Believer: My Forty Years in Politics

by David Axelrod

  The other piece we needed to get right was the communications team that would be dealing with the news media. With each passing election, this aspect of campaigning had become more frenetic and demanding. When I was a young reporter, we would write stories for the next day’s editions, giving us time to report and the campaigns time to respond to our questions. The growth of cable television along with the emergence of the Internet changed all that. Now news was breaking minute to minute, from both traditional outlets and lone-wolf bloggers whom we’d never even met.

  Gibbs would be at the center of managing this maelstrom, but we needed to build a team around him. At Rouse’s urging, the campaign hired Dan Pfeiffer, an old Daschle staffer who had been communications director for Senator Evan Bayh before Bayh pulled the plug on his own presidential candidacy. Pfeiffer was hired to travel with Obama while Robert ran the communications operation at headquarters, but they would soon trade places. Gibbs, never much for writing memos, became restless in the office while the boss and the action were out on the road, and Pfeiffer, accustomed to the planning role, easily slipped into the desk job.

  Plouffe assumed his new command with the steely determination of a battlefield general. He promoted a genuine esprit de corps among the troops assembling in Chicago—a band of agile, young, cyber-savvy renegades determined to reinvent campaigns.

  Still, as much as he encouraged innovative thinking, David also established firm control. When, early on, I was quoted on a campaign matter, Plouffe confronted me. “You have to clear your interviews with the campaign in advance,” he said. I was incredulous. I had been dealing with the news media my whole life. Hell, I was one of them! Now I needed clearance for my conversations with reporters I had known for decades? It was particularly galling coming from Plouffe, my former lieutenant at AKPD—but that was the point, of course. David was sending me a message. He was no longer simply a partner in my firm. He was the campaign manager and, as such, the final authority. It was a transition for me, having spent a lifetime bucking authority. The dustup—one of the few we Davids would have—came and went, and I pretty much continued to work in my own fashion. Plouffe gave me a wide berth to direct the message strategy of the campaign, but I took care to keep the campaign posted on my conversations.

  Even as we built the team and established our headquarters in Chicago, we also had to move forward with preparations for a February 10 announcement. Alyssa’s advance team had scouted several sites, but I was partial to the heavy Old State Capitol in Springfield, with its immense columns and rich history. It was there that Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, prepared for the presidency and plotted his strategy to save the Union. What better site for Obama to announce his candidacy? And what better town than Springfield, where Barack had forged so many bipartisan coalitions for progress during his years in the legislature? Our team felt we could draw a large crowd there, which was a first, critical test of strength. Also the small-town setting of Springfield would resonate with the people next door in Iowa better than a Chicago backdrop.

  Before we got there, however, we had some important matters to resolve. One was to develop a distinctive logo for the campaign. Since the logo would have to travel from print to video, I tasked the folks at Crimson Creative Group, a Chicago edit house where I finished my ads, to come up with options. Colin Carter, a splendid editor with whom I had collaborated for more than fifteen years, owned Crimson, and had some creative young designers on staff. I was looking for something that would transcend the usual political iconography and would speak to a movement for change, not just a campaign for office. As a starting point, I showed them the blue Harold Washington button from 1983 with the white lines that hinted at a sunrise. “I want something with a feel like this,” I told Colin and his team. “Something hopeful. Something that speaks to a new beginning.”

  A few days later, they came back with a dozen imaginative options. Yet one immediately caught my eye. It was a round insignia with a red-and-white-striped ocean and a white sun rising on a sky-blue horizon. It was exactly what I had hoped for. Even though it employed traditional colors, it didn’t look like a political insignia. Without Obama’s name or a word of copy, the image conveyed so much. I could see it becoming the badge of the movement we hoped to build. As I circulated the proposed logo, however, I confronted a critical dissenter: the candidate.

  “That’s awful! It’s so corporate!” Obama said, groaning. I pushed back, reminding him of his reservations about the “Yes We Can” tag line in 2004. “Trust me a little,” I said. “Well,” he said, with a frown. “We’re on a short turnaround. I guess we can live with it for a while and see how people react.”

  Neither of us could have predicted that the sunrise logo soon would become as hip and ubiquitous as Apple’s iconic insignia, emblazoned on everything from T-shirts to playing cards to any other tchotchke Plouffe could sell online to support the campaign.

  The other and more urgent imperative, as we prepared for the launch, was the speech. Obama’s formal announcement was generating enormous interest. It would be intensively covered, and would give Barack an unparalleled opportunity to introduce himself and his candidacy to a huge media audience. In the days leading up to the announcement, I worked on the speech with Favreau and another speechwriter, Wendy Button, whom I had known from my Edwards days. Drafts circulated among the three of us and, of course, Obama. The goal was to get a solid draft to Barack, knowing that he had all the chops to take it to the next level. Besides, the more he owned the words, the more powerfully he would deliver them.

  As we discussed the speech, the imperative was clear: this had to be less a declaration of candidacy than a manifesto for change—and not simply a change of parties in the White House, but a fundamental change in the coagulated, self-interested politics of Washington. Obama’s own remarkable story would be an important element of the speech, of course, but in the end, the speech would be less about Barack and more about the country; less about “I” and more about “we.” Also, while it was essential to bring a strong indictment against the status quo, it was critical to describe an alternative—and far better—future. In place of cynicism and division, our appeal was to hope and change.

  As a measure of the elevated attention the media were giving the Obama rollout, 60 Minutes sent a crew to Chicago a full week before the announcement to interview Barack and Michelle for a piece that would air the day after he launched. The correspondent, Steve Kroft, and his crew gave it the whole nine yards, interviewing Barack in his home and on a drive through the South Side streets he had worked as an organizer and then represented as a legislator. They interviewed him in a van on the way to Springfield and again on the eve of his speech. Yet for all the tape they ran on Obama and all his wisdom and pronouncements, probably the most newsworthy bit came from Michelle, who revealed that she’d agreed to support his decision to run only after he pledged to quit smoking.

  For a guy with few discernable bad habits, the cigarette was a glaring exception. It was his one act of complete defiance. He had been smoking since he was in his teens, and Michelle intended to use the campaign as leverage finally to get Barack to quit.

  “I hate it,” she told Kroft, when the subject of Barack’s smoking came up. “That’s why he doesn’t do it anymore. Proud to say I outed him—I’m the one that outed him on the smoking. That was one of my prerequisites for, you know, entering into this race . . . he couldn’t be a smoking president.”

  When Kroft asked Barack if he had really quit, Barack carefully described himself as a “recovering” smoker, and made reference to chewing Nicorette. Gibbs and I shot each other nervous glances. He might be “recovering,” but we knew he hadn’t yet “recovered,” and after a lifetime of smoking, it seemed doubtful that Barack could quit cold turkey in the midst of the most pressure-filled venture of his life. But Michelle had seen her chance to pin him down on national TV, and she ran with it. “Please, America, watch,” she sai
d, with obvious glee. “Keep an eye on him, and call me if you see him smoking.”

  Maybe if Michelle had offered to pay a bounty to anyone who spied Barack smoking, it would have moved her penurious husband more. He continued to smoke surreptitiously throughout the campaign and beyond, sometimes going to farcical lengths to steal a smoke away from his family and public view. He would finally quit for good a few years later, only after winning the stressful battle for health reform.

  Alyssa’s team did remarkable work in preparation for the rollout. The setting promised to be as inspiring as the speech. We were overwhelmed by the number of people who signaled their intention to attend. The one thing our team couldn’t control, however, was the weather, and on this day, Obama did not have Deval Patrick’s good luck. The forecast was for bitter cold, and Michelle, now fully invested in the campaign, wanted to pull the plug on the historic Lincoln site.

  “It’s not right to ask people, a lot of whom will be bringing their kids, to stand out there for hours in subzero temperatures,” she said. “I don’t even want to subject our kids to that! Let’s move it indoors.”

  Barack was sensitive to Michelle’s point, and even more to her feelings. Having worked hard to convince her of the wisdom of the enterprise, the last thing he wanted to do was dampen her enthusiasm on opening day. “Michelle makes a good point,” he said, but the rest of us were in a panic. The only alternative was the drab, hangar-like convention center in Springfield, which could accommodate only a fraction of the crowd we expected. It could turn a potentially spectacular announcement into a humdrum affair. So Alyssa and crew shifted into overdrive, purchasing ski caps, hastily embroidered with “Obama ’08,” twenty thousand sets of hand warmers, and a heater for the podium, all in a concerted effort to keep people warm and Michelle on board. To our relief, she grudgingly relented.

  The afternoon before the Saturday announcement, Obama, his family, and senior staff boarded vans for Springfield. Though we all were encased in the multiple layers we thought we would need to ward off the elements, emotionally we were in the capsule and liftoff was at hand. All the months of contemplation and planning were over. Momentum and interest had been building steadily. We were looking forward to a great day. Then we got a call that punctured the buoyant mood.

  Rolling Stone magazine had just released a profile of Barack, written by a hot young writer, Ben Wallace-Wells. Headlined “Destiny’s Child,” it was a generally positive piece, but the text on the magazine’s cover—“The Radical Roots of Barack Obama”—portended something else entirely. In researching the piece, Wallace-Wells had spent time in the pews of the Trinity United Church of Christ, where the Obamas were congregants. There he witnessed a sermon by Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Trinity’s outspoken and charismatic pastor, whose phrase “the audacity of hope” had provided Barack with the theme for his convention speech and the title of his latest book. On the day Wallace-Wells visited, however, Reverend Wright’s sermon was geared less toward raising hope than raising hell.

  “‘Fact number one: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college,’ he intones. ‘Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!’ There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. ‘We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!’ The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: ‘And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!’”

  Noting Obama’s professed closeness to his pastor, Wallace-Wells extrapolated from there.

  “This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.”

  As we cruised toward Springfield, all I could think of was how our opponents and Fox News would pounce if Reverend Wright were to deliver the invocation as planned. On a day when our message would be about building community and healing the nation’s wounds, we would be answering questions about Reverend Wright’s contentious remarks. Fair or not, it would be fodder for those who wanted to tap into latent biases and portray Obama as a frightening and divisive figure. I called Barack in his van and explained the situation. He asked to read the story and then called us back.

  “Well, we can’t afford to let this story hijack the day,” he said, without hesitation. The next morning, Reverend Wright led a private prayer with the Obama family and Senator Dick Durbin inside the Old State Capitol. I stood against a wall, and caught Wright’s withering glare as he walked by. In his mind, I sensed, I was the political hack who had driven a wedge between the reverend and his most celebrated parishioner. To my mind, there went a man who, however important a role he had played in the Obamas’ past, represented a problem we would have to manage carefully in the future.

  Outside, the crowd that had begun to gather before dawn had swelled to more than fifteen thousand. This was not your typical political announcement. It was a coming together. And with temperatures near zero, coming together was more than a statement. It was a survival strategy.

  “We all made this journey for a reason,” Obama told the sea of frozen humanity before him. “It’s humbling to see a crowd like this, but in my heart I know you didn’t come here just for me—no, you came here because you believe in what this country can be. In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that’s shut you out, that’s told you to settle, that’s divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what’s possible, building that more perfect union.”

  Obama spoke of the lessons he learned as a young community organizer, working to help lift neighborhoods that had been ravaged by steel plant closings. He warmly recalled his years in Springfield, seeking common ground and workable solutions with legislators from throughout a profoundly diverse state.

  “It was here where we learned to disagree without being disagreeable—that it’s possible to compromise so long as you know those principles that can never be compromised,” he said, pointing to the progress he had achieved in Illinois by bringing together disparate factions.

  With bridging divisions and forging progress as his mission, Barack Obama stood in Lincoln’s awesome shadow and announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

  “I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness in this—a certain audacity—to this announcement,” he said, conceding the obvious. “I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.”

  That line, which I wrote into the speech, summed up what would be the unique calculus of our campaign. Perhaps in most years past, and possibly again in the future, the fact that Obama was just two years out of the Illinois State Senate would have been disqualifying. Yet in this year of pervasive alienation, many Americans would see the absence of years in Washington as a plus.

  All of us know what those challenges are today—a war with no end, a dependence on oil that threatens our future, schools where too many children aren’t learning, and families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can. We know the challenges. We’ve heard them. We’ve talked about them for years.

  What’s stopped us from meeting these challenges is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans. What’s stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we’re distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackl
e the big problems of America.

  With that, Barack laid out an ambitious agenda for change, from education to health care to energy; an end to the Iraq War and the dawning of a new foreign policy in which diplomacy would resume its rightful place in the forefront as a tool of American security.

  “I know there are those who don’t believe we can do all these things. I understand the skepticism,” he said, as more than a few people around me nodded their hooded heads.

  All of us running for president will travel around the country offering ten-point plans and making grand speeches; all of us will trumpet those qualities we believe make us uniquely qualified to lead this country. But too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and special interests move in, and people turn away, disappointed as before, left to struggle on their own.

  That’s why this campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us—it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice—to push us forward when we’re doing right, and let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.

  My eyes welled up as Barack spoke. I had helped write the speech and advised on the stagecraft. None of what Obama said was a surprise to me. Yet, as he spoke, I believed. I believed in his extraordinary ability to reason, to lead, to inspire, and to speak hard truths. More than that, I believed in them, the thousands upon thousands of folks crowded into that plaza, folks who had come from near and far on a frigid day to begin the march for change.