A Reason to Believe (21 page)

“Wait, wait,” I said, flustered. “I’m in the middle of a mall. May I find a quiet place and call right back?”

I got a number and made my way to the hair salon where my sister worked, on the second floor of the mall. She let me sit in a supply closet, where I could close the door. I immediately got the president on the line. He was planning to travel to the University of Texas to give a speech, and he wanted me to suggest some text to inspire the students.

“Tell them that you know there are idealists among them, and that you believe in them,” I said. I tried to explain the power of having the president of the United States affirm their highest aspirations. I could tell he was skeptical; he did not want to raise anyone’s expectations too high. There is probably no more skilled politician in this generation than Bill Clinton, and his presidency, notwithstanding his personal shortcomings, was substantively among the most successful ever. But he was cautious about trying to inspire people.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, understands and embraces his role as an aspirational leader. It’s funny how many people presume that, because we are both black politicians with roots in Chicago, we’ve been friends all our lives. We didn’t actually meet until 1995, when I was at the Justice Department. Abner Mikva, then the White
House counsel, was a great progressive in his own right. He had served as a congressman from Chicago and as a federal court of appeals judge in Washington, D.C., and I had gotten to know him during policy debates with the White House staff. Mikva was an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago Law School and knew a young black attorney there who was practicing voting rights law. At lunch in the White House mess one afternoon, he leaned in close.

“Have you met Barack Obama?” he asked.

“The name is familiar,” I said.

He encouraged me to meet Obama for a cup of coffee the next time I was in Chicago. When I did, I saw what he and others had found so captivating—Obama’s intelligence, idealism, and determination to make a difference in others’ lives. Here’s a guy to watch, I thought, and over the years, we stayed in touch.

By 2004, I was desperate for aspirational leadership. My frustrations with the Bush presidency had been rising steadily. I felt the Republicans had led us down a dangerous path—a huge debt, an ill-advised war, and the undue curtailing of our personal liberties in the name of national security. I do not accept all of the perceived wisdom of the Democratic Party, and some of the ideas associated with the Republican Party are appealing. Most people aren’t buying 100 percent of what either party is selling. But the country needed change. I did not know John Kerry well, but what I knew I liked. He’s smart about public policy and has a warmth and wit that do not always come through on
television. Throughout his primary campaign, he tapped a yearning for change felt by many Democrats, but something was missing. It was clear that we Democrats were united against Bush and his policies. It became less and less clear, however, what we were
for
.

Then Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention in Boston. I had been at the convention the night before and had tickets for the night that Obama was to deliver the keynote address, but we were at home instead hosting a party for friends who had come from out of town for the convention. Obama was the Democratic candidate from Illinois for the Senate, but he had no national standing. He was little known to most of the political sophisticates at my house as well.

Many politicians pay lip service to hope and idealism, but Obama’s appeal in his speech was so clearly heartfelt that it lifted the crowd. After acknowledging the “spin masters” who embrace “the politics of anything goes,” he declared:

As soon as Obama finished his speech, one of our guests said, “That will change the calculation for 2008.” At last someone had invoked the language of idealism that I was longing for. Because Kerry had personally asked Obama to open the convention, I thought it reflected well on the tone he was trying to set for the party and on the general election campaign.

But his campaign seemed more focused on how to win than on why he should. Kerry was given a perfect opportunity to distinguish himself from Bush in the summer of 2004 when a bipartisan commission issued a damning report on the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq. The weapons of mass destruction, used by Bush to justify his decision to go to war, did not exist. Both candidates were
asked: Had you known then what you know now—that there were no weapons of mass destruction—would you have still invaded Iraq?

Bush immediately said yes. Kerry dawdled for three days, and many assumed he was conducting a poll to determine the best answer or the best way to frame it. I furiously shot off e-mails to Kerry’s brother, a prominent Boston lawyer who was central to the campaign. I thought Kerry had a chance to present a different vision for using American military force while confronting the Bush administration for its carelessness in starting the war. Instead, he answered the question by agreeing with Bush. I was certain it was not what he believed.

At that moment, the air went out of the campaign for me and many others. I put on a brave face, of course, and helped where I could. But it seemed to me that the Democrats had lost the will to champion values and to be a voice of optimism. At a minimum, that meant rejecting the radical idea of preemptive war when there was no imminent threat to the nation.

I was still working at Coca-Cola at the time, but that’s when the seed was planted that I wanted to run for governor. The outcome of the Bush-Kerry contest was close. I was in the campaign suite in the Copley Place Hotel in Boston in the early hours of November 3 when the call was finally made that the race was over. I was thoroughly disappointed, though none could be more than the people around me who had dedicated so much to the campaign,
and I left the suite quickly to avoid the inevitable recriminations. But I did wonder if the American people had been allowed to glimpse the real John Kerry or been given a reason for why his victory mattered to the nation. Here was an uncommonly decent man, who had sacrificed for his country and would lead with fortitude and worldliness. Would our knowing his values and ideals have mattered? Would knowing mine?

Obama won the Senate seat, of course. Not long after he was sworn in, I went to Washington to meet with him in his cramped basement office in the Russell building. The standard government furniture was still being moved in. He was himself: long, perilously lanky, relaxed, confident, and a little preoccupied. His eyes are deep and considering; his ears, famously wide. His hands are surprisingly delicate. We discussed staffing—he had hired an assistant who had worked for me at Justice—and the oddity of being a celebrity in an institution that values seniority above all else. He was looking forward to finding out about his committee assignments.

Then I told him that I was thinking of running for governor.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You got any money?”

“No.”

“You got any name recognition?”

“No.”

“You got any staff or consultants yet?”

“No.”

I said what I did have was a passion for helping people, a willingness to make the tough calls if they are the right ones, and a hunger to reach out to people who were not feeling connected to their government. Above all was my determination to run on my values—win or lose. Democrats, I said, needed to regain their voice of optimism, but a voice that blended optimism with pragmatism, and we needed to put hard questions to our own family members—organized labor, teachers, people of color, public employees, everyone. I didn’t know whether I could win, but I thought a little authenticity might count for something in Massachusetts.

I sat on the brown leather sofa of the type and kind that adorns every federal office. Obama sat opposite me on a leather and wooden chair that was also standard issue. He leaned back in his chair and rocked on the two back legs, looking first at me and then into the middle distance. After a few minutes he spoke.

“I’m in,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

Suddenly I had my first major political endorsement. I was grateful. Notwithstanding his skepticism, Obama was exuberant. He immediately proposed to come to Massachusetts for a fundraiser, but I told him it was too early. My own senators weren’t on board yet; no point in embarrassing them.

“Oh, yeah,” he remembered. “They are my colleagues.” We were both new to the big leagues.

Idealism was the theme of my first race for governor. I found I couldn’t make a case for changing our policies without also talking about changing our broken politics, about fixing our “broken civic life.” Acknowledging how disillusioned so many of our citizens had become, I urged those who had lost faith in their public leaders to return to the political process and to renew their belief that they could make a difference. Against the urging of many of my own supporters and political advisers, we shunned negative ads and maintained a positive message of hope and change.

I was called everything from naive to an “empty suit.” Supporters were cautious, as detractors made idealism seem either misleading or dumb. All that led to a remarkable exchange at a candidates’ forum in the general election. The moderator asked each of us to say something positive about the other candidate. I complimented the Republican nominee, Kerry Healey, for putting her ideas and her vision on the line and subjecting them to scrutiny and criticism. She had been a leader in response to substance abuse in teenagers as well, and I may have acknowledged that, too. When her turn came, she said rather grudgingly, “Well, he can give a good speech.”

Healey’s campaign made some withering attacks on my
ideas, my experience, my character, and even my family. It was classic fear-mongering, and I was convinced that people were tired of it. When she dismissed what I was trying to get across in my stump speech, it somehow cut to the core of what I was trying to do in the campaign, to ask people to think and act big, to reach beyond our collective grasp. At a late campaign rally, we hit back, calling out her crucial misunderstanding of what our campaign was all about.

“Healey says that all I can do is give a good speech,” I said. “It’s just words, she says.”

I paused. Then, “ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words?”

I was warming up. “ ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words?”

And another one: “ ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’ Just words?”

The clincher: “ ‘I have a dream.’ Just words?”

Let me be clear: I am no Dr. King, no President Kennedy, no FDR, no Thomas Jefferson. But I do know that certain words survive because they are the indispensable language of inspiration and resolve. No ten-point plan is inscribed on any wall or monument in Washington, D.C. Words that matter capture a noble sentiment, an enduring ideal, a heroic vision. And the right words, spoken from the heart, are a call to action.

The night I was elected governor, I began my acceptance speech by saying that the people of Massachusetts
had taken back their government. Then I said, “This was not a victory just for me. This was not a victory just for Democrats. This was a victory for hope.”

Hope, it turns out, was springing eternal.

In early 2006, Barack Obama began to toss around the idea of running for president among his friends and staff. Word then got out. He was a junior senator in the third year of his first term and had never run anything larger than a community organization, so he was vulnerable to charges of inexperience. He was aware of his political celebrity but cautious not to make too much of it for fear of seeming presumptuous. He was black. Was the country ready for him?

He announced his candidacy in February 2007. Before a huge, enthusiastic crowd in Springfield, Illinois, he ignited a nervous sense of possibility. Speculation naturally turned to whether he could win; the general consensus was negative. Diane and I had dinner with a fellow governor and her husband one summer evening during a governors’ retreat in upstate Michigan. I was new to the job and still tiptoeing around the veteran politicians, trying to avoid political conversations the way one might in any new company. Not Diane. She broke the ice by asking the governor her thoughts about the field of probable candidates, including the favorite Democrat, Hillary Clinton. The governor said flatly that Clinton could not win and that “Barack
should.” In conversations like that one, repeated over and over among politicians and casual observers alike, I began to sense that what people wanted most was a reason to hope. They wanted to be inspired. They wanted leadership.

Still, so many people I spoke with said they wanted Obama to be president but feared he could never be elected. Pundits and pollsters dismissed the idea as a long shot at best, self-indulgent at worst. According to some commentators, Clinton even outpolled Obama among black people. By summer, the campaign seemed stalled.

In August, after several grueling months of campaigning, Barack and Michele Obama went to Martha’s Vineyard for a vacation with their family and stayed with Valerie Jarrett, a close friend from Chicago. Diane and I joined them for dinner one night, and the five of us sat gazing out at the water on a perfect summer evening, talking lazily. Diane had never met Barack and I had never met Michele, but everyone was so relaxed that we all felt like fast friends.