Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  On the drive back to Des Moines’s airport, Steve Hildebrand told Barack how remarkable the Iowans’ excitement had been. “What does all this mean?” Steve asked. “I am not sure,” Barack answered. But Hildebrand, who had not previously met him, was now convinced that Barack was the Democrats’ best possible presidential candidate for 2008, and he began e-mailing friends to promote an Obama candidacy. Several days later, David Yepsen wrote that the steak fry crowd had included “a lot of people I’d never seen at a Democratic event. Young people. People of color. Most old pros will tell you that attracting new people to your campaign is one sign of a winner.” Yepsen believed “Obama’s got to look at the reception he got and think there just might be some chemistry happening” with Iowa Democrats. “Maybe I didn’t want to make the run this soon in life,” Yepsen imagined Barack thinking, “but the presidency is up for grabs, and I’ve got to take my chances now, not later. As the old saying goes: He who hesitates—is lost.”

  As Barack’s remarks to David Axelrod even before his Iowa reception indicated, Barack thought there should be a serious discussion once the November 7 midterms took place. “We ought to see how this goes and after the election just talk about whether or not we ought to consider running,” Barack told his aides. Within a few days Pete Rouse sent a memo to Barack’s closest political advisers recommending they all assemble in Chicago on November 8.32

  Barack resumed his jam-packed schedule of speaking appearances and congressional business. A weekend return to Illinois saw him hold his fifty-seventh town hall meeting, drawing a Friday-night crowd of more than thirteen hundred in Joliet. On September 26 Barack and Tom Coburn visited the White House to watch President Bush sign their Transparency Act into law. When journalists the next day asked Chicago mayor Richard Daley about Barack running for president, Daley responded that “everybody wants him. If he wants to run, he should run. I mean, why not?” The day after that, Oprah Winfrey, who was reading an advance copy of Barack’s book, chimed in to say, “I do wish he would run. And if he would run, I would do everything in my power to campaign for him,” because Barack’s “sense of hope and optimism for this country and what is possible for the United States is the kind of thing that I would like to get behind.”

  In Washington, Barack spoke up in support of an amendment aimed at curtailing military tribunal proceedings for captured terrorists. “We don’t know when this war against terrorism might end” but “the fundamental human rights of the accused should be bigger than politics.” The procedure the U.S. was using for captives held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, “allows them no real chance to prove their innocence” and thus represented a “betrayal of American values.” Instead, Barack called for “a real military system of justice that would sort out the suspected terrorists from the accidentally accused” who had ended up in U.S. custody.

  A pair of weekend town hall meetings back in Illinois also allowed Barack to hop across the Mississippi River and campaign for a Democratic congressional candidate in Davenport, Iowa. National journalists like Time magazine’s Joe Klein were in tow, and in Rockford, Register Star political editor Chuck Sweeny told Klein, “Obama is reaching out. He’s saying the other side isn’t evil. You can’t imagine how powerful a message that is for an audience like this.” In the Quad Cities, longtime Democratic activist Bill Gluba told Klein that people’s reactions to Barack reminded him of when he had driven New York senator Robert F. Kennedy around Davenport in May 1968. “I’ll never forget the way people reacted to Kennedy. Never seen anything like it since—until this guy.”

  When a local reporter asked Barack if he would run in 2008, he responded, “I’ll let you know.” Speaking privately with Klein, Barack said that once his upcoming book tour and the November 7 election were over, “I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband . . . I haven’t completely decided or unraveled that puzzle yet.” Klein was struck by “the elaborate intellectual balancing mechanism” that Barack “applies to every statement and gesture, to every public moment of his life.” Barack, like fellow African Americans Colin Powell, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan, all “transcend racial stereotypes,” Klein wrote. Black academic John McWhorter believed that race was the very core of Barack’s appeal. “The key factor that galvanizes people around the idea of Obama for president is, quite simply, that he is black,” McWhorter stated. Absent his blackness, Barack would just be “some relatively anonymous rookie,” and thus “Obama is being considered as presidential timber not despite his race, but because of it.”

  But to Joe Klein, watching people’s reactions to Barack in Rockford, Rock Island, and Davenport, Barack was “an American political phenomenon,” who was “the political equivalent of a rainbow—a sudden preternatural event inspiring both awe and ecstasy.” Klein’s Time cover story stressed that Barack was “not a screechy partisan. Indeed, he seems obsessively eager to find common ground with conservatives.” Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn agreed, telling another journalist that “Barack’s got the capability . . . and the pizzazz and the charisma to be a leader of America, not a leader of Democrats.”33

  Sitting down with Oprah Winfrey to tape a long interview for broadcast during his book tour, Barack expressed dismay at “this celebrity culture” that “gobbles you up.” Barack worried about saying “what they want to hear, as opposed to you trying to stay in touch with that deepest part of you, that kernel of truth inside,” invoking again the Borges phrase he had recited to Jacob Weisberg three months earlier. “I think what’s happened is that we are so interested in spin and we’re less interested in facts,” but “the country is not as divided as Washington . . . not as divided as those cable news shows make it out to be.” Barack complained about seeing erectile dysfunction ads during hours when children could be watching television and noted that “one of the tragedies of Africa is that the relationship between men and women, I think, has broken down. There’s a lot of sexual violence, a lot of AIDS is caused by women whose husbands are bringing it home to them.” Michelle told Oprah that the Kenya “trip was overwhelming for me,” but that their daughters “just sort of took it all in stride.” The girls were so “patient” that “we have to be careful to really structure boundaries for them” because if not “they’d let their time be eaten up by other things. So it’s really up to us to protect that time, to make sure that we demand for them what they don’t demand for themselves.” But Michelle saw her family’s greatest challenge as “how do you make sure . . . that you don’t . . . get swept up in this celebrity, that you don’t get caught up in the hype . . . that you remain centered and focused.”

  In Illinois, headlines like “‘Obama Fever’ Grips Peoria” attested to Barack’s popularity as he campaigned for local candidates. The Peoria Journal Star lauded Barack as “a veritable national celebrity,” and the Champaign News-Gazette complimented him as “an attractive, intelligent guy who conducts his politics in a gentlemanly fashion” and “shows great promise.” But the News-Gazette cited questions concerning Alexi Giannoulias’s “family links to organized crime figures” as an example of Barack’s “lack of experience and seasoned judgment” and said it would be “the height of folly” for Barack to run for president. When Barack campaigned in Kansas City for Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, a local columnist praised him as “an icon of the American Dream,” but back in Metro East the Belleville News-Democrat took note of that coverage and complained that “Obama always seems to be making headlines in places other than Illinois.”

  The next day, following a media advisory that U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald would be holding a 1:00 P.M. press conference, Illinois headlines focused not on Barack but on his friend Tony Rezko: “Top Blagojevich Adviser Indicted.” Six days earlier a federal grand jury had returned a twenty-four-count, sixty-five-page criminal indictment against Rezko, charging him with trying to extort more than $7.5 million in contract kickbacks and campaign contr
ibutions to Illinois’s governor. With Tony out of the country and his whereabouts unknown, the indictment initially was issued under seal, but the U.S. attorney labeled the crimes committed by Rezko a “pay-to-play scheme on steroids.”

  Chicago journalists had expected this shoe to drop ever since Tony’s pal Stuart Levine had been indicted months earlier, but the charges focused white-hot attention on Rezko’s political patrons, especially Rod Blagojevich. Tony’s former business partner Dan Mahru told the Tribune that the man he first met in 1989 had for years “worked so hard” to help his extended family. “But the Tony Rezko I knew after the governor got elected was not the same person. He changed,” Mahru explained. A quick Tribune tally showed that Rezko and his companies had contributed at least $385,000 to Illinois politicians since 1994, and Barack’s communications director Robert Gibbs immediately announced that Barack’s federal campaign fund would divest itself of the $11,500 that Tony had donated to Barack’s 2004 Senate race.

  A Sun-Times gossip columnist wrote that “Rezko is hurt by Obama’s lack of support since reports surfaced” of the federal probe, and competing newspapers struggled to collate just how much Tony had raised for Barack from friends and business associates, with reliable tallies reaching as high as $200,000. Eight days later, FBI agents took Rezko into custody at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as soon as his plane taxied to the gate. One Democratic legislator noted that even two years earlier “it wasn’t a secret that Tony Rezko was a very connected moneyman in the Blagojevich administration who was coming under increased scrutiny.” Asked about Barack’s friendship with Tony, Illinois campaign reform advocate Cindi Canary expressed dismay. “It surprised me that late in the game he continued to take contributions from somebody who was under a rather dark cloud in the state.”34

  The same morning that the Rezko headlines dominated Chicago newspapers’ front pages, the Tribune ran a page-3 story previewing Barack’s new book, The Audacity of Hope—its title echoing a Jeremiah Wright sermon first preached years earlier. An advance review in Publishers Weekly had dismissed the book as a “sonorous manifesto” offering “muddled, uninspiring proposals” that represented only “tepid Clintonism.” With its official publication date set for Tuesday, October 17, Barack on Monday made a quick trip to Indianapolis for a fund-raising luncheon before returning to Chicago for an evening book party at the home of Valerie Jarrett’s parents, Jim and Barbara Bowman—just like eleven years earlier with Dreams. When radio executive Melody Spann Cooper asked Barack about a presidential race, he said, “I don’t think Michelle is going to let me do this.” Jarrett remembered that when the time came for Barack to offer some brief remarks, he “started to say he was sorry to have been away from his family so much . . . and began crying so hard he couldn’t go on.”

  In Tuesday morning’s New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that portions of Audacity “read like outtakes from a stump speech” and that the book “occasionally slips into . . . flabby platitudes” that were “little more than fuzzy statements of the obvious.” A Los Angeles Times review was somewhat kinder, calling Audacity “an easy-reading, congenial book that is halfway successful,” but adding that too many of Barack’s proposals “are incremental, timid, tangential—anything but audacious.” But early reviewers often missed those brief occasions when Audacity offered refreshing political honesty—“much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone”—and bracing self-criticism: “as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met.” Barack acknowledged that “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” and “for the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.” Barack conceded that “I don’t consider George Bush a bad man” and admitted that “it is my obligation . . . to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided.”

  But without a doubt by far the most outspoken of Audacity’s nine topical chapters was the one on race. “The collapse of the two-parent black household,” with 54 percent of African American children now living in single-parent homes, “is occurring at such an alarming rate” that black America’s divergence from the rest of the United States “has become a difference in kind, a phenomenon that reflects a casualness toward sex and child rearing among black men.” Warning that “conditions in the heart of the inner city are spinning out of control,” Barack wrote that “liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders” have “tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty.” Barack suggested that “perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of wedlock.” More broadly, Audacity also insisted that “proposals that solely benefit minorities . . . can’t serve as the basis for the kinds of sustained, broad-based political coalitions needed to transform America.”35

  As Barack’s book tour commenced, Illinois seatmate Dick Durbin renewed his call for Barack to run. “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?” Barack responded that “it’s a family decision,” but other voices echoed Durbin. A Chicago Sun-Times reporter wrote, “Why wait? Obama’s stock has never been higher,” even though “he is very untested. He has never even had a tough, adversarial press conference.” Springfield’s State Journal-Register agreed, citing Barack’s “ability to inspire and touch people,” and advising “Run, Sen. Obama, run.” The Chicago Tribune, praising Barack for “beautifully” handling his first nineteen months as a U.S. senator, singled out how he had “not strayed from his early message that America must rise above angry partisanship.”

  In the national press, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks echoed the Journal-Register in a column headlined “Run, Barack, Run.” Declaring that “Obama is a new kind of politician” and “a mega-hyped phenomenon that lives up to the hype,” Brooks asserted that “the times will never again so completely require the gifts that he possesses.” Fellow Times columnist Frank Rich concurred, saying “of course he should run,” because Barack “is Bill Clinton without the baggage.” African American columnist Clarence Page advised “Seize the day . . . I hope you run . . . you may never again see this many people who are this eager for you to run. Just don’t expect us to be nice to you after you decide to do it.”

  On October 19, Barack blanketed the airwaves from dawn until midnight, beginning with NBC’s Today show. Barack rued the impact of the nation’s capital. “The minute you arrive in Washington, suddenly there are all these forces, whether it’s the media or parties or the need to raise money, that kind of tamp down those basic human responses that you have towards other people.” On NPR’s All Things Considered, Barack told host Michele Norris that “there’s a strong impulse when you’re in public life to try to control your image as much as possible.” Regarding Audacity, Barack said, “I’m sure that if you asked my wife whether I adequately listed my failings in the book she would say no, that she could supplement it substantially.” Fund-raising was a never-ending problem. “My preference would be that we’ve got public financing of campaigns, and nobody has to raise money whatsoever.” Failing that, “the question then you constantly have to ask yourself is, are the means that you’re using to make sure you’re competitive in elections in any way undermining those core values that brought you into politics in the first place? I feel confident that hasn’t happened, but it’s something you constantly have to monitor.” A presidential run has “got to be based on you feeling that somehow you can be useful, that you can offer something that is unique and will help create a better life for the people you seek to represent. And those are questions that I’m constantly asking myself.”

  On CNN’s
Larry King Live, Barack explained that “I’ve got a wife at home who is more interested in whether I rinsed out the dishes and put them in the dishwasher” than in his public acclaim. “This has been a very unproductive Congress since I’ve arrived,” but Barack thought his Africa trip and public HIV test had been highly valuable. “I thought that was probably the best investment of fifteen minutes that I’d ever make,” because across Africa “men continue to oftentimes abuse woman, have multiple partners, and so there’s a whole situation in terms of how men treat women that has to be dealt with.” Barack told King that “faith is very important in my life on a daily basis,” and that after November 7 he would focus on 2008. “I love that idea of deciding what will be most useful.”

  With PBS late-night TV host Charlie Rose, Barack explained that “what I’m really trying to do here is to see, can I change the political culture? . . . What we have now is a surplus amount of conflict that is manufactured. It’s manufactured in television ads, it’s manufactured in terms of how the parties portray each other.” Regarding 2008, “when you decide to run for president . . . you are saying to the American people, ‘I am giving my life to you’ . . . and that’s not a decision that I think you can or should make solely on the basis of ambition. It transcends ambition.”

  The next day, when a questioner asked Barack what his greatest fear was as a politician, he answered, “my greatest fear, I think, is that I lose track of that voice: who I am and what my values are and what I care most deeply about.” At a Kennedy Library Q&A in Boston, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert cited Barack’s previous night appearances with King and Rose. “It’s a bit much, isn’t it?” Barack replied as the audience laughed. “That’s what my wife says, anyway: ‘I am fed up with reading about you.’” Barack explained, “I actually find the attention and seeing my name in the papers and the stuff that feeds your ego less satisfying as time goes on.” Concerning the presidency, “that office is so different from any other office on the planet that you have to understand that if you seek that office, you have to be prepared to give your life to it. . . . The bargain that any president, I think, strikes with the American people is ‘You give me this office, and in turn my fears, doubts, insecurities, foibles, need for sleep, family life, vacations, leisure is gone. I am giving myself to you,’” and “you don’t make that decision unless you are prepared to make that sacrifice, that trade-off, that bargain.”