The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  The African trip had a profound effect on Obama. For the first time, he later told advisers, he began to think about how his election as president might change America’s image around the world, and how people would view the United States if an African-American was its leader.

  In late summer, he accepted an invitation from Tom Harkin to speak at the Iowa senator’s annual steak fry in September. For Obama and his team, the Iowa trip was a deliberate attempt to create some buzz, though those around him were still uncertain he would run in 2008. To further stoke presidential speculation, however, Rouse, formerly the top aide to Majority Leader Tom Daschle, asked another Daschle person, Steve Hildebrand, to join Obama. Since Hildebrand had been well-known as Gore’s Iowa caucus guru, this was seen as another signal of Obama’s presidential ambitions. Other Democratic candidates, including Clinton, had been recruiting Hildebrand, but he had never met Obama. That weekend Hildebrand became a convert. Soon, he was the most enthusiastic advocate for a 2008 race.

  In October, Obama began a national publication tour for his second book, The Audacity of Hope, a title he borrowed from a sermon by his longtime Chicago pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. The book was published not long before Obama’s second appearance with Tim Russert on Meet the Press. His goal was to propel Audacity to the top of the best-seller lists, Obama told his aides. Don’t you know, they said, you will be competing with John Grisham’s first venture into nonfiction? That didn’t bother Obama. When Audacity first hit the best-seller list, it was ranked number two behind Grisham. “It’s great,” he told Gibbs. “I want to be number one.”

  It was in that period that Obama and his key group privately began giving serious consideration to a presidential run. “During the book tour and then in rallies for ’06 candidates, we were just getting enormous crowds and a lot of interest,” Obama later explained to us. “At that point, I think my team and myself—my team and me—started thinking about what does this mean and is there something to the message I’m delivering that is right for these times, and is there something I could do at this moment that is different from what another Democratic candidate might be able to do.”

  On November 8, 2006, the day after the midterm elections, Obama and his advisers gathered around the conference table in Axelrod’s Chicago offices for a major discussion about running for president. The group included Obama; Michelle; Axelrod; Gibbs; Rouse; Hildebrand; David Plouffe, slated to be his presidential campaign manager, if there was to be a campaign; Alyssa Mastromonaco, his scheduler; and close friends Valerie Jarrett and Marty Nesbitt. They agreed to set deadlines for a campaign that would have to go, as Obama put it, “from zero to sixty.”

  During one of their early meetings, Plouffe, relatively new to Obama’s inner circle, had starkly posed Obama’s choices. Your next two years could be remarkable times for you and your young family, Plouffe said. You could have pretty much every weekend off, take vacations, enjoy your lives. The alternative is a schedule that will keep you on the road constantly, with intense scrutiny, and that’s going to be very hard. He cautioned Obama to keep two things in mind: While everyone’s throwing rose petals in front of you now, you’re not the front-runner in this race and you’re going to have a lot of people who don’t support you. On the other hand, if you win, you’ll be the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.

  “They didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know,” Obama later told us, smiling as he recalled the meetings. “I was in a very good place. I was doing well in the Senate. We had gotten some legislative accomplishments I was very proud of. We’d just gotten the majority and I’d helped achieve that majority, so I was well positioned to get committee assignments I wanted, to maybe get some things done I’d been looking at for a long time. My books had sold, so I had some financial freedom I hadn’t had before. My daughters were at just the most magnificent age there is. So I think I understood this was going to be a big sacrifice.”

  Asked about the best advice he received during that period, Obama replied, “Well, I have to say, it was advice I gave to myself. Which was, don’t do this unless you actually believe that you’d be the best president. . . . There might be some people who would run for president to sort of boost their profile. I was already about as well-known as any politician in the country, with the exception of maybe Hillary and a handful of others. So I didn’t need to run just as a gesture.”

  During that period, Obama privately consulted key political figures to get their assessment on whether or not he should run. Among them were Dick Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois, Tom Daschle, the well-respected former Democratic leader of the Senate, and Edward M. Kennedy, keeper of the Kennedy legacy. All urged him to run.

  In the meantime, Axelrod had prepared a private presidential strategy memo for Obama dated November 28, 2006. An outgoing president nearly always defines the next election, Axelrod wrote, and people almost never seek a replica—certainly not after the presidency of George W. Bush. The basic qualities people saw in Bush—especially those voters likely to participate in Democratic primaries, but Independents and disaffected Republicans as well—were stubbornness, hyperpartisanship, a tendency to place ideology over reason, and a predilection to side with special interests. In 2008 people were going to be looking for a replacement, someone who represented different qualities. Where Bush was stubborn and unwilling to admit error, they were going to be seeking someone open and willing to bring together people with different points of view. Where Bush was hyperpartisan, they were going to be looking for someone to transcend the morass in Washington.

  In Axelrod’s opinion, Obama’s profile fit this historical moment far better than Hillary Clinton’s. If he was right, Obama could spark a political movement and prevail against sizable odds. “You are uniquely suited for these times,” Axelrod wrote. “No one among the potential candidates within our party is as well positioned to rekindle our lost idealism as Americans and pick up the mantle of change. No one better represents a new generation of leadership, more focused on practical solutions to today’s challenges than old dogmas of the left and right. That is why your convention speech resonated so beautifully. And it remains the touchstone for our campaign moving forward.”

  The second half of the Axelrod memo was more personal and pointed. “We should not get into a White Paper war with the Clintons, or get twisted into knots by the elites.” He argued that the issue of experience was overrated but said strength was not, and he conceded that Clinton, because of all she had weathered, was seen by voters as a candidate of strength. “But the campaign itself also is a proving ground for strength.”

  His assessment of the field concluded that there were only two real rivals. Clinton, he wrote, “will try to command the race early with an array of White Papers. Her goal will be two: to suggest that she has the beef, while we offer only sizzle; and that she is not about the past but the future. But for all her advantages, she is not a healing figure. As much as she tacks to the right, she will have a hard time escaping the well-formulated perceptions of her among swing voters as a left-wing ideologue.”

  Edwards, he wrote, “is not to be discounted.” The Edwards message of anticorporate populism and the widening gap between rich and poor had real resonance. “He connects viscerally with working class and rural voters, which is reflected in his impressive early lead in Iowa. He is a dynamic, relentless campaigner and debater.” But Edwards, he added, had a potential problem raising the necessary funds to win the nomination, and there were also questions about whether he had the heft to become president.

  “Finally,” Axelrod wrote, “a word on the politics: Many have counseled you to wait and acquire more experience and seasoning before you jump into a race for the presidency. But history is replete with potential candidates for the presidency who waited too long rather than examples of people who ran too soon. . . . You will never be hotter than you are right now. And with the longevity favored by the Washington establishment comes all the baggage. You could wi
nd up calcified in the Senate, with a voting record that hangs from your neck like the anchor from the Lusitania. . . . In short, there are many reasons to believe that if you are ever to run for the presidency, this is the time.”

  Axelrod’s memo was most notable for its unsparing critique of his client. “The disarming admissions of weakness in your book [Dreams from My Father] will become fodder for unflattering, irritating inquiries.” In parentheses, he alluded to questions Obama might face as a candidate: “How many times did you use cocaine and marijuana? When did you stop? Who did you buy it from? Did you sell drugs? Have you broken any other laws?”

  He continued, “This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience. It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don’t know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much what is written and said about you. You don’t relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched.

  “All of this may be worth enduring for the chance to change the world. And many, many people who believe in you are ready to march because we think the world so badly needs the change and leadership you have to offer. (Perhaps by running and winning, you can help change our politics too.)

  “If you pull the trigger,” the memo ended, “I am confident that we can put together a great campaign and campaign message of which we can all be proud.”

  Obama took two trips in December as he and his advisers refined their campaign strategy. The first was to California and the Saddleback Church of Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor and author of The Purpose Driven Life. Obama appeared as part of a summit on AIDS and the church, and he won a standing ovation. But it was the second trip, his first ever to New Hampshire, that moved him irretrievably into the 2008 campaign.

  The pretext for traveling to New Hampshire was a book signing for Audacity in Portsmouth, where he spoke at an events center on the outskirts of town. Long before his arrival, the parking lot was jammed and the conference center packed to overflowing—all 750 tickets were gone within hours. Outside, hawkers were selling Obama-for-President shirts, campaign buttons, and paraphernalia while inside, veteran political operatives were talking of how Obama had tapped into a public yearning for a leader who can change attitudes and bring the country together.

  Later in Manchester, fifteen hundred people paid twenty-five dollars each to see Obama. He was introduced by New Hampshire Governor John Lynch, who joked that the party had originally invited the Rolling Stones until learning they could sell more tickets by having Obama there. When Lynch said, “Senator Obama, should you choose to run—” he was immediately interrupted by cheers and applause. Obama spoke for half an hour, ending with what sounded like a candidate’s rallying cry: “America is ready to turn the page. America is ready for a new set of challenges. This is our time. A new generation is prepared to lead. You are part of that and I am grateful to be a partner with you on that.”

  Chuck Campion, who ran Walter Mondale’s 1984 New Hampshire campaign and had come up from Boston with his wife to see firsthand what the Obama phenomenon was about, marveled at the scene. “In all my history,” he said, “nobody’s ever had a crowd this big, this early.”

  Throughout the day Obama was trailed by a press corps that rivaled that of most candidates on the eve of a New Hampshire presidential primary. They sat at row after row of tables in the back of the banquet hall hammering out leads that described Obama’s visit in the most extraordinarily flattering terms—a swooning press reaction later called, accurately, “Obamamania.” The TV talk show host Chris Matthews typified this kind of reaction when he remarked much later that he got “a thrill up my leg” after listening to Obama.

  Before Obama spoke in Manchester, he held a press conference. He hadn’t made a final decision about running, he said, and didn’t believe ambition alone justified a candidacy. “I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t want to be driven into this decision simply because the opportunity is there,” he said, “but rather because I think I will serve the country well by running.” Did he think what he was offering was different from other Democrats? “I think there’s a certain tone that I’ve taken in my career that seems to be resonating right now. I will say this, that I am suspicious of hype. The fact that I’ve become—that my fifteen minutes of fame has extended a little longer than fifteen minutes is, I think, somewhat surprising to me and completely baffling to my wife. And I think what’s going on is that people are very hungry for something new. I think they are interested in being called to be part of something larger than the kind of small, petty, slash-and-burn politics that we’ve been seeing over the last several years, and to some degree I think I’m a stand-in for that desire on the part of the country. . . . I think right now people are feeling they want commonsense, nonideological solutions to practical problems that they face, and so they’re wondering could I be somebody who would help be partners in that.”

  When he finished, he looked toward one of his aides and asked, “Who’s got my tea?”

  Before announcing his candidacy, Obama vacationed in Hawaii. But he found no refuge there. A photograph of the bare-chested Obama on the beach in his swimsuit showed up in People magazine. He called Plouffe in Chicago. This is a drag, he told his would-be campaign manager. Plouffe wondered what he meant. I’ve been on the streets my whole life, Obama told him. I can’t really move around. As he listened, Plouffe thought to himself, Maybe he’s not going to do this. But Obama returned ready to run. On January 16, 2007, twenty-four months after being sworn in to the Senate, he filed the required notice of his presidential exploratory committee and announced his intentions with a video on his new Web site.

  Obama set February 10 for his formal announcement in Springfield, Illinois, where he had served for eight years in the state senate. He chose the grounds of the Old State Capitol, where in 1858 Abraham Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” speech during his losing campaign for the United States Senate against Stephen A. Douglas. Obama’s advisers liked the symbolism of having the first serious African-American presidential candidate standing where the Great Emancipator had spoken. They also hoped the scene might remind people of another Obama connection to Lincoln: Obama, like Lincoln, would come to the presidency with only limited national experience.

  Obama, who liked to write late into the night, delivered a draft of his speech to his advisers about 4 a.m. on the Thursday before the Saturday announcement. Two speechwriters reworked it, but there was little time for Obama to practice. He arrived in Springfield on Friday night, where he was scheduled to tape an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes. He had gone through the speech a few times the previous day, but had time for what one aide remembered as “one indifferent read-through” before returning to his hotel. Back in his suite, several friends prepared to leave to give Obama time to sleep. He insisted they stay and talk. “I remember looking at him,” recalled Valerie Jarrett, one of his closest friends and a Chicago confidant, “and saying, ‘Are you okay?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I’m fine. Are you okay?’” She replied, “No, I’m not. I’m a nervous wreck.”

  Saturday dawned with brilliant sunshine and bone-chilling temperatures, hovering in single digits as the announcement time neared. When she saw the weather forecasts, Michelle Obama urged his political team to move the event indoors. Obama’s advisers resisted. They wanted not only the Greek-revival Capitol topped with a white-and-red cupola in the background but also the television shots that would show a sea of supporters huddled together as the candidate spoke. On the grounds of the Old State Capitol, and in the streets adjacent, people began to assemble—and then more people and more people until there were more than fifteen thousand of them, bundled against the frozen central Illinois morning. Even the advisers had not anticipated a crowd this large. Obama, his wife, and their daughters made their way
onto the stage to a gigantic roar. He spoke of destiny and “the improbable quest” he was beginning that day:

  “I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness—a certain audacity—to this announcement. I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change. The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we’ve changed this country before. In the face of tyranny, a band of patriots brought an empire to its knees. In the face of secession, we unified a nation and set the captives free. In the face of Depression, we put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty. We welcomed immigrants to our shores, we opened railroads to the West, we landed a man on the moon, and we heard a King’s call to let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what’s needed to be done. Today we are called once more—and it is time for our generation to answer that call. For that is our unyielding faith—that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.”