Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

And my constituents. After one town hall meeting in Godfrey, an older gentleman came up and expressed outrage that despite my having opposed the Iraq War, I had not yet called for a full withdrawal of troops. We had a brief and pleasant argument, in which I explained my concern that too precipitous a withdrawal would lead to all-out civil war in the country and the potential for widening conflict throughout the Middle East. At the end of our conversation he shook my hand.

“I still think you’re wrong,” he said, “but at least it seems like you’ve thought about it. Hell, you’d probably disappoint me if you agreed with me all the time.”

“Thanks,” I said. As he walked away, I was reminded of something Justice Louis Brandeis once said: that in a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen.

O NE THING ABOUT being a U.S. senator — you fly a lot. There are the flights back and forth from Washington at least once a week. There are the trips to other states to deliver a speech, raise money, or campaign for your colleagues. If you represent a big state like Illinois, there are flights upstate or downstate, to attend town meetings or ribbon cuttings and to make sure that the folks don’t think you’ve forgotten them.

Most of the time I fly commercial and sit in coach, hoping for an aisle or window seat and crossing my fingers that the guy in front of me doesn’t want to recline.

But there are times when — because I’m making multiple stops on a West Coast swing, say, or need to get to another city after the last commercial flight has left — I fly on a private jet. I hadn’t been aware of this option at first, assuming the cost would be prohibitive. But during the campaign, my staff explained that under Senate rules, a senator or candidate could travel on someone else’s jet and just pay the equivalent of a first-class airfare. After looking at my campaign schedule and thinking about all the time I would save, I decided to give private jets a try.

It turns out that the flying experience is a good deal different on a private jet. Private jets depart from privately owned and managed terminals, with lounges that feature big soft couches and big-screen TVs and old aviation photographs on the walls. The restrooms are generally empty and spotless, and have those mechanical shoe-shine machines and mouthwash and mints in a bowl. There’s no sense of hurriedness at these terminals; the plane is waiting for you if you’re late, ready for you if you’re early. A lot of times you can bypass the lounge altogether and drive your car straight onto the tarmac. Otherwise the pilots will greet you in the terminal, take your bags, and walk you out to the plane.

And the planes, well, they’re nice. The first time I took such a flight, I was on a Citation X, a sleek, compact, shiny machine with wood paneling and leather seats that you could pull together to make a bed anytime you decided you wanted a nap. A shrimp salad and cheese plate occupied the seat behind me; up front, the minibar was fully stocked. The pilots hung up my coat, offered me my choice of newspapers, and asked me if I was comfortable. I was.

Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made sports car grips the road. Shooting through the clouds, I turned on the small TV monitor in front of my seat. A map of the United States appeared, with the image of our plane tracking west, along with our speed, our altitude, our time to destination, and the temperature outside. At forty thousand feet, the plane leveled off, and I looked down at the curving horizon and the scattered clouds, the geography of the earth laid out before me — first the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois, then the python curves of the Mississippi, then more farmland and ranch land and eventually the jagged Rockies, still snow-peaked, until the sun went down and the orange sky narrowed to a thin red line that was finally consumed by night and stars and moon.

I could see how people might get used to this.

The purpose of that particular trip was fund-raising, mostly — in preparation for my general election campaign, several friends and supporters had organized events for me in L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco. But the most memorable part of the trip was a visit that I paid to the town of Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Stanford University and Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the search engine company Google maintains its corporate headquarters.

Google had already achieved iconic status by mid-2004, a symbol not just of the growing power of the Internet but of the global economy’s rapid transformation. On the drive down from San Francisco, I reviewed the company’s history: how two Stanford Ph.D. candidates in computer science, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had collaborated in a dorm room to develop a better way to search the web; how in 1998, with a million dollars raised from various contacts, they had formed Google, with three employees operating out of a garage; how Google figured out an advertising model — based on text ads that were nonintrusive and relevant to the user’s search — that made the company profitable even as the dot-com boom went bust; and how, six years after the company’s founding, Google was about to go public at stock prices that would make Mr. Page and Mr. Brin two of the richest people on earth.

Mountain View looked like a typical suburban California community — quiet streets, sparkling new office parks, unassuming homes that, because of the unique purchasing power of Silicon Valley residents, probably ran a cool million or more. We pulled in front of a set of modern, modular buildings and were met by Google’s general counsel, David Drummond, an African American around my age who’d made the arrangements for my visit.

“When Larry and Sergey came to me looking to incorporate, I figured they were just a couple of really smart guys with another start-up idea,” David said. “I can’t say I expected all this.”

He took me on a tour of the main building, which felt more like a college student center than an office — a café on the ground floor, where the former chef of the Grateful Dead supervised the preparation of gourmet meals for the entire staff; video games and a Ping-Pong table and a fully equipped gym. (“People spend a lot of time here, so we want to keep them happy.”) On the second floor, we passed clusters of men and women in jeans and T-shirts, all of them in their twenties, working intently in front of their computer screens, or sprawled on couches and big rubber exercise balls, engaged in animated conversation.

Eventually we found Larry Page, talking to an engineer about a software problem. He was dressed like his employees and, except for a few traces of early gray in his hair, didn’t look any older. We spoke about Google’s mission — to organize all of the world’s information into a universally accessible, unfiltered, and usable form — and the Google site index, which already included more than six billion web pages. Recently the company had launched a new web-based email system with a built-in search function; they were working on technology that would allow you to initiate a voice search over the telephone, and had already started the Book Project, the goal of which was to scan every book ever published into a web-accessible format, creating a virtual library that would store the entirety of human knowledge.

Toward the end of the tour, Larry led me to a room where a three-dimensional image of the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor. Larry asked the young Indian American engineer who was working nearby to explain what we were looking at.

“These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now,” the engineer said. “Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way”—he caused the screen to alter—“you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.”