by Obama Barack
“If you lose, we’ll be deeper in the hole,” she said. “And what happens if you win? How are we supposed to maintain two households, in Washington and Chicago, when we can barely keep up with one?”
I’d anticipated this. “If I win, hon,” I said, “it will draw national attention. I’ll be the only African American in the Senate. With a higher profile, I can write another book, and it’ll sell a lot of copies, and that will cover the added expenses.”
Michelle let out a sharp laugh. I’d made some money on my first book, but nothing close to what it would take to pay for the expenses I was now talking about incurring. As my wife saw it—as most people would see it, I imagine—an unwritten book was hardly a financial plan.
“In other words,” she said, “you’ve got some magic beans in your pocket. That’s what you’re telling me. You have some magic beans, and you’re going to plant them, and overnight a huge beanstalk is going to grow high into the sky, and you’ll climb up the beanstalk, kill the giant who lives in the clouds, and then bring home a goose that lays golden eggs. Is that it?”
“Something like that,” I said.
Michelle shook her head and looked out the window. We both knew what I was asking for. Another disruption. Another gamble. Another step in the direction of something I wanted and she truly didn’t.
“This is it, Barack,” Michelle said. “One last time. But don’t expect me to do any campaigning. In fact, you shouldn’t even count on my vote.”
* * *
—
AS A KID, I had sometimes watched as my salesman grandfather tried to sell life insurance policies over the phone, his face registering misery as he made cold calls in the evening from our tenth-floor apartment in a Honolulu high-rise. During the early months of 2003, I found myself thinking of him often as I sat at my desk in the sparsely furnished headquarters of my newly launched Senate campaign, beneath a poster of Muhammad Ali posed triumphantly over a defeated Sonny Liston, trying to pep-talk myself into making another fundraising call.
Aside from Dan Shomon and a Kentuckian named Jim Cauley we’d recruited as campaign manager, our staff consisted mostly of kids in their twenties, only half of whom were paid—and two of whom were still undergraduates. I felt especially sorry for my lone full-time fundraiser, who had to push me to pick up the phone and solicit donations.
Was I getting better at being a politician? I couldn’t say. In the first scheduled candidates’ forum in February 2003, I was stiff and ineffectual, unable to get my brain to operate in the tidy phrases such formats required. But my loss to Bobby Rush had given me a clear blueprint for upping my game: I needed to interact more effectively with the media, learning to get my ideas across in pithy sound bites. I needed to build a campaign that was less about policy papers and more about connecting one-on-one with voters. And I needed to raise money—lots of it. We’d conducted multiple polls, which seemed to confirm that I could win, but only if I managed to improve my visibility with costly TV ads.
And yet, as snakebit as my congressional race had been, this one felt charmed. In April, Peter Fitzgerald decided not to run for reelection. Carol Moseley Braun, who would probably have locked up the Democratic nomination for her old seat, had inexplicably chosen to run for president instead, leaving the contest wide open. In a primary race against six other Democrats, I went about lining up endorsements from unions and popular members of our congressional delegation, helping to shore up my downstate and liberal bases. Aided by Emil and a Democratic majority in the state senate, I spearheaded the passage of a slew of bills, from a law requiring the videotaping of interrogations in capital cases to an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, reinforcing my credentials as an effective legislator.
The national political landscape tilted in my favor as well. In October 2002, before even announcing my candidacy, I’d been invited to speak against the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq, addressing an antiwar rally held in downtown Chicago. For a soon-to-be Senate candidate, the politics were muddy. Both Axe and Dan thought that taking a clear, unequivocal stand against the war would help in a Democratic primary. Others cautioned that, given the post-9/11 mood of the country (at the time, national polls showed as many as 67 percent of Americans in favor of taking military action against Iraq), the likelihood of at least short-term military success, and my already challenging name and lineage, opposition to the war could cripple my candidacy by election time.
“America likes to kick ass,” one friend warned.
I mulled over the question for a day or so and decided this was my first test: Would I run the kind of campaign that I’d promised myself? I typed out a short speech, five or six minutes long, and—satisfied that it reflected my honest beliefs—went to bed without sending it to the team for review. On the day of the rally, more than a thousand people had gathered at Federal Plaza, with Jesse Jackson as the headliner. It was cold, the wind gusting. There was a smattering of applause muffled by mittens and gloves as my name was called and I stepped up to the microphone.
“Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.”
The crowd grew quiet, uncertain of where I was going. I described the blood spilled to preserve the Union and usher in a new birth of freedom; the pride I had in my grandfather volunteering to fight in the wake of Pearl Harbor; my support for our military actions in Afghanistan and my own willingness to take up arms to prevent another 9/11. “I don’t oppose all wars,” I said. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” I went on to argue that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States or its neighbors, and that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” I ended with the suggestion that if President Bush was looking for a fight, he should finish the job against al-Qaeda, stop supporting repressive regimes, and wean America off Middle Eastern oil.
I took my seat. The crowd cheered. Leaving the plaza, I assumed my remarks would be little more than a footnote. News reports barely mentioned my presence at the rally.
* * *
—
ONLY A FEW months after a U.S.-led military coalition began bombing Baghdad, Democrats started turning against the Iraq War. As casualties and chaos mounted, the press began asking questions that should have been posed from the outset. A groundswell of grassroots activism lifted a little-known Vermont governor, Howard Dean, to challenge 2004 presidential candidates like John Kerry who had voted in support of the war. The short speech I’d given at the antiwar rally suddenly looked prescient and began to circulate on the internet. My young staff had to explain to me what the hell “blogs” and “MySpace” had to do with the flood of new volunteers and grassroots donations we were suddenly getting.
As a candidate, I was having fun. In Chicago, I spent Saturdays plunging into ethnic neighborhoods—Mexican, Italian, Indian, Polish, Greek—eating and dancing, marching in parades, kissing babies and hugging grandmas. Sundays would find me in Black churches, some of them modest storefronts wedged between nail salons and fast-food joints, others expansive megachurches with parking lots the size of football fields. I hopscotched through the suburbs, from the leafy, mansion-filled North Shore to towns just south and west of the city, where poverty and abandoned buildings made some of them indistinguishable from Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods. Every couple of weeks, I’d head downstate—sometimes driving myself but more often traveling with Jeremiah Posedel or Anita Decker, the two talented staffers running my operations there.
Talking to voters in the early days of the campaign, I tended to address the issues I was running on—ending tax breaks for companies that were moving jobs overseas, or promoting renewable energy, or making it easier for kids to afford college. I explained why I had opposed the war in Iraq, acknowledging the remarkable service o
f our soldiers but questioning why we had started a new war when we hadn’t finished the one in Afghanistan while Osama bin Laden was still at large.
Over time, though, I focused more on listening. And the more I listened, the more people opened up. They’d tell me about how it felt to be laid off after a lifetime of work, or what it was like to have your home foreclosed upon or to have to sell the family farm. They’d tell me about not being able to afford health insurance, and how sometimes they broke the pills their doctors prescribed in half, hoping to make their medicine last longer. They spoke of young people moving away because there were no good jobs in their town, or others having to drop out of college just short of graduation because they couldn’t cover the tuition.
My stump speech became less a series of positions and more a chronicle of these disparate voices, a chorus of Americans from every corner of the state.
“Here’s the thing,” I would say. “Most people, wherever they’re from, whatever they look like, are looking for the same thing. They’re not trying to get filthy rich. They don’t expect someone else to do what they can do for themselves.
“But they do expect that if they’re willing to work, they should be able to find a job that supports a family. They expect that they shouldn’t go bankrupt just because they get sick. They expect that their kids should be able to get a good education, one that prepares them for this new economy, and they should be able to afford college if they’ve put in the effort. They want to be safe, from criminals or terrorists. And they figure that after a lifetime of work, they should be able to retire with dignity and respect.
“That’s about it. It’s not a lot. And although they don’t expect government to solve all their problems, they do know, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities government could help.”
The room would be quiet, and I’d take a few questions. When a meeting was over, people lined up to shake my hand, pick up some campaign literature, or talk to Jeremiah, Anita, or a local campaign volunteer about how they could get involved. And I’d drive on to the next town, knowing that the story I was telling was true; convinced that this campaign was no longer about me and that I had become a mere conduit through which people might recognize the value of their own stories, their own worth, and share them with one another.
* * *
—
WHETHER IN SPORTS or politics, it’s hard to understand the precise nature of momentum. But by the beginning of 2004 we had it. Axe had us shoot two television ads: The first had me speaking directly to the camera, ending with the tagline “Yes we can.” (I thought this was corny, but Axe immediately appealed to a higher power, showing it to Michelle, who deemed it “not corny at all.”) The second featured Sheila Simon, daughter of the state’s beloved former senator Paul Simon, who had died following heart surgery days before he’d planned to publicly endorse me.
We released the ads just four weeks before the primaries. In short order, my support almost doubled. When the state’s five largest newspapers endorsed me, Axe recut the ads to highlight it, explaining that Black candidates tended to benefit more than white candidates from the validation. Around this time, the bottom fell out of my closest rival’s campaign after news outlets published details from previously sealed court documents in which his ex-wife alleged domestic abuse. On March 16, 2004, the day of the Democratic primary, we ended up winning almost 53 percent of the vote in our seven-person field—not only more than all the other Democratic candidates combined, but more than all the Republican votes that had been cast statewide in their primary.
I remember only two moments from that night: the delighted squeals from our daughters (with maybe a little fear mixed in for two-year-old Sasha) when the confetti guns went off at the victory party; and an ebullient Axelrod telling me that I’d won all but one of the majority white wards in Chicago, which had once served as the epicenter of racial resistance to Harold Washington. (“Harold’s smiling down on us tonight,” he said.)
I remember the next morning as well, when after almost no sleep I went down to Central Station to shake hands with commuters as they headed for work. A gentle snow had begun to fall, the flakes thick as flower petals, and as people recognized me and shook my hand, they all seemed to wear the same smile—as if we had done something surprising together.
* * *
—
“BEING SHOT FROM a cannon” was how Axe would describe the next few months, and that’s exactly how it felt. Our campaign became national news overnight, with networks calling for interviews and elected officials from around the country phoning with congratulations. It wasn’t just that we had won, or even the unexpectedly large margin of our victory; what interested observers was the way we’d won, with votes from all demographics, including from southern and rural white counties. Pundits speculated on what my campaign said about the state of American race relations—and because of my early opposition to the Iraq War, what it might say about where the Democratic Party was headed.
My campaign didn’t have the luxury of celebration; we just scrambled to keep up. We brought on additional, more experienced staff, including communications director Robert Gibbs, a tough, quick-witted Alabaman who had worked on the Kerry campaign. While polls showed me with a nearly twenty-point lead over my Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, his résumé made me cautious about taking anything for granted—he was a Goldman Sachs banker who had quit to teach at a parochial school serving disadvantaged kids and whose matinee-idol looks sanded the edges off his very conventional Republican platform.
Fortunately for us, none of this translated on the campaign trail. Ryan was flogged by the press when, in an attempt to tag me as a big-spending, tax-hiking liberal, he used a series of charts showing numbers that turned out to be wildly and obviously wrong. He was later pilloried for having dispatched a young staffer who aggressively tailed me with a handheld camcorder, following me into lavatories and hovering even while I tried to talk to Michelle and the girls, hoping to catch me in a gaffe. The final blow came when the press got hold of sealed records from Ryan’s divorce, in which his ex-wife alleged that he had pressured her to visit sex clubs and tried to coerce her into having sex in front of strangers. Within a week, Ryan withdrew from the race.
With just five months to go until the general election, I suddenly had no opponent.
“All I know,” Gibbs announced, “is after this thing is all over, we’re going to Vegas.”
Still, I maintained a grueling schedule, often finishing the day’s business in Springfield and then driving to nearby towns for campaign events. On the way back from one such event, I got a call from someone on John Kerry’s staff, inviting me to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention being held in Boston in late July. That I felt neither giddy nor nervous said something about the sheer improbability of the year I’d just had. Axelrod offered to pull together the team to begin the process of drafting a speech, but I waved him off.
“Let me take a crack at it,” I told him. “I know what I want to say.”
For the next several days, I wrote my speech, mostly in the evenings, sprawled on my bed at the Renaissance Hotel in Springfield, a ball game buzzing in the background, filling a yellow legal pad with my thoughts. The words came swiftly, a summation of the politics I’d been searching for since those early years in college and the inner struggles that had prompted the journey to where I was now. My head felt full of voices: of my mother, my grandparents, my father; of the people I had organized with and folks on the campaign trail. I thought about all those I’d encountered who had plenty of reason to turn bitter and cynical but had refused to go that way, who kept reaching for something higher, who kept reaching for one another. At some point, I remembered a phrase I’d heard once during a sermon by my pastor, Jeremiah Wright, one that captured this spirit.
The audacity of hope.
Axe and Gibbs would later swap st
ories about the twists and turns leading up to the night I spoke at the convention. How we had to negotiate the time I would be allotted (originally eight minutes, bargained up to seventeen). The painful cuts to my original draft by Axe and his able partner John Kupper, all of which made it better. A delayed flight to Boston as my legislative session in Springfield dragged into the night. Practicing for the first time on a teleprompter, with my coach, Michael Sheehan, explaining that the microphones worked fine, so “you don’t have to yell.” My anger when a young Kerry staffer informed us that I had to cut one of my favorite lines because the nominee intended to poach it for his own speech. (“You’re a state senator,” Axe helpfully reminded me, “and they’ve given you a national stage….I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”) Michelle backstage, beautiful in white, squeezing my hand, gazing lovingly into my eyes, and telling me “Just don’t screw it up, buddy!” The two of us cracking up, being silly, when our love was always best, and then the introduction by the senior senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, “Let me tell you about this Barack Obama…”
I’ve only watched the tape of my 2004 convention speech once all the way through. I did so alone, well after the election was over, trying to understand what happened in the hall that night. With stage makeup, I look impossibly young, and I can see a touch of nerves at the beginning, places where I’m too fast or too slow, my gestures slightly awkward, betraying my inexperience.
But there comes a point in the speech where I find my cadence. The crowd quiets rather than roars. It’s the kind of moment I’d come to recognize in subsequent years, on certain magic nights. There’s a physical feeling, a current of emotion that passes back and forth between you and the crowd, as if your lives and theirs are suddenly spliced together, like a movie reel, projecting backward and forward in time, and your voice creeps right up to the edge of cracking, because for an instant, you feel them deeply; you can see them whole. You’ve tapped into some collective spirit, a thing we all know and wish for—a sense of connection that overrides our differences and replaces them with a giant swell of possibility—and like all things that matter most, you know the moment is fleeting and that soon the spell will be broken.
