Unlikely,Inevitable

Richard Wolffe is what they call a political embed. As a reporter with Newsweek,he was on assignment to cover Barack Obamas campaign from its earliest stages back when the Senator from Chicago took on the seeming inevitability of a Hillary Clinton Democratic nomination. He also had unusual access to the candidate as he is inclined to refer to Obama and his campaign staff. A measure can be had from a remark reported in the afterword. Days after the race speech in Philadelphia,Wolffe had just finished a long interview for a profile of the candidates early years in Indonesia and in college,and remarked how even after the two memoirs there was a vast curiosity about who Obama really was. Youre absolutely right, responded Obama. If I wasnt in this campaign,I would love to follow this election as an observer. Why cant you write a book about it?

The book written about it is difficult to find fault with even as a sense of incompleteness lingers after it has been read. The account is fascinating,especially in the early bits when Obama and his advisers are trying to figure out whether he should run in 2008. Wolffe builds up the story incrementally with accounts by all those involved at each step. And perhaps that is the problem. He is so caught up in collating quotes from those who were there as it happened,in compiling the inside story,that he loses the distance needed to appreciate just how remarkable Obamas story really is.

Yet,there is much in Renegade to reward even the careful reader of Obamas own two memoirs. In fact,in getting to know the candidate codenamed Renegade by his Security Service Wolffe uses those memoirs to gain a fuller understanding of Obamas struggle to understand himself: His entire memoir Dreams From My Father revolves around his search for a father and an identity that was absent. What fills the hole is not his father; it is his own quest,his self-reflection,and his storytelling.

That quest,reflection and storytelling would be the tools even in the course of Obamas campaign. They would help him wrestle with himself at times when the campaign became too much about his person and to use that experience to alter his countrys self-narrative. It all came together after his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wrights condemnations of the US forced a speech on race that Obama would perhaps have anyway made later but with less personal storytelling. And Wolffes account of how that speech was written is riveting.
He is equally good in profiling Obamas bid for the Iowa caucuses,detailing the campaigns brilliant strategy of swamping the state so that a first strike in the quest for delegates would crack Clintons cloak of invincibility.