Book sheds light on Obama's character
Updated on 04 September 2009
It's a story of a man who never quite fitted in. Raised to be a citizen of the world, yet all but abandoned by his mother in his crucial teenage years.
A man who created a new story and a new character for himself and forged it into being by sheer will.
No wonder Barack Obama's secret service nickname is Renegade, says journalist Richard Wolffe, who's purloined it for the title of his book about the making of the president, as he puts it "witnessed from a front row seat, as it unfolded, from the first day to the last".
In conversation with Jon Snow at London's Frontline Club last night Wolffe elaborated on the insights he gained about the man himself and how Obama's coping with the considerable challenges of being in power.
Despite numerous interviews with Obama himself and key members of his team - it's clear that the president is not a man who allows anyone to get close, apart from a tiny handful of trusted confidantes.
You learn this about him from the book: he might have some radical ideas, he might be an uncoventional man - but he locks up his emotions behind a strict facade.
No wonder, says Wolffe, that Joe Biden said Obama had steel running through his veins.
But Obama was not born with a burning ambition to be president. Far from it.
Indeed it took some persuasion to get him to run at all as advisors tried to explain to him the sheer madness of taking on such a monumental campaign.
Indeed the book reveals how the inhuman pace of the schedule frequently irritated Obama: at one stage, seeing him clearly fed up with the constant travel and sleepless nights, one staffer asks him "Is there anything you like about the campaign?"
"Nothing" he said.
In an effort to raise the mood, his body man Reggie Love quips "Well I've gotta tell you, I'm having the time of my life".
What Wolffe does reveal is the twin passions of civil rights and community organising that inform the way Obama does politics, a marriage of inspiration and methodical work that achieved such brilliant success in his election campaign.
Obama is a man who can bring a vast arena to life with the power of his oratory but seems strangely reluctant to use it.
I fact Wolffe recounts how his most inspirational speech, his first "Yes We Can" in his concession speech after the New Hampshire primary, almost didn't happen. His speechwriter Jon Favreau said he didn't want the audience to start chanting it but Obama went ahead. The moment turned around his campaign and the rest is history.
For another key part of Obama's character that emerges from the book is the basketball player who likes to leave it till the fourth quarter when everything seems to be going wrong. He suddenly makes an incredible speech and saves the day.
It's what's happening next week - when after a terrible summer of poltiical disasters and falling ratings - Obama is due to make a keynote address on his healthcare plans - hoping, no doubt, to rescue the whole scheme from falling apart.
But don't expect the answer to the Democrats lifelong dreams, says Wolffe. Obama never promised universal healthcare, and it's not what he plans to deliver.
Liberals disappointed by the concessions and compromises take note: Obama is a man of compromise, always has been but he says there have been real changes in the way Washington works: notably that corporate special interests aren't getting any favours from the new healthcare plans.
Indeed they've been forced to make substantial commitments to cost cutting in order to get their photo-op with the president who, despite those plunging ratings, is still as popular as he was on election day.
The biggest pitfall, warns Wolffe, is the relentless pace of his administration - which has totally overextended itself in its desire to roll out every single policy from the get-go.
In the week it brought out the budget, he says, it also detailed plans to withdraw from Iraq. Could they not have waited another week?
Now along with healthcare there's Afghanistan, the bailout, the stimulus plan, climate change, the Middle East, Guantanamo... the list goes on.
Partly it's due to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel - who, says Wolffe, "isn't just borderline ADD". But the administration seems intent on "everything at once", frightened, perhaps by the idea that there is only the narrowest window for achieving change.
But by doing so - they're in serious danger of losing the narrative, of confusing the message: over the summer at least, the Right has been running rings around the White House.
There's a danger of serious burnout, says Wolffe, especially from those who also worked themselves into the ground during the two-year long campaign. But he says Obama values fresh ideas and fresh faces more than loyalty to one particular team - so we can expect to see a completely different White House staff in two, three years time.
There's more than a nod of sympathy towards Obama in Wolffe's book: and little about the drama within the Clinton camp - or team McCain. But there's plenty about the journey that brought the 44th President of the United States to where he is today: the first Black American to hold the office - the man who made history simply by being who he is.
But there's a coda that still needs writing. For at the moment, at least, the politician whose life is all about stories, has no idea how this one will end.
