Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry. I could not get over the incident, and my loss of any attraction to him as a result. Respondent knew this was a serious problem. I told him I did not know if we could work it out.
The documents also quoted Jeri Ryan's mother, Sharon Zimmerman, saying, "Jeri Lynn told me that she was tired of being told what to eat, how to sit, what to wear, tired of being criticized about her physical appearance and told to exercise."
Ryan said in the filing that he had been "faithful and loyal" to his wife during their marriage. "I did arrange romantic getaways for us, but that did not include the type of activities she describes," he said. "We did go to one avant-garde nightclub in Paris which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return." Ryan made it sound as if they had walked out on an underground production of Ubu Roi.
Obama was at a fund-raising dinner in distant Carbondale when the news broke. How to react to a story as strange as a second sex scandal? In April, after his primary victory, Obama had hired a new communications director, Robert Gibbs, a shrewd operative from Alabama, who had worked for Ernest Hollings, of South Carolina, in the Senate and on the campaign trail with John Kerry. In 2002, Gibbs had worked for another Joshua generation politician, former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, who had tried, and failed, to beat John Cornyn for a Senate seat in Texas. Like Cauley, Gibbs was a white Southerner with sharp instincts about the politics of race. The issue now, however, was sex. Obama and Gibbs worked quickly to come up with a suitably dignified, and anodyne, response. "I've tried to make it clear throughout the campaign," Obama told reporters, "that my focus is on what I can do to help the families of Illinois and I'm not considering this something appropriate for me to comment on." (The invoking of "families" was an inspired touch.) Later, Obama would lower his head in embarrassed silence as reporters shouted questions at him like "Do you think a sexual fetish defines a person's character?"
While the Obama campaign stepped back in studied (and stunned) silence as yet another opponent endured a humiliating implosion, Jay Leno weighed in:
In the Senate race in Illinois, the Republican candidate Jack Ryan just went through an ugly divorce and in court papers, his wife accused him of taking her to sex clubs where he tried to make her have sex with him in front of strangers. Aren't Republicans the family-values people? That's the difference between Republicans and Democrats on family values. Democrat politicians cheat on their wives. Republicans cheat, too--but they bring the wife along. Make it a family event! They include the whole family!
For a few days, Ryan seemed to think he could get past the crisis by emphasizing the potential damage done to his son and his outrage at the judge who had released the papers. "A lot of people were saying to me the last three months it's politically damaging to keep these files sealed, just release the files," Ryan told reporters. "But what dad wouldn't do the same thing I did? What dad wouldn't try to keep information about your child, that might be detrimental to the world knowing, private? Even the things moms and dads say to each other, about each other, should be kept away from children." Ryan insisted that he had done nothing illegal. Jeri Ryan followed with a statement that, while not denying the accuracy of her testimony in the divorce papers, underscored that her ex-husband had never been unfaithful or abusive.
"Jack is a good man, a loving father and he shares a strong bond with our son," she said. "I have no doubt that he will make an excellent senator."
Ryan also found support from the man he hoped to succeed, Peter Fitzgerald (who had voted to find President Clinton guilty during his impeachment trial) and from the Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, who said, "Just think about it, any politician or somebody thinking about running for office, if they have an ex-wife who is mad at them or an ex-girlfriend, they are dead, they are toast, because you can make any accusation in the world."
But political endorsements from Jeri Ryan and Bill O'Reilly were not going to sway the state Republican Party organization. At the start of the campaign, Judy Baar Topinka, the Republican chairwoman in Illinois, had asked Ryan if there was anything damaging or embarrassing in the files. He had assured her that there was not. "I consider him an honest man and I take him at his word," she said just before the primary vote. The state Republican leadership now made it plain, on and off the record in the press, that Jack Ryan was no longer a viable candidate. Raymond LaHood, a Republican moderate from central Illinois, was among those who called on Ryan to leave the race. (Obama appointed LaHood to his Cabinet, as Secretary of Transportation, in 2009.)
On June 25th, Ryan complied with his Party's wish, but not without complaining that the Tribune had held him to a "higher standard than anyone else in the history of the United States." One politician who showed some pity for Ryan was Blair Hull. "He is the closest thing to a saint that you can find," he said years later. "He's a kind and generous person. It was sad. It's funny where these turns in life take you. He could be where Obama is right now. He looked like John Kennedy."
Obama continued to keep his rhetoric, and his public face, as impassive as possible. "What happened to him over the last three days was unfortunate," he said of Ryan. "It's not something I certainly would wish on anybody. And having said that, from this point forward, I think we will be continuing to talk about the issues."
At around the time Ryan was enduring his public humiliation, the Obama campaign was hearing rumors that the Kerry team was going to ask him to give the keynote address at the Convention. Both parties often used the keynote address as a way to focus on the next generation of leadership. In 1988, the Democrats called on the Texas state treasurer, Ann Richards, to give the keynote at the Convention nominating Michael Dukakis, and Richards delivered an attack on George H. W. Bush that had more one-liners than a midnight monologue. ("Poor George. He can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.") The speech propelled Richards to victory in the Texas gubernatorial campaign.
To Mary Beth Cahill, the short list for keynoter seemed dull--except for Obama. Everything she had seen of Obama on the video reel that his campaign had sent convinced her that he was a gamble worth taking. Just before the July Fourth weekend, she recommended Obama to Kerry, and Kerry, who was not deeply involved in the details of the Convention, waved it forward. Obama was riding from Springfield to Chicago when he got the call telling him the news. After hanging up, he turned to his driver and said, "I guess this is pretty big."
Obama was able to spend far more time on the speech than if he had had an actual opponent to campaign against. The press was filled with reports that the Republicans were grasping at ideas to replace Jack Ryan: there was Mike Ditka, the celebrated former tight end and coach for the Chicago Bears, and there was Orion (The Big O) Samuelson, a radio broadcaster known for his popular daily spot, "National Farm Report," and his recording of Yogi Yorgesson's "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas." Andrea Barthwell, the deputy drug czar in the Bush Administration, was the favorite of the moderate wing of the nineteen-person Illinois Republican Central Committee, but the conservatives blocked the idea and continued searching for someone who leaned harder to the right. None of the candidates who finished behind Ryan seemed either sufficiently appealing or willing to enter a race that they were likely to lose.
While the Republicans continued their search, Obama worked in Springfield on a first draft of his speech, making notes and sketching passages on yellow legal pads at his desk in the Senate chamber. Sometimes, in order to get away from his colleagues and the budget debates on the floor, he worked in the men's room, near the sinks. In the course of the campaign, Obama had developed a keen sense of what lines and ideas from his speeches played well with audiences, and much of the writing process was
a matter of cobbling together a new text out of his stump speeches.
Obama faxed his first draft to Axelrod, who was on vacation in Italy, and to the Kerry campaign. The point person among Kerry's aides for Obama's speech was Vicky Rideout, who had been a campaign aide to Dukakis and the lead speechwriter for Geraldine Ferraro, when she ran with Walter Mondale, in 1984. The Kerry campaign had determined from polling numbers that the public did not want to witness a fusillade of negativity about the Bush Administration at the Convention--especially when the country was at war. Rideout was keeping a careful watch for anti-Bush rhetoric in all the speeches to be delivered in Boston. Some people in the campaign thought this reluctance to attack Bush was foolhardy, that voters routinely told pollsters that they disliked negative campaigning even though it plainly worked, but Robert Shrum, who spoke for the Kerry campaign, prevailed, and so Obama delivered a draft that focused on hope--which was his disposition anyway.
"My distinct impression was that Obama was writing this himself," Rideout recalled. "He e-mailed the draft to me a little late. I was getting nervous because he was a high-risk speaker, no one really knew him, and this was the most important speech outside of the nominees. When I read it I breathed a sigh of relief. I had no idea what to expect from a guy who had been a state senator for a few terms. We didn't want an Ann Richards, vituperative, lashing kind of speech. This was uplifting. The only problem was that it was twice as long as it should have been."
One touch that Obama did not use often on the campaign trail but added to the speech draft was a phrase that was a turn on the title of one of Jeremiah Wright's sermons--"the audacity to hope." This phrase was to be the refrain of the speech's climax, the clarion call to optimism, to vote for Kerry, and to a renewed national spirit.
Working with Rideout and his own aides, Obama went about the work of cutting the speech, which was scheduled for July 27, 2004, the second night of the four-day-long Convention. There is nothing like excessive length to kill the rhythm and effectiveness of a political speech. None of the Kerry people had forgotten Bill Clinton's windy address at the 1988 Convention, which drew its loudest applause when he arrived at the phrase, "In conclusion ..." Obama had a hard time reconciling himself to the cuts at first and despaired of the initial instruction that the draft, which ran twenty-five minutes, be reduced by half. Rideout told Obama that he needed to cut back on the more provincial material about Illinois and "turn up the volume a bit" on the words in praise of John Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, and place them earlier in the speech.
Three days before the speech, Obama, Axelrod, and Gibbs boarded a chartered Hawker jet late at night in Springfield. By now, Obama had trimmed the text to twenty-three hundred words and had it more or less memorized. He had practiced in Axelrod's office on a rented teleprompter; he'd never used the machine before. Since the start of his political career, he had worked either from notes, from a full text, or purely from memory. With the teleprompter, he had to work on not squinting or taking on a mesmeric, metronomic rhythm as he shifted reading from the two screens flanking the lectern. He also had to realize that he was speaking both to a packed arena and, more important, to millions of people watching on television. If he shouted, he would come off on television as abrasive, unhinged. In Chicago, he practiced the speech fifteen times or more on the teleprompter. As they flew to Boston, Obama told the story of his miserable, brief stay at the Los Angeles Convention four years before.
"Let's hope this Convention goes a whole lot better," he said.
They arrived at Logan Airport after midnight and went straight to the Hilton Boston Back Bay to get some sleep. But Obama couldn't sleep and, for a while, he just wandered around the hotel lobby. "He'd been at it for weeks," Jim Cauley recalled. "He told me, 'No mistakes. We have got to nail this one.'"
Over the next two days, Obama split his time between rehearsing his speech in one of the windowless locker rooms of the FleetCenter and doing interviews. At rehearsals, he worked with Michael Sheehan, a longtime speech coach for Democratic politicians, who started out as a producer of Shakespeare at the Folger in Washington. Sheehan worked with Obama on various techniques unique to a venue like the FleetCenter. First, he and Obama toured the cavernous, empty hall, just to get a feel for the enormity of the place. Sheehan had been giving these tutorials to Democratic nominees since 1988 and he was accustomed to meeting egotistical politicians who insisted on moving with big entourages; he was struck by how Obama went around with, at most, two or three people: Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and Jonathan Favreau, a speechwriter in his mid-twenties, whom Gibbs knew from the Kerry campaign. Then, once they went down to the basement rehearsal room, Sheehan encouraged Obama to "surf," to speak over applause rather than waiting for it to die down, thereby avoiding a start-stop, start-stop cadence that would have the rhythm of a car in heavy traffic and play poorly on television. They worked on emphases and accents, pauses before punch lines, pacing and timbre. Sheehan showed Obama videotapes of some "counter-examples," like Alfonse D'Amato, the New York Republican, who had botched their speeches with singsong deliveries and clumsy pacing. Above all, he counseled Obama not to bellow or shout, as if he were in a small auditorium or a state fair; he had to let the microphone do the work for him and vary his volume only moderately to indicate a heightening emotional pitch.
"To trust the microphone in a hall like that was a leap of faith," Sheehan said. "It's like that moment in one of the Indiana Jones movies where he comes to a chasm and there is an invisible bridge. You have to have that kind of confidence.... Barack was never nervous. He was all about 'Show me what I need to know.' And then he assimilated it. There is a massive misconception about him that he is totally a community organizer. I look at him and I see the law professor. He studies."
In his interviews with the national press, Obama was asked about everything from his views on Iraq to his own burgeoning celebrity status. If Obama was in the least bit nervous about this deluge of attention, he did not show it. Equanimity was part of his appeal. "I love to body surf," he said. "If you're on a wave, you ride it. You figure at some point you're going to get a mouthful of sand. It doesn't last forever." Obama even felt confident enough to be a little critical of John Kerry's limitations. When he was asked about the nominee's relationship with African-American voters, he said, "There's no doubt John Kerry has not captured the hearts of the black community the way Clinton did. His style is pretty buttoned down. He's not the guy who is going to play the saxophone on MTV."
Obama did so many interviews and rehearsed his speech so often that by Tuesday, the day of the speech, he was feeling a little hoarse. At noon, he was scheduled to speak at a rally assembled by the League of Conservation Voters. He cut his remarks short. Apologizing, he said, "I can't throw out my throat for tonight or I've had it."
Obama was on edge especially when the Kerry campaign, which reviewed all the speeches in order to check for thematic consistency and to avoid overlap, called to say that Obama's extended riff on there not being red states or blue states, only the United States, was a problem. Kerry, they said, wanted to say something very similar. They asked for cuts. "For Obama, this was the emotional peak of the speech, his signature lines--it's what he had been saying for months--and so I wanted to be absolutely sure the Kerry people thought it was a really big deal to do this at the last minute," Vicky Rideout recalled. "I discussed it with the campaign's speechwriters and I approached Obama and said, 'We have a little challenge here.'"
Rideout explained what she'd been told, half-expecting Obama to lose his temper. He was, after all, wound up about the speech and had been working on it for weeks. A last-minute excision of the heart of the text was sure to throw him.
"All he said was, 'Jeez, really?' He was upset but he didn't show that much anger," Rideout said. "It was that temperament--'no drama Obama' all the way. He didn't cheerfully slap me on the back the way Bill Richardson might have but there was no steam coming out of his ears, either."
Perhap
s not, but when Obama got in the car afterward with Axelrod and another campaign aide, he was furious, according to an account in Chicago magazine. "That fucker is trying to steal a line from my speech," Obama said, according to the campaign worker. Axelrod, for his part, did not recall Obama's language but said that Obama, after being upset, eventually cooled off. In a subsequent conversation with Vicky Rideout, Obama asked whether the request to cut the passage was coming directly from Kerry or from a nervous staff member. Rideout checked and was told that Kerry had made the request himself. "In that case, it's John's convention," Obama said, and he pared back the passage somewhat but retained the crucial lines.
At around two that afternoon, Obama rehearsed in a room just under the stage. He was still adjusting to the teleprompter and it was very hard to tell, without crowd noise, without the dual audiences of the arena and the television camera, if he was going to be entirely at ease that night. Network television no longer carried the event live--that was left to the cable stations---but there was no doubt that he would get coverage if he scored or if he bombed. Some politicians, including Clinton, had survived a disastrous performance at a Convention, but not many. Despite all the pressure, the story most frequently repeated in Obama's circles about the day of the speech centers on a moment he had with his close friend Marty Nesbitt. As crowds milled around on the streets and in the hotel lobbies of Boston, asking him to sign autographs or pose for cell-phone pictures, Nesbitt said to him, "You know, this is pretty unbelievable. You're like a rock star."
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 52
