United States. Congress. Senate. - Renegade: the making of a president

ONE
CHANGE

TWO
THE DECIDER

THREE
RULES FOR RADICALS

FOUR
FAILURE

FIVE
BARACK X

SIX
GAME CHANGER

SEVEN
ALIEN

EIGHT
THE RECKONING

NINE
TRANSITION

E lection day starts, in the small hours, where the candidate has spent most of his last 626 days: on a plane. Stuck to the gray plastic walls of the pressurized cabin are snapshots of his odyssey across cities and fields, mountains and deserts, continents and oceans. A snowstorm in Iowa, a press conference in Downing Street. Camera crews dozing onboard, Secret Service agents sharing a joke. The candidate signing books, reporters holding audio recorders close to his face. Now, between the empty candy wrappers and the drained beer bottles, he walks back one last time from his spacious first-class section, through his staffers business-class seats, to the coach class of the press. You know, whatever happens, its extraordinary you guys have shared this process with us, and I just want to say thank you and I appreciate you, he says, shaking everyones hand. One reporter asks how hes feeling, but he insists that he wont answer questions. Even obvious ones. He thanks the young TV producers who have trailed his every move from the start, admires the photos on the overhead bins, then pokes fun at a magazine reporter who was parodied on Saturday Night Live. He gives a birthday kiss to a young photographer, shakes hands with every member of the aircrew, and finishes with a simple farewell: OK, guys, lets go home.

The last twenty-four hours felt like the longest day of the long campaign. It began with the news that the last living person to raise Barack Obama through childhood, his grandmother Toot, had lost her struggle against cancer. At his penultimate stop in Charlotte, North Carolina, it rains so hard, and for so long, that its hard to see the streaks running down both his cheeks. They dont come obviously or immediately. Hardened by two years of campaigning and many more years of self-control, his voice never breaks as he announces the news. Some of you heard that my grandmother who helped raise me passed away early this morning, he says calmly. Look, she has gone home. And she died peacefully in her sleep, with my sister at her side. So theres great joy as well as tears. Im not going to talk about it too long, because its hard a little to talk about. His face remains composed as he talks about the bittersweet sensation of losing his grandmother while his campaign draws to a close. He betrays little emotion as he describes her as a quiet hero and sketches out her life story. But when he starts to read his stump speech from his teleprompter, when he talks about the broken politics in Washington, he surreptitiously strokes one cheek with his thumb. He condemns eight years of failed Bush policies, and casually strokes the other cheek. Two minutes later, as the crowd chants Yes We Can, he finally takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes his face down. It is one of the rarest moments of the entire election: a display of raw emotion from a candidate whose mask almost never slips before the dozens of cameras that trail him every day. Even then, at his most vulnerable point, he defers the moment and dissipates its impact.

The cracks in his self-control spread to those closest to him. Standing at the back of a leaking tent in a parched yellow field is the candidates friend and strategist David Axelrod. Hes at peace with what happened. It wasnt unexpected. He just wishes he had some time to deal with it in his own way, Axelrod says. But Im finding this hard right now. The enormity of it all is almost overwhelming. I love him; hes my friend. This election is ridiculously long and there are many stupid things about it. But you really have to earn the presidency. And hes been tested. You cant hide it or fake it.

Yet the candidate has partly passed the test by hiding himself away. By the time he reaches the final campaign rally in Manassas, Virginia, he has regained full control. Close to the site of two Confederate victories in the Civil War, the nations first major African American nomineea Democrat, no lessspeaks to some 100,000 people at Prince William Fairgrounds. As a community organizer two decades earlier, Obama often feared that no one would show up to his meetings. Now there are so many people the traffic is snarled for hours and miles around. These crowds, he says, have enriched him, moved him, and lifted him up when he was down. Now hes so inspired he tells his signature story from Greenwood, South Carolina. The tale of a little woman who lifted his spirits, on a dismal day early in the campaign, with a simple chant: Fired Up! Ready to Go!

It shows you what one voice can do, he concludes. One voice can change a room. And if a voice can change a room, it can change a city! And if it can change a city it can change a state! And if it can change a state, it can change a nation! And if it can change a nation, it can change the world!

Yet at the start of this historic election day, in the early hours of the morning, the candidate seems weighed down. Determined and spirited perhaps, but also crushed with exhaustion and emotion. The gray wisps on his head are now visible from a distance, like the lines scored close to his eyes and across his cheeks. He sounds fired up, but looks ready to drop.

It is one in the morning when he lands at Chicagos Midway airport. The polls have already closed in the small New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch, which has not voted for a Democratic president since 1968, but favors Obama by fifteen votes to six. The candidate walks down the stairs from his plane and steps into his armored SUV to a flash of cameras. Behind him is a new addition to his motorcade: another SUV filled with a black-clad, heavily armed Counter Assault Team.

Obama liked to describe his journey from freshman senator to presidential front-runner as an improbable one. It was also preposterous and quixotic, at least in the judgment of the greatest political minds in the nations capital. In February 2007, as Obama was readying the formal launch of his campaign, President Bush cast his expert eye across the contenders who wanted to succeed him. Sitting in the yellow oval room of the White House, on the second-floor residence of the executive mansion, the president conceded he had no idea who would win the GOP nomination. But he was clear about the other side. I think Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, he said with his feet propped on a glass coffee table. Ill tell you why. I think she will because I think she has staying power, star power, and money power. She brings a big organization that is well funded right off the bat, and one of the lessons I learned is you have to be able to play the long ball. As for Obama, who was on the verge of announcing his candidacy Bush was deeply doubtful. Certainly a phenom and very attractive. The guy is very smart, he said before realizing he sounded like Joe Biden, who had just stepped into the racial minefield for calling Obama articulate and bright and clean. Bush was so taken aback with the public criticism of Biden that he called in his African American secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. I dont get it, he said. Condi, whats going on? Rice told him what everyone else had said: that white people dont call each other articulate.