Obama's Quick Rise on a Non-Traditional Career Path

Still, the brief time Obama has spent on Capitol Hill, taken together with his eight years in the Illinois Senate and the stories from his community organizing and Harvard Law Review days, provides just enough threads to piece together a decent narrative of what Obama cares about and how he might operate if he’s elected the 44th president of the United States.

The record shows him to be a good-government type, well-liked by his colleagues, sometimes a creative thinker, a thoughtful questioner in congressional hearings, cautious and strategic, capable of repositioning to fit his needs, and not nearly so revolutionary as he suggests. Although many of his campaign speeches have been long on inspirational rhetoric and short on specifics, the congressional colleagues who know him best, as well as his former legislative colleagues in Springfield, say he’s well versed in policy details and the realities of the legislative process, including when to push hard and when to back off.

“I could really relate to him as a legislator,” said Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who teamed up with Obama to push the 2007 overhaul of lobbying and ethics rules through the Senate. “Just like me, he came directly to the United States Senate from the state Senate. He already knew the legislative process. He knew when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em.”

Democrat Melissa Bean , who was elected to her House seat from Illinois in 2004, the same year Obama was elected to the Senate, said he is “very much about substance. When he’s talking to people one-on-one or in small groups, he’s prepared to give pretty substantive answers. When they started hammering him for not being specific enough, he said, ‘Wait a second, you were the guys who told me I was being too wonky.’ ”

Obama is capable of working with Republicans, but he tends to choose those areas carefully and focuses on issues that don’t split along traditional party lines (ethics, open government, the death penalty and weapons proliferation). Those skills helped him get by in the Illinois Senate, where Republicans were in charge for three-quarters of his tenure, and in the U.S. Senate, which the GOP ran his first two years.

“Barack, especially in his first few years, tried to work on selective issues, and I emphasize selective issues, with the Republicans,” said Republican state Sen. Kirk Dillard, Obama’s partner on a 1998 law banning Illinois politicians from taking gifts from lobbyists and a 2003 rewrite of the death penalty statute. “To do anything, he had to work with the Republicans.”

And through most of his career as an elected official, Obama has carried the lessons he learned as a community organizer in New York and Chicago in the 1980s. He often talks about the importance of mobilizing people to push for change, and he even helped organize the Senate Democratic freshmen in 2007 to push for the broadest ethics overhaul possible. “He does think things through, and he thinks about success — what can we do to build a coalition while keeping the principles,” said Democratic Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez of Chicago.

But one of the most important, and least obvious, lessons he picked up from those days was the value of open government, which is now a theme in his career. “That’s a direct result of his experience in Chicago, where everything wasn’t quite what it seemed,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who hired Obama to work in Chicago’s South Side in 1985.

In that role, Kellman said, Obama had to deal with politicians rooted in Chicago’s political machine, where “the stated reason for voting for things was never the real reason. You’d have to find out what their second job was, or who their sister was.” In Kellman’s view, Obama decided that by opening the workings of government to the public, “the problem solves itself.”

These issues may seem like an incomplete guide for evaluating a potential president. But Obama’s allies, including senators and former senators with far more experience, said Obama has already proved he has what it takes to be successful in the White House: a willingness to listen to diverse views, an ability to ask the right questions before making decisions, a knack for surrounding himself with talented advisers and solid judgment.

“Barack has said, and I share the view, that experience is oftentimes viewed as a substitute for judgment,” said former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, one of Obama’s closest advisers. “It’s judgment that matters.”

Product of Intellectuals

Politically, Obama’s identity was defined mainly by his time in Illinois. But his personality — cool and collected, supremely confident despite his self-deprecating humor — was shaped by his Hawaiian upbringing, surrounded by people of diverse racial and international backgrounds. And his intellect, in Abercrombie’s view, comes directly from two of the smartest people the congressman said he has ever known.

Obama's Quick Rise on a Non-Traditional Career Path

Obama has no memories of his father, who left Hawaii when his son was 2 years old for a scholarship to Harvard. His marriage to the candidate’s mother, Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kan., soon ended, and he moved back to his native Kenya. Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” chronicles his efforts to piece together his father’s life story and his own struggle to come to terms with his biracial background, including the vast cultural differences of the two sides of his family.

Bio of Barack Hussein Obama II: Click Here to View Chart

Abercrombie, however, paints a vivid picture of the elder Obama from their many conversations at the university. He was shorter than the candidate, with ’60s-style horn-rim glasses, but with every bit as much intelligence and personal charisma as his son. “I could easily call him the smartest person I’ve ever met,” Abercrombie said.

The elder Obama spoke frequently about the political situation in Kenya, worrying that tribalism was such a powerful and destructive force that it would overcome nationalism. And he wasn’t shy about sharing his opinions, Abercrombie said — an observation that squares with Obama’s account of his father’s downfall. In his book, Obama said his father was banished from the Kenyan government after complaining that tribalism was placing unqualified people in government jobs.

His mother, meanwhile, was “very adventurous” and “a great scholar and feminist in her own right,” Abercrombie said. And she gave Obama “the room to explore himself,” he said, which — despite the brief period of inner turmoil he describes in his book — eventually laid the groundwork for his apparent self-confidence and internal calm. When faced with a crisis, Abercrombie said, Obama “has the quality of being able to calm people down. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll cogitate on this. I’ll come up with a solution. Don’t get rattled.’ That’s a very presidential quality.”

It is a side of Obama that law school colleagues saw in the fall of 1990, when he took over as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Michael L. Cohen, one of the editors, noticed that several students failed to return to Cambridge three weeks early to work on the first issue, as they were supposed to. Cohen complained to Obama; after all, he said, he would have liked to have the extra three weeks’ pay as a summer associate, but he did what the job required.

Obama’s response was sympathetic, but philosophical. “I remember he listened to the complaint, and he said, ‘I’ve worked at a lot of organizations, and sometimes that’s just how it is. Some people do the minimum, and others do more,’ ” said Cohen, now a lawyer who handles insurance and class-action lawsuits in Los Angeles.

“He was only maybe five years older than me, but I felt like he was 50 years older than me in terms of the maturity with which he handled it.”

A Front-Runner Emerges

Obama was older than many of his Law Review peers for a reason. Between earning his undergraduate degree from Columbia and heading to law school, he spent three years running the Developing Communities Project. “What he really wanted to be was a civil rights organizer, but he was 10 to 11 years too young,” said Kellman, who hired him.

Obama learned to speak the language of mass mobilization but also learned to mediate between competing interests, Kellman said, including people who aren’t easy to work with. “Barack’s gift is diversity,” Kellman said. “He does diversity very well,” not only in dealing with people from different racial backgrounds, but also in moving between the impoverished world of Chicago’s South Side and the Harvard Law graduates who later joined his circle.

Kellman remembers Obama revealing a side of himself that would turn out to be a mixed blessing: a gift for understanding and communicating subtlety.

“Barack is incredibly nuanced. He can see gray as well as black and white,” Kellman said. “Sounds great, right? But at times, that’s proven a nuisance for him. He can sound almost wonky. When he’s forced in politics to take a black-and-white position, he sees the rest.”

Obama's Quick Rise on a Non-Traditional Career Path

When Obama took the reins at the Law Review, however, his ability to see all sides of an issue — and listen carefully to all of the competing arguments — became a gift. “I think he likes to hear different points of view, and he is a critical thinker,” said A. Marisa Chun, a San Francisco lawyer who was another editor at the Law Review. During a debate about the role of affirmative action, for example, “I think he listened more than he spoke himself,” she said. “I remember less about his own opinions than the fact that he was masterfully able to make sure everyone else spoke their piece.”

On a purely political level, the way Obama won the Law Review presidency — coming seemingly out of nowhere — seems to have foreshadowed his rise through the Democratic ranks. During the first few rounds of voting, Cohen said, Obama never struck him as a front-runner for the job. Other rivals, perhaps louder and better at self-promotion, seemed to have the edge. Then, early in the evening, “he sort of emerged as the front-runner.”

The Springfield Years

In 1996, Obama won a seat in the state Senate after displaying a harder edge. The incumbent, Alice Palmer, launched a bid for Congress and endorsed Obama as her successor, then changed her mind when her campaign went badly and decided to run for re-election instead. Obama challenged the signatures she had gathered in a hurry, forcing her to withdraw.

Obama arrived in Springfield at a time when Democrats were the minority in the state Senate, and he soon decided he wanted to learn to work with the majority Republicans. He struck up a friendship with Emil Jones, the minority leader, who assigned him to work with Republican Dillard on the first state government ethics overhaul since the 1970s. In addition to prohibiting gifts from lobbyists, the final package banned fundraising on state property and imposed tougher disclosure requirements, particularly on nonprofit groups that lobby the Illinois General Assembly.

“He was very pragmatic and practical, and he knew when to quit to get something passed,” Dillard said. “Barack probably wanted to put in some kind of limits on campaign giving, but he knew he couldn’t get that through the rough-and-tumble Illinois legislature.” With his constitutional law background, “he was instrumental in writing the final draft of the legislation,” Dillard said.

Obama would rack up more accomplishments, mostly during his last two years: expanding the state earned-income tax credit to make it refundable, broadening the coverage in the state under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, requiring the publication of report cards for Illinois hospitals, and cracking down on racial profiling by police officers at traffic stops. He had less luck pushing for a universal health care initiative, eventually settling for creating a task force.

But during his first six years, Obama mainly saw the limits of legislating from the side of the aisle with fewer seats, which made an already ambitious politician even more restless. “I know Barack was frustrated with the process, being in the minority. He had so many things he wanted to do,” said Larry Walsh, who shared a desk in the state Senate chamber with Obama during the candidate’s final two years there. “When you were in the minority, you just did not get your name on legislation, period. If you sold maybe three bills of your own and picked up a number of House bills, you were doing well.”

Voting ‘Present’

It was largely during this period that Obama racked up a string of “present” votes — on 129 bills and 11 nominations, out of approximately 4,000 votes during his tenure, he took no official position, according to a review of state records by the Chicago Tribune. Clinton criticized those votes during the primaries, and it’s almost certain John McCain or his surrogates will revive the issue during this fall’s campaign.

An examination of roughly 100 of Obama’s present votes — the rest aren’t available online — shows many were part of a protest by members of the Democratic caucus, often against appropriations bills written by the GOP and put before the Senate on short notice. “You did not want to be classified as a ‘no’ vote because there might have been something in there that was important” to a crucial constituency, Walsh said.

Obama's Key Votes: Click Here to View Chart

Other times, according to abortion rights advocates, his present votes were part of a campaign by sympathetic legislators to stall measures that would restrict abortions and in the process help colleagues in swing districts avoid casting politically difficult votes. And Dillard said Obama, a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted “present” on some bills he viewed as unconstitutional. “He used to joke that he couldn’t vote for something that was probably unconstitutional, or his students would laugh him out of the classroom,” Dillard said.

Obama's Quick Rise on a Non-Traditional Career Path

Other votes, stripped of context, could provide Republicans with fodder this fall, such as his “present” vote in 2001 on a measure that would have put distance requirements between adult entertainment businesses and schools or day care centers. Obama said doing so would have violated the principle of home rule and that local zoning ordinances were the best way to handle the issue. But such explanations could sound legalistic — a common problem in Democratic presidential campaigns — if voters are exposed to enough attack ads claiming that Obama didn’t vote to keep sex shops away from children.

Boxes of Bills

This was also the period when Obama mounted his ill-fated challenge to the renomination of Rep. Bobby L. Rush . Another state senator from Chicago who ran in that 2000 race — Donne E. Trotter, an occasional Obama antagonist — said Rush would often list Trotter’s accomplishments in the state Senate and joke that’s why the voters needed to keep Trotter in Springfield. At the time, though, “Barack did not have that record,” Trotter said. Without a compelling case to make against Rush, Obama took just 30 percent of the primary vote.

Obama dealt with his stinging defeat in part by becoming a more prolific legislator, clearly hoping to build a more solid record. “You saw a remarkable change in the due diligence that Barack showed in pushing bills and language,” Trotter said. “He became the ‘box guy.’ He had so many bills he had to carry them in a box on the floor.”

In 2003, when Democrats took over the state Senate, Obama enjoyed a string of legislative successes. His most widely touted accomplishment in Springfield was a law that requires police to videotape interrogations in most cases that might lead to the death penalty. In brokering an agreement, Obama worked with death penalty opponents, who would have preferred broader limitations on capital punishment, and police officials, who didn’t want the new requirement to jeopardize their ability to obtain confessions.

Keeping Score of Obama's Votes: Click Here to View Chart

Mark Donahue, who participated in the negotiations as a leader of the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago, said Obama showed a pragmatic side, accepting police requests to allow confessions in some cases when taping equipment wasn’t available. “Barack sort of acted as a bridge between the intent and the logistics, and he was able to accept and recognize some of the situations that occur in reality,” Donahue said.

It was about that time Obama settled on an “up-or-out” career trajectory. He would make one more try for higher office and, if he didn’t win, he’d retire from the state legislature and look for a better-paying, more stable job in the private sector. His last shot would be a run for the Senate in 2004.

All the potential obstacles to his success fell away in relatively quick succession. The GOP incumbent, Peter G. Fitzgerald, decided not to seek a second term. Carol Moseley Braun, Fitzgerald’s predecessor, decided not to try to return to her old job and ran for president instead. The Democratic front-runners, investment banker Blair Hull and state Comptroller Daniel Hynes, focused their fire on each other, and both imploded. Obama won the seven-person primary with 53 percent of the vote. The initial Republican nominee, Jack Ryan, dropped out after reports surfaced that he pressured the actress Jeri Ryan to visit sex clubs during their marriage. The replacement GOP candidate, former presidential aspirant Alan L. Keyes, was such a conservative hard-liner that he scared some members of his own party. (He was also from Maryland.)

And then, of course, there was a certain speech Obama gave at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. During the keynote address, he unveiled the phrase “the audacity of hope” that made him a national figure overnight. He won in November with 70 percent of the vote, the most lopsided Senate race in the state in more than half a century.

Surprises in the Senate

“In the world’s greatest deliberative body, no one is listening.”

That’s how Obama summed up the Senate in his second book, named “The Audacity of Hope” and written during his first two years as a senator. It’s a line that captures a truth few outsiders see: Many of the most bombastic speeches are delivered to a nearly empty Senate chamber — with only one other senator, a handful of tourists, a few aides, some pages and perhaps a reporter listening in. But it also illustrates how new Obama was to the chamber — so new that such a scene would still surprise him.

Obama's Quick Rise on a Non-Traditional Career Path

After his arrival in Washington in January 2005, he quickly rounded up a staff whose collective experience was unusual for a freshman. His chief of staff, Pete Rouse, had been Daschle’s chief of staff for 19 years. His legislative director, Christopher P. Lu, had worked on California Democrat Henry A. Waxman ’s staff on what is now called the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Karen Kornbluh, his policy director, had founded the New America Foundation’s Work and Family Program.

Other hires were part of his longtime circle of friends, like chief counsel and deputy chief of staff Michael Strautmanis, who’s now on the presidential campaign’s congressional liaison team. Most are still with Obama in one capacity or another. (His foreign policy adviser, Mark Lippert, a Navy reservist, recently finished a tour in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Navy SEALs.)

Once again, though, Obama found himself on the minority side of the aisle, with no special power to get anything accomplished despite the star power he had brought to Washington. He also professed an outsider’s sense of surprise that the priorities of the congressional leadership didn’t match the priorities of voters he had met during his campaign.

“He and I did talk about how, clearly, we were going to have to do something about health care because, clearly, that was what everyone was talking about,” said Bean, the House Democrat who had campaigned with Obama in 2004. “And when we got here, there was absolutely no interest in addressing health care.”

For the most part, Obama, with the encouragement of his staff, sought to keep his head down during those first months. There would be no quixotic attempts to push a universal health care plan. Instead, he tried to advance more modest steps, sometimes in creative ways. One early bill was a “health care for hybrids” plan, which offered to help automakers pay for some of their retiree health care costs if they embraced tougher fuel efficiency standards. (The idea may have been a little too creative for the automakers, whose lobbyists said they didn’t want the help.)

Once again, Obama found Republicans to work with on selected projects. During freshman orientation, he struck up a friendship with an unlikely ally: Tom Coburn , a conservative physician from Oklahoma who disagreed with him on many things but shared his interest in open government. The two would collaborate on a 2006 law creating a public database of federal spending and another law enacted the same year banning most non-competitive contracts in post-disaster reconstruction.

“I really like the guy. I don’t want him to be my president, and I think he could use some years on him, but I like him just fine,” Coburn said. He dismissed the surprise many have expressed that he and Obama could work together: “That’s the way people always think of things in Washington, where they think it’s all about the political rather than the personal.”

That said, their friendship suffered strain during the primaries, when Obama defended his past associations with controversial figures by noting that Coburn had “once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions.” In a subsequent interview on Fox News, Coburn responded, “Why answer a question by throwing a friend under a bus?”

His Own Press Corps

Obama also cultivated a friendship with Republican Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, then the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, which was Obama’s most prestigious freshman-year committee assignment. The two traveled together to Russia and Ukraine in August 2005 to watch the dismantling of missiles and the destruction of conventional weapons. Later, they collaborated on a 2006 law designed to prevent the spread of conventional weapons, such as shoulder-fired missiles, that could land in terrorists’ hands.

“It was his initiative,” Lugar said. “He asked me if he could go with me to Russia, because he knew that I go every year. And I said, ‘Sure, why not?’” Obama was interested in the nuclear nonproliferation law Lugar had written in 1991 with Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, Lugar said, and that statute served as the model for the conventional weapons law.

“I’ve always found him to be conscientious and well-prepared,” Lugar said. In Foreign Relations hearings, “he was always at the end of the line at that time, but he was always there. And his questions were always very thoughtful.”

Obama began compiling a voting record that, for all of his expressed weariness of partisan politics, was generally partisan. In 2005 he sided with the Democrats on 97 percent of the votes in which most of them voted against most Republicans. The next two years were much the same: a 96 percent party unity score in 2006 and 97 percent last year. So far this year his party unity score is 95 percent, although he has missed almost half of the relevant Senate roll calls because of the campaign.

Obama's Quick Rise on a Non-Traditional Career Path

The scores do mask a few significant departures. In his second month on the job, Obama joined 17 other Senate Democrats in voting to give the federal courts jurisdiction over most class-action lawsuits, a bill that most in his party argued would improperly water down and slow the civil litigation system. He also voted later that year for a Republican energy overhaul, which McCain has criticized as a handout to special interests, because it would have increased the use of ethanol, a parochial priority for any Illinois lawmaker.

Unlike McCain, Obama declined to get involved in one of the most dangerous partisan disputes of 2005. Tired of Democratic filibusters thwarting the confirmation of Bush’s judicial nominees, Republicans were on the verge of deploying what became known as the “nuclear option.” That parliamentary maneuver, if successful, would have banned judicial filibusters altogether — but would have prompted the Democrats, in retaliation, to block almost all Senate business.

The situation was diffused at the last moment by the “Gang of 14,” an equal number of senators from both parties assembled by McCain and Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who vowed to prevent filibusters except in “extraordinary circumstances.” Obama did not join the group, he explained later, because some Bush nominees were so objectionable that he couldn’t see how much worse they would have had to be to qualify as “extraordinary circumstances.”

In general, Obama used his conciliatory manner to take the edge off of his partisan voting record. He opposed the confirmation of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice, for example, but defended the 22 Democrats who voted for him. And Obama tried to keep tensions over his high national profile to a minimum. Lincoln Chafee, a GOP senator who lost his Rhode Island seat in 2006, said Obama used self-deprecating humor to deflect the jealousy his colleagues could have felt over his celebrity status.

“He was one of the only senators who was constantly being trailed by his own press corps. In the clubby atmosphere of the Senate, that can become a problem, but it wasn’t in this case,” said Chafee, who has since become an independent and has endorsed Obama over McCain.

The Airport Stalemate

That summer, Obama quietly tried to do what he says he’s good at: bringing clashing parties together to try to find common ground. It was a purely regional dispute, involving a proposal to build a third airport to serve the Chicago area. But the story of Obama’s intervention, and his inability to broker a deal, provides a lesser-known illustration of how he mediates arguments and why his approach can carry him only so far.

Since his arrival in the House in 1995, Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. has been working to advance plans for an airport in Will County, Ill., which he sees as an economic boon to communities he represents nearby, on the far south side of Chicago and its suburbs. But other officials in the region — including Will County Executive Larry Walsh, a colleague of Obama’s in the Illinois Senate — say Jackson has no business pushing the project on a community outside his House district and worry the plan would not give the locals enough control over airport governance. And that’s pretty much where the debate has stood since.

So in August 2005, Obama agreed to sit down with Jackson, Walsh and state Sen. Debbie Halvorson — who is now running for Congress — to try to find a solution. “He had the trust and confidence of both sides. He knew all the players,” said Kenneth Edmonds, Jackson’s chief of staff. “I think both sides trusted him enough that they felt they could get a fair hearing.”

But after two meetings, the talks fell apart without any real advances. Neither side blames Obama for that. “It was an issue where both sides were just so dug in with their positions that he tried, but he was not successful,” Walsh said. And to listen to the two sides describe their arguments, it’s not hard to see why. It may be just an airport project, but their frustrations boil to the surface so rapidly that Middle East peace seems easy by comparison.

It may be that the airport dispute, still in limbo three years later, is so fundamental that it didn’t lend itself to a middle ground. But as president, Obama would face disputes of far more consequence, particularly in international affairs. Talking to clashing parties would probably earn him good will and possibly some victories. But as he found in the airport dispute, some arguments may just be so emotional that people don’t want to solve them.

Speaking Out on Katrina

In September 2005, Obama started to raise his profile again, giving speeches and appearing on the Sunday talk shows. The reason: Hurricane Katrina had just devastated the Gulf Coast, and the federal government’s chaotic response left thousands of people stranded without help, including many low-income African-Americans.

Obama's Quick Rise on a Non-Traditional Career Path

For Obama, a symbol of a younger generation of African-American leaders who have cultivated an appeal beyond race, choosing Katrina as the issue to mark his re-emergence was a bit of a risk. It easily could have typecast him as a spokesman for black America, a label he was working to avoid. But as a moral imperative, he could hardly avoid speaking out against the incompetence of the response and calling for greater federal help for the survivors.

AFTER THE STORM: Obama emphasized poverty over racial injustice in his response to Hurricane Katrina three years ago. He visited New Orleans with Sen. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana five months after the storm. (GETTY IMAGES / CHRIS GRAYTHEN)

“I think he felt a particular pull that no one else would feel, as the only African-American member of the Senate. But when he visited, he didn’t only talk about that aspect of it,” Democratic Sen. Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana said.

Obama handled the sensitivity of the subject by emphasizing class over race. In a floor speech in early September, Obama rejected the notion that the slow response was evidence of a racial bias. “The ineptitude was colorblind,” he said. But the emergency planners “seemed to assume that every American has the capacity to load up the family in a SUV, fill it up with $100 worth of gasoline, stick some bottled water in the trunk and use a credit card to check into a hotel on safe ground.”

“I see no evidence of active malice,” Obama said, “but I see a continuation of passive indifference on the part of our government toward the least of us.”

Obama was able to get two small, targeted relief measures signed into law as part of broader bills: a national family locator system to help separated families find one another and a requirement that states have evacuation plans for people with special needs. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to secure advance payments of the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit for storm survivors.

But Obama’s commitment to the Gulf Coast — and to his friend Coburn — only went so far. That October, the Oklahoman sought to shift $125 million in funding from the Ketchikan-Gravina and Knik Arm bridge projects in Alaska — the so-called bridges to nowhere — to rebuild a bridge connecting New Orleans and Slidell, La. Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska launched a tirade, threatening to become “a wounded bull on the floor of the Senate” if the amendment was adopted. In the end, only 15 senators voted for it. Obama wasn’t one of them.

Voting Cautiously

The next year, Obama started to have more success as a legislator, though still on modest measures. The federal spending database bill he had written with Coburn and the weapons nonproliferation measure he had worked on with Lugar became law. Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, taking note of Obama’s work on public officials’ ethics in the Illinois Senate, made him the point man in the caucus on a new ethics overhaul measure the Senate was about to take up in response to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Along the way, Obama got into a highly publicized scrap with his future Republican presidential rival. In February, McCain released a letter blasting Obama for allegedly backing out of a pledge to work on a bipartisan ethics package. “I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere,” McCain said in the letter. “Please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.”

The two eventually put their tensions aside; at a hearing of the Rules and Administration Committee that month, Obama referred to McCain as “my pen pal.” In the end, they came to the same conclusion about the Republican-drafted ethics legislation: It wasn’t worth supporting. Obama was especially critical that it didn’t include an independent commission to enforce the rules or require senators to pay full charter fare to fly on private jets, two proposals he had championed. Both Obama and McCain voted against it, and the legislation was eventually dropped without final action by the Senate and House.

During this period, Obama attended several Foreign Relations hearings that allowed him to display his style of questioning, which may be the closest available parallel to the kinds of questions he might ask in a White House situation room briefing.

At times, he would ask devil’s advocate questions, insisting he was only making an inquiry to get a witness’ response on the record. In a March 2006 hearing on Iran’s nuclear program, for example, he asked foreign policy experts to debate a recent journal article that argued a nuclear Iran could be contained. “We have generally, across the board said that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. I happen to share that view,” Obama explained. “But I think it is worth at least exploring the other side or examining why it is not acceptable.”

Obama's Quick Rise on a Non-Traditional Career Path

In other cases, he would invite foreign policy experts to examine issues from the point of view of the United States’ adversaries. At a hearing on Lebanon, Obama asked David Welch, an assistant secretary of State, to “get inside Hezbollah’s head for a moment” and predict what the group might do next after battling Israel to a draw that summer.

On the floor, Obama continued his cautious voting streak. He voted for the broad immigration overhaul the Senate passed that year, but when it stalled he voted for a narrower measure pushed by the Republican majority to build a 700-mile fence along the border between the United States and Mexico. Twenty-five other Democrats voted for the bill, but Obama received a scolding from the Chicago-based U.S. Hispanic Leadership Institute, whose president, Juan Andrade Jr., accused him of pandering.

“He didn’t seem to understand why people would be mad about that. And they were mad,” said Gutierrez, the House Democrat from Chicago.

But when Republicans arranged a vote on authorizing military commissions to try suspected terrorists in September — hoping to maximize their political advantage on national security — Obama voted against it, noting that, among other things, the bill did not allow suspects to challenge their detention in federal courts. He predicted, correctly, that the language would not pass muster in the Supreme Court. “The problem with this bill is not that it is too tough on terrorists. The problem with this bill is that it is sloppy,” Obama said in a floor speech. “And the reason it is sloppy is that we rushed it to serve political purposes instead of taking the time to do the job right.”

Working With Feingold

In his brief time in Washington, the 2007 overhaul of congressional lobbying and ethics rules, just after the Democrats took control of the Senate, stands out as Obama’s most significant accomplishment. It wasn’t his alone; he and Feingold worked closely with Reid, and numerous House Democrats influenced the legislation in their chamber. But the ethics bill provides the only meaningful case study of how Obama approaches a major legislative initiative in Congress.

In general, he is credited with pushing the envelope on the measure and, together with Feingold, pressuring Reid to make it as ambitious as possible. Even though his full-time involvement ended after the Senate approved its version of the bill in January 2007, and it was mainly his aides who spoke for him during the final negotiations that summer, Democrats and ethics watchdog groups said Obama — along with Feingold — pushed hardest to set the bill’s form.

ETHICS FRONT: Obama with Feingold, his partner on ethics issues in the Senate. (AFP/GETTY IMAGES / MANDEL NGAN)

When the two of them, at the start of last year, held a news conference with all of the Senate Democratic freshman to endorse their “Cadillac bill” — including the corporate jets provision, a ban on gifts from lobbyists and a provision limiting most privately funded travel to one-day events — Reid decided to offer the amendments himself rather than get outflanked by Feingold and Obama. “I think that sent a strong signal to the majority leader and others that this was the real standard for reform,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of the ethics watchdog group Democracy 21.

Craig Holman, a campaign finance lobbyist for the watchdog group Public Citizen, said Obama was open to his group’s suggestions as well, such as imposing a waiting period before former members can organize a lobbying campaign behind the scenes, not just before they can contact their old colleagues directly. “He would explain to us how he was walking a fine line between the leadership and us,” Holman said. “He was very straightforward with us on what he thought he could get and what he thought he couldn’t get.”

The ethics legislation was one example where Obama did have to stand up to pressure from his colleagues — notably on his proposal to require lobbyists to disclose their “bundling” practices, in which they collect checks from clients and friends to give to campaigns. At one point, Obama suffered the wrath of Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who feared the change would hurt the party’s ability to raise money.

Even after Obama convinced Reid to accept the amendment without a recorded vote, the resistance to the bundling provision continued behind the scenes, according to Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and sponsored the provision on the House side. The apparent ease with which the language survived, Van Hollen said, “really does not reveal the kind of guerrilla warfare that took place behind closed doors.”

To prevail against “lots of people, both inside and outside Congress, who were trying to sabotage the effort,” Van Hollen said, he, Obama and Feingold “had to convince our colleagues that this was the litmus test for reform.” If Democrats didn’t include the language after making the ethics package such a high priority after winning control of Congress, they argued, “we would be rightly criticized for not going as far as we should have.”