Dream team for the top job
US Democratic presidential candidate, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, waits backstage at a campaign rally yesterday in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was hoping to deal a second, crushing blow to Hillary Clinton’s White House hopes and boost his quest to become the first black US president, as New Hampshire voted in key presidential primaries. Picture: Getty Images
BARACK OBAMA was badly in need of sleep, but he wasn’t going to get any just yet. Late last Wednesday night, the candidate and his wife, Michelle, collapsed on the sofa aboard their campaign bus. It was the end of a 17-hour day rolling around Iowa trawling for votes. They had just come from a night-time rally in Waterloo, where they double-teamed an enthusiastic crowd in an overheated school gym. On the bus, Obama nursed his raw throat with tea from a steel travel mug, his arm around Michelle.
The long-awaited Iowa caucuses were the next day. In less than 24 hours, he’d know if it had all been worth it. It was.
In public, Obama attributes his quick political rise to that “respectful tone” he believes voters crave after so many ugly, dispiriting campaign seasons. When he first began thinking about a White House bid, he told advisers he would be willing to run only if he could do it his way, which meant defying the conventional campaign theology of hitting the other guy hard and first, instead sticking to simple soundbites and preaching only to the base. He has shown a willingness to stray from his script and reach across racial and party lines to appeal to the broadest base of supporters.
But along the way, he has had to resist continual pressure even from inside his own campaign to take a harder line against his rivals, Hillary Clinton in particular. Last summer Obama’s campaign was stalling after a series of lacklustre debate performances. His staff pleaded with him to go after Clinton. Then, an anonymous oppo-research memo, sourced to the Obama campaign, started making the rounds among reporters. It suggested Bill Clinton had profited from companies that outsourced jobs to India while Hillary raked in donations from Indian-Americans.
The Clinton campaign was justifiably angry, and seized on the episode as proof Obama had abandoned his vaunted “politics of hope” and had offended Indian-Americans in the process. Obama was furious with his staff. “Some of my roommates in college were Indian and Pakistani,” he said. “I had to call some of my best friends and explain my campaign wasn’t engaged in xenophobia.”
Obama held a meeting with his senior aides and vented his anger. “If you’re even going close to the line, you better ask me first,” he recalled saying. “That was the most angry I’ve been in this campaign.”
Obama’s high-minded themes of hope and change can come off as earnest, even naive, but Obama is also a streetwise Chicago politician who put together a campaign machine formidable enough to take on the Clintons and win. Polls had made it seem the contest would be close. Instead, Terry McAuliffe, Hillary’s campaign manager, conceded that even Bill Clinton was “very surprised” by Obama’s nine-point victory over his wife. The win crowned Obama the frontrunner, and put to rest the doubts of many people. It also suggests that if his unorthodox approach to presidential politics worked in Iowa, it may win over voters in other states as well. Iowa’s Democrats tend to be older, whiter and more partisan than the national average. Yet Obama attracted significant numbers of independent voters and persuaded young people to turn out in record numbers.
Obama, who generally shies away from questions about how “historic” it would be for him to win the White House, nevertheless acknowledged that Iowa was, in fact, a noteworthy moment. “I think there’s no doubt that it’s a measure of our progress as a country,” he said. “I’ve said from the beginning I had confidence in the American people. Race is no doubt still a factor in our culture. But people want to know who is going to provide healthcare that works, schools that work, a foreign policy that works. If they think you can do the work, I think they are willing to give you a chance.”
On the campaign trail, Obama portrays himself as a one-man melting pot. There’s something for everyone: a biracial kid with an absentee father whose improbable path carried him from Hawaii to Indonesia to Chicago to Washington. A Harvard Law graduate who turned down a coveted Supreme Court clerkship to work with the poor in Chicago. A US senator who shops for groceries with his daughters and only recently got out from underneath his student loans. At a high-school rally in Des Moines, he brought his field organisers onstage to take a bow. The group included whites and blacks, asians and latinos. “It’s a good-looking bunch,” he said. “They’re like a Benetton ad.”
It’s a compelling theme, and it doesn’t hurt that Obama knows how to bring along a crowd while seeming to stay slightly above it. It also doesn’t hurt that he is married to Michelle Obama, a dynamic, ambitious Princeton and Harvard Law graduate, her husband’s intellectual equal, and often a better pitch-person than the candidate himself. When they campaign separately, she often draws crowds in the hundreds.
Out campaigning, Obama leaves the impression he is in awe of his good fortune. Yet little about his career has had to do with chance. His success so far has just as much to do with what the crowds don’t see — the deep political organisation Obama quietly built in preparation for his run.
An obsessive details man when he was a community organiser on the southside of Chicago, Obama and his crew of more than 700 paid staffers are trying to apply the same low-tech, word-of-mouth methods to the entire country. In Iowa, 17-year-olds who would turn 18 before the elections were allowed participate in the caucuses. Obama field-organisers recruited high-school students to form Obama ’08 clubs to persuade friends to get over their apathy and vote. In South Carolina, campaign workers have spent months recruiting hairdressers to preach the candidate’s virtues to their customers.
Obama says the low turnover on his staff says a lot about his leadership skills. “I’ve said from the outset that starting from scratch, starting from zero, we’ve built the best political organisation in the field. And I think that [Iowa] confirms it. I have managed this operation without any drama. My staff is famous for being courteous and treating people with respect.”
After the decisive Iowa win, it might be tempting for Obama and his team to portray his campaign as a smooth operation that took its cues from the top. But for months leading up to the caucuses, Obama’s staff continually argued with him over his approach. Those who grudgingly admired his no-attack decree still thought him hopelessly unrealistic about what it takes to beat Clinton and John Edwards. At the very least, his aides urged him to hone sharper responses to questions in the debates and to confront Clinton directly. Sometimes in attempting to appear above politics he can come off as ponderous and unprepared instead. “He always tries to answer the question,” says one senior aide. “He doesn’t see the question like the others do, as an opportunity to talk about what he wants.” By the late summer, Obama was coming under more intense pressure from donors and fundraisers, who feared the campaign had lost all momentum in the polls and the press.
On October 28, Obama met with a group of nine close advisers, many of them old pros in Washington’s political wars. They pressed him to hit back hard against Clinton, who was portraying him as inexperienced. Some of them spoke up to say he could not afford to turn the other cheek forever.
“Barack looked around the room and said, ‘That’s not the way I want to win’,” recalls Eric Holder Jr, deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, who was present at the dinner.
“‘We’re not going to get personal. We’re not going to kneecap anybody.’ The room went silent. It felt like time slowed down,” Holder says.
Now Obama looks back on that period with wry humour. At an event last week in Coralville, Iowa, he described a favourite editorial cartoon that had appeared at the time. It depicted him smiling and hugging Hillary. The caption read: OBAMA ATTACKS CLINTON. “Folks were writing us off,” he said. “They said, ‘If he wants to catch up, he’s got to kneecap the frontrunner, do a Tonya Harding on her.’ That’s what they said ... ‘He’s too nice.’ But you know what? We didn’t change course. We kept on running a positive campaign. We pointed out our differences, but we rejected the slash-and-burn tactics Washington is so accustomed to.”
Sitting on the campaign bus the night before the caucuses, Michelle explained her desire to shake up American politics. “We complain that politicians are mean and cynical and angry, but we’ve been doing the same thing over and over again,” she said. “We have been making the same irrational decisions. When faced with the most rational choice, we hesitate — and ... we have to break out of this.” Stretched out beside her, Obama was clearly enjoying watching his wife getting all worked up even as he was ready to go to sleep. He leaned forward and stage-whispered, “She’s scary”. His wife wasn’t entirely amused. She poked him and forced herself to smile.
Obama loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. “I think it’s fair to say that there were some who were sceptical that young people would come out, that independents and Republicans would be voting Democratic in a caucus... I think it’s a harbinger of what’s going to happen around the country.” A few minutes later, Obama cut off the question time. “All right, let me go to sleep,” he said. “Can you sleep?” asked a reporter. Obama smiled. “You bet.”
Full Name: Barack Obama
Party: Democrat
Age: 46
Birthplace: Honolulu, Hawaii
Spouse: Michelle Obama
Children: Mali and Sasha
Religion: United Church of Christ
Current Job: US senator from Illinois
Past offices: 1997-2004: State senator, Illinois 2005-present: US senator, Illinois
Previous Experience:
1993-2004: Constitutional law professor, University of Chicago
Education: Colombia University: Bachelor’s degree in political science, 1983
Harvard University: Law degree, 1991
Books: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama in His Own Words
Quote: “I am suspicious of hype. The fact that my 15 minutes of fame has extended a little longer than 15 minutes is somewhat surprising to me and baffling to my wife.”
Website: www.barackobama.com
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