An Interview with Barack Obama

In May of 2008, NEWSWEEK's Daren Briscoe interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama during a campaign flight from Oregon to Chicago. It had taken months to secure the interview—months during which Obama and his team had put off requests to interview him for a special reporting project culminating in a book entitled "A Long Time Coming," by Evan Thomas and Newsweek staff, to be published Jan. 12 by Public Affairs.

It was an opportunity to step back from the daily churn of the campaign, and talk big-picture stuff: how Obama had decided to run, what had made him think, at the outset, that he could best Hillary Clinton, how he and the campaign had weathered some rough going in the early months of the campaign. To this point, Briscoe's requests had fallen on unsympathetic ears. "We're trying to win a nomination," he was told repeatedly, and it was hard to argue with that—having witnessed firsthand what a grueling campaign schedule Obama had and how completely full his days were, from before dawn to well after midnight most days. Finally, though, the campaign relented. Just a few days before, with the number of primary contests dwindling, and Hillary needing a game-changing turn of fortune, Obama had carried the North Carolina primary by nearly 15 percentage points, and had fought Clinton to a near-draw in Indiana, where she won by a single point. "We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and no one is going to dispute it," Tim Russert said that night.

Briscoe recalls the mood as he was waved to the front section of Obama's plane, at this, a pivotal juncture in what would become an historic campaign.

"Come on up," said Robert Gibbs, Obama's spokesman, extending an invitation that was the only real sign of the campaign's optimism. Although Obama had already started talking about the general election and recalibrating his stump speech to focus less on Clinton, more on McCain, there were no outward signs of celebration; it was business as usual within a very businesslike campaign. Gibbs escorted me to Obama's first-class row, where the senator sat at the window, reading a copy of The New Yorker. Obama looked up, said hello, and asked me to sit. On the advice of one of Obama's best friends, who thought that Obama would respond well to my somewhat unconventional path into journalism, I started to tell him a bit about my background, but I had stumbled over only a couple of awkward sentences when Obama broke in and said, "I have a suggestion. Why don't you just ask me some questions? I want to make sure you maximize your time. You don't need to make me feel comfortable with you; if I didn't trust you, you wouldn't be here." I was immediately struck by Obama's focus, so intense that it almost felt like a physical force.

By this point in the campaign, I'd seen Obama interviewed dozens of times, and heard him answer hundreds, if not thousands of questions. After some early struggles, he'd almost mastered campaign-speak, the dull art of condensing any answer to any question into a talking point. But as we began to talk, it quickly became apparent that he wasn't in campaign mode. Away from the unblinking eyes of the TV cameras that tracked him at every debate, and from the brace of microphones at every campaign stop that recorded his every utterance, later to be pored over for any gaffe or possible gaffe, Obama seemed more at ease. His speech fell into the natural pattern that his advisers had tried to drum out of him, full of pensive pauses and compound sentences. At one point, when I asked Obama what more he'd asked of himself, during a difficult stretch in the campaign where he'd asked his team to redouble their efforts, he paused for a full seventeen seconds before answering. Obama is fiercely intelligent and characteristically confident, but what I remember most was how self-aware he seemed, with a grasp of his own strengths as well as weaknesses and a keen sense of other people's reactions to him. I found the interview fascinating—a revealing glimpse into a man who I suspect even then had a quiet confidence that he would be the nation's next president.

What follows are excerpts from Briscoe's spring interview with Obama, from the forthcoming book—a snapshot of a candidate on a path to power that culminates Jan. 20, when he is sworn in as the nation's 44th president. Some of the questions have been edited for conciseness and clarity, and extraneous material omitted.

NEWSWEEK: Going back to the period where you were deciding whether to run or not, I'm very curious about what you wanted to hear when you sat around with your friends and advisers. What were you looking for in terms of what you hoped to hear from them?
Barack Obama: Well, the first question was, could I win? And I think that's something that I needed to get some very objective assessments of, because one of the things that I've always been suspicious of is the hype that surrounded my entry into the U.S. Senate. I wanted to make sure that we hadn't fallen prey to hype and believing our own press, so I wanted to test in very concrete terms and push very hard on the question of whether we could win. Since we assumed that we had a strong field, including Sen. Clinton and John Edwards.

The second question, which had more to do with conversations between Michelle and myself on which we needed some feedback from the staff who had been through a presidential election, was how it would have an impact on our family. And that actually was the most important question, but unless we crossed the threshold where we could win, the second one became moot, because I had no interest in running if I didn't think we could win. I wasn't interested in setting myself up for four years from now because to some degree I was very fortunate; I already had a very high profile. I stood to lose more than gain in a presidential race if I wasn't successful. So the second question was: how it would affect our family? And then thinking about schedules and workloads and the rhythm of a campaign, the nature of the scrutiny involved, how it would alter our daily round, and how would we, how effectively could we shield our families, our girls?

And then the third question, which was the most profound question, and one where probably ... in the end I had to answer all by myself was: should I win? Just because you can win doesn't mean you're the person who's best for the country at this moment in time, and I, I, I actually believe my own rhetoric when I say I think we're in a defining moment. It's very difficult to think back to a time where we had a bigger series of choices, and obviously World War maybe, and then the immediate aftermath of WWII, the Great Depression, and before that, the Civil War . . . but the country has a lot of issues that it's got to deal with. And so I don't, I didn't think it was sufficient for me to run just because of my own ambition or because I thought this was my time. I felt as if there had to be at least the possibility that I could do something that no other candidate in the race could do, whether it was bringing the country together more effectively, [or] building a consensus, [or] reinvigorating the American people's interest in government. So that was a series of questions that had to be raised, and those questions were probably the ones that were least amenable to quantification. I mean, we can do some polling and sort of figure out, "Alright, can we win this thing or not?" It's a lot harder to gauge whether you are what the country needs at this point in time.

Were there any points, either in the conversations with your friends, or in the conversations with Michelle, or in the conversations with yourself, anything now that stands out in your mind as crossing the threshold, where you went from "Well, maybe not" to "Maybe so"?
Well, one critical moment was where Michelle said that she would be willing to do it.