The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  "When he won the Illinois primary for Senate, he demonstrated the breadth of his appeal--white folks, black folks everywhere," his law partner Judd Miner said. "He won every suburban district in the primary. He won overwhelmingly in those white districts. And then he carried that forward to the campaign itself for the seat itself. He just gained more and more confidence. People felt he was so different and intelligent. He never thought there was something he couldn't do."

  On Halloween night, Alan Keyes held a last get-out-the-vote rally at the Spirit of God Fellowship Church in the Chicago suburb of South Holland, delivering a long disquisition on the need for religious virtue in politics. As he had throughout the race, Keyes denounced the media for trying "to portray me as some sort of inflammatory person." He spoke of going to Washington, but it was clear that he had come with the thought not of winning but of gaining a new pulpit.

  On November 2, 2004, Obama voted just after seven in the morning at the Catholic Theological Union in Hyde Park. As the cameras followed him and his family, Michelle Obama said, "Don't you think he's been on TV enough?"

  "I'm waiting for you to be at the top of the ticket!" one resident called out.

  By early evening, the Chicago Defender started distributing a special edition with the headline, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington." The Obamas went to a suite at the Hyatt Regency where they watched television and waited for the first vote tallies. A crowd of some two thousand gathered in the ballroom downstairs.

  Not long afterward, it was clear that Obama had won the Illinois Senate race in a landslide, defeating Keyes by forty-three points, seventy per cent to twenty-seven. Obama was so far ahead in the closing weeks of the campaign that he'd started giving away money to other Democratic candidates and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. He sanctioned many of his volunteers to go and work on other races. Despite the fact that Keyes had said that it would be a "mortal sin" to vote for a candidate who supported abortion rights, Obama won three-quarters of the Catholic vote. He also won ninety-one per cent of the black vote.

  Sometime after nine on Election Night, Obama went down to the hotel ballroom to greet his supporters, who were chanting the now familiar phrase: "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!"

  "Thank you, Illinois! I don't know about you, but I'm still fired up!" he said. "Six hundred and fifty-six days ago, I announced in a room a little smaller than this ... for the United States Senate. At the time, people were respectful but nevertheless skeptical. They knew the work that we had done ... but they felt that in a nation as divided as ours there was no possibility that someone who looked like me could ever aspire to the United States Senate. They felt that in a fearful nation, someone named Barack Obama could never hope to win an election. And yet, here we stand!"

  Part Four

  If you don't have enough self-awareness to see the element of megalomania involved in thinking you should be President, then you probably shouldn't be President. There's a slight madness to thinking you should be the leader of the free world.

  --Barack Obama, November 1, 2007, ABC News

  Are you going to try to be President? Shouldn't you be Vice-President first?

  --Malia Obama to her father at his swearing-in as U.S. Senator

  Chapter Twelve

  A Slight Madness

  After accepting the last words of congratulations for his landslide election to the Senate, Barack Obama slept for two hours. Then he woke to answer questions about his prospects for running for President of the United States. This was now the velocity of his life.

  Obama had agreed to a morning-after meeting with reporters at his campaign headquarters downtown--a tradition of winning politicians and fighters. The questions dwelled little on the campaign, for all its low comedy. Instead the reporters focused almost solely on one subject: Was he going to run for the White House in 2008? Obama had not spent five minutes in an office higher than that of an Illinois state legislator and he had never really been in a close competitive election, yet this was not an entirely disingenuous line of inquiry. At the Convention and afterward, Obama had hardly shunned media attention--his advisers scheduled as many national broadcast and print interviews as he could handle. In all those interviews, he was described as a new "hope" or "face" for the Democrats. When he was asked about running for President, Obama shyly dismissed it as absurd conjecture. But his novelty and glamour resided partly in the fact that he was asked the question in the first place.

  Obama knew the rules. Even to hint at an interest in the White House would be unseemly. Election Night, 2004, had been misery for the Democrats. George W. Bush won back the White House. John Kerry's inability to rebuff the smears on his character and his record--particularly the attacks on his war record by the well-funded group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth--had cost him dearly. The Democrats also lost four seats in the Senate, including their leader, Tom Daschle, of South Dakota.

  Obama had many qualities; he would have to work at modesty. Come January, 2005, when he was to be sworn in, he would be a junior senator in the minority party and, as he knew from his backbench years in Springfield, there were strict limits to such a position. At least on this November morning, Obama needed to appear the awed and eager apprentice of the Senate. The hype about the Presidency needed to be "corrected," as he put it. Each time the question was asked, with slight variation, Obama's level of irritation rose:

  "I am not running for President. I am not running for President in four years. I am not running for President in 2008."

  "Come on, guys, the only reason I am being definitive is because until I am definitive, you will keep asking me this question. It's a silly question."

  And then: "Guys, I am a state senator. I was elected yesterday. I have never set foot in the U.S. Senate. I have never worked in Washington. And the notion that somehow I am going to start running for higher office, it just doesn't make sense. My understanding is that I will be ranked ninety-ninth in seniority. I am going to be spending the first several months of my career in the U.S. Senate looking for the washroom and trying to figure out how the phones work."

  Obama got especially irritated with Lynn Sweet, a persistent veteran reporter for the Sun-Times. "Lynn, you're dictating the answers as well as the questions," Obama said wearily. "Let me move on to the next question." Later, he guided her out to the hall to admonish her further.

  Obama and his aides said that he was tired after campaigning. And, of course, it was true: he'd been at it, non-stop, for well over a year. In order to be a decent legislator, he would have to learn to parcel out his time and be discriminating with the national press and the constant invitations to give speeches around the country. Michelle, Malia, and Sasha were going to remain in Chicago; Obama rented a one-bedroom apartment near the Capitol in a high-rise near Georgetown Law School and shuttled back home for the weekends to see his family and meet with constituents. One of Moseley Braun's many mistakes as a senator was to spend too much time in Washington and grow remote from her constituents; Obama was determined not to do the same. In his first year, he held thirty-nine town meetings in Illinois.

  At the Convention, Joe Biden had advised Obama to "go slow" in Washington. Obama knew that he had at least to seem unhurried. He would have to balance his tasks as the sole African-American senator and as a newborn political celebrity with his straightforward role as an institutional plebe. He had to avoid at least the appearance of placing national celebrity before sincere rookie effort.

  "It's going to be important for me to say no, when it just comes to appearances, wanting to be the keynote speaker at every N.A.A.C.P. Freedom Fund dinner across the country," he told one reporter. "You know, those are the kinds of things where I'm just going to have to explain to people that there are limits to my time. I've got a family that I've got to look after. But when it comes to speaking out on issues that are of particular importance to the African-American community, I don't think that's a conflict with my role as an effective legislator for the people of Illinoi
s."

  After the press conference, Obama went to Union Station to be filmed thanking voters. But there, too, he spent time answering the same question again and again. David Axelrod put out the deflecting message, even if the reporters were not willing to accept it. "I don't think we're trying to dampen expectations, we're trying to douse them," he said. "We're trying to pour as much water as we can find on them. We don't want even a smoldering ember when it comes to this."

  But, despite his modest words about wanting to be a good apprentice, to learn the craft of legislation and the customs of the institution, Obama was acutely aware that, as a rookie, his most powerful leverage in the Senate would be the force of his celebrity and his importance as the only African-American in the chamber. He did not have to wait to go slowly up the seniority ladder to gain a public platform. In the last week of November, Obama went to New York for a publicity tour to help plump sales for the paperback re-issue of Dreams from My Father--a publishing phenomenon, ignited by the Boston speech, that lasted for years; the book helped to spread word of his story and forever eased his family's financial concerns.

  The tour, of course, was a strange way to correct the hype and put an end to outsized expectations. In a matter of hours, Obama was everywhere, and the questioning was not exactly rigorous. On ABC's daytime show "The View," Meredith Vieira predicted that Obama would be a "huge force in this country for the better"; not to be outdone, Barbara Walters put Obama in the same sentence with Nelson Mandela.

  "I didn't spend twenty-seven years in prison," Obama solemnly reminded Walters.

  Obama agreed to interviews with Charlie Rose, Wendy Williams, Leonard Lopate, Don Imus, and David Letterman. On Letterman's show, Obama seemed ready for admission to the Friar's Club:

  LETTERMAN: The thing about your name, it's easy to pronounce and it's cool.

  OBAMA: Well, that's what I think, that's what I think. You know, there were some advisers who told me to change my name.

  LETTERMAN: Really?

  OBAMA: Yeah, and somebody suggested "Cat Stevens," for example....

  LETTERMAN: NOW, was there a guy running for Senate, maybe an incumbent, maybe not, I think a Republican, and he had a problem because he and his wife would go to strip clubs and have sex.

  OBAMA: Well, that was--

  LETTERMAN: Did I dream that? Does any of this ring a bell?

  OBAMA: There were some issues, some allegations.

  LETTERMAN: (laughs) Yeah.

  OBAMA: But we didn't touch that stuff.

  LETTERMAN: I see.

  OBAMA: We took the high road, and--

  LETTERMAN: Now is this who you were running against, or he dropped out, right?

  OBAMA: Yeah, he dropped out--yeah, the Republicans, you know, they seem to have a lot of fun given all their moral values stuff. They enjoy themselves.

  LETTERMAN: It sounded like fun to me.... Have you met the President? You must know the President?

  OBAMA: Well, you know, he called me. He was very gracious. After the election, he gave me a call and we both agreed that we'd married up, and then he invited me over to the White House and we had breakfast with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, and it was a real fun time.

  LETTERMAN: Yeah, it sounds like Mardi Gras.

  A couple of weeks later, Obama was in Washington. He had not yet been sworn in, but he was a headline speaker at the Gridiron Club. Adopting a tone of flagrant self-deprecation, he admitted that he was now so overexposed that he made "Paris Hilton look like a recluse."

  "I figure there's nowhere to go from here but down," he said. "So, tonight, I'm announcing my retirement from the United States Senate."

  There is no underestimating the importance of Dreams from My Father in the political rise of Barack Obama. After the 2004 Democratic Convention, his increased prominence had caught the attention of Rachel Klayman, an editor at Crown. She was inspired to re-issue the paperback version of Dreams after she read an article on Salon.com, by Obama's Chicago friend the novelist Scott Turow, touting him as "the new face of the Democratic Party." Obama was pleased by the sales of the re-issue, but he now realized that if his agent, Jane Dystel, had acted more quickly to regain the rights and spark an auction, he could have made even more money. He decided to end his business relationship with Dystel and to have Robert Barnett, an attorney at Williams & Connolly, in Washington, handle his literary affairs. Obama had met Barnett at the Democratic Convention and not long afterward Barnett prepared a debate-prep memorandum for Obama. Not only was Barnett far better connected than Dystel--he has negotiated book deals for everyone in the Washington establishment, from Bob Woodward and Alan Greenspan to the Clintons--he was also less expensive. As an attorney, Barnett charged up to a thousand dollars an hour--a hefty fee--but, in the end, far less than the normal fifteen-per-cent fee of an agent. Woodward once called him the "last bargain in Washington."

  Two weeks before Obama was sworn in as a senator, Crown, a division of Random House, announced that he had signed a contract to write three books; the deal was for just under two million dollars. The press release was a model of diplomacy, saying that the agreement had been "initiated" by Dystel but "negotiated and concluded" by Barnett. Since that time, Dystel has avoided talking to reporters.

  "Obama showed a kind of dry-eyed practicality by getting rid of Jane to get Barnett," Peter Osnos, the former head of Times Books, which had originally published Dreams from My Father, said. "I have to admit that even though it is common practice in Washington now, it startled me that practically the first thing that Obama did after being elected to the Senate was to sign a contract for two million dollars with Crown." Obama's contract called first for The Audacity of Hope, an account of his first year in the Senate and his thoughts on various issues, from religion and race to foreign policy. There was to be an illustrated children's book (with the proceeds going to charity), and the third book would be determined later. Unlike members of the House of Representatives, who are not permitted to accept book advances, only royalties, senators have no such restrictions, and, with the contract, Obama, like Hillary Clinton, who also signed a huge book deal before taking her Senate seat, transformed his financial life. It did not go unnoticed that The Audacity of Hope was to be published in the fall of 2006, a tight deadline, and just in time to ignite a round of publicity and further speculation about a run for the White House.

  Although Peter Osnos counted himself an admirer of Obama, he later wrote an article for the Century Foundation in which he said of Obama's book deal, "I just wish that this virtuous symbol of America's aspirational class did not move quite so smoothly into a system of riches as a reward for service, especially before it has actually been rendered."

  But even if Osnos was right and Obama's decision to sign a three-book deal was a hasty move to capitalize on his political celebrity and provide a tool for the next Presidential campaign, that celebrity was not something that he could control. Not long after the Convention speech, Eli Attie, one of the writers and producers for NBC's hit television series "The West Wing," was starting to flesh out a character to succeed President Josiah (Jed) Bartlet, the wry and avuncular head of state played by Martin Sheen. Although the series, the creation of Aaron Sorkin, first went on the air during the Clinton years, many Democrats watched it during the Bush Presidency as a kind of alternative-reality show. Bartlet, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a devout Catholic with liberal values, was, for that audience, everything that Bush was not: mature, curious, assured, skeptical, and confident of his own intelligence.

  Attie wanted the new character to be no less a liberal ideal, but this time he wanted someone of the "post-Oprah" generation, as he put it, someone black or Hispanic, but not an older figure closely tied to the rhetoric of the civil-rights movement and identity politics. Attie had serious political experience. He had written speeches for the former New York mayor David Dinkins, and had been an aide to Richard Gephardt in Congress, and to Bill Clinton in the White House; he was Al Gore's chief speechwriter thro
ugh the 2000 Presidential campaign. When he watched Obama, he thought he saw the model for his character, Matt Santos: a young urban progressive with dignified bearing, a "bring-the-electorate-along-slowly candidate" who was neither white nor focused on race. "Faced with the task of fleshing out a fictional first-ever and actually viable Latino candidate for President, I had no precedent, no way to research a real-life version," he said.