The long alliance, p.4
The Long Alliance, page 4
The cameras, looking for something vaguely interesting to broadcast, panned out and found Clinton again, this time zooming in on the back of her head as she talked to a reporter, facing away from the stage. They returned to the set only when the next speaker strolled on. Here was retired general Wesley Clark, a failed presidential candidate, reporting to the mic to insist on a lot of the same stuff Biden just had, only with more reminders that he’d actually served in wars. Biden’s time on-screen was done; he hadn’t so much as cracked a smile.
No one in the crowd was likely to disagree much with what Biden had said, nor were they likely to remember it. He was background noise, even though he was speaking in what should have been the buildup to the convention’s highest-profile evening. It was already obvious that all anyone would remember from Boston had already happened two days earlier.
* * *
Obama had been prone to thinking expansively about his place in the world since long before that summer, and he’d long harbored the conviction—rarely expressed, but deeply embedded—that his unique personal story, oratorical skills, and belief in consensus-driven liberal-flecked politics that transcended partisan bickering would, eventually, inspire a lot of people as long as he introduced himself the right way. A convention wasn’t necessarily the intuitive place for him to do it: he’d had a bad experience at Al Gore’s confab four years earlier, buying a cheap last-second Southwest ticket to Los Angeles only to be turned away from the rental car desk when his credit card was declined. Confined to the outer rungs of the Staples Center because he wasn’t important enough to get anywhere near the stage after losing his congressional primary that spring, he ran into Raja Krishnamoorthi, a fellow young Chicagoan who’d worked on Obama’s 1998 state senate campaign, and sighed at his circumstances. Keynote addresses could be fraught, too: Obama had seen Harold Ford Jr. flop that year, and he kept that uncomfortable memory in mind as he sat down to write.
From the start, Obama told Axelrod and Robert Gibbs he would write this speech himself. They knew he was a talented writer but agreed partly because he was proposing to write something personal and partly because he sometimes came off as flat when he delivered someone else’s words, even if they were a professional speechwriter’s. Gibbs replied by sending Obama copies of keynote speeches that had worked out well, including an especially galvanizing trio: Mario Cuomo’s legendary 1984 address, Ann Richards’s from 1988, and Barbara Jordan’s from 1976.
As the summer aged, Obama took to his yellow legal pads between spurts of work at the state senate in Springfield—sometimes he wrote in the bathroom at the capitol—and on his long car rides back home to Chicago. After midnight one evening in July, he felt like he finally had a satisfactory draft and sent it to Axelrod, who was vacationing in Florence. By this point, Axelrod’s work for Edwards was done and he was fully bought into the Obama project—that spring he’d recruited Democrats’ leading speech coach Michael Sheehan to help Obama by telling Sheehan that this candidate was “the one,” and that they had to take this speech seriously, since Obama could “go all the way.” He read the speech as it printed off the fax machine, handing pages off to his wife, Susan, as he finished them. By the third one, he turned to her and predicted the speech might go down in history.
It still needed work—it was at least two times too long, for one thing—and Obama’s inner circle was still nervous about how Kerry would present him in Boston. So as another consultant dove in on the first of more than a dozen rounds of drafts with Obama, the rest of the team worked its connections to make sure Obama would get sufficient promotion from the nominee and a spot safely in the prime-time lineup.
The whispers built in Boston even as Obama was stuck in Springfield for budget votes that inconveniently dragged on, forcing Jimmy Cauley, Obama’s campaign manager, to reserve a private plane to shuttle them and Michelle to Massachusetts whenever Obama was finally free to go. Obama wasn’t slated to speak until the final Tuesday of the month, but the team’s real deadline for getting there was the preceding Sunday morning, when he was booked for Meet the Press.
They got in with only a few hours to spare and little time to prep. Obama wasn’t quite nervous, but he was extraconscious that he was walking into a defining moment for his career, no matter how it went. Almost immediately, Meet the Press host Tim Russert caught Obama off guard by asking him to answer for a quote he’d given The Atlantic that would be published the next day. Obama had been critical of Kerry (he “just doesn’t have that oomph”) but now explained that he’d spoken to the magazine months earlier, when Kerry was still developing as a candidate. Russert brought up Obama’s 2002 Chicago speech opposing the Iraq war, which had helped put him on the map, and asked if Kerry had been wrong to vote for invasion. Obama had at least prepared for this question, and parried it by noting the senator had access to information he didn’t, then pivoting: what he was concerned about now was the path ahead.
The rest of the weekend’s media blitz was only slightly less perilous. For the first time in front of a national audience, he got—and dodged—ridiculous-sounding questions about whether he’d run for president one day. Still, Obama tried keeping his mind on his speech and, when he had time, on meeting the kinds of people who he hoped could help him in Washington. He recognized Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff and budget director Leon Panetta walking into the arena, introduced himself, and asked if they could meet about budget policy after the convention.
Mostly, though, he holed up at his hotel and his practice room under the stage. The Kerry campaign had already thrown Obama two significant bones that no one else got. First, they’d originally offered him an eight-minute speaking slot but conceded seventeen minutes after Axelrod’s haggling wore them down. (Obama’s first drafts clocked in at more like twenty-seven.) Second, they granted him far more leeway than typical to share his own words, rather than the nominee’s preferred message of military strength and international responsibility. They’d agreed to this when it became clear he wanted to intertwine his own history with talk about values that all Americans shared, which was consistent with a vague unity theme Kerry was also pushing. Their condition was that Obama refrain from ripping into Bush—they were desperate to keep things mostly positive that night—which suited his personal political interest in positioning himself above the fray of workaday politics.
The real trouble began when Kerry’s top staffers reviewed what should have been a nearly final draft. Obama had written an emotional arc that would crescendo with a riff about transcending political divides, referring to “red” and “blue” states in a nod to the trendy way of analyzing politics ever since TV networks used those colors to identify Republicans and Democrats in their 2000 election broadcasts. This was too close to Kerry’s script, and a young speechwriter named Jon Favreau came down to talk to Gibbs. Gibbs knew how Obama felt about the line and replied: you tell him. When Obama heard the request to cut the line, which was really a demand, he was furious and refused to budge, creating an awkward standoff in the bowels of the stadium.
Obama often got quiet and stewed when he was angry, and after some choice words he stalked back to the hotel in search of a resolution, Axelrod in tow. The strategist tried reasoning with the candidate. The way he figured it, Obama just had to give up a line and Kerry would give him the chance to speak to twenty million people. That was a pretty good bargain, and he should just forget about the line.
Obama reluctantly relented but promised he wouldn’t forget about it. Axelrod and Gibbs, who was on his way to earning Obama’s trust with his quick attitude and DC chops, had a bigger concern, anyway. It took real work to get Obama used to speaking into a microphone for an arena-size crowd, and it was still a work in progress in Boston. Months before, Axelrod had explained to Sheehan that Obama was comfortable speaking to a church-style audience, but that not only had he never used a teleprompter before, he also had a hard time stopping himself from yelling. Sheehan walked him through the mechanics of talking to an audience split between a loud convention hall and the produced broadcast that most people would be watching on TV—a dynamic that was old hat to almost every other speaker in Boston. To make it look on-air like the crowd was booming, Obama should talk—but not scream—over the applause, assuming there was any.
* * *
Obama walked into the FleetCenter the afternoon of his speech after days of run-throughs, and turned to David Mendell, a Chicago Tribune reporter he knew. As Mendell later recounted, Obama, alluding to the NBA’s new teen superstar, said, “I’m LeBron, baby, I can play on this level. I got some game.” It was self-consciously arrogant, enough to be disarming, but also true, and thus classic Obama. It was also a vivid reflection of how his confidence—or at least his unwillingness to let himself get inside his own head—persisted even though he also knew he only got one chance to introduce himself to the country. Inside, he took Gibbs’s tie because they determined it looked better than his own. When his speaking slot approached, Axelrod walked him up to the edge of the stage, visibly nervous. Obama put an arm on his shoulder and coolly reassured him that he knew what he was doing.
His team did, too. Obama’s emergence hadn’t all been inspiration and lucky timing. They already knew that the moment had to be nurtured, and then carefully designed, before Obama could seize it. A few weeks earlier, Cauley had gotten a call from Tom Lindenfeld, a former Axelrod business partner who’d helped Obama in the primary and who was now running the party’s delegate floor operations at the convention. They needed to pay for signs to distribute in the audience for Obama’s speech, Lindenfeld told him. Cauley hesitated—it would cost around $20,000—but Lindenfeld insisted it would be an important part of the visual on TV. He had advice for the design, too: make the signs blue with white lettering—keep it clean, just Obama’s name—on noncoated paper so the arena lights didn’t reflect off them and render them unreadable. He also advised Cauley to make the sign order bigger than the standard one, since they wanted to create the impression that the arena was extrapacked and extraenthusiastic about Obama when he spoke. Cauley relented, but Lindenfeld still had to convince the Teamsters on-site to help him shepherd in the signs after the truck delivering them broke down in Ohio and delayed their arrival past the Secret Service’s deadline for bringing material into the arena. With just hours to go, he distributed the placards not just on the convention floor and around the lower bowl, as was standard for every speaker not named Kerry, but also up and down the FleetCenter’s tiers.
The effect, at first, was underwhelming in the room. Only the delegates directly in front of Obama and in the Illinois section held the signs aloft when he walked onstage and struggled to modulate his voice’s volume for the TV audience’s benefit. Axelrod and Gibbs slipped out from backstage to watch from the arena, and found themselves standing behind George Stephanopoulos, the former Bill Clinton advisor turned ABC host, and Jeff Greenfield, a journalist who’d come up as a speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy.
It didn’t take long, however, for a murmur to break out across the convention floor alongside the rustle of signs being picked up from row to row. Obama, in a voice that seemed an octave too low for his body—but quickly adjusted to the arena’s volume—started by talking about his father, who was “born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack.” He talked about his veteran maternal grandfather, who enlisted after Pearl Harbor, and spoke about what it took for him to make it to this stage: “That is the true genius of America, a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door.”
It was unlike any other speech the crowd had heard or would hear in Boston—more ambitious and more hopeful, and for long stretches not obviously about Kerry vs. Bush at all—and Obama was getting into a groove. He spoke about struggling Illinoisans he’d met and then, occasionally, about Kerry.
And then he hit his stride, building up to the carefully workshopped lines Kerry and Favreau had forced him to alter. He discussed collective responsibility, community connection, and a fierce yearning for fairness among neighbors as fundamentally American values.
It is that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper—that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, and yet still come together as one single American family. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
Now even as we speak, there are those who are prepared to divide us. The spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of “anything goes.” Well, I say to them tonight: there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America, there is the United States of America. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states, and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
Well-designed conventions have a way of overwhelming their crowds, between the dramatic lighting and booming acoustics and inspirational music and videos. But now the effect wasn’t limited to the delegates, who had in many cases flown across the country specifically because they wanted to be bowled over by Kerry and his lineup. As Axelrod later recalled, he saw Greenfield lean over to Stephanopoulos and say, “This is a great fucking speech.”
Obama’s life just changed, Axelrod told Gibbs as the applause continued. The memory of Cuomo’s 1984 appearance was inescapable. Until that moment, it had been history’s most famous convention address. That speech, everyone knew, had made Cuomo a national celebrity. It had also almost immediately started a round of earnest whispers: that guy should really run for president in four years. The camera panned, repeatedly, to a smiling and applauding Reverend Jesse Jackson, and to an obviously impressed Hillary Clinton, who nodded slightly.
* * *
The Friday after the convention, Obama was ticketed for a budget flight back to the Midwest with the rest of the Illinois delegation. This amused him more than anything—“Jimmy, you flew me down here on a G5 and you’re taking me back in a cattle car?” he ribbed Cauley—but the arrangement devolved into chaos almost as soon as they got to Boston’s Logan International Airport.
Obama was mobbed when he stepped inside, surrounded by Democrats traveling home from the convention carrying leftover signs and asking for autographs. Once he waded through the crowd, he was pulled aside for an extra screening. Cauley let his frustration bubble over. “You don’t know who this is?!” he asked the TSA agent. Obama looked back, annoyed, if unsurprised, by the security check. “Jimmy, my name is Barack Obama, I know what my life is,” he said.
He no longer did. The rest of the airport, which was starting to look unnavigable as word spread that Obama was in the terminal, was now a problem, too. Fearing for his candidate’s safety and patience, Cauley convinced an American Airlines representative to let Obama wait in the lounge before his flight, and after retrieving him from the TSA, they slipped inside.
They’d barely been able to catch their breath when Cauley’s phone started ringing with an unknown number. He picked up, only to find former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on the other line, wishing to congratulate Obama for his speech. After determining that this wasn’t a joke, he handed the phone off to Obama and stepped outside to let them talk.
It was, finally, a good chance for Cauley to catch his breath, and to think about what on Earth was happening. Clearly, whatever it was, it was bigger than he’d signed up for. Outside the lounge the crowds had subsided, and the operative looked around for something to do.
Joe and Jill Biden quietly sat alone and unnoticed by the window, waiting for their own flight out of town, when Cauley approached. The Bidens were gracious when he introduced himself—Obama’s speech had obviously been great, Biden thought, though he was more taken by its focus on everyday Americans than by his unity talk. He told Cauley that his young candidate had plenty of potential.
But Biden had been around long enough—had gone to enough conventions, had seen enough keynote addresses—to know better than to fall for the celebrity aura that was already settling around Obama. Biden hadn’t really spent much time thinking about Obama at all that week—Kerry’s campaign was the real story, as far as he was concerned. Still, since he had some time, he might as well make sure Cauley understood that it wouldn’t necessarily be smooth sailing from here.
Listen, Biden said, unprompted. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do what you’re about to do.
Obama would be erring gravely if he tried to spin this one speech into political superstardom right away, Biden suggested. He had to prove himself still, to demonstrate he was as substantive as he was stylish. Biden could still remember how John Glenn, the world-famous astronaut, had settled into the Senate, but there was a more recent example, too. Look at how Hillary Clinton had done it in her first few years in the Senate, he told Cauley. Instead of bursting onto the Capitol Hill scene in 2001 on the strength of her fame, she’d kept her head down, worked on unsexy issues, and made some important, policy-minded friends. Biden then looked at Cauley like he was sharing something momentous, wisdom that could only come from a three-decade veteran of the world’s greatest deliberative body. Make sure, he said seriously, that he’s a workhorse, and not a show horse.
