Saturday, September 1, 2007
provided by CNN Money
By keeping your car for 15 years, or 225,000 miles of driving, you could save nearly $31,000, according to Consumer Reports magazine. That's compared to the cost of buying an identical model every five years, which is roughly the rate at which most car owners trade in their vehicles.
In its annual national auto survey, the magazine found 6,769 readers who had logged more than 200,000 miles on their cars. Their cars included a 1990 Lexus LS400 with 332,000 miles and a 1994 Ford Ranger pick-up that had gone 488,000 miles.
Calculating the costs involved in buying a new Honda Civic EX every five years for 15 years - including depreciation, taxes, fees and insurance - the magazine estimated it would cost $20,500 more than it would have cost to simply maintain one car for the same period.
Added to that, the magazine factored in $10,300 in interest that could have been earned on that money, assuming a five percent interest rate and a three percent inflation rate, over that time.
The magazine found similar savings with other models.
To have much hope of making it to 200,000 miles, a car has to be well maintained, of course. The magazine recommends several steps to help your car see it through.
Follow the maintenance guide in your owner's manual and make needed repairs promptly. Use only the recommended types of fluids, including oil and transmission fluids. Check under the hood regularly. Listen for strange sounds, sniff for odd smells and look for fraying or bulges in pipes or belts. Also, get a vehicle service manual. They're available at most auto parts stores or your dealership. Clean the car carefully inside and out. This not only helps the car's appearance but can prevent premature rust. Vacuuming the inside also prevents premature carpet wear from sand and grit. Buy a safe, reliable car. Buying a car with the latest safety equipment makes it more likely you'll feel as safe in your aging car as a newer model.
The magazine recommends several cars that have the best shot at reaching the 200,000 mile mark and a few that, according to its data, aren't likely to make it.
All the cars in the magazine's "Good bets" list are manufactured by Honda and Toyota. (One extreme example was not enough to get the Ford Ranger onto the list.) The "Bad bets" are a mixture of European models and two Nissans.
Consumer Reports' "Good bets" for making 200,000 miles: Honda Civic, Honda CR-V, Honda Element, Lexus ES, Lexus LS, Toyota 4Runner, Toyota Highlander, Toyota Land Cruiser, Toyota Prius, Toyota RAV4
Consumer Reports' "Bad bets" for making 200,000 miles: BMW 7-series, Infiniti QX56, Jaguar X-type, V8-powered Mercedes-Benz M-class, Mercedes-Benz SL, Nissan Armada, Nissan Titan, Volkswagen Touareg, V6-powered Volvo XC90.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
The Case for National Service – Time Magazine
A republic, if you can keep it. The founders were not at all optimistic about the future of the Republic. There had been only a handful of other republics in all of human history, and most were small and far away. The founders' pessimism, though, came not from history but from their knowledge of human nature. A republic, to survive, needed not only the consent of the governed but also their active participation. It was not a machine that would go of itself; free societies do not stay free without the involvement of their citizens.
Today the two central acts of democratic citizenship are voting and paying taxes. That's basically it. The last time we demanded anything else from people was when the draft ended in 1973. And yes, there are libertarians who believe that government asks too much of us — and that the principal right in a democracy is the right to be left alone — but most everyone else bemoans the fact that only about half of us vote and don't do much more than send in our returns on April 15. The truth is, even the archetype of the model citizen is mostly a myth. Except for times of war and the colonial days, we haven't been all that energetic about keeping the Republic.
When Americans look around right now, they see a public-school system with 38% of fourth graders unable to read at a basic level; they see the cost of health insurance escalating as 47 million people go uninsured; they see a government that responded ineptly to a hurricane in New Orleans; and they see a war whose ends they do not completely value or understand.
But there is something else we are seeing in the land. Polls show that while confidence in our democracy and our government is near an all-time low, volunteerism and civic participation since the '70s are near all-time highs. Political scientists are perplexed about this. If confidence is so low, why would people bother volunteering? The explanation is pretty simple. People, especially young people, think the government and the public sphere are broken, but they feel they can personally make a difference through community service. After 9/11, Americans were hungry to be asked to do something, to make some kind of sacrifice, and what they mostly remember is being asked to go shopping. The reason private volunteerism is so high is precisely that confidence in our public institutions is so low. People see volunteering not as a form of public service but as an antidote for it.
That is not a recipe for keeping a republic.
Another reality the founders could not have possibly foreseen was that a country that originally enslaved African Americans would be a majority non-white nation by 2050. Robert Putnam, the famed Harvard political scientist who wrote about the decline of civic engagement in Bowling Alone, recently released a new study that showed the more diverse a community is, the less people care about and engage with that community. Diversity, in fact, seems to breed distrust and disengagement. The study lands in the midst of a rackety immigration debate, but even if all immigration were to cease tomorrow, we would still be diverse whether we liked it or not. Yet the course of American history, Putnam writes, has always given way to "more encompassing identities" that create a "more capacious sense of 'we.'"
But at this moment in our history, 220 years after the Constitutional Convention, the way to get citizens involved in civic life, the way to create a common culture that will make a virtue of our diversity, the way to give us that more capacious sense of "we" — finally, the way to keep the Republic — is universal national service. No, not mandatory or compulsory service but service that is in our enlightened self-interest as a nation. We are at a historic junction; with the first open presidential election in more than a half-century, it is time for the next President to mine the desire that is out there for serving and create a program for universal national service that will be his — or her — legacy for decades to come. It is the simple but compelling idea that devoting a year or more to national service, whether military or civilian, should become a countrywide rite of passage, the common expectation and widespread experience of virtually every young American.
In 2006 more than 61 million Americans dedicated 8.1 billion hours to volunteerism. The nation's volunteer rate has increased by more than 6 percentage points since 1989. Overall, 27% of Americans engage in civic life by volunteering. Dr. Franklin would be impressed. The service movement itself began to take off in the 1980s, and today there is a renaissance of dynamic altruistic organizations in the U.S., from Teach for America to City Year to Senior Corps, many of them under the umbrella of AmeriCorps. In a 2002 poll, 70% of Americans thought universal service was a good idea. And while it's easy to sit back and say this to a pollster, the next President can harness the spirit of volunteerism that already exists and make it a permanent part of American culture.
At various times in American history, public service and private effort went arm in arm. After Pearl Harbor, Rosie the Riveter and Uncle Sam exhorted people to help the war effort, and Americans responded. But since F.D.R., and especially since J.F.K.'s launching of the Peace Corps, national service has been seen by some as a Democratic or liberal idea. In the '90s, Newt Gingrich argued that the rise of big government programs robbed people of their initiative to volunteer. After Bill Clinton signed the bill to create AmeriCorps in 1993, then Senator John Ashcroft called it "welfare for the well-to-do."
But these days there is a growing consensus on Capitol Hill that the private and public spheres can be linked. Democrats understand the need to support programs outside of government; Republicans understand that voluntary programs can be helped by government. In his first State of the Union address after 9/11, President George W. Bush called for Americans to give 4,000 hours of service and established the USA Freedom Corps. One of the early critics of AmeriCorps, John McCain, has since become a devout supporter. "National service is an issue that has been largely identified with the Democratic Party and the left of the political spectrum," McCain wrote in a 2001 Washington Monthly essay. "That is unfortunate, because duty, honor and country are values that transcend ideology...National service is a crucial means of making our patriotism real, to the benefit of both ourselves and our country."
It may seem like a strange moment to make the case for national service for young Americans when so many are already doing so much. Young men and women have made their patriotism all too real by volunteering to fight two wars on foreign soil. But we have battlefields in America, too — particularly in education and health care — and the commitment of soldiers abroad has left others yearning to make a parallel commitment here at home.
THE PLANSo what would a plan for universal national service look like? It would be voluntary, not mandatory. Americans don't like to be told what they have to do; many have argued that requiring service drains the gift of its virtue. It would be based on carrots, not sticks — "doing well by doing good," as Benjamin Franklin, the true father of civic engagement, put it. So here is a 10-point plan for universal national service. The ideas here are a mixture of suggestions already made, revised versions of other proposals and a few new wrinkles.
1. Create a National-Service Baby Bond
Every time an American baby is born, the Federal Government would invest $5,000 in that child's name in a 529-type fund — the kind many Americans are already using for college savings. At a rate of return of 7% — the historic return for equities — that money would total roughly $19,000 by the time that baby reaches age 20. That money could be accessed between the ages of 18 and 25 on one condition: that he or she commits to at least one year of national or military service. Like the old GI Bill, the money must be used to fund education, start a business or make a down payment on a home. The bond would preserve the voluntary nature of the service but offer a strong incentive for young people to sign up for it. Says City Year CEO and co-founder Michael Brown: "It's a new kind of government philosophy about reciprocity. If you invest in your country, your country will invest in you."
2. Make National Service a Cabinet-Level Department
Right now, the Corporation for National and Community Service — created in 1993 to manage AmeriCorps, Senior Corps and Learn and Serve America — is a small, independent federal agency. Find a catchier name, streamline its responsibilities and bring it up to Cabinet level. This would show that the new President means business when it comes to national service and would recognize that service is integral to how America thinks of itself — and how the President thinks of America. And don't appoint a gray bureaucrat to this job; make it someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Bloomberg, who would capture the imagination of the public. In fact, the next President — whatever party — should set a goal to enlist at least 1 million Americans annually in national service by the year 2016.
3. Expand Existing National-Service Programs
Like AmeriCorps and the National Senior Volunteer CorpsSince 1994, 500,000 people have gone through AmeriCorps programs tutoring and teaching in urban schools; managing after-school programs; cleaning up playgrounds, schools and parks; and caring for the elderly. After Katrina, AmeriCorps participants descended on the Gulf Coast within 24 hours and have since contributed more than 3 million hours of service. AmeriCorps members earn a small stipend for their volunteering and receive education awards of up to $4,725 per year. Right now, says David Eisner, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, "AmeriCorps is the best-kept secret in America." But under this national-service proposal, the program would more than triple in size, from 75,000 members each year to approximately 250,000. "We don't need to reinvent this nascent infrastructure," says Brown. "We need to take it to scale."
Presently, AmeriCorps is a catch-all initiative for a variety of different programs. Here are four new branded corps and other programs that could come under the new Department of National Service.
4. Create an Education Corps
The idea here is to create a cadre of tutors, teachers and volunteers who can help the 38% of fourth-graders who can't read at a basic level. The members of the Education Corps would also lead after-school programs for the 14 million students — a quarter of all school-age kids — who do not have a supervised activity between 3 and 6 p.m. on schooldays. Studies show that students who spend no time in after-school programs are almost 50% more likely to have used drugs and 37% more likely to become teen parents than students who spend one to four hours a week in an extracurricular activity. The Corps members would also focus on curbing America's dropout epidemic. Right now, 50% of the dropouts come from 15% of the high schools in the U.S., most of them located in high-poverty city neighborhoods and throughout the South. The Education Corps would focus on those troubled school districts.
5. Institute a Summer of Service
For many teenagers, the summer between middle school and high school is an awkward time. They're too young to get a real job and too old to be babysat. Well-to-do families can afford summer camps and exotic learning opportunities, but they're a minority. Shirley Sagawa, an expert on youth policy and an architect of the AmeriCorps legislation, is proposing a Summer of Service. One hundred thousand students would volunteer for organizations like City Year, a national volunteering program and think tank, or Citizen Schools, which organizes after-school activities for middle schoolers, and run summer programs for younger students in exchange for a $500 college scholarship. Senators Christopher Dodd (Democrat, Conn.) and Thad Cochran (Republican, Miss.) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (Democrat, Conn.) have sponsored a bill that would support a service "rite of passage" for students before they begin high school.
6. Build a Health Corps
There are nearly 7 million American children who are eligible for but not enrolled in government-sponsored health-insurance programs. Health Corps volunteers would assist the mostly low-income families of these children in accessing available public insurance offerings like the Children's Health Insurance Program. These volunteers could also act as nonmedical support staff such as caseworkers and community education specialists in underserved rural health clinics — which have less than three-quarters of the nonmedical staffing they need, according to Voices for National Service, a coalition of service organizations that advocates expanding federal service programs. The one-year experience in the Health Corps could lead these volunteers toward careers in nursing or medicine, helping to redress gaps that have left the U.S. with a dearth of qualified nurses and medical professionals.
7. Launch a Green Corps
This would be a combination of F.D.R.'s Civilian Conservation Corps — which put 3 million "boys in the woods" to build the foundation of our modern park system — and a group that would improve national infrastructure and combat climate change. When Roosevelt created the CCC, there were 25 million young Americans who were unemployed. Today there are 1.5 million Americans between 18 and 24 who are neither employed nor in school. These young men and women could address America's well-documented infrastructure problems. The Green Corps could reclaim polluted streams and blighted urban lots; repair and rehabilitate railroad lines, ports, schools and hospitals; and build energy-efficient green housing for elderly and low-income people.
8. Recruit a Rapid-Response Reserve Corps
The disarray and lack of a coordinated response to 9/11 and Katrina tell us there is a role volunteers can play in responding quickly to disasters and emergencies. The new Rapid-Response Reserve Corps would consist of retired military and National Guard personnel as well as national- and community-service program alumni to focus on disaster preparedness and immediate response to local and national disasters. The program would initially train 50,000 members, who could be deployed for two-week periods in response to emergencies and serve under the guidance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
9. Start a National-Service Academy
Picture West Point, but instead of learning how to fire an M-4 and reading The Art of War, students would be studying the Federalist papers and learning how to transform a failing public school. Conceived by two former Teach for America corps members, Chris Myers Asch and Shawn Raymond, the U.S. Public Service Academy would give undergraduates a four-year education in exchange for a five-year commitment to public service after they graduate. The idea is to provide a focused education for people who will serve in the public sector — either the federal, state or local government — and thereby create a new generation of civic leaders. Asch and Raymond were so dismayed by the government's response to Katrina that they wanted to create a new generation of people who were idealistic about government. "We need an institution that systematically develops leadership," says Asch. "We need to elevate it in the eyes of young people so we can attract the best and the brightest." The idea has been endorsed by Hillary Clinton and Pennsylvanian Republican Senator Arlen Specter, who are co-sponsors of legislation that would allocate $164 million per year for the envisioned 5,000-student academy.
10. Create a Baby-Boomer Education Bond
Over the next 20 years, 78 million baby boomers will be eligible to retire. That is, if they can afford to — and if they want to. According to an AARP survey, 80% of Americans between 50 and 60 said they were planning to work during retirement. "Many seniors are interested in careers that are influenced by a spirit of service. Over half want to work in the education, health-care and nonprofit sector," says Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Civic Ventures and co-founder of Experience Corps. Experience Corps is the largest AmeriCorps program for people over 55; it consists of teams of 10 to 15 people working to improve reading for students in kindergarten through third grade. Just as AmeriCorps members receive scholarships, baby-boomer volunteers would be able to designate a scholarship of $1,000 for every 500 hours of community service they complete. The $1,000 would be deposited into an education savings account or a 529 fund to be used by the volunteer's children or grandchildren or a student they designate. "There is a whole trend of people starting second careers with a focus on service," says Freedman. "National service is not just for young people. This is the generation that national service was created for in the first place, whom J.F.K. called on to help and for whom we created the Peace Corps. Many missed their chance and are now getting a second opportunity to ask what they can do for their country."
THE COST
So how much would all this cost? There are about 4 million babies born each year, and if each receives a $5,000 baby bond, that would be about $20 billion a year; that is, roughly two months of funding for the Iraq war and about half what the government spends per year on the federal prison system. The government would get $1 billion in dividends from the investment and would be able to cash in the bonds that people don't use. At the same time, corporate America would need to play a critical role in a plan for universal national service. The private sector has contributed more than $1 billion to AmeriCorps. The private sector must step up to the plate in funding national service — after all, it benefits too.
People are often skeptical of calls for service, especially from politicians, as they see them as crowd-pleasing rhetoric or a way of avoiding asking people to make a true sacrifice. But Americans are ready to be asked to do something. "People understand the idea that this is a great country, and that greatness isn't free," says Zach Maurin, the co-founder of ServeNext.org, which has launched a campaign to get the presidential candidates to endorse national service.
Between 1944 and 1956, 8 million returning veterans received debt-free education, low-interest mortgages or small-business loans. The GI Bill helped assimilate those young men into a new postwar society and helped turn America into a middle-class nation. A new GI Bill for national service involving men and women, young and old, could help secure America for the future and turn every new generation into a Greatest Generation. The courageous souls who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." The least we can do to keep the Republic is to pledge a little time.
With reporting by Jeremy Caplan and Kristina Dell/New York
Today the two central acts of democratic citizenship are voting and paying taxes. That's basically it. The last time we demanded anything else from people was when the draft ended in 1973. And yes, there are libertarians who believe that government asks too much of us — and that the principal right in a democracy is the right to be left alone — but most everyone else bemoans the fact that only about half of us vote and don't do much more than send in our returns on April 15. The truth is, even the archetype of the model citizen is mostly a myth. Except for times of war and the colonial days, we haven't been all that energetic about keeping the Republic.
When Americans look around right now, they see a public-school system with 38% of fourth graders unable to read at a basic level; they see the cost of health insurance escalating as 47 million people go uninsured; they see a government that responded ineptly to a hurricane in New Orleans; and they see a war whose ends they do not completely value or understand.
But there is something else we are seeing in the land. Polls show that while confidence in our democracy and our government is near an all-time low, volunteerism and civic participation since the '70s are near all-time highs. Political scientists are perplexed about this. If confidence is so low, why would people bother volunteering? The explanation is pretty simple. People, especially young people, think the government and the public sphere are broken, but they feel they can personally make a difference through community service. After 9/11, Americans were hungry to be asked to do something, to make some kind of sacrifice, and what they mostly remember is being asked to go shopping. The reason private volunteerism is so high is precisely that confidence in our public institutions is so low. People see volunteering not as a form of public service but as an antidote for it.
That is not a recipe for keeping a republic.
Another reality the founders could not have possibly foreseen was that a country that originally enslaved African Americans would be a majority non-white nation by 2050. Robert Putnam, the famed Harvard political scientist who wrote about the decline of civic engagement in Bowling Alone, recently released a new study that showed the more diverse a community is, the less people care about and engage with that community. Diversity, in fact, seems to breed distrust and disengagement. The study lands in the midst of a rackety immigration debate, but even if all immigration were to cease tomorrow, we would still be diverse whether we liked it or not. Yet the course of American history, Putnam writes, has always given way to "more encompassing identities" that create a "more capacious sense of 'we.'"
But at this moment in our history, 220 years after the Constitutional Convention, the way to get citizens involved in civic life, the way to create a common culture that will make a virtue of our diversity, the way to give us that more capacious sense of "we" — finally, the way to keep the Republic — is universal national service. No, not mandatory or compulsory service but service that is in our enlightened self-interest as a nation. We are at a historic junction; with the first open presidential election in more than a half-century, it is time for the next President to mine the desire that is out there for serving and create a program for universal national service that will be his — or her — legacy for decades to come. It is the simple but compelling idea that devoting a year or more to national service, whether military or civilian, should become a countrywide rite of passage, the common expectation and widespread experience of virtually every young American.
In 2006 more than 61 million Americans dedicated 8.1 billion hours to volunteerism. The nation's volunteer rate has increased by more than 6 percentage points since 1989. Overall, 27% of Americans engage in civic life by volunteering. Dr. Franklin would be impressed. The service movement itself began to take off in the 1980s, and today there is a renaissance of dynamic altruistic organizations in the U.S., from Teach for America to City Year to Senior Corps, many of them under the umbrella of AmeriCorps. In a 2002 poll, 70% of Americans thought universal service was a good idea. And while it's easy to sit back and say this to a pollster, the next President can harness the spirit of volunteerism that already exists and make it a permanent part of American culture.
At various times in American history, public service and private effort went arm in arm. After Pearl Harbor, Rosie the Riveter and Uncle Sam exhorted people to help the war effort, and Americans responded. But since F.D.R., and especially since J.F.K.'s launching of the Peace Corps, national service has been seen by some as a Democratic or liberal idea. In the '90s, Newt Gingrich argued that the rise of big government programs robbed people of their initiative to volunteer. After Bill Clinton signed the bill to create AmeriCorps in 1993, then Senator John Ashcroft called it "welfare for the well-to-do."
But these days there is a growing consensus on Capitol Hill that the private and public spheres can be linked. Democrats understand the need to support programs outside of government; Republicans understand that voluntary programs can be helped by government. In his first State of the Union address after 9/11, President George W. Bush called for Americans to give 4,000 hours of service and established the USA Freedom Corps. One of the early critics of AmeriCorps, John McCain, has since become a devout supporter. "National service is an issue that has been largely identified with the Democratic Party and the left of the political spectrum," McCain wrote in a 2001 Washington Monthly essay. "That is unfortunate, because duty, honor and country are values that transcend ideology...National service is a crucial means of making our patriotism real, to the benefit of both ourselves and our country."
It may seem like a strange moment to make the case for national service for young Americans when so many are already doing so much. Young men and women have made their patriotism all too real by volunteering to fight two wars on foreign soil. But we have battlefields in America, too — particularly in education and health care — and the commitment of soldiers abroad has left others yearning to make a parallel commitment here at home.
THE PLANSo what would a plan for universal national service look like? It would be voluntary, not mandatory. Americans don't like to be told what they have to do; many have argued that requiring service drains the gift of its virtue. It would be based on carrots, not sticks — "doing well by doing good," as Benjamin Franklin, the true father of civic engagement, put it. So here is a 10-point plan for universal national service. The ideas here are a mixture of suggestions already made, revised versions of other proposals and a few new wrinkles.
1. Create a National-Service Baby Bond
Every time an American baby is born, the Federal Government would invest $5,000 in that child's name in a 529-type fund — the kind many Americans are already using for college savings. At a rate of return of 7% — the historic return for equities — that money would total roughly $19,000 by the time that baby reaches age 20. That money could be accessed between the ages of 18 and 25 on one condition: that he or she commits to at least one year of national or military service. Like the old GI Bill, the money must be used to fund education, start a business or make a down payment on a home. The bond would preserve the voluntary nature of the service but offer a strong incentive for young people to sign up for it. Says City Year CEO and co-founder Michael Brown: "It's a new kind of government philosophy about reciprocity. If you invest in your country, your country will invest in you."
2. Make National Service a Cabinet-Level Department
Right now, the Corporation for National and Community Service — created in 1993 to manage AmeriCorps, Senior Corps and Learn and Serve America — is a small, independent federal agency. Find a catchier name, streamline its responsibilities and bring it up to Cabinet level. This would show that the new President means business when it comes to national service and would recognize that service is integral to how America thinks of itself — and how the President thinks of America. And don't appoint a gray bureaucrat to this job; make it someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mike Bloomberg, who would capture the imagination of the public. In fact, the next President — whatever party — should set a goal to enlist at least 1 million Americans annually in national service by the year 2016.
3. Expand Existing National-Service Programs
Like AmeriCorps and the National Senior Volunteer CorpsSince 1994, 500,000 people have gone through AmeriCorps programs tutoring and teaching in urban schools; managing after-school programs; cleaning up playgrounds, schools and parks; and caring for the elderly. After Katrina, AmeriCorps participants descended on the Gulf Coast within 24 hours and have since contributed more than 3 million hours of service. AmeriCorps members earn a small stipend for their volunteering and receive education awards of up to $4,725 per year. Right now, says David Eisner, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, "AmeriCorps is the best-kept secret in America." But under this national-service proposal, the program would more than triple in size, from 75,000 members each year to approximately 250,000. "We don't need to reinvent this nascent infrastructure," says Brown. "We need to take it to scale."
Presently, AmeriCorps is a catch-all initiative for a variety of different programs. Here are four new branded corps and other programs that could come under the new Department of National Service.
4. Create an Education Corps
The idea here is to create a cadre of tutors, teachers and volunteers who can help the 38% of fourth-graders who can't read at a basic level. The members of the Education Corps would also lead after-school programs for the 14 million students — a quarter of all school-age kids — who do not have a supervised activity between 3 and 6 p.m. on schooldays. Studies show that students who spend no time in after-school programs are almost 50% more likely to have used drugs and 37% more likely to become teen parents than students who spend one to four hours a week in an extracurricular activity. The Corps members would also focus on curbing America's dropout epidemic. Right now, 50% of the dropouts come from 15% of the high schools in the U.S., most of them located in high-poverty city neighborhoods and throughout the South. The Education Corps would focus on those troubled school districts.
5. Institute a Summer of Service
For many teenagers, the summer between middle school and high school is an awkward time. They're too young to get a real job and too old to be babysat. Well-to-do families can afford summer camps and exotic learning opportunities, but they're a minority. Shirley Sagawa, an expert on youth policy and an architect of the AmeriCorps legislation, is proposing a Summer of Service. One hundred thousand students would volunteer for organizations like City Year, a national volunteering program and think tank, or Citizen Schools, which organizes after-school activities for middle schoolers, and run summer programs for younger students in exchange for a $500 college scholarship. Senators Christopher Dodd (Democrat, Conn.) and Thad Cochran (Republican, Miss.) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (Democrat, Conn.) have sponsored a bill that would support a service "rite of passage" for students before they begin high school.
6. Build a Health Corps
There are nearly 7 million American children who are eligible for but not enrolled in government-sponsored health-insurance programs. Health Corps volunteers would assist the mostly low-income families of these children in accessing available public insurance offerings like the Children's Health Insurance Program. These volunteers could also act as nonmedical support staff such as caseworkers and community education specialists in underserved rural health clinics — which have less than three-quarters of the nonmedical staffing they need, according to Voices for National Service, a coalition of service organizations that advocates expanding federal service programs. The one-year experience in the Health Corps could lead these volunteers toward careers in nursing or medicine, helping to redress gaps that have left the U.S. with a dearth of qualified nurses and medical professionals.
7. Launch a Green Corps
This would be a combination of F.D.R.'s Civilian Conservation Corps — which put 3 million "boys in the woods" to build the foundation of our modern park system — and a group that would improve national infrastructure and combat climate change. When Roosevelt created the CCC, there were 25 million young Americans who were unemployed. Today there are 1.5 million Americans between 18 and 24 who are neither employed nor in school. These young men and women could address America's well-documented infrastructure problems. The Green Corps could reclaim polluted streams and blighted urban lots; repair and rehabilitate railroad lines, ports, schools and hospitals; and build energy-efficient green housing for elderly and low-income people.
8. Recruit a Rapid-Response Reserve Corps
The disarray and lack of a coordinated response to 9/11 and Katrina tell us there is a role volunteers can play in responding quickly to disasters and emergencies. The new Rapid-Response Reserve Corps would consist of retired military and National Guard personnel as well as national- and community-service program alumni to focus on disaster preparedness and immediate response to local and national disasters. The program would initially train 50,000 members, who could be deployed for two-week periods in response to emergencies and serve under the guidance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
9. Start a National-Service Academy
Picture West Point, but instead of learning how to fire an M-4 and reading The Art of War, students would be studying the Federalist papers and learning how to transform a failing public school. Conceived by two former Teach for America corps members, Chris Myers Asch and Shawn Raymond, the U.S. Public Service Academy would give undergraduates a four-year education in exchange for a five-year commitment to public service after they graduate. The idea is to provide a focused education for people who will serve in the public sector — either the federal, state or local government — and thereby create a new generation of civic leaders. Asch and Raymond were so dismayed by the government's response to Katrina that they wanted to create a new generation of people who were idealistic about government. "We need an institution that systematically develops leadership," says Asch. "We need to elevate it in the eyes of young people so we can attract the best and the brightest." The idea has been endorsed by Hillary Clinton and Pennsylvanian Republican Senator Arlen Specter, who are co-sponsors of legislation that would allocate $164 million per year for the envisioned 5,000-student academy.
10. Create a Baby-Boomer Education Bond
Over the next 20 years, 78 million baby boomers will be eligible to retire. That is, if they can afford to — and if they want to. According to an AARP survey, 80% of Americans between 50 and 60 said they were planning to work during retirement. "Many seniors are interested in careers that are influenced by a spirit of service. Over half want to work in the education, health-care and nonprofit sector," says Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Civic Ventures and co-founder of Experience Corps. Experience Corps is the largest AmeriCorps program for people over 55; it consists of teams of 10 to 15 people working to improve reading for students in kindergarten through third grade. Just as AmeriCorps members receive scholarships, baby-boomer volunteers would be able to designate a scholarship of $1,000 for every 500 hours of community service they complete. The $1,000 would be deposited into an education savings account or a 529 fund to be used by the volunteer's children or grandchildren or a student they designate. "There is a whole trend of people starting second careers with a focus on service," says Freedman. "National service is not just for young people. This is the generation that national service was created for in the first place, whom J.F.K. called on to help and for whom we created the Peace Corps. Many missed their chance and are now getting a second opportunity to ask what they can do for their country."
THE COST
So how much would all this cost? There are about 4 million babies born each year, and if each receives a $5,000 baby bond, that would be about $20 billion a year; that is, roughly two months of funding for the Iraq war and about half what the government spends per year on the federal prison system. The government would get $1 billion in dividends from the investment and would be able to cash in the bonds that people don't use. At the same time, corporate America would need to play a critical role in a plan for universal national service. The private sector has contributed more than $1 billion to AmeriCorps. The private sector must step up to the plate in funding national service — after all, it benefits too.
People are often skeptical of calls for service, especially from politicians, as they see them as crowd-pleasing rhetoric or a way of avoiding asking people to make a true sacrifice. But Americans are ready to be asked to do something. "People understand the idea that this is a great country, and that greatness isn't free," says Zach Maurin, the co-founder of ServeNext.org, which has launched a campaign to get the presidential candidates to endorse national service.
Between 1944 and 1956, 8 million returning veterans received debt-free education, low-interest mortgages or small-business loans. The GI Bill helped assimilate those young men into a new postwar society and helped turn America into a middle-class nation. A new GI Bill for national service involving men and women, young and old, could help secure America for the future and turn every new generation into a Greatest Generation. The courageous souls who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." The least we can do to keep the Republic is to pledge a little time.
With reporting by Jeremy Caplan and Kristina Dell/New York
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Labels Aren't What Kids Need
By Patrick Welsh
Sunday, August 26, 2007; B01
It's that anxious time again, the start of a new school year. But when Alexandria elementary schools resume classes after Labor Day, a lot of parents will be even more anxious than usual. Like Nancy Williams, the mother of a fifth-grader at George Mason Elementary, who has been fighting the good fight to get her son the best education she can.
"It's an ongoing comedy trying to get the school to challenge him," she says. "The school keeps saying, 'Don't worry. Your child's needs will be met.' Then his teacher says she can't give him challenging work because 'We were told not to assign above-grade-level work to anyone who isn't labeled TAG.' "
That's TAG as in Talented and Gifted. And who is and who isn't -- or at least who's designated such and who isn't -- has been one of the most contentious issues in Alexandria since the school system raised the bar for the TAG program two years ago. The new rules have cut out about two-thirds of the students who once qualified: At George Mason, the size of the fourth-grade program went from 17 to six last year.
Which means that a substantial number of students will now be relegated to the "regular" curriculum, where the emphasis is on ensuring that lower-income children who lag far behind in basic skills will pass the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) exams. In Alexandria, the first group is mostly white, the second mostly black and Hispanic. Some white parents at George Mason are now demanding a special class, between regular and gifted, for the "nearly gifted" -- as they call the children who missed the TAG cut.
Nancy Williams does not want a special class, but she does believe that the education her fourth-grader, who didn't make TAG, is getting at George Mason can't compare to what his older brother received there four years ago, when he got into TAG under the old rules.
"It's become too restrictive," agreed Priscilla Zanone Goodwin, whose three children are in the TAG program. "You have bright kids who don't make the cut wondering what's wrong with them, why they aren't getting to leave the room and do the same work as their friends in TAG."
The debate over designating students "gifted and talented" has been bedeviling school districts in the Washington area and throughout the country for years. Middle-class parents have come to see the label not just as a guarantee that their children will be challenged, but also as a status symbol, and they complain when their kids aren't included in the programs.
But of all the labels that we so-called educators give students, none seems more absurd -- and few more destructive. When we apply this tag to a tiny group of children in third, fourth or fifth grade, we are in effect saying that the rest are ungifted and untalented. We're denigrating hard work and perseverance, telling children that no matter how much effort they put forth, they just can't measure up to their special peers.
Just as bad, we're telling those on whom we deign to bestow the coveted label that they have it made; we're giving them an overblown sense of their intellectual abilities and setting them up to fall short when they face real challenges later. What schools need to do is not to single out a small group as special, but push all kids to work to their fullest potential.
The TAG philosophy heightens the racial and class tensions that have long been at the heart of the Alexandria school system. This is a city where 52 percent of the school children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. White students, most from fairly affluent families, make up 24 percent of the school district.
It's easy to write off the white parents now seeking a special class for their kids as snobs who want to create an exclusive club within the public schools for their darlings. But the parents at George Mason and elsewhere have reason to be concerned. For a fairly bright child, the SOL exams aren't much more than a minimum-competency test. To allay parental anxieties, Superintendent Rebecca Perry has said that the students at the top of the regular classes -- i.e., the white kids who didn't get into TAG -- will help to "challenge, mentor and coach" the students struggling with the SOL material.
George Mason parent David Rainey charitably calls Perry's statement "an interesting perspective." But "the unanswered question remains," he says. "What else could these students be doing instead of reviewing material they already understand as they challenge, coach and mentor their classmates?"
Alexandria's school administrators are caught in a political and moral trap. They have to assure mostly white middle-class parents, who provide most of the tax dollars for the schools, that their children can progress academically without being held back by lower-income kids. At the same time, the school system cannot create exclusive schools-within-schools for upper-income students.
Then there's the question that's usually too delicate to address: Can low-income minority students get the attention they need when they're in classes with middle-class whites? Research shows that KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools are the most successful in the country at closing the gap between low-income black students and middle-class white students. But the philosophy of these schools is geared to the needs of poor children. The schools operate on the belief that to close the learning gap, children from poor homes need an education that's not just equal, but superior, to that of middle-class whites. KIPP students, virtually all of whom are minority and poor, spend 60 percent more time in school than most other children in public schools.
Over the past 30 years, I've seen Alexandria swing back and forth between the concerns of the white and the black communities. Until the mid-1980s, the emphasis was on keeping white families in the system by running schools with large TAG programs, as well as honors and advanced-placement (AP) courses, that were virtually all white. In the late '80s and early '90s, Superintendent Paul Masem began to whittle away at that system. Every year during his seven-year tenure, the school system declared "minority achievement" to be its main goal; this angered white parents, many of whom left the system.
In 1995, Virginia instituted the SOLs, which are now complicating the racial dynamics even further and causing new concerns among white parents. Even the TAG students are being slowed down by the emphasis on the tests. When Priscilla Goodwin complained that her third-grader was bored, the principal of George Mason told her that the mandate from the central office was to get all students to pass the SOL exams. "Principals are running scared," Goodwin says. "Their reputations and promotions depend on the SOLs; they think that as long as bright kids pass these simple tests, they're doing fine. They're giving kids worksheets on facts that most children already know because they go at the pace of the slowest kid in the room. TAG or regular classes, kids aren't being challenged."
This is a problem not only in Alexandria, but in school systems throughout Northern Virginia and elsewhere in the state. Says University of Virginia education professor Carol Tomlinson: "Many bright kids encounter year after year of waiting for other kids to finish work so they can move ahead. Parents get weary of advocating for challenges in 'general' classroom settings and understandably come to believe that the only folks in the building who have their kids on the radar are the folks in the gifted program."
What most parents don't realize is that the gifted label can harm not only those who don't receive it, but also those who do. Labeling can create what Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a "fixed" mindset of intelligence -- the belief that your intelligence is set in stone -- as opposed to a "growth" mindset, which views intelligence as a muscle, something that can be developed throughout your life. In 1998, Dweck conducted an experiment in which she gave two evenly matched groups of elementary school kids the same nonverbal IQ test. When one group of children did well, they were told that they must have worked very hard to get their results. The students in the other group, meanwhile, were told that they must be very smart to have done so well.
Dweck found that as time went on, the kids who were told that they were smart "fell apart when they hit a challenge. They lost confidence in their abilities. Their motivation dwindled and their performance on the next IQ test dropped." By contrast, the children in the group praised for working hard tended to seek out challenges and persist at difficult tasks and ultimately learned more.
I've seen Dweck's theory proved time and again in my AP English classes. When an Asian student who has spoken English for only four or five years gets an A on a test and an American kid labeled gifted gets a D, the American will often do one of two things: denigrate the Asian's grade because it was achieved through hard work, or bring in his mother to argue that the test was unfair and that I should change his grade because I "know how smart he is."
In truth, many bright students feel uncomfortable as they go through the gifted-and-talented program. "I was always uneasy about being pulled out of class for TAG, set apart from other kids and shuttled through to college," says Sarah Shaffer, a sophomore at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Shep Walker, a T.C. graduate about to enter the College of William and Mary, says the problem is that "gifted-and-talented programs get filled with white kids who have pushy parents, leaving a lot of black and Hispanic kids out in the cold and creating de facto segregation in the classes."
In its defense, Alexandria's school administration was probably trying to fix that situation. But the solution isn't to mark fewer students as gifted and talented. It's to challenge all our kids, all the time.
Sunday, August 26, 2007; B01
It's that anxious time again, the start of a new school year. But when Alexandria elementary schools resume classes after Labor Day, a lot of parents will be even more anxious than usual. Like Nancy Williams, the mother of a fifth-grader at George Mason Elementary, who has been fighting the good fight to get her son the best education she can.
"It's an ongoing comedy trying to get the school to challenge him," she says. "The school keeps saying, 'Don't worry. Your child's needs will be met.' Then his teacher says she can't give him challenging work because 'We were told not to assign above-grade-level work to anyone who isn't labeled TAG.' "
That's TAG as in Talented and Gifted. And who is and who isn't -- or at least who's designated such and who isn't -- has been one of the most contentious issues in Alexandria since the school system raised the bar for the TAG program two years ago. The new rules have cut out about two-thirds of the students who once qualified: At George Mason, the size of the fourth-grade program went from 17 to six last year.
Which means that a substantial number of students will now be relegated to the "regular" curriculum, where the emphasis is on ensuring that lower-income children who lag far behind in basic skills will pass the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) exams. In Alexandria, the first group is mostly white, the second mostly black and Hispanic. Some white parents at George Mason are now demanding a special class, between regular and gifted, for the "nearly gifted" -- as they call the children who missed the TAG cut.
Nancy Williams does not want a special class, but she does believe that the education her fourth-grader, who didn't make TAG, is getting at George Mason can't compare to what his older brother received there four years ago, when he got into TAG under the old rules.
"It's become too restrictive," agreed Priscilla Zanone Goodwin, whose three children are in the TAG program. "You have bright kids who don't make the cut wondering what's wrong with them, why they aren't getting to leave the room and do the same work as their friends in TAG."
The debate over designating students "gifted and talented" has been bedeviling school districts in the Washington area and throughout the country for years. Middle-class parents have come to see the label not just as a guarantee that their children will be challenged, but also as a status symbol, and they complain when their kids aren't included in the programs.
But of all the labels that we so-called educators give students, none seems more absurd -- and few more destructive. When we apply this tag to a tiny group of children in third, fourth or fifth grade, we are in effect saying that the rest are ungifted and untalented. We're denigrating hard work and perseverance, telling children that no matter how much effort they put forth, they just can't measure up to their special peers.
Just as bad, we're telling those on whom we deign to bestow the coveted label that they have it made; we're giving them an overblown sense of their intellectual abilities and setting them up to fall short when they face real challenges later. What schools need to do is not to single out a small group as special, but push all kids to work to their fullest potential.
The TAG philosophy heightens the racial and class tensions that have long been at the heart of the Alexandria school system. This is a city where 52 percent of the school children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. White students, most from fairly affluent families, make up 24 percent of the school district.
It's easy to write off the white parents now seeking a special class for their kids as snobs who want to create an exclusive club within the public schools for their darlings. But the parents at George Mason and elsewhere have reason to be concerned. For a fairly bright child, the SOL exams aren't much more than a minimum-competency test. To allay parental anxieties, Superintendent Rebecca Perry has said that the students at the top of the regular classes -- i.e., the white kids who didn't get into TAG -- will help to "challenge, mentor and coach" the students struggling with the SOL material.
George Mason parent David Rainey charitably calls Perry's statement "an interesting perspective." But "the unanswered question remains," he says. "What else could these students be doing instead of reviewing material they already understand as they challenge, coach and mentor their classmates?"
Alexandria's school administrators are caught in a political and moral trap. They have to assure mostly white middle-class parents, who provide most of the tax dollars for the schools, that their children can progress academically without being held back by lower-income kids. At the same time, the school system cannot create exclusive schools-within-schools for upper-income students.
Then there's the question that's usually too delicate to address: Can low-income minority students get the attention they need when they're in classes with middle-class whites? Research shows that KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools are the most successful in the country at closing the gap between low-income black students and middle-class white students. But the philosophy of these schools is geared to the needs of poor children. The schools operate on the belief that to close the learning gap, children from poor homes need an education that's not just equal, but superior, to that of middle-class whites. KIPP students, virtually all of whom are minority and poor, spend 60 percent more time in school than most other children in public schools.
Over the past 30 years, I've seen Alexandria swing back and forth between the concerns of the white and the black communities. Until the mid-1980s, the emphasis was on keeping white families in the system by running schools with large TAG programs, as well as honors and advanced-placement (AP) courses, that were virtually all white. In the late '80s and early '90s, Superintendent Paul Masem began to whittle away at that system. Every year during his seven-year tenure, the school system declared "minority achievement" to be its main goal; this angered white parents, many of whom left the system.
In 1995, Virginia instituted the SOLs, which are now complicating the racial dynamics even further and causing new concerns among white parents. Even the TAG students are being slowed down by the emphasis on the tests. When Priscilla Goodwin complained that her third-grader was bored, the principal of George Mason told her that the mandate from the central office was to get all students to pass the SOL exams. "Principals are running scared," Goodwin says. "Their reputations and promotions depend on the SOLs; they think that as long as bright kids pass these simple tests, they're doing fine. They're giving kids worksheets on facts that most children already know because they go at the pace of the slowest kid in the room. TAG or regular classes, kids aren't being challenged."
This is a problem not only in Alexandria, but in school systems throughout Northern Virginia and elsewhere in the state. Says University of Virginia education professor Carol Tomlinson: "Many bright kids encounter year after year of waiting for other kids to finish work so they can move ahead. Parents get weary of advocating for challenges in 'general' classroom settings and understandably come to believe that the only folks in the building who have their kids on the radar are the folks in the gifted program."
What most parents don't realize is that the gifted label can harm not only those who don't receive it, but also those who do. Labeling can create what Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a "fixed" mindset of intelligence -- the belief that your intelligence is set in stone -- as opposed to a "growth" mindset, which views intelligence as a muscle, something that can be developed throughout your life. In 1998, Dweck conducted an experiment in which she gave two evenly matched groups of elementary school kids the same nonverbal IQ test. When one group of children did well, they were told that they must have worked very hard to get their results. The students in the other group, meanwhile, were told that they must be very smart to have done so well.
Dweck found that as time went on, the kids who were told that they were smart "fell apart when they hit a challenge. They lost confidence in their abilities. Their motivation dwindled and their performance on the next IQ test dropped." By contrast, the children in the group praised for working hard tended to seek out challenges and persist at difficult tasks and ultimately learned more.
I've seen Dweck's theory proved time and again in my AP English classes. When an Asian student who has spoken English for only four or five years gets an A on a test and an American kid labeled gifted gets a D, the American will often do one of two things: denigrate the Asian's grade because it was achieved through hard work, or bring in his mother to argue that the test was unfair and that I should change his grade because I "know how smart he is."
In truth, many bright students feel uncomfortable as they go through the gifted-and-talented program. "I was always uneasy about being pulled out of class for TAG, set apart from other kids and shuttled through to college," says Sarah Shaffer, a sophomore at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Shep Walker, a T.C. graduate about to enter the College of William and Mary, says the problem is that "gifted-and-talented programs get filled with white kids who have pushy parents, leaving a lot of black and Hispanic kids out in the cold and creating de facto segregation in the classes."
In its defense, Alexandria's school administration was probably trying to fix that situation. But the solution isn't to mark fewer students as gifted and talented. It's to challenge all our kids, all the time.
A Series of Fortunate Events
Barack Obama needed more than talent and ambition to rocket from obscure state senator to presidential contender in three years. He needed serious luck.
By Liza Mundy
Sunday, August 12, 2007; W10
In the summer of 2002, a little-known Illinois state legislator named Barack Obama thought he saw the political opening he'd been looking for. It was a long shot, a flier -- a race for the U.S. Senate against a sitting Republican. Obama believed he could beat the incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald. The immediate and, in some ways, harder challenge would be getting the Democratic nomination.
Obama was about to turn 41. An attorney and law lecturer at the University of Chicago, he had been elected to the state Senate in 1996, but had been chafing for some time at the limitations of legislating in Springfield. In 2000, he'd overreached by challenging former Black Panther Bobby Rush for the seat Rush held in the U.S. House of Representatives. It had been a disastrous bid, but understandable given that in Illinois, as around the country, paths to higher office for black politicians are few.
But this new opportunity looked, to him, feasible. In 1992, another Chicago politician, Carol Moseley Braun, had demonstrated that it was possible for an African American to win a statewide U.S. Senate primary, as long as there were at least two white Democrats to split the white vote. And several were already lining up to take on Fitzgerald.
There was just one problem, and it was a big one: Moseley Braun was talking about running herself. Only the second African American U.S. senator since Reconstruction, she had lost to Fitzgerald in 1998, in part as a result of allegations, never proved, that she had misused campaign funds. After the loss, she had been appointed U.S. ambassador to New Zealand. But now she was back in Hyde Park, the neighborhood that surrounds the University of Chicago, where Obama also lived. If she did run, there would be two credible black Democrats in the primary -- one far better known than the other.
"Our bases overlapped so much -- not just that she was African American, but that she came out of the progressive wing of the party . . . and our donor bases would have been fairly similar," says Obama, who also needed support from liberal whites. "So it would have been difficult, I think, to mobilize the entire coalition that was required for me to run."
During the second half of 2002, Obama quietly hired staffers, putting a team together and planning his campaign. But he couldn't announce until Moseley Braun made up her mind. Lobbying her seemed likely to backfire. "She's a very independent person," says Obama's campaign manager at the time, Dan Shomon, and "the view was to let her decide on her own."
And then, just after the new year, news reached them that Moseley Braun had made her decision. She was running.
For president of the United States.
And with that, the first cherry had clicked into place: one in an extraordinary series that would hit -- bing bing bing bing -- in the jackpot that for the past five years has characterized Barack Obama's career. If Moseley Braun had run for her old seat, Obama would not be where he is now: sitting on an upholstered couch in a busy office in the Hart Senate Office Building, the only African American member of the U.S. Senate and a leading contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Legs crossed, suit jacket off, Obama readily acknowledges Moseley Braun's decision "was another example of the stars aligning" to land him in what seemed, not so long ago, a laughably improbable spot.
Had he been unable to run for the Senate, he says, "I would probably have stepped out of politics for a while." That he didn't step out -- that he stepped in to the degree that he has -- is partly due to the existence, at a pivotal moment, of a politician who had more hubris than he did. Even more audacity, you could say, and even more hope.
The run of luck set off by Moseley Braun's ill-fated presidential run helps explain how Obama has managed to do the political equivalent of zero to 100 mph in 60 seconds. Four years ago, the name "Barack Obama" might register a single hit on the Nexis news database, on a good day. These days, there are about 300 news items that mention Obama each day. His poll numbers aren't as high as those of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has spent decades building her political profile. But his campaign outstripped Clinton's in fundraising in the second quarter of 2007.
"It's like he cut in line," says Tony Bullock, a former Hill staffer and vice president at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. "He's become a household name far faster than anyone who doesn't have a hit movie."
"He became an important person overnight," agrees Dem-ocratic political consultant Donna Brazile. What's unusual, Brazile says, is that most political celebrities -- Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John McCain -- earn that status only after prolonged ordeals. "What's unique about Obama is that he's done it because he's cool. Because he's new."
In fact, the story of Obama's rise is more complicated -- and more interesting -- than simple novelty. To understand his ascent, it helps to invoke the anthropic principle, the theory some scientists use when exploring how a perfectly calibrated set of variables -- the necessary amounts of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen; the right temperature range; a propitious distance from the sun -- all had to be present for human life to arise on Earth. Had any one of thousands of factors not been present, our planet might have been a wasteland.
Similarly, had any number of events fallen out slightly differently, Barack Obama might have a lot more time to spend with his family just now. Had the late Harold Washington not been elected mayor of Chicago in 1983, changing what seemed possible for African American politicians in Illinois; had the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill not passed in 2002; had a series of Illinois politicians not suffered a run of spectacular marital problems; had John Kerry not been introduced by Obama during a stop on the former's 2004 presidential campaign, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama would not have happened.
"It's not as though he's the accidental senator," Bullock says, "but, to some degree, his political story is a series of random walks and chance encounters."
To be sure, among the factors contributing to Obama's rise are innate gifts, including what Newton Minow, a Chicago attorney and mentor, calls "the combination of a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament." Obama is bright and attractive, with an air of calm as well as a wonderful speaking voice, hyper-articulate and sometimes pedantic, but also rich, warm, authoritative and reassuring. His voice, his appearance and his life story are particularly well suited to attract white votes. "We'd probably like it better if he talked like Jesse Jackson, but ya'll wouldn't," says African American political commentator Debra Dickerson.
And then there's ambition -- a given in any presidential candidate, but worth pointing out because Obama works hard to dispel the image of having sought his superstar status. "It's not about me, it's about you," he likes to tell his crowds. But according to those who know him, he has been talking about the presidency for more than a decade. "It was clear to me from the day I met him that he was thinking about politics," says Harvard Law School classmate Christine Spurell.
"There's a central conundrum about him," says another Harvard classmate, Brad Berenson. "On the one hand, he's this laid-back guy from Hawaii. On the other hand, he's vaulted himself into the race for president of the United States. And that doesn't happen by accident."
In some ways, nothing is more implausible than the coming together of Obama's parents. His mother, a white Kansan named Stanley Ann Dunham (her father had wanted a boy), met his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, in Hawaii in the late 1950s. Her family had relocated there, and he'd come to study at the University of Hawaii.
The second Barack Hussein Obama was born in 1961. After two years, his father left to pursue a PhD at Harvard (his fellowship did not cover family expenses), then returned to his home -- and first wife, whom he apparently had not divorced -- in Kenya.
Obama grew up a child of color in a white family, raised by his mother as well as loving grandparents. (He saw his father only once again; the elder Barack, by then a stranger to him, paid an awkward visit when the son was 10.) Obama spent several years in Indonesia after his mother married an Indonesian student. He returned to Hawaii to attend private school and live with his maternal grandparents in Honolulu, where he was largely insulated from the overt racism of 1970s America but became increasingly aware of the lack of African Americans around him.
In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama portrays himself as drifting through high school, a little directionless and rebellious. It was becoming clear to him that there were aspects of his identity that white family members couldn't help him sort out. "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America," he writes. The quest drove him East to New York City, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. In search of the communal spirit of the civil rights era, he decided to become a community organizer.
At that time, steel mills in Illinois and Indiana were closing, and an organizer named Gerald Kellman had been hired to help the devastated workers. Kellman's assignment included Chicago's South Side, home to one of the nation's largest African American communities. To win the cooperation of local leaders, Kellman promised to hire at least one black organizer. When he heard from Obama, he wasn't sure if he qualified racially. He asked his wife, who is of Japanese descent, if "Obama" might be a Japanese name, and she said it might. Kellman later met him in Manhattan and was impressed. After offering Obama the job, Kellman says, he gave him an advance to buy a car, "or something that resembled a car."
And so it was that Barack Obama loaded up an old Honda and drove to Chicago, a place that was not an obvious launching pad for a young man with zero ties to the city. There was a deeply rooted black community, but most black politicians -- like most white ones -- came from political families, ward organizations, or both. And there was terrible racial tension.
"The divide in Chicago between black and white was incredibly hostile," says Judson Miner, a white civil rights attorney who would later hire Obama. Not long before, however, Harold Washington had taken on the fabled Daley machine, and beaten it to become the city's first black mayor. It was a watershed moment. While he didn't get many white votes the first time, Washington was a charismatic figure who taught voters, as Miner puts it, "that an African American could run Chicago, and it wouldn't fall apart."
Obama also came to Chicago without traditional African American credentials. He didn't belong to a church, and he had to work to win the trust of South Side leaders, many of whom were Baptist and Pentecostal ministers. But Obama was polite and winning, willing to work with pastors, separatists and grandmothers alike. He was a good listener, and Kellman set out to make him better.
"We did training in listening skills," Kellman says. "You spend time as an organizer going from one person to another doing interviews. You're listening for story, because story communicates more about a person than simply facts. When people share their story, they get a different sense of themselves, and you get a different sense of them. Barack did that very well. One of the remarkable things is how well he listens to people who are opposed to him."
But three years of listening was enough for Obama, who began applying to law schools. Kellman thinks his father's legacy was coming into play. By then, Obama had met some Kenyan half-siblings who told him more about his father, a finance minister who had suffered major career setbacks, taken several wives and died in a car accident in 1982, when Obama was 21. During a trip to Harvard for a conference on the black church, Kellman says, Obama did a lot of reflecting on his father.
"His dad was not practical, not effective personally. His personal life was a wreck -- also his career in Kenya -- and Barack did not want to follow that," says Kellman, recalling that Obama "talked about wanting to make a difference and be effective." Kellman perceived a new interest in politics: "My sense is that Barack's dream was to come back and possibly become mayor of Chicago."
Obama's take on that period is different. He says that it never occurred to him to try to follow in Harold Washington's footsteps. "I was, like many people, impressed by the degree to which he could mobilize the community and push for change," Obama says. But after Washington died from a heart attack at his city hall office in 1987, Obama became disillusioned by the splintering of the coalition that had supported Washington. At that point, Obama says, "I was somewhat disdainful of politics. I was much more interested in mobilizing people to hold politicians accountable."
This would quickly change. Whatever he thought going in, it was at Harvard Law School that Obama's political skills -- and aspirations -- would emerge rather dramatically. All that South Side dispute mediation prepared him well to operate in a more elite but equally factionalized atmosphere.
In 1988, Harvard, like Chicago, was a bitterly divided place politically: It was a liberal campus, mostly, but there was a hardy body of conservatives who belonged to the campus chapter of the Federalist Society. "The conservatives were a small and beleaguered minority, which made us all the more vocal," says one of them, Brad Berenson, a former associate counsel to President George W. Bush who is now a lawyer in the Washington office of Sidley Austin. There were fights over legal issues -- habeas corpus, the First Amendment -- but most of all, Berenson says, there were "tremendous fights over tenure decisions for women and minorities."
These were professional arguers, the most career-driven young people imaginable: Many of them belonged to what Martha Minow, a professor at the law school, calls "a very large diverse group of people who think rather well of themselves and who are already jockeying for power not only within the institution, but who are ambitious about the future." In this cauldron of careerism, Minow says, Obama stood out because he was not an obvious climber and because "he had then, as he has now, a sense of individuals having obligations to the community, which is not something people [at Harvard Law] usually talk about." Like others, she was struck by his ability to entertain the ideas of opponents. "He spoke with a kind of ability to rise above the conversation and summarize it and reframe it. There was a maturity he brought to the discussion."
But he was also among the most driven in his class. In his first year, he entered the competition for the law review, one of the country's premier scholarly law journals and, for the students who select, edit and write articles, a ticket to a high-powered legal or academic career. To become an editor of the law review was grueling: If you were impossibly smart, you might qualify through grades, but most editors were selected through an exhausting multi-day writing process, their output judged by the current editors. There was also a highly secretive process by which a few students were chosen based at least in part on race. Obama, says one classmate, was never suspected of making law review because of his race.
The fact that these suspicions existed at all says much about the tenor of the time. "That was the most race-conscious time of my life," says Christine Spurell, who, as an African American, found it a "very charged, very hostile atmosphere." She participated in protests calling for more black women faculty members, whereas Obama -- who speaks in favor of affirmative action in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, but dislikes conflict and confrontation -- was not the type to mount the barricades. "He wasn't out there going to the mat on any issue," says Spurell, who recalls that she and Obama argued incessantly, like siblings. "I would say he had all your standard liberal views in law school, but he did not shout them from the rooftops."
In the middle of his second year, Obama surprised his classmates by entering the race for law review president, a job that involves appointing other editors, mediating disagreements and influencing the careers of the nation's legal scholars by accepting or rejecting articles. Obama had not been expected to run. He had spent the summer working at Sidley Austin in Chicago, where he met Michelle Robinson, a Princeton-educated attorney, also a graduate of Harvard Law, whom he would marry. He made it clear he wanted to go back to Chicago, where he had found the community he had missed growing up. Traditionally, the president of the law review uses the job as a springboard to a top-level legal or academic position: Among the ranks are former U.S. attorney general Elliot Richardson and feminist law professor Susan Estrich.
Obama portrays his decision to compete as having been almost impulsive. "It was probably one of those moments where I said, What the heck," he says. "I was an older student, 27 [when he started]. Most of my peers at the law review were a couple of years younger than I was. I thought I could apply some common sense and management skills to the job. I was already investing a lot of time in the law review, and my attitude was: Why not try to run the law review?"
The 1990 election, which took place in a house on campus, was a daylong ritual with all the secrecy and silliness of any Ivy League selection process. Those editors who were running went into the kitchen and began cooking breakfast for the people debating their merits: third-year editors and those second-years who weren't running. There would be rounds of polling to winnow the ranks, and if you lost -- were voted off the island -- you left the kitchen and joined the voters.
Voting went on for hours. Obama stayed in, but so did several other liberal candidates. After the last conservative fell, the right-wingers had to decide which liberal would be palatable. They saw Obama as the one most likely to listen and include them in decisions. "He was not perceived as a zealot," says Berenson. "Conservatives felt that he respected them on a personal level and would take seriously what they had to say, and their points of view -- even if he didn't always, or ever, agree with them -- would be treated with some measure of respect."
They were right. Just below the presidency, there are important masthead positions that auger well for later life, and Obama bestowed a number on conservatives. At the time, Spurell was so incensed at his failure to promote more black editors that she complained to the Los Angeles Times that Obama was no different from white editors who had come before. "I personally thought I deserved a spot. My work was, I thought, extremely excellent," says Spurell, who now works as a public defender in Abingdon, Va. But Obama's approach -- she believes now -- was more effective. "As you can probably tell, I wasn't that popular a personality. So I don't blame him in the least for not picking me for the position I thought I should have." She adds that she feels the same "rush of pride" for him now that she felt when he won the law review presidency.
"The president of the law review is regarded as the most intellectually savvy person on campus," she says. "And for that to go to a black person -- I feel so moved to have known him. All the same things that made me frustrated with him," such as his chumminess with Federalist Society members, "are the things that got him so far."
There are judges and blue-chip law partners who wait to see who is elected president of the Harvard Law Review and call immediately to offer clerkships and jobs. For Obama, the inquiries were even more numerous because of the publicity around the first African American president. There were national newspaper articles and a book contract to write his life story.
Abner Mikva, a Chicago lawyer and former congressman who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, made an inquiry. When word came back that Obama was not interested, Mikva assumed he wanted to clerk for a black judge. But Obama simply didn't want to clerk at all. Instead, he wrote his memoir, took a job with Judson Miner's civil rights practice, worked on a voter registration drive and began making political contacts.
"I think he saw himself with a political career even before I knew him," says Newton Minow, who had heard about Obama from his daughter Martha and met him the summer Obama worked at Sidley Austin. "He was at the firm for only one summer, and when we offered him a job to come back, he came in to see me and told me he was going to go into politics. I think he had that in mind very early."
There was one impediment to a political career: In 1992, Obama married Michelle, who wasn't "gung-ho on the political bandwagon," reports her brother, Craig Robinson. "We as a family were extremely cynical about politics and politicians." Michelle Obama confirms this description, saying that when she was dating Barack, "we didn't talk about politics specifically."
But Obama didn't keep his interests secret. Early in the relationship, Michelle, who was notoriously picky about her boyfriends, asked Craig, now the men's basketball coach at Brown University, to take Obama out on the ball court to get a sense of his character. Obama passed that test -- he wasn't a ball hog or a hotshot -- and was invited to a family event, where Craig pulled him aside and asked about his plans.
"He said, 'I think I'd like to teach at some point in time, and maybe run for public office,'" recalls Robinson, who assumed Obama meant he'd like to run for city alderman. "He said no -- at some point he'd like to run for the U.S. Senate. And then he said, 'Possibly even run for president at some point.' And I was like, 'Okay, but don't say that to my Aunt Gracie.' I was protecting him from saying something that might embarrass him."
Obama laughs, now, hearing that anecdote. He doesn't remember the exchange, but adds, "If the conversation did come up, and I said that I was interested in electoral politics . . . my aspirations would have been higher than being an alderman."
Craig "should have said, 'Don't tell Michelle!'" says Michelle Obama, who initially tried to talk her husband out of running for office. He persuaded her, she says, by arguing that they had a responsibility to work on behalf of people less privileged than they are.
"You know, Barack is very convincing and very passionate," says Michelle, who says she was naive in the beginning about the impact it would have on their family life, which now includes two young daughters, Malia and Sasha. "So I eventually said: 'Sure, let's do it. Okay, you win.'"
"And then," she concludes, "you're in."
Barack Obama's first opportunity came, as opportunities would with striking frequency, when somebody else's personal life got messy.
In the fall of 1995, Mel Reynolds, 43, who represented Illinois' 2nd Congressional District, was forced to resign when he was convicted on charges related to having sex with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer. There were several contenders in the special election to replace him, including Alice Palmer, a progressive state senator who represented Hyde Park and urged Obama to run for her state Senate seat. But when Jesse Jackson Jr. won the primary, Palmer decided she wanted her old job back. Obama did not step aside. More than that, according to the Chicago Tribune, when Obama's staffers looked at the petitions she'd hastily garnered, they saw irregularities and challenged them before the board of elections. Then, noting irregularities in the petitions of his other primary opponents, Obama knocked them all out of the race. He went on to win and was sworn into the state Senate in January 1997, and started commuting to Springfield.
His ambition, now, was as visible as a radio tower. Invited by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam to participate in the Saguaro Seminar, a network of thinkers who met around the country to discuss community issues, Obama talked so openly about his political future that the group began referring to him, teasingly, as "Governor."
"He was transparently and lovably ambitious," says Putnam, author of a seminal work on the withering of community in American life, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. "He was always talking about running for office and the importance of being in politics."
The group stoked his sense of potential. "I remember, after the second or third meeting, a crowd gathered around him and said, 'When are you running for president?' recalls Martha Minow, who was also a Saguaro member. "I try to remember: Why did we think this? It was his way of listening astutely to the conversations, offering an embracing, objective view: Here's how what everybody says fits together."
Lacking ties to any ward machine, or the street credibility of leaders who had ascended the ranks, Obama ingratiated himself with Emil Jones, who would become president of the Illinois state Senate after the Democrats assumed control. Jones became a mentor to Obama, entrusting him with overseeing reforms of welfare, campaign finance and the criminal justice system. Among Obama's achievements was a law requiring that murder confessions be videotaped. In all of this he displayed what Mikva, who became another of his mentors, calls his characteristic "knack for getting people to bargain seriously." Not everybody liked him; one Senate colleague described him as so ambitious that given the chance, he'd run for "king of the world."
After just a few years, Obama was talking about running for Congress, and thought he saw an opportunity. In 1999, black congressman Bobby Rush had challenged Richard M. Daley for mayor, and lost. Obama conducted a poll, says then-campaign manager Dan Shomon, and it suggested that some voters, particularly white ones, were looking for an alternative to Rush. "I was a little bit questioning about whether Rush was vulnerable at all, but Barack was sure that he was," Mikva says.
Obama paid a price for trying to depose a member of the African American power structure: During the race, the suggestion was subtly advanced that Obama was not "black enough." Then, that October, Rush's adult son was murdered in a street shooting, and Obama shut down his campaign for several weeks to show compassion. His campaign lost momentum, and he lost badly in the March 2000 primary.
He did not take his drubbing well. "He is not a good loser," says Shomon. Obama acknowledges this: "Losing's always miserable."
So miserable, that when Mikva met with Obama, he found him unusually dispirited. "That was the one time he semi-seriously thought about giving up politics. He was frustrated; he had been [in the state Senate] for four years; the pay is very modest. It seemed that whatever his ambitions were, there wasn't going to be a channel for them."
Obama, who didn't want to be a "lifer in the state legislature," agrees that he seriously considered looking for another way to make an impact. "Some doubts entered my mind as to whether some kid from Hawaii named Barack Obama could succeed in a political venue, where a lot of times voters are relying on very little information and making snap judgments based on somebody's name and whether they've got family ties."
But, of course, the loss to Rush would turn out to be more fortunate than it appeared. As Newton Minow points out, had Obama beaten Rush, "he would have been in Congress, not a senator, and he wouldn't have given the speech at the [2004] Demo-cratic National Convention" that would change the trajectory of his career. "Nothing like that would have happened. I'm a great believer in timing. Everything is timing."
And timing, now, was on his side. Just when Obama was despairing, it became evident that Peter Fitzgerald was foundering in the U.S. Senate. "He had some very good characteristics," says Obama now. "But he just didn't seem to enjoy the job much, and wasn't a particularly good politician. I thought that a Democratic challenger could draw a sharp contrast and be effective. I thought I could beat him."
Shomon tried to dissuade him from running, arguing that a Senate campaign would put too much pressure on his personal life. "His counterargument was similar to his counterargument always: We can change politics, we can change the agenda, we can help average people." He said, Shomon recalls, "I'm not going to be able to help people if I'm stuck in the state Senate for 20 years."
"He really felt like this was his opportunity," Shomon says. "Every time Barack saw an opportunity, he felt like it could be his last."
Then in April 2003 -- just a few months after Obama formally entered the primary -- Fitzgerald surprised everyone by announcing he would not run for reelection. This, Obama believes, was his luckiest break of all, because it meant that there was no incumbent. The seat was truly open. "I thought I could beat him, and still think I could have beat him, but the fact that he did not end up running, obviously, left the field wide open."
Ultimately there would be seven candidates in the Democratic primary, but for Obama there were two who mattered. One was Dan Hynes, the popular state comptroller and favorite of the party machine. The other was Blair Hull, a wealthy stock trader who had sold his company to Goldman Sachs for $531 million.
Hull's presence, while formidable, did two things to help Obama. First, it increased the likelihood that the white vote would split between Hynes and Hull. Second, it enabled Obama to raise much more money than he otherwise could have. The newly passed McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law contained a "millionaire's amendment." In a race against a wealthy opponent who is financing his own campaign, a candidate is permitted to raise significantly more than the normal limit. In this case, Obama could raise $12,000 from each donor instead of $2,000.
"This was a huge advantage; it just made a huge difference," says Mikva. "I gave him more money than I've ever given anyone in my life."
In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes how put off he was by the magnitude of the fundraising effort a Senate race requires. "I started engaging in elaborate games of avoidance during call time -- frequent bathroom breaks, extended coffee runs." But he steeled himself for the task and learned to set aside "any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums of money."
He built a diverse group of donors. Among them were black business owners and professionals. He could also take advantage of his Ivy connections, drawing on moneyed Harvard classmates and his wife's super-loyal Princeton connections. He had energetic supporters in Minow and Mikva, as well as David Axelrod, the leading Democratic campaign consultant in Illinois. He appealed to many of Chicago's "lakefront liberals," who occupy a strip stretching from downtown to the North Shore along Lake Michigan, and attracted major benefactors such as the Crown and Pritzker families, big money.
But Hull was still vastly outspending him, and the spending mattered. A poll taken about a month before the primary showed Hull in the lead, with Hynes and Obama trailing.
Then, in late February 2004, Blair Hull had a very bad day. There had been rumors of an ugly divorce from an ex-wife; when the court records were released, they contained allegations of domestic abuse. Shomon remembers Obama's reaction. He feared that if Hull dropped out of the race, Hull's support would shift to Hynes. But Hull stayed in the race, and hung onto about 10 percent of the vote.
This may not have mattered as much as it seemed. In the end, Obama, preaching a message of unity, did much better with white voters than anyone had anticipated. After Hull's disaster, Hynes's numbers edged up slightly, while Obama's soared. "Much to our shock and surprise," says Axelrod, "he won with 53 percent of the vote." They were incredulous -- and ecstatic. Obama won in the most unlikely places, including portions of northwest Chicago, where Harold Washington once had been treated so venomously that it made the national news. He was, it now became clear, a genuine crossover politician, something that put Obama on the national map. William Finnegan profiled him in in the New Yorker, Scott Turow wrote a piece in Salon, and the newsweeklies took notice.
Now the cherries were falling into place furiously. Obama's Republican opponent was Jack Ryan, another very wealthy opponent, well-regarded. And the Democratic Party -- finally taking notice -- decided it would give Barack Obama some help.
It would ask him to make a speech.
In early summer of 2004, organizers of the Democratic presidential convention were faced with some challenges, chief among them the fact that no Bush-bashing would be allowed among convention speakers. The Kerry campaign didn't want to alienate swing voters by speaking ill of Republicans. So the convention needed speakers who could present an upbeat message and still sound compelling.
There were some givens. Bill Clinton would be the prime time speaker Monday night; the third and fourth nights would feature John Edwards and John Kerry, respectively. On Tuesday they wanted a keynote speaker in the tradition of the great keynoters of the past: Barbara Jordan, Mario Cuomo, Ann Richards, "people who inspired hope," as Donna Brazile puts it, "and not only inspired hope, but laid a framework for the party."
There were a number of criteria as planners began proposing candidates. Youth was desirable, and freshness, and diversity. "We were trying to think creatively of the next generation of leaders," says one campaign official. They came up with a list of Democratic governors that included Mark Warner of Virginia, Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Tom Vilsack of Iowa: solid choices, but a list that, as the official put it, "didn't get us where we wanted to go." Jennifer Granholm, the photogenic new governor of Michigan, was also on the list. And Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, who had read some of the coverage following Obama's primary victory, proposed Obama.
It was an appealing idea. Obama was known to be a speaker who could get a crowd going. He was a Midwesterner from a major industrial state, providing a demographic complement to Southerner Edwards and Northerner Kerry. But these things were also true of Granholm.
Weeks before the decision was made, David Axelrod heard "scuttlebutt" that Obama was being considered. Axelrod told Obama, who says he found it a bit hard to believe. "I have to say, I was skeptical," Obama says. "Traditionally -- obviously -- that slot is not given to a state senator." Obama did not lobby directly, but Axelrod did, saying, "My case was that he was a transcendent figure who could deliver a unifying message and had just won a spectacular victory."
According to an official involved, the decision came down to the fact that Obama, unlike Granholm, was still trying to win an election. Just a few weeks before the convention, it would emerge that Obama's opponent, Jack Ryan, had tried to talk his wife at the time into performing public acts at a sex club. Ryan would eventually withdraw, and there was talk that some marquee Republican, possibly former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, would enter the race. The balance in the Senate was 51-48 in favor of Republicans. "We needed his Senate seat," says the official. So Obama it was.
Kerry gave Obama's selection an enthusiastic thumbs up. "I was impressed by him," Kerry says. "I had met him and . . . campaigned with him in Illinois, and thought on a personal level he would be able to convey the kind of message I wanted to convey out of my convention: a message of inclusiveness and change, a new view about how we can make our politics more relevant to people and, in a sense, just put a little bit of different language in front of folks."
In The Audacity of Hope, Obama portrays it as a total surprise when Cahill called to invite him to deliver the keynote. "The process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me," he writes, saying that after he received the call in his car, he marveled to his driver, "I guess this is pretty big."
This seems disingenuous. "There is no doubt that that call was expected," says Michael Duga, chief of staff to former senator Max Cleland, who also was involved in the planning. Axelrod doesn't dispute this: "We heard shortly before he got the call that he was likely to get it." So, he acknowledges, "we did get a little bit of a heads-up."
Obama knew what he wanted do with the speech, says his communications director, Robert Gibbs. He wanted to tell his life story as an American narrative. He wanted to offer himself as an embodiment of what's possible. And he wanted to write the speech himself, which he did, stuck in Springfield during votes, sending drafts by e-mail. But Gibbs also did research. Listening to past keynote speeches, he realized that there were two basic models. One was the 1988 Ann Richards punch-line model -- you deliver a one-liner, and there is wild applause, and you deliver a one-liner, and there is wild applause -- and the other was the 1984 Mario Cuomo model, a visionary declaration that the audience doesn't punctuate with clapping, because it's rapt. That's the model Obama went for.
On the night of the speech, Gibbs and Axelrod stayed in the greenroom with Obama and his wife beforehand, then went down to watch on the convention floor, with thousands of delegates, reporters and spectators. Another 9 million people saw the speech on the cable channels covering the convention.
Obama began by talking about his mother and father, the diversity of his heritage, how "in no other country on Earth, is my story even possible." He spoke about issues -- better government, health coverage, better care for veterans -- then delivered his famous call for unity and compassion: "We are all connected as one people. If there is a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child," he said, dismissing the idea of "red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats . . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
On the floor, Gibbs recalls, he and Axelrod sensed the rapture of the crowd and looked at each other "like two kids at Christmas."
"Sometimes you know it's a home run at the crack of the bat," says Axelrod. "As soon as he swung, you knew that the ball was going to go over the fence."
The full impact of the speech became clear to Obama's staff days later, when they embarked on a whistle-stop RV tour of downstate Illinois. Obama, Shomon says, was furious when he saw the schedule. He was exhausted and wanted to spend time with his family. But at the first town on the first day, there were 500 people instead of the 100 that had been expected. The same thing happened again, and again; then one day they drove into a state park to see 1,000 people crowded into an open-air amphitheater. "Everyone knew exactly what everyone else was thinking," say Gibbs. "Wow."
This continued. "You'd hear [Democratic] party people talking: Not only was it the biggest crowd we ever saw, it's new people, not just the usual suspects -- we don't even know who these people are," says political analyst Charlie Cook.
The speech vaulted Obama into mega-celebrity. "It's like walking around with Michael Jordan now," says his brother-in-law Craig Robinson. As for money: "It wasn't a matter of fundraising anymore," says one of his consultants, Joe McLean. "It was just a matter of collecting money."
And they didn't even need all of it. The next cherry clicked into place when the Illinois Republican Party, having taken more than a month to find a replacement for Jack Ryan, had the extraordinary bad sense to import Alan Keyes, a loose cannon and perennial candidate from Maryland. Obama won with 70 percent of the vote. "You'd have to be appointed to get an easier ride than that," says Cook. "How many people get elected to the U.S. Senate without having a single negative ad run against them?" Ron Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, agrees. "You could argue that if the Republicans had had a viable candidate, there would be no Barack."
The country happened to be uniquely poised to receive Obama at the precise moment when he materialized, says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. In 2004 -- and even more, now -- the country was deeply unhappy with the status quo. "They're looking for political change, and he certainly personifies change," says Kohut, who conducted a poll showing that when people hear the name "Barack Obama," the words that come to mind are "new," "young," "charismatic" and "smart."
Then again, "inexperienced" is another word that comes to mind. Kohut's polls show that the second thing voters want is competence, and they see this in Hillary Clinton more than Obama. "And that," says Kohut, "is why we have a horse race."
Obama appeals most to well-educated college graduates, Kohut says, the same demographic group that supported Gary Hart, Bill Bradley and Howard Dean in previous campaigns. People with college degrees tend to be driven by hope and idealism. In contrast, as Cook explains, "downscale Democrats" tend to focus more on economic issues and are more likely to have fond memories of Clinton-era prosperity. "They're more survival oriented."
Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, believes Obama's appeal springs from the fact that the country feels more fragmented than it is comfortable with, and there is a "hunger for connection and for unity." It also helps, Putnam believes, that Obama is not identified with the 1960s, nor does he carry the baggage of past campaigns, as both Edwards and Clinton do.
But most important, Putnam believes, is Obama's biography: the racial unity he represents and an upbringing that enables him to speak to blacks and whites alike. "He's black, but not just black," says Putnam. "A large number of Americans would like to feel they're in a country where someone like that could be president."
The racial question is, of course, complicated and heated. Some commentators, including Debra Dickerson and Stanley Crouch, have revived the idea that Obama is not authentically "black," in that he is not the descendant of slaves and thus lacks this classic part of the African American experience. He has also never been what Dickerson calls "black for a living." He's never worked for the NAACP or any advocacy organization whose goal is taking on the white power structure.
Dickerson points out that, early in his career, Obama did a number of crucial things to neutralize this problem of authenticity. He married a black woman, and he joined an inner-city, mostly black church, Trinity United Church of Christ, led by the charismatic pastor Jeremiah Wright. "I'm not saying he doesn't love her, and I'm sure he believes with all his heart," says Dickerson, but both moves helped shore up his credentials. For black politicians, to begin a speech by praising God is "the black secret handshake," she says. "It's like saying, 'Joe sent me.'"
But it's equally important, Dickerson says, that Obama does not speak like Jesse Jackson or Martin Luther King Jr. It may be good that his keynote speech wasn't delivered in King's majestic cadence, because then he might have been too authentically African American. To appeal to whites as well as blacks, he can't do "the whole Southern preacher thing." And appealing to whites is crucial; Clinton does almost as well as Obama among black voters, for whom, Dickerson says, 2008 presents a "delicious" choice.
"If you're looking for how does Barack Obama win the nomination, he needs to win [the African American vote] by a big margin," says Charlie Cook, and also enlarge that base. "He's got to have a broader base of support than he has now." As in Illinois, he has to be a crossover candidate. And his mannerisms, his credentials, his white mother all help. "He doesn't look like a sub-Saharan African, and he doesn't have an accent," Dickerson says. "If he were sub-Saharan-African-looking, with the same résumé, we would not know his name right now."
In her most controversial assertion, Dickerson argues that Obama appeals to white voters because he enables them to support a black man without having to confront the legacy of slavery. Because Obama is not confrontational; because he describes himself as "being rooted in the African American community, but not limited to it," he permits whites to support a black and feel self-congratulatory. This may or may not be true, but it does seem that -- in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- part of Obama's appeal is the opportunity to send the world a different message about American racial tolerance at a moment when this seems more important than ever.
"His election would do so much to restore people's faith and belief in the U.S. around the world," says Meg Hirshberg, an influential New Hampshire political donor who recently threw her support behind Obama. "Can you imagine them being president and first lady? It knocks me out, as far as what we would be saying to ourselves and to the world. He's not a descendant of slaves, but she is. I think it would be a remarkable moment in American history."
He also represents biracialism -- what one supporter calls "the emerging majority demographic," the face of what all America will look like someday: brown. No surprise, then, that he appeals more to young voters than do the other Democrats. Twentysomethings are more likely to think biracialism is cool; more likely to be biracial; more likely to have parents who are immigrants. This support may or may not get Obama where he needs to go. Younger voters are enthusiastic, but they are not, as Tony Bullock puts it, "the most reliable loading dock."
One evening early this summer, Obama was on the floor of the U.S. Senate while a series of complicated votes were taking place on President Bush's ill-fated immigration bill. Between votes, Obama milled around, chatting with colleagues. He is a touchy kind of mingler; he tends to put his hands on an arm or shoulder while talking, in an easy, friendly, intimate way. Watching him provided stark evidence of just how rare a person of color is on the Senate floor; apart from him, there were a few black staffers. He is a living testament to how hard it remains for a black politician to win a statewide race, let alone a national election.
After his keynote speech, he was asked, over and over again, if he would run in '08. Diane Sawyer asked. Oprah Winfrey asked. Tim Russert asked. Wolf Blitzer asked. The answer: He would serve out his six-year Senate term.
"The first conversation about the presidential campaign was that there was not going to be a presidential campaign," says Axelrod. Obama agrees. "We very deliberately tried to tamp down expectations," he says. "I didn't do any national interviews until Katrina. I tried to be very deliberate in terms of the work that I did here in the U.S. Senate. I didn't file a lot of symbolic bills -- like a universal health-care bill or other legislation that I wasn't in a position to pass because we were in a minority party."
In October 2006, however, Russert asked again, and this time Obama said, "I have thought about it." Then, this February, he announced. He would run. In '08.
What changed? First, The Audacity of Hope was published in 2006. While on book tour, Obama did a lot of campaigning for other candidates, helping Democrats win control of Congress. During that campaign, the war emerged as a key factor in Obama's favor, points out Ron Walters. In 2002, Obama had made a powerful speech opposing the Iraq war as "rash" and "dumb," and it was probably just as well for him, at the time, that few people had heard of him. But now the country had caught up with his views. The majority of voters, particularly Democrats, think the war was a mistake and want U.S. troops withdrawn.
Last summer Obama also went to Africa, visiting Kenya and South Africa, and speaking out against the violence in Darfur. The crowds he attracted gave him, Axelrod says, "a heightened sense of what he could accomplish."
Shortly before Christmas 2006, he met with Minow and Mikva to discuss whether to run. "He was very worried about what this was going to do to his family," says Minow. "I think Michelle at that point was very dubious, not at all enthusiastic about his running." The two men, who have six adult daughters between them, said they thought it made more sense to run when Obama's children were young and relatively insulated.
The opportunity, in the end, was irresistible. Obama says that what tipped the balance was the crowds. "After seeing the response I was getting around the country, I had to step back and ask: Is there something about my message that is sufficiently unique and could potentially be useful enough to moving the country forward?" he says. "And, ultimately, the answer was yes."
Obama also understands, more than most, the significance of an open seat. For the first time in more than 50 years, there is no incumbent president or vice president running for the White House. An opportunity like that is priceless. "You can't choose the times," says Axelrod. "The times choose you."
Is there a downside? Obama says the biggest one "is personal. It's relinquishing your privacy. As much attention as I had gotten as U.S. senator, I could still hop in my car, drive myself to the grocery store, take my kids to the zoo." Not anymore.
Politically, the risk is that there will be a negative attack that sticks, that Obama will be, in some way, swift-boated. "I will never be more popular than I am as a potential presidential candidate," he says he told a friend before announcing. "Because it was inevitable that the moment I ran, suddenly those of you in the fourth estate would start, you know, chipping away at this image that you guys have created. And so I was mindful of that. The easier thing for me to do would have been to stay put; continue to enjoy nice things being said about me; potentially get on some short list for vice president, which, even if I wasn't selected, would be sufficiently flattering; and see if something came up, some opportunity came up to run for president later."
"This is always a risky enterprise." But, he says, "I just got a sense that the country is in this ferment right now, that everything's up for grabs. Those moments in our politics don't come that often, where -- it really is possible in this election, in a way that might not be four years from now, or eight years or 12 years from now, to help redefine our politics and help point the country in a fundamentally different direction. So, I believe I made the right decision to run. But it was not a slam dunk, to quote George Tenet."
Now there are only 2,181 more cherries that have to click into place for Barack Obama. That would be the number of delegates a Democratic candidate needs to win the party's presidential nomination.
Liza Mundy is a Magazine staff writer. She can be reached at mundyl@washpost.com. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
By Liza Mundy
Sunday, August 12, 2007; W10
In the summer of 2002, a little-known Illinois state legislator named Barack Obama thought he saw the political opening he'd been looking for. It was a long shot, a flier -- a race for the U.S. Senate against a sitting Republican. Obama believed he could beat the incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald. The immediate and, in some ways, harder challenge would be getting the Democratic nomination.
Obama was about to turn 41. An attorney and law lecturer at the University of Chicago, he had been elected to the state Senate in 1996, but had been chafing for some time at the limitations of legislating in Springfield. In 2000, he'd overreached by challenging former Black Panther Bobby Rush for the seat Rush held in the U.S. House of Representatives. It had been a disastrous bid, but understandable given that in Illinois, as around the country, paths to higher office for black politicians are few.
But this new opportunity looked, to him, feasible. In 1992, another Chicago politician, Carol Moseley Braun, had demonstrated that it was possible for an African American to win a statewide U.S. Senate primary, as long as there were at least two white Democrats to split the white vote. And several were already lining up to take on Fitzgerald.
There was just one problem, and it was a big one: Moseley Braun was talking about running herself. Only the second African American U.S. senator since Reconstruction, she had lost to Fitzgerald in 1998, in part as a result of allegations, never proved, that she had misused campaign funds. After the loss, she had been appointed U.S. ambassador to New Zealand. But now she was back in Hyde Park, the neighborhood that surrounds the University of Chicago, where Obama also lived. If she did run, there would be two credible black Democrats in the primary -- one far better known than the other.
"Our bases overlapped so much -- not just that she was African American, but that she came out of the progressive wing of the party . . . and our donor bases would have been fairly similar," says Obama, who also needed support from liberal whites. "So it would have been difficult, I think, to mobilize the entire coalition that was required for me to run."
During the second half of 2002, Obama quietly hired staffers, putting a team together and planning his campaign. But he couldn't announce until Moseley Braun made up her mind. Lobbying her seemed likely to backfire. "She's a very independent person," says Obama's campaign manager at the time, Dan Shomon, and "the view was to let her decide on her own."
And then, just after the new year, news reached them that Moseley Braun had made her decision. She was running.
For president of the United States.
And with that, the first cherry had clicked into place: one in an extraordinary series that would hit -- bing bing bing bing -- in the jackpot that for the past five years has characterized Barack Obama's career. If Moseley Braun had run for her old seat, Obama would not be where he is now: sitting on an upholstered couch in a busy office in the Hart Senate Office Building, the only African American member of the U.S. Senate and a leading contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Legs crossed, suit jacket off, Obama readily acknowledges Moseley Braun's decision "was another example of the stars aligning" to land him in what seemed, not so long ago, a laughably improbable spot.
Had he been unable to run for the Senate, he says, "I would probably have stepped out of politics for a while." That he didn't step out -- that he stepped in to the degree that he has -- is partly due to the existence, at a pivotal moment, of a politician who had more hubris than he did. Even more audacity, you could say, and even more hope.
The run of luck set off by Moseley Braun's ill-fated presidential run helps explain how Obama has managed to do the political equivalent of zero to 100 mph in 60 seconds. Four years ago, the name "Barack Obama" might register a single hit on the Nexis news database, on a good day. These days, there are about 300 news items that mention Obama each day. His poll numbers aren't as high as those of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has spent decades building her political profile. But his campaign outstripped Clinton's in fundraising in the second quarter of 2007.
"It's like he cut in line," says Tony Bullock, a former Hill staffer and vice president at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. "He's become a household name far faster than anyone who doesn't have a hit movie."
"He became an important person overnight," agrees Dem-ocratic political consultant Donna Brazile. What's unusual, Brazile says, is that most political celebrities -- Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John McCain -- earn that status only after prolonged ordeals. "What's unique about Obama is that he's done it because he's cool. Because he's new."
In fact, the story of Obama's rise is more complicated -- and more interesting -- than simple novelty. To understand his ascent, it helps to invoke the anthropic principle, the theory some scientists use when exploring how a perfectly calibrated set of variables -- the necessary amounts of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen; the right temperature range; a propitious distance from the sun -- all had to be present for human life to arise on Earth. Had any one of thousands of factors not been present, our planet might have been a wasteland.
Similarly, had any number of events fallen out slightly differently, Barack Obama might have a lot more time to spend with his family just now. Had the late Harold Washington not been elected mayor of Chicago in 1983, changing what seemed possible for African American politicians in Illinois; had the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill not passed in 2002; had a series of Illinois politicians not suffered a run of spectacular marital problems; had John Kerry not been introduced by Obama during a stop on the former's 2004 presidential campaign, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama would not have happened.
"It's not as though he's the accidental senator," Bullock says, "but, to some degree, his political story is a series of random walks and chance encounters."
To be sure, among the factors contributing to Obama's rise are innate gifts, including what Newton Minow, a Chicago attorney and mentor, calls "the combination of a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament." Obama is bright and attractive, with an air of calm as well as a wonderful speaking voice, hyper-articulate and sometimes pedantic, but also rich, warm, authoritative and reassuring. His voice, his appearance and his life story are particularly well suited to attract white votes. "We'd probably like it better if he talked like Jesse Jackson, but ya'll wouldn't," says African American political commentator Debra Dickerson.
And then there's ambition -- a given in any presidential candidate, but worth pointing out because Obama works hard to dispel the image of having sought his superstar status. "It's not about me, it's about you," he likes to tell his crowds. But according to those who know him, he has been talking about the presidency for more than a decade. "It was clear to me from the day I met him that he was thinking about politics," says Harvard Law School classmate Christine Spurell.
"There's a central conundrum about him," says another Harvard classmate, Brad Berenson. "On the one hand, he's this laid-back guy from Hawaii. On the other hand, he's vaulted himself into the race for president of the United States. And that doesn't happen by accident."
In some ways, nothing is more implausible than the coming together of Obama's parents. His mother, a white Kansan named Stanley Ann Dunham (her father had wanted a boy), met his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, in Hawaii in the late 1950s. Her family had relocated there, and he'd come to study at the University of Hawaii.
The second Barack Hussein Obama was born in 1961. After two years, his father left to pursue a PhD at Harvard (his fellowship did not cover family expenses), then returned to his home -- and first wife, whom he apparently had not divorced -- in Kenya.
Obama grew up a child of color in a white family, raised by his mother as well as loving grandparents. (He saw his father only once again; the elder Barack, by then a stranger to him, paid an awkward visit when the son was 10.) Obama spent several years in Indonesia after his mother married an Indonesian student. He returned to Hawaii to attend private school and live with his maternal grandparents in Honolulu, where he was largely insulated from the overt racism of 1970s America but became increasingly aware of the lack of African Americans around him.
In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama portrays himself as drifting through high school, a little directionless and rebellious. It was becoming clear to him that there were aspects of his identity that white family members couldn't help him sort out. "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America," he writes. The quest drove him East to New York City, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. In search of the communal spirit of the civil rights era, he decided to become a community organizer.
At that time, steel mills in Illinois and Indiana were closing, and an organizer named Gerald Kellman had been hired to help the devastated workers. Kellman's assignment included Chicago's South Side, home to one of the nation's largest African American communities. To win the cooperation of local leaders, Kellman promised to hire at least one black organizer. When he heard from Obama, he wasn't sure if he qualified racially. He asked his wife, who is of Japanese descent, if "Obama" might be a Japanese name, and she said it might. Kellman later met him in Manhattan and was impressed. After offering Obama the job, Kellman says, he gave him an advance to buy a car, "or something that resembled a car."
And so it was that Barack Obama loaded up an old Honda and drove to Chicago, a place that was not an obvious launching pad for a young man with zero ties to the city. There was a deeply rooted black community, but most black politicians -- like most white ones -- came from political families, ward organizations, or both. And there was terrible racial tension.
"The divide in Chicago between black and white was incredibly hostile," says Judson Miner, a white civil rights attorney who would later hire Obama. Not long before, however, Harold Washington had taken on the fabled Daley machine, and beaten it to become the city's first black mayor. It was a watershed moment. While he didn't get many white votes the first time, Washington was a charismatic figure who taught voters, as Miner puts it, "that an African American could run Chicago, and it wouldn't fall apart."
Obama also came to Chicago without traditional African American credentials. He didn't belong to a church, and he had to work to win the trust of South Side leaders, many of whom were Baptist and Pentecostal ministers. But Obama was polite and winning, willing to work with pastors, separatists and grandmothers alike. He was a good listener, and Kellman set out to make him better.
"We did training in listening skills," Kellman says. "You spend time as an organizer going from one person to another doing interviews. You're listening for story, because story communicates more about a person than simply facts. When people share their story, they get a different sense of themselves, and you get a different sense of them. Barack did that very well. One of the remarkable things is how well he listens to people who are opposed to him."
But three years of listening was enough for Obama, who began applying to law schools. Kellman thinks his father's legacy was coming into play. By then, Obama had met some Kenyan half-siblings who told him more about his father, a finance minister who had suffered major career setbacks, taken several wives and died in a car accident in 1982, when Obama was 21. During a trip to Harvard for a conference on the black church, Kellman says, Obama did a lot of reflecting on his father.
"His dad was not practical, not effective personally. His personal life was a wreck -- also his career in Kenya -- and Barack did not want to follow that," says Kellman, recalling that Obama "talked about wanting to make a difference and be effective." Kellman perceived a new interest in politics: "My sense is that Barack's dream was to come back and possibly become mayor of Chicago."
Obama's take on that period is different. He says that it never occurred to him to try to follow in Harold Washington's footsteps. "I was, like many people, impressed by the degree to which he could mobilize the community and push for change," Obama says. But after Washington died from a heart attack at his city hall office in 1987, Obama became disillusioned by the splintering of the coalition that had supported Washington. At that point, Obama says, "I was somewhat disdainful of politics. I was much more interested in mobilizing people to hold politicians accountable."
This would quickly change. Whatever he thought going in, it was at Harvard Law School that Obama's political skills -- and aspirations -- would emerge rather dramatically. All that South Side dispute mediation prepared him well to operate in a more elite but equally factionalized atmosphere.
In 1988, Harvard, like Chicago, was a bitterly divided place politically: It was a liberal campus, mostly, but there was a hardy body of conservatives who belonged to the campus chapter of the Federalist Society. "The conservatives were a small and beleaguered minority, which made us all the more vocal," says one of them, Brad Berenson, a former associate counsel to President George W. Bush who is now a lawyer in the Washington office of Sidley Austin. There were fights over legal issues -- habeas corpus, the First Amendment -- but most of all, Berenson says, there were "tremendous fights over tenure decisions for women and minorities."
These were professional arguers, the most career-driven young people imaginable: Many of them belonged to what Martha Minow, a professor at the law school, calls "a very large diverse group of people who think rather well of themselves and who are already jockeying for power not only within the institution, but who are ambitious about the future." In this cauldron of careerism, Minow says, Obama stood out because he was not an obvious climber and because "he had then, as he has now, a sense of individuals having obligations to the community, which is not something people [at Harvard Law] usually talk about." Like others, she was struck by his ability to entertain the ideas of opponents. "He spoke with a kind of ability to rise above the conversation and summarize it and reframe it. There was a maturity he brought to the discussion."
But he was also among the most driven in his class. In his first year, he entered the competition for the law review, one of the country's premier scholarly law journals and, for the students who select, edit and write articles, a ticket to a high-powered legal or academic career. To become an editor of the law review was grueling: If you were impossibly smart, you might qualify through grades, but most editors were selected through an exhausting multi-day writing process, their output judged by the current editors. There was also a highly secretive process by which a few students were chosen based at least in part on race. Obama, says one classmate, was never suspected of making law review because of his race.
The fact that these suspicions existed at all says much about the tenor of the time. "That was the most race-conscious time of my life," says Christine Spurell, who, as an African American, found it a "very charged, very hostile atmosphere." She participated in protests calling for more black women faculty members, whereas Obama -- who speaks in favor of affirmative action in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, but dislikes conflict and confrontation -- was not the type to mount the barricades. "He wasn't out there going to the mat on any issue," says Spurell, who recalls that she and Obama argued incessantly, like siblings. "I would say he had all your standard liberal views in law school, but he did not shout them from the rooftops."
In the middle of his second year, Obama surprised his classmates by entering the race for law review president, a job that involves appointing other editors, mediating disagreements and influencing the careers of the nation's legal scholars by accepting or rejecting articles. Obama had not been expected to run. He had spent the summer working at Sidley Austin in Chicago, where he met Michelle Robinson, a Princeton-educated attorney, also a graduate of Harvard Law, whom he would marry. He made it clear he wanted to go back to Chicago, where he had found the community he had missed growing up. Traditionally, the president of the law review uses the job as a springboard to a top-level legal or academic position: Among the ranks are former U.S. attorney general Elliot Richardson and feminist law professor Susan Estrich.
Obama portrays his decision to compete as having been almost impulsive. "It was probably one of those moments where I said, What the heck," he says. "I was an older student, 27 [when he started]. Most of my peers at the law review were a couple of years younger than I was. I thought I could apply some common sense and management skills to the job. I was already investing a lot of time in the law review, and my attitude was: Why not try to run the law review?"
The 1990 election, which took place in a house on campus, was a daylong ritual with all the secrecy and silliness of any Ivy League selection process. Those editors who were running went into the kitchen and began cooking breakfast for the people debating their merits: third-year editors and those second-years who weren't running. There would be rounds of polling to winnow the ranks, and if you lost -- were voted off the island -- you left the kitchen and joined the voters.
Voting went on for hours. Obama stayed in, but so did several other liberal candidates. After the last conservative fell, the right-wingers had to decide which liberal would be palatable. They saw Obama as the one most likely to listen and include them in decisions. "He was not perceived as a zealot," says Berenson. "Conservatives felt that he respected them on a personal level and would take seriously what they had to say, and their points of view -- even if he didn't always, or ever, agree with them -- would be treated with some measure of respect."
They were right. Just below the presidency, there are important masthead positions that auger well for later life, and Obama bestowed a number on conservatives. At the time, Spurell was so incensed at his failure to promote more black editors that she complained to the Los Angeles Times that Obama was no different from white editors who had come before. "I personally thought I deserved a spot. My work was, I thought, extremely excellent," says Spurell, who now works as a public defender in Abingdon, Va. But Obama's approach -- she believes now -- was more effective. "As you can probably tell, I wasn't that popular a personality. So I don't blame him in the least for not picking me for the position I thought I should have." She adds that she feels the same "rush of pride" for him now that she felt when he won the law review presidency.
"The president of the law review is regarded as the most intellectually savvy person on campus," she says. "And for that to go to a black person -- I feel so moved to have known him. All the same things that made me frustrated with him," such as his chumminess with Federalist Society members, "are the things that got him so far."
There are judges and blue-chip law partners who wait to see who is elected president of the Harvard Law Review and call immediately to offer clerkships and jobs. For Obama, the inquiries were even more numerous because of the publicity around the first African American president. There were national newspaper articles and a book contract to write his life story.
Abner Mikva, a Chicago lawyer and former congressman who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, made an inquiry. When word came back that Obama was not interested, Mikva assumed he wanted to clerk for a black judge. But Obama simply didn't want to clerk at all. Instead, he wrote his memoir, took a job with Judson Miner's civil rights practice, worked on a voter registration drive and began making political contacts.
"I think he saw himself with a political career even before I knew him," says Newton Minow, who had heard about Obama from his daughter Martha and met him the summer Obama worked at Sidley Austin. "He was at the firm for only one summer, and when we offered him a job to come back, he came in to see me and told me he was going to go into politics. I think he had that in mind very early."
There was one impediment to a political career: In 1992, Obama married Michelle, who wasn't "gung-ho on the political bandwagon," reports her brother, Craig Robinson. "We as a family were extremely cynical about politics and politicians." Michelle Obama confirms this description, saying that when she was dating Barack, "we didn't talk about politics specifically."
But Obama didn't keep his interests secret. Early in the relationship, Michelle, who was notoriously picky about her boyfriends, asked Craig, now the men's basketball coach at Brown University, to take Obama out on the ball court to get a sense of his character. Obama passed that test -- he wasn't a ball hog or a hotshot -- and was invited to a family event, where Craig pulled him aside and asked about his plans.
"He said, 'I think I'd like to teach at some point in time, and maybe run for public office,'" recalls Robinson, who assumed Obama meant he'd like to run for city alderman. "He said no -- at some point he'd like to run for the U.S. Senate. And then he said, 'Possibly even run for president at some point.' And I was like, 'Okay, but don't say that to my Aunt Gracie.' I was protecting him from saying something that might embarrass him."
Obama laughs, now, hearing that anecdote. He doesn't remember the exchange, but adds, "If the conversation did come up, and I said that I was interested in electoral politics . . . my aspirations would have been higher than being an alderman."
Craig "should have said, 'Don't tell Michelle!'" says Michelle Obama, who initially tried to talk her husband out of running for office. He persuaded her, she says, by arguing that they had a responsibility to work on behalf of people less privileged than they are.
"You know, Barack is very convincing and very passionate," says Michelle, who says she was naive in the beginning about the impact it would have on their family life, which now includes two young daughters, Malia and Sasha. "So I eventually said: 'Sure, let's do it. Okay, you win.'"
"And then," she concludes, "you're in."
Barack Obama's first opportunity came, as opportunities would with striking frequency, when somebody else's personal life got messy.
In the fall of 1995, Mel Reynolds, 43, who represented Illinois' 2nd Congressional District, was forced to resign when he was convicted on charges related to having sex with a 16-year-old campaign volunteer. There were several contenders in the special election to replace him, including Alice Palmer, a progressive state senator who represented Hyde Park and urged Obama to run for her state Senate seat. But when Jesse Jackson Jr. won the primary, Palmer decided she wanted her old job back. Obama did not step aside. More than that, according to the Chicago Tribune, when Obama's staffers looked at the petitions she'd hastily garnered, they saw irregularities and challenged them before the board of elections. Then, noting irregularities in the petitions of his other primary opponents, Obama knocked them all out of the race. He went on to win and was sworn into the state Senate in January 1997, and started commuting to Springfield.
His ambition, now, was as visible as a radio tower. Invited by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam to participate in the Saguaro Seminar, a network of thinkers who met around the country to discuss community issues, Obama talked so openly about his political future that the group began referring to him, teasingly, as "Governor."
"He was transparently and lovably ambitious," says Putnam, author of a seminal work on the withering of community in American life, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. "He was always talking about running for office and the importance of being in politics."
The group stoked his sense of potential. "I remember, after the second or third meeting, a crowd gathered around him and said, 'When are you running for president?' recalls Martha Minow, who was also a Saguaro member. "I try to remember: Why did we think this? It was his way of listening astutely to the conversations, offering an embracing, objective view: Here's how what everybody says fits together."
Lacking ties to any ward machine, or the street credibility of leaders who had ascended the ranks, Obama ingratiated himself with Emil Jones, who would become president of the Illinois state Senate after the Democrats assumed control. Jones became a mentor to Obama, entrusting him with overseeing reforms of welfare, campaign finance and the criminal justice system. Among Obama's achievements was a law requiring that murder confessions be videotaped. In all of this he displayed what Mikva, who became another of his mentors, calls his characteristic "knack for getting people to bargain seriously." Not everybody liked him; one Senate colleague described him as so ambitious that given the chance, he'd run for "king of the world."
After just a few years, Obama was talking about running for Congress, and thought he saw an opportunity. In 1999, black congressman Bobby Rush had challenged Richard M. Daley for mayor, and lost. Obama conducted a poll, says then-campaign manager Dan Shomon, and it suggested that some voters, particularly white ones, were looking for an alternative to Rush. "I was a little bit questioning about whether Rush was vulnerable at all, but Barack was sure that he was," Mikva says.
Obama paid a price for trying to depose a member of the African American power structure: During the race, the suggestion was subtly advanced that Obama was not "black enough." Then, that October, Rush's adult son was murdered in a street shooting, and Obama shut down his campaign for several weeks to show compassion. His campaign lost momentum, and he lost badly in the March 2000 primary.
He did not take his drubbing well. "He is not a good loser," says Shomon. Obama acknowledges this: "Losing's always miserable."
So miserable, that when Mikva met with Obama, he found him unusually dispirited. "That was the one time he semi-seriously thought about giving up politics. He was frustrated; he had been [in the state Senate] for four years; the pay is very modest. It seemed that whatever his ambitions were, there wasn't going to be a channel for them."
Obama, who didn't want to be a "lifer in the state legislature," agrees that he seriously considered looking for another way to make an impact. "Some doubts entered my mind as to whether some kid from Hawaii named Barack Obama could succeed in a political venue, where a lot of times voters are relying on very little information and making snap judgments based on somebody's name and whether they've got family ties."
But, of course, the loss to Rush would turn out to be more fortunate than it appeared. As Newton Minow points out, had Obama beaten Rush, "he would have been in Congress, not a senator, and he wouldn't have given the speech at the [2004] Demo-cratic National Convention" that would change the trajectory of his career. "Nothing like that would have happened. I'm a great believer in timing. Everything is timing."
And timing, now, was on his side. Just when Obama was despairing, it became evident that Peter Fitzgerald was foundering in the U.S. Senate. "He had some very good characteristics," says Obama now. "But he just didn't seem to enjoy the job much, and wasn't a particularly good politician. I thought that a Democratic challenger could draw a sharp contrast and be effective. I thought I could beat him."
Shomon tried to dissuade him from running, arguing that a Senate campaign would put too much pressure on his personal life. "His counterargument was similar to his counterargument always: We can change politics, we can change the agenda, we can help average people." He said, Shomon recalls, "I'm not going to be able to help people if I'm stuck in the state Senate for 20 years."
"He really felt like this was his opportunity," Shomon says. "Every time Barack saw an opportunity, he felt like it could be his last."
Then in April 2003 -- just a few months after Obama formally entered the primary -- Fitzgerald surprised everyone by announcing he would not run for reelection. This, Obama believes, was his luckiest break of all, because it meant that there was no incumbent. The seat was truly open. "I thought I could beat him, and still think I could have beat him, but the fact that he did not end up running, obviously, left the field wide open."
Ultimately there would be seven candidates in the Democratic primary, but for Obama there were two who mattered. One was Dan Hynes, the popular state comptroller and favorite of the party machine. The other was Blair Hull, a wealthy stock trader who had sold his company to Goldman Sachs for $531 million.
Hull's presence, while formidable, did two things to help Obama. First, it increased the likelihood that the white vote would split between Hynes and Hull. Second, it enabled Obama to raise much more money than he otherwise could have. The newly passed McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law contained a "millionaire's amendment." In a race against a wealthy opponent who is financing his own campaign, a candidate is permitted to raise significantly more than the normal limit. In this case, Obama could raise $12,000 from each donor instead of $2,000.
"This was a huge advantage; it just made a huge difference," says Mikva. "I gave him more money than I've ever given anyone in my life."
In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes how put off he was by the magnitude of the fundraising effort a Senate race requires. "I started engaging in elaborate games of avoidance during call time -- frequent bathroom breaks, extended coffee runs." But he steeled himself for the task and learned to set aside "any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums of money."
He built a diverse group of donors. Among them were black business owners and professionals. He could also take advantage of his Ivy connections, drawing on moneyed Harvard classmates and his wife's super-loyal Princeton connections. He had energetic supporters in Minow and Mikva, as well as David Axelrod, the leading Democratic campaign consultant in Illinois. He appealed to many of Chicago's "lakefront liberals," who occupy a strip stretching from downtown to the North Shore along Lake Michigan, and attracted major benefactors such as the Crown and Pritzker families, big money.
But Hull was still vastly outspending him, and the spending mattered. A poll taken about a month before the primary showed Hull in the lead, with Hynes and Obama trailing.
Then, in late February 2004, Blair Hull had a very bad day. There had been rumors of an ugly divorce from an ex-wife; when the court records were released, they contained allegations of domestic abuse. Shomon remembers Obama's reaction. He feared that if Hull dropped out of the race, Hull's support would shift to Hynes. But Hull stayed in the race, and hung onto about 10 percent of the vote.
This may not have mattered as much as it seemed. In the end, Obama, preaching a message of unity, did much better with white voters than anyone had anticipated. After Hull's disaster, Hynes's numbers edged up slightly, while Obama's soared. "Much to our shock and surprise," says Axelrod, "he won with 53 percent of the vote." They were incredulous -- and ecstatic. Obama won in the most unlikely places, including portions of northwest Chicago, where Harold Washington once had been treated so venomously that it made the national news. He was, it now became clear, a genuine crossover politician, something that put Obama on the national map. William Finnegan profiled him in in the New Yorker, Scott Turow wrote a piece in Salon, and the newsweeklies took notice.
Now the cherries were falling into place furiously. Obama's Republican opponent was Jack Ryan, another very wealthy opponent, well-regarded. And the Democratic Party -- finally taking notice -- decided it would give Barack Obama some help.
It would ask him to make a speech.
In early summer of 2004, organizers of the Democratic presidential convention were faced with some challenges, chief among them the fact that no Bush-bashing would be allowed among convention speakers. The Kerry campaign didn't want to alienate swing voters by speaking ill of Republicans. So the convention needed speakers who could present an upbeat message and still sound compelling.
There were some givens. Bill Clinton would be the prime time speaker Monday night; the third and fourth nights would feature John Edwards and John Kerry, respectively. On Tuesday they wanted a keynote speaker in the tradition of the great keynoters of the past: Barbara Jordan, Mario Cuomo, Ann Richards, "people who inspired hope," as Donna Brazile puts it, "and not only inspired hope, but laid a framework for the party."
There were a number of criteria as planners began proposing candidates. Youth was desirable, and freshness, and diversity. "We were trying to think creatively of the next generation of leaders," says one campaign official. They came up with a list of Democratic governors that included Mark Warner of Virginia, Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Tom Vilsack of Iowa: solid choices, but a list that, as the official put it, "didn't get us where we wanted to go." Jennifer Granholm, the photogenic new governor of Michigan, was also on the list. And Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, who had read some of the coverage following Obama's primary victory, proposed Obama.
It was an appealing idea. Obama was known to be a speaker who could get a crowd going. He was a Midwesterner from a major industrial state, providing a demographic complement to Southerner Edwards and Northerner Kerry. But these things were also true of Granholm.
Weeks before the decision was made, David Axelrod heard "scuttlebutt" that Obama was being considered. Axelrod told Obama, who says he found it a bit hard to believe. "I have to say, I was skeptical," Obama says. "Traditionally -- obviously -- that slot is not given to a state senator." Obama did not lobby directly, but Axelrod did, saying, "My case was that he was a transcendent figure who could deliver a unifying message and had just won a spectacular victory."
According to an official involved, the decision came down to the fact that Obama, unlike Granholm, was still trying to win an election. Just a few weeks before the convention, it would emerge that Obama's opponent, Jack Ryan, had tried to talk his wife at the time into performing public acts at a sex club. Ryan would eventually withdraw, and there was talk that some marquee Republican, possibly former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, would enter the race. The balance in the Senate was 51-48 in favor of Republicans. "We needed his Senate seat," says the official. So Obama it was.
Kerry gave Obama's selection an enthusiastic thumbs up. "I was impressed by him," Kerry says. "I had met him and . . . campaigned with him in Illinois, and thought on a personal level he would be able to convey the kind of message I wanted to convey out of my convention: a message of inclusiveness and change, a new view about how we can make our politics more relevant to people and, in a sense, just put a little bit of different language in front of folks."
In The Audacity of Hope, Obama portrays it as a total surprise when Cahill called to invite him to deliver the keynote. "The process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me," he writes, saying that after he received the call in his car, he marveled to his driver, "I guess this is pretty big."
This seems disingenuous. "There is no doubt that that call was expected," says Michael Duga, chief of staff to former senator Max Cleland, who also was involved in the planning. Axelrod doesn't dispute this: "We heard shortly before he got the call that he was likely to get it." So, he acknowledges, "we did get a little bit of a heads-up."
Obama knew what he wanted do with the speech, says his communications director, Robert Gibbs. He wanted to tell his life story as an American narrative. He wanted to offer himself as an embodiment of what's possible. And he wanted to write the speech himself, which he did, stuck in Springfield during votes, sending drafts by e-mail. But Gibbs also did research. Listening to past keynote speeches, he realized that there were two basic models. One was the 1988 Ann Richards punch-line model -- you deliver a one-liner, and there is wild applause, and you deliver a one-liner, and there is wild applause -- and the other was the 1984 Mario Cuomo model, a visionary declaration that the audience doesn't punctuate with clapping, because it's rapt. That's the model Obama went for.
On the night of the speech, Gibbs and Axelrod stayed in the greenroom with Obama and his wife beforehand, then went down to watch on the convention floor, with thousands of delegates, reporters and spectators. Another 9 million people saw the speech on the cable channels covering the convention.
Obama began by talking about his mother and father, the diversity of his heritage, how "in no other country on Earth, is my story even possible." He spoke about issues -- better government, health coverage, better care for veterans -- then delivered his famous call for unity and compassion: "We are all connected as one people. If there is a child on the South Side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child," he said, dismissing the idea of "red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats . . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
On the floor, Gibbs recalls, he and Axelrod sensed the rapture of the crowd and looked at each other "like two kids at Christmas."
"Sometimes you know it's a home run at the crack of the bat," says Axelrod. "As soon as he swung, you knew that the ball was going to go over the fence."
The full impact of the speech became clear to Obama's staff days later, when they embarked on a whistle-stop RV tour of downstate Illinois. Obama, Shomon says, was furious when he saw the schedule. He was exhausted and wanted to spend time with his family. But at the first town on the first day, there were 500 people instead of the 100 that had been expected. The same thing happened again, and again; then one day they drove into a state park to see 1,000 people crowded into an open-air amphitheater. "Everyone knew exactly what everyone else was thinking," say Gibbs. "Wow."
This continued. "You'd hear [Democratic] party people talking: Not only was it the biggest crowd we ever saw, it's new people, not just the usual suspects -- we don't even know who these people are," says political analyst Charlie Cook.
The speech vaulted Obama into mega-celebrity. "It's like walking around with Michael Jordan now," says his brother-in-law Craig Robinson. As for money: "It wasn't a matter of fundraising anymore," says one of his consultants, Joe McLean. "It was just a matter of collecting money."
And they didn't even need all of it. The next cherry clicked into place when the Illinois Republican Party, having taken more than a month to find a replacement for Jack Ryan, had the extraordinary bad sense to import Alan Keyes, a loose cannon and perennial candidate from Maryland. Obama won with 70 percent of the vote. "You'd have to be appointed to get an easier ride than that," says Cook. "How many people get elected to the U.S. Senate without having a single negative ad run against them?" Ron Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, agrees. "You could argue that if the Republicans had had a viable candidate, there would be no Barack."
The country happened to be uniquely poised to receive Obama at the precise moment when he materialized, says Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center. In 2004 -- and even more, now -- the country was deeply unhappy with the status quo. "They're looking for political change, and he certainly personifies change," says Kohut, who conducted a poll showing that when people hear the name "Barack Obama," the words that come to mind are "new," "young," "charismatic" and "smart."
Then again, "inexperienced" is another word that comes to mind. Kohut's polls show that the second thing voters want is competence, and they see this in Hillary Clinton more than Obama. "And that," says Kohut, "is why we have a horse race."
Obama appeals most to well-educated college graduates, Kohut says, the same demographic group that supported Gary Hart, Bill Bradley and Howard Dean in previous campaigns. People with college degrees tend to be driven by hope and idealism. In contrast, as Cook explains, "downscale Democrats" tend to focus more on economic issues and are more likely to have fond memories of Clinton-era prosperity. "They're more survival oriented."
Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, believes Obama's appeal springs from the fact that the country feels more fragmented than it is comfortable with, and there is a "hunger for connection and for unity." It also helps, Putnam believes, that Obama is not identified with the 1960s, nor does he carry the baggage of past campaigns, as both Edwards and Clinton do.
But most important, Putnam believes, is Obama's biography: the racial unity he represents and an upbringing that enables him to speak to blacks and whites alike. "He's black, but not just black," says Putnam. "A large number of Americans would like to feel they're in a country where someone like that could be president."
The racial question is, of course, complicated and heated. Some commentators, including Debra Dickerson and Stanley Crouch, have revived the idea that Obama is not authentically "black," in that he is not the descendant of slaves and thus lacks this classic part of the African American experience. He has also never been what Dickerson calls "black for a living." He's never worked for the NAACP or any advocacy organization whose goal is taking on the white power structure.
Dickerson points out that, early in his career, Obama did a number of crucial things to neutralize this problem of authenticity. He married a black woman, and he joined an inner-city, mostly black church, Trinity United Church of Christ, led by the charismatic pastor Jeremiah Wright. "I'm not saying he doesn't love her, and I'm sure he believes with all his heart," says Dickerson, but both moves helped shore up his credentials. For black politicians, to begin a speech by praising God is "the black secret handshake," she says. "It's like saying, 'Joe sent me.'"
But it's equally important, Dickerson says, that Obama does not speak like Jesse Jackson or Martin Luther King Jr. It may be good that his keynote speech wasn't delivered in King's majestic cadence, because then he might have been too authentically African American. To appeal to whites as well as blacks, he can't do "the whole Southern preacher thing." And appealing to whites is crucial; Clinton does almost as well as Obama among black voters, for whom, Dickerson says, 2008 presents a "delicious" choice.
"If you're looking for how does Barack Obama win the nomination, he needs to win [the African American vote] by a big margin," says Charlie Cook, and also enlarge that base. "He's got to have a broader base of support than he has now." As in Illinois, he has to be a crossover candidate. And his mannerisms, his credentials, his white mother all help. "He doesn't look like a sub-Saharan African, and he doesn't have an accent," Dickerson says. "If he were sub-Saharan-African-looking, with the same résumé, we would not know his name right now."
In her most controversial assertion, Dickerson argues that Obama appeals to white voters because he enables them to support a black man without having to confront the legacy of slavery. Because Obama is not confrontational; because he describes himself as "being rooted in the African American community, but not limited to it," he permits whites to support a black and feel self-congratulatory. This may or may not be true, but it does seem that -- in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- part of Obama's appeal is the opportunity to send the world a different message about American racial tolerance at a moment when this seems more important than ever.
"His election would do so much to restore people's faith and belief in the U.S. around the world," says Meg Hirshberg, an influential New Hampshire political donor who recently threw her support behind Obama. "Can you imagine them being president and first lady? It knocks me out, as far as what we would be saying to ourselves and to the world. He's not a descendant of slaves, but she is. I think it would be a remarkable moment in American history."
He also represents biracialism -- what one supporter calls "the emerging majority demographic," the face of what all America will look like someday: brown. No surprise, then, that he appeals more to young voters than do the other Democrats. Twentysomethings are more likely to think biracialism is cool; more likely to be biracial; more likely to have parents who are immigrants. This support may or may not get Obama where he needs to go. Younger voters are enthusiastic, but they are not, as Tony Bullock puts it, "the most reliable loading dock."
One evening early this summer, Obama was on the floor of the U.S. Senate while a series of complicated votes were taking place on President Bush's ill-fated immigration bill. Between votes, Obama milled around, chatting with colleagues. He is a touchy kind of mingler; he tends to put his hands on an arm or shoulder while talking, in an easy, friendly, intimate way. Watching him provided stark evidence of just how rare a person of color is on the Senate floor; apart from him, there were a few black staffers. He is a living testament to how hard it remains for a black politician to win a statewide race, let alone a national election.
After his keynote speech, he was asked, over and over again, if he would run in '08. Diane Sawyer asked. Oprah Winfrey asked. Tim Russert asked. Wolf Blitzer asked. The answer: He would serve out his six-year Senate term.
"The first conversation about the presidential campaign was that there was not going to be a presidential campaign," says Axelrod. Obama agrees. "We very deliberately tried to tamp down expectations," he says. "I didn't do any national interviews until Katrina. I tried to be very deliberate in terms of the work that I did here in the U.S. Senate. I didn't file a lot of symbolic bills -- like a universal health-care bill or other legislation that I wasn't in a position to pass because we were in a minority party."
In October 2006, however, Russert asked again, and this time Obama said, "I have thought about it." Then, this February, he announced. He would run. In '08.
What changed? First, The Audacity of Hope was published in 2006. While on book tour, Obama did a lot of campaigning for other candidates, helping Democrats win control of Congress. During that campaign, the war emerged as a key factor in Obama's favor, points out Ron Walters. In 2002, Obama had made a powerful speech opposing the Iraq war as "rash" and "dumb," and it was probably just as well for him, at the time, that few people had heard of him. But now the country had caught up with his views. The majority of voters, particularly Democrats, think the war was a mistake and want U.S. troops withdrawn.
Last summer Obama also went to Africa, visiting Kenya and South Africa, and speaking out against the violence in Darfur. The crowds he attracted gave him, Axelrod says, "a heightened sense of what he could accomplish."
Shortly before Christmas 2006, he met with Minow and Mikva to discuss whether to run. "He was very worried about what this was going to do to his family," says Minow. "I think Michelle at that point was very dubious, not at all enthusiastic about his running." The two men, who have six adult daughters between them, said they thought it made more sense to run when Obama's children were young and relatively insulated.
The opportunity, in the end, was irresistible. Obama says that what tipped the balance was the crowds. "After seeing the response I was getting around the country, I had to step back and ask: Is there something about my message that is sufficiently unique and could potentially be useful enough to moving the country forward?" he says. "And, ultimately, the answer was yes."
Obama also understands, more than most, the significance of an open seat. For the first time in more than 50 years, there is no incumbent president or vice president running for the White House. An opportunity like that is priceless. "You can't choose the times," says Axelrod. "The times choose you."
Is there a downside? Obama says the biggest one "is personal. It's relinquishing your privacy. As much attention as I had gotten as U.S. senator, I could still hop in my car, drive myself to the grocery store, take my kids to the zoo." Not anymore.
Politically, the risk is that there will be a negative attack that sticks, that Obama will be, in some way, swift-boated. "I will never be more popular than I am as a potential presidential candidate," he says he told a friend before announcing. "Because it was inevitable that the moment I ran, suddenly those of you in the fourth estate would start, you know, chipping away at this image that you guys have created. And so I was mindful of that. The easier thing for me to do would have been to stay put; continue to enjoy nice things being said about me; potentially get on some short list for vice president, which, even if I wasn't selected, would be sufficiently flattering; and see if something came up, some opportunity came up to run for president later."
"This is always a risky enterprise." But, he says, "I just got a sense that the country is in this ferment right now, that everything's up for grabs. Those moments in our politics don't come that often, where -- it really is possible in this election, in a way that might not be four years from now, or eight years or 12 years from now, to help redefine our politics and help point the country in a fundamentally different direction. So, I believe I made the right decision to run. But it was not a slam dunk, to quote George Tenet."
Now there are only 2,181 more cherries that have to click into place for Barack Obama. That would be the number of delegates a Democratic candidate needs to win the party's presidential nomination.
Liza Mundy is a Magazine staff writer. She can be reached at mundyl@washpost.com. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.
Seven Deadly Sins
How to Commit Them (Without, You Know, Doing Anything Wrong)
By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2007; M01
Hot as hell out there, isn't it?
The summer heat amplifies our vices, but we're sinners year-round. Doesn't matter if you're religious or not. We harbor scandalous thoughts about our married sunbathing neighbor. We seethe with jealousy over a co-worker's promotion. We allow ourselves to descend into a rut of laziness and file stories well past deadline. Ahem.
Seven sins in particular have fascinated us for centuries. They're the deadly ones: envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath. They sprang from the minds of 1st-century monks and were codified by Pope Gregory I at the end of the 6th century as behavioral markers on one's earthly route to heaven or hell.
Although grandiose and Dantean in name, the sins are as applicable to us today as they ever were, says Solomon Schimmel, author of "The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Nature."
"The purpose of civilization is not to deny human nature," Schimmel says. "But one has to figure out a way to civilize [the sins], so to speak. Not to sublimate them, but to channel them or direct them."
We're nothing if not civilized here at the Sunday Source, so we thought it might be purposeful (or fun, at the very least) to indulge the sins without harming ourselves or others. A little redirection, if you will. We tested seven innocent ways to "commit" the seven deadly sins. So let's ascend Dante's Mountain of Purgatory, terrace by terrace, sin by sin, until we reach our metaphorical paradise. Or, in my case, the completion of this story.
ENVY
A resentfulawareness of an advantage enjoyed by another ... Ogling Jewelry You Can't Have
They come in as if they might buy something. They try this on. They try that on. They pretend to be in the market so they can see what it feels like to wear one-of-a-kind $13,000 Peruvian opal earrings. And that's more than welcome at Tiny Jewel Box.
"That happens all the time, and I really like that we can serve that purpose for people, because there should be a degree of fantasy in the store," says Matt Rosenheim, the store's president. "That's how a lot of people develop their taste and their appreciation for unusual things. We love that, and we're happy to indulge them."
Tiny Jewel Box started 77 years ago in a 6-by-6-foot space on G Street NW and now makes a grand six-story building home on Connecticut Avenue NW between Farragut Square and Dupont Circle. It carries exclusive items from both prominent and smaller designers, and it sells double brilliant diamonds -- meaning they have 108 facets instead of the normal 54.
They're really sparkly.
"The first floor has what I like to call serious bling," says Paola Domenge, the store's marketing director. It doesn't get much more serious than a certain piece in the vintage section of the first floor. It's a set from 1925: a brooch and two bracelets made of moonstones, sapphires and diamonds that combine into one necklace. Price tag?
$145,000. Bam.
"If it's not special, it's not here," goes the store's motto.
After trying on the opals, moonstones and other new or vintage items (ranging from the Victorian era to retro), you can take the elevator up to a higher floor, where purchases may be more fiscally feasible: fashion-savvy gifts such as wallets, umbrellas and vases, plus jewelry by David Yurman. You can drop as little as $150 on a pair of quality earrings or revel in a fine selection of watches. Just don't give the first floor a second thought till you make your first million.
Tiny Jewel Box, 1147 Connecticut Ave. NW, 202-393-2747, http://www.tinyjewelbox.com.
GLUTTONY
Overindulgence of food or drink ... Bellying Up to the Buffet
One price + no limit on servings = the ravenous splendor of an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Take the Sunday Champagne Brunch at Beacon Bar & Grill, where $24.95 will get you bottomless mimosas, champagne and bloody marys, plus an extravagant breakfast spread featuring made-to-order omelets and teeming tins of brunchy goodness.
Let's quantify the gluttony: About 144 bottles of champagne are consumed every Sunday, general manager Kamran Vakili says, and it's not uncommon for parties to park themselves at 11 a.m. and gorge for the full four hours.
Then there's dinner at the area's premier all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. A quartet of folks from Las Vegas -- the buffet capital of North America -- was starting dessert recently at Phillips Seafood's flagship restaurant on the District's Southwest waterfront (lunch is $14.99, dinner $26.99). Do they feel the need to gorge themselves to get more than their money's worth?
"Absolutely I do," Darren Gagnon says instantly.
"I can't breathe right now," Jim Kennedy says, leaning back in his chair and patting his tummy.
The restaurant can seat 1,200 people in its 40,000-square-foot space, and it goes through 500 pounds of crab legs per day (and 2,200 pounds on Mother's Day alone), says executive chef Ben Opitz, whose kitchen must keep up with diners' limitless appetites.
"I've seen a woman with two full plates, and she said it was her seventh and eighth plate," says Opitz, who in his 20 years at Phillips has seen people's buffet habits tend toward "grazing," or filling a plate with just a little bit of everything. Ask any diner who is strategically apportioning his plate, and he'll say the point is to take advantage of both the volume and the variety.
Brunch is 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Beacon Bar & Grill, 1615 Rhode Island Ave. NW, 202-872-1126, http://www.beaconbarandgrill.com.
Phillips Seafood, 900 Water St. SW, 202-488-8515, http://www.phillipsseafood.com.
GREED
A selfish desire for material wealth ... Betting at Rosecroft Raceway
"Discover the winner in you!"
So says the sign outside Rosecroft Raceway in Fort Washington, just off the Capital Beltway. Since 1949, people have gambled there on harness racing, where a driver in a cart steers a horse in a mile-long sprint around the track.
"Everybody that comes through the door -- though they won't admit it -- thinks they're going to come out a winner," track announcer Pete Medhurst says while preparing for a 7:20 p.m. post time last weekend. You need bet only $1, though Medhurst has seen several wagers in excess of $150,000 this summer.
Dozens of televisions (even on tables in the upstairs restaurant) show simulcasts of horse racing across the country. Audiences gather around the screens, shouting at horses in New Jersey and Louisiana, slapping their own haunches, scampering back and forth to the betting booths to put down and collect money.
The main event is the twice-weekly live racing at Rosecroft, which draws families and grizzled old-timers into the humid trackside twilight. Last weekend, father-and-son team Tim and John Ellis snagged front-row seats as the first of 15 races got underway. It was the fifth time this summer that they had made the 40-minute trip from Centreville.
"I love to gamble," says John, 19.
"We bring our whole paycheck," jokes John's friend Rajan Sagar, also 19.
So is it about greed?
"It's about recreation," Rajan says.
"Recreation, my butt," Tim scoffs. "He likes to win money."
"We're college students with a gambling problem," Rajan deadpans.
"I just try to keep them away from the ATM," Tim says.
Live racing Tuesdays at 5:35 p.m. and Saturdays at 7:20 p.m. through Sept. 29, and Nov. 3-Dec. 15. Simulcasting daily at 11:30 a.m. Rosecroft Raceway, 6336 Rosecroft Dr., Fort Washington, 301-567-4000, http://www.rosecroft.com. $3, simulcasting only is free.
LUST
An obsessive or excessive desire, usually of a sexual nature ... People-Watching at Ibiza
There are a dozen reservable tables throughout the new dance club Ibiza, but the costliest one is next to the main dance floor and underneath a transparent glass platform on which go-go dancers gyrate in skimpy white feathered bikinis. In short, it's a prime location for ogling flesh and fashion on both the X and Y axes.
But so is anywhere else in Ibiza, a classy 30,000-square-foot leviathan of a club that opened two weeks ago and strives to reproduce the hyper-trendy complete entertainment experience of rock-star venues in Los Angeles and Miami. It's designed for watching and being watched -- from the tables adjoining the dance floors, to tiered terraces from which you can gaze down at objects of attraction, to a giant open-air dual-level rooftop. On a recent Friday night, men took cellphone videos of the go-go dancers, whose duty is . . .
"To entertain," says dancer Jenni Rodriguez, 20, who lives in Springfield. "The dancers are there to make people dance."
And to inspire desire?
"I try to always smile," she says. "I try to flirt with my eyes, but as soon as they go -- " she pantomimes someone trying to grab her arm " -- nuh-uh."
Justin Reid, 25, stands a few feet away with a bird's-eye view of the vast main dance floor. "I approach a girl, and whatever happens happens," says Reid, who lives in New Carrollton. "I'm looking for a connection. A lot of people come for lust, but I think you can find love here."
Or at least a clot of smartly dressed clientele. Ibiza is the kind of place that brings in a supermodel to be a guest DJ and hosts a Nicole Miller fashion show in the middle of the dance floor, both of which happened last weekend. At 12:30 a.m., all eyes turned to the catwalk, lusting after the clothes on the women or the women inside them. Cameras flashed. Necks craned.
All of a sudden it was over, and Amy Winehouse blared, and everyone went back to appraising one another.
Ibiza, 1222 First St. NE. 877-424-9207. http://www.dcclubhost.com. Thursday is college night (18 to enter, 21 to drink, $10 cover). $20 cover Friday and Saturday.
PRIDE
Inordinate self-esteem ... Ego Alley in Annapolis
Pride floats in from the Chesapeake on million-dollar boats and idles into Ego Alley -- a narrow inlet that runs 300 paces from Spa Creek to the foot of Main Street in downtown Annapolis. Here's where boastful boat owners parade their shiny white trophies in front of gawking pedestrians. They tie up for lunch, gamely field questions from tourists ("What kind?" "How much?") and bask in the grandeur of their vehicles.
To understand this maritime pride, you need only look at the names painted on the boats: Perfection from Riva. My Boat and Show Time from Annapolis. Sometimes the boats are so big they have to back out of the alley to get to open water.
"You come down here on a Saturday, and it's a constant parade of boats," says Tom Van Huben, a dockmaster for Fawcett Boat Supplies. "But no matter what size your boat is, you're always going to find someone with something bigger."
On a recent sunny afternoon, a man and woman stroll by Pool Man, a 48-foot Sea Ray that B.D. and Penny Laderberg have just ridden in on from Virginia Beach.
"I love your boat," the woman gushes.
"Beautiful boat," the man echoes curtly.
The Laderbergs bought it a couple of months ago. It's a step up from their previous boat: a 42-foot Sea Ray.
So why the six-foot upgrade?
"Aw, c'mon," Penny says. "Men and their toys. It's his baby. Ask him."
B.D. demurs. "I saw this boat and fell in love with it," he says.
Ego Alley is bordered by Compromise and Dock streets at the foot of Main Street in downtown Annapolis.
SLOTH
Disinclination to action or labor ... Tubing on the Potomac
Then there was the time a group of tubers fell asleep on the Potomac and drifted 11 miles downstream from their pickup point.
"They were sunbathing and relaxed too much," owner George Heffner Jr. says, shrugging. He started Butts Tubes 13 seasons ago with his father. The venture has since spawned a yearly pilgrimage of people who plop their behinds in an inner tube and let the water do the work.
On any given Saturday this summer, a thousand people descend on Butts Tubes at the northern tip of Loudoun County about an hour from the District. They put on life vests, shuttle to the river, sit in a tube, enjoy the passing scenery and get picked up again a few miles downstream.
It's the perfect way to revel in slothfulness, right?
"Ohhh, no," Gaby Sardo, 7, says while waiting for the bus to the banks earlier this month. She's quick to refute the notion that tubing is for the indolent.
"You've got to paddle and get into the right stream," she explains. "It's a lot of work."
"It's not a lot of work -- c'mon," says her mother, Kathy Jenkins.
Gaby and her mom, who live in Fairfax, went flatwater tubing with other family members, but Butts Tubes (under the umbrella moniker BTI Whitewater) also offers whitewater tubing and rafting for the more industrious.
For non-river time, there's a picnic area, charcoal grills, a horseshoe pit and live bluegrass music on Saturday afternoons. So there's a range of recreational options on the sloth scale, but the mission is the same: a little invigoration couched by a lot of relaxation.
"That's what we're aiming for," Heffner says. "For people to come out and relax."
Tubing is available into September at Butts Tubes, on Harpers Ferry Road off Route 340, 800-836-9911, http://www.buttstubes.com. $18-$28 per person for a whole day.
For other tubing options, check out River Riders (800-326-7238, http://www.riverriders.com) in Harpers Ferry and River & Trail Outfitters (888-446-7529, http://www.rivertrail.com) in Frederick County.
WRATH
Strong vengeful anger or indignation ... Paintball in Bowie
Paintball changes people.
You'll see this when the white-collar crowd takes an office field trip to Outdoor Adventures in Bowie. With their ties off and workplace manner shucked, they get into it. Paintball referee Ron Williamsen, 21, has seen it firsthand.
"They're cooped up in those offices, and they're all suited up and stuck in that little environment of theirs," says Williamsen, who lives in Anne Arundel County. "This is almost primal for them. It's a great release. . . . I've definitely chilled out since I've started playing."
"It's great for that," echoes Gambrills resident Russ Battaglia, 32, who plays at Outdoor Adventures several times a week. "Go out there and shoot the boss. If you're having a bad day, it's hard to leave here with a frown."
On a recent Tuesday night, Battaglia was a walk-on, or a solo paintballer who shows up for night games on Tuesdays and Fridays (6 to 10 p.m.) or on weekends during the day (9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.) to be grouped into a random team. With the sun setting and the wrathful humidity waning, a dozen walk-ons darted behind bunkers and pillars, firing rounds of paintballs at speeds up to 300 feet per second on a 120-yard-long field. Blebs of yellow paint zipped off obstacles and goggles as referees called people out.
"Almost every paintballer comes out here to get out aggression," says referee Quay Bright, 19, of Bowie. "It keeps kids out of trouble."
Outdoor Adventures has been around since 1988 and has seen a surge in attendance since ESPN began featuring paintball competitions a few years ago. More than 100 walk-ons show up on the weekends to play on any of the 14 fields on the 88-acre spread. The excitement and the teamwork are big draws, the referees say.
"Most of these guys are high on adrenaline," Williamsen says while watching a group of 25 friends on one of the playing fields in the woods. "Then they'll go home and sleep like babies."
Outdoor Adventures, 16698 Governor Bridge Rd., Bowie (take a left on the dirt path after the Toyota dealership and drive about a mile), 800-456-6636, http://www.oapaintball.com. $35-$65 for a rental package (includes admission, paintballs, a semi-automatic air gun, compressed air fills, goggles, face mask and a two-pouch harness for extra paintballs).
By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 22, 2007; M01
Hot as hell out there, isn't it?
The summer heat amplifies our vices, but we're sinners year-round. Doesn't matter if you're religious or not. We harbor scandalous thoughts about our married sunbathing neighbor. We seethe with jealousy over a co-worker's promotion. We allow ourselves to descend into a rut of laziness and file stories well past deadline. Ahem.
Seven sins in particular have fascinated us for centuries. They're the deadly ones: envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth and wrath. They sprang from the minds of 1st-century monks and were codified by Pope Gregory I at the end of the 6th century as behavioral markers on one's earthly route to heaven or hell.
Although grandiose and Dantean in name, the sins are as applicable to us today as they ever were, says Solomon Schimmel, author of "The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Nature."
"The purpose of civilization is not to deny human nature," Schimmel says. "But one has to figure out a way to civilize [the sins], so to speak. Not to sublimate them, but to channel them or direct them."
We're nothing if not civilized here at the Sunday Source, so we thought it might be purposeful (or fun, at the very least) to indulge the sins without harming ourselves or others. A little redirection, if you will. We tested seven innocent ways to "commit" the seven deadly sins. So let's ascend Dante's Mountain of Purgatory, terrace by terrace, sin by sin, until we reach our metaphorical paradise. Or, in my case, the completion of this story.
ENVY
A resentfulawareness of an advantage enjoyed by another ... Ogling Jewelry You Can't Have
They come in as if they might buy something. They try this on. They try that on. They pretend to be in the market so they can see what it feels like to wear one-of-a-kind $13,000 Peruvian opal earrings. And that's more than welcome at Tiny Jewel Box.
"That happens all the time, and I really like that we can serve that purpose for people, because there should be a degree of fantasy in the store," says Matt Rosenheim, the store's president. "That's how a lot of people develop their taste and their appreciation for unusual things. We love that, and we're happy to indulge them."
Tiny Jewel Box started 77 years ago in a 6-by-6-foot space on G Street NW and now makes a grand six-story building home on Connecticut Avenue NW between Farragut Square and Dupont Circle. It carries exclusive items from both prominent and smaller designers, and it sells double brilliant diamonds -- meaning they have 108 facets instead of the normal 54.
They're really sparkly.
"The first floor has what I like to call serious bling," says Paola Domenge, the store's marketing director. It doesn't get much more serious than a certain piece in the vintage section of the first floor. It's a set from 1925: a brooch and two bracelets made of moonstones, sapphires and diamonds that combine into one necklace. Price tag?
$145,000. Bam.
"If it's not special, it's not here," goes the store's motto.
After trying on the opals, moonstones and other new or vintage items (ranging from the Victorian era to retro), you can take the elevator up to a higher floor, where purchases may be more fiscally feasible: fashion-savvy gifts such as wallets, umbrellas and vases, plus jewelry by David Yurman. You can drop as little as $150 on a pair of quality earrings or revel in a fine selection of watches. Just don't give the first floor a second thought till you make your first million.
Tiny Jewel Box, 1147 Connecticut Ave. NW, 202-393-2747, http://www.tinyjewelbox.com.
GLUTTONY
Overindulgence of food or drink ... Bellying Up to the Buffet
One price + no limit on servings = the ravenous splendor of an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Take the Sunday Champagne Brunch at Beacon Bar & Grill, where $24.95 will get you bottomless mimosas, champagne and bloody marys, plus an extravagant breakfast spread featuring made-to-order omelets and teeming tins of brunchy goodness.
Let's quantify the gluttony: About 144 bottles of champagne are consumed every Sunday, general manager Kamran Vakili says, and it's not uncommon for parties to park themselves at 11 a.m. and gorge for the full four hours.
Then there's dinner at the area's premier all-you-can-eat seafood buffet. A quartet of folks from Las Vegas -- the buffet capital of North America -- was starting dessert recently at Phillips Seafood's flagship restaurant on the District's Southwest waterfront (lunch is $14.99, dinner $26.99). Do they feel the need to gorge themselves to get more than their money's worth?
"Absolutely I do," Darren Gagnon says instantly.
"I can't breathe right now," Jim Kennedy says, leaning back in his chair and patting his tummy.
The restaurant can seat 1,200 people in its 40,000-square-foot space, and it goes through 500 pounds of crab legs per day (and 2,200 pounds on Mother's Day alone), says executive chef Ben Opitz, whose kitchen must keep up with diners' limitless appetites.
"I've seen a woman with two full plates, and she said it was her seventh and eighth plate," says Opitz, who in his 20 years at Phillips has seen people's buffet habits tend toward "grazing," or filling a plate with just a little bit of everything. Ask any diner who is strategically apportioning his plate, and he'll say the point is to take advantage of both the volume and the variety.
Brunch is 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Beacon Bar & Grill, 1615 Rhode Island Ave. NW, 202-872-1126, http://www.beaconbarandgrill.com.
Phillips Seafood, 900 Water St. SW, 202-488-8515, http://www.phillipsseafood.com.
GREED
A selfish desire for material wealth ... Betting at Rosecroft Raceway
"Discover the winner in you!"
So says the sign outside Rosecroft Raceway in Fort Washington, just off the Capital Beltway. Since 1949, people have gambled there on harness racing, where a driver in a cart steers a horse in a mile-long sprint around the track.
"Everybody that comes through the door -- though they won't admit it -- thinks they're going to come out a winner," track announcer Pete Medhurst says while preparing for a 7:20 p.m. post time last weekend. You need bet only $1, though Medhurst has seen several wagers in excess of $150,000 this summer.
Dozens of televisions (even on tables in the upstairs restaurant) show simulcasts of horse racing across the country. Audiences gather around the screens, shouting at horses in New Jersey and Louisiana, slapping their own haunches, scampering back and forth to the betting booths to put down and collect money.
The main event is the twice-weekly live racing at Rosecroft, which draws families and grizzled old-timers into the humid trackside twilight. Last weekend, father-and-son team Tim and John Ellis snagged front-row seats as the first of 15 races got underway. It was the fifth time this summer that they had made the 40-minute trip from Centreville.
"I love to gamble," says John, 19.
"We bring our whole paycheck," jokes John's friend Rajan Sagar, also 19.
So is it about greed?
"It's about recreation," Rajan says.
"Recreation, my butt," Tim scoffs. "He likes to win money."
"We're college students with a gambling problem," Rajan deadpans.
"I just try to keep them away from the ATM," Tim says.
Live racing Tuesdays at 5:35 p.m. and Saturdays at 7:20 p.m. through Sept. 29, and Nov. 3-Dec. 15. Simulcasting daily at 11:30 a.m. Rosecroft Raceway, 6336 Rosecroft Dr., Fort Washington, 301-567-4000, http://www.rosecroft.com. $3, simulcasting only is free.
LUST
An obsessive or excessive desire, usually of a sexual nature ... People-Watching at Ibiza
There are a dozen reservable tables throughout the new dance club Ibiza, but the costliest one is next to the main dance floor and underneath a transparent glass platform on which go-go dancers gyrate in skimpy white feathered bikinis. In short, it's a prime location for ogling flesh and fashion on both the X and Y axes.
But so is anywhere else in Ibiza, a classy 30,000-square-foot leviathan of a club that opened two weeks ago and strives to reproduce the hyper-trendy complete entertainment experience of rock-star venues in Los Angeles and Miami. It's designed for watching and being watched -- from the tables adjoining the dance floors, to tiered terraces from which you can gaze down at objects of attraction, to a giant open-air dual-level rooftop. On a recent Friday night, men took cellphone videos of the go-go dancers, whose duty is . . .
"To entertain," says dancer Jenni Rodriguez, 20, who lives in Springfield. "The dancers are there to make people dance."
And to inspire desire?
"I try to always smile," she says. "I try to flirt with my eyes, but as soon as they go -- " she pantomimes someone trying to grab her arm " -- nuh-uh."
Justin Reid, 25, stands a few feet away with a bird's-eye view of the vast main dance floor. "I approach a girl, and whatever happens happens," says Reid, who lives in New Carrollton. "I'm looking for a connection. A lot of people come for lust, but I think you can find love here."
Or at least a clot of smartly dressed clientele. Ibiza is the kind of place that brings in a supermodel to be a guest DJ and hosts a Nicole Miller fashion show in the middle of the dance floor, both of which happened last weekend. At 12:30 a.m., all eyes turned to the catwalk, lusting after the clothes on the women or the women inside them. Cameras flashed. Necks craned.
All of a sudden it was over, and Amy Winehouse blared, and everyone went back to appraising one another.
Ibiza, 1222 First St. NE. 877-424-9207. http://www.dcclubhost.com. Thursday is college night (18 to enter, 21 to drink, $10 cover). $20 cover Friday and Saturday.
PRIDE
Inordinate self-esteem ... Ego Alley in Annapolis
Pride floats in from the Chesapeake on million-dollar boats and idles into Ego Alley -- a narrow inlet that runs 300 paces from Spa Creek to the foot of Main Street in downtown Annapolis. Here's where boastful boat owners parade their shiny white trophies in front of gawking pedestrians. They tie up for lunch, gamely field questions from tourists ("What kind?" "How much?") and bask in the grandeur of their vehicles.
To understand this maritime pride, you need only look at the names painted on the boats: Perfection from Riva. My Boat and Show Time from Annapolis. Sometimes the boats are so big they have to back out of the alley to get to open water.
"You come down here on a Saturday, and it's a constant parade of boats," says Tom Van Huben, a dockmaster for Fawcett Boat Supplies. "But no matter what size your boat is, you're always going to find someone with something bigger."
On a recent sunny afternoon, a man and woman stroll by Pool Man, a 48-foot Sea Ray that B.D. and Penny Laderberg have just ridden in on from Virginia Beach.
"I love your boat," the woman gushes.
"Beautiful boat," the man echoes curtly.
The Laderbergs bought it a couple of months ago. It's a step up from their previous boat: a 42-foot Sea Ray.
So why the six-foot upgrade?
"Aw, c'mon," Penny says. "Men and their toys. It's his baby. Ask him."
B.D. demurs. "I saw this boat and fell in love with it," he says.
Ego Alley is bordered by Compromise and Dock streets at the foot of Main Street in downtown Annapolis.
SLOTH
Disinclination to action or labor ... Tubing on the Potomac
Then there was the time a group of tubers fell asleep on the Potomac and drifted 11 miles downstream from their pickup point.
"They were sunbathing and relaxed too much," owner George Heffner Jr. says, shrugging. He started Butts Tubes 13 seasons ago with his father. The venture has since spawned a yearly pilgrimage of people who plop their behinds in an inner tube and let the water do the work.
On any given Saturday this summer, a thousand people descend on Butts Tubes at the northern tip of Loudoun County about an hour from the District. They put on life vests, shuttle to the river, sit in a tube, enjoy the passing scenery and get picked up again a few miles downstream.
It's the perfect way to revel in slothfulness, right?
"Ohhh, no," Gaby Sardo, 7, says while waiting for the bus to the banks earlier this month. She's quick to refute the notion that tubing is for the indolent.
"You've got to paddle and get into the right stream," she explains. "It's a lot of work."
"It's not a lot of work -- c'mon," says her mother, Kathy Jenkins.
Gaby and her mom, who live in Fairfax, went flatwater tubing with other family members, but Butts Tubes (under the umbrella moniker BTI Whitewater) also offers whitewater tubing and rafting for the more industrious.
For non-river time, there's a picnic area, charcoal grills, a horseshoe pit and live bluegrass music on Saturday afternoons. So there's a range of recreational options on the sloth scale, but the mission is the same: a little invigoration couched by a lot of relaxation.
"That's what we're aiming for," Heffner says. "For people to come out and relax."
Tubing is available into September at Butts Tubes, on Harpers Ferry Road off Route 340, 800-836-9911, http://www.buttstubes.com. $18-$28 per person for a whole day.
For other tubing options, check out River Riders (800-326-7238, http://www.riverriders.com) in Harpers Ferry and River & Trail Outfitters (888-446-7529, http://www.rivertrail.com) in Frederick County.
WRATH
Strong vengeful anger or indignation ... Paintball in Bowie
Paintball changes people.
You'll see this when the white-collar crowd takes an office field trip to Outdoor Adventures in Bowie. With their ties off and workplace manner shucked, they get into it. Paintball referee Ron Williamsen, 21, has seen it firsthand.
"They're cooped up in those offices, and they're all suited up and stuck in that little environment of theirs," says Williamsen, who lives in Anne Arundel County. "This is almost primal for them. It's a great release. . . . I've definitely chilled out since I've started playing."
"It's great for that," echoes Gambrills resident Russ Battaglia, 32, who plays at Outdoor Adventures several times a week. "Go out there and shoot the boss. If you're having a bad day, it's hard to leave here with a frown."
On a recent Tuesday night, Battaglia was a walk-on, or a solo paintballer who shows up for night games on Tuesdays and Fridays (6 to 10 p.m.) or on weekends during the day (9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.) to be grouped into a random team. With the sun setting and the wrathful humidity waning, a dozen walk-ons darted behind bunkers and pillars, firing rounds of paintballs at speeds up to 300 feet per second on a 120-yard-long field. Blebs of yellow paint zipped off obstacles and goggles as referees called people out.
"Almost every paintballer comes out here to get out aggression," says referee Quay Bright, 19, of Bowie. "It keeps kids out of trouble."
Outdoor Adventures has been around since 1988 and has seen a surge in attendance since ESPN began featuring paintball competitions a few years ago. More than 100 walk-ons show up on the weekends to play on any of the 14 fields on the 88-acre spread. The excitement and the teamwork are big draws, the referees say.
"Most of these guys are high on adrenaline," Williamsen says while watching a group of 25 friends on one of the playing fields in the woods. "Then they'll go home and sleep like babies."
Outdoor Adventures, 16698 Governor Bridge Rd., Bowie (take a left on the dirt path after the Toyota dealership and drive about a mile), 800-456-6636, http://www.oapaintball.com. $35-$65 for a rental package (includes admission, paintballs, a semi-automatic air gun, compressed air fills, goggles, face mask and a two-pouch harness for extra paintballs).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)