Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (66 page)

Boy reporter. When I completed a six-month internship at the
Villager
, my editors at this venerable community weekly in New York City put together a mock front page to mark the occasion.

Two days after college, I began working at the
Chicago Tribune
. In this reporter scrum, I questioned Jane Byrne, whose improbable election as mayor of Chicago catapulted my career as a political writer.

Tired of merely writing about political actors, I jumped into the action in 1984, managing the upset victory of U.S. senator Paul Simon of Illinois. I was twenty-nine.

I never worked for a more charismatic or entertaining politician than Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, shown here in a billboard photo I staged for his reelection campaign in 1987.

In 1992, I turned down a job with Bill Clinton that I thought would take too much time from my family. When Clinton came to Chicago in the final weeks of the campaign, he signed a poster for my son Michael.

Devastated by our daughter’s lifelong battle with epilepsy, Susan launched Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy. It’s now the largest private funder of epilepsy research in the world.

In 2004, I helped engineer the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. Senate. Here we were shooting an ad in a closed steel mill near where Barack once worked as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side.

For inspiration, Obama kept an iconic photo of a triumphant Muhammad Ali on the wall of his tiny campaign office.

By the summer of 2004, Obama was drawing huge crowds, as his then-six-year-old daughter Malia could see through the window of our campaign RV.

On the road. Sitting in the bleachers at a campaign rally in 2008, chatting with Shailagh Murray of the
Washington Post
.

“Stop the Drama. Vote Obama.” Weary of the marathon battle with Hillary Clinton, communications director Robert Gibbs and I visited reporters in the back of our campaign plane, clad in T-shirts bearing that message.

As the campaign wore on, the “O Team” gained notoriety. This
Newsweek
cover, late in the primary season, featured Valerie Jarrett and me flanking the soon-to-be nominee.

I was shocked to pick up the
New Yorker
and find myself alongside Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, peeking around the corner as the president-elect interviewed candidates for White House dog.