Biography plays a central role in all political campaigns, with candidates deploying their life stories to buttress their arguments. During Obama's first presidential run, however, the story did not just strengthen the message — it became interchangeable with it. This was not by accident but by design. "Barack is the personification of his own message for this country, that we get past the things that divide us and focus on the things that unite us," Axelrod, the campaign's chief strategist, told the New York Times in 2007. "He is his own vision." So much so, in fact, that when President-elect Obama endured criticism for recycling Clinton-era officials into top posts, he argued that it didn't matter, that he was enough. "I was never of the belief that the way you bring about change is to not hire anybody who knows how things work, and to start from scratch and completely reinvent the wheel," Obama said to The Washington Post in January 2009. "I'm the one who brings change. It is my vision. It is my agenda." Turns out he was the change we had been waiting for. His effort to improve relations with the Muslim world, for instance, was premised on the notion that his personal story could make a difference. In his speech at Cairo University in June 2009, the president said that a "new beginning" was possible in the troubled relationship. "Part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience," he explained. He invoked his Kenyan family, with its generations of Muslims; recalled his childhood in Indonesia; and cited his work with Muslim communities in Chicago. His story was supposed to dispel foreign stereotypes of a self-interested, imperial United States and show that not all Americans shared apocalyptic visions of Islam.