The Audacity of Hope (17 page)

That may be a little dramatic. Still, no legislator, state or federal, is immune from such difficult moments—and they are always far worse for the party out of power. As a member of the majority, you will have some input in any bill that’s important to you before it hits the floor. You can ask the committee chairman to include language that helps your constituents or eliminate language that hurts them. You can even ask the majority leader or the chief sponsor to hold the bill until a compromise more to your liking is reached.

If you’re in the minority party, you have no such protection. You must vote yes or no on whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be a compromise that either you or your supporters consider fair or just. In an era of indiscriminate logrolling and massive omnibus spending bills, you can also rest assured that no matter how many bad provisions there are in the bill, there will be something—funding for body armor for

our troops, say, or some modest increase in veterans’ benefits—that makes the bill painful to oppose.

In its first term, at least, the Bush White House was a master of such legislative gamesmanship. There’s an instructive story about the negotiations surrounding the first round of Bush tax cuts, when Karl Rove invited a Democratic senator over to the White House to discuss the senator’s potential support for the President’s package. Bush had won the senator’s state handily in the previous election—in part on a platform of tax cuts—and the senator was generally supportive of lower marginal rates. Still, he was troubled by the degree to which the proposed tax cuts were skewed toward the wealthy and suggested a few changes that would moderate the package’s impact.

“Make these changes,” the senator told Rove, “and not only will I vote for the bill, but I guarantee you’ll get seventy votes out of the Senate.”

“We don’t want seventy votes,” Rove reportedly replied. “We want fifty-one.”

Rove may or may not have thought the White House bill was good policy, but he knew a political winner when he saw one. Either the senator voted aye and helped pass the President’s program, or he voted no and became a plump target during the next election.

In the end, the senator—like several red state Democrats—voted aye, which no doubt reflected the prevailing sentiment about tax cuts in his home state. Still, stories like this illustrate some of the difficulties that any minority party faces in being “bipartisan.” Everybody likes the idea of bipartisanship. The media, in particular, is enamored with the term, since it contrasts neatly with the “partisan bickering” that is the dominant story line of reporting on Capitol Hill.

Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained—by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate— to negotiate in good faith. If these conditions do not hold—if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs of the tax cut are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so—the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100 percent of what it wants, go on to concede 10 percent, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this “compromise” of being “obstructionist.” For the minority party in such circumstances, “bipartisanship” comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being “moderate” or “centrist.”

Not surprisingly, there are activists who insist that Democratic senators stand fast against any Republican initiative these days—even those initiatives that have some merit—as a matter of principle. It’s fair to say that none of these individuals has ever run for high public office as a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state, nor has any been a target of several million dollars’ worth of negative TV ads. What every senator understands is that while it’s easy to make a vote on a complicated piece of legislation look evil and depraved in a thirty-second television commercial, it’s very

hard to explain the wisdom of that same vote in less than twenty minutes. What every senator also knows is that during the course of a single term, he or she will have cast several thousand votes. That’s a whole lot of potential explaining to do come election time.

Perhaps my greatest bit of good fortune during my own Senate campaign was that no candidate ran a negative TV ad about me. This had to do entirely with the odd circumstances of my Senate race, and not an absence of material with which to work. After all, I had been in the state legislature for seven years when I ran, had been in the minority for six of those years, and had cast thousands of sometimes difficult votes. As is standard practice these days, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had prepared a fat binder of opposition research on me before I was even nominated, and my own research team spent many hours combing through my record in an effort to anticipate what negative ads the Republicans might have up their sleeves.

They didn’t find a lot, but they found enough to do the trick—a dozen or so votes that, if described without context, could be made to sound pretty scary. When my media consultant, David Axelrod, tested them in a poll, my approval rating immediately dropped ten points. There was the criminal law bill that purported to crack down on drug dealing in schools but had been so poorly drafted that I concluded it was both ineffective and unconstitutional—“Obama voted to weaken penalties on gangbangers who deal drugs in schools,” is how the poll described it. There was a bill sponsored by antiabortion activists that on its face sounded reasonable enough—it mandated lifesaving measures for premature babies (the bill didn’t mention that such measures were already the law)—but also extended “personhood” to previable fetuses, thereby effectively overturning Roe v. Wade; in the poll, I was said to have “voted to deny lifesaving treatment to babies born alive.” Running down the list, I came across a claim that while in the state legislature I had voted against a bill to “protect our children from sex offenders.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, snatching the sheet from David’s hands. “I accidentally pressed the wrong button on that bill. I meant to vote aye, and had it immediately corrected in the official record.”

David smiled. “Somehow I don’t think that portion of the official record will make it into a Republican ad.” He gently retrieved the poll from my hands. “Anyway, cheer up,” he added, clapping me on the back. “I’m sure this will help you with the sex offender vote.”

I WONDER SOMETIMES how things might have turned out had those ads actually run. Not so much whether I would have won or lost—by the time the primaries were over, I had a twenty-point lead over my Republican opponent—but rather how the voters would have perceived me, how, entering into the Senate, I would have had a much smaller cushion of goodwill. For that is how most of my colleagues, Republican and Democrat, enter the Senate, their mistakes trumpeted, their words distorted, and their motives questioned. They are baptized in that fire; it haunts them each and every time they cast a vote, each and every time they issue a press release or make a statement, the fear of losing not just a political race, but of losing favor in the eyes of

those who sent them to Washington—all those people who have said to them at one time or another: “We have great hopes for you. Please don’t disappoint us.”

Of course, there are technical fixes to our democracy that might relieve some of this pressure on politicians, structural changes that would strengthen the link between voters and their representatives. Nonpartisan districting, same-day registration, and weekend elections would all increase the competitiveness of races and might spur more participation from the electorate—and the more the electorate is paying attention, the more integrity is rewarded. Public financing of campaigns or free television and radio time could drastically reduce the constant scrounging for money and the influence of special interests. Changes in the rules in the House and the Senate might empower legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and encourage more probing reporting.

But none of these changes can happen of their own accord. Each would require a change in attitude among those in power. Each would demand that individual politicians challenge the existing order; loosen their hold on incumbency; fight with their friends as well as their enemies on behalf of abstract ideas in which the public appears to have little interest. Each would require from men and women a willingness to risk what they already have.

In the end, then, it still comes back to that quality that JFK sought to define early in his career as he lay convalescing from surgery, mindful of his heroism in war but perhaps pondering the more ambiguous challenges ahead—the quality of courage. In some ways, the longer you are in politics, the easier it should be to muster such courage, for there is a certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do, someone will be angry at you, that political attacks will come no matter how cautiously you vote, that judgment may be taken as cowardice and courage itself may be seen as calculation. I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.

And my constituents. After one town hall meeting in Godfrey, an older gentleman came up and expressed outrage that despite my having opposed the Iraq War, I had not yet called for a full withdrawal of troops. We had a brief and pleasant argument, in which I explained my concern that too precipitous a withdrawal would lead to all-out civil war in the country and the potential for widening conflict throughout the Middle East. At the end of our conversation he shook my hand.

“I still think you’re wrong,” he said, “but at least it seems like you’ve thought about it. Hell, you’d probably disappoint me if you agreed with me all the time.”

“Thanks,” I said. As he walked away, I was reminded of something Justice Louis Brandeis once said: that in a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen.

The Audacity of Hope

Chapter Five

Opportunity

ONE THING ABOUT being a U.S. senator—you fly a lot. There are the flights back and forth from Washington at least once a week. There are the trips to other states to deliver a speech, raise money, or campaign for your colleagues. If you represent a big state like Illinois, there are flights upstate or downstate, to attend town meetings or ribbon cuttings and to make sure that the folks don’t think you’ve forgotten them.

Most of the time I fly commercial and sit in coach, hoping for an aisle or window seat and crossing my fingers that the guy in front of me doesn’t want to recline.

But there are times when—because I’m making multiple stops on a West Coast swing, say, or need to get to another city after the last commercial flight has left—I fly on a private jet. I hadn’t been aware of this option at first, assuming the cost would be prohibitive. But during the campaign, my staff explained that under Senate rules, a senator or candidate could travel on someone else’s jet and just pay the equivalent of a first-class airfare. After looking at my campaign schedule and thinking about all the time I would save, I decided to give private jets a try.

It turns out that the flying experience is a good deal different on a private jet. Private jets depart from privately owned and managed terminals, with lounges that feature big soft couches and big-screen TVs and old aviation photographs on the walls. The restrooms are generally empty and spotless, and have those mechanical shoe-shine machines and mouthwash and mints in a bowl. There’s no sense of hurriedness at these terminals; the plane is waiting for you if you’re late, ready for you if you’re early. A lot of times you can bypass the lounge altogether and drive your car straight onto the tarmac. Otherwise the pilots will greet you in the terminal, take your bags, and walk you out to the plane.

And the planes, well, they’re nice. The first time I took such a flight, I was on a Citation X, a sleek, compact, shiny machine with wood paneling and leather seats that you could pull together to make a bed anytime you decided you wanted a nap. A shrimp salad and cheese plate occupied the seat behind me; up front, the minibar was fully stocked. The pilots hung up my coat, offered me my choice of newspapers, and asked me if I was comfortable. I was.

Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made sports car grips the road. Shooting through the clouds, I turned on the small TV monitor in front of my seat. A map of the United States appeared, with the image of our plane tracking west, along with our speed, our altitude, our time to destination, and the temperature outside. At forty thousand feet, the plane leveled off, and I looked down at the curving horizon and the scattered clouds, the geography of the earth laid out before me—first the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois, then the python curves of the Mississippi, then more farmland and ranch land and eventually the jagged Rockies, still snow-peaked, until the sun went down and the orange sky narrowed to a thin red line that was finally consumed by night and stars and moon.

I could see how people might get used to this.

The purpose of that particular trip was fund-raising, mostly—in preparation for my general election campaign, several friends and supporters had organized events for me in L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco. But the most memorable part of the trip was a visit that I paid to the town of Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Stanford University and Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the search engine company Google maintains its corporate headquarters.

Google had already achieved iconic status by mid-2004, a symbol not just of the growing power of the Internet but of the global economy’s rapid transformation. On the drive down from San Francisco, I reviewed the company’s history: how two Stanford Ph.D. candidates in computer science, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had collaborated in a dorm room to develop a better way to search the web; how in 1998, with a million dollars raised from various contacts, they had formed Google, with three employees operating out of a garage; how Google figured out an advertising model—based on text ads that were nonintrusive and relevant to the user’s search—that made the company profitable even as the dot-com boom went bust; and how, six years after the company’s founding, Google was about to go public at stock prices that would make Mr. Page and Mr. Brin two of the richest people on earth.

Mountain View looked like a typical suburban California community—quiet streets, sparkling new office parks, unassuming homes that, because of the unique purchasing power of Silicon Valley residents, probably ran a cool million or more. We pulled in front of a set of modern, modular buildings and were met by Google’s general counsel, David Drummond, an African American around my age who’d made the arrangements for my visit.

“When Larry and Sergey came to me looking to incorporate, I figured they were just a couple of really smart guys with another start-up idea,” David said. “I can’t say I expected all this.”

He took me on a tour of the main building, which felt more like a college student center than an office—a café on the ground floor, where the former chef of the Grateful Dead supervised the preparation of gourmet meals for the entire staff; video games and a Ping-Pong table and a fully equipped gym. (“People spend a lot of time here, so we want to keep them happy.”) On the second floor, we passed clusters of men and women in jeans and T-shirts, all of them in their twenties, working intently in front of their computer screens, or sprawled on couches and big rubber exercise balls, engaged in animated conversation.

Eventually we found Larry Page, talking to an engineer about a software problem. He was dressed like his employees and, except for a few traces of early gray in his hair, didn’t look any older. We spoke about Google’s mission—to organize all of the world’s information into a universally accessible, unfiltered, and usable form—and the Google site index, which already included more than six billion web pages. Recently the company had launched a new web-based email system with a built-in search function; they were working on technology that would allow you to initiate a voice search over the telephone, and had already started the Book Project, the goal of which was to scan

every book ever published into a web-accessible format, creating a virtual library that would store the entirety of human knowledge.

Toward the end of the tour, Larry led me to a room where a three-dimensional image of the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor. Larry asked the young Indian American engineer who was working nearby to explain what we were looking at.

“These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now,” the engineer said. “Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way”—he caused the screen to alter—“you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.”

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men—nationality, race, religion, wealth—were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light. Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on its axis—most of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States, where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.

My reverie was broken by the appearance of Sergey, a compact man perhaps a few years younger than Larry. He suggested that I go with them to their TGIF assembly, a tradition that they had maintained since the beginning of the company, when all of Google’s employees got together over beer and food and discussed whatever they had on their minds. As we entered a large hall, throngs of young people were already seated, some drinking and laughing, others still typing into PDAs or laptops, a buzz of excitement in the air. A group of fifty or so seemed more attentive than the rest, and David explained that these were the new hires, fresh from graduate school; today was their induction into the Google team. One by one, the new employees were introduced, their faces flashing on a big screen alongside information about their degrees, hobbies, and interests. At least half of the group looked Asian; a large percentage of the whites had Eastern European names. As far as I could tell, not one was black or Latino. Later, walking back to my car, I mentioned this to David and he nodded.

“We know it’s a problem,” he said, and mentioned efforts Google was making to provide scholarships to expand the pool of minority and female math and science students. In the meantime, Google needed to stay competitive, which meant hiring the top graduates of the top math, engineering, and computer science programs in the country—MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. You could count on two hands, David told me, the number of black and Latino kids in those programs.

In fact, according to David, just finding American-born engineers, whatever their race, was getting harder—which was why every company in Silicon Valley had come to rely heavily on foreign students. Lately, high-tech employers had a new set of worries: Since 9/11 a lot of foreign students were having second thoughts about studying in the States due to the difficulties in obtaining visas. Top-notch engineers or software designers didn’t need to come to Silicon Valley anymore to find work or get financing for a start- up. High-tech firms were setting up operations in India and China at a rapid pace, and venture funds were now global; they would just as readily invest in Mumbai or

Shanghai as in California. And over the long term, David explained, that could spell trouble for the U.S. economy.

“We’ll be able to keep attracting talent,” he said, “because we’re so well branded. But for the start-ups, some of the less established companies, the next Google, who knows? I just hope somebody in Washington understands how competitive things have become. Our dominance isn’t inevitable.”

AROUND THE SAME time that I visited Google, I took another trip that made me think about what was happening with the economy. This one was by car, not jet, along miles of empty highway, to a town called Galesburg, forty-five minutes or so from the Iowa border in western Illinois.

Founded in 1836, Galesburg had begun as a college town when a group of Presbyterian and Congregational ministers in New York decided to bring their blend of social reform and practical education to the Western frontier. The resulting school, Knox College, became a hotbed of abolitionist activity before the Civil War—a branch of the Underground Railroad had run through Galesburg, and Hiram Revels, the nation’s first black U.S. senator, attended the college’s prep school before moving back to Mississippi. In 1854, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad line was completed through Galesburg, causing a boom in the region’s commerce. And four years later, some ten thousand people gathered to hear the fifth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, during which Lincoln first framed his opposition to slavery as a moral issue.

It wasn’t this rich history, though, that had taken me to Galesburg. Instead, I’d gone to meet with a group of union leaders from the Maytag plant, for the company had announced plans to lay off 1,600 employees and shift operations to Mexico. Like towns all across central and western Illinois, Galesburg had been pounded by the shift of manufacturing overseas. In the previous few years, the town had lost industrial parts makers and a rubber-hose manufacturer; it was now in the process of seeing Butler Manufacturing, a steelmaker recently bought by Australians, shutter its doors. Already, Galesburg’s unemployment rate hovered near 8 percent. With the Maytag plant’s closing, the town stood to lose another 5 to 10 percent of its entire employment base.

Inside the machinists’ union hall, seven or eight men and two or three women had gathered on metal folding chairs, talking in muted voices, a few smoking cigarettes, most of them in their late forties or early fifties, all of them dressed in jeans or khakis, T-shirts or plaid work shirts. The union president, Dave Bevard, was a big, barrel- chested man in his mid-fifties, with a dark beard, tinted glasses, and a fedora that made him look like a member of the band ZZ Top. He explained that the union had tried every possible tactic to get Maytag to change its mind—talking to the press, contacting shareholders, soliciting support from local and state officials. The Maytag management had been unmoved.

“It ain’t like these guys aren’t making a profit,” Dave told me. “And if you ask ’em, they’ll tell you we’re one of the most productive plants in the company. Quality workmanship. Low error rates. We’ve taken cuts in pay, cuts in benefits, layoffs. The state and the city have given Maytag at least $10 million in tax breaks over the last eight

years, based on their promise to stay. But it’s never enough. Some CEO who’s already making millions of dollars decides he needs to boost the company stock price so he can cash in his options, and the easiest way to do that is to send the work to Mexico and pay the workers there a sixth of what we make.”

I asked them what steps state or federal agencies had taken to retrain workers, and almost in unison the room laughed derisively. “Retraining is a joke,” the union vice president, Doug Dennison, said. “What are you going to retrain for when there aren’t any jobs out there?” He talked about how an employment counselor had suggested that he try becoming a nursing aide, with wages not much higher than what Wal-Mart paid their floor clerks. One of the younger men in the group told me a particularly cruel story: He had made up his mind to retrain as a computer technician, but a week into his courses, Maytag called him back. The Maytag work was temporary, but according to the rules, if this man refused to accept Maytag’s offer, he’d no longer be eligible for retraining money. If, on the other hand, he did go back to Maytag and dropped out of the courses he was already taking, then the federal agency would consider him to have used up his one-time training opportunity and wouldn’t pay for any retraining in the future.