by Obama Barack
We had no press with us then, and I took my time wandering through the crowd, shaking hands and thanking those who planned to support me, asking those who were caucusing for another candidate to please at least make me their second choice. A few had last-minute questions about my stance on ethanol or what I intended to do about human trafficking. Over and over again, people rushed up to tell me that they’d never caucused before—some had never even bothered to vote—and that our campaign had inspired them to get involved for the very first time.
“I didn’t know I counted before,” one woman said.
On the ride back to Des Moines, we were mostly quiet, processing the miracle of what we had just witnessed. I looked out the window at the passing strip malls and houses and streetlights, all fuzzy behind the frosty glass, and felt a kind of peace. We were hours, still, from knowing what would happen. The results, when they came in, showed us winning Iowa decisively, carrying just about every demographic group, our victory propelled by unprecedented turnout, including tens of thousands of people who’d participated for the first time. I knew none of this yet, but pulling away from Ankeny about fifteen minutes before the caucuses began, I knew we had accomplished, if even for just a moment, something real and noble.
Right there, in that high school in the middle of the country on a cold winter night, I had witnessed the community I had so long sought, the America I imagined, made manifest. I thought of my mom then, and how happy she would have been to see it, and how proud she would have been, and I missed her terribly, and Plouffe and Valerie pretended not to notice as I wiped away my tears.
CHAPTER 6
OUR EIGHT-POINT MARGIN OF VICTORY in Iowa made news across the country. The media used words like “stunning” and “seismic” to describe it, noting that the results were especially devastating for Hillary, who finished third. Both Chris Dodd and Joe Biden promptly dropped out of the race. Elected officials who’d stayed cautiously on the sidelines were now calling, ready to endorse. Pundits declared me the new Democratic front-runner, suggesting that the high level of voter engagement in Iowa signaled a broader appetite for change in America.
Having spent the previous year as David, I was suddenly cast as Goliath—and as happy as I was about our victory, the new role felt awkward. For a year, my team and I had avoided getting too high or too low, ignoring both the initial hype surrounding my candidacy and the subsequent reports of its imminent demise. With only five days between Iowa and the New Hampshire primary, it took everything we had to tamp down expectations. Axe considered the gushing stories and TV images of me before adoring crowds (“Obama the icon,” he complained) especially unhelpful in a state like New Hampshire, where the electorate—many of them independents who liked to decide at the last minute between voting in the Democratic or Republican primary—had a reputation for being contrarian.
Still, it was hard not to feel like we were in the driver’s seat. Our organizers in New Hampshire were just as tenacious and our volunteers just as spirited as those in Iowa; our rallies drew enthusiastic crowds, with lines to get in that would wind through parking lots and stretch around the block. Then, in the span of forty-eight hours, the contest took a couple of unexpected turns.
The first happened during the lone debate before the primary when, midway through, the moderator asked Hillary how she felt when people said she was not “likable.”
Now, this was the type of question that drove me nuts on several levels. It was trivial. It was unanswerable—what’s a person supposed to say to something like that? And it was indicative of a double standard that Hillary specifically and women politicians in general had to put up with, in which they were expected to be “nice” in ways that were never deemed relevant to their male counterparts.
Despite the fact that Hillary was handling the question just fine (“Well, that hurts my feelings,” she said, laughing, “but I’ll try to go on”), I decided to interject.
“You’re likable enough, Hillary,” I said, deadpan.
I assumed the audience understood my intentions—to make an overture to my opponent while indicating scorn for the question. But whether because of bad delivery, clumsy phrasing, or spin by the Clinton communications team, a story line emerged—that I had been patronizing toward Hillary, dismissive, even, yet another boorish male putting down his female rival.
In other words, the opposite of what I had meant.
Nobody on our team got too exercised about my remark, understanding that any attempt to clarify it would only fuel the fire. But no sooner had the story begun to die down than the media exploded yet again, this time over how Hillary was being perceived following a meeting she’d had with a group of undecided voters in New Hampshire, most of them women. Fielding an empathetic question about how she was managing the stresses of the race, Hillary had momentarily choked up, describing how personally and passionately invested she was—how she didn’t want to see the country move backward and how she’d devoted her life to public service “against some pretty difficult odds.”
It was a rare and genuine show of emotion on Hillary’s part, one that ran counter to her steely, controlled image, enough so that it made headlines and sent the cable news pundits into orbit. Some interpreted the moment as compelling and authentic, a new point of human connection between Hillary and the public. Others deemed it either a manufactured bit of emotion or a sign of weakness that threatened to damage her candidacy. Running beneath it all, of course, was the fact that Hillary quite possibly could become the nation’s first female president and—just as mine did with race—her candidacy surfaced all sorts of stereotypes about gender and how we expected our leaders to look and behave.
The frenzy around whether Hillary was trending up or down continued right into primary day in New Hampshire. My team took comfort in the fact that we had a big cushion: Polls showed us with a ten-point lead. So when the midday rally we’d scheduled at a local college drew a sparse crowd, my speech interrupted by a fainting student and what seemed like an interminable response time by the medics, I didn’t take it as a bad omen.
It wasn’t until that evening, after the polls had closed, that I knew we had a problem. As Michelle and I were in our hotel room getting ready for what we expected to be a victory celebration, I heard a knock and opened the door to find Plouffe, Axe, and Gibbs standing sheepishly in the hall, looking like teenagers who had just crashed their dad’s car into a tree.
“We’re going to lose,” Plouffe said.
They began offering various theories on what had gone wrong. It was possible that independents who supported us over Hillary had decided to vote en masse in the Republican primary to help John McCain, figuring that we had our race well in hand. Undecided women may have swung sharply in Hillary’s direction during the campaign’s final days. Or maybe it was the fact that when the Clinton team attacked us on TV and in campaign mailings, we hadn’t done enough to highlight their negative tactics, allowing the punches to land.
The theories all sounded plausible. But for the moment, the whys didn’t matter.
“Looks like winning this thing’s going to take a while,” I said with a rueful smile. “Right now, let’s figure out how to cauterize the wound.”
No hangdog looks, I told them; our body language had to communicate to everyone—the press, donors, and most of all our supporters—that setbacks were par for the course. I reached out to our distraught New Hampshire team to tell them how proud I was of their efforts. Then there was the matter of what to say to the seventeen hundred or so people who had gathered in a Nashua school gym in anticipation of victory. Fortunately I had already worked with Favs earlier in the week to tone down any triumphalist tones in the speech, asking him instead to emphasize the hard work that lay ahead. I now got him on the phone to instruct that—other than a tip of the hat to Hillary—we barely change the text.
The speech I gave to our supporters that evening would end
up being one of the most important of our campaign, not just as a rallying cry for the disheartened, but as a useful reminder of what we believed. “We know the battle ahead will be long,” I said, “but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.” I said that we lived in a country whose history was all but built on hope, by people—pioneers, abolitionists, suffragists, immigrants, civil rights workers—who’d been undeterred by seemingly impossible odds.
“When we’ve been told we’re not ready,” I said, “or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can.” The crowd began to chant the phrase like a drumbeat, and for perhaps the first time since Axe had suggested it as a slogan for my Senate campaign, I fully believed the power of those three words.
* * *
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THE NEWS COVERAGE following our loss in New Hampshire was predictably tough, the overall message being that order had been restored and Hillary was back on top. But a funny thing happened inside our campaign. Devastated as they were by the loss, our staff grew more unified and also more determined. Instead of a drop-off in volunteers, our offices reported a surge of walk-ins across the country. Our online contributions—particularly from new small-dollar donors—spiked. John Kerry, who’d previously been noncommittal, came out with an enthusiastic endorsement for me. This was followed by announcements of support from Governor Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, all hailing from states that leaned Republican and helping to send a message that despite the setback, we were strong and moving forward, our hopes intact.
All this was gratifying, and it confirmed my instinct that losing New Hampshire wasn’t the disaster commentators thought it might be. If Iowa had shown me to be a real contender, and not simply a novelty act, the rush to anoint me had been artificial and premature. In that sense, the good people of New Hampshire had done me a favor by slowing down the process. Running for president is supposed to be hard, I told a group of supporters the next day, because being president is hard. Delivering change is hard. We were going to have to earn this thing, and that meant getting back to work.
And that’s what we did. Nevada’s caucus came on January 19, just a week and a half after New Hampshire, and we weren’t surprised when we lost the raw vote to Hillary; polls there had shown us to be well behind her throughout the year. But in presidential primaries, what matters is not so much the number of individual votes you get but rather how many pledged convention delegates you win, with delegates apportioned based on a series of arcane rules unique to each state. Thanks to our organization’s strength in rural Nevada, where we’d campaigned hard (Elko, a town that looked like a western movie set, complete with tumbleweeds and a saloon, was one of my all-time favorite stops), our more even distribution of votes across the state resulted in us winning thirteen delegates to Hillary’s twelve. Improbably enough, we were able to emerge from Nevada claiming a draw and entered the next phase of the campaign—the South Carolina primary and the behemoth, twenty-two-state Super Tuesday—with at least a fighting chance.
My senior team would later say it was my optimism that carried them through the loss in New Hampshire. I don’t know if that’s actually the case, since my staff and supporters operated with admirable resilience and consistency throughout the campaign, independent of anything I did. At most, I had simply returned the favor, given all that others had done to drag me across the Iowa finish line. What is probably true is that New Hampshire showed my team and supporters a quality I had learned about myself, something that proved useful not just during the course of the campaign but for the eight years that followed: I often felt steadiest when things were going to hell. Iowa may have convinced me and my team that I could end up being president. But it was the New Hampshire loss that made us confident I’d be up to the job.
I’ve often been asked about this personality trait—my ability to maintain composure in the middle of crisis. Sometimes I’ll say that it’s just a matter of temperament, or a consequence of being raised in Hawaii, since it’s hard to get stressed when it’s eighty degrees and sunny and you’re five minutes from the beach. If I’m talking to a group of young people, I’ll describe how over time I’ve trained myself to take the long view, about how important it is to stay focused on your goals rather than getting hung up on the daily ups and downs.
There’s truth in all of this. But there’s another factor at play. In tough spots, I tend to channel my grandmother.
She was eighty-five years old then, the last survivor of the trio who raised me. Her health was declining; cancer had spread through a body already ravaged by osteoporosis and a lifetime of bad habits. But her mind was still sharp, and because she was no longer able to fly and I’d missed our annual Christmas trip to Hawaii due to the demands of the campaign, I had taken to calling her every few weeks just to check in.
I placed such a call after New Hampshire. As usual, the conversation didn’t last long; Toot considered long-distance calls an extravagance. She shared news from the Islands, and I told her about her great-granddaughters and their latest mischief. My sister Maya, who lived in Hawaii, reported that Toot watched every twist and turn of the campaign on cable TV, but she never brought it up with me. In the wake of my loss, she had just one piece of advice.
“You need to eat something, Bar. You look too skinny.”
This was characteristic of Madelyn Payne Dunham, born in Peru, Kansas, in 1922. She was a child of the Depression, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a bookkeeper at a small oil refinery, themselves the children of farmers and homesteaders. These were sensible people who worked hard, went to church, paid their bills, and remained suspicious of bombast, public displays of emotion, or foolishness of any sort.
In her youth, my grandmother had pushed against these small-town constraints, most notably by marrying my grandfather Stanley Armour Dunham, who was prone to all the questionable qualities mentioned above. Together they’d had their fair share of adventures, during the war and after, but by the time I was born, all that remained of Toot’s rebellious streak was her smoking, drinking, and taste for lurid thrillers. At the Bank of Hawaii, Toot had managed to rise from an entry-level clerical position to become one of its first female vice presidents, and by all accounts she’d been excellent at her job. For twenty-five years, there would be no fuss, no mistakes, and no complaints, even when she saw younger men that she’d trained promoted ahead of her.
After Toot retired, I sometimes ran into people back in Hawaii who told stories of how she’d helped them—a man insisting he’d have lost his company without her intervention, or a woman recalling how Toot waived an arcane bank policy requiring an estranged husband’s signature to secure a loan for the real estate agency she was starting. If you asked Toot about any of these things, though, she’d maintain that she’d started working at the bank not because of any particular passion for finance or wish to help others, but because our family needed the money, and that’s what had been available to her.
“Sometimes,” she told me, “you just do what needs to be done.”
It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I understood just how far my grandmother’s life had strayed from the path she’d once imagined; how much of herself she had sacrificed, first for her husband, then for her daughter, then for her grandchildren. It struck me as quietly tragic, how cramped her world seemed.
And yet even then it wasn’t lost on me that it was because of Toot’s willingness to carry the load in front of her—waking before sunup every day to stuff herself into a business suit and heels and take the bus to her downtown office, working all day on escrow documents before coming home too tired to do much else—that she and Gramps were able to retire comfortably, travel, and maintain their independence. The
stability she provided allowed my mother to pursue a career she enjoyed, despite its sporadic pay and overseas postings, and was why Maya and I had been able to go to a private school and fancy colleges.
Toot showed me how to balance a checkbook and resist buying stuff I didn’t need. She was the reason why, even in my most revolutionary moments as a young man, I could admire a well-run business and read the financial pages, and why I felt compelled to disregard overly broad claims about the need to tear things up and remake society from whole cloth. She taught me the value of working hard and doing your best even when the work was unpleasant, and about fulfilling your responsibilities even when doing so was inconvenient. She taught me to marry passion with reason, to not get overly excited when life was going well, and to not get too down when it went badly.
All this was instilled in me by an elderly, plainspoken white lady from Kansas. It was her perspective that often came to mind when I was campaigning, and her worldview that I sensed in many of the voters I encountered, whether in rural Iowa or in a Black neighborhood in Chicago, that same quiet pride in sacrifices made for children and grandchildren, the same lack of pretension, the same modesty of expectations.
And because Toot possessed both the remarkable strengths and stubborn limitations of her upbringing—because she loved me fiercely and would literally do anything to help me, and yet never fully shed the cautious conservatism that had made her quietly agonize the first time my mother brought my father, a Black man, home for dinner—she also taught me the tangled, multifaceted truth of race relations in our country.
* * *
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“THERE IS NOT a Black America and a white America and a Latino America and an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”
