Chapter 3

The Presidential Run and the Earthquake of Iowa

Obama’s decision to run for the United States Senate was the first step in a journey that culminated on November 8, 2008, with his election as the forty-fourth president of the United States. Whether he was thinking that far ahead when he officially announced in January 2003 that he was running for the US Senate is unclear, although a number of persons who knew him were already predicting that he might become the nation’s first African American president. Whatever his intention, in the five years following his announcement that he was running for the US Senate, he became the transcendent figure in national politics. What continued to stand out about him was his intellect, his commitment to principle, his pragmatism, his ambition, and his drive. He was also a progressive on a journey of heart and mind central to which remained the establishment of a shared multiethnic, multicultural society. Beyond that, he was a political and economic conservative bent on expanding the nation’s middle class.

Winning the Democratic Senate Nomination

Obama may have briefly considered running for the US Senate as early as 1998 after he was elected to the state senate and while deciding to challenge Bobby Rush for his congressional seat in 2000. In early 1998, his legislative aide, Dan Shomon, a seasoned political operative who had served previously in Springfield as a legislative aide to Democratic leader Emil Jones Jr., took him on a week-long golf outing at a resort in the rich farmland of southern Illinois. Although Shomon had been reluctant to work with Obama, whom he found to be overly ambitious and starry-eyed at what he thought he could accomplish as a newly elected state senator, he changed his mind after having dinner with him. After just one meal, he left committed to his political future. Like others who came to know Obama, he was struck immediately by his sheer brain power and appealing personality. Not only was Obama a community activist and organizer, he had a keen intellect with a demeanor to match.¹

Still viewing Obama as politically naïve and uninformed about the vast regions of Illinois south of Chicago and its suburbs, Shomon proposed the trip downstate to give him a better idea of the largely conservative makeup of the state’s small town and rural regions and a more realistic sense of what he could hope to accomplish in a government controlled by Republicans representing these constituencies.²

Despite the color of his skin and the fact that he was a liberal Democrat from Chicago, known for its lawlessness, broken homes, crime, and secular values—the very antithesis of what most downstate voters valued—Obama was struck by how well he was received at a number of stops along the way, “whether we were at a county fair or a union hall or on the porch of someone’s farm.” Because Shomon was well known and respected in Springfield and Obama was a state senator who had established friendly relations with a number of his Republican colleagues from the region, Shomon was able to arrange small gatherings of local farmers and merchants and rounds of golf and one-on-one meetings with local officials in the towns he visited, including a number of downstate liberals and graduates of elite institutions like himself. Among these was the state’s senior US senator, Richard Durbin of Springfield, who later became one of the first national figures to urge him to run for president. Wherever he went, he was greeted respectfully. Returning to Chicago, he was pleased by the reaction he received downstate. “These folks could vote for me—I mean these folks could help me—they could support me,” he later remarked. “I think it was a revelation to him that he had a lot of appeal as a politician,” his aide added.³

Obama’s visit to downstate Illinois also convinced him that the state and the nation might not be as divided as the media and pundits proclaimed and that by running for the US Senate, he might be the person who could heal whatever divides there were. “If … a campaign could somehow challenge America’s reigning political assumptions about how divided we were,” he wrote, “well just maybe it would be possible to build a new covenant between its citizens.”⁴

Soon after his defeat for Congress, he began to organize his campaign for the US Senate. In July 2002 he established a campaign committee to run for the Senate in 2004 against the first-term Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald. A renegade, who spent millions of dollars of his own fortune to defeat another first-term senator, Democrat Carol Mosely Braun, Fitzgerald had alienated even his own party’s leadership by his opposition to measures they supported.⁵

As a result, most political observers considered Fitzgerald’s seat highly vulnerable to a challenge even from within his own party. Facing opposition from six Democrats, including Obama and three formidable Republicans, Fitzgerald announced on April 3 that he would not seek reelection. After he made his announcement, Mosely Braun also made clear that she did not intend to try to get her seat back—that she was preparing instead to run for president of the United States. With Mosely Braun out of the race, Obama reasoned he could capture most of the state’s Black vote. Having done well among white voters in his bid against Rush and having been well received in his first trip downstate in 1998 and in a number of follow-up trips afterward, he also reasoned that in the primary he could win enough white votes, which, together with the Black vote, would carry him to victory in the primary.⁶

As a largely unknown state senator who had been handily defeated for Congress in 2000, he was regarded by most political pundits as a long shot to gain the Democratic nomination. Among the Democrats running to replace Fitzgerald, the most prominent were the state comptroller, Daniel Hynes, and the multimillionaire businessman and stock investor, Blair Hull. A member of a prominent Chicago political family, whose father, Tom Hynes, had been president of the Illinois state senate and Cook County assessor, Hynes brought to his campaign name recognition, political connections, an ability to raise large sums of money, and a reputation as a capable officeholder. Hull shared none of these qualities with Hynes but he was prepared to spend a considerable portion of his personal fortune, estimated to be around $300 million, on his campaign.⁷

Luck played an important role in bringing Obama from underdog status to a decisive victory in the Democratic primary in March 2004. For most of the campaign, Hull had been the front runner, largely because of the millions of dollars he poured into promoting his candidacy and gaining name recognition. But as the campaign drew to a close, he was forced to release divorce papers showing that his ex-wife, a Chicago real estate broker, had obtained two restraining orders against him and that there had been a physical fight between him and his former wife.⁸

Luck alone, however, cannot account for the fact that, by the end of February 2004, Obama had jumped from being an obscure state senator with little name recognition and no apparent source of funding into second place with significant funding just waiting to be used in a media blitz to vault him to a landslide victory in March. What accounted for his success was that he never wavered from his original strategy of sweeping the Black vote in Chicago and gaining enough of the white vote in the suburbs, in the wealthy North Shore of Chicago along Lake Michigan, and in downstate, to win the primary.⁹

Although Hull denied the charge of physical abuse, his campaign was never able to recover from the revelations. When the primary was held in March 2004, Obama won a landslide victory capturing 53 percent of the vote, nearly 29 points ahead of his nearest opponent, Comptroller Hynes, who picked up 24 percent of the vote with Hull badly trailing in third place with just 11 percent of the electorate. The other candidates were in single digits. ¹⁰

If there was any surprise in the outcome, it was how well Obama was able to do among white voters. This was made possible, in part, by two other strategic moves he made. One was to hire as his media specialist David Axelrod, and the second was to continue to build upon the network of wealthy donors and political insiders he had been developing even before he first ran for office in 1996. A University of Chicago graduate and one-time city hall bureau chief and political columnist for the Chicago Tribune, Axelrod had left the Tribune in 1984 to help run the successful campaign for the US Senate of Paul Simon.¹¹

A liberal and political idealist, Axelrod became attracted to politics by the idealism of Bobby Kennedy during his 1968 campaign. As a media specialist, he enjoyed great success in getting Black candidates elected to office and had a long list of clients that included the Black mayors of Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. His strategy employed heavy reliance on the life story of his clients.¹²

Axelrod came to regard Obama as a potential Bobby Kennedy. He first heard about him in 1992 while he was organizing Project Vote. A Democratic activist, Betty Saltzman, urged him to meet with Obama. “I think he will be our first Black president,” Saltzman told him. Meeting with Obama shortly thereafter, he also was impressed with the Illinois senator. “Without displaying any arrogance,” he later wrote, “Barack spoke with the wisdom and earnest self-assurance of someone much older… . He was clearly ambitious, but those ambitions seemed less about doing well than about doing good.” ¹³

In the ensuing years prior to Obama’s successful campaign for state senator, Axelrod did not have much contact with him. Once he ran for office and got elected to Springfield, the media specialist started to follow his career more carefully, especially since now retired Paul Simon spoke so favorably about him. What impressed Axelrod was Obama’s packaging of idealism and toughness. “This thoughtful and polished young man had a competitive edge,” he wrote about his 1995 campaign for the state senate. “Clearly he could be tough, unsentimental and even bruising when the situation demanded it.”¹⁴

Not until Obama challenged Bobby Rush for his congressional seat, however, and called Axelrod asking for his help in his coming campaign against the congressman, did he begin to establish the close relationship with him that would carry both of them to the White House in 2008. Although Axelrod advised him against challenging Rush and turned down his request to run his media campaign because he was a consultant to Mayor Daley, whose machine politics Obama opposed, he did give the state senator the names of other consultants he might call and offered to provide him with informal advice.¹⁵

Having decided to make a last effort at public office by running for the US Senate in 2004, Obama turned again to Axelrod for help in the coming campaign. The media consultant remained reluctant. “Wait till Rich Daley retires and then run for mayor,” he told the state senator after a luncheon meeting. After more meetings, however, Obama was able finally to convince Axelrod to be his media consultant and help run his campaign for the US Senate. Several polls showed that while name recognition was still a major problem for him, if voters were made aware of his life story, including the fact that he was the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama could win the Democratic primary. That was enough to persuade Axelrod. “Barack personified the kind of politics and politician I believe in,” he later stated.¹⁶

On Axelrod’s advice, Obama replaced Dan Shomon as his campaign manager with Jim Cauley, a seasoned political operative. No one had been closer politically to him since he was first elected to the state senate in 1996 than Shomon. Since 1996 he had managed every one of his political campaigns. But in a display of how hardened and unsentimental Obama could be, he concluded after conferring with Axelrod that Shomon did not have the organizational and policy skills to run a statewide campaign. As painful as it was to him, he also moved his campaign treasurer, Cynthia Miller, to a position with the state because of the distraction he believed her membership in the Nation of Islam would cause to his campaign.¹⁷

One of the first issues that Obama and Axelrod took up after Axelrod agreed to become his media consultant involved a little-known speech Obama had made in 2002 opposing United States’ involvement in a war in Iraq to oust its dictator, Saddam Hussein. The talk would become pivotal to his senatorial campaign and remain one of the most important issues of his whole journey to the presidency.

Up to this point, he had not spoken publicly about Iraq or, for that matter, about most other foreign policy issues. But as someone who had lived overseas much of his life, had studied European political thought while at Occidental College, majored in political science with an emphasis on international relations at Columbia, and envisioned a multiracial and multicultural world, he took a keen interest in the rest of the world.¹⁸

This was apparent in his reaction on September 11, 2001, to the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City and at the Pentagon. As he began to explore the meaning of these attacks, he laid out what would become a hallmark of his foreign policy in the Middle East—a determination to pursue relentlessly and to destroy completely terrorist networks while at the same time reaching an understanding of the root causes of terrorist activity. “We must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction,” he stated. “We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness.”¹⁹

In the late summer and early fall of 2002, the immediate issue facing the candidate was Iraq. Claiming that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), including nuclear weapons, President George W. Bush threatened to take unilateral military actions against him. In September 2002, Saltzman asked Obama to speak at an antiwar demonstration she was organizing as the US Senate prepared to take up a resolution approving military intervention in Iraq. Like other liberal progressives, the state senator opposed military intervention. Not only did he believe it would divert attention and resources from a failing economy at home, he did not think Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States. He had no misconceptions about the Iraqi dictator. He was ruthless and his possession of WMDs posed a threat to stability in the Middle East. He also had not cooperated for many years with UN inspectors sent to Iraq to examine his stockpiles of weapons. But Obama was still convinced that additional diplomatic pressure short of war could force Hussein to open his stockpile of weapons for international inspection.²⁰

He was inclined, therefore, to join other speakers at the antiwar rally. At the same time, he was concerned about the impact his remarks might have on his campaign for Senate. “I mulled over the question for a day or so and decided this was my first test,” he later commented. Polls indicated that there was strong support for the war resolution. He wanted Axelrod’s input on how seriously he would be hurt if he spoke out against the war. After consulting with other advisers, Axelrod responded that he should participate in the rally.²¹

In a short speech he gave in Chicago in October before a crowd estimated as high as several thousand, Obama startled his audience by making clear that he did not oppose all wars. He thought, for example, that the Civil War was a war worth fighting and pointed out that his grandfather had fought in George Patton’s army during World War II. He was “not opposed to all wars,” he then said in what became a refrain throughout his speech and another tenet of his foreign policy as president. He was “opposed to dumb wars.” Similarly, he suggested that if President Bush wanted a fight, he should battle “against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.” His speech was so well received by the crowd that Axelrod later regretted he had not taped it for later use in the campaign.²²

In a radio interview in November, he amplified on his views about military intervention in Iraq. First, he expressed his satisfaction about President Bush’s recent decision to seek a UN resolution calling for “aggressive inspections” of Iraqi weapons stockpiles. Then he raised a number of issues that characterized the way he would approach making major foreign policy decisions. What would be the costs of the intervention? he asked. What did it mean to rebuild Iraq, and how did the United States stabilize and make sure that the country did not “split into factions between the Shias and the Kurds and the Sunnis?” Finally, he stated that he was against giving “carte blanche to the administration for a doctrine of preemptive strikes that [he] was not sure would set a good precedent.” If he had had to vote up or down on an Iraq war powers resolution, he would have voted against it.²³

By coming out against intervention in Iraq, he separated himself from the rest of the candidates running for the US Senate. His refrain that he was not opposed to all wars, just dumb wars, showed again how pragmatic and genuine Obama could be at the same time. It also made for good oratory. For the tens of thousands of voters still strongly opposed to intervention, he became their only candidate.²⁴

A strong message that was barely covered in the media and failed to reach a large audience, however, was of little value. The candidate’s problem was how to spread his message and attract enough white voters in Chicago and downstate, while winning an overwhelming majority of the Black vote. Former senator Moseley Braun’s announcement that she would not seek her old job back cleared the way for Obama to win the Black vote by the margins he needed to win the primary; had Mosely Braun decided to seek the nomination, he would have withdrawn from the race.²⁵

As for the white vote, his opposition to US intervention in the war assured strong support from antiwar progressives living along Lake Michigan’s North Shore and in Chicago’s white suburbs. He still had to increase his share of the white vote elsewhere, however, where his opposition to the war was unpopular and where he was still an unknown figure.²⁶

Obama’s intellectual gifts and personality stood out in winning over these voters. Even when voters disagreed with him on specific issues, they were won over by his freshness, earnestness, and clarity in explaining his position on these matters and by his engagement with them. When he spoke, his answers were fluent and knowledgeable. As he told his life story, moreover, he emphasized his grandparents’ roots in Kansas rather than his father’s roots in Kenya. Addressing Black audiences, he could be Black. Addressing white audiences, he could be white. “It’s like he’s talking to you, and not a crowd,” one local downstate politician remarked. “That’s the thing about him,” David Axelrod added. “He has the ability to walk into any room and connect with anybody. I think it’s because of who he is—the many different cultural strands that are part of him.”²⁷

He was also able to project a message of optimism and hope and of inclusion and not exclusion. He made his audiences feel proud to be Americans. Speaking directly on the question of racial differences, he declared, “We have shared values, values that aren’t Black or white or Hispanic—values that are American, and Democratic.” After following him on the campaign trail, William Finnegan of the New Yorker called his ease before white crowds “a source of wonderment.”²⁸

Throughout the primary and the general election Obama tried to avoid racial issues. This was, of course, good politics since the premise of his campaign was attracting a large enough white vote, which, when combined with his almost certain monopoly of the Black vote, would assure his nomination and then his election to the United States Senate. But he avoided bringing race into his candidacy for more than political calculation. A predicate of his campaign was his lifelong commitment to a multicultural and multiethnic nation devoid of issues like race. Taking pride in the great strides of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, he sought, nevertheless, to transcend that movement, which had pitted the supporters of civil rights against its opponents, sometimes in violent confrontation, often through lesser acts of civil disobedience. Even though Obama embraced the goals of the movement, he rejected its confrontational politics.²⁹

Instead, he sought to be a bridge-builder—a unifier rather than a divider. He saw no inconsistency between diversity and his pride in his own race and in wanting to live in a postracial, postethnic, and postpartisan world. Unlike the liberals of the 1960s, Obama did not even intend to rely primarily on government organization to achieve his agenda. While he felt government had an important role in advancing infrastructure projects, public education, and dynamic communities in which even poor children had the opportunity to rise and succeed, he believed strongly that individuals had to earn their own success. As much a product of a middle-class upbringing and an elite education as a community organizer working (but not living) in the poorest areas of Chicago’s South Side, he sought to return to an America that was ever expanding its middle class. Ironically, his political and economic conservatism was foundational to his belief on how progress was achieved in the US.³⁰

Obama spent eighteen months on the campaign trail going from small town to small town throughout Illinois. “I was having fun,” the former president recalled. He enjoyed going into ethnic communities and speaking at Black churches. But increasingly he just listened. He raised enough funds to sustain the primary campaign, mostly from smaller donors, including the network of supporters he had been building since he entered politics a decade earlier. Because Axelrod chose to hold back most of these funds for a television blitz in the last month of the campaign, he could only reach a relatively small number of Illinois voters. A poll conducted one month before the primary showed Obama with still just 15 percent of the vote.³¹

About three weeks before the March primary, Axelrod unleashed the funds the campaign had been raising and he had been hoarding. In a data-driven media campaign, he spread the story throughout the state about the gifted and talented candidate from Chicago with a biography that included both a midwestern and international upbringing, president of the Harvard Law Review, experience as a community organizer, knowledge about national issues, and skillful in getting state measures passed in Springfield. The campaign also featured both Obama talking about his life and the endorsement of Paul Simon’s daughter, Sheila. In addition, it emphasized how he represented the politics of hope and promise at a time when the nation was in the first throes of an ill-conceived war abroad and an economic downturn at home. For the first time, he employed the phrases “Yes We Can,” and “Change We Can Believe In,” which became the themes of his 2008 presidential campaign. Combined with the collapse of the Hull campaign, the result was his overwhelming victory in the March primary in which he gained a majority of the vote and more than doubled the vote of his nearest rival, Dan Hynes.³²

Election to the US Senate and the Keynote Address

As in the Democratic primary, Obama faced a formidable Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, in the general election in November. Though Ryan had never run for office, he managed in March to win a decisive victory over a number of strong Republican rivals. Handsome with movie star looks, Ryan had been married to a movie and television star, Jeri Ryan, with whom he had a son. A graduate of Harvard Law School with an MBA from Harvard Business School, he had been a wealthy investment banker at Goldman Sachs before giving up his career on Wall Street to teach at an all-Black Catholic school for boys in Chicago’s South Side. In his campaign he appealed directly to African American voters. Charismatic and personable, he had a personal attraction rivaling Obama’s appeal.³³

Obama maintained a sizable lead against Ryan in the early polls, but the electorate was divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the Republican Party had a sizable war chest that it was prepared to use to hold onto Fitzgerald’s seat, and its candidate took a stand on the issues that enjoyed widespread support downstate. Unlike his Democratic opponent, Ryan supported the Iraq war. He also took a pro-life position on abortion, opposed gun control, and was a fiscal conservative. Had Ryan stayed in the race, the voters would have been offered a clear choice between the two candidates.³⁴

As in the March primary, however, a nasty divorce involving his opponent worked in Obama’s favor. In 1999, Ryan’s wife had divorced him. To protect their young son, the couple had the court records involving his custody sealed. During the primary the Chicago Tribune and a local ABC affiliate filed successfully to have the records unsealed, and when they were opened, they revealed that Ryan’s ex-wife had accused him of making her go to sex clubs in New York, New Orleans, and Paris. Although Ryan denied the accusation, the media storm that followed forced him to leave the race at the end of July.³⁵

Even though Obama profited from the revelations, this type of mass-appeal journalism genuinely disgusted him. It was one reason why he did not like journalists or debates that required short answers to what he considered complex issues requiring lengthy and sometimes nuanced answers. “So much of our culture is caught up in celebrity and sensationalism,” he remarked in response to the unsealing of the records. “It’s an unfortunate aspect of our culture generally, and our politics ends up taking on that same flavor.”³⁶

After the Republicans failed to find a candidate within the state willing to challenge Obama so late in the race, they turned to a well-known African American activist from Maryland, Alan Keyes, who had earlier run for president and the US Senate. An arch opponent of abortion and gay marriage, he had a volatile personality and outspoken conservative views on a large agenda of social issues, which left him outside the mainstream of American politics. Characterizing Obama’s views on abortion as “the slaveholder’s position,” he added separately that “Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has behaved in a way that is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.”³⁷

Ryan’s withdrawal from the race and the choice of Keyes to replace him turned what promised to be a close race into a romp. When the votes were counted in November, Obama won by a margin of 70 percent to Keyes’s 27 percent, the largest one in the state’s history. He also carried 92 of the state’s 102 counties.³⁸

It was not, however, just good fortune again coming to Obama’s assistance that accounted for the size of his victory over Keyes. Not taking the bait of his opponent’s outrageous statements against him, he continued to campaign hard and not let Keyes’s remarks distract him. Nor was it only good fortune that turned an opportunity given to him by Massachusetts senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic nominee for president in 2004, to deliver the keynote address at the party’s national convention in Boston in July into the springboard for his own presidential bid in 2008.³⁹

Kerry decided to give the Illinois senatorial candidate the keynote spot because of the personal buzz surrounding him as a result of his decisive, come-from-behind victory in the March primary. Party leaders regarded the Illinois seat as one they could take back from the Republicans in November and realized Obama’s broad appeal among voters. Not only would he become the only Black member of the Senate, they were aware of his growing reputation among all those who met or heard him speak as one of the party’s brightest, most articulate, and most promising future leaders.⁴⁰

Kerry was also personally impressed by the Illinois lawmaker and candidate for the US Senate. Although he hardly knew him before coming to Chicago after the primary for a big fund-raising event, he was impressed by Obama’s charismatic personality, oratorical skills, and ability to rouse an audience. Kerry had a similar impression of him as he campaigned with him the next day at a job-training site in the city’s West Side. “We believe he represents the future of the party,” Stephanie Cutter, the communications director for the Kerry campaign, remarked in explaining Kerry’s choice of Obama.⁴¹

Once Obama was told he would be named the keynote speaker, he seized the opportunity given him. Even before he got word that Kerry would give him a national spotlight, he began to think seriously about what he would say if he were given the opportunity. He intended to write his own speech. “I know what I want to say,” he told Axelrod. “I want to talk about my own story as part of the larger American story.” “I want to talk about who we are at our best.” ⁴²

“The words came swiftly,” the former president later recalled, “a summation of the politics I’d been searching for since those early years in college and the inner struggles that had prompted the journey to where I was now. My head felt full of voices: of my mother, my grandparents, my father; of the people I had organized with and folks on the campaign trail.”⁴³

Obama did not deliver his speech without engaging in a dispute with campaign officials who objected to the speech’s length and some of its phraseology. The final draft that Obama gave the Kerry campaign was timed at almost thirty minutes even though campaign officials had allotted him just eight minutes. Obama was upset. If the campaign insisted on a short speech, he told Axelrod, he would give up his spot entirely. After several rounds of negotiations, he was able to reach an agreement with campaign officials by which he was allotted seventeen minutes for his address.⁴⁴

Another problem between Obama and the Kerry campaign involved what became one of the most memorable sections of his address. A young Kerry official, John Favreau, who would later become his chief speech writer, asked him to strike out from his draft a phrase having to do with an alleged divide between red and blue states. The official claimed that Kerry had a similar phrase in his acceptance speech. Again, Obama became furious. After he cooled down, Axelrod convinced him to cut the phrase, arguing that his sacrifice of a few words was worth speaking before millions of people.⁴⁵

Despite never having spoken before an audience of fifteen thousand delegates and visitors, much less millions more watching on television, despite never having used a teleprompter (which he rarely looked at since he had memorized his speech), and despite being fully aware that he was a Black man doing what had always been a white person’s business with his political future on the line, Obama remained composed and unflappable throughout his address. His highest priority was generating enthusiasm for Kerry’s campaign against his Republican opponent, President George W. Bush. Like the other speakers at the convention, he did this by first comparing the failures of the Bush administration with Kerry’s qualifications to be president. But instead of a frontal attack on the president like these other speakers, he never even addressed Bush by name. Rather, he spoke artfully of the urgency of the situation facing the nation and used a recurring phrase “more work” that needed to be done. “More work to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that’s moving to Mexico,” he remarked. “More to do for the father that I met who was losing his job choking back the tears, wondering how he would pay the $4500 a month for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits he counted on.” “These individuals and thousands like them were not looking for a government handout,” he added. “They know they have to work hard to get ahead, and they want to.”⁴⁶

Pivoting away from the bad judgment and mistakes of the Bush administration, he then spoke about Kerry’s commitment to public service from the time he was a young naval officer patrolling the dangerous waters of the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War to his present role as a US senator from Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Next, he outlined what the senator intended to do as president. This part of the speech could have been a traditional laundry list of promises, but what made it so effective was his cadence, his powerful voice, his growing confidence before an increasingly cheering audience, and his repetitive use of a few key phrases. “John Kerry believes in an America where hard work is rewarded,” he stated. “John Kerry believes in an America where all Americans can afford the same health coverage our politicians have for themselves… . John Kerry believes in energy independence.”⁴⁷

The most memorable part of his speech was his portrayal of the United States as a nation united rather than divided and of optimism rather despair. As he neared the end of his remarks, he speeded up his delivery and his voice burst with energy. Employing all the tactics he had used throughout his earlier remarks, including reference to his own life story, alliteration, anecdotes, contrasting imagery, and short repetitive phraseology, he portrayed an America different from that often described in the media. “There is not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and Asian America—there is the United States of America,” he stated. “The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States,” he continued. “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 in our libraries in the Red States.” His final words were those of “hope,” using shorter, quicker sentences. “Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!” The response in the convention hall to Obama’s address was electric. Standing up throughout much of the speech, the delegates waved banners and shouted chants of “hope” and “Obama.”⁴⁸

Afterward, some critics argued that Obama’s remarks actually hurt the cause of the civil rights movement by its emphasis on the unity of America, thereby allowing white Americans to ignore the racial and other divides that still plagued the nation. For these critics, Obama remained “not Black enough,” a charge that had been made against him earlier and one with which he would have to deal during his campaign for the presidency.⁴⁹

Those critics, however, represented a small ripple in the sea of approval that greeted his speech. Most major media outlets hailed his address as one of the greatest speeches ever delivered at a presidential convention. Some even speculated on the possibility that he might someday be president of the United States even though he had not yet even been elected to the US Senate. “A great speech brings together three aspects—the right speaker, with the right message, at the right time,” one analyst commented. “Obama’s speech covers all three aspects and you are left with the impression that he is a man whose message was right, whose delivery was right and whose time had come.”⁵⁰

Obama denied that he had anything in mind following his convention speech other than being elected to the Senate and helping Kerry get elected to the White House in November. Throughout the months following the Democratic convention he campaigned for the Democratic nominee and for himself while refusing to speculate about his future beyond his election to the US Senate. Given the extent of the media coverage already being given to him, however, it would have been impossible for him to have ignored the widespread speculation about an Obama presidential candidacy, possibly as early as 2008, if Kerry lost in November. ⁵¹

The idea of running for president was almost certainly on his mind even as he labored over his speech in Boston. While remaining an idealist, his determination to advance up the ladder of success—a constant in his career—meant that he always kept his eye on the prize and worked with all the skill, determination, and cold calculation needed to achieve that goal. Having been successful throughout most of his career and having been told all the while that he could become the first Black president of the United States, he had enough confidence in himself to believe that goal was achievable.⁵²

From Capitol Hill to the Iowa Caucuses

With Obama’s overwhelming election to the US Senate and Kerry’s defeat for the presidency, a new round of speculation began over whether he would run for president in 2008. In news interviews, he repeated over and over that he had no plans for the future other than to be a good senator on Capitol Hill. Throughout 2005, he turned down almost all speaking engagements outside of Illinois and, indeed, devoted most of his time to his senatorial duties. Minority Leader Harry Reid (NV) and Dick Durbin, his second-in-command and Obama’s political friend, gave the new senator special attention, introducing him to what Obama later described as “the old bulls of the Senate”—Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Robert Byrd (D-WV), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and John Warner (R-VA).⁵³

As a new senator, and because Democrats were in the minority, Obama had little input on the legislation that came before the upper chamber, mostly establishing a reputation as a hardworking, smart, Democratic loyalist with presidential ambitions who, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, traveled extensively abroad. About the most noteworthy event of his four years in the Senate was a public clash with Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who accused him in 2006 of reneging on a promise he made to work on a task force on rules governing lobbyists.⁵⁴

In January 2006 Obama made an unequivocal statement on the Sunday news show Meet the Press that he would not run for president in 2008. The same month he made that statement, however, he formed a political leadership PAC, “The Hope Fund.” In a little over a year, he managed to raise $4.4 million for his PAC, one of the largest amounts ever raised so quickly by a member of Congress. With these funds, he was able to support a major political operation including experienced staff members like Robert Gibbs, who had signed on to be his communications director just before he gave his keynote address and who later became his White House press secretary, Jennifer Yeager, who had been his cofinance director during his campaign for the US Senate and would serve as a finance director during his presidential campaign, and David Axelrod, whose firm, AKP, sent camera crews videotaping virtually every one of his public activities. In 2007 Axelrod used this footage to produce a five-minute online video for Obama’s announcement on January 16 that he was running for president. ⁵⁵

Besides supporting his own political operation, Obama was able to contribute $562,000 to candidates running for federal office and another $110,000 to local, state, and national parties and committees. As the most sought-after Democratic speaker among the party’s rank-and-file, he also began in 2006 to travel throughout the country raising money for his PAC, promoting his new book, The Audacity of Hope, and speaking at political events in support of Democratic officials and candidates for office. In these ways, he built up his donor base, won over volunteers, and gained political capital if he decided to run for president.⁵⁶

Wherever he went, he was greeted by an outpouring of emotion usually reserved for entertainers. “For our generation he is kind of the lighthouse, the hope,” explained one nineteen-year-old student from the University of Chicago. “He’s changing the face of government in America.” In Chicago, where he began his book tour, people lined up before bookstores for as long as three hours in the rain for a chance to have him autograph their copies of The Audacity of Hope. Very quickly, it became the nation’s number one best-selling nonfiction book. Dreams from My Father, which had sold fewer than ten thousand copies when it was first released in 1995, was re-released, and it, too, became a number one best seller. The royalties he received from the sales of both books made the Obamas comfortable enough to buy a large home in the upscale neighborhood of Hyde Park near the University of Chicago.⁵⁷

The Audacity of Hope lacked the introspective quality or lyrical prose of Dreams from My Father. Instead of Dreams’ poignant reflection on an unusual life, he intended Audacity as a political autobiography written at a time when he had just been elected to the US Senate. In the book, Obama spelled out his latest thinking on most every policy issue facing the nation. Not surprisingly, he called for a progressive, multicultural, postethnic, postracial world. In doing so, he spoke out against doctrinaire thinking, criticized such organized evangelical groups as the “Moral Majority” and “the Christian Coalition,” and wondered why anyone would spend their evenings watching conservative “sour-pusses” like Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter. “I find it hard to take them seriously,” he wrote. “I assume they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings.”⁵⁸

At the same time, he took the Democratic Party to task for not understanding the importance of religion to Americans and for being the “party of reaction” rather than the party of hope and reform. “In reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action… . In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning.” ⁵⁹

Finally, Obama explained why he was a Democrat. “Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action,” he wrote. “The state of our inner-city schools is a case in point. All the money in the world won’t boost student achievement if parents make no effort to instill in their children the values of hard work and delayed gratification.” He was a Democrat, he continued, because his party believed in “the idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government.” Concluding, he added, “Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of culture to determine both individual success and social cohesion… . But I also believe that our government can play a role in shaping that culture for the better—or for the worse.”⁶⁰

By the summer of 2006 Obama was clearly thinking of a White House bid. He had been deeply affected by the ineptitude of the Bush administration in responding to Hurricane Katrina the previous August. The hugely destructive storm overwhelmed the levees in New Orleans, led to the destruction of whole sections of the city (most of which were predominantly Black), left hospitals without backup power and emergency workers without supplies, and caused misery to families sheltered in the leaky Superdome. Over five hundred thousand people were displaced as a result of the hurricane, and eighteen hundred more died. According to Michelle Obama, her husband’s visit to New Orleans after the storm “kindled something in him, that nagging sense he wasn’t yet doing enough.”⁶¹

In September, the senator accepted an invitation to be the keynote speaker at the annual steak fry of Senator Tom Harkin in the early caucus state of Iowa—his strongest indication yet that he was contemplating running. In a return appearance on Meet the Press in October, he walked back his earlier statement of January that under no circumstance would he be a candidate for president in 2008. At the same time, he refused in his public appearances to commit himself to serving out his six-year term as senator or to pledge that he would not run for president in 2008.⁶²

Following a decisive Democratic victory in the congressional elections the next month in which Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress, Obama assembled his closest advisers, including two new members of his political team, Peter Rouse and David Plouffe. Erstwhile chief of staff to former senate majority leader Tom Daschle before Daschle’s recent defeat for reelection in South Dakota, Rouse became Obama’s chief of staff. Plouffe, who had a sterling reputation as a campaign strategist and manager, had been Axelrod’s partner since 2003, but he had not been heavily involved in Obama’s race for the US Senate. He would later become his campaign manager in his race for president.⁶³

The meeting’s purpose was to discuss an Obama presidential candidacy. A number of those in attendance advised against running, pointing out to him the need for him to wait in line and first gain more experience on Capitol Hill, and the difficulty of defeating such Democratic heavyweights as Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, whom political pundits regarded as having a virtual lock on the party’s nomination should she decide to seek it, and John Edwards, Kerry’s vice presidential candidate in 2004, who remained popular among the party’s more progressive wing.⁶⁴

Obama thought differently. Earlier he had been advised against running for Congress and then had been advised against running for the US Senate. Both times he had let his own instincts and reading of the political map override the advice he received, but not this time. “I’ve never been a big believer in destiny,” he commented as a former president. Still, he knew “by the spring of 2006, the idea of running for president in the next election, while still unlikely, was no longer outside the realm of possibility.” Minority Leader Reid even took him aside and urged him to consider running, telling him that ten more years in the Senate would not make him a better president and that he motivated people, especially young people and minorities and even middle-of-the-road white people. Senator Kennedy also encouraged him to run, remarking, “you don’t choose the time. The time chooses you.” Before moving further, however, Obama waited until after the big Democratic victory in the 2006 congressional elections.⁶⁵

At his meeting with his advisers, the senator directed them to develop a preliminary plan for winning the Democratic nomination. At the same time, he instructed them to examine the obstacles to winning and the impact on his family of a run for the presidency. If he determined they were too much against him or that a campaign for the presidency would be too harmful to his family, he was prepared to give up any thought of running. Later, he also asked the staff to look closely at the strengths and weaknesses of his likely opponents.⁶⁶

Even after these early meetings, a few of his advisers, including Plouffe, were not convinced that he would become a candidate for president in 2008. “I still believed that the undertaking was largely a theoretical exercise,” Plouffe later wrote. But he also acknowledged that “Obama was more serious about running than [he] had anticipated.” The Illinois senator was aware of how difficult his march to the presidential nomination, much less to the Oval Office, would be. He was untested and unforged in a national campaign, lacked experience on Capitol Hill, and was without the resources or organization of Clinton, who enjoyed her own star power.⁶⁷

Driven by his own restless ambition and motivated by confidence—almost cockiness—in himself as an agent of change at a time of growing partisanship and loss of optimism about the nation’s future, the senator believed he could win his party’s nomination and the election with his message of hope. The conservative tide in the country was coming to a close, he thought, and the American people yearned for a new and different type of politician like himself. As the political writers of Newsweek wrote, he “understood that he had become a giant screen upon which Americans projected their hopes and fears, dreams and frustrations.”⁶⁸

Before he could make a final decision, however, he still needed Michelle’s approval. He knew that she had serious reservations about making the race. “Her initial instinct was to say no,” Obama recalled. She had accepted only reluctantly his decision to run for the US Senate. She feared he might be killed by an assassin determined not to have a Black president in the Oval Office. As the mother of two young children and the wife of a career politician, she was also aware of how disruptive the campaign would be for her children and herself. Never comfortable on the public stage, she dreaded even the thought of having to speak at routine campaign events. And if Barack was elected, she was concerned that Malia and Sasha would not be able to have normal childhoods.⁶⁹

For the first time in their lives, the Obamas did not have to worry about money. Besides her husband’s income as a new US senator and the royalties from his two books, she had recently taken a new position with a handsome six-figure salary as vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago’s Medical Center. She enjoyed the semblance of a regular family life, her children were in school, and she had a close network of friends. She realized that if her husband ran for president, they would become subject to a grueling presidential campaign that would last eighteen months, test the endurance of their marriage, open every facet of their lives to close scrutiny, and almost certainly subject them to racial epithets and scurrilous accusations.⁷⁰

Obama understood the difficult position in which he placed his wife and even questioned his own motives for running. “Why would I put her through this?” he asked himself. “Was it just vanity? Or perhaps something darker—a raw hunger, a blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service? Or was I still trying to prove myself worthy of a father who had abandoned me, live up to my mother’s starry-eyed expectations of her only son, and resolve whatever self-doubt remained from being born a child of a mixed race.”⁷¹

Despite the difficult position in which he placed Michelle and his self-doubts about why he was running for president, Obama was unable to “close the door” on a presidential run, and Michelle threw her full support behind him. Accepting the fact that she was the wife of a career politician who set high, seemingly impossible, goals for himself, she was persuaded that if their marriage was to succeed, she needed to support him. The fact that she frequently changed jobs, always with increasing responsibilities, also suggested a certain restlessness and ambition on her part. Most important, she shared her husband’s goals and believed he could win and break through the partisanship and deadlock that gripped Capitol Hill. Like her husband she wanted stronger regulation of big business and big banks, universal health care, tax cuts and rising wages for lower- and middle-class Americans, and stronger efforts to deal with climate change. She was certain her husband could deliver on these and other promises he made to the American people and restore confidence in the US system of government. “In the end,” she later wrote, she approved of Obama’s candidacy for president “because I believed that Barack could be a great president.”⁷²

With Michelle’s approval, Obama announced on February 10, 2007, on the stairs of the state capitol in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln had begun his political career, that he was running for president of the United States. Despite temperatures in the single digits, a gathering estimated at more than sixteen thousand people crowded the blocks below the capitol to hear Obama deliver an impassioned speech in which he invoked the name of Lincoln and spoke of a new generation of Americans who had formed into a movement committed to bringing about change in Washington. By running for president, he was offering to lead that movement into the seats of power. “Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what’s needed to be done,” he remarked. “Today we are called once more, and it’s time for our generation to answer that call.”.⁷³

Having framed his candidacy as one of a new leader for a new generation of Americans and having adopted a message of hope and confidence about the future, Obama still faced the huge problems of developing an electoral strategy and an organization for taking his message to the people of the US. Recognizing that he remained far behind the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, both in terms of organization and fund-raising, and reflecting his background as a community organizer, he was convinced that the successful strategy for winning the nomination was to build support from precincts to counties to states and then the nation. His strategy was similar to President Jimmy Carter’s in the 1976 campaign in which Carter realized that the first state primary took place not in New Hampshire, the traditional start of the primary season, but in Iowa. In the Hawkeye State the process of choosing delegates to the national convention was started in January of the election year with the holding of a complex system of local caucuses in schools and other public buildings.⁷⁴

Obama’s commitment to a grassroots campaign coincided with Plouffe’s and Axelrod’s view of the race not as a national campaign but as a series of state races starting with Iowa in January and continuing through Montana and South Dakota on June 3. In 2004 Edwards had come in a close second to Kerry in Iowa both in terms of votes and delegates. If Obama won in Iowa in 2008, he would not only strike a blow at Clinton and build momentum going into the New Hampshire primary, but he would also replace Edwards as the leading challenger to the New York senator.⁷⁵

In choosing to run a series of state races rather than a single national campaign, Plouffe and Axelrod challenged the tradition-bound strategy of the Clinton campaign, which called for concentrating on the states with the biggest blocks of delegates, like New York, California, the industrial states of the Midwest, Texas, and Florida. In making their decision on an alternative, grassroots national strategy, they were influenced by the 2004 presidential campaign of Governor Howard Dean of Vermont and the 2006 gubernatorial campaign of Deval Patrick in Massachusetts.⁷⁶

A little-known governor from a small rural state, Dean shook the political world in 2004 when, for a short while, he emerged as a front-runner in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The strategy that Dean employed was to tap into the still relatively new internet to raise large sums of money and, in the process garner campaign volunteers, through a successful appeal to small donors of $5 to $50. Also little known at the time he decided to run for governor, Patrick was an African American businessman and civil rights lawyer who had run the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department during Bill Clinton’s administration. He managed to win the election by a campaign using the internet to organize and communicate with local supporters and get voters to the ballot box on election day.⁷⁷

Using the Dean and Patrick campaigns as models, Plouffe developed a technology-driven campaign structure that made it possible for Obama to stay in touch with supporters throughout Iowa and get them to the polls for the January caucuses. The technology was more sophisticated than any used in previous campaigns. Its usefulness, however, was effective only to the extent to which it supported the hundreds of young, idealistic volunteers who, having been motivated by Obama, poured into the state to support him. Going door-to-door, they reminded those whom the technology had identified as his supporters to go to the caucuses to vote.⁷⁸

Even before Obama declared his candidacy for president, speculation had begun to grow that he would soon make it official. In April, he announced that he had raised $24.8 million during the first quarter of 2008 for his campaign, more money than any other Democratic candidate except for Clinton, much of whose funding was designated for the general election rather than the primaries. He also began to draw large crowds at his rallies.⁷⁹

The pressure of the campaign began to take its toll on him. His cool, dispassionate, and unflappable public face started to show signs of cracking. He bridled at the constant pressure of cable news to break a news story. As he told Newsweek, he resented what he believed was its pressure for him to show his “toughness” on the war on terrorism by stating that he “want[ed] to bomb the hell out of someone.” He grew annoyed at the desire of crowds to touch him, and his hands became numb from all the handshaking he had to do. Because of the unusually large number of racial death threats on him, he was provided with extra secret service protection, which limited his activities. He began to snap at his campaign staff, such as when a low staffer issued a press release mocking Clinton as “D-Punjab” because of her ties to alleged supporters of India. “I don’t want you guys freelancing and, quote, protecting me, from what you’re doing,” he warned his staff.⁸⁰

Eight candidates sought the Democratic nomination for president. Besides Obama, Clinton, and Edwards, the most prominent were former governor Bill Richardson (NM) and US Senators Joe Biden (DE), and Chris Dodd (CT). Although the candidates agreed to a series of party-sanctioned debates beginning with the first one at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg on April 26, 2007, in March they held an earlier face-off at a health-care forum in Las Vegas. Even Obama was displeased by his performance in these debates. “It’s worse than I thought,” the candidate told Axelrod, who agreed that Clinton had crisper, better prepared answers. He seemed remote to reporters, many of whom found him chilly and guarded. In contrast to their editors, they did not like him. Unlike former president Bill Clinton, who had the gift to simplify complex issues in a way audiences could easily understand, Obama also tended to be long-winded in explaining similar issues.⁸¹

In May, he reflected at length on why he was not living up to his own standards as a candidate. “Part of it is psychological,” he told his aides. “I’m still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think other candidates just aren’t. There is a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer… . It’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.” Even though aware of his problem, he continued to be distant and detached throughout the months preceding the Iowa caucuses. A staffer, Betsy Myers, the sister of Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, even expressed disappointment that after returning to Chicago from a campaign trip, he preferred to use the gym rather than come to headquarters to mingle with the staff. ⁸²

After a short time, however, the senator began to loosen up and be more comfortable on the campaign trail, speaking to small and large groups. Addressing a Black crowd in South Carolina (an early primary state that would vote soon after Iowa and New Hampshire), he began to riff and speak with the cadence of a Black preacher, soliciting cheers and “Amens!” from the audience. In Aiken, he brought a rally to its feet by retelling the story of how a local city council woman, Edith Childs, had “fired up” a small crowd of only thirty attendees in a dismal rainy day by chanting repeatedly, “Fired Up! Ready to Go!” Then he introduced Childs to the audience, whom she led in the chant. Very quickly it became a part of the campaign. Volunteers carried signs and wore shirts with the slogan printed on them. Childs was even interviewed by CBS News.⁸³

At the most important event of the early primary season, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines on November 10, which the campaign had already packed with Obama supporters, he lighted up the large gathering with his best speech since announcing he was running for president. Because the speakers were not permitted to use teleprompters, he spent hours memorizing the speech and perfecting its delivery. Talking for about thirty minutes, the candidate employed many of the same elements as his keynote address of 2004, alliteration, repetition, short phrases, and an increasingly more rapid delivery that built to a crescendo at the end. Mixing opposing elements of contempt for the Bush administration and his own confidence in the future, he spoke about the president’s failures of leadership at home. He also attacked him for “using fear and falsehoods” in leading the United States into an unwarranted war in Iraq and for not having any plan for bringing the troops home. In contrast, he emphasized his own opposition to the war and made clear that if elected president, he intended to withdraw all troops within sixteen months.⁸⁴

Also taking potshots at Hillary Clinton, Obama pointed out that she had voted for the Iraq War. Without mentioning her by name, he mocked her for basing her campaign on the latest polling. He wanted, he said, a “party that offers not just a difference in policies, but a difference in leadership. A party that doesn’t just focus on how to win but why we should. A party that doesn’t just offer change as a slogan, but real, meaningful change—change that America can believe.”⁸⁵

Like his keynote address, his speech at the dinner was singled out by journalists as the outstanding event of the night. The reporter, Garance Frank-Ruta, remarked that he “finally gave the speech his supporters have been waiting for him to give all year. If anyone comes out of this dinner with The Big Mo,” she said, “it will be him.” “The excitement generated by Obama’s fiery but disciplined speech is a reminder of what it means to convince someone,” the commentator Ana Marie Cox, added.⁸⁶

In contrast to the Obama campaign, the Clinton campaign never caught fire in Iowa. While Mrs. Clinton came to the debates with a firm grasp of the issues and, almost always, was on point in responding to questions, on occasion she tripped up or was caught off guard by her opponents. On one particularly bad night, she danced around a question by Tim Russert about whether she supported New York governor Elliot Spitzer’s plan to give driver’s licenses to undocumented workers. This allowed her opponents to trounce on her for her indecisiveness on the issue of illegal immigration.⁸⁷

The leadership of the Clinton campaign seemed to be in denial about the earthquake that was about to take place in Iowa or about the impact of Obama’s speech at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner on the coming caucuses. Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief pollster and strategist, whom Axelrod described as “dark, brooding [and] smugly self-assur[ed],” commented after the dinner that Obama’s supporters “look like Facebook,” while Mandy Grunwald, a veteran consultant and adviser to the New York senator, remarked, “Our people look like caucus-goers and his people look like they are eighteen.”⁸⁸

Many of his supporters in Iowa may have been only eighteen or just a few years older; indeed, some were only seventeen since Iowa permitted seventeen-year-olds who would be eighteen by the November election to vote in the caucuses. But when they took place a month later, Obama won a resounding victory, capturing 38 percent of the vote while Edwards eked out a narrow victory over Clinton gaining 29.8 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 29.5 percent. What was astonishing about his victory was that 239,000 Iowans turned out to vote compared to just 124,000 in 2004. As polls confirmed, a large percentage of the turnout consisted of new registrants, who were under the age of thirty and voted for him. They were attracted by his charismatic personality and his change-oriented message. Like him, they also believed that his victory represented, “a defining moment in history.”⁸⁹

Immediately after the caucuses, Dodd and Biden dropped out of the battle for the Democratic nomination. Richardson remained in the contest, but was given almost no chance of surviving the New Hampshire primary a week later. The contest for the nomination had been whittled down to one between Obama, Clinton, and Edwards. Obama had gone from being an underdog in the race to being the favorite. Edwards still had a chance of winning, but Clinton, who had been the clear frontrunner, looked as if she could be knocked out if she lost in New Hampshire even though she still had a formidable national organization and a sizable war chest at her disposal.⁹⁰

It was a momentous time for Obama. Practically unknown to the American public in 2004, when the presumptive nominee for the Democratic nomination delivered his keynote address in Boston, he introduced himself to the American people as a new kind of politician for a new generation of Americans. A unifier rather than a divider, he rejected the status quo in favor of change, arguing that change was possible, but only through shared responsibility and collective action within the context of the nation’s existing political system. America’s best times, he said, lay not in the past but were yet to come. There was also a subtext to his message. Politics and smart government were not mutually exclusive. Joined together, they could bend the arc of history toward a more just, moral, and humane society.

This was a set of beliefs that Obama had always maintained since his years as a community organizer in Chicago’s South Side. It was one he brought to the political arena when he first ran for the Illinois state senate in 1996, and it guided his actions in the state legislature. Until he delivered the keynote address in 2004, however, he had not had the opportunity to champion his beliefs before a national audience. His message resonated with the American people. In the Iowa caucuses, it created a seismic event that elevated him to within grasp of the Democratic nomination. All eyes turned to New Hampshire to watch if that primary would knock Senators Clinton and Edwards out of the race and all but assure that Obama would be the presumptive Democratic nominee in 2008.