Can you believe it? He is just as fine in person as on TV.
—A YOUNG FEMALE ADMIRER
Barack Obama’s “IT” factor came to the fore at the strangest moments. And just as his natural talents often bred jealousy among his colleagues in the Illinois General Assembly, his charismatic appeal drew resentment from other campaigns, particularly supporters of the stoic Dan Hynes and the artless Blair Hull. Case in point: the morning of January 24, 2004.
On this Saturday, sleep was still in my eyes as my wife set breakfast on the table. Before I could take a bite, the phone rang. It was a few minutes before nine, the time of the day and week when custom allows only family members or close friends into your world. So when my wife came marching toward me with the phone in hand and a sour look on her face, my keen reportorial instincts told me that good news was not afoot. “It’s somebody from the Hynes campaign,” she grumbled, with a half-quizzical look on her face that clearly said: “Why would they be calling at this hour on a weekend? Can’t you ever get some peace from these politicians?”
My gut told me what to expect—my stomach fluttered with that little uneasy feeling common to reporters when a source is calling to complain about something in a story, possibly an error. The Tribune’s first Sunday edition, called the “bulldog,” had hit the newsstands that Saturday morning, and it featured my campaign profile of Obama. The article concluded with a short anecdote in which I hoped to convey what I considered key aspects of Obama’s persona: his political brazenness and his infectious personal charm, especially with women. The anecdote read:
There’s no doubt Obama can draw attention. Shortly after signing autographs at the recent forum, Obama grabbed the hand of Christina Hynes, the wife of one of his opponents, Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes, and then kissed her cheek, prompting her to flush and smile broadly. “He has a smooth personality, sometimes a little too smooth,” said his campaign manager, Jim Cauley. “He’s still young, and we have a ways to go, but he has the potential to be something very special in this business.”
Sure enough, I grabbed the phone to find an irate Matt Hynes on the other end, the younger brother of Dan Hynes and the manager of his older brother’s Senate campaign. In a sharp tone that ranged from incredulity to anger to outright paranoia, he launched into a several-minute diatribe. The thrust of his speech was that this anecdote suggested that his brother’s wife had reacted sexually to Obama’s smoochy greeting—which was not only unfair but intolerable.
The short version of Matt Hynes’s emotional tirade went like this: “You have Christina falling into Barack’s arms like she can’t control herself around his magnetism. This is a cheap shot, a total cheap shot. Something has to be done about this in Sunday’s paper or Dan is never going to speak to you again.” I mulled over his assertion. Was it a cheap shot? The moment certainly had occurred, since I had witnessed it firsthand only days before. I believed I had accurately described it—although, if anything, I had toned down Mrs. Hynes’s overt response to Obama. A somewhat shy woman, she actually giggled and teetered backward like an awkward high school freshman given attention by the school’s star senior quarterback. But was I being unfair to Hynes by bringing his wife into the profile of Obama at all? Had I unintentionally caused a schism in his marriage? “This is a cheap shot, and you know it,” Matt Hynes repeated again and again.
Though I meant only to make an observation about Obama, the Hynes people clearly believed deeply in this ulterior motive. Their emotional response was far over the top and suggested the paranoia about the media and political opponents ingrained in many successful political families in Chicago, such as the Hyneses and the Daleys. Weeks later, a writer for the alternative paper the Chicago Reader learned of the matter and wrote a short piece about it. In the Reader story, Chris Mather, Hynes’s communications director, said that my piece “talked about how women were wowed by [Obama].” The weekly dubbed the less-than-sordid matter “The Kiss and the Cover-Up.” “I think it was inappropriate to bring Dan’s wife into the story by saying that—by implying that she was reacting for the same reason the other women were reacting,” Mather said.
On the phone, I had attempted in vain to calm Matt Hynes, to persuade him that I was not taking a cheap shot at his brother, that this anecdote simply explained much about Obama’s appeal. Yet despite making that argument and opening a moral dialogue with myself, I have to admit that the words that echoed in my head were “Dan is never going to speak to you again.” If that were true, it would make my assignment of covering the Senate race more than a little difficult and perhaps impossible. Hynes, after all, was the front-runner in the race at that time. In my thinking, it seemed ridiculous to allow such a seemingly innocuous thing to end my professional relationship with a key political candidate just as the race was heating up. So I hung up with Hynes’s brother and consulted with the Tribune’s political editor, Bob Secter. After some discussion, we both agreed that the anecdote was effective at conveying Obama’s charm and charisma and agreed to leave it in subsequent editions of the Sunday paper. But we decided to edit out the reference to Hynes’s wife, changing her identifier to “a supporter of an opponent.”
For me, it was a matter of placating a source and keeping my journalism integrity intact, while still serving the Tribune readers. Secter seemed more worried about extricating our reportage from the Hynes’s marital relationship. Secter later told the Reader, “It seemed gratuitous, and it didn’t seem to be necessary. I think they thought it made an unnecessarily demeaning impression about Hynes’ relationship with his wife. We’re dealing with a difficult dimension here—a guy’s personal relationship with his wife. And I don’t know anything about their relationship, and it wasn’t our place to try to. If they inferred something out of it that we didn’t originally see, I didn’t think it was worth the hurt feelings to Hynes, since it was really a total side issue to the main point we were writing about.”
Near the end of the campaign, while on a plane during Obama’s tour of the state, I mentioned the much-ado-about-nothing matter to Obama, who, appropriately, appeared less than interested. One of Obama’s strengths is that he rarely busies his mind with matters that seem trivial to him, and this certainly was, at its essence, a trivial matter—but a trivial matter that said much about its participants. Indeed, as Obama stepped away from Mrs. Hynes that morning months before, I suggested that it “might not be wise” to greet your opponent’s wife with a kiss. Even then, he just sloughed it off, saying he had seen her many times on the campaign trail and they had gotten to know each other. Hynes’s brother, however, said much the opposite. He said that Christina Hynes was taken aback by the physical nature of the greeting.
In any case, on the campaign plane, Obama himself summed up the matter succinctly: “Sounds like [the Hynes campaign] spent too much time arguing with the refs.”
Surely that was true. But by design or happenstance, here was another instance in which Obama’s charming and bold nature had again subtly unnerved a political opponent and helped to further Obama’s own political cause.
AS THE PRIMARY ELECTION DREW CLOSER, THE CAMPAIGNS OF ALL the candidates naturally took on more urgency and more vitriol. Volunteers, consultants and the candidates themselves were all a bit more on edge and more aggressive in their tactics. Hull and Hynes, in particular, were growing more venomous toward each other. Hynes’s campaign was anemic from start to finish, except when it came to attacking Hull behind the scenes. As the front-runner with a powerful political father, Hynes had chosen a Rose Garden strategy—lie low publicly and the vote will be there on election day when the unions and ward groups churn it out. This proved a fatal error. Hynes was running in a U.S. Senate race, not a local aldermanic contest or even a race for a state executive office. He had been adept at hitting his lines at editorial boards and in public debates, but he was offering nothing particularly special to the voters. For their senator in Washington, voters wanted something more than “the favorite son of the Democratic Party,” in Obama’s words. In most polling, Hynes hovered around 20 percent and, as the stretch run began, had moved only a few percentage points, if that. Hynes’s play-it-safe strategy was taken to the extreme in nearly every aspect of his campaign. For example, in contrast to the couple of hours I spent talking with Michelle Obama, Hynes declined to make his wife available for an interview, even before the Obama kiss incident. When I shadowed Hynes, he seemed reluctant to talk about anything in his personal life, for fear of alienating a constituency. “I knew Dan Hynes was not going to win that race,” a high-ranking Illinois Democrat told me. “I’ve played basketball with both him and Obama—and Hynes played soft.”
Nevertheless, the one aspect of the Hynes campaign that showed no timidity was its criticism of Hull. To a large extent, Hull and Hynes were targeting the same Democratic constituencies—suburban and downstate Democrats. This made the two candidates natural enemies. Chris Mather, Hynes’s spokeswoman, would bend my ear daily about Hull’s many political weaknesses and liabilities. And I would get the same treatment of Hynes from Hull staffers. As these two duked it out, Obama was putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward slowly but surely. “They’re running a very smart campaign over there,” allowed Anita Dunn, Hull’s media strategist. Catching up with Obama one afternoon after he spoke to a progressive crowd in suburban Oak Park, I mentioned the fierce battle between Hull and Hynes. Obama laughed and ducked his head as he emphasized this point: “I’m just trying to keep my head down while they fling arrows at each other.”
As Obama largely ignored Hull and Hynes, there was a candidate who could irritate him—Gery Chico. The former school board president was the first to announce his candidacy and he was well funded, but his money began drying up when his campaign had trouble getting off the ground. Chico had overestimated the strength of the Latino vote and, most damaging, became distracted by the controversial disintegration of the venerable law firm that he had co-led. He did not project a positive television presence—his gruff manner could be a turnoff to viewers—but he was especially skilled at turning a complicated policy matter into a pithy, two-sentence sound bite. This was a skill that Obama did not possess. Obama flourished in extended interviews and longer speeches, where he impressed his audience with elongated, eloquent, thoughtful passages. But in the many candidate forums on the stump, Chico overshadowed Obama with snappy phrasing that cut to the heart of an issue.
After attending one forum, Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Cauley, advised his candidate: “You know, Chico is good out there. You’re going to have to raise your game.” Obama was the intellectual Harvard Law graduate and was expected to excel in a debate setting. But that wasn’t necessarily the case in this Senate race. At one forum in suburban Evanston, a liberal lakefront bastion surrounding Northwestern University that Obama needed to carry in overwhelming fashion, Chico tartly challenged Obama about arcane specifics of his education policy. Most of the Democrats in the race agreed on policy matters, and substantial argument over policy was uncharacteristic. Obama is a policy wonk in his soul. But on education, he generally used a standard Democratic applause line about President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law—“George Bush left the money behind”—and he was taken aback by Chico’s spicy criticism. Chico, having served as president of the Chicago school board, was expert in the subject area and got the better of the exchange. When I asked Obama afterward what he thought about Chico’s attack, Obama responded by beginning to relitigate the policy argument. I stopped him. “Not that,” I said. “Why do you think he went after you? Because you are the liberal favorite up here in Evanston?” Obama stammered and said, “Oh, you mean you think it was a political thing?” He was so caught up in the intellectual policy aspect of the incident that he completely missed the politics of it. Chico clearly wanted to score a point on Obama on Obama’s home turf, not hash out education policy.
THE FOCAL POINT OF OBAMA’S SHOE-LEATHER CAMPAIGN WAS unquestionably his stump speech. His main address throughout his Senate race was never formally assigned to paper or computer file. He started with a basic framework and spoke extemporaneously from that, usually with similar themes carried throughout. He typically opened with the same joke about his odd name by saying that people invariably call him something else—“Yo mama” or “Alabama.” This line always drew a laugh, and Obama delivered it with such frequency that, as the primary wound down, he had to remind himself to smile in response to the audience laughter. The quip served to begin a short explanation of his unique biography. (“My father was from Kenya, in Africa, which is where I got my name. Barack means ‘blessed by God’ in Swahili. My mother was from Kansas, which is where I got my accent from.”) He then launched into the meat of the speech, which usually involved the gap he perceived between his own values and the course of the country as set by Republican leadership.
These primary speeches were fairly consistent addresses that he would tweak on the spot, depending on feedback from that particular audience. One weekend, as the day wore on and he delivered his speech at least half-a-dozen times, he told me, “It’s getting harder and harder to change this speech each time for you, Mendell.” The comment surprised me. First, I hadn’t noticed many substantial changes, just a bit different language to emphasize the same themes. Second, having shadowed political candidates previously, I was accustomed to the identical speech being delivered day in, day out. One candidate I had covered had given the same speech, almost word for word, at each stop, and I told Obama there was no reason to alter his addresses on my account. But after some thought, I realized that he was using my nearly permanent presence as an intellectual device. These speeches were mental exercises for him—to hone his message and advance his already polished oratory skills. Varying his addresses, no matter how slightly, helped him mature as a public speaker. “My general attitude is practice, practice, practice,” Obama said. “I was just getting more experienced and seeing what is working and what isn’t, when I am going too long and when it is going flat. Besides campaigning, I have always said that one of the best places for me to learn public speaking was actually teaching—standing in a room full of thirty or forty kids and keeping them engaged, interested and challenged. I also think that David [Axelrod] was always very helpful in identifying what worked and what didn’t in my speeches.” Axelrod described their chats about message and speech delivery as akin to “musicians riffing together.”
Obama’s ability to connect with a black audience, once questionable, grew tremendously during the Senate contest. As a community organizer and as a candidate against Bobby Rush, Obama spent countless hours in Chicago’s African-American churches digesting the cadence of a preacher’s rhythm and the themes that stoke an African-American crowd. So when he came before black audiences as a Senate candidate, particularly in a church, Obama spoke in start-and-stop passages, imbuing his delivery with a touch of soulfulness and building complex thoughts about social justice and economic inequity into bold emotional crescendos. His message remained remarkably consistent: Despite many superficial differences, Americans are linked by a common bond of humanity, and the country’s government must reflect that benevolent core. “I am my brother’s keeper! I am my sister’s keeper!” he proclaimed, his rich voice booming as he reached the height of the speech. Such addresses from Obama were mostly secular and political in nature, but he made sure to pepper them with hints of the Bible, Christian orthodoxy and borrowed phrases from the nation’s African-American civil rights icon, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He would end many of these speeches by intoning his favorite quote from King: “‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ But it doesn’t bend on its own,” he told his audiences. “It bends because you put your hand on that arc and you bend it in the direction of justice.”
ONLY ONE REAL MISFORTUNE BEFELL OBAMA’S PRIMARY CAMPAIGN. During the final week of November 2003, Paul Simon, the bespectacled, gracious former two-term senator from Illinois who had run for president, stopped by the Tribune. I caught him briefly in the hall and asked if he had a preference in the U.S. Senate race. Simon said he would make a formal endorsement in a couple of weeks, but would not divulge at that moment which candidate he supported. “But,” he added with a grin, “I’m going to be very proud of this one.” Knowing that Obama was an acolyte of Simon’s, I simply said, “Obama.” Simon responded, “Just wait two weeks,” and he hopped in the elevator. The next week, Simon suffered serious complications during surgery to repair a valve in his heart and died the following day. The down-to-earth Simon, who hailed from central Illinois, was a figure beloved by Democrats throughout the state for his honesty, integrity and unabashed progressive politics. Axelrod had planned to shoot a television commercial with Simon’s personal endorsement of Obama. By linking Obama with Simon, Axelrod hoped to create the image for both progressives and downstate residents that Obama had the same characteristics as Simon: passionately liberal, disarmingly honest and definitely his own man. The ad would run primarily in downstate markets and it was considered crucial to help Obama pick up some votes outside the Chicago metro area. So Simon’s death was a blow to the Obama camp.
Initially, Axelrod was unsure how to proceed. Then he took a risk. He cut a Simon-themed ad featuring Simon’s adult daughter comparing Obama with her father. In the commercial, Sheila Simon talked about the values her father brought to politics and proclaimed that Obama was the person who would best carry on his legacy. “For half a century,” she said, as images of her father flashed on the screen, “Paul Simon stood for something very special—integrity, principle and a commitment to fight for those who most needed a voice. Barack Obama is cut from that same cloth.” The ad was risky, to some extent, because it could have been perceived as exploiting Simon’s death for the sake of Obama’s political career. In fact, while test-marketing the ad in focus groups, consultants found that one woman reacted negatively for that very reason. But Axelrod felt strongly that the commercial would resonate with Democratic voters and devoted liberals. Going with his gut over the consultants’ findings, Axelrod ran the ad anyway. It turned out to be a huge success in downstate Illinois, projecting a positive image of Obama to voters who had most likely never heard of him. Indeed, their introduction to Obama was framed in these terms: Here comes the next Paul Simon.
In those final three weeks, Obama’s campaign ran several more of Axelrod’s handsome television ads. The first was a biographical piece with footage of Obama that introduced his candidacy and his life to voters. One of Axelrod’s foremost talents was identifying the key selling points of a candidate’s biography and creating an attractive video package to highlight those points. Axelrod had learned in his focus groups that whites were drawn to Obama’s Harvard résumé and blacks to his community-organizing experience—so both were accentuated in the advertising. In Obama’s case, it was rather easy to produce an appealing video commercial because of his television charisma and legislative accomplishments.
The theme was “Yes, we can,” which implied many things depending on who was interpreting its meaning: Yes, a politician with the ideals and track record of Obama could make a difference and change lives for the better. Yes, a black man could win a U.S. Senate seat. Yes, “we”—meaning all people—could make a difference too. Axelrod framed this message primarily in terms of Obama’s barrier-breaking Harvard Law Review presidency (which whites had reacted to favorably in focus groups) and the landmark legislation that he passed in Springfield. The legislation aided key Democratic constituencies that Obama was courting: for women, a law that forced insurance companies to cover routine mammograms; for liberals, blacks and the poor, laws that expanded health care coverage to twenty thousand more impoverished children, provided tax relief to the working poor and reformed the death penalty. “Now they say we can’t change Washington?” Obama asked in an earnest voice while stepping forward to fill the camera frame. “I’m Barack Obama and I am running for the United States Senate to say, ‘Yes, we can.’”
When Obama first saw the “Yes, we can” theme, he was far from impressed. In fact, he did not care for the idea. Obama understood the implication of this sound bite, but intellectually he found the simple refrain “Yes, we can” rather trite considering the seriousness of his cause. He was inclined toward something with more depth. But Axelrod felt so strongly about this message that he stood fast behind it. So Obama went to his most trusted adviser—Michelle—and asked what she thought. She told him that it was a good idea, that it would penetrate the African-American community and that he should use it. Obama knew that his wife understood the culture and psyche of South Side blacks, and he deferred to her judgment. This indicated the maturity of Obama as a political candidate. Earlier in his career, he might have fought Axelrod on the concept. “Barack is extremely intelligent, and one of the pitfalls of extreme intelligence is you are so accustomed to being right that you believe you are always right,” Axelrod observed. But after the Bobby Rush debacle, Obama discovered that, when it came to politics, there were professionals in the field who could offer wisdom beyond his. It was probably wise to heed the guidance of a political professional like Axelrod, especially if his wife agreed with the plan.
Other commercials used the same “Yes, we can” mantra to appeal to different constituencies. Pollsters have consistently found that urban voters lean toward candidates who are change agents, while voters in rural areas are more conservative, perhaps a bit less jaded, and tend to look for political experience in their candidates. So Axelrod’s downstate ad touted Obama’s legislative experience and his proclivity to work hand in hand with Republicans. Over narration about Obama’s bipartisan nature, there was an image of Obama walking next to a blue-jean-clad farmer, with silos and green fields in the background. Wearing a less formal beige suit, Obama stood in front of a small-town courthouse and asked: “What if folks in office spent their time attacking problems instead of each other?” Another ad targeted for rural areas featured a protectionist theme. Obama was seen shaking hands with union members as he promised to work to enforce trade laws and slash tax breaks for corporations that moved jobs overseas. “Give [those tax breaks] to companies that create jobs here—in America,” he said firmly.
In perhaps Axelrod’s most effective ad, he harked back to the days of both Simon and the iconic Harold Washington—and then morphed into Obama as the modern-day ambassador of their causes. “There have been moments in our history when hope defeated cynicism, when the power of people triumphed over money and machines,” a deep-throated narrator intones as images of Simon and Washington wash over the screen. The ad then quoted various newspaper endorsements of Obama that called him “the man for this time and place” (Chicago Sun-Times) who has a “proven record of spirited, principled and effective leadership” (Chicago Tribune).
As much hard work as Obama put into his on-the-stump campaigning, it was this television campaign produced by Axelrod that pushed him over the top in the final three weeks of the race. As Hull’s divorce files became part of the public consciousness around Chicago, Obama’s ads were hitting the small screen. It was difficult to know specifically if they were resonating with the voting public, but internal polling from the campaigns indicated that Obama was surging and filling up the void opened by Hull’s collapse. “Obama is on fire!” Jason Erkes, the Hull spokesman, told me.
As usual in the final two weeks of any major election, the Tribune beefed up coverage of the Senate race, assigning a single reporter to cover each major candidate. Hull had been the story of the campaign so far, and my editor, Bob Secter, told me that he wanted me to shadow Hull. Since the Tribune had sued for the Hull records, Secter explained to me, “We can’t get beat on the Blair Hull story.” But I told Secter that I should be assigned to Obama. I could see how the race was playing out—Obama was about to cruise into the lead and probably win. If I were to continue on and cover the Democratic nominee in the general election over the next six months, these last two weeks could be crucial in building a better working relationship with that candidate. After Obama was nominated, there would probably be more staff hired and more obstacles between the candidate and me. It would be easier to cut through that small bureaucracy if I got to him now, when there was no real protection day to day. Then, in August, he would be much more comfortable with me tagging along and my access would be improved. “Besides, the Hull story is over,” I told Secter. “The story on election night will be the Barack Obama story.” My editor was not necessarily in agreement. “What makes you so sure Obama is going to win?” Secter asked. I told him that the polling was clearly headed in that direction, and suddenly you could feel something in the air when Obama appeared in public—a buzz in the crowd, a certain look of sheer devotion on the faces of his followers. “It’s like when you’re watching a ball game and you can feel the momentum shift toward one team,” I said. Secter relented. I would now enter Obama’s orbit full-time, hanging on his coattails for the next couple of weeks and beyond. And what a strange trip it would prove to be.
ON THE WEEKEND BEFORE THE ELECTION, OBAMA’S EASE IN DIFFERENT ethnic and racial settings was on vivid display as he bounced from black church to white event to Latino neighborhood.
After a morning breakfast in the black community on the South Side, Obama’s small entourage—just Obama, his driver and me—was headed downtown for Chicago’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, the predominantly white celebration not to be missed by prominent elected officials, and especially not to be overlooked by those hoping to become elected officials. This was the parade in which he was dead last the year before. Indeed, just a month earlier, Obama was still little more than an obscure state lawmaker campaigning tirelessly to spread his unusual name and his political message to a largely disengaged Illinois electorate. Now, he was seventy-two hours from the biggest election in his career, perhaps the biggest single moment of his life. And suddenly it appeared as if his long-held lofty vision for himself might be on the verge of realization—he might just be rising from obscurity. Nothing was certain yet, but after one of the most bizarre campaign seasons in Illinois history, newspaper and campaign polls all indicated that Obama had surged from third place to the top of the crowded field of Democratic candidates.
His driver parked Obama’s campaign-leased black sport utility vehicle beneath a row of leafless trees lining downtown Chicago’s Grant Park, a sprawling and scenic public green space situated between the Loop commercial district and Lake Michigan. Chicago’s interminable gray winter cloud cover had parted in recent days, and Obama stepped into bright noon sunshine. He pulled a well-worn charcoal gray wool overcoat onto his even thinner than usual frame, reduced by months of fourteen-hour days on the campaign trail. He reached into a frayed coat pocket and secured an always present pair of sleek black Ray Ban sunglasses, ever so slowly raised them to his face, assuredly cocked his head a quarter turn sideways and with chin pointed upward, coolly slipped on the glasses.
Just then, three young white women, none of them beyond their early twenties, spotted the political candidate and darted from a nearby throng of parade-goers. Judging by their accents, the women hailed from one of the mostly white ethnic sections of the town, where heavy Chicago accents are inescapable.
“Mr. Obaaaama! Mr. Obaaaama!” one of the young women said, rushing to the candidate’s side and pronouncing the first a in Obama’s name with a nasal Chicago inflection, as a sheep says “baaaaa.” “Can we pleeeeze get a picture with you, Mr. Obaaaaama?” she pleaded. “Pleeeeeze?! We have seen you on TV and we are all going to vote for you!” With no visible reaction to the flattering attention, Obama turned to me.
A photo was snapped of Obama smiling broadly, his arms loosely fastened around the waists of two of the women, and I was immediately struck by how remarkable this moment was. In all likelihood, these women came from a place in Chicago that has never produced a substantial number of votes for a black political candidate. In one of the most racially and ethnically segregated metropolitan regions in the country, they most likely came from a part of town where, even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, blacks still rarely felt comfortable enough to venture.
Besides the racial disconnect, I wondered how these three women even knew who Obama was. Immersed in establishing a career, building a romantic relationship and following pop culture, the typical twenty-something is the least reliable vote on election day. At that point, the vast majority of white Democrats had never even heard of this state lawmaker with the strange-sounding name. These women were not in Obama’s target groups, being neither black nor lakefront liberals, and just two months earlier, Obama had the backing of fewer than three in ten black Democratic voters. Moreover, he was running for the U.S. Senate, not Illinois governor or Chicago mayor, the political jobs in this midwestern state with real public cachet. Had Axelrod’s ads really sunk into the public consciousness to this extent, to produce these three young white women gushing over him as if he were some rising rock star and assuring him of their electoral support three days hence?
After the photo was taken and all arms unlocked, one young lady looked at another and said, “Can you believe it? He is just as fine in person as on TV.”
Obama’s SUV driver, a barrel-chested black man named Mike Signator, glanced at me with eyebrows raised and a wry smile on his face. Obama smiled to himself. At long last, here was firsthand evidence that his television splash had transformed his campaign, and at the perfect political moment. “You know, if you have the votes of those three young white women,” I said, “you really are going to run away with this thing.”
Obama flashed a confident and knowing smile. “You just wait to see where all our votes are coming from on Tuesday,” he said. “You just wait.”