The Audacity of Hope

nation’s business? The longer I served in Washington, the more I saw friends studying
my face for signs of a change, probing me for a newfound pomposity, searching for
hints of argumentativeness or guardedness. I began examining myself in the same way;
I began to see certain characteristics that I held in common with my new colleagues, and
I wondered what might prevent my own transformation into the stock politician of bad
TV movies.
ONE PLACE TO start my inquiry was to understand the nature of ambition, for in this
regard at least, senators are different. Few people end up being United States senators
by accident; at a minimum, it requires a certain megalomania, a belief that of all the
gifted people in your state, you are somehow uniquely qualified to speak on their
behalf; a belief sufficiently strong that you are willing to endure the sometimes
uplifting, occasionally harrowing, but always slightly ridiculous process we call
campaigns.
Moreover, ambition alone is not enough. Whatever the tangle of motives, both sacred
and profane, that push us toward the goal of becoming a senator, those who succeed
must exhibit an almost fanatical single-mindedness, often disregarding their health,
relationships, mental balance, and dignity. After my primary campaign was over, I
remember looking at my calendar and realizing that over a span of a year and a half, I
had taken exactly seven days off. The rest of the time I had typically worked twelve to
sixteen hours a day. This was not something I was particularly proud of. As Michelle
pointed out to me several times a week during the campaign, it just wasn’t normal.
Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians,
however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more
destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as a
candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn’t release you until after Election Day.
That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing—although that is bad enough—but fear of
total, complete humiliation.
I still burn, for example, with the thought of my one loss in politics, a drubbing in 2000
at the hands of incumbent Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush. It was a race in which
everything that could go wrong did go wrong, in which my own mistakes were
compounded by tragedy and farce. Two weeks after announcing my candidacy, with a
few thousand dollars raised, I commissioned my first poll and discovered that Mr.
Rush’s name recognition stood at about 90 percent, while mine stood at 11 percent. His
approval rating hovered around 70 percent—mine at 8. In that way I learned one of the
cardinal rules of modern politics: Do the poll before you announce.
Things went downhill from there. In October, on my way to a meeting to secure an
endorsement from one of the few party officials who had not already committed to my
opponent, I heard a news flash on the radio that Congressman Rush’s adult son had
been shot and killed by a pair of drug dealers outside his house. I was shocked and
saddened for the congressman, and effectively suspended my campaign for a month.
Then, during the Christmas holidays, after having traveled to Hawaii for an abbreviated
five-day trip to visit my grandmother and reacquaint myself with Michelle and then-