The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  "So he was punching the clock during the day and then coming alive at night to write the book," the aide went on. "The book was about a mortgage and cashing in on the success of the first book. And the book was a way to think through who he was and what he stood for. It was a culmination of thinking and refinement. He created a mechanism where he was chained to the mast and had to figure out who he was to meet a book deadline."

  Obama also spent a lot of time now raising money for his political-action committee, Hopefund, and for his political colleagues. Eventually, Hopefund would become a bulwark for a Presidential campaign, accumulating money and a vast computerized list of contacts. As a fundraiser, Obama had uncommon capacities, especially for a Senate freshman. He could call on Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Oprah Winfrey, and George Soros and ask for their support. Like a traditional pol, he spent hours making cajoling calls to potential donors, but, because of his celebrity, he could also do things quickly. On a single night, he drew a crowd of more than a thousand and raised a million dollars for the Arizona Democratic Party. With a single e-mail appeal, he raised eight hundred thousand dollars for Robert Byrd. When he went to Omaha, he won the glowing endorsement of Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, and his daughter, Susie. Obama was completely at ease with financial barons like Buffett, and they, it seemed, saw something promising in him. "He has as much potential as anyone I've seen to have an important impact over his lifetime on the course that America takes," Buffett said of Obama.

  In order to increase the sense of connection between himself and his donors, Obama, in late October, 2005, had invited a hundred people who had given at least twenty-five hundred dollars to Hopefund to a conference in Chicago to discuss policy and spend time together socially. Peter Bynoe, an African-American entrepreneur who helped build a new stadium for the Chicago White Sox and owned a chunk of the Denver Nuggets, thought Obama had become such a gifted fundraiser that he started calling him "Money." "When his name pops up on caller I.D. on my cell phone, I know it's going to cost a lot more than two cents a minute, but I'm compelled to take the call," Bynoe told one fund-raising audience. "I pride myself on saying no to politicians, but I can't say no to 'Money.'"

  Ever since Obama's election to the Senate, his staff had been planning an official visit to Africa for him. They set the trip for August, 2006, after he completed the manuscript of The Audacity of Hope but before its publication. Obama could justify the trip--to Kenya, Djibouti, Chad, and South Africa--as an important fact-finding mission for a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of the subcommittee on Africa. There were myriad issues for a legislator to discuss: H.I.V./AIDS, Darfur, extreme poverty, development, terrorism, the proliferation of conventional arms. It was hardly a cynical trip. Gibbs, Axelrod, Rouse, and Obama knew that the two-week journey would provoke an emotional reaction in Kenya and in the American press, not least among African-Americans who had not yet learned much about Obama. They did not realize the extent of the reaction: the huge crowds, people watching from balconies, children perched in the branches of trees.

  Traveling with his wife and daughters and just two aides, Mark Lippert and Robert Gibbs, Obama visited a refugee camp in Chad to highlight the slaughter in Darfur; received a briefing from U.S. military officials at a base in Djibouti; and met with officials in South Africa. He made some policy pronouncements along the way, including a sharp denunciation of corruption and tribalism in Kenya that echoed his father's deepest political concerns and a critique of the South African leader, Thabo Mbeki, for his bewildering and dangerous beliefs about the source of AIDS. In Kenya, Obama made sure to travel beyond Nairobi. He visited Wajir, in the northeastern region of Kenya, near Somalia, which had experienced famine and drought. As a gesture of hospitality, the local Somali Kenyans took Obama to a camel auction and gave him the robes of a Somali elder. (During the 2008 Presidential campaign, right-wing Web sites published a photograph of Obama wearing the robes to suggest that he was, in fact, a Muslim.) Near Kisumu, where his father was born, he took an AIDS test to reduce the stigma of testing, which is especially prevalent among African men, and visited "Granny" at her modest concrete house in Kogelo.

  "The happiest I've seen him, maybe, is when he saw his grandmother," Lippert said. "He truly has a relationship with her. You could see his reaction when he spotted her in a sea of people--it was so deep and genuine." Obama spent nearly two hours in his grandmother's house talking with relatives and eating a traditional stew. He also paid a visit to the raised, tile graves of his father and grandfather, who are buried near the house.

  The extraordinary reception Obama received seemed to demonstrate the effect he could have in altering the battered image of America that had taken hold all over the world during the Bush Administration. The trip certainly reignited the media's infatuation. The networks ran clips, magazines had new pictures and cover stories, newspapers carried news of each event and venue--Obama's team was not disappointed.

  * * *

  Just a couple of weeks after returning from Africa, Obama accepted an invitation to speak at a venue that was very different from Kogelo. It was an invitation to appear at the Warren County Fairgrounds, in Indianola, Iowa. The occasion was Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry, at which more than three thousand people paid twenty-five dollars to eat fantastic quantities of food, stroll around the fairgrounds, and then settle on the grass or in lawn chairs to listen to a few speeches. The headliner in 2003 had been Bill Clinton and, in 2005, John Edwards. Obama had initially been reluctant to come to the event, but now he was willing to attract the attention and speculation.

  To help guide Obama in Iowa, a trip that only the dense would fail to see as an exploratory mission for the 2008 caucuses, Pete Rouse called on a friend, Steve Hildebrand, who had run Al Gore's campaign in the state six years earlier, and had worked for Daschle, too. "I thought, let's have a little fun with this," Rouse said. "I wanted to create a little buzz." Much of the buzz was within the Clinton and Edwards camps; they, too, had hoped to hire Hildebrand. Harkin, a liberal who had taken a brief run at the Presidency in 1992, introduced his guest to the crowd by saying, "I really tried to get Bono this weekend. I settled for the second-biggest rock star in America."

  Dressed in standard steak-fry garb for visiting Washingtonians--shirtsleeves and khaki pants--Obama was in good form. He began with his well-honed description of his family background (my mother is from Kansas, he said, "which is where I got this accent"), then he moved on to a description of the troubled state of the nation. If the country didn't change course soon the next generation would find life "a little bit meaner and a little bit poorer than the one we inherited from our parents." But he did not come to Iowa intent on attacking the President, or not personally.

  "I don't think George Bush is a bad man," he said. "I think he's a patriotic person and I don't think that the people who work for him are stupid people. I think a lot of them are smart in their own way. I think that the problem is that they've got a different idea of America than the idea we've got."

  In the simplest terms--terms that he had been rehearsing for a long time, terms that became the center of his stump speech in the months ahead--Obama provided a homey, deeply affecting vision of a liberal American idea:

  They believe in different things. They have a sense that in fact government is the problem, not the solution, and that if we just dismantle government, piece by piece, if we break it up in tax cuts to the wealthy and if we just make sure that we privatize Social Security and we get rid of public schools and we make sure that we don't have police on the streets, we hire private security guards and we don't have public parks, we've got private parks and if we just break everything up, then in fact everybody's going to be better off--that in fact we don't have obligations to each other, that we're not in it together but instead you're on your own. That's the basic concept behind the ownership society. That's what George Bush and this Republican Congress have been arguing for the last six years. And
it's a tempting idea because it doesn't require anything from each of us.

  It's very easy for us to say that I'm going to think selfishly about myself, that I don't have to worry that forty-six million people don't have health insurance and I don't have to make any effort to deal with the fact that our children don't have any opportunities to go to college because student loans have been cut and I don't have to worry about the guy who just lost his job after working thirty years at a plant because his plant's moved down to Mexico or out to China, despite the fact that he has been producing profits on behalf of that company this whole time and that he's lost his health care and he's lost his pension as a consequence. I don't have to worry about those things.

  But here's the problem. The problem is that idea won't work because despite the much-vaunted individual initiative and self-reliance that has been the essence of the American dream, the fact of the matter is that there has always been this other idea of America, this idea that says we have a stake in each other, that I am my brother's keeper, that I am my sister's keeper, that I've got obligations not just for myself, not just for my family but also for you, that every child is my child, that every senior citizen deserves protection. That simple notion is one that we understand in our churches and our synagogues and our mosques and we understand in our own families, in our blocks, in our own workplaces, but it also has to reflect itself in our government. You know, nobody here expects government to solve all our problems for us. We don't want government to solve our problems but what we do expect is that government can help. That government can make a difference in all of our lives and that is essentially the battle that we are going to be fighting in this election ... a battle about what America is going to be.

  Yet again, Obama was extending a hand to moderates, to voters who saw a black senator from Chicago and required complex forms of reassurance. In phrase after phrase, Obama emitted signals about religion, the economy, race, and much else, saying, in essence, Even if you don't agree with me on everything, I will listen to you, you are heard. It was the rhetoric, once more, of moderate liberalism and inclusion.

  What besides Obama's skills as a speaker and politician could have given him and his circle of aides the idea that he could run for President, and run not foremost as a black candidate, but as a candidate with a chance to win? Millions of whites, Hispanics, and even African-Americans were not going to be easily convinced that Obama, or the country, was ready for this. What beyond the generally adoring press coverage and standing ovations provided a foundation for a Presidential candidacy?

  First, there was the mood of the electorate, which was increasingly frustrated with, even despairing of, its leadership. "George Bush was instrumental in the rise of Barack Obama," Cornell Belcher, one of Obama's pollsters, said. "Quite frankly, before George Bush, who so screwed things up, we could not have had a Barack Obama. After Bush's election there was talk of a permanent Republican majority. Their Party structure was that strong and was built on the sense that their values were more in line with the values of regular Americans. And that was tied to security: 'I trust your values, therefore I trust you to keep us safe.' But George Bush undermined the Republican brand and created an environment in which people were hungry for something fundamentally new. By 2006, 2007, the country was positioned for something that didn't look like what had come before. There was deep-seated anger and anxiety, a monumental drop-off in voters' trust in politics as usual. Hillary is brilliant, but for a lot of people she couldn't answer that call because of her history. Everything about Barack Obama--the very name!--spoke of change."

  But how much had the country really changed? Obama's experience running for Senate had been essential to his team's core of optimism--an optimism not only about the candidate and his qualities but also about the country and its deepest emotions about race. Obama's victories in white suburbs and rural counties had convinced his circle that he had the capacity to run extremely well not only among African-Americans and white progressives; he could also win votes in areas of the country which had once been bastions of racial animosity.

  Much of the empirical basis for Obama's confidence about his prospects rested on persuasive evidence of generational change. First of all, the country was growing much more diverse. The whitest part of the American population was the oldest. Among people over sixty-five, the population was around eighty-per-cent white; the population under twenty-five is about half white. And the white population, even among older and middle-aged people, was susceptible to change in their attitudes. In the nineteen-thirties, thirty-seven per cent of the American people told pollsters from Gallup that they would be willing to vote for an African-American for President; now the percentage was ninety-five per cent. Other polls had somewhat lower numbers, but the trend was clear. When Colin Powell flirted with running for President in 1996, polls showed that the number of people who would not vote for him based on race was negligible.

  The Obama team watched with keen interest as Harold Ford, Jr., the House member from Tennessee and a friend of Obama's in the congressional Black Caucus, ran an incredibly tight race in 2006 for Senate against the Republican, Bob Corker. It had been unthinkable that an African-American could beat a white opponent in a statewide race in the South. Ford ended up losing by just three points, and the reasons had far less to do with race or ideology than with the fact that, not long before the vote, one of Ford's relatives was indicted. Ford, like Obama--like Artur Davis, in Alabama, or Cory Booker, in Newark, Deval Patrick, in Massachusetts, and Michael Nutter, in Philadelphia--was a Joshua generation politician. He had attended the University of Pennsylvania, not seminary or a historically black college. His rhetoric was not that of struggle, of opposition to white oppression, but rather of mainstream American politics. The electorate seemed welcoming.

  The country was also changing in terms of class and education, factors that could also have an impact on an Obama candidacy. Ruy Teixeira of the Brookings Institution and Alan Abramowitz of Emory University studied demographic trends and saw a dramatic decline in the primacy of the traditionally defined white working class and the rise of what they call a "mass upper-middle class." Simply put, in 1940 three-quarters of adults twenty-five and over were high-school dropouts or never made it to high school at all. Decade after decade, education rates rose so that by 2007 more than half the population had at least some college education. Similarly, in 1940, about thirty-two per cent of employed Americans had white-collar jobs as managers, professionals, or in clerical or sales positions. By 2006, that percentage had nearly doubled; there were now nearly three times as many white-collar Americans as manual workers. What was more, many white working-class voters had not permanently and entirely abandoned the Democratic Party; many had grown despairing of a broken health-care system, a failing economy, and the seemingly endless war in Iraq. Teixeira and Abramowitz did not discount the continuing importance of white working-class votes, especially in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, but their study was one of the best among many that made clear how much the country was changing.

  In the fall of 2006, Mark Alexander, a professor of constitutional law at Seton Hall University, in New Jersey, wrote a memorandum about a potential Obama campaign for the Presidency. The five-page memo, which was titled "It Can Be Done," gave a positive assessment of Obama's chances based on a variety of shifts in the demographic and racial landscape of the country. Alexander reviewed Obama's policy positions; the scale and organizational strength of the black church and historically black colleges; promising trends in the census and voter lists, particularly the huge number of unregistered black voters in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia. Alexander knew Obama; his sister, Elizabeth, was a poet and had been a professor at the University of Chicago, where she got to know the Obamas. (Their father, Clifford Alexander, was counsel to Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter's secretary of the Army.) Mark Alexander had first met Barack and Michelle at Elizabeth's wedding, in 1997; he held on to Barack's cell-phone number. He
'd worked for a string of liberal Democrats: Howard Metzenbaum, Edward Kennedy, Bill Bradley, and, most recently, Cory Booker; in Obama, he saw someone who could win the ultimate political prize. When he called Obama in 2006, he told him, "You may believe my memo or you may not believe my memo. But don't run unless you really believe it can happen." Obama took Alexander's advice so seriously that he eventually made him his campaign-policy director.

  Alexander and other analysts were right in thinking that the country had changed. The old electoral map of Southern strategies, a dominant, monolithic religious right, and other post-Voting-Rights-era obstacles for the Democrats was in flux. In addition to overwhelming dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration, the very nature of how most Americans understood basic issues like race was shifting in ways that could only be encouraging to Obama and his circle. Virginia had elected a black governor, Doug Wilder, as long ago as 1990. The South was no longer monolithic. Mississippi was still at the bottom of the nation in education and it was nearly impossible for a black politician to run statewide. But Virginia and North Carolina, with their centers for high-tech jobs, had attracted educated workers who were ready to vote for black candidates.

  Obama's team believed it was possible that race could be, on balance, an asset. Nearly a quarter of the Democratic primary vote is African-American. In 1980, Jimmy Carter retained the Democratic nomination after a strong challenge from Edward Kennedy not least because Carter secured more of the black vote; in 2000, Al Gore defeated Bill Bradley largely because of Gore's popularity among black voters. The Clintons had long been popular among African-Americans, but Obama could capture that vote if he could prove that he was a serious, and not a symbolic, candidate.