the rising star
But alas, I have to admit that when it came to Barack Obama—the most gifted politician of my lifetime—I blew it.
When it was his turn to speak that day, he talked about the trials and tribulations of trying to organize low-income black communities. I wasn’t impressed. To be honest, I’ve always been attracted to the Sammy Glicks of Chicago politics—the street fighters who scratch and claw their way to the top. But then as now, Obama was a different kind of cat. Smooth and calm, he shielded his ambition behind a veneer of cool. Not that he didn’t enjoy being listened to—I remember thinking that he sounded like a windy sociology professor with nothing particularly insightful to say. If you had told me he was going to become president, I would have said sure, right after I win the Nobel Prize for literature.
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On January 2, the day before the caucuses, I caught an Obama rally in a hotel banquet room in Coralville, a town just outside of Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa. I couldn’t believe what I saw—it defied everything I’d come to believe about how race intersects politics in this country. It wasn’t just that the room was packed; it was that it was packed with white people, and their excitement bordered on euphoria. They didn’t care that Obama was black—or maybe they liked him precisely for that reason. Either way, his race was hardly an impediment.
On January 3, I watched a caucus at the University of Iowa’s student union, where one desperate Clinton supporter tried to win over undecided voters by linking Obama to Tony Rezko. He might as well have been speaking another language—I may well have been the only other person in the room who’d even heard of Rezko. “He’s this really sleazy guy who helped Obama buy a house on the south side of Chicago,” the guy explained. “You’ll hear about him. Trust me, the Republicans will make a really big deal about him if Obama’s the nominee… “
With less than an hour before the polls closed, Wes and his roommate James were sent back out to rouse any late-voting stragglers. They stumbled about in the dark in some god-forsaken precinct where the few people they found at home were annoyed—of course they’d all been to the polls. Wes got a call on his cell from his father telling him Pennsylvania had gone to Obama. Not long after that we saw a guy standing on his porch smoking a cigarette. “Forget it, dude,” he said. “Everybody’s voted. It’s over.”
