Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (21 page)

Obama was just the opposite, drilling three and four levels deep on issues to hone his thinking, changing up his stump speech from stop to stop because he felt inauthentic sticking to a script. At one strategy meeting, he engaged my old partner, Forrest Claypool, on the issue of school vouchers. A strong believer in market solutions, Forrest was interested in vouchers as a means of improving educational opportunity for inner-city students.

“Forrest, I have supported charter schools, but not vouchers because I worry about siphoning off resources from public schools, where they’re needed,” Obama said. “But make the best case for that position. A lot of these students you’re talking about are poor black kids, like the kids in my state senate district. I don’t want to casually throw away good ideas if they can help.”

For the next forty-five minutes, Barack and Forrest engaged in a riveting colloquy on school choice. It was thrilling to watch these two brilliant, passionate politicians earnestly exploring an issue they each cared deeply about. I, and the rest of Obama’s campaign team, sat transfixed by their exchange. I could not have imagined John Edwards carrying on the same conversation or, indeed, wanting to. “Barack has a beautiful mind,” Forrest said admiringly as we walked to our car after their “debate.”

Still, Obama’s interest in policy sometimes weighed him down. Susan and I held a fund-raiser for Barack at our apartment during the Senate primary. We raised about eleven thousand dollars, which was significant for Obama in those days. When Barack spoke, I thought his remarks were too elevated and lacked an emotional connection. I sensed he was talking up to what he thought was the level of the crowd. Afterward, I was honest with him. His speech should be consistent and connecting, not calibrated up or down depending upon an assessment of the audience.

“You call me every night from the road with these moving stories about the struggles people are facing,” I said. “Why don’t you share them in these speeches? They animate the things you’re fighting for. It isn’t an intellectual exercise.”

Obama didn’t enjoy my critique, but—to his credit—he took it to heart. As he developed his stump speech, he increasingly relied on the stories of the people he had met across the state. He became less the professor and more the advocate, standing up for folks who were fighting to join the middle class and the many who were struggling to stay there. And once he found that groove, Obama, a brilliant storyteller, was a natural in bringing others’ stories to life. The narrative wasn’t new. For Barack, the impact of a changing economy on everyday people had been an animating concern since his days as a community organizer.

One person who saw this firsthand was John Kerry, now the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting. He had come to Illinois shortly after our state’s primary for a big fund-raising event and watched as Obama brought down the house. The next day, Kerry got a closer look at Obama as the two campaigned together at a job-training site on the city’s West Side. Thinking ahead to the Democratic National Convention, Kerry made a mental note of this rising star.

Meanwhile, Obama’s opponent and the Republican’s rising star, Jack Ryan, collapsed after his own divorce file was released, detailing steamy allegations that he had forced his ex-wife to accompany him to sex clubs.

Obama’s talent was beyond dispute, but his luck was beyond belief. Moseley Braun’s improbable decision to seek the presidency instead of the Senate seat had made Obama’s candidacy possible. Though he would have won the primary regardless, Hull’s implosion surely didn’t hurt. Now Obama’s well-regarded Republican opponent was being forced to drop out, leaving the state GOP in disarray.

“This guy must sleep with a horseshoe under his pillow,” I told my partners.

Not long after, Obama was on a campaign swing in Southern Illinois when his cell phone rang. It was Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry’s campaign manager. Cell service being what it was downstate, it took three calls to complete one conversation, but the offer came through loud and clear—would Obama be the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention?

“Yes, that’s great,” Obama said quickly, before the call got dropped again. “I’d be honored to do it.”

After acknowledging the magnitude of the role, Obama turned and said, “I know what I want to say.” He clearly had been giving this serious thought, having heard weeks earlier that he was being considered for the coveted slot. “I want to talk about my own story as part of the larger American story. I want to talk about who we are at our best.”

In the coming weeks, Barack worked on a draft whenever and wherever he could. He would write in longhand on car rides around the state. He would duck into the men’s room off the state senate floor to jot down lines in between votes. One evening in July, he e-mailed me a first draft after having worked into the early morning hours.

Susan and I were on vacation in Italy, but my office faxed a copy to our hotel in Florence. As I read each page, I passed it on to Susan for her reaction. By the third page, we looked at each other with the same thought. “My God,” I said. “This is going to be one of the greatest convention speeches ever.”

I knew Barack was an exceptional writer.
Dreams from My Father
, the memoir he published at the age of thirty-three, was a powerful and poignant work, and when I finally got to see the written speech, I felt the same emotional tug. He had crafted something that contemplated America’s promise and potential through the lens of his own extraordinary experience. Tracing the paths that brought together the son of a Kenyan goatherder and the daughter of small-town Kansas, Obama spoke not only of his parents’ “improbable love,” but of their “abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.”

“I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents’ dreams live on in my two precious daughters,” he said. “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

Then he shared the stories of people he had met across Illinois, to ask if America today was living up to its promise. He spoke of the factory workers who saw their jobs shipped out of the country; the father struggling to afford the lifesaving medications his son needed; the student who “has the grades, has the drive, has the will, but doesn’t have the money to go to college.”

The language was fresh, honest, and suffused with enduring American values. Among its most memorable moments was his assault on the red state/blue state mind-set that had divided Washington and our nation’s politics.

“The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them,” he had written. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us standing up for the red, white and blue.”

There were only two problems with this brilliant speech. The Kerry convention planners, in their desire to keep the program running on time, had allotted just eight minutes for the keynote, and Obama’s draft clocked in at four times that long. “I can’t do it,” Obama grumbled. “It’s ridiculous. If they insist, I don’t think I should speak.” After a great deal of haggling, we agreed to a seventeen-minute speech. And while Obama hated cutting the words he had so lovingly crafted, the edits made the speech tighter without sacrificing its power.

The second problem was that Obama had never spoken in an arena before and had it in his head that he wouldn’t be heard unless he bellowed. One of the strengths of the speech was that it was at once elegant and conversational. It didn’t sound like a political speech, but with Barack doing an imitation (and not even a very good imitation) of an old-time tub-thumper, his soaring prose didn’t take flight.

We still had plenty of work to do when, less than seventy-two hours until his big moment, we took off from Springfield in a private plane bound for Boston: Barack, Michelle, me, and Robert Gibbs, the campaign’s new communications director.

For Gibbs, the return to Boston was a satisfying redemption. He had quit the Kerry campaign in November during a messy shake-up. We had a big hole in communications to fill after the primary, and Giangreco and others who had worked with Robert were effusive about his talents. The tough, quick-witted Alabama native swiftly became a mainstay of our campaign.

Our mission on the flight was to brief Obama for his maiden appearance the next morning on
Meet the Press
with Tim Russert. Russert was a masterful interviewer with a well-earned reputation for using exhaustive research to confront his guests with their own past statements and deeds. Gibbs and I took turns firing questions at Obama, laying the traps we anticipated in Russert’s signature prosecutorial style. As is often the case, Michelle kept Barack loose with good-natured ribbing, teasing him when he complained that his favorite drink was not on board. “Aww,” she said, with mock compassion. “Poor Barack.” He broke up in laughter.

The next morning, Obama aced the exam, handling Russert’s crafty questions like a pro. Later that day, he began rehearsing his keynote with an expert speech coach, Michael Sheehan. Michael had studied as an actor to overcome a childhood stutter and transformed himself into one of the foremost media trainers in America. He was a fixture at Democratic conventions, setting up training booths beneath the rostrum where all the major speakers would prepare. I had known Michael for years and privately had confided Obama’s habit of over-orating. “First lesson: Let the microphone do the work,” he told Barack. “You don’t have to shout. You’ll be heard in the hall. But you’re really speaking to twenty million people at home. Have a conversation with them.”

With each repetition of the speech, Barack became more relaxed and conversational, adding pauses, nuanced phrasing, and natural gestures to accent his points. Soon his performance rivaled the quality of the words on the page. “This is really, really good,” Gibbs whispered to me between takes. “He’s definitely got it.”

The only hiccup came when Kerry’s team sent a crew-cutted young speechwriter to iron out a small turf problem. Jon Favreau, then just twenty-three, explained that Senator Kerry had a phrase in his speech that was similar to one in Obama’s draft and they needed Obama to cut his version—or, in other words, to take one for the team. “Just get in there and tell him,” Gibbs advised the doe-eyed rookie.

Unfortunately, the phrase in question was one of Obama’s favorites—the crescendo of his red state/blue state passage in which he declared that we are one, “all of us standing up for the red, white, and blue.”

When Favreau left, Obama was furious.

“You know they didn’t have that in Kerry’s speech,” he said, his voice rising. “They saw it, they liked it, and now they’re stealing it!”

No doubt he was right, but in the bigger scheme of things, it was a sacrifice worth making.

“Listen, Barack,” I said. “They’re giving you a chance to speak to millions of people. They want to steal a few words? Let ’em. It’s a small price to pay.”

“I guess,” he said. “But damn, why did it have to be those words? I loved the way that worked!”

On Tuesday, the night of the speech, Obama ran into the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was scheduled to speak the next evening.

“How much time did they give you?” Obama asked Sharpton.

“Six minutes,” the reverend replied. “But you never know how the Lord may move me!”

Obama was calm as he waited for his turn at the podium, chatting with Michelle and Illinois senator Dick Durbin, who would introduce him. Since the primary, Durbin had become one of Obama’s most vocal and active supporters, without displaying any trace of the resentment that senior senators often feel toward highly touted newcomers invading their turf. Gibbs and I, on the other hand, were nervous wrecks. Obama must have sensed this as we walked him to the runway for his big national debut.

“Don’t worry,” he said, his hand on my shoulder. “I always make my marks.”

With that, he strode off to await his cue, while Gibbs and I hustled to the floor of the arena. As Obama began to speak, there was the murmur of disinterest that greets most convention speakers. Delegates networked, stretched their legs, and sauntered to and from their various pit stops. But it didn’t take long for Obama to capture the crowd. Gone was the wooden, labored delivery that had marred his speech in early run-throughs. For the first time, he was working with a teleprompter, though by now he could deliver this speech from memory. He had internalized the words and served them up with remarkable ease and considerable energy. In both language and delivery, his stood apart from the other political speeches, free of both clichéd phrases and hidebound dogma.

“The people I meet—in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks—they don’t expect government to solve all their problems,” Obama said. “They know they have to work hard to get ahead, and they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don’t want their tax money wasted, by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon. Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn; they know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things!”

As Obama told his story, I saw an African American woman nearby brushing away tears. With each point and passage of the speech, delegates all around us were vigorously nodding their heads. Without prompting, folks who an hour earlier could not have picked Barack out of a crowd were joyously waving blue-and-white signs bearing his name.