POTUS Principle: Hendrik Hertzberg, '¡Obámanos! The Birth of a New Political Era'

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IN THE INTRODUCTION to his new book, "¡Obámanos! The Birth of a New Political Era," Hendrik Hertzberg explains that he has followed 15 elections during his lifetime, beginning in 1952 when Adlai Stevenson ran against Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was only a fourth grader at the time, but his mother was an avid Stevenson campaigner and recruited her son to help pass out buttons and stuff envelopes. Hertzberg grew up to be a similarly staunch Democrat, who served as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and now covers politics for The New Yorker.

In many ways, the 2008 election was very different from anything he had previously witnessed. It was certainly one of the longest and most expensive races in American history, and perhaps one of the most crucial. For Hertzberg, it was one of the few where he had a heavy investment in the outcome: After reading "Dreams From My Father" and watching its author speak at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Hertzberg says he "jumped on Obama express." He saw in the junior U.S. senator from Illinois not just a corrective to eight years of conservatives in power, but a candidate of remarkable principle and temperament.

In his columns and blog posts for The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer and editor, Hertzberg covered that arduous election, offering incisively analytical and exactingly penned commentary on what he saw as the failures of the Bush administration, the shortcomings of the Clinton and McCain campaigns, and the steady ship of Obama's candidacy.

Nearly a year after election night, Hertzberg is recounting those crucial two years in American history in "¡Obámanos!" which gathers his columns into a report from the front lines, a firsthand account of a strange and unprecedented presidential race.

Express spoke to Hertzberg about organizing the book, his own impressions of the candidates, and what the election of Barack Obama means for America.

» EXPRESS: How did this book originate?
» HERTZBERG: It came about toward the end of the campaign. It gradually took shape, as it was being written. Of course, most of the time when I was writing it I didn't know I was writing it. I just thought I was writing my comment pieces and blog items. It turned out I was writing a book. It's really the fact of Obama's appearance on the scene and rise to the presidency and contrast between the previous regime and him that shaped the book. I didn't shape it. It shaped itself into a story. This book is a photo album of snapshots. If it has some value, it's probably in being a real-time record of what it felt like in the moment. Because we're on to a very different moment now.

» EXPRESS: You must have had a massive amount of columns to go through. What were your criteria for choosing what went in and what didn't?
» HERTZBERG: I guess it was sort of like scenes in a screenplay. Does it move the action forward? There's a certain amount of side trips that I went on during the campaign and during the second Bush administration, too. It really was not difficult to weed it down. I don't think that I threw out the pieces in which I made horrendous misjudgments or bad predictions. But I can't be completely sure. I'll have to leave that to some investigative journalist to figure out.

» EXPRESS: Going through them, did you come across any missed calls or particularly prescient predictions?
» HERTZBERG: Not really. Mainly because of luck and because of hoping that wishing would make it so, I did get on board the Obama express fairly early, and I pretty much always thought he was going to end up on top. I don't remember having that confidence seriously shaken — at least that prediction anyway — but the emotional roller coaster was another story. That was very steep and full of scary moments.

It was harder for me to enjoy the pure spectacle of it than it usually is, and partly that's because the stakes seemed so high, and partly because in many of the campaigns I've covered, it was obvious from the beginning which way it was going to do, so therefore you don't put a lot of emotional investment in an outcome that has no chance of happening. That was certainly the case in 1984, when Reagan ran for re-election. And by the end of the campaign, that was certainly the case in 1988. In the last few weeks of 1988 when it was obvious that Bush Sr. was going to win. This one, even though I thought Obama was going to win, I was perfectly well aware that I might be wrong. And because I didn't know how much of my thinking it was going to come out that way was just wishful thinking, I didn't have much confidence in my own sense of where it was going.

» EXPRESS: The story seemed to reshape and redefine itself almost every day.
» HERTZBERG: It did. One of the things that was impressive about Obama was that he seemed to be able to step back from that roiling daily, hourly, minute-by-minute news cycle of mass hysteria and think three or four steps ahead and not get dangerously rattled every time something went wrong and it looked like he was on the edge of the precipice.

He did remain to all appearances preternaturally calm throughout this whole experience. And that was one of the things that boded well for an Obama presidency. This was a candidate of temperament above all. I think it was his temperament that was his most attractive about him, and his best weapon, as it were, as president.

» EXPRESS: You mentioned that you boarded the Obama express very early. What was the deciding factor for you?
» HERTZBERG: The deciding factor was reading "Dreams From My Father." The first time the thought entered my head was the first time I saw Obama at the Kerry convention. His keynote address blew me away as only one other convention speech had done, and that was Mario Cuomo's in 1984. But it was reading the book that really persuaded me that we had an extraordinary opportunity here to elect as president somebody capable of writing that book. I don't know anything like it in American history. I don't know of anything that a future president has written that is as revealing and is as fine a piece of sustained literature. There's plenty of good writing that presidents have done before they were president, especially in the nineteenth century, but nothing quite like "Dreams From My Father."

Even if the person who wrote it did not become president, it would still be a worthwhile piece of literature, but when you read it with the thought in mind that this is a 30-year-old man, who in 15 years is going to come out of nowhere to be president of the United States, it adds something to it. So yes, it was reading that book that was the decisive thing for me, and certainly was in my own mind the reason I favored his candidacy and became invested in it emotionally.

» EXPRESS: Going back through these pieces, were there any threads that were running through them that you didn't realize at the time of writing?
» HERTZBERG: One theme was the tragedy of McCain getting more and more tangled in the rise of this phenomenon of talk radio/Fox News/lunatic right wing and finding himself trapped in it, with what looked to me like dismay. I don't think he was happy to be trapped in it. He didn't do a lot to get himself out of it. That was one thread, this business of Obama's temperament and it being tested and coming through for him over and over again.

There's a thread of Obama's luck, which really is remarkable maybe right from the moment he was born and certainly from the moment he entered politics. The paths had been cleared for him time after time, certainly when he ran for United States senator in Illinois and then for president, too. But you can't say he walked into the nomination. He fully earned that presidential nomination. You could say he was lucky the Clinton campaign turned out to be so dreadfully mismanaged. She herself was a strong opponent, and I'm not sure she would have done all that much better if her campaign had been better run, if certain mistakes hadn't been made — bumbling Iowa and being seemingly unaware California was a winner-take-all state, things like that.

But Obama seemed to have a strategy from the beginning that kept looking ahead, that enabled him to see over the horizon, and because of that, when the emergencies popped up, the structure of his campaign was sound enough that it didn't just punch a hole in the hull and sink it, as something like the Reverend Wright business might have sunk a more ramshackle candidacy. It didn't sink his. And that was partly because of the brilliance of his response to it in that that speech, but it was because of the steadiness of the campaign, which was able to keep on moving forward, despite taking that heavy fire — in this case, self-inflicted.

» EXPRESS: And to take fire for what seemed like one of the longest campaigns at least in recent history. It seemed very drawn out. How does that affect you being on the front lines and writing about it?
» HERTZBERG: It gives you plenty of wonderful material to work with. And although I deplore the length of these campaigns, I'm grateful for the way they shovel coal into my furnace. Campaigns have become ridiculously long, since I've been paying attention to them. I guess this one certainly felt longer, I'm not sure if was longer than the last half dozen or so. But it started to feel that way. I think partly that had to do with it being an open seat, as it were. This was the first campaign since 1952 in which there was no incumbent president or vice president on either ticket. That's a hell of a long time.

There was just so much happening, so it wasn't just the length, but the volume of it — and with both parties up for grabs and no continuity. In the book it starts with Bush's re-election four years earlier, because that's an essential part of what happened last year. That's another way that even if the country wasn't lucky, Obama was, to follow a performance like Bush's.

» EXPRESS: How do you feel about Obama's performance so far?
» HERTZBERG: There was obviously no way the euphoria of election night a year ago could continue. There was really nowhere to go but down form there.

What has happened is that we've gone form the kind of magical world of a campaign into the real world of governing. We tend to forget during the presidential campaign that the power of the president is actually quite limited, especially in domestic affairs, and that whoever wins an election is going to have to grapple with the realities of a political system that is designed to be dysfunctional and has grown more dysfunctional than its designers intended it to be. Most of the ways people are disappointed with the first 10 months of the Obama administration have to do with one thing, and that's the U.S. Senate. The process is like a funnel: In the fat end of the funnel, that's where you stuff all the hopes and dreams of Obama mania, and it goes down into the thin end of the funnel, where there are four or five senators who seem to have veto power over the will of the American people. If it weren't for the Senate, you'd have a whole set of completed accomplishments on the domestic front.

When you look at the very big issues of health care and climate change on the domestic side, and jobs and stimulus, all these would have probably already happened if it weren't for the Senate. And the second two — the stimulus was accomplished, but it should have been bigger, and it probably would have been bigger if the administration had been able to get what it wanted to get rather than what it calculated it could get.

That's our system. I write about it a lot. I feel like part of my role is to remind readers over and over again of the peculiarity of our system. So much tends to be attributed to a morality play. We do tend to blame the people who are in these positions rather than the design of the positions, and I feel like my roles are to remind people of those systemic problems that are there no matter who's president, and to steer people away from a purely moralistic view of success and failure.

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Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy The Penguin Group