People have always had a tendency to give Obama a pass. It’s like no other politician I’ve seen. They feel like he is on this important mission. And maybe he is.
—FORMER AIDE DAN SHOMON
Within weeks of his return from Africa, Barack Obama began thinking seriously about running for president in 2008. The reception he had received and the publicity he had generated back home was exhilarating, if not intoxicating. “How bad can you feel when everybody is telling you that you should be president?” observed Nate Tamarin, a former aide. A White House bid this early was not the timetable that Obama would have chosen—he still had two young daughters at home whom he adored and missed—but there was such a strong political wind at his back that he and his ambitious advisers simply had to give a presidential run serious consideration. “We definitely looked at it as something that was now plausible,” Robert Gibbs said. “It would not be a whimsical thing.”
Obama had been in the public eye through most of 2006, receiving almost universally glowing treatment in the national media. Earlier, in March, he had appeared at the annual Gridiron dinner, where Washington journalists and politicians gather to make light of each other. In typical fashion, he impressed reporters with wit, intelligence and poise. Even President Bush took note of the Washington love affair with Obama. “Senator Obama, I want to do a joke on you,” the president told the Gridiron audience. “But doing a joke on you is like doing a joke on the pope. Give me something to work with. Mispronounce something.” After seeing him at the Gridiron, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, one of the country’s touchstone liberal columnists, suggested that Obama should think about the White House. She opined that the Democrats should not cast him aside because of lack of national experience. “The Democrats should not dismiss a politically less experienced but personally more charismatic prospect as ‘an empty vessel,’” she wrote. “Maybe an empty vessel can fill the room.” The idolatry and flattery from the mainstream media in 2006 was constant, unlike anything that politicians generally experience for a day, much less months or years on end. Men’s Vogue put Obama on the cover, and, to the magazine writer, the senator let slip his thoughts of the Oval Office and his overabundance of confidence. “My attitude is that you don’t want to just be the president,” Obama said. “You want to change the country. You want to be a great president.” Profiles of him appeared everywhere, from New York magazine to the national newsweeklies to a spread of him and Michelle in Ebony. The media could not get enough of him, and neither could his growing legions of followers. A Washington political consultant called Obama the “Black Jesus.” Even his drug use as a teenager became a laugh line and won him praise for candor. Asked about smoking pot by the Tonight Show’s Jay Leno, Obama said casually, “I inhaled; that was the point.” His supporters seemed to forgive him for this and much more—for his unbridled ambition, for raising millions in campaign dollars from established interests, for tacking to the center, for speaking mostly in the same broad, general themes. “People have always had a tendency to give Obama a pass,” former aide Dan Shomon said. “It’s like no other politician I’ve seen. They feel like he is on this important mission. And maybe he is.”
Up to now, The Plan had been working to near perfection.
So after Africa, Obama began talking to people earnestly and deliberately about an Oval Office bid. His first round of discussions came with his immediate inner circle of Michelle, David Axelrod and Gibbs. Then he branched out to others, such as Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson, Newton Minow and Abner Mikva, Penny Pritzker and Valerie Jarrett, Cassandra Butts and Marty Nesbitt. In all these discussions, Obama heard little to discourage him from pushing forward. “There are an awful lot of people urging him to go,” Axelrod told me over breakfast. “There aren’t too many people waving yellow caution flags.” In September, when Obama was the main speaker at Senator Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry fund-raiser in Iowa, the first presidential caucus state, the future became clear to Minow. By happenstance, the former counselor to Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy had watched Obama’s speech to more than three thousand Iowans on the C-Span public affairs network. He soon called Obama. “I saw John Kennedy and now I have seen you—and I haven’t seen anything quite like it in between,” Minow told Obama. “You ought to go for it now.”
This was perhaps all the more interesting because, in truth, Obama had not performed well in Iowa. When he arrived at the Indianola fairgrounds, it was typical Obama-mania, as adoring fans engulfed him everywhere. Gibbs made sure to alert reporters that a “Draft Obama for President in 2008” petition was circulating in the crowd. But when Obama spoke, he left some of these veteran Democratic activists a bit bored. After years of red-meat speeches from hard-charging Democrats such as John Edwards and Howard Dean and home-state hero Harkin, Obama’s lecturing manner and professorial prose more evoked the cerebral Adlai Stevenson. Obama also made the same mistake as he had on his election night—failing to prepare a speech ahead of time and instead letting it all come to him on the stage. When his crescendo lines failed to draw the appropriate responses, he reached back for another crescendo line. This made his speech wander from anecdote to anecdote without tying all the themes into a coherent whole. It also made the speech, at nearly forty minutes, far too long. “When it comes to leaders of the Democratic Party, I think he is up there,” said sixty-two-year-old Irene Wesley of Ames. “But he just needs to be maturing a little bit, learn to relate to a crowd a little bit more and come up with some positive accomplishments in the Senate. He just needs a little maturity and he will be there.” Others, however, gushed over Obama. The influential Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen opened his column the next day, “Oh Oh Oh Obama.” Yepsen later wrote, “This guy looks like a winner.” And overall, most of the Iowans seemed to adore him. So if Obama could get this kind of positive reaction in Iowa after a sub-par performance, his advisers mused, what would happen if he brought his A-game?
In October came the much-anticipated release of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. A major publicity campaign was undertaken, with Obama launching a national two-week book tour and appearing on seemingly every major network talk show, capped by an appearance with Michelle on Oprah. Book sales boomed, and Audacity eventually dislodged John Grisham’s latest work from the top of the New York Times bestseller list. This satisfied Obama’s stridently competitive nature. He had asked his advisers, “What can we do to make it number one? I want to be number one.”
The book’s content was not nearly as raw as that of Dreams from My Father. After all, Audacity was a work from a man in his mid-forties who, by this time in life, had made concessions and reconciliations to an imperfect world, both for his own survival and his own advancement. In fact, much of the book wrestles with how a politician can hold on to his ideals amid a scrutinizing press, a media culture that feeds on conflict and a political system that makes it necessary to raise big money from special interests and wealthy donors. In this way, for a book from a politician with presidential aspirations, Audacity was rather candid, and it again put Obama’s uniquely personal writing voice on vivid display. Obama acknowledged internal struggles, including an insecurity about his role in his own family; he even took the blame for most domestic problems. He fretted about losing his own voice because a politician can fall victim to “a committee of scribes and editors and censors” who “take residence in your head.” He said that he sometimes worried that his idealism was overcome by personal vanity. And he conceded that, as a consequence of modern political necessity, he now spent far more time in a rarefied world of moneyed and intellectual elites and much less time with ordinary people.
This was very different from the wandering, occasionally angry young man in Dreams. “There was more of an edge to me back then, I suppose,” Obama said of the angst-ridden prose found in Dreams. “You grow a little older, you know, and become more forgiving of yourself and others.” In Audacity, Obama provided a somewhat sentimental vision for the future of America, a vision that, of course, called for more civility and unity in our culture. Much like his political rhetoric, however, the book lacked detailed, real-world specifics about how to accomplish that. Overall, it received positive reviews, something that his staff had worried about before its release. They did not want him to come across to the East Coast media elites judging his political future as an unserious, self-serving politician.
But it was the monster sales of the book that provided the linchpin for Obama’s next move. As Obama’s book hit the top spot in sales, books written by the major Democrats considering the presidency, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, languished far down on the bestseller lists. Also, Obama’s book tour was pure madness. Thousands gobbled up tickets for the events in all corners of the country. At a book signing in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, after Obama delivered a centrist-oriented speech, fifty-two-year-old Penny Reynolds wasn’t sure if Obama was ready to lead the nation, but she said his message of unity and bipartisanship made her an instant fan. “He’s not really saying anything different than anybody else except that we should all try to work together, enough of this partisan stuff,” she said. “And it’s sad to say, but that’s really refreshing right now.” Obama’s advisers took this kind of talk as confirmation that, beyond his physical and emotional appeal, Obama’s message of political consensus was striking a lasting chord with people. With a widely unpopular Republican president in the White House who had governed in a rigidly ideological manner, Obama the good-natured consensus-builder seemed to be the antidote for these faithful Democrats. “The combination of the book, the reaction he got campaigning and the election results—it all sort of validated his message,” Gibbs said. “It made [running for president] something that we could no longer avoid thinking about.”
THE DAY AFTER THE NOVEMBER ELECTION, IN WHICH DEMOCRATS took control of Congress, Obama and his advisers began meeting in Axelrod’s office in Chicago’s West Loop to discuss seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Vital to these discussions was Michelle. In a Chicago Tribune interview at the end of 2005, Michelle had complained that because of her husband’s onerous work schedule, she often felt like a single mother and she worried about an erosion of Obama’s paternal connection to his daughters. Axelrod and Gibbs knew that these kinds of press quotes would be highly damaging to a presidential candidate. They also knew that Obama would need full support from home if he were to run. So Michelle was brought into the discussions as a full partner. Her voice carried as much resonance as that of anyone in the room. By December, the Michelle hurdle had been cleared. She asked only that, as a prerequisite for her approval, Obama quit smoking, which he agreed to do. “If Barack really wants this, Michelle will support him and do what’s necessary,” said Cassandra Butts, Obama’s friend from Harvard. “That’s always been their relationship.”
In an interview in December 2006, Michelle sounded very much as if she had weighed the pros and cons of the decision, as well as the consequences of that decision on her family. She had risen out of the fog of the overwhelming African adventure, yet still marveled at the American public’s yearning for more of her husband. “You keep waiting for people to be like, okay, you are tired of him now, right? You’ve had enough.” When I said the public seemed to want even more, she said only, “I know.”
By now, an image of Michelle was evolving in the media, and it was not entirely positive. Obama had consistently portrayed her as both a solidifying force (“my rock at home,” he would say) and the scolding wife who kept his ego in check. She also gained a spate of publicity and raised some eyebrows for being promoted to a lucrative vice presidential position at the University of Chicago Hospitals, where she was now earning more than a quarter of a million dollars a year. In addition, she sat on the board of a food supplier to Wal-Mart Stores Inc., a position that earned her another fifty thousand dollars a year, although her husband had been a critic of the labor practices of the megaretailer, giving the appearance of hypocrisy. So if she were to be considered as First Lady material, a more three-dimensional, positive image of Michelle would be necessary. And she would also need to hit the campaign trail with and without her husband. “I know that my caricature out there is sort of the bad-ass wife who is sort of keeping it real, which is fine,” Michelle said, adding that her husband’s career pressures on the family remained an issue. “There is still the part of me that, if we do something this big, our kids are still really little, and what I am not ready to sacrifice is their livelihood. But . . . I am going to be the person who is providing them with the stability. So that means my role with the kids becomes even more important. What I am not willing to do is hand my kids over to my mom and say, ‘We’ll see you in two years.’ That’s not going to happen. . . . There has to be a balance and there will be a balance. You just have to make your mind open to it, in some way, shape and form.” (As the campaign kicked off, Michelle would quit the food supplier’s board and cut back on her hours at the university.)
Michelle indicated that she had thought deeply about the prospect of losing her husband, presumably to an assassin. I mentioned to her that a newspaper editor in Nairobi had asked me, “Don’t you worry that as a black man in America the skinheads will kill him?” She confided that he was now in a fragile spot as a major black politician. “I don’t worry about it every day, but it’s there. And it’s a nonstarter,” she said. “So if we take this next step, there would have to be a comprehensive security plan in place. . . . It only takes one person and it only takes one incident. I mean, I know history too. So it’s still an issue.” She said that her own career ascension has been tied to this possibility. Michelle worried, for example, that if something happened to her husband she would lose her prime means of financial and emotional support. “I do think about the fact that my husband is in a high-risk sort of position right now. And I need to be able to take care of myself and my kids. I have to be in a position that if anything unexpected or unfortunate happens, where are all those people who are being critical of my credentials or my ability to serve on boards, where are they going to be if I have to take care of my kids? There would be great sympathy and outpouring if something were to happen, but I have to maintain some level of professional credibility not only because I enjoy it, but I don’t want to be in a position one day where I am vulnerable with my children. I need to be in a position for my kids where, if they lose their father, they don’t lose everything.”
A COUPLE OF WEEKS BEFORE INTERVIEWING MICHELLE, WHEN Obama was still being coy about his final presidential decision, I asked Obama how he viewed the 2008 election cycle. In his typical understated way, he said that the trend of the country—its severe antipathy toward the Bush administration—had given the Democrats a “great opportunity” to win the White House. “I think the Democratic nomination in ’08 is worth something. Yeah, I do. But I think that over the next two years, the Democrats have to show the country that they are listening and that they are interested in crafting a set of commonsense practical solutions.”
Obama gave little indication that he was anywhere but on the path toward running for president. If there were any doubt left, his visit to the early-primary state of New Hampshire in December erased it. He was the main speaker at a fund-raiser that drew more than fifteen hundred guests. That visit effectively pushed at least one other potential candidate out of the race, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who had drawn just a couple of dozen people to an event the preceding weekend. This was similar to what followed the Harkin steak-fry in Iowa, where former Virginia governor Mark Warner witnessed firsthand the Obama phenomenon. As Warner spoke from the stage, a good number of the attendees had their heads turned backward to watch Obama wend his way through the fawning crowd. Soon thereafter, Warner announced that he would not run.
But as the wheels were in motion to launch a campaign, Obama—coincidentally or not—was hit with the most damaging news story of his career. With his newfound wealth, in 2005, he and Michelle had purchased a mansion in Hyde Park for more than one million six hundred thousand dollars. Michelle, in particular, had wanted a good-sized home because, she said, the couple wanted a roomy refuge from the public trappings of fame. But purchasing a piece of property right next door, on the very same day, had been the wife of Antoin “Tony” Rezko, an old friend and financial contributor of Obama’s who had been indicted just months before on federal fraud charges. Reporters for the Tribune, where the story broke, also found that Obama and Rezko’s wife engaged in a series of financial transactions to redivide the properties and improve their parcels. The relationship between Rezko and Obama went back twenty years. Obama had met him when Obama was in law school and Rezko’s development partners had tried to hire him. At his north suburban home, Rezko had hosted a fund-raiser for Obama in 2003 that helped fund early parts of his Senate candidacy. Since then, Rezko had been a regular contributor to Obama’s campaigns. The two had also been social friends, with the Rezkos dining out a few times a year with the Obamas.
As soon as the story was aired, Obama expressed contrition and openly conceded bad judgment, calling the transaction “bone-headed.” His radar with Rezko had broken down, he said, and if he had to make the deal again, he would not have. “Look, I came up through politics in Chicago and Cook County and Illinois,” Obama said. “And this is the first time that I’ve ever, in ten years, having risen from knowing nobody to being a U.S. senator, where people suggested anything that I’d done was inappropriate. And so, I’d have to say that, you know, that would indicate that I must have a pretty good radar, because that’s a pretty good track record.”
Back at the Tribune, reporters saw the hand of Obama’s shrewd political advisers in the deal’s sudden uncovering. The paper had gotten hold of the story through an anonymous tip. As the Blair Hull experience showed, it’s always better to get any negative press for your candidate out of the way as early as possible so it does not break at the height of the election season. Obama had been bloodied for a few days in the Chicago media, and surely future political opponents would point to the Rezko deal as untoward, but the story was out there for all to see—and Obama seemed little the worse for it.
WITH MICHELLE ON BOARD, WITH AXELROD AND GIBBS ASSEMBLING a national political operation, with Democrats across the country in thrall over Obama, the decision was made. In January, Obama announced on his Internet website that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee and would announce his final plans in early February. This methodology gave the candidate two media hits surrounding his announcement, two for the price of one.
Top aides were not without concerns about Obama’s preparedness. The speed of his ascendancy has been unprecedented and it was uncertain how that would affect him in the long run. He neared burnout in his first months in the Senate. And his life had not slowed from warp speed since he first decided to run for the Senate in 2003. Could this breakneck pace be sustained through a bruising presidential contest? “He is in fantastic shape, but I wonder about his physical stamina,” said one of his consultants, Pete Giangreco. “It takes just an incredible amount of physical stamina out there.”
Indeed, running for president is like no other experience a human can endure. It is so bizarre and so surreal that journalists Mark Halperin and John F. Harris have dubbed modern presidential politics “the Freak Show.” In their book The Way to Win, the two posited a theory that advanced modern technology and the breakdown of old media like newspapers and network television have made presidential contests into a ruthless blood sport in which referees no longer exist. This, in turn, exacerbates partisan fighting and is largely responsible for the polarization of the voting public. “The supreme challenge for any presidential candidate is keeping control of his or her public image in the face of the Freak Show’s destructive power,” the authors wrote.
I asked Axelrod in December whether he thought Obama was ready for this Freak Show. His message, after all, was conciliation. What happens if things devolve into a muddy free-for-all? Axelrod’s candor was surprising. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you mean?” I responded. “Do you think he can handle it?” “I don’t know,” Axelrod said again. “One thing about running for president is that—and he knows this—it’s like putting an X-ray machine on yourself twenty-four hours a day, because . . . at the end of the day, the American people know who you are. But with Barack, he’s kind of a normal guy in a lot of ways. He likes to watch football on Sundays. He treasures his time with his kids and Michelle. I think he has an inner toughness, and that is reflected in the road he traveled to get where he is, because you know, he didn’t exactly start off in an optimal place. And he has, I think, struggled through a lot of challenges to make himself what he is. I think there’s this impression that here’s this Harvard-educated, stem-winding intellectual, but he is a guy who was raised by a single mother who wasn’t there to help all the time because she couldn’t be. And you know, he fought his way through a lot.”
I wasn’t sure whether Axelrod was trying to sell me or himself with this speech. And I am not sure it even mattered. There was no turning back. Axelrod’s young political talent had cast himself in the Freak Show.
LESS THAN TWO MONTHS LATER, ON A FRIGID FEBRUARY DAY OUTSIDE the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, I stood on a grandstand riser filled with newspaper, wire service and television photographers waiting for Barack Obama to tell the world he was running for president of the United States.
Two more risers were equally jammed with media. And big-name national journalists were scattered throughout the crowd of fifteen thousand true believers assembled down below. As I put pencil to paper, my thoughts rambled back over the past three years that I had spent following this likable, idealistic yet utterly mercurial politician, and I couldn’t help but recall the small moment when Obama showed me off to a stranger who honked at him as we walked down Martin Luther King Drive in Chicago. Just three short years ago, Obama seemed proud to have a single reporter interested in him. Now, on this day in Springfield, he had thousands of journalists worldwide ready to listen, and examine, his every word. And he had thousands more enthused spectators overjoyed at viewing this small slice of American history.
Perhaps the only moment that came close was that keynote address in Boston, when I had been sitting in a vast arena wondering how Obama would perform. On this day, I had to admit, I had no wonder. Having watched him deliver impassioned speeches to blacks on Chicago’s South Side, to Latinos on its Near West Side, to rural whites in downstate Illinois, to people in cities across the United States and to poor villagers in remote Africa, I knew exactly what to expect. A call for mutual citizenship, a call for a new generation to lead, a call for an end to the Iraq War. Obama had stayed up into the wee hours the night before, crafting and rehearsing these words. It was twelve degrees outside, but this was the Hawaii native’s true element—preaching to the masses the gospel of Barack Obama; the gospel of a common humanity, the gospel that, if everyone would just join together behind him, he could be the one to make the world a better place.
As his friend Marty Nesbitt told me that day in Boston, Obama is like that basketball player on his high school team back in Ohio, always able to elevate his game when the situation demanded it. With Michelle on his arm, a supremely confident-looking Obama strode onto a long black catwalk that led to a wooden podium, situated front and center. The handsome couple, each in black winter overcoats, held hands as they walked forward, waving to the cheering crowd and stoking the electrified atmosphere. Nearing the podium, Obama let go of Michelle, who stepped down to allow her husband to take the stage by himself. The crowd heaved into a chant, “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” The senator walked up to the podium, his most natural setting, and I couldn’t help but say to myself, “Here comes LeBron, indeed.”