Barack. “Obama must strike while he is hot.” Two days later, Daily Herald columnist Burt Constable, citing his own March 2, 2004, column as the first published item touting Barack as a future presidential candidate, seconded Lizza’s argument. Barack “should be president,” and Constable wished that George W. Bush would “outsource the next three years of presidential duties to Obama.” Asserting that “he’s ready now,” Constable recounted that when someone at the Herald had cited the downside of accumulating a lengthier Senate voting record prior to a presidential run, Barack had replied, “I’m not unmindful of that.” Constable concluded, “Let’s hope Obama changes his mind about running for president in 2008. The country needs him.”16

  On December 8, Barack’s celebrity got a further unexpected boost when it was announced that he was one of five nominees for a Grammy Award—“best spoken word album”—for his audiobook edition of Dreams. His competition was stiff: George Carlin, Al Franken, Garrison Keillor, and Sean Penn, and by chance Barack already was scheduled to appear on Franken’s syndicated radio show the next day. Barack joked, “I told my wife this morning that I wanted to be referred to from now on as ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Barack Obama,’” and “she told me to go shovel snow.” Barack was looking forward to two weeks in Hawaii before heading to Iraq, and when Franken told him “you would be the strongest nominee in 2008” for Democrats, Barack responded that “I’m not there yet.” Franken jokingly riffed on Ryan Lizza’s line: “There’s a time when you’re hot, and remember President Cuomo.”

  At the behest of Senator Bill Nelson, Barack flew to Orlando to speak to the Florida Democratic Party’s annual convention. Back in D.C., Barack coauthored a Wall Street Journal op-ed on immigration reform with Florida Republican senator Mel Martinez and a few days later coauthored a Washington Post one on Darfur with extremely conservative Kansas Republican senator Sam Brownback. As the Senate moved toward adjournment for the holidays, Barack joined with almost all other Democrats to block a renewal of the Patriot Act amid press reports that government electronic surveillance programs illegally exceeded what even that statute generously authorized. “Before I ever arrived in the Senate, I began hearing concerns from people of every background and political leaning that this law” was “threatening to violate our righ
ts and freedoms as Americans,” Barack said on the Senate floor. The Patriot Act gave government “powers it didn’t need to invade our privacy,” and the pending renewal was “legislation that puts our own Justice Department above the law” by allowing it to “go on a fishing expedition through every personal record,” including phone calls and e-mails. Saying “this is just plain wrong,” Barack warned that “doing it without any real oversight seriously jeopardizes the rights of all Americans and the ideals America stands for.”

  The Senate’s ongoing business delayed Barack’s departure to Honolulu, but on a podcast version of his floor statement opposing the Patriot Act, Barack explained that the rest of his family was already en route. “My wife basically said, ‘Well, I hope you can make it, buddy,’ and took off.” Several journalists used the extra time to prepare end-of-the-year stories on Barack’s freshman experience, with Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that Barack was a “phenomenal young man who will go to great heights.” Arizona Republican John McCain added that Barack is “very impressive, he’s thoughtful, he’s centrist.” When the Chicago Tribune’s Jeff Zeleny interviewed him, Barack confessed, “I’m subject like everyone else to vanity and what Dr. King called ‘the drum major instinct’ of wanting to lead the parade.” He explained that “one sort of measure of my own wisdom is the degree to which I can clear my mind of ego and focus on what’s useful, and I’m not always successful at that.” Asked about his smoking, Barack admitted that “it’s an ongoing battle” because “the flesh is weak,” and when Zeleny inquired about how work on his second book was going, Barack responded, “Don’t ask.” He added that “it’s not coming as fast as I would like. It needs to be done by March. I feel like I do have to write it myself. I would feel very uncomfortable putting my name to something that was written by somebody else or co-written or dictated. If my name is on it, it belongs to me.”