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CHILDHOOD TO CHICAGO
In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,”
Barack Obama conjures up an imagined meeting between his white
Kansas-born mother and his black Kenyan father that could have come
straight out of the iconic, if hopelessly dated, 1960s movie “Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
In 1960 such a meeting took place in Hawaii, where his mother’s parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, prepared to meet their daughter’s beau, an African student reaching toward Phi Beta Kappa, whom she had met in Russian class.
The parents, Barack Obama’s beloved “Gramps” and “Toot,” were wary.
Although Hawaii was a place of rich ethnic blends, racial tensions were
still simmering, like those evident in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,”
where white liberals like the couple portrayed by Spencer Tracy and
Katharine Hepburn nonetheless cringed over the prospect of a black
son-in-law.
The Dunham’s new son-in-law-to-be, Barack (meaning “blessed”), was from
the small village of Nyang’oma Kogelo near Lake Victoria. Now an
economics student with a polished British accent, as a boy Barack had
helped tend his family’s goats and his school was a small shack. If the
Dunhams were unsettled by the match between Barack Sr. and their
daughter, 18-year-old Stanley Ann
(her father had wanted a boy and she was named for him), Obama’s family
in Africa was apoplectic over the prospect of their blood being
“sullied by a white woman.” (“Dreams from My Father,” p. 126.)
In 1961, the short-lived marriage produced a son, also named Barack.
But the father soon abandoned his young family to attend Harvard, and
then returned to Africa. The son would see his father only once again,
when he was 10. Barack Sr. had a new life, wives and children back in
Kenya as well as new demons, including depression and alcohol. One
crippling car accident was followed by another, this time fatal, his
short life ending in Nairobi at age 46 in 1982.
When, as her son became a young adult, Ann tried to explain his
father’s life to him, “she saw my father as everyone hopes at least one
other person might see him; she tried to help the child who never knew
him see him the same way. And it was the look on her face that day that
I would remember when a few months later I called to tell her that my
father had died and heard her cry out over the distance.” (“Dreams From
My Father, p.127.)
After divorcing Barack Sr., Ann had remarried, another foreign student,
Lolo Soetoro, of Indonesia, who was attending the University of Hawaii.
After Mr. Soetoro’s student visa was revoked, the family moved to
Jakarta, where Barack was joined by a half-sister with whom he remains
close, Maya. He attended an Indonesian school,
although campaign attacks suggesting it was militantly Islamic were
patently false. To make sure her son kept up his English, Ann would
wake him hours before school began to study a correspondence course.
When Barack balked at her 4 a.m. home-schooling program, she replied,
“this is no picnic for me either, Buster.”
Soetoro bought Barack
boxing gloves and taught him how to fend off bullies. Ann began
bringing home books and records by great black Americans, being a
flower child who viewed every black man, including her son, as the next
Thurgood Marshall.
But this blended family, too, soon cracked and Ann returned to Hawaii
to be near her parents. Through his boss, Barack’s “Gramps” had
arranged for him to enter fifth grade at Punahou, an elite prep school
founded by missionaries. His grandfather saw the school as his
grandson’s meal ticket and Barack said he told him “that the contacts I
made at Punahou would last a lifetime, that I would move in charmed
circles and have all the opportunities that he’d never had.”
Barack’s sojourn at the school, where there were few other blacks,
including learning the folkways of the American elite, grounding that
would be helpful at other academic proving grounds, like Columbia University and Harvard Law School.
He excelled on the basketball court, with a jump shot that earned him
the nickname “Barry O’Bomber.” When his mother returned to Indonesia to
do field work for her degree, Obama remained with his grandparents to
finish his studies at Punahou.
In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama
writes candidly about the struggle for identity that defined his
boyhood. At school he heard a coach use the word “nigger,” and his own
beloved grandmother “Toot” (his rendering of an abbreviation for
“grandparent” in Hawaiian), would occasionally utter “racial or ethnic
stereotypes that made me cringe,” Obama recalled in his campaign speech on race.
He had a pack of close friends and exhibited behavior, including
drinking and smoking marijuana, typical of male teenagers. His mother
and grandparents worried that he was lackadaisical about his studies,
but Barack had begun a habit of disappearing behind his bedroom door to
read for hours,
shuttered with Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Malcolm X, and “there
I would sit and wrestle with words, locked suddenly in desperate
argument, trying to reconcile the world as I’d found it with the terms
of my birth.” (“Dreams From My Father,” p. 85.)
His quest for identity continued at the small California liberal arts Occidental College, known for its diverse student body, and also at Columbia,
where he transferred after two years. On his first night in New York
City, Obama spent the night curled up in an alleyway, waiting to move
into his apartment in Spanish Harlem. The precariousness of his place
in the world, the sense that his life could have easily slipped into
the stereotype of black male failure, pervades “Dreams From My Father.”
“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role
of the young would-be black man.” (“Dreams From My Father,” p. 93.)
Interestingly, when The Times investigated Obama’s use of drugs during this period of his life, the paper found that it seemed to be less of an issue than Obama portrayed in his book.
He said he used drugs to help numb the confusion he felt about himself
and described partying, smoking “reefer,” and doing a little “blow.”
But Amiekoleh Usafi, a friend from Occidental, said the most she saw
Obama indulging in were cigarettes and beer, and others interviewed had
similar accounts.
During his Occidental and Columbia years, Obama became far more aware
of politics, becoming involved in student anti-apartheid groups. After
Columbia, he had difficulty getting hired as a community organizer, the
job he wanted, and worked for a year at a business where he wore a suit
and could have started down a path toward money and status.
But in 1985, Gerald Kellman, a community organizer in Chicago’s tough South Side,
interviewed a young applicant who “challenged me on whether we would
teach him anything,” Mr. Kellman recalled. “He wanted to know things
like ‘How are you going to train me?’ and ‘What am I going to learn?’”
With a $10,000 salary and $2,000 Mr. Kellman gave him to buy a used
car, Obama began a three-year stint as a grassroots organizer in
Chicago’s projects and churches.
It is a period that looms large
in “Dreams From My Father,” where Obama recounts the frustrations and
triumphs of getting asbestos removed from the apartments at Altgeld
Gardens and learning the political skills needed to mediate anger and
deal with urban poverty. In the book he vividly recounts his
disappointment with himself when he was unable to control a group of
residents whose anger boiled over at a tense meeting with city
officials. But the job, he wrote, was “the best education I ever had,
better than anything I got at Harvard Law School.” On the streets of Chicago’s South Side, Obama came to terms with his place in black America.
THE MOST FAMOUS LAW STUDENT IN AMERICA
“Dreams From My Father” ends with Barack Obama’s first journey to
Kenya, where he went after receiving his acceptance letter from Harvard
Law School. He met his half-brothers and half-sisters, forging new
relationships with his father’s African family, including his
step-grandmother, Sarah, who helped raise his father in the same way
his grandmother, Toot, looked after Barack.
He was older than the other first-year students at Harvard and at the
end of the year he won a coveted slot as one of about 80 editors of the
prestigious law review,
the most influential in the country. That summer, he worked as a summer
associate at Chicago’s Sidley & Austin, where he met and fell in
love with another young Harvard Law grad, Michelle Robinson. They continued a long-distance courtship.
The next year, in February 1990, after a deliberation that took 17 hours, he won the law review’s presidency with support from politically conservative students. Weeks before the voting he had made a speech
in favor of affirmative action that so eloquently summarized the
arguments against it that conservatives believed he would give their
concerns a fair shake.
Mr. Obama sometimes joked that the presidency of the Harvard Law Review
was the second-hardest elective office in the country to win. He was
the first black elected in its 104 year history and the election made
him an instant celebrity, including a profile in The New York Times.
From Harvard he returned to Chicago, where he worked on a voter
registration drive, started work at a small law firm specializing in
civil rights cases and teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. In 1992, he and Michelle were married.
A Harvard Law connection, Michael W. McConnell,
a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge who had
been impressed by Mr. Obama’s editing of an article he wrote at
Harvard, put him on the path to a fellowship at the law school, which
provided an office and a computer, which he used to write “Dreams From
My Father.”
He taught three courses, the most original of which was as much a
historical and political seminar on racism and the law. He refined his
public speaking style. He was wary of noble theories, his students
said. He was, rather, a contextualist, willing to look past legal
niceties to get results.
Religion had begun playing a role in his life before he went to
Harvard, and he had joined Trinity United Church of Christ, led by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who later presided at the Obamas' marriage. One of the pastor’s sermons had inspired both the title of Mr. Obama’s second book and his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, “The Audacity of Hope.” The ties between the young couple and the sometimes incendiary pastor would causean unanticipated firestorm during the 2008 presidential primaries.
POLITICS
Politics was very much on his mind as Barack Obama cemented his ties to Hyde Park,
the Chicago neighborhood with a long history of electing reform-minded
politicians. A tight-knit community that runs through the South Side, Hyde Park is a liberal bastion of integration in what is otherwise one of the nation’s most segregated cities. At its heart is the University of Chicago,
where Mr. Obama also began cultivating connections to the city’s white
legal elite, including Democrats like former U.S. Judge Abner J. Mikva and the former chairman of the F.C.C., Newton Minow.
“He felt completely comfortable in Hyde Park,” said Martha Minow,
Newton’s daughter and Mr. Obama’s former law professor and mentor.
In 1992, Mr. Obama led a successful registration drive that added nearly 150,000 black voters and helped elect Carol Moseley Braun,
a Democrat and the first African-American woman in the U.S. Senate.
Judson Miner, the lawyer who hired him, was also active in Democratic
politics. In 1995, Obama kicked off his candidacy for the Illinois
Senate at the same Hyde Park hotel where Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, had announced his candidacy.
He did not fit the profile of the typical black politician. For one, he
had not grown up in the traditions of the American black church and he
was younger than the generation of civil rights
leaders for whom Birmingham and Selma were defining moments. He had
thrived in white institutions with a style more conciliatory than
confrontational, more technocrat than preacher. Like other members
of a new class of black political leaders, he tended to speak about
race indirectly or implicitly, when he spoke about it at all.
In a state where the Democratic machine still dominated local politics, he was an independent progressive. But once in the Senate, he learned to straddle all of these worlds. He found a mentor in an old-style boss, State Senator Emil Jones Jr.,
a black leader of the older generation. Mr. Jones made sure to give
Obama headline-grabbing issues, including ethics reform and an issue
important to the black community, legislation forcing the police to
tape interrogations. He played in a regular poker game with other
legislators.
However, the legislative footprints he left in Springfield were hardly deep. During the presidential campaign, his record of voting “present” 130 times,
rather than casting an aye or a nay, was criticized, although Obama
insisted that he did not use those present votes to duck taking
controversial stands. And in 1999, he made a rare political
miscalculation.
Despite warnings from friends like Newton Minow, he decided to challenge an incumbent Democratic congressman and former Black Panther, Bobby L. Rush.
Mr. Rush enjoyed deep loyalty in the black community and trounced
Obama. “He was blinded by his ambition,” Representative Rush said
later, but he nonetheless endorsed Obama for president.
In 2002, as Washington prepared to wage war in Iraq, Obama contemplated
making an antiwar speech, something unusual for a state legislator. He
consulted David Axelrod, a prominent national political consultant, and the speech he gave managed to carefully thread the political needle. He called the war in Iraq “dumb,” while carefully pointing out that he was not opposed to all wars. His early stand against the war gave him a defining issue in his run for president.
Unexpectedly, a seat in the U.S. Senate opened up in 2004. This time,
Obama was careful to get the blessing of Representative Jessie Jackson
Jr., who was thought to have his eye on the seat but had decided
against it. The winds were running strongly in Obama’s favor. For one,
he had been selected to give the keynote speech at the Democratic convention and he managed to set the place on fire
with his youthful energy and lilting rhetoric.Then, his two most
serious opponents self-destructed. He won the election with 70 percent
of the popular vote.
So by the time he was sworn into the U.S. Senate, he was already a megawatt celebrity.
He did not fall in love with Washington. He was 99th in seniority and
in the minority party for his first two years. At committee hearings he
had to wait to speak until the end.
Although he won a seat on the coveted Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and maintained a solidly liberal voting record, he
disappointed some Democrats by not taking a more prominent role in
opposing the war. In 2006, he voted against troop withdrawal, arguing
that a firm date would hamstring diplomats and military commanders in
the field. His most important accomplishment was a push for ethics
reform, but as the legislation was reaching the Senate floor, Obama was
criticized for not working harder to prevent the bill’s collapse.
During the 2006 mid-term elections, Obama was his party’s most
sought-after campaigner and he raised money for many of his Democratic
colleagues. In a matter of days, he raised nearly $1 million online, a
glimpse of the fundraising prowess to come.
And he was running for president even as he was still getting lost in the Capitol’s corridors.
THE PRIMARIES
It was Michelle Obama
who kept questioning a run for the presidency. She worried about the
disruption of their family life and about her husband’s safety. Over a
Christmas vacation in Hawaii in 2006, the couple visited his
grandmother, Toot, and took long walks to talk about Barack’s political
future. Finally, a decision had to be made and the couple holed up in
the office of Mr.Axelrod, a sad-eyed former newspaper reporter, with a
few of his lieutenants and trusted friends like Valerie Jarrett.
Michelle wanted assurances on a number of points. Were the Clintons
really vulnerable? Would the money be there for a national contest that
would drag on for 21 months? And then, after hearing the pros and cons
from their six closest political advisers and trusted friends, she
turned to her husband.
“You need to ask yourself, Why do you want to do this? What are you hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?”
Her husband sat quietly for a moment and then responded: “This I know:
When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world
will look at us differently. And millions of kids across this country
will look at themselves differently.”
The nucleus of the campaign was a group of Chicago political professionals, Axelrod and one of his younger partners, David Plouffe,
who would manage the campaign. Neither man had ever worked on a winning
presidential campaign. The core team also included those closest to the
Obamas, like Michelle’s brother, Craig, a nationally respected basketball coach.
The initial campaign plan aimed at dealing Hillary Rodham Clinton,
the frontrunner, a devastating blow in the Iowa caucuses in early
January. Positioning Clinton as a consummate Washington insider, the
plan called for harnessing the newest technology to build grassroots
enthusiasm, raise record sums of money and build an organization of
volunteers across the state. The core theme, from which the campaign
never wavered, was change.
An announcement was set for Feb. 10, 2007,
a day so frigid that Obama was forced to wear an overcoat and scarf
against the cold. He stood before the Old State Capitol in Springfield,
Ill., where Abraham Lincoln began his political career, and invoked
Lincoln’s famous words, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
In Obama’s words, it was the poisoned atmosphere in Washington, a
government hobbled by cynicism, petty corruption and “a smallness of
our politics,” that now divided the nation. “The time for that politics
is over,” he said “It is through. It’s time to turn the page. ”
One of Obama’s aides later asked him how he had prevented his teeth
from chattering in the cold. It turned out that a heating device had
been positioned at his feet, out of the audience’s view.
After an initial burst of interest and enthusiasm following the
Springfield announcement, the campaign floundered. In October 2007,
Obama told his aides, “Right now we are losing, and we have 90 days to
turn it around.”
Plouffe made good on his pledge to build a first-rate field
organization on the ground and opened 37 offices in Iowa. The money
came in. Using the Internet to draw in new donors, the campaign hauled
in an impressive $24 million during the first quarter of 2007,
just behind the Clinton money machine. Then, using his oratorical
talents and story-telling ability to the hilt, Obama brought the house
down at the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines.
One striking anecdote from the speech quickly became a YouTube sensation. In it he recalled a lonely campaign rally in Greenwood, S.C., on a miserable day. Edith Childs, a single voice in the meager crowd, began shouting encouragement. “Fired up! Ready to go.” Soon she had everyone else chanting, too.
Then, pacing back and forth as if marching to the chant, Obama, his
voice raised to a spirited shout, asked the crowd, “Are you fired up?
Are you ready to go? Fired up! Ready to go!”
The audience was electrified and some had tears in their eyes as Obama left the stage saying, “Let’s go change the world.”
Hillary Clinton said his liberal message was naïve, his Senate record
too scant. He seemed cowed, especially when at one early debate he was
waiting to shake her hand and say hello and she turned her back. But it
turned out that Iowa Democrats were fired up and ready to go and Hillary had a disappointing third-place finish. It was on to New Hampshire.
Addressing voters in a Manchester theater the Sunday before the
primary, Obama was unmistakably a candidate tasting victory. “In two
days time,” he intoned, they would be making history. Back-to-back wins
in Iowa and New Hampshire, two overwhelmingly white states, would put
to rest questions over whether a black candidate could be nominated.
But a casual debate put-down, in which Obama muttered to Clinton that she was “likable enough,” backfired. Clinton, meanwhile, was able to shed her icy frontrunner persona and even shed tears at a New Hampshire coffee shop,
or came close enough. She seemed to find her voice as the heroine of
the struggling working class and New Hampshire responded. Obama came in second.
“I guess this is going to go on for awhile,” Obama said when aides delivered the disappointing results.
With North Carolina’s John Edwards a perpetual also-ran, Obama and Clinton split states on Super Tuesday.
Despite the millions it had raised, the Clinton campaign had not really
planned to fight beyond that lollapalooza of primaries. Money was
running out and there was internal squabbling among top staffers,
problems that bedeviled the campaign through June. Axelrod and Plouffe,
by contrast, had created a “Feb. 5 and Beyond Room,” where money and
organization were meticulously allotted to most of the primary and
caucus states. Even as Clinton regained momentum in some big states, winning Ohio and Texas, Obama kept pulling out victories in red states and smaller caucus sates, building up a steady count in delegates. Money kept flowing in ever-larger streams from the Internet.
Obama and Clinton went out of their way to point out their foreign
policy differences, with Clinton portraying herself as a hawkish
Democrat and defending her decision to vote in favor of the 2002 resolution
that President Bush later considered an authorization to use military
force against Saddam Hussein. (Later, she said she fully expected Bush
to use diplomacy first — and was shocked that he did not.)
On domestic issues, both candidates advocated turning the government
onto roughly the same course — shifting resources to help low-income
and middle-class Americans, and broadening health coverage
dramatically. Clinton criticized Obama’s health care plan for not
covering all Americans, though her own plan had become less grandiose
than the infamous Hillarycare maze of government-paid coverage she had
proposed during her husband’s first term. She now favored allowing
citizens to choose their plans.
Many voters were impressed by Clinton’s résumé and her depth of
knowledge about America’s biggest problems. But Obama built an exciting
campaign around the theme of change. There were some missteps. Obama
was caught by a blogger describing some white, working-class voters as “bitter. ” And the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ’s more outrageous sermons almost upended his candidacy (see below.)
But the numbers were the numbers. Although Clinton kept winning
primaries to the end, Obama’s early delegate lead proved
insurmountable. It was a long slog, but going toe to toe with Clinton
on so many battlegrounds actually toughened Obama and made him a better
candidate. She had previewed all of the arguments the Republicans would
launch: he was too eager to deal with rogue dictators; his stands on
the issues offered too little substance; most of all, he lacked
experience. But he had stood up to her and won.
On June 3, the final day of the long primary season, he secured the delegates necessary to be the presumptive nominee. Almost immediately, talk centered on whether he would choose Clinton as his running mate.
She played coy. Although a Clinton restoration was no longer possible,
the great Barack-Hillary soap opera would continue through Inauguration
Day.
GENERAL ELECTION
While Barack Obama projected youth and change, John McCain, the Republican nominee who turned 72 during the campaign, was running on his distinguished biography and experience. A former P.O.W. in Vietnam, the Arizona senator was admired for his straight talk and independent stands on contentious issues, such as torture of detainees, campaign finance and immigration reform. And he should have enjoyed one tremendous advantage.
After a decisive win in New Hampshire, he wrapped up his party’s nomination
in early March, leaving Mr. Obama and Mrs.Clinton to slug it out over a
long, divisive spring. But Mr. McCain found himself tethered to an
unpopular incumbent president,and an even more unpopular war. Mr.
McCain not only supported the war in Iraq, he insisted the United States was winning the war. Mr. Obama, of course, had promised to end the war.
But national security was not the dominant issue in this election. All spring and summer, the economy had faltered. By the fall, the bursting of the housing bubble had become a four-alarm financial crisis, requiring an emergency federal bailout of the country’s leading financial institutions. The political environment for Republicans went from challenging to downright sour.
The only strategy that seemed to make a win possible under such
circumstances was to go heavily negative against Obama, but McCain was
reluctant.
In late July, Mr. Obama toured Iraq, the Middle East and Europe on a trip intended to make him appear presidential, but the trip also showcased him as a political rock star.
The McCain campaign pounced. After Mr. Obama appeared before a huge crowd in Berlin, the McCain team began airing an attack ad portraying him as “the biggest celebrity in the world,” juxtaposing the Berlin speech with pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
Money helped insulate the Obama campaign from the attacks. The candidate had made a fateful decision to forgo $84 million in federal election funds
for the general election in order to raise donations outside of the
limits of the Watergate-era campaign finance strictures. The campaign
ended up raising $750 million,
more than George W. Bush and John Kerry combined had raised in 2004 and
hundreds of millions more than McCain. One of McCain’s signature issues
was campaign finance reform and he railed against Obama’s hypocrisy for
going back on his early campaign pledge to live within the federal
limits. But voters didn’t seem to care, and while McCain struggled to
fund a national advertising campaign, Obama had buckets of money.
Clinton’s supporters continued to press her vice-presidential claims leading up to the Democratic convention in Denver.
Obama had promised his supporters that he would announce his selection
in a mass e-mail (which had the dividend of giving the campaign
millions more contacts for getting out the vote in November). The pick
was not Clinton but another one of the Democrats Obama had vanquished
in the primaries, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.
of Delaware. He was a safe choice who brought decades of experience in
foreign affairs, helping to parry McCain’s attacks that Obama was too
light on national security.
The Democratic convention featured the soap opera of whether the Clintons would fully embrace Obama and Biden in Denver. Bill Clinton could still explode in rage over the way he and his wife had been portrayed during the primaries. But in Denver, he gave a gracious endorsement that betrayed no lingering ill will. Hillary Clinton, too, gave a warm speech and rushed to the floor of the convention hall to make Obama’s nomination unanimous on the eve of his acceptance speech.
For the final night of the convention,
the campaign had decided to move everyone, delegates and all, to Mile
High Stadium, where 80,000 people, some waiting in line for nearly a
day, celebrated the new Democratic ticket. The stage, draped with flags
and lined with Greek columns, was meant to evoke the White House but
some found the whole thing over the top.
“With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States,” Obama began,
the culmination of a marathon political carnival that bore little
resemblance to any convention finale that had come before. The speech
was being delivered on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s
“I Have a Dream” speech, and Obama movingly referred to the throngs who
had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear “a young preacher from
Georgia speak of his dream.”
McCain seemed to gain ground after the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn. His choice of a young female governor, Sarah Palin of Alaska, energized the conservative G.O.P. base. But the Obama strategist David Axelrod
and others deemed the choice a disaster because it undermined McCain’s
major campaign theme, experience. Palin had been in office only a few
years and before becoming Alaska’s governor she was the mayor of a tiny
town, Wasilla, and was a self-described Hockey Mom. After rejoicing
over her strong convention acceptance speech,
in which she relentlessly attacked and mocked Obama, the McCain
campaign kept her closeted from the national media. Then, after
overcoaching her, interviews with the network anchors were scheduled.
Her performance during an interview with Katie Couric,
in which she stumbled repeatedly over relatively simple questions and
spoke in almost comic non sequiturs, went viral on YouTube and became
fodder for a barrage of brutally comic skits on “Saturday Night Live.” A $150,000-plus spending spree on clothes financed by the Republican National Committee tarnished her image even more.
Once the campaign turned to party against party, the dynamics changed.
Unlike in the primaries, where Obama and Clinton had agreed on more
issues than not, Obama and McCain had extremely divergent worldviews.
Their most profound differences were over the war in Iraq.
McCain still spoke of “victory” and opposed setting dates for
extracting American troops. Obama was an early opponent of the war in
Iraq, and he presented a military and diplomatic plan for withdrawing
American forces. He also warned that until the Pentagon began pulling
troops out of Iraq, there would not be enough troops to defeat the
Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He blamed President Bush for
taking his focus off defeating Al Qaeda and becoming distracted by Iraq.
They differed over government’s proper role in people’s lives. McCain
was an economic conservative who railed against wasteful government
spending and appropriations called earmarks. In his convention speech
in Denver, Obama said: “Government cannot solve all our problems, but
what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us
from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water
clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads, and
science and technology.” He favored raising the minimum wage and tying
it to inflation.
Both candidates denounced torture
and were committed to closing the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
But Obama went further and promised to identify and correct the Bush
administration’s abuse of executive power. McCain promised improved
protections for detainees, but he had helped the White House push
through the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denied detainees the right to a court hearing and put Washington in conflict with the Geneva Conventions.
They differed sharply on the kinds of justices they would appoint to
the Supreme Court. Obama favored abortion rights, McCain opposed them,
and McCain promised to continue the court’s tilt to the right.
In this campaign, McCain abandoned his earlier, moderate positions on
climate change and immigration reform. Obama presented himself as an
environmental protector who would strictly control the emissions of
greenhouse gases. He endorsed some offshore drilling, but as part of a
comprehensive strategy including big investments in new, clean
technologies.
Right before the first debate, the economy cratered. Lehman Brothers
collapsed, a harrowing indicator of the coming financial crisis and a
reminder that the presidential campaign was turning into a referendum
on which candidate could best address the nation’s economic challenges.
Speaking at an almost empty convention center in Jacksonville, Fla., on
Sept. 15, McCain was trying to show concern for the prospect of
hardship but also optimism about the country’s resilience. “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” he said, words that some believed doomed his candidacy.
At the McCain campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., at almost the
same moment that morning, McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt,
looked stricken when his war room alerted him to the comment. Within 30
minutes, he was headed for a flight to Florida to join McCain as they
began a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful effort to recover.
McCain’s inartful phrase about the economy that day, and the responses
of the two campaigns, fundamentally altered the dynamic of the race.
But the episode also highlighted a deeper difference: the McCain
campaign team often seemed to make missteps and lurch from moment to
moment in search of a consistent strategy and message, while the
disciplined and nimble Obama team marched through a presidential
contest of historic intensity learning to exploit opponents’ weaknesses
and making remarkably few stumbles.
From there, McCain staggered forward. He announced he was suspending his campaign
to return to Washington to help solve the financial crisis, suggesting
he might skip the first debate. Then, after he arrived in Washington,
Republicans balked at approving the bailout plan. When McCain could not
mediate the impasse, the debate was suddenly back on.
After this wild ride, Obama’s calm performance in their first debate
made him appear presidential. While McCain jabbed at him during the
debate, he did not look at Obama once during the 90-minute debate,
despite rules that encouraged them to speak directly to each other.
The second and third debates were really no better. McCain tediously
repeated the phrase “My friends,” as the overture to his answers and,
in the third, he endlessly invoked Joe the Plumber,
a middle-class Everyman who McCain insisted would see his taxes balloon
under Obama’s economic plan. In various polls, Obama was deemed the
winner of all three debates. Well-prepared and commanding, if not
exciting, he had come across as a plausible president.
The
negative tone of the McCain campaign and the murmurings about Obama
being a Muslim had a powerful impact on one disgusted Republican,
former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. During an appearance on
“Meet the Press” in late October, Powell broke with his party and endorsed Obama
With plenty of money still flowing into the campaign during the final month, Obama bought a half-hour of national television time
for a glossy infomercial. A smashing ratings success, the commercial
proved to be more popular than even the final game of the World Series
— or last season’s finale of “American Idol.”
Now all the campaign needed to worry about was overconfidence.
VICTORY
When Senator Barack Obama stepped from his plane on the final ride of
his presidential candidacy and loped to the bottom of the stairs, he
did something he had not done at the end of any of the thousands of
miles logged on this journey.
He saluted.
A group of his campaign workers had gathered at Midway Airport in
Chicago to watch him arrive from his last trip, a short hop from nearby
Indiana. Given the day, as Mr. Obama raised his hand to offer his
gratitude, it looked a lot like a gesture from a commander in chief.
In the final hours of a 22-month campaign, he quickly moved on to an
Election Day tradition that is rooted in a sweaty superstition:
basketball. Twice in his primary fight with Hillary Rodham Clinton he
skipped his afternoon game on the day ballots were cast. And both times
he lost.
So at 2:45 p.m. Mr. Obama arrived at a gymnasium on the West Side,
aptly named Attack Athletics. For two hours, he ran up and down the
court with Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who had become
a good friend, along with a close group of Chicago pals who assembled
to help take his mind off the other events of the day.
When he went to vote
with Michelle and their two daughters on Tuesday morning, he had
narrowly missed another familiar face at his polling place. Bill Ayers,
the former member of the radical Weather Underground who became a
central figure in the attacks from John McCain and Sarah Palin, had
dropped by to vote a few minutes earlier.
By nightfall, thousands of his admirers streamed into Grant Park for
the celebration. At a nearby hotel, he took one more pass through his
speech, while commentary about his future played on television sets in
the background.
Celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, gathered in a tent to await the candidate.
As Ohio was called for Mr. Obama, a roar sounded from the 125,000 people gathered in Hutchison Field in Grant Park.
It was the last state needed to put Mr. Obama over the top. But the
networks waited to make their calls until 11 p.m., Eastern time, when
polls in California and on the West Coast closed. The candidate waited
to watch Mr. McCain's gracious concession speech, in which he praised the president-elect as a fellow American and paid homage to the racial barrier just fallen.
“This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has
for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs
tonight,” Mr. McCain said, adding, “We both realize that we have come a
long way from the injustices that once stained our nation’s
reputation.”
Finally, looking a bit exhausted, Mr. Obama stood at the lectern, looking
over a vast undulating sea of screaming humanity of all races, waving
American flags. “What a scene, what a crowd,” he said, shaking his
head. “Wow.” He took a long drink out of the water bottle inside the
lectern.
With a bank of flags at his back, he told the screaming, dancing crowd,
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place
where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our
founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our
democracy, tonight is your answer.”
“It’s been a long time coming,” the president-elect added, “but
tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this
defining moment, change has come to America.”
Not only had he captured the presidency, but he also led his party to sharp gains in Congress.
This put Democrats in control of the House, the Senate and the White
House for the first time since 1995, when Bill Clinton was in office.
Spontaneous parties erupted on streets across America. At 2 a.m., about
20 revelers from Times Square congregated outside The New York Times’s
new headquarters on Eighth Avenue, waiting for newspapers to mark the
historic occasion. When a senior editor appeared with a bundle of early
editions, the crowd went nuts and began taking her picture holding the
newspaper with the simple headline that captured their joy: OBAMA.
Oceans away in Jakarta, a young Indonesian student, attending the same
public school where Mr. Obama’s mother had sent him, was hoisted aloft
on the shoulders of his joyous schoolmates, waving his shirt in the
air. It was a picture repeated elsewhere around the globe, especially
in Kenya, where some members of Mr. Obama’s more distant family made
plans to attend the inauguration.
At Obama headquarters in Albany, Ga., where as a part of the nascent
civil rights movement she had been beaten back with tear gas and
billyclubs, Rutha Mae Harris could not hold back her tears any longer,
the emotions of a lifetime released in a flood.
“Glory, glory, hallelujah,” she sang.
THE NEW TEAM
Throughout November, the financial tsunami was gaining such ferocity
that virtually every large institution, from investment banks to
insurers to companies like Citigroup, was approaching Washington for federal funds. Help couldn’t wait.
Although Barack Obama kept reminding people that the United States only
had one president at a time, he knew the world expected him to get to
work to help stabilize the teetering economy. That meant the quick
announcement of an economic team and a fiscal stimulus plan, perhaps one as large as $700 billion, equivalent to the financial bailout plan approved by Congress before the election.
For his first staff announcements, the president-elect turned to two old Clinton hands, Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and John Podesta.
Neither was considered a practitioner of the “new” politics, but both
were respected for their effectiveness and Washington-savvy.
The captains of his economic team, similarly, were both disciples of Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The new Treasury secretary was Timothy F. Geithner, the young president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers
was to be the director of the National Economic Council in the White
House, the president’s principal economic adviser and policy
coordinator. Both men believed in the pillars of Rubinomics, including
free trade, deregulation and fiscal discipline.
The severity of the economic crisis created an opportunity to act on
many of the issues Obama had emphasized in his campaign, including
cutting taxes for lower- and middle-class workers, addressing neglected
public infrastructure projects like roads and schools, and creating
“green jobs” through business incentives for energy alternatives and
environmentally friendly technologies.
For his national security team, Obama also went long on experience. The biggest surprise was Hillary Rodham Clinton
for secretary of state. Although they had disagreed about the Iraq war
and during the primaries Clinton had portrayed herself as more hawkish
than Obama, she opted to accept the chance to play on the world stage
once again. Although his campaign nickname was “No Drama Obama,” the
choices meant an Obama White House that would brim with big
personalities and far more spirited debate than occurred among the
largely like-minded advisers who populated President George W. Bush’s
first term.
Obama asked Bush’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to stay on; and picked Gen. James L. Jones,
the former NATO commander and Marine Corps commandant, to be national
security adviser. Another former rival for the Democratic nomination, Bill Richardson
of New Mexico, was chosen for Commerce secretary, although he withdrew
because of an investigation into his political donors. Another Western
governor, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, was selected as secretary of Homeland Security.
By the end of the process, the 20 members of the Obama cabinet included
two Republicans and four African Americans, two Asian Americans. three
Latinos and two white women. The nine white men in the Obama cabinet
were to be, as they were in the Clinton administration, a minority.
Critics of the Iraq war particularly rejoiced over the choice of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs,
seeing the appointment as a second chance for a brave truth-teller.
Shinseki had been denounced by senior Bush administration officials for
prewar testimony in which the general said hundreds of thousands of
troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq, predictions that proved
accurate.
The mainly centrist cabinet choices angered some liberals, who worried
that the team might not deliver the change Obama had promised. But some
predicted that the locus of real power would not be cabinet meetings
but the meetings of the senior White House staff, working under the
leadership of Emanuel, renowned for his tough tactics and language. The
staff also included campaign hands like David Axelrod, who would keep his portfolio on message and Robert Gibbs, who was chosen for press secretary, and Chicago loyalists like Valerie Jarrett.
The president-elect finished his Cabinet appointments by announcing his
intelligence team, led by another veteran of both Congress and the
Clinton White House, Leon Panetta, the nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Although a few Democrats complained about not being informed beforehand
of the choice, and others worried that Panetta, a vocal critic of the
C.I.A.’s interrogation methods, did not come from inside the
intelligence community, it seemed that he and the rest of Obama’s
nominees were likely to be confirmed, even the disclosure that Mr.
Geithner, the Treasury nominee, had failed to pay some personal taxes in earlier years, appeared to be more of an embarrassment than a stumbling block.
The only real controversy was the continued ethical mess swirling around Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor, who was arrested in December and charged with trying to sell the right to be appointed to take Mr. Obama’s seat in the Senate. The Obama camp responded with an internal review
that showed that Mr. Emmanuel had held discussions with the Mr.
Blagojevich, but that there had been no sign of any favors being traded
to secure the choice of a nominee.
Mr. Blagojevich then turned the Senate in knots by filling the seat with a former Illinois state official, Roland W. Burris. Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
at first said Burris should not be seated because Blagojevich was not
fit to make the appointment. But they changed their minds, in part
because Senate Democrats needed Burris’s vote. Some members of the
Congressional Black Caucus also supported Burris, who would be the
Senate’s only African-American. In the meantime, in early January,
Blagojevich was impeached by a vote of the State House of Representatives, setting the stage for a trial in the State Senate.
Still, these matters appeared as mere distractions, considering the
deteriorating state of the economy. In January, as the Obamas returned
from their holiday in Hawaii, the nation’s jobless rate rose to a
16-year high of 7.2 percent. Obama enlarged his stimulus proposal to
$775 billion over two years, saying it would save between three and
four million jobs. Some Democrats criticized the plan for not being
bold enough and others worried that Obama should not have proposed tax
cuts to offset opposition from Republicans, some of whom railed about
the government going into so much debt. But with the country rallying
behind him, Obama had the upper hand. National polls showed
that 65 percent of the country supported his leadership, a much higher
approval rate than other president-elects enjoyed. Congressional
leaders promised to act on the stimulus package in February.
On foreign policy, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas
raged in the Middle East, Obama continued to stress that there was only
one president at a time and left diplomacy to the Bush administration.
But on the economy, he stepped fully into the role of president before
his inauguration. He met with congressional leaders and, in a somber
but commanding tone, gave a major economic address at George Mason University
in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. “For every day we wait or point
fingers or drag our feet,” he warned, “more Americans will lose their
jobs, more families will lose their savings, more dreams will be
deferred and denied, and our nation will sink deeper into a crisis
that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”
The idea was not to wait but to build public support by mapping out a
series of events to explain his economic approach, including long,
televised interviews.
The Obamas had moved into a suite at the nearby Hay-Adams Hotel, so
that Malia and Sasha could begin school after the holiday break.There
was one more announcement before the family move into the White House: Marian Robinson,
Michelle’s mother and a mainstay for the girls all through the
campaign, said she would move in with the First Family after all,
putting aside, for now, her worries about losing touch with her friends
and beloved Chicago. And the closely followed saga of which breed of
man’s best friend would share the Obama White House narrowed to two,
Labradoodle and Portuguese water dog.
Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United
States on Jan. 20, 2009. The son of a black man from Kenya and a white
woman from Kansas, he was the first African-American to ascend to the
highest office in the land.
He was also the first new president since terrorists attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the first to use the Internet to decisive political advantage, the first to insist on handling a personal smartphone
while in the White House. So striking was the novelty of his rise that
he embraced it himself: as a candidate he called himself “a skinny kid
with a funny name” and the theme for his campaign was “change.”
It was a theme with deep resonance for a country enmeshed in what was widely believed to be the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Abroad, many challenges loomed: the war in Iraq, the worsening conflict in Aghanistan, the repercussions from Israel's broad assault on Gaza,
the threat of terrorism and the increasing signs that the economic woes
that began on Wall Street had spread across the global economy.
Mr. Obama arrived at the White House with a resume that appeared short
by presidential standards: eight years in the Illinois State Senate,
four years as a senator in Washington. He had managed to wrest the Democratic nomination from a field of far more experienced competitors, most notably Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he outlasted in what became an epic primary battle. And he defeated Senator John McCain, the Republican of Arizona, by an electoral margin of 365 to 173, while outpolling him by more than eight million votes.
During the campaign, Mr. Obama laid out a set of large promises that
were solidly within the traditional agenda of the Democratic Party,
with plans to offer health insurance to all and reduce carbon emissions
at the top of the list. At the same time, he proposed moving toward
what was sometimes called a post-partisan landscape, appealing to
voters of all stripes to come together. As he took office, voters
seemed cautiously optimistic, with high hopes for the Obama presidency
mixed with a sense that complicated problems would take years to
resolve.
Republicans attributed Mr. Obama's victory primarily
to a dismal trifecta: the cratering economy, an incumbent president,
George W. Bush, with near-record disapproval ratings
and a series of stumbles by Mr. McCain's campaign. But even his
opponents acknowledged that Mr. Obama had run a remarkable campaign,
highly disciplined in its message, relentlessly focused on building a
field organization that was second to none and unprecedentedly successful in fundraising, particularly over the Internet.
In the weeks after the election, the Obama team tried to bring the same level of focus to the transition, moving rapidly to name a large roster of nominees
to posts large and small. He dipped deeply into the pool of Clinton-era
officials, beginning with his former rival, naming Mrs. Clinton to be
his secretary of state. While he resisted calls to involve himself
publicly in many of the pressing issues of the moment, declaring
repeatedly that "we only have one president at a time,"
Mr. Obama began negotiations with congressional leaders on a massive
economic stimulus package and hit the road for campaign-style events to
build support for the $825 billion bill introduced by the House on Jan. 15, 2009.
