The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Finally, on February 18, 2003, Moseley Braun ended her indecision and announced that, in fact, she was running for office. The office was President of the United States.

  Eric Zorn, an influential liberal columnist for the Tribune, was among the dumbstruck, writing that Moseley Braun was "ethically challenged" and was now "making reservations for fantasy land." In any event, the Senate race, for both parties, was absolutely open with no incumbent and not a single dominant candidate on the horizon. Obama called David Axelrod for advice and planned a press conference. He was in.

  Obama's intentions did not yet impress everyone as entirely serious. Some of his colleagues at the University of Chicago still thought that he could be persuaded to give up politics for good and accept a tenured teaching position. At a fundraiser for Bill Clinton's charitable foundation, Obama's law-school colleague Geoffrey Stone watched his friend work the room. Stone felt pity for Obama. "After the defeat by Bobby Rush, people here thought Barack's political career was over," Stone recalled. "At the reception, I saw Barack in the crowd, and he was doing the politician thing, shaking hands, looking people in the eye, and I was thinking, What a waste! What is he doing this for? Twenty minutes later, we were at the shrimp bowl. I said to him, 'As your friend, I tell you, I was watching you work the room and I can't believe you're doing this. Why not settle down and be a law professor?' He says, 'Geoff, I appreciate that, but I really have to do this. I think I can make a difference. I've got to try.' As he disappeared into the crowd, I thought, What a putz. What a waste."

  Luck is not the least of the many factors that figured into the rise of Barack Obama. First came the unseemly fall, in 1995, of Mel Reynolds, which led to Alice Palmer's decision to run for Congress and Obama's subsequent decision to succeed her in the Illinois State Senate. As a candidate for the statehouse, Obama enjoyed an easy path to office: he faced nominal competition in his first two campaigns and none at all in his third. Following the decisive loss to Bobby Rush--a campaign in which everything that could go wrong did--Obama was, in his run for the U.S. Senate, the beneficiary of one fantastic stroke of fortune after another. The first was Moseley Braun's unforeseen decision to run for President.

  At the press conference opening his campaign, Obama declared that Peter Fitzgerald had done "zilch" for the general welfare. "Four years ago, Peter Fitzgerald bought himself a Senate seat, and he's betrayed Illinois ever since," he said. "But we are here to take it back on behalf of the people of Illinois." But before he had to answer any return volleys Fitzgerald retired from the Senate. He had recommended Patrick Fitzgerald, a crusading prosecutor from New York, as U.S. Attorney--whose appointment led to the indictments of corrupt officials in both parties. Peter Fitzgerald's biggest opponents to that appointment had been the Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and George W. Bush. He had battled his own party on everything from environmentalism (he was for it) to the funding of the Lincoln Library. After six years, he had tired of bankrolling a life in politics.

  In the nearly three years since losing to Bobby Rush, Obama had, like an athlete in training or a musician woodshedding, worked hard at his craft. Not only had he become a far more engaged legislator (especially after the Democrats came into the majority); he had also lost his diffident bearing when it came to retail politics. After countless speeches, cocktail parties, panel discussions, fund-raising dinners, business lunches, and state fairs, after speaking in the pulpits of black churches in Chicago and in V.F.W. halls downstate, he had become a better orator, a smoother campaigner, a more disciplined fundraiser. Obama was beginning to develop his signature appeal, the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal, a conceit both sentimental and effective. He was no longer straining to be someone he was not. Instead, he was among those politicians who were forging a new identity for the next generation of black leaders, men and women with no direct connection to the civil-rights movement except in the ways the movement had helped them to gain greater access to the best colleges and law schools and other realms of American opportunity. Unlike the elder generation of black politicians, many Southern-born and educated at historically black colleges and seminaries, Obama navigated Harvard and Roseland, the Loop and Altgeld Gardens. He was adept at pitching his cadences one way in black churches, another way at a P.T.A. meeting downstate, and yet another at a living-room gathering in Hyde Park or the near North Side. Some of his critics took notice of these differences in intonation and body language and counted Obama as a phony, but there was no doubt that for the vast majority of his audiences he was developing into a fresh, compelling candidate. What was more, he was utterly aware of his shape-shifting capacities.

  "The fact that I conjugate my verbs and speak in a typical Midwestern newscaster voice--there's no doubt that this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences," Obama said. "And there's no doubt that when I'm with a black audience I slip into a slightly different dialect. But the point is, I don't feel the need to talk in a certain way before a white audience. And I don't feel the need to speak a certain way in front of a black audience. There's a level of self-consciousness about these issues the previous generation had to negotiate that I don't feel I have to."

  Salim Muwakkil, the left-wing columnist who had come to know Obama in the early nineties, noticed that Obama had also become much more comfortable campaigning in the kinds of lower-income black communities where he had lost so badly in his 2000 congressional race. "One day, Barack was at Wallace's Catfish Corner on the West Side, an outpost where black politicians met, run by a former alderman, Wallace Davis," Muwakkil recalled. "His talk was interrupted by a radical group composed of ex-inmates who said, 'We're tired of you uppity Negroes treating us like trash. No one cares about ex-inmates. We're growing in strength and we want to be dealt with.' Barack acknowledged their plight. He gave a calm, well-grounded response, in words they could understand, how they were barking up the wrong tree if they thought this was aiding their cause. They didn't buy it all, but it was hard-won respect."

  Obama was also proving to be an African-American politician who made white voters--white voters who could never have imagined themselves voting for a black man for senator--come around to him. Eric Zorn, of the Tribune, followed Obama into various receptions and marveled at his ease with everyone in the room. "Obama was somehow all about validating you," Zorn said. "He was radiating the sense that 'You're the kind of guy who can accept a black guy as a senator.' He made people feel better about themselves for liking him." Obama's manner, his accent, his pedigree, his broad approach to the issues, told white voters, among other things: I am not Jesse Jackson. Jackson was a man of his time and place and history: he was born in the segregationist South, steeped in the civil-rights movement. Jackson certainly learned to navigate the broader world, but the difference in generation, psychology, speech, politics, and history was unmistakable. Jackson demanded painful change; the largest part of his history was one of heated rebuke, the rightful demand for redress. It was an illusion to think that all the victories were won, but Obama, so much younger, fluent in so many languages, possessed a manner of cool, yet winning embrace.

  Obama seemed capable of making whites forget even the most alien detail about him--his name. Early on, Dan Shomon had polled Obama's name, asking voters if they would not prefer "Barack (Barry) Obama." They did, by a small percentage. "From the start of Obama's career, a lot of people mistakenly thought he was a Muslim from his name, especially a lot of blacks," Shomon recalled. "But Barack refused to change it. He was who he was and that was it."

  Emil Jones, a creature of the South Side and the statehouse, accompanied Obama on one of his trips to southern Illinois and was amazed at the younger man's talent. "A little old lady said to me, 'I'm eighty-six years of age. I hope I live long enough because this young man's going to be President and I want to be able to vote for him,'" Jones recalled. "It was a little old white lady! It was astounding. There were three thousand people there.
There were three blacks: him, me, and my driver."

  Obama was at ease even doing what he liked least--raising money. "I remember one of Barack's first fund-raisers," his direct-mail consultant Pete Giangreco recalled. "It was in Evanston in the backyard of Paul Gaynor, a left-leaning lawyer. He's from an old lefty family: his father was a big lawyer, Mickey Gaynor, and his mother, Judy, a great fund-raiser. Their block seceded from the United States of America during the Vietnam War; it was that kind of block in the People's Republic of Evanston. Anyway, the fund-raiser was packed with the old-time progressive establishment people--but regular people, not stars. It was a warm, late-summer night. And Obama gave that riff about how if there was a senior downstate who can't get her prescription drugs, it matters to me even if it's not my grandmother; if a kid on the South Side can't read it matters to me even if it's not my kid; if a Muslim is hassled unjustly at the airport it affects my freedoms, too. It was one of those rare moments: goosebumps. And to a person they all walked out of there saying, 'Sign me up.' It was not a high-dollar thing but the buzz was there. These were people who had memories of Paul Simon, Harold Washington, Bobby Kennedy, and they were waiting and wanting to believe again. The word went out: this was the guy."

  David Wilkins, the Harvard Law School professor who grew up in Hyde Park, threw one of the earliest out-of-state fund-raising events for Obama at his house in Cambridge. "I had to beg people to come and pay a hundred dollars," Wilkins recalled. "We got about twenty-five people to come and I remember feeling so bad. Collectively, we probably got about ten thousand dollars. And Barack sat right over there, right against that window, and he talked with us for three hours. He was dazzling. This was before he was a thing. It was like seeing Hendrix in a club before he was Hendrix."

  To win, Obama needed top-level professional help. At first, his campaign manager was Dan Shomon, who had a keen understanding of the state and long experience with the candidate. Al Kindle took a leave of absence from Toni Preckwinkle's staff to make sure that Obama had an effective ground operation in Chicago's black neighborhoods. Kindle, who had worked for Harold Washington and Carol Moseley Braun, was especially adept at get-out-the-vote operations on Election Day. But, much more important, Obama now had the guidance of David Axelrod, who had established himself as the leading Democratic political and communications strategist in the state. A shambling, easygoing personality, Axelrod was a great believer in the use of narrative and biography to put across a candidate to the public; he was also not at all reluctant to use negative ads if the situation required it. Axelrod had first met Obama through Bettylu Saltzman during Project Vote in 1992, and had spent plenty of time learning the details of Obama's story and his personality in preparation for a campaign.

  Obama and Axelrod remained friends and talked frequently about politics, but when it came time to hire a staff, Obama did not immediately leap into Axelrod's embrace. Axelrod was unblemished, but he was also a close associate of the Daley family, a certified member of the city's political establishment. Just as Obama wanted to meet Valerie Jarrett before Michelle accepted her offer of a job at City Hall, he also wanted to think through signing on with David Axelrod. In the end, though, it was not an agonizing decision: Obama wanted to win. He liked and trusted Axelrod. Going with Axelrod made him less of an outsider, perhaps, but it also helped make him a serious candidate for the United States Senate.

  Born in 1955, Axelrod grew up in Stuyvesant Town, a post-war middle-class apartment development in Manhattan, just north of the East Village. His parents were liberal Jewish intellectuals and the household was full of talk about politics. Axelrod's mother was a reporter for the left-leaning newspaper P.M. and his father was a psychologist. In 1960, when he was five, his parents separated; he remembered seeing John Kennedy make a campaign speech near his building to a crowd of five thousand people that same year. When he was thirteen, he and a friend sold campaign materials at the Bronx Zoo supporting Robert Kennedy's Presidential campaign. R.F.K.'s assassination in 1968 was, outside of his parents' separation and divorce, the most devastating memory of his childhood.

  As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Axelrod became obsessed with the city's politics and managed to get a job writing a column called "Politicking" for the Hyde Park Herald. In one fantastical column published in 1974, he described having a dream about Chicago and then waking to see a headline in the newspaper: "Daley in 20th year as Mayor." In fact, Richard J. Daley died two years later; Axelrod eventually worked not only for political independents but for the resumption of the Daley dynasty.

  The year Axelrod started working for the Herald, his father committed suicide. Soon afterward, Axelrod decided to make his life in Chicago. On the recommendation of the political strategist Don Rose, who lived in Hyde Park and read the Herald, the Tribune gave Axelrod an internship right after his graduation, in 1976. After covering crime and other city stories for three years, Axelrod started working as a political reporter and soon became the paper's lead political writer.

  At the Tribune, Axelrod's favorite editors included an ex-Marine who had penetrated a crime syndicate for a story. "It was a real 'Front Page' cast of characters," he said, "and they could get you excited about your work. They made you feel that journalism was really a calling."

  Axelrod was an aggressive reporter with a future at the Tribune, but, after a while, he started to lose his taste for the paper. "The news side became much more permeated by the business side," he said. "In other words you could see the warning signs of where the news business was going." Axelrod and his wife, Susan, have a daughter, Lauren, who suffered irreparable brain damage from years of seizures caused by epilepsy. "The H.M.O.s wouldn't cover a lot. We were paying eight, ten thousand dollars out of pocket, and I was making forty-two thousand a year. It was a lot. The only reason I could even think about leaving is because my wife is a saint. She basically said, 'You've got to be happy or otherwise what's the point?' ... Besides, I always thought that the only two jobs worth having at the paper were writer and editor. The rest was middle management."

  Axelrod left the Tribune in 1984 and helped manage Paul Simon's successful Senate campaign against the incumbent, Charles Percy. The Simon campaign attracted a group of young people who soon became fixtures in Illinois politics, including Rahm Emanuel. After the election, Axelrod turned down a chance to work for Simon in Washington and set up his own political consulting business and worked for Democrats, both independents like Harold Washington and "organization" candidates, most notably Richard M. Daley. Axelrod turned down roles in both Bill Clinton's and Al Gore's Presidential campaigns--his daughter's seizures were still too severe for him to travel as often as would have been necessary--but his reputation grew as he helped with successful campaigns for African-American mayoral candidates in Detroit, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Houston, and Philadelphia.

  Among the recent campaigns that Axelrod had worked on before joining Obama was that of Rahm Emanuel, in 2002, when he ran for Congress from the Fifth District, on the North Side--the seat abandoned by Rod Blagojevich when he was elected governor. Although Emanuel was born and reared in Chicago, he spent many years working in Washington, as an aide to Bill Clinton, and then making a fast fortune as an investment banker. When he ran for Congress, he faced accusations of being a "millionaire carpetbagger." Axelrod helped silence those charges when he did a television ad for Emanuel featuring a Chicago police sergeant named Les Smulevitz. The setting was a Chicago diner. "I've been a Chicago police officer for a long time, and I've seen it all--the guns, the gangs, the drugs," the officer said. Then he praised Emanuel's crime-fighting bona fides as an aide to Clinton. "That's why the Fraternal Order of Police and Chicago firefighters backs Rahm Emanuel for Congress. And I'd tell you that even if I weren't his uncle."

  Axelrod was a magnet for first-rate help. With Shomon, he brought in Peter Giangreco, the direct-mail expert, who had just advised Rod Blagojevich's successful run for governor; Paul Harstad, a polling expert who had h
elped Tom Vilsack, of Iowa, in his gubernatorial race; and, as deputy campaign manager, Nate Tamarin, who worked for Giangreco. Axelrod was Obama's chief strategist and media guru, but he could not manage the campaign. In the spring of 2003, he invited Jim Cauley, a tough, plainspoken political operative from the Appalachian territory in Kentucky, to talk with him and Obama about replacing Dan Shomon as campaign manager. The relationship between Shomon and Obama had grown more distant, and it was time, some in the campaign believed, to bring in someone with wider experience.

  Cauley had impressed Axelrod when, in 2001, he helped Glenn Cunningham, an African-American and a former police officer and U.S. marshal, become mayor of Jersey City. The challenge of electing an African-American where blacks were not in the majority was something that Cauley had spent years thinking about and he had succeeded brilliantly with Cunningham.

  When Cauley first met Obama at his modest campaign offices, he told him, "If you want to run an old-school African-American race, it's not my thing. I don't know how to do it."

  But after listening to Obama talk for a while, Cauley could see that he was far less attuned to the generation of Jesse Jackson, Sr., and Bobby Rush. His natural cohort included younger African-American office-holders like Harold Ford, Jr., of Tennessee; Deval Patrick, of Massachusetts; Artur Davis, of Alabama; and, eventually, Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark. These were young men who had little, if any, direct memory of the civil-rights movement, but who possessed a distinct sense of debt to that past. Their experiences were hardly uniform: Ford, for instance, grew up in a prominent Memphis family and, as the son of a congressman, attended the St. Albans School for Boys and the University of Pennsylvania. Patrick was born in the Robert Taylor Homes projects on the South Side of Chicago and his father, a musician in the Sun Ra Arkestra, left the family. Patrick got a boost from A.B.C.--a nonprofit organization called A Better Chance, which helped send him to Milton Academy--and that led to Harvard College and then Harvard Law School. Cauley and Axelrod were eager to work with Obama. They agreed that he was not only individually gifted and politically progressive, but also that he was an exemplar of this new generation of black politicians who could potentially win elections--governorships, Senate seats--that had always been considered out of reach.