Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (22 page)

A few feet in front of Gibbs and me were George Stephanopoulos, now with ABC News, and CNN’s Jeff Greenfield, a onetime speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy. “This is a great fucking speech,” Greenfield said to George, mouthing the words to cut through the din.

Amid this madhouse, I thought about that night, twenty years earlier, when I heard Mario Cuomo deliver his rousing, career-making keynote in San Francisco. From that moment on, Cuomo was a star, and the constant focus of speculation when presidential politics came up. The reception for Obama in Boston was at least as emphatic.

“Barack doesn’t know it, but his life just changed in a big way,” I told Gibbs. “It’ll never be the same.” Though I didn’t say it, I had a feeling that the same could be said for Gibbs and me. We were at the beginning of what promised to be a rocket ride with our once-in-a-lifetime client.

Susan watched the speech from a friends-and-family box. When I met up with her afterward, she was effusive. “We were in tears up here!”

The next morning, as we walked the streets of Boston, well-wishers swarmed around Obama. A previously scheduled press breakfast was suddenly overflowing. Back home, the
Sun-Times
screaming headline read, “Obama Delivers!” The
Tribune
published an editorial entitled “The Phenom.” “Obama delivered a brilliant, passionate and heartening speech,” it read.

 • • • 

All the attention certainly wouldn’t hurt us in the Senate race—not that, by then, we needed much of a boost. While Obama was wowing the nation, Republicans were tripping all over themselves trying to find a candidate to oppose him. Former Illinois governor Jim Edgar and several other credible state Republicans opted not to step in the path of our juggernaut. Finally, in August, GOP leaders recruited a candidate from Maryland and conservative talk radio.

Like much of the Midwest, Illinois had a history of moderate Republicanism. Alan Keyes broke that mold. The bombastic, homophobic Keyes was a favorite among right-wing evangelicals for his fiery jeremiads against liberalism in all its forms. The fact that he was African American was particularly enticing to the desperate GOP leaders, who had the preposterous notion that they could match the power of one African American candidate simply by importing one of their own.

Within days of parachuting in to fill the Senate void, the voluble Keyes was roiling the waters, decrying Obama’s “slaveholder’s position” on abortion and insisting that Obama “countenances even the murder of living young children outside the womb.”

The election was effectively over before it started. The first public poll showed Obama with a forty-point lead. By the second poll, his lead had stretched to fifty.

Yet if Keyes was a dead man campaigning in the Senate race, he still had an uncanny ability to get under Obama’s skin. Intentionally mispronouncing Obama’s first name by putting the emphasis on the first syllable, Keyes was a bubbling, spewing cauldron of pompous, morally superior attacks. The
Sun-Times
pretty well summarized his approach in its account of one of three candidate debates: “Keyes ridiculed Obama as ignorant of the Constitution, naive on foreign policy, out of touch with African Americans descended from slaves and willing to compromise his Christian faith for politics.”

As Keyes probably knew, all these were hot buttons for Obama, but the hottest were on race and faith. Barack had written an entire book on his own journey on race, and he took seriously the Christian faith he had consciously embraced as a young adult, even if he didn’t read its mandates the same way Keyes did. These frustrations were already evident when the two candidates crossed paths at an Indian Independence Day parade just weeks after the bombastic Keyes arrived in Illinois. News footage captured Obama jabbing the shorter Keyes in the chest with his finger in response to Keyes’s demand that Obama honor the pledge he made to Jack Ryan to participate in six debates. “I guarantee we’re going to debate,” Obama assured him. “Because you’ve been talking a lot. You’ve been talking a lot!”

I was shocked when I watched the confrontation on the news. Why in the world would the normally unflappable Obama get into it with a guy he was going to bury at the polls? “I just went over to shake his hand,” Barack explained. “But then he started in on debates and got on my nerves. He’s an obnoxious guy, man. I just wasn’t going to let him punk me.”

Obama would go on to win a staggering 70 percent of the vote, nearly an Illinois record, but not definitive enough for Keyes to reach out to him with the traditional concession call before he pulled up stakes and left Illinois. Obama carried all but a handful of small downstate counties and every demographic group and every section of the state. His landslide stood out in a year when Democrats were licking their wounds, losing the presidency and seats in both houses of Congress. It wasn’t just the victory that was noteworthy, but how we won.

The previous spring, after the primary but before Ryan’s campaign imploded, I sent Obama and the team a strategy memo entitled, “Yes We Can!”

Obama’s record of advocacy for the middle class was powerful and important, I wrote,

but to approach the message in a purely linear fashion, simply checking off issue boxes, would be to rob this campaign of its full power.

Against a backdrop of the paralyzing partisanship and special interest hegemony in Washington, voters are responding to a candidate who has the integrity, temperament and proven commitment to challenge the status quo and get things done.

Barack stands apart from the mess they see, preaching a politics of civility and community, of mutual respect and responsibility. It’s a tone distinct from the nasty and personal debate to which voters have become accustomed, and draws to Obama many voters who may not agree with him on specific issues but respond to his character and sincerity.

Our challenge is to maintain that tone, protect that special character and sincerity and always bear in mind that the brain dead politics of Washington is as much our target as Jack Ryan.

This was the essence of Obama’s appeal. The core of his “brand.” The entire nation had seen and responded to it in Boston. The next test would be how it, and he, would hold up in Washington.

T
HE
DAY
AFTER
THE
ELECTION
,
we got a taste of things to come.

Fighting through almost no sleep, Barack did two national morning shows, where the hosts informed their viewers that they were listening to a potential presidential candidate and “the next great voice in the Democratic Party.” Now reporters jammed into his campaign headquarters to hear from the Man of the Hour, and before he had spent a day in the Senate—before he had hired a staff or cast a vote—he was already fending off questions about just how long he intended to stay.

“We’ve got to tamp this shit down,” he said, before he stepped out to meet the media. “It’s way over the top.” And he tried. He tried very hard.

Dismissing the notion as “silly,” Obama was emphatic. “I can unequivocally say I will not be running for national office in four years, and my entire focus is making sure that I’m the best possible senator on behalf of the people of Illinois.”

It was not a misdirection play. In November 2004, the last person on the planet who expected Barack Obama to run for president in 2008 was Barack Obama. It clearly wasn’t a lack of ambition or confidence on his part. He was a realist, and the notion of running for president so soon seemed entirely a fantasy. What seemed slightly less implausible was the notion that someone else would want to cash in on Barack’s talents and make him their number two. Yet Obama had no interest in running for vice president, even if he were offered the spot. He was not a man suited for the second chair.

“Can you imagine me as vice president?” he asked, with a laugh, in a private conversation. “I can’t. I can’t imagine wanting that job. I’d rather come back and run for governor after a term than be somebody’s vice president. I’m not cut out for that.”

Despite Obama’s emphatic denial at his press conference, the following Sunday he got the Question again, this time from Tim Russert on a postelection edition of
Meet the Press
. “Before you go, you know there’s been enormous speculation about your political future,” Russert said. “Will you serve your full six-year term as U.S. senator from Illinois?”

“Absolutely,” Barack replied. “You know, some of this hype’s been a little overblown. It’s flattering, but I have to remind people that I haven’t been sworn in yet. I don’t know where the restrooms are in the Senate. I’m going to have to figure out how to work the phones, answer constituent mail. I expect to be in the Senate for quite some time, and hopefully I’ll build up my seniority from my current position, which I believe is 99th out of 100.”

Only two U.S. senators in my lifetime have entered the Senate with such fanfare, Bobby Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, and both for the same reason: no one expected them to stay for long. For Obama, managing these expectations was essential. He didn’t want voters in Illinois to feel as if they were merely a launching pad to something bigger. Most important, he didn’t want to antagonize his colleagues in the Senate, who would be watching closely to see if this new media sensation had bought into the hype.

Controlling the circus wouldn’t be easy, though. After his convention speech made him one of the hottest politicians in America, Obama’s well-reviewed but little-read autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
, was reissued, and he was obligated to hit the road to promote it.
Letterman
,
The View
, morning and Sunday shows—he was a ubiquitous presence in the weeks following the election. There was a practical reason for this: Obama actually needed the money. For years he had sacrificed income to public service. The Obamas lived in a four-bedroom apartment in East View Park, a comfortable but modest low-rise condominium complex in Hyde Park. They had a mortgage to pay, and each carried significant tuition debts. So the explosion in popularity meant serious income for the first time in their lives.

Michelle wanted to move to a larger space. Barack had another idea.

“I want Michelle and the kids to move to Washington,” he told me. “I’m going to be out there a lot and I don’t want to be away from them.”

I told him that I thought this was a horrible idea. What message would it send to become an absentee senator, living in Washington and visiting Illinois on weekends and holidays? I suggested he and Michelle have dinner with Rahm Emanuel and his wife, Amy Rule, who might serve as a model in this matter. Rahm commuted to and from Congress, while Amy and their three kids remained in Chicago.

“The other way doesn’t even make sense from a family standpoint,” Rahm explained to me and, later, to the Obamas. “He’d have to be here on holidays and weekends, while his family stayed back in Washington. It’s a bad idea.”

Michelle agreed. She had her own career, friends, and family in Chicago and wasn’t eager to move. Instead, they would buy a spacious Georgian Revival mansion in Kenwood, just north of Hyde Park. Barack felt he owed Michelle the home, though he worried about the cost. After a lifetime of thriftiness, he found it difficult to adjust to the fact that he wasn’t a struggling legislator and college instructor anymore. His book was a bestseller, and by the end of the year, he had signed a lucrative deal to write three more.

“The price of victory,” he said, sighing, though I have no doubt he considered it a fair price, indeed a bargain, for Michelle’s extraordinary forbearance and steadfast support in his political endeavors.

 • • • 

One of the other benefits of being shot out of the cannon was that a lot of talented people wanted to jump on for the ride.

Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, had lost his seat in the same election. Now his coveted chief of staff, Pete Rouse, was a free agent. After his nearly thirty years on Capitol Hill, no one knew more about the inner workings of the Senate than Rouse. His seen-it-all, done-it-all wisdom was a highly sought-after commodity. But the gravelly voiced, bespectacled Senate guru was heartbroken by his friend Daschle’s loss. They had been together for decades, and Rouse was prepared to follow him out the door. Obama made a hard sell, telling Rouse that he wanted to be an impact player in the Senate, but without being the hot dog some feared. He felt he could make a persuasive speech and digest policy with the best of them, but knew nothing about how to put together a Senate staff or navigate the plays and players that awaited him. He needed a Sherpa to guide him, and Pete was the very best. There was one more thing, Obama told his prized recruit: “You may have heard that I’m planning to run for president in 2008. I can give you an absolute assurance that’s not true. I have two kids who are too young for that, and a wife who wouldn’t tolerate it. You don’t have to worry about that.”

So Rouse, who was nearing sixty, put his own plans on hold for this promising newcomer, as he would so many times in the years to come. He became to Obamaworld what George Bailey was to his neighbors in the movie
It’s a Wonderful Life
. No matter how much he wanted to leave town, Rouse found that his sense of duty always kept him at Barack’s side. Rouse, who made a short-term commitment to help set up the operation, would work for Obama for eight years.

Pete became the lynchpin of an extraordinary Senate staff. Gibbs, though a generation younger, also knew his way around the Senate and the town. In addition to his stint with Kerry and others, Gibbs had been the campaign communications director for Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, though Robert’s job there consisted largely of keeping the acid-tongued, irascible Senate elder
out
of the news. Obama also recruited Alyssa Mastromonaco, who had run the scheduling and advance operation for Kerry’s presidential campaign. And he apparently forgot that Jon Favreau was the talented young Kerry speechwriter who bore the bad news in Boston when Team Kerry swiped Barack’s favorite speech line; Favreau joined the staff as chief speechwriter. Obama was assembling a team of old pros and young talent that could carry him far.

For me, Obama’s swearing in was a sublime moment. We had come a long way together since our first conversations back in the summer of 2002, when both of us faced doubts about the future. As I watched from the Senate gallery, I felt I had truly helped do something meaningful. Just the sight of this tall, elegant African American man walking down the center aisle of a chamber filled with white faces represented an important change. After the ceremony, Barack signed my blue ticket in silver marker: “To Axe, Here because of you!”

It was a generous gesture and a memento I would cherish. Yet I knew that our relationship would inevitably change. We began the Senate race as lonely partners in a highly speculative campaign and spoke almost daily for the better part of two years. Now Barack would be in Washington, relying on his superb new staff to guide him on this next leg of the journey. I would continue to provide political advice and would work closely with Rouse, Gibbs, and others, but I would miss the day-to-day interaction of our shared odyssey and the running conversations that veered from professional considerations to the chitchat of friends about sports, family, and life.

 • • • 

As much as I would miss the man and the mission, I would not lack for work in the 2005 and 2006 election cycle. Obama’s out-of-nowhere ascension to the Senate had opened new doors for my firm, now known as AKPD Message and Media, to reflect the names of its four partners: Axelrod, Kupper, Plouffe, and Del Cecato.

I first met David Plouffe in 1994, when, just twenty-seven, he led a Senate race on which I worked, in his home state of Delaware. Two years later he managed a knock-down, drag-out fight to elect Senator Bob Torricelli in New Jersey, and went on to run the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Though still young, he was whip smart, campaign savvy, and would add a Washington presence the firm needed.

Del Cecato was Plouffe’s young press secretary at the DCCC when I recruited him to play the same role for Fernando Ferrer during the New York City mayoral race in 2001. John was passionate, hilarious, and creative, and struck me as a guy who could become a good ad writer, so I hired him after that race. My instincts were right. He picked up spot writing quickly, and would become a creative force at AKPD.

While the company was still mine, I wanted to raise the profile of my colleagues. It was necessary to signify to needy clients that when these talented folks provided counsel, they were not the B-Team. Also, we needed a bigger A-Team. As a small, boutique firm headquartered in the Midwest, we had often struggled to land the high-profile races that usually gravitated to Washington-based media consultants, but now the Obama aura had enhanced our stature in the eyes of candidates looking to be the next new thing.

While I was settled in to my other projects, Obama was trying his best to follow Hillary’s example and establish himself as a productive and respectful new member of the Senate. He made the rounds of the gray eminences, humbly asking their counsel. And he found an unlikely mentor in Dick Lugar, a well-regarded, five-term incumbent Republican from Indiana. Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, worked closely with Obama and took him on as his junior partner in crafting legislation to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. “I like Lugar,” Barack reported. “He’s not a showboat. He a very decent, serious guy.” He also found Lugar’s laconic nature a welcome counterpoint to the committee’s verbose ranking member, Joe Biden. “Joe Biden is a decent guy, but man, that guy can just talk and talk,” Barack complained to me on one of our regular calls. “It’s an incredible thing to see.”

A month before Obama took office, the
Sun-Times
had published an investigation revealing that Illinois veterans in large numbers were being unfairly denied disability payments to which they were entitled. After he was named to the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Barack joined with our state’s senior senator, Dick Durbin, in a long campaign to address the problem. He also introduced a bill for the expansion of college Pell grants to needy students. And after reading a piece in the
New Yorker
on the emerging threat of the Avian flu, he wrote legislation to, among other things, fund the development and stockpiling of sufficient vaccine to combat a deadly influenza pandemic. In Obama’s first year in Washington, he held thirty-nine town hall meetings across Illinois and, according to the periodic public polls, remained an extraordinarily popular figure in the state.

Yet Barack was frustrated with the slow pace and endless debate of the Senate. On a visit to Washington during his first year, I waited for him outside the Senate chamber while he was delivering a floor speech. His oration over, Barack burst through the door and walked past me. “Blah, blah, blah. That’s all we do around here,” he muttered. It was clear that Obama would not be comfortable growing old in the Senate. He ruminated again about the possibility of returning to Illinois, near the end of his Senate term in 2010, to run for governor. “Governors don’t just talk. They actually can do things,” he said. “And, besides, I’d be able to live with my family.”

Despite his growing misgivings about the Senate, Obama stuck to the plan, trying to maintain a smooth and low-key debut. Yet he naturally remained the object of immense political interest. He topped the wish lists of candidates and Democratic state parties across the nation looking for a speaker who would boost their fortunes. Gibbs, who functioned as a kind of de facto political director in addition to communications director, deftly arranged the schedule with Alyssa for Obama to campaign for candidates and state parties in as many presidential battleground states as possible. “I just thought it was a good investment,” he said. In that same spirit, Obama immediately put his fund-raising power to good use, raising and distributing nearly $1.5 million to candidates.

Despite his best efforts to accept his lowly place in the political hierarchy, Barack found himself inexorably drawn into the spotlight by unexpected and tragic events.