The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [53]
What could I do? I explained that unlike Mr. Hull I practically had a negative net worth. Assuming the best-case scenario, our campaign would have enough money for exactly four weeks of television ads, and given this fact it probably didn’t make sense for us to blow the entire campaign budget in August. Everybody just needed to be patient, I would tell supporters. Stay confident. Don’t panic. Then I’d hang up the phone, look out the window, and happen to catch sight of the RV in which Hull tooled around the state, big as an ocean liner and reputedly just as well appointed, and I would wonder to myself if perhaps it was time to panic after all.
In many ways, I was luckier than most candidates in such circumstances. For whatever reason, at some point my campaign began to generate that mysterious, elusive quality of momentum, of buzz; it became fashionable among wealthy donors to promote my cause, and small donors around the state began sending checks through the Internet at a pace we had never anticipated. Ironically, my dark-horse status protected me from some of the more dangerous pitfalls of fund-raising: Most of the corporate PACs avoided me, and so I owed them nothing; the handful of PACs that did give, like the League of Conservation Voters, typically represented causes I believed in and had long fought for. Mr. Hull still ended up outspending me by a factor of six to one. But to his credit (although perhaps to his regret) he never ran a negative TV ad against me. My poll numbers stayed within shouting distance of his, and in the final weeks of the campaign, just as my own TV spots started running and my numbers began to surge, his campaign imploded when allegations surfaced that he’d had some ugly run-ins with an ex-wife.
So for me, at least, the lack of wealth or significant corporate support wasn’t a barrier to victory. Still, I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways. Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums of money. By the end of the campaign, the banter and small talk that had once accompanied my solicitation calls were eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not to take no for an answer.
But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.
And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had