The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  In October of 2006, The Audacity of Hope was published to a historic reception. Supporters wearing “Obama for President” paraphernalia mobbed his events, and tickets to free book readings were sold by scalpers online. With crowds overrunning the bookstores, Obama’s publicity team laid down rules: no photos, no personal conversations, and no more than three books to sign per person.

  Obama told me that he had begun to think seriously about a presidential run, but he was worried about the time away from his daughters and Michelle. He knew that he would be sacrificing his privacy and that the campaign trail would be grueling. “I just don’t know if I want the aggravation,” he told me.

  I urged him to go for it. “There’s nobody else who can break through. And even if it won’t be fun for you, and you don’t need it, the issues you care about need you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I get the argument for doing it. I just need to know that we can manage this as a family. And I need to know that I can win.”

  I was acutely conscious of how little I knew about political campaigns or his prospects against the financial juggernaut that seemed ready to line up behind Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic front-runner for 2008. I also couldn’t conceive of what it would be like to weigh pursuit of the highest office in the land against missing one’s spouse and young children. I didn’t bring up the topic again. Instead, I scrutinized his public statements just like the rest of the country. All I knew was that if he did decide to run, I wanted to be there with him.

  As I waited, I had a lurking fear that I would make a mistake that would somehow foil his ascent. Now that my intensive therapy had helped me recognize the misplaced sense of responsibility I felt for my dad’s death, I had begun experiencing telling dreams.

  In one dream, I had brought Obama to sunny Yankee Stadium for Opening Day. As we watched the Red Sox defeat the Yankees, he told me that if he raised the money that he expected during a fundraiser that night, he would announce the next day that he was running for President.

  During this dream conversation, his communications director kept calling, reminding Obama that he needed to get back to Manhattan for what the campaign was calling the “mother of all fundraisers.” Obama put his hand over the phone and said, “You’ll get me there on time, right?” I gave him a thumbs-up.

  When the game ended, we climbed the stairs to board the subway back into the city. No sooner had we started moving than I realized I had accidentally led him onto a northbound train, traveling away from Manhattan. I rushed to the conductor.

  “Sir,” I said. “I’m here with Senator Obama, the next President of the United States. Could you tell me what the next stop is?”

  “Yes,” the conductor said. “It’s Albany, New York, in three hours.”

  In my subconscious, Obama’s mistake of trusting me had cost him the presidency.

  Of course I kept this inner drama to myself, and continued to hope he would announce he was running. In November of 2006, I had just returned from a run when the phone rang.

  “I have some great news,” Obama said when I answered. I held my breath. “I wanted to call to share it with you,” he said.

  “Yes?” I managed.

  “My news is . . . WE BEAT JOHN GRISHAM!!” he exclaimed. “Audacity of Hope is number one on the New York Times bestseller list!!”

  My heart sank. He was clearly thrilled that he had edged the hugely popular writer from the top spot. But I wasn’t sure whether he took more pleasure in his book news or in messing with my head.

  “Congratulations, Barack,” I said quietly.

  Several weeks later, on December 12th, 2006, I finally got the real call. “We’re pulling the trigger on this thing,” he told me. “You can’t tell anyone. We’ll probably announce in mid-January. It’ll be fun.”

  — 16 —

  Yes We Can

  As I worked at my computer in Winthrop in the spring of 2007, I received an email that was clearly not intended for me. Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor and an Obama campaign adviser, had written:

  Martha—Isn’t this law group a disaster? As in, worse than, say, anything?

  I had met Cass once before at an academic conference. We had struck up a lively conversation, and I had learned that, like me, he was an avid squash player. But we hadn’t kept in touch.

  Cass had seemed almost incurably cheerful during our brief interaction, so the sour tone of his email surprised me. But since it was addressed to Harvard Law School professor Martha Minow, I deleted the message and went about my day. I soon realized, however, that I was not the only accidental recipient of Cass’s private lament.

  Neither Cass nor I were full-time or paid campaign advisers. We were professors who contributed policy ideas by telephone and email to candidate Obama’s campaign and who spoke publicly on his behalf. Obama’s staff had assembled a working group comprised of legal scholars to inform his views about an assortment of pressing issues, including how to go about closing the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and reversing President Bush’s licensing of torture. Obama and Cass had been colleagues at the University of Chicago, where they both taught classes on constitutional law. With a possible Obama speech on the rule of law approaching, the group had produced nothing.

  In expressing his frustration to Minow via email, Cass had mistakenly autofilled the entire senior staff of the Obama campaign. His criticism of the law group caused wide offense. Danielle Gray, the immensely capable lawyer in charge of domestic policy, took it as an insult to her leadership and forwarded the email to me, saying, “Can you believe this asshole?” A friend of hers converted part of Cass’s email into a large poster and hung it on the wall at campaign headquarters: DANIELLE GRAY . . . WORSE THAN, SAY, ANYTHING?

  I felt for Cass. Like most mortals, I had suffered my own email mishaps. Not long before, I had been set up on a blind date by Tom Keenan, a friend and fellow professor whom I had come to know through his research on mass atrocities. The date had not gone well. I wrote to Tom with a rundown of all I did not like about his friend, asking how he could have conceivably thought we might get along. I stressed that the incompatibilities were deep, signing off the email, “I think, as the old saying goes, you can only make them dress better!”

  As soon as I hit send, I heard a ping in my inbox: it was the message I had just sent, freshly delivered as an incoming email.

  Within seconds of that first ping, I heard a second. I had received a note from Tom, which simply read: “You didn’t?”

  I put my head in my hands, then slowly typed: “I did.”

  Tom and I were part of a listserv of thousands of genocide activists, scholars, and survivors, and I had accidentally sent the note savaging the blind date to that whole list. Years later, when I was serving as US Ambassador to the UN, people who had received my email would still exuberantly quote my words back to me: “You can only make them dress better!”

  After triple-checking the “To,” “Cc,” and “Bcc” fields, I wrote to Cass, telling him not to lacerate himself, as just about everyone had either made a similar technological slip or soon would. When he was next in Cambridge, we met for coffee and brainstormed about what Obama should actually propose in order to reverse Bush’s problematic policies. I also learned that, like me, he was a compulsive Red Sox fan.

  In the coming weeks, Cass gave me helpful comments on a draft of my biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, and I offered feedback on his forthcoming book, Nudge. As we got to know each other, I found myself wondering how he might respond to an article I was reading or lecture I was attending.

  When the Red Sox began their triumphant 2007 playoff run, we started texting each other managerial advice during the games: “This pitcher has nothing left—sit him down!”; or, if a runner got on base, “Send him, NOW.” At first, I didn’t attach special significance to the fact that I was taking an inordinate amount of time to craft these texts.

  I LOVED EVERYTHING ABOUT CAMPAIGNING for Obama a
nd leaped at the tasks his full-time team in Chicago assigned me. I spoke at fundraisers. I traveled to critical early primary and caucus states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada to fire up volunteers. And I went on television to debate surrogates for Hillary Clinton, the odds-on favorite among the eight candidates competing for the Democratic nomination. Not only did my values strongly align with Obama’s, but I had found the collegial community that I had hoped for when I worked in the Senate office. Cass’s email venting notwithstanding, the Obama campaign volunteers were joined by a deep sense of kinship.

  In the early months of the Democratic primary contest, Obama’s candidacy was a long shot. He still started many of his campaign rallies by acknowledging that voters sometimes confused his name with “Yo Mama” and “Alabama.” But the first sign that the campaign might be more than just a feel-good journey came in April of 2007, during the first of what campaign insiders call “mini-primaries,” moments when competing candidates announce how much money they have raised. David Plouffe, the hyper-disciplined campaign manager, had given no public indication of how we were faring, coyly waiting until Clinton publicized her numbers—$19.1 million raised in the first quarter—before releasing Obama’s total. Our campaign had raised $24.8 million, shattering all prior first-quarter records. OBAMA RAISES $25 MILLION, CHALLENGES CLINTON’S FRONT-RUNNER STATUS, read CNN’s headline. “Not bad for a rookie,” Obama emailed me.

  One of the Democratic primary’s most important moments—and one that would be a harbinger of Obama’s eventual foreign policy as President—occurred during an early debate in July of 2007. A voter who submitted his question via YouTube asked if Obama would be willing to meet without preconditions with the leaders of US adversaries such as Iran and Cuba.

  “I would,” Obama answered. “The notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them . . . is ridiculous.” Clinton disagreed with Obama on the spot, and the next day attacked his position as “irresponsible and frankly naive.” The press and pundits joined the Clinton campaign in ridiculing the novice candidate for his “gaffe.”

  “How are you holding up?” I asked Obama when we spoke the evening after the debate. My tone was that of someone gingerly checking in with a friend after a personal tragedy.

  “Never better,” he said. “This whole controversy is absurd. But it is orienting. These people really do believe that they can keep following the same herd mentality, and that they will get different results. What is it they say about the definition of insanity?” he continued. “We can’t only try diplomacy after countries have done what we want.”

  Instead of backpedaling, Obama made diplomacy and engagement with adversaries a centerpiece of his candidacy going forward. He grew more outspoken about how his views differed from conventional wisdom on foreign policy. In the week after the July 2007 debate, he publicly ruled out using nuclear weapons against terrorists, a stance that commentators ridiculed as “soft.” He also promised to pursue Osama bin Laden into Pakistan—if necessary, without permission from the Pakistani government. Clinton and Obama’s other primary opponents criticized this position as reckless.

  With the foreign policy back-and-forths heating up, the Obama campaign sought “validators” who would defend his positions in public. There were almost no takers. Indeed, when Obama wanted to argue for diplomatic engagement with Iran in a speech on terrorism, even members of our in-house foreign policy group bristled.

  I got a call from Ben Rhodes, Obama’s twenty-nine-year-old foreign policy speechwriter, who was at his wits’ end as he tried to mobilize support for his boss’s positions. Ben had been an aspiring fiction writer, but the September 11th attacks had led him to parlay his writing talents into the realm of US foreign policy. Prior to Obama’s campaign, he had spent five years working for former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton and helped draft a congressionally mandated report on how to fix US policy in Iraq. He thought Democrats lacked creativity on foreign policy and, like me, appreciated Obama for his willingness to challenge Washington orthodoxy.

  “I need your help on something,” he said when we spoke in early August of 2007. “We need to make a clean argument, pulling all the strands together, as to why we need fresh thinking.”

  Ben and I spent the next day going back and forth on an ambitious memo that the campaign would send under my name to media outlets, supporters, and donor mailing lists. Titled “Conventional Washington versus the Change We Need,” the memo took on the Bush administration, the Clinton campaign, the editorial pages of the major newspapers, and majorities in both houses of Congress—all of whom had supported the Iraq War.

  “It was Washington’s conventional wisdom that led us into the worst strategic blunder in the history of US foreign policy,” I began. Those who were attacking Obama’s foreign policy ideas, I wrote, were using the same labels—“weak, inexperienced, and even naive”—that they had used against those who had the good sense to oppose invading Iraq.

  “American foreign policy is broken,” I argued. “It has been broken by people who supported the Iraq War, opposed talking to our adversaries, failed to finish the job with al-Qaeda, and alienated the world with our belligerence.”

  The response to the memo was decidedly mixed. Despite turning down Richard Holbrooke’s job offer during the Bosnian war, I had stayed in touch with him. He had championed my genocide book and even become a friend. He was also a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter. “Sam, Sam, Sam,” he said when he called to give me his take on the memo. “Did you really think it was necessary to insult everyone in Washington?”

  While Obama became increasingly sure-footed on foreign policy, his campaign as a whole appeared to be flagging. Even his increased national exposure during the debates was not putting a dent in Clinton’s nearly 30-point lead in the national polls. By the fall of 2007, Obama’s top donors were asking where their money was going. Obama tried to calm his supporters, reminding them that he was the insurgent running against the Democratic Party favorite: “I was the unlikely one, remember?” he pointed out. “This is supposed to be hard.”

  In 2004, I had followed the primaries the old-fashioned way—by watching debates and reading national polls to figure out who was “leading.” But now that I was immersed in a campaign, I realized that victory would have little to do with these metrics.

  Obama’s campaign strategy boiled down to a simple mantra: “Iowa, Iowa, Iowa.” To win the Democratic nomination, Obama had to win the January 2008 Iowa caucus, the first primary contest, and use the momentum from that victory to leapfrog into national contention. Plouffe judged every request that came to the campaign by a simple standard: Will this help us win in Iowa?

  “We are running for President of Iowa,” I explained to Cass, whom I was now talking to several times a day.

  Obama decamped to the state for much of 2007, meeting Iowans in person and trying to convince those who had never participated in Democratic caucuses to get involved. Personally, I didn’t know whether winning Iowa was feasible, but I did recognize that it was his only viable pathway to the presidency. With three months to go before the caucus, the Des Moines Register poll—the one poll that actually did matter—had Obama trailing Clinton by seven points. I began to worry that his improbable candidacy might flame out. If Obama didn’t win in Iowa, we had no backup plan.

  While I never heard Obama express doubts about his campaign strategy, I did hear him begin to entertain the prospect of losing. In one phone call, sounding exhausted, he told me how worn down he was by being away from his wife and daughters.

  “This campaign is win-win,” Obama said. “Either we win, and that’s great. Or we lose, and I get my life back.” A few weeks later, just after an interview I had given aired on television, I was surprised to see an email pop up from Obama. “Your candidate needs to do better in the polls so you don’t have to be so defensive,” he wrote.

  I couldn’t stand the thought of a defeated Obama going back to the US Senate. And, if I were honest with m
yself, I also couldn’t bear the idea of leaving Team Obama and returning to the routine of academic life.

  FORTUNATELY, SOMETHING SHIFTED IN OBAMA during the final days before the Iowa Democratic Caucus: for the first time, he seemed to be having fun.

  Having survived what he called the “public colonoscopy” of almost a year of campaigning, he could finally focus on the two dimensions of the contest that he had a real knack for: grassroots organizing—and winning.

  The campaign’s ground game in Iowa was breathtakingly comprehensive. Seeing the young campaign staff’s relentless efforts during a trip to Iowa, I commented in my journal, “something is building, something unstoppable, something deeply affirming.” Plouffe and Iowa state director Paul Tewes had deployed 159 field organizers to all of Iowa’s 99 counties, a strategy that was then unheard of. These paid staff were supported by 10,000 volunteers—all for a state where only 124,000 caucus-goers had participated in the previous Democratic primary. Tewes and his team were so thorough that the campaign contacted one undecided voter—in person, on the phone, and through mailings—a whopping 103 times.10

  When I met Obama’s young volunteers, I rarely had the sense that they were involved in order to land Washington jobs or even to add an experience to their résumés. The Iowa field organizers pulled countless all-nighters in their genuine desire to see Obama win. And their passion began to carry over into Obama’s own approach.

  During rallies, Obama was alone among primary candidates in calling his young organizers up on stage to thank them. He became a more determined, more inspiring version of himself. As he later put it, “Iowa really belonged to those kids . . . you just didn’t want to screw up. You wanted to make sure that you were worthy of these efforts.”11

  I hadn’t known Obama long, but my experience offering edits for The Audacity of Hope had demonstrated that he could crank up his energy when facing the pressure of a deadline. David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist, likened him to Michael Jordan, who once said, “When the game gets close and something big is on the line, it all slows down, and I see things better.”