ONE OF MY favorite tasks of being a senator is hosting town hall meetings. I heldthirty-nine of them my first year in the Senate, all across Illinois, in tiny rural towns likeAnna and prosperous suburbs like Naperville, in black churches on the South Side and acollege in Rock Island. There’s not a lot of fanfare involved. My staff will call up thelocal high school, library, or community college to see if they’re willing to host theevent. A week or so in advance, we advertise in the town newspaper, in churchbulletins, and on the local radio station. On the day of the meeting I’ll show up a halfhour early to chat with town leaders and we’ll discuss local issues, perhaps a road inneed of repaving or plans for a new senior center. After taking a few photographs, weenter the hall where the crowd is waiting. I shake hands on my way to the stage, whichis usually bare except for a podium, a microphone, a bottle of water, and an Americanflag posted in its stand. And then, for the next hour or so, I answer to the people whosent me to Washington.
Attendance varies at these meetings: We’ve had as few as fifty people turn out, as manyas two thousand. But however many people show up, I am grateful to see them. Theyare a cross-section of the counties we visit: Republican and Democrat, old and young,fat and skinny, truck drivers, college professors, stay-at-home moms, veterans,schoolteachers, insurance agents, CPAs, secretaries, doctors, and social workers. Theyare generally polite and attentive, even when they disagree with me (or one another).
They ask me about prescription drugs, the deficit, human rights in Myanmar, ethanol,bird flu, school funding, and the space program. Often they will surprise me: A youngflaxen-haired woman in the middle of farm country will deliver a passionate plea forintervention in Darfur, or an elderly black gentleman in an inner-city neighborhood willquiz me on soil conservation.
And as I look out over the crowd, I somehow feel encouraged. In their bearing I seehard work. In the way they handle their children I see hope. My time with them is like adip in a cool stream. I feel cleansed afterward, glad for the work I have chosen.
At the end of the meeting, people will usually come up to shake hands, take pictures, ornudge their child forward to ask for an autograph. They slip things into my hand—articles, business cards, handwritten notes, armed-services medallions, small religiousobjects, good-luck charms. And sometimes someone will grab my hand and tell me thatthey have great hopes for me, but that they are worried that Washington is going tochange me and I will end up just like all the rest of the people in power.
Please stay who you are, they will say to me.
Please don’t disappoint us.
IT IS AN American tradition to attribute the problem with our politics to the quality ofour politicians. At times this is expressed in very specific terms: The president is amoron, or Congressman So-and-So is a bum. Sometimes a broader indictment is issued,as in “They’re all in the pockets of the special interests.” Most voters conclude thateveryone in Washington is “just playing politics,” meaning that votes or positions aretaken contrary to conscience, that they are based on campaign contributions or the pollsor loyalty to party rather than on trying to do what is right. Often, the fiercest criticismis reserved for the politician from one’s own ranks, the Democrat who “doesn’t standfor anything” or the “Republican in Name Only.” All of which leads to the conclusionthat if we want anything to change in Washington, we’ll need to throw the rascals out.
And yet year after year we keep the rascals right where they are, with the reelection ratefor House members hovering at around 96 percent.
Political scientists can give you a number of reasons for this phenomenon. In today’sinterconnected world, it’s difficult to penetrate the consciousness of a busy anddistracted electorate. As a result, winning in politics mainly comes down to a simplematter of name recognition, which is why most incumbents spend inordinate amounts oftheir time between elections making sure their names are repeated over and over again,whether at ribbon cuttings or Fourth of July parades or on the Sunday morning talkshow circuit. There’s the well-known fund-raising advantage that incumbents enjoy, forinterest groups—whether on the left or the right—tend to go with the odds when itcomes to political contributions. And there’s the role of political gerrymandering ininsulating House members from significant challenge: These days, almost everycongressional district is drawn by the ruling party with computer-driven precision toensure that a clear majority of Democrats or Republicans reside within its borders.
Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives;instead, representatives choose their voters.
Another factor comes into play, though, one that is rarely mentioned but that helpsexplain why polls consistently show voters hating Congress but liking theircongressman. Hard as it may be to believe, most politicians are pretty likable folks.
Certainly I found this to be true of my Senate colleagues. One-on-one they made forwonderful company—I would be hard-pressed to name better storytellers than TedKennedy or Trent Lott, or sharper wits than Kent Conrad or Richard Shelby, or warmerindividuals than Debbie Stabenow or Mel Martinez. As a rule they proved to beintelligent, thoughtful, and hardworking people, willing to devote long hours andattention to the issues affecting their states. Yes, there were those who lived up to thestereotype, those who talked interminably or bullied their staffs; and the more time Ispent on the Senate floor, the more frequently I could identify in each senator the flawsthat we all suffer from to varying degrees—a bad temper here, a deep stubbornness orunquenchable vanity there. For the most part, though, the quotient of such attributes inthe Senate seemed no higher than would be found in any random slice of the generalpopulation. Even when talking to those colleagues with whom I most deeply disagreed,I was usually struck by their basic sincerity—their desire to get things right and leavethe country better and stronger; their desire to represent their constituents and theirvalues as faithfully as circumstances would allow.
So what happened to make these men and women appear as the grim, uncompromising,insincere, and occasionally mean characters that populate our nightly news? What was itabout the process that prevented reasonable, conscientious people from doing thenation’s business? The longer I served in Washington, the more I saw friends studyingmy face for signs of a change, probing me for a newfound pomposity, searching forhints of argumentativeness or guardedness. I began examining myself in the same way;I began to see certain characteristics that I held in common with my new colleagues, andI wondered what might prevent my own transformation into the stock politician of badTV movies.
ONE PLACE TO start my inquiry was to understand the nature of ambition, for in thisregard at least, senators are different. Few people end up being United States senatorsby accident; at a minimum, it requires a certain megalomania, a belief that of all thegifted people in your state, you are somehow uniquely qualified to speak on theirbehalf; a belief sufficiently strong that you are willing to endure the sometimesuplifting, occasionally harrowing, but always slightly ridiculous process we callcampaigns.
Moreover, ambition alone is not enough. Whatever the tangle of motives, both sacredand profane, that push us toward the goal of becoming a senator, those who succeedmust exhibit an almost fanatical single-mindedness, often disregarding their health,relationships, mental balance, and dignity. After my primary campaign was over, Iremember looking at my calendar and realizing that over a span of a year and a half, Ihad taken exactly seven days off. The rest of the time I had typically worked twelve tosixteen hours a day. This was not something I was particularly proud of. As Michellepointed out to me several times a week during the campaign, it just wasn’t normal.
Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians,however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly moredestructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as acandidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn’t release you until after Election Day.
That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing—although that is bad enough—but fear oftotal, complete humiliation.
I still burn, for example, with the thought of my one loss in politics, a drubbing in 2000at the hands of incumbent Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush. It was a race in whicheverything that could go wrong did go wrong, in which my own mistakes werecompounded by tragedy and farce. Two weeks after announcing my candidacy, with afew thousand dollars raised, I commissioned my first poll and discovered that Mr.
Rush’s name recognition stood at about 90 percent, while mine stood at 11 percent. Hisapproval rating hovered around 70 percent—mine at 8. In that way I learned one of thecardinal rules of modern politics: Do the poll before you announce.
Things went downhill from there. In October, on my way to a meeting to secure anendorsement from one of the few party officials who had not already committed to myopponent, I heard a news flash on the radio that Congressman Rush’s adult son hadbeen shot and killed by a pair of drug dealers outside his house. I was shocked andsaddened for the congressman, and effectively suspended my campaign for a month.
Then, during the Christmas holidays, after having traveled to Hawaii for an abbreviatedfive-day trip to visit my grandmother and reacquaint myself with Michelle and then-eighteen-month-old Malia, the state legislature was called back into special session tovote on a piece of gun control legislation. With Malia sick and unable to fly, I missedthe vote, and the bill failed. Two days later, I got off the red-eye at O’Hare Airport, awailing baby in tow, Michelle not speaking to me, and was greeted by a front-page storyin the Chicago Tribune indicating that the gun bill had fallen a few votes short, and thatstate senator and congressional candidate Obama “had decided to remain on vacation”
in Hawaii. My campaign manager called, mentioning the potential ad the congressmanmight be running soon—palm trees, a man in a beach chair and straw hat sipping a maitai, a slack key guitar being strummed softly in the background, the voice-overexplaining, “While Chicago suffered the highest murder rate in its history, BarackObama…”
I stopped him there, having gotten the idea.
And so, less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going tolose. Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense of dread,realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking hands and pretendingthat everything was going according to plan. In the few weeks before the primary, mycampaign recovered a bit: I did well in the sparsely covered debates, received somepositive coverage for proposals on health care and education, and even received theTribune endorsement. But it was too little too late. I arrived at my victory party todiscover that the race had already been called and that I had lost by thirty-one points.
I’m not suggesting that politicians are unique in suffering such disappointments. It’sthat unlike most people, who have the luxury of licking their wounds privately, thepolitician’s loss is on public display. There’s the cheerful concession speech you haveto make to a half-empty ballroom, the brave face you put on as you comfort staff andsupporters, the thank-you calls to those who helped, and the awkward requests forfurther help in retiring debt. You perform these tasks as best you can, and yet no matterhow much you tell yourself differently—no matter how convincingly you attribute theloss to bad timing or bad luck or lack of money—it’s impossible not to feel at somelevel as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don’tquite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word “loser” is flashingthrough people’s minds. They’re the sorts of feelings that most people haven’texperienced since high school, when the girl you’d been pining over dismissed you witha joke in front of her friends, or you missed a pair of free throws with the big game onthe line—the kinds of feelings that most adults wisely organize their lives to avoid.
Imagine then the impact of these same emotions on the average big-time politician, who(unlike me) has rarely failed at anything in his life—who was the high schoolquarterback or the class valedictorian and whose father was a senator or admiral andwho has been told since he was a child that he was destined for great things. I remembertalking once to a corporate executive who had been a big supporter of Vice President AlGore during the 2000 presidential race. We were in his suitably plush office,overlooking all of midtown Manhattan, and he began describing to me a meeting thathad taken place six months or so after the election, when Gore was seeking investors forhis then-fledgling television venture.
“It was strange,” the executive told me. “Here he was, a former vice president, a manwho just a few months earlier had been on the verge of being the most powerful man onthe planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrangemy schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, when hewalked in, I couldn’t help feeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to admit it,because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn’t Al Gore, former vicepresident. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking formoney. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on.”
A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall. Over the past five years, Al Gore has shown thesatisfaction and influence that a life after politics can bring, and I suspect the executiveis eagerly taking the former vice president’s calls once again. Still, in the aftermath ofhis 2000 loss, I imagine Gore would have sensed the change in his friend. Sitting there,pitching his television idea, trying to make the best of a bad situation, he might havethought how ridiculous were the circumstances in which he found himself; how after alifetime of work he could have lost it all because of a butterfly ballot that didn’t align,while his friend the executive, sitting across from him with the condescending smile,could afford to come in second in his business year after year, maybe see his company’sstock tumble or make an ill-considered investment, and yet still be consideredsuccessful, still enjoy the pride of accomplishment, the lavish compensation, theexercise of power. It wasn’t fair, but that wouldn’t change the facts for the former vicepresident. Like most men and women who followed the path of public life, Gore knewwhat he was getting himself into the moment he decided to run. In politics, there may besecond acts, but there is no second place.
MOST OF THE other sins of politics are derivative of this larger sin—the need to win,but also the need not to lose. Certainly that’s what the money chase is all about. Therewas a time, before campaign finance laws and snooping reporters, when money shapedpolitics through outright bribery; when a politician could treat his campaign fund as hispersonal bank account and accept fancy junkets; when big honoraria from those whosought influence were commonplace, and the shape of legislation went to the highestbidder. If recent news reports are accurate, these ranker forms of corruption have notgone away entirely; apparently there are still those in Washington who view politics asa means of getting rich, and who, while generally not dumb enough to accept bags ofsmall bills, are perfectly prepared to take care of contributors and properly feather theirbeds until the time is finally ripe to jump into the lucrative practice of lobbying onbehalf of those they once regulated.
More often, though, that’s not the way money influences politics. Few lobbyists profferan explicit quid pro quo to elected officials. They don’t have to. Their influence comessimply from having more access to those officials than the average voter, having betterinformation than the average voter, and having more staying power when it comes topromoting an obscure provision in the tax code that means billions for their clients andthat nobody else cares about.
As for most politicians, money isn’t about getting rich. In the Senate, at least, mostmembers are already rich. It’s about maintaining status and power; it’s about scaring offchallengers and fighting off the fear. Money can’t guarantee victory—it can’t buypassion, charisma, or the ability to tell a story. But without money, and the televisionads that consume all the money, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose.
The amounts of money involved are breathtaking, particularly in big state races withmultiple media markets. While in the state legislature, I never needed to spend morethan $100,000 on a race; in fact, I developed a reputation for being something of a stick-in-the-mud when it came to fund-raising, coauthoring the first campaign financelegislation to pass in twenty-five years, refusing meals from lobbyists, rejecting checksfrom gaming and tobacco interests. When I decided to run for the U.S. Senate, mymedia consultant, David Axelrod, had to sit me down to explain the facts of life. Ourcampaign plan called for a bare-bones budget, a heavy reliance on grassroots supportand “earned media”—that is, an ability to make our own news. Still, David informed methat one week of television advertising in the Chicago media market would costapproximately half a million dollars. Covering the rest of the state for a week would runabout $250,000. Figuring four weeks of TV, and all the overhead and staff for astatewide campaign, the final budget for the primary would be around $5 million.
Assuming I won the primary, I would then need to raise another $10 or $15 million forthe general election.
I went home that night and in neat columns proceeded to write down all the people Iknew who might give me a contribution. Next to their names, I wrote down themaximum amounts that I would feel comfortable asking them for.
My grand total came to $500,000.
Absent great personal wealth, there is basically one way of raising the kind of moneyinvolved in a U.S. Senate race. You have to ask rich people for it. In the first threemonths of my campaign, I would shut myself in a room with my fund-raising assistantand cold-call previous Democratic donors. It was not fun. Sometimes people wouldhang up on me. More often their secretary would take a message and I wouldn’t get areturn call, and I would call back two or three times until either I gave up or the person Iwas calling finally answered and gave me the courtesy of a person-to-person rejection. Istarted engaging in elaborate games of avoidance during call time—frequent bathroombreaks, extended coffee runs, suggestions to my policy staff that we fine-tune thateducation speech for the third or fourth time. At times during these sessions I thought ofmy grandfather, who in middle age had sold life insurance but wasn’t very good at it. Irecalled his anguish whenever he tried to schedule appointments with people whowould rather have had a root canal than talk to an insurance agent, as well as thedisapproving glances he received from my grandmother, who for most of their marriagemade more money than he did.
More than ever, I understood how my grandfather must have felt.
At the end of three months, our campaign had raised just $250,000—well below thethreshold of what it would take to be credible. To make matters worse, my race featuredwhat many politicians consider their worst nightmare: a self-financing candidate withbottomless pockets. His name was Blair Hull, and he had sold his financial tradingbusiness to Goldman Sachs a few years earlier for $531 million. Undoubtedly he had agenuine, if undefined, desire to serve, and by all accounts he was a brilliant man. But onthe campaign trail he was almost painfully shy, with the quirky, inward manner ofsomeone who’d spent most of his life alone in front of a computer screen. I suspect thatlike many people, he figured that being a politician—unlike being a doctor or airlinepilot or plumber—required no special expertise in anything useful, and that abusinessman like himself could perform at least as well, and probably better, than anyof the professional pols he saw on TV. In fact, Mr. Hull viewed his facility withnumbers as an invaluable asset: At one point in the campaign, he divulged to a reportera mathematical formula that he’d developed for winning campaigns, an algorithm thatbeganProbability = 1/(1 + exp(-1 × (-3.9659056 + (General Election Weight × 1.92380219)…and ended several indecipherable factors later.
All of which made it easy to write off Mr. Hull as an opponent—until one morning inApril or May, when I pulled out of the circular driveway of my condo complex on theway to the office and was greeted by row upon row of large red, white, and blue lawnsigns marching up and down the block. BLAIR HULL FOR U.S. SENATE, the signsread, and for the next five miles I saw them on every street and along every majorthoroughfare, in every direction and in every nook and cranny, in barbershop windowsand posted on abandoned buildings, in front of bus stops and behind grocery storecounters—Hull signs everywhere, dotting the landscape like daisies in spring.
There is a saying in Illinois politics that “signs don’t vote,” meaning that you can’tjudge a race by how many signs a candidate has. But nobody in Illinois had ever seenduring the course of an entire campaign the number of signs and billboards that Mr.
Hull had put up in a single day, or the frightening efficiency with which his crews ofpaid workers could yank up everybody else’s yard signs and replace them with Hullsigns in the span of a single evening. We began to read about certain neighborhoodleaders in the black community who had suddenly decided that Mr. Hull was achampion of the inner city, certain downstate leaders who extolled Mr. Hull’s support ofthe family farm. And then the television ads hit, six months out and ubiquitous untilElection Day, on every station around the state around the clock—Blair Hull withseniors, Blair Hull with children, Blair Hull ready to take back Washington from thespecial interests. By January 2004, Mr. Hull had moved into first place in the polls andmy supporters began swamping me with calls, insisting that I had to do something,telling me I had to get on TV immediately or all would be lost.
What could I do? I explained that unlike Mr. Hull I practically had a negative net worth.
Assuming the best-case scenario, our campaign would have enough money for exactlyfour weeks of television ads, and given this fact it probably didn’t make sense for us toblow the entire campaign budget in August. Everybody just needed to be patient, Iwould tell supporters. Stay confident. Don’t panic. Then I’d hang up the phone, look outthe window, and happen to catch sight of the RV in which Hull tooled around the state,big as an ocean liner and reputedly just as well appointed, and I would wonder to myselfif perhaps it was time to panic after all.
In many ways, I was luckier than most candidates in such circumstances. For whateverreason, at some point my campaign began to generate that mysterious, elusive quality ofmomentum, of buzz; it became fashionable among wealthy donors to promote mycause, and small donors around the state began sending checks through the Internet at apace we had never anticipated. Ironically, my dark-horse status protected me from someof the more dangerous pitfalls of fund-raising: Most of the corporate PACs avoided me,and so I owed them nothing; the handful of PACs that did give, like the League ofConservation Voters, typically represented causes I believed in and had long fought for.
Mr. Hull still ended up outspending me by a factor of six to one. But to his credit(although perhaps to his regret) he never ran a negative TV ad against me. My pollnumbers stayed within shouting distance of his, and in the final weeks of the campaign,just as my own TV spots started running and my numbers began to surge, his campaignimploded when allegations surfaced that he’d had some ugly run-ins with an ex-wife.
So for me, at least, the lack of wealth or significant corporate support wasn’t a barrier tovictory. Still, I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways.
Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sumsof money. By the end of the campaign, the banter and small talk that had onceaccompanied my solicitation calls were eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not totake no for an answer.
But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found myselfspending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedgefund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people,knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more thana hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almostuniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scalethat can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the freemarket and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there mightbe any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience withprotectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic tothose whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most wereadamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religioussentiment.
And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone tothe same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in manyof the same ways—I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations withthem, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issuesI was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’dreceived from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to sharewith them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate:
the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in ruralparts of the state.
Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthydonors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time abovethe fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, andfrequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I’dentered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true forevery senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions.
You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the oldneighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from mostof the people you represent.
And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want tohave to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all overagain. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the freshface; you haven’t changed Washington, and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy withdifficult votes. The path of least resistance—of fund-raisers organized by the specialinterests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops—starts to look awfullytempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held,you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learningthe ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or thedwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions tobe managed rather than battles to be fought.
THERE ARE OTHER forces at work on a senator. As important as money is incampaigns, it’s not just fund-raising that puts a candidate over the top. If you want towin in politics—if you don’t want to lose—then organized people can be just asimportant as cash, particularly in the low-turnout primaries that, in the world of thegerrymandered political map and divided electorates, are often the most significant racea candidate faces. Few people these days have the time or inclination to volunteer on apolitical campaign, particularly since the day-to-day tasks of working on a campaigngenerally involve licking envelopes and knocking on doors, not drafting speeches andthinking big thoughts. And so, if you are a candidate in need of political workers orvoter lists, you go where people are already organized. For Democrats, this means theunions, the environmental groups, and the prochoice groups. For Republicans, it meansthe religious right, local chambers of commerce, the NRA, and the antitaxorganizations.
I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interests,” which lumpstogether ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents ofspecial-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree with me, but to mymind, there’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on moneyalone, and a group of like-minded individuals—whether they be textile workers, gunaficionados, veterans, or family farmers—coming together to promote their interests;between those who use their economic power to magnify their political influence farbeyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pooltheir votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea ofdemocracy. The latter are its essence.
Still, the impact of interest groups on candidates for office is not always pretty. Tomaintain an active membership, keep the donations coming in, and be heard above thedin, the groups that have an impact on politics aren’t fashioned to promote the publicinterest. They aren’t searching for the most thoughtful, well-qualified, or broad-mindedcandidate to support. Instead, they are focused on a narrow set of concerns—theirpensions, their crop supports, their cause. Simply put, they have an ax to grind. Andthey want you, the elected official, to help them grind it.
During my own primary campaign, for example, I must have filled out at least fiftyquestionnaires. None of them were subtle. Typically they would contain a list of ten ortwelve questions, phrased along the following lines: “If elected, will you solemnlypledge to repeal the Scrooge Law, which has resulted in widows and orphans beingkicked to the curb?”
Time dictated that I fill out only those questionnaires sent by organizations that mightactually endorse me (given my voting record, the NRA and National Right to Life, forexample, did not make the cut), so I could usually answer “yes” to most questionswithout any major discomfort. But every so often I would come across a question thatgave me pause. I might agree with a union on the need to enforce labor andenvironmental standards in our trade laws, but did I believe that NAFTA should berepealed? I might agree that universal health care should be one of the nation’s toppriorities, but did it follow that a constitutional amendment was the best way to achievethat goal? I found myself hedging on such questions, writing in the margins, explainingthe difficult policy choices involved. My staff would shake their heads. Get one answerwrong, they explained, and the endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would allgo to the other guy. Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself intothe pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end.
Say one thing during the campaign and do another thing once in office, and you’re atypical, two-faced politician.
I lost some endorsements by not giving the right answer. A couple of times, a groupsurprised us and gave me their endorsement despite a wrong answer.
And then sometimes it didn’t matter how you filled out your questionnaire. In additionto Mr. Hull, my most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senatewas the Illinois state comptroller, Dan Hynes, a fine man and able public servant whosefather, Tom Hynes, happened to be a former state senate president, Cook Countyassessor, ward committeeman, Democratic National Committee member, and one of themost well-connected political figures in the state. Before even entering the race, Danhad already sewn up the support of 85 of the 102 Democratic county chairmen in thestate, the majority of my colleagues in the state legislature, and Mike Madigan, whoserved as both Speaker of the House and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party.
Scrolling down the list of endorsements on Dan’s website was like watching the creditsat the end of a movie—you left before it was finished.
Despite all this, I held out hope for a few endorsements of my own, particularly those oforganized labor. For seven years I had been their ally in the state legislature, sponsoringmany of their bills and making their case on the floor. I knew that traditionally the AFL-CIO endorsed those who had a strong record of voting on their behalf. But as thecampaign got rolling, odd things began to happen. The Teamsters held theirendorsement session in Chicago on a day when I had to be in Springfield for a vote;they refused to reschedule, and Mr. Hynes got their endorsement without them evertalking to me. Visiting a labor reception during the Illinois State Fair, we were told thatno campaign signs would be allowed; when my staff and I arrived, we discovered theroom plastered with Hynes posters. On the evening of the AFL-CIO endorsementsession, I noticed a number of my labor friends averting their eyes as I walked throughthe room. An older guy who headed up one of the state’s bigger locals walked up andpatted me on the back.
“It’s nothing personal, Barack,” he said with a rueful smile. “You know, Tom Hynesand me go back fifty years. Grew up in the same neighborhood. Belonged to the sameparish. Hell, I watched Danny grow up.”
I told him I understood.
“Maybe you could run for Danny’s spot once he goes to the Senate. Whaddya think?
You’d make a heck of a comptroller.”
I went over to my staff to tell them we would not be getting the AFL-CIO endorsement.
Again things worked out. The leaders of several of the largest service workers unions—the Illinois Federation of Teachers, SEIU, AFSCME, and UNITE HERE, representingtextile, hotel, and foodservice workers—broke ranks and chose to endorse me overHynes, support that proved critical in giving my campaign some semblance of weight. Itwas a risky move on their part; had I lost, those unions might have paid a price inaccess, in support, in credibility with their members.
So I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back rightaway. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way; I don’t mind feeling obligated towardhome health-care workers who clean bedpans every day for little more than theminimum wage, or toward teachers in some of the toughest schools in the country,many of whom have to dip into their own pockets at the beginning of every school yearto buy crayons and books for their students. I got into politics to fight for these folks,and I’m glad a union is around to remind me of their struggles.
But I also understand that there will be times when these obligations collide with otherobligations—the obligation to inner-city children who are unable to read, say, or theobligation to children not yet born whom we are saddling with debt. Already there havebeen some strains—I’ve proposed experimenting with merit pay for teachers, forexample, and have called for raising fuel-efficiency standards despite opposition frommy friends at the United Auto Workers. I like to tell myself that I will continue to weighthe issues on the merits—just as I hope my Republican counterpart will weigh the no-new-tax pledge or opposition to stem cell research that he made before the election inlight of what’s best for the country as a whole, regardless of what his supportersdemand. I hope that I can always go to my union friends and explain why my positionmakes sense, how it’s consistent with both my values and their long-term interests.
But I suspect that the union leaders won’t always see it that way. There may be timeswhen they will see it as betrayal. They may alert their members that I have sold themout. I may get angry mail and angry phone calls. They may not endorse me the nexttime around.
And perhaps, if that happens to you enough times, and you almost lose a race because acritical constituency is mad at you, or you find yourself fending off a primary challengerwho’s calling you a traitor, you start to lose your stomach for confrontation. You askyourself, just what does good conscience dictate exactly: that you avoid capture by“special interests” or that you avoid dumping on your friends? The answer is notobvious. So you start voting as you would answer a questionnaire. You don’t ponderyour positions too deeply. You check the yes box up and down the line.
POLITICIANS HELD CAPTIVE by their big-money contributors or succumbing tointerest-group pressure—this is a staple of modern political reporting, the story line thatweaves its way into just about every analysis of what’s wrong with our democracy. Butfor the politician who is worried about keeping his seat, there is a third force that pushesand pulls at him, that shapes the nature of political debate and defines the scope of whathe feels he can and can’t do, the positions he can and can’t take. Forty or fifty years ago,that force would have been the party apparatus: the big-city bosses, the political fixers,the power brokers in Washington who could make or break a career with a phone call.
Today, that force is the media.
A disclaimer here: For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my candidacyfor the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the beneficiary ofunusually—and at times undeservedly—positive press coverage. No doubt some of thishad to do with my status as an underdog in my Senate primary, as well as my novelty asa black candidate with an exotic background. Maybe it also had something to do withmy style of communicating, which can be rambling, hesitant, and overly verbose (bothmy staff and Michelle often remind me of this), but which perhaps finds sympathy inthe literary class.
Moreover, even when I’ve been at the receiving end of negative stories, the politicalreporters I’ve dealt with have generally been straight shooters. They’ve taped ourconversations, tried to provide the context for my statements, and called me to get aresponse whenever I’ve been criticized.
So personally, at least, I have no cause for complaint. That doesn’t mean, though, that Ican afford to ignore the press. Precisely because I’ve watched the press cast me in alight that can be hard to live up to, I am mindful of how rapidly that process can work inreverse.
Simple math tells the tale. In the thirty-nine town hall meetings I held during my firstyear in office, turnout at each meeting averaged four to five hundred people, whichmeans that I was able to meet with maybe fifteen to twenty thousand people. Should Isustain this pace for the remainder of my term, I will have had direct, personal contactwith maybe ninety-five to one hundred thousand of my constituents by the time ElectionDay rolls around.
In contrast, a three-minute story on the lowest-rated local news broadcast in the Chicagomedia market may reach two hundred thousand people. In other words, I—like everypolitician at the federal level—am almost entirely dependent on the media to reach myconstituents. It is the filter through which my votes are interpreted, my statementsanalyzed, my beliefs examined. For the broad public at least, I am who the media says Iam. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.
The media’s influence on our politics comes in many forms. What gets the mostattention these days is the growth of an unabashedly partisan press: talk radio, FoxNews, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk-show circuit, and most recently thebloggers, all of them trading insults, accusations, gossip, and innuendo twenty-fourhours a day, seven days a week. As others have noted, this style of opinion journalismisn’t really new; in some ways, it marks a return to the dominant tradition of Americanjournalism, an approach to the news that was nurtured by publishers like WilliamRandolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick before a more antiseptic notion of objectivejournalism emerged after World War II.
Still, it’s hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through television and theInternet, coarsens the political culture. It makes tempers flare, helps breed distrust. Andwhether we politicians like to admit it or not, the constant vitriol can wear on the spirit.
Oddly enough, the cruder broadsides you don’t worry about too much; if RushLimbaugh’s listeners enjoy hearing him call me “Osama Obama,” my attitude is, letthem have their fun. It’s the more sophisticated practitioners who can sting you, in partbecause they have more credibility with the general public, in part because of the skillwith which they can pounce on your words and make you seem like a jerk.
In April 2005, for example, I appeared on the program to dedicate the new LincolnPresidential Library in Springfield. It was a five-minute speech in which I suggestedthat Abraham Lincoln’s humanity, his imperfections, were the qualities that made himso compelling. “In [Lincoln’s] rise from poverty,” I said in one part of my remarks, “hisself-study and ultimate mastery of language and of law, in his capacity to overcomepersonal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all of this, wesee a fundamental element of the American character, a belief that we can constantlyremake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”
A few months later, Time magazine asked if I would be interested in writing an essayfor a special issue on Lincoln. I didn’t have time to write something new, so I asked themagazine’s editors if my speech would be acceptable. They said it was, but asked if Icould personalize it a bit more—say something about Lincoln’s impact on my life. Inbetween meetings I dashed off a few changes. One of those changes was to the passagequoted above, which now read, “In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery oflanguage and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in theface of repeated defeat—in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.”
No sooner had the essay appeared than Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter andcolumnist for the Wall Street Journal, weighed in. Under the title “Conceit ofGovernment,” she wrote: “This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama,flapping his wings in Time Magazine and explaining that he’s a lot like AbrahamLincoln, only sort of better.” She went on to say, “There is nothing wrong with BarackObama’s resume, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it is also a greatness-free zone. Ifhe keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.”
Ouch!
It’s hard to tell, of course, whether Ms. Noonan seriously thought I was comparingmyself to Lincoln, or whether she just took pleasure in filleting me so elegantly. Aspotshots from the press go, it was very mild—and not entirely undeserved.
Still, I was reminded of what my veteran colleagues already knew—that everystatement I made would be subject to scrutiny, dissected by every manner of pundit,interpreted in ways over which I had no control, and combed through for a potentialerror, misstatement, omission, or contradiction that might be filed away by theopposition party and appear in an unpleasant TV ad somewhere down the road. In anenvironment in which a single ill-considered remark can generate more bad publicitythan years of ill-considered policies, it should have come as no surprise to me that onCapitol Hill jokes got screened, irony became suspect, spontaneity was frowned upon,and passion was considered downright dangerous. I started to wonder how long it tookfor a politician to internalize all this; how long before the committee of scribes andeditors and censors took residence in your head; how long before even the “candid”
moments became scripted, so that you choked up or expressed outrage only on cue.
How long before you started sounding like a politician?
There was another lesson to be learned: As soon as Ms. Noonan’s column hit, it wentracing across the Internet, appearing on every right-wing website as proof of what anarrogant, shallow boob I was (just the quote Ms. Noonan selected, and not the essayitself, generally made an appearance on these sites). In that sense, the episode hinted at amore subtle and corrosive aspect of modern media—how a particular narrative, repeatedover and over again and hurled through cyberspace at the speed of light, eventuallybecomes a hard particle of reality; how political caricatures and nuggets of conventionalwisdom lodge themselves in our brain without us ever taking the time to examine them.
For example, it’s hard to find any mention of Democrats these days that doesn’t suggestwe are “weak” and “don’t stand for anything.” Republicans, on the other hand, are“strong” (if a little mean), and Bush is “decisive” no matter how often he changes hismind. A vote or speech by Hillary Clinton that runs against type is immediately labeledcalculating; the same move by John McCain burnishes his maverick credentials. “Bylaw,” according to one caustic observer, my name in any article must be preceded by thewords “rising star”—although Noonan’s piece lays the groundwork for a different ifequally familiar story line: the cautionary tale of a young man who comes toWashington, loses his head with all the publicity, and ultimately becomes eithercalculating or partisan (unless he can somehow manage to move decisively into themaverick camp).
Of course, the PR machinery of politicians and their parties helps feed these narratives,and over the last few election cycles, at least, Republicans have been far better at such“messaging” than the Democrats have been (a cliché that, unfortunately for usDemocrats, really is true). The spin works, though, precisely because the media itselfare hospitable to spin. Every reporter in Washington is working under pressuresimposed by editors and producers, who in turn are answering to publishers or networkexecutives, who in turn are poring over last week’s ratings or last year’s circulationfigures and trying to survive the growing preference for PlayStation and reality TV. Tomake the deadline, to maintain market share and feed the cable news beast, reportersstart to move in packs, working off the same news releases, the same set pieces, thesame stock figures. Meanwhile, for busy and therefore casual news consumers, a well-worn narrative is not entirely unwelcome. It makes few demands on our thought ortime; it’s quick and easy to digest. Accepting spin is easier on everybody.
This element of convenience also helps explain why, even among the most scrupulousreporters, objectivity often means publishing the talking points of different sides of adebate without any perspective on which side might actually be right. A typical storymight begin: “The White House today reported that despite the latest round of tax cuts,the deficit is projected to be cut in half by the year 2010.” This lead will then befollowed by a quote from a liberal analyst attacking the White House numbers and aconservative analyst defending the White House numbers. Is one analyst more crediblethan the other? Is there an independent analyst somewhere who might walk us throughthe numbers? Who knows? Rarely does the reporter have time for such details; the storyis not really about the merits of the tax cut or the dangers of the deficit but rather aboutthe dispute between the parties. After a few paragraphs, the reader can conclude thatRepublicans and Democrats are just bickering again and turn to the sports page, wherethe story line is less predictable and the box score tells you who won.
Indeed, part of what makes the juxtaposition of competing press releases so alluring toreporters is that it feeds that old journalistic standby—personal conflict. It’s hard todeny that political civility has declined in the past decade, and that the parties differsharply on major policy issues. But at least some of the decline in civility arises fromthe fact that, from the press’s perspective, civility is boring. Your quote doesn’t run ifyou say, “I see the other guy’s point of view” or “The issue’s really complicated.” Goon the attack, though, and you can barely fight off the cameras. Often, reporters will goout of their way to stir up the pot, asking questions in such a way as to provoke aninflammatory response. One TV reporter I know back in Chicago was so notorious forfeeding you the quote he wanted that his interviews felt like a Laurel and Hardy routine.
“Do you feel betrayed by the Governor’s decision yesterday?” he would ask me.
“No. I’ve talked to the Governor, and I’m sure we can work out our differences beforethe end of session.”
“Sure…but do you feel betrayed by the Governor?”
“I wouldn’t use that word. His view is that…”
“But isn’t this really a betrayal on the Governor’s part?”
The spin, the amplification of conflict, the indiscriminate search for scandal andmiscues—the cumulative impact of all this is to erode any agreed-upon standards forjudging the truth. There’s a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell aboutDaniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from NewYork. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues overan issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument,blurted out: “Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, but I’m entitled to my own opinion.”
To which Moynihan frostily replied, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you arenot entitled to your own facts.”
Moynihan’s assertion no longer holds. We have no authoritative figure, no WalterCronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictoryclaims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its ownversion of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation. Depending on yourviewing preferences, global climate change is or is not dangerously accelerating; thebudget deficit is going down or going up.
Nor is the phenomenon restricted to reporting on complicated issues. In early 2005,Newsweek published allegations that U.S. guards and interrogators at the GuantanamoBay detention center had goaded and abused prisoners by, among other things, flushinga Koran down the toilet. The White House insisted there was absolutely no truth to thestory. Without hard documentation and in the wake of violent protests in Pakistanregarding the article, Newsweek was forced to publish a self-immolating retraction.
Several months later, the Pentagon released a report indicating that some U.S. personnelat Guantanamo had in fact engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate activity—including instances in which U.S. female personnel pretended to smear menstrual bloodon detainees during questioning, and at least one instance of a guard splashing a Koranand a prisoner with urine. The Fox News crawl that afternoon: “Pentagon finds noevidence of Koran being flushed down the toilet.”
I understand that facts alone can’t always settle our political disputes. Our views onabortion aren’t determined by the science of fetal development, and our judgment onwhether and when to pull troops out of Iraq must necessarily be based on probabilities.
But sometimes there are more accurate and less accurate answers; sometimes there arefacts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether it’s raining can usually besettled by stepping outside. The absence of even rough agreement on the facts putsevery opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtfulcompromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those—like the White House pressoffice—who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately,and with the best backdrop.
Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that there is nogreat reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may becomplicated. The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the mediawon’t have the patience to sort out all the facts and so the public may not know thedifference between truth and falsehood. What comes to matter then is positioning—thestatement on an issue that will avoid controversy or generate needed publicity, thestance that will fit both the image his press folks have constructed for him and one ofthe narrative boxes the media has created for politics in general. The politician may still,as a matter of personal integrity, insist on telling the truth as he sees it. But he does soknowing that whether he believes in his positions matters less than whether he lookslike he believes; that straight talk counts less than whether it sounds straight on TV.
From what I’ve observed, there are countless politicians who have crossed these hurdlesand kept their integrity intact, men and women who raise campaign contributionswithout being corrupted, garner support without being held captive by special interests,and manage the media without losing their sense of self. But there is one final hurdlethat, once you’ve settled in Washington, you cannot entirely avoid, one that is certain tomake at least a sizable portion of your constituency think ill of you—and that is thethoroughly unsatisfactory nature of the legislative process.
I don’t know a single legislator who doesn’t anguish on a regular basis over the votes heor she has to take. There are times when one feels a piece of legislation to be soobviously right that it merits little internal debate (John McCain’s amendmentprohibiting torture by the U.S. government comes to mind). At other times, a billappears on the floor that’s so blatantly one-sided or poorly designed that one wondershow the sponsor can maintain a straight face during debate.
But most of the time, legislation is a murky brew, the product of one hundredcompromises large and small, a blend of legitimate policy aims, political grandstanding,jerry-rigged regulatory schemes, and old-fashioned pork barrels. Often, as I readthrough the bills coming to the floor my first few months in the Senate, I wasconfronted with the fact that the principled thing was less clear than I had originallythought; that either an aye vote or a nay vote would leave me with some trace ofremorse. Should I vote for an energy bill that includes my provision to boost alternativefuel production and improves the status quo, but that’s wholly inadequate to the task oflessening America’s dependence on foreign oil? Should I vote against a change in theClean Air Act that will weaken regulations in some areas but strengthen regulation inothers, and create a more predictable system for corporate compliance? What if the billincreases pollution but funds clean coal technology that may bring jobs to animpoverished part of Illinois?
Again and again I find myself poring over the evidence, pro and con, as best I can in thelimited time available. My staff will inform me that the mail and phone calls are evenlydivided and that interest groups on both sides are keeping score. As the hour approachesto cast my vote, I am frequently reminded of something John F. Kennedy wrote fiftyyears ago in his book Profiles in Courage:
Few, if any, face the same dread finality of decision that confronts a Senator facing animportant call of the roll. He may want more time for his decision—he may believethere is something to be said for both sides—he may feel that a slight amendment couldremove all difficulties—but when that roll is called he cannot hide, he cannotequivocate, he cannot delay—and he senses that his constituency, like the Raven inPoe’s poem, is perched there on his Senate desk, croaking “Nevermore” as he casts thevote that stakes his political future.
That may be a little dramatic. Still, no legislator, state or federal, is immune from suchdifficult moments—and they are always far worse for the party out of power. As amember of the majority, you will have some input in any bill that’s important to youbefore it hits the floor. You can ask the committee chairman to include language thathelps your constituents or eliminate language that hurts them. You can even ask themajority leader or the chief sponsor to hold the bill until a compromise more to yourliking is reached.
If you’re in the minority party, you have no such protection. You must vote yes or no onwhatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be a compromise thateither you or your supporters consider fair or just. In an era of indiscriminate logrollingand massive omnibus spending bills, you can also rest assured that no matter how manybad provisions there are in the bill, there will be something—funding for body armor forour troops, say, or some modest increase in veterans’ benefits—that makes the billpainful to oppose.
In its first term, at least, the Bush White House was a master of such legislativegamesmanship. There’s an instructive story about the negotiations surrounding the firstround of Bush tax cuts, when Karl Rove invited a Democratic senator over to the WhiteHouse to discuss the senator’s potential support for the President’s package. Bush hadwon the senator’s state handily in the previous election—in part on a platform of taxcuts—and the senator was generally supportive of lower marginal rates. Still, he wastroubled by the degree to which the proposed tax cuts were skewed toward the wealthyand suggested a few changes that would moderate the package’s impact.
“Make these changes,” the senator told Rove, “and not only will I vote for the bill, but Iguarantee you’ll get seventy votes out of the Senate.”
“We don’t want seventy votes,” Rove reportedly replied. “We want fifty-one.”
Rove may or may not have thought the White House bill was good policy, but he knewa political winner when he saw one. Either the senator voted aye and helped pass thePresident’s program, or he voted no and became a plump target during the next election.
In the end, the senator—like several red state Democrats—voted aye, which no doubtreflected the prevailing sentiment about tax cuts in his home state. Still, stories like thisillustrate some of the difficulties that any minority party faces in being “bipartisan.”
Everybody likes the idea of bipartisanship. The media, in particular, is enamored withthe term, since it contrasts neatly with the “partisan bickering” that is the dominant storyline of reporting on Capitol Hill.
Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and thatthe quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upongoal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majoritywill be constrained—by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate—to negotiate in good faith. If these conditions do not hold—if nobody outsideWashington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs of thetax cut are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so—themajority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100 percent of what it wants,go on to concede 10 percent, and then accuse any member of the minority party whofails to support this “compromise” of being “obstructionist.” For the minority party insuch circumstances, “bipartisanship” comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled,although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently goingalong with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being “moderate” or“centrist.”
Not surprisingly, there are activists who insist that Democratic senators stand fastagainst any Republican initiative these days—even those initiatives that have somemerit—as a matter of principle. It’s fair to say that none of these individuals has everrun for high public office as a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state, nor hasany been a target of several million dollars’ worth of negative TV ads. What everysenator understands is that while it’s easy to make a vote on a complicated piece oflegislation look evil and depraved in a thirty-second television commercial, it’s veryhard to explain the wisdom of that same vote in less than twenty minutes. What everysenator also knows is that during the course of a single term, he or she will have castseveral thousand votes. That’s a whole lot of potential explaining to do come electiontime.
Per