Todd Spivak of the Houston Press used to work in Chicago
and covered Barack Obama way before he was a Senator. In fact at that point, Spivak says no one really knew who Obama was:
My view of Obama then wasn't all that different from the image he projects now. He was smart, confident, charismatic and liberal. One thing I can say is, I never heard him launch into the preacher-man voice he now employs during speeches. He sounded vanilla, and activists in his mostly black district often chided him for it. I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.
It was serendipity that I ever came to know Obama at all. Looking back, I think of it as a Forrest Gump moment: History was unfolding and I was at the center of it, clueless. It's a huge bummer to me that I never taped our interviews.
READ THE RESTSpivak also got yelled at by Obama for a story!
[via blogHOUSTON]
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