Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (24 page)

I knew Barack admired Forrest and didn’t think much of Stroger, and given Stroger’s snub in the Senate race, Obama owed him nothing. Yet Obama also believed that to side openly against the highest-ranking African American in Chicago would be a needless affront to the community. Under pressure from both camps, Barack wearied of my repeated appeals to his conscience.

“David, stop it. Just knock it off,” he said with irritation, when I called him in Washington to make a last attempt to sway him. “You’re not thinking about my interests here. I haven’t endorsed Stroger, even though Emil Jones has been pounding on me to do it. It’s only out of respect for Forrest, and you, that I’ve stayed out of it. And by the way, Forrest didn’t endorse me when I was running. I didn’t push him. He had his own politics, and I understood. So stop pushing me. I don’t want to have this discussion again.”

Obama’s flash of anger was extremely rare, and thus jarring. I had clearly touched a nerve by suggesting that his neutrality was somehow a dereliction of his responsibilities and, more critically, an abandonment of principle. I was in the wrong there. Blair Hull had given twenty-one thousand dollars to Forrest in his first run for office, so, partial as he was to Barack, Forrest had made no endorsement in Barack’s Senate race. When I related my conversation with Barack to Forrest, he understood. “That’s fair,” he said, with a shrug. “I totally get that. He doesn’t owe me a thing.”

Forrest progressed, even without Barack’s backing, and was surging a week before the primary when we learned that Stroger had been rushed to the hospital. Though the extent of his condition was initially shrouded in secrecy, he had apparently suffered a stroke. Suddenly, the dynamic had changed. “It’s over,” Forrest said glumly. “There is going to be a rallying around John now.” Indeed, Daley, Senator Durbin, and other party leaders seized the moment. They urged a vote for Stroger as he waged his valiant struggle, and confidently assured the public that he would return. He never did. The ailing county board president narrowly won the primary in absentia, only to be replaced on the ticket a few months later by his son Todd, one of the lesser lights on a dimly lit City Council. John Stroger never again appeared in public and died two years later. Obama publicly declared on the eve of the primary that he would vote for Forest, but it was too late. I will never know if an earlier announcement might have made the difference in a tight race, but in terms of his own political considerations, he clearly made a shrewd assessment and, ultimately, the right decision.

Sometime in the spring or early summer of 2006, I got a call from Barack.

“I just had the strangest meeting with Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer,” he said. “I didn’t know why they were calling me over there. Turns out they wanted to tell me I should run for president.”

Though Schumer signaled he couldn’t publically oppose Clinton, neither he nor Reid thought Hillary could win. They saw her “yes” vote on the Iraq invasion as an albatross that would sink her, and they worried that their Senate candidates could be sucked down with her in the undertow. As a compelling new face, Barack was untainted by the war or by hostile sentiments aimed at Washington, and had proven to have a broad appeal that could expand the electoral map and redound to the party’s benefit in November.

“They pushed me pretty hard to think about it. I still think it’s far-fetched, but it was interesting that they felt as strongly as they do,” Barack told me. “Interesting” was a euphemism. “Intriguing,” perhaps “tantalizing,” even “incredible” would have better suited the moment. If two of the most powerful Democrats in Washington thought he was ready to be president, and could win, who was he to dismiss the idea?

Barack was a long way from overtly signifying his interest, but he was certainly creating excitement wherever he went. Both the growing sense of outrage over the rancid politics of the nation’s capital and the sputtering war effort were creating a growing appetite for change, particularly among Democrats. Even for the famously chill Obama, this surprising encouragement from unexpected quarters had to be intoxicating. Still, in the spring of 2006, less than a year and a half into his Senate term, the notion seemed implausible.

I was so certain that Obama would not run for president in 2008 that I had begun to plan a hiatus from campaigns. I already had opened informal chats with friends in journalism about writing occasional campaign analyses of the 2008 race, rather than participating in it. Combining my passions for journalism and film production, I also had launched a documentary project about Father Michael Pfleger, the fiery, white Catholic priest of St. Sabina Church on the black South Side. Through sheer force of personality, Pfleger had revived a dying parish and the impoverished neighborhood around it. But his tactics were those of an organizer, and he was as brash in challenging the conservative archdiocese as he was in confronting local street gangs and drug dealers. I was convinced that, despite his accomplishments, Pfleger would be forced to leave the parish he had led for a generation, and I knew this painful drama would make for a great film.

There was another reason I was making alternative plans. Four of my former clients were already at the starting gate for the presidential race: Clinton, Edwards, Vilsack, and Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Edwards, given our rocky past, was a nonstarter. Then there was the odds-on favorite, Hillary, but the idea of working with Mark Penn (her chief strategist) again was unthinkable. I already had informed my partners and staff that I was planning to sit out 2008. The only thing that would change my thinking was if Obama were to run.

In mid-August, Obama took off for a seventeen-day official trip to Africa, with Gibbs and Mark Lippert, Obama’s national security adviser, the only staff allowed on what was an official congressional trip. With such a small entourage, the logistics were rocky. The value of the trip, however, was immeasurable. Wherever he went, Obama stirred a huge response, yielding scenes more appropriate to a visiting head of state than a freshman U.S. senator. It was a stature-enhancing tour, and as I watched, I was sure it would further stir speculation about 2008.

“You know, having witnessed this trip, I am beginning to believe this guy is ready to be president,” Gibbs told me when they returned. “The reaction he got over there . . . the way he inspired people . . . it was pretty remarkable.”

Slowly, subtly, what a year earlier had seemed impossible, had evolved into something more than a pipe dream.

Privately, Barack continued to express healthy skepticism. Self-confident though he was, he was not blind to the audacity of such a candidacy or, more important, the organizational challenges of pulling it off. No less daunting would be the challenge of persuading Michelle that his running for the presidency would be the right path for their young family. Yet after the trip to Africa, Barack was privately a little more forward-leaning. The reception he had received overseas, coupled with the extraordinary media coverage of the trip back home, was an encouraging sign. “With so many folks talking to me about running, I feel like I have an obligation to at least think about this in a serious, informed way,” he said to me. “Let’s collect some information and sit down after the midterms and see where we are at.”

For an Obama candidacy, we reasoned that Iowa stood as the critical threshold. It was the same test Paul Simon had faced twenty years earlier. If Barack, as a progressive senator from a neighboring state, could not make a strong showing in a contest traditionally dominated by liberal activists, he would have no chance to pull off a long-shot candidacy on less friendly political terrain. On the other hand, a victory in these first-in-the-nation caucuses would make all things possible. So as he continued to demur publicly, Barack authorized us to engage in some discreet polling to test the plausibility of an Iowa campaign.

Even before the polling, Obama would have a chance to test his Iowa chops at Senator Tom Harkin’s annual Steak Fry, a highly prized event that attracted thousands of hard-core Democratic activists from across Iowa—the type of people who would be important players in the 2008 presidential caucuses. Much like the Florida Democratic convention organizers, Harkin told Obama he needed him to help fend off all the presidential wannabes, most of whom were hungry for the keynote slot. Obama was the perfect compromise: an A-list attraction who had disavowed a 2008 candidacy. But if he accepted, his disavowal of interest might begin to strain the straight-face test. “If we do this, the whole presidential thing is going to kick up like ten notches,” I told Gibbs. “Oh, don’t I know,” he replied. “Be kind of fun to screw with everybody, though.”

If Obama was looking for encouragement, he found plenty in Indianola, the site of the Steak Fry. A much larger than usual crowd of about thirty-five hundred activists turned out for Harkin’s event and cheered wildly as Barack made a robust case for a renewed Democratic vision that he had refined over his year of political travels. “I’ll tell you what,” Obama said in his typically understated manner, after returning from his Iowa expedition. “If I did run, I’d have a few supporters there.”

When Paul Harstad’s hush-hush poll came back at the beginning of October, it confirmed Barack’s upbeat assessment. Edwards, who had finished a strong second to Kerry in Iowa in 2004, was well in the lead with 33 percent. Hillary followed with 18—but right behind her, at 15, came Obama, ahead of 2004 caucus winner Kerry and seven other potential candidates all mired in single digits. Without a candidacy or campaign apparatus, and despite being brand new to the national scene, Barack was already in the top tier, with room to grow.

With the encouraging Iowa results in hand, we decided to repeat the polling exercise a few weeks later in New Hampshire. Far from our Illinois turf, we didn’t have high expectations, but when the results came back, they showed Obama trailing Hillary by just seven points, with Edwards in third and the rest of the field well behind—this, despite the fact that Obama had spent no time in the Granite State and was virtually unknown to nearly one out of three voters. Holy shit, I thought. This goddamned thing could happen.

 • • • 

After his election to the Senate, Obama had signed a contract to write a second book. It was to be a volume of his reflections on politics and policy. Only there wasn’t a great deal of time for reflection. Pressed by his day job, political travel, and the desire to spend time with his family, he had not exactly hunkered down on the project. So throughout the early winter and spring, chapters were flying between Obama and his team. He would hole up in his tiny apartment near the Capitol, writing deep into the night. His policy advisers checked and supplied facts. Favreau contributed edits for language. The political team read for potential land mines—though Obama ignored some of our red flags, having eagerly planted them in the manuscript. That the race to the finish line was such a frantic process made the final product all the more remarkable. The book reflected serious, hard thinking about where we were as a country and where we needed to go.

What animated
The Audacity of Hope
were the stories of people, written with the narrative skill of a gifted novelist. It occurred to me, in reading the manuscript, that Obama approached every encounter as a participant and an observer. He processed the world around him with a writer’s eye, sizing up the characters and the plot, filing them away even as he fully engaged in the scene. He has appreciation for irony and a firm grasp on the fact that some things remain beyond our control. It’s a quality that contributes to his outward calm, even amid utter chaos.

When Obama signed his lucrative book deal, however, it wasn’t with 2008 in mind. But by the time
The Audacity of Hope
appeared, just weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, its publication was viewed by the political world not as a pragmatic moneymaker or a means for Obama to organize and present his views, but as another signal of his political intentions. And the reaction was kinetic.

Though he scrambled to make his deadline, the book was released on October 17 to rave reviews and shot to the top of the charts. Obama was back on the television circuit and touring the nation, where his book signings drew overflow crowds. As folks passed through the line for an autographed copy and a quick hello, many of them urged Barack to take the plunge into the presidential race.

One Saturday in late October, I met Barack and Gibbs in Philadelphia, where hundreds of people had lined up at a local library for a book signing. Obama was taping
Meet the Press
the next day, and I was there to join Gibbs and Barack on the ride to Washington to run through the questions he’d likely face.

The interview was scheduled to promote Obama’s book, but there would be an unmistakable subtext. Rigorous as Russert was,
Meet the Press
had become a required proving ground—or killing field—for potential presidential candidates. With Obama’s rising stature, Russert would put him through his paces, testing this rookie with the fastballs and hard curves that a serious presidential candidate would be expected to handle.

“One thing you can be one hundred percent sure Tim will do is replay the tape of you on his show from January, when you said you wouldn’t run for president or vice president in 2008,” I said, as we rumbled down I-95 toward DC.

“Right,” Obama said. “Well, I see no point in playing games. I’m going to tell him that I’ve changed my mind and I’m thinking about it.”

Gibbs, who was sitting in the jump seat of the Suburban, shot me a quick glance. We knew that such a statement would be big news, a seismic event that would send the Washington political class into a frenzy.

“Sir, that’s fine by me,” Gibbs said, “but have you mentioned this to Mrs. Obama?” Robert knew that Michelle was far from sold on the wisdom of a presidential campaign and would not be thrilled to learn about her husband’s altered sentiments by watching TV. “Ooh, that’s a good point, Robert,” Barack said, wincing at the thought. “I’d better give her a heads-up.” It probably was a conversation he was less than eager to have. Michelle was barely tolerating the demands of Barack’s schedule as a senator and barnstorming campaigner. She was far from ready to sign off on an even bigger and more demanding venture.