Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  Unfortunately, the phrase in question was one of Obama’s favorites—the crescendo of his red state/blue state passage in which he declared that we are one, “all of us standing up for the red, white, and blue.”

  When Favreau left, Obama was furious.

  “You know they didn’t have that in Kerry’s speech,” he said, his voice rising. “They saw it, they liked it, and now they’re stealing it!”

  No doubt he was right, but in the bigger scheme of things, it was a sacrifice worth making.

  “Listen, Barack,” I said. “They’re giving you a chance to speak to millions of people. They want to steal a few words? Let ’em. It’s a small price to pay.”

  “I guess,” he said. “But damn, why did it have to be those words? I loved the way that worked!”

  On Tuesday, the night of the speech, Obama ran into the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was scheduled to speak the next evening.

  “How much time did they give you?” Obama asked Sharpton.

  “Six minutes,” the reverend replied. “But you never know how the Lord may move me!”

  Obama was calm as he waited for his turn at the podium, chatting with Michelle and Illinois senator Dick Durbin, who would introduce him. Since the primary, Durbin had become one of Obama’s most vocal and active supporters, without displaying any trace of the resentment that senior senators often feel toward highly touted newcomers invading their turf. Gibbs and I, on the other hand, were nervous wrecks. Obama must have sensed this as we walked him to the runway for his big national debut.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, his hand on my shoulder. “I always make my marks.”

  With that, he strode off to await his cue, while Gibbs and I hustled to the floor of the arena. As Obama began to speak, there was the murmur of disinterest that greets most convention speakers. Delegates networked, stretched their legs, and sauntered to and from their various pit stops. But it didn’t take long for Obama to capture the crowd. Gone was the wooden, labored delivery that had marred his speech in early run-throughs. For the first time, he was working with a teleprompter, though by now he could deliver this speech from memory. He had internalized the words and served them up with remarkable ease and considerable energy. In both language and delivery, his stood apart from the other political speeches, free of both clichéd phrases and hidebound dogma.

  “The people I meet—in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks—they don’t expect government to solve all their problems,” Obama said. “They know they have to work hard to get ahead, and they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don’t want their tax money wasted, by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon. Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn; they know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things!”

  As Obama told his story, I saw an African American woman nearby brushing away tears. With each point and passage of the speech, delegates all around us were vigorously nodding their heads. Without prompting, folks who an hour earlier could not have picked Barack out of a crowd were joyously waving blue-and-white signs bearing his name.

  A few feet in front of Gibbs and me were George Stephanopoulos, now with ABC News, and CNN’s Jeff Greenfield, a onetime speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy. “This is a great fucking speech,” Greenfield said to George, mouthing the words to cut through the din.

  Amid this madhouse, I thought about that night, twenty years earlier, when I heard Mario Cuomo deliver his rousing, career-making keynote in San Francisco. From that moment on, Cuomo was a star, and the constant focus of speculation when presidential politics came up. The reception for Obama in Boston was at least as emphatic.

  “Barack doesn’t know it, but his life just changed in a big way,” I told Gibbs. “It’ll never be the same.” Though I didn’t say it, I had a feeling that the same could be said for Gibbs and me. We were at the beginning of what promised to be a rocket ride with our once-in-a-lifetime client.

  Susan watched the speech from a friends-and-family box. When I met up with her afterward, she was effusive. “We were in tears up here!”

  The next morning, as we walked the streets of Boston, well-wishers swarmed around Obama. A previously scheduled press breakfast was suddenly overflowing. Back home, the Sun-Times screaming headline read, “Obama Delivers!” The Tribune published an editorial entitled “The Phenom.” “Obama delivered a brilliant, passionate and heartening speech,” it read.

  • • •

  All the attention certainly wouldn’t hurt us in the Senate race—not that, by then, we needed much of a boost. While Obama was wowing the nation, Republicans were tripping all over themselves trying to find a candidate to oppose him. Former Illinois governor Jim Edgar and several other credible state Republicans opted not to step in the path of our juggernaut. Finally, in August, GOP leaders recruited a candidate from Maryland and conservative talk radio.

  Like much of the Midwest, Illinois had a history of moderate Republicanism. Alan Keyes broke that mold. The bombastic, homophobic Keyes was a favorite among right-wing evangelicals for his fiery jeremiads against liberalism in all its forms. The fact that he was African American was particularly enticing to the desperate GOP leaders, who had the preposterous notion that they could match the power of one African American candidate simply by importing one of their own.

  Within days of parachuting in to fill the Senate void, the voluble Keyes was roiling the waters, decrying Obama’s “slaveholder’s position” on abortion and insisting that Obama “countenances even the murder of living young children outside the womb.”

  The election was effectively over before it started. The first public poll showed Obama with a forty-point lead. By the second poll, his lead had stretched to fifty.

  Yet if Keyes was a dead man campaigning in the Senate race, he still had an uncanny ability to get under Obama’s skin. Intentionally mispronouncing Obama’s first name by putting the emphasis on the first syllable, Keyes was a bubbling, spewing cauldron of pompous, morally superior attacks. The Sun-Times pretty well summarized his approach in its account of one of three candidate debates: “Keyes ridiculed Obama as ignorant of the Constitution, naive on foreign policy, out of touch with African Americans descended from slaves and willing to compromise his Christian faith for politics.”

  As Keyes probably knew, all these were hot buttons for Obama, but the hottest were on race and faith. Barack had written an entire book on his own journey on race, and he took seriously the Christian faith he had consciously embraced as a young adult, even if he didn’t read its mandates the same way Keyes did. These frustrations were already evident when the two candidates crossed paths at an Indian Independence Day parade just weeks after the bombastic Keyes arrived in Illinois. News footage captured Obama jabbing the shorter Keyes in the chest with his finger in response to Keyes’s demand that Obama honor the pledge he made to Jack Ryan to participate in six debates. “I guarantee we’re going to debate,” Obama assured him. “Because you’ve been talking a lot. You’ve been talking a lot!”

  I was shocked when I watched the confrontation on the news. Why in the world would the normally unflappable Obama get into it with a guy he was going to bury at the polls? “I just went over to shake his hand,” Barack explained. “But then he started in on debates and got on my nerves. He’s an obnoxious guy, man. I just wasn’t going to let him punk me.”

  Obama would go on to win a staggering 70 percent of the vote, nearly an Illinois record, but not definitive enough for Keyes to reach out to him with the traditional concession call before he pulled up stakes and left Illinois. Obama carried all but a handful of small downstate counties and every demographic group and every section of the state.
His landslide stood out in a year when Democrats were licking their wounds, losing the presidency and seats in both houses of Congress. It wasn’t just the victory that was noteworthy, but how we won.

  The previous spring, after the primary but before Ryan’s campaign imploded, I sent Obama and the team a strategy memo entitled, “Yes We Can!”

  Obama’s record of advocacy for the middle class was powerful and important, I wrote,

  but to approach the message in a purely linear fashion, simply checking off issue boxes, would be to rob this campaign of its full power.

  Against a backdrop of the paralyzing partisanship and special interest hegemony in Washington, voters are responding to a candidate who has the integrity, temperament and proven commitment to challenge the status quo and get things done.

  Barack stands apart from the mess they see, preaching a politics of civility and community, of mutual respect and responsibility. It’s a tone distinct from the nasty and personal debate to which voters have become accustomed, and draws to Obama many voters who may not agree with him on specific issues but respond to his character and sincerity.

  Our challenge is to maintain that tone, protect that special character and sincerity and always bear in mind that the brain dead politics of Washington is as much our target as Jack Ryan.

  This was the essence of Obama’s appeal. The core of his “brand.” The entire nation had seen and responded to it in Boston. The next test would be how it, and he, would hold up in Washington.

  ELEVEN

  RELUCTANT HERO

  THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTION, we got a taste of things to come.

  Fighting through almost no sleep, Barack did two national morning shows, where the hosts informed their viewers that they were listening to a potential presidential candidate and “the next great voice in the Democratic Party.” Now reporters jammed into his campaign headquarters to hear from the Man of the Hour, and before he had spent a day in the Senate—before he had hired a staff or cast a vote—he was already fending off questions about just how long he intended to stay.

  “We’ve got to tamp this shit down,” he said, before he stepped out to meet the media. “It’s way over the top.” And he tried. He tried very hard.

  Dismissing the notion as “silly,” Obama was emphatic. “I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years, and my entire focus is making sure that I’m the best possible senator on behalf of the people of Illinois.”

  It was not a misdirection play. In November 2004, the last person on the planet who expected Barack Obama to run for president in 2008 was Barack Obama. It clearly wasn’t a lack of ambition or confidence on his part. He was a realist, and the notion of running for president so soon seemed entirely a fantasy. What seemed slightly less implausible was the notion that someone else would want to cash in on Barack’s talents and make him their number two. Yet Obama had no interest in running for vice president, even if he were offered the spot. He was not a man suited for the second chair.

  “Can you imagine me as vice president?” he asked, with a laugh, in a private conversation. “I can’t. I can’t imagine wanting that job. I’d rather come back and run for governor after a term than be somebody’s vice president. I’m not cut out for that.”

  Despite Obama’s emphatic denial at his press conference, the following Sunday he got the Question again, this time from Tim Russert on a postelection edition of Meet the Press. “Before you go, you know there’s been enormous speculation about your political future,” Russert said. “Will you serve your full six-year term as U.S. senator from Illinois?”

  “Absolutely,” Barack replied. “You know, some of this hype’s been a little overblown. It’s flattering, but I have to remind people that I haven’t been sworn in yet. I don’t know where the restrooms are in the Senate. I’m going to have to figure out how to work the phones, answer constituent mail. I expect to be in the Senate for quite some time, and hopefully I’ll build up my seniority from my current position, which I believe is 99th out of 100.”

  Only two U.S. senators in my lifetime have entered the Senate with such fanfare, Bobby Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, and both for the same reason: no one expected them to stay for long. For Obama, managing these expectations was essential. He didn’t want voters in Illinois to feel as if they were merely a launching pad to something bigger. Most important, he didn’t want to antagonize his colleagues in the Senate, who would be watching closely to see if this new media sensation had bought into the hype.

  Controlling the circus wouldn’t be easy, though. After his convention speech made him one of the hottest politicians in America, Obama’s well-reviewed but little-read autobiography, Dreams from My Father, was reissued, and he was obligated to hit the road to promote it. Letterman, The View, morning and Sunday shows—he was a ubiquitous presence in the weeks following the election. There was a practical reason for this: Obama actually needed the money. For years he had sacrificed income to public service. The Obamas lived in a four-bedroom apartment in East View Park, a comfortable but modest low-rise condominium complex in Hyde Park. They had a mortgage to pay, and each carried significant tuition debts. So the explosion in popularity meant serious income for the first time in their lives.

  Michelle wanted to move to a larger space. Barack had another idea.

  “I want Michelle and the kids to move to Washington,” he told me. “I’m going to be out there a lot and I don’t want to be away from them.”

  I told him that I thought this was a horrible idea. What message would it send to become an absentee senator, living in Washington and visiting Illinois on weekends and holidays? I suggested he and Michelle have dinner with Rahm Emanuel and his wife, Amy Rule, who might serve as a model in this matter. Rahm commuted to and from Congress, while Amy and their three kids remained in Chicago.

  “The other way doesn’t even make sense from a family standpoint,” Rahm explained to me and, later, to the Obamas. “He’d have to be here on holidays and weekends, while his family stayed back in Washington. It’s a bad idea.”

  Michelle agreed. She had her own career, friends, and family in Chicago and wasn’t eager to move. Instead, they would buy a spacious Georgian Revival mansion in Kenwood, just north of Hyde Park. Barack felt he owed Michelle the home, though he worried about the cost. After a lifetime of thriftiness, he found it difficult to adjust to the fact that he wasn’t a struggling legislator and college instructor anymore. His book was a bestseller, and by the end of the year, he had signed a lucrative deal to write three more.

  “The price of victory,” he said, sighing, though I have no doubt he considered it a fair price, indeed a bargain, for Michelle’s extraordinary forbearance and steadfast support in his political endeavors.

  • • •

  One of the other benefits of being shot out of the cannon was that a lot of talented people wanted to jump on for the ride.

  Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, had lost his seat in the same election. Now his coveted chief of staff, Pete Rouse, was a free agent. After his nearly thirty years on Capitol Hill, no one knew more about the inner workings of the Senate than Rouse. His seen-it-all, done-it-all wisdom was a highly sought-after commodity. But the gravelly voiced, bespectacled Senate guru was heartbroken by his friend Daschle’s loss. They had been together for decades, and Rouse was prepared to follow him out the door. Obama made a hard sell, telling Rouse that he wanted to be an impact player in the Senate, but without being the hot dog some feared. He felt he could make a persuasive speech and digest policy with the best of them, but knew nothing about how to put together a Senate staff or navigate the plays and players that awaited him. He needed a Sherpa to guide him, and Pete was the very best. There was one more thing, Obama told his prized recruit: “You may have heard that I’m planning to run for president in 2008. I can give you an absolute assurance that’s not true. I have two kids who are too yo
ung for that, and a wife who wouldn’t tolerate it. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  So Rouse, who was nearing sixty, put his own plans on hold for this promising newcomer, as he would so many times in the years to come. He became to Obamaworld what George Bailey was to his neighbors in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. No matter how much he wanted to leave town, Rouse found that his sense of duty always kept him at Barack’s side. Rouse, who made a short-term commitment to help set up the operation, would work for Obama for eight years.

  Pete became the lynchpin of an extraordinary Senate staff. Gibbs, though a generation younger, also knew his way around the Senate and the town. In addition to his stint with Kerry and others, Gibbs had been the campaign communications director for Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, though Robert’s job there consisted largely of keeping the acid-tongued, irascible Senate elder out of the news. Obama also recruited Alyssa Mastromonaco, who had run the scheduling and advance operation for Kerry’s presidential campaign. And he apparently forgot that Jon Favreau was the talented young Kerry speechwriter who bore the bad news in Boston when Team Kerry swiped Barack’s favorite speech line; Favreau joined the staff as chief speechwriter. Obama was assembling a team of old pros and young talent that could carry him far.

  For me, Obama’s swearing in was a sublime moment. We had come a long way together since our first conversations back in the summer of 2002, when both of us faced doubts about the future. As I watched from the Senate gallery, I felt I had truly helped do something meaningful. Just the sight of this tall, elegant African American man walking down the center aisle of a chamber filled with white faces represented an important change. After the ceremony, Barack signed my blue ticket in silver marker: “To Axe, Here because of you!”