Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (40 page)

I needn’t have worried. A few hours later, when I returned with Obama for the speech, the plaza was overflowing. So was the boulevard beyond it, with people stretching back blocks toward the Brandenburg Gate, some hoisting handmade signs with the Obama logo, or the words “Yes We Can!” Riding past this assembly with Barack and Ben Rhodes, I was blown away by the sheer size of the crowd. “Boy, the Germans are a lot nicer than my grandparents made them out to be,” I said. Yet it wasn’t just Germans. People had come from all over the Continent to see Barack, a stunning outpouring of affection after all the anti-American sentiment that had welled up in Europe during the Bush years.

“The day I raise my hand to take that oath of office . . . the world will look at us differently,” Barack had said back when Michelle challenged him to articulate what he could uniquely bring to the campaign. As I surveyed this remarkable crowd, more than two hundred thousand strong, I fully appreciated just how right he had been. Whatever our foibles, America remains a beacon for much of the world. The folks who turned out in Berlin also yearned for change, and welcomed a new American leader, a black man, whose expansive and inclusive views along with his inspiring personal story spoke to a universal ideal that gave them hope for the future.

The speech Barack gave had to strike a delicate balance, urging greater global cooperation without disparaging America or attacking Bush on foreign soil. If he appeared to cast his country or his president in a negative light, it would backfire at home. To assure that this wouldn’t happen, I had read multiple drafts from Rhodes, a young writer and student of history every bit as gifted as Favreau. Barack, with his edits, had taken the speech to another level. By the time Obama walked down the runway, I had every confidence it would be one of his best ever, a speech that could have been delivered in the shadows of Kennedy and Reagan at the historic Brandenburg Gate.

Framed by the stirring story of the Berlin Airlift and, more than forty years later, the demolition of the wall that had divided East and West, his speech made a passionate case for the new spirit of collaboration between peoples that was required to tackle the huge challenges facing an ever-shrinking and interconnected world.

“Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the only way, the one way to protect our common security and advance our common humanity,” he said. “That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow
new
walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

In time, the challenge of overcoming ancient rivalries, of rising above parochial political concerns and advancing democracy in places with no history or institutions to support it, would prove far more daunting than we had hoped or imagined on that glorious day in Berlin. Stubborn realities would intrude, often frustrating the vision of meaningful global cooperation Barack articulated in the Tiergarten. Yet on that day, looking out at the vast, cheering crowd from a discreet perch behind Barack, I believed, as Obama surely did, that anything was possible.

The trip almost came off without a hitch but for a couple of exceptions. One was a phony theory peddled by the right-wing echo chamber suggesting that Obama canceled a trip to an American military base in Germany to visit with servicemen and -women wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan because he couldn’t bring cameras with him. The second problem was never aired publicly, but it had long-term repercussions.

Maureen Dowd, the talented but tart columnist for the
Times
, was traveling with us and was granted a brief interview with Obama. When we brought her to the front of the plane for the interview, however, Obama proceeded to blister her for a previous column she had written. No one got under Barack’s skin more than Maureen, whose penchant for delving into the psyches of her subjects was particularly irritating to the self-possessed Obama. Normally polite under any circumstances, he was patronizing and disrespectful to Maureen in a way that I had rarely seen. This was not well received by Dowd who, like most journalists, was accustomed to firing off salvos, yet decidedly uncomfortable when fired upon herself. After that awkward encounter, she seemed to take particular delight in psychoanalyzing Barack and belittling him in print, which only deepened his contempt. Maureen, who is as gracious and loyal to her friends as she is rough on the high and mighty, would become a friend of mine in Washington, which became a minor source of tension with Obama. “Why are you friends with her?” he would demand after Maureen sent one of her acid darts his way.

Meanwhile, I was delighted to see that the stories from back home reported that McCain’s team was “seething” over Obama’s elevated treatment by world leaders and the international media. The footage of Obama amid the frenzied, adoring crowds would later be used in a McCain ad portraying Barack as the Paris Hilton of politics, basking in unearned celebrity. It was the preposterous contrivance of a campaign rendered powerless in the face of the torrent of positive coverage Obama was receiving on the trip.

 • • • 

By the time Obama traveled overseas, the VP selection process was well under way. A team of lawyers had spent weeks quietly vetting potential candidates, under the direction of Eric Holder and Caroline Kennedy, with strong input from Plouffe and our campaign attorney, Bob Bauer. I asked Harstad and Binder to conduct some very discreet polling and focus groups. In addition to testing various contenders, I wanted to know what people were looking for in Obama’s running mate. Not surprisingly, they wanted more of what Barack didn’t have. Governors were considered appealing for their executive experience, but more than that, folks were looking for someone with a little gray hair. They thought Obama represented sufficient change by himself, and preferred as his backstop a candidate with long experience in Washington and a deep résumé on national security.

Plouffe and I would brief Barack periodically. He wasn’t dismissive of the political considerations, but knew that if he won the White House, this would have been his first and most significant personnel decision. He was intent on finding someone who could not only help us win the election, but also bring value to the administration. Above all, he wanted someone who would be ready to take over if disaster struck. Though I never asked him about it, it seemed to me that a sense of his own mortality loomed somewhat large in the mind of the first African American to be this close to the presidency. He knew he could be choosing a future president.

In the end, the process winnowed down to four, and then three. The names that emerged were Biden, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Governors Tim Kaine of Virginia and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, though Sebelius didn’t make the final cut. In the political calculus, we concluded that we could pass on Hillary, but not for another woman.

In the midst of the search process, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, called to make a surprising recommendation. Reid floated the name of Robert Gates, Bush’s defense secretary, who had made a strongly positive impression after succeeding the terminally arrogant Donald Rumsfeld. Gates certainly had the gray hair, Washington experience, and national security credentials, but he was a Republican, and despite Obama’s vow to end the red state/blue state divides, there wasn’t much public appetite for such a fusion ticket. It was an intriguing suggestion, but never seriously considered.

I also got a call from Caroline.

“I’m here with Uncle Teddy,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.” Kennedy was home in Hyannis Port, where he was recovering from brain surgery to remove a malignant tumor. After a few minutes of small talk, Kennedy raised the vice-presidential search. The names of the front-runners had now leaked, which was natural, given the amount of vetting that had to be done.

“Joe Biden is a great guy,” Teddy said, in his familiar, though slightly labored, Bah-ston accent. “I can’t say a bad word about him.” Next he turned to Evan Bayh. Bayh’s father, Birch, also had served in the Senate and had once saved Kennedy’s life, pulling him from the wreckage of a small plane in which they had been flying. “His father is a great friend of mine. Great guy,” Kennedy said. “I just don’t know the son very well.” Since Kennedy had served with the younger Bayh for nearly a decade, I assumed he was making a point. “And I just don’t know Governor Kaine much at all. I’m sure he’s a good man. I just don’t know him.”

Kennedy then got to the point of the call. “Have you thought about John Kerry?” he asked. “He’s smart, he’s experienced, he has debated before and did very well.” Kennedy’s loyalty was impressive. The support he gave to his longtime ally from Massachusetts at a critical juncture in 2004 helped Kerry win the Iowa caucuses and the nomination. Now, fighting a mortal illness, Kennedy was calling from his sickbed to tout Kerry again. Yet choosing the last presidential nominee for the second spot seemed odd, and the idea never went anywhere.

Obama held a series of clandestine interviews with the finalists during the first week of August, and then asked Plouffe and me to do the same. So as Barack and his family took off for a vacation in Hawaii, David and I headed east in a small chartered jet for a whirlwind day of meetings with all three candidates.

The favorite was still Joe Biden, for all the reasons Barack had laid out in May. Biden had come through our polling project on top. Barack had interviewed him a couple of days earlier, in Minnesota, and had been impressed. Biden asked for no formal portfolio as vice president but very much wanted to play the role of consigliere, advising the president on all key decisions. “I want your advice, Joe,” Obama replied. “I just want it in ten-minute, not sixty-minute, increments!” The shot was playful, but the concern was real. Biden had shown admirable restraint in the debates, but he still could not shake his penchant for talking in a long, rambling fashion.

Plouffe and I landed midmorning in Wilmington, Delaware, and were greeted at the charter terminal by Biden’s wife, Jill, and his son Beau, who was the attorney general of Delaware. The Biden family story was well known. Shortly after he was elected to the Senate in 1972, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and his daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident. Beau, then three, and another son, Hunter, who was two, were seriously injured in the crash. Biden kept vigil by their bedsides, and considered renouncing his Senate seat in order to care for the young boys. Instead, he would commute each day to Washington from Wilmington, becoming Amtrak’s greatest patron. In 1977 he married Jill, a vivacious schoolteacher, who added stability to the family. Together, they added a daughter, Ashley.

In the brief drive to our secret rendezvous with Biden, I was charmed by Jill and Beau, and struck by their close and seemingly easy relationship. They asked about our families, and spoke about theirs with a warmth and old-fashioned wholesomeness that—and perhaps this reflects only on the odd world of politics—seemed remarkably normal and unconstrained by their prominent places in the public eye. A few minutes after we arrived at the home of Biden’s sister, Valerie Owens, the senator drove up in a pickup truck wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, in keeping with the clandestine nature of our meeting. Before Beau drove off and left us to our interview, Biden kissed him good-bye. “I may come by later to see the kids,” he told his son, an Iraq War veteran and rising star in Delaware politics. Maybe because I lost my dad so young, I was touched by this simple expression of love between a father and his grown son. “There’s something special about this family,” I told Barack later when I was debriefing him on our trip.

In our interview, Biden did nothing to dispel our concerns about his verbosity. Even as we expressed that concern, he would respond in ten- or fifteen-minute bursts, coming up for air only long enough to inquire, “Do you understand what I’m saying here?” or “Am I making sense?” Yet when you cut through the hail of words, Biden
was
making sense. He was genuinely impressive, disarmingly candid, and just plain likable.

“You know, I ran for president because I thought I would be the best president, and I still do,” he said honestly, leaning in for emphasis. “But what, one percent of the people in Iowa agreed with me? And I was done. Barack got the nomination and now I want to help him win this election and govern. I like being a senator, but this is such an important election and such an important time. It’s just so important that he succeed.”

In what amounted to a two-hour monologue, Biden talked about the world, the middle class, the challenges and opportunities America faced, and how he might be helpful to Obama as a running mate. I was so transfixed that we were halfway back to the airport in Biden’s truck before I realized I had left my briefcase sitting by the poolside table where we’d met.

Our next stop was the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, where Evan Bayh, his wife, Susan, and their young twin sons were vacationing. Bayh, barefooted and in shorts, greeted us in his suite. He once was the Boy Wonder of Indiana politics, elected to statewide office at the age of thirty and governor two years later. He had benefitted from his father’s name, but shared little of his warmth or populist bent. Bayh was an avowed centrist who had won five statewide elections as a Democrat in a conservative state by hewing closely to the low-tax, small-government line. Now fifty-two, and in his second term in the Senate, Bayh was ready to move on. He had briefly explored a campaign for president, but found little traction.

Bayh had an impressive résumé and came from a state that would be in play for the Democrats for the first time in forty-four years. Still, I was struck by how low-key, even flat, he seemed. Maybe it was that we had just spent two hours with Joltin’ Joe, but I was a bit concerned by how little emotion Bayh displayed when he spoke, be it about family or the critical issues facing the nation. He presented himself more like an MBA interviewing for a senior management position at Whirlpool. Next to that of Biden, who spoke energetically, in big, historical terms, Bayh’s vision of the vice-presidential role and the times we lived in seemed decidedly small. As we made our way back to the plane, Plouffe and I agreed: Bayh would be a safe but uninspiring choice.