MY SWEARING IN to the U.S. Senate in January 2005 completed a process thathad begun the day I announced my candidacy two years earlier—the exchange of arelatively anonymous life for a very public one.
To be sure, many things have remained constant. Our family still makes its home inChicago. I still go to the same Hyde Park barbershop to get my hair cut, Michelle and Ihave the same friends over to our house as we did before the election, and our daughtersstill run through the same playgrounds.
Still, there’s no doubt that the world has changed profoundly for me, in ways that Idon’t always care to admit. My words, my actions, my travel plans, and my tax returnsall end up in the morning papers or on the nightly news broadcast. My daughters have toendure the interruptions of well-meaning strangers whenever their father takes them tothe zoo. Even outside of Chicago, it’s becoming harder to walk unnoticed throughairports.
As a rule, I find it difficult to take all this attention very seriously. After all, there aredays when I still walk out of the house with a suit jacket that doesn’t match my suitpants. My thoughts are so much less tidy, my days so much less organized than theimage of me that now projects itself into the world, that it makes for occasional comicmoments. I remember the day before I was sworn in, my staff and I decided we shouldhold a press conference in our office. At the time, I was ranked ninety-ninth in seniority,and all the reporters were crammed into a tiny transition office in the basement of theDirksen Office Building, across the hall from the Senate supply store. It was my firstday in the building; I had not taken a single vote, had not introduced a single bill—indeed I had not even sat down at my desk when a very earnest reporter raised his handand asked, “Senator Obama, what is your place in history?”
Even some of the other reporters had to laugh.
Some of the hyperbole can be traced back to my speech at the 2004 DemocraticConvention in Boston, the point at which I first gained national attention. In fact, theprocess by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mysteryto me. I had met John Kerry for the first time after the Illinois primary, when I spoke athis fund-raiser and accompanied him to a campaign event highlighting the importanceof job-training programs. A few weeks later, we got word that the Kerry people wantedme to speak at the convention, although it was not yet clear in what capacity. Oneafternoon, as I drove back from Springfield to Chicago for an evening campaign event,Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill called to deliver the news. After I hung up, Iturned to my driver, Mike Signator.
“I guess this is pretty big,” I said.
Mike nodded. “You could say that.”
I had only been to one previous Democratic convention, the 2000 Convention in LosAngeles. I hadn’t planned to attend that convention; I was just coming off my defeat inthe Democratic primary for the Illinois First Congressional District seat, and wasdetermined to spend most of the summer catching up on work at the law practice thatI’d left unattended during the campaign (a neglect that had left me more or less broke),as well as make up for lost time with a wife and daughter who had seen far too little ofme during the previous six months.
At the last minute, though, several friends and supporters who were planning to goinsisted that I join them. You need to make national contacts, they told me, for whenyou run again—and anyway, it will be fun. Although they didn’t say this at the time, Isuspect they saw a trip to the convention as a bit of useful therapy for me, on the theorythat the best thing to do after getting thrown off a horse is to get back on right away.
Eventually I relented and booked a flight to L.A. When I landed, I took the shuttle toHertz Rent A Car, handed the woman behind the counter my American Express card,and began looking at the map for directions to a cheap hotel that I’d found near VeniceBeach. After a few minutes the Hertz woman came back with a look of embarrassmenton her face.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Obama, but your card’s been rejected.”
“That can’t be right. Can you try again?”
“I tried twice, sir. Maybe you should call American Express.”
After half an hour on the phone, a kindhearted supervisor at American Expressauthorized the car rental. But the episode served as an omen of things to come. Notbeing a delegate, I couldn’t secure a floor pass; according to the Illinois Party chairman,he was already inundated with requests, and the best he could do was give me a passthat allowed entry only onto the convention site. I ended up watching most of thespeeches on various television screens scattered around the Staples Center, occasionallyfollowing friends or acquaintances into skyboxes where it was clear I didn’t belong. ByTuesday night, I realized that my presence was serving neither me nor the DemocraticParty any apparent purpose, and by Wednesday morning I was on the first flight back toChicago.
Given the distance between my previous role as a convention gate-crasher and mynewfound role as convention keynoter, I had some cause to worry that my appearance inBoston might not go very well. But perhaps because by that time I had becomeaccustomed to outlandish things happening in my campaign, I didn’t feel particularlynervous. A few days after the call from Ms. Cahill, I was back in my hotel room inSpringfield, making notes for a rough draft of the speech while watching a basketballgame. I thought about the themes that I’d sounded during the campaign—thewillingness of people to work hard if given the chance, the need for government to helpprovide a foundation for opportunity, the belief that Americans felt a sense of mutualobligation toward one another. I made a list of the issues I might touch on—health care,education, the war in Iraq.
But most of all, I thought about the voices of all the people I’d met on the campaigntrail. I remembered Tim Wheeler and his wife in Galesburg, trying to figure out how toget their teenage son the liver transplant he needed. I remembered a young man in EastMoline named Seamus Ahern who was on his way to Iraq—the desire he had to servehis country, the look of pride and apprehension on the face of his father. I remembered ayoung black woman I’d met in East St. Louis whose name I never would catch, but whotold me of her efforts to attend college even though no one in her family had evergraduated from high school.
It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it wastheir determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. Itbrought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., had once used ina sermon.
The audacity of hope.
That was the best of the American spirit, I thought—having the audacity to believedespite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to anation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of ajob or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control—and therefore responsibility—over our own fate.
It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spiritof hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story, and my own storyto those of the voters I sought to represent.
I turned off the basketball game and started to write.
A FEW WEEKS later, I arrived in Boston, caught three hours’ sleep, and traveled frommy hotel to the Fleet Center for my first appearance on Meet the Press. Toward the endof the segment, Tim Russert put up on the screen an excerpt from a 1996 interview withthe Cleveland Plain-Dealer that I had forgotten about entirely, in which the reporter hadasked me—as someone just getting into politics as a candidate for the Illinois statesenate—what I thought about the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
The convention’s for sale, right…. You’ve got these $10,000-a-plate dinners, GoldenCircle Clubs. I think when the average voter looks at that, they rightly feel they’ve beenlocked out of the process. They can’t attend a $10,000 breakfast. They know that thosewho can are going to get the kind of access they can’t imagine.
After the quote was removed from the screen, Russert turned to me. “A hundred andfifty donors gave $40 million to this convention,” he said. “It’s worse than Chicago,using your standards. Are you offended by that, and what message does that send theaverage voter?”
I replied that politics and money were a problem for both parties, but that John Kerry’svoting re............