Snip:
The Plan didn’t call for sacrificing Obama’s political fame so much as allowing it to attenuate and bringing his ego into line with his role as a senator in the minority party. The hope was that questions like the one posed by a journalist during Obama’s first week in the Senate—“What is your place in history?”—would dissipate, allowing him to focus on the interests of Illinois and build toward bigger things. Nothing foreclosed larger ambitions. “Would I tell you that it never came up in any discussion, anytime, anywhere—that sometime in the future, Barack Obama would run for national office?” Obama’s chief adviser, David Axelrod, asked me. “If I told you that, you’d turn your tape recorder off, and we’d end this conversation, because you’d think everything I told you was a lie.” But in early 2005, the context of those discussions was at least 10 years in the future.
Initially, Obama did try to avoid publicity, turning down repeated requests to appear on national television, as well as invitations to speak before Democratic groups. “We wanted to be mindful of our place,” Robert Gibbs, his spokesman, told me. Even on the issue of Iraq, which dominated 2005, Obama, an opponent of the invasion from the beginning, passed up the chance to speak out. “He could have been the moral voice, the moral authority on Iraq,” one of Obama’s closest advisers told me. “But he was just a freshman senator. It would have been presumptuous of him to take that lead.” In January of 2006, appearing on Meet the Press, Obama reiterated his intention to serve a full six-year term.
But something changed—and fairly rapidly. Obama diverged from the Clinton path and decided to challenge the former first lady for the presidency.
Obama is a wonderful backstabber. Ask Alice Palmer about what a great guy he is.
