Book Excerpt: Fear drives Obama’s quest to win

“Not just fear of losing — although that is bad enough — but fear of total, complete humiliation,” Obama wrote in a memoir last year. “In politics, there may be second acts, but there is no second place.”

Obama learned that lesson the hard way. After winning several elections to the Illinois state Senate in the late 1990s, he made the mistake of challenging the wildly popular Rep. Bobby Rush of Chicago in the Democratic primary of 2000.

“Less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going to lose,” Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.” “I arrived at my victory party to discover that the race had already been called and that I had lost by thirty-one points.”

Years later, Obama still burned with the thought of his only political loss, which he called a “drubbing.” But that didn’t stop him from plunging into yet another campaign, this one a bid for the U.S. Senate in 2004.

“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,” he mused.

It also requires “breathtaking” amounts of money. “Without money, and the television ads that consume all the money, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose,” he said.

“As a consequence of my fundraising, I became more like the wealthy donorsI met,” Obama acknowledged. “I can’t assume the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways. Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums of money. By the end of the campaign, the banter and small talk that had once accompanied my solicitation calls were eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not to take no for an answer.”

At least Obama didn’t have to worry about the media.

“For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my candidacy for the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the beneficiary of unusually — and at times undeservedly — positive press coverage,” Obama wrote in “Audacity.” “No doubt some of this had to do with my status as an underdog in my Senate primary, as well as my novelty as a black candidate with an exotic background.

“Maybe it also has something to do with my style of communicating, which can be rambling, hesitant, and overly verbose — both my staff and Michelle often remind me of this —, but which perhaps finds sympathy in the literary class,” he said. “I’ve watched the press cast me in a light that can be hard to live up to.”

In addition to getting a free ride from the media, Obama was blessed with political opponents who self-destructed. He won the Democratic primary in 2004 after watching his top rival “flame out” because of an “unflattering divorce file.” Then his Republican opponent “was felled by a divorce scandal of his own,” he said.

“There was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune. To political insiders, my victory proved nothing.”

After only two years in the Senate, Obama announced last January that he was filing papers to become a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. The announcement drew massive media coverage, with reporters hailing Obama as the first African-American to have a realistic shot at capturing the White House. They pointed out that Obama, unlike Clinton, had publicly opposed the Iraq war from the very beginning.

Determined to cut short this love-fest, Clinton spent the next day recording her own presidential campaign announcement, which she released three days later. The announcement succeeded in choking off the media oxygen to Obama’s fledgling campaign. But Clinton could not keep him down for long.

Obama quickly began picking off big Democratic donors who had previously been loyal to Team Clinton. One of the biggest was Hollywood producer David Geffen, who added insult to injury by trashing Clinton in an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Geffen said he hoped Obama could stand up to what Dowd called “Clinton Inc.,” adding: “That machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.”

The blunt remarks so rattled Clinton that she instructed her campaign to lash out at Obama, which kept the story alive. Pundits clucked that Clinton should have ignored the story, but the battle-hardened candidate stood firm: “When you are attacked, you have to deck your opponents.”

Obama, however, was proving difficult to deck. Americans were mesmerized by an underground campaign ad that urged voters to support him over Clinton. The Internet ad was an adaptation of the iconic “1984” television spot that introduced Apple Macintosh computers 23 years earlier.

In the updated version, images of Clinton were substituted for the Orwellian “Big Brother.” Row after row of mind-numbed “proles” stare vacantly at a giant screen of Clinton dispensing banalities. Then a colorfully dressed woman, chased by storm troopers, hurls a sledgehammer that shatters the screen and frees the proles from their oppression.

The ad underscored Obama’s image as the fresh face in the campaign. But he gradually discovered that the media would not always fawn over him.

In “Audacity,” Obama lamented “the growth of an unabashedly partisan press: talk radio, Fox News, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk-show circuit, and most recently the bloggers, all of them trading insults, accusations, gossip, and innuendo twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

“The constant vitriol can wear on the spirit,” he added. “Oddly enough, the cruder broadsides you don’t worry about too much; if Rush Limbaugh’s listeners enjoy hearing him call me ‘Osama Obama,’ my attitude is, let them have their fun.”

Republican Mitt Romney says Obama has “a real shot” at defeating Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

“I would weigh that more heavily than I think the insiders are weighing it,” said Romney, who was succeeded by a black Democrat as governor last year.

“Part of that is from my experience here in Massachusetts, having watched a fellow, Deval Patrick, run for governor here with no particular political experience, as I recall, virtually no positions on important issues, but wonderful rhetoric about hope and, you know, a brighter future,” Romney told The Examiner. “People glommed on and just loved the rhetoric.”

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