An Interview with Barack Obama

And her biggest hesitation was concern about the impact on your family, or concern for your safety?
Mostly the impact on the family—the impact on her, the impact on the girls, my absence, our loss of privacy. Michelle is not somebody who defines herself by my political success or defines our family by my political success. She's much more interested in me being a good father, and her having support, our kids doing well, and so her belief that this was worth it and that our family could manage the stresses and strains was probably the most important piece to the puzzle. I think a second part, the second piece to the puzzle, was her conclusion that I could win, that I wasn't the odds on favorite, but that it was possible for me to pull this off. And I think the final piece was the sense that there were no guarantees, but I might just be able to break through the partisanship, the gridlock that had existed for the last 20 years, and offer a fresh perspective in our politics at a time when our country needed a clean break from the past.

When Michelle was processing this and grappling with this question herself, what role did you take? Did you give her space? Did she have questions for you?
She had questions, but her initial instinct was to say no. Her initial instinct was that we had just gotten off of the U.S. Senate campaign, we had finally stabilized a little bit, the girls were getting older, she knew how difficult it was for me to be away from the girls, she feels lonely when I'm not around, so her initial instinct was not to do it. And I think she also felt that the Clintons were tough and that I would be subject to a lot of attacks. She felt that eight years later I would be in a stronger position and less vulnerable to attack. She doesn't like to see her husband attacked.

Now you're a pretty persuasive guy. Did you do much in the way of trying to persuade her, or did you just leave it with her and let her find her way?
We just talked it through. It wasn't as if it was a slam-dunk for me. I think part of the reason she agreed to do it was because she knew that she had veto power, that she and the girls ultimately mattered more than my own ambitions in this process, and that if she said no, we would be ok.

The point at which she said ok, do you remember that well?
No. I'm sure, by the way, that she was influenced by other people, who might have been stronger advocates for the notion that now is the time, than even I was.

There had to have been some range of opinion amongst the people close to you about whether it was a good idea. Can you give me any sense of who was where? Do you have an institutional skeptic among your friends?
I think everybody just tried to be as objective as possible. I think we all were of the same mindset, which was, this will be a daunting and difficult task, and there is a high price to it, but it may be worth it, and so I think it was a very systematic deliberation, it wasn't as if there were two people who were saying yes, and two people who were saying no, and I was weighing it back and forth. I think everybody was a mix of yes and no. Everybody was excited about the prospect of mounting a campaign. I think everybody had an instinct that the country might be looking for something new, but everybody I think was also mindful that the odds weren't in our favor and that it would exact a significant personal toll.

Give me your own sense of the Clintons and how they factored into your own decision. You said that Michelle was worried about them and knew they were tough, and I'm sure you thought they were tough too, but in deciding that you were going to run, clearly you must have decided that you could take them.
Well . . . my view of the Clintons has always been generally favorable. As I've written in my book, I think that Bill Clinton was a very important figure in helping to steer the Democratic Party out of the wilderness. I think he's as smart and effective a politician as we've seen. You know, he and I sort of have roughly similar perspectives on where ... let me put it this way, I think he is instinctively a pragmatist and not an ideologue, and so I think we share some sympathies there. And with respect to Hillary, I've always viewed her as extraordinarily smart, as disciplined a person as I've ever seen ... a more effective communicator than she is given credit for. My instinct was, though, that given all of their history, they could not reset the country, they could not move us past some of the old arguments. And so ... it wasn't so much that I didn't think Senator Clinton could win, which some people have voiced. It was more of an assessment of whether she would be able to govern and move the big issues forward. My assessment was that they were going to be very tough because they had a 20-year head start in building a political operation that was as good as anything out there.

Yet, even taking that into consideration, you still gave yourself a shot.
You know, this isn't all science. Some of it is just feeling. And there was a feeling that the country was searching for something. And we could see it. I had done my book signing in October, and there was just this remarkable, visceral response, not all of it justified by me, it was more ... that I had become a symbol for the next thing. So some of it was undeserved, but what it told me was that people really were looking for something different. I joked with my team—and it wasn't entirely a joke, it's something I still think about—that the country was looking for a Barack Obama. Now, I'm not sure that I am Barack Obama, right? But they were looking for an idea like that. It was an idea that we're moving into a different phase of politics, and we're moving past the old racial divisions, and we're moving past some of the sharply ideological arguments, and we're trying to, in a very practical, concrete, common sense way, solve some problems that we can't put off any longer, and that we've got to try to be real honest with the American people about this and treat them like adults. I always felt as if I were an imperfect vessel for that idea, but I have a pretty strong instinct that that particular message might resonate with the American people right now.

Let's talk about the summer after you guys got in the race, about that period where the feeling was that you guys were kind of in the doldrums ...
Let's back up. ...Before we get there, a couple of things happened. Number one, we were stunned with our fundraising success. Keep in mind that we basically outraised [Hillary Clinton] in that first quarter, something that nobody expected, least of all, me. And so, in some ways, that created a set of outsized expectations. I think everybody was shocked, and having set the bar real high, suddenly we were no longer the underdogs we expected to be. The sense was that somehow we were this phenomenon, and the hype built around that in what I think was an unhealthy way, because I was still learning my way. The same thing happened, by the way, in our rallies. ...Just in those first couple of months after the announcement, none of us thought we'd have 17,000 people at the announcement, in seven-degree weather. In that first couple of months, it was like we defied gravity. We got 23,000 people in Austin, Texas, the month after I had announced.

And that did a couple of things. It confirmed my instinct that the country really was hungry for something fresh and new. On the other hand, it put us immediately in the spotlight at a time when we were still trying to work out the kinks of our organization, and I was certainly trying to work out the kinks of my own presentation. My stump speech back then ... people would see these huge crowds and all the reporters were writing, "Oh his stump is kind of uninspired." Well, what I had done in my U.S. Senate race was develop my stump organically. I wouldn't necessarily write it all down. I'd try different things and refine them until it really worked. The difference in the Senate race was, I had six months where I was just talking to crowds of 50 people and 100 people, or I was in somebody's living room, without a camera. Suddenly, day one [of the campaign], people are thinking, "Every time he comes out we want him to be as good as he was at the convention speech." And that was a speech I had taken three weeks or four weeks to write and had memorized. So I think that caught us off guard.

I remember that there was an SEIU health care forum, and it was before the first debate. And all the candidates were just supposed to be presenting our views on health care. And because our policy team wasn't all that well worked out, I had a pretty good sense of where I wanted to go on health care, but we hadn't unveiled our health care plan ... we went in there a little casual. I sat down and had kind of a general conversation about health care the way I would if I were on Charlie Rose or something, and you know, Hillary was standing up, and she gave a full-blown presentation. And Edwards had already come out with his plan and was very specific about what he wanted to do. We just got ripped in the press, "Oh look, Obama; he's unprepared; he's amateurish."