Newsweek: COVER STORY - Inside Obama’s Dream Machine

COVER STORY
Inside Obama’s Dream Machine
An icon of hope, he won't 'kneecap' his foes. But Obama knows what it takes, and how to win.



By Richard Wolffe | NEWSWEEK
Jan 14, 2008 Issue

Barack Obama was badly in need of sleep, but he wasn't going to get any just yet. Late last Wednesday night, the candidate and his wife, Michelle, collapsed on the leather sofa aboard their campaign bus. It was the end of a 17-hour day rolling around Iowa trolling for votes. They had just come from a nighttime rally in Waterloo, where they double-teamed an enthusiastic crowd in an overheated school gym. On the bus, Obama nursed his raw throat with tea from a steel travel mug, his arm around Michelle's shoulder.

The long-awaited Iowa caucuses—portrayed by the pundits as a make-or-break test of a black candidate's viability with white voters, and of his ability to stand up to Hillary Clinton—were the next day. In less than 24 hours, he'd know if it had all been worth it, or if he had been wasting his time. A NEWSWEEK reporter asked him how he felt on the eve of the big event. "I feel calm," he answered. Calm? Not nervous about the results, or plain exhausted after 10 months on the road? "No. Because this is the campaign I always wanted to run. If it doesn't work, it's not because of the organization we built or the respectful tone that we set."

In public, Obama attributes his quick political rise to that "respectful tone," which he believes voters crave after so many ugly, dispiriting campaign seasons. (Which includes most races since 1800.) When he first began thinking about a White House bid, he told advisers that he would be willing to run only if he could do it his way, which meant defying the conventional campaign theology of hitting the other guy hard and first, sticking to simple sound bites and preaching only to the base. He has shown a willingness to stray from his script and risk engaging (or boring) audiences with rambling professorial explanations about the details of this or that policy. And he has tried to rewrite Karl Rove's campaign manual by reaching across racial and party lines to appeal to the broadest—rather than the very narrowest—base of supporters.

But along the way, he has had to resist continual pressure even from inside his own campaign to take a harder and harsher line against his rivals, Hillary Clinton in particular. On the bus the night before the Iowa caucuses, Obama recounted one difficult episode. Early in the campaign, he lectured his staff that he wasn't going to tolerate any bashing of his rivals—no slipping anonymous snarky quotes to reporters, no feeding nasty gossip to bloggers. (Of course, Obama staffers, like all campaign aides, can't resist swapping choice bits of gossip with eager reporters.) But last summer Obama's campaign was stalling after a series of lackluster debate performances. His staff pleaded with him to go after Clinton. Then, a sleazy anonymous oppo-research memo, sourced to the Obama campaign, started making the rounds among reporters. It suggested Bill Clinton had profited from companies that outsourced jobs to India, while Hillary raked in donations from Indian-Americans. The memo was crudely titled "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)."

The Clinton campaign was justifiably angry, and seized on the episode as proof that Obama had abandoned his vaunted "politics of hope" and had offended Indian-Americans in the process. Obama was furious with his staff. "Some of my roommates in college were Indian and Pakistani," he told NEWSWEEK. "I had to call some of my best friends and explain that my campaign wasn't engaged in xenophobia." Obama held a come-to-Jesus meeting with his senior aides at his Chicago headquarters and vented his anger. "If you're even going close to the line, you better ask me first," he recalled saying. "That was the most angry I've been in this campaign."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/84581

Lol

Whomever would have won Iowa, would have made that cover.

Thank God and mostly voters, Obama is on that cover. Iowan voters endorsed Obama, Newsweek is just doing what it is supposed to do.

and it's get on board the train to glory now.

I think.

:loveya:

"I had to call some of my best friends and explain that my campaign wasn't engaged in xenophobia."

Protecting the last few good jobs in the US is not xenophobia.

didn't want those aides to engage in dissing people from other countries just because a lot of US companies outsource their jobs. Is it really the fault of other countries and the people who take the jobs away from Americans that the owners are outsourcing?

Why don't the companies just hire Americans? And why do they get tax breaks for hiring people in other countries?

The Stealth Evangelical Candidate.

... of Media hype. If they can't have Corporate Dem #1, then #2 will have to do. Either way ... make sure it's not the true populist of the group.