Barack shook off the question.
“I will serve out my full six-year term. You know, Tim, if you get asked enough, sooner or later you get weary and you start looking for new ways of saying things,” he replied. “But my thinking has not changed.”
So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?
“I will not,” Obama said.
Yet things had changed, and even as he gave Russert another firm no, Barack was positioning himself to seize the moment if and when it came. He had in hand the memo Rouse, Gibbs, and I had sent outlining a program in 2006 that would keep his options open for 2008.
“If making a run in 2008 is at all a possibility, no matter how remote,” we had written, “it makes sense to begin talking and making decisions about what you should be doing ‘below the radar’ in 2006 to maximize your ability to get out in front of this presidential wave should it emerge and should you and your family decide it is worth riding.” We had offered him an opt out, and he had driven right through it, authorizing a series of activities aimed at subtly nurturing the possibility of a candidacy.
Obama already had committed to aggressive travel in 2006 to raise money and build support for Democratic Senate candidates, a strategy designed to burnish his reputation as a “team player” within the caucus and earn chits with his colleagues. Now we set in motion our plan to expand Barack’s trips to include meetings with key political players, donors, and local media. We also moved to enhance his political and policy teams, increase his personal fund-raising goals, and seize timely opportunities to spell out an alternative vision for the Democratic Party.
I was skeptical. Hillary was vacuuming up dollars and political commitments, and many other potential candidates already were barnstorming the country, competing for the meager leavings from her table. Most of all, I doubted that Barack, with a young family, would decide that this was the right time to commit to all the hardships of a presidential candidacy.
For my part, I had a bunch of new projects in 2006 that were more immediate and realer than the remote prospect of an Obama presidential candidacy. One of the most satisfying began with a phone call from an unlikely source: my sister, Joan.
Saint Joan, as we sometimes call her, has always been involved in good deeds. An educational psychologist, she is a hero to families around Boston for the guidance and advocacy she has provided for countless kids with learning disabilities. Yet, save for her days as an antiwar protester in college, Joan was never much of a political activist until she took an interest in town government and school board elections in Arlington, the suburb just northwest of Boston where her family lived. Warm, effusive, and relentless, Joan committed her nights and weekends to the school battles and developed into a master field organizer. Her talents had not escaped the notice of aspiring candidates, and now one had stolen her heart.
“Dave, I never do this,” she said. “But I just met a guy you have to work for. His name is Deval Patrick and he’s running for governor here. I don’t know if he has a chance, but he’s such a good guy. He’s progressive. He’s idealistic. He’s really inspiring. You would love him.”
I knew a little about Patrick and the Massachusetts race. Deval was an African American who had led the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department during the Clinton years. Friends who had worked with him were effusive in their praise. However, the smart money dismissed Patrick, little known to voters in a state with a relatively small black population, as largely irrelevant to the gubernatorial race. Mitt Romney was retiring after one term to run for president, so, in that sense, the race appeared wide open. Yet Tom Reilly, the state’s attorney general, had a huge leg up on the Democratic nomination. If voters preferred an outsider, another rumored candidate, a venture capitalist and education reformer named Chris Gabrieli, could bring significant personal resources to the race. The Beacon Hill insiders were disdainful of Patrick’s prospects, as the relative unknown spent a great deal of time and money building a grassroots field operation and meeting with local activists like my sister.
Joan’s enthusiastic report on Patrick piqued my interest, and the next day, entirely by coincidence, I got a call from Doug Rubin, a senior adviser for Patrick’s campaign. Rubin didn’t know my sister; his inquiry about whether our firm would take a meeting with Deval had been prompted entirely by our role in the Obama campaign. “This must be kismet,” I told him, relating Joan’s call.
The more I learned of Deval’s compelling story, the more I was drawn to him. He was a native of Chicago’s South Side. His father, Pat, a saxophone player for jazz icon Sun Ra, had abandoned the family, walking out despite the plaintive pleas of his four-year-old son. Deval, his mother, and sister shared a room in his grandparents’ small tenement apartment, where some nights he got to sleep in the bunk bed and other nights he took his turn on the floor. Then Deval’s life took a dramatic turn when a Chicago public school teacher nominated him for a scholarship at the prestigious Milton Academy in Massachusetts. Milton was a world (maybe a couple of worlds) apart from the one into which Deval had been born. He showed up at Milton dressed in a windbreaker because he had been informed that students were required to wear jackets to class. Notwithstanding the culture gap, Deval excelled and won scholarships to Harvard College and then its eminent law school. As a Justice Department official during the Clinton administration, Deval had proved himself a fierce and able advocate for civil rights, sometimes locking horns with the political hands in the White House who preferred a more muted approach. He went on to break through corporate barriers by becoming the chief counsel first for Texaco and then for Coca-Cola.
Obama knew Patrick well through legal circles. “He’s a great guy,” Barack told me. “You’ll really like him. I don’t know what kind of chance he has, though. Seems like a tough road.”
Whatever the odds, once Plouffe and I had traveled to Massachusetts to meet Deval, my desire to do the race was unequivocal. He was genuine, passionate, and inspiring. In Deval’s campaign, I had found another, exhilarating opportunity to tilt at a windmill and break down a barrier.
For all their superficial similarities and shared ideals, Deval and Barack were very different people. Barack, tall, regal, and blessed with a mellifluous baritone, was more reserved and self-possessed. Deval, half a head shorter with a voice several octaves higher, was naturally warm, open, and accessible. Barack made an early commitment to a career in politics. Deval came to it much later, after his government and private-sector career, and there was a charming innocence to his candidacy. Deval cheerfully endorsed gay marriage before it was fashionable, and a proposed wind farm in the waters off the coast of Cape Cod—an irritant to many of the Cape’s prominent denizens, including the revered and powerful senior senator Ted Kennedy. “Look, I believe in these things and I’m going to run on what I believe,” Deval explained to us when some of the prickly issues came up for discussion. “If that costs me the job, I can live with that.”
Deval and I clicked in every way, collaborating on a series of ads, scripted and unscripted, designed to bring his ideals and vision for Massachusetts to life. Like Barack, he was an eloquent and evocative writer, who drafted his own, soaring speeches, including a stem winder he delivered to the state Democratic convention. “It’s time to put our cynicism down,” he implored the delegates. “Put it down. Stand with me and take that leap of faith. Because I’m not asking you to take a chance on me. I’m asking you to take a chance on your own aspirations. Take a chance on hope.”
Take a chance on hope. In times of disillusionment and doubt, it was such a timely and affirming message. In its freshness, authenticity, and idealism, the Deval Patrick campaign was the spiritual twin of the Obama for Senate campaign. Yet, in its execution, the Patrick campaign was far more advanced. It drew an incisive corps of young insurgents, some of whom were refugees from Howard Dean’s failed presidential bid. As such, they had glimpsed the potential of the Intern
et, and tech-savvy Massachusetts proved to be fertile ground for their new, expansive digital strategies. Plouffe took copious notes that would pay off down the line.
• • •
The other big project we took on in 2006 was for Rahm. Nancy Pelosi, vying to become the first woman to serve as Speaker, had drafted Rahm to chair the DCCC and spearhead the party’s effort to recapture the House. Rahm’s legendary fund-raising prowess, shrewd political instincts, and almost pathological competitiveness made him the perfect choice. After a few weeks of playing hard to get, Rahm cut a deal and accepted the DCCC post, which he knew would consume him for two years and take time away from his young family. In return, he demanded a coveted seat on the House Ways and Means Committee and a place on Pelosi’s leadership team if the Dems took back the House.
However reluctant Rahm might have been to take the job, he attacked it with his typical manic energy. He spent months recruiting top-notch candidates in swing districts, love-bombing them with visits, e-mails, and follow-up calls. When Heath Shuler, a former NFL quarterback from western North Carolina, initially refused Rahm’s draft appeal because he worried about being away from his small children, Rahm called him repeatedly from his own family events. “I’m at a soccer game with my kids. Just wanted to let you know that,” Rahm would say, and hang up. “I’m at a kindergarten play now. Talk to you soon,” he’d bark. After ten of these calls, Shuler finally surrendered. Then, after he’d rounded up an all-star slate of challengers, the relentless Rahm spent hours each day overseeing their progress and raising money for an independent campaign to support their candidacies. My firm agreed to help shape strategy and produce party-sponsored ads in a handful of these pivotal districts. As part of the deal, and in a nod to a friendship of more than twenty years’ duration, I threw in therapy calls with Rahm at all hours of the day or night, which I knew I would have received in any case.
We took on one other assignment in 2006 that was a labor of loyalty and love—one that would provoke one of the few angry exchanges I ever had with Barack Obama.
My close friend and former business partner, Forrest Claypool, was rattling one of the few pillars still standing from the old Chicago Democratic machine by challenging a longtime incumbent for president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, a position second in power only to mayor.
It wasn’t the first time Forrest had shaken things up. When Daley appointed him to head the Chicago Park District in 1993, Forrest slashed a bloated bureaucracy, fired politically connected slackers, and used the proceeds to enrich park programs. Daley saw the parks as vital civic assets and neighborhood anchors, and tolerated Forrest’s reforms despite wails of discontent from patronage-hungry ward committeemen. Then, in 2001, when Forrest decided to challenge a veteran ward heeler with ties to the Daley family for a seat on the county board, the mayor fought unsuccessfully to stop him.
Now, after four years as a reform voice on the board, Forrest was challenging one of Daley’s longtime African American allies, John Stroger, for county board president. Forrest saw it as a chance to reform another bloated, underperforming government body. Yet the mayor and his organization were hell-bent on defending their man. Yes, Stroger, seventy-six, was well past his prime, and his prime wasn’t all that impressive, but he had earned their fidelity with his own, having supported young Rich Daley for mayor over Harold Washington—the only black ward committeeman to do so—just as he would back Dan Hynes over Obama in the Senate primary two decades later.
I respected Daley and valued our relationship, but I also believed deeply in Forrest, his passion and integrity. I knew the difference he could make to fix an antiquated, corrupt system that, among its other responsibilities, administered the county’s health care system for the poor. If he succeeded there, he would be well positioned for higher office in the future. So I worked pro bono for his insurgent campaign, and Forrest slowly gained momentum—with the support of the local newspapers, government reform groups, and a few politicians like Rahm who were willing to buck City Hall. Still, there was one endorsement I felt could make the difference.
I knew Barack admired Forrest and didn’t think much of Stroger, and given Stroger’s snub in the Senate race, Obama owed him nothing. Yet Obama also believed that to side openly against the highest-ranking African American in Chicago would be a needless affront to the community. Under pressure from both camps, Barack wearied of my repeated appeals to his conscience.
“David, stop it. Just knock it off,” he said with irritation, when I called him in Washington to make a last attempt to sway him. “You’re not thinking about my interests here. I haven’t endorsed Stroger, even though Emil Jones has been pounding on me to do it. It’s only out of respect for Forrest, and you, that I’ve stayed out of it. And by the way, Forrest didn’t endorse me when I was running. I didn’t push him. He had his own politics, and I understood. So stop pushing me. I don’t want to have this discussion again.”
Obama’s flash of anger was extremely rare, and thus jarring. I had clearly touched a nerve by suggesting that his neutrality was somehow a dereliction of his responsibilities and, more critically, an abandonment of principle. I was in the wrong there. Blair Hull had given twenty-one thousand dollars to Forrest in his first run for office, so, partial as he was to Barack, Forrest had made no endorsement in Barack’s Senate race. When I related my conversation with Barack to Forrest, he understood. “That’s fair,” he said, with a shrug. “I totally get that. He doesn’t owe me a thing.”
Forrest progressed, even without Barack’s backing, and was surging a week before the primary when we learned that Stroger had been rushed to the hospital. Though the extent of his condition was initially shrouded in secrecy, he had apparently suffered a stroke. Suddenly, the dynamic had changed. “It’s over,” Forrest said glumly. “There is going to be a rallying around John now.” Indeed, Daley, Senator Durbin, and other party leaders seized the moment. They urged a vote for Stroger as he waged his valiant struggle, and confidently assured the public that he would return. He never did. The ailing county board president narrowly won the primary in absentia, only to be replaced on the ticket a few months later by his son Todd, one of the lesser lights on a dimly lit City Council. John Stroger never again appeared in public and died two years later. Obama publicly declared on the eve of the primary that he would vote for Forest, but it was too late. I will never know if an earlier announcement might have made the difference in a tight race, but in terms of his own political considerations, he clearly made a shrewd assessment and, ultimately, the right decision.
Sometime in the spring or early summer of 2006, I got a call from Barack.
“I just had the strangest meeting with Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer,” he said. “I didn’t know why they were calling me over there. Turns out they wanted to tell me I should run for president.”
Though Schumer signaled he couldn’t publically oppose Clinton, neither he nor Reid thought Hillary could win. They saw her “yes” vote on the Iraq invasion as an albatross that would sink her, and they worried that their Senate candidates could be sucked down with her in the undertow. As a compelling new face, Barack was untainted by the war or by hostile sentiments aimed at Washington, and had proven to have a broad appeal that could expand the electoral map and redound to the party’s benefit in November.
“They pushed me pretty hard to think about it. I still think it’s far-fetched, but it was interesting that they felt as strongly as they do,” Barack told me. “Interesting” was a euphemism. “Intriguing,” perhaps “tantalizing,” even “incredible” would have better suited the moment. If two of the most powerful Democrats in Washington thought he was ready to be president, and could win, who was he to dismiss the idea?
Barack was a long way from overtly signifying his interest, but he was certainly creating excitement wherever he went. Both the growing sense of outrage over the rancid politics of the nation’s capital and the sputtering war
effort were creating a growing appetite for change, particularly among Democrats. Even for the famously chill Obama, this surprising encouragement from unexpected quarters had to be intoxicating. Still, in the spring of 2006, less than a year and a half into his Senate term, the notion seemed implausible.
I was so certain that Obama would not run for president in 2008 that I had begun to plan a hiatus from campaigns. I already had opened informal chats with friends in journalism about writing occasional campaign analyses of the 2008 race, rather than participating in it. Combining my passions for journalism and film production, I also had launched a documentary project about Father Michael Pfleger, the fiery, white Catholic priest of St. Sabina Church on the black South Side. Through sheer force of personality, Pfleger had revived a dying parish and the impoverished neighborhood around it. But his tactics were those of an organizer, and he was as brash in challenging the conservative archdiocese as he was in confronting local street gangs and drug dealers. I was convinced that, despite his accomplishments, Pfleger would be forced to leave the parish he had led for a generation, and I knew this painful drama would make for a great film.
There was another reason I was making alternative plans. Four of my former clients were already at the starting gate for the presidential race: Clinton, Edwards, Vilsack, and Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Edwards, given our rocky past, was a nonstarter. Then there was the odds-on favorite, Hillary, but the idea of working with Mark Penn (her chief strategist) again was unthinkable. I already had informed my partners and staff that I was planning to sit out 2008. The only thing that would change my thinking was if Obama were to run.
Believer: My Forty Years in Politics Page 22