Truthfully, it feels like a movement. I think for people of our generation, we haven’t been a part of something like this before.
—A THIRTY-SOMETHING OBAMA VOTER
David Axelrod’s television advertising defined Barack Obama in the public consciousness in those final three weeks of the primary campaign. Axelrod’s long-held strategy of keeping a lock on the money and spending it on TV at the end proved to be positively genius, especially in light of the ugly demise of Blair Hull. Axelrod, of course, had full knowledge of Hull’s unseemly personal baggage and he was confident that, in such a high-profile contest, it would not remain under wraps forever. Dan Hynes, meanwhile, ran a series of commercials, but they had a cutesy quality and got lost in the seasonal blitz of political ads. In one commercial intended to court suburban women, Hynes stood at a kitchen counter attired in an apron and cradling an egg—“a nest egg,” he called it—and then cracked the egg over a skillet. This was a reference to Republican indifference to safeguarding a retirement nest egg for everyday people. (Note to campaign commercial scriptwriters: Never put your candidate in an apron.) Another ad featured Hynes and his wife, but again, it seemed lightweight for a U.S. Senate contest.
With Obama’s ads resonating, momentum had swung his way and it seemed unstoppable. He was soaring in the polls. This was the very beginning of the Obama phenomenon that would sweep through Illinois and then spread nationwide, carrying him into the U.S. Senate and ultimately into the 2008 presidential contest.
Obama’s Democratic primary opponents huddled with their staffs to brainstorm about how to stop Obama in those final weeks, but they came up with nothing. Hynes had been concentrating almost solely on derailing Hull and seemed clueless about how to respond to Obama’s surge. The Hull campaign had assembled opposition research on Obama, but nothing was of much substance. Obama had been inoculated from harsh criticism of his teenage and college cocaine snorting because he had divulged the matter himself in a book published ten years earlier. Hoping to turn Democratic women away from Obama, operatives for one opponent feverishly lobbied me behind the scenes to write a story about Obama’s many “present” votes in the legislature on abortion bills. But when I interviewed abortion rights activists in Springfield about Obama’s posture on abortion, they stood firmly behind him as a staunch pro-choice advocate. “There was nowhere to go, nothing to make an issue of,” said Mark Blumenthal, one of Hull’s pollsters. “Obama had the best of all worlds. He said, ‘I embody change, but I have experience.’ The Obama persona born the last week of the campaign—we couldn’t look at that with any depth. He was just on the right side of Democratic primary voters that season. And nobody was able to create a news story to take him down.”
As a black man, Obama, in some ways, wore a suit of armor. No candidate wanted to alienate the significant black voting bloc by sharply attacking him as he was fast becoming a symbol of pride in the African-American community. When Obama stepped into public spaces, he was recognized as never before. “Hey, that’s Barack Obama,” a black man whispered to a friend with a beaming smile on his face as Obama marched through Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center to an event. “Let’s face it—he’s black. And we don’t want to look racist,” explained Jason Erkes, the Hull communications director. There was also more to Hull’s reluctance—Hull’s campaign cochairman, Bobby Rush, had assured the Hull team early in the race that Obama could not draw votes from the black community. So he had never developed a strategy for attacking Obama. Indeed, the bad blood was with Hynes. Said Erkes, “If we don’t win, and it looks like we can’t, we are going to do everything we can to make sure Hynes doesn’t win.”
The only other event that could have damaged Obama’s pristine image came in the final televised debate. Obama, now the clear front-runner, was visibly nervous from the outset and did not deliver his opening statement with his usual cocksure attitude. To offer support and prepare Obama for the debate, Axelrod and Pete Giangreco had traveled back to Chicago from their duties with the John Edwards presidential campaign and other clients. They assumed that the other candidates would come out swinging at Obama, and that was true. And one could sense that Obama was thinking about what might soon be coming his way. Hynes, for one, assailed Obama for doing little to curb state spending under the previous Republican gubernatorial administration and thus asserted that Obama was partially responsible for creating the state’s fiscal mess. “He stayed silent,” Hynes said of Obama. “He did nothing.” But, Giangreco noted, while Obama’s even temperament can make him poorly equipped to take the first swing at an opponent, “Barack is a great counterpuncher when he’s attacked.” Sure enough, Obama swatted back effectively by saying that Hynes was the state comptroller at the time and “he signed off on every one of these budgets.”
Obama came out of the forum largely unscathed, with only days to the election. For all intents and purposes, the nomination was his.
THE TYPICALLY GRAY WINTER SKY OF CHICAGO HUNG BEFORE ME on March 10, 2004, framing the impressive city skyline in dreariness. I was juggling my morning coffee, a manual-shift Saturn and speeding traffic along the Eisenhower Expressway en route to the Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago when my cell phone showed that Obama was calling. It is a rare occurrence when a candidate calls a reporter himself, but to this point, Obama had pretty much run his campaign on his own terms, and pretty cheaply as well. Instantly I sensed why he was dialing me. For the first time, Obama had led the Tribune’s daily wrap-up story on the Senate race. The Tribune had run weekly stories on the policy issues in the race, but the coverage that had absorbed most of the media’s attention concerned Hull’s marital troubles. And in this case, not only was Obama the lead of the story, but the article featured a negative finding about him. Talk about rare.
A rival campaign had passed along to me an Obama flyer dubbed a “Legislative Update” that looked suspiciously like campaign advertising, although its cost was borne by state taxpayers. The flyer had been mailed in early February to every household in his state senate district on Chicago’s South Side under even more suspicious circumstances. It arrived in mailboxes just days before an ethics law prohibited elected officials running for office from dispersing such taxpayer-funded literature. And there was irony to the story. Obama had written the ethics law himself, touting it as an example of both his probity and his legislative accomplishments. Thus, it seemed he was caught in an impropriety: By mailing the state-funded positive piece about himself just before the deadline, he was clearly doing an end run around the very law that he had sponsored with pride.
The Tribune story, which I cowrote with colleague John Chase, began like this: “State Sen. Barack Obama claims the mantle of a reformer, but early last month the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate spent $17,191 in state taxpayer money on a mailer that had the look and feel of a campaign flier. The mailing went out just days before a new ban on the pre-election dissemination of such state-paid constituent newsletters went into effect, part of a package of ethics reforms that Obama takes credit for getting passed.”
Considering that his main opponents in the Senate race had been caught up in improperly bundling campaign contributions (Hynes) and allegations of spousal abuse (Hull), this story hardly merited a misdemeanor. But it did put a slight chink in Obama’s armor, which at that point hadn’t endured so much as a minor surface scratch.
Like most reporters who receive such phone calls, I quickly realized I was going to have to defend my story. In this case, that didn’t seem like a difficult chore. It was hardly the crime of the century, but the story was solid and legitimate, far from a cheap journalistic shot. “Hey, this story today,” Obama began, before pausing a moment. “Uh, I guess with me at the top, I guess this means I’m the front-runner, huh?” His hesitation and his less-than-assured tone told me he didn’t seem comfortable making the call, but felt he must defend himself. “You know, Dave,” he continued, “this story today, we didn’t do anything illegal here. The implication is, we did something illegal.” I explained that the story never implied illegality, but said that he appeared to have breached “the spirit of the law.” I then waited for his defense of that argument.
But, to my shock, Obama did something that politicians rarely do—he backed down and concurred with me, showing a rare glimpse of both humility and candor. “Okay, I’ll give you that,” he said. “And between you and me, I chewed out my staff for mailing that out when they did. It should have gone out a long time ago.”
And with that, the matter seemed to be laid to rest. That is, until I chatted with Obama’s lead campaign consultant later in the day. Axelrod called to inform me that my story was bogus—his candidate had done nothing wrong. When I used the same response as with Obama—I never implied illegality, only that he had violated the spirit of his own ethics law—Axelrod disagreed entirely. He argued vigorously that the mailing in no way resembled campaign literature and it was strictly distributed by Obama’s senate office to inform his constituents about his work in Springfield. No laws were broken—just an unfair shot from the newspaper at his man, Axelrod insisted.
When I told Axelrod that his candidate had conceded to me earlier in the day that he had mistakenly sent out the flyer when he did, that it should have gone out earlier, and that Obama had further admitted to breaking the spirit of the law, Axelrod responded with utter amazement.
“He did?” Axelrod said. “He said that?”
“Yes,” I said. “How about that? It would appear that you have an honest man on your hands here.”
“Yeah, I know. And you know what?” Axelrod said. “That can be a real problem.”
AS THE PRIMARY CAMPAIGN WOUND DOWN AND OBAMA’S VICTORY seemed in the bag, he naturally started thinking about the general election and how to strengthen his campaign organization. He would now be the Democratic Party nominee, and resources from the national party would be forthcoming. The question was, how much did he need to avail himself of these resources. As someone who endeavored to keep his career as unencumbered as possible by the organized political structure, he wanted to maintain autonomy over his message, his media and his policy. In the primary, Obama had hired savvy professional consultants and staff with ties to the mainstream political establishment in Axelrod, Jim Cauley and Pete Giangreco. But for the most part, Obama’s message and his core beliefs were the main thrust. He also had a flock of volunteers who believed in him. Many of them were students at the University of Chicago and other Chicago-area colleges who had heard of Obama by word of mouth or had seen him speak. “We have all these save-the-world types showing up at the door,” campaign manager Cauley mused one day. “Sometimes, I don’t know what to do with them all.” I almost laughed aloud at this comment. Wasn’t Obama a save-the-world type himself?
In any case, Obama could still look at his primary campaign and say that victory pretty much came organically—not just because the powers-that-be wished it so. Obama, to be sure, had worked within the established order, currying favor with insiders, raising millions in campaign money and hiring aides with powerful connections. He had secured Illinois senate president Emil Jones’s backing. He had tapped many of the same financial donors who also backed Mayor Richard Daley. Unions, trial lawyers and other so-called special interests had backed him financially and with grassroots help. And Michelle, of course, had worked in city hall and helped to introduce her husband to a network of important African-American business leaders. But Obama operated mostly on the fringes of Chicago’s legendary machine politics. He was not considered a vital cog in the wheel of any political operation but his own.
So Obama wanted to keep his freedom and his independence intact through the fall election. “I don’t want this campaign to be taken over by Washington,” he said, while riding in the campaign SUV between appearances at African-American churches. That will be easier said than done, I thought to myself. Perhaps Obama didn’t realize the power of his candidacy. Illinois was trending heavily Democratic, and he had an excellent chance to be only the third black elected to the Senate since Reconstruction and most likely the only sitting black in the upper chamber. This in itself would catapult his profile above all the black representatives who had been in Washington for years.
THE BUZZ AROUND OBAMA IN THOSE FINAL WEEKS BECAME INTENSE. African Americans, especially, jumped aboard his candidacy with fervor. Private polling showed that Obama shot from less than 15 percent of the black vote to nearly 50 percent just a week after his television ads hit the airwaves. “It was a straight arrow up,” said Blumenthal, the Hull pollster. “And it just kept going up and up.” This electricity among blacks was palpable in nearly every African-American setting Obama walked into. Rather than sitting anonymously in a church pew on Sunday morning and then having to introduce himself from the pulpit, he now turned heads wherever he went. A fund-raiser thrown by a young black professional at a trendy downtown bar was packed to capacity. It took Obama half an hour to push himself through the crowd to the back of the huge nightclub, where he was to speak. When the host introduced him to a cheering crowd as “the best and the brightest we have to offer the world,” even the ambitious, self-assured Obama raised an eyebrow at this obsequious treatment. He needed a burly escort to help him back through the crowd and into the waiting SUV. Finally hopping back into the vehicle, he seemed stunned himself at the outpouring of affection.
Wherever Obama went in public as primary election day neared, he put on his game face. “I am fired up!” he would exclaim in joyous rallies filled with exuberant union members and teachers and progressives and blacks. Privately, however, Obama’s driving ambition, and now the seeming fait accompli of becoming a U.S. senator, was having a different effect—it was eating him up.
What is worse: Getting a job that you desperately want but that will dramatically alter your relatively happy life, whisking you away from your beloved wife and children and curtailing your time with close friends, or not getting the job and living out your life quite comfortably? Obama dearly loved his wife and his two young girls, and it was dawning on him that being a U.S. senator—especially one with star power—was going to pull him away from them more than he might have foreseen. Obama’s abiding belief in his own personal destiny created this paradoxical effect—he would strive for something passionately and then rebel against its deleterious effects on his life. “Ambition has always been both Barack’s downfall and his greatest attribute,” his former aide Dan Shomon said.
This internal conflict came to the attention of his close friend Valerie Jarrett at a picnic she threw for the campaign’s volunteers and staff. Throughout the event, Obama’s face was tight and he was on edge—almost the antithesis of his easygoing public persona. Jarrett noticed this and asked him about it when the two had a private lunch not long after. “Well, you are on your way now,” she told him. “It looks like you are going to be a U.S. senator and who knows what’s next? So what’s the matter, Barack?” Obama’s eyes had been downcast since he greeted her, and he now hung his head low as Jarrett spoke. When he lifted his head to answer, a tear rolled down his cheek. “I’m really going to miss those little girls,” he said.
ELECTION NIGHT WAS A RAPTUROUS EXPERIENCE FOR MOST OF Obama’s supporters, except Obama. Highly disciplined and focused, he displayed few signs that he was about to be the Democratic nominee to the U.S. Senate. The victory party was held at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, owned by the Pritzker family. As a roomful of two hundred guests watched election results pour in across the television screen, Obama paced about endlessly, checking notes for the speech he had cobbled together and greeting the many smiling well-wishers who hugged him and shook his hand. Obama had stepped into his Hawaii calm, cool exterior. “He’s really pretty excited,” Michelle told a quizzical-looking Eric Zorn, the Tribune columnist. “He’s basically a calm guy. It takes a lot to push his buttons. He has incredibly low blood pressure.”
Axelrod was stationed at the Cook County Board of Elections, monitoring the results of the race. On election night, Axelrod’s crusader instincts took over from those of the Machiavellian consultant bent on winning a race at all costs. As he looked over the numbers, he began thinking about the historic nature of what was occurring. A black man was running away with a statewide race for the U.S. Senate, and he was not squeaking through. He was winning predominantly white wards all over the city and precincts in the suburbs that most blacks would have considered far out of reach. The breadth of Obama’s support shocked even his chief strategists. “The most surprising and gratifying thing was when those numbers rolled in on primary night,” Axelrod said. “And you saw numbers from the Northwest Side of Chicago, and you saw the numbers from the collar counties, and you realized that, you know, I mean, I was covering Chicago politics when the issue of race was at a jagged edge here. And I was around when Harold Washington went to Saint Pasquale’s church on the Northwest Side and was roundly booed and the hatred was, you know, palpable. And that night, that primary night, I was moved, if you could be moved by watching numbers come across a computer screen. What those numbers meant was that we had passed a Rubicon in the politics of this state, where a guy could come along who was an African-American candidate, but who had universal appeal and people were willing to look beyond race.”
I had run back to the Tribune from Obama’s fete in order to assemble the story on his victory for the next day’s paper. And I was surprised by the numbers as well, even if my roots in Chicago and its racial schisms were more recent. The final tally: Obama had a whopping 53 percent of the vote; Hynes had 24 percent; and Hull finished with about 10 percent. These numbers were beyond anything that Cauley, Giangreco or Axelrod had fathomed was possible. Giangreco initially figured that if Obama pulled in 80 percent of blacks and half of college-educated liberals—which was the initial goal—he could win 35 percent of Democratic voters and prevail in such a crowded field. Giangreco’s analysis of voting patterns had Obama’s high-end threshold in the upper 30s or, maybe, if all went perfectly, in the low 40s. Cracking 50 percent was beyond hope. But in the end, Obama raked in more than 95 percent of the black vote and even won some city wards with a heavy percentage of non-college-educated whites.
As I sat at my desk to write the “Obama Wins” story, I looked through the various feeds arriving from reporters in the field who were interviewing voters at polling stations. There was one theme throughout: Barack Obama was a “breath of fresh air,” in the words of one voter in a white Northwest Side ward that would have seemed safely in Hynes’s pocket. But Obama displayed a unique quality that she could not quite put her finger on. In the end, she summed it up by saying: “He knows his stuff. I’m tired of the machine.”
This was the kind of Obama voter that shocked pollsters and strategists. Obama destroyed the stereotypical appeal of a black candidate. Illinois surely had a history of electing blacks to statewide offices, but usually this was done purely on the strength of liberals, college-age voters and African Americans themselves. A postprimary analysis by Blumenthal showed that even when he subtracted college-educated whites from his sample, Obama still garnered nearly 30 percent of the rest of the white vote, which was extremely unusual for a black candidate. He decisively won all the heavily white Chicago collar counties and even captured nearly one in four Democratic votes outside the Chicago region, though he barely campaigned there.
Those who were inclined toward Obama in the first place were swept away in the heady moment. They talked about Obama representing a new generation of politician whose language was not shrill and who eloquently conveyed a feeling of hope and honesty. “Truthfully, it feels like a movement,” said Leslie Corbett, who had met Obama the year before at a meeting of the National Center on Poverty Law and instantly became a supporter. “I think for people of our generation, we haven’t been a part of something like this before.” Twenty-six-year-old Deborah Landis of Chicago said she first saw Obama a year before and was overwhelmed by his aura. “When I first met him, I registered to vote that evening just so I could vote for him,” Landis said.
Back at his victory party, Obama ambled onstage surrounded by his family—Michelle, Sasha and Malia; his brother-in-law, Craig Robinson; and his half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, from Hawaii. A proud-looking Reverend Jesse Jackson, who had endorsed Obama, proclaimed: “Tonight, surely Dr. King and the martyrs smiled upon us.” Obama himself told the crowd that they, not he, were responsible for this victory. He reiterated the Democratic ideals that he had cited throughout the campaign, saying that he was on a mission to enact broad social change to better the condition of society’s most vulnerable citizens. “At its best, the idea of this party has been that we are going to expand opportunity and include people that have not been included, that we are going to give voice to the voiceless, and power to the powerless, and embrace people from the outside and bring them inside, and give them a piece of the American dream,” Obama said.
Throughout his speech, a chant rose from the jubilant and attentive crowd, and Obama used the chant to launch a call-and-response. The words of this chant could be found on the huge white-and-blue banners hanging throughout the hotel ballroom: “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”