I’ve voraciously devoured all the post-election analyses and commentary that I can get my hands on, and the best two I’ve read so far are obviously Newsweek’s lengthy but insightful reporting from inside the campaign (every presidential election, Newsweek reporters get a unique insider view on the condition that they don’t report anything until after Election Day) and Ron Suskind’s article in this past week’s NY Times Magazine. I’ve read the Newsweek piece twice now (and trust me, it’s long), but I’ll quote from Suskind’s piece because, as usual, he writes with a succint beauty that is conducive for distilling narratives down into a handful of memorable and bloggable bites:
On an early meeting with key supporters before the Iowa caucus, when Obama was trailing badly in the polls:
Obama explained that day that they were running a different kind of campaign, a real grass-roots campaign, one that grew from the bottom up, from the dirt, and that it takes time for those roots to take hold. And the heavy hitters nodded; yes, they understood that idea, but it wasn’t working. The polls were the proof. They showed Clinton with a double-digit lead.
And Jarrett can remember how Obama looked at them, hard-eyed, everything on the line. “ ‘Did you think I was kidding when I said this was the unlikely journey?’ ” Jarrett recalls him saying. “‘You thought this would be simple? No, change is never simple. Change is hard.
“ ‘Listen, I know you’re nervous,’ he went on. ‘But if you’re nervous, I’ll hold your hand. We’re going to get through this together. And if we win Iowa, we’ll win this country.’ ”
Jarrett said: “He turned their emotion around. He made sense of it. He told them why we were there and what was within our grasp. And people became jubilant. You never heard cheering like that. That was the turn, where it happened.”
Of course, the roots took hold in Iowa and spread state to state. And now, the day before Election Day, Team Obama was running though fields of tall grass, city to city, in the final day of a kind of electoral mystery tour.
At a meeting in late 2006 with close friends and advisers, the decision on whether he should run or not still hangs in the air:
It was Michelle, Axelrod remembers, who stopped the show. “You need to ask yourself, Why do you want to do this?” she said directly. “What are hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?”
Obama sat quietly for a moment, and everyone waited. “This I know: When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently,” he said. “And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently.”
Why this was so unstoppable for McCain and the tattered party of Bush:
McCain, like Obama, is a storyteller. All the best leaders are. Which is why he couldn’t have failed to see that his story — of the freed prisoner from a failed war who rose to greatness — was a story with roots sunk too deeply in the past for this moment. This is even more true for the president that Obama will soon replace. Bush, locked in his Oedipal struggles — father and son, World War II and Vietnam, a faded generation and a fading one — again and again mistook rigidity for fortitude and never really evolved in office, as all presidents must. He rose up, using his innate trust of emotion and impulse, to meet the first challenges of 9/11, but then froze solid. At a time when the nation’s challenges, so fresh, so fast-moving, so startling, demanded constant reappraisal and response, he — the child of a president — thought it was about him: his issues, his battles, his heart. It’s not, at least not now.
Tags: obama
