part 2: Excerpts from Barack Obama's new book 'A Promised Land'

WHETHER IN SPORTS or politics, it’s hard to understand the precise nature of momentum. But by the beginning of 2004 we had it. Axe had us shoot two television ads: The first had me speaking directly to the camera, ending with the tagline “Yes we can.” (I thought this was corny, but Axe immediately appealed to a higher power, showing it to Michelle, who deemed it “not corny at all.”)

The second featured Sheila Simon, daughter of the state’s beloved former senator Paul Simon, who had died following heart surgery days before he’d planned to publicly endorse me.

We released the ads just four weeks before the primaries. In short order, my support almost doubled. When the state’s five largest newspapers endorsed me, Axe recut the ads to highlight it, explaining that Black candidates tended to benefit more than white candidates from the validation. Around this time, the bottom fell out of my closest rival’s campaign after news outlets published details from previously sealed court documents in which his ex-wife alleged domestic abuse. 

On March 16, 2004, the day of the Democratic primary, we ended up winning almost 53 percent of the vote in our seven-person field—not only more than all the other Democratic candidates combined, but more than all the Republican votes that had been cast statewide in their primary.

...foreign policy argument arose just a few days later, when during a
speech I mentioned that if I had Osama bin Laden in my sights within Pakistani
territory, and the Pakistani government was unwilling or unable to capture or kill
him, I would take the shot. This shouldn’t have been particularly surprising to
anyone; back in 2003, I had premised my opposition to the Iraq War partly on
my belief that it would distract us from destroying al-Qaeda.

But such blunt talk ran counter to the Bush administration’s public position; the U.S. government maintained the dual fiction that Pakistan was a reliable partner in the war against terrorism and that we never encroached on Pakistani territory in the pursuit of terrorists. My statement threw Washington into a bipartisan tizzy, with Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Republican presidential candidate John McCain both expressing the view that I was not ready to be president.

In my mind, these episodes indicated the degree to which the Washington foreign policy establishment got things backward—taking military action without first testing diplomatic options, observing diplomatic niceties in the interest of maintaining the status quo precisely when action was called for.

ends