on a newly elected senator named Barack
Obama. “There was a lot of attention given
to him, and as the hometown newspaper, we
thought it would be a good use of our time,”
Souza remembers. “We approached [communications director] Robert Gibbs and pitched
the story, which we were going to do regardless. We wanted special access, especially for
me. I wanted to be able to go behind the
scenes with him as much as possible.”
With some negotiations and wrangling,
they got the access they needed and traveled with Obama around Illinois and to
Georgia; later came international trips to
Russia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan, as well as
South Africa, Kenya, and Chad. “Just in the
course of that travel I got to know him a little bit as a person,” Souza says.
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