The Long Alliance, page 7
He wasn’t always so discreet, especially when his frustration boiled over. Late in 2005, when a prospective donor asked him about Biden, Obama replied with a story encapsulating his exasperation: once, when a Republican official was coming to the committee to testify, Biden gathered the Democratic members and told them he wanted the witness to feel like he was in the hot seat, on the record, for the meeting’s scheduled one and a half hours. The official’s answers had to be the story of the day. Biden then proceeded to open the hearing with a fifty-five-minute monologue, Obama said.
Even this extreme loquaciousness still didn’t really distinguish Biden from a lot of the rest of the Senate in Obama’s eyes. Within weeks of his arrival, Obama was complaining to advisors that there was no strategy to be found there and that—as he once vented while bursting out of the chamber while flapping his hand open and shut—“Blah, blah, blah! That’s all we do here, is talk.” Even in the minority in Springfield he’d helped craft legislation and deals—he’d built ties with Democrats and Republicans alike over poker games—but here the older, slower members showed little interest in this kind of work. And when he did get to vote on things, he griped, it was often on bullshit measures that could come back to bite him politically down the road.
One saving grace and source of education was Obama’s unlikely relationship with Richard Lugar, the understated top Republican on the foreign relations committee. The pair connected in 2004 when, as a candidate, Obama took to citing Lugar’s initiative to reduce risks posed by old Soviet nuclear weapons as the kind of thing he’d be interested in working on, too. Lugar wrote to Obama that he would be happy to help him join the committee, and Obama adopted the quiet older Hoosier as an informal mentor. When Lugar invited him on his annual summer trip to the former Soviet Union in 2005, Obama jumped at the opportunity to tour old weapons facilities. His admiration for Lugar peaked when, in Siberia, the pair was detained on a runway. Obama tried to find a way out, and fast. Lugar, who’d seen it all before, knew the saga would be over soon and replied that it was a great time to take a nap. To close readers of the Senate, it was easy to interpret their friendly dynamic as an implicit rejection of Biden’s style. Obama had nowhere near this level of relationship with the committee’s top Democrat.
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Obama was on his way back from Siberia when he caught footage of New Orleans underwater on an airport TV. He was on the phone with his office back in Washington, and his top aides said he should really head to Louisiana to survey the damage from Hurricane Katrina. Obama hesitated, since it wasn’t his state. But the images stuck with him: Black Louisianans, in particular, had disproportionately just seen their lives destroyed, and he was the lone Black senator. He hesitated to talk about racism immediately—he would talk about it on his own terms, when the time came, he figured—but he agreed to fly down and appear with Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, and then to lift his self-imposed national media ban to talk about what he’d seen and what the Bush administration should be doing.
The positive reaction to his media blitz fed a flood of new invitations to speak to local and state-level Democratic events. Obama had refused most such asks since arriving to the Senate, but he now caught his advisors by surprise when he wondered if they could arrange a plane to let him attend one of Malia’s dance recitals in Chicago and the Florida Democrats’ state convention on the same night. Perhaps he wanted to step further into the national spotlight after all. So, as Obama kept saying yes and 2006 neared, Rouse asked if he should draw up a plan to consider how to use the coming midterm season to increase his visibility further, just in case a “perfect storm” appeared for him in 2007 and 2008. His proposal—to build the reach of Obama’s personal PAC, raise cash for colleagues and candidates, and promote the forthcoming book—sounded good to Obama, who signed off in January.
Still, more of Obama’s attention was on making sure he was correctly articulating his worldview in his first few months in office. He’d been bristling at the assumption that he was some sort of party-line liberal or even especially progressive, and after lefty activists protested his choice to defend some Democrats who supported Bush’s nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, he saw a chance to define himself as a different kind of Democrat. He wrote in the popular Daily Kos blog, which had been lighting him up for his apostasy, that the notion that Democrats simply needed to show more backbone was naive and divorced from the reality of everyday Americans, who had no interest in demonization or purity tests. As Obama saw it, this way of viewing the world invited permanent minority status for his party.
He was also invited to deliver the commencement speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois—once an Underground Railroad hub, host of a Lincoln-Douglas debate, and home to a closed Maytag factory—which he used to lay out his economic priorities with some historical sweep. With the help of policy advisor Karen Kornbluh and speechwriter Jon Favreau, Kerry’s old aide, Obama framed the modern American economic challenge and opportunity as being of a piece with the labor and antitrust movements after the Civil War and the push to open college for veterans after World War Two. “I saw it during the campaign when I met union guys who worked at the plant for twenty, thirty years and now wonder what they’re gonna do at the age of fifty-five without a pension or health care, when I met the man whose son needed a new liver but, because he’d been laid off, didn’t know if he could afford to provide his child the care that he needed,” he said. “It’s as if someone changed the rules in the middle of the game and no one bothered to tell these folks.” He identified automation and outsourcing, the rise of China and India, and conservatives’ belief in the “Ownership Society,” which he likened to “social Darwinism,” as factors to reckon with. The latter “is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: ‘You’re fired!’” he said. Instead, he argued, Americans needed to insist on affordable college and job retraining, reliable health-care coverage and pensions, and more funding for research. The speech was light on specific proposals but, by the standards of Democrats talking about globalization and the transforming economy, notably forward-looking.
This was just as well, since Obama was at the same time trying to avoid saying too much about the actual topic du jour. Obama had told Rouse upon arriving in the Senate that he didn’t want to involve himself too deeply in the Iraq debate yet, since his views about the invasion had been well known since 2002 and he saw little upside in the back-and-forth that was unfolding in hearings and private meetings between the administration and lawmakers like Biden. Even when he wanted to reconsider tenets of his own stance opposing the war, he didn’t consult other senators but arranged private debates among aides including Gibbs, Rouse, Power, and her fellow foreign policy advisor Mark Lippert.
Obama’s sessions were more or less irrelevant to the policy debate consuming Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden’s views weren’t. In 2005, Biden was still steaming over the way his joint proposal with Lugar to circumvent a full invasion had been squashed two years earlier when fellow Democrat Dick Gephardt made an end around and publicly, surprisingly, backed Bush’s plan to invade. Biden joined the supportive group, but he and Lugar and a handful of others including Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel still thought the course of the war would be dramatically different if these guidelines had been ratified. They had wanted invasion only to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction, not for regime change, and only with United Nations or congressional approval—which would be contingent on Bush proving the need for military force. The disappointment of this plan’s failure continued to paint Biden’s interactions with the White House until he turned to a new idea in mid-2006, when he ran into foreign policy grandee Les Gelb on a delayed flight. They should wind down the war by splitting Iraq into autonomous Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite regions, they wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed that Biden had Blinken—by then already one of Biden’s closest aides, who was basically family and certainly capable of inhabiting his voice—pull together after the flight.
This proposal had the added benefit of being a useful talking point ahead of Biden’s probable campaign, which was by this point growing real enough that he, Kaufman, Blinken, and McSweeny were pinning down its core policy proposals. Biden was on board with promoting new ways to make college more affordable, especially community college—a topic that interested him in particular as Jill, a community college instructor, was then on her way to receiving her doctor of education degree, after which she would primarily be known in Biden’s circles as Dr. B. On most issues, though, he had weeks’ worth of questions for McSweeny and the experts she brought in for him—“I don’t just understand, I overstand!” he liked to smile and say, by way of shrugging apology. This diligence would come in handy, he was convinced, on the eventual campaign trail.
Why, he debated for hours, was a single-payer health-care system preferable to a Medicare buy-in for fifty-five-year-olds? (He worried that other popular proposals were too complicated: we’re going to tell everyone they need to have health care but then they have to go buy it?) Why, he asked, were medical leave and equal pay policies so difficult to implement? And what, he kept wondering, was happening to the middle class? Why couldn’t you support a family on one income? If he was going to run for president, he figured, he better have some answers. If he was going to be a leading contender, he’d surely be pressed for specifics.
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Obama only moved closer to the national spotlight as he accepted more invitations and raced to finish his book at night, hoping to deliver the manuscript in time to combine the publicity tour with his high-profile travel for midterm candidates. Curiosity spiked when he traveled to Africa that summer with massive international fanfare and a local reception that reminded old hands of Bobby Kennedy’s trip to the continent in 1966. To his aides, it was an eye-opening display of his power to attract media and maybe to turn around international sentiment about the country after Bush’s two terms—even if back in Washington some of his older colleagues, like Biden, saw the coverage and found it all a tad messianic.
Still, though, he hesitated to talk about the elephant crowding the doorway. Early in 2006 his senior Illinois colleague Dick Durbin—hardly known for overexuberance himself—started arguing to Obama that he should run for president, insisting the lesson to learn from Kerry’s loss was that spending more time in the Senate and building a record doesn’t make for a better presidential candidate. The moment picks the candidate, he said. Soon after, Jan Schakowsky, the liberal Chicago congresswoman, told Obama to take Durbin’s words seriously. He was noncommittal until a few months later, when Axelrod weighed in: “We haven’t had a true summons to hope and change like the Kennedy campaign in forty years,” he told Obama, urging him to consider the opportunity. They agreed to defer any serious discussion until after the midterms but didn’t yet tell anyone that conversation was coming.
Of course, it was obvious to anyone paying attention. Rouse’s latest memo spelled out how Obama was now the most requested surrogate for Democratic campaign events, and that if there was even a 10 to 15 percent chance he might run, then he should spend two to three hours at a time doing these events, meeting local pols and press around the country. As his team tried building enough buzz online to get his email list to a hundred thousand subscribers, Obama finished his book in time to make it on Oprah Winfrey’s show before his final campaign blitz. The combination of stumping and book sales paid off immediately: ahead of one event in Minneapolis for Senate hopeful Amy Klobuchar, Obama aide Alyssa Mastromonaco had to convince the candidate’s team they needed a bigger room than the three-hundred-capacity space they had reserved. They simply didn’t get big crowds here, Klobuchar’s aides assured her, to which Mastromonaco insisted they didn’t understand what was about to happen. Over three thousand locals showed up.
Obama grew more comfortable with the speculation about his future as the political momentum grew impossible to ignore, and he accepted an invitation to Senator Tom Harkin’s Steak Fry, the late-summer fundraiser in Iowa that doubled as a launching pad for presidential hopefuls. Steve Hildebrand, a prominent local strategist, volunteered to show Obama around, while Axelrod quietly ordered up polling in the first-to-vote state to gauge Obama’s potential support. Obama still wasn’t even admitting that he was considering running, but his appearance there was enough to dissuade one likely 2008 candidate—former Virginia governor Mark Warner, who was in the audience—from a campaign of his own. Soon thereafter, a similar appearance at a New Hampshire Democratic Party fundraiser helped convince Indiana senator Evan Bayh, another probable contender watching from the sidelines, not to run, either.
* * *
In the fall of 2006, John Kerry was finding that once you get close to the presidency, it’s nearly impossible to give up the dream. His remaining advisors didn’t see any path back to the nomination, let alone the White House. That didn’t stop him from asking some of the top donors from his last campaign to meet, just in case. At one lunch, Kerry grew frustrated as the mogul across the table told him he wasn’t buying his pitch, informing him that the last thing people wanted right now, after eight years of Bush, was a retread. Kerry replied, Fine, but aside from Hillary Clinton, who might the nominee even be? When the donor replied that he wouldn’t rule Obama out, Kerry was incredulous. This was too much for an old-school rules-follower who believed in climbing the dues ladder rung by rung. He muttered that he’d quit politics if Obama became the Democrats’ nominee.
Kerry—whose spokesman denied this encounter years later, and who soon became encouraging of Obama’s presidential aspirations—wasn’t alone. Gore was also skeptical about Obama at first—to plenty of DC veterans the very idea that he’d be ready for the presidency was almost offensive—as were a range of governors who hadn’t met the man in person, but who figured they’d been around long enough to know he had no shot.
As the spring had progressed, Obama hadn’t exactly been inclined to agree—he was sure he could run, and certainly that he could do the job—but he remained skeptical that the timing made sense for him. He was forty-five, which put him in the same age range as Bill Clinton when he’d become president, but before that you had to go all the way back to JFK to find a winning candidate younger than his fifties. Then again, the same history showed that Democrats really only won with youthful outsiders. Still, though, he’d spent less than two years in the Senate. Bill Clinton had at least been a governor for over a decade. And the others who might run? Hillary had been first lady and a senator, Edwards had been a senator and Kerry’s running mate, and Bayh, who was still publicly considering a campaign, had been a governor and a senator, and he was the son of another famous senator, too. Hell, Bill Richardson had been a congressman, a cabinet member, and a governor. Connecticut’s Chris Dodd had been in DC for three decades—come to think of it, his dad was a well-known senator, too—and Biden even longer.
Harry Reid, however, disagreed that any of this mattered. Obama didn’t know what to expect when the leader summoned him to his office, thinking that perhaps he’d done something wrong. They’d developed a good working relationship—Obama appreciated the way Reid protected Democrats from tough votes when Republicans tried pinning them down on topics like abortion and the estate tax. Reid, meanwhile, had been convinced of Obama’s potential and impressed by his self-awareness ever since the young senator’s first floor speech about Iraq. Reid had congratulated Obama on the persuasive address as soon as it was over, and Obama replied soberly: “I have a gift, Harry,” which stuck with the Nevadan.
Now, seemingly out of nowhere, Reid told Obama he should think about running. It was obvious that Obama hated this job, he said, and “ten more years in the Senate won’t make you a better president.” He’d motivate young people, minorities, and moderate white voters, Reid said, and Chuck Schumer, another Senate operator, agreed. “If you want to be president, you can be president now,” Reid said. In the moment, Obama replied, “I don’t know, Harry, I don’t think so,” but his calculus instantly shifted—he knew something important was happening, and he’d later frequently think back on the conversation, and eventually write about it momentously. He’d assumed Reid would be with Clinton and that her fellow New Yorker Schumer would too, but now Reid told him that while he’d have to remain neutral publicly, they were worried about her baggage. None of the other potential candidates sitting in the Senate came up at all—not Dodd nor Bayh, and not Biden, either.
Still, between trips to flog the book and campaign for midterm candidates, Obama kept trying to plan for his next few years in the Senate. When he met with Montana senator Max Baucus, the top Democrat on the finance committee, about joining his panel after the midterms, Baucus replied that he wasn’t sure, since Obama might want to run for president and wouldn’t be around much in 2007. Obama laughed and agreed, but said he might also run for governor in 2010. Baucus counseled him to run for president, since opportunities to do so tend to be fleeting. Obama started hearing this argument a lot. Daschle, for one, said something similar when they talked about it, adding that staying in DC too long often just makes one cynical. Ted Kennedy’s words, in particular, stuck with Obama, who later wrote about them, too. He said that while he wouldn’t endorse anyone because he had too many friends in the race, “The power to inspire is rare. Moments like this are rare.” Kennedy said Obama didn’t have the luxury of choosing when to run, but as Durbin had argued, sometimes the moment chooses you. And if you don’t run, he said, you have to be OK with knowing the chance passed you by. Kennedy didn’t say it out loud, but Biden was an obvious counterexample—someone who’d run twenty years earlier and was still chasing the dream.
