The Official Barak Obama thread
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Obama spreads message, ideas
Freshman senator: Speeches aim at finding solutions to common problems
By Dennis Conrad
The Associated Press
November 22, 2005
WASHINGTON — With a national spotlight on him that is rare for any freshman lawmaker, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has spent his first year in Congress taking advantage of his celebrity by making speeches on everything from sex and violence on television to the threat of nuclear weapons.
It's all part of a careful and deliberate plan for the Senate's only black member, who captured national attention last year with a stirring keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
"Early on, I realized that, deserved or not, I had received a lot of attention," the Chicago Democrat said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It gave me a bully pulpit."
Obama said he is not targeting national office with the speeches, but he is trying to advance his ideas and respond to calls from back home in Illinois to work toward commonsense solutions to problems.
Helping shape ideas
"As somebody who is in the minority party, I can't always shape the agenda on the floor of the Senate," said Obama, who ranks 99th among 100 senators in seniority. "So what I try then is use the opportunity that I have outside the Senate to start helping to shape the ideas for the Democrats that will speak to some of the most urgent concerns that I'm hearing from the folks back home."
His next speech, scheduled for today before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, is on "Moving Forward in Iraq." He's given other speeches before groups such as think tanks and national women's organizations.
"Most freshmen wouldn't be invited to give these sorts of speeches," said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor. "He's seen as an inevitable national leader who could be on a national ticket."
Michael Daly, a longtime political aide to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said all senators are interested in speaking on important issues, but Obama is atypical.
"The difference is not what he's doing but who's paying attention," Daly said. He attributed Obama's drawing power to a couple factors: he is the Senate's only black and he won his seat in a stunning manner, including capturing a majority vote in a crowded primary.
Retired Republican Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, who previously held the seat Obama has, said that even though Obama is a freshman lawmaker, he is a celebrity better known than most members of Congress, even more so than Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
"I think there is a very good chance that Senator Obama is on the Democratic ticket in 2008 as the vice presidential nominee and in subsequent elections as the presidential nominee," said Fitzgerald.
Close-knit speechwriters
Helping Obama with his speeches is a close-knit staff that includes Jon Favreau, formerly a speechwriter for the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
Others have worked for the Clinton administration, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Gov. Rod Blagojevich when he was a congressman.
Typically, Obama will dictate a first draft, sometimes with fine details, other times with nothing more than building blocks. A staffer then prepares the first draft, which is circulated in the office and followed by a staff debate of its merits.
Numerous outside experts are also tapped for their knowledge — people like Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan; former CIA Director James Woolsey; Kenneth Thorpe, chair of the Department of Health Policy & Management at Emory University in Atlanta; and Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"It does require having some really smart staff people who are around to do the day-to-day work, but also do some longer-term thinking about problems," Obama said. "It requires taking the time to write speeches and debate them and schedule forums for them and organize them."
During a commencement speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Obama suggested that investments have to be made to ensure that every single person can compete and move up the ladder of economic opportunity.
In a subsequent address in Washington, he said the nation's schools need not only money, but also reforms such as the creation of "innovation districts" that put an emphasis on better trained, better paid teachers.
With energy, he has proposed asking Detroit to make a trade with Washington, whereby the government would help with the auto industry's health care costs but the money saved would have to be invested in technologies designed to improve fuel efficiency to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil.
Obama said generally the responses to his speeches have been positive, but he cautioned that much more must be done. That includes following up with proposed legislation and working with others, including Republicans, to bring together the best of all ideas.
"On any of these issues, making a speech doesn't make it so," he said.
http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/couriernews/top/3_1_EL22_A1OBAMA_S1.htm
Freshman senator: Speeches aim at finding solutions to common problems
By Dennis Conrad
The Associated Press
November 22, 2005
WASHINGTON — With a national spotlight on him that is rare for any freshman lawmaker, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has spent his first year in Congress taking advantage of his celebrity by making speeches on everything from sex and violence on television to the threat of nuclear weapons.
It's all part of a careful and deliberate plan for the Senate's only black member, who captured national attention last year with a stirring keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
"Early on, I realized that, deserved or not, I had received a lot of attention," the Chicago Democrat said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It gave me a bully pulpit."
Obama said he is not targeting national office with the speeches, but he is trying to advance his ideas and respond to calls from back home in Illinois to work toward commonsense solutions to problems.
Helping shape ideas
"As somebody who is in the minority party, I can't always shape the agenda on the floor of the Senate," said Obama, who ranks 99th among 100 senators in seniority. "So what I try then is use the opportunity that I have outside the Senate to start helping to shape the ideas for the Democrats that will speak to some of the most urgent concerns that I'm hearing from the folks back home."
His next speech, scheduled for today before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, is on "Moving Forward in Iraq." He's given other speeches before groups such as think tanks and national women's organizations.
"Most freshmen wouldn't be invited to give these sorts of speeches," said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor. "He's seen as an inevitable national leader who could be on a national ticket."
Michael Daly, a longtime political aide to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said all senators are interested in speaking on important issues, but Obama is atypical.
"The difference is not what he's doing but who's paying attention," Daly said. He attributed Obama's drawing power to a couple factors: he is the Senate's only black and he won his seat in a stunning manner, including capturing a majority vote in a crowded primary.
Retired Republican Illinois Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, who previously held the seat Obama has, said that even though Obama is a freshman lawmaker, he is a celebrity better known than most members of Congress, even more so than Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
"I think there is a very good chance that Senator Obama is on the Democratic ticket in 2008 as the vice presidential nominee and in subsequent elections as the presidential nominee," said Fitzgerald.
Close-knit speechwriters
Helping Obama with his speeches is a close-knit staff that includes Jon Favreau, formerly a speechwriter for the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.
Others have worked for the Clinton administration, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Gov. Rod Blagojevich when he was a congressman.
Typically, Obama will dictate a first draft, sometimes with fine details, other times with nothing more than building blocks. A staffer then prepares the first draft, which is circulated in the office and followed by a staff debate of its merits.
Numerous outside experts are also tapped for their knowledge — people like Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan; former CIA Director James Woolsey; Kenneth Thorpe, chair of the Department of Health Policy & Management at Emory University in Atlanta; and Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"It does require having some really smart staff people who are around to do the day-to-day work, but also do some longer-term thinking about problems," Obama said. "It requires taking the time to write speeches and debate them and schedule forums for them and organize them."
During a commencement speech at Knox College in Galesburg, Obama suggested that investments have to be made to ensure that every single person can compete and move up the ladder of economic opportunity.
In a subsequent address in Washington, he said the nation's schools need not only money, but also reforms such as the creation of "innovation districts" that put an emphasis on better trained, better paid teachers.
With energy, he has proposed asking Detroit to make a trade with Washington, whereby the government would help with the auto industry's health care costs but the money saved would have to be invested in technologies designed to improve fuel efficiency to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil.
Obama said generally the responses to his speeches have been positive, but he cautioned that much more must be done. That includes following up with proposed legislation and working with others, including Republicans, to bring together the best of all ideas.
"On any of these issues, making a speech doesn't make it so," he said.
http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/couriernews/top/3_1_EL22_A1OBAMA_S1.htm
<font size="6"><center>Barack Obama Won't Admit Byrd Error</font size></center>
Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005 12:10 p.m. EST
Sen. Barack Obama is blasting President Bush for not admitting alleged mistakes he made in waging the Iraq war.
But the up-and-coming black Democrat still has yet to acknowledge his own mistake in endorsing and raising campaign funds for notorious one-time Ku Klux Klansman, Sen. Robert Byrd.
On the Iraq war, Obama told the Washington Post on Tuesday:
"Straight answers to critical questions. That's what we don't have right now. Members of both parties and the American people have now made clear that it is simply not enough for the president to simply say 'We know best' and 'Stay the course.' "
But Obama still hasn't given a straight answer about his endorsement for the former Grand Cyclops, who, until recently, was still using the "N"-word in television interviews.
In a fundraising letter issued on Byrd's behalf earlier this year, the celebrated black Democrat declared:
"In 2006, Senator Byrd will be the target of Republicans because he stands up for what he believes. Will you join me in supporting Senator Byrd's campaign for re-election?"
And just what does Sen. Byrd believe?
After leaving the Klan in 1946 the West Virginia Democrat remained an unabashed admirer of the anti-black terror group. "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth," he urged in a letter to the group's Grand Imperial Wizard later that year.
Byrd led the filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and called notorious white supremacist Sen. Richard B. Russell, who was chiefly remembered for blocking anti-lynching legislation, "my mentor." In 1972 Byrd sponsored legislation to name the Senate's main office building after Russell.
Still, the West Virginia Democrat's well-documented history of racism hasn't fazed the Senate's lone black Democrat. Obama's springtime fundraising pitch saved Byrd's flagging campaign, raising a record $823,000 for the ex-Klansman in just 48 hours.
If Sen. Obama is having any second thoughts about supporting the man who once compared his people to "the darkest specimens of the wilds," he has yet to express them publicly.
NewsMax's call to Obama's office last May inquiring about his Byrd endorsement was not returned.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/11/23/121833.shtml
Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2005 12:10 p.m. EST
Sen. Barack Obama is blasting President Bush for not admitting alleged mistakes he made in waging the Iraq war.
But the up-and-coming black Democrat still has yet to acknowledge his own mistake in endorsing and raising campaign funds for notorious one-time Ku Klux Klansman, Sen. Robert Byrd.
On the Iraq war, Obama told the Washington Post on Tuesday:
"Straight answers to critical questions. That's what we don't have right now. Members of both parties and the American people have now made clear that it is simply not enough for the president to simply say 'We know best' and 'Stay the course.' "
But Obama still hasn't given a straight answer about his endorsement for the former Grand Cyclops, who, until recently, was still using the "N"-word in television interviews.
In a fundraising letter issued on Byrd's behalf earlier this year, the celebrated black Democrat declared:
"In 2006, Senator Byrd will be the target of Republicans because he stands up for what he believes. Will you join me in supporting Senator Byrd's campaign for re-election?"
And just what does Sen. Byrd believe?
After leaving the Klan in 1946 the West Virginia Democrat remained an unabashed admirer of the anti-black terror group. "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth," he urged in a letter to the group's Grand Imperial Wizard later that year.
Byrd led the filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and called notorious white supremacist Sen. Richard B. Russell, who was chiefly remembered for blocking anti-lynching legislation, "my mentor." In 1972 Byrd sponsored legislation to name the Senate's main office building after Russell.
Still, the West Virginia Democrat's well-documented history of racism hasn't fazed the Senate's lone black Democrat. Obama's springtime fundraising pitch saved Byrd's flagging campaign, raising a record $823,000 for the ex-Klansman in just 48 hours.
If Sen. Obama is having any second thoughts about supporting the man who once compared his people to "the darkest specimens of the wilds," he has yet to express them publicly.
NewsMax's call to Obama's office last May inquiring about his Byrd endorsement was not returned.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/11/23/121833.shtml
Glad you are doing this. thanks. Will be checking in from time to time to see updates. And I agree with author above that Obama has a bright political future at higher levels if he can minimize the number and type of missteps i.e. Byrd endorsement he makes. Thanks again
Sen. Obama Criticizes Filibuster Tactic
Sen. Obama Criticizes Filibuster Tactic
By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 27 minutes ago
To more effectively oppose Supreme Court nominees in the future, Democrats need to convince the public "their values are at stake" rather than use stalling tactics to try to thwart the president, said a senator who opposes Samuel Alito's confirmation.
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., predicted on Sunday that an effort to try to block a final vote on Alito would fail on Monday. That would clear the way for Senate approval Tuesday of the federal appeals court judge picked to succeed the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Democrats fear he would shift the court rightward on abortion rights, affirmative action, the death penalty and other issues.
"We need to recognize, because Judge Alito will be confirmed, that, if we're going to oppose a nominee that we've got to persuade the American people that, in fact, their values are at stake," Obama said.
"There is an over-reliance on the part of Democrats for procedural maneuvers," he told ABC's "This Week."
Sens. John Kerry and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts are urging fellow Democrats to support a filibuster, citing in part Alito's conservative record on abortion and deference to executive power.
Alito's supporters must produce 60 votes to cut off a filibuster; an Associated Press tally shows at least 62.
The AP tally also shows that at least 53 Republicans and three Democrats intend to vote to confirm Alito; that is well over the required majority.
President Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address that senators should have an up-or-down on a nominee "who understands that the role of a judge is to strictly interpret the law."
Obama cast Alito as a judge "who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values."
But Obama joined some Democrats, including Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Charles Schumer of New York, in expressing his unhappiness with the filibuster bid.
"There's one way to guarantee that the judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court are judges that reflect our values. And that's to win elections," Obama said.
Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), D-Del., said he, too, would support the filibuster attempt but agreed that it was not particularly wise.
"I think a filibuster make sense when you have a prospect of actually succeeding," Biden said on CNN's "Late Edition." "I will vote one time to say to continue the debate. but the truth of the matter" is that Alito will be confirmed, he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060129...slI2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
Sen. Obama Criticizes Filibuster Tactic
By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 27 minutes ago
To more effectively oppose Supreme Court nominees in the future, Democrats need to convince the public "their values are at stake" rather than use stalling tactics to try to thwart the president, said a senator who opposes Samuel Alito's confirmation.
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., predicted on Sunday that an effort to try to block a final vote on Alito would fail on Monday. That would clear the way for Senate approval Tuesday of the federal appeals court judge picked to succeed the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Democrats fear he would shift the court rightward on abortion rights, affirmative action, the death penalty and other issues.
"We need to recognize, because Judge Alito will be confirmed, that, if we're going to oppose a nominee that we've got to persuade the American people that, in fact, their values are at stake," Obama said.
"There is an over-reliance on the part of Democrats for procedural maneuvers," he told ABC's "This Week."
Sens. John Kerry and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts are urging fellow Democrats to support a filibuster, citing in part Alito's conservative record on abortion and deference to executive power.
Alito's supporters must produce 60 votes to cut off a filibuster; an Associated Press tally shows at least 62.
The AP tally also shows that at least 53 Republicans and three Democrats intend to vote to confirm Alito; that is well over the required majority.
President Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address that senators should have an up-or-down on a nominee "who understands that the role of a judge is to strictly interpret the law."
Obama cast Alito as a judge "who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values."
But Obama joined some Democrats, including Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Charles Schumer of New York, in expressing his unhappiness with the filibuster bid.
"There's one way to guarantee that the judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court are judges that reflect our values. And that's to win elections," Obama said.
Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), D-Del., said he, too, would support the filibuster attempt but agreed that it was not particularly wise.
"I think a filibuster make sense when you have a prospect of actually succeeding," Biden said on CNN's "Late Edition." "I will vote one time to say to continue the debate. but the truth of the matter" is that Alito will be confirmed, he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060129...slI2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
Barak Obama just launched a website 
http://www.barackobama.com/main.php
http://www.barackobama.com/main.php
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<img src="http://www.prospect.org/web/galleries/default-image/cover2_06-obama.jpg" width="400" height="523">
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Great Expectations</h2></font><font face="arial" size="4" color="#0000FF"><b>People expect great things of Barack Obama. His first year in the Senate -- in which he’s shown a deliberative and sometimes surprising streak -- has by design been a relatively quiet one. </b></font>
<font face="Trebuchet MS, arial unicode ms, verdana" color="#000000" size="3">
<b>By Jodi Enda
Feb. 5th 2006
</b>
By 30 minutes and several days, Barack Obama is running late. He is supposed to be at his grandmother’s in Hawaii -- his wife and daughters already are there -- but the Senate is still voting on some fairly significant legislation. So here he is, stuck in Washington nine days before Christmas. Illinois’ junior senator just came from the Senate floor, where he and his fellow Democrats scored big by blocking a Republican drive to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act. He appears at once exhausted and energetic as he carefully places his finely tailored, charcoal-gray suit jacket on the back of a chair and centers his long, lean frame on the sofa beneath a large oil painting of an Illinois cornfield. Some of his heroes stare down at him from his office walls: Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Mahatma Gandhi to his left; Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Nelson Mandela across the room. A White Sox cap lies atop his desk, a symbol of triumph secured after years in the wilderness.
Obama closes his eyes and turns his youthful, angular face upward, as if he is contemplating all the world’s problems from a place deep inside himself. His head rests against the back of the gold couch; his left fingertips touch his forehead. His right leg, long and crooked at the knee, is stretched across a coffee table. He speaks softly and slowly, pausing frequently to choose just … the right … words.
The question on the table -- and the reason for the pause -- is the future of the Democratic Party. It’s not an easy question for anyone these days, and it’s not a question that is normally asked of a first-term senator with only one year’s experience. But Obama is not a normal first-termer -- not after the slew of national magazine profiles that ran before he was even elected (and while he was still a state senator), and definitely not after The Speech, his electric keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, which catapulted him from obscurity (people sometimes called him “Alabama”) to the national A-list. These days, people want to know what Obama thinks about everything, from baseball to foreign affairs.
His party, it’s worth remembering, didn’t even want him to get to the Senate -- Illinois’ historically muscular Democratic machine backed a party insider in the primary. But Obama blew away that opponent, and five others, winning an outright majority of 53 percent of the vote. Now, at 44, Obama embraces his role with confidence, a great deal of pleasure -- and no small amount of care. Speculation swirls about his becoming America’s first black president (he is the biracial son of a black, Kenyan father and a white, Kansan mother), even about the possibility he will launch a surprise run in 2008.
Obama is coy about that. But he has little doubt about what he views as the role he should play in the Senate, within his party, and even as a force in shaping the nation’s future. He wants to change things, and he envisions himself doing so. There is about him a sense of, well, destiny; his background, his charm, his intellect, and his way with words have marked him as someone special. Obama is aware of this, and every so often, he will say something that tacitly acknowledges as much. But usually he manages himself well, upward and downward, mindful to show the proper respect for his colleagues, some of whom have been in the Senate for most of his life, and for the voters who sent him to Washington with extraordinarily high expectations. He tells me he was happy to have made it through his first Senate year without falling “flat on my face.”
That he has not pushed through major legislation matters hardly at all, not to him, not to supporters. He is a fledgling in the minority party and, during his first year, 99th in seniority. No matter. Obama has bigger ideas.
Back to the Democrats. The first part of his answer involves some boilerplate about the usual list of issues -- education, health care, energy independence -- peppered with deferential language about wanting to “be a part of the process.” Then, he gets to the business about what makes him different: “Where I probably can make a unique contribution is in helping to bring people together and bridging what I call the ‘empathy deficit,’ helping to explain the disparate factions in this country and to show them how we’re joined together, helping bridge divides between black and white, rich and poor, even conservative and liberal.” Later, in a similar vein: “The story that I’m interested in telling is how we can restore that sense of commitment to each other in a way that doesn’t inhibit our individual freedoms, doesn’t diminish individual responsibility, but does promote collective responsibility.”
Obama wants nothing less than to redefine progressive values, make them more universal, and unite the country around them. His staggering 72 percent approval rating in Illinois -- a number that reflects strong support not only in and around Democratic Chicago, but from Republican downstate as well -- shows he may be figuring out how to do that. His first year in the Senate suggests a man on a long, ambitious, and intricate journey. It’s not too much to say that the future of the Democratic Party, and maybe even the country, could be profoundly affected by where that journey ends.
* * *
Like any freshman, Obama didn’t know exactly how to get around in the Senate. But unlike any freshman, save Hillary Clinton in 2001, he came to town with a national platform. All eyes were on him, and hopes, particularly among liberals, ran high. Obama took things slowly at first. He didn’t want to arrive in Washington looking “too big for his britches,” says his communications director, Robert Gibbs. So he turned down repeated invitations to appear on national talk shows (and most of the 300 or so solicitations he received each week) and focused instead on such issues as veterans’ disability pay and money for locks and dams back home. He wanted to demonstrate to the people of Illinois that he was working for them, and to his fellow senators that he was “not just a show horse,” said his political consultant, David Axelrod.
He surrounded himself with people experienced in Senate protocol and procedure. He hired as his chief of staff Pete Rouse, who for years held the same position for former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. He took the unusual step of hiring a policy adviser, nabbing Karen Kornbluh, who had been deputy chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. But even with a star staff, Obama has moved slowly; one senior aide told me that if Obama has one regret about his first year in office, it is that he occasionally has been “late to pull the trigger.” A case in point is an immigration bill sponsored by Edward M. Kennedy and John McCain. The two Senate titans asked Obama early in his term if he wanted to sign on to the bill as a cosponsor. Brushing aside the advice of his staff, he declined, saying he hadn’t had a hand in crafting the bill. It was only in December, after it became clear that immigration would be a hot topic in 2006, that he attached his name to the legislation. At the same time, he told Kennedy he would like to strengthen the section on border security by adding some measures from a Republican bill.
His concern about border security shows a side of Obama that occasionally has taken some liberals by surprise. It would be far too strong to say that he’s been heterodox -- after all, he has voted for the liberal position the vast majority of the time, and the initiatives and bills he has emphasized in his year have been solidly progressive. But he has thrown enough curves to keep people guessing.
When George W. Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state last January, Obama resisted pressure from liberal groups and civil rights advocates and voted for her confirmation. In that case, he was with most of his fellow Democrats in backing Rice. But two weeks later, when the Senate voted on a Republican bill to limit class-action lawsuits, Obama was one of 17 Democrats to oppose the trial lawyers -- who contributed more than any other special interest to his 2004 campaign -- and support the bill. He said at the time that he remained a “strong believer” in class-action lawsuits, and he briefly explained why he supported a bill that would move more of the suits from state to federal court. “When multimillion-dollar settlements are handed down and all the victims get are coupons for a free product, justice is not being served,” he said in a statement. “And when cases are tried in counties only because it’s known that those judges will award big payoffs, you get quick settlements without ever finding out who’s right and who’s wrong.”
Obama sided against many of his natural allies on that vote, including labor, consumer and civil-rights groups, and environmentalists. Yet, the fallout (or lack of it) demonstrates that he has a way of communicating with people so that these breaches never grow into outright rifts. Todd Smith, immediate past president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) and a Chicago lawyer, paid a visit to Obama shortly after the Senate passed the bill. Smith told Obama how disappointed he was that Obama voted for legislation the trial lawyers considered to be bad for “regular Americans.” Obama told Smith he was unhappy with mailers the group distributed throughout Illinois saying he was “depriving poor people of the right to go to court,” according to one of his senior aides.
“It was quite open,” Smith recalled. “He said, ‘Todd, go right ahead, speak your mind.’ And I did. He believed there needed to be changes and, on balance, he felt it was the right way to go.” Smith, who chairs the Board of Trustees of ATLA’s political action committee, said he intends to continue to back Obama with campaign contributions. “I don’t think your support for somebody rises or falls on a single issue. He will be there for regular people and their rights the vast majority of the time and when he’s not, it’s going to be, at least in his mind I’m certain, for solid reasons,” Smith told me. “He’s an outstanding U.S. senator already.”
* * *
Obama almost goes out of his way sometimes to challenge members of his own party and their loyalists. In a move that was highly unusual for a sitting senator, he took to the blogosphere last fall to confront progressives who criticized two other Democrats for voting to confirm John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Although Obama opposed Roberts, he defended his colleagues, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, during a frank exchange on Daily Kos -- the largest liberal Web site and home to the ferocious “Kossacks,” who usually lambaste politicians who deviate from the accepted line.
What Obama wrote speaks volumes about his political philosophy and independent streak: “… to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, ‘true’ progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive ‘checklist,’ then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted. Beyond that, by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority. We won’t be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate.”
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the site’s proprietor -- sounding not unlike the ATLA’s Smith -- said the main reaction among site visitors was one of “gratitude.” “He didn’t come to pander, but to take a stand that might not have been all that popular with a certain segment of the community,” Moulitsas says. “That showed a level of leadership that is oftentimes missing in a party more afraid to offend than in taking principled stands on issues.”
These deviations from the script have caused some concern. One leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party said he thought Obama was demonstrating a “Clinton sensibility” by standing up to liberals. The leader, who asked not to be identified because of his relationship with the senator, said Obama did not take on centrists when they wanted to purge the party of anti-war liberals. “That’s defining himself as Hillary Clinton defines herself -- as needing to get to the center -- which I think is a mistake in strategy, but one that he is flirting with,” the leader said. Obama ran as an anti-war candidate. Last November, after a small number of his colleagues had begun calling for a quick withdrawal, he told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that “U.S. forces are still a part of the solution in Iraq” and came out for a phased withdrawal. He reiterated the message from Iraq in January.
Obama told me he viewed the give-and-take on Daily Kos as a “teachable moment” and rebuffed the notion that he was trying to score political points. “What I want to be able to do if possible, and it’s not always possible, is to engage people who disagree with me in a dialogue,” he said. “One of the assumptions I think that a lot of progressives in a sort of knee-jerk way make is that if you stray from the progressive orthodoxy then you automatically must be doing it for political reasons -- that you must either be getting campaign contributions from somebody, or you’re positioning for national office, or you’re a wimp, right? They never assume that you just don’t agree with them on something. And so part of what I like to do is at least try to dispel that cynicism about motives.”
* * *
He is tranquil: before his convention speech, consultant Axelrod recalled, “I was a nervous wreck. I remember him patting me on the shoulder and saying, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll make my marks.’” He is charming, and sets people at ease with his warm, big-toothed smile much the way Bill Clinton did with his intense, blue-eyed gaze. He is, oddly enough, a Grammy Award nominee for narrating his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. He is a policy wonk. He is the rapt father of Malia, 7, and Sasha, 4, and a protective spouse to Michelle (he once insisted on interviewing someone who was trying to hire her). She, like him, is a Harvard-educated lawyer and now a vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals. He is a habitual exerciser. He is unfailingly polite (when he was 30 minutes late for our interview, he made a point of coming to the outer office himself to escort me in).
From the time he was born, Obama was different in an intriguing way -- and to the extent that he is different from most politicians, his background surely is a big reason. He grew up in Hawaii, then Jakarta, then back to Hawaii; he saw his father, an economist for the Kenyan government, just once after the age of two; though black, the only family he knew -- his mother and her parents -- were white. He made it to Columbia, worked in Chicago as a community organizer, and then went to Harvard Law School, becoming the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.
Judd Miner remembers the day he read in an obscure Chicago publication that an African American from the South Side was joining a silk-stocking law firm. Miner, a partner in a much smaller firm that specialized in civil-rights cases, decided to give the guy a call. He phoned the law review.
“The young lady said, ‘He’s not in, but is this a recruiting call?’ I said, ‘I guess so.’ She said, ‘I’ll put you on the list, you’re number 643,’ or something like that,” Miner told me. The two met for lunch. After several weeks and many lunches, Obama decided to skip the glitzy, high-paying firms and join Miner’s because it fit with his commitment to community work, Miner said.
Miner is just one of a band of Obama friends who swear that all the hoopla surrounding him is warranted. After Obama’s primary victory, Miner began to get calls from the editors of national newspapers and magazines. They were concerned that their reporters had been snookered into believing the hype. “The stories they were getting back were puff pieces. They thought there must be some flaw. They thought it couldn’t be,” Miner said. What he told them, and me, was: “When you do political stuff and you run into a Barack, you think, ‘Oh, there’s hope!’”
Supporters in Illinois say Obama represents something of a Rorschach test: people project their viewpoints onto him. Valerie Jarrett, a longtime friend and the treasurer of his political action committee, said that people see something of themselves in him. The danger, she said, is that they assume Obama will do what they would do, vote the way they would vote. That could backfire on him, but it hasn’t yet. “He has the ability to touch diverse crowds and there’s a sense of clicking,” Jarrett said. “And because he can click with so many different kinds of people, the expectation is that because I clicked with him, he’s going to agree with me.”
Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr. still hasn’t gotten over a scene he witnessed the day he accompanied Obama on a campaign swing in the predominately white, southern part of the state. “A little old lady said to me, ‘I’m 86 years of age. I hope I live long enough because this young man’s going to be president and I want to be able to vote for him.’ It was a little old white lady! It was astounding,” says Jones, who was something of a mentor to Obama in the state Senate. “There were 3,000 people there. There were three blacks: him, me, and my driver. People are drawn to him. He talks to people on the same level … It resonates more.”
* * *
It may be that the very universality of his personal appeal prevents Obama from appearing, or wanting to be, overtly ideological -- as if his life story and his gift for connecting with people are too large to be categorized. He clearly wants to be thought of differently, as too complex to be encompassed by one label. When I ask if he’s liberal, progressive, or centrist, he says: “I like to think I’m above it. Only in the sense that I just don’t like how the categories are set up.” He describes two common Democratic caricatures: the “DLC-centrist-Joe Lieberman-Al From types” and the “old-time-religion-Ted Kennedy-die-hard-liberal types.”
“There are dangers in both camps,” he continues. “Sometimes the DLC camp seems to want to run to the center no matter how far right the Republican Party has moved the debate -- that sense of ‘let’s cut a deal no matter what the deal is.’ The old-time religion school sometimes seems unreflective and is unwilling to experiment or update old programs to meet new challenges.
“And the way I would describe myself is I think that my values are deeply rooted in the progressive tradition, the values of equal opportunity, civil rights, fighting for working families, a foreign policy that is mindful of human rights, a strong belief in civil liberties, wanting to be a good steward for the environment, a sense that the government has an important role to play, that opportunity is open to all people and that the powerful don’t trample on the less powerful … I share all the aims of a Paul Wellstone or a Ted Kennedy when it comes to the end result. But I’m much more agnostic, much more flexible on how we achieve those ends.”
And yet, for all these demurrals, when he finally did decide to occupy the spotlight last year, it was on a tried-and-true liberal issue. After Hurricane Katrina hit last August, Obama decided that it was time to speak out. As the Senate’s only African American and as someone who had worked on poverty issues, he knew people would be looking to him for leadership. He traveled to Houston with former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton. He went on ABC’s This Week. “Whoever was in charge of planning was so detached from the realities of inner-city life in New Orleans ... that they couldn’t conceive of the notion that [residents] couldn’t load up their SUVs, put $100 worth of gas in there, put some sparkling water, and drive off to a hotel and check in with a credit card,” he snapped. But he later said Democrats must accept some of the blame because they, too, had downplayed poverty as a national issue [see Ezra Klein, “Poverty Is Back!,” page 45].
On other issues, too, Obama has stuck close to the traditional liberal line. Just two months into his term, he became the first senator to speak out on avian flu, spearheading an effort to spend $25 million to prevent a pandemic. In November, he introduced a bill that would help underwrite health-care costs for automakers that produce fuel-efficient cars. And, invoking a pragmatic political strategy, he has repeatedly teamed up with Republicans to accomplish worthwhile goals. He has worked with the ultra-conservative Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to stop the Bush administration from awarding no-bid contracts for post-Katrina reconstruction projects. Most notably, Obama has developed a particularly close relationship with Indiana’s Richard Lugar, the well-regarded chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The two inspected nuclear and biological weapons sites in the former Soviet Union last August, then cosponsored a bill to reduce stockpiles of conventional weapons.
Obama thinks Democrats need to talk more concretely about health care, energy, globalization, and education -- issues on which he says he will spend his time in the next year. Beyond that, he says, they need to address the values problem.
“I do think that there’s a strain of the Democratic Party -- it’s not uniform -- that is somewhat patronizing towards people who go to church,” says Obama, who attends the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which is Congregationalist, and keeps a Bible in his car. “If you go to a black evangelical church, there may be traditions that secular humanists might be uncomfortable with -- hoopin’ and hollerin’, wavin’ and dancin’,” he says, purposefully slipping into the vernacular. But, he says, the preachers and the parishioners are talking about the same things that Democratic leaders are: “They’re talking about health care and looking after our seniors and trying to salvage young men from going into the prison system. So there’s nothing alien about it. And yet sometimes, the Democratic Party, I think, just assumes that as long as people are in church that somehow we can’t reach them, that we have nothing in common. That’s simply not true and certainly hasn’t been true historically.”
* * *
There is also a strain of the Democratic Party -- and a broad one -- that is promoting Obama as the party’s savior. “He represents the future of the party for a lot of people, which is good because a lot of people question whether we have a future as a party,” said strategist Jenny Backus.
Harold Ickes, a high-ranking White House aide under President Clinton and 2000 campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton, said Obama is poised to speak to issues that “have gotten short shrift in the past two decades among progressive Democrats,” like poverty and income distribution. “He’s a powerful spokesman and he comes into Washington fresh, not encumbered by Washington mentality,” Ickes said. “He certainly has the capacity to speak out on issues and get attention. And that’s no small accomplishment. … I personally have high hopes for him.”
Senator Dick Durbin, Obama’s Illinois partner and the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, has no doubt about the future of his state’s most popular politician. “He’s an odds-on favorite to run for higher office,” Durbin predicts. “If you are a personal investment banker, you certainly want to invest in the Barack Obama IPO … It is a solid investment in the American political scene.”
It’s ironic, all this talk, given that his party didn’t even want him in the first place. Many party leaders backed Dan Hynes, the state comptroller and Cook County political scion. There’s a lesson the party needs to learn here about nurturing and developing such obvious talent (do the Republicans ignore their Obamas?). In any case, his party can’t get enough of him now. Obama has bolstered his status within his party by raising huge amounts of cash for his colleagues’ campaigns. His political action committee, Hopefund, raised an estimated $1.8 million in 2005. That doesn’t count the millions he has raised for and donated to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and to individual candidates. In one night alone last fall, he raised $1 million for the Arizona Democratic Party by drawing 1,400 people to a dinner. And with one e-mail, Obama raised $800,000 for Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a powerhouse who first was elected to the Senate nearly three years before Obama was born.
Most of his fund-raising trips are not on his public schedules. And Obama’s staff, quick to tout his 39 town hall meetings in 31 Illinois counties, claimed not to know how many fund-raising events he attended around the country the past year. A fair assumption might be that Obama is collecting chits and loyalties and building a national political machine, a precursor to a presidential run. It’s something that everyone around him talks about. The senator himself is more understated. “I think it’s flattering,” he says of the conjecture. “It indicates that I’m doing something right. But I try not to get too far ahead of myself. And I find that I perform best when I’m focused on being useful as opposed to becoming something.”
Undoubtedly, pressure and speculation will grow as 2008 approaches. Even if Obama doesn’t run for president then -- and his advisers insist he won’t -- another kind of pressure will present itself: to use his unique talents and his bully pulpit to further a progressive agenda. Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, the first labor union to endorse Obama during his primary campaign, said he’d like to see Obama lead on issues that are critical to working people. “America needs champions right now. And he has that ability and potential,” Stern said. “My New Year’s resolution for him is not wait in line but seize the time.” If Obama indeed is destined to do great things, the time may be right for him to step more forcefully into the spotlight that beckons.
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Jodi Enda writes about politics and government from Washington. Her last piece for the Prospect was “Howard’s Beginning,” a profile of Howard Dean, in the August 2005 issue.
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Great Expectations</h2></font><font face="arial" size="4" color="#0000FF"><b>People expect great things of Barack Obama. His first year in the Senate -- in which he’s shown a deliberative and sometimes surprising streak -- has by design been a relatively quiet one. </b></font>
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<b>By Jodi Enda
Feb. 5th 2006
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By 30 minutes and several days, Barack Obama is running late. He is supposed to be at his grandmother’s in Hawaii -- his wife and daughters already are there -- but the Senate is still voting on some fairly significant legislation. So here he is, stuck in Washington nine days before Christmas. Illinois’ junior senator just came from the Senate floor, where he and his fellow Democrats scored big by blocking a Republican drive to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act. He appears at once exhausted and energetic as he carefully places his finely tailored, charcoal-gray suit jacket on the back of a chair and centers his long, lean frame on the sofa beneath a large oil painting of an Illinois cornfield. Some of his heroes stare down at him from his office walls: Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Mahatma Gandhi to his left; Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Nelson Mandela across the room. A White Sox cap lies atop his desk, a symbol of triumph secured after years in the wilderness.
Obama closes his eyes and turns his youthful, angular face upward, as if he is contemplating all the world’s problems from a place deep inside himself. His head rests against the back of the gold couch; his left fingertips touch his forehead. His right leg, long and crooked at the knee, is stretched across a coffee table. He speaks softly and slowly, pausing frequently to choose just … the right … words.
The question on the table -- and the reason for the pause -- is the future of the Democratic Party. It’s not an easy question for anyone these days, and it’s not a question that is normally asked of a first-term senator with only one year’s experience. But Obama is not a normal first-termer -- not after the slew of national magazine profiles that ran before he was even elected (and while he was still a state senator), and definitely not after The Speech, his electric keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, which catapulted him from obscurity (people sometimes called him “Alabama”) to the national A-list. These days, people want to know what Obama thinks about everything, from baseball to foreign affairs.
His party, it’s worth remembering, didn’t even want him to get to the Senate -- Illinois’ historically muscular Democratic machine backed a party insider in the primary. But Obama blew away that opponent, and five others, winning an outright majority of 53 percent of the vote. Now, at 44, Obama embraces his role with confidence, a great deal of pleasure -- and no small amount of care. Speculation swirls about his becoming America’s first black president (he is the biracial son of a black, Kenyan father and a white, Kansan mother), even about the possibility he will launch a surprise run in 2008.
Obama is coy about that. But he has little doubt about what he views as the role he should play in the Senate, within his party, and even as a force in shaping the nation’s future. He wants to change things, and he envisions himself doing so. There is about him a sense of, well, destiny; his background, his charm, his intellect, and his way with words have marked him as someone special. Obama is aware of this, and every so often, he will say something that tacitly acknowledges as much. But usually he manages himself well, upward and downward, mindful to show the proper respect for his colleagues, some of whom have been in the Senate for most of his life, and for the voters who sent him to Washington with extraordinarily high expectations. He tells me he was happy to have made it through his first Senate year without falling “flat on my face.”
That he has not pushed through major legislation matters hardly at all, not to him, not to supporters. He is a fledgling in the minority party and, during his first year, 99th in seniority. No matter. Obama has bigger ideas.
Back to the Democrats. The first part of his answer involves some boilerplate about the usual list of issues -- education, health care, energy independence -- peppered with deferential language about wanting to “be a part of the process.” Then, he gets to the business about what makes him different: “Where I probably can make a unique contribution is in helping to bring people together and bridging what I call the ‘empathy deficit,’ helping to explain the disparate factions in this country and to show them how we’re joined together, helping bridge divides between black and white, rich and poor, even conservative and liberal.” Later, in a similar vein: “The story that I’m interested in telling is how we can restore that sense of commitment to each other in a way that doesn’t inhibit our individual freedoms, doesn’t diminish individual responsibility, but does promote collective responsibility.”
Obama wants nothing less than to redefine progressive values, make them more universal, and unite the country around them. His staggering 72 percent approval rating in Illinois -- a number that reflects strong support not only in and around Democratic Chicago, but from Republican downstate as well -- shows he may be figuring out how to do that. His first year in the Senate suggests a man on a long, ambitious, and intricate journey. It’s not too much to say that the future of the Democratic Party, and maybe even the country, could be profoundly affected by where that journey ends.
* * *
Like any freshman, Obama didn’t know exactly how to get around in the Senate. But unlike any freshman, save Hillary Clinton in 2001, he came to town with a national platform. All eyes were on him, and hopes, particularly among liberals, ran high. Obama took things slowly at first. He didn’t want to arrive in Washington looking “too big for his britches,” says his communications director, Robert Gibbs. So he turned down repeated invitations to appear on national talk shows (and most of the 300 or so solicitations he received each week) and focused instead on such issues as veterans’ disability pay and money for locks and dams back home. He wanted to demonstrate to the people of Illinois that he was working for them, and to his fellow senators that he was “not just a show horse,” said his political consultant, David Axelrod.
He surrounded himself with people experienced in Senate protocol and procedure. He hired as his chief of staff Pete Rouse, who for years held the same position for former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. He took the unusual step of hiring a policy adviser, nabbing Karen Kornbluh, who had been deputy chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. But even with a star staff, Obama has moved slowly; one senior aide told me that if Obama has one regret about his first year in office, it is that he occasionally has been “late to pull the trigger.” A case in point is an immigration bill sponsored by Edward M. Kennedy and John McCain. The two Senate titans asked Obama early in his term if he wanted to sign on to the bill as a cosponsor. Brushing aside the advice of his staff, he declined, saying he hadn’t had a hand in crafting the bill. It was only in December, after it became clear that immigration would be a hot topic in 2006, that he attached his name to the legislation. At the same time, he told Kennedy he would like to strengthen the section on border security by adding some measures from a Republican bill.
His concern about border security shows a side of Obama that occasionally has taken some liberals by surprise. It would be far too strong to say that he’s been heterodox -- after all, he has voted for the liberal position the vast majority of the time, and the initiatives and bills he has emphasized in his year have been solidly progressive. But he has thrown enough curves to keep people guessing.
When George W. Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state last January, Obama resisted pressure from liberal groups and civil rights advocates and voted for her confirmation. In that case, he was with most of his fellow Democrats in backing Rice. But two weeks later, when the Senate voted on a Republican bill to limit class-action lawsuits, Obama was one of 17 Democrats to oppose the trial lawyers -- who contributed more than any other special interest to his 2004 campaign -- and support the bill. He said at the time that he remained a “strong believer” in class-action lawsuits, and he briefly explained why he supported a bill that would move more of the suits from state to federal court. “When multimillion-dollar settlements are handed down and all the victims get are coupons for a free product, justice is not being served,” he said in a statement. “And when cases are tried in counties only because it’s known that those judges will award big payoffs, you get quick settlements without ever finding out who’s right and who’s wrong.”
Obama sided against many of his natural allies on that vote, including labor, consumer and civil-rights groups, and environmentalists. Yet, the fallout (or lack of it) demonstrates that he has a way of communicating with people so that these breaches never grow into outright rifts. Todd Smith, immediate past president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) and a Chicago lawyer, paid a visit to Obama shortly after the Senate passed the bill. Smith told Obama how disappointed he was that Obama voted for legislation the trial lawyers considered to be bad for “regular Americans.” Obama told Smith he was unhappy with mailers the group distributed throughout Illinois saying he was “depriving poor people of the right to go to court,” according to one of his senior aides.
“It was quite open,” Smith recalled. “He said, ‘Todd, go right ahead, speak your mind.’ And I did. He believed there needed to be changes and, on balance, he felt it was the right way to go.” Smith, who chairs the Board of Trustees of ATLA’s political action committee, said he intends to continue to back Obama with campaign contributions. “I don’t think your support for somebody rises or falls on a single issue. He will be there for regular people and their rights the vast majority of the time and when he’s not, it’s going to be, at least in his mind I’m certain, for solid reasons,” Smith told me. “He’s an outstanding U.S. senator already.”
* * *
Obama almost goes out of his way sometimes to challenge members of his own party and their loyalists. In a move that was highly unusual for a sitting senator, he took to the blogosphere last fall to confront progressives who criticized two other Democrats for voting to confirm John Roberts as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Although Obama opposed Roberts, he defended his colleagues, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, during a frank exchange on Daily Kos -- the largest liberal Web site and home to the ferocious “Kossacks,” who usually lambaste politicians who deviate from the accepted line.
What Obama wrote speaks volumes about his political philosophy and independent streak: “… to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, ‘true’ progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive ‘checklist,’ then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted. Beyond that, by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority. We won’t be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate.”
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the site’s proprietor -- sounding not unlike the ATLA’s Smith -- said the main reaction among site visitors was one of “gratitude.” “He didn’t come to pander, but to take a stand that might not have been all that popular with a certain segment of the community,” Moulitsas says. “That showed a level of leadership that is oftentimes missing in a party more afraid to offend than in taking principled stands on issues.”
These deviations from the script have caused some concern. One leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party said he thought Obama was demonstrating a “Clinton sensibility” by standing up to liberals. The leader, who asked not to be identified because of his relationship with the senator, said Obama did not take on centrists when they wanted to purge the party of anti-war liberals. “That’s defining himself as Hillary Clinton defines herself -- as needing to get to the center -- which I think is a mistake in strategy, but one that he is flirting with,” the leader said. Obama ran as an anti-war candidate. Last November, after a small number of his colleagues had begun calling for a quick withdrawal, he told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that “U.S. forces are still a part of the solution in Iraq” and came out for a phased withdrawal. He reiterated the message from Iraq in January.
Obama told me he viewed the give-and-take on Daily Kos as a “teachable moment” and rebuffed the notion that he was trying to score political points. “What I want to be able to do if possible, and it’s not always possible, is to engage people who disagree with me in a dialogue,” he said. “One of the assumptions I think that a lot of progressives in a sort of knee-jerk way make is that if you stray from the progressive orthodoxy then you automatically must be doing it for political reasons -- that you must either be getting campaign contributions from somebody, or you’re positioning for national office, or you’re a wimp, right? They never assume that you just don’t agree with them on something. And so part of what I like to do is at least try to dispel that cynicism about motives.”
* * *
He is tranquil: before his convention speech, consultant Axelrod recalled, “I was a nervous wreck. I remember him patting me on the shoulder and saying, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll make my marks.’” He is charming, and sets people at ease with his warm, big-toothed smile much the way Bill Clinton did with his intense, blue-eyed gaze. He is, oddly enough, a Grammy Award nominee for narrating his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. He is a policy wonk. He is the rapt father of Malia, 7, and Sasha, 4, and a protective spouse to Michelle (he once insisted on interviewing someone who was trying to hire her). She, like him, is a Harvard-educated lawyer and now a vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals. He is a habitual exerciser. He is unfailingly polite (when he was 30 minutes late for our interview, he made a point of coming to the outer office himself to escort me in).
From the time he was born, Obama was different in an intriguing way -- and to the extent that he is different from most politicians, his background surely is a big reason. He grew up in Hawaii, then Jakarta, then back to Hawaii; he saw his father, an economist for the Kenyan government, just once after the age of two; though black, the only family he knew -- his mother and her parents -- were white. He made it to Columbia, worked in Chicago as a community organizer, and then went to Harvard Law School, becoming the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.
Judd Miner remembers the day he read in an obscure Chicago publication that an African American from the South Side was joining a silk-stocking law firm. Miner, a partner in a much smaller firm that specialized in civil-rights cases, decided to give the guy a call. He phoned the law review.
“The young lady said, ‘He’s not in, but is this a recruiting call?’ I said, ‘I guess so.’ She said, ‘I’ll put you on the list, you’re number 643,’ or something like that,” Miner told me. The two met for lunch. After several weeks and many lunches, Obama decided to skip the glitzy, high-paying firms and join Miner’s because it fit with his commitment to community work, Miner said.
Miner is just one of a band of Obama friends who swear that all the hoopla surrounding him is warranted. After Obama’s primary victory, Miner began to get calls from the editors of national newspapers and magazines. They were concerned that their reporters had been snookered into believing the hype. “The stories they were getting back were puff pieces. They thought there must be some flaw. They thought it couldn’t be,” Miner said. What he told them, and me, was: “When you do political stuff and you run into a Barack, you think, ‘Oh, there’s hope!’”
Supporters in Illinois say Obama represents something of a Rorschach test: people project their viewpoints onto him. Valerie Jarrett, a longtime friend and the treasurer of his political action committee, said that people see something of themselves in him. The danger, she said, is that they assume Obama will do what they would do, vote the way they would vote. That could backfire on him, but it hasn’t yet. “He has the ability to touch diverse crowds and there’s a sense of clicking,” Jarrett said. “And because he can click with so many different kinds of people, the expectation is that because I clicked with him, he’s going to agree with me.”
Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr. still hasn’t gotten over a scene he witnessed the day he accompanied Obama on a campaign swing in the predominately white, southern part of the state. “A little old lady said to me, ‘I’m 86 years of age. I hope I live long enough because this young man’s going to be president and I want to be able to vote for him.’ It was a little old white lady! It was astounding,” says Jones, who was something of a mentor to Obama in the state Senate. “There were 3,000 people there. There were three blacks: him, me, and my driver. People are drawn to him. He talks to people on the same level … It resonates more.”
* * *
It may be that the very universality of his personal appeal prevents Obama from appearing, or wanting to be, overtly ideological -- as if his life story and his gift for connecting with people are too large to be categorized. He clearly wants to be thought of differently, as too complex to be encompassed by one label. When I ask if he’s liberal, progressive, or centrist, he says: “I like to think I’m above it. Only in the sense that I just don’t like how the categories are set up.” He describes two common Democratic caricatures: the “DLC-centrist-Joe Lieberman-Al From types” and the “old-time-religion-Ted Kennedy-die-hard-liberal types.”
“There are dangers in both camps,” he continues. “Sometimes the DLC camp seems to want to run to the center no matter how far right the Republican Party has moved the debate -- that sense of ‘let’s cut a deal no matter what the deal is.’ The old-time religion school sometimes seems unreflective and is unwilling to experiment or update old programs to meet new challenges.
“And the way I would describe myself is I think that my values are deeply rooted in the progressive tradition, the values of equal opportunity, civil rights, fighting for working families, a foreign policy that is mindful of human rights, a strong belief in civil liberties, wanting to be a good steward for the environment, a sense that the government has an important role to play, that opportunity is open to all people and that the powerful don’t trample on the less powerful … I share all the aims of a Paul Wellstone or a Ted Kennedy when it comes to the end result. But I’m much more agnostic, much more flexible on how we achieve those ends.”
And yet, for all these demurrals, when he finally did decide to occupy the spotlight last year, it was on a tried-and-true liberal issue. After Hurricane Katrina hit last August, Obama decided that it was time to speak out. As the Senate’s only African American and as someone who had worked on poverty issues, he knew people would be looking to him for leadership. He traveled to Houston with former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton. He went on ABC’s This Week. “Whoever was in charge of planning was so detached from the realities of inner-city life in New Orleans ... that they couldn’t conceive of the notion that [residents] couldn’t load up their SUVs, put $100 worth of gas in there, put some sparkling water, and drive off to a hotel and check in with a credit card,” he snapped. But he later said Democrats must accept some of the blame because they, too, had downplayed poverty as a national issue [see Ezra Klein, “Poverty Is Back!,” page 45].
On other issues, too, Obama has stuck close to the traditional liberal line. Just two months into his term, he became the first senator to speak out on avian flu, spearheading an effort to spend $25 million to prevent a pandemic. In November, he introduced a bill that would help underwrite health-care costs for automakers that produce fuel-efficient cars. And, invoking a pragmatic political strategy, he has repeatedly teamed up with Republicans to accomplish worthwhile goals. He has worked with the ultra-conservative Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to stop the Bush administration from awarding no-bid contracts for post-Katrina reconstruction projects. Most notably, Obama has developed a particularly close relationship with Indiana’s Richard Lugar, the well-regarded chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The two inspected nuclear and biological weapons sites in the former Soviet Union last August, then cosponsored a bill to reduce stockpiles of conventional weapons.
Obama thinks Democrats need to talk more concretely about health care, energy, globalization, and education -- issues on which he says he will spend his time in the next year. Beyond that, he says, they need to address the values problem.
“I do think that there’s a strain of the Democratic Party -- it’s not uniform -- that is somewhat patronizing towards people who go to church,” says Obama, who attends the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which is Congregationalist, and keeps a Bible in his car. “If you go to a black evangelical church, there may be traditions that secular humanists might be uncomfortable with -- hoopin’ and hollerin’, wavin’ and dancin’,” he says, purposefully slipping into the vernacular. But, he says, the preachers and the parishioners are talking about the same things that Democratic leaders are: “They’re talking about health care and looking after our seniors and trying to salvage young men from going into the prison system. So there’s nothing alien about it. And yet sometimes, the Democratic Party, I think, just assumes that as long as people are in church that somehow we can’t reach them, that we have nothing in common. That’s simply not true and certainly hasn’t been true historically.”
* * *
There is also a strain of the Democratic Party -- and a broad one -- that is promoting Obama as the party’s savior. “He represents the future of the party for a lot of people, which is good because a lot of people question whether we have a future as a party,” said strategist Jenny Backus.
Harold Ickes, a high-ranking White House aide under President Clinton and 2000 campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton, said Obama is poised to speak to issues that “have gotten short shrift in the past two decades among progressive Democrats,” like poverty and income distribution. “He’s a powerful spokesman and he comes into Washington fresh, not encumbered by Washington mentality,” Ickes said. “He certainly has the capacity to speak out on issues and get attention. And that’s no small accomplishment. … I personally have high hopes for him.”
Senator Dick Durbin, Obama’s Illinois partner and the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, has no doubt about the future of his state’s most popular politician. “He’s an odds-on favorite to run for higher office,” Durbin predicts. “If you are a personal investment banker, you certainly want to invest in the Barack Obama IPO … It is a solid investment in the American political scene.”
It’s ironic, all this talk, given that his party didn’t even want him in the first place. Many party leaders backed Dan Hynes, the state comptroller and Cook County political scion. There’s a lesson the party needs to learn here about nurturing and developing such obvious talent (do the Republicans ignore their Obamas?). In any case, his party can’t get enough of him now. Obama has bolstered his status within his party by raising huge amounts of cash for his colleagues’ campaigns. His political action committee, Hopefund, raised an estimated $1.8 million in 2005. That doesn’t count the millions he has raised for and donated to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and to individual candidates. In one night alone last fall, he raised $1 million for the Arizona Democratic Party by drawing 1,400 people to a dinner. And with one e-mail, Obama raised $800,000 for Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a powerhouse who first was elected to the Senate nearly three years before Obama was born.
Most of his fund-raising trips are not on his public schedules. And Obama’s staff, quick to tout his 39 town hall meetings in 31 Illinois counties, claimed not to know how many fund-raising events he attended around the country the past year. A fair assumption might be that Obama is collecting chits and loyalties and building a national political machine, a precursor to a presidential run. It’s something that everyone around him talks about. The senator himself is more understated. “I think it’s flattering,” he says of the conjecture. “It indicates that I’m doing something right. But I try not to get too far ahead of myself. And I find that I perform best when I’m focused on being useful as opposed to becoming something.”
Undoubtedly, pressure and speculation will grow as 2008 approaches. Even if Obama doesn’t run for president then -- and his advisers insist he won’t -- another kind of pressure will present itself: to use his unique talents and his bully pulpit to further a progressive agenda. Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, the first labor union to endorse Obama during his primary campaign, said he’d like to see Obama lead on issues that are critical to working people. “America needs champions right now. And he has that ability and potential,” Stern said. “My New Year’s resolution for him is not wait in line but seize the time.” If Obama indeed is destined to do great things, the time may be right for him to step more forcefully into the spotlight that beckons.
<font color="#0000ff">
Jodi Enda writes about politics and government from Washington. Her last piece for the Prospect was “Howard’s Beginning,” a profile of Howard Dean, in the August 2005 issue.
© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.</font>
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But Will They Love Him Tomorrow?</font> <img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/03/19/weekinreview/19kornblut.184.jpg">
<b>
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
March 19th 2006
WASHINGTON</b>
MOST politicians spend their careers working to overcome flaws. Then there are politicians like Barack Obama.
So charismatic that his greatest challenge has been trying to play down expectations during his first Senate term, Mr. Obama's enviable plight was neatly underlined at a black-tie dinner here last weekend, as President Bush facetiously tried to roast him.
"Senator Obama, I want to do a joke on you," the president told the audience at the annual Gridiron dinner, an event where politicians and the press mingle to make fun of one another. "But doing a joke on you is like doing a joke on the pope. Give me something to work with. Mispronounce something."
Ribbing aside, Mr. Obama's seeming perfection — as a gifted orator, award-winning author and proven intellect who was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review — has become something of a political marvel in itself, as Democrats survey the landscape of potential presidential candidates and endlessly wonder if he is the one to lead them back into favor after a season of darkness.
But such grand expectations can, by turns, be a curse — not only for Mr. Obama himself but for the party overall. From William Jennings Bryan, who electrified the populace with his 1896 "cross of gold" speech, to former Senator John Edwards, who briefly dazzled the Democratic party before fizzling out in the 2004 presidential race, fledgling superstars have often learned the perils of soaring expectations the hard way.
"Perfection is always risky," said Darrell M. West, a professor of politics at Brown University.
If Mr. Obama's popularity and reputation among Democrats grow, will it be possible, his advisers and other Democrats wonder, for Mr. Obama to maintain his smooth trajectory over time? How can he lower expectations, to reduce the impact of any future misstep? Could voters and the press tire of his impeccability, and start looking harder for flaws? (One admitted speck: a smoking habit that he is working to break, and a past experimentation with drugs.)
Historians and political strategists see lessons for the senator's future in the stories of wunderkinds from the past.
"The ones who have been successful were very focused in understanding where they wanted to go, and had a good strategy to get there," Professor West said. "You can't wait too long because golden boys only last so long and then they start to tarnish. And then they just become one of the pack, and there's nothing special about them."
To some, at this early stage, Mr. Obama is most directly comparable to John F. Kennedy, whose youth, dashing looks and captivating speaking skills catapulted him to national stardom in 1956, when, as a first-term senator, he campaigned for the vice presidential nomination; four years later he was elected president. His assassination in 1963 raised him to the category of permanent golden status among Democrats.
Of course, that was time when it was easier to sparkle. Kennedy benefited from a cozy press corps that largely left personal issues alone, something Mr. Obama could never count on.
Other political stars have fallen over time, as shining promise has given way to the inevitable disappointment of reality.
Even when he was still a basketball player, well before he was elected to the Senate, Bill Bradley seemed destined for greatness. He dominated the spotlight for a time, but stumbled, and his political career ended in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2000. John Edwards made a splash when elected to the Senate in 1998, but he quickly suffered from criticism that he was light on gravitas and failed to live up to some expectations that he was the next Bill Clinton.
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin argued that Bryan, the three-time Democratic candidate for president, dazzled the country in a way comparable to the Obama phenomenon with that one speech in 1896. But he faced too much resistance to his perceived radical populism to win election and, having lost, wore the indelible taint of failure. History has not been kind.
Robert Dallek, the author of several presidential biographies, said that such "golden boy" leaders have emerged "in a time of frustration and disillusionment," but that few, apart from Kennedy, sustained the momentum. "Kennedy hadn't done much, there wasn't much of a Congressional record you could point to, and so people said, 'Wow, this guy has got imagination and principles,' " Mr. Dallek said.
More recently, glamorous governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, both Republicans, have lost some of their luster after clashing with state legislatures. By that standard, Mark Warner, a Democrat and the former governor of Virginia, may have benefited from the law requiring him to step down after one term; without more of a record to haunt him, he has had the luxury of picking issues to champion, unlike his potential rivals in the Senate, who still must vote on everything from the federal budget to Iraq. Mr. Warner is now among the Democrats contemplating running in 2008.
"The longer you are in a position of making the hard decisions, weighing in on the difficult questions, the weaker you become," said Mario M. Cuomo, whose rousing 1984 speech at the Democratic National Convention, during his first term as governor of New York, fueled a decade of chatter about his greater political potential before he finally lost a re-election bid to George Pataki in 1994.
"The third term is a killer," Mr. Cuomo said. "I had three terms, and what happens is, people get to know you so well, and their instinct is to be angry with the negative more than it is to appreciate the positive."
But when asked whether he saw a comparison in his early rave reviews to those Mr. Obama is experiencing now, Mr. Cuomo demurred. "I'm a whole different story," Mr. Cuomo said. "I'm not in his class at all."
Still, Mr. Obama has yet to finish one term as senator — a reality he seems keenly aware of, as he lightly mocks his own press coverage while slowly beginning to promote his legislative work, like pushing for research on the avian flu.
Mr. Obama seems, at times, to be balancing the need to reduce unrealistic expectations with the wish to retain his golden mystique. Even in acknowledging, with some embarrassment, his ongoing cigarette smoking habit, Mr. Obama has managed to turn it into an expression of his imperfection, telling The Chicago Tribune last year: "The flesh is weak."
Mr. Obama did not return a call seeking comment, but in his Gridiron speech, which brought down the house, he tweaked the press for its fawning coverage so far — a recurring theme he has hit upon in response to an excessive crush of media attention from the start of his political career.
"I want to thank you for all the generous advance coverage you've given me in anticipation of a successful career," Mr. Obama said. "When I actually do something, we'll let you know."
And no doubt, when that happens, the world will notice.
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Click link below for New York Times Barack Obama audio slideshow</font>
<p><b><font face="Copperplate Gothic Bold" size="4">
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2006/03/19/weekinreview/20060319_KORNBLUT_FEATURE.html">
<u>Barack Obama Audio Slide Show</u></a></font></b></p>
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But Will They Love Him Tomorrow?</font> <img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/03/19/weekinreview/19kornblut.184.jpg">
<b>
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
March 19th 2006
WASHINGTON</b>
MOST politicians spend their careers working to overcome flaws. Then there are politicians like Barack Obama.
So charismatic that his greatest challenge has been trying to play down expectations during his first Senate term, Mr. Obama's enviable plight was neatly underlined at a black-tie dinner here last weekend, as President Bush facetiously tried to roast him.
"Senator Obama, I want to do a joke on you," the president told the audience at the annual Gridiron dinner, an event where politicians and the press mingle to make fun of one another. "But doing a joke on you is like doing a joke on the pope. Give me something to work with. Mispronounce something."
Ribbing aside, Mr. Obama's seeming perfection — as a gifted orator, award-winning author and proven intellect who was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review — has become something of a political marvel in itself, as Democrats survey the landscape of potential presidential candidates and endlessly wonder if he is the one to lead them back into favor after a season of darkness.
But such grand expectations can, by turns, be a curse — not only for Mr. Obama himself but for the party overall. From William Jennings Bryan, who electrified the populace with his 1896 "cross of gold" speech, to former Senator John Edwards, who briefly dazzled the Democratic party before fizzling out in the 2004 presidential race, fledgling superstars have often learned the perils of soaring expectations the hard way.
"Perfection is always risky," said Darrell M. West, a professor of politics at Brown University.
If Mr. Obama's popularity and reputation among Democrats grow, will it be possible, his advisers and other Democrats wonder, for Mr. Obama to maintain his smooth trajectory over time? How can he lower expectations, to reduce the impact of any future misstep? Could voters and the press tire of his impeccability, and start looking harder for flaws? (One admitted speck: a smoking habit that he is working to break, and a past experimentation with drugs.)
Historians and political strategists see lessons for the senator's future in the stories of wunderkinds from the past.
"The ones who have been successful were very focused in understanding where they wanted to go, and had a good strategy to get there," Professor West said. "You can't wait too long because golden boys only last so long and then they start to tarnish. And then they just become one of the pack, and there's nothing special about them."
To some, at this early stage, Mr. Obama is most directly comparable to John F. Kennedy, whose youth, dashing looks and captivating speaking skills catapulted him to national stardom in 1956, when, as a first-term senator, he campaigned for the vice presidential nomination; four years later he was elected president. His assassination in 1963 raised him to the category of permanent golden status among Democrats.
Of course, that was time when it was easier to sparkle. Kennedy benefited from a cozy press corps that largely left personal issues alone, something Mr. Obama could never count on.
Other political stars have fallen over time, as shining promise has given way to the inevitable disappointment of reality.
Even when he was still a basketball player, well before he was elected to the Senate, Bill Bradley seemed destined for greatness. He dominated the spotlight for a time, but stumbled, and his political career ended in the Democratic presidential primaries in 2000. John Edwards made a splash when elected to the Senate in 1998, but he quickly suffered from criticism that he was light on gravitas and failed to live up to some expectations that he was the next Bill Clinton.
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin argued that Bryan, the three-time Democratic candidate for president, dazzled the country in a way comparable to the Obama phenomenon with that one speech in 1896. But he faced too much resistance to his perceived radical populism to win election and, having lost, wore the indelible taint of failure. History has not been kind.
Robert Dallek, the author of several presidential biographies, said that such "golden boy" leaders have emerged "in a time of frustration and disillusionment," but that few, apart from Kennedy, sustained the momentum. "Kennedy hadn't done much, there wasn't much of a Congressional record you could point to, and so people said, 'Wow, this guy has got imagination and principles,' " Mr. Dallek said.
More recently, glamorous governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, both Republicans, have lost some of their luster after clashing with state legislatures. By that standard, Mark Warner, a Democrat and the former governor of Virginia, may have benefited from the law requiring him to step down after one term; without more of a record to haunt him, he has had the luxury of picking issues to champion, unlike his potential rivals in the Senate, who still must vote on everything from the federal budget to Iraq. Mr. Warner is now among the Democrats contemplating running in 2008.
"The longer you are in a position of making the hard decisions, weighing in on the difficult questions, the weaker you become," said Mario M. Cuomo, whose rousing 1984 speech at the Democratic National Convention, during his first term as governor of New York, fueled a decade of chatter about his greater political potential before he finally lost a re-election bid to George Pataki in 1994.
"The third term is a killer," Mr. Cuomo said. "I had three terms, and what happens is, people get to know you so well, and their instinct is to be angry with the negative more than it is to appreciate the positive."
But when asked whether he saw a comparison in his early rave reviews to those Mr. Obama is experiencing now, Mr. Cuomo demurred. "I'm a whole different story," Mr. Cuomo said. "I'm not in his class at all."
Still, Mr. Obama has yet to finish one term as senator — a reality he seems keenly aware of, as he lightly mocks his own press coverage while slowly beginning to promote his legislative work, like pushing for research on the avian flu.
Mr. Obama seems, at times, to be balancing the need to reduce unrealistic expectations with the wish to retain his golden mystique. Even in acknowledging, with some embarrassment, his ongoing cigarette smoking habit, Mr. Obama has managed to turn it into an expression of his imperfection, telling The Chicago Tribune last year: "The flesh is weak."
Mr. Obama did not return a call seeking comment, but in his Gridiron speech, which brought down the house, he tweaked the press for its fawning coverage so far — a recurring theme he has hit upon in response to an excessive crush of media attention from the start of his political career.
"I want to thank you for all the generous advance coverage you've given me in anticipation of a successful career," Mr. Obama said. "When I actually do something, we'll let you know."
And no doubt, when that happens, the world will notice.
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<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="14"></hr>
<font face="Copperplate Gothic Bold" size="3" color="#ff0000">
Click link below for New York Times Barack Obama audio slideshow</font>
<p><b><font face="Copperplate Gothic Bold" size="4">
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2006/03/19/weekinreview/20060319_KORNBLUT_FEATURE.html">
<u>Barack Obama Audio Slide Show</u></a></font></b></p>
<font face="arial black" size="4" color="#d90000">Remarks of Senator Barack Obama at Emily's List Annual Luncheon</font>
<b><font face="trebuchet ms, verdana" size="3" color="#000000">
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Washington, DC</b>
Thank you for inviting me here today and thank you to EMILY's List for all you've done to forever change the face of women in politics. Your efforts haven't just sent women to Congress, you've sent champions - champions for the right to choose, for the right to equality, for the millions of women who ask only that their voices are heard too.
And we all owe the biggest thanks to the woman who hasn't just believed in that change, but who's done more to actually affect it, who's helped send more Democratic women to Congress over the last two decades than anyone in politics today. Ellen Malcolm, we are in debt to you, we are in awe of you, and we continue to be inspired by your example and your commitment to women everywhere. Thank you.
We meet here today at a time where we find ourselves at a crossroads in America's history.
It's a time where you can go to any town hall or street corner or coffee shop and hear people express the same anxiety about the future; hear them convey the same uncertainty about the direction we're headed as a country. Whether it's the war or Katrina or their health care or their jobs, you hear people say that we've finally arrived at a moment where something must change.
These are Americans who still believe in an America where anything's possible - they just don't think their leaders do. These are Americans who still dream big dreams -they just sense their leaders have forgotten how.
I remember when I first ran for the state Senate - my very first race. A seat had opened up, and some friends asked me if I'd be interested in running. Well, I thought about it, and then I did what every wise man does when faced with a difficult decision: I prayed, and I asked my wife.
And after consulting with these higher powers, I threw my hat in the ring and I did what every person on a campaign does - I talked to anyone who'd listen.
I went to bake sales and barber shops and if there were two guys standing on the corner I'd pull up and hand them literature. And everywhere I went I'd get two questions:
First, they'd ask, "Where'd you get that funny name, Barack Obama?" Because people just couldn't pronounce it. They'd call me "Alabama," or they'd call me "Yo Mama." And I'd have to explain that I got the name from my father, who was from Kenya.
And the second thing people would ask me was, "You seem like a nice young man. You teach law school, you're a civil rights attorney, you organize voter registration, you're a family man - why would you wanna go into something dirty and nasty like politics?"
And I understood the question because it revealed the cynicism people feel about public life today. That even though we may get involved out of civic obligation every few years, we don't always have confidence that government can make a difference in our lives.
So I understand the cynicism. But whenever I get in that mood, I think about something that happened to me on the eve of my election to the United States Senate.
We had held a large rally the night before in the Southside of Chicago. And in the midst of this rally, someone comes up to me and says that there's a woman who'd like to meet you, and she's traveled a long way and she wants to take a picture and shake your hand.
And so I said fine, and I met her, and we talked. And all of this would have been unremarkable except for the fact that this woman, Marguerite Lewis, was born in 1899 and was 105 years old.
And ever since I met this frail, one-hundred-and-five-year-old African-American woman who came all the way to this rally, I've thought about all she's seen in her life.
I've thought about the fact that when she was born, there weren't cars on the road, and no airplanes in the sky. That she was born under the cloud of Jim Crow, at a time for black folks when lynchings were common, but voting was forbidden.
I've thought about how she lived to see a world war and a Great Depression and a second world war.
I thought about how she saw women finally win the right to vote. How she watched FDR lift this nation out of its own fear. How she saw unions rise up and watched immigrants leave distant shores in search of an idea known as America.
She believed in this idea and she saw all this progress and she had faith that someday it would be her turn. And when she finally saw hope break through the horizon in the Civil Rights Movement, she thought, "Maybe it's my turn."
And at last - at last - she saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And she saw people lining up to vote for the first time - and she got in that line - and she never forgot it. She kept on voting in each and every election because she believed. She believed that over a span of three centuries, she had seen enough to know that there is no challenge too great, no injustice too crippling, no destiny too far out of reach for America.
She believed that we don't have to settle for equality for some or opportunity for the lucky or freedom for the few.
And she knew that during those moments in history where it looked like we might give up hope or settle for less, there have always been Americans who refused. Who said we're going to keep on dreaming, and we're going to keep on building, and we're going to keep on marching, and we're going to keep on working because that's who we are. Because we've always fought to bring all of our people under the blanket of the American Dream.
And I think that we face one of those moments today. In a century just five years old, our faith has already been shaken by war and terror, disaster and despair, threats to the middle-class dream, and scandal and corruption in our government.
The world has changed. No longer can we assume that a high-school education is enough to compete for a job that could easily go to a college-educated student in Bangalore or Beijing. No more can we count on employers to provide health care and pensions and job training when their bottom-lines know no borders. Never again can we expect the oceans that surround America to keep us safe from attacks on our own soil.
But while the world has changed around us, too often our government has stood still. Our faith has been shaken, but the people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe again.
It's the timidity - the smallness - of our politics that's holding us back right now. The idea that some problems are just too big to handle, and if you just ignore them, sooner or later, they'll go away. That if you give a speech where you rattle off statistics about the stock market being up and orders for durable goods being on the rise, no one will notice the single mom whose two jobs won't pay the bills or the student who can't afford his college dreams. That if you say the words "plan for victory" and point to the number of schools painted and roads paved and cell phones used in Iraq, no one will notice the more than 2,300 flag-draped coffins that have arrived at Dover Air Force base.
Well it's time we finally said we notice, and we care, and we're not gonna settle anymore.
You know, you probably never thought you'd hear this at an Emily's List luncheon, but Newt Gingrich made a great point a few weeks back. He was talking about what an awful job his own party has done governing this country, and he said that with all the mistakes and misjudgments the Republicans have made over the last six years, the slogan for the Democrats should come down to just two words:
Had enough?
I don't know about you, but I think old Newt is onto something here. Because I think we've all had enough. Enough of the broken promises. Enough of the failed leadership. Enough of the can't-do, won't-do, won't-even-try style of governance.
Four years after 9/11, I've had enough of being told that we can find the money to give Paris Hilton more tax cuts, but we can't find enough to protect our ports or our railroads or our chemical plants or our borders.
I've had enough of the closed-door deals that give billions to the HMOs when we're told that we can't do a thing for the 45 million uninsured or the millions more who can't pay their medical bills.
I've had enough of being told that we can't afford body armor for our troops and health care for our veterans. I've had enough of that.
I've had enough of giving billions away to the oil companies when we're told that we can't invest in the renewable energy that will create jobs and lower gas prices and finally free us from our dependence on the oil wells of Saudi Arabia.
I've had enough of our kids going to schools where the rats outnumber the computers. I've had enough of Katrina survivors living out of their cars and begging FEMA for trailers. And I've had enough of being told that all we can do about this is sit and wait and hope that the good fortune of a few trickles on down to everyone else in this country.
You know, we all remember that George Bush said in 2000 campaign that he was against nation-building. We just didn't know he was talking about this one.
So yes, I've had enough. And if you've had enough too, then we got some work to do. If you've had enough, then we have some checks to write, and some calls to make, and some doors to knock on. And if we do this, then in November, we're gonna have a U.S. House with people like Tammy Duckworth in it, and Melissa Bean, and Betty Sutton, and Dianne Farrell and Lois Murphy. And we're gonna have a U.S. Senate with Amy Klobuchar and Claire McCaskill and Maria Cantwell and Debbie Stabenow. And we're gonna change business-as-usual in Washington, and we're gonna set this country in a new direction.
Now, let me say this - I don't think that George Bush is a bad man. I think he loves his country. I don't think this administration is full of stupid people - I think there are a lot of smart folks in there. The problem isn't that their philosophy isn't working the way it's supposed to - it's that it is. It's that it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
The reason they don't believe government has a role in solving national problems is because they think government is the problem. That we're better off if we dismantle it - if we divvy it up into individual tax breaks, hand 'em out, and encourage everyone to go buy your own health care, your own retirement security, your own child care, their own schools, your own private security force, your own roads, their own levees...
It's called the Ownership Society in Washington. But in our past there has been another term for it - Social Darwinism - every man or women for him or herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford - life isn't fair. It allows us to say to the child who didn't have the foresight to choose the right parents or be born in the right suburb - pick yourself up by your bootstraps. It lets us say to the guy who worked twenty or thirty years in the factory and then watched his plant move out to Mexico or China - we're sorry, but you're on your own.
It's a bracing idea. It's a tempting idea. And it's the easiest thing in the world.
But there's just one problem. It doesn't work. It ignores our history. Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, of mutual responsibility. The idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity.
Americans know this. We know that government can't solve all our problems - and we don't want it to. But we also know that there are some things we can't do on our own. We know that there are some things we do better together.
We know that we've been called in churches and mosques, synagogues and Sunday schools to love our neighbors as ourselves; to be our brother's keeper; to be our sister's keeper. That we have individual responsibility, but we also have collective responsibility to each other.
That's what America is.
And so I am eager to have this argument not just with the President, but the entire Republican Party over what this country is about.
Because I think that this is our moment to lead.
The time for our party's identity crisis is over. Don't let anyone tell you we don't know what we stand for and don't doubt it yourselves. We know who we are and we know what our legacy is.
We're the party of Jefferson who first believed that every child in America should be educated regardless of wealth and birth and circumstance. That's who we are.
We're the party of Roosevelt who lifted this nation out of its own fear and sent workers to the factories and veterans to college and families to new homes and seniors to a comfortable retirement. That's who we are.
We're the party that stood up to fascism and defended freedom across the globe during World War II.
We're the party of civil rights, and workers' rights, and women's rights who believes that that every member of the American family deserves a shot at the American Dream. That's who we are.
We're the party of new frontiers and bold horizons - the party that put man on the moon and fueled the research that unlocked the secrets of the human genome. That's who we are.
And let me tell you about the party I see in the future.
In a globalized economy with bigger risks and greater rewards - a world where we are at once more connected and more competitive - let it be said that we are the party of opportunity. The party that guarantees every American an affordable, world-class, top-notch, life-long education - from early childhood to high school, from college to on-the-job training.
Let it be said that we are the party that equips every worker with what they need to succeed in a 21st century economy - wage supports and pensions, child care and health care that will stay with them no matter where they work or what they do.
Let it be said that we are the party of innovation and discovery - willing to blaze a trail toward energy independence or invest in the research that could create whole new industries and save thousands of lives.
And in a world where evil lurks and terrorists plot, let it be said that we will conduct a smart foreign policy that matches the might of our military with the power of our diplomacy. And when we do go to war, let us always be honest with the American people about why we are there and how we will win.
If we do all this, if we can be trusted to lead, this will not be a Democratic Agenda, it will be an American agenda. Because in the end, we may be proud Democrats, but we are prouder Americans. We're tired of being divided, tired of running into ideological walls and partisan roadblocks, tired of appeals to our worst instincts and greatest fears.
Americans everywhere are desperate for leadership. They are longing for direction. And they want to believe again.
You know, as I was thinking about today's luncheon and all the progress EMILY's List has made over the years, the first thing that came to mind wasn't all the politics or the campaigns; it wasn't even all the issues debated or the legislation passed.
I thought about my daughters.
I thought about the world that Sasha and Malia will grow up in, about the chances they'll have and the challenges they'll face. And I thought about my hopes for them - that they'll be able to dream without limit, achieve without constraint, and be free to seek their own happiness.
And I wondered - if they are lucky enough to live as long as 105-year-old Marguerite Lewis, if they someday have the chance to look back across the twenty-first century, what will they see? Will they see a country that is freer and kinder, more tolerant and more just than the one they grew up in? Will they see greater opportunities for every citizen of this country? Will all her of my hopes for my girls be fulfilled?
We are here today because we believe that in this country, we have it within our power to say "yes" to those questions - to forge our own destiny - to begin the world anew.
We are here because we believe that this is our time.
Our time to make a mark on history.
Our time to write a new chapter in the American story.
And then someday, someday, if our kids get the chance to stand where we are and look back at the beginning of the 21st century, they can say that this was the time when America renewed its purpose.
They can say that this was the time when America found its way.
They can say that this was the time when America learned to dream again.
Thank you.
</font>
<b><font face="trebuchet ms, verdana" size="3" color="#000000">
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Washington, DC</b>
Thank you for inviting me here today and thank you to EMILY's List for all you've done to forever change the face of women in politics. Your efforts haven't just sent women to Congress, you've sent champions - champions for the right to choose, for the right to equality, for the millions of women who ask only that their voices are heard too.
And we all owe the biggest thanks to the woman who hasn't just believed in that change, but who's done more to actually affect it, who's helped send more Democratic women to Congress over the last two decades than anyone in politics today. Ellen Malcolm, we are in debt to you, we are in awe of you, and we continue to be inspired by your example and your commitment to women everywhere. Thank you.
We meet here today at a time where we find ourselves at a crossroads in America's history.
It's a time where you can go to any town hall or street corner or coffee shop and hear people express the same anxiety about the future; hear them convey the same uncertainty about the direction we're headed as a country. Whether it's the war or Katrina or their health care or their jobs, you hear people say that we've finally arrived at a moment where something must change.
These are Americans who still believe in an America where anything's possible - they just don't think their leaders do. These are Americans who still dream big dreams -they just sense their leaders have forgotten how.
I remember when I first ran for the state Senate - my very first race. A seat had opened up, and some friends asked me if I'd be interested in running. Well, I thought about it, and then I did what every wise man does when faced with a difficult decision: I prayed, and I asked my wife.
And after consulting with these higher powers, I threw my hat in the ring and I did what every person on a campaign does - I talked to anyone who'd listen.
I went to bake sales and barber shops and if there were two guys standing on the corner I'd pull up and hand them literature. And everywhere I went I'd get two questions:
First, they'd ask, "Where'd you get that funny name, Barack Obama?" Because people just couldn't pronounce it. They'd call me "Alabama," or they'd call me "Yo Mama." And I'd have to explain that I got the name from my father, who was from Kenya.
And the second thing people would ask me was, "You seem like a nice young man. You teach law school, you're a civil rights attorney, you organize voter registration, you're a family man - why would you wanna go into something dirty and nasty like politics?"
And I understood the question because it revealed the cynicism people feel about public life today. That even though we may get involved out of civic obligation every few years, we don't always have confidence that government can make a difference in our lives.
So I understand the cynicism. But whenever I get in that mood, I think about something that happened to me on the eve of my election to the United States Senate.
We had held a large rally the night before in the Southside of Chicago. And in the midst of this rally, someone comes up to me and says that there's a woman who'd like to meet you, and she's traveled a long way and she wants to take a picture and shake your hand.
And so I said fine, and I met her, and we talked. And all of this would have been unremarkable except for the fact that this woman, Marguerite Lewis, was born in 1899 and was 105 years old.
And ever since I met this frail, one-hundred-and-five-year-old African-American woman who came all the way to this rally, I've thought about all she's seen in her life.
I've thought about the fact that when she was born, there weren't cars on the road, and no airplanes in the sky. That she was born under the cloud of Jim Crow, at a time for black folks when lynchings were common, but voting was forbidden.
I've thought about how she lived to see a world war and a Great Depression and a second world war.
I thought about how she saw women finally win the right to vote. How she watched FDR lift this nation out of its own fear. How she saw unions rise up and watched immigrants leave distant shores in search of an idea known as America.
She believed in this idea and she saw all this progress and she had faith that someday it would be her turn. And when she finally saw hope break through the horizon in the Civil Rights Movement, she thought, "Maybe it's my turn."
And at last - at last - she saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And she saw people lining up to vote for the first time - and she got in that line - and she never forgot it. She kept on voting in each and every election because she believed. She believed that over a span of three centuries, she had seen enough to know that there is no challenge too great, no injustice too crippling, no destiny too far out of reach for America.
She believed that we don't have to settle for equality for some or opportunity for the lucky or freedom for the few.
And she knew that during those moments in history where it looked like we might give up hope or settle for less, there have always been Americans who refused. Who said we're going to keep on dreaming, and we're going to keep on building, and we're going to keep on marching, and we're going to keep on working because that's who we are. Because we've always fought to bring all of our people under the blanket of the American Dream.
And I think that we face one of those moments today. In a century just five years old, our faith has already been shaken by war and terror, disaster and despair, threats to the middle-class dream, and scandal and corruption in our government.
The world has changed. No longer can we assume that a high-school education is enough to compete for a job that could easily go to a college-educated student in Bangalore or Beijing. No more can we count on employers to provide health care and pensions and job training when their bottom-lines know no borders. Never again can we expect the oceans that surround America to keep us safe from attacks on our own soil.
But while the world has changed around us, too often our government has stood still. Our faith has been shaken, but the people running Washington aren't willing to make us believe again.
It's the timidity - the smallness - of our politics that's holding us back right now. The idea that some problems are just too big to handle, and if you just ignore them, sooner or later, they'll go away. That if you give a speech where you rattle off statistics about the stock market being up and orders for durable goods being on the rise, no one will notice the single mom whose two jobs won't pay the bills or the student who can't afford his college dreams. That if you say the words "plan for victory" and point to the number of schools painted and roads paved and cell phones used in Iraq, no one will notice the more than 2,300 flag-draped coffins that have arrived at Dover Air Force base.
Well it's time we finally said we notice, and we care, and we're not gonna settle anymore.
You know, you probably never thought you'd hear this at an Emily's List luncheon, but Newt Gingrich made a great point a few weeks back. He was talking about what an awful job his own party has done governing this country, and he said that with all the mistakes and misjudgments the Republicans have made over the last six years, the slogan for the Democrats should come down to just two words:
Had enough?
I don't know about you, but I think old Newt is onto something here. Because I think we've all had enough. Enough of the broken promises. Enough of the failed leadership. Enough of the can't-do, won't-do, won't-even-try style of governance.
Four years after 9/11, I've had enough of being told that we can find the money to give Paris Hilton more tax cuts, but we can't find enough to protect our ports or our railroads or our chemical plants or our borders.
I've had enough of the closed-door deals that give billions to the HMOs when we're told that we can't do a thing for the 45 million uninsured or the millions more who can't pay their medical bills.
I've had enough of being told that we can't afford body armor for our troops and health care for our veterans. I've had enough of that.
I've had enough of giving billions away to the oil companies when we're told that we can't invest in the renewable energy that will create jobs and lower gas prices and finally free us from our dependence on the oil wells of Saudi Arabia.
I've had enough of our kids going to schools where the rats outnumber the computers. I've had enough of Katrina survivors living out of their cars and begging FEMA for trailers. And I've had enough of being told that all we can do about this is sit and wait and hope that the good fortune of a few trickles on down to everyone else in this country.
You know, we all remember that George Bush said in 2000 campaign that he was against nation-building. We just didn't know he was talking about this one.
So yes, I've had enough. And if you've had enough too, then we got some work to do. If you've had enough, then we have some checks to write, and some calls to make, and some doors to knock on. And if we do this, then in November, we're gonna have a U.S. House with people like Tammy Duckworth in it, and Melissa Bean, and Betty Sutton, and Dianne Farrell and Lois Murphy. And we're gonna have a U.S. Senate with Amy Klobuchar and Claire McCaskill and Maria Cantwell and Debbie Stabenow. And we're gonna change business-as-usual in Washington, and we're gonna set this country in a new direction.
Now, let me say this - I don't think that George Bush is a bad man. I think he loves his country. I don't think this administration is full of stupid people - I think there are a lot of smart folks in there. The problem isn't that their philosophy isn't working the way it's supposed to - it's that it is. It's that it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
The reason they don't believe government has a role in solving national problems is because they think government is the problem. That we're better off if we dismantle it - if we divvy it up into individual tax breaks, hand 'em out, and encourage everyone to go buy your own health care, your own retirement security, your own child care, their own schools, your own private security force, your own roads, their own levees...
It's called the Ownership Society in Washington. But in our past there has been another term for it - Social Darwinism - every man or women for him or herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford - life isn't fair. It allows us to say to the child who didn't have the foresight to choose the right parents or be born in the right suburb - pick yourself up by your bootstraps. It lets us say to the guy who worked twenty or thirty years in the factory and then watched his plant move out to Mexico or China - we're sorry, but you're on your own.
It's a bracing idea. It's a tempting idea. And it's the easiest thing in the world.
But there's just one problem. It doesn't work. It ignores our history. Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, of mutual responsibility. The idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity.
Americans know this. We know that government can't solve all our problems - and we don't want it to. But we also know that there are some things we can't do on our own. We know that there are some things we do better together.
We know that we've been called in churches and mosques, synagogues and Sunday schools to love our neighbors as ourselves; to be our brother's keeper; to be our sister's keeper. That we have individual responsibility, but we also have collective responsibility to each other.
That's what America is.
And so I am eager to have this argument not just with the President, but the entire Republican Party over what this country is about.
Because I think that this is our moment to lead.
The time for our party's identity crisis is over. Don't let anyone tell you we don't know what we stand for and don't doubt it yourselves. We know who we are and we know what our legacy is.
We're the party of Jefferson who first believed that every child in America should be educated regardless of wealth and birth and circumstance. That's who we are.
We're the party of Roosevelt who lifted this nation out of its own fear and sent workers to the factories and veterans to college and families to new homes and seniors to a comfortable retirement. That's who we are.
We're the party that stood up to fascism and defended freedom across the globe during World War II.
We're the party of civil rights, and workers' rights, and women's rights who believes that that every member of the American family deserves a shot at the American Dream. That's who we are.
We're the party of new frontiers and bold horizons - the party that put man on the moon and fueled the research that unlocked the secrets of the human genome. That's who we are.
And let me tell you about the party I see in the future.
In a globalized economy with bigger risks and greater rewards - a world where we are at once more connected and more competitive - let it be said that we are the party of opportunity. The party that guarantees every American an affordable, world-class, top-notch, life-long education - from early childhood to high school, from college to on-the-job training.
Let it be said that we are the party that equips every worker with what they need to succeed in a 21st century economy - wage supports and pensions, child care and health care that will stay with them no matter where they work or what they do.
Let it be said that we are the party of innovation and discovery - willing to blaze a trail toward energy independence or invest in the research that could create whole new industries and save thousands of lives.
And in a world where evil lurks and terrorists plot, let it be said that we will conduct a smart foreign policy that matches the might of our military with the power of our diplomacy. And when we do go to war, let us always be honest with the American people about why we are there and how we will win.
If we do all this, if we can be trusted to lead, this will not be a Democratic Agenda, it will be an American agenda. Because in the end, we may be proud Democrats, but we are prouder Americans. We're tired of being divided, tired of running into ideological walls and partisan roadblocks, tired of appeals to our worst instincts and greatest fears.
Americans everywhere are desperate for leadership. They are longing for direction. And they want to believe again.
You know, as I was thinking about today's luncheon and all the progress EMILY's List has made over the years, the first thing that came to mind wasn't all the politics or the campaigns; it wasn't even all the issues debated or the legislation passed.
I thought about my daughters.
I thought about the world that Sasha and Malia will grow up in, about the chances they'll have and the challenges they'll face. And I thought about my hopes for them - that they'll be able to dream without limit, achieve without constraint, and be free to seek their own happiness.
And I wondered - if they are lucky enough to live as long as 105-year-old Marguerite Lewis, if they someday have the chance to look back across the twenty-first century, what will they see? Will they see a country that is freer and kinder, more tolerant and more just than the one they grew up in? Will they see greater opportunities for every citizen of this country? Will all her of my hopes for my girls be fulfilled?
We are here today because we believe that in this country, we have it within our power to say "yes" to those questions - to forge our own destiny - to begin the world anew.
We are here because we believe that this is our time.
Our time to make a mark on history.
Our time to write a new chapter in the American story.
And then someday, someday, if our kids get the chance to stand where we are and look back at the beginning of the 21st century, they can say that this was the time when America renewed its purpose.
They can say that this was the time when America found its way.
They can say that this was the time when America learned to dream again.
Thank you.
</font>
`
<font size="5"><center>Obama's Profile Has Democrats Taking Notice</font size>
<font size="4">Popular Senator Is Mentioned as 2008 Contender</font size></center>
Washington Post
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 18, 2006; Page A01
EAST ORANGE, N.J. -- Barack Obama was standing before a packed high school auditorium when he noticed a familiar face in the crowd -- none other than singer Dionne Warwick. He paused, flashed a mischievous smile, then let loose with a perfectly on-key performance of the opening line of her hit song "Walk On By."
The audience of 300 students and adults roared with approval.
Obama, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, seems to be hitting the right notes these days. During Senate recesses, he has been touring the country at breakneck pace, basking in the sudden fame of a politician turned pop star. Along the way, he has been drawing crowds and campaign cash from Democrats starved for a fresh face and ready to cheer what Obama touts as "a politics of hope instead of a politics of fear."
His office fields more than 300 requests a week for appearances. One Senate Democrat, curious about Obama's charisma, took notes when watching him perform at a recent political event. State parties report breaking fundraising records when Obama is the speaker.
The money he is bringing in for fellow Democrats is shaping up as an important influence on 2006. And the potential Obama is demonstrating as a political performer -- less than two years after his elevation from the Illinois state legislature -- is prompting some colleagues to urge him to turn his attention to 2008 and a race for the presidency. Obama has made plain he is at least listening.
"I think he is unique," said Illinois's senior senator, Richard J. Durbin (D). "I don't believe there is another candidate I've seen, or an elected official, who really has the appeal that he does." As for the 2008 presidential race, "I said to him, 'Why don't you just kind of move around Iowa and watch what happens?' I know what's going to happen. And I think it's going to rewrite the game plans in a lot of presidential candidates if he makes that decision."
Obama deflects such talk, while not ruling out a presidential candidacy. The speculation is as much a commentary on the state of the party as it is on Obama. The Democrats' most prominent likely contenders -- such as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and John F. Kerry (Mass.) -- are figures who have been in the public eye for many years and wear scars from earlier controversies.
At age 44, the former Harvard Law School standout has little baggage. But Obama also has a scant legislative record in the Senate, where some members privately say they view him as drawn to news conferences and speeches more than to the hard details of lawmaking.
He has yet to carve out a distinctive profile on the policy and ideological debates that are central to how Democrats will position themselves in a post-Bush era.
In his stump speech, he offers a standard Democratic criticism of President Bush's tax cuts as favoring the rich, and promotes energy independence with only modest detail about how to achieve it. Nor does he dwell on the Iraq war, assailing the administration's handling of the conflict but not addressing such questions as a timetable for troop withdrawal.
Instead, it is almost entirely Obama's biography, along with his gift for engaging people in large audiences and one-on-one encounters, that is driving interest.
"It's very exciting for him to come here," said Iqua Colson, a public schools administrator who appeared at the event here. Most of the students are African American, as is Colson, and she said they see the Senate's only black member as an appealing role model: "He represents hope, promise, excellence."
Every speech includes a version of people telling him in 2004 that a Hawaiian-born African American with a Kenyan father, Kansan mother and "an unpronounceable name" could never be elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois. Before mostly black audiences, he triggers guffaws by saying people rendered his surname as "Alabama" and "yo mama." He refers to himself as "a black guy" before white audiences, "a brother" before black groups.
Every story ends the same, however. He overcame the odds, he tells the listeners, and so can they.
It is a homily that has left some fellow politicians swooning. "I haven't seen a phenomenon like this, where someone comes in so new and is so dazzling," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a 25-year veteran of Congress. Schumer, who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Obama "is more requested than anybody else" in the party's hierarchy for fundraising and campaign appearances on behalf of congressional candidates. "Everyone wants him. He's lightning."
Barely known outside his state until he delivered a widely praised speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, Obama is scrambling to meet his party's demands.
He starred at a March 30 dinner for Connecticut Democrats that drew more than 1,700 people paying at least $175 each -- the state party's biggest such take in decades. "The Darling of His Party," the next day's Hartford Courant front-page headline said, "Wows the Faithful." A March rally on behalf of a Senate candidate in Vermont drew 2,000 people to a hall with 800 seats. "Organizers underestimated Barack Obama's star power," said the next day's Burlington Free Press.
Invitations he has turned down included a chance to be Stanford University's commencement speaker, because he tries to spend Sundays at home in Chicago with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters.
Interviewed recently as he jetted between campaign appearances for Democrats in Massachusetts and New Jersey, Obama said he is flattered but so far unmoved by appeals that he seek the presidency in 2008: "It's gratifying to know that my message resonates enough that people are thinking in those terms. But at this stage, I haven't changed my mind from previous demurrals."
Obama, however, is not exactly standing still. He recently hired two nationally experienced political consultants, Anita Dunn in Washington and David Axelrod in Chicago. The senator suggested that a presidential bid is a matter of when, not if.
"We've visited 25 states since taking office," he said. "And in each of those states, we might have 2,000 people show up at a rally. And we'd get back to D.C. and we'd realize we didn't have e-mail addresses for any of those people. That might be a useful thing to have when, you know, I'm running for something and might be looking to raise some money."
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who lauded Obama's political and legislative skills, said he must think about what timing is best for him. "It is unfair to him to heap too much praise on him, because he's so new here," he said. "He's kind of like an all-star baseball player who comes right out of high school or college and has a major impact in that first season. And always the question is, 'Can he sustain it? Will he get burned out?' "
Obama said he wishes reporters and others would pay more attention to his work that helped Illinois veterans receive larger disability benefits, and his legislation encouraging alternative fuels. But he said he understands that "there's a certain story line that attaches to each celebrity. . . . My story line is: 'Rising star comes to D.C. and how quickly will D.C. corrupt him?' "
He praised Clinton's approach to Congress and prominence. "One of the things that both Hillary and I recognize is that we are conferred a huge advantage by virtue of our notoriety," he said. "We don't really have to chase the cameras."
For now, most of his Democratic colleagues believe that Obama's advancement only benefits them. In East Orange, Obama made three stops on behalf of Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), including at a fundraiser that brought in $500,000.
Menendez, who has won seven U.S. House races, later confided, "I took some notes on his interactions."
Onstage, Obama carries audiences along with self-deprecating jokes and gently rhythmic riffs that accent his main points. With a comic's timing, he gets big laughs describing how he reacted when friends first urged him to run for the Illinois Senate. "I prayed on it," he says, pausing briefly. "And I asked my wife." He adds that "those higher authorities" gave their assent.
Perhaps because he has been a national figure for so short a time, there's little of the air of self-importance that surrounds many senators. Staffers generally refer to him as "Barack" rather than "the senator," and they don't snap to attention, as some aides do, when the boss suddenly appears.
Offstage, his matter-of-fact demeanor rarely changed in two busy days of travel. As the plane was about to lift off in overcast skies, he nonchalantly discussed the weather-related crashes that killed Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan and Minnesota Sen. Paul D. Wellstone on campaign trips. An Obama staff member and a reporter later acknowledged that they found the conversation a bit unsettling.
Stylistically, Obama conveys a "sense of authenticity, which I think is the silver coin of the time in terms of leadership," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). In the Senate, he credited the freshman with persuading Republicans to accept a controversial provision on wages in the hard-fought immigration bill.
What Kennedy viewed as a coup, however, was seen as showy overreaching by some Republicans. They complained that in private negotiations Obama seemed more interested in his pet amendments than in the need for an overarching, filibuster-proof compromise.
Such reproaches are bound to increase with Obama's visibility, and the potential danger of moving too far, too fast "is certainly something that I think he thinks about," Kennedy said. "On the other hand, there is enormous thirst within the Democratic Party, within the country, to have new directions, new solutions, new ideas." Kennedy said he doesn't know Obama well enough to counsel him on whether to run in 2008.
But some grass-roots Democrats are ready. "I think he's spectacular," said ophthalmologist David Victor after hearing Obama speak at a Boston rally. "Barack Obama represents the heart and soul of the party, the real future of the party."
Washingtonpost.com staff writer Chris Cillizza and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report in Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6061700736.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
<font size="5"><center>Obama's Profile Has Democrats Taking Notice</font size>
<font size="4">Popular Senator Is Mentioned as 2008 Contender</font size></center>
Washington Post
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 18, 2006; Page A01
EAST ORANGE, N.J. -- Barack Obama was standing before a packed high school auditorium when he noticed a familiar face in the crowd -- none other than singer Dionne Warwick. He paused, flashed a mischievous smile, then let loose with a perfectly on-key performance of the opening line of her hit song "Walk On By."
The audience of 300 students and adults roared with approval.
Obama, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, seems to be hitting the right notes these days. During Senate recesses, he has been touring the country at breakneck pace, basking in the sudden fame of a politician turned pop star. Along the way, he has been drawing crowds and campaign cash from Democrats starved for a fresh face and ready to cheer what Obama touts as "a politics of hope instead of a politics of fear."
His office fields more than 300 requests a week for appearances. One Senate Democrat, curious about Obama's charisma, took notes when watching him perform at a recent political event. State parties report breaking fundraising records when Obama is the speaker.
The money he is bringing in for fellow Democrats is shaping up as an important influence on 2006. And the potential Obama is demonstrating as a political performer -- less than two years after his elevation from the Illinois state legislature -- is prompting some colleagues to urge him to turn his attention to 2008 and a race for the presidency. Obama has made plain he is at least listening.
"I think he is unique," said Illinois's senior senator, Richard J. Durbin (D). "I don't believe there is another candidate I've seen, or an elected official, who really has the appeal that he does." As for the 2008 presidential race, "I said to him, 'Why don't you just kind of move around Iowa and watch what happens?' I know what's going to happen. And I think it's going to rewrite the game plans in a lot of presidential candidates if he makes that decision."
Obama deflects such talk, while not ruling out a presidential candidacy. The speculation is as much a commentary on the state of the party as it is on Obama. The Democrats' most prominent likely contenders -- such as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and John F. Kerry (Mass.) -- are figures who have been in the public eye for many years and wear scars from earlier controversies.
At age 44, the former Harvard Law School standout has little baggage. But Obama also has a scant legislative record in the Senate, where some members privately say they view him as drawn to news conferences and speeches more than to the hard details of lawmaking.
He has yet to carve out a distinctive profile on the policy and ideological debates that are central to how Democrats will position themselves in a post-Bush era.
In his stump speech, he offers a standard Democratic criticism of President Bush's tax cuts as favoring the rich, and promotes energy independence with only modest detail about how to achieve it. Nor does he dwell on the Iraq war, assailing the administration's handling of the conflict but not addressing such questions as a timetable for troop withdrawal.
Instead, it is almost entirely Obama's biography, along with his gift for engaging people in large audiences and one-on-one encounters, that is driving interest.
"It's very exciting for him to come here," said Iqua Colson, a public schools administrator who appeared at the event here. Most of the students are African American, as is Colson, and she said they see the Senate's only black member as an appealing role model: "He represents hope, promise, excellence."
Every speech includes a version of people telling him in 2004 that a Hawaiian-born African American with a Kenyan father, Kansan mother and "an unpronounceable name" could never be elected to the U.S. Senate from Illinois. Before mostly black audiences, he triggers guffaws by saying people rendered his surname as "Alabama" and "yo mama." He refers to himself as "a black guy" before white audiences, "a brother" before black groups.
Every story ends the same, however. He overcame the odds, he tells the listeners, and so can they.
It is a homily that has left some fellow politicians swooning. "I haven't seen a phenomenon like this, where someone comes in so new and is so dazzling," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a 25-year veteran of Congress. Schumer, who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Obama "is more requested than anybody else" in the party's hierarchy for fundraising and campaign appearances on behalf of congressional candidates. "Everyone wants him. He's lightning."
Barely known outside his state until he delivered a widely praised speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, Obama is scrambling to meet his party's demands.
He starred at a March 30 dinner for Connecticut Democrats that drew more than 1,700 people paying at least $175 each -- the state party's biggest such take in decades. "The Darling of His Party," the next day's Hartford Courant front-page headline said, "Wows the Faithful." A March rally on behalf of a Senate candidate in Vermont drew 2,000 people to a hall with 800 seats. "Organizers underestimated Barack Obama's star power," said the next day's Burlington Free Press.
Invitations he has turned down included a chance to be Stanford University's commencement speaker, because he tries to spend Sundays at home in Chicago with his wife, Michelle, and their two young daughters.
Interviewed recently as he jetted between campaign appearances for Democrats in Massachusetts and New Jersey, Obama said he is flattered but so far unmoved by appeals that he seek the presidency in 2008: "It's gratifying to know that my message resonates enough that people are thinking in those terms. But at this stage, I haven't changed my mind from previous demurrals."
Obama, however, is not exactly standing still. He recently hired two nationally experienced political consultants, Anita Dunn in Washington and David Axelrod in Chicago. The senator suggested that a presidential bid is a matter of when, not if.
"We've visited 25 states since taking office," he said. "And in each of those states, we might have 2,000 people show up at a rally. And we'd get back to D.C. and we'd realize we didn't have e-mail addresses for any of those people. That might be a useful thing to have when, you know, I'm running for something and might be looking to raise some money."
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who lauded Obama's political and legislative skills, said he must think about what timing is best for him. "It is unfair to him to heap too much praise on him, because he's so new here," he said. "He's kind of like an all-star baseball player who comes right out of high school or college and has a major impact in that first season. And always the question is, 'Can he sustain it? Will he get burned out?' "
Obama said he wishes reporters and others would pay more attention to his work that helped Illinois veterans receive larger disability benefits, and his legislation encouraging alternative fuels. But he said he understands that "there's a certain story line that attaches to each celebrity. . . . My story line is: 'Rising star comes to D.C. and how quickly will D.C. corrupt him?' "
He praised Clinton's approach to Congress and prominence. "One of the things that both Hillary and I recognize is that we are conferred a huge advantage by virtue of our notoriety," he said. "We don't really have to chase the cameras."
For now, most of his Democratic colleagues believe that Obama's advancement only benefits them. In East Orange, Obama made three stops on behalf of Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), including at a fundraiser that brought in $500,000.
Menendez, who has won seven U.S. House races, later confided, "I took some notes on his interactions."
Onstage, Obama carries audiences along with self-deprecating jokes and gently rhythmic riffs that accent his main points. With a comic's timing, he gets big laughs describing how he reacted when friends first urged him to run for the Illinois Senate. "I prayed on it," he says, pausing briefly. "And I asked my wife." He adds that "those higher authorities" gave their assent.
Perhaps because he has been a national figure for so short a time, there's little of the air of self-importance that surrounds many senators. Staffers generally refer to him as "Barack" rather than "the senator," and they don't snap to attention, as some aides do, when the boss suddenly appears.
Offstage, his matter-of-fact demeanor rarely changed in two busy days of travel. As the plane was about to lift off in overcast skies, he nonchalantly discussed the weather-related crashes that killed Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan and Minnesota Sen. Paul D. Wellstone on campaign trips. An Obama staff member and a reporter later acknowledged that they found the conversation a bit unsettling.
Stylistically, Obama conveys a "sense of authenticity, which I think is the silver coin of the time in terms of leadership," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). In the Senate, he credited the freshman with persuading Republicans to accept a controversial provision on wages in the hard-fought immigration bill.
What Kennedy viewed as a coup, however, was seen as showy overreaching by some Republicans. They complained that in private negotiations Obama seemed more interested in his pet amendments than in the need for an overarching, filibuster-proof compromise.
Such reproaches are bound to increase with Obama's visibility, and the potential danger of moving too far, too fast "is certainly something that I think he thinks about," Kennedy said. "On the other hand, there is enormous thirst within the Democratic Party, within the country, to have new directions, new solutions, new ideas." Kennedy said he doesn't know Obama well enough to counsel him on whether to run in 2008.
But some grass-roots Democrats are ready. "I think he's spectacular," said ophthalmologist David Victor after hearing Obama speak at a Boston rally. "Barack Obama represents the heart and soul of the party, the real future of the party."
Washingtonpost.com staff writer Chris Cillizza and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report in Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6061700736.html?referrer=email&referrer=email
Throngs greet Senator Obama in Kenya
Throngs greet Senator Obama in Kenya
By C. Bryson Hull
Sat Aug 26, 11:52 AM ET
U.S. Senator Barack Obama returned to his ancestral village in west Kenya on Saturday as thousands of cheering well-wishers thronged to greet the rising political star in America's Democratic Party as a native son.
After flying into Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria, Obama drove 100 km (60 miles) northwest to the village where his father was born and buried for the highly anticipated climax of his two-week African tour.
Unlike his last visit in the early 1990s when he traveled by public minibus with chickens in his lap, this time Obama reached the verdant village in a motorcade with police escorts.
"People of Kogelo, thank you!" he said in the local Luo language to rapturous applause as he stood on a table to greet thousands gathered on the football pitch of the Senator Obama Primary School, renamed in his honor.
A carnival atmosphere prevailed as residents banged drums, sang songs and waved flags reading "Obama we love you."
Weaving through the excited masses, vendors sold red popsicles to ward off the Equatorial heat, while others hawked T-shirts and calendars saying "Welcome home Senator Obama."
Born in Hawaii to a white American mother and a Kenyan father, the 45-year-old is revered by many Kenyans the way the Irish idolized former U.S. President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s -- as a native who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Obama said his return as a senator represented a cyclical journey like that of his father, who grew up herding goats and then traveled to America where he studied at Harvard before returning to Kenya to become a noted economist.
"Whenever I see a young boy, I think about my father, and I think about the journey he traveled so many miles," Obama said.
"I think about those boys and can think of no reason why they can't do the same thing."
FAMILIY WAITING
Waiting at his father's farm, his extended family sang, chanted and waved a U.S. flag, before his 83-year-old step-grandmother, Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama, greeted him with a hearty handshake and a big hug.
Thronged by dozens of journalists, it was hardly a private reunion, as he and his grandmother walked arm-in-arm to her farm next door. There they talked away from the cameras and ate chicken, cabbage and porridge, Obama said.
The senator told reporters his grandmother had accepted his apology for bringing so many camera people to her home.
"I feel very, very good," she said, speaking in Luo.
Since 2004 when the Harvard-trained lawyer and civil rights activist was running for the Senate in Illinois, he has been a star in the east African nation.
On his arrival earlier in Kisumu, he took an AIDS test at a local hospital with his wife Michelle, setting an example for the tens of thousands of Africans who fear the stigma of being tested for the disease ravaging sub-Saharan Africa.
"If a senator from the United States and his wife can get tested, then everyone in this crowd, in this town and in this province can get tested," he told the crowd in Nyanza province, which has one of the highest HIV infection rates in Kenya.
This was Obama's first visit to the country since being elected senator, although he had visited twice before in anonymity in trips to search for his father's roots.
Since his election, many in poor Kogelo village have been creating a to-do-list of projects he can fund. But Obama -- whose first name Barack means "blessed" in Swahili -- has tried to dampen expectations of what he can provide.
"I think people understand that I am the senator from Illinois, not the senator from Kogelo," he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060826...PZZ.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--
Throngs greet Senator Obama in Kenya
By C. Bryson Hull
Sat Aug 26, 11:52 AM ET
U.S. Senator Barack Obama returned to his ancestral village in west Kenya on Saturday as thousands of cheering well-wishers thronged to greet the rising political star in America's Democratic Party as a native son.
After flying into Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria, Obama drove 100 km (60 miles) northwest to the village where his father was born and buried for the highly anticipated climax of his two-week African tour.
Unlike his last visit in the early 1990s when he traveled by public minibus with chickens in his lap, this time Obama reached the verdant village in a motorcade with police escorts.
"People of Kogelo, thank you!" he said in the local Luo language to rapturous applause as he stood on a table to greet thousands gathered on the football pitch of the Senator Obama Primary School, renamed in his honor.
A carnival atmosphere prevailed as residents banged drums, sang songs and waved flags reading "Obama we love you."
Weaving through the excited masses, vendors sold red popsicles to ward off the Equatorial heat, while others hawked T-shirts and calendars saying "Welcome home Senator Obama."
Born in Hawaii to a white American mother and a Kenyan father, the 45-year-old is revered by many Kenyans the way the Irish idolized former U.S. President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s -- as a native who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Obama said his return as a senator represented a cyclical journey like that of his father, who grew up herding goats and then traveled to America where he studied at Harvard before returning to Kenya to become a noted economist.
"Whenever I see a young boy, I think about my father, and I think about the journey he traveled so many miles," Obama said.
"I think about those boys and can think of no reason why they can't do the same thing."
FAMILIY WAITING
Waiting at his father's farm, his extended family sang, chanted and waved a U.S. flag, before his 83-year-old step-grandmother, Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama, greeted him with a hearty handshake and a big hug.
Thronged by dozens of journalists, it was hardly a private reunion, as he and his grandmother walked arm-in-arm to her farm next door. There they talked away from the cameras and ate chicken, cabbage and porridge, Obama said.
The senator told reporters his grandmother had accepted his apology for bringing so many camera people to her home.
"I feel very, very good," she said, speaking in Luo.
Since 2004 when the Harvard-trained lawyer and civil rights activist was running for the Senate in Illinois, he has been a star in the east African nation.
On his arrival earlier in Kisumu, he took an AIDS test at a local hospital with his wife Michelle, setting an example for the tens of thousands of Africans who fear the stigma of being tested for the disease ravaging sub-Saharan Africa.
"If a senator from the United States and his wife can get tested, then everyone in this crowd, in this town and in this province can get tested," he told the crowd in Nyanza province, which has one of the highest HIV infection rates in Kenya.
This was Obama's first visit to the country since being elected senator, although he had visited twice before in anonymity in trips to search for his father's roots.
Since his election, many in poor Kogelo village have been creating a to-do-list of projects he can fund. But Obama -- whose first name Barack means "blessed" in Swahili -- has tried to dampen expectations of what he can provide.
"I think people understand that I am the senator from Illinois, not the senator from Kogelo," he said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060826...PZZ.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--
IF I WAS HIM...
I'LL PLACE AN ORDER FOR BULLET PROOF GLASS CAGE LIKE THE MUTHAFUCKEN POPE...
AS SOON as he gets to 'popular'....
THEY GONNA TRY TO KILL HIM.
So far, he's not consider a real threat yet (I think ?).
I'll keep an eye on him.
Ohh..and one last question.
WHERE THE FUCK IS OUR POLITICAL PARTY.??
neo
I'LL PLACE AN ORDER FOR BULLET PROOF GLASS CAGE LIKE THE MUTHAFUCKEN POPE...
AS SOON as he gets to 'popular'....
THEY GONNA TRY TO KILL HIM.
So far, he's not consider a real threat yet (I think ?).
I'll keep an eye on him.
Ohh..and one last question.
WHERE THE FUCK IS OUR POLITICAL PARTY.??
neo
<img src="http://proquest.umi.com/i/pub/7818.gif">
<font face="arial Black" size="5" color="#D90000">
For This Red Meat Crowd, Obama’s ’08 Choice Is Clear</FONT>
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/18/us/18obama.span.jpg">
<font face="arial" size="2" color="#333333"><b>Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, greeting the party faithful Sunday before speaking at Senator Tom Harkin’s steak fry in Iowa.</b></font>
<font face="georgia" size="3" color="#000000">
<b>
September 18, 2006
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT</b>
INDIANOLA, Iowa, Sept. 17 — Senator Barack Obama insists, as always, that he is not running for president. But there are compelling clues that he is not exactly not running, either.
The most obvious was his keynote appearance here on Sunday at Senator Tom Harkin’s legendary steak fry, a popular Democratic ritual in Iowa — and a prominent staging ground in this first presidential caucus state. The crowd rushed Mr. Obama when he arrived, then mobbed him for hours as other politicians wandered the fairgrounds introducing themselves and shaking hands.
But beyond his first trip to Iowa — a visit that was guaranteed to set off new speculation about his presidential ambitions — Mr. Obama is in the midst of an unconventional publicity tour of sorts. Fresh off a closely watched journey through Africa, including a stop at the home of his Kenyan-born father, Mr. Obama is about to publish a second book that supporters believe will outpace his best-seller from 1995.
With the book, titled “The Audacity of Hope,” will come an October appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” magazine profiles and a national speaking tour. Throughout, Mr. Obama is keeping up a full schedule of political speeches on behalf of Democrats nationwide; his fame has made him one of the most requested fund-raising guests in the party.
All of which means that, despite his efforts to coolly play down expectations for his future, Mr. Obama has allowed his already stratospheric profile to grow a little higher of late and has done less to tamp down the celebrity buzz than he did when he first arrived in the Senate last year.
“What a wonderful reception; I’m going to have to come to Iowa again,” Mr. Obama said as he took the podium under a sunny sky here on Sunday afternoon in front of an estimated 3,500 people. In response, someone in the audience shouted, “Obama ’08,” a sentiment reflected in T-shirts and buttons featuring his name throughout the crowd in defiance of his repeated claim that he is focused on his duties as a first-term senator.
His 40-minute speech was punctuated by applause and standing ovations but also, at its most serious moments, brought the audience to a silence hushed enough for rustling trees to be heard. It focused on the importance of a Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections. Characteristically, he spoke in mostly moderate language.
“I don’t think that George Bush is a bad man,” he said. Referring to Republicans, he said, “They believe in different things.”
But he touched on core Democratic themes, praising labor unions, defending the role of government and excoriating the Bush administration over the war in Iraq, the politicization of the threat of terrorism and the so-called ownership society.
If it was not a presidential stump speech, it certainly had the underpinnings of one. “Our parents and our grandparents faced greater challenges than we face, and yet somehow they were able to overcome it,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s the essence of America.”
The trip, which had been hyped for weeks, took on greater significance when news leaked that Mr. Obama had invited along Steve Hildebrand, a political strategist who ran Vice President Al Gore’s campaign in Iowa in 2000. (Advisers to Mr. Obama insisted he merely wanted an old Iowa hand at his side.) In a frenetic question-and-answer session in front of dozens of camera crews before his speech, Mr. Obama got nearly a dozen questions about the presidential campaign and only one about national security.
Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa, chatted easily with constituents, watching the news media crush from afar. Mr. Vilsack, who is also considering a presidential bid and recently came in fourth place in a poll of Iowa caucusgoers, played down the response to Mr. Obama, describing it as “certainly predictable.” Asked whether the senator should run, Mr. Vilsack replied, “That’s a question you’re going to have to ask the voters,” and walked away.
Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor, who is also testing the waters for a presidential campaign, made brief remarks at the start of the event, although he was barely audible from the back of the crowd amid the frenzy over Mr. Obama.
Mr. Harkin, a legendary political figure and the sponsor of the event, seemed amused by the Obama phenomenon. “Honestly, tell you the truth — I really tried to get Bono this weekend,” Mr. Harkin said in his introduction. “I couldn’t get him, so I settled for the second biggest rock star in America today.”
For all of Mr. Obama’s star appeal — a recent Newsweek article compared his arrival in Kenya to the second coming of the Messiah — he has earned a reputation for persuasive rhetoric about the role of religion in politics, which is one strand of his new book, due out Oct. 17. Unlike his original memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” an autobiographical reflection on his African father and his Kansas-born mother, the new book is a series of meditations on matters like race and family.
Books have generated speculation about a presidential race in the past. In 1995, when Colin L. Powell published “My American Journey,” it spurred months of urging for him to run for higher office. He ultimately declined.
Whether Mr. Obama decides to take his own shot at becoming the first black president, the paraphernalia, and the popular movement, designed to persuade him to do so is already in full development. His fellow senator from Illinois, Richard J. Durbin, has urged him to consider running; so has the state comptroller, Dan Hynes, who in recent weeks said that Mr. Obama “alone can restore the hope and optimism that has made this country great.”
Several people in the crowd on Sunday expressed a similar sentiment. Matt Hawkins, a 38-year-old wearing a blue “Illinois for Obama in 2008” T-shirt, pushed his way through the mass of people to meet the senator. Mr. Obama’s response left him undaunted.
“He’s telling us he’s got to pay his dues,” Mr. Hawkins said, “and we’re telling him, ‘Learn as you go.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/us/politics/18obama.html
</font>
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>
<font face="arial Black" size="5" color="#D90000">
For This Red Meat Crowd, Obama’s ’08 Choice Is Clear</FONT>
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/18/us/18obama.span.jpg">
<font face="arial" size="2" color="#333333"><b>Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, greeting the party faithful Sunday before speaking at Senator Tom Harkin’s steak fry in Iowa.</b></font>
<font face="georgia" size="3" color="#000000">
<b>
September 18, 2006
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT</b>
INDIANOLA, Iowa, Sept. 17 — Senator Barack Obama insists, as always, that he is not running for president. But there are compelling clues that he is not exactly not running, either.
The most obvious was his keynote appearance here on Sunday at Senator Tom Harkin’s legendary steak fry, a popular Democratic ritual in Iowa — and a prominent staging ground in this first presidential caucus state. The crowd rushed Mr. Obama when he arrived, then mobbed him for hours as other politicians wandered the fairgrounds introducing themselves and shaking hands.
But beyond his first trip to Iowa — a visit that was guaranteed to set off new speculation about his presidential ambitions — Mr. Obama is in the midst of an unconventional publicity tour of sorts. Fresh off a closely watched journey through Africa, including a stop at the home of his Kenyan-born father, Mr. Obama is about to publish a second book that supporters believe will outpace his best-seller from 1995.
With the book, titled “The Audacity of Hope,” will come an October appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” magazine profiles and a national speaking tour. Throughout, Mr. Obama is keeping up a full schedule of political speeches on behalf of Democrats nationwide; his fame has made him one of the most requested fund-raising guests in the party.
All of which means that, despite his efforts to coolly play down expectations for his future, Mr. Obama has allowed his already stratospheric profile to grow a little higher of late and has done less to tamp down the celebrity buzz than he did when he first arrived in the Senate last year.
“What a wonderful reception; I’m going to have to come to Iowa again,” Mr. Obama said as he took the podium under a sunny sky here on Sunday afternoon in front of an estimated 3,500 people. In response, someone in the audience shouted, “Obama ’08,” a sentiment reflected in T-shirts and buttons featuring his name throughout the crowd in defiance of his repeated claim that he is focused on his duties as a first-term senator.
His 40-minute speech was punctuated by applause and standing ovations but also, at its most serious moments, brought the audience to a silence hushed enough for rustling trees to be heard. It focused on the importance of a Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections. Characteristically, he spoke in mostly moderate language.
“I don’t think that George Bush is a bad man,” he said. Referring to Republicans, he said, “They believe in different things.”
But he touched on core Democratic themes, praising labor unions, defending the role of government and excoriating the Bush administration over the war in Iraq, the politicization of the threat of terrorism and the so-called ownership society.
If it was not a presidential stump speech, it certainly had the underpinnings of one. “Our parents and our grandparents faced greater challenges than we face, and yet somehow they were able to overcome it,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s the essence of America.”
The trip, which had been hyped for weeks, took on greater significance when news leaked that Mr. Obama had invited along Steve Hildebrand, a political strategist who ran Vice President Al Gore’s campaign in Iowa in 2000. (Advisers to Mr. Obama insisted he merely wanted an old Iowa hand at his side.) In a frenetic question-and-answer session in front of dozens of camera crews before his speech, Mr. Obama got nearly a dozen questions about the presidential campaign and only one about national security.
Tom Vilsack, the governor of Iowa, chatted easily with constituents, watching the news media crush from afar. Mr. Vilsack, who is also considering a presidential bid and recently came in fourth place in a poll of Iowa caucusgoers, played down the response to Mr. Obama, describing it as “certainly predictable.” Asked whether the senator should run, Mr. Vilsack replied, “That’s a question you’re going to have to ask the voters,” and walked away.
Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor, who is also testing the waters for a presidential campaign, made brief remarks at the start of the event, although he was barely audible from the back of the crowd amid the frenzy over Mr. Obama.
Mr. Harkin, a legendary political figure and the sponsor of the event, seemed amused by the Obama phenomenon. “Honestly, tell you the truth — I really tried to get Bono this weekend,” Mr. Harkin said in his introduction. “I couldn’t get him, so I settled for the second biggest rock star in America today.”
For all of Mr. Obama’s star appeal — a recent Newsweek article compared his arrival in Kenya to the second coming of the Messiah — he has earned a reputation for persuasive rhetoric about the role of religion in politics, which is one strand of his new book, due out Oct. 17. Unlike his original memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” an autobiographical reflection on his African father and his Kansas-born mother, the new book is a series of meditations on matters like race and family.
Books have generated speculation about a presidential race in the past. In 1995, when Colin L. Powell published “My American Journey,” it spurred months of urging for him to run for higher office. He ultimately declined.
Whether Mr. Obama decides to take his own shot at becoming the first black president, the paraphernalia, and the popular movement, designed to persuade him to do so is already in full development. His fellow senator from Illinois, Richard J. Durbin, has urged him to consider running; so has the state comptroller, Dan Hynes, who in recent weeks said that Mr. Obama “alone can restore the hope and optimism that has made this country great.”
Several people in the crowd on Sunday expressed a similar sentiment. Matt Hawkins, a 38-year-old wearing a blue “Illinois for Obama in 2008” T-shirt, pushed his way through the mass of people to meet the senator. Mr. Obama’s response left him undaunted.
“He’s telling us he’s got to pay his dues,” Mr. Hawkins said, “and we’re telling him, ‘Learn as you go.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/us/politics/18obama.html
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A Different Kind of Politics?</font><font face="tahoma" size="4" color="#0000FF"><b>
Sen. Barack Obama believes America is ready to move beyond extreme partisan debates. Could he be the candidate to lead the way?</b></font>
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<font face="arial" size="2" color="#000000"><b>Obama: ‘There is a hunger right now for America coming together’</b></font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial Unicode MS, Verdana, sans-serif" size="3" COLOR="#000000">
<b>WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Howard Fineman
<font color="#ff0000"><h3>Newsweek</h3></font>
Sept. 25, 2006</b>
- On the campaign trail this fall, no one is a bigger draw—especially for young voters—than <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6732724/site/newsweek/"><b>Sen.</b> <b>Barack Obama</b></a> of Illinois. Of mixed racial and religious heritage, the 45-year-old Harvard Law School graduate strikes many Americans as a one-man answer to both the "clash of civilizations" and the Red-Blue chasm in America. Last week he spoke to a packed house at a MoveOn.org event hosted by Georgetown University students in regal Gaston Hall—a favorite venue for Democrats trying out ideas for presidential campaigns. In the green room afterward, Obama sat down with NEWSWEEK chief political correspondent Howard Fineman. Obama, who has been in the Senate for less than two years, did not slam the door on what would be a daring 2008 bid. Excerpts:</p><p><b>NEWSWEEK: Your grandfather was Muslim, but you are a Christian. What did you think of the </b><a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14866559/site/newsweek/"><b>pope’s original comments</b></a><b> about Islam and how the reaction played out?</b><br><b>Barack Obama:</b> Well, I think that we live in a time where there are enormous religious sensitivities, and I have no doubt that the pope did not intend to offend the Muslim faith any more than many of us sometimes say things in a different context that aren’t intended to cause offense. But I think all of us, particularly religious leaders, have to be mindful that there are a lot of sensitivities out there. Now, the flip side is that there are those in the Muslim community who are looking to take offense and are constantly on the lookout for anything that would indicate that the West is somehow antagonistic toward Islam.</p><p><b>Did he say anything that he needed to apologize for?</b><br>You know, I leave it up to the pope. He made an apology and I wouldn’t challenge his judgment on it.</p><p><b>Did you read what he said?</b><br>I read what he said. And, as I said, I think he is mindful that he did not want to cause offense or pain, and to the extent that he did, I think he felt it necessary to apologize. My point, I guess is that all sides in the current environment have to be very careful how we talk about faith. I gave a speech recently in which I said that Democrats, for example, should not be afraid to talk about faith. But I think we’ve got to do so in a way that admits the possibility that we are not always right, that our particular faith may not have all the monopoly on truth, and we’ve got to be able to listen to other people. You know I think one of the trends we are seeing right now, and which I think is causing so much political grief both domestically and internationally, is that absolutism has become sort of the flavor of the day.</p><p><b>Have you read the Qur'an?<br></b>I can’t say that I have read all of it.</p><p></p><p><b>Have you read enough of it to have an opinion as to whether Islam is what the 14th-century Byzantine emperor said in his argument that it was, in other words, a religion of violent conquest?<br></b>I think there are so many different interpretations of Islam as there are so many different interpretations of Christianity, that to somehow fix or define a religion based on one particular reading of the text is a mistake.</p><p><b>Why did you call your new book “The Audacity of Hope”? Why is hope audacious?</b>
Because we live in some tough times. Because when you look around the world you see crisis in Darfur, you see conflagrations in the Middle East, you see political polarization at home, you’ve got environmental crisis, 46 million without health insurance, inner-city children that are trapped in despair. So you know I think it is easy sometimes to say that there is nothing much we can do about it. And you know that the title is a line that I got from a sermon my pastor gave once, which made the point that sometimes it’s easier to be cynical and give up hope. But part of our character as a nation has been a sense of optimism, a sense that we can overcome.</p><p><b>The reaction you get around the country is remarkable. Why are people reacting to you the way they are?<br></b>It’s always hard to stand outside yourself and know what it is that people are reacting to. Some of it is just dumb luck. I was elected based on a campaign that was positive and that was hopeful, and somehow it worked and it was multiracial and I got votes from farmers and I got votes from suburbanites and inner-city blacks. And I think that there is a hunger right now for America coming together, and my campaign sort of captured that wave, and I expressed it as best I could during my speech in the 2004 election and that seemed to resonate. It probably says less about me than an indication that people want a different kind of politics.</p><p><b>Is it fair to say that you are a human embodiment of the kind of unity you think people are hungering for?</b><br>I don’t know that I am a human embodiment of it. I think that probably it helps that I’ve got pieces of everybody in me.</p><p></p><p><b>If your name were Joe Smith, mightn’t there be less enthusiasm?</b><br>You never know. The original assumption was that I could never win an election statewide with a name like Barack Obama. I actually write in the new book about a political consultant in Chicago who had originally been interested in me running statewide [who met] with me right after 9/11 and [said,] “There’s a picture of [Osama] bin Laden on the magazine cover. Boy, this is really bad for you.”</p><p><b>But it’s just the opposite, isn’t it?</b><br>You know, that’s the kind of thing that is hard to tell. It’s very hard to speculate on what’s going on. But let’s take some other examples. Deval Patrick’s victory in Massachusetts. He’s a dear friend, and I endorsed him early and campaigned for him early, and I think he embodies a different kind of politics.</p><p><b>You’d better mention </b><a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14205533/site/newsweek/"><b>Rep. Harold Ford</b></a><b>, for the Senate in Tennessee, or you are going to get in a lot of trouble with Don Imus.<br></b>I was just going to mention him. I did a fund-raiser for him in New York two days ago. In the black community there are people like Ford and Patrick and [Mayor] <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12662228/site/newsweek/"><b>Cory Booker</b></a> Newark. But it’s also in the white community. You look at somebody like [gubernatorial candidate] Eliot Spitzer, who is doing terrific work in New York. And at the other end of the geographical arena you’ve got people like Gov. [Brian] Schweitzer in Montana. What you just get a sense of is that there is a political transition that is going to happen nationally, where people try to break out of some of the conservative-liberal sharp divisions.</p><p><b>Do you worry that people are piling too many expectations and hopes on you? Some people seem to say, “OK, there is an easy answer, it’s Barack Obama.”<br></b>I go back to the quote from the speech I just gave: Justice [Louis] Brandeis saying that “the most important office in a democracy is that of citizen.” I come from a community-organizing background and a civil-rights background. I always believe that ultimately, if people are paying attention, then we get good government and good leadership. And when we get lazy, as a democracy and civically start taking shortcuts, then it results in bad government and politics.</p><p></p><p><b>But the paradox is that you’ve got this moment, this “dumb luck” to be seen by some as a vehicle for hope, but of course it’s not that simple.<br></b>These issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.</p><p><b>What is the current formulation of your answer to the question, "Are you running for president in 2008?"</b><br>I’ve said I wasn’t the day after I was elected [to the Senate]. That was almost two years ago. There is nothing so far that has changed my mind.</p><p><b>So under no circumstances would you seek or accept the 2008 Democratic nomination?</b><br>I am not prepared to say that I could never change my mind on something, but, at this juncture, I have no intentions of running.</p><p></p><p><b>Someone I know played basketball with you at Harvard Law School, and he complimented you on your game. He said you ran the floor and shared the ball. How would you describe your game?<br></b>I was a slasher—somewhere between Alan Iverson and LeBron James, but keep in mind that the gym in law school was pretty short, shorter than regulation. The last time I played was actually in Djibouti, with [U.S.] troops. I was terrific for the first five minutes.</FONT>
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<font face="arial black" size="6" color="#d90000">
A Different Kind of Politics?</font><font face="tahoma" size="4" color="#0000FF"><b>
Sen. Barack Obama believes America is ready to move beyond extreme partisan debates. Could he be the candidate to lead the way?</b></font>
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<font face="arial" size="2" color="#000000"><b>Obama: ‘There is a hunger right now for America coming together’</b></font>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial Unicode MS, Verdana, sans-serif" size="3" COLOR="#000000">
<b>WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Howard Fineman
<font color="#ff0000"><h3>Newsweek</h3></font>
Sept. 25, 2006</b>
- On the campaign trail this fall, no one is a bigger draw—especially for young voters—than <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6732724/site/newsweek/"><b>Sen.</b> <b>Barack Obama</b></a> of Illinois. Of mixed racial and religious heritage, the 45-year-old Harvard Law School graduate strikes many Americans as a one-man answer to both the "clash of civilizations" and the Red-Blue chasm in America. Last week he spoke to a packed house at a MoveOn.org event hosted by Georgetown University students in regal Gaston Hall—a favorite venue for Democrats trying out ideas for presidential campaigns. In the green room afterward, Obama sat down with NEWSWEEK chief political correspondent Howard Fineman. Obama, who has been in the Senate for less than two years, did not slam the door on what would be a daring 2008 bid. Excerpts:</p><p><b>NEWSWEEK: Your grandfather was Muslim, but you are a Christian. What did you think of the </b><a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14866559/site/newsweek/"><b>pope’s original comments</b></a><b> about Islam and how the reaction played out?</b><br><b>Barack Obama:</b> Well, I think that we live in a time where there are enormous religious sensitivities, and I have no doubt that the pope did not intend to offend the Muslim faith any more than many of us sometimes say things in a different context that aren’t intended to cause offense. But I think all of us, particularly religious leaders, have to be mindful that there are a lot of sensitivities out there. Now, the flip side is that there are those in the Muslim community who are looking to take offense and are constantly on the lookout for anything that would indicate that the West is somehow antagonistic toward Islam.</p><p><b>Did he say anything that he needed to apologize for?</b><br>You know, I leave it up to the pope. He made an apology and I wouldn’t challenge his judgment on it.</p><p><b>Did you read what he said?</b><br>I read what he said. And, as I said, I think he is mindful that he did not want to cause offense or pain, and to the extent that he did, I think he felt it necessary to apologize. My point, I guess is that all sides in the current environment have to be very careful how we talk about faith. I gave a speech recently in which I said that Democrats, for example, should not be afraid to talk about faith. But I think we’ve got to do so in a way that admits the possibility that we are not always right, that our particular faith may not have all the monopoly on truth, and we’ve got to be able to listen to other people. You know I think one of the trends we are seeing right now, and which I think is causing so much political grief both domestically and internationally, is that absolutism has become sort of the flavor of the day.</p><p><b>Have you read the Qur'an?<br></b>I can’t say that I have read all of it.</p><p></p><p><b>Have you read enough of it to have an opinion as to whether Islam is what the 14th-century Byzantine emperor said in his argument that it was, in other words, a religion of violent conquest?<br></b>I think there are so many different interpretations of Islam as there are so many different interpretations of Christianity, that to somehow fix or define a religion based on one particular reading of the text is a mistake.</p><p><b>Why did you call your new book “The Audacity of Hope”? Why is hope audacious?</b>
Because we live in some tough times. Because when you look around the world you see crisis in Darfur, you see conflagrations in the Middle East, you see political polarization at home, you’ve got environmental crisis, 46 million without health insurance, inner-city children that are trapped in despair. So you know I think it is easy sometimes to say that there is nothing much we can do about it. And you know that the title is a line that I got from a sermon my pastor gave once, which made the point that sometimes it’s easier to be cynical and give up hope. But part of our character as a nation has been a sense of optimism, a sense that we can overcome.</p><p><b>The reaction you get around the country is remarkable. Why are people reacting to you the way they are?<br></b>It’s always hard to stand outside yourself and know what it is that people are reacting to. Some of it is just dumb luck. I was elected based on a campaign that was positive and that was hopeful, and somehow it worked and it was multiracial and I got votes from farmers and I got votes from suburbanites and inner-city blacks. And I think that there is a hunger right now for America coming together, and my campaign sort of captured that wave, and I expressed it as best I could during my speech in the 2004 election and that seemed to resonate. It probably says less about me than an indication that people want a different kind of politics.</p><p><b>Is it fair to say that you are a human embodiment of the kind of unity you think people are hungering for?</b><br>I don’t know that I am a human embodiment of it. I think that probably it helps that I’ve got pieces of everybody in me.</p><p></p><p><b>If your name were Joe Smith, mightn’t there be less enthusiasm?</b><br>You never know. The original assumption was that I could never win an election statewide with a name like Barack Obama. I actually write in the new book about a political consultant in Chicago who had originally been interested in me running statewide [who met] with me right after 9/11 and [said,] “There’s a picture of [Osama] bin Laden on the magazine cover. Boy, this is really bad for you.”</p><p><b>But it’s just the opposite, isn’t it?</b><br>You know, that’s the kind of thing that is hard to tell. It’s very hard to speculate on what’s going on. But let’s take some other examples. Deval Patrick’s victory in Massachusetts. He’s a dear friend, and I endorsed him early and campaigned for him early, and I think he embodies a different kind of politics.</p><p><b>You’d better mention </b><a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14205533/site/newsweek/"><b>Rep. Harold Ford</b></a><b>, for the Senate in Tennessee, or you are going to get in a lot of trouble with Don Imus.<br></b>I was just going to mention him. I did a fund-raiser for him in New York two days ago. In the black community there are people like Ford and Patrick and [Mayor] <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12662228/site/newsweek/"><b>Cory Booker</b></a> Newark. But it’s also in the white community. You look at somebody like [gubernatorial candidate] Eliot Spitzer, who is doing terrific work in New York. And at the other end of the geographical arena you’ve got people like Gov. [Brian] Schweitzer in Montana. What you just get a sense of is that there is a political transition that is going to happen nationally, where people try to break out of some of the conservative-liberal sharp divisions.</p><p><b>Do you worry that people are piling too many expectations and hopes on you? Some people seem to say, “OK, there is an easy answer, it’s Barack Obama.”<br></b>I go back to the quote from the speech I just gave: Justice [Louis] Brandeis saying that “the most important office in a democracy is that of citizen.” I come from a community-organizing background and a civil-rights background. I always believe that ultimately, if people are paying attention, then we get good government and good leadership. And when we get lazy, as a democracy and civically start taking shortcuts, then it results in bad government and politics.</p><p></p><p><b>But the paradox is that you’ve got this moment, this “dumb luck” to be seen by some as a vehicle for hope, but of course it’s not that simple.<br></b>These issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.</p><p><b>What is the current formulation of your answer to the question, "Are you running for president in 2008?"</b><br>I’ve said I wasn’t the day after I was elected [to the Senate]. That was almost two years ago. There is nothing so far that has changed my mind.</p><p><b>So under no circumstances would you seek or accept the 2008 Democratic nomination?</b><br>I am not prepared to say that I could never change my mind on something, but, at this juncture, I have no intentions of running.</p><p></p><p><b>Someone I know played basketball with you at Harvard Law School, and he complimented you on your game. He said you ran the floor and shared the ball. How would you describe your game?<br></b>I was a slasher—somewhere between Alan Iverson and LeBron James, but keep in mind that the gym in law school was pretty short, shorter than regulation. The last time I played was actually in Djibouti, with [U.S.] troops. I was terrific for the first five minutes.</FONT>
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<font size="6"><center>The Fresh Face</font size>
<font size="4">First-term Senator Barack Obama has the charisma
and the ambition to run for President. But, as JOE KLEIN
reports from the campaign trail, he's not quite ready
to answer the tough questions</font size></center>
TIME Magazine
Posted Sunday, Oct. 15, 2006
It is 9 A.M. on a fresh, sunny Saturday in Rockford, Ill., and nearly a thousand people have gathered in the gymnasium at Rock Valley College to participate in a town meeting with their Senator, Barack Obama. It is an astonishingly large crowd for a beautiful Saturday morning, but Obama--whose new book, The Audacity of Hope, is excerpted starting on page 52--has become an American political phenomenon in what seems about a nanosecond, and the folks are giddy with anticipation. "We know he's got the charisma," says Bertha McEwing, who has lived in Rockford for more than 50 years. "We want to know if he's got the brains." Just then there is a ripple through the crowd, then gasps, cheers and applause as Obama lopes into the gym with a casual, knees-y stride. "Missed ya," he says, moving to the microphone, and he continues greeting people over raucous applause. "Tired of Washington."
There's a sly hipster syncopation to his cadence, "Been stuck there for a while." But the folksiness pretty much disappears when he starts answering questions. Obama's actual speaking style is quietly conversational, low in rhetoric-saturated fat; there is no harrumph to him. About halfway through the hour-long meeting, a middle-aged man stands up and says what seems to be on everyone's mind, with appropriate passion: "Congress hasn't done a damn thing this year. I'm tired of the politicians blaming each other. We should throw them all out and start over!"
"Including me?" the Senator asks.
A chorus of n-o-o-o-s. "Not you," the man says. "You're brand new." Obama wanders into a casual disquisition about the sluggish nature of democracy. The answer is not even remotely a standard, pretaped political response. He moves through some fairly arcane turf, talking about how political gerrymandering has led to a generation of politicians who come from safe districts where they don't have to consider the other side of the debate, which has made compromise--and therefore legislative progress--more difficult. "That's why I favored Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal last year, a nonpartisan commission to draw the congressional-district maps in California. Too bad it lost." The crowd is keeping up with Obama, listening closely as he segues into a detailed discussion of the federal budget. Eventually, he realizes he has been filibustering and apologizes to the crowd for "making a speech." No one seems to care, since Obama is doing something pretty rare in latter-day American politics: he is respecting their intelligence. He's a liberal, but not a screechy partisan. Indeed, he seems obsessively eager to find common ground with conservatives. "It's such a relief after all the screaming you see on TV," says Chuck Sweeny, political editor of the Rockford Register Star. "Obama is reaching out. He's saying the other side isn't evil. You can't imagine how powerful a message that is for an audience like this."
Obama's personal appeal is made manifest when he steps down from the podium and is swarmed by well-wishers of all ages and hues, although the difference in reaction between whites and blacks is subtly striking. The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved--quiet pride, knowing nods and be-careful-now looks. The white people, by contrast, are out of control. A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the Senator's sleeve. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I just touched a future President! I can't believe it!" She is literally shaking with delight--her voice is quivering--as she asks Obama for an autograph and then a hug.
Indeed, as we traveled that Saturday through downstate Illinois and then across the Mississippi into the mythic presidential-campaign state of Iowa, Obama seemed the political equivalent of a rainbow--a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy. Bill Gluba, a longtime Democratic activist who sells real estate on both sides of the river in the Quad Cities area, reminisced about driving Bobby Kennedy around Davenport, Iowa, on May 14, 1968. "I was just a teenaged kid," he says. "But I'll never forget the way people reacted to Kennedy. Never seen anything like it since--until this guy." The question of when Obama--who has not yet served two years in the U.S. Senate--will run for President is omnipresent. That he will eventually run, and win, is assumed by almost everyone who comes to watch him speak. In Davenport a local reporter asks the question directly: "Are you running for President in 2008?" Obama surprises me by saying he's just thinking about the 2006 election right now, which, in the semiotic dance of presidential politics, is definitely not a no. A few days later, I ask Obama the obvious follow-up question: Will he think about running for President in 2008 when the congressional election is over? "When the election is over and my book tour is done, I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband," he says carefully, and then adds, "I haven't completely decided or unraveled that puzzle yet."
Which is even closer to a yes--or, perhaps, it's just a clever strategy to gin up some publicity at the launch of his book tour. The current Obama mania is reminiscent of the Colin Powell mania of September 1995, when the general--another political rainbow--leveraged speculation that he might run for President into book sales of 2.6 million copies for his memoir, My American Journey. Powell and Obama have another thing in common: they are black people who--like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan--seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes. "It's all about gratitude," says essayist Shelby Steele, who frequently writes about the psychology of race. "White people are just thrilled when a prominent black person comes along and doesn't rub their noses in racial guilt. White people just go crazy over people like that."
Obama's personal appeal is made manifest when he steps down from the podium and is swarmed by well-wishers of all ages and hues, although the difference in reaction between whites and blacks is subtly striking. The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved--quiet pride, knowing nods and be-careful-now looks. The white people, by contrast, are out of control. A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the Senator's sleeve. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I just touched a future President! I can't believe it!" She is literally shaking with delight--her voice is quivering--as she asks Obama for an autograph and then a hug.
Indeed, as we traveled that Saturday through downstate Illinois and then across the Mississippi into the mythic presidential-campaign state of Iowa, Obama seemed the political equivalent of a rainbow--a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy. Bill Gluba, a longtime Democratic activist who sells real estate on both sides of the river in the Quad Cities area, reminisced about driving Bobby Kennedy around Davenport, Iowa, on May 14, 1968. "I was just a teenaged kid," he says. "But I'll never forget the way people reacted to Kennedy. Never seen anything like it since--until this guy." The question of when Obama--who has not yet served two years in the U.S. Senate--will run for President is omnipresent. That he will eventually run, and win, is assumed by almost everyone who comes to watch him speak. In Davenport a local reporter asks the question directly: "Are you running for President in 2008?" Obama surprises me by saying he's just thinking about the 2006 election right now, which, in the semiotic dance of presidential politics, is definitely not a no. A few days later, I ask Obama the obvious follow-up question: Will he think about running for President in 2008 when the congressional election is over? "When the election is over and my book tour is done, I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband," he says carefully, and then adds, "I haven't completely decided or unraveled that puzzle yet."
Which is even closer to a yes--or, perhaps, it's just a clever strategy to gin up some publicity at the launch of his book tour. The current Obama mania is reminiscent of the Colin Powell mania of September 1995, when the general--another political rainbow--leveraged speculation that he might run for President into book sales of 2.6 million copies for his memoir, My American Journey. Powell and Obama have another thing in common: they are black people who--like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan--seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes. "It's all about gratitude," says essayist Shelby Steele, who frequently writes about the psychology of race. "White people are just thrilled when a prominent black person comes along and doesn't rub their noses in racial guilt. White people just go crazy over people like that."
Obama's personal appeal is made manifest when he steps down from the podium and is swarmed by well-wishers of all ages and hues, although the difference in reaction between whites and blacks is subtly striking. The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved--quiet pride, knowing nods and be-careful-now looks. The white people, by contrast, are out of control. A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the Senator's sleeve. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I just touched a future President! I can't believe it!" She is literally shaking with delight--her voice is quivering--as she asks Obama for an autograph and then a hug.
Indeed, as we traveled that Saturday through downstate Illinois and then across the Mississippi into the mythic presidential-campaign state of Iowa, Obama seemed the political equivalent of a rainbow--a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy. Bill Gluba, a longtime Democratic activist who sells real estate on both sides of the river in the Quad Cities area, reminisced about driving Bobby Kennedy around Davenport, Iowa, on May 14, 1968. "I was just a teenaged kid," he says. "But I'll never forget the way people reacted to Kennedy. Never seen anything like it since--until this guy." The question of when Obama--who has not yet served two years in the U.S. Senate--will run for President is omnipresent. That he will eventually run, and win, is assumed by almost everyone who comes to watch him speak. In Davenport a local reporter asks the question directly: "Are you running for President in 2008?" Obama surprises me by saying he's just thinking about the 2006 election right now, which, in the semiotic dance of presidential politics, is definitely not a no. A few days later, I ask Obama the obvious follow-up question: Will he think about running for President in 2008 when the congressional election is over? "When the election is over and my book tour is done, I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband," he says carefully, and then adds, "I haven't completely decided or unraveled that puzzle yet."
Which is even closer to a yes--or, perhaps, it's just a clever strategy to gin up some publicity at the launch of his book tour. The current Obama mania is reminiscent of the Colin Powell mania of September 1995, when the general--another political rainbow--leveraged speculation that he might run for President into book sales of 2.6 million copies for his memoir, My American Journey. Powell and Obama have another thing in common: they are black people who--like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan--seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes. "It's all about gratitude," says essayist Shelby Steele, who frequently writes about the psychology of race. "White people are just thrilled when a prominent black person comes along and doesn't rub their noses in racial guilt. White people just go crazy over people like that."
When I asked Obama about this, he began to answer before I finished the question. "There's a core decency to the American people that doesn't get enough attention," he said, sitting in his downtown Chicago office, casually dressed in jeans and a dark blue shirt. "Figures like Oprah, Tiger, Michael Jordan give people a shortcut to express their better instincts. You can be cynical about this. You can say, It's easy to love Oprah. It's harder to embrace the idea of putting more resources into opportunities for young black men--some of whom aren't so lovable. But I don't feel that way. I think it's healthy, a good instinct. I just don't want it to stop with Oprah. I'd rather say, If you feel good about me, there's a whole lot of young men out there who could be me if given the chance."
But that's not quite true. There aren't very many people--ebony, ivory or other--who have Obama's distinctive portfolio of talents, or what he calls his "exotic" family history. His parentage was the first thing he chose to tell us about himself when he delivered his knockout keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004: his father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. He told the story in brilliant, painful detail in his first book, Dreams from My Father, which may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician. His parents met at the University of Hawaii and stayed together only briefly. His father left when Obama was 2 years old, and Barack was raised in Hawaii by his Kansas grandparents, except for a strange and adventurous four-year interlude when he lived in Indonesia with his mother and her second husband. As a teenager at Hawaii's exclusive Punahou prep school and later as a college student, Obama road tested black rage, but it was never a very good fit. There was none of the crippling psychological legacy of slavery in his family's past. He was African and American, as opposed to African American, although he certainly endured the casual cruelties of everyday life--in the new book, he speaks of white people mistaking him for a valet-parking attendant--that are visited upon nonwhites in America. "I had to reconcile a lot of different threads growing up--race, class," he told me. "For example, I was going to a fancy prep school, and my mother was on food stamps while she was getting her Ph.D." Obama believes his inability to fit neatly into any group or category explains his relentless efforts to understand and reconcile opposing views. But the tendency is so pronounced that it almost seems an obsessive-compulsive tic. I counted no fewer than 50 instances of excruciatingly judicious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handedness in The Audacity of Hope. At one point, he considers the historic influence of ideological extremists--that is, people precisely unlike him. "It has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty," he writes about the antislavery movement of the 19th century. "Knowing this, I can't summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today--the antiabortion activist ... the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory--no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty--for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute."
Yikes. But then Obama is nothing if not candid about his uncertainties and imperfections. In Dreams from My Father, which was written before he became a politician, he admits to cocaine and marijuana use and also to attending socialist meetings. In The Audacity of Hope, I counted 28 impolitic or self-deprecating admissions. Immediately, on page 3, he admits to political "restlessness," which is another way of saying he's ambitious. He flays himself for enjoying private jets, which eliminate the cramped frustrations of commercial flying but--on the other hand!--isolate him from the problems of average folks. He admits that his 2004 Senate opponent, Alan Keyes, got under his skin. He blames himself for "tensions" in his marriage; he doubts his "capacities" as a husband and father. He admits a nonpopulist affinity for Dijon mustard; he cops to being "grumpy" in the morning. He even offers his media consultant David Axelrod's opinions about the best negative TV ads that could have been used against him in the 2004 Senate campaign. (He once--accidentally, he says--voted against a bill to "protect our children from sex offenders.")
There is a method to this anguish. Self-deprecation and empathy are powerful political tools. Obama's candor is reminiscent of John McCain, who once said of his first marriage, "People wouldn't think so highly of me if they knew more about that." Obama's empathy is reminiscent of Bill Clinton, although the Senator's compassion tends to be less damp than Clinton's: it's more about understanding your argument than feeling your pain. Both those qualities have been integral to Obama's charm from the start. His Harvard Law School classmate Michael Froman told me Obama was elected president of the Law Review, the first African American to hold that prestigious position, because of his ability to win over the conservatives in their class. "It came down to Barack and a guy named David Goldberg," Froman recalls. "Most of the class were liberals, but there was a growing conservative Federalist Society presence, and there were real fights between right and left about almost every issue. Barack won the election because the conservatives thought he would take their arguments into account."
After three years as a civil rights lawyer and law professor in Chicago, Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate and quickly established himself as different from most of the other African-American legislators. "He was passionate in his views," says state senator Dave Syverson, a Republican committee chairman who worked on welfare reform with Obama. "We had some pretty fierce arguments. We went round and round about how much to spend on day care, for example. But he was not your typical party-line politician. A lot of Democrats didn't want to have any work requirement at all for people on welfare. Barack was willing to make that deal."
The raising and dashing of expectations is at the heart of almost every great political drama. In Obama's case, the expectations are ridiculous. He transcends the racial divide so effortlessly that it seems reasonable to expect that he can bridge all the other divisions--and answer all the impossible questions--plaguing American public life. He encourages those expectations by promising great things--at least, in the abstract. "This country is ready for a transformative politics of the sort that John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt represented," he told me. But those were politicians who had big ideas or were willing to take big risks, and so far, Barack Obama hasn't done much of either. With the exception of a bipartisan effort with ultra-conservative Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to publish every government contract--a matter of some embarrassment to their pork-loving colleagues--his record has been predictably liberal. And the annoying truth is, The Audacity of Hope isn't very audacious.
A few weeks ago, I watched Obama give a speech about alternative energy to an audience gathered by MoveOn.org at Georgetown University. It was supposed to be a big deal, one of three speeches MoveOn had scheduled to lay out its 2008 issues agenda, a chance for the best-known group of activist Democrats to play footsie with the party's most charismatic speaker, and vice versa. But it was a disappointment, the closest I had seen Obama come to seeming a standard-issue pol, one who declares a crisis and answers with Band-Aids. In this case, he produced a few scraggly carrots and sticks to encourage Detroit to produce more fuel-efficient cars. The audience of students and activists sensed the Senator's timidity and became palpably less enthusiastic as Obama went on. Just two days before, Al Gore gave a rousing speech in New York City in which he proposed a far more dramatic alternative energy plan: a hefty tax on fossil fuels that would be used, in turn, to reduce Social Security and Medicare taxes. I asked Obama why he didn't support an energy-tax increase married to tax relief for working Americans in the MoveOn speech or in The Audacity of Hope. "I didn't think of it," he replied, but sensing the disingenuousness of his response--talk of a gas tax is everywhere these days, especially among high-minded policy sorts--he quickly added,"I think it's a really interesting idea."
I pressed him on this. Surely he had thought about it? "Remember, the premise of this book wasn't to lay out my 10-point plan," Obama danced. "My goal was to figure out the common values that can serve as a basis for discussion." Sensing my skepticism, he tried again: "This book doesn't drill that deep in terms of policy ... There are a slew of good ideas out there. Some things end up on the cutting-room floor."
Universal health insurance also found its way to the cutting-room floor. I asked about the universal plan recently passed in Massachusetts, which was a triumph of Obama-style bipartisanship. The plan requires everyone who earns three times the poverty rate to purchase health insurance and subsidizes those who earn less than that. Shouldn't health insurance be mandatory, like auto insurance, for those who can afford it? Obama wouldn't go there. "If there's a way of doing it voluntarily, that's more consonant with the American character," he said. "If you can't solve the problem without the government stepping in, that's when you make it mandatory."
After we jousted over several other issues, Obama felt the need to step back and defend himself. "Look, when I spoke out against going to war in Iraq in 2002, Bush was at 60-65% in the polls. I was putting my viability as a U.S. Senate candidate at risk. It looks now like an easy thing to do, but it wasn't then." He's right about that: more than a few of his potential rivals for the presidency in 2008 voted, as a matter of political expediency, to give Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq. Then Obama returned to the energy issue. "When I call for increased fuel-economy standards, that doesn't sit very well with the [United Auto Workers], and they're big buddies of mine ... Look, it's just not my style to go out of my way to offend people or be controversial just for the sake of being controversial. That's offensive and counterproductive. It makes people feel defensive and more resistant to changes."
Talk about defensive: this was the first time I had ever seen Obama less than perfectly comfortable. And his discomfort exposed the elaborate intellectual balancing mechanism that he applies to every statement and gesture, to every public moment of his life. "He's working a very dangerous high-wire act," Shelby Steele told me. "He's got to keep on pleasing white folks without offending black folks, and vice versa." Indeed, Obama faces a minefield on issues like the racial gerrymandering of congressional districts and affirmative action. "You're asking him to take policy risks? Just being who he is is taking an enormous risk."
There is a certain amount of political as well as psychological wisdom to what Steele says. The most basic rule of presidential politics is that you run against your predecessor. If Obama, 45, chooses to run in 2008, his consensus seeking would stand in stark contrast not only to the hyperpartisan Bush Administration but also to the histrionic, self-important style of baby-boom-generation politicians. Or it could work against him. An old-time Chicago politician told me Obama's thoughtfulness might be a negative in a presidential campaign. "You have to convey strength," he said, "and it's hard to do that when you're giving on-the-other-hand answers."
Meanwhile, back in our interview, I offer a slightly barbed olive branch: Maybe I'm asking for too much when I expect him to be bold on the issues, I suggest. Maybe my expectations for him are too high? "No, no," he says, and returns for a third time to energy policy--to Gore's tax-swap idea. "It's a neat idea. I'm going to call Gore and have a conversation about it. It might be something I'd want to embrace."
But he's not ready to make that leap just yet. Boldness needs to be planned, not blurted--and there are all sorts of questions to ponder before he takes the next step.Would the arrogance implicit in running now, after less than one term in the Senate, undercut his carefully built reputation for judiciousness? Is the Chicago politician right about the need to be strong and simple in a run for President? Or can Obama overturn all the standard political assumptions simply by being himself? "In setting your expectations for me now, just remember I haven't announced that I'm running in 2008," he concluded. "I would expect that anyone who's running in 2008, you should have very high expectations for them."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1546362-1,00.html
<font size="4">First-term Senator Barack Obama has the charisma
and the ambition to run for President. But, as JOE KLEIN
reports from the campaign trail, he's not quite ready
to answer the tough questions</font size></center>
TIME Magazine
Posted Sunday, Oct. 15, 2006
It is 9 A.M. on a fresh, sunny Saturday in Rockford, Ill., and nearly a thousand people have gathered in the gymnasium at Rock Valley College to participate in a town meeting with their Senator, Barack Obama. It is an astonishingly large crowd for a beautiful Saturday morning, but Obama--whose new book, The Audacity of Hope, is excerpted starting on page 52--has become an American political phenomenon in what seems about a nanosecond, and the folks are giddy with anticipation. "We know he's got the charisma," says Bertha McEwing, who has lived in Rockford for more than 50 years. "We want to know if he's got the brains." Just then there is a ripple through the crowd, then gasps, cheers and applause as Obama lopes into the gym with a casual, knees-y stride. "Missed ya," he says, moving to the microphone, and he continues greeting people over raucous applause. "Tired of Washington."
There's a sly hipster syncopation to his cadence, "Been stuck there for a while." But the folksiness pretty much disappears when he starts answering questions. Obama's actual speaking style is quietly conversational, low in rhetoric-saturated fat; there is no harrumph to him. About halfway through the hour-long meeting, a middle-aged man stands up and says what seems to be on everyone's mind, with appropriate passion: "Congress hasn't done a damn thing this year. I'm tired of the politicians blaming each other. We should throw them all out and start over!"
"Including me?" the Senator asks.
A chorus of n-o-o-o-s. "Not you," the man says. "You're brand new." Obama wanders into a casual disquisition about the sluggish nature of democracy. The answer is not even remotely a standard, pretaped political response. He moves through some fairly arcane turf, talking about how political gerrymandering has led to a generation of politicians who come from safe districts where they don't have to consider the other side of the debate, which has made compromise--and therefore legislative progress--more difficult. "That's why I favored Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal last year, a nonpartisan commission to draw the congressional-district maps in California. Too bad it lost." The crowd is keeping up with Obama, listening closely as he segues into a detailed discussion of the federal budget. Eventually, he realizes he has been filibustering and apologizes to the crowd for "making a speech." No one seems to care, since Obama is doing something pretty rare in latter-day American politics: he is respecting their intelligence. He's a liberal, but not a screechy partisan. Indeed, he seems obsessively eager to find common ground with conservatives. "It's such a relief after all the screaming you see on TV," says Chuck Sweeny, political editor of the Rockford Register Star. "Obama is reaching out. He's saying the other side isn't evil. You can't imagine how powerful a message that is for an audience like this."
Obama's personal appeal is made manifest when he steps down from the podium and is swarmed by well-wishers of all ages and hues, although the difference in reaction between whites and blacks is subtly striking. The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved--quiet pride, knowing nods and be-careful-now looks. The white people, by contrast, are out of control. A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the Senator's sleeve. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I just touched a future President! I can't believe it!" She is literally shaking with delight--her voice is quivering--as she asks Obama for an autograph and then a hug.
Indeed, as we traveled that Saturday through downstate Illinois and then across the Mississippi into the mythic presidential-campaign state of Iowa, Obama seemed the political equivalent of a rainbow--a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy. Bill Gluba, a longtime Democratic activist who sells real estate on both sides of the river in the Quad Cities area, reminisced about driving Bobby Kennedy around Davenport, Iowa, on May 14, 1968. "I was just a teenaged kid," he says. "But I'll never forget the way people reacted to Kennedy. Never seen anything like it since--until this guy." The question of when Obama--who has not yet served two years in the U.S. Senate--will run for President is omnipresent. That he will eventually run, and win, is assumed by almost everyone who comes to watch him speak. In Davenport a local reporter asks the question directly: "Are you running for President in 2008?" Obama surprises me by saying he's just thinking about the 2006 election right now, which, in the semiotic dance of presidential politics, is definitely not a no. A few days later, I ask Obama the obvious follow-up question: Will he think about running for President in 2008 when the congressional election is over? "When the election is over and my book tour is done, I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband," he says carefully, and then adds, "I haven't completely decided or unraveled that puzzle yet."
Which is even closer to a yes--or, perhaps, it's just a clever strategy to gin up some publicity at the launch of his book tour. The current Obama mania is reminiscent of the Colin Powell mania of September 1995, when the general--another political rainbow--leveraged speculation that he might run for President into book sales of 2.6 million copies for his memoir, My American Journey. Powell and Obama have another thing in common: they are black people who--like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan--seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes. "It's all about gratitude," says essayist Shelby Steele, who frequently writes about the psychology of race. "White people are just thrilled when a prominent black person comes along and doesn't rub their noses in racial guilt. White people just go crazy over people like that."
Obama's personal appeal is made manifest when he steps down from the podium and is swarmed by well-wishers of all ages and hues, although the difference in reaction between whites and blacks is subtly striking. The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved--quiet pride, knowing nods and be-careful-now looks. The white people, by contrast, are out of control. A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the Senator's sleeve. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I just touched a future President! I can't believe it!" She is literally shaking with delight--her voice is quivering--as she asks Obama for an autograph and then a hug.
Indeed, as we traveled that Saturday through downstate Illinois and then across the Mississippi into the mythic presidential-campaign state of Iowa, Obama seemed the political equivalent of a rainbow--a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy. Bill Gluba, a longtime Democratic activist who sells real estate on both sides of the river in the Quad Cities area, reminisced about driving Bobby Kennedy around Davenport, Iowa, on May 14, 1968. "I was just a teenaged kid," he says. "But I'll never forget the way people reacted to Kennedy. Never seen anything like it since--until this guy." The question of when Obama--who has not yet served two years in the U.S. Senate--will run for President is omnipresent. That he will eventually run, and win, is assumed by almost everyone who comes to watch him speak. In Davenport a local reporter asks the question directly: "Are you running for President in 2008?" Obama surprises me by saying he's just thinking about the 2006 election right now, which, in the semiotic dance of presidential politics, is definitely not a no. A few days later, I ask Obama the obvious follow-up question: Will he think about running for President in 2008 when the congressional election is over? "When the election is over and my book tour is done, I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband," he says carefully, and then adds, "I haven't completely decided or unraveled that puzzle yet."
Which is even closer to a yes--or, perhaps, it's just a clever strategy to gin up some publicity at the launch of his book tour. The current Obama mania is reminiscent of the Colin Powell mania of September 1995, when the general--another political rainbow--leveraged speculation that he might run for President into book sales of 2.6 million copies for his memoir, My American Journey. Powell and Obama have another thing in common: they are black people who--like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan--seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes. "It's all about gratitude," says essayist Shelby Steele, who frequently writes about the psychology of race. "White people are just thrilled when a prominent black person comes along and doesn't rub their noses in racial guilt. White people just go crazy over people like that."
Obama's personal appeal is made manifest when he steps down from the podium and is swarmed by well-wishers of all ages and hues, although the difference in reaction between whites and blacks is subtly striking. The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved--quiet pride, knowing nods and be-careful-now looks. The white people, by contrast, are out of control. A nurse named Greta, just off a 12-hour shift, tentatively reaches out to touch the Senator's sleeve. "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! I just touched a future President! I can't believe it!" She is literally shaking with delight--her voice is quivering--as she asks Obama for an autograph and then a hug.
Indeed, as we traveled that Saturday through downstate Illinois and then across the Mississippi into the mythic presidential-campaign state of Iowa, Obama seemed the political equivalent of a rainbow--a sudden preternatural event inspiring awe and ecstasy. Bill Gluba, a longtime Democratic activist who sells real estate on both sides of the river in the Quad Cities area, reminisced about driving Bobby Kennedy around Davenport, Iowa, on May 14, 1968. "I was just a teenaged kid," he says. "But I'll never forget the way people reacted to Kennedy. Never seen anything like it since--until this guy." The question of when Obama--who has not yet served two years in the U.S. Senate--will run for President is omnipresent. That he will eventually run, and win, is assumed by almost everyone who comes to watch him speak. In Davenport a local reporter asks the question directly: "Are you running for President in 2008?" Obama surprises me by saying he's just thinking about the 2006 election right now, which, in the semiotic dance of presidential politics, is definitely not a no. A few days later, I ask Obama the obvious follow-up question: Will he think about running for President in 2008 when the congressional election is over? "When the election is over and my book tour is done, I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband," he says carefully, and then adds, "I haven't completely decided or unraveled that puzzle yet."
Which is even closer to a yes--or, perhaps, it's just a clever strategy to gin up some publicity at the launch of his book tour. The current Obama mania is reminiscent of the Colin Powell mania of September 1995, when the general--another political rainbow--leveraged speculation that he might run for President into book sales of 2.6 million copies for his memoir, My American Journey. Powell and Obama have another thing in common: they are black people who--like Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan--seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes. "It's all about gratitude," says essayist Shelby Steele, who frequently writes about the psychology of race. "White people are just thrilled when a prominent black person comes along and doesn't rub their noses in racial guilt. White people just go crazy over people like that."
When I asked Obama about this, he began to answer before I finished the question. "There's a core decency to the American people that doesn't get enough attention," he said, sitting in his downtown Chicago office, casually dressed in jeans and a dark blue shirt. "Figures like Oprah, Tiger, Michael Jordan give people a shortcut to express their better instincts. You can be cynical about this. You can say, It's easy to love Oprah. It's harder to embrace the idea of putting more resources into opportunities for young black men--some of whom aren't so lovable. But I don't feel that way. I think it's healthy, a good instinct. I just don't want it to stop with Oprah. I'd rather say, If you feel good about me, there's a whole lot of young men out there who could be me if given the chance."
But that's not quite true. There aren't very many people--ebony, ivory or other--who have Obama's distinctive portfolio of talents, or what he calls his "exotic" family history. His parentage was the first thing he chose to tell us about himself when he delivered his knockout keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004: his father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. He told the story in brilliant, painful detail in his first book, Dreams from My Father, which may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician. His parents met at the University of Hawaii and stayed together only briefly. His father left when Obama was 2 years old, and Barack was raised in Hawaii by his Kansas grandparents, except for a strange and adventurous four-year interlude when he lived in Indonesia with his mother and her second husband. As a teenager at Hawaii's exclusive Punahou prep school and later as a college student, Obama road tested black rage, but it was never a very good fit. There was none of the crippling psychological legacy of slavery in his family's past. He was African and American, as opposed to African American, although he certainly endured the casual cruelties of everyday life--in the new book, he speaks of white people mistaking him for a valet-parking attendant--that are visited upon nonwhites in America. "I had to reconcile a lot of different threads growing up--race, class," he told me. "For example, I was going to a fancy prep school, and my mother was on food stamps while she was getting her Ph.D." Obama believes his inability to fit neatly into any group or category explains his relentless efforts to understand and reconcile opposing views. But the tendency is so pronounced that it almost seems an obsessive-compulsive tic. I counted no fewer than 50 instances of excruciatingly judicious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-handedness in The Audacity of Hope. At one point, he considers the historic influence of ideological extremists--that is, people precisely unlike him. "It has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty," he writes about the antislavery movement of the 19th century. "Knowing this, I can't summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today--the antiabortion activist ... the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory--no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty--for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute."
Yikes. But then Obama is nothing if not candid about his uncertainties and imperfections. In Dreams from My Father, which was written before he became a politician, he admits to cocaine and marijuana use and also to attending socialist meetings. In The Audacity of Hope, I counted 28 impolitic or self-deprecating admissions. Immediately, on page 3, he admits to political "restlessness," which is another way of saying he's ambitious. He flays himself for enjoying private jets, which eliminate the cramped frustrations of commercial flying but--on the other hand!--isolate him from the problems of average folks. He admits that his 2004 Senate opponent, Alan Keyes, got under his skin. He blames himself for "tensions" in his marriage; he doubts his "capacities" as a husband and father. He admits a nonpopulist affinity for Dijon mustard; he cops to being "grumpy" in the morning. He even offers his media consultant David Axelrod's opinions about the best negative TV ads that could have been used against him in the 2004 Senate campaign. (He once--accidentally, he says--voted against a bill to "protect our children from sex offenders.")
There is a method to this anguish. Self-deprecation and empathy are powerful political tools. Obama's candor is reminiscent of John McCain, who once said of his first marriage, "People wouldn't think so highly of me if they knew more about that." Obama's empathy is reminiscent of Bill Clinton, although the Senator's compassion tends to be less damp than Clinton's: it's more about understanding your argument than feeling your pain. Both those qualities have been integral to Obama's charm from the start. His Harvard Law School classmate Michael Froman told me Obama was elected president of the Law Review, the first African American to hold that prestigious position, because of his ability to win over the conservatives in their class. "It came down to Barack and a guy named David Goldberg," Froman recalls. "Most of the class were liberals, but there was a growing conservative Federalist Society presence, and there were real fights between right and left about almost every issue. Barack won the election because the conservatives thought he would take their arguments into account."
After three years as a civil rights lawyer and law professor in Chicago, Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate and quickly established himself as different from most of the other African-American legislators. "He was passionate in his views," says state senator Dave Syverson, a Republican committee chairman who worked on welfare reform with Obama. "We had some pretty fierce arguments. We went round and round about how much to spend on day care, for example. But he was not your typical party-line politician. A lot of Democrats didn't want to have any work requirement at all for people on welfare. Barack was willing to make that deal."
The raising and dashing of expectations is at the heart of almost every great political drama. In Obama's case, the expectations are ridiculous. He transcends the racial divide so effortlessly that it seems reasonable to expect that he can bridge all the other divisions--and answer all the impossible questions--plaguing American public life. He encourages those expectations by promising great things--at least, in the abstract. "This country is ready for a transformative politics of the sort that John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt represented," he told me. But those were politicians who had big ideas or were willing to take big risks, and so far, Barack Obama hasn't done much of either. With the exception of a bipartisan effort with ultra-conservative Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to publish every government contract--a matter of some embarrassment to their pork-loving colleagues--his record has been predictably liberal. And the annoying truth is, The Audacity of Hope isn't very audacious.
A few weeks ago, I watched Obama give a speech about alternative energy to an audience gathered by MoveOn.org at Georgetown University. It was supposed to be a big deal, one of three speeches MoveOn had scheduled to lay out its 2008 issues agenda, a chance for the best-known group of activist Democrats to play footsie with the party's most charismatic speaker, and vice versa. But it was a disappointment, the closest I had seen Obama come to seeming a standard-issue pol, one who declares a crisis and answers with Band-Aids. In this case, he produced a few scraggly carrots and sticks to encourage Detroit to produce more fuel-efficient cars. The audience of students and activists sensed the Senator's timidity and became palpably less enthusiastic as Obama went on. Just two days before, Al Gore gave a rousing speech in New York City in which he proposed a far more dramatic alternative energy plan: a hefty tax on fossil fuels that would be used, in turn, to reduce Social Security and Medicare taxes. I asked Obama why he didn't support an energy-tax increase married to tax relief for working Americans in the MoveOn speech or in The Audacity of Hope. "I didn't think of it," he replied, but sensing the disingenuousness of his response--talk of a gas tax is everywhere these days, especially among high-minded policy sorts--he quickly added,"I think it's a really interesting idea."
I pressed him on this. Surely he had thought about it? "Remember, the premise of this book wasn't to lay out my 10-point plan," Obama danced. "My goal was to figure out the common values that can serve as a basis for discussion." Sensing my skepticism, he tried again: "This book doesn't drill that deep in terms of policy ... There are a slew of good ideas out there. Some things end up on the cutting-room floor."
Universal health insurance also found its way to the cutting-room floor. I asked about the universal plan recently passed in Massachusetts, which was a triumph of Obama-style bipartisanship. The plan requires everyone who earns three times the poverty rate to purchase health insurance and subsidizes those who earn less than that. Shouldn't health insurance be mandatory, like auto insurance, for those who can afford it? Obama wouldn't go there. "If there's a way of doing it voluntarily, that's more consonant with the American character," he said. "If you can't solve the problem without the government stepping in, that's when you make it mandatory."
After we jousted over several other issues, Obama felt the need to step back and defend himself. "Look, when I spoke out against going to war in Iraq in 2002, Bush was at 60-65% in the polls. I was putting my viability as a U.S. Senate candidate at risk. It looks now like an easy thing to do, but it wasn't then." He's right about that: more than a few of his potential rivals for the presidency in 2008 voted, as a matter of political expediency, to give Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq. Then Obama returned to the energy issue. "When I call for increased fuel-economy standards, that doesn't sit very well with the [United Auto Workers], and they're big buddies of mine ... Look, it's just not my style to go out of my way to offend people or be controversial just for the sake of being controversial. That's offensive and counterproductive. It makes people feel defensive and more resistant to changes."
Talk about defensive: this was the first time I had ever seen Obama less than perfectly comfortable. And his discomfort exposed the elaborate intellectual balancing mechanism that he applies to every statement and gesture, to every public moment of his life. "He's working a very dangerous high-wire act," Shelby Steele told me. "He's got to keep on pleasing white folks without offending black folks, and vice versa." Indeed, Obama faces a minefield on issues like the racial gerrymandering of congressional districts and affirmative action. "You're asking him to take policy risks? Just being who he is is taking an enormous risk."
There is a certain amount of political as well as psychological wisdom to what Steele says. The most basic rule of presidential politics is that you run against your predecessor. If Obama, 45, chooses to run in 2008, his consensus seeking would stand in stark contrast not only to the hyperpartisan Bush Administration but also to the histrionic, self-important style of baby-boom-generation politicians. Or it could work against him. An old-time Chicago politician told me Obama's thoughtfulness might be a negative in a presidential campaign. "You have to convey strength," he said, "and it's hard to do that when you're giving on-the-other-hand answers."
Meanwhile, back in our interview, I offer a slightly barbed olive branch: Maybe I'm asking for too much when I expect him to be bold on the issues, I suggest. Maybe my expectations for him are too high? "No, no," he says, and returns for a third time to energy policy--to Gore's tax-swap idea. "It's a neat idea. I'm going to call Gore and have a conversation about it. It might be something I'd want to embrace."
But he's not ready to make that leap just yet. Boldness needs to be planned, not blurted--and there are all sorts of questions to ponder before he takes the next step.Would the arrogance implicit in running now, after less than one term in the Senate, undercut his carefully built reputation for judiciousness? Is the Chicago politician right about the need to be strong and simple in a run for President? Or can Obama overturn all the standard political assumptions simply by being himself? "In setting your expectations for me now, just remember I haven't announced that I'm running in 2008," he concluded. "I would expect that anyone who's running in 2008, you should have very high expectations for them."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1546362-1,00.html
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Run, Barack, Run
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<b>by David Brooks
October 19, 2006</b>
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...nQ20Q22.Q20Q22HQ20ljIBIlBQ20Q22HLTllhtg,Q7B89
Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in the party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama.
Second, he should run because of his age. Obama's inexperience is his most obvious shortcoming. Over the next four years, the world could face a genocidal civil war in Iraq, a wave of nuclear proliferation, more Islamic extremism and a demagogues' revolt against globalization. Do we really want a forty-something in the White House?
And yet in his new book, ''The Audacity of Hope,'' Obama makes a strong counterargument. He notes that it's time to move beyond the political style of the baby boom generation. This is a style, he said in an interview late Tuesday, that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad.
Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal discussion between different pieces of his hybrid self -- Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago -- and he takes that conversation outward into the world.
''Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality,'' he writes in his book. He distrusts righteous anger and zeal. He does not demonize his opponents and tells audiences that he does not think George Bush is a bad man.
He has a compulsive tendency to see both sides of any issue. Joe Klein of Time counted 50 instances of extremely judicious on-the-one-hand-on the-other-hand formulations in the book. He seems like the guy who spends his first 15 minutes at a restaurant debating the relative merits of fish versus meat.
And yet this style is surely the antidote to the politics of the past several years. It is surely true that a president who brings a deliberative style to the White House will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.
During our talk, I reminded Obama that at some level politics is about power, not conversation. He pointed out that he'd risen from nothing to national prominence in a few years so he knew something about acquiring power, but he kept returning to his mode, which is conversation, deliberation and reconciliation.
The third reason Obama should run for president is his worldview. At least in the way he conceptualizes the world, he is not an orthodox liberal. In the book, he harks back to a Hamiltonian tradition that calls not for big government, but for limited yet energetic government to enhance social mobility. The contemporary guru he cites most is Warren Buffett.
He has interesting things to say about the way culture and economics intertwine to create urban poverty. He, conceptually, welcomes free trade and thinks the U.S. may have no choice but to improvise and slog it out in Iraq.
The chief problem in his book is that after launching off on some interesting description of a problem, he will settle back, when it comes time to make a policy suggestion, into a familiar and small-bore Democratic proposal. I'd give him an A for conception but a B-minus for policy creativity.
Obama, who is nothing if not honest about himself, is aware of the problem, and has various explanations for it. And what matters at this point is not his platform, but the play of his mind. He is one of those progressives, like Gordon Brown in Britain, who is thinking about the challenges of globalization outside the normal cliches.
Coming from my own perspective, I should note that I disagree with many of Obama's notions and could well end up agreeing more with one of his opponents. But anyone who's observed him closely can see that Obama is a new kind of politician. As Klein once observed, he's that rarest of creatures: a megahyped phenomenon that lives up to the hype.
It may not be personally convenient for him, but the times will never again so completely require the gifts that he possesses. Whether you're liberal or conservative, you should hope Barack Obama runs for president.
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Obama's Project Runway
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<b>by Maureen Dowd
October 21 2006</b>
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...xwwFvn33Q27vh3vnhvwaQ5EQ5DQ5EwQ5DvnhAwHAYeFTU
So the question before us is, should Barack Obama stop lounging around in fashion magazines and do some honest work, like running for president?
How will we ever persuade him to give up his modeling gigs in Men's Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Washington Life? How can we lure the lanky young senator from Illinois out of the glossy celebrity pages and back to gritty substance, away from Annie Leibovitz's camera and back to Abraham Lincoln's tradition? He may not want to come back, now that he has mastered that J.F.K. casual glamour pose in shirt sleeves and tie, suit jacket slung over his shoulder, elegant wife and pretty children accessorizing.
The Washington Post's fashion reporter, Robin Givhan, analyzed the Men's Vogue spread, with its ''touch football'' aura: ''Obama is pictured in warm light or soft focus. He is pondering, nurturing, working. But never glad-handing, pontificating or fund-raising. The pictures celebrate the idea of Obama rather than the reality of politics.''
Why should the 45-year-old senator tackle reality in a city that has forsworn it altogether? And why not join the catwalk of Democratic hotties? The Washington Post reported that the Democrats were ''fielding an uncommonly high number of uncommonly good-looking candidates.'' Young and cute, as the party campaign honcho Rahm Emanuel wryly told me, could be a refreshing change from ''Hastert, Rumsfeld and Cheney, who look like the retirees from 'Goodfellas.' ''
Mr. Obama's main accomplishment so far is sending a chill through Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' dreaded eventuality. It must certainly be more fun cavorting on a cover with Eva Longoria than caucusing in the Capitol with Harry Reid. Working on legislation can be so tedious, compared with a 13-city book tour in which you are feted as the liberal hunk of the 21st century, generating buzz about your future instead of the country's.
Mr. Obama, who fears being seen as fluffy and who has been known to mock pretty boys in his party, never seems to take off his makeup these days, as he pads from one soft perch to the next, from Oprah to Meredith to Larry. The first black president of the Harvard Law Review is spending too much time in green rooms.
He also logs a lot of time at the gym. (You never know when Anna Wintour will call.) It is the only thing this intellectually nimble, preternaturally articulate smarty-pants has in common with W.
''Politics sometimes blends in with celebrity,'' he told Oprah this week. ''And it gobbles you up because the tendency is for people to want to see you perform and say what they want to hear, as opposed to you trying to stay in touch with, you know, that deepest part of you, that kernel of truth inside.'' Doesn't he see that when you express this skepticism on Oprah it is not skepticism at all?
Haven't we seen this tease before? Before the 1996 campaign, Colin Powell scared the bejesus out of Hillary's husband by showing a fair amount of leg on his book tour. He sold 2.6 million books and was hugely popular, but caution crimped him. He never ran for president, and when he went to the State Department he never stood up to the forces of darkness.
Senator Obama's caution, too, may cause him to miss the moment. Like Alma Powell, Michelle Obama is afraid for her husband to run.
After 16 years of polarizing presidents driving them crazy, Americans will be yearning for someone as soothing as Obama. (''No one is exempt,'' he writes in one of many platitudes in his new book, ''from the call to find common ground.'') He is so hot now that tickets to his political events are being sought, at scalpers' prices, on Craig's List.
His appeal combines the political ability -- alien to the Bush administration -- to see something from your opponent's point of view with the cool detachment of a J.F.K. He's intriguingly imperfect: His ears stick out, he smokes, and he's written about wrestling with pot, booze and ''maybe a little blow'' as a young man.
He has been told by Democratic leaders to think about whether he really wants to be president, or whether he's just getting swept away by people who want him to do it. (That's a distinction that entitled and unqualified Republican WASPs like W. and Dan Quayle never bother to make, simply learning -- or not learning -- on the job.)
Does Barack Obama want to be a celebrity or a man of history -- or is there no longer any difference?
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Obama Is Not a Miracle Elixir
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<b>by Frank Rich
October 22, 2006</b>
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...MMkQ25-MQ25IIQ254D1A14AQ25IIT1Q5BQ3DQ2FQ3D8cu
THE Democrats are so brilliant at yanking defeat from the jaws of victory that it still seems unimaginable that they might win on Nov. 7. But even the most congenital skeptic has to face that possibility now. Things have gotten so bad for the Republicans that were President Bush to unveil Osama bin Laden's corpse in the Rose Garden, some reporter would instantly check to see if his last meal had been on Jack Abramoff's tab.
With an approval rating of 16 percent -- 16! -- in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Congress has matched the Democrats of 1994 or, for that matter, Michael Jackson during his own version of Foleygate. As for Mr. Bush, he is once more hiding behind children in an elementary school, as he did last week when the monthly death toll for Americans in Iraq approached a nearly two-year high. And where else could he go? Some top Republican Congressional candidates in the red state he was visiting, North Carolina, would not appear with him. When the president did find a grateful campaign mate at his next stop, Pennsylvania, it was the married congressman who paid $5.5 million to settle a lawsuit by a mistress who accused him of throttling her.
Maybe the Democrats can blow 2006 as they did 2004, but not without herculean effort. As George Will memorably wrote, if they can't at least win back the House under these conditions, ''they should go into another line of work.''
The tough question is not whether the Democrats can win, but what will happen if they do win. The party's message in this campaign has offered no vision beyond bashing Mr. Bush and pledging to revisit the scandals and the disastrous legislation that went down on his watch. Last spring Nancy Pelosi did promote a ''New Direction for America'' full of golden oldies -- raising the minimum wage, enacting lobbying reform, cutting Medicare drug costs, etc. She promised that Democrats would ''own August'' by staging 250 campaign events to publicize it. But this rollout caused so few ripples that its participants might as well have been in the witness protection program. Meanwhile, it was up to John Murtha, a congressman with no presidential ambitions, to goad his peers to start focusing on a specific Iraq exit strategy.
Enter Barack Obama. To understand the hysteria about a Democratic senator who has not yet served two years and is mainly known for a single speech at the 2004 convention, you have to appreciate just how desperate the Democrats are for a panacea for all their ills. In the many glossy cover articles about Obamamania, the only real suspense is whether a Jack or Bobby Kennedy analogy will be made in the second paragraph or the fifth. Men's Vogue (cover by Annie Leibovitz) went so far as to say that the Illinois senator ''alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath'' as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Why not throw in Mark Twain and Sammy Davis Jr.?
This is a lot to put on the shoulders of anyone, even someone as impressive as Mr. Obama. Though he remains a modest and self-effacing guy from all appearances, he is encouraging the speculation about seeking higher office -- and not as a coy Colin Powell-style maneuver to sell his new book, ''The Audacity of Hope.'' Mr. Obama hasn't been turning up in Iowa for the corn dogs. He consistently concedes he's entertaining the prospect of a presidential run.
There's no reason to rush that decision now, but it's a no-brainer. Of course he should run, assuming his family is on the same page. He's 45, not 30, and his slender resume in public office (which also includes seven years as a state senator) should be no more of an impediment to him than it was to the White House's current occupant. As his Illinois colleague Dick Durbin told The Chicago Tribune last week, ''I said to him, 'Do you really think sticking around the Senate for four more years and casting a thousand more votes will make you more qualified for president?' '' Instead, such added experience is more likely to transform an unusually eloquent writer, speaker and public servant into another windbag like Joe Biden.
The more important issue is not whether Mr. Obama will seek the presidency, but what kind of candidate he would be. If the Democratic Party is to be more than a throw-out-Bush party, it can't settle for yet again repackaging its well-worn ideas, however worthy, with a new slogan containing the word ''New.'' It needs a major infusion of steadfast leadership. That's the one lesson it should learn from George Bush. Call him arrogant or misguided or foolish, this president has been a leader. He had a controversial agenda -- enacting big tax cuts, privatizing Social Security, waging ''pre-emptive'' war, packing the courts with judges who support his elisions of constitutional rights -- and he didn't fudge it. He didn't care if half the country despised him along the way.
The interminable Iraq fiasco has branded the Democrats as the party of fecklessness. The failure of its leaders to challenge the administration's blatant propaganda to gin up the war is a failure of historic proportions (as it was for much of the press and liberal punditry). When Tom Daschle, then the Senate leader, presided over the rushed passing of the war resolution before the 2002 midterms, he explained that the ''bottom line'' was for Democrats ''to move on''; they couldn't wait to campaign on the economy. The party's subsequent loss of the Senate did not prevent it two years later from nominating a candidate who voted for the war's funding before he voted against it.
What makes the liberal establishment's crush on Mr. Obama disconcerting is that it too often sees him as a love child of a pollster's focus group: a one-man Benetton ad who can be all things to all people. He's black and he's white. He's both of immigrant stock (Kenya) and the American heartland (Kansas, yet). He speaks openly about his faith without disowning evolution. He has both gravitas and unpretentious humor. He was the editor of The Harvard Law Review and also won a Grammy (for the audiobook of his touching memoir, ''Dreams From My Father''). He exudes perfection but has owned up to youthful indiscretions with drugs. He is post-boomer and post-civil-rights-movement. He is Bill Clinton without the baggage, a fail-safe 21st-century bridge from ''A Place Called Hope'' to ''The Audacity of Hope.''
Mr. Obama has offended no one (a silly tiff with John McCain excepted). Search right-wing blogs and you'll find none of the invective showered on other liberal Democrats in general and black liberal leaders in particular. What little criticism Mr. Obama has received is from those in his own camp who find him cautious to a fault, especially on issues that might cause controversy. The sum of all his terrific parts, this theory goes, may be less than the whole: another Democrat who won't tell you what day it is before calling a consultant, another human weather vane who waits to see which way the wind is blowing before taking a stand.
That has been the Democrats' fatal malady, but it's way too early and there's too little evidence to say Mr. Obama has been infected by it. If he is conciliatory by nature and eager to entertain adversaries' views in good faith, that's not necessarily a fault, particularly in these poisonous times. The question is whether Mr. Obama will stick up for core principles when tested and get others to follow him.
That's why it's important to remember that on one true test for his party, Iraq, he was consistent from the start. On the long trail to a hotly competitive senatorial primary in Illinois, he repeatedly questioned the rationale for the war before it began, finally to protest it at a large rally in Chicago on the eve of the invasion. He judged Saddam to pose no immediate threat to America and argued for containment over a war he would soon label ''dumb'' and ''political-driven.'' He hasn't changed. In his new book, he gives a specific date (the end of this year) for beginning ''a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops'' and doesn't seem to care who calls it ''cut and run.''
Contrast this with Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, who last week said that failed American policy in Iraq should be revisited if there's no improvement in ''maybe 60 to 90 days.'' This might qualify as leadership, even at this late date, if only John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, hadn't proposed exactly the same time frame for a re-evaluation of the war almost a week before she did.
The Democrats may well win on Election Day this year. But one of their best hopes for long-term viability in the post-Bush era is that Barack Obama steps up and changes the party before the party of terminal timidity and equivocation changes him.
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The Obama Bandwagon
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<b>by Bob Herbert
October 23, 2006</b>
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...TQ7DMTQ2FYT.VLbL.bTQ2FYQ3BDmQ20DmiQ60Q3BiQ5CO
The capacity crowd on a rainy night at the John F. Kennedy Library couldn't have been happier. The guest of honor had been born the same year that J.F.K. was inaugurated, and now he was generating the kind of political delirium we have tended to associate with the Kennedys.
I was the interviewer that night, and as I arrived in a cab outside the library, the driver said, ''Who's on the program?'' When I said, ''Barack Obama,'' the driver replied, ''Oh, our next president.''
It's a measure of how starved the country is for a sensible, appealing, intelligent, trustworthy leader that a man who until just a couple of years ago was an obscure state senator in Illinois is now suddenly, in the view of an awful lot of voters, the person we should install in the White House.
At the Kennedy Library forum on Friday night, Mr. Obama declined to rule out a run for the White House in 2008. In an appearance on ''Meet the Press'' yesterday, he made it clear that he was considering such a run.
With all due respect to Senator Obama, this is disturbing. He may be capable of being a great president. Someday. But one quick look around at the state of the nation and the world tells us that we need to be more careful than we have been in selecting our leaders. There shouldn't be anything precipitous about the way we pick our presidents.
That said, the Barack Obama boom may well have legs. During the forum, every reference to the possibility of him running drew a roar from the audience. He's thoughtful, funny and charismatic. And there is not the slightest ripple of a doubt that he wants to run for president.
The reason he went into politics, he said, was to be able to influence events, to make a difference. ''Obviously,'' he added, ''the president has the most influence.''
I asked what thoughts run through his mind when he thinks about himself and the presidency. He said: ''That office is so different from any other office on the planet, you have to understand that if you seek that office you have to be prepared to give your life to it. How I think about it is that you don't make that decision unless you are prepared to make that sacrifice, that trade-off.
''What's difficult and important for somebody like myself, who has a wonderful, forbearing wife and two gorgeous young children, is that they end up having to make some of those sacrifices with you. And that's a profound decision that we won't make lightly.''
I asked if he could imagine himself, at some point, making the kind of commitment he described. He said that he could, and the crowd erupted.
I asked if he might run in 2008. He said he was focused on the coming Congressional elections.
''So you have not ruled it out,'' I said.
''We'll leave it there,'' he said.
The giddiness surrounding the Obama phenomenon seems to be an old-fashioned mixture of fun, excitement and a great deal of hope. His smile is electric, and when he laughs people tend to laugh with him. He's the kind of politician who makes people feel good.
But the giddiness is crying out for a reality check. There's a reason why so many Republicans are saying nice things about Mr. Obama, and urging him to run. They would like nothing more than for the Democrats to nominate a candidate in 2008 who has a very slender resume, very little experience in national politics, hardly any in foreign policy -- and who also happens to be black.
The Republicans may be in deep trouble, but they believe they could pretty easily put together a ticket that would chew up Barack Obama in 2008.
My feeling is that Senator Obama may well be the real deal. If I were advising him, I would tell him not to move too fast. With a few more years in the Senate, possibly with a powerful committee chairmanship if the Democrats take control, he could build a formidable record and develop the kind of toughness and savvy that are essential in the ugly and brutal combat of a presidential campaign.
After the interview at the Kennedy Library, hundreds of people lined up to have copies of Mr. Obama's book, ''The Audacity of Hope,'' autographed. He signed as many as he could. Then he shook hands with everyone who remained and assured them that he would have their books delivered to his hotel, where he would sign them later that night.
He's 45. There's no hurry. He should take all the time he needs.
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Run, Barack, Run
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<b>by David Brooks
October 19, 2006</b>
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...nQ20Q22.Q20Q22HQ20ljIBIlBQ20Q22HLTllhtg,Q7B89
Barack Obama should run for president.
He should run first for the good of his party. It would demoralize the Democrats to go through a long primary season with the most exciting figure in the party looming off in the distance like some unapproachable dream. The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama.
Second, he should run because of his age. Obama's inexperience is his most obvious shortcoming. Over the next four years, the world could face a genocidal civil war in Iraq, a wave of nuclear proliferation, more Islamic extremism and a demagogues' revolt against globalization. Do we really want a forty-something in the White House?
And yet in his new book, ''The Audacity of Hope,'' Obama makes a strong counterargument. He notes that it's time to move beyond the political style of the baby boom generation. This is a style, he said in an interview late Tuesday, that is highly moralistic and personal, dividing people between who is good and who is bad.
Obama himself has a mentality formed by globalization, not the S.D.S. With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama. He is perpetually engaged in an internal discussion between different pieces of his hybrid self -- Kenya with Harvard, Kansas with the South Side of Chicago -- and he takes that conversation outward into the world.
''Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality,'' he writes in his book. He distrusts righteous anger and zeal. He does not demonize his opponents and tells audiences that he does not think George Bush is a bad man.
He has a compulsive tendency to see both sides of any issue. Joe Klein of Time counted 50 instances of extremely judicious on-the-one-hand-on the-other-hand formulations in the book. He seems like the guy who spends his first 15 minutes at a restaurant debating the relative merits of fish versus meat.
And yet this style is surely the antidote to the politics of the past several years. It is surely true that a president who brings a deliberative style to the White House will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.
During our talk, I reminded Obama that at some level politics is about power, not conversation. He pointed out that he'd risen from nothing to national prominence in a few years so he knew something about acquiring power, but he kept returning to his mode, which is conversation, deliberation and reconciliation.
The third reason Obama should run for president is his worldview. At least in the way he conceptualizes the world, he is not an orthodox liberal. In the book, he harks back to a Hamiltonian tradition that calls not for big government, but for limited yet energetic government to enhance social mobility. The contemporary guru he cites most is Warren Buffett.
He has interesting things to say about the way culture and economics intertwine to create urban poverty. He, conceptually, welcomes free trade and thinks the U.S. may have no choice but to improvise and slog it out in Iraq.
The chief problem in his book is that after launching off on some interesting description of a problem, he will settle back, when it comes time to make a policy suggestion, into a familiar and small-bore Democratic proposal. I'd give him an A for conception but a B-minus for policy creativity.
Obama, who is nothing if not honest about himself, is aware of the problem, and has various explanations for it. And what matters at this point is not his platform, but the play of his mind. He is one of those progressives, like Gordon Brown in Britain, who is thinking about the challenges of globalization outside the normal cliches.
Coming from my own perspective, I should note that I disagree with many of Obama's notions and could well end up agreeing more with one of his opponents. But anyone who's observed him closely can see that Obama is a new kind of politician. As Klein once observed, he's that rarest of creatures: a megahyped phenomenon that lives up to the hype.
It may not be personally convenient for him, but the times will never again so completely require the gifts that he possesses. Whether you're liberal or conservative, you should hope Barack Obama runs for president.
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Obama's Project Runway
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<b>by Maureen Dowd
October 21 2006</b>
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...xwwFvn33Q27vh3vnhvwaQ5EQ5DQ5EwQ5DvnhAwHAYeFTU
So the question before us is, should Barack Obama stop lounging around in fashion magazines and do some honest work, like running for president?
How will we ever persuade him to give up his modeling gigs in Men's Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Washington Life? How can we lure the lanky young senator from Illinois out of the glossy celebrity pages and back to gritty substance, away from Annie Leibovitz's camera and back to Abraham Lincoln's tradition? He may not want to come back, now that he has mastered that J.F.K. casual glamour pose in shirt sleeves and tie, suit jacket slung over his shoulder, elegant wife and pretty children accessorizing.
The Washington Post's fashion reporter, Robin Givhan, analyzed the Men's Vogue spread, with its ''touch football'' aura: ''Obama is pictured in warm light or soft focus. He is pondering, nurturing, working. But never glad-handing, pontificating or fund-raising. The pictures celebrate the idea of Obama rather than the reality of politics.''
Why should the 45-year-old senator tackle reality in a city that has forsworn it altogether? And why not join the catwalk of Democratic hotties? The Washington Post reported that the Democrats were ''fielding an uncommonly high number of uncommonly good-looking candidates.'' Young and cute, as the party campaign honcho Rahm Emanuel wryly told me, could be a refreshing change from ''Hastert, Rumsfeld and Cheney, who look like the retirees from 'Goodfellas.' ''
Mr. Obama's main accomplishment so far is sending a chill through Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' dreaded eventuality. It must certainly be more fun cavorting on a cover with Eva Longoria than caucusing in the Capitol with Harry Reid. Working on legislation can be so tedious, compared with a 13-city book tour in which you are feted as the liberal hunk of the 21st century, generating buzz about your future instead of the country's.
Mr. Obama, who fears being seen as fluffy and who has been known to mock pretty boys in his party, never seems to take off his makeup these days, as he pads from one soft perch to the next, from Oprah to Meredith to Larry. The first black president of the Harvard Law Review is spending too much time in green rooms.
He also logs a lot of time at the gym. (You never know when Anna Wintour will call.) It is the only thing this intellectually nimble, preternaturally articulate smarty-pants has in common with W.
''Politics sometimes blends in with celebrity,'' he told Oprah this week. ''And it gobbles you up because the tendency is for people to want to see you perform and say what they want to hear, as opposed to you trying to stay in touch with, you know, that deepest part of you, that kernel of truth inside.'' Doesn't he see that when you express this skepticism on Oprah it is not skepticism at all?
Haven't we seen this tease before? Before the 1996 campaign, Colin Powell scared the bejesus out of Hillary's husband by showing a fair amount of leg on his book tour. He sold 2.6 million books and was hugely popular, but caution crimped him. He never ran for president, and when he went to the State Department he never stood up to the forces of darkness.
Senator Obama's caution, too, may cause him to miss the moment. Like Alma Powell, Michelle Obama is afraid for her husband to run.
After 16 years of polarizing presidents driving them crazy, Americans will be yearning for someone as soothing as Obama. (''No one is exempt,'' he writes in one of many platitudes in his new book, ''from the call to find common ground.'') He is so hot now that tickets to his political events are being sought, at scalpers' prices, on Craig's List.
His appeal combines the political ability -- alien to the Bush administration -- to see something from your opponent's point of view with the cool detachment of a J.F.K. He's intriguingly imperfect: His ears stick out, he smokes, and he's written about wrestling with pot, booze and ''maybe a little blow'' as a young man.
He has been told by Democratic leaders to think about whether he really wants to be president, or whether he's just getting swept away by people who want him to do it. (That's a distinction that entitled and unqualified Republican WASPs like W. and Dan Quayle never bother to make, simply learning -- or not learning -- on the job.)
Does Barack Obama want to be a celebrity or a man of history -- or is there no longer any difference?
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Obama Is Not a Miracle Elixir
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<b>by Frank Rich
October 22, 2006</b>
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...MMkQ25-MQ25IIQ254D1A14AQ25IIT1Q5BQ3DQ2FQ3D8cu
THE Democrats are so brilliant at yanking defeat from the jaws of victory that it still seems unimaginable that they might win on Nov. 7. But even the most congenital skeptic has to face that possibility now. Things have gotten so bad for the Republicans that were President Bush to unveil Osama bin Laden's corpse in the Rose Garden, some reporter would instantly check to see if his last meal had been on Jack Abramoff's tab.
With an approval rating of 16 percent -- 16! -- in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, Congress has matched the Democrats of 1994 or, for that matter, Michael Jackson during his own version of Foleygate. As for Mr. Bush, he is once more hiding behind children in an elementary school, as he did last week when the monthly death toll for Americans in Iraq approached a nearly two-year high. And where else could he go? Some top Republican Congressional candidates in the red state he was visiting, North Carolina, would not appear with him. When the president did find a grateful campaign mate at his next stop, Pennsylvania, it was the married congressman who paid $5.5 million to settle a lawsuit by a mistress who accused him of throttling her.
Maybe the Democrats can blow 2006 as they did 2004, but not without herculean effort. As George Will memorably wrote, if they can't at least win back the House under these conditions, ''they should go into another line of work.''
The tough question is not whether the Democrats can win, but what will happen if they do win. The party's message in this campaign has offered no vision beyond bashing Mr. Bush and pledging to revisit the scandals and the disastrous legislation that went down on his watch. Last spring Nancy Pelosi did promote a ''New Direction for America'' full of golden oldies -- raising the minimum wage, enacting lobbying reform, cutting Medicare drug costs, etc. She promised that Democrats would ''own August'' by staging 250 campaign events to publicize it. But this rollout caused so few ripples that its participants might as well have been in the witness protection program. Meanwhile, it was up to John Murtha, a congressman with no presidential ambitions, to goad his peers to start focusing on a specific Iraq exit strategy.
Enter Barack Obama. To understand the hysteria about a Democratic senator who has not yet served two years and is mainly known for a single speech at the 2004 convention, you have to appreciate just how desperate the Democrats are for a panacea for all their ills. In the many glossy cover articles about Obamamania, the only real suspense is whether a Jack or Bobby Kennedy analogy will be made in the second paragraph or the fifth. Men's Vogue (cover by Annie Leibovitz) went so far as to say that the Illinois senator ''alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath'' as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. Why not throw in Mark Twain and Sammy Davis Jr.?
This is a lot to put on the shoulders of anyone, even someone as impressive as Mr. Obama. Though he remains a modest and self-effacing guy from all appearances, he is encouraging the speculation about seeking higher office -- and not as a coy Colin Powell-style maneuver to sell his new book, ''The Audacity of Hope.'' Mr. Obama hasn't been turning up in Iowa for the corn dogs. He consistently concedes he's entertaining the prospect of a presidential run.
There's no reason to rush that decision now, but it's a no-brainer. Of course he should run, assuming his family is on the same page. He's 45, not 30, and his slender resume in public office (which also includes seven years as a state senator) should be no more of an impediment to him than it was to the White House's current occupant. As his Illinois colleague Dick Durbin told The Chicago Tribune last week, ''I said to him, 'Do you really think sticking around the Senate for four more years and casting a thousand more votes will make you more qualified for president?' '' Instead, such added experience is more likely to transform an unusually eloquent writer, speaker and public servant into another windbag like Joe Biden.
The more important issue is not whether Mr. Obama will seek the presidency, but what kind of candidate he would be. If the Democratic Party is to be more than a throw-out-Bush party, it can't settle for yet again repackaging its well-worn ideas, however worthy, with a new slogan containing the word ''New.'' It needs a major infusion of steadfast leadership. That's the one lesson it should learn from George Bush. Call him arrogant or misguided or foolish, this president has been a leader. He had a controversial agenda -- enacting big tax cuts, privatizing Social Security, waging ''pre-emptive'' war, packing the courts with judges who support his elisions of constitutional rights -- and he didn't fudge it. He didn't care if half the country despised him along the way.
The interminable Iraq fiasco has branded the Democrats as the party of fecklessness. The failure of its leaders to challenge the administration's blatant propaganda to gin up the war is a failure of historic proportions (as it was for much of the press and liberal punditry). When Tom Daschle, then the Senate leader, presided over the rushed passing of the war resolution before the 2002 midterms, he explained that the ''bottom line'' was for Democrats ''to move on''; they couldn't wait to campaign on the economy. The party's subsequent loss of the Senate did not prevent it two years later from nominating a candidate who voted for the war's funding before he voted against it.
What makes the liberal establishment's crush on Mr. Obama disconcerting is that it too often sees him as a love child of a pollster's focus group: a one-man Benetton ad who can be all things to all people. He's black and he's white. He's both of immigrant stock (Kenya) and the American heartland (Kansas, yet). He speaks openly about his faith without disowning evolution. He has both gravitas and unpretentious humor. He was the editor of The Harvard Law Review and also won a Grammy (for the audiobook of his touching memoir, ''Dreams From My Father''). He exudes perfection but has owned up to youthful indiscretions with drugs. He is post-boomer and post-civil-rights-movement. He is Bill Clinton without the baggage, a fail-safe 21st-century bridge from ''A Place Called Hope'' to ''The Audacity of Hope.''
Mr. Obama has offended no one (a silly tiff with John McCain excepted). Search right-wing blogs and you'll find none of the invective showered on other liberal Democrats in general and black liberal leaders in particular. What little criticism Mr. Obama has received is from those in his own camp who find him cautious to a fault, especially on issues that might cause controversy. The sum of all his terrific parts, this theory goes, may be less than the whole: another Democrat who won't tell you what day it is before calling a consultant, another human weather vane who waits to see which way the wind is blowing before taking a stand.
That has been the Democrats' fatal malady, but it's way too early and there's too little evidence to say Mr. Obama has been infected by it. If he is conciliatory by nature and eager to entertain adversaries' views in good faith, that's not necessarily a fault, particularly in these poisonous times. The question is whether Mr. Obama will stick up for core principles when tested and get others to follow him.
That's why it's important to remember that on one true test for his party, Iraq, he was consistent from the start. On the long trail to a hotly competitive senatorial primary in Illinois, he repeatedly questioned the rationale for the war before it began, finally to protest it at a large rally in Chicago on the eve of the invasion. He judged Saddam to pose no immediate threat to America and argued for containment over a war he would soon label ''dumb'' and ''political-driven.'' He hasn't changed. In his new book, he gives a specific date (the end of this year) for beginning ''a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops'' and doesn't seem to care who calls it ''cut and run.''
Contrast this with Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, who last week said that failed American policy in Iraq should be revisited if there's no improvement in ''maybe 60 to 90 days.'' This might qualify as leadership, even at this late date, if only John Warner, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, hadn't proposed exactly the same time frame for a re-evaluation of the war almost a week before she did.
The Democrats may well win on Election Day this year. But one of their best hopes for long-term viability in the post-Bush era is that Barack Obama steps up and changes the party before the party of terminal timidity and equivocation changes him.
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The Obama Bandwagon
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<b>by Bob Herbert
October 23, 2006</b>
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.h...TQ7DMTQ2FYT.VLbL.bTQ2FYQ3BDmQ20DmiQ60Q3BiQ5CO
The capacity crowd on a rainy night at the John F. Kennedy Library couldn't have been happier. The guest of honor had been born the same year that J.F.K. was inaugurated, and now he was generating the kind of political delirium we have tended to associate with the Kennedys.
I was the interviewer that night, and as I arrived in a cab outside the library, the driver said, ''Who's on the program?'' When I said, ''Barack Obama,'' the driver replied, ''Oh, our next president.''
It's a measure of how starved the country is for a sensible, appealing, intelligent, trustworthy leader that a man who until just a couple of years ago was an obscure state senator in Illinois is now suddenly, in the view of an awful lot of voters, the person we should install in the White House.
At the Kennedy Library forum on Friday night, Mr. Obama declined to rule out a run for the White House in 2008. In an appearance on ''Meet the Press'' yesterday, he made it clear that he was considering such a run.
With all due respect to Senator Obama, this is disturbing. He may be capable of being a great president. Someday. But one quick look around at the state of the nation and the world tells us that we need to be more careful than we have been in selecting our leaders. There shouldn't be anything precipitous about the way we pick our presidents.
That said, the Barack Obama boom may well have legs. During the forum, every reference to the possibility of him running drew a roar from the audience. He's thoughtful, funny and charismatic. And there is not the slightest ripple of a doubt that he wants to run for president.
The reason he went into politics, he said, was to be able to influence events, to make a difference. ''Obviously,'' he added, ''the president has the most influence.''
I asked what thoughts run through his mind when he thinks about himself and the presidency. He said: ''That office is so different from any other office on the planet, you have to understand that if you seek that office you have to be prepared to give your life to it. How I think about it is that you don't make that decision unless you are prepared to make that sacrifice, that trade-off.
''What's difficult and important for somebody like myself, who has a wonderful, forbearing wife and two gorgeous young children, is that they end up having to make some of those sacrifices with you. And that's a profound decision that we won't make lightly.''
I asked if he could imagine himself, at some point, making the kind of commitment he described. He said that he could, and the crowd erupted.
I asked if he might run in 2008. He said he was focused on the coming Congressional elections.
''So you have not ruled it out,'' I said.
''We'll leave it there,'' he said.
The giddiness surrounding the Obama phenomenon seems to be an old-fashioned mixture of fun, excitement and a great deal of hope. His smile is electric, and when he laughs people tend to laugh with him. He's the kind of politician who makes people feel good.
But the giddiness is crying out for a reality check. There's a reason why so many Republicans are saying nice things about Mr. Obama, and urging him to run. They would like nothing more than for the Democrats to nominate a candidate in 2008 who has a very slender resume, very little experience in national politics, hardly any in foreign policy -- and who also happens to be black.
The Republicans may be in deep trouble, but they believe they could pretty easily put together a ticket that would chew up Barack Obama in 2008.
My feeling is that Senator Obama may well be the real deal. If I were advising him, I would tell him not to move too fast. With a few more years in the Senate, possibly with a powerful committee chairmanship if the Democrats take control, he could build a formidable record and develop the kind of toughness and savvy that are essential in the ugly and brutal combat of a presidential campaign.
After the interview at the Kennedy Library, hundreds of people lined up to have copies of Mr. Obama's book, ''The Audacity of Hope,'' autographed. He signed as many as he could. Then he shook hands with everyone who remained and assured them that he would have their books delivered to his hotel, where he would sign them later that night.
He's 45. There's no hurry. He should take all the time he needs.
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The first article of the two posted below is your must read.
The sobering reality is that the overwhelming majority of the voting American populace possesses scant knowledge of how National; State and Local politics really functions. This knowledge deficit is even greater in the Black community. Excluding a federal tax-return election funding check-off option, less than 2% of all American households have ever contributed money to a political campaign.
Onto the bridge that connects the starry eyed naïve voters to the Washington power elite steps Barack Obama. As the article “ BARACK OBAMA INC.” illuminates; the balance between maintaining “street credibility” and satisfying the financial and political cognoscenti is the ultimate challenge. Can he do it?
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BARACK OBAMA INC.</font><font face="tahoma" size="4" color="#0000FF"><b>
The Birth Of A Washington Machine</b></font>
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<b>by Ken Silverstein
November 2006 | Harpers Magazine</b>
www.harpers.org
In July, on a typically oppressive summer day in Washington, D.C., roughly a thousand college students from across the country gathered at a Marriott hotel with plans to change the world. Despite being sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a moderate think tank founded by one of Bill Clinton's former chiefs of staff, John Podesta, the student group—called Campus Progress—leans decidedly farther to the left, At booths outside the main auditorium, young activists handed out pamphlets opposing nuclear power, high pay for CEOs, excessive profits for oil companies, harsh prison sentences for drug users, and Israeli militarism in Gaza and the West Bank. At one session, Adrienne Maree Brown of The Ruckus Society—a protest group whose capacious mission is to promote "the voices and visions of youth, women, people of color, indigenous people and immigrants, poor and working class people, lesbian, gay, bisexual, gender queer, and trans-gendered people"—urged students to "break the fucking rules." Even the consummate insider Podesta told attendees, with unintended ambiguity, "We need more of you hanging from trees,"
Around noon, conference participants began filing into the auditorium; activists staffing the literature booths abandoned their posts to take seats inside as well. The crowd, and the excitement, building in the hall was due entirely to the imminent arrival of the keynote speaker: Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Having ascended to political fame through a stirring and widely lauded speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama, the U.S. Senate's only African-American member, is now considered to be the party's most promising young leader—especially among those who, like the student organizers present, are seeking to reinvigorate its progressive wing. In terms of sheer charisma, Obama is certainly the party's most magnetic leader since Bill Clinton, and perhaps since Robert F. Kennedy.
The senator was running a bit late; but when he finally glided into the auditorium, escorted by an assortment of aides, he was greeted by a tremendous swell of applause as he took to the stage. Dressed in a brown jacket and red tie, Obama approached the podium, flanked by two giant screens enlarging his image, and began a softly spoken but compelling speech that recalled his own days, after his graduation in 1983 from Columbia University, as a community organizer in poor neighborhoods of Chicago. "You'll have boundless opportunities when you graduate," he told the students, "and it's very easy to just take that diploma, forget about all this progressive-politics stuff, and go chasing after the big house and the large salary and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy, But 1 hope you don't get off that easy. There's nothing wrong with making money, but focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition."
Obama complained of an American culture that "discourages empathy," in which those in power blame poverty on people who are "lazy or weak of spirit" and believe that "innocent people being slaughtered and expelled from their homes halfway around the world are somebody else's problem." He urged the assembled activists to ignore those voices, "not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although 1 think you do have that obligation . . . but primarily because you have that obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. It's only when you hitch yourself up to something bigger than yourself that you realize your true potential."
It was a rousing speech, and Obama is probably the only member of Congress who could have delivered it with any conviction or credibility. When he left the stage and headed toward the hotel exit, he was trailed by a pack of autograph seekers, picture takers, and glad-handers.
Despite its audience and ostensible subject matter, however, Obama's speech had contained just a single call for political action. That was when he had introduced Mark Pike, a law student who then came bounding across the stage in a green one-piece mechanic's outfit. As part of a campaign called "Kick the Oil Habit," Pike was to depart directly from the conference and drive from Washington to Los Angeles in a "flex-fuel" vehicle. "Give it up for Mark!" Obama had urged the crowd, noting that Pike would be refueling only at gas stations that offer E85—which Obama touts as "a clean, renewable, and domestically produced alternative fuel."
Although the senator did not elaborate, E85 is so called because it is 85 percent ethanol, a product whose profits accrue to a small group of corporate corn growers led by Illinois-head quartered Archer Daniels Midland. Not surprisingly, agribusiness is a primary advocate of E85, as are such automobile manufacturers as Ford, which donated Pike's car. The automakers love E85 because it allows them to look environmentally correct ("Live Green, Go Yellow," goes GM's advertising pitch for the fuel) while producing vehicles, mostly highly profitable and fuel-guzzling SUV and pickup models, that can run on regular gasoline as well as on E85. Obama had essentially marshaled his twenty minutes of undeniably moving oratory to plump for the classic pork-barrel cause of every Midwestern politician.
In an election season, when Americans of all political persuasions can allow themselves to imagine—even if for just a few unguarded moments—how matters in this country might improve it it’s leaders did, it is worthwhile to consider the path so far of Senator Barack Obama. A man more suited to the tastes of reform-minded Americans could hardly be imagined: he is passionate, charming, and well-intentioned, and his desire to change the culture of Washington seems deeply held and real. He managed to win a tremendous majority in his home state of Illinois despite rhetoric, and a legislative record, that marked him as a true progressive. During his first year in the state senate—1997—he helped lead a bud' able if quixotic crusade that would have amended the state constitution to define health care as a basic right and would have required the Illinois General Assembly to ensure that all the state's citizens could get health insurance within five years. He led initiatives to aid the poor, including campaigns that resulted in an earned-income tax credit and the expansion of early-childhood-education programs. In 2001, reacting to a surge in home foreclosures in Chicago, he helped push for a measure that cracked down on predatory lenders that peddled high-interest, high-fee mortgages to lower-end homebuyers. Obama was also the driving force behind legislation, passed in 2003, that made Illinois the first state to require law-enforcement agencies to tape interrogations and confessions of murder suspects. Throughout his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama called for social justice, promised to "stand up to the powerful drug and insurance lobbies" that block health-care reform, and denounced the war in Iraq and the Bush White House.
Since coming to Washington, Obama has advocated for the poor, most notably in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and has emerged as a champion of clean government. He has fought for restrictions on lobbying, even as most of his fellow Democrats postured on the issue while quietly seeking to gut real reform initiatives. In mid-September, Congress approved a bill he co-authored with Oklahoma's arch-conservative senator, Tom Coburn, requiring all federal contracts and earmarks to be published in an Internet database, a step that will better allow citizens to track the way the government spends their money.
Yet it is also startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation's manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama's top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland &. Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a "leadership PAC," a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians' campaigns—-and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.
Already considered a potential vice-presidential nominee in 2008, Obama clearly has abundant political ambitions. Hence he is playing not only to voters in Illinois—a reliably Democratic and generally liberal state—but to the broader national audience, as well as to the Democratic Party establishment, the Washington media, and large political donors. Perhaps for this reason, Obama has taken an approach to his policymaking that is notably cautious and nonconfrontational. "Since the founding, the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary," he told me during an interview at his office on Capitol Hill this summer. "What that means is that for a political leader to get things done, he or she ideally should be ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. I want to push the envelope but make sure I have enough folks with me that I'm not rendered politically impotent."
The question, though, is just how effective—let alone reformist—Obama's approach can be in a Washington grown hostile to reform and those who advocate it. After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to the right and the political system in general has become thoroughly dominated by the corporate perspective, the first requirement of electoral success is now the ability to raise staggering sums of money. For Barack Obama, this means that mounting a successful career, especially one that may include a run for the presidency, cannot even be attempted without the kind of compromising and horse trading that may, in fact, render him impotent.
The walls of Obama's office on the seventh floor of the Hart Senate Office Building are decorated with images from the canon of liberal icons. There are photos of Martin Luther King addressing a civil rights rally, Gandhi sitting cross-legged, and Obama with Nelson Mandela; a painting of Thurgood Marshall, and, above a framed pair of red boxing gloves signed by Muhammad Ali, the famous photo of a scowling Ali standing over Sonny Liston after knocking him out during their second fight, in Lewiston, Maine.
When 1 interviewed him this summer, I had my eleven-year-old daughter in tow, because her outing with a friend had fallen through just as I was leaving home. Obama, who is married and has two young daughters of his own, asked her a few questions; when she told him she was starting seventh grade in the fall, he told her that at her age, "I was such a terror that my teachers didn't know what to do with me." He draped his gray jacket over his leather desk chair and urged her to have a seat. For the next hour, she contentedly twirled on the chair while we spoke across the room, Obama on a tan sofa and me on a chair to his right.
I asked Obama how he was adjusting to Washington and the city's peculiar political culture. "I have not had to partake of the culture much," he replied. "My family lives in Chicago, and I'm usually here Tuesday through Thursday. I rarely meet lobbyists; it's one of the benefits of having a good staff." Nor has he had to devote much time to fund-raising. "The first $250,000 that I raised was like pulling teeth," he recalled. "No major Democratic donors knew me, I had a funny name, they wouldn't take my phone calls. Then at a certain point we sort of clicked into the public consciousness and the buzz, and I benefited from a lot of small individual contributions that helped me get over the hump….And then after winning, the notoriety that I received made raising money relatively simple, and so I don't have the same challenges that most candidates do now, and that's pure luck. It's one of the benefits of celebrity."
Obama sat with his arms and legs crossed, one foot tapping the air. Progressive candidates generally have a harder time raising money, he said, and at times some of them will "trim their sails" on behalf of the people who are financing them. "When I say that," he was hasty to add, "I want to make sure I'm not saying all the time. I'm just saying there are going to be points where donors have more access and are taken more into account than ordinary voters." The solution he supports js some form of public financing for campaigns, combined—since big donors "are always going to find a way to get money" to candidates—with some reduction in the cost of running for office; for example, by providing candidates with free political advertising.
Personally, though, Obama felt that he had not trimmed his own political sails to make himself palatable to the political center. His primary obstacle, he said, is simply that the G.O.P. controls the White House and Congress. "My experience in the state legislature is instructive. The first seven years 1 was there I was in the minority, and 1 think that I passed maybe ten bills; maybe five of them were substantive- Most of the bills that 1 did pass were in partnership with Republicans, because that was the only way I could get them passed. The first year we were in the majority party I passed twenty-six hills in one year." While Washington "moves more slowly than the state legislature," Obama said he had no doubt that it the Democrats controlled Congress, it would he possible to move forward on important progressive legislation.
The alternative, until then, is to he opportunistic and look for areas where he can get enough Republican support to actually get a bill passed. That, he said, "means that most of the legislation I've proposed will be more modest in its goals than it would be if I were in the majority party." Obama gave an example: although he is a strong supporter of raising fuel-economy standards, proposals to do so have gone nowhere for years. In 2005, Congress overwhelmingly rejected an amendment to the energy bill that would have required cars, minivans, and SUVs to get 40 miles pet gallon on average by 2016. This year, Obama and Indiana Republican Richard Lugar introduced a bill that would require fuel-economy targets to rise 4 percent annually unless federal regulators specifically blocked that step. Obama recruited as co-sponsors four senators who had voted against the 2005 amendment— Democrat Joe Biden of Delaware and Republicans Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania— and although this bill might not pass either, it has a better chance than past efforts.
I asked Obama a question about pork-barrel spending. Did he feel pressure to deliver federal money for home-state interests? “Pork is in the eye of the beholder," he said. "The recipients don't tend to think it's pork, especially if it's a great public-works project." He said he felt "pretty good" about projects he had sought in last year's transportation bill and "unashamed" about getting them in. House Speaker Dennis Hastert had praised Obama for his efforts in helping win Illinois its $6.2 billion in the massive, earmark-larded 2005 transportation bill. (Illinois's most extravagant project funded by the bill was the Prairie Parkway, a controversial regional highway that would run through Hastert's district and, in fact, has significantly increased the value of real estate he owns along the proposed route.)
An aide came in and told Obama that Congressman David Dreier was on the phone to discuss legislation to aid the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that Obama was planning to visit as part of a trip to Africa. After taking the call at his desk, Obama returned to the couch and took up the pork-barrel question again. He gave as an example President Bush's Clear Skies Initiative, which he described as a difficult decision. After examining the legislation, he determined that it would significantly weaken the Clean Air Act, yet the administration claimed it would help the coal industry, a major economic force in southern Illinois. In the end, he opposed it because he decided it would have been more beneficial to western coal producers, not those in Illinois. "That kind of vote is a tough vote, not so much on the merits as it is on the politics," he said. "I then have to spend a lot of time working that through with my constituents in southern Illinois, explaining to them why I did not think it was actually good for them." Even so, he took heat at home, with one southern Illinois newspaper editorial saying that he was less interested in looking out for the interests of the state's coal industry than he was in voting with the interests of Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton.
And what if he had determined that the Clear Skies Initiative would have aided Illinois coal? I asked. In that case, Obama said, "It would have been more difficult for me. ... If I thought that it would have significantly helped Illinois coal but would have been a net minus for the environment, then you've got your classic legislative dilemma."
Obama said that the "blogger community," which by now is shorthand for liberal Democrats, gets frustrated with him because they think he's too willing to compromise with Republicans, "My argument," he says, "is that a polarized electorate plays to the advantage of those who want to dismantle government. Karl Rove can afford to win with 51 percent of the vote. They're not trying to reform health care. They are content with an electorate that is cynical about government. Progressives have a harder job. They need a big enough majority to initiate bold proposals."
Before he addressed the 2004 convention, Obama was virtually unknown nationally, and even in Illinois his was far from a household name. Just four years earlier, he had been defeated by a significant margin when he tried to unseat Chicago-area Congressman Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary. But following the speech, which was universally hailed—even the National Review called it "simple and powerful," conceding that it had deserved its "rapturous critical reception"—Obama became a national celebrity. Less than two months later, he won election to the Senate with 70 percent of the vote.
If the speech was his debut to the wider American public, he had already undergone an equally successful but much quieter audition with Democratic Party leaders and fund-raisers, without whose support he would surely never have been chosen for such a prominent role at the convention. The early, if not overwhelming, favorite to be the Senate nominee from Illinois had been Dan Hynes, the state comptroller, who had twice won statewide office and had the support of the state's Democratic machine and labor unions. But by September 2003, six months before the primary, Obama was winning support from not only African Americans but also Chicago's "Lake-front Liberals" and other progressives. He was still largely unknown in Washington circles, but that changed the following month when Vernon Jordan, the well-known power broker and corporate boardmember who chaired Bill Clinton's presidential transition team after the 1992 election, placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends and invited them to a fund-raiser at his home.
That event marked his entry into a well-established Washington ritual—the gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through which potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists. Gregory Craig, an attorney with Williams & Connolly and a longtime Democratic figure who, as special counsel in the White House, had coordinated Bill Clinton's impeachment defense, met Obama that night. "I liked his sense of humor and the confidence he had discussing national issues, especially as a state senator," Craig recalled of the event. "You felt excited to he in his presence." Another thing that Craig liked about Obama was that he's not seen as a "polarizer," like such traditional African-American leaders as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. "He gets respect from his adversaries because of the way he Heats them," Craig said. "He doesn't try to be all things to all people, but he has a way of taking positions you don't like without making you angry."
Word about Obama spread through Washington’s blue-chip law firms, lobby shops, and political offices, and this accelerated after his win in the March primary. Mike Williams, vice president for legislative affairs at The Bond Market Association and a member of an African-American lobbying association, had been following the race in Illinois and was introduced to Obama through acquaintances in Washington who had known him at Harvard Law School. "We represent Wall Street firms," Williams said in recounting his first conversation with Obama. "A big issue for us since 2000 is predatory lending. He worked on that issue in Illinois; he was the lead sponsor of a bill there. I talked Co him about that. He had a different position from ours. There's a perception out there that the Democrats are anti-business, and I talked to him about that directly. I said, There's a perception that you're coming at this from the angle of consumers. He was forthright, which I appreciated. He said, I tried to broker the best deal I could." Williams still had his differences with Obama, but the conversation convinced him that the two could work together. "He's not a political novice and he's smart enough not to say things cast in stone, but you can have a conversation with him," Williams said. "He's a straight shooter. As a lobbyist, that's something you value. You don't need a yes every time, but you want to be able to count the votes. That's what we do."
Williams subsequently set up a conference call between Obama and a group of financial-industry lobbyists. That, too, went well, and in June of 2004, Williams helped organize "a little fund-raiser" for Obama at The Bond Market Association. "It wasn't just the financial community. There was a broad cross-section," he said of the 200 ot so people who turned out. "There was overwhelming support, not just people from associations giving $2,000 but from individuals who just wanted to meet him, giving smaller contributions."
Tom Quinn, a senior partner at Venable and widely considered one of the top lobbyists in town, got a call from Williams and attended the fund-raiser. "I'm on the list. Pretty much everyone in political fund-raising circles knows me," said Quinn, who works closely with the Democratic National Committee and has been a party power broker since the late 1960s, when he worked on the presidential campaign of Hubert Humphrey. "Every day I get ten or fifteen solicitations. I contribute if I like the candidate and think they have a chance to win." He was impressed when he heard that Obama had been president of the Harvard Law Review—"That jumped out at me. It showed he had absolute intelligence"—and even more impressed after meeting him. "He's got a nice personal touch and the ability to kid around a little bit too," he said. "He's got star quality." Quinn contributed $500 to Obama at The Bond Marker Association event, and later made calls to people he knew and asked them to donate money as well.
Robert Harmala, also a big player in Democratic circles and a colleague of Quinn's at Venable, attended tin- association's event as well. He bad been invited by Larry Duncan—an African-American lobbyist for Lockheed Martin, a Venable client—who helped Williams organize the affair. Harmala liked what he saw and continued to be impressed by Obama, "There's a reasonableness about him," he said- "I don't see him as being on the liberal fringe. He's not going to be a parrot for the party line." Like Quinn, Harmala donated $500 to Obama and made calls to a number of political donors ("Some usual suspects in California whom I've worked with before") and urged them to support Obama's campaign. Other fund-raisers were soon organized—one at the Four Seasons Hotel, another at a Dupont Circle restaurant, yet another at the Clintons' home off Embassy Row. "He was hitting his stride. There were people clamoring to help," said Williams. "It wasn't just one person who put the events together and it wasn't all about raising money—people wanted to meet him and talk to him,"
It's not always clear what Obama's financial backers want, but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are nor interested merely in clean government and political reform. And although Obama is by no means a mouthpiece lor his hinders, it appears that he's not entirely indifferent to their desires either.
Consider the case of Illinois-based Exelon Corporation, the nation's leading nuclear-power-plant operator. The firm is Obama's fourth largest patron, having donated a total of $74,350 to his campaigns. During debate on the 2005 energy bill, Obama helped to vote down an amendment that would have killed vast loan guarantees for power-plant operators to develop new energy projects. The loan guarantees were called "one of the worst provisions in this massive piece of legislation" by Taxpayers for Common Sense and Citizens Against Government Waste; the public will not only pay millions of dollars in loan costs but will risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default.
In one of his earliest votes, Obama joined a bloc of mostly conservative and moderate Senate Democrats who helped pass a G.O.P.-driven class-action "reform" bill. The bill had been long sought by a coalition of business groups and was lobbied for aggressively by financial firms, which constitute Obama's second biggest single bloc of donors.
Although The Bond Market Association didn't lobby directly on the legislation, Williams took note of Obama's vote. "He's a Democrat, and some people thought he'd do whatever the trial lawyers wanted, but he didn’t do that," he said. That's a testament to his character." Obama has voted on one bill that was of keen interest to Williams's members: last year's hotly contested bankruptcy bill, which made filing for bankruptcy more difficult and gives creditors more recourse to recover debts. Obama voted against the bill, but Williams was pleased that he did side with The Bond Market Association position on a number of provisions. Most were minor technical matters, but he also opposed an important amendment, which was defeated, that would have capped credit-card interest rates at 30 percent. "He studied the issue," Williams said. "Some assumed he would just go along with consumer advocates, but he voted with us on several points. He understood the issue. He wasn't closed-minded. A lot of people found that very refreshing."
As of this summer, Obama had raised nearly $16 million for his original Senate run and for his 2010 reelection war chest. He has taken in an additional $3.8 million for the Hopefund, his leadership PAC. Such PACs are subject to fewer restrictions on raising and spending money than general campaign funds. Over a six-year term, a senator can raise a maximum of $4,200 per individual donor; the same donor can give as much as $30,000 to the senator’s leadership PAC during that same period. Traditionally, leadership PACs were established by veteran members of Congress, but now they are set up by anyone who hopes to work his or her way up through party ranks. Last year, the Hopefund took in more than any other leadership PAC except for those of Bill Frist, John McCain, and John Kerry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
In several primaries, Obama's PAC has given to candidates that have been carefully-culled and selected by the Democratic establishment on the basis of their marketability as palatable "moderates"—even when they are facing more progressive and equally viable challengers. Most conspicuously, Obama backed Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont, his Democratic primary opponent in Connecticut, endorsing him publicly in March and contributing $4,200 to his campaign. The Hopefund also gave $10,000 to Tammy Duckworth, a helicopter pilot in the National Guard who lost both legs in Iraq and who is running for the seat of retiring G.O.P. Congressman Henry Hyde in Chicago's western suburbs. Despite her support from the party establishment, an enormous fund-raising advantage, and sympathy she had due to her war record, Duckworth won the primary by just 1,100 votes over a vocal war opponent named Christine Cegelis. (When asked about her stand on the Iraq war by a reporter, Duckworth had replied, "There is good and bad in everything.")
The calibration of Obama's own political rhetoric has been particularly evident in regard to the war in Iraq. At an antiwar rally in Chicago in October 2002, when Obama was still a state senator, he savaged the Bush Administration for its by then obvious plans to invade. "1 don't oppose all wars," he said that day. "What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."
Since taking office, Obama has become far more measured in his position. After Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha called for withdrawal from Iraq last fall, Obama rejected such a move in a speech before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, saying the United States needed "to manage our exit in a responsible way—with the hope of leaving a stable foundation for the future." His stance won him praise from Washington Post columnist David Broder, the veritable weather vane of political conventional wisdom. Murtha's was "not a carefully reasoned analysis of the strategic consequences of leaving Iraq," Broder wrote, whereas Obama was helping his party define "a sensible common ground" and had "pointed the administration and the country toward a realistic and modestly hopeful course on Iraq." Obama continues to reject any specific timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, even as public opposition to the war grows and as the military rationale for staying becomes less and less apparent.
For the past several decades, the two senators from Illinois have held a weekly meeting on Thursday mornings called the Constituent Coffee, where visitors from the Prairie State can meet and ask questions of their elected officials. Traditionally, the coffees have been low-key affairs, but since Obama took office they have been moved to a larger room—often on the top floor of the Hart Building, which looks out on the Capitol dome—that can accommodate the crowds they now invariably attract.
Obama and Richard Durbin, Illinois’s senior senator and the Democrats' Senate minority whip, are a winning team. At one coffee I attended this summer, Obama noted in introducing Durbin that his colleague had recently been selected by Time magazine as one of the ten best members of the Senate. "Only ninety senators disagree," said Durbin in rejoinder, adding, "I haven't done the cover of Newsweek or won a Grammy. There's a pretty important junior senator from Illinois too." (Obama won a Best Spoken Word Grammy this year, for his reading of his autobiography.) At another coffee, Durbin mentioned to the crowd that Obama had thrown out the first pitch at a Chicago White Sox game last year; this, he noted, had sparked a long winning streak, at the end of which the team won its first World Series in eighty-eight years. Later, a student at the University of Illinois asked Obama if he might also throw out the first pitch for the perennial sad-sack Cubs, in order to impart similarly good luck. "My arm," Obama deadpanned, "is only so good."
By 8:30 A.M. on July 13, when that week's coffee was scheduled to begin, about 150 people had filled the seats and several dozen more were standing at the back. The top-floor space at Hart was not available that day, so the coffee bad been moved to a large hearing room in the basement of the neighboring Dirksen Building. A few stragglers huddled around a table near the entrance, picking from a platter of doughnuts and filling cups of coffee from a shiny metal urn. "The doughnuts are the main reason people come," Obama joked, opening the affair from a podium at the head of the room. In fact, it was clear that many in attendance—especially among the sizable contingent who weren't actually from Illinois, including many congressional interns and pages—had turned up just to see Obama.
Although Obama and Durbin did field some questions on foreign policy, especially on Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah, the audience seemed more interested in domestic issues— health and education and basic pocketbook worries. What, one middle-aged woman asked pointedly, was Congress planning to do about the soaring price of gasoline?
Like the natural politician he is, Obama packaged his reply to appeal to the broadest spectrum of opinion. Energy, he said, was not just an economic issue but a national-security issue ("We now are dependent on the most volatile regions of the world for running our economy") and an environmental issue as well ("There are a lot of farmers in the room whose croplands could be impacted by global warming"). President Bush, said Obama, had finally acknowledged the need to break America's addiction to foreign oil, "but with the twelve-step program there are eleven other steps after you acknowledge your addiction." One step, he said, in bringing the issue home to Illinois interests, was to support biofuels such as ethanol, which are "a terrific way for us to start cutting down our use of imported oil."
Obama's support among traditional Democratic constituencies was apparent in the audience members, a number of whom worked for low-income housing, civil rights, and pro-choice groups. Grateful representatives of big-money interests were on hand as well, in the form of officials from the Illinois Soybean Association and the Illinois Corn Growers Association. "We appreciate the relationship and the help," said the latter, who was in town as part of a lobbying blitz called the Corn Congress.
And indeed Obama has delivered for his constituents—for social activists, but also for business groups whose demands are invariably more costly. Although this is not the place to review the full history of ethanol, it's beyond dispute that it survives only because members of Congress from farm states, whether liberal or conservative, have for decades managed to win billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite its production. It is not, of course, family farmers who primarily benefit from the program bur rather the agribusiness giants such as Illinois-based Aventine Renewable Energy and Archer Daniels Midland (for which ethanol accounts for just 5 percent of its sales but an estimated 2 5 percent of its profits). Ethanol production, as Tad Patzek of UC Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering wrote in a report this year, is based on "the massive transfer of money from the collective pocket of the U.S. taxpayers to the transnational agricultural cartel."
Since arriving on Capitol I [ill, Obama has been as assiduous as any member of Congress in promoting ethanol. He has introduced a number of measures that benefit the industry— such as the "Obama Amendment" that offered oil companies a 50 percent tax credit for building stations that offer E85 fuel—and voted for the corporate-welfare-laden 2005 energy bill, which offered billions in subsidies to ethanol producers as well as lavish incentives for developing cars that run on alternative fuels.
Meanwhile, Obama, Durbin, and three other farm-state senators opposed a proposal this year by the Bush Administration to lower stiff tariffs on cheaper sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil and other countries. To lower such tariffs, the senators suggested, would leave the nation dangerously dependent on foreign ethanol. "Our focus must be on building energy security through domestically produced renewable fuels," wrote the senators in a letter to Bush. That Obama would lend his name to such an argument— with its dubious implication that Brazilian ethanol is a national-security liability comparable to Saudi crude—indicates that he is at least as interested in protecting domestic producers of ethanol as he is in weaning America from imported petroleum.
I recall a remark made by Studs Terkel in 1980, about the liberal Republican John Anderson, who was running as an independent against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter: "People are so tired of dealing with two-foot midgets, you give them someone two foot four and they start proclaiming him a giant." In the unstinting and unanimous adulation of Barack Obama today, one wonders if a similar dynamic might be at work. If so, his is less a midgetry of character than one dictated by changing context. Gone are the days when, as in the 1970s, the U.S. Senate could comfortably house such men as Fred Harris (from Oklahoma, of all places), who called for the breakup of the oil, steel, and auto industries; as Wisconsin's William Proxmire, who replaced Joe McCarthy in 1957 and survived into the 1980s, a crusader against big banks who neither spent nor raised campaign money; as South Dakota's George McGovern, who favored huge cuts in defense spending and a guaranteed income for all Americans; as Frank Church of Idaho, who led important investigations into CIA and FBI abuses.
Today, money has all but wrung such dissent from the Senate. Campaigns have grown increasingly costly; in 2004 it took an average of more than $7 million to run for a Senate seat. As Carl Wagner, a Democratic political strategist who first came to Washington in 1970, remarked to me, the Senate today is a fundamentally different institution than it was then. "Senators were creatures of their states and reflected the cultures of their states," he said. "Today they are creatures of the people who pay for their multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. Representative democracy has largely been taken off the table. It's reminiscent of the 1880s and 1890s, when senators were chosen by state legislatures who were owned by the railroads and the banks." Accordingly, as corporate money has grown increasingly important to candidates, we have seen the rise of the smothering K Street culture and the revolving door that feeds it—not just lobbyists themselves but an entire interconnected world of campaign consultants, public-relations agencies, pollsters, and media strategists.
All of this has forged a political culture that is intrinsically hostile to reform. On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious; that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a "player." The lobbyist added: "What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?"
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<font face="rockwell extra bold, arial black" size="6" color="#D90000">The Path To Power</font>
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Barack Obama lays down a grand challenge to his own party—and it may get him elected president one day</b></font>
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<b>by Jacob Weisberg
October 2006 | Men's VOGUE</b>
http://www.mensvogue.com/business/politics/feature/articles/2006/09/11/barack_obama
Early last summer, Barack Obama, the 45-year-old junior senator from Illinois, took the pulpit at the National City Christian Church in downtown Washington, D.C., to make the most important speech delivered by a Democrat since—well, since his keynote at the Democratic Convention in 2004. That earlier address, which set the political world spinning in Obama's direction, drew quietly on the religious imagery of "things not seen." This one confronted the problem of faith and politics directly. Looking out among the Sojourners assembly, a group that aspires to be a liberal answer to the Christian coalition, Obama began by recalling a moment in his 2004 Senate campaign. His Republican opponent—the blistering, possibly deranged conservative orator Alan Keyes—declared one day (and here Obama channeled Keyes's ranting staccato) that "Jesus Christ would not vote for Ba-rack O-bama!"
Forty points ahead in the polls, Obama shrugged off the comment at the time by saying that he was running for senator, not minister—and from the podium he disparaged his own words as the "typically liberal response." But the problem of religion in politics nagged at him. In a country where "more people believe in angels than they do in evolution," Democrats would never be able to reach their fellow citizens so long as they continued to insist that religion and politics don't mix.
In his remarks, Obama linked himself to literary and political figures who had God on their minds and in their voices. "If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice," he argued. "Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—the majority of great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity."
As a speaker, Obama does not strive for the soulful effect of an African-American evangelical. Nor does he conjure instant empathy with an audience, the way Bill Clinton does. He delivers his message with the understated charisma of a Midwestern news anchor. But when he writes or when he speaks, Obama does something no one else in politics does: He plumbs his own anxiety and doubt, and ties his life story to political problems that few elected officials dare to discuss so personally, including the disparities of race and class, drug abuse, poverty, and, of course, faith.
That afternoon, the senator recounted his own path from a secular, multicultural household to the spiritual home he found in the black church. As a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s, Obama had put together demonstrations and registered voters alongside Christian leaders who honored the civil-rights tradition of social change. His faith-grounded fellow activists, he explained, "saw that I knew their Book, that I shared their values, that I sang their songs." But, he said, they also "sensed that part of me that remained detached and removed, that I was an observer in their midst." He continued, "In time, I came to realize that something was missing for me as well, that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone." Though Obama had long been skeptical of organized religion, he gradually came to embrace it "as a choice, not an epiphany."
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Obama's spirited argument that afternoon had sprung from a less lofty concern: a looming book deadline, which he was on the verge of blowing. His speech emerged from months of late-night ruminations at his laptop, turning over the kind of big ideas that tend not to be part of the typical senator's day. His new book, The Audacity of Hope, is quite unlike most written by politicians—those arid, rhetorical manifestos, penned by ghostwriters to meet the needs of a pending campaign and an ascendant career. (Obama's closest political adviser, the Chicago-based consultant David Axelrod, distinguishes it from "the stone tablets kind of approach—the ten things we have to do to ensure the future of democracy.") Instead, the book follows the pointed yet bridge-building tone Obama has set throughout his young career. The pages I've read are conversational and serious-minded reconsiderations of subjects that include race, values, foreign policy, and economics. The larger theme: How someone can speak the truth—and be true to his own ideals—amid the superficiality, sniping, and sheer soul-sapping drudgery of politics.
The Audacity of Hope has a hard act to follow: Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, sprang from his small-scale celebrity as the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He sank years of his life and hours of self-examination into the writing project, and came back with a gripping autobiographical narrative. (The book was reissued in paperback in 2004 and spent 54 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.) Obama is as much an American writer who has found his way to politics as he is a politician who knows how to write. "I kept a journal basically from my junior year in college until I went to law school, for a span of about five years," he tells me when I visit him in his Senate office, on the top floor of the Hart Office Building. As he continues, Obama speaks with the methodical care of prose composition. "Even though I hadn't written a book before, I had a sense of what it felt like to write something that rang true. When you start writing you are able to discern where you're being false, where you're using clichés, where you're manufacturing emotion that's not really there, or where you're shying away from something that isn't necessarily flattering."
The senator's tie is loosened, and he keeps his pin-striped jacket on while inside his formal office. The room looks barely lived in, the result of his spending nearly every moment when the Senate isn't in session on the road raising money for his Democratic colleagues, or with his family back in Chicago. Obama has just flown back to D.C., and he remains upright and alert in a straight-backed chair. His build is so lean and sinewy that he seems much shorter than his 6'2" stature. Despite the demands of his schedule, he manages to keep in shape with daily runs or workouts in the Senate gym. He also plays golf occasionally and basketball when he can, including once with troops in Iraq.
Behind him is a wall of historical and personal artifacts: a 1965 Life cover of the Selma march inscribed "Keep the faith" by Representative John Lewis, who was badly beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and an original program from the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. There are also pictures of Lincoln, Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Obama with Nelson Mandela, and family photos that look like Christmas cards from the post-racial future, with white, black, brown, and Asian relatives intermingled.
Obama says he wrote The Audacity of Hope on his own, as he does anything important, at his Washington apartment, late at night. "What I've had to do when I get home at eight or nine o'clock is start writing," he says. Why he puts himself through this toil is, at least partly, for the money, as one of his friends told me: Obama never really made much before last year. (Royalties from his first book enabled him to pay back the last of his student loans—fifteen years after he graduated from law school.) The $1.9 million contract he signed for The Audacity of Hope, and another as-yet-unannounced title, allowed him and his wife, Michelle, to move with their two daughters from their condo into a large, prairie-style house in Kenwood, an upper-middle-class, mixed-race neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Facing a deadline may also explain why the senator has found it so hard to quit smoking, although the government buildings smoking ban has helped curb his on-again, off-again habit that began 25 years ago.
Of all of the assets that make Obama such an appealing figure to Democrats—his reflective intellect, his departure from the familiar paths of racial politics, his good looks and easy manner—it is his writer's voice that most distinguishes him as a political figure. Many of the nation's greatest leaders—Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln—were of course men of letters as well as candidates and officeholders. But the demands of a modern political career—the fund-raising, the constant travel, the need to respond to a 24-hour news cycle—seem to preclude collecting one's thoughts in such a polished and engaging way. The Senate, in particular, breeds the kind of pomposity and egotism that ruins thoughtful prose. Senators publish a lot of books, but most are memorabilia, not political literature.
A few highbrow politicians—Eugene McCarthy, Mario Cuomo, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—have managed to write seriously. But much of this body of literature conveys the message that the writers, whose careers never went as far as their admirers thought they could, are too good for the dirty business of politics. Obama seems determined not to fall into either trap—growing so infatuated with his own reflection that he can't succeed as a leader, or charging ahead so hard that there's no space left for his emotional and intellectual life.
"If you read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson—I'm not Johnson, but I'm fascinated by him—there's a piece of him in me," Obama says, leaning forward. "That kind of hunger—desperate to win, please, succeed, dominate—I don't know any politician who doesn't have some of that reptilian side to him. But that's not the dominant part of me. On the other hand, I don't know that it was the dominant part of—" his voice suddenly trails off as he motions behind him to a portrait of Lincoln, the self-invented lawyer, writer, and politician from Illinois. "This guy was pretty reflective," he says, offering a sly smile.
The turning point in Dreams from My Father comes when Obama is helping to organize an anti-apartheid rally as a sophomore at Occidental College in the early 1980s. He describes his own involvement with the divestment movement as stemming from racial posturing, part of the "radical pose" he cultivated in those days, when he was trying to demonstrate his blackness. As he was drawn into the effort, Obama found himself giving a speech to classmates, who cheered him on. But after it ended in a bit of street theater—two white students dressed as policemen dragged the black protester away—he began to doubt his own sincerity. "Through my eyes, we suddenly appeared like the sleek and well-fed amateurs we were," he writes. "The whole thing was a farce, I thought to myself—the rally, the banners, everything."
At a party the night of the rally, a friend of Obama's named Regina—who made her way to college from a struggling African-American family in the Chicago ghetto—congratulated him. Obama snapped that he had no business speaking for black people, and that nothing he did would make any difference. Standing on stage and receiving applause was just a way to feed his ego.
"If anyone's being naive, it's you," Regina told him. "You wanna know what your real problem is? You always think everything's about you." Regina's words resonated, and helped Obama move beyond his sense of grievance, and commit himself to social change.
Up until that point, his search had been more inward, defined by the fact that he barely knew his father and that he grew up with black skin and a white family. His mother, Ann Dunham, was born in a small Kansas town, and could trace her ancestry to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. She moved to Hawaii with her parents, and, in 1959, while attending the University of Hawaii, met a charismatic 23-year-old exchange student from Kenya named Barack Hussein Obama, who was raised a Muslim and grew up during the heyday of anticolonial politics. They married, had a son, divorced, and Barack Senior, who specialized in econometrics and won a scholarship for a Harvard graduate degree, soon returned to Kenya to put his training to use. Though he kept in touch and made it clear that he expected great things from his namesake, the father remained mostly a heroic legend to his son, whom he saw only once more, for a month when the boy was ten years old.
Soon his mother found a new love, and for Barry, as she called her son, a new adventure. To begin a second marriage to an Indonesian man, Ann moved her six-year-old son to Jakarta, where the boy had to contend with street children—and the occasional water buffalo. But after three years, Ann sent her son back to Hawaii to live with her comfortably middle-class parents. She followed soon after with a new daughter, Maya. Even in multicultural Honolulu, Obama's complex racial heritage provoked conflict. At Punahou, an elite prep school, he was one of only a handful of African-American students. Obama searched for black role models and channeled his angry sense of racial displacement into drinking, drugs (pot and a little cocaine), and basketball—none of which prevented him from excelling academically. A voracious reader, he immersed himself in the classics of African-American literature—books by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Malcolm X.
"At night I would close the door to my room, telling my grandparents I had homework to do, and there I would sit and wrestle with words, locked in a suddenly desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I'd found it with the terms of my birth," he writes. "I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect."
Obama moved to New York City, where he finished college at Columbia, and one day in 1982, he received a call from a relative in Nairobi, who told him his father had been killed in a car accident. Obama thought that as a result, half of his heritage would remain closed to him. But a few years later he found a soul mate in his sister Auma, his father's daughter who came to visit him in Chicago. The long last section of his first book describes a visit to Kenya, where, with Auma as his guide, he unearthed the reality about his father, who was in fact a polygamist and, toward the end, an embittered alcoholic. As Obama met his extended family and learned about the struggles his forebears faced, his disappointment faded.
After working as a community organizer in Chicago in the mid-eighties, the next logical step was a law degree. At Harvard he quickly made his mark and developed a close circle of friends who continue to function as his advisers. After his first year, Obama worked as a summer associate at a law firm, where he met a brilliant and attractive first-year associate named Michelle Robinson. The daughter of a working-class family from the South Side, Michelle had finished Harvard Law before Obama started, though as she is quick to remind everyone, he is older. "What do you do when you have a very assertive and confident first-year who asks you out on dates and then keeps asking and is pretty persistent?" she asks, recalling their initial involvement. "What you do is give in."
The courtship continued while Obama was working on Dreams from My Father, which Michelle says defined the first part of their marriage, before the birth of their daughters, Malia, eight, and Sasha, five. Now the vice president of community relations at the University of Chicago Hospitals, Michelle Obama appears to be neither a Nancy Reagan, pushing her husband's political career forward, nor an Alma Powell, holding it back. "Politics is a completely unappealing way to live your life," she says, with trademark bluntness. "There's nothing that makes this attractive to go through as a family. But I also know very deeply and much more intimately than anyone out there how truly gifted Barack is. Part of me looks at my children and the world that I want my kids and grandkids to live in and says, 'How can I stand in the way?' But I struggle with it everyday." She says the knowledge that her husband would walk away from politics without hesitation if she asked him to makes the sacrifices easier to handle.
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"Michelle is definitely the grounding presence in his life," says Cassandra Butts, a close friend from Harvard who now works for the liberal Center for American Progress. "I don't want to make this sound stereotypical, because Michelle is an intelligent professional with her own career and instincts. But she provides a base of support that allows him to do all the things he wants to do in his career. She is his rock."
Passing up a prestigious clerkship and high-paying offers from firms, Obama returned to Chicago in 1991 to practice civil-rights law. At that point, friends say, his ambition was to be mayor of Chicago. But in 1996, he was elected to the Illinois State Senate and four years later, mounted a failed attempt to unseat Congressman Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther who brushed him off as "not black enough." In his new book, Obama recalls how the loss forced him to relax: "I spent more time at home and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife." He continues, "I exercised, and picked up novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part."
After an incumbent's surprise retirement, a Senate seat came open and Obama and his wife forged an "up-or-out strategy," as he reveals in the new book: If he didn't win the Senate race, he would find a career that would make for a more placid home life. Obama does not suppress his own qualms about public life, anymore than he hides his teenage dabbling with drugs and alcohol. Even today, he struggles with the burden his political commitment puts on him. "There's a big part of me that's pretty lazy," he says. "You know, I grew up in Hawaii and really liked going to the beach and talking to girls and playing basketball."
"I wasn't one of these folks who at the age of five said to myself, 'I'm going to be a U.S. senator,' " Obama continues. "The motivation for my work has been more rooted in the need to live up to certain values that, more than anybody, my mother instilled in me, and to figure out how you reconcile those values with a world that is broken apart by class and race and nationality. And so I guess I have on occasions had to push myself or I've been pushed into service, not always because I thought it was fun or that it was preferable to sitting down and watching a ball game, but because I felt it was necessary."
It was during his years as a community activist that Obama's social commitment began to be infused with the religious feeling he describes in the book. A spiritual inclination he attributes to his mother drew him, despite his "quarrels with God," to hang around the United Church of Christ, a community popular with black professionals. There he got to know the man who became his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., something of an Ellison or Richard Wright character himself, who came through encounters with drink, Islam, and Black Nationalism before he learned Greek and Hebrew and received a Ph.D. in Divinity.
When I asked Obama whether he believed in God before joining the Reverend Wright's Church, something I wondered after reading his first book, he responded with a comment you'd wait a long time to hear from any other senator. He quoted a favorite line from a poem by Borges:
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
"I think Borges is talking to a mistress or lover," Obama said. "But that kernel that is untouched—that doesn't traffic in the trivial or the mean or the petty—that sounds like God to me."
Obama arrived in Washington focused on how to avoid being known as the guy who gave one great speech, at the 2004 Democratic convention. Following Hillary Clinton's example, he put together a first-rate staff, studied procedural arcana, got local jobs done, and deferred to his Senate elders. After his first year and a half in office, he can expound with authority on immigration policy, the post-Katrina government contracting mess, and nuclear proliferation, usually in the same bipartisan tones. Hardly ever does he lead the party's charge against the Bush?Cheney White House. Obama especially dislikes the vituperative intramural debate to which left-wing blogs have contributed. Last fall, he sent a 2,000-word e-mail to the Daily Kos—a widely read progressive Web site—defending Democratic colleagues who voted to confirm Chief Justice John Roberts, even though he himself opposed the nominee. This further enraged some of the "netroots" antiwar activists who first backed him, and who were already upset that he opposes a rapid pullout from Iraq.
His other notable splash came through the thankless task he undertook at the behest of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: ethics reform, a topic that wins neither votes nor friends on Capitol Hill. After he became allied with John McCain, Senate Democrats compelled Obama to side with them rather than McCain's bipartisan effort, and the ornery Arizonan fired off a sarcastic accusation of double-crossing. More than anything else, the public denunciation indicated that the 70-year-old Republican front-runner, for whom 2008 will be a last shot at the presidency, sees the Democratic golden boy as a political threat. Ever the diplomat, Obama says that the spat is now ancient history and the two again get along well. "People see John McCain as a prima donna," Obama joked to the elites gathered for the Gridiron Club dinner this spring. "I think of him as a role model."
Obama usually deflects questions about his political future with this kind of self-deprecation. "I'm so overexposed, I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse," he likes to say. When Jon Stewart asked about his celebrity on The Daily Show, Obama responded, "The only person more over-hyped than me is you," convulsing the host with laughter.
The Democratic obsession—it is not too strong a word—with the possibility of his running in 2008 reflects a combination of concern about Hillary Clinton's electability and impatience with the notion that their biggest talent intends to sit out the race to marinate longer in the Senate. There's also the fact of his crossover appeal—in the 2004 Illinois race, Obama won an impressive 40 percent of the Republican vote. (And as the Daily Kos episode suggests, he's not afraid to criticize his own side, chiding Democrats in his new book for sometimes being "smug, detached and dogmatic.") Somewhat against his will, the force of his voice—and the truth that legislating veterans' benefits is not his highest calling—seems to be pulling him toward considering a run. As Joe Klein recently wrote in Time, the gossip in Washington is that Obama "isn't not running for President."
Obama is too candid to deny that he's thinking about the presidency. "Look, it was highly unlikely that I would ever be a U.S. senator, so it's very flattering for people to talk about a presidential race," he says. He recalls walking recently through a corridor of the Capitol Hilton, which is filled with portraits of all 43 presidents, and pondering their careers. "You go through and you think, 'Who are these guys?' There are—what?—maybe ten presidents in our history out of 40-something who you can truly say led the country? And then there are 30-odd who just kind of did their best. And so—I guess my point is—just being the president is not a good way of thinking about it."
Obama is well aware of the obstacles he would face, including his limited experience in foreign policy, and Hillary Clinton's embedded position as front-runner. It's also not lost on him that much of the next president's job will be "cleaning up the mess," which is as close as he comes to trashing the Bush administration. "My attitude about something like the presidency is that you don't want to just be the president," he continues. "You want to change the country. You want to make a unique contribution. You want to be a great president."
It can't be easy being the repository for so many hopes—from Democrats, African-Americans, and both his parents. Obama sometimes quotes Lyndon Johnson's remark that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for his mistakes. "I guess I'm trying to do both," he said in another interview. The greater influence is clearly his mother, who died of cancer in 1996. "She had this amazing sense of wonder about the world and this huge heart and huge sense of compassion and empathy for people—and a great kindness toward them," he says. In the introduction to the paperback edition of his first book, written with his Senate election in sight, Obama calls his mother "the single constant in my life." That passage, he says, is the one piece of his own writing he can't reread without breaking up.
For the most part, Obama appears to wear the burden of others' dreams lightly. They hang loosely on his shoulders, like the dark suits that compliment his slender frame. But beneath his open, companionable exterior, one detects a certain brooding quality, a concern etched into the sharp lines of his face about whether he's up to the tasks ahead.
His book will only add to the run-Obama-run! clamor, and the intensity of the pressure on him. But even as the Democratic political discussion grows and engulfs him, Obama is engaged in another more personal and historical conversation—with Wright and Ellison, with his parents, and with those two tragic and prophetic figures, Lincoln and King. Obama, of course, would never be so immodest as to compare himself to either of these men. But being clear-eyed, he must see what others do: that among American politicians, he alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath.
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The first article of the two posted below is your must read.
The sobering reality is that the overwhelming majority of the voting American populace possesses scant knowledge of how National; State and Local politics really functions. This knowledge deficit is even greater in the Black community. Excluding a federal tax-return election funding check-off option, less than 2% of all American households have ever contributed money to a political campaign.
Onto the bridge that connects the starry eyed naïve voters to the Washington power elite steps Barack Obama. As the article “ BARACK OBAMA INC.” illuminates; the balance between maintaining “street credibility” and satisfying the financial and political cognoscenti is the ultimate challenge. Can he do it?
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BARACK OBAMA INC.</font><font face="tahoma" size="4" color="#0000FF"><b>
The Birth Of A Washington Machine</b></font>
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<b>by Ken Silverstein
November 2006 | Harpers Magazine</b>
www.harpers.org
In July, on a typically oppressive summer day in Washington, D.C., roughly a thousand college students from across the country gathered at a Marriott hotel with plans to change the world. Despite being sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a moderate think tank founded by one of Bill Clinton's former chiefs of staff, John Podesta, the student group—called Campus Progress—leans decidedly farther to the left, At booths outside the main auditorium, young activists handed out pamphlets opposing nuclear power, high pay for CEOs, excessive profits for oil companies, harsh prison sentences for drug users, and Israeli militarism in Gaza and the West Bank. At one session, Adrienne Maree Brown of The Ruckus Society—a protest group whose capacious mission is to promote "the voices and visions of youth, women, people of color, indigenous people and immigrants, poor and working class people, lesbian, gay, bisexual, gender queer, and trans-gendered people"—urged students to "break the fucking rules." Even the consummate insider Podesta told attendees, with unintended ambiguity, "We need more of you hanging from trees,"
Around noon, conference participants began filing into the auditorium; activists staffing the literature booths abandoned their posts to take seats inside as well. The crowd, and the excitement, building in the hall was due entirely to the imminent arrival of the keynote speaker: Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Having ascended to political fame through a stirring and widely lauded speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama, the U.S. Senate's only African-American member, is now considered to be the party's most promising young leader—especially among those who, like the student organizers present, are seeking to reinvigorate its progressive wing. In terms of sheer charisma, Obama is certainly the party's most magnetic leader since Bill Clinton, and perhaps since Robert F. Kennedy.
The senator was running a bit late; but when he finally glided into the auditorium, escorted by an assortment of aides, he was greeted by a tremendous swell of applause as he took to the stage. Dressed in a brown jacket and red tie, Obama approached the podium, flanked by two giant screens enlarging his image, and began a softly spoken but compelling speech that recalled his own days, after his graduation in 1983 from Columbia University, as a community organizer in poor neighborhoods of Chicago. "You'll have boundless opportunities when you graduate," he told the students, "and it's very easy to just take that diploma, forget about all this progressive-politics stuff, and go chasing after the big house and the large salary and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy, But 1 hope you don't get off that easy. There's nothing wrong with making money, but focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition."
Obama complained of an American culture that "discourages empathy," in which those in power blame poverty on people who are "lazy or weak of spirit" and believe that "innocent people being slaughtered and expelled from their homes halfway around the world are somebody else's problem." He urged the assembled activists to ignore those voices, "not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although 1 think you do have that obligation . . . but primarily because you have that obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. It's only when you hitch yourself up to something bigger than yourself that you realize your true potential."
It was a rousing speech, and Obama is probably the only member of Congress who could have delivered it with any conviction or credibility. When he left the stage and headed toward the hotel exit, he was trailed by a pack of autograph seekers, picture takers, and glad-handers.
Despite its audience and ostensible subject matter, however, Obama's speech had contained just a single call for political action. That was when he had introduced Mark Pike, a law student who then came bounding across the stage in a green one-piece mechanic's outfit. As part of a campaign called "Kick the Oil Habit," Pike was to depart directly from the conference and drive from Washington to Los Angeles in a "flex-fuel" vehicle. "Give it up for Mark!" Obama had urged the crowd, noting that Pike would be refueling only at gas stations that offer E85—which Obama touts as "a clean, renewable, and domestically produced alternative fuel."
Although the senator did not elaborate, E85 is so called because it is 85 percent ethanol, a product whose profits accrue to a small group of corporate corn growers led by Illinois-head quartered Archer Daniels Midland. Not surprisingly, agribusiness is a primary advocate of E85, as are such automobile manufacturers as Ford, which donated Pike's car. The automakers love E85 because it allows them to look environmentally correct ("Live Green, Go Yellow," goes GM's advertising pitch for the fuel) while producing vehicles, mostly highly profitable and fuel-guzzling SUV and pickup models, that can run on regular gasoline as well as on E85. Obama had essentially marshaled his twenty minutes of undeniably moving oratory to plump for the classic pork-barrel cause of every Midwestern politician.
In an election season, when Americans of all political persuasions can allow themselves to imagine—even if for just a few unguarded moments—how matters in this country might improve it it’s leaders did, it is worthwhile to consider the path so far of Senator Barack Obama. A man more suited to the tastes of reform-minded Americans could hardly be imagined: he is passionate, charming, and well-intentioned, and his desire to change the culture of Washington seems deeply held and real. He managed to win a tremendous majority in his home state of Illinois despite rhetoric, and a legislative record, that marked him as a true progressive. During his first year in the state senate—1997—he helped lead a bud' able if quixotic crusade that would have amended the state constitution to define health care as a basic right and would have required the Illinois General Assembly to ensure that all the state's citizens could get health insurance within five years. He led initiatives to aid the poor, including campaigns that resulted in an earned-income tax credit and the expansion of early-childhood-education programs. In 2001, reacting to a surge in home foreclosures in Chicago, he helped push for a measure that cracked down on predatory lenders that peddled high-interest, high-fee mortgages to lower-end homebuyers. Obama was also the driving force behind legislation, passed in 2003, that made Illinois the first state to require law-enforcement agencies to tape interrogations and confessions of murder suspects. Throughout his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama called for social justice, promised to "stand up to the powerful drug and insurance lobbies" that block health-care reform, and denounced the war in Iraq and the Bush White House.
Since coming to Washington, Obama has advocated for the poor, most notably in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and has emerged as a champion of clean government. He has fought for restrictions on lobbying, even as most of his fellow Democrats postured on the issue while quietly seeking to gut real reform initiatives. In mid-September, Congress approved a bill he co-authored with Oklahoma's arch-conservative senator, Tom Coburn, requiring all federal contracts and earmarks to be published in an Internet database, a step that will better allow citizens to track the way the government spends their money.
Yet it is also startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation's manufacturing sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama's top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland &. Ellis and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from telecommunications to defense). Obama immediately established a "leadership PAC," a vehicle through which a member of Congress can contribute to other politicians' campaigns—-and one that political reform groups generally view as a slush fund through which congressional leaders can evade campaign-finance rules while raising their own political profiles.
Already considered a potential vice-presidential nominee in 2008, Obama clearly has abundant political ambitions. Hence he is playing not only to voters in Illinois—a reliably Democratic and generally liberal state—but to the broader national audience, as well as to the Democratic Party establishment, the Washington media, and large political donors. Perhaps for this reason, Obama has taken an approach to his policymaking that is notably cautious and nonconfrontational. "Since the founding, the American political tradition has been reformist, not revolutionary," he told me during an interview at his office on Capitol Hill this summer. "What that means is that for a political leader to get things done, he or she ideally should be ahead of the curve, but not too far ahead. I want to push the envelope but make sure I have enough folks with me that I'm not rendered politically impotent."
The question, though, is just how effective—let alone reformist—Obama's approach can be in a Washington grown hostile to reform and those who advocate it. After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to the right and the political system in general has become thoroughly dominated by the corporate perspective, the first requirement of electoral success is now the ability to raise staggering sums of money. For Barack Obama, this means that mounting a successful career, especially one that may include a run for the presidency, cannot even be attempted without the kind of compromising and horse trading that may, in fact, render him impotent.
The walls of Obama's office on the seventh floor of the Hart Senate Office Building are decorated with images from the canon of liberal icons. There are photos of Martin Luther King addressing a civil rights rally, Gandhi sitting cross-legged, and Obama with Nelson Mandela; a painting of Thurgood Marshall, and, above a framed pair of red boxing gloves signed by Muhammad Ali, the famous photo of a scowling Ali standing over Sonny Liston after knocking him out during their second fight, in Lewiston, Maine.
When 1 interviewed him this summer, I had my eleven-year-old daughter in tow, because her outing with a friend had fallen through just as I was leaving home. Obama, who is married and has two young daughters of his own, asked her a few questions; when she told him she was starting seventh grade in the fall, he told her that at her age, "I was such a terror that my teachers didn't know what to do with me." He draped his gray jacket over his leather desk chair and urged her to have a seat. For the next hour, she contentedly twirled on the chair while we spoke across the room, Obama on a tan sofa and me on a chair to his right.
I asked Obama how he was adjusting to Washington and the city's peculiar political culture. "I have not had to partake of the culture much," he replied. "My family lives in Chicago, and I'm usually here Tuesday through Thursday. I rarely meet lobbyists; it's one of the benefits of having a good staff." Nor has he had to devote much time to fund-raising. "The first $250,000 that I raised was like pulling teeth," he recalled. "No major Democratic donors knew me, I had a funny name, they wouldn't take my phone calls. Then at a certain point we sort of clicked into the public consciousness and the buzz, and I benefited from a lot of small individual contributions that helped me get over the hump….And then after winning, the notoriety that I received made raising money relatively simple, and so I don't have the same challenges that most candidates do now, and that's pure luck. It's one of the benefits of celebrity."
Obama sat with his arms and legs crossed, one foot tapping the air. Progressive candidates generally have a harder time raising money, he said, and at times some of them will "trim their sails" on behalf of the people who are financing them. "When I say that," he was hasty to add, "I want to make sure I'm not saying all the time. I'm just saying there are going to be points where donors have more access and are taken more into account than ordinary voters." The solution he supports js some form of public financing for campaigns, combined—since big donors "are always going to find a way to get money" to candidates—with some reduction in the cost of running for office; for example, by providing candidates with free political advertising.
Personally, though, Obama felt that he had not trimmed his own political sails to make himself palatable to the political center. His primary obstacle, he said, is simply that the G.O.P. controls the White House and Congress. "My experience in the state legislature is instructive. The first seven years 1 was there I was in the minority, and 1 think that I passed maybe ten bills; maybe five of them were substantive- Most of the bills that 1 did pass were in partnership with Republicans, because that was the only way I could get them passed. The first year we were in the majority party I passed twenty-six hills in one year." While Washington "moves more slowly than the state legislature," Obama said he had no doubt that it the Democrats controlled Congress, it would he possible to move forward on important progressive legislation.
The alternative, until then, is to he opportunistic and look for areas where he can get enough Republican support to actually get a bill passed. That, he said, "means that most of the legislation I've proposed will be more modest in its goals than it would be if I were in the majority party." Obama gave an example: although he is a strong supporter of raising fuel-economy standards, proposals to do so have gone nowhere for years. In 2005, Congress overwhelmingly rejected an amendment to the energy bill that would have required cars, minivans, and SUVs to get 40 miles pet gallon on average by 2016. This year, Obama and Indiana Republican Richard Lugar introduced a bill that would require fuel-economy targets to rise 4 percent annually unless federal regulators specifically blocked that step. Obama recruited as co-sponsors four senators who had voted against the 2005 amendment— Democrat Joe Biden of Delaware and Republicans Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania— and although this bill might not pass either, it has a better chance than past efforts.
I asked Obama a question about pork-barrel spending. Did he feel pressure to deliver federal money for home-state interests? “Pork is in the eye of the beholder," he said. "The recipients don't tend to think it's pork, especially if it's a great public-works project." He said he felt "pretty good" about projects he had sought in last year's transportation bill and "unashamed" about getting them in. House Speaker Dennis Hastert had praised Obama for his efforts in helping win Illinois its $6.2 billion in the massive, earmark-larded 2005 transportation bill. (Illinois's most extravagant project funded by the bill was the Prairie Parkway, a controversial regional highway that would run through Hastert's district and, in fact, has significantly increased the value of real estate he owns along the proposed route.)
An aide came in and told Obama that Congressman David Dreier was on the phone to discuss legislation to aid the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that Obama was planning to visit as part of a trip to Africa. After taking the call at his desk, Obama returned to the couch and took up the pork-barrel question again. He gave as an example President Bush's Clear Skies Initiative, which he described as a difficult decision. After examining the legislation, he determined that it would significantly weaken the Clean Air Act, yet the administration claimed it would help the coal industry, a major economic force in southern Illinois. In the end, he opposed it because he decided it would have been more beneficial to western coal producers, not those in Illinois. "That kind of vote is a tough vote, not so much on the merits as it is on the politics," he said. "I then have to spend a lot of time working that through with my constituents in southern Illinois, explaining to them why I did not think it was actually good for them." Even so, he took heat at home, with one southern Illinois newspaper editorial saying that he was less interested in looking out for the interests of the state's coal industry than he was in voting with the interests of Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton.
And what if he had determined that the Clear Skies Initiative would have aided Illinois coal? I asked. In that case, Obama said, "It would have been more difficult for me. ... If I thought that it would have significantly helped Illinois coal but would have been a net minus for the environment, then you've got your classic legislative dilemma."
Obama said that the "blogger community," which by now is shorthand for liberal Democrats, gets frustrated with him because they think he's too willing to compromise with Republicans, "My argument," he says, "is that a polarized electorate plays to the advantage of those who want to dismantle government. Karl Rove can afford to win with 51 percent of the vote. They're not trying to reform health care. They are content with an electorate that is cynical about government. Progressives have a harder job. They need a big enough majority to initiate bold proposals."
Before he addressed the 2004 convention, Obama was virtually unknown nationally, and even in Illinois his was far from a household name. Just four years earlier, he had been defeated by a significant margin when he tried to unseat Chicago-area Congressman Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary. But following the speech, which was universally hailed—even the National Review called it "simple and powerful," conceding that it had deserved its "rapturous critical reception"—Obama became a national celebrity. Less than two months later, he won election to the Senate with 70 percent of the vote.
If the speech was his debut to the wider American public, he had already undergone an equally successful but much quieter audition with Democratic Party leaders and fund-raisers, without whose support he would surely never have been chosen for such a prominent role at the convention. The early, if not overwhelming, favorite to be the Senate nominee from Illinois had been Dan Hynes, the state comptroller, who had twice won statewide office and had the support of the state's Democratic machine and labor unions. But by September 2003, six months before the primary, Obama was winning support from not only African Americans but also Chicago's "Lake-front Liberals" and other progressives. He was still largely unknown in Washington circles, but that changed the following month when Vernon Jordan, the well-known power broker and corporate boardmember who chaired Bill Clinton's presidential transition team after the 1992 election, placed calls to roughly twenty of his friends and invited them to a fund-raiser at his home.
That event marked his entry into a well-established Washington ritual—the gauntlet of fund-raising parties and meet-and-greets through which potential stars are vetted by fixers, donors, and lobbyists. Gregory Craig, an attorney with Williams & Connolly and a longtime Democratic figure who, as special counsel in the White House, had coordinated Bill Clinton's impeachment defense, met Obama that night. "I liked his sense of humor and the confidence he had discussing national issues, especially as a state senator," Craig recalled of the event. "You felt excited to he in his presence." Another thing that Craig liked about Obama was that he's not seen as a "polarizer," like such traditional African-American leaders as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. "He gets respect from his adversaries because of the way he Heats them," Craig said. "He doesn't try to be all things to all people, but he has a way of taking positions you don't like without making you angry."
Word about Obama spread through Washington’s blue-chip law firms, lobby shops, and political offices, and this accelerated after his win in the March primary. Mike Williams, vice president for legislative affairs at The Bond Market Association and a member of an African-American lobbying association, had been following the race in Illinois and was introduced to Obama through acquaintances in Washington who had known him at Harvard Law School. "We represent Wall Street firms," Williams said in recounting his first conversation with Obama. "A big issue for us since 2000 is predatory lending. He worked on that issue in Illinois; he was the lead sponsor of a bill there. I talked Co him about that. He had a different position from ours. There's a perception out there that the Democrats are anti-business, and I talked to him about that directly. I said, There's a perception that you're coming at this from the angle of consumers. He was forthright, which I appreciated. He said, I tried to broker the best deal I could." Williams still had his differences with Obama, but the conversation convinced him that the two could work together. "He's not a political novice and he's smart enough not to say things cast in stone, but you can have a conversation with him," Williams said. "He's a straight shooter. As a lobbyist, that's something you value. You don't need a yes every time, but you want to be able to count the votes. That's what we do."
Williams subsequently set up a conference call between Obama and a group of financial-industry lobbyists. That, too, went well, and in June of 2004, Williams helped organize "a little fund-raiser" for Obama at The Bond Market Association. "It wasn't just the financial community. There was a broad cross-section," he said of the 200 ot so people who turned out. "There was overwhelming support, not just people from associations giving $2,000 but from individuals who just wanted to meet him, giving smaller contributions."
Tom Quinn, a senior partner at Venable and widely considered one of the top lobbyists in town, got a call from Williams and attended the fund-raiser. "I'm on the list. Pretty much everyone in political fund-raising circles knows me," said Quinn, who works closely with the Democratic National Committee and has been a party power broker since the late 1960s, when he worked on the presidential campaign of Hubert Humphrey. "Every day I get ten or fifteen solicitations. I contribute if I like the candidate and think they have a chance to win." He was impressed when he heard that Obama had been president of the Harvard Law Review—"That jumped out at me. It showed he had absolute intelligence"—and even more impressed after meeting him. "He's got a nice personal touch and the ability to kid around a little bit too," he said. "He's got star quality." Quinn contributed $500 to Obama at The Bond Marker Association event, and later made calls to people he knew and asked them to donate money as well.
Robert Harmala, also a big player in Democratic circles and a colleague of Quinn's at Venable, attended tin- association's event as well. He bad been invited by Larry Duncan—an African-American lobbyist for Lockheed Martin, a Venable client—who helped Williams organize the affair. Harmala liked what he saw and continued to be impressed by Obama, "There's a reasonableness about him," he said- "I don't see him as being on the liberal fringe. He's not going to be a parrot for the party line." Like Quinn, Harmala donated $500 to Obama and made calls to a number of political donors ("Some usual suspects in California whom I've worked with before") and urged them to support Obama's campaign. Other fund-raisers were soon organized—one at the Four Seasons Hotel, another at a Dupont Circle restaurant, yet another at the Clintons' home off Embassy Row. "He was hitting his stride. There were people clamoring to help," said Williams. "It wasn't just one person who put the events together and it wasn't all about raising money—people wanted to meet him and talk to him,"
It's not always clear what Obama's financial backers want, but it seems safe to conclude that his campaign contributors are nor interested merely in clean government and political reform. And although Obama is by no means a mouthpiece lor his hinders, it appears that he's not entirely indifferent to their desires either.
Consider the case of Illinois-based Exelon Corporation, the nation's leading nuclear-power-plant operator. The firm is Obama's fourth largest patron, having donated a total of $74,350 to his campaigns. During debate on the 2005 energy bill, Obama helped to vote down an amendment that would have killed vast loan guarantees for power-plant operators to develop new energy projects. The loan guarantees were called "one of the worst provisions in this massive piece of legislation" by Taxpayers for Common Sense and Citizens Against Government Waste; the public will not only pay millions of dollars in loan costs but will risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default.
In one of his earliest votes, Obama joined a bloc of mostly conservative and moderate Senate Democrats who helped pass a G.O.P.-driven class-action "reform" bill. The bill had been long sought by a coalition of business groups and was lobbied for aggressively by financial firms, which constitute Obama's second biggest single bloc of donors.
Although The Bond Market Association didn't lobby directly on the legislation, Williams took note of Obama's vote. "He's a Democrat, and some people thought he'd do whatever the trial lawyers wanted, but he didn’t do that," he said. That's a testament to his character." Obama has voted on one bill that was of keen interest to Williams's members: last year's hotly contested bankruptcy bill, which made filing for bankruptcy more difficult and gives creditors more recourse to recover debts. Obama voted against the bill, but Williams was pleased that he did side with The Bond Market Association position on a number of provisions. Most were minor technical matters, but he also opposed an important amendment, which was defeated, that would have capped credit-card interest rates at 30 percent. "He studied the issue," Williams said. "Some assumed he would just go along with consumer advocates, but he voted with us on several points. He understood the issue. He wasn't closed-minded. A lot of people found that very refreshing."
As of this summer, Obama had raised nearly $16 million for his original Senate run and for his 2010 reelection war chest. He has taken in an additional $3.8 million for the Hopefund, his leadership PAC. Such PACs are subject to fewer restrictions on raising and spending money than general campaign funds. Over a six-year term, a senator can raise a maximum of $4,200 per individual donor; the same donor can give as much as $30,000 to the senator’s leadership PAC during that same period. Traditionally, leadership PACs were established by veteran members of Congress, but now they are set up by anyone who hopes to work his or her way up through party ranks. Last year, the Hopefund took in more than any other leadership PAC except for those of Bill Frist, John McCain, and John Kerry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
In several primaries, Obama's PAC has given to candidates that have been carefully-culled and selected by the Democratic establishment on the basis of their marketability as palatable "moderates"—even when they are facing more progressive and equally viable challengers. Most conspicuously, Obama backed Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont, his Democratic primary opponent in Connecticut, endorsing him publicly in March and contributing $4,200 to his campaign. The Hopefund also gave $10,000 to Tammy Duckworth, a helicopter pilot in the National Guard who lost both legs in Iraq and who is running for the seat of retiring G.O.P. Congressman Henry Hyde in Chicago's western suburbs. Despite her support from the party establishment, an enormous fund-raising advantage, and sympathy she had due to her war record, Duckworth won the primary by just 1,100 votes over a vocal war opponent named Christine Cegelis. (When asked about her stand on the Iraq war by a reporter, Duckworth had replied, "There is good and bad in everything.")
The calibration of Obama's own political rhetoric has been particularly evident in regard to the war in Iraq. At an antiwar rally in Chicago in October 2002, when Obama was still a state senator, he savaged the Bush Administration for its by then obvious plans to invade. "1 don't oppose all wars," he said that day. "What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."
Since taking office, Obama has become far more measured in his position. After Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha called for withdrawal from Iraq last fall, Obama rejected such a move in a speech before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, saying the United States needed "to manage our exit in a responsible way—with the hope of leaving a stable foundation for the future." His stance won him praise from Washington Post columnist David Broder, the veritable weather vane of political conventional wisdom. Murtha's was "not a carefully reasoned analysis of the strategic consequences of leaving Iraq," Broder wrote, whereas Obama was helping his party define "a sensible common ground" and had "pointed the administration and the country toward a realistic and modestly hopeful course on Iraq." Obama continues to reject any specific timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, even as public opposition to the war grows and as the military rationale for staying becomes less and less apparent.
For the past several decades, the two senators from Illinois have held a weekly meeting on Thursday mornings called the Constituent Coffee, where visitors from the Prairie State can meet and ask questions of their elected officials. Traditionally, the coffees have been low-key affairs, but since Obama took office they have been moved to a larger room—often on the top floor of the Hart Building, which looks out on the Capitol dome—that can accommodate the crowds they now invariably attract.
Obama and Richard Durbin, Illinois’s senior senator and the Democrats' Senate minority whip, are a winning team. At one coffee I attended this summer, Obama noted in introducing Durbin that his colleague had recently been selected by Time magazine as one of the ten best members of the Senate. "Only ninety senators disagree," said Durbin in rejoinder, adding, "I haven't done the cover of Newsweek or won a Grammy. There's a pretty important junior senator from Illinois too." (Obama won a Best Spoken Word Grammy this year, for his reading of his autobiography.) At another coffee, Durbin mentioned to the crowd that Obama had thrown out the first pitch at a Chicago White Sox game last year; this, he noted, had sparked a long winning streak, at the end of which the team won its first World Series in eighty-eight years. Later, a student at the University of Illinois asked Obama if he might also throw out the first pitch for the perennial sad-sack Cubs, in order to impart similarly good luck. "My arm," Obama deadpanned, "is only so good."
By 8:30 A.M. on July 13, when that week's coffee was scheduled to begin, about 150 people had filled the seats and several dozen more were standing at the back. The top-floor space at Hart was not available that day, so the coffee bad been moved to a large hearing room in the basement of the neighboring Dirksen Building. A few stragglers huddled around a table near the entrance, picking from a platter of doughnuts and filling cups of coffee from a shiny metal urn. "The doughnuts are the main reason people come," Obama joked, opening the affair from a podium at the head of the room. In fact, it was clear that many in attendance—especially among the sizable contingent who weren't actually from Illinois, including many congressional interns and pages—had turned up just to see Obama.
Although Obama and Durbin did field some questions on foreign policy, especially on Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah, the audience seemed more interested in domestic issues— health and education and basic pocketbook worries. What, one middle-aged woman asked pointedly, was Congress planning to do about the soaring price of gasoline?
Like the natural politician he is, Obama packaged his reply to appeal to the broadest spectrum of opinion. Energy, he said, was not just an economic issue but a national-security issue ("We now are dependent on the most volatile regions of the world for running our economy") and an environmental issue as well ("There are a lot of farmers in the room whose croplands could be impacted by global warming"). President Bush, said Obama, had finally acknowledged the need to break America's addiction to foreign oil, "but with the twelve-step program there are eleven other steps after you acknowledge your addiction." One step, he said, in bringing the issue home to Illinois interests, was to support biofuels such as ethanol, which are "a terrific way for us to start cutting down our use of imported oil."
Obama's support among traditional Democratic constituencies was apparent in the audience members, a number of whom worked for low-income housing, civil rights, and pro-choice groups. Grateful representatives of big-money interests were on hand as well, in the form of officials from the Illinois Soybean Association and the Illinois Corn Growers Association. "We appreciate the relationship and the help," said the latter, who was in town as part of a lobbying blitz called the Corn Congress.
And indeed Obama has delivered for his constituents—for social activists, but also for business groups whose demands are invariably more costly. Although this is not the place to review the full history of ethanol, it's beyond dispute that it survives only because members of Congress from farm states, whether liberal or conservative, have for decades managed to win billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite its production. It is not, of course, family farmers who primarily benefit from the program bur rather the agribusiness giants such as Illinois-based Aventine Renewable Energy and Archer Daniels Midland (for which ethanol accounts for just 5 percent of its sales but an estimated 2 5 percent of its profits). Ethanol production, as Tad Patzek of UC Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering wrote in a report this year, is based on "the massive transfer of money from the collective pocket of the U.S. taxpayers to the transnational agricultural cartel."
Since arriving on Capitol I [ill, Obama has been as assiduous as any member of Congress in promoting ethanol. He has introduced a number of measures that benefit the industry— such as the "Obama Amendment" that offered oil companies a 50 percent tax credit for building stations that offer E85 fuel—and voted for the corporate-welfare-laden 2005 energy bill, which offered billions in subsidies to ethanol producers as well as lavish incentives for developing cars that run on alternative fuels.
Meanwhile, Obama, Durbin, and three other farm-state senators opposed a proposal this year by the Bush Administration to lower stiff tariffs on cheaper sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil and other countries. To lower such tariffs, the senators suggested, would leave the nation dangerously dependent on foreign ethanol. "Our focus must be on building energy security through domestically produced renewable fuels," wrote the senators in a letter to Bush. That Obama would lend his name to such an argument— with its dubious implication that Brazilian ethanol is a national-security liability comparable to Saudi crude—indicates that he is at least as interested in protecting domestic producers of ethanol as he is in weaning America from imported petroleum.
I recall a remark made by Studs Terkel in 1980, about the liberal Republican John Anderson, who was running as an independent against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter: "People are so tired of dealing with two-foot midgets, you give them someone two foot four and they start proclaiming him a giant." In the unstinting and unanimous adulation of Barack Obama today, one wonders if a similar dynamic might be at work. If so, his is less a midgetry of character than one dictated by changing context. Gone are the days when, as in the 1970s, the U.S. Senate could comfortably house such men as Fred Harris (from Oklahoma, of all places), who called for the breakup of the oil, steel, and auto industries; as Wisconsin's William Proxmire, who replaced Joe McCarthy in 1957 and survived into the 1980s, a crusader against big banks who neither spent nor raised campaign money; as South Dakota's George McGovern, who favored huge cuts in defense spending and a guaranteed income for all Americans; as Frank Church of Idaho, who led important investigations into CIA and FBI abuses.
Today, money has all but wrung such dissent from the Senate. Campaigns have grown increasingly costly; in 2004 it took an average of more than $7 million to run for a Senate seat. As Carl Wagner, a Democratic political strategist who first came to Washington in 1970, remarked to me, the Senate today is a fundamentally different institution than it was then. "Senators were creatures of their states and reflected the cultures of their states," he said. "Today they are creatures of the people who pay for their multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. Representative democracy has largely been taken off the table. It's reminiscent of the 1880s and 1890s, when senators were chosen by state legislatures who were owned by the railroads and the banks." Accordingly, as corporate money has grown increasingly important to candidates, we have seen the rise of the smothering K Street culture and the revolving door that feeds it—not just lobbyists themselves but an entire interconnected world of campaign consultants, public-relations agencies, pollsters, and media strategists.
All of this has forged a political culture that is intrinsically hostile to reform. On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious; that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a "player." The lobbyist added: "What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?"
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<font face="rockwell extra bold, arial black" size="6" color="#D90000">The Path To Power</font>
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Barack Obama lays down a grand challenge to his own party—and it may get him elected president one day</b></font>
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<b>by Jacob Weisberg
October 2006 | Men's VOGUE</b>
http://www.mensvogue.com/business/politics/feature/articles/2006/09/11/barack_obama
Early last summer, Barack Obama, the 45-year-old junior senator from Illinois, took the pulpit at the National City Christian Church in downtown Washington, D.C., to make the most important speech delivered by a Democrat since—well, since his keynote at the Democratic Convention in 2004. That earlier address, which set the political world spinning in Obama's direction, drew quietly on the religious imagery of "things not seen." This one confronted the problem of faith and politics directly. Looking out among the Sojourners assembly, a group that aspires to be a liberal answer to the Christian coalition, Obama began by recalling a moment in his 2004 Senate campaign. His Republican opponent—the blistering, possibly deranged conservative orator Alan Keyes—declared one day (and here Obama channeled Keyes's ranting staccato) that "Jesus Christ would not vote for Ba-rack O-bama!"
Forty points ahead in the polls, Obama shrugged off the comment at the time by saying that he was running for senator, not minister—and from the podium he disparaged his own words as the "typically liberal response." But the problem of religion in politics nagged at him. In a country where "more people believe in angels than they do in evolution," Democrats would never be able to reach their fellow citizens so long as they continued to insist that religion and politics don't mix.
In his remarks, Obama linked himself to literary and political figures who had God on their minds and in their voices. "If we scrub language of all religious content, we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice," he argued. "Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—the majority of great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity."
As a speaker, Obama does not strive for the soulful effect of an African-American evangelical. Nor does he conjure instant empathy with an audience, the way Bill Clinton does. He delivers his message with the understated charisma of a Midwestern news anchor. But when he writes or when he speaks, Obama does something no one else in politics does: He plumbs his own anxiety and doubt, and ties his life story to political problems that few elected officials dare to discuss so personally, including the disparities of race and class, drug abuse, poverty, and, of course, faith.
That afternoon, the senator recounted his own path from a secular, multicultural household to the spiritual home he found in the black church. As a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s, Obama had put together demonstrations and registered voters alongside Christian leaders who honored the civil-rights tradition of social change. His faith-grounded fellow activists, he explained, "saw that I knew their Book, that I shared their values, that I sang their songs." But, he said, they also "sensed that part of me that remained detached and removed, that I was an observer in their midst." He continued, "In time, I came to realize that something was missing for me as well, that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone." Though Obama had long been skeptical of organized religion, he gradually came to embrace it "as a choice, not an epiphany."
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Obama's spirited argument that afternoon had sprung from a less lofty concern: a looming book deadline, which he was on the verge of blowing. His speech emerged from months of late-night ruminations at his laptop, turning over the kind of big ideas that tend not to be part of the typical senator's day. His new book, The Audacity of Hope, is quite unlike most written by politicians—those arid, rhetorical manifestos, penned by ghostwriters to meet the needs of a pending campaign and an ascendant career. (Obama's closest political adviser, the Chicago-based consultant David Axelrod, distinguishes it from "the stone tablets kind of approach—the ten things we have to do to ensure the future of democracy.") Instead, the book follows the pointed yet bridge-building tone Obama has set throughout his young career. The pages I've read are conversational and serious-minded reconsiderations of subjects that include race, values, foreign policy, and economics. The larger theme: How someone can speak the truth—and be true to his own ideals—amid the superficiality, sniping, and sheer soul-sapping drudgery of politics.
The Audacity of Hope has a hard act to follow: Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, sprang from his small-scale celebrity as the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He sank years of his life and hours of self-examination into the writing project, and came back with a gripping autobiographical narrative. (The book was reissued in paperback in 2004 and spent 54 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.) Obama is as much an American writer who has found his way to politics as he is a politician who knows how to write. "I kept a journal basically from my junior year in college until I went to law school, for a span of about five years," he tells me when I visit him in his Senate office, on the top floor of the Hart Office Building. As he continues, Obama speaks with the methodical care of prose composition. "Even though I hadn't written a book before, I had a sense of what it felt like to write something that rang true. When you start writing you are able to discern where you're being false, where you're using clichés, where you're manufacturing emotion that's not really there, or where you're shying away from something that isn't necessarily flattering."
The senator's tie is loosened, and he keeps his pin-striped jacket on while inside his formal office. The room looks barely lived in, the result of his spending nearly every moment when the Senate isn't in session on the road raising money for his Democratic colleagues, or with his family back in Chicago. Obama has just flown back to D.C., and he remains upright and alert in a straight-backed chair. His build is so lean and sinewy that he seems much shorter than his 6'2" stature. Despite the demands of his schedule, he manages to keep in shape with daily runs or workouts in the Senate gym. He also plays golf occasionally and basketball when he can, including once with troops in Iraq.
Behind him is a wall of historical and personal artifacts: a 1965 Life cover of the Selma march inscribed "Keep the faith" by Representative John Lewis, who was badly beaten at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and an original program from the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. There are also pictures of Lincoln, Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Obama with Nelson Mandela, and family photos that look like Christmas cards from the post-racial future, with white, black, brown, and Asian relatives intermingled.
Obama says he wrote The Audacity of Hope on his own, as he does anything important, at his Washington apartment, late at night. "What I've had to do when I get home at eight or nine o'clock is start writing," he says. Why he puts himself through this toil is, at least partly, for the money, as one of his friends told me: Obama never really made much before last year. (Royalties from his first book enabled him to pay back the last of his student loans—fifteen years after he graduated from law school.) The $1.9 million contract he signed for The Audacity of Hope, and another as-yet-unannounced title, allowed him and his wife, Michelle, to move with their two daughters from their condo into a large, prairie-style house in Kenwood, an upper-middle-class, mixed-race neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Facing a deadline may also explain why the senator has found it so hard to quit smoking, although the government buildings smoking ban has helped curb his on-again, off-again habit that began 25 years ago.
Of all of the assets that make Obama such an appealing figure to Democrats—his reflective intellect, his departure from the familiar paths of racial politics, his good looks and easy manner—it is his writer's voice that most distinguishes him as a political figure. Many of the nation's greatest leaders—Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln—were of course men of letters as well as candidates and officeholders. But the demands of a modern political career—the fund-raising, the constant travel, the need to respond to a 24-hour news cycle—seem to preclude collecting one's thoughts in such a polished and engaging way. The Senate, in particular, breeds the kind of pomposity and egotism that ruins thoughtful prose. Senators publish a lot of books, but most are memorabilia, not political literature.
A few highbrow politicians—Eugene McCarthy, Mario Cuomo, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—have managed to write seriously. But much of this body of literature conveys the message that the writers, whose careers never went as far as their admirers thought they could, are too good for the dirty business of politics. Obama seems determined not to fall into either trap—growing so infatuated with his own reflection that he can't succeed as a leader, or charging ahead so hard that there's no space left for his emotional and intellectual life.
"If you read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson—I'm not Johnson, but I'm fascinated by him—there's a piece of him in me," Obama says, leaning forward. "That kind of hunger—desperate to win, please, succeed, dominate—I don't know any politician who doesn't have some of that reptilian side to him. But that's not the dominant part of me. On the other hand, I don't know that it was the dominant part of—" his voice suddenly trails off as he motions behind him to a portrait of Lincoln, the self-invented lawyer, writer, and politician from Illinois. "This guy was pretty reflective," he says, offering a sly smile.
The turning point in Dreams from My Father comes when Obama is helping to organize an anti-apartheid rally as a sophomore at Occidental College in the early 1980s. He describes his own involvement with the divestment movement as stemming from racial posturing, part of the "radical pose" he cultivated in those days, when he was trying to demonstrate his blackness. As he was drawn into the effort, Obama found himself giving a speech to classmates, who cheered him on. But after it ended in a bit of street theater—two white students dressed as policemen dragged the black protester away—he began to doubt his own sincerity. "Through my eyes, we suddenly appeared like the sleek and well-fed amateurs we were," he writes. "The whole thing was a farce, I thought to myself—the rally, the banners, everything."
At a party the night of the rally, a friend of Obama's named Regina—who made her way to college from a struggling African-American family in the Chicago ghetto—congratulated him. Obama snapped that he had no business speaking for black people, and that nothing he did would make any difference. Standing on stage and receiving applause was just a way to feed his ego.
"If anyone's being naive, it's you," Regina told him. "You wanna know what your real problem is? You always think everything's about you." Regina's words resonated, and helped Obama move beyond his sense of grievance, and commit himself to social change.
Up until that point, his search had been more inward, defined by the fact that he barely knew his father and that he grew up with black skin and a white family. His mother, Ann Dunham, was born in a small Kansas town, and could trace her ancestry to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. She moved to Hawaii with her parents, and, in 1959, while attending the University of Hawaii, met a charismatic 23-year-old exchange student from Kenya named Barack Hussein Obama, who was raised a Muslim and grew up during the heyday of anticolonial politics. They married, had a son, divorced, and Barack Senior, who specialized in econometrics and won a scholarship for a Harvard graduate degree, soon returned to Kenya to put his training to use. Though he kept in touch and made it clear that he expected great things from his namesake, the father remained mostly a heroic legend to his son, whom he saw only once more, for a month when the boy was ten years old.
Soon his mother found a new love, and for Barry, as she called her son, a new adventure. To begin a second marriage to an Indonesian man, Ann moved her six-year-old son to Jakarta, where the boy had to contend with street children—and the occasional water buffalo. But after three years, Ann sent her son back to Hawaii to live with her comfortably middle-class parents. She followed soon after with a new daughter, Maya. Even in multicultural Honolulu, Obama's complex racial heritage provoked conflict. At Punahou, an elite prep school, he was one of only a handful of African-American students. Obama searched for black role models and channeled his angry sense of racial displacement into drinking, drugs (pot and a little cocaine), and basketball—none of which prevented him from excelling academically. A voracious reader, he immersed himself in the classics of African-American literature—books by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Malcolm X.
"At night I would close the door to my room, telling my grandparents I had homework to do, and there I would sit and wrestle with words, locked in a suddenly desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I'd found it with the terms of my birth," he writes. "I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect."
Obama moved to New York City, where he finished college at Columbia, and one day in 1982, he received a call from a relative in Nairobi, who told him his father had been killed in a car accident. Obama thought that as a result, half of his heritage would remain closed to him. But a few years later he found a soul mate in his sister Auma, his father's daughter who came to visit him in Chicago. The long last section of his first book describes a visit to Kenya, where, with Auma as his guide, he unearthed the reality about his father, who was in fact a polygamist and, toward the end, an embittered alcoholic. As Obama met his extended family and learned about the struggles his forebears faced, his disappointment faded.
After working as a community organizer in Chicago in the mid-eighties, the next logical step was a law degree. At Harvard he quickly made his mark and developed a close circle of friends who continue to function as his advisers. After his first year, Obama worked as a summer associate at a law firm, where he met a brilliant and attractive first-year associate named Michelle Robinson. The daughter of a working-class family from the South Side, Michelle had finished Harvard Law before Obama started, though as she is quick to remind everyone, he is older. "What do you do when you have a very assertive and confident first-year who asks you out on dates and then keeps asking and is pretty persistent?" she asks, recalling their initial involvement. "What you do is give in."
The courtship continued while Obama was working on Dreams from My Father, which Michelle says defined the first part of their marriage, before the birth of their daughters, Malia, eight, and Sasha, five. Now the vice president of community relations at the University of Chicago Hospitals, Michelle Obama appears to be neither a Nancy Reagan, pushing her husband's political career forward, nor an Alma Powell, holding it back. "Politics is a completely unappealing way to live your life," she says, with trademark bluntness. "There's nothing that makes this attractive to go through as a family. But I also know very deeply and much more intimately than anyone out there how truly gifted Barack is. Part of me looks at my children and the world that I want my kids and grandkids to live in and says, 'How can I stand in the way?' But I struggle with it everyday." She says the knowledge that her husband would walk away from politics without hesitation if she asked him to makes the sacrifices easier to handle.
<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" -->
<img src="http://www.mensvogue.com/images/business/2006/08/21/busl02_obama.jpg" align="right" width="500" height="336"></div>
"Michelle is definitely the grounding presence in his life," says Cassandra Butts, a close friend from Harvard who now works for the liberal Center for American Progress. "I don't want to make this sound stereotypical, because Michelle is an intelligent professional with her own career and instincts. But she provides a base of support that allows him to do all the things he wants to do in his career. She is his rock."
Passing up a prestigious clerkship and high-paying offers from firms, Obama returned to Chicago in 1991 to practice civil-rights law. At that point, friends say, his ambition was to be mayor of Chicago. But in 1996, he was elected to the Illinois State Senate and four years later, mounted a failed attempt to unseat Congressman Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther who brushed him off as "not black enough." In his new book, Obama recalls how the loss forced him to relax: "I spent more time at home and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife." He continues, "I exercised, and picked up novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part."
After an incumbent's surprise retirement, a Senate seat came open and Obama and his wife forged an "up-or-out strategy," as he reveals in the new book: If he didn't win the Senate race, he would find a career that would make for a more placid home life. Obama does not suppress his own qualms about public life, anymore than he hides his teenage dabbling with drugs and alcohol. Even today, he struggles with the burden his political commitment puts on him. "There's a big part of me that's pretty lazy," he says. "You know, I grew up in Hawaii and really liked going to the beach and talking to girls and playing basketball."
"I wasn't one of these folks who at the age of five said to myself, 'I'm going to be a U.S. senator,' " Obama continues. "The motivation for my work has been more rooted in the need to live up to certain values that, more than anybody, my mother instilled in me, and to figure out how you reconcile those values with a world that is broken apart by class and race and nationality. And so I guess I have on occasions had to push myself or I've been pushed into service, not always because I thought it was fun or that it was preferable to sitting down and watching a ball game, but because I felt it was necessary."
It was during his years as a community activist that Obama's social commitment began to be infused with the religious feeling he describes in the book. A spiritual inclination he attributes to his mother drew him, despite his "quarrels with God," to hang around the United Church of Christ, a community popular with black professionals. There he got to know the man who became his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., something of an Ellison or Richard Wright character himself, who came through encounters with drink, Islam, and Black Nationalism before he learned Greek and Hebrew and received a Ph.D. in Divinity.
When I asked Obama whether he believed in God before joining the Reverend Wright's Church, something I wondered after reading his first book, he responded with a comment you'd wait a long time to hear from any other senator. He quoted a favorite line from a poem by Borges:
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
"I think Borges is talking to a mistress or lover," Obama said. "But that kernel that is untouched—that doesn't traffic in the trivial or the mean or the petty—that sounds like God to me."
Obama arrived in Washington focused on how to avoid being known as the guy who gave one great speech, at the 2004 Democratic convention. Following Hillary Clinton's example, he put together a first-rate staff, studied procedural arcana, got local jobs done, and deferred to his Senate elders. After his first year and a half in office, he can expound with authority on immigration policy, the post-Katrina government contracting mess, and nuclear proliferation, usually in the same bipartisan tones. Hardly ever does he lead the party's charge against the Bush?Cheney White House. Obama especially dislikes the vituperative intramural debate to which left-wing blogs have contributed. Last fall, he sent a 2,000-word e-mail to the Daily Kos—a widely read progressive Web site—defending Democratic colleagues who voted to confirm Chief Justice John Roberts, even though he himself opposed the nominee. This further enraged some of the "netroots" antiwar activists who first backed him, and who were already upset that he opposes a rapid pullout from Iraq.
His other notable splash came through the thankless task he undertook at the behest of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: ethics reform, a topic that wins neither votes nor friends on Capitol Hill. After he became allied with John McCain, Senate Democrats compelled Obama to side with them rather than McCain's bipartisan effort, and the ornery Arizonan fired off a sarcastic accusation of double-crossing. More than anything else, the public denunciation indicated that the 70-year-old Republican front-runner, for whom 2008 will be a last shot at the presidency, sees the Democratic golden boy as a political threat. Ever the diplomat, Obama says that the spat is now ancient history and the two again get along well. "People see John McCain as a prima donna," Obama joked to the elites gathered for the Gridiron Club dinner this spring. "I think of him as a role model."
Obama usually deflects questions about his political future with this kind of self-deprecation. "I'm so overexposed, I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse," he likes to say. When Jon Stewart asked about his celebrity on The Daily Show, Obama responded, "The only person more over-hyped than me is you," convulsing the host with laughter.
The Democratic obsession—it is not too strong a word—with the possibility of his running in 2008 reflects a combination of concern about Hillary Clinton's electability and impatience with the notion that their biggest talent intends to sit out the race to marinate longer in the Senate. There's also the fact of his crossover appeal—in the 2004 Illinois race, Obama won an impressive 40 percent of the Republican vote. (And as the Daily Kos episode suggests, he's not afraid to criticize his own side, chiding Democrats in his new book for sometimes being "smug, detached and dogmatic.") Somewhat against his will, the force of his voice—and the truth that legislating veterans' benefits is not his highest calling—seems to be pulling him toward considering a run. As Joe Klein recently wrote in Time, the gossip in Washington is that Obama "isn't not running for President."
Obama is too candid to deny that he's thinking about the presidency. "Look, it was highly unlikely that I would ever be a U.S. senator, so it's very flattering for people to talk about a presidential race," he says. He recalls walking recently through a corridor of the Capitol Hilton, which is filled with portraits of all 43 presidents, and pondering their careers. "You go through and you think, 'Who are these guys?' There are—what?—maybe ten presidents in our history out of 40-something who you can truly say led the country? And then there are 30-odd who just kind of did their best. And so—I guess my point is—just being the president is not a good way of thinking about it."
Obama is well aware of the obstacles he would face, including his limited experience in foreign policy, and Hillary Clinton's embedded position as front-runner. It's also not lost on him that much of the next president's job will be "cleaning up the mess," which is as close as he comes to trashing the Bush administration. "My attitude about something like the presidency is that you don't want to just be the president," he continues. "You want to change the country. You want to make a unique contribution. You want to be a great president."
It can't be easy being the repository for so many hopes—from Democrats, African-Americans, and both his parents. Obama sometimes quotes Lyndon Johnson's remark that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for his mistakes. "I guess I'm trying to do both," he said in another interview. The greater influence is clearly his mother, who died of cancer in 1996. "She had this amazing sense of wonder about the world and this huge heart and huge sense of compassion and empathy for people—and a great kindness toward them," he says. In the introduction to the paperback edition of his first book, written with his Senate election in sight, Obama calls his mother "the single constant in my life." That passage, he says, is the one piece of his own writing he can't reread without breaking up.
For the most part, Obama appears to wear the burden of others' dreams lightly. They hang loosely on his shoulders, like the dark suits that compliment his slender frame. But beneath his open, companionable exterior, one detects a certain brooding quality, a concern etched into the sharp lines of his face about whether he's up to the tasks ahead.
His book will only add to the run-Obama-run! clamor, and the intensity of the pressure on him. But even as the Democratic political discussion grows and engulfs him, Obama is engaged in another more personal and historical conversation—with Wright and Ellison, with his parents, and with those two tragic and prophetic figures, Lincoln and King. Obama, of course, would never be so immodest as to compare himself to either of these men. But being clear-eyed, he must see what others do: that among American politicians, he alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath.
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"Why bush trying to act like he want to find Osama? why don't we impeach him and ELECT Obama?" ...... Common, on Jadakiss WHY remix
Political Memo
<font size="5"><center>
Early ‘Maybe’ From Obama Jolts ’08 Field
</font size></center>
Clockwise from top left: Looking toward 2008, Senator Evan Bayh said he would
explore a presidential run, and Senator Barack Obama announced six weeks ago that
he might run. Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa was the first Democrat to announce his plans,
while Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has long been a potential candidate.
New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: December 4, 2006
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — Senator Barack Obama’s announcement that he might run for president is altering the early dynamics of the 2008 Democratic nominating contest. The move has created complications for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as she steps up her own preparations and is posing a threat to lesser-known Democrats trying to position themselves as alternatives to Mrs. Clinton, Democrats said Sunday.
The declaration six weeks ago by Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, has set off a surge of interest in Democratic circles, which party officials expect will only be fueled in the coming week as Mr. Obama prepares for a day of campaignlike events in New Hampshire next Sunday.
At the least, Mr. Obama’s very high-profile explorations have contributed to a quickening of the pace across the 2008 Democratic field. On Sunday, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana said that he would create a presidential exploratory committee this week. And Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa went so far as to announce his candidacy two years before Election Day, in what his aides said was a calculated strategy to grab a moment of attention before Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton blot out the sun.
Mrs. Clinton has been meeting in recent days with New York Democrats — including a two-hour brunch on Sunday at the Manhattan apartment of Gov.-elect Eliot Spitzer — to telegraph her own likely entry into the race, though her aides said the get-together had been planned before Mr. Obama discussed his possible run publicly.
But more than simply picking up the pace, Democrats increasingly believe that Mr. Obama has the potential of upending the dynamics of the 2008 contest more than any other Democrat who might run — short, perhaps, of Al Gore, the former vice president, whom some Democrats are pressing to run.
In Mr. Obama, Democrats have a prospective candidate who both underlines and compensates for the potential weaknesses that worry many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton.
He is a fervent opponent of the war in Iraq, and Democrats see him as an exceedingly warm campaigner with a compelling personality and a striking ability to command a crowd. He has no known major political baggage (though he has yet to encounter anything approaching the level of scrutiny Mrs. Clinton has undergone during her years in public life). And Mr. Obama can even match Mrs. Clinton’s arresting political storyline if he tries to became the nation’s first black president as she seeks to become its first female president.
But whatever complications he might pose for Mrs. Clinton are dwarfed by the shadow he is throwing over lesser-known Democrats. Almost without exception, they have approached this race with the same strategy: to try to emerge as the alternative to Mrs. Clinton and take advantage of substantial reservations in Democratic circles about her potential to win the White House.
There is only so much money, seasoned political expertise and media attention to go around, so the prospect of Mr. Obama eyeing the presidential nomination is understandably unsettling to his potential rivals. Whereas their original success was contingent on Mrs. Clinton folding, now they face the prospect of having to hope that two high-profile national Democrats collapse in the year leading into the Iowa caucuses.
“For every candidate in the race who isn’t Hillary Clinton, the entry of any other candidate in the races makes your job that much harder,” said Ron Klain, who worked as a senior adviser for Mr. Gore when he ran for president. “For all those guys, Obama is a very serious candidate who will compete with them for the limited supply of activists and media attention.”
Mark McKinnon, who was a top adviser to President Bush in his two White House runs and who is a senior adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a likely presidential candidate in 2008, said, “I think Barack Obama is the most interesting persona to appear on the political radar screen in decades.” He added, “He’s a walking, talking hope machine, and he may reshape American politics.”
David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said, “If you believe at some level that this is a zero-sum game in terms of money and supporters and talent, then any time someone gets in with a big excitement quotient, that affects everybody else.” Mr. Axelrod has worked for Mr. Vilsack and for John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who ran for president in 2004 and is likely to do so again this time.
Mr. Bayh got a reminder of that on Sunday when he appeared on “This Week” on ABC.
“What kind of a strategy do you need to combat huge political celebrities like John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton?” asked George Stephanopoulos, the program’s host.
Mr. Bayh earnestly dodged the question for a moment, before finally responding: “Is this a little bit like David and Goliath? A little bit, but as I recall, David did O.K.”
Asked repeatedly about the woman who is perceived as his most formidable challenge in the primary, Mr. Obama has been careful not to criticize Mrs. Clinton directly. But one of his central messages is that he is something Mrs. Clinton is not: a late baby boomer (he was born in 1961, at the tail end of the post-World War II generation; Mrs. Clinton was born in 1947), and a fresh face that rises above old partisan grudges.
Mr. Obama has already provided some hints of how he would position himself against Mrs. Clinton, suggesting he would link her to her husband’s presidency and their role in the intense partisanship that marked much of the 1990s and that carried over into the Bush presidency.
During a lengthy interview just before the midterm elections, Mr. Obama portrayed himself as part of a new generation of political leaders. Asked whether he detected a void in the Democratic presidential field, Mr. Obama replied that he sensed a mood of “Do we want to get beyond the slash-and-burn, highly ideological politics that bogged us down over the last several decades?”
Mr. Obama went on to say that he admired former President Bill Clinton for trying to bridge a centrist course between Democrats and Republicans. But he did not shy away from pointing out Mr. Clinton’s weaknesses — as someone who came of age in the 1960s, and all the debates about Vietnam service, drug use and sexual conduct that went with it, issues that continued to play out, sometimes with Mrs. Clinton in a supporting role.
“Although his instincts were right on target, and I think, intellectually and pragmatically, he understood that America wanted to move beyond those categories, in some ways he was trapped by his biography,” Mr. Obama said. “Some of what I say, I think, is facilitated by the fact that I’m less rooted in some of those arguments.”
For all the excitement Mr. Obama’s potential candidacy has stirred, he remains a 45-year-old first-term senator who is largely untested in national politics. Yes, Mr. Obama is unusually talented, Democrats and Republicans alike say, but the history of presidential campaigns is filled with examples of celebrity candidates like Gen. Wesley Clark in 2004 who burst onto the political stage but eventually sputtered as they struggled to master the difficulties of running for president.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they never figured this would be an easy race for her, should she run. They said they appreciated Mr. Obama’s political talents and the threats he posed to her candidacy — in particular, his appeal to liberal voters, given the opposition to the war, and his appeal to black voters, who have been a large part of Mrs. Clinton’s base.
It is conceivable that Mr. Obama would help Mrs. Clinton by initially commanding contributions and blocking out more experienced and tested potential rivals — like Mr. Edwards or Mr. Bayh — only to stumble later on, when it is too late for anyone else to catch up.
James Carville, a Democratic consultant who advises Mrs. Clinton, said it was impossible to predict how Mr. Obama might shape such a crowded field.
“He has an early effect on the race, but there’s no way to predict what happens in a presidential race with this many funded candidates and this kind of name recognition,” Mr. Carville said.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have said throughout the year that she would wait until after the midterm election before moving into the more aggressive exploration phase that she is now in. “Her decision-making process is not going to depend on what candidates do or don’t do, which isn’t to say we don’t have tremendous respect for the other candidates,” said Howard Wolfson, a Clinton adviser.
One Democrat with knowledge of Mrs. Clinton’s conversation with Mr. Spitzer on Sunday, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversation was meant to be private, said Mrs. Clinton did not tell Mr. Spitzer that she was running or ask him to commit to her possible candidacy; rather, they talked over the pros and cons of a presidential run.
Mr. Obama, who first said in October that he was considering a race for the White House, said he intended to make his decision known after the first of the year.
Other Democrats who might run include Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Joseph R. Biden of Delaware and John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
Mr. Vilsack has been the most aggressive in trying to compensate for an expected move by Mr. Obama: the governor did a five-state announcement tour last week. “We accomplished our mission which was to make our introduction before anyone else sort of crowded in on the field,” said Jeff Link, a senior adviser to Mr. Vilsack.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/w...em&ex=1165381200&en=d49457a4ea531ddd&ei=5087
<font size="5"><center>
Early ‘Maybe’ From Obama Jolts ’08 Field
</font size></center>
Clockwise from top left: Looking toward 2008, Senator Evan Bayh said he would
explore a presidential run, and Senator Barack Obama announced six weeks ago that
he might run. Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa was the first Democrat to announce his plans,
while Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has long been a potential candidate.
New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: December 4, 2006
WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — Senator Barack Obama’s announcement that he might run for president is altering the early dynamics of the 2008 Democratic nominating contest. The move has created complications for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as she steps up her own preparations and is posing a threat to lesser-known Democrats trying to position themselves as alternatives to Mrs. Clinton, Democrats said Sunday.
The declaration six weeks ago by Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, has set off a surge of interest in Democratic circles, which party officials expect will only be fueled in the coming week as Mr. Obama prepares for a day of campaignlike events in New Hampshire next Sunday.
At the least, Mr. Obama’s very high-profile explorations have contributed to a quickening of the pace across the 2008 Democratic field. On Sunday, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana said that he would create a presidential exploratory committee this week. And Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa went so far as to announce his candidacy two years before Election Day, in what his aides said was a calculated strategy to grab a moment of attention before Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton blot out the sun.
Mrs. Clinton has been meeting in recent days with New York Democrats — including a two-hour brunch on Sunday at the Manhattan apartment of Gov.-elect Eliot Spitzer — to telegraph her own likely entry into the race, though her aides said the get-together had been planned before Mr. Obama discussed his possible run publicly.
But more than simply picking up the pace, Democrats increasingly believe that Mr. Obama has the potential of upending the dynamics of the 2008 contest more than any other Democrat who might run — short, perhaps, of Al Gore, the former vice president, whom some Democrats are pressing to run.
In Mr. Obama, Democrats have a prospective candidate who both underlines and compensates for the potential weaknesses that worry many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton.
He is a fervent opponent of the war in Iraq, and Democrats see him as an exceedingly warm campaigner with a compelling personality and a striking ability to command a crowd. He has no known major political baggage (though he has yet to encounter anything approaching the level of scrutiny Mrs. Clinton has undergone during her years in public life). And Mr. Obama can even match Mrs. Clinton’s arresting political storyline if he tries to became the nation’s first black president as she seeks to become its first female president.
But whatever complications he might pose for Mrs. Clinton are dwarfed by the shadow he is throwing over lesser-known Democrats. Almost without exception, they have approached this race with the same strategy: to try to emerge as the alternative to Mrs. Clinton and take advantage of substantial reservations in Democratic circles about her potential to win the White House.
There is only so much money, seasoned political expertise and media attention to go around, so the prospect of Mr. Obama eyeing the presidential nomination is understandably unsettling to his potential rivals. Whereas their original success was contingent on Mrs. Clinton folding, now they face the prospect of having to hope that two high-profile national Democrats collapse in the year leading into the Iowa caucuses.
“For every candidate in the race who isn’t Hillary Clinton, the entry of any other candidate in the races makes your job that much harder,” said Ron Klain, who worked as a senior adviser for Mr. Gore when he ran for president. “For all those guys, Obama is a very serious candidate who will compete with them for the limited supply of activists and media attention.”
Mark McKinnon, who was a top adviser to President Bush in his two White House runs and who is a senior adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a likely presidential candidate in 2008, said, “I think Barack Obama is the most interesting persona to appear on the political radar screen in decades.” He added, “He’s a walking, talking hope machine, and he may reshape American politics.”
David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said, “If you believe at some level that this is a zero-sum game in terms of money and supporters and talent, then any time someone gets in with a big excitement quotient, that affects everybody else.” Mr. Axelrod has worked for Mr. Vilsack and for John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who ran for president in 2004 and is likely to do so again this time.
Mr. Bayh got a reminder of that on Sunday when he appeared on “This Week” on ABC.
“What kind of a strategy do you need to combat huge political celebrities like John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton?” asked George Stephanopoulos, the program’s host.
Mr. Bayh earnestly dodged the question for a moment, before finally responding: “Is this a little bit like David and Goliath? A little bit, but as I recall, David did O.K.”
Asked repeatedly about the woman who is perceived as his most formidable challenge in the primary, Mr. Obama has been careful not to criticize Mrs. Clinton directly. But one of his central messages is that he is something Mrs. Clinton is not: a late baby boomer (he was born in 1961, at the tail end of the post-World War II generation; Mrs. Clinton was born in 1947), and a fresh face that rises above old partisan grudges.
Mr. Obama has already provided some hints of how he would position himself against Mrs. Clinton, suggesting he would link her to her husband’s presidency and their role in the intense partisanship that marked much of the 1990s and that carried over into the Bush presidency.
During a lengthy interview just before the midterm elections, Mr. Obama portrayed himself as part of a new generation of political leaders. Asked whether he detected a void in the Democratic presidential field, Mr. Obama replied that he sensed a mood of “Do we want to get beyond the slash-and-burn, highly ideological politics that bogged us down over the last several decades?”
Mr. Obama went on to say that he admired former President Bill Clinton for trying to bridge a centrist course between Democrats and Republicans. But he did not shy away from pointing out Mr. Clinton’s weaknesses — as someone who came of age in the 1960s, and all the debates about Vietnam service, drug use and sexual conduct that went with it, issues that continued to play out, sometimes with Mrs. Clinton in a supporting role.
“Although his instincts were right on target, and I think, intellectually and pragmatically, he understood that America wanted to move beyond those categories, in some ways he was trapped by his biography,” Mr. Obama said. “Some of what I say, I think, is facilitated by the fact that I’m less rooted in some of those arguments.”
For all the excitement Mr. Obama’s potential candidacy has stirred, he remains a 45-year-old first-term senator who is largely untested in national politics. Yes, Mr. Obama is unusually talented, Democrats and Republicans alike say, but the history of presidential campaigns is filled with examples of celebrity candidates like Gen. Wesley Clark in 2004 who burst onto the political stage but eventually sputtered as they struggled to master the difficulties of running for president.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they never figured this would be an easy race for her, should she run. They said they appreciated Mr. Obama’s political talents and the threats he posed to her candidacy — in particular, his appeal to liberal voters, given the opposition to the war, and his appeal to black voters, who have been a large part of Mrs. Clinton’s base.
It is conceivable that Mr. Obama would help Mrs. Clinton by initially commanding contributions and blocking out more experienced and tested potential rivals — like Mr. Edwards or Mr. Bayh — only to stumble later on, when it is too late for anyone else to catch up.
James Carville, a Democratic consultant who advises Mrs. Clinton, said it was impossible to predict how Mr. Obama might shape such a crowded field.
“He has an early effect on the race, but there’s no way to predict what happens in a presidential race with this many funded candidates and this kind of name recognition,” Mr. Carville said.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers have said throughout the year that she would wait until after the midterm election before moving into the more aggressive exploration phase that she is now in. “Her decision-making process is not going to depend on what candidates do or don’t do, which isn’t to say we don’t have tremendous respect for the other candidates,” said Howard Wolfson, a Clinton adviser.
One Democrat with knowledge of Mrs. Clinton’s conversation with Mr. Spitzer on Sunday, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversation was meant to be private, said Mrs. Clinton did not tell Mr. Spitzer that she was running or ask him to commit to her possible candidacy; rather, they talked over the pros and cons of a presidential run.
Mr. Obama, who first said in October that he was considering a race for the White House, said he intended to make his decision known after the first of the year.
Other Democrats who might run include Senators Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Joseph R. Biden of Delaware and John Kerry of Massachusetts, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
Mr. Vilsack has been the most aggressive in trying to compensate for an expected move by Mr. Obama: the governor did a five-state announcement tour last week. “We accomplished our mission which was to make our introduction before anyone else sort of crowded in on the field,” said Jeff Link, a senior adviser to Mr. Vilsack.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/w...em&ex=1165381200&en=d49457a4ea531ddd&ei=5087
Come on does any body really think barak obama really have a chance of winning this election? i mean come on.
one way to guarantee those crazy christians who help bush get into office will get out to vote in record numbers is to entertain the idea of a black man as president. This is a republican conspiracy to tar and feather another black man, remember the good general powell, and the dems are in on it. Obama is so caught up in the ride he doesn't see the forest for the trees. with that said i'd vote for him even if he only has two years as a senator and don't know what the hell he's doing.
one way to guarantee those crazy christians who help bush get into office will get out to vote in record numbers is to entertain the idea of a black man as president. This is a republican conspiracy to tar and feather another black man, remember the good general powell, and the dems are in on it. Obama is so caught up in the ride he doesn't see the forest for the trees. with that said i'd vote for him even if he only has two years as a senator and don't know what the hell he's doing.
hoodedgoon said:
I think its silly to assume "those crazy christians" are only on the right side of the aisle. Democrats are christians too. I'm with you though, brand new senator running for president? He has my vote. Hell if a mayor can run for president, why not Obama?
Question though, if Obama doesn't get the Democratic nod, should he jump on with the Demo canidate as vice president?
Non-Substantive fluff media article about Barack
At Newsstands Everywhere, the Honorable Beach Babe From Illinois
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/08/AR2007010801535_pf.html
The just-out issue of People magazine, the one that says "Julia Pregnant!" on its cover, has a two-page spread titled "BEACH BABES."
There's Catherine Zeta-Jones in a teeny string bikini, Penelope Cruz in a cleavage shot on a boogie board, Jessica Alba in a skimpy fuchsia bandeau bikini, and hunky Australian actor Hugh Jackman shirtless in Nevis.
Then there's the junior senator from Illinois. Rounding out the Beach Babes spread is a New Year's Day photo of Barack Obama in the Hawaiian surf. We see his well-defined pecs, his perfectly hairless torso, just a bit of padding around the abs and a drawstring dangling from his form-fitting surfer trunks.<div align="right"><!-- MSTableType="layout" --><br>
<img src="http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2007/01/08/PH2007010801538.jpg" align="right">
</div> The aspiring presidential candidate splashes through the water and squints into the distance; he is transformed into Burt Lancaster in "From Here to Eternity."
"I really appreciate you toting that around," Obama said with evident sarcasm yesterday when presented with the image as he left a news conference in the Senate TV gallery on ethics laws. "Thank you very much."
The senator was more appropriately attired, in a navy business suit and pale-blue tie, but he was uncharacteristically flustered as he sought to explain the photo.
"You know, it's uh --," he attempted.
And: "It's embarrassing."
And: "You know, I have no idea what beach it was taken on."
And: "It was, it was, it's uh, it's uh, paparazzi!"
Obama noticed that Jay Newton-Small of Bloomberg News was studying the image. "Stop looking at it!" he mock-scolded, and hustled away.
Newton-Small offered her critique. "He does look slimmer in his work suits," the young woman judged, but she allowed that he "looks good for his age."
Such candid photos -- the People shot of Obama was, as the senator suspected, done by a paparazzi agency that People identified as Fame Pictures -- can be damaging to a politician. Few can forget, try though they might, the Agence France-Presse photo nine years ago of a fleshy Bill and Hillary Clinton dancing on the beach in bathing suits. And the shots of John Kerry windsurfing in his skintight wetsuit proved poisonous to his presidential aspirations.
The Obama shot caused more buzz than it otherwise might have because the newly formed Senate was off to a slow start yesterday. Plans to debate the ethics package on the Senate floor were postponed in favor of a long series of quorum calls. The Senate held its first roll-call vote of the session -- a resolution remembering Gerald Ford -- but a dozen senators failed to show up for the vote; one, freshman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), dashed into the chamber five minutes after the vote closed.
But in truth, Obama did not seem entirely displeased by the Beach Babes shot. Perhaps that's because he has spent a lot of time working out at Chicago's East Bank Club, as the Chicago Sun-Times has documented. Asked what Obama was planning to do yesterday afternoon, the senator's communications director, Robert Gibbs, replied: "Photo shoot on South Beach."
Actually, Obama was going to New York for an event with Jesse Jackson. But as the 2008 presidential campaign gets off to an early start, a potential candidate's every move is aimed at one constituency or another. Just last month, Obama appeared on "Monday Night Football." At the B. Dalton in Union Station yesterday, his campaign book, "The Audacity of Hope," was prominently displayed on the same rack with Hillary Clinton's "It Takes a Village," 10th-anniversary edition.
Would other candidates concede the beachcomber vote to Obama, or would they, too, don swimsuits in People magazine? A spokeswoman for Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) laughed at the notion but provided no substantive answer.
"Are you asking me to pose in a bathing suit?" asked Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines, deflecting. "Can it be 1920s-style?"
On the other hand, Obama doesn't need to get undressed to attract the paparazzi these days. Introducing him at the news conference yesterday, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who opted against a presidential run himself, announced: "I'd like to turn to Senator Obama, who has been working on this issue for many years but can't seem to get any attention from the press in general."
Each of the 12 Democratic senators took a turn at the microphone, but it quickly became apparent that most of the cameras were pointed at Obama, even when he wasn't talking. And though Feingold started out as the event's MC, Obama quickly assumed that role when the questions began.
"Senator Obama," CNN's Dana Bash hollered from the back row, "on the issue of Iraq . . ."
"I'm sorry," the senator demurred. "Let's get the ethics questions out, and then I'll be happy to stick around."
The next question was also directed at Obama, and the one after that. Inch by inch, Obama edged Feingold away from the lectern; the man from Wisconsin was reduced to nodding and wiping his forehead.
"Are we done with the ethics?" Obama finally asked. His colleagues departed. Obama took five more questions about Iraq and then was chased from the room by reporters and camera crews until an aide pleaded for his release. It was quite a swell, but this Beach Babe didn't mind swimming in it.
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