I have been chasing this same goal my entire adult career, and that is creating an America that is fairer, more compassionate and has greater understanding between its various peoples.
—BARACK OBAMA
My first encounter with Barack Obama in his U.S. Senate race came on a cold fall morning in November 2003. I had been assigned to cover the Democrats vying for the nomination and I began reporting profiles of the top-tier candidates: Obama, Dan Hynes, Gery Chico and Blair Hull. By now, Obama had contracted with a communications director named Pam Smith. Good-natured and usually smiling, Smith was a Chicago-based public relations consultant in her forties who was rather inexperienced in politics at this level, and she could be a bit overwhelmed with the daunting task of serving as the lead spokeswoman for a high-profile Senate candidate. She was aware of the importance of the campaign—and Obama understood the significance of hiring a black woman as his public face to Chicago area voters—but she acted more as a conduit to reporters than as a mouthpiece for Obama. Just as Obama had told Shomon years before, Obama handled his own press for the most part. He wanted control over his message, especially when it came to his image in such a powerful local media outlet as the Chicago Tribune. I told Smith that I wanted to attend one of Obama’s constitutional law classes at the University of Chicago and we arranged for me to sit through a lecture later that week.
But when I arrived at 8:50 A.M. at the room number Smith had given me, I found no students and no Obama, even though the class was to begin in ten minutes. After a series of cell phone calls—to Smith, who called Obama, who called me—we straightened out the matter. His class was down the hall. Political campaigns, especially in the early stages, are rarely well-oiled machines. They are like a start-up company tossed together, usually populated by young people barely removed from college. So this disorganization was irritating, especially at 9 A.M., but not surprising. What surprised me was Obama’s handling of the foul-up. He apologized and told me that he had given Smith the wrong room number. He emphasized that it was his fault. “Don’t blame Pam,” he said. “It was my mistake.” I found this odd—and rather refreshing. Obama could easily have made his aide the culprit but chose to accept the blame himself. Politicians are not known for admitting to mistakes. Settling into a chair in his classroom, I thought, He is either honest, naive or endeavoring to change my first impression of him from several years ago—as one who would blame an ill child for his missing a key Illinois senate vote while he vacationed in Hawaii.
Dressed in blue shirt and tie, Obama strode into the classroom about five minutes late and did not acknowledge my presence, another act I found somewhat strange. How many times does a Tribune reporter sit through your class? He pulled off his winter coat and his navy suit coat, and I noted that his frame was even thinner than I had remembered from that press conference a couple of years earlier. He opened the discussion and, as he paced the room, he loosened his tie and reached down to roll up the sleeves of his shirt. He turned over each layer of light blue cotton so slowly and with such precision that it was impossible not to fix your eyes on his movements. Obama certainly knew how to call attention to himself, and in the most subtle manner. It was understated, but he definitely had a confident presence, if not overly confident.
To Obama’s far right, I spotted two young African-American female students gazing at him from above their laptop computer screens. One of the young women looked positively enraptured, while the other appeared just slightly entranced. Even if they did not have crushes on the instructor, they seemed more focused on his physical being than the subject of his lecture. Obama went through the material of the day, cases involving civil rights and voting rights, in a clear and methodical manner. He challenged some students but in no way seemed bent on embarrassing them. The University of Chicago is an elite institution, and the students were bright and alert. It was evident that they had read the assignments and were at least minimally prepared. As the class ended, the two young African-American women approached Obama. The woman with the intense gaze was fidgety and nervous in his presence, even as she asked a common question about an assignment. He folded his arms with a detached coolness that did little to put her at ease. I smiled. If Obama runs any kind of television ad campaign that gets him noticed by large numbers of voters, I thought, it’s crystal clear where the vote of college-educated black women is going.
As students departed, Obama walked up and shook hands with me. His handshake was not as tight and firm as I had come to expect from politicians. He joked that he was going to call on me a couple of times in the class, but “wasn’t sure you had read the assignment.” I laughed mildly. I then explained that I would be covering the campaigns of the Democratic candidates for the Tribune over the next five months, and I suggested that we grab a cup of coffee and talk about the race. “Great idea,” he said. So we walked out and headed down the hallway. A student with a blue-white “Obama, Democrat for Senate” button fastened to his backpack walked by. Obama broke into a wide grin and pointed, “Hey, look at that.” The button didn’t exactly impress me. Surely Obama had a good number of university students in his corner, considering that he was teaching there and lived just a few blocks away in Hyde Park. As we stepped down a corridor and neared some outside doors, Obama turned and said, “Well, have a good day.” Perplexed, I froze in my tracks. “I thought we were getting coffee?” I asked. “Oh, we will,” he said. And he stepped away. This baffled me, but over time I would learn that Obama was a man accustomed to setting his own pace and his own schedule—and that day, a cup of coffee with the Tribune reporter was not in his plans. He had only learned the night before that I would be there, and he was a man who insisted on being fully prepared for these kinds of encounters.
I found Obama again when he was one of several speakers to a crowd of South Side black veterans. The event was outdoors and Obama was late arriving. He surprised me by driving up to the gathering by himself, with no staff accompaniment. Most politicians, and especially candidates for high office, are chauffeured from place to place with at least one aide at their side. Afterward, as I walked with Obama back to his Jeep Cherokee, he seemed to have only faint interest in setting up that cup of coffee with me. Yet when a black man slowed his car and waved encouragement to him in his Senate race, Obama was quick to point me out: “Hey, I’m doing good,” he told the man. “Look, I’ve got the Chicago Tribune here with me right now.” I guess I came in handy for show-and-tell, I thought.
OBAMA’S CANDIDACY INTRIGUED ME, BUT NOT NEARLY AS MUCH AS the newest face on the political scene: multimillionaire Blair Hull. His résumé of making hundreds of millions as a securities trader was interesting enough, but as the story went, he had moved into trading after parlaying twenty-five thousand dollars in blackjack winnings from Las Vegas into a successful trading company. Besides that, rumors swirled about those personal issues—alcohol abuse and ex-wife problems—that had scared David Axelrod away from working for his campaign. Hull had long ago put together a campaign apparatus, and it was so well assembled that it resembled a minicorporation. Professional-sounding secretaries answered the phone and there were up-to-date magazines in the waiting area. The campaign was housed in a historic-looking building in the bustling Near North neighborhood of downtown Chicago, within walking distance of the “Magnificent Mile” of North Michigan Avenue. I counted more than two dozen signs or buttons or stickers with the name “HULL” emblazoned on them in the waiting area. Hull entered the race with zero name recognition, and the first order of business was building his name into a brand. He had already been running television commercials across the state. The poll-driven theme was that, as an outsider to Washington not beholden to any special interests, Hull would cut through the muck of the Beltway cesspool to solve the nation’s health care crisis. His health care plan, in fact, would ensure that all Americans had medical coverage. The ads were slick and highly professional—and Hull had an unlimited bank account to flood the airwaves with them.
I had called the Hull campaign to establish contact and meet with his press secretary, a good-humored, buttoned-down spokesman named Jim O’Connor. I wanted to meet Hull, and O’Connor said that would be “fantastic.” But after weeks of chatting, the meeting still had not come together. O’Connor seemed to find one excuse after another for why we could not sit down. I would learn later that Hull’s aides had been working for months to prepare the political neophyte for talking with reporters. Finally, in late November, O’Connor, Hull and I had lunch, and Hull seemed amiable enough. I told him that his ads were sharply produced and appeared to be having some effect on an electorate that, at the moment, was barely aware that a Senate contest was under way. But I also took notice of something that a colleague had pointed out: “Those Blair Hull ads are good, but you know, I can never remember what he looks like afterward, even though I have seen that commercial a dozen times.” Indeed, Hull had such an undistinctive face—none of his characteristics were particularly defining—that his physical presence could go largely unnoticed and be soon forgotten. Bespectacled, with gray hair, Hull smiled throughout the lunch and appeared to be reciting lines that had been written for him, but I expected this from a first-time candidate for office.
What I did not expect was the call from his office that came about 6 P.M. several days later—on Monday, December 8. Someone named Jason Erkes said there would be an important announcement from the Hull campaign at any moment. When Erkes called back, he explained that he was a second campaign spokesman and he had information to release: A young woman had been found dead in the garage of Hull’s home in Chicago’s tony Gold Coast neighborhood on Saturday evening. Hull had not been living in the home and he did not know the woman—she apparently was the close friend of a former young girlfriend of Hull’s. The two women had been sharing the home and Hull had moved elsewhere. The police were investigating but did not believe foul play was involved.
Later, the authorities ruled the woman had died from carbon monoxide that had emanated from a malfunctioning swimming pool heater located inside the garage. The pool was atop the garage. The young woman had stepped into the garage and was felled by the poisonous fumes before she reached her car.
The story was buried in the newspapers and only lasted a day. But four months before the primary, Blair Hull’s bizarre, scrambled personal life was already taking center stage in the Senate race.
THE WEEKEND BEFORE THE HULL STORY BROKE, I WROTE A curtain-raising story about the Senate race for the Tribune. The piece called Dan Hynes the front-runner and mentioned Blair Hull, Gery Chico and another candidate who had now entered the race, Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas. She was perhaps the hardest candidate to explain. Pappas was an eccentric who had high name recognition, but she had jumped into the campaign so late that observers wondered if she was really serious or was a stalking horse for another candidate. I had spoken with her on the telephone and the conversation left me more puzzled than anything. She was known for her quirky nature, and in the chat with me, she stressed that she might even hop on a bicycle and go through neighborhoods on two wheels. Then she invited me to bike with her. “Um, it’s December and this whole campaign is running through the winter,” I said. “I think I’ll take a pass on the Sunday bike rides.” First there was Blair Hull and the death of a young woman in his home. Now here came this odd woman insisting that I bicycle with her in December in Chicago—this race had more characters to it than I had ever anticipated.
In the Tribune story, I mentioned that Obama was trying to pull together the key Chicago Democratic voting blocs of North Shore liberals and African Americans. In doing so, I wrote, Obama had campaigned “almost exclusively” in the black community, at least so far. I wrote this because I had limited information about Obama’s campaigning, since he had not yet sat down to speak with me. Smith had told me that he was spending every Sunday morning in black churches—and I had spent one Sunday observing him in several of them. But once the story appeared, Smith called to say that he had been campaigning in far more settings than the African-American community, and Obama wanted to talk to me in person about my misrepresentation of his campaign. And could I do it that afternoon? she asked.
Obama’s campaign office was located high inside a beautiful white terra-cotta building along South Michigan Avenue across from downtown Chicago’s Grant Park. When I stepped into his private corner office, my eyes were drawn to two things: the room’s clutter and a huge framed poster of heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali. The striking photograph caught the fighter with a clenched right arm and a bloodthirsty, celebratory gaze in his eyes just moments after blasting opponent Sonny Liston to the canvas. The famous Ali image hovered above Obama’s head at his desk. The candidate explained that he recently grabbed it on the spot from a street vendor. Was this a metaphor for his underdog campaign pulverizing the opposition with glee? I asked with a grin. He returned a smile.
I sat in front of Obama’s desk, with Smith taking her place in the chair beside me, and was prepared for Obama to launch into a diatribe about what he believed I had written inaccurately about his campaigning. Instead, Obama said, “Well, go ahead, fire away. Ask whatever you want.” I realized that this was our profile interview, not a dressing-down session. Obama was now obviously ready to speak to the Tribune and had summoned me for that purpose, and somehow the communication wires were crossed again. I hadn’t fully prepared for such an extensive discussion, but the candidate was right here in front of me, so away we went. After about a half hour, I had managed to ask only three questions. Once he was fully prepared, Obama could talk endlessly about a subject dear to him: himself. He spoke quietly and slowly, measuring each of his statements. Indeed, his low-key, conversational delivery in a one-on-one interview can be the complete opposite of his stage persona. His rich baritone is very clear in personal settings, but sometimes it is almost hushed. As Obama would do with so many reporters as the months wore on, he impressed me that evening with his mixture of intelligence, eloquence and a committed idealism. He framed his entrance into politics as part of an ongoing quest for social change. He was truly an activist at heart, not a politician, he claimed. I would see each of his life experiences shape the course of his discussion—the happy-go-lucky prep school teen from Hawaii, the adventurous community organizer with trained listening skills, the Harvard Law School graduate who presided over combative intellectuals on the Law Review, the state lawmaker who had endeavored to remain out of Chicago’s nasty ward politics, the devoted husband and father:
I think politics was really an extension or progression from a broader set of goals and concerns. When I was in college, I decided I wanted to be part of bringing about social change in this country, and some of that is based on the values my family gave me. Some of it is based on, I think, my status as an African American in this country. And some of it is informed by my having lived abroad and having family in underdeveloped countries where the contrast between rich and poor is so sharp that it is hard to ignore injustice. But I didn’t know in college how that would take shape. And I was actually pretty cynical in college about electoral politics. That’s when I decided to get involved in community organizing as opposed to signing up with someone’s campaign. I took a lot of inspiration from the civil rights movement and the way the movement brought ordinary people into extraordinary positions of leadership. It struck me that lasting change came from the bottom up and not from the top down. I have been chasing this same goal my entire adult career, and that is creating an America that is fairer, more compassionate and has greater understanding between its various peoples.
I asked Obama something of a reporter’s question—designed in an impossible fashion to elicit a certain response. At the time, the city was building a grandiose park area, now called Millennium Park, just outside Obama’s window on the other side of South Michigan Avenue. The project was well beyond its target date for completion and far over budget—into the hundreds of millions of dollars. I asked him about his relationship with Mayor Daley, and he responded that it was “cordial, not close.” So I queried Obama about what he thought of the park, if it wouldn’t have been wiser to spend those hundreds of millions on the beleaguered city school system or to spur economic development in the poor neighborhoods of his district. Spending those kinds of public resources on a park largely for tourists and the elites—how was that advancing social change? And why hadn’t he spoken out on this issue? Obama winced at the question, and I readied myself for a politic answer, perhaps something about how the center city needed to be developed, how Chicago was a tourist metropolis and needed that kind of urban investment. Instead, Obama leaned forward and said, “How do you really expect me to answer that? If I told you how I really felt, I’d be committing political suicide right here in front of you.” I found his candor refreshing. But it also told me something: Even if he was driven by an activist heart, he was no radical. Rather, he was a polished professional politician who knew that, despite being a community organizer and staunch do-gooder, as a U.S. Senate candidate, he was now working from within the established political order. And when I pressed further for a real answer, he indeed found that politically correct response, saying that the park would advance the city’s national reputation and he understood its importance to overall economic development, but he would also like to see more resources devoted to the problems in the city’s economically depressed neighborhoods.
In the interview, Obama said the three men he most admired were Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.—“men who were able to bring about extraordinary changes and place themselves in a difficult historical moment and be a moral center.” (It’s worth noting that Obama might fall into that category if he were to win the presidency in a difficult period fraught with a foreign war. As a presidential candidate, he has portrayed himself as a moral leader who wants to change not only policy but the combative nature of politics.) As we spoke, Obama also emphasized various themes that I would hear over the coming months and years in his stump speeches as a Senate candidate, in his town hall meetings as a senator and in his trips across the country in his White House quest. Even though he spent his teen years ridden with feelings of parental abandonment—again, he had often deemed himself “an orphan”—he said that he had been blessed with so much good fortune in his life that it was incumbent upon him to give something back to society. His devoted mother and grandparents, as well as college professors and adult friends, were aligned to steer him from a path of self-destruction, he said. And too many black teenagers are not that fortunate:
When I see young African-American men out there and the struggles that they go through, then I connect with that. I know what that means. I know that, in my book, I mention that I dabbled in drugs or that I was acting tough. I put that in there explicitly because what I wanted to communicate was the degree to which many young men, particularly young African-American men, engage in self-destructive behavior because they don’t have a clear sense of direction. But I also wanted to point out that there is way to pull out of that and refocus, and in my case, it was tying myself to something much larger than myself. In my case, that was trying to promote a fair and just society. That is the reason I work on ex-offender legislation. I say to myself that if I had been growing up in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago, there is no reason to think that I wouldn’t be in jail today, that I could have easily taken that same wrong turn. That is something that I am very mindful of and it is something that motivates me. Thinking about how you provide hope and opportunity to every kid is my biggest motivator. When I see my five-year-old and my two-year-old, it makes me weep because I see children who are just as smart and just as beautiful as they are, who just don’t get a shot. It’s unacceptable in a country as wealthy as ours that children every bit as special as my own children are not getting a decent shot at life.
Obama’s notion of attaching oneself to a larger ideal is a persistent theme in his public rhetoric. Through the first months of his presidential campaign, he would challenge audiences of all political stripes, educations and financial levels to work on behalf of a greater good and not to spend their lives strictly in pursuit of material possessions. This fell right in line with his mother’s post–World War II brand of liberalism and humanism. His message could be preachy, especially coming from a Harvard Law graduate who eventually would become a millionaire presidential candidate, but even conservatives would be hard-pressed to argue against the premise of helping those less fortunate. Throughout our first encounter, Obama also exuded a certain authenticity and great ease with himself, the polar opposite of, say, Blair Hull, who could seem uncomfortable just saying “Hello.”
IN SUMMER AND FALL 2003, DAVID AXELROD HAD BEGUN TO PULL together facets of Obama’s résumé to sell to his Washington media contacts and Illinois-based reporters. He managed to get some pieces in Washington-based political journals that touted Obama as a potential star in the making. These were helpful not only to build up his candidate in the media but to present to potential fund-raising contacts to show Obama’s viability as a strong contender in the race. This helped Obama raise three million dollars overall and still have two million on hand heading into the final months of the campaign. This was nothing compared with Hull’s tens of millions, but it would be enough to run a two- to three-week television campaign and present Obama as a serious candidate to influential political insiders.
Also in the fall of 2003, as most professional campaigns would do, Obama’s advisers hosted a series of focus groups to determine their candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. Focus groups are a far cry from scientific experiments, but they can open eyes to what voters might be thinking. In these groups, a cross section of people were assembled to review television footage of the candidates. Obama’s consultants watched from the next room, munching on junk food and swilling canned diet soda. The sessions revealed that Obama’s self-confidence as a political candidate and as the purveyor of a desirous message was not misplaced. There was even an epiphany or two among Obama’s campaign team.
The aides learned that various parts of Obama’s unique résumé appealed to different demographic groups. In explaining Obama’s experience to a white voter, all they had to do was mention “first black president of the Harvard Law Review” and the voter suddenly had an image drawn—a positive portrait of a black man. “It worked on two levels,” Axelrod said. “There were those who thought that breaking barriers is very important. And for others, the Harvard Law Review was a major credential in itself.” With black voters, however, it was not Harvard Law that evoked positive responses but Obama’s community-organizing experience and the legislation he had successfully sponsored, such as the racial profiling law and the expansion of health care coverage to poor children.
But Obama’s campaign tacticians also learned that he would probably play fabulously on television. Indeed, their candidate had an amazing telegenic quality. Jim Cauley, the campaign manager, had not necessarily swallowed Axelrod’s predictions of Obama’s potential star power. Perhaps it was because Axelrod had to be sold on it himself by Bettylu Saltzman. But as these two and others would learn, Obama could be viewed very differently by women than by men. And when it came to suburban white women, he could be viewed in “magical” terms, to quote Saltzman. Obama not only had good looks, but his charm with women apparently emanated through the television screen. His face had a certain honesty and handsome warmth that was not offending, much like his personality. In addition, many strong women had shaped Obama’s character, from his mother and his grandmother as a child, to his sister and his wife as an adult.
“My moment was a focus group,” Cauley recalled in his Kentucky twang. “The moderator was talking to [liberal, North Shore] women voters, thirty-five to fifty-five and fifty-five plus. He asked the older group, ‘Who do each of these guys remind you of?’ For Dan Hynes, a woman said, ‘Dan Quayle.’ For Hull, she said, ‘Embalmed.’ And she looked at Barack, and the lady said, ‘Sidney Poitier.’ At that moment, I was like, ‘Shit, this is real!’”