In an August 12 Washington Post Magazine cover story on presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), Liza Mundy asserted that Obama, in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Crown), “portrays it as a total surprise when [Mary Beth] Cahill,” Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) 2004 presidential campaign manager, “called to invite him to deliver the keynote” speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Mundy went on to describe Obama's purported portrayal of the invitation as “seem[ingly] disingenuous” and quoted two people acknowledging that Obama's camp knew in advance that the invitation was coming. However, according to the passage of the book to which the article referred and, indeed, the very quotes the article pulled from the book, Obama did not portray the invitation as a “total surprise.”

From the August 12 Washington Post Magazine article:

Weeks before the decision was made, [Obama adviser] David Axelrod heard “scuttlebutt” that Obama was being considered. Axelrod told Obama, who says he found it a bit hard to believe. “I have to say, I was skeptical,” Obama says. “Traditionally -- obviously -- that slot is not given to a state senator.” Obama did not lobby directly, but Axelrod did, saying, “My case was that he was a transcendent figure who could deliver a unifying message and had just won a spectacular victory.”

According to an official involved, the decision came down to the fact that Obama, unlike Granholm, was still trying to win an election. Just a few weeks before the convention, it would emerge that Obama's opponent, Jack Ryan, had tried to talk his wife at the time into performing public acts at a sex club. Ryan would eventually withdraw, and there was talk that some marquee Republican, possibly former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, would enter the race. The balance in the Senate was 51-48 in favor of Republicans. “We needed his Senate seat,” says the official. So Obama it was.

Kerry gave Obama's selection an enthusiastic thumbs up. “I was impressed by him,” Kerry says. “I had met him and ... campaigned with him in Illinois, and thought on a personal level he would be able to convey the kind of message I wanted to convey out of my convention: a message of inclusiveness and change, a new view about how we can make our politics more relevant to people and, in a sense, just put a little bit of different language in front of folks.”

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama portrays it as a total surprise when Cahill called to invite him to deliver the keynote. “The process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me,” he writes, saying that after he received the call in his car, he marveled to his driver, “I guess this is pretty big.”

This seems disingenuous. “There is no doubt that that call was expected,” says Michael Duga, chief of staff to former senator Max Cleland, who also was involved in the planning. Axelrod doesn't dispute this: “We heard shortly before he got the call that he was likely to get it.” So, he acknowledges, “we did get a little bit of a heads-up.”

But neither Obama's statement in the book that the selection process “remains something of a mystery to me,” nor the full passage in which he recounts the invitation suggest that it came as a “total surprise.” From The Audacity of Hope [Page 354]:

Some of the hyperbole can be traced back to my speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, the point at which I first gained national attention. In fact, the process by which I was first selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me. I had met John Kerry for the first time after the Illinois primary, when I spoke at his fundraiser and accompanied him to a campaign event highlighting the importance of job-training programs. A few weeks later, we got word that the Kerry people wanted me to speak at the convention, although it was not clear in what capacity. One afternoon, as I drove back from Springfield [Illinois] to Chicago for an evening campaign event, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill called to deliver the news. After I hung up, I turned to my driver, Mike Signator.

“I guess this is pretty big,” I said.

Mike nodded. “You could say that.”