The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [49]
So what happened to make these men and women appear as the grim, uncompromising, insincere, and occasionally mean characters that populate our nightly news? What was it about the process that prevented reasonable, conscientious people from doing the nation’s business? The longer I served in Washington, the more I saw friends studying my face for signs of a change, probing me for a newfound pomposity, searching for hints of argumentativeness or guardedness. I began examining myself in the same way; I began to see certain characteristics that I held in common with my new colleagues, and I wondered what might prevent my own transformation into the stock politician of bad TV movies.
ONE PLACE TO start my inquiry was to understand the nature of ambition, for in this regard at least, senators are different. Few people end up being United States senators by accident; at a minimum, it requires a certain megalomania, a belief that of all the gifted people in your state, you are somehow uniquely qualified to speak on their behalf; a belief sufficiently strong that you are willing to endure the sometimes uplifting, occasionally harrowing, but always slightly ridiculous process we call campaigns.
Moreover, ambition alone is not enough. Whatever the tangle of motives, both sacred and profane, that push us toward the goal of becoming a senator, those who succeed must exhibit an almost fanatical single-mindedness, often disregarding their health, relationships, mental balance, and dignity. After my primary campaign was over, I remember looking at my calendar and realizing that over a span of a year and a half, I had taken exactly seven days off. The rest of the time I had typically worked twelve to sixteen hours a day. This was not something I was particularly proud of. As Michelle pointed out to me several times a week during the campaign, it just wasn’t normal.
Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians, however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as a candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn’t release you until after Election Day. That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing—although that is bad enough—but fear of total, complete humiliation.
I still burn, for example, with the thought of my one loss in politics, a drubbing in 2000 at the hands of incumbent Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush. It was a race in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong, in which my own mistakes were compounded by tragedy and farce. Two weeks after announcing my candidacy, with a few thousand dollars raised, I commissioned my first poll and discovered that Mr. Rush’s name recognition stood at about 90 percent, while mine stood at 11 percent. His approval rating hovered around 70 percent—mine at 8. In that way I learned one of the cardinal rules of modern politics: Do the poll before you announce.
Things went downhill from there. In October, on my way to a meeting to secure an endorsement from one of the few party officials who had not already committed to my opponent, I heard a news flash on the radio that Congressman Rush’s adult son had been shot and killed by a pair of drug dealers outside his house. I was shocked and saddened for the congressman, and effectively suspended my campaign for a month.
Then, during the Christmas holidays, after having traveled to Hawaii for an abbreviated five-day trip to visit my grandmother and reacquaint myself with Michelle and then-eighteen-month-old Malia, the state legislature was called back into special session to vote on a piece of gun control legislation. With Malia sick