by Obama Barack
Before my first debate with John McCain in late September, I followed the ritual to a T. I ate my steak, listened to my music, felt the weight of the charms in my pocket as I walked onto the stage. But frankly, I didn’t need a lot of luck. By the time I arrived on the campus of the University of Mississippi—the place where less than fifty years earlier a Black man named James Meredith had been forced to obtain a Supreme Court order and the protection of five hundred federal law enforcement personnel simply to attend—I was no longer the underdog.
The race was now mine to lose.
As expected, the press covering the fiasco at the White House meeting had been merciless to McCain. His problems only grew worse when his campaign announced, just a few hours before the debate, that—because of the “progress” that had resulted from his intervention in congressional negotiations around TARP—he would lift the self-imposed suspension of his campaign and participate after all. (We’d planned to show up regardless, even if it meant I had a nice, televised one-on-one conversation with the moderator, Jim Lehrer.) Reporters saw McCain’s latest move for what it was: a hasty retreat after a political stunt that had backfired.
The debate itself offered few surprises. McCain appeared relaxed onstage, patching together lines from his campaign speeches and standard Republican orthodoxy, delivered with ample doses of humor and charm. Still, his spotty knowledge of the details of the financial crisis and his lack of answers for what he planned to do about it became more and more evident as we continued to joust. Meanwhile, I was on my game. No doubt my training regimen at the hands of drill sergeants Klain and Donilon had paid off; as much as I instinctively resisted canned answers to questions, there was no denying that both television audiences and the pundits found my more practiced responses compelling, and the preparation kept me from droning on too long.
More than that, though, my mood for the debate with McCain was noticeably different. Unlike my debates with Hillary and the rest of the Democratic field, which so often felt like an elaborate game, splitting hairs and notching style points, the differences between me and John McCain were real and deep; the stakes in choosing one of us over the other would reverberate for decades, with consequences for millions of people. Confident in my command of the facts, certain of why my ideas had a better chance than John’s of meeting the challenges the country now faced, I felt energized by our exchanges and found myself (almost) enjoying our ninety minutes onstage.
The snap postdebate surveys of undecided voters showed me winning by a wide margin. My team was giddy, full of fist bumps, high fives, and probably a few private sighs of relief.
Michelle was happy but more subdued. She hated going to debates; as she described it, having to sit there looking serene, no matter what was said about me or how badly I screwed up, her stomach churning, was like getting a tooth drilled without novocaine. In fact, whether out of fear that it might jinx the outcome, or because of her own ambivalence about the prospect of my winning, she generally avoided talking to me about the horse-race aspect of the campaign. Which is why I was surprised when, in bed later that night, she turned to me and said, “You’re going to win, aren’t you?”
“A lot can still happen…but yeah. There’s a pretty good chance I will.”
I looked at my wife. Her face was pensive, as if she were working out a puzzle in her mind. Finally she nodded to herself and returned my gaze.
“You’re going to win,” she said softly. She kissed me on the cheek, turned off the bedside lamp, and pulled the covers over her shoulders.
* * *
—
ON SEPTEMBER 29, three days after the debate at Ole Miss, Bush’s TARP legislation fell thirteen votes short of passage in the House of Representatives, with two-thirds of Democrats voting in support of it and two-thirds of Republicans voting against it. The Dow Jones immediately sustained a terrifying 778-point drop, and after a pounding in the press and no doubt a flood of calls from constituents watching their retirement accounts evaporate, enough members of both parties flipped to pass an amended version of the rescue package several days later.
Greatly relieved, I called Hank Paulson to congratulate him for his efforts. But while TARP’s passage would prove to be critical in saving the financial system, the whole episode did nothing to reverse the public’s growing impression that the GOP—and by extension their nominee for president—couldn’t be trusted to responsibly handle the crisis.
Meanwhile, the campaign decisions that Plouffe had pushed for months earlier were paying off. Our army of organizers and volunteers had fanned out across the country, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters and launching unprecedented operations in states that allowed early voting. Our online donations continued to flow, allowing us to play in whatever media markets we chose. When, a month ahead of the election, the McCain campaign announced it was halting its efforts in Michigan, historically a key battleground state, to concentrate its resources elsewhere, Plouffe was almost offended. “Without Michigan, they can’t win!” he said, shaking his head. “They might as well raise a white flag!”
Instead of focusing energy on Michigan, the McCain campaign turned their attention to a man who’d become an unlikely cult figure: Joe Wurzelbacher.
I’d encountered Wurzelbacher a few weeks earlier as I did some old-fashioned door knocking in Toledo, Ohio. It was the kind of campaigning I enjoyed most, surprising people as they raked leaves or worked on their cars in the driveway, watching kids zoom up on bikes to see what the commotion was about.
That day, I was standing on a corner, signing autographs and talking with a group of people, when a man with a shaved head who looked to be in his late thirties introduced himself as Joe and asked about my tax plan. He was a plumber, he said, and he was worried that liberals like me would make it harder for him to succeed as a small-business owner. With the press pool cameras rolling, I explained that my plan would raise taxes only on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, and that by investing those revenues in things like education and infrastructure, the economy and his business would be more likely to prosper. I told him that I believed that this sort of redistribution of income—“when you spread the wealth around” were my words—had always been important in opening up opportunity to more people.
Joe was affable but unconvinced, and we agreed to disagree, shaking hands before I left. In the van headed back to our hotel, Gibbs—who like any great campaign communications director had an unerring nose for how a few seemingly innocuous words could trigger political silliness—told me my comment about spreading the wealth was problematic.
“What are you talking about?”
“The phrase doesn’t poll well. People associate it with communism and shit.”
I laughed it off, saying that the whole point of rolling back the Bush tax cuts was to redistribute income from people like me to folks like Joe. Gibbs looked at me like a parent whose child keeps making the same mistake over and over again.
Sure enough, as soon as the footage of me and Wurzelbacher, instantly dubbed “Joe the Plumber,” surfaced, McCain started hammering on it during our debates. His campaign went all in, suggesting that this salt-of-the-earth guy in Ohio had unmasked my secret, socialist income-redistribution agenda, treating him like an oracle of Middle America. Broadcast news anchors were suddenly interviewing Joe. There were Joe the Plumber TV spots, and McCain brought Joe with him to a few campaign rallies. Joe himself seemed by turns amused, baffled, and occasionally put out by his newfound fame. But when all was said and done, most voters seemed to view Joe as not much more than a distraction from the serious business of electing the next president.
Most voters, but not all. For those who got their news from Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber fit neatly into some larger narrative involving Reverend Wright; my alleged fealty to radical community organizer Saul Alinsky; my friendship with my neighbor Bill Ayers, who’d once been a
leader of the militant group the Weather Underground; and my shadowy Muslim heritage. For these voters, I was no longer just a left-of-center Democrat who planned to broaden the social safety net and end the war in Iraq. I was something more insidious, someone to be feared, someone to be stopped. To deliver this urgent, patriotic message to the American people, they increasingly looked to their most fearless champion, Sarah Palin.
Since August, Palin had tanked during a number of high-profile media interviews, becoming a punch line on Saturday Night Live and other late-night comedy shows. But her power lay elsewhere. She’d spent the first week of October drawing big crowds and enthusiastically gassing them up with nativist bile. From the stage, she accused me of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” She suggested that I was “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” People turned up at rallies wearing T-shirts bearing slogans like PALIN’S PITBULLS and NO COMMUNISTS. The media reported shouts of “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” coming from her audiences. Through Palin, it seemed as if the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican Party—xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward Black and brown folks—were finding their way to center stage.
It was a testament to John McCain’s character, his fundamental decency, that anytime a supporter approached him spewing Palin-style rhetoric, he politely pushed back. When a man at a Minnesota rally announced into the microphone that he was afraid of having me as a president, McCain wouldn’t have it.
“I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States,” he said, causing his audience to boo lustily. Answering another question, he said, “We want to fight, and I will fight. But we will be respectful. I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments. I will respect him. I want everyone to be respectful and let’s make sure we are because that’s the way politics should be conducted in America.”
I wonder sometimes whether with the benefit of hindsight McCain would still have chosen Palin—knowing how her spectacular rise and her validation as a candidate would provide a template for future politicians, shifting his party’s center and the country’s politics overall in a direction he abhorred. I never posed the question to him directly, of course. Over the next decade, our relationship would evolve into one of grudging but genuine respect, but the 2008 election understandably remained a sore point.
I like to think that, given the chance to do it over again, he might have chosen differently. I believe he really did put his country first.
* * *
—
THE CHANT THAT had started with Edith Childs and her big hat in a small room in Greenwood, South Carolina, more than a year earlier now rose spontaneously, rippling through crowds of forty or fifty thousand, as people filled up football fields and city parks, undaunted by the unseasonably hot October weather. Fired up, ready to go! Fired up, ready to go! We had built something together; you could feel the energy like a physical force. With just a few weeks to go before the election, our field offices were scrambling to find enough space to accommodate the numbers of people signing on to volunteer; Shepard Fairey’s graphic art poster, titled HOPE, with a stylized red, white, and blue version of my face staring off into the distance, seemed suddenly ubiquitous. It felt as though the campaign had moved beyond politics and into the realm of popular culture. “You’re the new ‘in’ thing,” Valerie would tease.
That worried me. The inspiration our campaign was providing, the sight of so many young people newly invested in their ability to make change, the bringing together of Americans across racial and socioeconomic lines—it was the realization of everything I’d once dreamed might be possible in politics, and it made me proud. But the continuing elevation of me as a symbol ran contrary to my organizer’s instincts, that sense that change involves “we” and not “me.” It was personally disorienting, too, requiring me to constantly take stock to make sure I wasn’t buying into the hype and remind myself of the distance between the airbrushed image and the flawed, often uncertain person I was.
I was also contending with the likelihood that if I was elected president, it would be impossible to meet the outsized expectations now attached to me. Since winning the Democratic nomination, I’d begun to experience reading the newspapers differently, in a way that gave me a jolt. Every headline, every story, every exposé, was another problem for me to solve. And problems were piling up quickly. Despite TARP’s passage, the financial system remained paralyzed. The housing market was in a nosedive. The economy was shedding jobs at an accelerating rate, and there was speculation that the Big Three automakers would soon be in jeopardy.
The responsibility of tackling these problems didn’t scare me. In fact, I relished the chance. But from everything I was learning, things were likely to get significantly worse before they got better. Resolving the economic crisis—not to mention winding down two wars, delivering on healthcare, and trying to save the planet from catastrophic climate change—was going to be a long, hard slog. It would require a cooperative Congress, willing allies, and an informed, mobilized citizenry that could sustain pressure on the system—not a solitary savior.
So what would happen when change didn’t come fast enough? How would these cheering crowds respond to the inevitable setbacks and compromises? It became a running joke between me and the team: “Are we sure we want to win this thing? It’s not too late to throw it.” Marty expressed a more ethnic version of the same sentiment: “Two hundred and thirty-two years and they wait until the country’s falling apart before they turn it over to the brother!”
* * *
—
MORE THAN ANYTHING campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.
And so, twelve days before the election, I made a thirty-six-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.
Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmother’s hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, she’d be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.
What dreams might she be having? I wondered if she’d been able to look back and take stock, or whether she’d consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that she’d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when she’d experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.
I thought back to a conversation I’d had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.
“The thing about getting old, Bar,” Toot had told me, “is that you’re the same person inside.” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re trapped in this dogg
one contraption that starts falling apart. But it’s still you. You understand?”
I did now.
For the next hour or so, I sat talking to Maya about her work and her family, all the while stroking Toot’s dry, bony hand. But eventually the room felt too crowded with memories—colliding, merging, refracting, like images in a kaleidoscope—and I told Maya I wanted to take a quick walk outside. After consulting with Gibbs and my Secret Service detail, it was agreed that the press pool downstairs would not be informed, and I took the elevator to the basement level and went out through the garage, turning left down the narrow street that ran behind my grandparents’ apartment building.
The street had barely changed in thirty-five years. I passed the rear of a small Shinto temple and community center, then rows of wooden homes broken up by the occasional three-story concrete apartment building. I had bounced my first basketball—a gift from my father when I was ten years old—down this street, dribbling the length of the uneven sidewalk on my way to and from the courts at the nearby elementary school. Toot used to say that she always knew when I was coming home for dinner because she could hear that darn ball bouncing from ten stories up. I had run down this street to the supermarket to buy her cigarettes, motivated by her promise that I could buy a candy bar with the change if I was back in ten minutes. Later, when I was fifteen, I’d walk this same street home from a shift at my first job, scooping ice cream at the Baskin-Robbins around the corner, Toot laughing heartily when I grumbled to her about my paltry paycheck.
Another time. Another life. Modest and without consequence to the rest of the world. But one that had given me love. Once Toot was gone, there would be no one left who remembered that life, or remembered me in it.
