by Obama Barack
What struck me as well was the growing role that technology played in our victories. The extraordinary youth of my team allowed us to embrace and refine the digital networks that Howard Dean’s campaign had set in motion four years earlier. Our status as upstarts forced us to trust, again and again, the energy and creativity of our internet-savvy volunteers. Millions of small donors were helping to fuel our operation, emailed links helped to spread our campaign messaging in ways that Big Media couldn’t, and new communities were forming among people who’d previously been isolated from one another. Coming out of Super Tuesday, I was inspired, imagining that I was glimpsing the future, a resurgence of bottom-up participation that could make our democracy work again.
What I couldn’t fully appreciate yet was just how malleable this technology would prove to be; how quickly it would be absorbed by commercial interests and wielded by entrenched powers; how readily it could be used not to unify people but to distract or divide them; and how one day many of the same tools that had put me in the White House would be deployed in opposition to everything I stood for.
Such insights would come later. After Super Tuesday, we went on an absolute tear, winning eleven straight primaries and caucuses over the course of two weeks, by an average margin of 36 percent. It was a heady stretch, almost surreal, although the staff and I did our best not to get too far ahead of ourselves—“Remember New Hampshire!” was a common refrain—understanding that the battle would remain pitched, aware that there were still plenty of people out there who wanted to see us fail.
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IN THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois describes the “double consciousness” of Black Americans at the dawn of the twentieth century. Despite having been born and raised on American soil, shaped by this nation’s institutions and infused with its creed, despite the fact that their toiling hands and beating hearts contributed so much to the country’s economy and culture—despite all this, Du Bois writes, Black Americans remain the perpetual “Other,” always on the outside looking in, ever feeling their “two-ness,” defined not by what they are but by what they can never be.
As a young man, I had learned a lot from Du Bois’s writing. But whether because of my unique parentage and upbringing or because of the times in which I had come of age, this notion of “double consciousness” was not something I felt personally. I had wrestled with the meaning of my mixed-race status and the fact of racial discrimination. Yet at no point had I ever questioned—or had others question—my fundamental “American-ness.”
Of course, I had never run for president before.
Even before I formally announced, Gibbs and our communications team had beaten back various rumors that bubbled up on conservative talk radio or fly-by-night websites before migrating to the Drudge Report and Fox News. There were reports that I had been schooled in an Indonesian madrassa, which gained enough traction that a CNN correspondent actually traveled to my old elementary school in Jakarta, where he found a bunch of kids wearing Western-style uniforms and listening to New Kids on the Block on their iPods. There were claims that I wasn’t an American citizen (helpfully illustrated by a picture of me wearing an African outfit at my Kenyan half brother’s wedding). As the campaign progressed, more lurid falsehoods were circulated. These had nothing to do with my nationality but everything to do with a “foreignness” of a more familiar, homegrown, dark-hued variety: that I had dealt drugs, that I had worked as a gay prostitute, that I had Marxist ties and had fathered multiple children out of wedlock.
It was hard to take any of this stuff seriously, and initially at least, not many people did—in 2008, the internet was still too slow, too spotty, and too removed from mainstream news operations to directly penetrate the minds of voters. But there were indirect, more genteel ways to question my affinities.
Following the terror attacks of 9/11, for example, I had taken to wearing an American flag lapel pin, feeling that it was one small way to express national solidarity in the face of enormous tragedy. Then, as the debate about Bush’s war on terrorism and the Iraq invasion wore on—as I watched John Kerry get swift-boated and heard those who opposed the Iraq War have their patriotism questioned by the likes of Karl Rove, as I saw my colleagues wearing flag pins in the Senate blithely vote for budget cuts to funding for veterans’ programs—I quietly set my own pin aside. It was less an act of protest and more a reminder to myself that the substance of patriotism mattered far more than the symbol. Nobody seemed to notice, especially since most of my fellow senators—including former navy POW John McCain—regularly sported flag-pin-less lapels.
So when back in October a local reporter in Iowa had asked me why I wasn’t wearing a flag pin, I told the truth, saying that I didn’t think the presence or absence of a token you could buy in a dime store measured one’s love of country. Soon enough, conservative talking heads were hammering on the purported meaning of my bare lapel. Obama hates the flag, Obama disrespects our troops. Months later, they were still making an issue of it, which began to piss me off. Just why was it, I wanted to ask, that only my pin habits, and not those of any previous presidential candidates, had suddenly attracted so much attention? Not surprisingly, Gibbs discouraged me from any public venting.
“Why give them the satisfaction?” he counseled. “You’re winning.”
Fair enough. I was less easily persuaded, though, when I saw the same sort of innuendo directed toward my wife.
Since Iowa, Michelle had continued to light up the campaign trail. With the girls in school, we limited her appearances to tight races and her travel mostly to weekends, but wherever she went, she was funny and engaging, insightful and blunt. She talked about raising kids and trying to balance the demands of work and family. She described the values she’d been raised with—her father never missing a day of work despite his MS, her mother’s deep attention to her education, the family never having had much money but always having plenty of love. It was Norman Rockwell, Leave It to Beaver stuff. My in-laws fully embodied the tastes and aspirations we tend to claim as uniquely American, and I didn’t know anyone more mainstream than Michelle, whose favorite meal was a burger and fries, who liked to watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show, and who relished any chance to pass a Saturday afternoon shopping at the mall.
And yet, at least according to some commentators, Michelle was…different, not First Lady material. She seemed “angry,” they said. One Fox News segment described her as “Obama’s Baby Mama.” It wasn’t just conservative media either. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a column suggesting that when Michelle painted a teasing portrait of me in her speeches as a hapless dad who let bread go stale in the kitchen and left dirty laundry lying around (reliably getting an appreciative laugh from her audience), she wasn’t humanizing me but rather “emasculating” me, hurting my chances at being elected.
This sort of commentary was infrequent, and some on our staff considered it on par with the usual nastiness of campaigns. But that’s not how Michelle experienced it. She understood that alongside the straitjacket that political wives were supposed to stay in (the adoring and compliant helpmeet, charming but not too opinionated; the same straitjacket that Hillary had once rejected, a choice she continued to pay dearly for), there was an extra set of stereotypes applied to Black women, familiar tropes that Black girls steadily absorbed like toxins from the day they first saw a blond Barbie doll or poured Aunt Jemima syrup on their pancakes. That they didn’t meet the prescribed standards of femininity, that their butts were too big and their hair too nappy, that they were too loud or hot-tempered or cutting toward their men—that they were not just “emasculating” but masculine.
Michelle had managed this psychic burden all her life, largely by being meticulous about her appearance, maintaining control of herself and her environment, and preparing assiduously for everything, even as she refused to be cowed into becoming someone she w
asn’t. That she had emerged whole, with so much grace and dignity, just as so many Black women had succeeded in the face of so many negative messages, was amazing.
Of course, it was the nature of presidential campaigns that control would occasionally slip. For Michelle, it happened right before the Wisconsin primary, when, during the course of a speech in which she described being awed by how many people were energized by our campaign, she said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country…because I think people are hungry for change.”
It was a textbook gaffe—a few ad-libbed words that could then be diced, clipped, and weaponized by the conservative media—a garbled version of what she’d said many times before in her speeches about being proud of the direction our country was headed in, the promising surge in political participation. My team and I largely deserved the blame; we’d put Michelle on the road without the speechwriting, prep sessions, and briefers that I had at all times, the infrastructure that kept me organized and on point. It was like sending a civilian into live fire without a flak jacket.
No matter. Reporters pounced, speculating as to how much Michelle’s comments might hurt the campaign, and how much it revealed about the Obamas’ true feelings. I understood this to be part of a larger and uglier agenda out there, a slowly accruing, deliberately negative portrait of us built from stereotypes, stoked by fear, and meant to feed a general nervousness about the idea of a Black person making the country’s most important decisions with his Black family in the White House. But I was less concerned about what all this meant for the campaign than I was pained by seeing how much it hurt Michelle; how it caused my strong, intelligent, and beautiful wife to doubt herself. Following the misstep in Wisconsin, she reminded me that she’d never had a desire to be in the spotlight and said that if her presence on the campaign trail hurt more than it helped, she would just as soon stay home. I assured her that the campaign would provide her better support, insisting that she was a far more compelling figure to voters than I would ever be. But nothing I said seemed to make her feel better.
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THROUGHOUT ALL THESE emotional ups and downs, our campaign continued to grow. By the time we entered Super Tuesday, the scale of our organization had mushroomed, a modest start-up transformed into a more secure and better-funded operation. The hotel rooms we stayed in were a bit roomier, our travel smoother. After starting out flying commercial, we’d later gone through our share of misadventures on cut-rate charter flights. One pilot landed us in the wrong city not once but twice. Another tried to jump-start the plane’s battery with an extension cord plugged into a standard socket in the airport lounge. (I was grateful when the experiment failed, though it meant we then waited two hours for a battery to be trucked in from a neighboring town on a flatbed.) With a bigger budget, we were now able to lease our own plane, complete with a flight attendant, meals, and seats that actually reclined.
But new growth brought with it rules, protocols, process, and hierarchy. Our staff had grown to more than a thousand people nationwide, and while those on our senior team did their best to maintain the campaign’s scrappy, informal culture, gone were the days when I could claim to know the majority of the people who worked for me. In the absence of such familiarity, fewer and fewer of the people I met in the course of a day addressed me as “Barack.” I was “sir” now, or “Senator.” When I entered the room, staff would often get up out of their seats to move elsewhere, assuming that I didn’t want to be disturbed. If I insisted they stick around, they would smile shyly and speak only in a low murmur.
It made me feel old, and increasingly lonely.
In an odd way, so did the crowds at our rallies. They had swelled to fifteen, twenty, or even thirty thousand strong at a stop, people wearing the red, white, and blue Obama campaign logo on shirts and hats and overalls, waiting for hours to get into whatever arena we’d found. Our team developed something of a pregame ritual. Reggie, Marvin, Gibbs, and I would jump out of the car at a service entrance or loading dock, then follow our advance team through corridors and back ways. Usually I’d meet with local organizers; take pictures with a hundred or so key volunteers and supporters, full of hugs, kisses, and small requests; and sign books, magazines, baseballs, birth announcements, military commissions, and just about anything else. Then there’d be an interview with a reporter or two; a quick lunch in a holding room that had been prestocked with bottled iced tea, trail mix, protein bars, and any other item that I had ever mentioned wanting, no matter how incidentally, in quantities adequate for a survivalist’s bomb shelter; followed by a bathroom break, with either Marvin or Reggie handing me a gel to put on my forehead and nose so my skin wouldn’t shine on television, though one of our videographers insisted it was a carcinogen.
I’d hear the buzz of the crowd growing louder as I walked under the stands or bleachers to the staging area. There’d be a cue to the sound engineer for the announcement (“the Voice of God,” I learned it was called), I’d listen quietly backstage as a local person introduced me, and then would come the words “the next president of the United States,” a deafening roar, the sound of U2’s “City of Blinding Lights,” and, after a quick fist bump or a “Go get ’em, boss,” a walk through the curtain and onto the stage.
I did this two or three times a day, traveling from city to city, state to state. And though the novelty wore off quickly, the sheer energy of those rallies never stopped filling me with wonder. “Like a rock concert” is how reporters described it, and in terms of noise at least, that was accurate. But that wasn’t how it felt while I was onstage. I wasn’t offering the crowd a solo performance so much as trying to be a reflector, reminding Americans—through the stories they’d told me—of all that they truly cherished, and the formidable power that, joined together, they possessed.
Once my speech was over and I walked off the stage to shake hands along the rope line, I often found people screaming, pushing, and grabbing. Some would cry or touch my face, and despite my best efforts to discourage it, young parents would pass howling babies across rows of strangers for me to hold. The excitement was fun and at times deeply touching, but it was also a little unnerving. At some basic level people were no longer seeing me, I realized, with all my quirks and shortcomings. Instead, they had taken possession of my likeness and made it a vessel for a million different dreams. I knew a time would come when I would disappoint them, falling short of the image that my campaign and I had helped to construct.
I realized, too, that if supporters could mold bits and pieces of me into an outsized symbol of hope, then the vague fears of detractors could just as readily congeal into hate. And it was in response to this disturbing truth that I’d seen my life change the most.
I had been assigned Secret Service protection in May 2007, just a few months after my campaign began—given the code name “Renegade” and a round-the-clock security detail. This wasn’t the norm. Unless you were a sitting vice president (or, in the case of Hillary, a former First Lady), candidates typically weren’t assigned coverage until they’d all but secured the nomination. The reason my case was handled differently, the reason Harry Reid and Bennie Thompson, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, had publicly insisted the Service move early, was straightforward: The number of threats directed my way exceeded anything the Secret Service had ever seen before.
The head of my personal detail, Jeff Gilbert, was an impressive guy. African American, bespectacled, with an open, friendly manner, he could have passed for an executive at a Fortune 100 company. In our first meeting, he emphasized his desire to make the transition as seamless as possible, understanding that as a candidate, I had to freely interact with the public.
Jeff proved true to his word: At no point did the Service ever prevent us from pulling off an event, and the agents did what they could to downplay their presence (using bales of hay rather than metal bike racks, for example,
to create a barrier in front of an outdoor stage). The shift leaders, most in their forties, were professional and courteous, with dry senses of humor. Often, we’d sit in the back of the plane or on a bus ride and rib one another about our respective sports teams or talk about our kids. Jeff’s son was a star offensive lineman at Florida, and we all began monitoring his prospects in the NFL draft. Meanwhile, Reggie and Marvin hit it off with the younger agents, going to the same watering holes after campaign business was done.
Still, to suddenly have armed men and women hovering around me wherever I went, posted outside every room I occupied, was a shock to my system. My view of the outside world started to shift, obscured by the veil of security. I no longer walked through the front entrance of a building when a back stairwell was available. If I worked out in a hotel gym, agents first covered the windows with cloth to prevent a potential shooter from getting a sight line. Bulletproof barriers were placed inside any room I slept in, including our bedroom at home in Chicago. And I no longer had the option of driving myself anywhere, not even around the block.
As we moved closer to the nomination, my world shrank even further. More agents were added. My movements became more restricted. Spontaneity vanished entirely from my life. It was no longer possible, or at least not easy, for me to walk through a grocery store or have a casual chat with a stranger on the sidewalk.
“It’s like a circus cage,” I complained to Marvin one day, “and I’m the dancing bear.”
There were times when I went stir-crazy, so fed up with the highly scheduled regimen of town halls, interviews, photo ops, and fundraising that I would up and take off, suddenly desperate to search for a good taco or to follow the sounds of some nearby outdoor concert, sending the agents scrambling to catch up, whispering “Renegade on the move” into their wrist mics.
