An Interview with Barack Obama

So what happened was, we were very successful in fundraising, very successful in building big crowds, had a terrific rollout, but suddenly expectations were up to here [raising his left hand head-high] and we were still, we still had an off-Broadway mentality except we were on the Great White Way. So we had a lot of catching up to do. And that, that tendency to set expectations very high for us, very early on, would continue all the way into the summer, and into the debates. ...If you've never been involved in a presidential debate before, I don't care who you are, you're going to be a little guarded, a little awkward, and a little uncertain. ...When I was asked about terrorism, and I didn't immediately say I'd bomb the heck out of somebody, that was sort of jumped upon by the pundits [who said]: "Look, this is an example [of his awkwardness]." ...It wasn't even that my answer was wrong; it was that it showed that I hadn't been in the national spotlight long enough to know that you've got to signify your toughness by blowing somebody up first before you start taking care of the wounded in the event of a terrorist attack. And so it was that we got some very rapid lessons in presidential politics, very quickly.

I'm reminded of reading about you when you went to go play [basketball] with these guys at the University of North Carolina. You got out there for a while and you said, "These guys are big, and they're fast," and it took you a little while to get up to game speed. Was there some of that?
No, it was a little bit different from that, because there was no phase in the campaign where I watched the other candidates and said to myself, "Wow, look at what they're doing." ...We were still in training camp, but in terms of the press's perspective, the game had already begun. And you know, John Edwards had been campaigning for two years at that point. Hillary had essentially been planning for her campaign for a very long time. And those were the two I was being compared to because of our hype and because of the money being raised. And so for me it was more just watching and saying, "All right, the game has started. They've got a head start; we've got to catch up."

And was this the point at which it was said—I'm not sure whether you said it first or someone else said it—but where you made the point, "Hey, we've got to step our game up"?
Well ... I don't remember exactly the timetable. ...The one thing I did understand—and this was from my Senate race, where we were in third place for the entire contest until the last month—what I did understand was that in politics, six months, nine months is an eternity, and so I wasn't nervous about all this. My attitude was "let's just keep on building and learning and improving, and everybody stay steady." There wasn't a lot of shouting or hollering, it was just, "Let's each day get a little bit better and make steady progress."

But it appears as though there was a recalibration at some point, maybe an adjustment in your own organization's assessment of what it was going to take...
I think that we sort of hit a trough in September and October. Because up until that point, I think the feeling was that we were building an organization; we were raising money; we were in the hunt. ...Right after Labor Day, you started seeing this big gap where Hillary started having a twenty-point, twenty-five point lead. The press started getting in that cycle where each story feeds on itself, you know: "Why is this not working?" And people start trying to find explanations for why you're twenty-five points behind, which means you must be an idiot, and some people try to look for an explanation of all the things you've done wrong, and funders start getting nervous and supporters start getting nervous and making suggestions. And people are second-guessing themselves. So we got in one of those negative spirals. It probably reached its nadir in October.

Was this when the fundraisers were grumbling?
Yeah, around that time, this is all roughly around the same time. And the truth was that at that point, I was actually pretty, I had grown . . . in a puzzling kind of way, I was growing more confident that we could win this thing because we had kept pace on the fundraising, because of the fact that in each successive debate, my performance had improved to the point where in the final four or five debates before Iowa, I felt that I was performing on a par with Hillary, even if the press didn't. I felt comfortable with how to communicate in these sound bites, which was not my strength. And because I always had a lot of confidence in our team in Iowa, we had a great organization, wonderful people, who had worked on the ground. The polls in Iowa were not twenty points apart. We felt that we had the best organization in Iowa, so in an odd way I was actually pretty calm.

It was during that period [when] I had that meeting with the fundraisers to give them an assurance that we are going to win this thing and everybody's gotta just stay calm. It was at that point where I did ask my team to pick up the pace. ...We had gotten sluggish, and we had to push ourselves harder. It was at that point where I had to dig deeper and make sure that I was pushing hard. It was at that point where we also realized we were going to have to make our case more clearly, and more directly [explain] why I would be a better president than Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, as opposed to just talking about what I wanted to do and what my plans were for the country. [We realized that] I had to be very specific and say, "I should be president because I can bring the country together. I'm not subject to special interests. I think I will be straight with the American people, and that's what's needed."

What more did you ask of yourself at this point?
Well, you know, I think that ... [here Obama turned to look out of the window and fell silent for a full seventeen seconds]. David Axelrod said something to me very early on, this was actually in the group meeting when we were deciding to run. And he said, "What I worry about most, Barack, about you running, is you may be too normal to win a presidential campaign." And I think what he meant—you can ask him what he meant—but I think what he meant was, I'm not ... [another pause, twelve seconds this time] I'm not just ... I've never felt that my worth is dependent on me winning this presidential campaign, that I have something that I have to prove. There was a time in my life where I had that feeling, because of an absent father, or always being a little bit of an outsider—you can psychoanalyze me and say, "Here's why he's a driven person." But I love my kids and I love my wife, and I love going to the movies without a fuss or reading a good book on a beach somewhere. ...So there were from the start ... some tensions in me about throwing myself into this and being consumed by it, and losing perspective, and losing touch with what were those things I believed were most important in life. I'm not trying to suggest that I'm some sort of reluctant candidate; obviously this is a choice I made. But there was some tension there in my own mind.

Did you have to reconcile yourself with saying, "I'm going to have to spend more time away from my family?" Was that the crux of it?
Well, yeah, not only that, but I have to embrace this path that I've chosen, and not keep on thinking about the path that wasn't chosen. And, and, it was throwing yourself into it and not holding anything back, so I think it was more of a mindset than it was any particular [thing].

Let me change tacks here a little bit. The law of inertia is a law for a reason and in a political campaign or I guess in any endeavor, particularly if things are going well, changing from the course that you're on is not the easy or natural thing to do. Given that you have defied everyone's expectations except maybe your own, as you move into the general ... in terms of figuring out what you need to do better, about where you need to tighten things up, is that made more difficult by the fact that you all have done so well? Do you think you have a clear sense as a campaign...
No, no ... I think that one thing I'm pretty good at is being my own best critic. Nobody's harder on me than me. I think that there are a lot of things that we need to do better, not just to win in November, but also to govern. I'm a firm believer that the habits you establish now carry over. If you're undisciplined now, you'll be undisciplined later. If there are areas of weakness in our organization now, that will reflect itself in my presence, and so ... assuming we're successful in winning the nomination, we're going to have to do a lot of work to retool.

Can you give me one or two examples of things you can do better?
... I think one of the things I said at the beginning of this campaign was that I wanted to block out a lot of time, especially early in the first two or three months of the campaign, to think about issues, because what I didn't want to do was just sort of paint by the numbers when it came to the policy side. I wanted to have conversations with the sharpest minds and the people who are pushing the envelope on health care or energy or education, to really drill down deep and figure out what is going to be ... the menu of options that we have and what are those steps that are most likely to lead us, lead the country, in a better direction. And ... not all that work was done, because the amount of time consumed just with politics, raising money, doing eight town hall meetings a day in Iowa, it just left very little time to devote to that kind of systematic, hard policy work. Now I think that our products, the policies we've offered are ones that I have great confidence in. And I think that our policy team has done a really good job, but my own involvement in us maybe stretching a little further and asking even tougher questions about what policies can really solve our energy crisis, for example, I'm not sure we've done that as well as we should have. ... That was one of the tradeoffs of having to go from zero to sixty—we couldn't do everything exactly as well as we wanted to do. Now, potentially, we have a little more time to do it.