Obama Audacity of Hope

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hard-pressed to name better storytellers than Ted Kennedy orTrent Lott, or sharper wits than Kent Conrad or Richard Shelby,or warmer individuals than Debbie Stabenow or Mel Martinez.As a rule they proved to be intelligent, thoughtful, and hard-working people, willing to devote long hours and attention tothe issues affecting their states. Yes, there were those who livedup to the stereotype, those who talked interminably or bulliedtheir staffs; and the more time I spent on the Senate floor, themore frequently I could identify in each senator the flaws that weall suffer from to varying degrees—a bad temper here, a deepstubbornness or unquenchable vanity there. For the most part,though, the quotient of such attributes in the Senate seemed nohigher than would be found in any random slice of the generalpopulation. Even when talking to those colleagues with whom Imost deeply disagreed, I was usually struck by their basic sincer-ity—their desire to get things right and leave the country betterand stronger; their desire to represent their constituents and theirvalues as faithfully as circumstances would allow.

So what happened to make these men and women appear asthe grim, uncompromising, insincere, and occasionally meancharacters that populate our nightly news? What was it aboutthe process that prevented reasonable, conscientious people fromdoing the nation’s business? The longer I served in Washington,the more I saw friends studying my face for signs of a change,probing me for a newfound pomposity, searching for hints ofargumentativeness or guardedness. I began examining myself inthe same way; I began to see certain characteristics that I held incommon with my new colleagues, and I wondered what mightprevent my own transformation into the stock politician of badTV movies.

One place to start my inquiry was to understand the nature ofambition, for in this regard at least, senators are different. Few

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people end up being United States senators by accident; at a min-imum, it requires a certain megalomania, a belief that of all thegifted people in your state, you are somehow uniquely qualifiedto speak on their behalf; a belief sufficiently strong that you arewilling to endure the sometimes uplifting, occasionally harrow-ing, but always slightly ridiculous process we call campaigns.

Moreover, ambition alone is not enough. Whatever the tangleof motives, both sacred and profane, that push us toward the goalof becoming a senator, those who succeed must exhibit an almostfanatical single-mindedness, often disregarding their health, rela-tionships, mental balance, and dignity. After my primary cam-paign was over, I remember looking at my calendar and realizingthat over a span of a year and a half, I had taken exactly sevendays off. The rest of the time I had typically worked twelve tosixteen hours a day. This was not something I was particularlyproud of. As Michelle pointed out to me several times a weekduring the campaign, it just wasn’t normal.

Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts forthe behavior of politicians, however. There is a companion emo-tion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more destructive, anemotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcementas a candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn’t releaseyou until after Election Day. That emotion is fear. Not just fearof losing—although that is bad enough—but fear of total, com-plete humiliation.

I still burn, for example, with the thought of my one loss inpolitics, a drubbing in 2000 at the hands of incumbent Demo-cratic Congressman Bobby Rush. It was a race in which everythingthat could go wrong did go wrong, in which my own mistakeswere compounded by tragedy and farce. Two weeks after an-nouncing my candidacy, with a few thousand dollars raised, Icommissioned my first poll and discovered that Mr. Rush’s namerecognition stood at about 90 percent, while mine stood at 11 per-cent. His approval rating hovered around 70 percent—mine at 8.

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In that way I learned one of the cardinal rules of modern politics:Do the poll before you announce.

Things went downhill from there. In October, on my way to ameeting to secure an endorsement from one of the few party offi-cials who had not already committed to my opponent, I heard anews flash on the radio that Congressman Rush’s adult son hadbeen shot and killed by a pair of drug dealers outside his house.I was shocked and saddened for the congressman, and effectivelysuspended my campaign for a month.

Then, during the Christmas holidays, after having traveled toHawaii for an abbreviated five-day trip to visit my grandmotherand reacquaint myself with Michelle and then-eighteen-month-old Malia, the state legislature was called back into special ses-sion to vote on a piece of gun control legislation. With Maliasick and unable to fly, I missed the vote, and the bill failed. Twodays later, I got off the red-eye at O’Hare Airport, a wailing babyin tow, Michelle not speaking to me, and was greeted by a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune indicating that the gun billhad fallen a few votes short, and that state senator and congres-sional candidate Obama “had decided to remain on vacation” inHawaii. My campaign manager called, mentioning the potentialad the congressman might be running soon—palm trees, a manin a beach chair and straw hat sipping a mai tai, a slack key gui-tar being strummed softly in the background, the voice-over ex-plaining, “While Chicago suffered the highest murder rate in itshistory, Barack Obama . . .”

I stopped him there, having gotten the idea.And so, less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my

bones that I was going to lose. Each morning from that pointforward I awoke with a vague sense of dread, realizing that Iwould have to spend the day smiling and shaking hands and pre-tending that everything was going according to plan. In the fewweeks before the primary, my campaign recovered a bit: I did



well in the sparsely covered debates, received some positive cov-erage for proposals on health care and education, and even re-ceived the Tribune endorsement. But it was too little too late. Iarrived at my victory party to discover that the race had alreadybeen called and that I had lost by thirty-one points.

I’m not suggesting that politicians are unique in sufferingsuch disappointments. It’s that unlike most people, who have theluxury of licking their wounds privately, the politician’s loss is onpublic display. There’s the cheerful concession speech you haveto make to a half-empty ballroom, the brave face you put on asyou comfort staff and supporters, the thank-you calls to thosewho helped, and the awkward requests for further help in retir-ing debt. You perform these tasks as best you can, and yet nomatter how much you tell yourself differently—no matter howconvincingly you attribute the loss to bad timing or bad luck orlack of money—it’s impossible not to feel at some level as if youhave been personally repudiated by the entire community, thatyou don’t quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you gothe word “loser” is flashing through people’s minds. They’re thesorts of feelings that most people haven’t experienced since highschool, when the girl you’d been pining over dismissed you witha joke in front of her friends, or you missed a pair of free throwswith the big game on the line—the kinds of feelings that mostadults wisely organize their lives to avoid.

Imagine then the impact of these same emotions on the aver-age big-time politician, who (unlike me) has rarely failed at any-thing in his life—who was the high school quarterback or theclass valedictorian and whose father was a senator or admiraland who has been told since he was a child that he was destinedfor great things. I remember talking once to a corporate execu-tive who had been a big supporter of Vice President Al Gore dur-ing the 2000 presidential race. We were in his suitably plushoffice, overlooking all of midtown Manhattan, and he began

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describing to me a meeting that had taken place six months or soafter the election, when Gore was seeking investors for his then-fledgling television venture.

“It was strange,” the executive told me. “Here he was, a for-mer vice president, a man who just a few months earlier hadbeen on the verge of being the most powerful man on the planet.During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day,would rearrange my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. Butsuddenly, after the election, when he walked in, I couldn’t helpfeeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to admit it, because Ireally like the guy. But at some level he wasn’t Al Gore, formervice president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day whoare coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what abig steep cliff you guys are on.”

A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall. Over the past five years,Al Gore has shown the satisfaction and influence that a life afterpolitics can bring, and I suspect the executive is eagerly takingthe former vice president’s calls once again. Still, in the aftermathof his 2000 loss, I imagine Gore would have sensed the change inhis friend. Sitting there, pitching his television idea, trying tomake the best of a bad situation, he might have thought howridiculous were the circumstances in which he found himself;how after a lifetime of work he could have lost it all because of abutterfly ballot that didn’t align, while his friend the executive,sitting across from him with the condescending smile, could af-ford to come in second in his business year after year, maybe seehis company’s stock tumble or make an ill-considered investment,and yet still be considered successful, still enjoy the pride of ac-complishment, the lavish compensation, the exercise of power.It wasn’t fair, but that wouldn’t change the facts for the formervice president. Like most men and women who followed thepath of public life, Gore knew what he was getting himself intothe moment he decided to run. In politics, there may be secondacts, but there is no second place.



Obama Audacity of Hope

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