I don’t think you are going to see me tacking to the center, because I never feel like I left what I consider to be the mainstream of American thinking. . . .
—BARACK OBAMA
Whether he wanted to admit it or not, Barack Obama and his “Yes, we can” campaign would soon be headed straight into the belly of the Washington establishment—and that establishment would embrace him. Because of Obama’s race and David Axelrod’s promotion of his client as a star in the making, Obama’s general election contest would soon gain national attention. The Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, decided against seeking reelection, and GOP voters in Illinois nominated a new youthful face of its own to run against Obama—Jack Ryan, who was Hollywood handsome and independently wealthy. In a state trending so heavily Democratic, early polling showed Obama with a definite advantage in the race, but this would be a matchup between two attractive, highly telegenic candidates anchored in distant political ideologies. Ryan was a fervent capitalist; Obama was a fervent big-government liberal.
Word of Obama’s rising star was now extending beyond Illinois, spreading especially fast through influential Washington political circles like blue-chip law firms, party insiders, lobbying houses. They were all hearing about this rare, exciting, charismatic, up-and-coming African-American Democrat who unbelievably could win votes across color lines. The New Yorker sent a writer to Illinois to do an extended profile of Obama, a piece that was largely laudatory and served to introduce him in more depth to the liberal cognoscenti across the country. The New Republic put him on the cover and ran a piece that dissected the racial reasons behind his ascendance and the ramifications of it. These were major literary stamps of approval, and a sign of things to come.
Obama took advantage of this groundswell of modest political celebrity and within weeks of his primary victory was on his way to Washington to raise campaign cash. Axelrod, Jim Cauley and Obama’s influential Chicago supporters and fund-raisers all vigorously worked their D.C. contacts to help Obama make the rounds with the Democrats’ set of power brokers. Even though Obama had spent that disappointing weekend at the Congressional Black Caucus in 2002, this would be his grand introduction to the major players inside the Beltway. He spent a couple of days and nights shaking hands, making small talk and delivering speeches before liberal groups, national union leaders, lobbyists, fund-raisers and well-heeled money donors. In setting after setting, Obama’s Harvard Law résumé and his reasonable tone impressed this elite crowd. “Barack was nervous a couple times, but he wowed them,” Cauley said. Obama gained the attention of liberal billionaire George Soros, who hosted a fund-raiser for him in New York. Senator Hillary Clinton opened her home in Washington to him.
As he had so often before, Obama sold his message to both liberals and centrists, as well as to some who tilted toward the right. His message, after all, was both liberal and conservative. His policy positions were decidedly to the left, but he offered them in such a passive, two-pronged way that it made him sound almost conservative. He talked at length about the importance of committed parents and communities in raising children. But, depending on his audience, he was liable to follow that with the responsibility of government to assist parents and communities struggling to stay committed. In the era of George Bush’s running up huge federal deficits, Obama advocated fiscal restraint, calling for pay-as-you-go government. He extolled the merits of free trade and charter schools, but he also pushed for tax incentives to keep businesses from moving abroad and for more money for ailing school systems to help the less fortunate. He waxed on about the power of the free market to create wealth and change lives. But he also had an afterthought on a market-based economy straight from liberal economist Paul Krugman: “Sometimes markets fail, and that’s when labor laws and government regulation are necessary correctives.” In other words, he was saying that capitalism is magnificent, but it does have its drawbacks. It would be hard for anyone to argue with such a balanced statement. “Obama figures out ways to present himself like a conservative to conservatives,” said David Wilhelm, a former campaign manager for Bill Clinton who informally advised Obama in his Senate race. “He has the whole venture capital industry here in Chicago, nothing but Republicans, thinking he is their champion. He has supported entrepreneurship. It is a pro-growth message and he is brilliant at delivering it.” Indeed, when Vernon Jordan, the ultimate Washington and corporate player, who was a close adviser to Bill Clinton, hosted a fund-raiser for Obama at his home, Obama had securely moved beyond being an obscure good-government reformer to being a candidate more than palatable to the moneyed and political establishment.
This moderate manner was in direct contrast to some of the language Obama used in the primary, where he often sounded like a fiery liberal. He would give eloquent speeches, but among crowds of angry, out-of-power Democrats, he would always be sure to toss them a juicy applause line. That exhortation typically involved excoriating the Bush administration, which, of course, was the bane of nearly all Democrats in that election cycle. This could be frustrating to Obama. Crowds listened attentively to his professorial prose, responding to his thoughtful oratory with polite applause. But “all I have to say is George Bush is a bad person and they all go wild,” Obama said with a shrug. He seemed genuinely distressed at this pattern, probably because bashing the other side for a jolt of audience electricity or a media sound bite is not in his true nature. He would much rather listen to all sides of an issue and offer a constructive solution than fan the flames of partisanship. Yet in a primary election the masses salivate for red meat, and Obama was aware of that and complied.
Now that he was a general election candidate, however, his overtly left-leaning lines would be reserved only for tried-and-true Democratic audiences. He now took a more centered, softer approach—and he held firmly to that mild manner all the way into his presidential bid. This darling of Illinois liberals was now engaged in the timeless dance of politics. Once the party nomination was in hand, Obama was gingerly stepping toward the center—Bill Clinton famously called it the “vital center”—in an effort to court independent and swing voters in the fall general election. When I posed this shift-toward-the-middle scenario to Obama, he insisted that he would remain true to his core beliefs. “I think you will see consistency in my message from the primary through the general election,” he told me. “I don’t think you are going to see me tacking to the center, because I never feel like I left what I consider to be the mainstream of American thinking and the mainstream of Illinois views.” However, when I wrote a story for the Chicago Tribune in late April 2004 that flatly stated that Obama was moderating his message and dashing toward the center, I heard nothing from him or his campaign disputing this assertion. My article delved into the unattractive political motivations behind this move, but in truth, the story most likely did more to alleviate concerns among moderates that Obama might be a liberal firebrand than it did to anger true believers on the left.
As an example of Obama’s movement toward the middle, I mentioned a recent vote on a bill in the Illinois senate that allowed retired law enforcement officers to carry concealed weapons. If there was any issue on which Obama rarely deviated, it was gun control. His district housed many economically depressed neighborhoods savaged by gangs and crime. In his answers to primary campaign questionnaires for the Tribune, he was the most strident candidate when it came to enforcing and expanding gun control laws. So this vote jumped out as inconsistent.
When I queried him about the vote in an interview in his campaign office, he grew defensive. I told him that I had taken a daylong class on firearms in which the instructor said that the people carrying guns who often concerned him were aging law enforcement officers. The firearms instructor worried that some in this group had an arrogance about how well they handled their deadly weapon because they had been carrying it for so long. And that arrogance sometimes bred a sloppiness that could cause a tragic accident. In addition, many failed to keep up with target-shooting and regular practice with their weapon because they were no longer assigned to the streets. When I ran this by Obama, his facial expression tightened. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t find that [vote] surprising. I mean, I am consistently on record and will continue to be on record as opposing concealed carry. This was a narrow exception in an exceptional circumstance where a retired police officer might find himself vulnerable as a consequence of the work he had previously done—and had been trained extensively in the proper use of firearms.”
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that another theory came forward about the uncharacteristic vote. Obama was battling with his GOP opponent to win the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police. Obama ultimately won the fight, and during the news conference on the endorsement, Obama stood beside police officers who noted that they had some qualms about his past legislative record. For example, Obama had voted against stiffer sentences for gang-related crimes, saying that these laws unfairly targeted minorities. But the union president told reporters that Obama stood with them on other issues, and he specifically cited the concealed carry vote for retired police officers. “It’s impossible to tell you how important it is for a black Democrat from Chicago to get the FOP endorsement,” an Obama aide told me. “Downstate, that endorsement can mean a lot. Obama might not be a big fan of guns, but he is a big fan of the FOP endorsing him.”
NOT ONLY DID OBAMA TAKE HIS FIRST BABY STEPS INSIDE THE Beltway during this period, but the Washington system also arrived on Obama’s doorstep in Illinois. With more resources at his disposal and a high-profile contest before him, he now attracted seasoned staff personnel—and quality résumés dropped on his desk like never before. He hired three thirty-something Washington-bred campaign veterans: Amanda Fuchs as his policy director, Darrel Thompson as his chief of staff and Robert Gibbs as his communications director. Fuchs had worked in organized labor and for various Democratic candidates, most notably as an issues and opposition researcher for Geraldine Ferraro in her ill-fated 1998 campaign for senator in New York. Thompson had been an aide for five years to then House minority leader Richard Gephardt. Gibbs had worked on more than a handful of Senate campaigns and had recently quit as chief spokesman for John Kerry’s presidential campaign amid an internal turf war.
Of this trio of new aides, Gibbs quickly established himself as the most influential. Through hard work, personal charm and keen political instincts, Gibbs would evolve into Obama’s most powerful staff adviser, projecting a voice among his inner circle eclipsed only by Axelrod. “Robert stepped into this incredible void—and he filled it up completely,” said Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s close friend and finance chairwoman. I first met Gibbs at a hastily organized campaign event in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood, an event seemingly assembled at the last moment to give a CNN reporting team some on-the-stump footage for a profile on the Illinois race. For the past couple of months, I had been hanging on to Obama’s coattails, shadowing him almost daily. This meant there was little buffer zone between him and the Chicago Tribune on a daily basis. It was fine to have me this close in the primary, when Obama was looking to spread his name and build relationships with campaign reporters. Now he was in a general election in which he was the favorite, and the strategy became less about introducing him to the populace and more about avoiding mistakes. Having a reporter at his side hour by hour only increased the chances that a verbal miscue would get a full airing in the media.
Even more than keeping my wary ears at bay, Obama needed more structure to his schedule in a general election campaign. An efficient daily schedule and structure were not among the strengths of his primary campaign, and this could have been Obama’s fault. He did not care for being chained to a schedule, and he and his driver would sometimes slip off on their own, many times so Obama could squeeze in one of his daily exercise workouts. During a campaign trip in the primary to Metro East, the Illinois section of greater St. Louis, Obama himself had to direct his small caravan into a pizza parlor because lunch had not been built into the schedule. There, Obama pulled out twenty-five dollars from his wallet to pay for the pizza, and then collected five-dollar donations from his hungry entourage. Needless to say, the candidate should not be worrying about feeding his staff or the media. That role should be delegated. In addition, on one of the primary debate days, Dan Shomon scheduled Obama to speak at a prison in southern Illinois in the morning and Obama had to be whisked back to Chicago in the evening for the debate. (Shomon was still assisting with downstate campaigning.) Obama scurried into the television studio and dropped into his chair just minutes before airtime. And he was so fatigued that at one point in the debate he nodded off for a moment.
When I saw Gibbs and Fuchs trailing their new boss through Chinatown that morning, I vividly recalled Obama’s anti-Washington words. I could only think: Good thing his campaign is not going Washington! Obama introduced me to Gibbs by putting his hand on Gibbs’s shoulder and casually pulling his new staff member to stand between us. “This is someone I’d like you to meet,” Obama said. The symbolism could not have been more apparent. Here comes the blocker between me and Obama. Gone were the days of Obama directly calling my cell phone when he had an issue. And vice versa. I’d now be calling Gibbs, who would be calling Obama for a response that would probably be drafted by Gibbs.
In his mid-thirties, Gibbs had cut his teeth in a number of campaigns, dating back to his first political job in college when he interned with a congressman. Wearing fashionable thin-framed glasses below his receding reddish-blond hair, Gibbs at first glance appeared to be every bit the son of two librarians from Alabama. But his scholarly appearance belied an undergirding of competitive intensity. He exuded a southern charm that was immediately apparent, typically greeting professional acquaintances with a hearty smile and friendly squeeze of the arm. “What’s neeeew?” he’d ask through a light Dixie accent. But in many ways, Gibbs was the anti-Obama, adding the tougher, rougher edges to Obama’s softer, more tranquil demeanor. Gibbs was an indispensable aide for a politician with the lofty long-term ambitions that Obama harbored. He was Obama’s hired gun, skillfully trained to shoot at reporters whose coverage was deemed unfair, as well as a cutthroat pragmatist who could brainstorm on message and tactical strategy. Gibbs was a ruthless political operative who relished personal confrontation as much as Obama fled from it. “Robert is a bully,” said a former Obama aide. “Stuff landed on his desk that should never be on the desk of a communications director. But nine out of ten times, his gut instincts are right. That tenth time could be ugly, though.” Cunningly smart, Gibbs understood the importance of a pithy sound bite and he thrived on manipulating reporters to the benefit of his candidate. But Obama and Gibbs did have two things in common: raw ambition and a burning competitive nature. A former college soccer player at North Carolina State University, Gibbs was a sports enthusiast with a particular fondness for fantasy sports leagues, the kind of guy who treated late-evening video golf games in a bar along the campaign trail as if they were life-and-death sport. “Plain and simple, Robert wants to be the communications director of the White House,” Cauley told me.
Gibbs was one of the few aides in Obama’s orbit who was fearless when it came to pushing back on the boss. When Obama’s oratory meandered toward the wonkish or his news conference answers drifted off message, Gibbs was not shy about schooling his boss in the vital importance of verbal restraint. After Obama had been elected to the Senate, he approached Gibbs in his Senate office one day and asked, “Gibbs, who is the president of Tanzania?” Many aides would wilt at this question, mostly because they would not know the answer. Gibbs’s response: “Who the fuck cares?” That answer got a laugh from Obama. Gibbs was fond of recounting his worst day in politics, a now infamous moment in the presidential campaign of John Kerry. While campaigning in Philadelphia for the Democratic nomination, Kerry had been handed a Philly cheesesteak sandwich. He asked if he could have Swiss cheese on it instead of the normal Cheese Whiz coating. Altering the ingredients of a traditional blue-collar hometown delicacy fed into the very blue blood, elitist image of Kerry that turned off voters, and Gibbs spent the rest of the day working the phones to temper the media fallout. When Kerry campaigned through a state fair, Gibbs yelled at traveling aides on their cell phones: “Get a fucking hot dog in his hand—now!”
Gibbs sold himself to Obama during a fairly brief interview in a bland conference room in Washington. Gibbs said what struck him about Obama in that first meeting was “Barack’s total ease with himself”—which is the first thing almost everyone notices about him. What helped to sell Obama on Gibbs was Gibbs’s experience in the campaign of Ron Kirk, an African American who made a valiant but unsuccessful Senate run in Texas. Obama assumed he would have little difficulty in the fall election with urban Chicago voters, and Gibbs seemed to understand the potential perils of a black man trying to win votes in conservative southern rural areas. “I told Barack there was no way Texas was going to elect a black Democrat like Kirk,” Gibbs said. “And that experience was unique, because the focus in that campaign was largely on race.”
KEEPING ME AT ARM’S LENGTH WAS NOT A DIFFICULT TRANSITION for Obama. It was not as if he had ever delighted in my presence. We had pleasant off-the-record conversations along the campaign trail about common interests such as raising young children, sports and jazz music, passions for both of us. But I always sensed that he would much rather be on his own. Perhaps realizing that his personal freedom would eventually fall victim to celebrity, he fought to hold on to it as long as possible. In fact, the first time I trailed him for a full day, back in January, I could feel him chafing at my proximity. Until then, Obama had been driving himself to campaign events. Using me as an excuse, Cauley finally forced him to be transported by a driver in a leased SUV like the typical candidate for high office like the Senate. “You know, it would slow me down looking for parking all the time,” Obama acknowledged. But it wasn’t as if we had a big entourage—there were just the three of us. Stopping that first afternoon at a suburban forum with the other Democratic candidates, Obama stepped from the jet-black SUV and spied Hull’s massive RV, the “Hull on Wheels.” Hull walked from the vehicle surrounded by at least half a dozen people. “I don’t know how he handles that,” Obama said about Hull and his flock of supporters. “I’m just not an entourage kind of guy. I’m more of a solo act.”
But if Obama was to be a senator, he needed to get accustomed to traveling in entourages and to have reporters trailing after him. His friend Valerie Jarrett, who holds degrees in both law and psychology, constantly psychoanalyzed Obama. She and Michelle would endlessly discuss what they believed made him tick, each adding an observation that would paint another layer on their overall portrait. In an interview with Jarrett, I asked her if she thought his father’s abandonment of Obama as a child contributed to his desire to seek public attention. “Absolutely,” she said. “Having a parent who leaves you makes you particularly energized for approval. I think that’s a real part of it. Rejection is a tough thing for a kid to accept. That’s a hard thing and you spend your life trying to get approval.” But often, getting that attention seems stifling to him, I said to her. He feeds on the energy of a crowd connecting with his words, but he can lose patience with hangers-on or people who he perceives are invading his personal space. She agreed, and said this was perhaps the most frustrating aspect of his personality. “He is so complicated,” Jarrett said. “He has this whole mercurial side to him. It’s like, no one made you run for U.S. senator. So stop complaining about things.”
This interview occurred months later. Earlier in the campaign, Obama’s occasional unease with my presence baffled me. Editorially, the Tribune was an ardent supporter of his candidacy, and he told me on various occasions that he believed my coverage of him had been fair. So what was the problem? This came to a head in the final weekend of the campaign during a scheduled fly-around of the state. Arriving at Midway Airport after a couple of morning events in Chicago, Obama shook my hand and said, “Nice having you around, David. See you later.” I was perplexed. An aide had assured me that I would be on the charter flight. Didn’t Obama realize this? I rushed over to Peter Coffey, one of his scheduling aides, and asked what was going on. My job, I explained, was to cover Obama every step of the way. Coffey conferred with Obama, and after a few minutes Obama shook his head and shrugged. Coffey walked over and told me that I was free to go along. As we nestled into our seats on the plane, Obama asked somewhat caustically, “Haven’t you had enough of this yet?” I explained that just as his job was to campaign, my job was to watch him campaign. “Okay,” he said, nodding. He now understood this reality but was not happy about it. He tried his best to hide it behind his normally gracious exterior, but the mercurial nature of Obama had seeped out.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I learned there was another reason besides personal privacy why Obama had been so resistant to my presence: Obama was a secret smoker—and he did not want to light up a Marlboro in front of a reporter. Some politicians are comfortable smoking in front of the media or in public, while others believe the habit will reflect poorly on their public image. Obama was in the latter group, almost to an obsessive degree. The public portrait of Obama now bordered on saintly, especially for a politician. Learning that he smoked might tarnish this picture. So Obama went to great lengths to conceal the habit. “He was fine with you personally,” Coffey told me weeks later. “But he wanted to have that cigarette, and he either couldn’t have it when you were with him or he had to sneak it.”
It really came as no surprise to me that Obama smoked. His wife mentioned in our interview that Obama had a cigarette dangling from his lips on their first lunch together. He had written in Dreams from My Father about smoking in the college dorms. But most telling, like most smokers, he occasionally smelled of tobacco. One morning, cigarette smoke still hung in the air of the campaign SUV as I boarded. When I asked his driver if he smoked, the driver replied that he did not, and so I surmised that Obama still did. But what was I to do with this information? At the time, it was pretty insignificant. I figured I would mention it in the lengthy personality profile I would be writing about him in the general election. Obama’s sense of abandonment as a child made him seek universal affection as an adult, but he was slowly learning that being in the public eye has a sharp downside.
Maybe the sharpest downside involved the pitfalls of celebrity. Obama would now consistently get autograph requests in public rather than just at political events. And his “IT” factor became something of a problem with his marital life. Michelle Obama had been accustomed to women finding her husband attractive, but she was always confident in his fidelity. In social settings, Dan Shomon, who was divorced, said it could be difficult being a friend of Obama’s because Obama would swallow up all the female attention, albeit quite unintentionally. “You really didn’t want him around anyone you wanted to date. He was the worst wingman in the world,” Shomon said, referring to the male role of helping your friend attain female companionship. “All the women would fall in love with him.” That equation would only expand to the general populace in Illinois now that he was gaining ever more recognition. Michelle, knowing of Obama’s devotion to her, could usually brush aside any fawning that women might do over her husband. But his growing status as a local celebrity was making her start to question things. A friend mentioned to her that she overheard two women at the health club discussing Obama. “Let’s go down and watch Barack Obama work out,” one woman excitedly said to the other. With women going out of their way just to watch your husband run on a treadmill, it would be hard not to feel some discomfort. I talked to Jarrett about this development and how Michelle was coping. Jarrett was blunt. “He knows that if he messes up, she’ll leave him. You know, she’ll kill him first—and then she’ll leave him,” Jarrett said with a laugh. “And I think there is a subtle element of fear on his part, which is good.”