Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

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 the threshold of what it would take to be credible. To make matters worse, my race featured what many politicians consider their worst nightmare: a self-financing candidate with bottomless pockets. His name was Blair Hull, and he had sold his financial trading business to Goldman Sachs a few years earlier for $531 million. Undoubtedly he had a genuine, if undefined, desire to serve, and by all accounts he was a brilliant man. But on the campaign trail he was almost painfully shy, with the quirky, inward manner of someone who’d spent most of his life alone in front of a computer screen. I suspect that like many people, he figured that being a politician — unlike being a doctor or airline pilot or plumber — required no special expertise in anything useful, and that a businessman like himself could perform at least as well, and probably better, than any of the professional pols he saw on TV. In fact, Mr. Hull viewed his facility with numbers as an invaluable asset: At one point in the campaign, he divulged to a reporter a mathematical formula that he’d developed for winning campaigns, an algorithm that began

Probability = 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 in April or May, when I pulled out of the circular driveway of my condo complex on the way to the office and was greeted by row upon row of large red, white, and blue lawn signs marching up and down the block. BLAIR HULL FOR U.S. SENATE, the signs read, and for the next five miles I saw them on every street and along every major thoroughfare, in every direction and in every nook and cranny, in barbershop windows and posted on abandoned buildings, in front of bus stops and behind grocery store counters — 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’t judge a race by how many signs a candidate has. But nobody in Illinois had ever seen during 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 of paid workers could yank up everybody else’s yard signs and replace them with Hull signs in the span of a single evening. We began to read about certain neighborhood leaders in the black community who had suddenly decided that Mr. Hull was a champion of the inner city, certain downstate leaders who extolled Mr. Hull’s support of the family farm. And then the television ads hit, six months out and ubiquitous until Election Day, on every station around the state around the clock — Blair Hull with seniors, Blair Hull with children, Blair Hull ready to take back Washington from the special interests. By January 2004, Mr. Hull had moved into first place in the polls and my 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 exactly four weeks of television ads, and given this fact it probably didn’t make sense for us to blow the entire campaign budget in August. Everybody just needed to be patient, I would tell supporters. Stay confident. Don’t panic. Then I’d hang up the phone, look out the 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 myself if perhaps it was time to panic after all.

In many ways, I was luckier than most candidates in such circumstances. For whatever reason, at some point my campaign began to generate that mysterious, elusive quality of momentum, of buzz; it became fashionable among wealthy donors to promote my cause, and small donors around the state began sending checks through the Internet at a pace we had never anticipated. Ironically, my dark-horse status protected me from some of 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 of Conservation 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 poll numbers 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 campaign imploded 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 to victory. 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 sums of money. By the end of the campaign, the banter and small talk that had once accompanied my solicitation calls were eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not to take no for an answer.

But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means — law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.

And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways — I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways — I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with 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 rural parts of the state.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every 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 old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.