The Long Alliance, page 3
For a few weeks now, Clinton had been hearing murmurs about this Senate candidate in Illinois, too. His buzz sounded different, somehow more electric than the usual pundit-class rumors she was used to hearing. Dick Durbin, the state’s usually dry sitting Democratic senator, swore by him, and Jon Corzine, the Goldman Sachs exec turned New Jersey senator now in charge of the Democrats’ Senate fundraising operation, gushed about him, too. There was plenty of reason to be skeptical, and that was putting it nicely: This guy was just a state senator, and how could you get past his name? When Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin had first heard it, she’d written it down for her boss as “Barak Obama,” missing the c. Was his charisma really so overwhelming?
Still, it looked like he’d be a US senator in a few months, and now he was in search of some campaign cash. And, it turned out, he wanted to use Clinton’s star power for a night. So sure, she was happy to fly out and headline a fundraiser with him at a private club, then another at a fancy hotel. She’d have to meet him eventually.
A few hours later, she waited for the former president to pick up the phone as she sped through pitch-black Illinois. “Bill,” she said when his Arkansas drawl came on the line, “I just met our first African American president.”
* * *
Clinton was, if anything, atypically late to Barack Obama’s unlikely whisper network of DC insiders. Similar scenes of awe had quietly been popping up around town throughout the first half of the year. In February, liberal Chicago congresswoman Jan Schakowsky had tagged along with the Congressional Black Caucus on a trip to the White House to discuss the coup in Haiti. After the meeting, she went to shake Bush’s hand and saw him draw back in apparent shock, his eyes fixed on the OBAMA campaign button on her lapel. Figuring he thought it said OSAMA, Schakowsky assured him: “Mr. President, it’s Obama. Barack Obama, he’s running for United States Senate.” Bush, carefully, replied, “I never heard of him.” Schakowsky assured him, “You will, Mr. President.”
In the House gym on Capitol Hill that spring, a former congressman approached Senator Harry Reid and told him, “I got somebody you should take a look at, a state senator from Illinois.” Reid, a quiet former boxer who brooked no bullshit and who was rising in the Senate—and who was therefore a useful man to know if you wanted a future there yourself—asked for this star’s name. Hearing it, he paused with a thought similar to Bush’s. “You gotta be kidding me,” he frowned.
This was all, more or less, part of the plan. Obama and his campaign team back in Chicago’s Loop could deal with the disbelief about his name. It was the word-of-mouth they were interested in carefully nurturing.
To some extent, they’d known it was coming. Obama himself had never exactly been short on confidence—no one who writes a memoir in his thirties is. He saw how people looked at him, talked about him ever since he’d been profiled in the New York Times as the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review. He knew his academic brilliance was obvious, that, under the right circumstances, he could deliver a knockout speech, and that his personal story—Kansan mother, absent Kenyan father—was not just objectively interesting but clearly different. In 2002, at forty, and just two years after getting crushed in a congressional primary, he’d gathered about a dozen close allies and family members at his friend Valerie Jarrett’s Hyde Park condo to pitch them on a run for the Senate. It’d be a big step up, but he was getting painfully bored in the legislature, and he thought he’d have a decent shot at beating the Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, if he could raise the cash to do it. No one thought it was a great idea at first—his political advisor Dan Shomon refused to run a Senate campaign, and another political consultant, David Axelrod, urged him to think about waiting for Chicago’s mayoral race to open up instead—not least because he’d probably be entering a crowded field of famous locals in the Senate race and barely anyone had any clue who he was, even in Chicago. But Obama’s wife, Michelle, a rising lawyer in the city, OK’d it, and the candidate-to-be went ahead with the planning.
He’d faced a crossroads almost immediately in the form of an invitation from his longtime supporter Bettylu Saltzman, an important activist, to an antiwar rally that October. The politics of the moment weren’t obvious for a young Democrat looking for a future beyond Springfield, Illinois. Bush was marching toward war in Iraq, and plenty of liberals were furious, but it wasn’t easy for national-level Democrats to oppose Bush openly without furious blowback and declarations of their lack of patriotism. On the other hand, the crowd would be made up of lefties, not triangulating senators. Obama told Axelrod, who spurned the advances of high-paying former Wall Street trader Blair Hull to join Obama’s campaign after recognizing his potential, that he wanted to use the opportunity to make the case for international alliances and against flimsy justifications for war. He’d be introducing himself as the left-leaning ex-organizer that many expected him to be, but also, he hoped, a pragmatist willing to buck political convenience.
He set off to write the speech longhand—a sure sign that he was taking it seriously, since he usually spoke off the cuff or relied on staff to write his remarks if he didn’t much care about the speech of the day. Axelrod, who rarely escaped comparisons to a walrus because of his distinctive mustache, called fellow consultant Pete Giangreco to gauge the wisdom of the approach. Giangreco, who’d also turned down other candidates to join Obama, summed it up: The candidate would get points for honesty, but would he look too weak? Obama needed not just Black voters in Chicago and activist-adjacent liberals but cautious white suburbanites, too, and this was a national issue they were all watching closely.
Obama opened the speech by insisting, three times, “I don’t oppose all wars,” before making the turn: “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.” In the moment, it wasn’t clear that he was onto something. “Did he really have to call it ‘dumb’?” Giangreco asked Axelrod. “We have people going over there and dying.” Obama, though, struck a nerve. A few months later, a focus group of white women in Northbrook, outside Chicago, effused over him, comparing him to liberal heroes Paul Simon, the former Illinois senator, and Bobby Kennedy. Obama’s support was growing, but he was still running behind both Hull and another better-known candidate, state comptroller Dan Hynes, with just months until the March 2004 Democratic primary.
This didn’t stop Obama and his team from starting to think a bit bigger. For one thing, he stood a decent chance of becoming just the third Black senator since Reconstruction, and he obviously deserved a platform. Both Axelrod and Giangreco were working on John Edwards’s presidential campaign at the time, too, and Axelrod used that perch to talk up his Senate prospect to national reporters eager for tips outside the cynical DC bubble. Obama’s name started appearing in articles as a potential long-term prospect for something.
Yet back in Illinois his team held off on spending too much cash to promote him, on the candidate’s orders. Obama had told his campaign manager, Jimmy Cauley, an irreverent Kentuckian, that he’d run up his credit card debt in his failed 2000 race and that Michelle had promised to kill him if he did it again. So it was only as the closing stretch approached that they started spending money on TV ads that portrayed Obama as both an aspirational changemaker and a regular guy. The first one featured a slogan that Obama found trite but Axelrod wanted to use to appeal to Black voters in Chicago. Obama only relented to “Yes We Can” when Michelle agreed that it would resonate. Another showed Obama with a farmer talking about working with Republicans; a third was about union jobs. The final ad, which Obama at first considered cheesy and slightly unseemly, featured Paul Simon’s daughter comparing the candidate to her father, who had just died, shortly before the ex-senator was supposed to endorse Obama.
The spots did half the work. “I’ve been going around this race for two years, going to every Rotary supper, and only now do people go up to me in the grocery store,” he told Cauley after they started airing. Meanwhile, news broke that Hull’s second ex-wife had, at one point, been granted an order of protection against him. The revelation spurred a drip-drip of brutal reporting that culminated in the revelation that Hull was accused of being violent and verbally abusive, and had once allegedly threatened to kill her.
Hull’s support collapsed just as Obama’s rose: in the final weeks before the election, Obama’s polling jumped from the midteens into the forties. “You believe this shit?” he asked his consultants, who barely did. None knew how to react when, on March 16, he won the primary by nearly thirty points, demolishing their projections with just about every group of Illinoisans, not just in Chicago and its suburbs but also including the group they’d been most worried about: less educated white voters outside the city. Even Obama had—atypically—underestimated his appeal. It didn’t take a once-in-a-generation talent or a fully funded consultant budget to recognize that maybe Obama was onto something no other Democrat had quite figured out. These were the exact kinds of voters Kerry was starting to struggle with ahead of November, and that Democrats more broadly had been having trouble with since the Bill Clinton–era 1990s.
* * *
Bush was still reasonably popular in the spring of 2004, and his war in Iraq—all anyone could talk about, at least aside from the final The Lord of the Rings movie and wardrobe malfunctions—wasn’t far behind. Both the president and the war, however, had started their long-term decline, and the populace had begun to retreat into the partisan corners it tended to frequent in the months before a presidential election ever since Kerry had effectively become the Democrats’ nominee in March. Still, Kerry’s party was grappling for coherence in opposition to the Republican administration, unsure of where to find hope or inspiration in the post-Clinton years and unclear on how to galvanize its half of a country that was still getting used to its new wartime reality and the attendant culture.
It would have been ridiculous to suggest that the senior senator from Delaware—three decades into his career as a DC fixture and convinced that he was finally about to take the next step he’d been trying to figure out for years, even if it was contingent on someone else’s success—and the up-and-coming Senate nominee from Illinois—semianonymous but clearly inspiring and bursting with self-confidence—were on anything resembling a collision course, or even set for an encounter anyone should care about.
If they had a common project, it was considering the dawn of a country and world reordered by 9/11 and America’s subsequent military excursions. But then, that’s what everyone was trying to figure out. For now, they were essentially operating in different political galaxies. A lot would have to change for both of them, and fast, for their trajectories to bend toward each other.
* * *
The people who made up Obama’s inner circle—friends like Jarrett, a shrewd and influential local operative and businesswoman, but also Axelrod, a well-known and thoughtful reporter turned consultant who was becoming a confidant—had been around politics long enough to recognize an opportunity when it presented itself. Not only had Obama unexpectedly crushed his primary opposition, but he also suddenly looked likely to be a senator. Peter Fitzgerald, the Republican incumbent, had decided not to run for reelection, so Obama now faced unknown former investment banker Jack Ryan, and was clearly favored. That meant he had a bit more time on his hands than he’d expected, which he could use to position himself for a splashy entry to DC. He was already turning into a minor political celebrity, welcomed for meet and greets and fundraisers after the primary by East Coasters who fancied themselves savvy donors. The Clintons hosted one, financier George Soros another.
It was a lot to take in, even for someone constitutionally allergic to second-guessing himself, and Obama withdrew slightly in private, growing more contemplative and talking less, but asking more pointed questions about the campaign plan in strategy meetings. It would soon be clear to those outside his immediate inner orbit that he was planning for the long term.
After the primary, Axelrod and his business partner David Plouffe set out a plan that was a long shot but that could cement Obama as a star: they wanted to convince Kerry to offer Obama the keynote address slot at July’s convention in Boston. Their pitch was simple. Here was a young, dynamic speaker—a rare bright spot down the ballot in a challenging environment for Democrats nationwide—who could draw attention away from Bush and onto the theoretical vibrancy of Kerry’s party. The two Davids and a DC-experienced communications staffer named Robert Gibbs, who joined Obama from Kerry’s campaign, tried to schedule Obama and Kerry to be in the room together. They succeeded first at a Chicago fundraiser, and the reviews came back positive; Kerry was impressed. He was doubly so after they appeared together again at a public roundtable discussion on health care and trade. Meanwhile, the trio of strategists started mentioning Obama more in conversations with friends in the nominee’s orbit, which didn’t go unnoticed back in his Boston headquarters.
Kerry’s team didn’t mind the not-terribly-subtle effort. His campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, had been trying to convince the TV networks to cover more of the convention live than they usually did, and Obama was becoming the kind of sizzling draw that might entice them to consider it. Kerry—a party stalwart but hardly anyone’s idea of a political dynamo after two decades in the Senate despite his entrée to national politics as a famous antiwar Vietnam hero—needed the political help, too. Polling showed him within striking distance of Bush throughout the spring, but seldom in the lead. Bob Shrum, Kerry’s strategist, brought the idea of elevating Obama to the nominee. “This guy has an unlimited future, and if we give him this opportunity that’ll really help him,” he said. Kerry shrugged. “That’s fine with me,” he replied. “My future is now.”
Cahill called Obama directly to deliver the news. Obama, riding between events, thanked her and turned to Axelrod. “I know what I want to say,” he told his strategist, who looked back, curious. It was immediately obvious Obama had been ruminating on this in his typical grand terms, and he told Axelrod he wanted to tell his own story as part of America’s, as the strategist later recalled in his memoir. It would certainly be different from the speeches that every other Democratic politician would be delivering.
* * *
About two hours before John Kerry was due to speak on the final night of his July convention in Boston, Biden half-jogged to the lectern. He hadn’t thought as much about this speech as some others he’d given in his career, mostly because he’d been saying all this stuff in public for months. But it was still the national stage, a juicy chance to set out a new center-left vision for American engagement in the world, maybe, or at least to send the message that he was worthy of the country’s attention again.
He was introduced as the Senate foreign relations committee’s ranking member, a formal title that would have read as inscrutable jargon to casual viewers if there were any, but which, to the crowd of professional partisans inside the FleetCenter, was meant to convey his gravitas—here’s the top Democrat working on international policy. Almost immediately, he got to the point. “Tonight, our country stands at the hinge of history, and America’s destiny is literally at stake,” he said to the quiet arena, which just seconds earlier had been grooving to Mavis Staples’s soulful belting of “America the Beautiful.” The next president’s “overwhelming obligation,” he continued, “is clear: make America stronger, make America safer, and win the death struggle between freedom and radical fundamentalism.”
The C-SPAN cameras panned out as Biden kept going with his grim warning, and they revealed an audience only half-engaged as he insisted an opportunity lay ahead. They caught a bored-looking Hillary Clinton, who’d spoken from that stage with much more fanfare on Monday, adjusting her hair. Biden, though, plowed on, starting to shout a bit, as he always did when he was tired or frustrated—or when he could tell he wasn’t connecting, or when he wanted to make sure you couldn’t miss that this point was important. This had been his style for years, since before he was first elected as a twenty-nine-year-old over three decades earlier, back when his childhood stutter and tough upbringing—child of a man who moved the family to find work and then reinvented himself as a used car salesman, an adventurous but self-conscious golden son in an Irish Catholic family raised on tales of seeking fairness and the importance of maintaining the honor of the family name—were a more recent memory. Back long before his beautiful young family was destroyed, and before he’d become the Democratic Party’s rising star, then flamed out, and then clawed his way back to genuine—if self-serious—importance, never letting himself forget the nadirs but also refusing to wallow.
“We were told by this administration we would pay no price for going it alone! But that is obviously wrong,” he continued, to patchy applause. “Because we waged a war in Iraq virtually alone, we are responsible for the aftermath virtually alone.”
It was all straightforward Democratic fare, the kind of argument the nominee had been making all year, too: Bush had lost the world’s trust. This audience of political pros and hobbyists not only knew it by heart but also knew the real headliner—the presidential candidate—was still a few hours away. When Biden turned to the matter of Kerry for the first time, he followed the campaign’s instructions to project martial strength to counter Republicans’ accusations of wimpiness. “John Kerry, when he is commander in chief, will not hesitate to unleash the awesome power of our military on any nation or group that does us harm, and without asking anyone’s permission,” he said. But you could trust his judgment, Biden added. He slipped briefly, calling Kerry “John Kennedy,” but rolled forward without acknowledging the mistake (or wishful thinking), instead precisely hitting his lines about Kerry’s preparedness. “It’s time to recapture the totality of America’s strength, it’s time to restore our nation to the respect it once had.” Biden closed after ten uneventful minutes with the kind of lofty line he loved, even if it could mean whatever you wanted it to: “It’s time to reclaim America’s soul.”
