The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [50]
I stopped him there, having gotten the idea.
And so, less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going to lose. Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense of dread, realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan. In the few weeks before the primary, my campaign recovered a bit: I did well in the sparsely covered debates, received some positive coverage for proposals on health care and education, and even received the Tribune endorsement. But it was too little too late. I arrived at my victory party to discover that the race had already been called and that I had lost by thirty-one points.
I’m not suggesting that politicians are unique in suffering such disappointments. It’s that unlike most people, who have the luxury of licking their wounds privately, the politician’s loss is on public display. There’s the cheerful concession speech you have to make to a half-empty ballroom, the brave face you put on as you comfort staff and supporters, the thank-you calls to those who helped, and the awkward requests for further help in retiring debt. You perform these tasks as best you can, and yet no matter how much you tell yourself differently—no matter how convincingly you attribute the loss to bad timing or bad luck or lack of money—it’s impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don’t quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word “loser” is flashing through people’s minds. They’re the sorts of feelings that most people haven’t experienced since high school, when the girl you’d been pining over dismissed you with a joke in front of her friends, or you missed a pair of free throws with the big game on the line—the kinds of feelings that most adults wisely organize their lives to avoid.
Imagine then the impact of these same emotions on the average big-time politician, who (unlike me) has rarely failed at anything in his life—who was the high school quarterback or the class valedictorian and whose father was a senator or admiral and who has been told since he was a child that he was destined for great things. I remember talking once to a corporate executive who had been a big supporter of Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential race. We were in his suitably plush office, overlooking all of midtown Manhattan, and he began describing to me a meeting that had taken place six months or so after the election, when Gore was seeking investors for his then-fledgling television venture.
“It was strange,” the executive told me. “Here he was, a former vice president, a man who just a few months earlier had been on the verge of being the most powerful man on the planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, when he walked in, I couldn’t help feeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to admit it, because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn’t Al Gore, former vice president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on.”
A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall. Over the past five years, Al Gore