The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Obama did his best to project equanimity about his new life. "This is all so, well, interesting. But it's all so ephemeral," he told David Mendell of the Tribune as they were driving between campaign stops in DeKalb and Marengo. "I don't know how this plays out, but there is definitely a novelty aspect to it all. The novelty wears off, and it can't stay white hot like it is right now."

  His campaign staff was also taking on a more big-time national cast. Dan Shomon, who had been by Obama's side since his earliest days as a state senator, was now barely a presence on the campaign. Shomon's mother had just died of cancer and, he said, "I needed a break." As an adviser, his influence was greatly reduced. Shomon had been helpful to Obama since his first years as a state senator, but his experience was limited to Illinois. Gibbs, Cauley, and Axelrod were advisers of much broader experience. As Obama became an increasingly national figure, a handful of Chicago politicians and organizers who were essential to his career in the early days--his alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, for instance--came to resent him and feel that he had grown egotistical, heedlessly casting aside old allies when they were no longer useful to him and cozying up to wealthy patrons farther north in Chicago. "I think he is an arrogant, self-absorbed, ungrateful jerk," one old South Side ally said. "He walked away from his friends." Dan Shomon, however, if his feelings were hurt, kept his counsel and eventually turned his attention to making money as a lobbyist.

  Finally, in early August, the Republican Party's central committee settled on a candidate: Alan Keyes. African-American, Catholic, and an official in the State Department and the United Nations bureaucracy during the Reagan Administration, Keyes, on paper, might have seemed an interesting challenge for Obama. He earned a doctorate at Harvard, studying with the political scientist Harvey Mansfield and writing a dissertation on Alexander Hamilton and constitutional theory. He was, briefly, the president of Alabama A&M University. His mentor was Jeane Kirkpatrick. The Republican Party leadership thought that perhaps Keyes might cut into Obama's strength among blacks and win voters downstate.

  In reality, Keyes was a stranger to the state and a hopeless choice for the Republicans, a Hail Mary pass for the religious right. Born on Long Island, he had lived in many places in the United States and abroad. Illinois was not one of them. Keyes was the most blatant sort of carpetbagger, a vagabond Quixote of the conservative movement. In 1988 and 1992, he ran for the Senate in Maryland against two popular Democratic incumbents, Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski, respectively, and he lost both races by spectacular margins. In each, he espoused the ideology of the religious right--abortion was his singular issue--and his attacks on his opponents resembled those of a tent-revival preacher reviling the heathen. In 1996, he ran for President, putting on an outlandish performance; he showed up at one debate to which he was not invited and had to be detained by the police. In 2000, he challenged George W. Bush for the Republican nomination; he received fourteen per cent of the vote in Iowa and, in order to keep hammering away at the abortion issue, stayed in the race long past the point of being a laughingstock. Now Keyes, who opposed the Seventeenth Amendment, a product of the Progressive Era that provides for the direct election of U.S. senators, was going to get on a plane to Chicago and rent an apartment in the south suburbs and run--for the U.S. Senate. Strident moralism was again to be his entire candidacy. Within a few weeks he was telling the people of Illinois, "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama."

  When Obama learned that his opponent would be Alan Keyes, he could not help but betray incredulous delight.

  "Can you believe this shit?" he said to Jim Cauley.

  "No, dude," Cauley replied. "You are the luckiest bastard in the world."

  On a hot evening in mid-August, a rented Budget truck pulled up in front of an apartment building in the suburb of Calumet City, south of Chicago near the Indiana border. Two young campaign workers unloaded a box spring and a mattress and carried everything up to a two-room apartment on the second floor--Alan Keyes's first apartment in the state of Illinois. Keyes had chosen Calumet City, a victim of deindustrialization, after asking his hastily assembled staff for an appropriately hardworking place he could call home. It was an odd choice for an evangelical candidate. Originally known as West Hammond, the town was once a headquarters for Al Capone, a center for gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging. It became known as Sin City.

  Keyes never shed his carpetbagger image. In his announcement speech, he had tried to overcome it by declaring, "I have lived in the land of Lincoln all my life." The media, to say nothing of the voters, remained unmoved by such finesse. One Tribune editorial said, "Mr. Keyes may have noticed a large body of water as he flew into O'Hare. That is called Lake Michigan."

  Obama treated the contest with Keyes the way a boxer treats the final round of a fight against a wounded opponent who has a reputation for last-ditch bursts of distemper. He cut back on the number of debates and tried to steer clear of Keyes, somberly acknowledging their differences and engaging him only when absolutely necessary. Neither white suburbanites nor African-Americans showed much interest in Keyes and his constant attacks on abortion laws, welfare, and gay marriage. What was more, Keyes had no money to run a proper campaign. His rhetoric was too excessive, his odds too long, for him to draw serious donors. When Keyes denounced the daughter of the Vice-President, Mary Cheney, for being a lesbian, even the chairman of the state Republican Party, which had put Keyes forward in the first place, denounced him as "idiotic."

  By early October, Obama was leading in the polls by a margin of forty-five per cent. He had large reserves of cash to spend on media--sufficient to run against a far more formidable candidate. He spent time out of state, campaigning for fellow Democrats in closer races. Keyes ran a symbolic race in which he was prepared to say almost anything, to inflict whatever damage he felt necessary, to bring attention to his issues.

  In a series of debates in October, Keyes was usually even-tempered when the discussion was about Iraq, national security, foreign policy, or local issues. But at times, he would call Obama's policy positions "wicked and evil," Marxist, and socialist. Usually, Obama's strategy was to absorb the blow impassively and, when it came time to speak, answer in a way that, at least subtly, made it clear that, at best, Keyes was to the right of the Illinois mainstream and, at worst, a demagogic fool. In the second debate, a televised session held during the deciding game of the National League Championship Series between the Houston Astros and the St. Louis Cardinals, Keyes reiterated his attack on Obama as a candidate whom Jesus would never support. As he spread his arms far apart, Keyes said, "Christ is over here, Senator Obama is over there--the two don't look the same."

  Obama did not wholly conceal his disgust. "That's why I have a pastor," he replied, speaking past Keyes and to the viewer. "That's why I have a Bible. That's why I have my own prayer. And I don't think any of you are particularly interested in having Mr. Keyes lecture you about your faith. What you're interested in is solving problems like jobs and health care and education. I'm not running to be the minister of Illinois. I'm running to be its United States senator."

  Keyes would not accept the distinction and said that Obama was putting himself forward as a man of faith only in order to win votes. "At the hard points when that faith must be followed and explained to folks and stood up for and witnessed to," Keyes said, "he then pleads separation of church and state, something found nowhere in the Constitution, and certainly found nowhere in the Scripture as such."

  Onstage, Obama tried to mask his feelings about Keyes, but David Axelrod, among others, noticed that these attacks really bothered Obama and, at times, put him on his heels. Keyes was a religious absolutist and Obama, who described his own faith with a sense of ambiguity and doubt, was clearly undone at times by his opponent's attacks. On one occasion, Obama poked Keyes in the chest when they started an impromptu debate at an Indian Independence Day parade; a camera crew caught the encounter and repeatedly showed Obama's irritated gesture in slow motion. This
worried Axelrod. He wondered if Obama would be able to absorb the more serious attacks that would inevitably occur in a tougher, closer race. Did he have the stomach for it, the taste for combat--and a capacity for moving on? Keyes was nothing, Axelrod knew. If Obama was going to go further in his career, he would have to learn to fend off far uglier, more effective attacks than Alan Keyes, a marginal candidate, could manage. He needed to be tougher.

  In late October, the editorial page of the Tribune, which leaned to the center-right, endorsed Obama. The paper noted elsewhere the incredible dearth across the country of blacks elected to statewide office, pointing to Mississippi, which had an African-American population of thirty-six per cent--"the largest in the nation, yet it has not elected a single black person to any statewide office since Reconstruction."

  A few days later, Obama won another endorsement--or at least an implicit one--from the most powerful political institution of all: Richard M. Daley. During the primary campaign, Daley, as usual, did not make an endorsement, but everyone, Obama included, assumed that Dan Hynes, with all his machine connections, had the Mayor's blessing. According to Bill Daley, Obama wrote the Mayor a letter during the Senate primary campaign, saying, "You're with Hynes, I understand that. I just hope that after the primary you can help me if I was to win this thing." Bill Daley, who recounted the letter for James L. Merriner of Chicago magazine, said that Obama's decision to send the note to the Mayor "was a very smart thing to do. I think he did that with a lot of people."

  Throughout his political life in Chicago and the state of Illinois, Obama had gone to great lengths to reconcile his desire to be an independent Democrat with the need to maintain friendly relations with City Hall. Obama's detente with City Hall, his ability to maintain his Hyde Park credentials and still forge a useful bond with Emil Jones--"one of the hackiest of the hacks," according to the strategist Don Rose--was, in Chicago, a sign of both skill and ambition. Obama was not alone in this. Among others, Abner Mikva, Richard Newhouse, Harold Washington, Barbara Flynn Currie, Carol Moseley Braun, and Paul Simon were also independents who had made their arrangements with the Daleys in order to achieve their political goals. In later years, Obama said little about the patronage scandals that arose in Daley's administration and, in 2006, he declined to endorse a reformer (and David Axelrod's business partner), Forrest Claypool, over a proven hack, Todd Stroger, an African-American, who was loyal to Daley, for Cook County Board president. What Obama understood from the start of his political career was that a purist, an anti-machine politician like the Hyde Park alderman Leon Despres, might gain a stronger foothold on the path to Heaven but would never advance far on the path to power. Obama could borrow from the cadences of King, he could advertise his genuine admiration for the civil-rights movement, but he was a politician, not the leader of a movement. And to be a successful politician you had to make a few compromises along the way. Obama rarely failed to make them.

  Daley's motives for coming around to Obama were relatively simple: Obama was a Democrat, first of all, and Daley was not about to waver from his party now that the primary was over. In addition, with Obama safely ensconced in Washington, Daley would not have to worry about a strong challenge from an African-American politician who once aspired to be mayor and now happened to be the hottest political celebrity in the country. "There were very few people on the Fifth Floor"--Daley's offices at City Hall--"who had given much thought to Barack until then," Pete Giangreco said. "But the modern Daley world revolved around racial divisions, which are as large and nasty in Chicago as anywhere in the country. It was always No. 1 on their agenda to make nice with black politicians in a way the Old Man"--Richard J. Daley--"never really did." As a Hyde Park independent, Obama had not been one of those state senators who consistently did Daley's bidding in Springfield, but now their interests converged. Obama going to the U.S. Senate was good for both of them.

  With a full media contingent, Obama and Richard M. Daley met for lunch at Manny's, a deli on the near North Side. They ate matzo-ball soup and corned-beef sandwiches. They shook hands with everyone in the place and talked long after the television crews had packed up and gone off to the next story.

  As the campaign headed into its final weeks, Obama grew accustomed both to the beat reporters who were following him around Illinois and on his travels out of the state, and to the growing blandishments and attentions of the national media. In many ways, the Illinois Senate race was a rehearsal for things to come and these reporters now focused less on the contest with Keyes than on Obama's biography, his rhetoric, his temperament, his staff, and his capacity for organization and fund-raising. The Illinois campaign also raised some of the same complicated discussions about Obama and race that came to the center of the American political debate a few years later. Of the many articles written in print or online, no piece rehearsed those themes more thoroughly during the Illinois campaign than a three-thousand-word article in the Chicago Tribune's Sunday magazine called "The Skin Game: Do White Voters Like Barack Obama Because 'He's Not Really Black'?"

  The author of the article was Don Terry, a forty-seven-year-old Chicagoan who had lived in Hyde Park nearly all his life. The parallels with Obama's background gave Terry's piece its resonance. Don Terry's father was black, his mother white; his parents had moved from Evanston to Hyde Park because it was integrated. Like Obama, Terry had a mother who taught him to value and explore his racial identity. She told him that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the "greatest man in the world" and that Paul Robeson "was an American hero with the singing voice of God."

  Terry published his article on October 24th when Obama was sure of victory:

  At the time, I was on assignment and speeding to a federal prison camp in a green Mercedes. The color of money. The white woman behind the wheel made sure I knew the car was 10 years old. She didn't have to be defensive with me. I know you can't judge a progressive by the car she drives. Besides, I never bite the hand that gives me a lift.

  "I love Barack," said the woman, a middle-aged filmmaker, as we zipped past a campaign-style yard sign shoved into the dirt on the edge of a cornfield. The sign proclaimed, "Guns Save Lives."

  "He's smart. He's handsome. He's charismatic," she continued. "He has the potential to be our first minority president."

  "I hear what you're saying," I said. "But tell me. Why don't you say he has the potential to be our first black president?"

  She seemed taken aback by my question and took a few moments to answer. "I guess it's because I don't think of him as black," she said.

  Terry was disturbed by this notion--one that had been thoroughly rehearsed by Bobby Rush, Donne Trotter, and many others. He was equally disturbed by an article in The New Republic that said that Obama was "an African-American candidate who was not stereotypically African-American." Terry knew what these people were getting at, however awkwardly. Obama was the son of an African and a white secular Protestant; unlike Terry, he had not grown up around other black people. And yet what was implicit is that if the woman had thought of Obama as black, she would not have felt the same way.

  Terry visited Obama at his campaign headquarters on South Michigan Avenue. The office was decorated with framed posters of Abraham Lincoln and of Muhammad Ali, in Lewiston, Maine, in 1965, standing over the prostrate body of Sonny Liston. On his desk was a copy of a book called One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, by Scott L. Malcomson, a journalist who had caught Obama's eye with an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "An Appeal Beyond Race" about his speech at the Convention in Boston. Malcomson, like Terry, was among a growing number of journalists who were trying to make sense of this young politician and how he seemed the embodiment of a new generation.

  Obama put his feet up on the desk. He said that as a young man he had written an autobiography of his struggle with the complexities of his racial identity, but now, as a politician, he protested that it was the pundits, and not voters, who were focusing on his identity as an explanation for his appeal
. "After the primary, the pundits were trying to figure out my ability to win in black as well as white neighborhoods," he told Terry. "It was easy to attach to the fact that I'm of mixed race. To some degree, my candidacy has been a convenient focal point to try to sort out issues" of ethnicity, assimilation, and diversity. He said that his capacity to succeed in both black and white areas was "not a consequence of my DNA.... It's a consequence of my experience." Obama pointed out that Bill Clinton did well among black voters, and "as far as I know, he doesn't have any black blood in him."

  Terry concluded his article by saying that he had recently turned on the television "hoping for a few minutes of distraction from the American Dilemma." He watched "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," and it was clear to him that Sidney Poitier's character, Dr. John Wade Prentice, "a super-qualified, super-handsome, super-dashing doctor living in Hawaii," had a "lot in common" with Barack Obama. Like Dr. Prentice, who had to be extraordinary to win the hand of a "vacant" white woman, Terry wrote, Obama had to be no less extraordinary to confront the challenge of persistent racism and win higher office. "Race," Terry wrote, "still matters."

  Terry's article did not engage all the questions that eventually surrounded Obama, but he succeeded in setting forth one of the most essential aspects of his unique appeal: that much of the excitement about him had to do with the beholder, with the anxieties, complexes, and hopes of the American voter. "He's a Rorschach test," Terry wrote of Obama. "What you see is what you want to see."

  The urge to see something large in Obama was obvious: he had come along at just the point when American confidence was at a low ebb. The Iraqi insurgency was growing and casualties were rising. In May, 2004, CBS and The New Yorker revealed that Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison had been tortured and sexually humiliated by American soldiers. The emblem of the scandal was a sickening photograph of one prisoner outfitted in a peaked hood and dark caftan and made to stand on a box with electric wires attached to his hands. For millions of people, George Bush was a national and personal embarrassment--an incurious, rash, flippant, pampered, dishonest leader. In Boston, Obama had seemed almost entirely the opposite: intelligent, idealistic, and engaged. Part of his glamour, at least for those inclined to read the Rorschach test this way, had to do with his race, his youth, his African name. As he presented his story--a narrative that said as much about his multicultural family as it did about Harvard or his apprenticeship in Chicago politics--he represented himself as the best of a post-civil-rights America, a fresh start. If his speeches were occasionally salted with platitudes, if his experience and his accomplishments were still slight, well, for so many Americans despairing of George Bush, that was O.K. They studied the Rorschach test that was Obama and they saw the outlines of promise. At the start of the campaign, Obama had won over crowds big enough to fit in Paul Gaynor's backyard in Evanston; now, even before he had faced the electorate of Illinois, he was reaching the country. The odd thing was that Barack Obama seemed to take it all in stride.