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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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