But none of these changes can happen of their own accord. Each would require a change in attitude among those in power. Each would demand that individual politicians challenge the existing order; loosen their hold on incumbency; fight with their friends as well as their enemies on behalf of abstract ideas in which the public appears to have little interest. Each would require from men and women a willingness to risk what they already have.
In the end, then, it still comes back to that quality that JFK sought to define early in his career as he lay convalescing from surgery, mindful of his heroism in war but perhaps pondering the more ambiguous challenges ahead — the quality of courage. In some ways, the longer you are in politics, the easier it should be to muster such courage, for there is a certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do, someone will be angry at you, that political attacks will come no matter how cautiously you vote, that judgment may be taken as cowardice and courage itself may be seen as calculation. I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.
And my constituents. After one town hall meeting in Godfrey, an older gentleman came up and expressed outrage that despite my having opposed the Iraq War, I had not yet called for a full withdrawal of troops. We had a brief and pleasant argument, in which I explained my concern that too precipitous a withdrawal would lead to all-out civil war in the country and the potential for widening conflict throughout the Middle East. At the end of our conversation he shook my hand.
“I still think you’re wrong,” he said, “but at least it seems like you’ve thought about it. Hell, you’d probably disappoint me if you agreed with me all the time.”
“Thanks,” I said. As he walked away, I was reminded of something Justice Louis Brandeis once said: that in a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen.
Chapter Five
Opportunity
O NE THING ABOUT being a U.S. senator — you fly a lot. There are the flights back and forth from Washington at least once a week. There are the trips to other states to deliver a speech, raise money, or campaign for your colleagues. If you represent a big state like Illinois, there are flights upstate or downstate, to attend town meetings or ribbon cuttings and to make sure that the folks don’t think you’ve forgotten them.
Most of the time I fly commercial and sit in coach, hoping for an aisle or window seat and crossing my fingers that the guy in front of me doesn’t want to recline.
But there are times when — because I’m making multiple stops on a West Coast swing, say, or need to get to another city after the last commercial flight has left — I fly on a private jet. I hadn’t been aware of this option at first, assuming the cost would be prohibitive. But during the campaign, my staff explained that under Senate rules, a senator or candidate could travel on someone else’s jet and just pay the equivalent of a first-class airfare. After looking at my campaign schedule and thinking about all the time I would save, I decided to give private jets a try.
It turns out that the flying experience is a good deal different on a private jet. Private jets depart from privately owned and managed terminals, with lounges that feature big soft couches and big-screen TVs and old aviation photographs on the walls. The restrooms are generally empty and spotless, and have those mechanical shoe-shine machines and mouthwash and mints in a bowl. There’s no sense of hurriedness at these terminals; the plane is waiting for you if you’re late, ready for you if you’re early. A lot of times you can bypass the lounge altogether and drive your car straight onto the tarmac. Otherwise the pilots will greet you in the terminal, take your bags, and walk you out to the plane.
And the planes, well, they’re nice. The first time I took such a flight, I was on a Citation X, a sleek, compact, shiny machine with wood paneling and leather seats that you could pull together to make a bed anytime you decided you wanted a nap. A shrimp salad and cheese plate occupied the seat behind me; up front, the minibar was fully stocked. The pilots hung up my coat, offered me my choice of newspapers, and asked me if I was comfortable. I was.
Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made sports car grips the road. Shooting through the clouds, I turned on the small TV monitor in front of my seat. A map of the United States appeared, with the image of our plane tracking west, along with our speed, our altitude, our time to destination, and the temperature outside. At forty thousand feet, the plane leveled off, and I looked down at the curving horizon and the scattered clouds, the geography of the earth laid out before me — first the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois, then the python curves of the Mississippi, then more farmland and ranch land and eventually the jagged Rockies, still snow-peaked, until the sun went down and the orange sky narrowed to a thin red line that was finally consumed by night and stars and moon.
I could see how people might get used to this.
The purpose of that particular trip was fund-raising, mostly — in preparation for my general election campaign, several friends and supporters had organized events for me in L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco. But the most memorable part of the trip was a visit that I paid to the town of Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Stanford University and Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the search engine company Google maintains its corporate headquarters.
Google had already achieved iconic status by mid-2004, a symbol not just of the growing power of the Internet but of the global economy’s rapid transformation. On the drive down from San Francisco, I reviewed the company’s history: how two Stanford Ph.D. candidates in computer science, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had collaborated in a dorm room to develop a better way to search the web; how in 1998, with a million dollars raised from various contacts, they had formed Google, with three employees operating out of a garage; how Google figured out an advertising model — based on text ads that were nonintrusive and relevant to the user’s search — that made the company profitable even as the dot-com boom went bust; and how, six years after the company’s founding, Google was about to go public at stock prices that would make Mr. Page and Mr. Brin two of the richest people on earth.
Mountain View looked like a typical suburban California community — quiet streets, sparkling new office parks, unassuming homes that, because of the unique purchasing power of Silicon Valley residents, probably ran a cool million or more. We pulled in front of a set of modern, modular buildings and were met by Google’s general counsel, David Drummond, an African American around my age who’d made the arrangements for my visit.
“When Larry and Sergey came to me looking to incorporate, I figured they were just a couple of really smart guys with another start-up idea,” David said. “I can’t say I expected all this.”