Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (19 page)

 • • • 

Just a year after Obama’s antiwar speech, public opinion had caught up with his view on Iraq. The weapons of mass destruction we had invaded to secure proved illusory. Rather than being greeted as “liberators,” as Vice President Dick Cheney had forecast, we were mired in the sectarian warfare of which Obama had warned. Also, partisan anger toward Bush, Cheney, and their entire bellicose crowd was on the rise. I saw it surface in an odd way in a heated race in the fall of 2003 in Philadelphia, where I was working to reelect an embattled client, Mayor John F. Street.

It’s not that Street hadn’t done a good job. He had greatly expanded after-school programs. He had pressured drug dealers off the street corners on which they had been loitering in crime-ridden neighborhoods. He’d launched an all-out war on the abandoned cars that littered the streets of Philadelphia, and won. It’s just that Street, a black man who worked his way up from rural poverty to become mayor of one of America’s largest cities, took pride in bending his knee to no one. He didn’t romance voters in the way to which they had become accustomed. He spoke his mind to a fault, took positions that were impolitic, and generally operated under the assumption that if you won an election by more than a percentage point, you had probably wasted a lot of time and money. So, by the end of his first term, he had provoked a reaction that was highly unusual in politics. His job approval rating was higher than his popularity. Philadelphians liked what he was doing; they just didn’t like
him
. So his race against a Republican challenger in an overwhelmingly Democratic city was no sure thing.

As we approached the final month of the campaign, I got a call from George Burrell, Street’s savvy political deputy at City Hall.

“I think we have a problem.”

“Problem?” I asked warily.

“Yes, it seems we’ve found a bug in the mayor’s office.”

“A bug?”

“Yes, a listening device.”

“And who do we think this bug belongs to?” I said. I really didn’t have to ask, but was hoping against hope for an unexpected explanation.

“It appears to belong to the United States government,” Burrell said, slamming the door on my wishful thinking.

Four weeks before the election, the news would be filled with headlines about a federal investigation of the mayor and his administration. It struck me, as I thought about it, that this was our problem but also our opportunity. In an overwhelmingly Democratic town, a probe launched by the Republican Justice Department in Washington would surely be greeted with skepticism, perhaps even outrage. I called Burrell back. “We need to hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall and accuse John Ashcroft of trying to steal this election.” (Attorney General Ashcroft, a well-known conservative ideologue, was highly unpopular among Democrats.) When Street confronted reporters, frantic over the news, he came armed with a line I had written for him: “I’m happy to speak into a microphone I can see!”

On Election Day, Street rolled to a crushing victory. The federal probe had thoroughly transformed the race in his favor. Liberal whites, traditionally resistant to Street, decided that any enemy of John Ashcroft’s was a friend of theirs. Sensing a looming injustice, an outraged African American community came out in large numbers to support Street, who defeated the Republican by seventeen points. The headline of the
Philadelphia Daily News
the morning after the election said it all: “We Interrupt This Probe . . . for a Landslide!”

 • • • 

Back in Illinois, I was holding off Obama, who nervously eyed the TV ads of some of his rivals, and periodically asked if we weren’t ceding too much ground. We didn’t have a huge bankroll, however, and I wanted to make sure that when we hit, we hit with force and stayed on the air for the duration of the race. By our estimate, this meant three or four weeks before the primary in March.

I was eager, too. I was excited about the ads we had produced early in 2004 for the primary. The initial ad, narrated by Obama, wove his personal history of defying the odds—as the first black president of the
Harvard Law Review
and on issues such as death penalty reform—into a parable about breaking down barriers. It had strong appeal to the black and liberal voters on whom we were counting. The closing lines tied his personal history to a larger theme.

“Now they say we can’t change Washington?” said the telegenic young legislator, stepping forward in the frame. “I’m Barack Obama, I’m running for the United States Senate and I approve this message to say, ‘Yes We Can!’”

I loved the closing line because it gave voters a stake in making change happen. It wasn’t just about him. It was about what we all could do together. After the first take, though, Obama wrinkled his face and expressed a concern. “‘Yes we can.’ Is that too corny?” he asked.

I made my case for the line. Still not convinced, Barack turned to Michelle, who had a spare hour and had come to watch him tape his first ad at the home of a neighbor. “Meesh, what do you think?”

Michelle, who was sitting on a staircase, chin in hand, slowly shook her head.

“Not corny,” she said.

That was enough. My reassurance had left Obama still wondering, but he deeply trusted Michelle’s instincts and connection with people. Her imprimatur immediately sealed the deal, preserving a tag line that would become our rallying cry in this and future campaigns.

A second ad featured Paul Simon, in absentia. Paul, with whom I had repaired my relationship, had been reluctant to endorse in a crowded primary. Yet, having spent his life fighting for civil rights and political reform, it was inconceivable to me that Simon would remain neutral. I wrote him a letter and said so. Two prominent supporters of Obama and longtime political allies of Simon, Newton Minow and Abner Mikva, joined in the lobbying. Finally, in October 2003, I picked up the phone to a familiar, countrified baritone voice.

“Dave, I’m ready to go anytime,” Paul told me. “I’ve been watching and I’m really impressed with Barack. I decided I just can’t sit this one out.”

Paul’s endorsement was a hugely valuable prize. He shared with Obama an approach to politics and a set of values that resonated with the liberal base of the party to whom Paul remained a hero. Yet voters weren’t entirely focused on the race yet. Looking to maximize the impact of Paul’s endorsement, I suggested that we delay it until closer to the primary. “Why don’t we roll this out in a statewide tour with you and Barack after the first of the year?” I said. “It would be a great way to kick off the sprint to the primary.” Simon cheerfully agreed.

It never happened. In early December, Paul went in to have a faulty heart valve repaired. The day before his surgery, he called me from the hospital with some thoughts on the campaign and said he was looking forward to the endorsement tour. He was confident he would be ready. Yet the next day, the surgery went tragically awry. Suddenly, shockingly, Paul Simon was dead at the age of seventy-five.

A month later, when we tested Obama’s biography with focus groups of liberal Democrats in the northern suburbs, the value of the lost endorsement opportunity was apparent. When these folks heard that Obama was a protégé of the revered Senator Simon, the reaction was kinetic. “That’s enough for me,” one woman said, echoing a widely held sentiment in the room. “I loved Paul.”

I was desperate to communicate to voters the link between Simon and Obama, but how do you tastefully imply the unstated support of a dead man?

To try, I produced an ad featuring the voice of a mystery female narrator, recalling Simon’s history and character over archival scenes that I had shot of Paul in action. “State Senator Barack Obama is cut from that same cloth,” she said, describing Barack’s record as the video shifted to matching footage of Obama on the trail. “I know Barack Obama will be a U.S. senator in the Paul Simon tradition,” the narrator declared, as the camera revealed a woman who bore an unmistakable resemblance to the late senator. “You see,” she concluded with a sweet smile, “Paul Simon was my dad.” We never got Paul’s endorsement, but Democratic voters would be moved by this heartfelt testimonial from his daughter, Sheila.

 • • • 

In mid-January, two months before the primary, we trailed Hynes by six points in our internal polling, bunched with Hull and others in the teens. Still, we stuck to our plan, and in late February, just a week after the “Yes We Can” ads started airing, Obama vaulted into a clear lead. Almost overnight, support among African Americans and white liberals nearly doubled. The coalition we envisioned was coming together, but the growth was not limited to these groups. Wherever he traveled, Obama was now encountering warm and enthusiastic crowds, including many who had not been involved in campaigns before. In style and substance, he projected a new kind of politics, and a hungry electorate was catching on. The spirit was contagious.

Some public polls had shown Hull in the lead in early February, though our polls never did. Then, as Barack’s campaign started surging, Hull’s campaign took a huge hit when, three weeks before Election Day, news surfaced that his ex-wife had asked for an order of protection against him, alleging domestic violence. The rehab story soon followed. The Hull campaign suggested to reporters that I had leaked the stories, and I knew their suspicions traced back to my early conversation with Hull, when I had asked about some of these rumors. Yet I considered those discussions out of bounds, and hadn’t leaked the stories. I was certain they had come from the Hynes camp. Hynes had strong support at the Chicago Board of Trade, where Hull had made his fortune over decades. In that hypercompetitive, insular world, the players knew a lot about one another, and particularly about the superstars among them. At the time the stories surfaced, Hynes and Hull were jousting for support downstate. The stories effectively ended Hull’s chances.

Then, in late February, as we launched the Simon ad, the newspaper endorsements started coming through. Normally, even effusive newspaper endorsements were of limited value. Yet I had learned, through years of experience, that with minority candidates, editorial endorsements can be a welcome reassurance for white voters who are contemplating what for them would be a precedent-shattering act—voting for a minority candidate. It affirmed their instincts, made the leap less “risky.” That certainly proved true for Obama, who won the enthusiastic endorsement of virtually every major newspaper in Illinois.

The
Sun-Times
weighed in first, calling Obama “a rising star” and a doer who “demonstrated an ability to forge partnerships across party lines.” Two days later, the generally conservative
Tribune
was just as effusive. Obama, they said, “rises above this field as one of the strongest Democratic candidates Illinois has seen in some time. He richly deserves his party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate.”

A week after that, the major suburban newspaper, the
Daily Herald
, outdid the
Trib
, praising Obama as “refreshing” for his “evident sense of decency and justice when so many phonies and fools—if not felons—are giving governing a bad name.”

“Very few candidates for public office have impressed us in this way,” the
Herald
wrote. “Paul Simon comes to mind.” We promptly featured each of these editorials in a TV ad.

A week after the launch of the Simon ad, Barack had stretched his lead to fifteen points over Hynes, 36 percent to 21 percent. Hull was a distant third. Blacks and liberals had solidly closed ranks behind Obama, but now he was showing some strength in other communities, swept up by the positive vibe surrounding his campaign. We had not run one negative ad. Obama’s candidacy promised a commonsense politics of cooperation and progress, and Illinoisans were responding.

“We’re rolling,” I reported to the candidate, but he wasn’t ready for good news. Barack was not given to giddiness or elation, even when things were going his way. When the game was on the line, he was all business. “Let’s just finish it,” he said.

We felt bullish enough in the final week to stop polling in order to put every last dime on the air, so we were flying blind. Still, there is a sense of rhythm in a campaign, a feeling that you acquire over time. Barack had the momentum, and you could sense it from the crowds and the media coverage. Yet even we were surprised on Election Night when the numbers began rolling in.

“Axe, our model calls for us to win with thirty-eight percent of the vote,” Giangreco said as he scanned the early returns.

“Right. I know. And?”

“This is crazy, but I think we might bust fifty!”

I was thinking back to what a long shot Obama had been when we teamed up a year and a half earlier. We had run the race we hoped to wage, appealing to the best in people by describing what politics could be. We had defied the cynics and beaten the odds. It was as satisfying a moment as I had ever had in politics.

Obama would take an unimaginable 53 percent of the vote in a seven-way race. Hynes finished second, nearly thirty points behind. Even our Election Night crowd estimate was low. We expected hundreds of people at a hotel ballroom in downtown Chicago, but more than a thousand showed up, wanting to be part of it. If Obama was the symbol of a new, inclusive politics, the exultant crowd was the portrait of that vision: old, young, folks of every hue, from every background. Some were familiar faces, but many were new to campaigns. All of them felt as if they were stakeholders in this inspiring journey.

As the results poured in, I was stunned to see that Obama had carried all but one ward, on Chicago’s Northwest Side, where two decades earlier white ethnic voters had almost unanimously rejected Harold Washington. I looked up the precinct that housed Saint Pascal Catholic Church, where those bitter protesters had greeted Washington and Walter Mondale. Obama had carried it.

After his rousing victory speech, which was punctuated by chants of “Yes, we can,” I took Barack aside and shared this news. As a young community organizer, he had witnessed the ugliness of the Council Wars. He knew what this meant. He smiled broadly and put a hand on my shoulder.