The Finish

the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain,” he said, and then repeated, “I don’t oppose all wars.”

He would continue to repeat that line as a refrain, imitating King’s famous and stirring repetition of the line “I have a dream.” It took cheek to borrow the most famous rhetorical device ever employed by King, the great practitioner of nonviolence, to proclaim his belief in the necessity of war.

“After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars.”

He went on to denounce the pending invasion of Iraq as a “dumb war,” and a “rash war,” but what those listening that day most remembered was his affirmation of war as just and necessary. His belief that some wars were worth fighting. The one against al Qaeda was one of them. It was a doubly bold speech for someone contemplating a run for the U.S. Senate, because it not only ran counter to the blanket antiwar sensibilities of his immediate audience but also bucked the decidedly pro–Iraq War sentiment of Illinois voters, most of whom were far to the right of the small group of protesters in downtown Chicago. Where the Iraq invasion was concerned, Obama was once more out of step with the nation, but where al Qaeda was concerned, he was no longer calling for some sort of global-welfare campaign. He was ready to “take up arms” himself in that war. In a more direct manner than he could have imagined, he would get his chance.

Three years later, after his victory in the 2004 Senate race and rapid ascent to national prominence, Obama was running for president. In August of 2007, he was still struggling. There had been excitement for him when he announced his candidacy in February, but things had quickly leveled off. He was running well behind Hillary Clinton, considered by many to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, and also behind John Edwards, who was thought to be next in line in the unlikely event that Clinton stumbled.

At the time, the strongest thing Obama had going for him seemed to be that 2002 speech. Here was an attractive, smart, antiwar candidate at a time when America’s patience for its adventure in Iraq was at an all-time low. Every Democrat in the race was opposed to continuing the war. They vied now only over who was more emphatically opposed to it. Obama had not been in the Senate when votes were cast to authorize the war so, unlike Clinton and Edwards, he could claim ideological purity on the issue. And the Chicago speech put him on record as having spoken out against it from the start. He was the premier antiwar candidate, and that’s how he presented himself. The simple thrust of his attack on Clinton, in particular, was that she had gone along with Bush on the war, while he had taken the unpopular, principled stand and had been proved right. Over the course of the campaign Obama would be forced to spell out his thinking in more detail, and the picture would become more complex.

His rise was so meteoric that many felt it had come too fast. His opponents were both baffled and annoyed by the messianic luster that he and his campaign encouraged. The best way to push back was to convince voters that he was in too big a hurry. At age forty-five, with only half of his Senate term behind him… well, even if he was destined to be America’s first black president, he wasn’t ready for the job yet. He was one of the youngest men to ever seek the presidency.

So experience was the hammer, and Clinton lowered it whenever Obama gave her a chance. He gave her one after a CNN/YouTube debate on July 23, when he was asked if he would consider meeting with America’s enemies without preconditions. The questioner, whose face was projected on a big screen, approvingly cited Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat’s courageous (and ultimately fatal) decision, in 1977, to initiate peace negotiations with Israel, and asked if any of the candidates would be willing, in the first year of their tenure, to meet without preconditions the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea in an effort to “bridge the gap that divides our countries.”

It was an easy question to dodge: Negotiation is terribly important… I wouldn’t rule it out… we have a history with these countries that didn’t begin yesterday… But Obama didn’t dodge it. Up on the glitzy stage before glowing red, white, and blue screens, behind a spare, modernist podium of steel and plastic, he was the first of the eight candidates asked to respond.

“I would,” he said.

A gasp rose from the studio audience, no doubt partly because of the directness of his answer. They were used to more maneuvering.

“My reason is this,” he explained. “The notion that, somehow, not talking to countries is punishment to them, which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this [George W. Bush] administration, is ridiculous… We may not trust them, they may pose an extraordinary danger to our country, but we have the obligation to find the areas where we may potentially move forward, and I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them.”

Clinton, who answered next, promptly said that she would not. She explained that a lot of groundwork went into negotiations with unfriendly nations; that one did not rush into them. But, perhaps startled like everyone else, she didn’t hit Obama too hard onstage. On reflection, however, and no doubt after her campaign strategists weighed in, she returned more harshly to the point the next day in interviews, labeling Obama’s answer “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

This was strictly politics. The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy—“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate”—to Richard Nixon’s opening with China, to Ronald Reagan’s famous “walk in the woods” with Mikhail Gorbachev. Obama’s position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush’s post–9/11 policy—“You are either for us or against us”—was the exception, and a bad one. It removed subtlety from international affairs. It made no sense whatsoever for a savvy internationalist like Clinton to ignore the opportunity every newly elected president has to reset relations with hostile nations. Still, conventional wisdom held that you didn’t admit such things. It made you sound soft. And naive was a word that worked against Obama.

It worked because many believed he lacked substance. He had yet to really define himself in detail on foreign policy or anything else. He had given a foreign policy address in April in line with his antiwar image, primarily calling for renewed internationalism, a greater willingness to seek consensus, and cooperation from other countries in pursuit of our national security goals. His remark about negotiating with enemies without preconditions made it easy for his critics to paint him as a complete pushover. It also suggested that Obama was a man who did not think things through carefully.

The “naive” label was troublesome. Soon enough the word had attached itself to him. TV pundits seemed unable to mention him without repeating it. Over the next few weeks his standing in the polls continued to fall as Clinton’s rose.

Obama’s staff fretted. Some wanted him to back off from his position, but he refused. “The thing is that I am right about this,” he insisted in a meeting with his advisers Denis McDonough and Robert Gibbs. “Why would we not want to get into any negotiation that we could?” He asked them to schedule a national TV interview to reiterate his position, to underline it. It was, he felt, precisely the kind of message he wanted to send. He was offering to break with the past, to look at these foreign policy issues in a new way.

And he was just getting started. Obama was not about to let others substitute their analysis for his own. His approach to a problem was to look for a new solution, an original one. He believed much of the way America thought about defense issues was cast in archaic molds—the old divisions of left vs. right, conservatives vs. liberals, hawks vs. doves that had been set by the debate over Vietnam. He had been thirteen years old when that war ended. Much of the voting-age population of the country had not even been born. Nothing had shaken up that old dynamic as much as 9/11. Young people in particular were hard to classify in this regard. They tended to be far more liberal than their parents on most social issues—hence more likely to support Obama—but were also strongly supportive of robust military and intelligence efforts. As the candidate saw it, he was as hawkish as any American about defeating al Qaeda, but some of the tools traditionally associated with doves—tools such as negotiation and international cooperation—weren’t just means of appeasing an enemy. They were essential to defeating this one.

A few weeks earlier, according to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in Game Change, Obama had brought one of his close friends and old law professors, Chris Edley, to Chicago to lambaste his inner campaign circle for failing to let him do things his way. They were not giving Obama time and space in his frenetic campaign schedule to lay out his ideas in more detail.

“This is a guy who likes to think, he likes to write, he likes to talk with experts,” said Edley, whose work on past Democratic campaigns and in White House service lent authority to his words. “You folks have got to recognize