Game Change

by John Heilemann

  BY THE END OF November 2006, Obama could see a route to beating Clinton. Not an easy highway to navigate, by any means, but at least one clearly marked and mapped. And he could also see that the biggest roadblock ahead of him was another woman entirely.

  From the get-go, Michelle Obama had made it plain that she didn’t want Barack to run for president. She was wary beyond words, for a long time refusing to discuss the concept, even with her closest friends. The citation of spousal hesitation is, of course, a timeworn trope in American presidential politics. Every male candidate loftily affirms that he couldn’t possibly go ahead without his wife’s full support, but as a matter of course, Y-chromosome ambition trumps X-chromosome reluctance. Really, it’s no contest.

  But with Barack and Michelle, it was. Obama adored his wife, genuinely believed she was his better half, that he’d be lost without her. He didn’t even bother to pretend that he enjoyed anyone else’s company remotely as much as he relished being with her and their daughters. As the midterms approached, he told his advisers more than once, I’m not doing this if Michelle’s not comfortable, and she’s certainly not there yet.

  She had always been a gut-level skeptic about the gaga-ness around her husband. In the wake of the drooling adulation poured on him after his convention speech, she suspected that he would be treated like “the flavor of the month,” a passing fancy soon discarded by a fickle political culture. As she watched people fawning over him at his swearing-in to the Senate, she said dryly to a reporter, “Maybe one day he’ll do something to merit all this attention.”

  She had no doubt that day would come. Her confidence in Barack was profound and unshakable. But in the meantime, she was perfectly miserable with him being in the Senate. The Robinson family had been close-knit: a homemaker mother, a municipal-employee father, and a basketball-star brother who ate dinner every night together with her in a one-bedroom brick bungalow on the South Side of Chicago. They were immersed in one another’s daily lives, the highs and lows, the successes and traumas of childhood and adolescence. She wanted that badly for her daughters, too, and she wasn’t getting it. She hadn’t signed up for a commuter marriage. She was laboring to make it work, but when she was being honest, she admitted that she hated it; she was lonely too much of the time. There had been strains in their marriage back in 2000, when Barack had run unsuccessfully for Congress. Now she was being asked to talk about his running for president—and it felt like the rug was about to be pulled out from under her even more violently than it had been already.

  One night midway through 2006, over a four-hour dinner with Jarrett, Michelle let her frustrations pour out. “This is hard,” she said. “Really hard.” Jarrett decided not to even mention the presidential chatter. Michelle was in a bad place emotionally. No point in making it worse.

  But following the midterms, Michelle had no choice but to grapple with the subject. After that first November meeting in Axelrod’s office, the Obamas, Jarrett, and Marty Nesbitt went for dinner at Coco Pazzo, an Italian joint they loved. Michelle was going on and on about her issues. She had a lot of questions—and also a lot of fears. She’d been worried about Barack’s safety since he entered the Senate. Now he would be an even bigger target, and so would she and the girls. Could the campaign keep their family safe?

  The atmosphere was tense. Finally, Jarrett interrupted and said, “Let’s try this from a different perspective. Michelle, let’s say Barack answers all your questions to your full satisfaction and he’s got an answer for every one of them. Are you in?”

  “I’m in a hundred and ten percent,” Michelle said. But she wasn’t going to let her husband get away with the “We’ll figure it out” bluster that he was prone to employ over contentious matters. Turning to Barack, she said, “You’re going to be really specific with me. You’re going to tell me exactly how we’re going to work it out.”

  All the stress seemed to drain right out of Obama’s posture. His shoulders slackened, his face softened. It was the first time he’d ever heard Michelle say that she could get behind his running. Her list, he knew, would be long and involved, but it would be finite—a mountain that he could scale.

  Most of the questions on Michelle’s list involved their daughters. How are you going to continue being a father to them? How many days will you be home? How are you going to communicate with the girls when you’re away? How often are you going to talk to them? Are you going to come to parent-teacher conferences? What about recitals? But other questions were directed elsewhere. How are you going to take care of your health? Are you going to quit smoking? (That was a deal-breaker, she claimed.) And then there was this: How are we, as a family, going to withstand the personal attacks that will certainly be coming?

  Barack knew Michelle was right to be worried about the hammer that would fall on both of them if he ran. But he believed it was possible to rise above the distortions and j’accuses that had turned politics into the sort of unedifying blood sport from which so many Americans recoiled. Obama was also resolute about not attempting to turn the onslaught against his opponents. Oh, he’d throw punches when it was necessary—he would never shy away from a vigorous fight. But if he had to become just another hack, gouging out eyes and wallowing in the mud to do this thing, then it wasn’t worth doing. If he got in, he told Michelle and his brain trust, he would be in with both feet, for sure. “But I’m also going to emerge intact,” he said. “I’m going to be Barack Obama and not some parody.”

  It was an extraordinary statement, the kind that few standard-issue pols would think to make when planning a long-shot adventure with their advisers. What gave him such an assured posture was his experience of the past two years—an experience that was without precedent in modern American politics. In his brief time on the national scene, Obama had compiled a staggering succession of big-stage triumphs that took the breath away. The convention speech. The Africa trip. The book tour. Appearances on Oprah and on the covers of Time and Newsweek. The reception he’d received from the media had been uniformly glowing, and that fed Obama’s sense that he could somehow transcend the horror show. Maybe that was insanely naive. Maybe it was incandescently mature. But at that moment, he had no reason to believe that it was anything but perfectly sound.

  OBAMA FLEW TO ORANGE COUNTY, California, on December 1 to take part in an event at the Saddleback megachurch run by Rick Warren, the bestselling author of The Purpose Driven Life. It was World AIDS Day, and Warren had invited Obama to appear alongside Republican senator Sam Brownback of Kansas. Brownback, speaking first, remarked to Obama, “Welcome to my house,” prompting peals from the crowd. When Obama’s turn came, he remarked, “There is one thing I’ve gotta say, Sam, though: This is my house, too. This is God’s house.” He quoted Corinthians and advocated the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV. At the end, the huge crowd of conservative Evangelicals awarded him a standing ovation.

  Saddleback was the start of a feverish two-week sprint before Obama would fly off on his family’s annual holiday in Hawaii, where he planned to make his final decision about running. On December 4, he traveled to New York for a meeting in the offices of billionaire financier George Soros with a dozen of New York’s heaviest Democratic fund-raisers. From there he proceeded to Washington and sought the counsel of a pair of the capital’s proverbial wise men, one a Republican and one a Democrat, one a stranger and one a friend.

  The Republican was General Colin Powell, who met with Obama at his office in Alexandria, Virginia. Obama wanted to know about Powell’s flirtation with running for the presidency in 1995. Why had he decided against it?

  “It was pretty easy,” Powell said. “I’m not a politician.”

  For the next hour, Obama quizzed Powell about foreign policy—and also about race. Did the general think the country was ready for an African American president? I think it might have been ready when I was thinking about running, Powell told Obama. It’s definitely more ready now.

  Powell had his own set of quest
ions for Obama, but the main one was: Why now? You don’t have much of an experience base, Powell pointed out. You’re new to the Senate, you have an interesting but limited resume from before that. So, again, why now?

  I think I might have what the country needs today, not four or eight years down the line, Obama responded. I think it might be my time.

  The second wise man was Daschle. Like Bill Daley, Daschle knew the Clintons well and wasn’t afraid of them. Didn’t much like them, either. He considered Hillary an icy prima donna; her husband (who after exiting the White House often called Daschle, imploring him for help in burnishing his legacy), a narcissist on an epic scale; the dynamic between the couple, bizarre; their treatment of their friends, unforgivably manipulative and disloyal. For Daschle, Clinton fatigue wasn’t simply a political analysis. It was personal. He was bone-weary of the duo and thought that Obama could and should take them on.

  Daschle met Obama at one of his favorite restaurants, an Italian place downtown near his Washington office. The owner set up a table for them in the kitchen so their privacy would be preserved. For three hours they sat drinking red wine and talking, Obama asking question after question: about money, about the microscope he’d be under if he ran, about how great a liability his threadbare CV might be. Daschle reflected on his own contemplation of a White House bid in 2004; he’d decided against it, certain he’d have another chance to run; but now, having lost his Senate seat, that option seemed foreclosed.

  Don’t assume that you’ll get a second window, Daschle told Obama. And don’t minimize the salience of being “un-Washington”—or ignore the fact that if you wait, the next time around you won’t be un-Washington anymore.

  At the end of the meal, the two men embraced, and then Daschle headed home. His wife, Linda, asked if Tom was planning to endorse Obama if he ran. Daschle said, “What the hell—yeah, I am.”

  That weekend, Obama went on to New Hampshire, his feet making contact with Granite State soil for the first time in his life—an incredible fact for a man on the verge of entering a presidential race. The crowds that met him in Portsmouth and Manchester were, as usual, large and loud and lusty, listening eagerly as he invoked Martin Luther King, Jr., and his longtime pastor in Chicago, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But more remarkable was the 150-strong flock of reporters, including many national big feet and thumb-suckers, credentialed for the festivities.

  Obama returned to Chicago from New Hampshire, but he wasn’t quite finished with his hyperdrive round of buzz-building. He’d begun his sprint at Saddleback with an act of outreach to one religious constituency and now he ended with a play for another: the nation’s pro-football fanatics, who were greeted with the sight of Obama at the start of the December 11 ABC broadcast of Monday Night Football. Besuited, looking solemn, seated behind a desk, an American flag to his left, Obama began, “Good evening. I’m Senator Barack Obama. I’m here tonight to answer some questions about a very important contest that’s been weighing on the minds of the American people. This is a contest about the future. A contest between two very different philosophies. A contest that will ultimately be decided in America’s heartland . . . Tonight, I’d like to put all the doubts to rest. I’d like to announce to my hometown of Chicago and all of America that I am ready.” With that, Obama placed a Chicago Bears hat on his head and continued, “For the Bears to go all the way, baby!” Then, with a mile-wide grin across his face punctuating a performance of unchecked charisma, he chanted the descending opening bars—“Dah, dah, dah, DAH!”—of the Monday Night Football theme.

  TO MANY, ESPECIALLY THOSE in the Clinton camp, Obama’s early-December itinerary was proof positive that he was running. But for all the outward signs to the contrary, Obama was still undecided. In Washington, he’d met with a group of his old friends from Harvard. They chewed over the prospect for a while, weighing the various points and possibilities. Eventually, someone observed, We’ve been in this room for two hours talking about why you should run, and no one has mentioned that you’re black.

  While it was true that Obama had rarely considered, or let himself consider, his skin pigmentation as a possible impediment to his running (or winning), race was never really absent from his thinking. Now, spontaneously, and quite unexpectedly, he found himself speaking passionately about what it would mean to women in black churches who had worked so long and so hard to see their kids grow up safe and have big dreams in inner-city communities.

  He returned to that motif on December 13, when he and his advisers gathered again in Axelrod’s conference room for a final meeting before the Obamas took off for Hawaii. “What exactly do you think you can accomplish by getting the presidency?” Michelle asked him pointedly.

  “Well,” Obama said, “there are a lot of things I think I can accomplish, but two things I know. The first is, when I raise my hand and take that oath of office, there are millions of kids around this country who don’t believe that it would ever be possible for them to be president of the United States. And for them, the world would change on that day. And the second thing is, I think the world would look at us differently the day I got elected, because it would be a reaffirmation of what America is, about the constant perfecting of who we are. I think I can help repair the damage that’s been done.”

  Like Obama, his nascent campaign brain trust rarely brought up the subject of race during the deliberations over whether he should run. In part, that was because of a combination of discomfort, confidence, and hope: discomfort in that almost all of them were white and felt presumptuous addressing the issue; confidence in Axelrod, who had a well-earned reputation for steering black candidates across the country to victory with significant white support; and hope that the post-racial appeal that Obama already exhibited would prove to be durable, even transcendent.

  Yet the near-silence on the topic also owed something to Obama’s combination of optimism and fatalism about it: either the country was ready now for an African American president, he said, or it wouldn’t be in his lifetime.

  Obama’s advisers had entered the room still dubious that he would run. But now it was clear that the probabilities had shifted. For one thing, Michelle’s opposition had eased; that much was obvious. At one point, when Barack went outside to have a smoke, someone brought up again the issue of his personal safety. “Well, I’ve already gone out and increased our life insurance on him,” Michelle said drolly, with a sly smile. “You just can’t be too careful!”

  In Hawaii, Barack and Michelle took long walks on Waikiki Beach, hammering out the final items on her questionnaire. (He gave in on everything.) One night close to New Year’s Eve, he called Jarrett and told her that his decision, in effect, was made. “This is pretty much done,” he said.

  But it wasn’t. On January 2, just back from Hawaii, Obama showed up unannounced in Axelrod’s office, wearing blue jeans and a White Sox cap, having come right from the gym—and expressing renewed ambivalence about undertaking the race. “Being Barack Obama isn’t a bad gig,” Obama said. I don’t need this to validate myself; I get plenty of validation as it is; and I can do some great things from where I am. I like being with my friends, I like being able to watch a ball game, and you guys have made it very clear what the cost of this is going to be.

  “I know there are a lot of people who want you to do this,” Axelrod replied, “but you don’t have to do this.” Having been acquainted with his share of presidential candidates, Axelrod knew that the ones who fared well were those who were psychically compelled to be president immediately.

  “I think you have ambition, but not that kind of pathological drive,” Axelrod went on. “I’ve worked with Hillary; I know she’ll drive herself as hard as is physically possible, because she has to be president, she wants to be, she needs it. I don’t sense that in you.”

  Obama didn’t really sense it, either. But he rejected the notion that running for president was a task suited only to the borderline mentally ill. What he knew about himself was that, at his core,
he was competitive enough to find the requisite motivation. He trusted the logic that had led him to this point, his perception of where the country was and the work that needed doing. He had come too far to turn back now. The talk with Axelrod constituted his final gut check. And although his insides remained queasy, his head was free of doubt—and in the Obama interior chain of command, the head always outranked the gut.

  Obama had one other thing to check. A few days later, he and Michelle secretly flew down to Nashville to have lunch with Al and Tipper Gore. Obama admired Gore immensely. He hoped that down the line he could secure the former vice president’s endorsement. But he also knew that the one thing that could kill his candidacy in the crib was an unexpected entry into the race by Gore—which more than a few Democratic insiders in January 2007 still considered a live possibility.

  So while the two couples engaged in a general discussion about how to shield a candidate’s children from the sharp glare of a presidential race, Obama asked Gore a more pointed question: Is there any chance you’ll run?

  Not a chance, Gore made clear. And Tipper was equally emphatic: her family, and her husband, would not be making this race.

  Obama and Michelle finished up their lunch and flew back to Chicago. The next Monday, Obama said to his team, “All right. Let’s do it. What’s next?”

  HE FORMALLY LAUNCHED HIS campaign six weeks later, on February 10, 2007, on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. Seventeen thousand people packed into the town square on one of those Midwestern winter days so frigid—the high was seven degrees—that every color seems brighter and the horizon line so sharp it could cut glass. Michelle suggested moving the event indoors so that families wouldn’t risk frostbite for their kids. But the alternative venue, the Prairie Capital Convention Center, was a sterile, hulking vault, and Axelrod was intent on creating a magical moment and capturing the pretty pictures for use in future ads. Twenty thousand hand warmers were secured and a heater installed in the lectern to keep Obama toasty enough to function.