Chapter 4

From Iowa to President-Elect

Following Obama’s decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses, political commentators speculated on the likelihood that the Illinois senator would wrap up the Democratic presidential nomination quickly. He left Iowa heavily favored to win the New Hampshire primary over Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Two weeks after New Hampshire, South Carolina held its primary. A victory in the Palmetto State, with its high percentage of Black voters, could seal the nomination for him even before Clinton could test her big-state strategy. The New York senator, however, surprised Obama in New Hampshire, leading to a protracted battle for the Democratic nomination that was not finally decided until the last days of the primary season in June.

Obama viewed his defeat in New Hampshire as a disappointment rather than as a major setback to his campaign. More than Clinton and Edwards, he understood the complex Democratic rules that provided for selection of two sets of delegates to the Democratic nominating convention in Denver: the first, superdelegates, mostly Democrats holding high elected office: the second, elected delegates. By gaining enough elected and superdelegates even in the states he lost, his campaign reasoned he would secure enough delegates to win the party’s nomination in July.

Despite losses to Clinton in key states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Texas, the strategy worked remarkably well. Although Clinton continued to refuse to cede the nomination to the Illinois senator until after the final primary was held in Puerto Rico in June, Tim Russert of Meet the Press, the dean of Washington commentators, announced a month earlier that Obama already had enough delegates to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. By the time the Democrats assembled in Denver to nominate their presidential candidate, the only remaining question was whether Hillary Clinton would insist on a divisive roll call vote of the delegates or cede the nomination to the Illinois senator without a vote. Clinton split the difference by asking for the vote but calling soon after the roll call began for his nomination by acclamation.

Obama won the nomination by continuing to frame the contest as one between the politics of the past represented by Clinton and the politics of the future, which he represented. In contrast to Clinton, he presented himself as the agent of change. In a bipartisan manner he promised to resolve the major issues facing the nation from the economy, health care, and failing education, to the Iraq War, Afghanistan, and the Russian threat in the Crimea. In making the primaries a referendum between Clinton and himself, he raised unrealistic expectations of what he could accomplish as president, a fact that later came back to haunt him. In the process, he revealed far more about himself than he would have had he made the primary season about issues rather than personalities. Besides being a conservative seeking progressive ends, another irony of his campaign was that even while looking to the future, Obama was motivated by a conscious effort to redeem his and the nation’s past. The same was true of his campaign against the Republican candidate for president, John McCain. However, the worst economic and financial crisis facing the nation since the Great Depression of the 1930s overshadowed all other issues.

The Philadelphia Speech

Even as he addressed the crowd that had gathered in Des Moines to celebrate the night of his victory in the Iowa caucuses, Obama tied his message of hope to his unique experience as the biracial child of parents from entirely different backgrounds. “Hope,” he said, “is what led me here today—-with a father from Kenya; a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America.” Throughout the rest of the campaign he returned repeatedly to his life story.¹

Following Iowa, all signs pointed to a decisive victory for Obama in New Hampshire. In the five days before the primary in the Granite State, he campaigned throughout the state, drawing overflow crowds wherever he went. Polls gave him a sizable lead over Clinton and John Edwards. Outwardly, Clinton tried, with a shrug and a smile, to play down the importance of her third-place finish in Iowa, but inwardly she was demoralized. Her campaign organization was rife with backstabbing and blame-calling for what might be the end of the campaign before it had even gotten started.²

What went undetected by most observers was a growing wave of sympathy for Clinton, who remained widely admired among women for her efforts throughout her career on behalf of children and women’s causes and for being the first female candidate with a real chance to win the nation’s highest office. Voters were also annoyed by a dismissive comment Obama made about Clinton during a debate with her four days after his victory in Iowa. In response to Clinton’s remark that she found Obama “very likeable,” he said he found Clinton “likeable enough.” Voters were turned off by his flippancy. They also began to wonder whether he was experienced enough to be president.³

What swung the election finally in Clinton’s favor was her tearing up while responding to an inquiry about how she remained so positive on the campaign trail. Instead of reacting negatively to her moistened eyes, voters reacted positively to the humanizing of a candidate widely perceived as being cold and aloof. Her response to the question—“I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do”—resonated with the voters. When the votes were counted, Clinton won over Obama gaining 39.1 percent of the vote to his 36.5 percent. Easily overlooked was the fact that while the New York senator narrowly defeated her Illinois rival, both candidates received the same number of delegates to the national convention in July. Eleven days after New Hampshire, Clinton won the popular vote in the Nevada caucuses, but Obama actually received one more elected delegate than Clinton.⁴

Attracting more national attention than the Nevada caucuses was the South Carolina primary on January 26 with its large Black population and more elected delegate seats at stake than Nevada. By winning a major victory over Clinton in South Carolina, Obama made clear that Black voters, convinced after Iowa that he could win the presidency, were prepared to come out in record numbers to vote for him.⁵

Former president Bill Clinton, whom the African American author Toni Morrison had once referred to as the “first Black president,” took it personally that a freshman senator with only two years of national political experience might defeat his more experienced wife. Acting as a surrogate for Hillary during much of the campaign, Bill Clinton even challenged Obama’s record of opposition to the Iraq war, pointing to his support of funding for the conflict. What struck many of those covering the primary was the bitterness of his remarks against his opponent. After Obama won the South Carolina primary, gaining 55 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 27 percent and Edwards’s 16 percent, he set off a firestorm of criticism by suggesting that Obama won because of his race.⁶

Making matters worse for Senator Clinton, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, joined with Obama at one of his rallies to announce that they were backing him. Other members of the Kennedy family appeared on stage with the Illinois senator as did the highly influential celebrity and successful businesswoman, Oprah Winfrey, who had already thrown her support behind Obama in Iowa, and the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, John Kerry, who had already been campaigning for him in South Carolina.⁷

Following South Carolina, the primary season settled into a long, drawn out and often heated contest between Obama and Clinton. On February 5 came Super Tuesday during which twenty-two states from across the country and the territory of American Samoa held their primaries or caucuses. At stake were 1,681 pledged delegates. At his rallies Obama drew crowds of as many as fifteen thousand. When all the votes were counted, he won a narrow victory over Clinton, carrying thirteen states to her nine states and the territory of Samoa and gaining 847 pledged delegates to her 834.⁸

Obama won decisively in Illinois and did his best in the caucus and in more rural states of the West, Midwest, and South, while Clinton did her best in the Northeast and the Southwest with their large and loyal Hispanic votes. Even in the states that he lost to Clinton, he was able to pick up large blocks of pledged delegates.⁹

In the two weeks following Super Tuesday, eight more states, the District of Columbia, Americans living abroad, and the Virgin Islands held primaries and caucuses. By sweeping to victory in all these contests and winning big in Virginia, Maryland, Wisconsin, and in the caucus state of Washington, the Illinois senator developed a small but insurmountable lead over Clinton in total delegates. Not only did he win pledged delegates, he also gained pledges from an increasing number of superdelegates, many of whom had earlier supported Clinton. ¹⁰

As early as the end of February, David Plouffe, his cautious campaign manager, even telephoned him to tell him that he would probably be his party’s presidential nominee. His response was more one of solemnity than exhilaration. “After we hung up,” the former president later recalled, “I sat alone, trying to take the measure of my emotions. There was pride, I suppose… . Mostly, though, I felt a certain stillness, without elation or relief, sobered by the thought that the responsibilities of governance were no longer a distant possibility.”¹¹

While Plouffe’s detailed strategic plan accounted in part for Obama’s campaign success, it was not the only reason for his success. In the three weeks before Super Tuesday, the candidate engaged in a series of bus tours and town halls throughout the caucus and rural states without ceding the large industrial states that the Clinton campaign had targeted. For a politician who did not enjoy retail politics and was known for the brilliance of his oratory, Obama proved most effective in town hall meetings, where he seemed to take inspiration from the back-and-forth that took place.¹²

No matter the type of the gathering, the Illinois senator inspired his audiences with the force of his personality, his vision of change, and the redemptive value of his biography. He also motivated them with his talk about collective redemption, not only for Black people but for white people. Unlike previous Black candidates for president, such as Jesse Jackson, who ran in 1984 and 1988 on behalf of a “rainbow coalition” of minority groups, and Al Sharpton, who ran in 2004 as the candidate of civil rights, Obama was not a product of the civil rights movement and did not run on behalf of any minority group, including Black Americans.¹³

Yet by presenting himself as a transformational president and as potentially the first African American president, Obama offered the nation a way for it to redeem itself. Former governor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, the nation’s first elected Black governor, sensed this early in Obama’s campaign. After having several conversations with him in the late summer of 2007, he remarked, “One thing we discussed is that there are no such things as ‘Black issues.’ Health and education are not Black issues. Improvement of job opportunities is not a Black issue.” In an interview for Politico about the same time, Wilder commented about Obama. “He’s not race-less, but the skin color is of no moment. I don’t think he would be an easy target for the Republicans.” A white Obama supporter also understood the message he was trying to deliver in his campaign. In a question and answer session during a forum with Neal Conan of NPR, he remarked about Obama, “you know, he’s not a Black candidate, and he’s not a white candidate… . He’s all of us… . And his unique history is going to allow him to inspire that next phase in the healing of this country’s racist past.”¹⁴

Although Obama tried to avoid racial issues in his bid to be president, they took center stage on March 13 when ABC televised portions of a sermon that his pastor, Reverend Jeremy Wright, delivered after 9/11 in which he fulminated about the “chickens coming home to roost … in response to America’s own acts of terrorism.” “For killing innocent people,” he also ranted, “God damn America.”¹⁵

Wright’s comments threw Obama’s campaign into crisis mode. His relationship with Wright went back nearly twenty years. He was his religious adviser and had baptized his two children and himself. He had also presided at his wedding to Michelle. Obama had titled his book, Audacity of Hope, after the name of one of Wright’s earlier sermons. Because of this close relationship and the widespread outrage at his pastor’s remarks, they threatened to destroy his chances of getting the Democratic nomination.¹⁶

The playing of Wright’s sermon also came at a low point in his campaign. In another attempt to defeat Clinton for the nomination, the Illinois senator campaigned hard and poured millions of dollars into the upcoming primaries in Ohio and Texas, both of which Clinton needed to win to stay in the race. To make this happen, her campaign went all out in its efforts to defeat Obama in these states.¹⁷

In one of their debates, Clinton even raised questions about her opponent’s character and judgment because of his association with Bill Ayers, a founding member of the militant Underground Weathermen, who in the 1970s bombed the Pentagon and the United States Capitol. To avoid prosecution Ayers fled the country, but gave himself up in 1980. Because of the government’s mishandling of his case, the charges against him were dropped, and he went on to become a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago.¹⁸

Obama had known Ayers since the time he hosted a gathering for the first-time candidate during his campaign for state senator. They also served together for three years on the board of directors of the Woods Foundation, the grant-giving organization that had supported Obama’s work as a community organizer in the 1980s. Although most news organizations concluded that his relationship with Ayers was not close, Clinton’s questions about his judgment were effective. So was an ad about the same time that suggested she was more prepared to be president than he was if a crisis developed.¹⁹

On March 4 Obama lost handily to Clinton in Ohio and more narrowly in Texas. He also lost by a sweeping margin in Rhode Island. Even though he won by a solid margin in Vermont, and the next week won in Wyoming and Mississippi, political observers began to wonder whether Clinton might yet win the Democratic nomination. “She’s like a fucking vampire,” Plouffe complained. “You can’t kill her off.” Flying back from San Antonio to Chicago, Michelle was glum and hardly spoke a word. Even Obama grew exasperated. “Her tenacity was admirable, but my sympathies extended only so far,” he later recounted.²⁰

Complicating matters still more for him was his involvement with the convicted real estate developer, Tony Rezko. Although Rezko had a reputation as a shady political insider and dealmaker, he had a relationship with Obama going back to at least 1991 when he offered the new graduate of Harvard Law School a job with his firm. While he was never part of his inner circle of friends, he kept in touch with the senator and raised about $150,000 for his campaigns over the years.²¹

In 2005, Obama purchased a home in the Hyde Park area of Chicago and Rezko’s wife bought an adjacent house and lot. Seven months later he bought a piece of the Rezko land in order to enlarge his yard. Although he paid fair market value for both pieces of property and there was no evidence that he had done anything wrong, when news broke about the land deals between Obama and Rezko, he was accused in the media of a surprising lack of judgment. Some even charged him with unethical behavior for continuing to take campaign contributions from Rezko even after he became a target of an FBI investigation. The candidate admitted bad judgment in buying land from Rezko, calling his action “boneheaded,” and he donated to charity money Rezko had personally given to his senatorial campaign, but the incident raised new questions about his ethics and his judgment, which he tried to answer by meeting with the editorial staffs of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.²²

Exhausted from being on the campaign trail, frustrated by the results from Ohio and Texas, and faced with putting out a fire over his ties to Rezko, Obama realized he had to respond immediately to Reverend Wright’s inflammatory remarks about white racism. “I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy,” he wrote in a blog for the HuffingtonPost. “I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies.” In other comments, he termed Wright’s words “incendiary.”²³

Obama realized this was not enough. Despite having tried to avoid racial issues during the campaign, he understood that, in the heat of a presidential race, they were bound to come up. Before the broadcasting of Wright’s post-9/11 sermon, he had informed his advisers, some of whom already suspected the Clinton campaign of race baiting, that he wanted to deliver a speech on racial issues. In the wake of the outrage against Wright, he felt he had to make the speech as soon as possible.²⁴

He wrote most of his remarks himself, spending three nights after full days of campaigning, to write them. The speech resurrected his campaign. Understanding its importance, his advisers chose the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia as its venue. Before a small audience in a talk that was broadcast nationally, he dealt directly with Wright’s comments, stating that they “were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems.” ²⁵

He could not disown Wright, Obama remarked. “Imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me,” he added, just as he could not disown his grandmother who raised and loved him but who “once confessed her fear of Black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” At the same time, he tried to place Wright’s sermon within the broader context of race relations going back to the founding fathers and to the nation’s failure to fulfill its commitment in the Constitution to form “a more perfect union.” That would not be achieved, the candidate noted, until the nation moved beyond “its original sin of slavery” and the racial divide that followed in the wake of its extinction nearly a century and a half earlier. While much racial progress had taken place, much remained to be done.²⁶

When Wright delivered his sermon, he was expressing the pent-up anger and emotions of the largely Black congregation to whom he spoke, Obama continued. “For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years… . And occasionally it found voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.” “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons was not that he spoke about racism in our society. [It was] that he spoke as if our society was static: as if no progress has been made; as if this country [was] still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.” ²⁷

Not only was context important for understanding the anger Wright expressed, Obama added, it was as important for appreciating the white outrage at his remarks. Both were part of the same racial divide that was the legacy of the nation’s original sin. Both were equally justified. Why, white workers wondered, should they have to pay the price in terms of lost jobs and low wages, for previous discrimination in which they did not participate? Why should they be denied the opportunity of their parents to work hard, raise families, and give their children the hope of an even better life than they enjoyed? “In an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.”²⁸

As justified as Black and white grievances were, they were also counterproductive. To make race an issue “would be making the same mistake that the Reverend Wright made … to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.”. The “real culprits of the middle class squeeze,” Obama argued, were “a corporate culture rife with inside dealings, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”²⁹

Because of his unusual American story as the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, Obama maintained he was in a unique position to bridge the divide that has separated the nation and move it finally toward the more perfect union envisioned by the founding fathers. That is why he was running for president. His story did not make him “the most conventional candidate,” he said. “But it [was] a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.”³⁰

By electing him president of the United States, the nation would be electing a candidate who did not represent any special group or interest and who was not tied down by the past but looked to the future. It would be electing a president who would be able to finally end the nation’s racial stalemate and move it on the path toward a more perfect union. For Blacks this meant binding “our particular grievances—for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans.” For white Americans it meant “acknowledging that what ails the African American community does not just exist in the minds of Black people; that the legacy of discrimination—and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past—are real and must be addressed.”³¹

Redeeming the nation’s past by electing him as president, was the subtle subtext of Obama’s Philadelphia speech and of his entire campaign. A number of Republicans and even some independents criticized the speech as a failed attempt on his part to move beyond his relationship with the Reverend Wright. Some African Americans complained again that he was compromising his Blackness to appeal to whites. In his comments, Obama made the point—which, he acknowledged, was “quintessential conservative”—that while Blacks had legitimate grievances, they also needed to engage in self-help. That meant, he said, “taking full responsibility for our own lives—by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must … always believe that they can write their own destiny.”³²

Many Black leaders found Obama’s advocacy of a traditional, middle-class road to success demeaning to Blacks. “He seems to want it both ways, Peter Bell, the Black chairman of the Minneapolis Metropolitan Council, said of the candidate. “He wants to be both above race and yet heal the racial wounds of the country, and he wants to do that as someone other than a Black man.” Jesse Jackson thought that he was “talking down to Black people.”³³

In contrast to these Black leaders, most commentators praised the speech. A number of them even compared it to Kennedy’s famous address in Houston in 1960 before a group of Southern Baptist ministers in which he tackled head on all doubts about his Catholicism. Kennedy’s chief speechwriter and close adviser, Ted Sorensen, called Obama’s remarks “historic.” The well-known biographer and president of the Aspen Institute, Walter Isaacson, added that Obama “wrestled with the most important issue we have faced throughout our history, and he did it in a way that wasn’t politically calculating, but was intensely personal as well as insightful.” Even the presumptive Republican nominee for president, John McCain, called it an “excellent speech” remarking that “it was good for all of America to have heard it.”³⁴

The Presumptive Democratic Nominee

In the nearly three months still remaining in the primary season, Obama continued to suffer setbacks. The most serious one was in Pennsylvania on April 22 where he lost by a margin of 54.6 percent for Clinton to 45.4 percent for Obama. A comment he made earlier that Pennsylvania voters were tied to their Bibles and guns hurt him badly in the middle and western parts of the state where religion and hunting were part of those regions’ culture. He later called that his “biggest mistake of the campaign.”³⁵

Less than a week after the Pennsylvania primary, the Obama campaign was rocked again by more of Reverend Wright’s remarks, this time at the National Press Club in Washington. Despite the hornets’ nest stirred by the clip of his fiery statements after 9/11 and Obama’s public denunciation of them, Wright had remained quiet. But he harbored deep resentment at how he was being treated in the media. He felt his remarks had been taken out of context. Notwithstanding Obama’s statement to the contrary, he also believed his parishioner and longtime friend had disowned him. “You’ve not only dissed me,” he said referring to Obama, “you have urinated on my tradition… . You’ve urinated on my parents, my grandparents, and our whole faith tradition.”³⁶

In a question and answer session following his speech to the National Press Club, Wright lashed out at his critics and became increasingly combative. He seemed to identify himself with the racist leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, who, he said, “did not put me in chains … did not put me in slavery, and … did not make me this color.” He even conjured up a conspiracy theory that the HIV virus was invented as a weapon to be used against people of color. For Obama, Wright had crossed one bridge too far. Speaking the next day in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he rejected his remarks and disowned him completely.³⁷

Despite these bumps on the road, in a come-from-behind victory, the Illinois senator won decisively in North Carolina on May 6 and lost the Indiana primary by only 1 percent. All told, he picked up 101 delegates to Clinton’s 86, leading to Tim Russert’s declaration of Obama as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.³⁸

One remaining problem that continued to weigh on the campaign was the outcome of primaries that had been held in Florida and Michigan in January. Contrary to rules established by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the two states held their primaries in January in anticipation of playing a more prominent role in the final outcome of the primary season. As a result, the DNC announced it would not recognize their primaries and urged the candidates not to campaign there. It also asked them to remove their names from the ballot in Michigan before they were printed. All of them agreed to the DNC’s request about not campaigning, but in contrast to the other candidates, Clinton and Chris Dodd refused to remove their names from the ballot in Michigan. The result was that Clinton gained 222 pledged delegates from Florida and Michigan to Obama’s 189 and claimed “a tremendous victory” after the Florida primary.³⁹

Had these delegates been figured into the pledged superdelegate count, Clinton maintained she would have been solidly ahead of Obama when South Carolina held its primary, and the whole momentum of the campaign would have changed in her favor. Obama responded that had he campaigned in Florida and not had his name removed from the Michigan ballot, the outcome of the two primaries would have been different.⁴⁰

In the final month of the primary season, Clinton picked up more pledged delegates (305) than Obama (261). The additional delegates Clinton gained, however, did not matter. The delegates and superdelegates he picked up were enough for all the major media outlets and party leaders to declare him the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.⁴¹

Still, the issue of the pledged delegates from Florida and Michigan stayed unresolved, and the Obama campaign worried that a failure to come to an agreement over the problem could lead to a floor fight at the convention. Despite a cordial meeting between the two candidates at the home of California senator Dianne Feinstein, Obama and his advisers were taken aback that Clinton’s aides asked him to help pay off the $23 million debt Clinton had borrowed during the campaign ($11 million of which she had lent herself).⁴²

Because Obama thought Clinton’s request would backfire on him, he turned it down. Assured of the nomination, however, his campaign advisers became more flexible about the final delegate count. On May 31, they agreed to a ruling that gave sixty-nine delegates pledged in Michigan to Clinton and fifty-nine to Obama. A week later, Clinton ceded the nomination to Obama, who was able finally to turn his full attention and resources to defeating John McCain. By staking his campaign on a single speech in Philadelphia three months earlier on a topic he had tried to avoid, he had turned a potential disaster into the major turning point in his march toward the Democratic presidential nomination.⁴³

Just as he did at the end of February, when Plouffe had told him that he was most likely going to be the Democratic presidential nominee, Obama responded more with reflection than elation, and even with uncertainty, now that he was about to win the nomination. What had brought him to the cusp of victory? To whom did he owe the most gratitude? What lay ahead in the campaign against the presumed Republican nominee, John McCain? And, if he were to be elected president, what would be his priorities as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation? Besides his campaign staff, especially Axelrod and Plouffe, he singled out the role in the campaign of Michelle, “who had put up with my absences, held down the home front, and overridden her reticence about politics to become effective and fearless on the campaign.”⁴⁴

As for his priorities as the Democratic nominee and then as president should he prevail in November, he seemed to place greater stress on domestic matters than on foreign policy. “I had asked something hard of the American people—to place their faith in a young and untested newcomer,” he later recounted, “not just a Black man” but one with a strange name and unconventional background. “Despite all that, they’d given me a chance … they’d heard my call for something different [and] that for all our differences, we remained bound as one people… . I promised myself I would not let them down.”⁴⁵

As Obama thought about his coming campaign against McCain, he made a momentous decision. Despite promises to the contrary, he became the first major presidential nominee to turn down public financing ($84.1 million in 2008) in favor of raising unlimited funds for his campaign. Claiming that he still supported “a robust system of public financing of elections,” he justified his decision on the grounds that the existing system of public financing, first employed in the 1976 presidential campaign between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, was “broken,” and that his opponents had “become masters at gaming” the system.⁴⁶

Actually, the candidate made his decision on the pragmatic grounds that he needed more than $84 million to defeat McCain, whom he considered “the most worthy” and decent of the Republican candidates for his party’s nomination, and that the Democratic candidate’s campaign had developed an election apparatus able to raise far more money than his opponent. As early as April, Plouffe had begun planning and budgeting for the fall campaign against McCain. He decided to expand the campaign beyond the traditionally few so-called battleground states, like Ohio and Florida, that had determined the outcome of earlier elections. “From an electoral perspective,” he later wrote, “nothing was more important to us strategically than having a wide playing field.” To carry out this strategy, he settled on a budget figure of around $450 million with $350 million being raised by the campaign and the rest coming from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). This was far larger than the maximum the campaign would have received had it chosen to rely on public financing.⁴⁷

Although Plouffe wanted to reject public in favor of private fund-raising, the campaign staff realized the problems that uncoupling the campaign from public funding would create. In the first place, Obama would have to devote much of the remaining months before the election to fund-raising, something he hated doing. Second, he had always been openly supportive of public financing. In February 2007, he had pledged to accept public financing if he won the Democratic nomination for president. Third, the decision to reject public financing would result in a strong backlash not only from Republicans but from Democrats who were against private financing on principle and would regard raising funds privately a betrayal of the very moral grounds on which he based his campaign. For them, “change we can believe in” would become little more than another hollow political sound bite by one more gifted, but otherwise traditional, politician.⁴⁸

Obama understood all the concerns raised by his staff, but in a short video, which he sent out to his supporters on February 20, 2008, he offered what he called a new system of campaign financing controlled by the “American People.” He was not rejecting public financing, he maintained, but seeking to amend it in such a way that it was no longer controlled by lobbyists and corporate interests.⁴⁹

By rejecting funds from interest groups during the primaries and soliciting small donations of less than $200, Obama’s campaign raised over $200 million and increased the base of Obama voters. Were he to accept public financing in the national election, that option would not be available to him. He would have to rely, instead, on outside groups to fund the campaign. Worse, he would have no control over them since the law prohibited his staffers and him from discussing campaign strategy with any outside political action committee (PAC) or interest group. “Instead of forcing us to rely on millions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACS, you’ve fueled this campaign with donations of $5, $10, $20, whatever you can afford,” Obama told his supporters. “We’ve won the Democratic nomination by relying on ordinary people coming together.”⁵⁰

In one short video Obama turned the argument in favor of public funding on its head and offered a new paradigm of campaign financing. “You’ve already changed the way campaigns are funded because you know that’s the only way we can truly change how Washington works,” he told his supporters. “I’m asking you to try to do something that’s never been done before. Declare our independence from a broken system, and run the type of campaign that reflects the grassroots values that have already changed our politics and brought us this far.”⁵¹

As Obama had anticipated, he was attacked from both the right and left for rejecting public financing. But by doing so while portraying himself as a forward-looking reformer, he emerged largely unscathed from his decision over private financing. In June his campaign raised over $54 million compared to about $23 million a month earlier.⁵²

Because he opted out of private funding, the Illinois senator had to devote extensive time traveling to fund-raising events throughout the country. During this time, however, his campaign operation became a money-making machine, perfecting its ground game, harnessing it to the internet, and raising approximately $400 million by June. After Clinton ceded the nomination to him, his campaign picked up its pace even more by tapping into a whole new pool of Clinton donors. At the same time, it became the most efficient operation in the nation’s history for identifying voters and volunteers and making sure the one got the other to the polls. “Technology was core to our campaign from Day One,” Plouffe later explained, “and it only grew in importance as the primary went on. We started out with fewer than ten thousand e-mail addresses, and by June 3, 2008, our list had grown to over 5 million. A huge portion of that group … had either volunteered or contributed.”⁵³

Yet Obama still remained a puzzle to many Americans. Despite sixteen months of campaigning, thousands of rallies and town halls, and twenty-six presidential debates, polls showed that as many as 13 percent of the voters in the primaries cast ballots against him because they thought he was a Muslim. A chain email had already gone viral complaining that he was hiding his radical Islamic background.⁵⁴

From the beginning of his campaign, Obama realized that he could not ignore the issue of his faith, which also came out during the Wright controversy. Was he a Christian? How deep was his faith? Why was he baptized so late in his life? What attracted him to join Reverend Wright’s church? These were some of the questions raised during the campaign. Although he never addressed them in a single televised speech as he did in his Philadelphia address on race in March, he talked about them at length throughout the campaign. He peppered his comments with biblical references and gave several speeches devoted entirely to issues of faith and religion.⁵⁵

As the senator made clear throughout the campaign and in his campaign biographies, Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006), he was raised in a secular household. His father was an atheist, and his mother and grandparents were only nominal Christians. His mother was also highly skeptical of organized religion. In her view “it too often dressed up closemindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness,” he wrote in Audacity.⁵⁶

Yet Obama also regarded his mother as “the most spiritually awakened … person” he had ever known. Although rejecting organized religion, she exposed him to a number of religious faiths from the Bible to the teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the Quran, as well as to Greek, Norse, and African mythology. Like “the anthropologist that she would become,” he remarked, she looked at religion as a “phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.” Similarly, she believed that religion was a way “that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.”⁵⁷

Obama shared his mother’s skepticism about organized religion. Like her, he was not so much religious as he was spiritual. Until he became a community organizer in Chicago and saw the power of the Black church in the community where he worked, he had not attended church on a regular basis or given much thought to his own religious beliefs. Issues of race were always of more concern to him than issues of religion. He was not even baptized until 1988 just as he was about to leave Chicago to attend Harvard Law School.⁵⁸

Despite his being baptized at the age of twenty-seven, Obama and Michelle never became regular churchgoers. Even as a community organizer, however, he was profoundly influenced by the centrality of the Black church to the clientele he served. In a city still new to him, he found in the church the sense of community and belonging which he had sought since graduating Columbia University. From a practical standpoint, he learned the power of church pastors and ministers to mobilize their congregations behind political causes and candidates they supported.⁵⁹

When he attended church services, he was able to cite verse as well as the other congregants. Even so, he realized he could not be part of the community until he fully embraced its values and beliefs. This did not happen easily or naturally for him. He described his acceptance of religion as “a journey” he had to travel. “The Christians with whom I worked recognized themselves in me,” he later wrote. “But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached… . I came to realize that without … an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart.” He would be free to enjoy the wonders of the world like his mother, but he would be alone at the same time.⁶⁰

Beyond the practical reasons why Obama decided to become baptized, he also held the Black church in high esteem because it was grounded in the historic struggle against slavery and injustice, and because it served the everyday needs of its constituents from day care to providing meals and clothes for the poor. As he explained, the Black church “rarely had the luxury of separating individual from collective salvation… . It understood in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.”⁶¹

Black clergymen typically delivered sermons linking the Bible to remedying social injustice. One of these pastors was Jeremiah Wright, who turned the Trinity United Church of Christ into the largest Black church in Chicago with a membership of 8,500 that included some of the wealthiest and most powerful Blacks in the city as well as parishioners of modest and lesser means. Albeit fiery and sometimes intemperate, he was one of the nation’s most learned and respected Black ministers, holding two master’s degrees and a doctorate in ministry. Taking Obama under his wing, he spent hours with him, talking about the historic role of the Black church in resisting social injustice and government-sanctioned acts against people of color. He also talked about the power of faith in giving believers a sense of redemption, renewal, and wonder. Obama rejected the more hot-tempered views of his pastor, but he came to agree with him about the wondrous power of faith.⁶²

By also acknowledging that the very definition of faith meant acceptance of a set of beliefs about the core of human existence without basing it on any sense of objective or scientific truth, Obama was able to accept the teachings of religion in a way that his mother was not. Religious faith did not mean that one could not share his mother’s doubts about organized religion, for faith was not doctrinaire. Faith, he argued, bonded people and gave them a sense of community. Religious doctrinism separated them.⁶³

Obama espoused ideas similar to those of the social gospel at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which applied the teachings of the Bible to rectifying such social problems as poverty, education, poor nutrition, alcoholism, and crime. “I came to see my faith as being both a personal commitment to Christ and a commitment to my community,” he stated in a speech in July. He could pray in church all he wanted, he continued, but he “wouldn’t be fulfilling God’s will unless [he] went out and did the Lord’s work.” Much to the annoyance of many of those who supported him but also believed in the total separation of church and state, he even advocated a place in the public square for religious believers. He also pledged as president to reform the Bush administration’s centralized Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives with a more decentralized Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.⁶⁴

President-Elect Obama

In the five months between the time Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in June and the time he was elected president in November, he continued to stress the importance of building a consensus among secular liberals and religious conservatives. This was part of a larger mosaic he envisioned for the United States, which went beyond partisanship, political party, economic status, religious belief, race, or gender. ⁶⁵

His proposal to continue Bush’s program of providing federal aid to faith-based initiatives was part of that vision, but it was also an indication of his growing confidence and boldness as a candidate as all the early polls showed him being slightly ahead of his presumptive Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. A hero of the Vietnam War with a reputation for honesty and straight talk, McCain was also a maverick who was not well liked by much of the conservative base of his party even though he voted solidly along party lines on such matters as abortion, a strong military, states’ rights, and tax cuts. His life story, while compelling, was well known and not as captivating as Obama’s story. When speaking, he also lacked his eloquence. Because of the growing opposition of Americans to the Iraq War, which McCain supported and Obama opposed, and President Bush’s unpopularity, the forthcoming election in November was shaping up to be a “wave election” for Democrats.⁶⁶

Obama’s campaign also seemed to be doing everything right. He mended relations with both Bill and Hillary Clinton. Regarded throughout the primaries as leaning politically left, he moved more to the center. He accepted the right of individuals to own handguns, moved away from total opposition to offshore drilling, and even voted for legislation permitting wiretapping for national security purposes. He also continued to outpace McCain in the amount of money he raised and the number of campaign offices he opened in targeted states like Iowa, Colorado, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, and Nevada.⁶⁷

As part of an effort to bolster his foreign policy bona fides, Obama traveled in July to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and Europe. “I knew that if I was to earn Americans’ trust on this front, I needed to speak from the most informed position possible, especially about the nation’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he recalled. In Kabul, he met with President Hamid Karzai, whose comments about his country being on the brink of a modern, tolerant, and sufficient nation, he might have believed, he added, “were it not for reports of rampant corruption and mismanagement in his government.” In Iraq he met with President Nuri al-Maliki, who seemed to endorse a proposal he made during the campaign to withdraw American troops from Iraq within sixteen months. He was also briefed by General David Petraeus, in charge of American forces, who opposed his withdrawal plan, and he found ample opportunity to be photographed eating and mingling with the troops on the ground. In Israel he was seen praying at the Wailing Wall. In Europe he was treated by its leaders almost like a head of state. In Berlin he addressed a crowd of around two hundred thousand cheering spectators. As a final reassurance to American voters about his competency to lead foreign policy, he chose as his vice presidential running mate the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Delaware senator Joe Biden.⁶⁸

Realizing Obama’s celebrity status worldwide and responding to growing commentary about the “inevitability” of his victory in November, the McCain campaign turned his celebrity status against him by implying that he was little different from other “celebrities” like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. Like them, McCain spokesmen suggested, Obama owed his fame to the media coverage he received rather than to any major achievement he could point to other than getting himself elected to office. In contrast, McCain was a highly decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, who had served in the US Senate since 1987 and was the ranking member of the powerful Armed Services Committee.⁶⁹

The point of the media campaign was clear. Would voters prefer an inexperienced and unaccomplished “celebrity” as president or a genuine war hero who stayed in captivity rather than leave his fellow prisoners and was serving his third term as one of the most powerful members of the US Senate? Did they want a self-consumed star with a possible messianic complex rather than a proven leader who, after being tortured in captivity, has devoted his entire life to public service? The strategy seemed to work, as charges from right-wing conspiracy theorists that Obama was a foreign-born, drug-dealing Muslim seeking to subvert the nation’s democratic institutions also began to gain traction. As the late summer blitz against him continued, his lead in the polls fell.⁷⁰

In August, the Democratic Convention in Denver went off flawlessly. Chosen by acclamation as the Democrats’ nominee for president after Hillary Clinton cut short a first ballot roll call vote, Obama delivered his acceptance speech in a packed outdoor stadium, Invesco Field. Even before he began to speak, the crowd of eighty-four thousand, which had begun lining up eight hours before he spoke, was chanting, “Yes we can.”⁷¹

In delivering his speech, the newly chosen Democratic candidate decided to make it “more prose than poetry.” He wanted “a hard-hitting critique of Republican policies” and the steps he intended to “take as president—all without being too long, too dry, or too partisan.” Although not as memorable oratorically as some of his earlier addresses, his forty-two-minute speech was still able to keep the gathering on its feet. Remarking that the American “promise that has always set this country apart” had been threatened by eight years of the Bush administration, he declared that the country could not tolerate the continuation of Bush’s policies under a McCain administration. He also attacked McCain for voting 90 percent of the time with the Bush administration and for advocating policies, which, he said, were predicated on “that old, discredited Republican philosophy—give more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.” Instead, he pledged that his administration would strive to achieve the American promise, which, he stated, was “that through hard work and sacrifice, each of us can pursue our individual dreams but still come together to ensure that the next generation can pursue their dreams as well.”⁷²

The significance of Obama’s speech was its emphasis on hard work and sacrifice. In talking about providing new educational opportunities for young Americans, for example, he promised to expand preschool programs, recruit more teachers, and pay them higher salaries. In contrast to proposals for free college education by more liberal members of his party, however, he emphasized parental responsibility for a child’s early education and promised “affordable college education” only to those who committed themselves to serving their community or country. He also called for eliminating capital gains taxes on “small businesses and startups that will create the high-wage, high tech jobs of the future.” Government, he said, “should ensure opportunity … for every American who’s willing to work.” An economy is strong, he added, “if it honors the dignity of work.”⁷³

As Obama neared the end of his speech, which also called for the development of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, criticized McCain for voting in favor of the Iraq war, and described his plan for withdrawing American troops from Iraq, he invoked the words of Martin Luther King. “America, we cannot turn back,” he said. “At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future.” Following the speech, which was seen by an estimated thirty-eight million people, believed to be the most-watched convention address ever, his poll numbers rose once again.⁷⁴

In a significant way, however, the convention played into the hands of McCain. The Democratic candidate arrived on a stage whose entrance looked like the columns of a classic Greek temple. He exited alongside Biden and their families before a raucous, banner-waving crowd as red, white, and blue fireworks lit the sky. Together the two images reinforced the Republican portrayal of the Democratic nominee as a celebrity with a godlike complex appealing to the raw emotions of an adoring audience.⁷⁵

More important in changing the dynamic of the election was the Arizona senator’s announcement, less than twelve hours after Obama gave his acceptance speech, of the little-known but controversial governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, to be his vice presidential running mate. In selecting a forty-four-year-old Christian conservative, who described herself as a “hockey mom” and who had been governor of Alaska for only two years, McCain was gambling that her relative lack of experience in higher political office would be offset by the novelty of his selection and her personal appeal. Highly popular in her state, she was young, attractive, highly competitive (she had earned the nickname of “Sarah Barracuda” in high school), and known in Alaska for successfully challenging her own party’s corrupt leadership and the state’s powerful oil industry.⁷⁶

At the Republican nominating convention, held in St. Paul, Minnesota, from September 1 through September 4, Palin delivered an acceptance speech, which eclipsed Obama’s address two weeks earlier. Step-by-step, Palin appealed to the base of the Republican Party, spending much of the first part of her speech introducing her family, including a son who was about to be deployed to Iraq and her five-month-old Down syndrome boy whom she chose to bring to birth rather than have him aborted. Appealing to the pro-life and family values of the large evangelical Christian base of the party, she told a compelling story. “No family ever seems typical, and that’s how it us with us,” she remarked. “Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys… . And children with special needs inspire a very, very special love.”⁷⁷

Immediately after her speech, the media pointed to Palin as a rising star within the Republican Party, whom McCain had plucked from obscurity. Even liberal commentators compared her to Obama in terms of her charisma and ability to deliver a stirring speech. “She did everything, she had to do, and more,” wrote Mark Halperin of Time Magazine, who had earlier raised doubts about her selection. “The Alaska Governor was poised, stirring, charming, confident, snarky, cozy, well-rehearsed, biting, utterly fearless, unflappable, and self-assured.” “Conservatives have found their Obama,” NBC political director Chuck Todd, remarked, while MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called Palin “a torpedo aimed directly at the ship.” Even Obama, who found her speech “incoherent” and lacking in knowledge, recognized her power as a performer.⁷⁸

McCain’s acceptance speech the next night was well crafted and delivered. Its highlight came toward its end when McCain told the story of how, during the Vietnam War, a privileged and self-centered son of a naval admiral, learned, through the adversity of being shot down, imprisoned, tortured, and saved only by the heroism of his colleagues, to place his love of country and sense of duty above all else. “I was never the same again,” he remarked referring to his years of imprisonment in Vietnam. “I wasn’t my own man anymore; I was my country’s.”⁷⁹

In the speech, McCain was respectful of Obama, whom, he said, he admired for winning the Democratic nomination and with whom he had more in common than their differences. The Republican candidate even made many of the same pleas for change in America as Obama did, emphasizing the same values of rewarding hard work and risk-taking. “We believe in the values of families, neighborhoods … communities [and] personal responsibility,” he added.⁸⁰ The difference between Obama and McCain, however, was that Obama’s calls for change rang real while McCain’s did not. In contrast to his Republican opponent, his theme of change embraced changes in public policy, such as major health reform and policies to reshape the economy, especially in the areas of energy consumption and environmental protection. By also stressing such core Republican values as hard work, personal responsibility, and tax relief for small businesses, Obama also reached out beyond the liberal base of his party to include conservative Republicans and independents of all political stripes, just as he did in his earlier speeches on race and religion.⁸¹

In contrast to Obama, McCain said little in his speech that deviated from traditional Republican orthodoxy. Instead of proposing a government offering the nation a bright future by helping Americans of all backgrounds who were trying to help themselves, the only change McCain seemed to offer was to turn the clock backward toward a darker past. “And let me just offer an advance warning to the old big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second crowd,” he said. “Change is coming.”⁸²

Following McCain’s speech, some liberal commentators like Frank Rich of the New York Times noted how old the Arizona senator looked and how pedestrian were his proposals for change, calling his speech “largely a repetitive slew of stump-speech lines and worn G.O.P. orthodoxy.” For the most part, though, McCain’s speech was well received. Even Rich acknowledged that in his remarks the Republican candidate “reminded us of what we once liked about the guy; his aspirations to bipartisanship, his heroic service in Vietnam, his twinkle.”⁸³

By all measurements, including favorability rankings and press coverage, the real star of the two conventions turned out to be neither McCain nor even Obama, but Palin, who helped give McCain a bigger convention bounce than Obama received after the Democratic convention. For the first time in months, McCain jumped into a lead over his Democratic opponent as more Republicans and independents showed up at campaign offices to volunteer their services and more money was raised over the internet.⁸⁴

Unfortunately for McCain, his bounce was short-lived. Even before the convention, reporters had begun to question Palin’s qualifications and the hasty manner in which she had been selected. The Christian Broadcasting Network reported that Palin’s husband, Todd Palin, had been arrested on a DUI charge in 1986. Beyond these issues, the fact that she had been named as McCain’s running mate renewed discussion of social issues like abortion and religion that both sides had tried to avoid.⁸⁵

As the investigators probed deeper into Palin’s background, the reporting on her turned decidedly negative and public opinion began to turn against her. In October, an investigation by the Alaskan legislature determined that Palin had abused her powers by pressuring subordinates to try to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired because of a bitter divorce and custody battle with her sister. About the same time, news stories broke about how Sarah Palin had spent over $150,000 of campaign funds on her personal wardrobe. “It looks like nobody with a political antenna was working on this,” said Ed Collins who had run President Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1984. “It just undercuts Palin’s whole image as a hockey mom.”⁸⁶

What was most damaging to Palin and the McCain campaign was a series of interviews for later viewing that Palin held with CBS broadcaster, Katie Couric, on September 24 and 25. More than any other event they exposed how ill-informed Palin was about current affairs and raised doubts about her qualifications to serve in the White House. In her response to a number of questions that should not have been hard to answer for someone who was a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, Palin gave answers that were convoluted and even incoherent. When queried, for example, about what newspapers and magazines she read, she responded, “I read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media … Um all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all of these years.”⁸⁷

Criticism of the Couric interview was harsh. “Dreadful” was how Rich Lowry of the conservative National Review described Palin’s performance. Jack Cafferty of CNN reminded his viewers that if McCain won the election, Palin would be “only one heartbeat away” from being president “and if that doesn’t scare the hell out of you it should.” The comedian Tina Fey mocked Palin in a widely hailed impersonation of the governor that drew millions of voters to the popular television show, Saturday Night Live.⁸⁸

Throughout the remainder of the campaign, Palin retained the loyalty of the more conservative wing of the Republican Party, especially its large evangelical Christian base, a fact that deeply troubled Obama, given what he considered her total lack of qualifications to be president. Most Americans also liked her personally. But she became an increasing drag on McCain’s chances to win in November. A Gallup poll taken after her one debate with her opponent, Joe Biden, on September 26 showed that while 55 percent of all voters still had a favorable opinion of her as a person, only 40 percent believed she was qualified to serve as president.⁸⁹

As the campaign continued into October, doubts about Palin’s qualifications to serve in the Oval Office grew more pronounced. Even young evangelicals grew unsure about Palin, more concerned about health care than her attacks on Obama and also objecting to the divisions they feared she was causing among Americans. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted near the end of the campaign, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Palin was not qualified to be vice president, up 9 percent since the beginning of October. Nearly a third of those polled said the vice presidential selection would be a major factor in deciding how they voted.⁹⁰

In its final weeks, the campaign became nasty. McCain’s supporters accused the media of being biased in favor of Obama. Palin brought up his troubled relationships with Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, and Bill Ayers. She even accused the Democratic candidate of “palling around with terrorists,” and remarked that Obama was “not the man who sees America the way you and I do.” At McCain-Palin rallies Obama became the target of racial epithets as insistent shouts rang out of “Terrorist,” “Kill Him,” and “Off with His Head.” Right-wing conspiracy theorists raised doubts about whether he was even born in the United States and whether he had attended Harvard Law School.⁹¹

A scandal involving charges of voter fraud on the part of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN) also followed the Democratic candidate through the last weeks of the campaign. A longtime target of conservatives, ACORN was eventually forced to close down because of videos showing some of its employees (subsequently fired) turned in registration forms for people who did not exist or lived outside the appropriate geographic area. Over the years, Obama had dealings with the organization, including the payment by Project Vote, which he had directed after moving to Chicago, of over $830,000 to an affiliate of ACORN for a voter registration drive aimed at minorities. As a result, Republican strategists accused him of having an “intimate relationship” with an agency engaged in voter fraud, forcing the Democratic candidate to make a statement in which he “strongly condemn[ed] voter registration fraud or any other breach of election law by any party or group.”⁹²

Even though the charges against Obama took their toll and most polls still showed a close race between him and McCain, there were numerous signs that the election was moving toward an Obama victory. Not only was Palin’s selection as McCain’s running mate hurting the Republican ticket, the Obama campaign was having success in tying the Republican candidate closely to Bush, whose popularity stood in the low twenties.⁹³

A growing number of leading conservatives were also either throwing their support behind the Democrat or not endorsing McCain. “He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which needs changing,” wrote Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal about the Illinois senator. “His rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which needs rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.” Other conservative spokesmen who favored or endorsed him included the columnists George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Andrew Sullivan, and the former secretary of state, Colin Powell, who called Obama a “transformational figure.”⁹⁴

What made the final difference in the election, however, was the banking and financial crisis that began in the middle of September but grew worse over the next six weeks. The reasons for the crisis are complicated, but the immediate cause was the collapse of a housing bubble that had begun several years earlier and grew worse because of easy credit, insufficient regulation, and the insertion into financial markets of creative, but complex, types of securities that were hard to understand even on Wall Street. These securities, known as derivatives, hid the severity of the crisis until the bankruptcy on September 15 of the Wall Street brokerage firm Lehman Brothers, the largest bankruptcy in the nation’s history. In danger of going under next was the American International Group (AIG), a major insurance firm. It was saved only by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s decision to infuse $182 billion of federal funds into the firm.⁹⁵

At first, the Democratic candidate was unaware of the dimension of the economic crisis about to hit the country. Like many Americans, he was able, after being elected to the US Senate, to sell the condo he and Michelle had purchased in 1993 for a tidy profit. Then he began to notice that many other condos in Chicago were being left unoccupied and unsold. A wealthy friend and Wall Street bond trader warned him that these “were just the start.”⁹⁶

He was made fully aware of the pending financial crisis, however, by Robert Wolf, the chairman and chief operating officer of the American division of UBS, one of the world’s largest investment banks. A liberal Democrat, Wolf, who had been huddling in New York with Paulson and other bankers and policy makers, warned the candidate of a possible panic ahead. Already concerned that his campaign was being too reactive to the Republican charges being made against him, Obama decided to go on the offensive by calling for greater federal regulation of the financial markets. “I wanted people to understand that there was a precedent for bold government action. FDR had saved capitalism from itself.”⁹⁷

For the last few weeks of the campaign, when the economy was tanking, McCain fumbled the ball, leaving it to Obama to pick it up and carry it to an election night victory. Reaction of the two candidates to the downward spiraling of the economy could not have been more different. Throughout his career on Capitol Hill, McCain’s interests and experience had always been in the areas of defense and foreign policy, not finance or banking. On these issues, he followed the lead of conservative colleagues in supporting free markets and deregulation. That is why his initial response to the crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers was his statement that “the fundamentals” of the economy were “strong.”⁹⁸

Although McCain issued a different statement the next day recognizing the gravity of the crisis facing the country, he continued to stumble. Intending to look strong and decisive, he seemed confused in his response to President Bush’s proposed “Troubled Asset Relief Program” (TARP) intended to bail out the country’s banks by allowing the government to buy up to $700 billion of their illiquid assets. He declared that he was suspending his campaign and would not participate in the first official debate in order to devote his entire time to the crisis. He asked Obama to do the same. He also asked President George Bush to call a meeting at the White House to include his Democratic opponent, himself, and the leaders of both political parties in the House and Senate. The Republican candidate, however, offered no proposals of his own or even articulated a governing philosophy.⁹⁹

At the White House meeting, McCain remained largely silent, while Obama led much of the discussion that followed. Although he had also not displayed much interest in financial matters, he engaged in what amounted to a tutorial on macroeconomics after Wolf warned him of the impending crisis. He talked regularly with former top government officials in the Clinton administration, FED chairman Ben Bernanke, and even with Paulson as well as the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate. He opened the discussion at the White House by calling for greater federal financial oversight and flexibility as well as caps on executive compensation and retirement packages for top business executives, two proposals that the majority of the public favored. “I think just about everyone has agreed on these,” he stated, and then jabbed at House Republicans by commenting, “I understand there are some who may not be as far along as the rest of us.”¹⁰⁰

Leaks from the meeting portrayed Obama as the stronger and more informed of the two candidates. Without McCain’s leadership, Republicans also continued to wrangle among themselves over TARP, which failed in the House. Although many political insiders regarded McCain’s announcement that he would not participate in the first official debate “a master stroke,” the Democratic candidate felt otherwise. “Not only did I think that the two of us posturing in Washington would lessen rather than improve the chances of getting TARP passed, but I felt that the financial crisis made it that much more important for the debate to take place,” he later commented. By stating that he would not suspend his campaign and intended to participate in the first nationally televised debate regardless of whether McCain showed up, Obama also reinforced his growing image as the more ready of the two candidates to seize the mantle of leadership. Under these circumstances McCain had no choice but to resume his campaign and participate in the first debate. In it and two other presidential debates that followed, both candidates came off well. But because McCain failed to gain any traction against Obama, they amounted to victories for the Democratic candidate.¹⁰¹

On October 13, Obama gave a major speech in which he set forth a series of long- and short-term measures to deal with the nation’s economic crisis. These included tax cuts for most workers, health-care reforms, and measures to make higher education affordable for anyone attending college. He also reached out to Republicans by again emphasizing job creation and embracing tax cuts for small business. As he had throughout the campaign, he stressed hope for the future, not despair about the past. “Together, we cannot fail,” he concluded. “Together, we can renew an economy that rewards work and rebuilds the middle class… . Together, we can change this country and change the world.” ¹⁰²

Polls taken on November 4 as election day neared showed that the Iraq War and the handling of terrorism remained McCain’s greatest strengths but that 51 percent of voters considered the economy the most important issue and that Obama was winning these voters by a margin of 62 to 35 percent. The same polls also showed that, by a wide margin, the same voters considered him the stronger leader of the two candidates and, by a smaller margin, the more honest and trustworthy and the one more likely to stand up to lobbyists and special interests. A composite of all the major polls made by Real Clear Politics on the eve of the election had Obama winning the election by 52.9 percent to McCain’s 45.6 percent.¹⁰³

Actual results on election day came close to these figures. He won 69 million votes (or 53.9 percent of the 128 million votes cast) to McCain’s 59 million votes (or 46.1 percent of the total ballots). More impressive was the fact that he won over two-thirds of the electoral college (365 votes to McCain’s 173). As forecast, his strength was in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast. McCain was strongest in the South, Southwest, Great Plains, and Rocky Mountain states. Except for Missouri, which he lost by less than 1 percent, Obama took most of the tossup states, again by margins of 1 percent or less, including North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida. He even won Indiana, a traditional Republican state.¹⁰⁴

As it became apparent to Obama that he was about to be elected President of the United States, he was once more taken aback by the enormity of the task that lay before him. “I was contending with the likelihood that … it would be impossible to meet the outsized expectations now attached to me,” he later wrote. “Every headline, every story, every expose” he read was “another problem for [him] to solve.” He was confident of his ability to solve these problems. At the same time, he realized that he would need the help of a “cooperative Congress, willing allies, and an informed mobilized citizenry.” He could not be “a solitary savior.” These were the thoughts he retained even as he welcomed the news that he had been elected the nation’s forty-fourth president.¹⁰⁵

In postelection analyses, numerous reasons were given for Obama’s victory over McCain including the large voter turnout, the size of the youth, women, and minority votes, the choice of Palin as McCain’s running mate, the weakness of McCain and the strength of Obama as candidates, anti-Bush sentiment, and the onslaught of the financial crisis. While all of these explanations were valid, Obama also won the election for more fundamental reasons. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times wrote on the eve of the election, the 2008 campaign represented a “sea change for politics.” “To a considerable extent, Republicans and Democrats say this is a result of the way that the Obama campaign sought to understand and harness the Internet (and other forms of so-called new media) to organize supporters and to reach voters… . Even more crucial,” Nagourney concluded, “has been Mr. Obama’s success in using the Internet to build a huge network of contributors that permitted him to raise enough money… [to] compete in traditionally Republican states.”¹⁰⁶

Throughout the campaign Obama had also given hope to Americans by hammering away at his message of change and a brighter future ahead. While he offered social programs for bringing about these changes that appealed to the liberal base of the Democratic Party, he made a concerted effort to attract Republican voters by emphasizing work, personal responsibility, and tax cuts for small businesses that created jobs. For Obama, this was not just a campaign tactic. He believed deeply that Americans in need of help had to be given help. As much as possible, however, they also had to take responsibility for improving their own lives and, especially, those of their children. This was a position he would retain throughout his presidency.