The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  “But I went into it with some modesty, thinking to myself, it may be that this really is all hype, and once people get a sense of my ideas and what’s going on there that they think I’m some callow youth or full of hot air, and if that turned out to be the case, that was okay. I think for me it was more of a sense of being willing to do this, understanding that the odds were probably—I gave myself twenty-five percent odds, you know, maybe thirty—which are pretty remarkable odds to be president of the United States, if you’re a gambling man.”

  By late 2006, Barack Obama was already the most exciting presidential candidate of either party. Clinton had the money, the experience, and the political machinery. McCain had run before, plus he had the compelling war hero profile. Both Clinton and McCain had long been preparing for their campaigns, while Obama was arriving at the starting gate seemingly out of nowhere in a rush of expectation and hype. Who, really, was he, and why had he struck such a strong chord among public and press?

  To say Barack Obama was ambitious, confident, even cocky is an understatement; but then the same can be said of nearly all who dream of becoming president of the United States. What distinguished Obama was his determination not to wait until he had forged a longer political record of achievement, and the historic conjunction of events that made possible so unlikely a candidacy.

  Part of Obama’s appeal was understandable. To an American public always open to the new, always susceptible to the political prospect of change, especially in difficult times, everything about him promised a sharp break from the past. His personal story was intriguing, and somewhat familiar, thanks to his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, written years earlier after his appointment as the first African-American editor in chief of the Harvard Law Review. The mere factual recitation of his biography suggested elements of a fable, a classic tale of rising from humble roots to triumph over adversity, the kind Americans have always relished: the black father from Kenya, the son of a goat herder, who came to the United States to study in Hawaii, there to meet and marry a fellow student, a white woman born in Wichita, Kansas, whose father served with Patton’s army and whose mother became a World War II Rosie the Riveter war plant worker; the family ultimately following the old American pattern of heading west after the war and settling in Hawaii; the collapse of the biracial marriage after the father abandoned his wife and two-year-old son, Barack, in 1963 to return to Africa, where he became an alcoholic5 and died in a 1982 car crash; the mother’s remarriage to an Indonesian businessman who moved his new wife and young son to Jakarta, where Barack attended local schools until the age of ten; then, yet another move, with Barack returning to Hawaii to be raised by his white grandparents and attend a private school while his mother remained in Jakarta.

  The rest of his story filled out the legend: attendance as a scholarship student at Occidental College in California, then Columbia University, then Harvard Law; community organizing on Chicago’s South Side; legal work in a firm specializing in civil rights law; teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago; the budding political career.

  However helpful his personal story, two speeches actually made his campaign for president possible. The first was in October 2002 before an anti-Iraq war rally in Chicago.

  That speech came at a decisive moment in Obama’s life, a time of self-doubt and frustration. At forty-one years old, he was in his sixth year in the Illinois Senate, relatively little known outside Illinois political circles. His career at that point could hardly be called soaring; just two years before, he had lost his attempt to take the congressional seat held by Democratic Representative Bobby Rush. He was tired of life in Springfield, the state capital, and envious of younger politicians on the rise. He was planning to run for the U.S. Senate in the 2004 Democratic primary, but had not yet formally announced. As he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream, after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues, he realizes that he’s gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grown-up and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.”

  As the debate over Iraq intensified in Washington, Clinton, McCain, John Edwards, John Kerry, and many others were preparing to support a congressional resolution giving Bush a blank check to go to war in Iraq. Obama decided to speak out against the war, though he was warned by friends to choose his words carefully. Whatever he said could affect his political future. For that reason, for one of the few times in his young career he used a prepared text.

  Here, in part, is what he said that day: “I don’t oppose all wars. After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars. All I know is that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income—to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

  He condemned Saddam Hussein, calling him “a brutal man, a ruthless man, a man who butchers his own people to secure his own power,” with a record of having “repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons and coveted nuclear capacity.” The world would be better off without him, Obama said, then added, “But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

  In words that would be seen as prescient, he summed up the case against American intervention: “I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.”

  His speech didn’t attract national attention, didn’t affect the outcome of the debate over Iraq, and didn’t then elevate Obama’s political stature. But it did attract the growing antiwar groups and passionately liberal activists who exercised great influence in the Democratic Party. Of all the candidates, Obama had staked out the earliest, clearest, and most eloquently expressed opposition to the war.

  Obama was not expected to win even the 2004 Democratic Senate primary. He faced two better known, and better funded, candidates: Dan Hynes, the state comptroller, was the son of one of Chicago’s most prominent and powerful Democrats; Blair Hull had made hundreds of millions of dollars as a stock trader and investor. Obama began the race far behind. Then, as the primary neared, Hull’s collapse—a scandalous divorce that included charges of abuse and an admission of cocaine use—aided Obama’s rise. Obama won the primary with 53 percent of the vote to become the Democratic nominee for the open seat.

/>   Instant good fortune came that April when he spoke at a John Kerry presidential campaign stop in Chicago. Kerry was so impressed by what he heard that he became an Obama patron who set in motion a crucial event.

  Kerry was searching for the right keynote speaker for the Democratic convention in Boston that July. Obama’s advisers quietly began lobbying the Kerry team. Obama was out campaigning for the Senate seat when the call came from Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry’s campaign manager. After it ended, Obama told the others with him in his car that he wanted to use his life story to speak about an America liberated from the red/blue divisions that then defined the political landscape. Later he made it sound as if his selection was merely a lucky matter over which he and his aides had little influence. “I have never exactly figured that out,” he told Larry King during an October 2006 TV interview, responding to King’s question about how he was chosen. “Somehow they thought that I could be useful at the convention. And so we started hearing that they might want me to speak there, which we didn’t think too much of. And then at some point we got a call that they actually wanted me to be the keynote speaker.”

  Between sessions in the Illinois Senate, working late at night, or even taking refuge in the Capitol men’s room, Obama kept scribbling away on scraps of paper to set down his thoughts and finally turned them into a speech draft. After finishing the legislative session in Springfield on Saturday, July 24, he arrived in Boston at close to midnight. On the flight he recalled his only other trip to a Democratic convention, four years earlier in Los Angeles. The car rental company had rejected his credit card, he couldn’t even get a floor pass, and eventually he left, early and disconsolate.

  Before he began final practices for his prime-time speech, now just two days away, he was booked to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows. Communications director Robert Gibbs roamed the convention floor, keeping a wary eye on his young star.

  “Is your candidate an orator?” we asked Gibbs that morning.

  “Not really,” he said matter-of-factly.

  What he didn’t tell us that morning was that the practice sessions were not going well. Obama’s delivery was flat and unimpressive. As he went through his lines, his advisers listened silently. Obama was frustrated by their lack of response. His team then brought in Michael Sheehan, the best speech coach in the Democratic Party, who tutored Obama from beneath the podium of the convention’s Fleet Center. Obama had thought that to reach twenty thousand in the arena and a television audience in the millions he had to bellow. You don’t need to shout, Sheehan told him. You don’t need to scream. Just tell your story. Talk as if you’re talking to someone. “With each rendition,” Axelrod said, “it just became more and more organic to him, more and more flowing.”

  On the afternoon before his speech, David Mendell, who was covering the Illinois Senate campaign for the Chicago Tribune, followed Obama through the security fences protecting the Fleet Center. Obama looked even more confident than usual, Mendell thought; then he asked Obama how he was feeling about his speech. “I’m LeBron, baby,” Obama replied, referring to LeBron James, the teenage phenomenon who was dazzling the National Basketball Association. “I can play on this level. I got some game.”

  His friend Marty Nesbitt marveled at the buildup surrounding Obama the day before the speech. “Wait until tomorrow,” Nesbitt recalled Obama telling him, according to a later account in the New Yorker.

  That night, moments before the speech, a nervous Axelrod and Gibbs were preparing to head out into the arena to watch their candidate. Obama patted Axelrod on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll make my marks.”

  As Obama began tracing the story of his own life, and of his biracial family, he was hitting his marks perfectly. “My parents shared not only an improbable love,” he said. “They shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or ‘blessed,’ believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined—they imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren’t rich, because in a generous America you don’t have to be rich to achieve your potential.”

  The delegates were riveted on the young black man wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and pale blue necktie. Now they were on their feet filling the hall with thunderous applause as Obama delivered what became his signature message:

  “Now, even as we speak, there are 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 is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America—there’s the United States of America. The pundits, 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. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end—in the end—in the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

  In just twenty minutes, Barack Obama’s political career had changed forever. The reaction to his speech was overwhelming. From commentators high in their booths broadcasting across the country to delegates in the hall, there was a sense of discovery and possibility. It was John Kerry’s convention, but Barack Obama was the star. In the days and weeks and months after Boston, that star would continue to rise. “I knew from the moment he finished that things had changed in a way they were never going to go back,” Axelrod said.

  He was now a national celebrity, but still a Senate candidate with a race to finish. There again, fortune smiled on Barack Obama: His path to the Senate was already assured by the surprise withdrawal a month before the convention of his Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, after an embarrassing sex scandal. Illinois Republicans scrambled to find a replacement. In August, they settled on a most improbable candidate: perennial presidential hopeful Alan Keyes, an African-American from Maryland, not Illinois, a bombastic conservative who had no realistic chance to win. On November 4, 2004, Obama defeated Keyes by a landslide, carrying 70 percent of the vote to 27 percent for Keyes. It was the widest victory margin for a statewide race in Illinois history. On that same election day, Obama’s patron John Kerry became the latest in the long line of Democratic presidential candidates—seven out of the last ten—to lose to a Republican and set up George W. Bush’s second term in the White House.

  Once the candle was lighted in Boston, it never went out. Obama arrived in the Senate to great fanfare. His office was inundated with requests— sometimes three hundred a week—for press interviews, speaking engagements, appearances at political dinners. He had passed no legislation, given no major speeches, and carved out no areas of expertise, yet he was treated as a rock star. On the day of Bush’s second inaugural, only two weeks after being sworn in, Obama was stopped repeatedly as he made his way around the Capitol. Republicans wearing Bush-Cheney buttons wanted to have their pictures taken with the new senator with the million-dollar smile and the compelling personal story. It was left to his seven-year-old daughter, Malia, to offer a humbling note. On the day he was sworn into office, Obama and his family were walking around the Capitol grounds. “Are you going to try to be president?” Malia asked playfully. “Shouldn’t you be vice president first?”

  In his second year in the Senate, Obama stepped up his outside political activity, appearing at Democratic Party events in Kansas and Minnesota and Ohio. Ben Nelson, the conservative Democrat from Nebraska, asked him t
o speak at a dinner in Omaha. Obama, he said, was about the only national Democrat he would invite into his state. Everywhere Obama went the crowds were far larger than those for other national candidates. And everywhere people were urging him to run for president.

  All this was part of a plan by his staff to raise Obama’s national profile and not foreclose the possibility of running for president in 2008. Though a 2008 campaign seemed highly doubtful at the time, Obama was taking deliberate steps to strengthen his position if the opportunity presented itself. Pete Rouse, his chief of staff, prepared a memo, dated January 16, 2006, outlining the strategy. “It makes sense for you to consider now whether you want to use 2006 to position yourself to run in 2008 if a ‘per fect storm’ of personal and political factors emerges in 2007,” he wrote.

  Rouse believed then that the odds Obama would run in 2008 were exceedingly low. He was doing what a good adviser does, which was to consider all contingencies. “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,” Rouse wrote.

  The summer of his second year in Washington, Obama followed the path of previous presidential hopefuls by making a well-publicized foreign trip—this one, chosen with symbolic and personal meaning, to Africa. His seventeen-day itinerary included South Africa, where he criticized the government for its indifference to the AIDS crisis on the continent, and a refugee camp in Chad where refugees from the Darfur catastrophe were living. The centerpiece of his journey was a return to his father’s native Kenya. There the outpouring was extraordinary: crowds surging close whenever he reached out to shake a hand; streets jammed; markets empty; a song written in his honor playing on loudspeakers. He and his wife, Michelle, took voluntary AIDS tests to encourage others to do the same. They visited Obama’s grandmother Sarah Hussein Obama in the small village of Kogelo.