The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Attie called David Axelrod, whom he had known from Democratic political campaigns, and asked him dozens of questions about Obama's history and psychology. Axelrod talked with Attie about the change in Obama's life after the Convention speech, the crowds that surrounded him everywhere he went, the incredible expectations people had for him even before he went to Washington. Santos, like Obama, wasn't an orthodox liberal, of the Edward Kennedy mold; instead, Attie came to see Santos the way Axelrod saw Obama and the way Obama saw himself--as both a progressive and a cautious coalition-builder.

  "Those early conversations with David turned out to play a huge role in my shaping of the character," Attie said. "One of the main things was Obama's attitude about race, his almost militant refusal to be defined by it, which became the basis for an episode I wrote called 'Opposition Research,' in which Santos said he didn't want to run as the 'brown candidate,' even though that's where all his support and fund-raising potential were. Also, there was Obama's rock-star charisma, the way people were drawn to him and were pulling the lever for him even though they didn't exactly think he'd win."

  In the final two seasons of "The West Wing," which aired in 2005 and 2006, Matt Santos, played by Jimmy Smits, runs for President against a Republican from California named Arnold Vinick, played by Alan Alda. Press-friendly, winningly acerbic, and unusually independent, Vinick is suspicious of the religious right and positions himself to the left of his Party on a variety of issues. At least in his ideological flexibility and outspokenness, Vinick resembled John McCain--particularly the self-fashioned maverick who ran in 2000 against George W. Bush for the Republican nomination.

  A couple of years later, those seasons of "The West Wing" proved so eerily prescient that David Axelrod sent Attie an e-mail from the campaign trail reading, "We're living your scripts!" And yet, while he was making those shows, Attie thought there was "no way" that the real character, Barack Obama, could go much farther than the Senate. "I just didn't think he could be the President of the United States in my lifetime, given the color of his skin," he said.

  Just before Obama's Senate swearing-in ceremony, in January, 2005, Newsweek put him on the cover as the future of his Party and a unifying figure for the country. Printed across the photograph of Obama was the headline "Seeing Purple," a play on his rhetoric of red-blue convergence in Boston.

  Obama was thrilled to learn that one of the previous occupants of his assigned desk on the Senate floor had been Robert Kennedy. As the junior senator from New York, Kennedy occupied the seat for just over three years, before entering the 1968 race for the Presidency.

  Obama could not have been more junior in the Senate, and he understood that he needed a first-rate chief of staff who knew the people and ways of the Senate thoroughly. His old law school friend Cassandra Butts, who had worked as policy director for Gephardt's 2004 Presidential campaign, arranged a meeting for him with Pete Rouse, a thirty-year veteran of Capitol Hill. Rouse, a stout, phlegmatic workaholic in his late fifties, had been thinking about retiring on his government pension; he had lately been chief of staff for the Senate Majority Leader, Tom Daschle, who had lost his seat by a few thousand votes. Rouse had been so influential in the Senate that he was known around the Capitol as "the hundred-and-first senator." He met with Obama at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where Obama had been attending an orientation session for the freshmen of the 109th Congress, and, after the two had talked for an hour or so about the process of getting started in Washington, Obama asked him if he would be interested in being his chief of staff. Like anyone involved in politics, Rouse had heard a lot about Obama, but he hadn't focused on him--he hadn't even seen the Convention speech. But, after some long thought over the next couple of weeks, he agreed to Obama's offer. Rouse, in turn, helped staff Obama with refugees from Daschle's office.

  "I know what I'm good at, I know what I'm not good at," Obama told Rouse at the beginning. "I know what I know and I know what I don't know. I can give a good speech."

  "Oh yes, you can," Rouse said. "We all agree with that."

  "I know policy," Obama continued. "I know retail politics in Illinois. I don't have any idea what it's like to come into the Senate and get established in the Senate. I want to get established and work with my colleagues and develop a reputation as a good senator, and we'll see what happens." This was precisely the approach that Hillary Clinton had taken when, in 2000, she won her seat in New York: undercut the image of a celebrity senator with hard work and deference to colleagues and the institution. The attention would come without asking for it.

  Obama asked Rouse to help him assemble a staff that was made up of both Washington insiders and independent experts who could bring some intellectual heft to the office. Obama had also hired Robert Gibbs, who had long experience as a press aide on Capitol Hill and became Obama's protector during the campaign. He told his staff that he would rather have "some extraordinary people for a shorter time than ordinary people for a long time." In April, Obama met at a Capitol Hill steakhouse with Samantha Power, a journalist who, in 2002, published A Problem from Hell, a study of modern genocide and American foreign policy that had won the Pulitzer Prize. Obama did not strike Power as a liberal interventionist or a Kissingerian realist or any other kind of ideological "ist" except maybe a "consequentialist." In foreign policy, Obama said, he was for what worked. He hired Power as a foreign-policy fellow in his office.

  Diversity was also a priority for Obama. More than half the staff of about sixty were people of color, including ten of the top fifteen salaried aides. Obama told Rouse that while he was perfectly aware that he was the only African-American in the Senate, a position that bore special responsibilities, "I don't want to be a black senator. I want to be a senator who happens to be black."

  Rouse took on the assignment sensing that Obama could have a big future but certain that a national race was not imminent. He planned to help Obama set a direction for himself, and then, he recalled thinking, "We'll see what happens. I'll be in my rocking chair when he runs [for President] in 2016 or whatever." With Gibbs and Axelrod, Rouse drafted a document called "The Strategic Plan." The plan was about mastering the craft, procedures, and courtesies of the Senate; it was about building relationships with colleagues, including Republicans, and demonstrating an emphasis on Illinois.

  In his first year, Obama carried out the plan with single-minded determination. He traveled extensively among his constituents in Illinois and even had his office keep in close contact with African-American leaders to his left. "He was worried that they would attack him on WVON," Dan Shomon, who stayed on Obama's payroll until 2006, said. "All that stopped when everyone fell into line when he ran for President."

  In Washington, Obama worked on legislation that had particular impact on the state, including bills on highway construction, alternative energy, and ethanol. It was more important, his advisers felt, for him to work quietly to gain the confidence of his colleagues and desirable committee posts than to step forward and speak out on national issues like the war on Iraq.

  As Rouse had predicted, the glitz took care of itself. Oprah Winfrey declared him "more than a politician. He's the real deal." Vanity Fair published a two-page spread on Obama, a rarity for any senator, much less a rookie. The magazine Savoy had a cover feature on Obama with the headline "Camelot Rising." At times, Obama's celebrity definitely had an erotic edge to it: the character Grace on the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" dreamed that she was in the shower with the new senator from Illinois--and he was "Baracking my world!"

  Obama did not ignore the attention, but he made a point of emphasizing his freshman learning and rituals. One of the first books that he read after his election was Master of the Senate, the third installment in Robert Caro's multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson. (He didn't want to be seen reading the book during the campaign; now he made a point of mentioning it.) The book, in addition to covering Johnson's career in the Senate in bountiful, dramatic detail, opens with a long history of the institution
and then an intricate set piece on Johnson's mentor, Richard Russell of Georgia. Russell served in the Senate from 1933 until 1971, when he died, and was the dominant figure in the conservative Southern faction that controlled the Senate until the rise of the civil-rights movement and the Kennedy assassination. Russell had supported Roosevelt's New Deal legislation but he was also an unapologetic proponent of Jim Crow. A virtuoso of Senate procedure and cloakroom persuasion, he blocked civil-rights legislation by whatever means available, including the repeated use of the filibuster. Nevertheless, Obama told Jeff Zeleny, the Tribune reporter who chronicled his career on the Hill most closely, that he was especially taken with Caro's passages about Russell's years in the Senate. Much of Obama's self-confidence resided in his belief that he could walk into any room, with any sort of people, and forge a relationship and even persuade those people of the rightness of his positions. Jim Cauley, Obama's Senate campaign manager, said he thought Obama believed that he could win over a room of skinheads. "All of us are a mixture of noble and ignoble impulses, and I guess that's part of what I mean when I say I don't go into meetings with people presuming bad faith," Obama has said. Now he seemed to think that he would have had a fighting chance with Russell: "Had I been around at all in the early sixties and had the opportunity to meet with Richard Russell, it would have been fascinating to talk to somebody like that. Even if you understood that this enormous talent would prevent me from ever being sworn in to the Senate."

  When Obama paid a visit to the Senate elder Robert Byrd, of West Virginia, who as a young man had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, he listened sympathetically as the old man described the sins of his youth as "the cross around my neck." It was the Rorschach effect all over again: Byrd saw in Obama a welcoming, forgiving face. And Obama, who was a gifted reader of other people, replied soothingly to Byrd, "If we were supposed to be perfect, we'd all be in trouble, so we rely on God's mercy and grace to get us through."

  Obama knew that if he made enough of these respectful visits, if he made enough gestures of modesty and obeisance to the institution, he could go a long way toward forming alliances and ease any jealousies. Obama tried to make these conspicuous shows of humility and the transcendence of political history a hallmark of his way of doing business. He did not hesitate to advertise them.

  Meanwhile, the true voice of sustained humility in Obama's life was his wife, who was back home in Chicago. Michelle Obama regarded the unending clamor and sycophancy that now attended her husband with a bracingly astringent bemusement. At the swearing-in ceremony, she observed all the commotion and said, "Maybe one day he will do something to warrant all this attention."

  In his three years as an active senator, Obama proved a reliable Democrat, voting with his Party more than ninety-five per cent of the time; at one point, he even earned the rating of "most liberal" from relatively uncontentious arbiters like The National Journal. And yet he sought, above all, to emphasize his flexibility and pragmatism. "Over the next six years, there will be occasions where people will be surprised by my positions," he told Zeleny. "I won't be easy to categorize as many people expect."

  Obama voted against Bush's nominee for Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, but he supported Bush's second-term nomination for Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, offering the rationalization that despite her unquestioning involvement in the planning of the Iraq war, a war that he had judged "a dumb war," Rice was a committed and intelligent diplomat and the President was not likely to nominate someone less conservative if she was rejected. He did not vote to punish. He also voted against a defense appropriations bill that would have included a firm date for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Despite lobbying by John Kerry, Obama supported the White House on legislation capping payoffs in class-action lawsuits. He voted for bills strengthening environmental protection and free trade. He voted consistently for abortion rights.

  Obama had wanted an appointment to the Commerce Committee, in order to be able to get some pork for his constituents in Illinois. He had hoped that his campaigning for Democratic candidates in the 2004 elections--which he had been able to do because his own race was not in doubt--would be enough to gain him the appointment. The Party leadership placed him instead on the committees for Environment and Public Works, Veterans Affairs, and Foreign Relations. At committee sessions, Obama, as the most junior senator, was eighteenth in line to ask questions; the committee room would often be all but empty when his turn at the microphone came. During Rice's confirmation hearings in the Foreign Relations Committee, Obama grew increasingly bored during one of Joe Biden's bloviations. Finally, Obama leaned back in his chair and handed one of his aides a note. The aide was excited to receive his first serious communication from the Senator. The note read, "Shoot. Me. Now."

  Obama's closest friend in the Senate was his Illinois colleague, Richard Durbin. For Obama, Durbin was a link to the glory days of Illinois liberalism. When Durbin was an undergraduate at Georgetown, he'd served as an intern in the office of Paul Douglas; as a young lawyer, he was counsel to Paul Simon when he was lieutenant governor. Durbin was elected to the House in 1982 and to the Senate in 1996; for Obama, he was a teacher unthreatened by the younger man's glossy public image and boundless prospects.

  Richard Lugar of Indiana, a Republican who was the longtime chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and an advocate of tighter control of nuclear-and conventional-weapons stockpiles, also tutored Obama. Lugar had worked with Sam Nunn, of Georgia, on the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to secure weapons stockpiles across the former Soviet Union. Obama had made a name for himself by opposing the invasion of Iraq, but there was not much he could do on the Foreign Relations Committee about Iraq. He thought he could make a concrete impact, with Lugar's help, by becoming an active voice on proliferation issues.

  In August, 2005, as a member of a congressional delegation that also included Lugar, Obama went to Russia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan to meet with officials and inspect various weapons-storage facilities. He had traveled fairly widely in Asia, Africa, and Europe, but this was his first trip to the former Soviet Union. The folkways of political missions to Moscow were alien to him. Faced with the prospect of mutual, and repeated, toasts, Obama asked to have his shot glass filled with water instead of vodka. Obama experienced what Lugar had many times before: rides in rickety buses to secret weapons sites; the dismantling of aging rockets; interminable briefings from officials telling partial truths. In Kiev, Obama went with Lugar to a dilapidated laboratory that had been used in the old Soviet biological weapons program. "So we enter into the building," Obama recalled for an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington a few weeks after the trip. "There are no discernible fences or security systems. And once we are inside, some sort of ramshackle building, there were open windows, maybe a few padlocks that many of us might use to secure our own luggage. Our guide, a young woman, takes us right up to what looked like a mini-refrigerator. And inside the refrigerator there were rows upon rows of test tubes. She picked them up, and she's clanking them around, and we listened to the translator explain what she was saying. Some of the tubes, he said, were filled with anthrax and others with plague. And you know, I'm pretty close and I start sort of backing off a little bit. And I turn around ... and say, 'Hey, where's Lugar? Doesn't he want to see this?' And I turn around and he's way in the back of the room, about fifteen feet away. And he looked at me and said, 'Been there, done that.'"

  Lugar had made countless such trips, but, for Obama, it was a revelation. He had studied arms-control issues at Columbia; now it stunned him to see the weaponry up close. "When you are there you get a sense of the totality of the nuclear program and the stockpiles of conventional arms," Mark Lippert, Obama's foreign-policy adviser, said. "It made an incredible impact on him to see the industrial complex behind it all. When we were in Ukraine, we went to a factory where they were disassembling conventional weapons. There were just piles and piles of shells. They told us that, working at the
rate they were working, it would take eighty years to disassemble them all. At one chem-bio plant, we saw a freezer for the pathogens kept closed by just a string."

  Three months after the trip, Lugar and Obama published an article on the Washington Post's op-ed page called "Junkyard Dogs of War," warning against the spread of loose conventional weapons from the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, "particularly shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that can hit civilian airliners." Lugar and Obama introduced legislation to gain the cooperation of other nations and tighten control of arms caches in the former Soviet Union that were being routinely plundered, and whose contents were being used to make improvised roadside bombs in the Middle East and to fuel civil wars in Africa. The legislation helped strengthen systems to detect and intercept illegal shipments of materials used in chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

  Obama's work with Lugar was not the only instance of his cooperating with Republicans and Democratic centrists. He worked with Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida, on immigration reform, and with Tom Coburn, a right-wing Republican from Oklahoma, on legislation to bring greater transparency to government contracting. He was getting along with his own Party and with his colleagues in general.

  "I am sure it was in the back of my mind that he would run for President someday," Lippert said, "but he felt we had to be serious and map out very particular policy issues where we could be heard. Obama's basic mantra is, You figure out the policy and I will figure out the politics."

  During his term, Obama also called on journalists like Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek, and Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, of the New York Times, to talk about policy. Obama was comfortable with them, eager to exchange ideas and, at the same time, playfully aware of the game of mutual seduction. When Brooks, a moderate conservative, wrote a column attacking the Republicans in Congress on fiscal issues and then added an additional attack on the Democrats, Obama sent him a friendly e-mail saying, "If you want to attack us fine, but you are only throwing in those sentences to make yourself feel better." Brooks felt caught out. "He was calling me to my better nature," Brooks said, wryly. As a conservative, Brooks was disappointed that Obama was such "an orthodox Democrat," but impressed with his intellect and the collective intelligence of the people whom he appointed.