Eventually I relented and booked a flight to L.A. When I landed, I took the shuttle to Hertz Rent A Car, handed the woman behind the counter my American Express card, and began looking at the map for directions to a cheap hotel that I’d found near Venice Beach. After a few minutes the Hertz woman came back with a look of embarrassment on her face.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Obama, but your card’s been rejected.”
“That can’t be right. Can you try again?”
“I tried twice, sir. Maybe you should call American Express.”
After half an hour on the phone, a kindhearted supervisor at American Express authorized the car rental. But the episode served as an omen of things to come. Not being a delegate, I couldn’t secure a floor pass; according to the Illinois Party chairman, he was already inundated with requests, and the best he could do was give me a pass that allowed entry only onto the convention site. I ended up watching most of the speeches on various television screens scattered around the Staples Center, occasionally following friends or acquaintances into skyboxes where it was clear I didn’t belong. By Tuesday night, I realized that my presence was serving neither me nor the Democratic Party any apparent purpose, and by Wednesday morning I was on the first flight back to Chicago.
Given the distance between my previous role as a convention gate-crasher and my newfound role as convention keynoter, I had some cause to worry that my appearance in Boston might not go very well. But perhaps because by that time I had become accustomed to outlandish things happening in my campaign, I didn’t feel particularly nervous. A few days after the call from Ms. Cahill, I was back in my hotel room in Springfield, making notes for a rough draft of the speech while watching a basketball game. I thought about the themes that I’d sounded during the campaign — the willingness of people to work hard if given the chance, the need for government to help provide a foundation for opportunity, the belief that Americans felt a sense of mutual obligation toward one another. I made a list of the issues I might touch on — health care, education, the war in Iraq.
But most of all, I thought about the voices of all the people I’d met on the campaign trail. I remembered Tim Wheeler and his wife in Galesburg, trying to figure out how to get their teenage son the liver transplant he needed. I remembered a young man in East Moline named Seamus Ahern who was on his way to Iraq — the desire he had to serve his country, the look of pride and apprehension on the face of his father. I remembered a young black woman I’d met in East St. Louis whose name I never would catch, but who told me of her efforts to attend college even though no one in her family had ever graduated from high school.
It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., had once used in a sermon.
The audacity of hope.
That was the best of the American spirit, I thought — having the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control — and therefore responsibility — over our own fate.
It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent.
I turned off the basketball game and started to write.
A FEW WEEKS later, I arrived in Boston, caught three hours’ sleep, and traveled from my hotel to the Fleet Center for my first appearance on Meet the Press. Toward the end of the segment, Tim Russert put up on the screen an excerpt from a 1996 interview with the Cleveland Plain-Dealer that I had forgotten about entirely, in which the reporter had asked me — as someone just getting into politics as a candidate for the Illinois state senate — what I thought about the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
The convention’s for sale, right…. You’ve got these $10,000-a-plate dinners, Golden Circle Clubs. I think when the average voter looks at that, they rightly feel they’ve been locked out of the process. They can’t attend a $10,000 breakfast. They know that those who can are going to get the kind of access they can’t imagine.
After the quote was removed from the screen, Russert turned to me. “A hundred and fifty donors gave $40 million to this convention,” he said. “It’s worse than Chicago, using your standards. Are you offended by that, and what message does that send the average voter?”
I replied that politics and money were a problem for both parties, but that John Kerry’s voting record, and my own, indicated that we voted for what was best for the country. I said that a convention wouldn’t change that, although I did suggest that the more Democrats could encourage participation from people who felt locked out of the process, the more we stayed true to our origins as the party of the average Joe, the stronger we would be as a party.
Privately, I thought my original 1996 quote was better.
There was a time when political conventions captured the urgency and drama of politics — when nominations were determined by floor managers and head counts and side deals and arm-twisting, when passions or miscalculation might result in a second or third or fourth round of balloting. But that time passed long ago. With the advent of binding primaries, the much-needed end to the dominance of party bosses and backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms, today’s convention is bereft of surprises. Rather, it serves as a weeklong infomercial for the party and its nominee — as well as a means of rewarding the party faithful and major contributors with four days of food, drink, entertainment, and shoptalk.
I spent most of the first three days at the convention fulfilling my role in this pageant. I spoke to rooms full of major Democratic donors and had breakfast with delegates from across the fifty states. I practiced my speech in front of a video monitor, did a walk-through of how it would be staged, received instruction on where to stand, where to wave, and how to best use the microphones. My communications director, Robert Gibbs, and I trotted up and down the stairs of the Fleet Center, giving interviews that were sometimes only two minutes apart, to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, at each stop emphasizing the talking points that the Kerry-Edwards team had provided, each word of which had been undoubtedly tested in a battalion of polls and a panoply of focus groups.
Given the breakneck pace of my days, I didn’t have much time to worry about how my speech would go over. It wasn’t until Tuesday night, after my staff and Michelle had debated for half an hour over what tie I should wear (we finally settled on the tie that Robert Gibbs was wearing), after we had ridden over to the Fleet Center and heard strangers shout “Good luck!” and “Give ’em hell, Obama!” after we had visited with a very gracious and funny Teresa Heinz Kerry in her hotel room, until finally it was just Michelle and me sitting backstage and watching the broadcast, that I started to feel just a tad bit nervous. I mentioned to Michelle that my stomach was feeling a little grumbly. She hugged me tight, looked into my eyes, and said, “Just don’t screw it up, buddy!”
We both laughed. Just then, one of the production managers came into the hold room and told me it was time to take my position offstage. Standing behind the black curtain, listening to Dick Durbin introduce me, I thought about my mother and father and grandfather and what it might have been like for them to be in the audience. I thought about my grandmother in Hawaii, watching the convention on TV because her back was too deteriorated for her to travel. I thought about all the volunteers and supporters back in Illinois who had worked so hard on my behalf.