Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Michelle Obama took part-time leave from her U of C job, and Barack told the Chicago Tribune’s Christi Parsons that “I’ve got an ironclad demand from my wife” to stop smoking. “I’ve been chewing Nicorette strenuously,” but while Barack claimed, “I’ve never been a heavy smoker,” his long-standing inability to quit, plus his repeated denials of how much he smoked, reflected his embarrassment about being a smoker and the strength of his addiction. Norman Mailer once confessed that “Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so,” and an insightful observer explained that Barack tried to hide and minimize his smoking so as “to deny . . . that he relies on a . . . nicotine addiction to manage his fears.”

  David Axelrod told the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut that Barack “is very focused on the fact that he doesn’t want to lose his essential self in this process, and if he does—if what he projects and delivers is just more of the kind of politics people have become accustomed to—it would be a disappointment to him.” In a pair of February 7 interviews, Barack said that “what I dread most is being away from my kids,” but he believed “there is this enormous hunger for a new kind of politics . . . a politics that brings us together.” “I think we are in a moment where there is a possibility” that his campaign “could reshape the political landscape.” He emphasized that he was running “to win. But it’s also to transform the country.”54

  At 4:00 A.M. Thursday, Barack e-mailed a final draft of his Saturday announcement speech to his advisers. On Friday afternoon, he and his campaign team climbed into multiple vans for the drive to Springfield, where, at 10:00 A.M. Saturday, Jeremiah Wright was scheduled to deliver an invocation before Barack took the podium. During the trip southward, David Axelrod got a call alerting him to a forthcoming Rolling Stone cover story headlined “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama.” Those “radical roots” were Trinity Church, which author Ben Wallace-Wells labeled “a leftover vision from the sixties of what a black nationalist future might look like.” Calling Jeremiah Wright “a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher,” one who “has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry,” Wallace-Wells quoted at length from a Wright sermon that actually had been delivered in 1993 at Washington’s Howard University, not at Trinity. “We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional killers,” Wright declared. “We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means,” and “God has got to be sick of this shit!”

  Wallace-Wells asserted that Trinity represented “as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.” Wallace-Wells quoted a characterization Barack had given the Tribune, that Wright was “a sounding board for me to make sure that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.” Wallace-Wells added that “when you read” Dreams, “the surprising thing—for such a measured politician—is the depth of radical feeling that seeps through, the amount of Jeremiah Wright that’s packed in there.”

  In the van headed southbound on I-55, Axelrod “looked stricken” as he read the article, David Plouffe recalled. “‘This is a fucking disaster,’ he said. ‘If Wright goes up on that stage, that’s the story. Our announcement will be an asterisk.’” Axelrod, Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs called Barack in his van, and Barack asked them to forward him the story. Barack soon called back, expressing agreement: the article featured “some pretty incendiary language” from Wright, and “we can’t afford to let this story hijack the day. I’ll call him and tell him it will overshadow everything. I still want him to come; maybe he can do a private prayer with my family before I go out to speak.”

  In Amherst, Massachusetts, Jeremiah Wright’s cell phone rang. Barack cited the Rolling Stone article, telling Wright, “You can kind of go over the top at times” and “get kind of rough in the sermons, so it’s the feeling of our people that perhaps you’d better not be out in the spotlight, because they will make you the focus, and not my announcement. Now, Michelle and I still want you to have a prayer with us. Can you still come and have prayer, before we go up?” Wright was puzzled at what sermon Rolling Stone had unearthed, but he already was scheduled to catch an early-morning flight out of Boston to O’Hare and then on to Springfield. Two years earlier, Wright had said Barack “is not a person to compromise,” so he was disappointed by this turn of events, but he quickly agreed and also concurred with Barack’s suggestion that Wright’s associate pastor and designated successor, Otis Moss III, be asked to give the invocation instead. Jerry gave Barack Moss’s cell number and immediately called Moss to tell him he had done so. To Jerry’s astonishment, Moss said that Barack’s buddy Eric Whitaker, also a Trinity member, had already called to invite him to Springfield. Moss told Wright he would decline, as he barely knew Barack, and after a brief night’s sleep, Saturday morning Wright flew to Springfield.55

  Saturday dawned exceptionally cold in Springfield. Michelle warned that “there’s no way anyone is going to come out and stand in the bitter cold to hear you,” but Obama’s aides brushed aside her plea that they hold the event indoors rather than in front of the picturesque Old State Capitol where Abraham Lincoln had served 150 years earlier. Anticipating the weather, Alyssa Mastromonaco’s advance team had a strong heater hidden inside Barack’s outdoor podium. The temperature was just 12 degrees, but by 10:00 A.M. a crowd of up to seventeen thousand people filled the streets and plaza surrounding the Old State Capitol. Inside the historic structure, Jeremiah Wright led a prayer before Barack headed outside. Standing nearby, David Axelrod “caught Wright’s withering glare as he walked by.” After being introduced by Illinois seatmate Dick Durbin, Barack confessed, “it’s humbling to see a crowd like this.” Some of Barack’s early stanzas echoed his 2004 DNC speech, and he said his three years in Roseland had sent him first to Harvard and then to Springfield. Pushing back against any suggestion that his Senate service was too brief to qualify him for the presidency, Barack declared, “I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change,” a line crafted by Axelrod and one that won the crowd’s loudest cheers. Barack blamed “the failure of leadership” for “our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead.” President after president had campaigned on promises of change, but time and again, “after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and special interests move in, and people turn away, disappointed as before.” Barack vowed he would be different, and asked his listeners to join him “if you feel destiny calling.”

  After his twenty-minute speech, Barack’s party headed to Springfield’s airport, where a chartered aircraft waited to fly them to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There, more than two thousand people packed Barack’s first campaign event in 2008’s first state. “I want to win,” Barack told them, “but I don’t just want to win. I want to transform this country.”56

  Epilogue

  THE PRESIDENT DID NOT ATTEND,

  AS HE WAS GOLFING

  In Chicago, Barack’s growing campaign staff set up shop in February 2007 on the eleventh floor at 233 North Michigan Avenue. Barack’s first campaign swing took him to South Carolina and Virginia. “Body man” Reggie Love, a former Duke University basketball player who had been on Barack’s Senate staff, and trip director Marvin Nicholson, who had been on Senator John Kerry’s staff, became Barack’s two closest traveling aides. Michelle was now campaigning too, having reduced her U of C job to one day a week, but her introduction of Barack at a Hollywood fund-raiser drew critical attention after New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd brought Michelle’s remarks to a wide readership. “I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama,” Michelle said. “There’s Barack Obama the phenomenon. He’s an amazing orator . . . best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right?
And then there’s the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy’s a little less impressive. For some reason this guy still can’t manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn’t get stale, and his 5-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is.” Dowd suggested that Michelle’s “chiding was emasculating, casting her husband . . . as an undisciplined child.” But Barack was unoffended. “I think creating a life for children that is stable and in which they have reliable, regular adult figures in their lives that they can look up to is important,” he told Times columnist Nick Kristof.1

  Speaking at the annual commemoration of Selma, Alabama’s 1965 voting rights campaign, Barack said that because of those protests, his parents “got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.” Reporters quickly noted, as the New York Times put it, “that he was born in 1961, four years before the confrontations at Selma took place.” Barack responded that “I meant to say the whole civil rights movement,” not Selma. The focus on Barack’s biographical misstatement led reporters to ignore his comment that “we’ve still got a lot of economic rights that have to be dealt with.” A Washington Post columnist who read Dreams warned that Barack’s “tendency to manipulate facts may bear watching,” since “we hardly know him.”

  To another Post columnist, Barack said that beyond winning the presidency, “there’s the possibility” he could “also transform the country in the process, that the language and the approach I take to politics is sufficiently different that I could bring diverse parts of this country together in a way that hasn’t been done in some time.” One possible example, at least in Barack’s mind, came in a CNN appearance. “I think that ‘marriage’ has a religious connotation in this society, in our culture, that makes it very difficult to disentangle from the civil aspects of marriage.” Thus for gay Americans Barack supported “civil unions that provide all the civil rights that marriage entails.”

  On March 6, the New York Times reported how Barack had disinvited Jeremiah Wright from taking the stage at his February 10 announcement. “When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Wright told reporter Jodi Kantor, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.” Five days earlier, Wright had appeared on Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, and when Sean Hannity had peppered him with aggressive questions, Wright responded with insistent anger. “How many of Cone’s books have you read? How many of Cone’s books have you read?” he repeated, citing the well-known founder of black liberation theology, James H. Cone. “How many books of Dwight Hopkins’s have you read?”—a Cone student and Trinity member.

  In Chicago, African American Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell cited Wright’s comment to the Times about Farrakhan in arguing that “Obama took some bad advice from campaign staff who underestimated the impact such a slight could have” in producing “hurt feelings.” Wright prophetically told a PBS interviewer that if “you think it’s ugly now, it’s going to get worse. It’s going to get much worse,” and Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington observed that “hell hath no fury like a preacher scorned.”

  Asked by one CNN interviewer, Barack said he and Wright had spoken, and Wright told Trinity’s congregation that Barack had apologized for the disinvitation, explaining that he had gotten “some bad advice from his own campaign people.” On another CNN show, Barack claimed he had stopped smoking because of “how scared I am of my wife,” but when the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor continued to pursue the Wright story, Barack disingenuously told her that “I’ve never had a thorough conversation with him about all aspects of politics.” Kantor observed that “it is hard to imagine” how “Obama can truly distance himself from” his pastor, but Wright told her that “if Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” and that Barack had said, “yeah, that might have to happen.”2

  In the midst of the Wright contretemps, Barack received an unexpected call from a long-forgotten schoolmate: Keith Kakugawa, his closest friend when Barry was a Punahou tenth grader, had just been released from a California prison. Barack “was utterly amazed,” Keith said, and “I told him how proud I am of him.” Keith had endured multiple convictions for cocaine possession with intent to sell, plus one for auto theft. “I’m really sorry,” Barack said. “How bad is it for you?” Keith knew all too well that as a felon “you can’t get a decent job, college education or not, once you have a record,” that “you’re not eligible for almost any kind of state assistance, and you have very few places to turn.” Barack told Keith, “Hey, I’d rather you not talk to reporters,” but within days first the Wall Street Journal and then the Chicago Tribune ran front-page stories about him. “Please don’t put Senator Obama in a bad light for knowing me,” Keith e-mailed the Journal’s Jackie Calmes. Barack was not enthused by the stories. “This is something I’m not enjoying about the presidential race,” he told the Trib. “Me getting screwed I’m fine with. Suddenly everybody who’s ever touched my life is subject to a colonoscopy on the front page of the newspaper.”

  In Chicago, Barack’s former friendship with Tony Rezko was drawing sustained press attention. The Sun-Times was doggedly pursuing the details, with columnist Carol Marin writing that “this gleaming presidential hopeful and paragon of new politics behaves just like any other dissembling, dismissive Chicago pol” after Barack’s aides physically shielded him from insistent Sun-Times reporter Tim Novak as his SUV pulled away. “Maybe it was the image of that getaway, played on the 5 o’clock news, that finally persuaded Obama to hastily call a news conference to which Novak was not invited,” Marin explained. The Sun-Times editorialized that Barack’s efforts to dodge Novak “make it appear as if he has something to hide,” and Barack refused to discuss Tony with the New York Times. In an ensuing front-page story, the Times accurately concluded that “the two men were closer than the senator has indicated.”

  When Times columnist David Brooks caught him in a Senate hallway, Barack responded eagerly when Brooks asked if he had ever read Reinhold Niebuhr. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” What had Barack learned from Niebuhr? “I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world,” that “we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things.” Brooks was impressed, but he was also frustrated. Barack “loves to have conversations about conversations. You have to ask him every question twice, the first time to allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and the second time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.” The result was “Bromide Obama, filled with grand but usually evasive eloquences about bringing people together and showing respect.”

  All of the journalistic interest in Barack’s past led new readers to absorb Dreams. Many erroneously presumed that the book predated any interest in a political career, but Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum offered a remarkably perceptive reading. A striking detachment between the author and his retrospective self was “clearest in the disconnect between emotions and events: Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest and most painful emotions imaginable . . . but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian.” Readers “get very little sense of what motivates him,” for “there’s very little insight into what he believes and what really makes him tick.” Drum concluded that “by the time I was done, I felt like I knew less about him than before.” Likewise, in the Weekly Standard Andrew Ferguson discussed how in Dreams Barack “was making it up, to an alarming extent,” while creating “a fable . . . far bigger and more consequential” than Barack’s actual life. In private, Barack told his aides that “there’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer,” but “it’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.”3

  In early May, responding to entreaties from Senators Dick Durbin and Harry Reid,
the Secret Service assigned agents to Barack and his family, replacing the private security guards his campaign had hired. A front-page Washington Post story quoted Barack as telling black officials in South Carolina that sometimes in Chicago “when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I say ‘You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars.’” In response, a Chicago Defender contributor wrote that “all this sounds very derogatory, à la Amos ’n’ Andy or Stepin Fetchit.”

  Garnering more attention was a front-page New York Times profile of Michelle, which quoted her brother Craig as explaining that “everyone in the family is afraid of her.” The Times also quoted Barack saying that “she’s a little meaner than I am,” and a nationwide Associated Press story revisited Michelle’s fund-raiser comments describing how the man with whom she lived differed so much from Barack’s media image. Only the Chicago papers covered Michelle’s resignation from the board of TreeHouse Foods, but Michelle told ABC’s Good Morning America that Barack “is very able to deal with a strong woman, which is one of the reasons why he can be president: because he can deal with me.” When the Capitol Hill town house where Barack stayed suffered a minor fire, Michelle’s reaction was almost gleeful. “I was like, I told you it was a dump!” Then Esquire magazine named Barack as one of the “Best Dressed Men in the World,” citing him for “sharply tailored two-piece suits offset by a peerless collection of light-blue ties.” Michelle was astonished. “He’s got like five white shirts and three black suits,” and “he’s like ‘Mr. GQ’ all of a sudden.”