Inside Obama’s Dream Machine

Sitting on the campaign bus the night before the caucuses, Michelle explained her desire to shake up American politics. "We complain that politicians are mean and cynical and angry, but we've been doing the same thing over and over again," she told NEWSWEEK. "We have been making the same irrational decisions. When faced with the most rational choice, we hesitate—and … we have to break out of this." Stretched out beside her, Obama was clearly enjoying watching his wife getting all worked up even as he was ready to sack out. He leaned forward and stage-whispered, "She's scary." His wife wasn't entirely amused. She poked him and forced herself to smile.

Obama shares his wife's sense of impatience and a certain disbelief that the world might think he's not ready for the presidency. In one of his rare evocations of the civil-rights movement, he said he shares Martin Luther King's belief in "the fierce urgency of now"—suggesting that his own accelerated run for the White House is the result of a burning need to right the nation's wrongs. At times, Michelle's enthusiasm for her husband's talents can come off as a bit regal. She recently told an audience that "Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics," and she has also suggested that if he loses, neither she nor her kids would want to go through the punishment of a national campaign again. That prompted New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to take a swipe at the Obamas. She wrote that they "radiate a sense that they are owed … for offering themselves up to save and uplift the nation, even though it disrupted their comfortable lives." Obama later recast his wife's remarks in more-flattering terms. Michelle, he explained, meant that it was important for him to run now, while he was still rooted in the real world, before life in Washington had "boiled all the hope out" of him. Michelle shrugs off the criticism. "It's ridiculous. People jump on little jokes. But you can't let that stop you."

Michelle has worried for years that politics has the potential to ruin her husband's idealism. In 2000, he lost his first campaign, for a House seat. "It really humbled him. It chastened him," recalls Joe Moore, a Chicago alderman who has known Obama for years. Up until then, Moore says, Obama "felt like he had been God's gift to politics." Three years later, when he toyed with running for Senate, Michelle told him no. With two young daughters, she dreaded losing him to another campaign. "We were uniformly against the idea," says Jarrett. "Our sense was it was just too soon for him to run." At a brunch with a small group of friends, they told him all the reasons he shouldn't do it. Then it was his turn to speak. "I can't quite explain how it happened," says Jarrett, who describes Obama as presenting his side like "he was making a closing argument in a case before the U.S. attorney." He said he wouldn't do it without her support. By the end of the brunch, Michelle had given her blessing.

Michelle didn't need that kind of convincing when he decided to run for president. Though the inexperience question came up in early conversations with friends and advisers, an old political mentor told him the bigger risk was not running. Obama's 2004 convention speech had generated buzz, and Dick Durbin, Illinois's other senator, urged him to take advantage of it while it lasted. "Don't believe you can time this thing," Durbin told his protégé at lunch one afternoon. "I have colleagues who waited for years and the opportunity never came." Forget about the whole "experience" question, he said. "A thousand more votes in the Senate isn't going to make you a better president."

There may be a more personal edge to Obama's impatience—a steadfast belief in his own qualities that he seems to think others should be able to see as clearly as he does. "At some point people have to stop asserting that because I haven't been in the league long enough I can't play," Obama told NEWSWEEK. "It's sort of like Magic Johnson or LeBron James, [who] keep on scoring 30 [points] and their team gets wins, but people say they can't lead their team because they're too young." Faced with stubbornly undecided voters in Iowa in the closing days of the race, Obama would sometimes wonder out loud what it would take to win them over. One church pastor stood up in Boone, Iowa, to praise Obama's 2006 op-ed in USA Today on the relationship between church and state. "I appreciate that, thank you very much," Obama told the man. "So what's the problem? Why don't I have your vote?" Obama demanded. The pastor froze, uncertain if Obama was serious. "I'm teasing you," he said with a smile.

Flying from Iowa to New Hampshire after midnight on Friday, Obama explained his impact on politics a little more modestly. "What I was so pleased with was not just the fact that we won, or the raw numbers, but what it showed about the country."