Obama, p.1
Obama, page 1
DEDICATION
For my father,
whose enduring example of moral courage
has always shown the way
CONTENTS
Dedication
1 The Ascent
2 Dreams from His Mother
3 Just Call Me Barry
4 The Mainland
5 The Organizer
6 Harvard
7 Sweet Home Chicago
8 Politics
9 The Legislator
10 The New Rochelle Train
11 The Candidate
12 The Consultant
13 The Race Factor
14 The Real Deal
15 Hull on Wheels
16 The Small Screen
17 A Victory Lap
18 A Dash to the Center
19 The Ryan Files
20 The Speech
21 Back to Illinois
22 The Senator
23 South Africa
24 Nairobi
25 Siaya: A Father’s Home
26 LeBron Revisited
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER
1
The Ascent
I’m LeBron, baby.
—BARACK OBAMA
For those who know Barack Obama well, this might sound close to impossible, but the swagger in his step appeared even cockier than usual on the afternoon of July 27, 2004.
As summertime bathed downtown Boston in warm sunshine, Obama led a gaggle of reporters, aides and a couple of friends—a group occasionally two dozen deep—around a maze of chain-link security fences guarding the large-scale FleetCenter indoor arena. A former high school basketball player who, at forty-two, still relished a pickup game, the rail-thin Obama was carrying his upper body as if he were heading to the free throw line for the game-winning shot, a shot he believed was destined to sink. His shoulders were pitched backward. His head was held erect. His blue-suited torso swayed in a side-by-side motion with every pace forward. His enormous confidence appeared at an all-time peak. And for good reason: hours later, the Illinois state lawmaker and law school lecturer would take his first steps onto the national stage to deliver his now famous 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention.
Indeed, Obama’s time in the bright sunshine had arrived. And though this moment had come upon him rather quickly, unexpectedly and somewhat weirdly, with only weeks of notice, his opportunity to prove to the world that he could play in this most elite league was at hand. Finally.
Having covered Obama for the Chicago Tribune since the early days of his U.S. Senate candidacy more than nine months before, I had already established a rapport with the state senator, and I was mostly trying to stay out of the way and watch the day unfold, watch the story of Barack Obama unfurl. Still, as a skeptical newspaper reporter, I was not completely convinced that, by day’s end, all would come out well. I was still trying to gauge if this strut was something of an act, whether his winning free throw would clang on the rim and bounce away or whether he was on the verge of hitting nothing but net and making a national name for himself.
After Obama and I slipped through a security checkpoint and he momentarily broke free from the entourage, I sidled up to him and told him that he seemed to be impressing many people of influence in this rarefied atmosphere.
Obama, his gaze fixed directly ahead, never broke his stride.
“I’m LeBron, baby,” he replied, referring to LeBron James, the phenomenally talented teenager who at the time was shooting the lights out in the National Basketball Association. “I can play on this level. I got some game.”
I wasn’t so sure. I fell back amid the marching gaggle of the Obama entourage and chatted with one of his closest friends, Marty Nesbitt, who had flown in from Chicago to accompany Obama during the convention week. I asked Nesbitt how he thought his friend would perform that night, given all the media attention and political pressure. “He sat down with Ted Koppel earlier this week and he hit the cover off the ball, didn’t he?” Nesbitt asked. “Barack reminds me of a player on my high school basketball team back in Ohio. He could elevate his game to almost any situation. And when we needed a shot, he always hit it. Always.”
That evening, Obama introduced himself to America. He delivered a keynote address of historic proportions, so inspiring that even some conservative commentators would concede they were moved by it. His rich baritone voice resolute and clear, he hearkened back to his beloved mother’s philosophy of a common humanity, a philosophy that had been ingrained in him throughout his childhood. He declared that America is a land of good-hearted people, a nation of citizens who have more unifying traits than dividing traits, a country of individuals bound by the common purpose of freedom and opportunity for all. “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America. . . . We are one people. . . .”
Across the arena, many Democrats from various states, various walks of life, various races, had tears in their eyes. And as the woman seated next to me in an upper level of the FleetCenter joyously shrieked—“Oh my god! Oh my god! This is history! This is history!”—I looked around at the energized and emotional crowd and heard myself speak aloud to no one in particular.
“Yes, indeed. Tonight, Barack, you are LeBron, baby.”
THROUGHOUT 2004, THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL MOOD IN Obama’s home state of Illinois—and much of the country—was sharply polarized. A bevy of Democratic presidential aspirants had vied to challenge President George W. Bush, who had led the country into war in Afghanistan, and then Iraq, in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington. Chagrined from being in the minority in both chambers of the Congress, Democrats desperately craved a strong candidate who could defeat Bush in the November election. Among those Democrats, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had won the party’s nomination, but despairing Democrats were having difficulty warming up to him. They hungered for something more than Kerry could offer—a political savior, an inspirational figure who could lead them out of one of the darkest periods in their party’s history. Kerry surely seemed electable, but his reserved nature and plodding public style made him far from a savior who could stir the souls of the masses.
At this point the nation was evenly divided on the Iraq war, but the Democrats were not. In the eyes of many moderate Democrats who had initially supported the war, the nationalistic fever that had washed over America in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist strike was beginning to wear off. For most left-leaning party members, the war had been nothing short of a colossal mistake from the very beginning. Thousands gathered for anti-war rallies in Chicago, San Francisco and other urban centers. In some cities, pro-war demonstrations attracted partisans on the other end of the spectrum. In Chicago, several anti-war events were largely well-behaved. They were arranged and attended not solely by young radicals but also by established members of the city’s lakefront liberal crowd. A rally in the city’s Federal Plaza seventeen months earlier, in October 2002, was assembled by an aide to former U.S. senator Paul Simon and a mainstream liberal public relations expert. The rally featured a pointed anti-war speech from Obama, then a fairly anonymous state lawmaker, who deemed the impending Iraq engagement “a dumb war.” The event drew old and young alike, as 1960s protest veterans mixed with suburbanites and college students and journalists. Another war protest was more demonstrative, spilling out of the city’s downtown Loop area one evening and choking off the main transportation artery of Lake Shore Drive. Protestors marched aimlessly to a destination unknown, before being cornered on the drive and arrested en masse by Chicago police attired in riot gear.
In spring 2003, the Washington Post, the daily bulletin board of the D.C. elite, published a story illuminating the nation’s growing political and cultural divide. The article explored a burgeoning theory that political scientists informally labeled as the red state–blue state phenomenon. The theory was gaining prominence in both political and intellectual circles. Red states were core Republican Party strongholds, populated primarily by culturally conservative Christian whites. The entire South and most of the Midwest fell into the red category. Blue states were Democratic Party territories, home to larger percentages of gays, minorities and college-educated intellectuals than the nation as a whole. West Coast and Northeastern states generally voted blue. The red-blue notion resonated with so many Americans that it soon took hold as something of a truism.
This tug-of-war was reflected in the nation’s capital by a bitterly partisan battle between minority Democrats and majority Republicans. After the fall elections of 2003, the Pew Research Center released a study summarizing eighty thousand interviews over the previous three years that found an evenly split and polarized nation, with sharp differences along political, cultural and religious lines. The country’s most religious states were in the South, and their residents tended to be the most socially traditional and the most hawkish on national security issues. People living in New England and on the Pacific Coast, meanwhile, were less religious, more dovish and less socially traditional.
On the night of that Democratic National Convention in Boston, a handsome, caramel-skinned man who seemed to embody all of these disparate parts appeared on television
Later that year, his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, would tell me, “When he was a young man, I asked him what he wanted to do with his life. He said, ‘I want to leave the world a better place than when I came in.’ And I believe that has been his guiding light.”
Obama, without argument, is imbued with an abiding sense of social and economic justice. He is an earnest, thoughtful, occasionally naive man who has a strong sense of moral purpose, a trait driven into him by his ardently progressive mother. But Obama is far more complex than just a crusading dreamer aiming to “give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless,” in his own oft-spoken words. He is an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see. “He definitely has this yin and yang quality to him,” said Robert Gibbs, one of Obama’s top political aides. He is not of the same specific ancestry as most blacks in the United States, nor has he lived the typical black experience in America. Yet he is accepted by most as a brother, in large part because his physical appearance is decidedly African and his wife and children are African American. He was raised by a white family and educated in elite white institutions, giving him nonthreatening appeal and instant credibility with the white cognoscenti. His parents and grandparents were of modest means, and for most of his life he has not had excessive material wealth, making him aware of the daily concerns of the middle class mostly because they have been his concerns.
But it is his easygoing public temperament and ingenious lack of specificity that perhaps have most abetted his career in politics. Whatever setting Obama steps into—a black church, the Senate floor, a rural farmhouse—he blends comfortably into the atmosphere, as if he has spent a lifetime there. With his relentlessly reasonable tone and a studied thoughtfulness, he can turn even the most jaded journalist into a mild fan. He emanates supreme confidence at almost every moment. But he also has a self-deprecating sense of humor and can express humility to an almost unnecessary degree, at least in public. While talking or writing about a deeply controversial subject, he considers all points of view before cautiously giving his often risk-averse assessment, an opinion that often appears so universal that people of various viewpoints would consider it their own. In settings with everyday voters, he dons his college lecturer hat and explains arcane policy matters in easy-to-understand terms that invite unanimity, not argument.
What the public has yet to see clearly is his hidden side: his imperious, mercurial, self-righteous and sometimes prickly nature, each quality exacerbated by the enormous career pressures that he has inflicted upon himself. He can be cold and short with reporters who he believes have given him unfair coverage. He is an extraordinarily ambitious, competitive man with persuasive charm and a career reach that seems to have no bounds. He is, in fact, a man of raw ambition so powerful that even he is still coming to terms with its full force. This drive is rooted in an effort to atone for his absent father’s tragic failures, both as a Kenyan politician and as a family man. “He’s always wanted to be president,” Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of Obama’s, would confide shortly after his Boston speech. “And I’m not sure that he’s even still fully admitted it to himself that he does, but I know he does. I know he does.”
The journey toward that admission, finally arriving while he vacationed in his native Hawaii in December 2006, would be unlike any other journey by an American politician. Indeed, for all of Obama’s intellectual heft, for all of his genuine sense of mission, for all of his aching desire for personal success, no man could be fully prepared for what lay ahead of him after that heady star turn in Boston. And no man could be left unaffected by it. In just a couple of years, he would rise from obscure state lawmaker to national celebrity pursued by paparazzi on his family vacation. He would struggle through a self-described “painful year” of just three or four hours of sleep per night in order to write a best-selling book that would assure his family’s financial security for his lifetime and nurture his burgeoning political career. He would spend many weekends and even more weeknights away from his devoted wife and two young daughters in helping the national Democratic Party raise millions of dollars to retake control of Congress. He would be discussed endlessly in the mainstream and alternative media as potentially the first African American to hold the Oval Office.
From Chicago’s South Side, an entirely new and unique politician had emerged on the American scene. Obama and his mother’s hopeful message of inclusion and brotherly compassion would land squarely in the middle of a massive political void. In a nation that perpetually seeks to anoint the next New Thing, Obama would bask for months in a remarkably intense media spotlight.
Over those two years, this new brand of politician would do the unthinkable: he would transcend race as he embodied it; he would throw an outstretched hand to conservatives as he enchanted progressives; he would beguile hard-bitten national political reporters (at least some of them, at least for a while) with his newness, intellect and affability; he would become a prideful and iconic symbol for millions of black Americans; and he would secure his role as a major national voice for Democrats. Obama would take the optimistic vision instilled in him by his mother—that, at our essence, all humans are connected by compassion and generosity of spirit—and mold it into a compelling political theme. He would offer this theme of reconciliation to a politically and culturally splintered republic as a form of national salvation.
Galloping onto the national stage, Obama would become a source of hope and optimism for disillusioned Democrats from California to New Hampshire. Obama’s come-from-nowhere ascent would make it starkly evident just how passionately many Americans yearned for an inspirational leader who could mend the various divisions within the country—racial, political, cultural, spiritual. “Hours before he gave the speech, Democrats were excited,” Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page said. “You know why? Because they finally got a black face for the party who’s not Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Let’s be frank. That’s how this thing got launched. It went beyond party, because the whole country right now is looking for that kind of a come-together kind of feeling.” Movements to draft him to run for the presidency in 2008 would take hold on the Internet, among Hollywood celebrities and on college campuses across the country. As a faraway war claimed thousands of American lives and descended into bloody chaos, as an inordinate number of power and finance scandals engulfed Congress, as Americans grew more disenchanted with the policies and leadership of Republican president George W. Bush, America seemed ready for a shepherd to lead the country in an entirely new direction.
Not since the days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, and their luminous political Camelot, had a politician captured so quickly the imagination of such a broad array of Americans, especially the significant voting bloc of black Americans. And even the Kennedy comparison would not characterize Obama’s fame properly. Not since Ronald Reagan had a politician been so adept at sharing his own unwavering optimism with a disheartened electorate. Cunningly using the broad power of the modern media as his launching pad, Obama and his small team of skilled advisers would plot a course that catapulted him from little-known state lawmaker to best-selling author to U.S. senator to national celebrity. A mixture of idealist and pragmatist, Obama would move almost overnight from a critic of the established political system inside the Beltway to a player within that system. He would represent both outsider and insider.
