Renegade: The Making of a President

Before the White House and Air Force One, before the TV ads and the enormous rallies, there was the real Barack Obama: a man wrestling with the momentous decision to run for the presidency, feeling torn about leaving behind a young family, and figuring out how to win the biggest prize in politics.This book is the previously untold and epic story of how a political newcomer with no money and an alien name grew into the world's most powerful leader. But it is also a uniquely intimate portrait of the person behind the iconic posters and the Secret Service code name Renegade. Drawing on a dozen unplugged interviews with the candidate and president, as well as twenty-one months covering his campaign as it traveled from coast to coast, Richard Wolffe answers the simple yet enduring question about Barack Obama: Who is he? Based on Wolffe's unprecedented access to Obama, Renegade reveals the making of a president, both on the campaign trail and before he ran for high office. It explains how the politician who emerged in an extraordinary election learned the personal and political skills to succeed during his youth and early career. With cool self-discipline, calculated risk taking, and simple storytelling, Obama developed the strategies he would need to survive the onslaught of the Clintons and John McCain, and build a multimillion-dollar machine to win a historic contest.In Renegade, Richard Wolffe shares with us his front-row seat at Obama's announcement to run for president on a frigid day in Springfield, and his victory speech on a warm night in Chicago. We fly on the candidate's plane and ride in his bus on an odyssey across a country in crisis; stand next to him at a bar on the night he secures the nomination; and are backstage as he delivers his convention speech to a stadium crowd and a transfixed national audience.

One
Change

Election day starts, in the small hours, where the candidate has spent most of his last 626 days: on a plane. Stuck to the gray plastic walls of the pressurized cabin are snapshots of his odyssey across cities and fields, mountains and deserts, continents and oceans. A snowstorm in Iowa, a press conference in Downing Street. Camera crews dozing onboard, Secret Service agents sharing a joke. The candidate signing books, reporters holding audio recorders close to his face. Now, between the empty candy wrappers and the drained beer bottles, he walks back one last time from his spacious first-class section, through his staffers’ business-class seats, to the coach class of the press. “You know, whatever happens, it’s extraordinary you guys have shared this process with us, and I just want to say thank you and I appreciate you,” he says, shaking everyone’s hand. One reporter asks how he’s feeling, but he insists that he won’t answer questions. Even obvious ones. He thanks the young TV producers who have trailed his every move from the start, admires the photos on the overhead bins, then pokes fun at a magazine reporter who was parodied on Saturday Night Live. He gives a birthday kiss to a young photo-grapher, shakes hands with every member of the aircrew, and finishes with a simple farewell: “OK, guys, let’s go home.”

The last twenty-four hours felt like the longest day of the long campaign. It began with the news that the last living person to raise him through childhood, his grandmother Toot, had lost her struggle against cancer. At his penultimate stop in Charlotte, North Carolina, it rains so hard, and for so long, that it’s hard to see the streaks running down both his cheeks. They don’t come obviously or immediately. Hardened by two years of campaigning and many more years of self-control, his voice never breaks as he announces the news. “Some of you heard that my grandmother who helped raise me passed away early this morning,” he says calmly. “Look, she has gone home. And she died peacefully in her sleep, with my sister at her side. So there’s great joy as well as tears. I’m not going to talk about it too long, because it’s hard a little to talk about.” His face remains composed as he talks about the “bittersweet” sensation of losing his grandmother while his campaign draws to a close. He betrays little emotion as he describes her as “a quiet hero” and sketches out her life story. But when he starts to read his stump speech from his teleprompter, when he talks about the broken politics in Washington, he surreptitiously strokes one cheek with his thumb. He condemns eight years of failed Bush policies, and casually strokes the other cheek. Two minutes later, as the crowd chants “Yes We Can,” he finally takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes his face down. It is one of the rarest moments of the entire election: a display of raw emotion from a candidate whose mask almost never slips before the dozens of cameras that trail him every day. Even then, at his most vulnerable point, he defers the moment and dissipates its impact.

The cracks in his self-control spread to those closest to him. Standing at the back of a leaking tent in a parched yellow field is the candidate’s friend and strategist David Axelrod. “He’s at peace with what happened. It wasn’t unexpected. He just wishes he had some time to deal with it in his own way,” Axelrod says. “But I’m finding this hard right now. The enormity of it all is almost overwhelming. I love him; he’s my friend. This election is ridiculously long and there are many stupid things about it. But you really have to earn the presidency. And he’s been tested. You can’t hide it or fake it.”

Yet the candidate has partly passed the test by hiding himself away. By the time he reaches the final campaign rally in Manassas, Virginia, he has regained full control. Close to the site of two Confederate victories in the Civil War, the nation’s first major African American nominee—a Democrat, no less—speaks to some 100,000 people at Prince William Fairgrounds. As a community organizer two decades earlier, Obama often feared that no one would show up to his meetings. Now there are so many people the traffic is snarled for hours and miles around. These crowds, he says, have enriched him, moved him, and lifted him up when he was down. Now he’s so inspired he tells his signature story from Greenwood, South Carolina. The tale of a little woman who lifted his spirits, on a dismal day early in the campaign, with a simple chant: “Fired Up! Ready to Go!”

“It shows you what one voice can do,” he concludes. “One voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city! And if it can change a city, it can change a state! And if it can change a state, it can change a nation! And if it can change a nation, it can change the world!”

Yet at the start of this historic election day, in the early hours of the morning, the candidate seems weighed down. Determined and spirited perhaps, but also crushed with exhaustion and emotion. The gray wisps on his head are now visible from a distance, like the lines scored close to his eyes and across his cheeks. He sounds fired up, but looks ready to drop.

It is one in the morning when he lands at Chicago’s Midway airport. The polls have already closed in the small New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch, which has not voted for a Democratic president since 1968, but favors Obama by fifteen votes to six. The candidate walks down the stairs from his plane and steps into his armored SUV to a flash of cameras. Behind him is a new addition to his motorcade: another SUV filled with a black-clad, heavily armed Counter Assault Team.
Obama liked to describe his journey from freshman senator to presidential front-runner as an improbable one. It was also preposterous and quixotic, at least in the judgment of the greatest political minds in the nation’s capital. In February 2007, as Obama was readying the formal launch of his campaign, President Bush cast his expert eye across the contenders who wanted to succeed him. Sitting in the yellow oval room of the White House, on the second-floor residence of the executive mansion, the president conceded he had no idea who would win the GOP nomination. But he was clear about the other side. “I think Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee,” he said with his feet propped on a glass coffee table. “I’ll tell you why. I think she will because I think she has staying power, star power, and money power. She brings a big orga?nization that is well funded right off the bat, and one of the lessons I learned is you have to be able to play the long ball.” As for Obama, who was on the verge of announcing his candidacy, Bush was deeply doubtful. “Certainly a phenom and very attractive. The guy is very smart,” he said before realizing he sounded like Joe Biden, who had just stepped into the racial minefield for calling Obama “articulate and bright and clean.” Bush was so taken aback with the public criticism of Biden that he called in his African American secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Condi, what’s going on?” Rice told him what everyone else had said: that white people don’t call each other articulate.

No matter. Only the tough and battle-scarred could survive, and Obama wasn’t one of them. “This primary election process is rough,” Bush said, popping an endless stream of peanuts into his mouth. “It’s really tough and rightly so. It exacerbates your flaws and tests your character. And I don’t think he’s been around long enough to stand it. I may be wrong. The process may forge a steel that I didn’t anticipate.”

In some ways the forty-third president was correct: Obama was untested, unforged. Not even his closest aides and friends knew whether he could really survive the trial by fire of a presidential election. There was only one way to find out. Winston Churchill once said, “No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.” Well, the education of Barack Obama was protracted and often painful. He was a political upstart, the candidate named Renegade by the Secret Service, and he repeatedly broke the rules. He did not wait his turn to run, and had no resources in the bank when he set out. He sunk his money into lowly fieldwork, and rejected public finance. He took his campaign overseas, and staged his acceptance speech in a football stadium. He kept his tone mostly positive, and spent millions on a prime-time TV show. His middle name was Hussein, and he wasn’t even conventionally African American. No, he didn’t look like the presidents on the dollar bills, as he once quipped. For that matter, he didn’t look or sound like other candidates for president. But he was highly disciplined and driven, supremely self-confident, and he possessed the rare ability to act both as a team player and a star athlete. Although he was a renegade, he was also a cautious and pragmatic one, who played by the rules when he needed them to win. On the surface, his performance was as steady as his resting heart rate of just sixty beats a minute. But his private moods were far more variable: he could be cocky and grumpy, impatient and withdrawn. He was often an inscrutable character. Yet he struck a rare emotional connection with those around him, no matter the size of the crowd or the ego of the person he was wooing.

There was a nagging question that cropped up at the beginning and the end of the election. It was posed at the start of his presidency and will likely be posed as his term finishes as America’s command...