It may be hard to fathom today, but initially I had no interest in covering the 2004 Senate race in Illinois—the fortuitous newspaper assignment that ultimately evolved into this political biography of a president.
In summer 2003, I was striving to carve out a niche as an urban affairs reporter in the faux meritocracy of the Chicago Tribune’s vast newsroom when lead political writer Rick Pearson began recruiting me to handle the Democratic half of the Senate contest. His reasoning was pretty simple: I was a capable reporter and I probably wouldn’t screw it up. Pearson would be tending to more high-profile contests for the next year, like the presidential race, and he needed a solid utility player to keep the state’s biggest media institution abreast of the Senate battle.
For the Chicago media, the mayor’s office and the Illinois governor’s mansion are the marquee political races, not the U.S. Senate. Stories about this race were unlikely to land anywhere near the newspaper’s coveted front page, although I’d certainly get noticed if I got beat on a story by a competitor, another significant downside. And not only that—the task would require a mountain of work, spending nights and weekends chasing after at least five Democratic candidates given a shot at winning the nomination.
This task seemed like it would put my career in purgatory, not on a path to promotion. Extra-hours work, little credit, major downside: No one in the newsroom was begging for this gig.
To escape the assignment, I did everything to physically avoid Pearson and political editor Bob Secter. If they didn’t see me, I hoped, perhaps they’d forget about me and someone with even less clout would take this bullet.
It even came to this: One afternoon, the two men strode into the first-floor cafeteria as I was heading out. I was carrying a monster tuna fish sandwich, balanced precariously atop a Styrofoam plate. Spotting Secter and Pearson, I darted toward the side of a Coke machine in hopes of hiding behind it. But in doing so, the sandwich teetered, tottered, and then shimmied off the thin sheet of Styrofoam, splattering across the floor. While I dropped to my knees to scoop up the mess, Secter laughed uproariously. Within days, Secter’s election assignment memo went out. As my tuna incident would indicate, I never mastered successfully playing the maddening internal politics of the Tribune. And so there I was—my name slotted next to the Democrats on Senate race coverage.
So the truth is, the book you’re holding (or reading on a tablet) might never had been written if I’d ordered a salad. Life can be so oddly random.
* * *
To my credit, even before Barack Obama bolted past the crowd of candidates and roared down the final stretch, I recognized that he was something well out of the ordinary.
Here was a unique political and cultural figure: a highly intellectual biracial man, born in Hawaii, schooled in community organizing on Chicago’s South Side, trained at Harvard Law, advised by one of the smartest political strategists in the country. And oh, this guy was serious of purpose and just a little good at writing and delivering a speech. It seemed that, indeed, there was a book in his ascent.
Later, when most literary agents and New York editors turned away my book proposal, expressing doubts about Obama’s lasting power on the national scene, I plugged away and finally secured a contract. On the crazy African adventure detailed in this book in great depth (probably too much depth), I consulted Pete Souza, a former Reagan White House photographer sent to cover Obama by the Trib. “Does he look like presidential material to you?” I asked Souza, who had personally witnessed Reagan’s rise and would later play the same role of chief photographer in Obama’s White House. Pete asked if I thought Obama would run for president. With some degree of uncertainty, I replied, “I think he’s going to run, at least someday, or I wouldn’t be standing here in South Africa.” Pete responded, “I’m seeing the same thing.” Finally, my tilting-at-wind-mills book project had some legitimacy. Given more time, it became impossible not to notice that something special, something quite intangible and fuel injected, had attached itself to Obama. Where this would propel him, who knew?
Since this book was published, I’ve given hundreds of interviews and talks on my subject to right-wing ranters like Bill O’Reilly, to staid questioners at NPR, the BBC, and other media instantly identified by initials, to curious reporters from Europe and Japan and New Zealand and elsewhere, to impressionable college and high school kids. Robert Gibbs, who would land his dream job of White House press secretary under Obama, warned me not long before the book’s initial release, “Get ready to become a commodity, Mendell.” That’s been true, and it’s also true that any author needs to be a zealous salesperson for his or her work. Yet I viewed talking about Obama in different terms—more as my journalistic and patriotic duty, and my fate, to truthfully inform people what I discovered about Barack Obama, no matter who was doing the asking. This was to the chagrin of more than one personal adviser. “You need to say much more, ‘In my book, I wrote this or that,’” a publicist told me. “We’re trying to sell books here.” But I felt that my role, as an up-close witness to history, was to answer questions about Obama as accurately as I could, not simply regurgitate passages from this text. I still do.
Through all of this, there’s one question I’ve most often heard: When, and how, did you know that Obama was on a trajectory to the White House?
This is impossible to pinpoint specifically, although there was a particularly early moment when I recall musing if Obama was born with a particular DNA to be a president. It came aboard a campaign plane in the days leading up to his Senate primary victory. We were flying back to Chicago from downstate Illinois when I asked Obama who had most influenced his oratory. Obama mentioned that one of his speech-making heroes was former New York governor Mario Cuomo, for Cuomo’s passion, grace and beauty of language. I recollected that, as a college student, I was awestruck watching Bill Clinton break into a brilliant soliloquy about American race relations, seemingly off the cuff, during an unrelated C-Span interview.
Without hesitation, Obama blurted, “Oh, I could be that good.” Still learning the supreme confidence that Obama possesses, I was taken aback. After all, at that time Obama was just a state senator, and while the polls had turned in his favor, it was still unclear if he would win the Senate race and rise above Illinois politics. And here he was, comparing his oratorical skills to arguably the most gifted speechmaking president of the Baby Boom generation. “I could be that good,” he said again.
* * *
Obama was elected president, twice, but I think the main question posed at the end of Chapter One remains unanswered today: Would America embrace someone as uniquely different as Obama as president?
Some analysts, and especially African Americans, see the selection of Donald Trump as Obama’s successor as a historic correction, proof that a significant number of people in our country, which remains roughly sixty percent white, were not fully ready for a minority to lead them. Left-wing commentator Van Jones, a black man, called Trump’s election “a whitelash.” Trump’s very campaign theme seemed to say this: “Make America Great Again”—a veiled charge that eight years of Obama had diminished the country’s greatness.
Still other analysts looked past the racial theory, saying that Trump’s populist message reached voters in key swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania who feel beaten by a new globalized economy in which technology is replacing human labor.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Trump burst onto the political scene by trying to delegitimize Obama’s birth on U.S. soil, even as all facts said otherwise. I never broached the birther subject in my long interview with his grandmother, Toot, because this charge had not yet been leveled, and it was never plausible. Toot, who passed away just days before Obama’s 2008 victory, was the matriarch of the family and no fan of Obama’s African father. I’m sure she would have had something bionically strong to say had Obama’s mother even suggested that she travel to Africa for Obama’s birth. This book should remain relevant, if for nothing else, for revealing Toot’s extreme influence on a young Barry Obama.
Several characters first introduced to the public through this book gained notice in Obama’s first presidential run, especially those who were mentors or central to Obama’s evolution.
Jerry Kellman campaigned for Obama, cutting a television commercial that ran in Iowa and speaking at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver. His sister Maya Soetoro-Ng also hit the 2008 campaign trail in Iowa, where she was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm for her brother. “I could see how much they loved Barack and how energized they were to work for him, especially the young people,” she told me. “It was uplifting and buoyant and beautiful.”
But the person from Obama’s past who caused the biggest stir was the bombastic Jeremiah Wright. Obama critics unearthed some of Wright’s recorded sermons, and Wright’s more militant and anti-American rhetoric soon was circulating throughout the media. Obama’s campaign fell into crisis, causing the candidate to deliver his now-famous “A More Perfect Union” speech in Philadelphia. Obama denounced his former mentor’s comments, but also tried to put them into historical, racial, and cultural context, particularly for white Americans. He deftly examined sensitive subjects such as racial inequality, white privilege, white resentment, and black anger from a perspective that probably only a person of mixed race could articulate, and in a reasonable and intellectual way that probably only Obama could manage. He concluded by issuing a plea for both whites and blacks to move past America’s “racial stalemate.”
Some observers deemed it the most significant address on American race relations since Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. A day or two after the speech, I ran into Rahm Emanuel, then a Chicago congressman. “He saved himself and his campaign and gave one of the great speeches in history—a political trifecta!” exhorted Emanuel, who would be summoned by Obama to serve as his first chief of staff and now is Chicago’s mayor. The speech certainly answered any doubt about whether Obama could match Bill Clinton’s speaking mastery. Yes, he could be that good, and even better.
This book has been used both by Obama supporters and detractors to make a case for him and against him. Despite the largely positive portrayal of its main subject, it was not necessarily well received in Obama’s world, or, from what I heard through channels, by the subject himself.
David Axelrod wrote his own memoir, which, at this writing, is the most inside glimpse at Obama since this book. When Obama began setting his sights on the presidency, the high level of access and cooperation that I was afforded in Illinois for months and years, and which began closing for me, closed almost completely to all journalists. Axelrod did not respond to my recent inquiries to be interviewed for this Afterword. A few others also did not respond. (During Obama’s first presidential term, several books reported staff disagreements and other internal sausage-making within Obama’s administration; by the second term, the White House had ceased cooperation with authors.)
In the immediate months after this book’s release, as Obama was running for president, I was persona non grata among Obama’s campaign team. When I met a campaign staff member for an off-the-record beer in Chicago’s Loop in summer 2008, he saw that some fellow staffers were grabbing an after-work drink at the same tavern, and he messaged to meet him on the other side of the business district. Being seen with me apparently was tantamount to consorting with the enemy!
Curiously, around that time, this book received a succession of one-star reviews on Amazon, with reviewers explaining that the “real story” of Obama can be found in his own books, not this one. To me, this signaled an effort by his campaign to dilute the book’s sales and influence. I spoke to Bill Burton, then a top Obama media aide, about putting an end to the one-star reviews. “I mean, Bill, it’s worth at least two stars, isn’t it?” I joked. Burton denied any knowledge of the reviews and maintained that the campaign “would never do anything like that.” Nevertheless, not one more single-star review appeared.
At the time, Obama was hovering on Cloud 9 with the media, selling a “Hope and Change” revolution that promised to reshape the very fabric of Washington and the world. His team largely had control of the candidate’s media narrative—and wanted to keep it that way. To be fair, it’s not unusual for a reporter to be frozen out if that journalist’s coverage isn’t deemed sympathetic enough or somehow unfair. I think, more broadly, they just didn’t like how this book occasionally portrayed Obama as a conventional, calculating politician. Democrats were still falling deeply in love with their new star. Entertainers were composing uplifting songs about him, Obama T-shirts and bumper stickers were ubiquitous, and the burgeoning Internet was on fire with videos of his soaring oratory. He was being viewed almost as a Messiah. This was a political altitude that could never hold forever, but his folks were trying.
I also had notebooks filled with interviews given before campaign scripts had been written. For example, Michelle Obama confided that she worried “every day” about Obama’s safety as a public figure, particularly as a black man. About two months after this interview, she told CBS’s 60 Minutes the exact opposite, that she had no such worry. It just wasn’t smart politics for the prospective First Lady to admit that she was reasonably frightened by the demons her husband’s political success could unleash.
Still, I wasn’t well prepared for pushback from Obama’s people. My first major media appearance came even before the book was released publicly, in August 2007 on NBC’s Meet the Press. After the show, host Tim Russert, who has since passed away, rushed up to me. He shoved two sticks of chewing gum into his mouth. “You know,” he said, chomping hard on the gum, “Axelrod lobbied hard to keep you off the show. He gave me a long spiel about how your reporting on Obama’s anti-war speech was all wrong.” “Really?” I said, rather shocked. Russert replied, “Yep. But it sounded like complete bullshit, so I brought you on anyway.”
I understand Axelrod’s thinking. One strong argument for Obama over Hillary Clinton for Democrats was Obama’s early public stance against the Iraq invasion. Axelrod wanted that stance to remain pure, not muddied by issues of money-raising or political calculation, though, in politics, they always are part of the equation.
Separately, Axelrod told me that I had “gotten hold of a bad source” for that section of this book, and others, which he didn’t specify. He apparently interpreted this passage to show Obama dithering, at best, or calculating, at worst, over the decision to give his anti-Iraq war speech in Chicago. Bettylu Saltzman, the rally organizer who adored Obama, even signed a letter to the Tribune calling my reporting “fiction.” (Trib editors, saying that staff writers were not permitted to respond to letters, declined my request to write a response.)
But, let history show that Obama did not immediately jump at the speaking invitation. He called several advisers first, even seeking Axelrod for a consultation, according to Axelrod’s own memoir. And really, this was only prudent on Obama’s part. Do we want a senator to cast a war vote, or a president to make decisions about war and peace, based on emotional or political whims? And does any serious, ambitious politician make such a big decision without looking at the political score first? Of course not. I imagine Russert reached the same conclusion.
As the 2008 primary gave way to the general election, it became apparent to someone on Obama’s squad that my balanced reporting could help to defuse negative stories and right-wing propaganda about Obama that had begun circulating. An aide met me for coffee and asked if she could suggest me as a resource to reporters and talk show producers who were seeking a corrective on these wild untruths. (He was born in Honolulu, not Africa, yes! He is a Christian, not a Muslim, yes! He truly does love his country, check! He’s not some radical left-wing socialist who wants to blow up Wall Street, no indeed!)
It’s worth noting that I appeared on O’Reilly’s show again in summer 2016, ostensibly to talk about Obama’s foreign policy legacy. In reality, O’Reilly wanted to kick around Obama a bit more before he left office, and I was one of the few Obama-connected guests who would agree to take the punishment.
In my 2008 appearances, O’Reilly was cordial, polite, and even seemed interested in calmly debating the merits of Obama’s progressive thought. By 2016, however, the war between America’s ideological factions, by way of the Internet and cable talk, had grown even more fierce.
Rather than talking legacy, I wound up in the uncomfortable position of defending Obama’s Christianity, as O’Reilly made a loud case that Obama was overly sympathetic toward the world’s Muslims and has put America at great terrorist risk because of these sympathies.
As a biographer, I don’t see it as my duty to defend Obama’s values or policies, only define them. But I made the argument that Obama was, indeed, a devout Christian—a statement that unhinged O’Reilly, as well as hundreds of Internet trolls who spammed my social media with their certainties that Obama is truly a Muslim and I am a liberal media sap, although their words were even less nice.
My treatment alone shows that honest reporting—the core of all good journalism, the very essence of our Constitution’s First Amendment—seems more under siege than at any point in the past century. Journalists and news consumers, alike, seem lost in a sea of Tweets, trolls, and fake news, and I pray that we find the course back to dry land.
* * *
It’s too early to fully gauge Obama’s legacy. The only certainty: In a country becoming less populated by whites, Obama will always be a racial symbol—the first non-white to occupy the Oval Office. On the other hand, Obama’s chief policy achievements—healthcare reform, an international climate change accord, withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops from the Middle East, a nuclear deal with Iran—face long-term uncertainty with the election of President Trump.
Economists also continue to debate if his administration pulled the country out of its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression swiftly or strongly enough, or whether he did a yeoman’s job by handing Trump an economy with low unemployment, record high stock prices, and robust growth.
Obama’s healthcare reform, which came at great political cost, is worthy of note. In my view, the Affordable Care Act reflects squarely on Obama’s youthful, idealistic mission to “make the world a better place.” Obama did not seek political power simply for the sake of acquiring power itself—though that clearly intoxicated him at moments—but his core mission was borne of an ideal. His healthcare bill was far from perfect legislatively, but it was rooted in that community-organizing mission to assist those in need. I suspect his tilt in this direction will be a significant part of his legacy, no matter how much of it survives Trump and a Republican Congress.
Obama’s teary response to the death of schoolchildren by gun violence also struck me as pure, untainted by political theatrics. Obama’s mother, who dearly loved children, imbued in him the same deep love and protective nature of children. In my first extended interview with Obama, in his Senate campaign office, he grew emotional when speaking of less privileged children in his state legislative district whose plight he felt powerless to change, even as an elected official. Flash forward to Obama standing before a row of reporters and wiping away tears in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shootings. This was clearly the same man, the same emotions pouring forth. He was now the leader of the free world, yet still just as powerless. I’m sure that Obama has left his presidency feeling like gun violence was a mission unaccomplished, and it would be unsurprising if, among other causes as a former president, he set his sights on stricter gun control measures.
Perhaps former Senate campaign aide Amanda Fuchs Miller offered the most prescient quote in this book. She spoke of how Obama managed to charm and work with Republicans in Illinois to pass legislation, and she correctly predicted this would be unworkable in the blood-sport fighting ring of Washington. Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett, who became a senior adviser in the White House, told an audience in November 2016 that this was Obama’s greatest disappointment.
“I thought Chicago was tough, but oooh baby, it is nothing compared to Washington,” Jarrett told the gathering at the Art Institute of Chicago. “In Chicago, you always kind of knew it was rough and tumble. But people really cared about the city and they might have disagreed about the means, but not the ends. But in Washington, what we’ve seen, frankly, is a few people really make up their minds that their goal is to hurt the president or hurt those who are around him, even if that means they are not taking that long view, that their goal is just to be obstructionist.”
She predicted that Republican obstructionism will be viewed as the main culprit in stifling Obama’s place in history.
“People forget that when the president took office, our economy was crumbling. It was in freefall. And to have that happening, and then you have the leader in the Senate, Senator McConnell, saying his No. 1 objective is to make sure that President Obama isn’t reelected. Really? You don’t think maybe we should try to stabilize the financial markets or revitalize our automobile industry or end a couple wars or give twenty million people healthcare? That’s not what we should be doing? We should just be trying to stop President Obama? And that is a toxicity that is just his biggest disappointment, that we can’t break that. It’s really going to take a lot of effort from the American people to make that change.”
Critics, however, might say that Obama’s introverted side and his aloof presence, whether real or perceived, also hampered his ability to work with both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. Bill Clinton, for example, made nightly phone calls to chew the fat with fund-raisers and members of Congress. The cerebral Obama studied policy papers deep into the night, but left some major donors and key legislative supporters wondering when they would hear from him again.
As part of his “Hope and Change” platform, Obama also promised that he was the best-suited candidate to temper Washington’s rancor and bridge the growing divide between Democrats and Republicans. He talked of unifying a nation that “cynics” had broken into Red States and Blue States. Yet he departed the White House with a country that seems far more disunited than when he entered it.
At Harvard Law, he extended a hand to conservatives, and they reached back. In Illinois, he was successful in bringing Republicans on board some of his bills. But uniting a nation fractured by race, culture, education, geography, and wealth proved every bit as vexing, and every bit as impossible, as his grand community-organizing dream to unite Chicago’s self-interested ministers for the good of the whole.
It’s fairly certain that, barring ill health, Obama will have an active post presidency. Trump’s victory all but assured this. In an interview just after the 2016 election, Obama told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that, at fifty-five years old, he still has a couple of decades of public life in him. With Trump in the White House, “I think I now have some responsibility to at least offer my counsel to those who will continue to be elected officials about how the DNC can help rebuild, how state parties and progressive organizations can work together,” Obama said.
Obama’s sister, Soetoro-Ng, told me that she still senses in him the same core belief in building a better future. His presidential museum and library, to be based on Chicago’s South Side, should provide a programmatic and public engine to keep his idealistic, liberal ideas churning in the public sphere, she said.
“I think he has remained optimistic about the country, about making positive change, and about democracy in general,” said Soetoro-Ng, a member of the Obama Library board. “He has retained his sense of humor. Although he is grayed, and there is much mention of that, in person, he does not seem old. He seems energetic and he seems youthful. He is almost as excited now about the decades that remain for him, about moving forward with all of these priorities and passions. He can now do his work through writing, speaking, building. The Obama Library will not simply be a legacy piece, but it will be about moving forward and thinking about the next levels of leadership and civic engagement. His priorities, whether they are civil rights or human rights or environmental preservation or resilience building, all of those things will be pursued with vigor.”
Obama leaves office still a beloved figure among Democrats, although it remains to be seen if he will be regarded as a liberal icon in the way Reagan is a conservative one.
In the Remnick interview, Obama seemed again to channel Axelrod’s sage advice to digest the stories of people he’s met over the long journey of a political campaign, now of a long political life, to speak directly to their concerns, and to remain ever optimistic. He reminisced about his time campaigning in southern Illinois, mingling and connecting with the types of voters who in 2016 either went for Trump or refrained from voting altogether.
The most effective politicians are able to conjure deep emotions and use those emotions to move an agenda. Obama tapped into human desires that the world could become fairer and more just, for all of us. That was the essence of the Hope and Change message.
Donald Trump skillfully tapped into human feelings, as well, and drew passionate crusaders to his cause. To Democrats, these were feelings of fear: fear of people unlike ourselves; fear of working-class Americans falling further behind; fear of America losing its vast global power; fear that corporate, media, and political elites were conspiring against them. These are emotions that, on the whole, do more to divide than bind. Trump’s strategy was divide and conquer, and conquer he did.
Conversely, an Obama rally provided supporters with a sense of experiencing something good and unifying, a sense that we are of a common humanity, the Bobby Kennedy phrase that Obama borrowed and used so effectively. I am fond of the singer James Taylor’s songwriting, and his concerts could elicit those same feel-good emotions. To paraphrase one of Taylor’s hits: To win people over, shower them with love.
The biggest challenge now, Obama told Remnick, is blasting that message through the disconnected tunnels of modern communications. “In southern Illinois, in those counties I won, I was at V.F.W.s and fish fries hearing people’s stories and talking to folks, so that they knew me,” he said. “They weren’t getting me through Fox or Rush Limbaugh or Breitbart or RedState.” He also talked of the same experiences in other Trump strongholds, rural white places in North Carolina. “So it’s not just, like, the gushing San Francisco liberal hugging me that makes me optimistic. It’s that I’ve seen the decency among people who may, nevertheless, have some presuppositions or biases about African Americans or Latinos or gays. And the issue is, constantly, How do we break through those barriers?”
Even after eight years of an African American president, that answer remains elusive.
“Sometimes you lose an argument. Sometimes you lose an election,” Obama said in the Rose Garden, the day after Trump was elected. “The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line. We zig and zag, and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back. And that’s okay.”
During his time in the Oval Office, Obama grew openly frustrated with an opposition party determined to block his every move, comforted people grieving the mass killings of children and churchgoers and homosexuals, managed relations with far-away nations riven by terrorism and civil war, gave orders to seek and kill terrorist Osama bin Laden, approved drone strikes that took the lives of Middle Eastern enemies and innocents. And in the end, he witnessed his country elect a successor in Donald Trump who rose in politics by trying to strip Obama of his beloved American identity, a man who now seeks to rip down Obama’s policy achievements.
After all this, Obama somehow retains optimism in his country. He remains devoted to the belief that love overcomes fear, devoted to those liberal ideals that his kind and naive mother instilled in him. He remains his mother’s child. And he remains every bit The Dreamer that made his long ago mentor Jeremiah Wright think of Joseph from the Old Testament and then laugh out loud.
Democrats looking for a liberal to canonize could do worse than America’s forty-fourth president, even if, in the end, he redirected the Mighty USA only a few degrees leftward, even if he left his party out of power and much in the same desperate place as where this book opened: searching, once again, for a new Obama.
—David Mendell, Chicago, December 2016