The Anti-Obama

“Maybe I’ll read about it in the paper,” Warfel said by phone the other day, as he walked outside his home in Springfield, Illinois. For a while he was seeing a lot of the 42-year-old Obama. Perhaps too much. For about two weeks in May, Warfel, his Panasonic digital video recorder in hand, followed Obama everywhere the candidate went, to campaign events in downstate Illinois, to speeches at the capitol in Springfield, to press gaggles outside campaign headquarters–day after day, sunrise to sunset.

Warfel was no stalker. He was a tracker: a campaign operative who engages in hands-on opposition research by recording all that an opponent says or does. Tracking is nothing new. Before video cameras, trackers–often young, ambitious party flacks–would follow candidates with tape recorders. Before that, the tools of choice were pad and pencil. “It’s something countless other campaigns have done before,” Warfel said. “Obama had his people tracking Jack as well.”

“Jack” is Jack Ryan, who until recently was Obama’s Republican opponent, as well as Warfel’s employer. In June, however, Ryan pulled out of the race. A court had released embarrassing testimony from a child custody battle with his ex-wife, the actress Jeri Ryan. Warfel, who now spends his days “relaxing,” thinks Ryan was betrayed by the Illinois Republican party in general and chairwoman Judy Baar Topinka in particular. “Jack’s campaign was a good campaign,” Warfel said. “You had a superlative candidate. You had a guy with firm beliefs. And if you’d had a situation where the Illinois Republican party rallied around their candidate, the court stuff would have been a two-day story, and Jack would have gone on to win in the end.”

And yet, by the time he dropped out, Ryan was clearly losing the race to Obama. One poll showed him as much as 20 points behind. A combination of factors plagued the Ryan campaign: Illinois has been trending Democratic, for one. Ryan, a former investment banker, had no government experience, for another.

Then there is Obama himself. He is a brilliant man and an impressive orator. Also, he has an unusual life story–unusual enough that he published a memoir, Dreams from My Father, before becoming an Illinois state senator. Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii, where his father, a student from Kenya, was studying economics. His mother was 18.

When Obama was 2, his father left the family to return to Kenya, where he eventually became finance minister. Abandoned, Obama’s mother, an anthropologist, married a man who worked in the oil business. The family moved to Indonesia, where they spent four years. Then Obama returned alone to Hawaii, where he was raised by his grandparents and attended Punahou, a tony prep school. The Ivy League followed: first Columbia, and then, after four years working as a community activist in Chicago, Harvard Law. In 1990, he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and saw his first round of adulatory press. It was already clear that Obama wanted to enter politics. He told reporters he would return to Chicago eventually. Chicago, he said, was “an ideal laboratory.” He won his state senate seat in 1996.

I asked Justin Warfel whether Obama’s biography explains his appeal.

He scoffed. “Obama himself doesn’t really interest me,” he said. His voice was intense. “What’s scary, though, is that he’s able to portray himself in a moderate light. He’s got so many people into thinking he is not the far-left candidate he is. But when you look at the issues, on abortion, on the gun issue, well, it’s scary.”

Warfel, who is 24, joined Jack Ryan’s campaign last October, starting out as a regional coordinator responsible for Central Illinois. His assignment to track Obama came much later. After Obama bested six other candidates (one of whom spent about $29 million) in the Democratic primary, the Ryan campaign wanted to compare Obama’s liberal primary message with his new, slightly more moderate general election one. The question of who exactly would track Obama was the subject of some debate in the Ryan camp, however. “Do you take a volunteer,” Warfel said, “and put someone in that position? Or do you take someone else, hire an outside agent?” His bosses chose Warfel.

The job did not turn out as expected. One day in May, Warfel walked down a hall in the state capitol towards the tall, thin Obama, who was speaking to a group of reporters, photographers, and television camera crews. “I heard my name coming out of his mouth,” Warfel said. The cameras, the lights, and the press all shifted their attention from the candidate to Warfel. Suddenly “they were tracking me.”

Warfel kept his camera running, taping the cameras taping him.

Obama had made the young man a campaign issue. It was a clever move. “It’s taking politics to a whole other level,” Obama told the Associated Press. “He stops short of the bathroom, but gets me right when I come back out.” Articles in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times soon followed. William Finnegan, writing in the New Yorker, called Warfel’s methods “unusually aggressive.” One journalist said Warfel was “bald”; another said he had “a shaved head.” According to AP, Warfel “held the camera less than two feet from Obama’s face, barking questions and interrupting Obama’s conversations with reporters.”

“Never happened,” Warfel said. “That’s the single most erroneous piece of reporting I’ve ever seen.” He spoke on his cell phone. Dogs barked in the distance. “Obama wanted to be viewed as a victim of the Jack Ryan campaign. And he played it well. And the press played into his hands.”

The press wrote that you taped his phone conversations with his wife and two daughters, I said.

“Also not correct,” Warfel continued. “He claimed he couldn’t speak to his wife without me taping his conversation. He never made any attempts to call any of his family members while I was tracking him.” He paused. “I can’t imagine a situation where you could legally tape someone when they were having a private conversation.” He chose his words carefully. “I never would do that.”

It was too late. Warfel became the bête noire of the Obama campaign. His cell phone number and email address were posted on a lefty blogger’s web page. Warfel started receiving menacing phone calls. The calls were frequent, unending. “It was a lot of four-letter words,” Warfel said. Every now and then he checks the nasty emails. They entertain him. Another lefty website claimed Warfel was a Dungeons & Dragons fanatic. “That’s not true either,” Warfel said. Then he groaned. “Oh,” he said. “That’s another game: Dragon Dice. I used to play it in college. You know, you’re sitting around the dorm room, looking for something to do. It’s like playing Risk.”

Warfel suspects the Obama campaign leaked his personal information. But he has no proof. And he feels no ill will towards Obama. “There was never personal animosity between he and I,” he said. “Were we best friends, were we congenial acquaintances? Well, I was doing a job. He just happened to be the subject of that job.”

Warfel says his problem is with Obama’s politics. In his years in the state senate, Obama amassed a left-liberal voting record. He cast votes in support of partial-birth abortion. He cast votes for gun control and tax hikes and expanded government health care. He was against the Iraq war, against last year’s $87 billion appropriation for reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, against both Bush tax cuts. He glosses over his opposition to NAFTA and his desire to “reexamine” trade agreements while advertising his support for “globalization” in the abstract. Once, not so long ago, Obama received an 88percent approval rating from the Illinois Chamber of Commerce. But times change. Now the number is 39percent.

This is what makes Warfel frustrated. “What voters see during an election cycle is a candidate’s campaign commercials,” he said. “That’s not an accurate picture of who Barack Obama is. The one thing people don’t see is the way he’s voted over the past seven years in the Illinois state senate.” The thing is, Obama’s positions are mainstream Democratic ones these days: “The convention frames where the party is,” Warfel went on. “You have the two most liberal senators on the presidential ticket. You have Barack Obama. You have Tom Daschle. When these are your leaders on a national scale, what does that say to conservative Democrats?” He paused thoughtfully. “They only have one choice: Vote for Republican candidates.”

Unfortunately, there is no Republican candidate for the Senate seat in Illinois. “So I suppose it’s inevitable” that Obama wins, Warfel said. “Some people say he’s a runaway freight train.”

A car passed in the distance.

Warfel was glum. “Yeah,” he said. “He and Hillary Clinton will be the best of friends in the Senate.”

Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.