The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  In David Axelrod's Chicago office in the River North neighborhood, just after the November, 2006, midterm elections, Obama met with Axelrod, Gibbs, Jarrett, Rouse, Steve Hildebrand, the strategist David Plouffe, Obama's close friend Marty Nesbitt, and his scheduler and aide, Alyssa Mastromonaco. The office walls are covered with framed newspaper pages announcing the victories of Axelrod's many clients. Rouse had prepared a background memo that included questions like "Are you intimidated by the prospect of being leader of the free world?"

  Which made Obama laugh.

  "Someone's got to do it," he said.

  In this and other early meetings that fall, Obama and his staff discussed all the obvious political ramifications. Was it really time? Was Obama prepared for the rigors of non-stop travel and scrutiny, the constant atmosphere of BlackBerry urgency, brushfires from early morning until late at night? Did he want to spend month after month in the first four primary states--Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina? Would he ever be able to catch up with Clinton, who was thirty points ahead, in terms of fund-raising and field organizations? Was Obama willing to endure the inhuman effort that a Presidential race demanded when the chance of winning was so remote? "We thought he could win," Plouffe said, "but it was a small possibility ... Barack had never been through the crucible. He'd never had negative ads run against him. So, the question was, could he deal with the intense scrutiny and the attacks that would come. It was an open question. It was going to be grueling. You'll never be home, it's lonely, you're going to be a huge underdog. You've just come off this book tour where you got all this adulation and pretty soon you're going to be in Iowa talking to twenty people, and none of them are going to be for you."

  The Democrats had just achieved a majority and so life in the Senate for Obama might become more satisfying, as it had when the Democrats took the State Senate in Illinois. At home, he talked with his wariest constituent: Michelle Obama. For a long time, Michelle had held their family together, taking care of the girls, working at the university, managing what needed doing as a political spouse. A run for the Presidency would mean two years of constant campaigning, of an absent husband and father, a brutal process of public exposure and unpredictable turns. Obama's books were best-sellers. The family was financially secure. Was this life so bad? Did they really want to endure the separations and risks of a Presidential race? As late as Thanksgiving, some members of Obama's inner circle would have put the odds against his running, despite his now public admission that he was thinking it through.

  The public adulation was extraordinary. One afternoon Abner Mikva waited for Obama at a famous German restaurant in the Loop called the Berghoff, which was just around the corner from Obama's Chicago office. "He was just a few minutes late but he pulled up in his black S.U.V. He hadn't walked, and I teased him about it," Mikva recalled. "Barack said, 'If I had walked, I would have been an hour late.' As it was he couldn't even eat. So many people came to the table just wanting to shake his hand. He said, 'It's getting more and more like this all the time.'"

  Mikva's friend Newton Minow had had similar experiences of Obama-mania. Throughout the summer he had been wary of Obama's running so soon for the Presidency--until he turned on C-SPAN and watched Obama's speech in Indianola. "I said, by God, he is Jack Kennedy all over again." On October 26th, Minow published an op-ed article in the Tribune headlined "Why Obama Should Run for President."

  Obama read the article and asked to meet with Minow and Mikva. The three men assembled at Minow's office downtown. Obama began by telling them that Michelle was extremely reluctant; they were both concerned that he would be away from his daughters for nearly two years if he ran.

  "Between Abner and me, we have six daughters, and they've all turned out pretty well," Minow replied. "Mine are all lawyers, Ab's are a rabbi, a judge, a lawyer, and we learned that a father's biggest role was when they are teenagers."

  Barack wrote down a few notes and said that he wanted to mention that to Michelle.

  "Then Abner was tough on him on security," Minow said. "We told him that there was a strong likelihood that someone would take a shot at him. And he said, 'You sound like Michelle.' He didn't seem rattled by it, though. He seemed less concerned than we were."

  Obama talked about his chances and said that, if he lost, at least he would learn a lot about the country and have a good shot at the Vice-Presidency.

  Back in Washington, Obama's confidant in the Senate, Richard Durbin, argued that greater seniority in the Senate could prove a liability. The two modern senators who went directly to the Presidency, Warren Harding and John Kennedy, had done so after short careers in the Senate. John Kerry had spent a lot of his time in debate in 2004 defending the many controversial votes he inevitably racked up over two decades on Capitol Hill. "I said to him, 'Do you really think sticking around the Senate for four more years and casting a thousand more votes will make you more qualified for President?'" Durbin recalled. Tom Daschle, who gave up a chance to run for President and then lost his seat in the Senate, had become another of Obama's mentors, and at a long meal, Daschle told him that his lack of experience was an asset, not a drawback. "I argued that windows of opportunity for running for the Presidency close quickly," Daschle recalled. "He shouldn't assume, if he passes up this window, that there will be another." The longer he stayed in Washington, Daschle told Obama, the harder it would be to present himself as a candidate of change. Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, and Kerry were just a few of the senators who, as Presidential candidates, suffered from an image of institutional calcification; their experience was, for many voters, offset by years of stentorian debate and stultifying compromise. Even the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, privately told Obama that he should at least consider running. Reid, as a Democratic Party leader, could obviously not show his hand, but he, too, was worried about Hillary Clinton's negatives.

  There were, however, admirers of Obama's who worried that, like a college athlete who jumps into the professional ranks before graduation, he could do himself irreparable damage. Harry Belafonte, who had been deeply engaged in the civil-rights movement while he was on the rise in show business, was in contact with Obama and he worried about him. "Because I do see in him something so terribly precious and I see in him such a remarkable potential, I would rather think of him as a work in progress," Belafonte said. "We are prone to push people beyond their time. We are so eager to devour our young. I think Senator Obama is a force, and I think he needs to see a lot about this nation and he needs to go to a lot of places. We've seen so many others who have come to high places and have failed so miserably. I think he could be our exception to the rule."

  In November of 2006, at the offices of a Washington law firm, Obama held one of a series of secret brainstorming sessions about his chances. His friends and advisers asked if he could overcome the charge of inexperience. Could he challenge the Clinton machine? After the meeting had gone on for a while, Broderick Johnson, a prominent Washington lawyer and lobbyist, asked, "What about race?"

  Obama replied, "I believe America is ready," and little more was said on the subject. Obama could not run a campaign like Jesse Jackson's, which had relied heavily on a black base; instead, he would aim at a notionally limitless coalition organized around a center-left politics.

  At around the same time, Obama had a telephone conversation with one of his African-American fundraisers. The fundraiser told Obama that he wasn't sure it was the right time, that Obama was vulnerable on the question of experience, that he had never run a state office or a large business. Obama answered that if experience necessarily led to good judgment then Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would be supreme. "But look where that got us," he said.

  The two men talked some more--about the Clintons, about the Republicans, and, most of all, about the barriers that Obama would face. Finally, the fundraiser said, "It's funny you call. I've taken my own plebiscite and there is an interesting divide."

  Obama cut him off and said, "
Yeah, yeah, I know. The white folks want me to run. And the black folks think I'm going to get killed."

  That was it, exactly. The donor, who was older than Obama, had keen memories of the assassinations of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. When King was shot in Memphis, Obama was six years old and living in Indonesia. The older man felt that there was an emotional and temporal divide. "If you are brought up in that experience and heard the things you've heard, then the idea of a black guy running for President was a little scary," he admitted later. As both a candidate and then as President, Obama would make jokes about "getting shot" in order to put friends and visitors at ease; he and Michelle had made their peace with this new reality and were determined not to feel its weight.

  Finally, Obama concluded that while he was not yet committed to running, it wasn't worthwhile to be consumed in speculation about the readiness, or not, of the American people for a black President. "If they're not ready now," he said more than once, "they won't be ready in my lifetime."

  Mike Strautmanis, who had first met the Obamas when he was a paralegal at Sidley Austin, where Michelle was working, had become chief counsel in the Senate. Even though he was younger than many of the black political advisers and fundraisers talking to Obama and expressing their anxieties, he, too, felt angry at times with the white liberals for pushing so hard. "They weren't seeing the United States and remembering its history clearly enough for what it was," he said. In his most pessimistic moments, Strautmanis believed that "once again their ideals would lead to something terrible, and it was my friend who was going to pay the price."

  And yet it calmed him to watch Obama sort through his options. "I remember a meeting in November, 2006," he recalled. "I'd heard from Pete Rouse how Barack and Michelle were going through this process, the questions they were asking. I realized that Barack had been thinking about this for a very long time. He'd been thinking about the political moment we're in for at least ten years. He was testing, seeing how all the pieces fit together. Would the pieces be there? The money? The ability to create a national political organization and a loyal team? And the pieces meant nothing unless you understood the political moment and how to meet it. He had a very sophisticated view of that. He'd been making a detailed, layered analysis of national politics for a long time."

  Obama's view, Valerie Jarrett said, was that "he would not lose because he's black, and, therefore, let's not dwell on the fact that he's black. Because if you dwell on it, and you make race an issue within the campaign, then it will become an issue." Jarrett, who was personally closer to the Obamas than anyone in his political circle, said that once they had been assured of the professionalism of the Secret Service, their anxieties eased. "I can't let that paralyze me," Obama said.

  "There were so many opportunities for him to be afraid along this path and to turn back," Jarrett recalled. "You know, when you were talking about the brothers saying, don't run because you might lose? They weren't worried about him. They were worried about themselves. They didn't want to be embarrassed."

  Around Thanksgiving of 2006, John Rogers and others in Obama's circle went to see "Bobby," a film written and directed by Emilio Estevez. The film was set in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Robert Kennedy and many of his supporters were staying at the time of the 1968 California Democratic primary. These were what turned out to be the last hours of Kennedy's life. What moved Rogers and his friends was not the bloody climax of the film, but, rather, the way that the film's many ordinary characters--a retired doorman, a soldier, a beautician, a black kitchen worker, two Mexican busboys, the campaign donors, and the long-haired volunteers--were swept up in the promise of Kennedy's campaign, the way that they represented a multi-ethnic coalition. The film suggested, once more, R.F.K.'s campaign in 1968 as a model of idealism. In the wake of emotional events like the Africa trip and his meetings with crowds of people during his cross-country book tour, Obama and his circle were arriving at the conclusion that he could run and, if things broke the right way, win the Presidency.

  "We were talking about this sense of passion and energy and love for Bobby and he was experiencing it in his life," Rogers recalled. "It's a rare thing to generate that kind of passion. You could just tell that it clearly affected him, what he was experiencing on the road. People were pushing him. I had had the sense he was going to push it off for the next time but when I met with him that November, December in the office here, you could sense that he was pretty well there. He was taking it really seriously and he was going to go to Hawaii and think about it. But reading body language, I had the strong feeling that he was going to move at warp speed."

  Rogers, who had played basketball with Michelle's brother, Craig, at Princeton, had been a big supporter of Bill Bradley's political career. He told Obama that one of Bradley's problems was that he had waited too long to make his run; that, by the time he did, his moment had passed. Rogers also described watching Hillary Clinton, who had been in Chicago to speak at the Economic Club downtown. It was a dull spectacle that gave him hope. "There wasn't a chuckle or smile in the hour," he said. "It was drab, facts and figures and numbers and policy points. And I thought Hillary wouldn't capture the imagination of the American people."

  On November 28, 2006, David Axelrod wrote Obama a tough-minded memorandum to force the issue. The memo asserted that Obama, because of his youth and non-partisan image, was the ideal antidote to the Bush Presidency: "You are uniquely suited for these times. No one among the potential candidates within our party is as well positioned to rekindle our lost idealism as Americans and pick up the mantle of change. No one better represents a new generation of leadership, more focused on practical solutions to today's challenges than old dogmas of the left and right. That is why your Convention speech resonated so beautifully. And it remains the touchstone for our campaign moving forward." Hillary Clinton's strategy, he said, will be "to suggest that she has the beef, while we offer only sizzle." She would, however, have a difficult task "escaping the well-formulated perception of her among swing voters as a left-wing ideologue." Axelrod did not discount John Edwards. He had worked for Edwards in his 2004 Presidential campaign--an experience that ended unhappily when, among other factors, Edwards's wife, Elizabeth, lost faith in him and helped to push him off the team. Edwards was ahead in Iowa, but, Axelrod said, that was because he was a "relentless campaigner and debater."

  Echoing the advice of Durbin and Daschle, Axelrod counseled against waiting for a moment when Obama was more seasoned: "You will never be hotter than you are right now." A longer voting record could hang "from your neck like the anchor from the Lusitania."

  There was no getting around the difficulties. "This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience. It goes to your willingness and ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism. At the risk of triggering the very reaction that concerns me, I don't know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch. You care far too much [about] what is written and said about you. You don't relish combat when it becomes personal and nasty. When the largely irrelevant Alan Keyes attacked you, you flinched."

  It was a shrewd memo, one written not only by a cunning political consultant attuned to the political moment but also by a friend who had the capacity to provoke Obama, purposively, preventatively. He made sure to finish on a note of idealistic purpose. "All of this," Axelrod wrote, "may be worth enduring for the chance to change the world."

  Not long afterward, Obama was speaking with the Reverend Alvin Love, from the Lilydale First Baptist Church, on the South Side, an old friend from his organizing days. The two men were talking about Obama's decision when, finally, Love said, "You know, my father always said you have to strike when the iron is hot."

  Obama laughed. "The iron can't get any hotter," he said.

  Finally, Rogers and Jarrett, as well as wealthy allies like Penny Pritzker, thought that his growing appeal could be leveraged to raise enough money to make him a seriou
s candidate. Pritzker, who had first met the Obamas in the mid-nineties when Craig Robinson coached her child in a summer Y.M.C.A. basketball league, became Obama's national finance chairman; her brother Jay did the same for Hillary Clinton. "I knew Barack would be able to raise the money," Rogers said. "He was always very disciplined about making his calls and building the relationships. Barack was the Michael Jordan of the political world. Jordan came into the N.B.A. as a gifted player, but he worked at getting better. Barack had all the skills but he also worked at getting better and better. He knew how to organize a team."

  In mid-December, Obama told his inner circle that he had moved "past the fifty-fifty mark," but he wanted to spend the holidays in Hawaii with his family and think it through to the end. The day before he left, he even told David Plouffe that he was "ninety per cent certain that I am running" and would give the "final green light" when he got back. Plouffe's concern was that the normalcy and fun of the trip with his family would awaken Obama to the many pleasures of private life that he would be giving up.

  Obama's sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, had been teasing Obama about running for President for years. At Christmas in 2005, she bought some "Obama '08" T-shirts from one of the draft movements and put them under the Christmas tree. Obama had just laughed and rolled his eyes. By Christmas of 2006, she said, "It felt less funny. It felt like people had been waiting for him." In Hawaii, as their daughters played in the sand, the Obamas talked through their last concerns--security, the loss of privacy, the effect on Malia and Sasha.

  When Obama came home after the New Year, he said, "Well, I've decided to do it, but I want to go home just this one last weekend to make sure I don't have buyer's remorse." He did not. He was sure. Late at night, on January 6th, Obama called Plouffe and said, "It's a go. You can start hiring some core people quietly but swear them to secrecy."