"It might be a little worse tomorrow," Obama said.
"Really?" Nesbitt said. "Why do you say that?"
Obama smiled and said, "It's a pretty good speech."
Obama called his grandmother Toot in Hawaii and his daughters, Sasha and Malia, who were back in Chicago. Michelle Obama, who had watched one of her husband's rehearsals the day before, had one piece of advice: "Smile a lot." Before the speech, the Obamas waited with Richard and Loretta Durbin in a blue-carpeted holding room backstage. Obama wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a tie that he'd borrowed from Gibbs.
When Obama emerged from behind the curtain, he smiled at the applause and heard the pulsing beat of Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions singing their civil-rights-era hit, "Keep on Pushing." (He was relieved to see five thousand blue and white Obama signs in the hands of delegates. Jim Cauley had hired two college kids to drive a U-Haul filled with the signs from Chicago to Boston and they had broken down somewhere outside of Cleveland; with little time to spare, they got back on the road.) After a half-minute of applause, Obama stepped to the podium and began:
On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deepest gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.
My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British. But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that has shone as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him.
While studying here my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor, my grandfather signed up for duty, joined Patton's army, marched across Europe. Back home my grandmother raised a baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through FHA and later moved west, all the way to Hawaii, in search of opportunity.
And they too had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream born of two continents.
Obama began the speech, as he had begun hundreds of others, with a highly compressed summary of his origins. He didn't stumble, but he was, at the beginning, somewhat ordinary, a little stiff, finding his way. Vicky Rideout and Jack Corrigan stood in the wings and watched Obama. Rideout had spent weeks going through the text with him and his team and thought it was a good speech, a winner, but she could see that there was nothing electrifying about Obama in the opening minute or two. He possessed neither the measured gravity of Mario Cuomo nor the theatrical passion of Jesse Jackson, whose Convention speeches remained embedded in the Party's collective memory.
The speech was structured to go from a passage on autobiography to one connecting the speaker to the diversity and the history of the nation ("I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story"), and then to the stories of specific, emblematic people. And by the time Obama began to talk about the suffering of the people he had met on the campaign trail--the union workers in Galesburg whose plant moved to Mexico; the bright young women in East St. Louis who can't afford college; the people in the collar counties around Chicago angry about waste in both the Pentagon and "a welfare agency"--somewhere in there, Obama began to find his rhythm. This speech was by no means the best he had written and far from the best he ever delivered. To some extent it was a condensed, if more polished, version of a stump speech that he had been honing for nearly two years. But almost no one in the hall or in the television audience had heard it before or had ever seen Obama and his skills, his melding of the professorial and the pastoral. Rideout said that she felt Obama "pull into another gear." His shoulders relaxed, his head was raised up a little higher, his voice took on a greater sense of abandon as he surfed the applause, just as he had rehearsed. From that point on the speech riveted both the hall and, even more, the television audience. "At that moment," Rideout said, "you could see that Obama felt he was meant to be there, delivering this speech--it was what he was meant to do." Watching Obama and the speech take off, as it did, reminded Michael Sheehan of the moment of brightness and fire just before a rocket gathers speed and truly launches.
In the closing flourish, which Obama had trimmed to please the Kerry campaign, he called on familiar themes of common purpose and national unity but put them in such a way that the speech would be talked about for many years to come:
If there's a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child.
If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription drugs and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent.
If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
It is that fundamental belief--I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper--that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as one American family: E pluribus unum, out of many, one.
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and 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 white America and Latino America and Asian America; there is 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 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, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?
The applause in this section of the speech was loud and, if it is possible to interpret applause, seemed to reflect years of frustration with the Republican culture wars, partisan warfare, and a political strategy of divide and conquer. Like the 2002 antiwar speech, it served a progressive message in a way that sounded deeply patriotic even to people who might consider themselves Republicans or independents. The speech seemed to many a long-awaited rebuke to the sneering moralism on display at earlier Republican Conventions when figures like Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan took the stage. Obama's speech depended on an audience ready to recognize the demographic and cultural shifts in the country. Nixon's strategy in 1968, with its implicit racial appeals, had been the fulfillment of L.B.J.'s prediction that his support of civil rights and voting rights for African-Americans would hand over the South to the Republicans for a generation. Whether it was a wish or a reality, Obama insisted, in the political and poetical terms of his speech, that the women's movement, gay liberation, immigration, affirmative action, and many other factors and patterns had helped to reverse that reality.
Finally, Obama used that phrase of Jeremiah Wright's--the audacity of hope--to distinguish between "blind optimism" and "something more substantial."
It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill-worker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny n
ame who believes that America has a place for him, too.
Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: in the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.
I believe that we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity.
I believe we can provide jobs for the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair.
I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs, and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices and meet the challenges that face us.
America, tonight, if you feel the same energy that I do, if you feel the same urgency that I do, if you feel the same passion that I do, if you feel the same hopefulness that I do, if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as President. And John Edwards will be sworn in as Vice-President. And this country will reclaim its promise. And out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.
As the camera panned the audience, there was not just the usual orchestrated applause and listless waving of signs. Some of the delegates were crying, some stomping their feet--for a state senator from Illinois. Professionals like Hillary Clinton, who stood applauding, fully recognized that they had been introduced to an extraordinarily talented young politician. "I thought that was one of the most electrifying moments that I can remember at any Convention," she said the next day. "I have campaigned and have done fund-raising for him, and a friend of mine asked who is this Barack Bama?" Clinton said she replied the name was Barack Obama. "It's Swahili for Bubba."
Vicky Rideout, who had been writing and editing speeches for a long time, stood in the arena, as the Curtis Mayfield song revved up again and Obama embraced his wife and waved and the applause kept coming in waves, and she thought she had never witnessed anything like it: "To see an absolute newbie set the place on fire like that? It was astonishing."
Chicagoans who had spent time with Obama might have been the slowest to see what had happened. Will Burns, who had been Obama's deputy campaign manager and field manager for the Rush campaign, was moved by the spectacle but also told friends, "That was a speech he used to give to crowds of ten people!" Eric Zorn, the Tribune columnist, had also seen Obama deliver similar speeches and watched this one from the arena. He thought Obama had done well enough, but he had no idea of the depth of the reaction until he went to the press center where journalists had watched it on television. "What was clear is that, good as he had been live, it was way better on the screen," Zorn said.
The cable anchors all praised Obama and the networks scurried to get video for their late broadcasts and morning shows. Almost instantly, Obama's team was getting invitations to appear on network television. Even the remote sultans of the Chicago and Illinois political organizations set aside their usual studied indifference to embrace Obama. Richard Daley, who had maintained a kingly aloofness during the primary campaign in Illinois, acknowledged that Obama had hit a "grand slam," and the governor, Rod Blagojevich, said of the Senate race, "If present trends continue, Barack Obama is on the verge of getting a hundred per cent of the vote." Even Bobby Rush, who wore his disdain of Obama like a gold watch, had to admit that his old rival was now a bona-fide star: "Do you know what 'Barack' means in Hebrew? It means 'one who God favors.' That's lightning. You don't fool with that." Then he smiled and said, "And besides, some people live a charmed life."
Clarence Page wrote in the Tribune:
A superstar is born. It is difficult for many of us to contain our enthusiasm for Barack Obama, yet we must try. We owe that to him. We should not reward his blockbuster performance last week at the Democratic National Convention by loading his shoulders with the fate of the nation. Not yet, anyway. That can wait, perhaps until, say, his 2012 Presidential campaign?
For the rest of the week in Boston, as Obama went from the Convention floor to various interview appointments, people circled around him asking for autographs, urging him to run for President.
At Logan Airport, where Obama was going to catch a flight back to Chicago with other members of the Illinois delegation, people asked for autographs. It seemed that the only people at Logan who didn't recognize him worked at security. As he went through the security checks, a guard pulled aside Obama, "a skinny black guy with a funny name," for extra screening. Jim Cauley, who was traveling with him, was shocked and wanted to protest as a security guard passed a wand over Obama's arms, legs, and body.
Obama smiled and told his campaign manager, "Dude, it's happened to me all my life. Don't worry about it."
Once they got past security and were walking to the gate, Cauley heard his cell phone ringing. He answered. It was an English-speaking aide to Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow. Gorbachev, who had been running a foundation since stepping down as the Soviet leader, in 1991, had heard the speech and wanted to speak to Obama. The most important foreign leader of the post-war era was on the line: Obama took the call.
Still, people kept crowding around Obama, making it hard to move. Cauley cajoled someone in charge of Delta's first-class lounge to let them inside. Later, Cauley ran into the senior senator from Delaware, Joe Biden.
While Obama spoke on the phone, Biden told Cauley that he was impressed and expected to see Obama soon in Washington.
"He's a good man," Biden said, "but tell him he needs to go slow when he gets to the Senate."
Even before Obama got back to Chicago, his fund-raising accelerated on the strength of his speech; much more was on the way. But Obama's newfound fame also brought an accompanying pang of anxiety, especially among African-Americans old enough to remember what had happened to some of the country's greatest black political figures. As energized as many black men and women in Illinois and across the country were by Obama's rise, many were immediately concerned with his safety. Just a few weeks before, when Obama gave a graduation speech at the Lab School, the private school in Hyde Park that his daughters attended, one of his leading black financial supporters and fellow parents repeatedly heard that anxiety. "A lot of friends of mine were saying, 'You tell that brother to be careful,'" the supporter recalled. Now that anxiety, accompanied by enormous pride, only increased.
In the meantime, the Republicans had still not come up with a candidate to replace Jack Ryan. Rather than rest on his lead against a phantom opponent, Obama embarked on a long-planned statewide campaign binge, hitting thirty counties and thirty-nine cities and towns. The Sun-Times printed one of his daily schedules:
8:30 A.M.: Champaign County rally, Urbana
10:05 A.M.: Douglas County rally, Tuscola
11:45 A.M.: Coles County rally, Mattoon
12:45 P.M.: Cumberland County rally, Neoga
2:40 P.M.: Jefferson County rally, Mount Vernon
3:55 P.M.: Wayne County rally, Fairfield
5 P.M.: Wabash County rally, Mount Carmel
5:45 P.M.: Lawrence County rally, Lawrenceville
6:30 P.M.: Richland County rally, Olney
8 P.M.: Marion County rally, Salem
The problem was that when he came home from Boston, Obama was exhilarated and exhausted. He knew, vaguely, that he and his family were going on an R.V. trip throughout the state, but he thought that there would be plenty of time to spend together--a kind of vacation with a little campaigning thrown in. When he actually checked his schedule and saw that it was a five-day jamboree of non-stop rallies, he called Jeremiah Posedel, his downstate director.
"This was a Friday night and the tour began that Saturday," Posedel recalled. "Barack called me at my house in Rock Island and I could tell he was pissed off. He said, 'What the hell are you trying to do to me? This schedule is out of control. This is a death march.'"
When Obama made a campaign s
top downstate in Rock Island County a year earlier, Posedel had made calls to twenty-five counties, frantically trying to gather people for a "rally." Obama drove three hours to the event. Thirty people showed up. "In those days, if you talked to people on the phone and tried to get them interested in Barack Obama, they would say, 'Who is he?' 'What is he?' which was a way of asking about his race. The only reason a few might come is because I worked for Lane Evans, a downstate Democratic congressman who had endorsed Barack early. But even then, they were probably still voting for Hynes. Barack would make a great impression, but a lot of people still said, 'I don't think he can win.' They wouldn't mention race but they used every other excuse in the book."
Now, on his five-day triumphal "death march," in towns where Posedel expected, at most, forty or fifty people at each stop, Obama was drawing hundreds, even thousands. Suddenly, he was working rope lines, shaking countless hands, and speaking in packed auditoriums with parents holding their children up on their shoulders. At each event, he performed well, remembering names, shaking hands, speaking with clarity and enthusiasm, but, back in the car, he barely talked to Posedel. Even at a birthday party that Posedel threw for Obama at his house in Rock Island, Obama was cool to him. Finally, on the last stop of the tour, Obama pulled Posedel into an alley and said, "You did a great job. This trip was unbelievable. It was great." Part of the strategy of the trip was to forever inoculate Obama against charges that he was unfamiliar with, and never visited, downstate Illinois--a charge that had plagued Moseley Braun. In every regard, Obama now had to admit, the journey had been a success. Then he tapped Posedel in the gut with mock menace. "But don't ever fucking do this to me again!"
Obama recognized that he was now a political phenomenon. The first edition of Dreams from My Father was now an expensive item on eBay. Rachel Klayman, an editor at Crown, the publishing house that had rights to the book, immediately started thinking about a new edition.
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 53
