Chapter Nine
The Wilderness Campaign
A month after losing to Bobby Rush, Obama bought a cheap plane ticket and flew to Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention, where the Party would put forward the ticket of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. Obama was not a delegate. He had not gained much favor in the Illinois Democratic Party by trying to unseat Rush. He didn't even have a floor credential, but his friends urged him to go and make some contacts. Later, Obama realized that they were trying to get him back on the horse and have some fun.
When Obama arrived at the airport in Los Angeles, he went to the Hertz counter to rent a car only to have his American Express card declined. He finally managed to convince a supervisor that he was good for the money. That may have been his most successful act of persuasion in months. For a couple of days, he watched speeches gazing up at a JumboTron at the Staples Center while thousands of Democrats, many of them in funny hats and all in sure possession of floor passes, streamed by him. He made his way into the skyboxes, but he could not get to the floor. He didn't stay long in Los Angeles.
Back in Springfield, Obama endured a round of "we-told-you-so"s at his Wednesday poker game. He became even closer to Emil Jones, who told him what had been so clear from the start of the campaign. The First Congressional District was not the right political arena for him. "It was a predominantly African-American district where you had to campaign solely on those issues," Jones said, recalling his conversations with Obama. "And Barack did not campaign that way, so as a result he lost. Which was good."
With time Obama and his small circle of political advisers and operatives began to see the value in having lost to Rush. Obama came to understand his defeat as a political education. He could not match the local appeal of Rush, who, while hardly the noblest exemplar of the civil-rights generation, boasted a historical credibility that Obama, as a man in his late thirties, could not. Rather, Obama, as a member of what he later called the Joshua generation, had a broader, more modern kind of appeal; and, because he had greater access to the elite institutions of American life, to Columbia and Harvard, to the liberals and the downtown business establishment, he had a familiar kind of education, an acceptable set of positions, a capacity to attract constituencies that Rush never would.
"Bobby did us a favor by running the campaign the way he did--it helped define Obama," Al Kindle said. "If Obama had tried to be 'more black' or be more like Rush to beat him, and if he'd been successful, he would have been forever pigeonholed. We already knew that he wasn't a traditional black politician. The race gave him exposure. He was not Harold Washington. He wasn't Bobby Rush. He was a different leader that the community had to grow toward, white and black. There was no model for it yet. The model was the flip side of what Harold couldn't be because the city back then was too divided racially. At this point in history, the city was less overtly racist and we didn't have the same lightning-rod politicians like Eddie Vrdolyak who organized on the basis of race. Obama became the next generation."
It was hard to imagine, in 2000 and 2001, when and how Obama's political second chance would emerge--if ever. Many in the African-American community were searching for the next generation of progressive leaders; the men and women of Rush's generation did not have the capacity to challenge Richard Daley. The situation in the Senate was not especially promising: Richard Durbin was the popular Democratic successor to Paul Simon, and Peter Fitzgerald, a wealthy young Republican, had toppled Carol Moseley Braun after a single term that had been plagued by accusations of ethical misdemeanors. When Fitzgerald's term was up in 2004, Braun could easily run again. Despite bungling her campaign finances and gaining a reputation in some quarters for low-grade corruption, she had far greater name recognition than Obama.
After the loss to Rush, Obama and Dan Shomon started traveling around the state again in earnest. According to Shomon, between 1997 and 2004, they put in nearly forty thousand miles stopping in at dinners, country fairs, Elks-club meetings, political rallies--any conceivable event that could get him better known in the state.
"In the car, it was just the two of us and we talked about everything, from his marriage to golf to life to women to politics," Shomon said. "A lot of it was me listening to his ideas about politics and strategy, and then I thought about how those ideas would fit into reality and how to advance him politically."
Obama quizzed Shomon about every political player in the state. He no longer thought about running for mayor: attorney general, governor, U.S. senator---those were the offices on the horizon of his ambition now. In the meantime, he was teaching and legislating, and he even brought in some legal work to his old firm. Obama's friend the African-American entrepreneur Robert Blackwell, Jr., thought there was money to be made in Ping-Pong, what he called "the No. 1 participation sport in the world." For fourteen months, Blackwell paid Obama's firm a monthly fee of eight thousand dollars to work on contracts. (The deal became a matter of controversy when Obama, in his capacity as Blackwell's state senator, wrote a letter recommending that Blackwell's Ping-Pong firm, Killerspin, receive a tourism grant to help sponsor international tournaments in Chicago.)
It was not clear, at first, where all this traveling and exposure would lead, but one thing was clear--that Michelle Obama was concerned about what it meant for their future. When Barack called in from the road to report how well a speech had gone, she would, Shomon recalled, reply something on the order of, "Malia is sick, so that's what I'm concerned about."
Obama was not deterred. Michelle's practiced dyspepsia was also part of the style of their relationship. She understood his ego and his self-involvement; this was her way of keeping it in check. Although politics was a strain on their relationship, it was never fatal. It is a mistake to make of her in those days, as some accounts have, a cartoonish nag; Michelle Obama was also proud of her husband and shared his desire to do good.
"I don't think Barack ever worried that their marriage was going to end," Shomon said. "He was worried about his future, if he was electable, if he was going to be stuck in the minority, if Michelle was going to be mad at him for this or that. But I never sensed his marriage was really in trouble."
"Without Michelle, there is no Barack," Al Kindle said. "He needed her as an image, and, of course, he really loved her. If she hadn't agreed to a political life, he wouldn't have run. A divorce would have killed him. After the congressional race, she wanted to know, 'Where are we going?' She needed him to make a decision. He decided, 'I am going to run one more time.' He was ready to leave the state legislature and he was looking for the next thing. He was evaluating his options. Some of what she was doing was forcing him to figure out what he wanted."
* * *
On September 19, 2001, the Hyde Park Herald published a gallery of reactions to the catastrophic terrorist attacks the week before at the World Trade Center in New York, and at the Pentagon. The two Illinois senators, Peter Fitzgerald and Richard Durbin; the House member for Hyde Park, Bobby Rush; the aldermen Toni Preckwinkle and Leslie Hairston; and the state representative Barbara Flynn Currie all provided fairly predictable messages of sympathy and vigilance. In 2001, Obama was still too insignificant a politician to be called on for comment in the national media, but in the Herald he provided a reaction to the events that is worth quoting in full for its attempt to explore the political meanings of the attacks:
Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.
We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.
We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe--children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and within our own shores.
Years later, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, of many more incidents of terrorism, of warrantless wiretaps and prisoner abuse, of profiling and intensified security, Obama's comments might seem commonplace. But in the days and weeks after 9/11, any attempt to understand "the sources of such madness," to understand how a young man comes to be a terrorist--how he might be shaped by economic and political despair and the demagoguery of fanatical leaders--was viewed by many with tremendous suspicion, as if an attempt at understanding constituted a lack of outrage at the terrorists or grief for the thousands of victims. And, in a reaction of just three paragraphs, to raise the question of civilian deaths in any U.S. military action was not at all a common sentiment at the time.
After the Al Qaeda attacks, Obama discovered that his name, never a great advantage in his political races, was, post 9/11, a kind of gruesome punchline. He had scheduled a meeting that month with Eric Adelstein, a media consultant for Democratic political candidates, to talk discreetly about the possibility of running for statewide office--possibly Illinois attorney general or U.S. senator. He had just been crushed by Bobby Rush and was deep in debt. Now his name rhymed with that of the most notorious terrorist alive. "Suddenly Adelstein's interest in the meeting had diminished!" Obama told the Tribune reporter David Mendell. "We talked about it and he said that the name thing was really going to be a problem for me now."
As he waited for his next political opportunity, Obama was determined to be a more engaged legislator in Springfield. He had come a long way. When he first arrived in the State Senate, he struck his colleagues as stiff, academic, arrogant. Over time, he became friendlier, more collegial. He did not radiate, as he once had, a sense of superiority. Obama had studied Bill Clinton on television. He had even watched Rod Blagojevich, a mediocre intellect, but a gifted one-on-one campaigner. "Barack wasn't Mr. Personality when he first got to the State Senate," Dan Shomon said. "He learned the Mr. Personality aspect of politics, the charm, only later. He even learned to get around the camera at public events, that you weren't there if you weren't in the picture. He learned ways to bring people toward him."
At the same time, Obama became a more effective advocate for serious issues. He was hardly on the left wing of his party, but he spoke out consistently for a moratorium on executions and against racial profiling. Like most Democrats in the legislature, he was especially wary of the conservative-era impulse to slash both social spending and income taxes--a far more concrete specter in the states, where budgets must be balanced. George Ryan, a moderate Republican who was elected governor in 1999, came to office with a glimmer of hope for the Democrats, and Obama was pleased that, in 2000, Ryan put a moratorium on capital punishment. He hoped that this signaled a more progressive trend in Illinois state politics, but in February, 2002, the state faced a budget crisis--a shortfall of more than seven hundred million dollars--and Ryan prepared to cut back on crucial state welfare programs. Writing in the Herald, Obama said that the state now faced one of the "paradoxes" of a recession. "The worst thing state government can do during a recession is cut spending," he wrote.
And yet one incident during the Democratic attempt to hang on to as many social-service programs as possible showed that Obama's problems with some of his African-American colleagues were not over. On June 11th, Rickey Hendon made a heartfelt speech on the Senate floor urging that funding for a child-welfare facility in his West Side district be preserved. Hendon had been especially angered by two terrible incidents over the years--the cases of the Keystone 19 and the Huron 12--when children on the West Side were found living in the most desperate conditions. There was no way that Hendon could succeed in his appeal--the Republican majority voted against him--but what surprised him was that Obama voted against him, too. Incensed, Hendon, who sat up front with the minority leadership, headed back to what was known as Liberal Row, where Obama sat with three other Democrats: Terry Link, Lisa Madigan, the daughter of the speaker of the Illinois House, and Carol Ronen, who was particularly active on gay issues.
"Rickey was very upset--screaming and hollering," Terry Link recalled.
Obama tried to calm Hendon down, saying something about keeping spending under control.
"He explained to me that we had to show fiscal responsibility during tough budget times," Hendon recalled. "Before I could ask him about the poor children, I found myself walking back to my seat in a daze. I sat down, like in a daydream, or nightmare, kind of blur, and continued to vote no on cut after cut along with all the Democrats, including Liberal Row. Finally I heard the bill number called for a cut on the South Side in Senator Obama's district. Barack rose to give an emotional speech condemning this particular cut. He asked for compassion and understanding. Now, this facility they wanted to close was very similar to the one he just voted to close on the West Side. His fiscally prudent vote took place only about ten minutes earlier and now he wants compassion!"
Hendon got up to speak and called out Obama on the floor of the Senate:
HENDON: I just want to say to the last speaker, you got a lot of nerve to talk about being responsible and then you voted for closing the [Department of Children and Family Services] office on the West Side, when you wouldn't have voted to close it on the South Side. So I apologize to my Republican friends about my--bipartisanship comments, 'cause clearly there's some Democrats on this side of the aisle that don't care about the West Side either, especially the last speaker.
PRESIDING OFFICER (SENATOR WATSON): Senator Obama, do you wish to speak? Senator Obama.
OBAMA: Thank you, Mr. President. I understand Senator Hendon's anger at--actually--the--I was not aware that I had voted No on that last piece of legislation. I would have the record record that I intended to vote Yes. On the other hand, I would appreciate that next time my dear colleague, Senator Hendon, ask me about a vote before he names me on the floor.
After Obama attempted, in vain, to have his vote changed, he angrily walked toward Hendon's seat on Leaders Row. As Hendon recalls it, Obama "stuck his jagged, strained face into my space" and told him, "You embarrassed me on the Senate floor and if you ever do it again I will kick your ass!"
"What?"
"You heard me," Obama said, "and if you come back here by the telephones, where the press can't see it, I will kick your ass right now!"
The two men walked off the floor of the Senate to a small antechamber in the back. In Hendon's self-dramatizing version of the incident, the confrontation got physical and came just short of a real fight with Emil Jones dispatching Donne Trotter to break things up before they descended to the level of the World Wide Wrestling Federation. Terry Link and Denny Jacobs say that Hendon has hyped the incident--that Obama never cursed at Hendon and that no blows were exchanged--but no one denies it was an emotional schoolyard confrontation that could have gotten out of hand.
In Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilemma, an often bitter book, Hendon writes that the incident proved that Obama was "bipartisan enough and white enough to be President of the United States." It also proved, in his dubious analysis, that Obama was sufficiently tough to occupy the Oval Office. "If we were attacked by terrorists, would he pull the trigger?" he wrote. "There's no doubt that he would." When asked what would have happened if Trotter and others hadn't separated the two men, he said, "I don't think anybody walking the face of the earth can whup me! It probably would have been the end of my career if I'd lost because of the neighborhood I represent. That's the kind of fight it would have been. Thank God cooler heads prevailed. I couldn't go back to the West Side getting beat up by a guy from Harvard. Or from the South Side. I would have been through." Such, on occasion, was the level of debate in Springfield, Illinois. And Barack Obama was eager to leave it behind.
That same month, in June, 2002, Obama was campaigning for Milorad (Rod) Blagojevich, then a two-term congressman, who was the Democratic candidate for governor. The son of a Serbian-born steelworker from the Northwest Side, Blagojevich had been an indifferent law student at Pepperdine ("I barely knew where the law library was") and got his political start through his father-in-law, an alderman named Richard Mell. In 2002, Blagojevich was one of eighty-one Democrats in the House of Representatives who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. In the gubernatorial primary, Blagojevich had defeated the former state attorney general, Roland Burris, and the Chicago schools head, Paul Vallas. Obama had supported Burris in the primary but turned his support to Blagojevich in the general election. Rahm Emanuel, who was then a member of the House, told Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker that he and Obama "participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor.... We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two." (Blagojevich's campaign adviser, David Wilhelm, refined Emanuel's remarks later, telling Jake Tapper of ABC that Obama was a member of an advisory council, not one of the principal strategists.) Years later, when Blagojevich was facing federal corruption charges, Obama was circumspect about his relations with him, but during the campaign he proved a loyal party man. Appearing in June, 2002, on Jeff Berkowitz's local cable show ("Berkowitz is my name, politics is our game"), Obama said, "Right now, my main focus is to make sure that we elect Rod Blagojevich as Governor."
BERKOWITZ: You working hard for Rod?
OBAMA: You betcha.
BERKOWITZ: Hot Rod?
OBAMA: That's exactly right. You know, I think having a Democratic governor will make a big difference. I think that I am working hard to get a Democratic senate and Emil Jones president, replacing Pate Philip, and once all that clears out in November, then I think we'll be able to make some good decisions about the [U.S.] Senate race.
In effect, Obama was closing his eyes and thinking of the Democratic Party. "He and Blagojevich had no relationship at all," Pete Giangreco, a direct-mail consultant who was working then for Blagojevich, said. "They came from two different planets politically. Barack was Hyde Park and the University of Chicago. Rod was an admitted C-student who had a not even thinly veiled contempt for intellectuals. He hated anyone from the North Shore or Hyde Park and he wore his contempt as a badge of honor. And there was some racial politics mixed up in there, too. They were not allies."
In 2001, Richard Durbin, the state's senior senator, hosted a group of Democratic Party activists and politicians. For the occasion, Dan Shomon printed up buttons reading "Obama: Statewide in 2002." But what statewide office did he and Obama have in mind? Lisa Madigan, Obama's friend on Liberal Row, was a likely candidate for attorney general. Peter Fitzgerald's seat in the U.S. Senate was the only attractive possibility. Fitzgerald had got into battles with his own party in both Washington and Springfield, but so far he showed no sign of stepping aside and the fact of the family's enormous banking fortune meant that he was perfectly capable of financing another race.
With the 2002 elections just over a month away, Obama confided to Abner Mikva that he was thinking about taking a run at Fitzgerald's U.S. Senate seat in 2004. Mikva told him, "You have to talk to the Jackson boys first." Jesse, Jr., who had won a seat in the House, in 1995, was also thinking about the Senate, Mikva said. Obama said he knew: "I'm working on that." At a lunch at 312, an Italian restaurant on LaSalle, Obama told Jackson that if Jackson was running he would not. Not to worry, Jackson replied; he was staying in the House.
By the late summer of 2002, the Bush Administration was intensifying its public rhetoric about an invasion of Iraq. On September 12th, Bush went to the General Assembly of the United Nations and declared, "If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted." Within a month, he would have the support of Congress to use force in Iraq.
On September 21st, Bettylu Saltzman, Obama's wealthy friend and patron on the near North Side, was having dinner with her husband and two other couples at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown called Pasteur. Saltzman, by then, had eight grandchildren and had not been to an antiwar rally of any kind since Vietnam, but as the group discussed their despair at the Administration's obvious desire to send troops to Iraq, Saltzman said, "We've got to do something!" Early the next morning, she called an old friend who might know how to put together a rally: Marilyn Katz, a raspy-voiced, chain-smoking raconteur, who had been a leader of S.D.S. in her youth and now ran a communications firm that regularly won contracts with Mayor Daley. Part of Richard Daley's Machiavellian skill had been to modernize the Chicago political structure, removing its mailed fist but retaining its toleration of corruption in the name of making things work. Daley's loss to Harold Washington in 1983 had taught him that he could not govern in opposition to the African-American community; he had to bring African-Americans into the process. By making City Hall more inclusive, by doing business with people his father could not tolerate--African-Americans, Hispanics, Lakefront liberals, old leftists like Marilyn Katz and Bill Ayers, and independent Democrats--he built a far broader coalition. In 1989, just weeks after winning his first of six mayoral elections, Daley became the first Chicago mayor to march in the city's annual Gay Pride parade. In Richard M. Daley's Chicago, a city of strange bedfellows, it was only natural that a wealthy liberal like Bettylu Saltzman would find an ally in an ex-radical like Marilyn Katz.
"Marilyn is a very good organizer, I am not," Saltzman said. "So I woke her up."
"Thank God you called," Katz said, and the two talked about how to proceed.
Two days later, the two women convened a meeting of about a dozen people at Saltzman's penthouse apartment, including a number of veteran left-wing activists, Michael Klonsky and Carl Davidson, and Rhona Hoffman, who ran a well-known art gallery. "We all took assignments," Saltzman said. Robert Howard, a local attorney, got permission to use Federal Plaza on South Dearborn at midday on October 2nd. Marilyn Katz and Davidson, another S.D.S. veteran, knew that with a well-aimed e-mail spray they could get a core of left-wing groups to come to Federal Plaza. Then they tried to assemble a list of speakers, which included Jesse Jackson, Sr., and various clergy and local politicians. Saltzman called John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, but he already had a speaking engagement in Wisconsin. Later in the week, she called Barack Obama at home. Michelle answered and said she would give him the message.
"I finally spoke to him on Monday for a Tuesday rally," she recalled. "Few knew who he was. The only people who really knew him were in Hyde Park, people who were his friends and associates."
Saltzman called on Obama simply because she had a sense that he had a future. "I didn't know him as well as Valerie Jarrett and Marty Nesbitt did. I am a North Sider. I'm white. It's a different group of people. I don't really know what he had in place. I just had this instinct about him."
Before agreeing to speak at the rally, Obama called a few trusted friends to discuss the political ramifications. He had already commissioned a benchmark poll to explore a Senate run and was fairly sure he was going to do it. For a Hyde Park politician, the risk of speaking was mild--at the university both the left and many on the right opposed an invasion of Iraq--but the issue got more complicated the farther away you went from Chicago. "Nationally, the conventional wisdom was to support the war," Will Burns said. "The war hadn't started yet, there was lots of triumphalism, lots of talk about mushroom clouds. If you are running for Senate, there's the chance of looking 'soft on terror.' This was just a year after 9/11."
Pete Giangreco, who had agreed to advise Obama and do his direct-mail campaign for a potential Senate campaign, got a call from Obama to discuss the invitation to speak. "The war was pretty popular then," Giangreco said. "Opposing it wouldn't be a problem in the primary, but it could be a really big problem in a general election. All kinds of people might have a problem with being 'soft': Reagan Democrats, downscale ethnic folks in Chicago, and people downstate who didn't live in college towns. Talking from a targeting standpoint, I said we already had a challenge with these folks. His name, Barack Obama, was different and not very helpful, and, while Roland Burris and Carol Moseley Braun had won statewide races, it's always a challenge for an African-American. So I said, 'You might be able to capture the folks on the left who are against this war, and against any war, frankly, but there were all the others to take into account.' He just took it all in. He finally said, 'Well, my instinct is to do this.' And my reaction was 'If this is what you really believe, you'll score huge points for courage and saying what you think.'"
"Politically, the reason why Barack's political advisers were saying it was a good idea for him to speak was because the coalition he needed to get elected was blacks and liberals, and he wasn't going to get liberals if he was supporting Bush in the war," Chris Sautter, Obama's media consultant in the 2000 congressional race, said. As Obama talked it through further with Giangreco, Shomon, and David Axelrod, he concluded that he could devise a rhetorical construction that would express his opposition to an invasion of Iraq without making him seem disqualifyingly weak on terror.
In defiance of the weather report, on October 2nd, the sun was shining. People milled around the speaker's platform holding up antiwar signs. Estimates of the crowd ranged from the Tribune's "about 1,000" to the Chicago Defender's "nearly 3,000." The organizers thought it was somewhere in the middle. Some of the trappings of the demonstration were comically reminiscent of earlier times. While the old John Lennon tune "Give Peace a Chance" played on the public-address system, Obama leaned over to Saltzman and said, "Can't they play something else?"
The Tribune reporter at the rally, Bill Glauber, described the crowd as a combination of college students, veterans of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and "a few second-generation activists following in the wake of parents radicalized by Vietnam." Bill Ayers was there; so were most of the board members from the Woods Foundation and students from Northwestern and other colleges in the area. Remarking on the calm atmosphere at the rally, Glauber said that it "wasn't a replay of the Days of Rage--it was more like a gentle call to arms for a nascent peace movement desperate to head off a new Gulf War."
The demonstration lasted less than an hour. Marilyn Katz read a statement from Senator Durbin, who had come out in opposition to the war: "When the Senate votes this week on President Bush's resolution to wage war against Iraq with preemptive force, I will vote no. I do not believe the Bush Administration has answered one simple question: Why now?"
By 2002 in Chicago, Jesse Jackson, Sr., was viewed, even by longtime allies, black and white, with mixed feelings. People paid tribute to his work in the civil-rights movement and to his historic Presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988, but they were also weary of his penchant for self-centeredness. Obama's relationship with Jackson was never entirely warm, despite the fact that Michelle Obama had grown up as a close friend of the family. The point of conflict, even early on, was simple: Jackson tended to treat young black politicians in Chicago with wariness, at best, and Obama, while he respected Jackson, also saw him as vain and out of date. Nevertheless, Jackson remained a reliable speaker against the Bush Administration, and he performed well that day.
"This is a rally to stop a war from occurring," Jackson said, and then he asked the crowd to look at the sky and count to ten. Looking down again, Jackson said, "I just diverted your attention away from the rally. That's what George Bush is doing. The sky is not falling and we're not threatened by Saddam Hussein." Jackson accused the Administration of trying to divert public attention, above all, from its economic failures.
In addition to Jackson and Obama, the speakers included the Reverend Paul Rutgers, the executive director of the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago, and a former state senator, Jesus Garcia.
Obama's speech, which ran just a few minutes, was an exquisitely calibrated rhetorical performance, signaling both his opposition to war with Iraq and a willingness to use force when necessary. It was a speech intended as much to assure people that he was not a wide-eyed pacifist as it was to show his antiwar solidarity.
Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don't oppose all wars.
My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don't oppose all wars.
After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don't oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.
What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear--I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied U.N. resolutions, thwarted U.N. inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is at a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.
Carl Davidson, one of the rally's organizers, was listening to the speech when a friend sitting next to him nudged him and said, "Who does he think this speech is for? It's not for this crowd." Davidson said he thought, This guy's got bigger fish to fry.
"It was a great rally and it wasn't an easy thing to do," Bill Ayers said. "There was a howling storm of patriotic nationalism going on. I remember Obama's speech vividly because it was all done in the cadence of the black church. 'I'm not against all war, just a foolish war ... ' That's so Obama: smart, unifying, and very moderate."
Obama received polite applause and his admiring sponsor, Bettylu Saltzman, thought he had performed effectively. But another civic leader at the rally, Juan Andrade, Jr., the president of the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, said that while he has since seen Obama give magnificent speeches, "there was nothing magic" about his performance that day. "There was nothing about that speech that would have given anybody any sense that he was going places. We were just glad that he was one of those who was willing to step up at a time when very few people seemed to be willing to do that." One of the organizers, Michael Klonsky, an S.D.S. leader who became a professor of education, remembers thinking at the time how qualified Obama's opposition to the war was. "He knew the war was a dead end but he was kind of clever," Klonsky said. "At the time, I didn't see much point in giving a treatise on just and unjust wars. Looking back, this was a guy with political ambitions who didn't want to box himself in."
The 2002 antiwar speech was a precursor to Obama's speech on December 10, 2009, in Oslo, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace. There, too, Obama spoke, to some extent, at cross-purposes with the audience in front of him. In Oslo, he made plain that the choices facing a head of state, a commander-in-chief, are not the same as those of the head of a movement, like King or Gandhi. In front of a Norwegian audience that could not have been entirely pleased with his decision just a week earlier to send an additional thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan, Obama refused the purity of pacifism and insisted on the complexity of the real world ("I face the world as it is ...") and the need, unfortunately, to rely on force when diplomacy has failed and the moral and political circumstances demand it. In Oslo, Obama implicitly rebuked the Bush Administration's use of torture and its invasion of Iraq, but it was this insistence on complexity, the refusal to adopt a purely pacific rhetoric, that was reminiscent of the speech on Federal Plaza.
While some of Obama's advisers worried that phrases like "a dumb war" might come back to haunt Obama, it would turn out that the war was far worse than dumb. It was a catastrophe that went on longer than the Second World War. But when Obama's team would eventually make use of the speech to advertise their candidate's strategic and moral judgment, they discovered there was no videotape. "There wasn't any, just some crappy snippet," Giangreco said. Had Obama been a certain, well-organized candidate for the Senate, he might have made sure there was someone there with a camera. "I would kill for that," David Axelrod said years later. "No one realized at the time that it would be a historic thing."
Toward the end of the rally, Obama told Bettylu Saltzman that he couldn't stick around long. He was headed downstate to Decatur, the county seat of Macon County.
"There really was no doubt he was running," she recalled. "Why else do you go to Decatur, Illinois?"
The 2002 elections were hugely successful for the Illinois Democrats--a statewide rebuke to the Bush Administration. Promising "to end business as usual," Rod Blagojevich was elected governor over the Republican, George Ryan, and both houses of the state legislature now had Democratic majorities--for the first time in twenty-six years. In the State Senate, Emil Jones got the post of president, displacing Pate Philip.
In the early spring of 2002, Obama went to see Emil Jones. Since 1997, Jones had been his mentor in the persistent realities of Illinois politics. He had helped soothe the friction between Obama and antagonists like Hendon and Trotter. Jones, a former sewer inspector and an old-school Party regular, could see that Obama was a new breed:
He said to me, he said, "You're the Senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er."... And I told Barack, "You think I got a lot of pow-er now?" And he said, "Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er." And I said, "What kind of pow-er do I have?" He said, "You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!"
I said to Barack, "That sounds good!" I said, "I haven't even thought of that." I said, "Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?," and he said, "Yeah. Me." The most interesting conversation. And so I said to him, "Let me think about this." We met a little later that day, and I said, "That sounds good. Let's go for it."
Before he became president of the Senate, Emil Jones had not yet gained great respect in the legislature. People looked on Michael Madigan, the Democratic speaker of the House and Lisa's father, as the Party's pillar. "The truth is, Emil was always underestimated," Will Burns, who worked for Jones before joining Obama's congressional campaign, said. "It was thought he didn't have the same political acumen as Madigan or Richie Daley. But he was underestimated, really, because he was black. No one would say it, but as an African-American I can't easily dismiss the effect of race on people's perceptions. There was the sense that he was just an old pol and that's it. So, for Emil, the challenge of helping Barack, using his position and leverage, to elect him to the Senate, was good for Barack and it was also good for him."
The most important thing that Jones could do now for Obama was to provide him with an increasingly substantive legislative docket--something that no Democrat could boast while languishing in the minority. Obama, like many others in the Senate, had been in the habit of dodging controversial votes (including on abortion measures) by voting "present" rather than "yea" or "nay." This was a well-known tactic that could be adopted to avoid being drawn into a vote whose only purpose was to expose the opposition in one way or another, but, still, Obama's frequent use of it--a hundred and twenty-nine times--allowed opponents to criticize him for lacking the courage of his convictions. A "present" vote has variously been described as "a soft 'no'" and "'no' with an explanation." But Emil Jones, of all people, was not interested in idealistic flameouts. Such creatures were alien to him. After their meeting, Jones started to funnel bills to Obama, some of which had lain dormant in committee for years. Jones knew that Obama had developed a penchant for compromise. He could work with Republicans and downstate Democrats with far greater finesse than most of his colleagues. When the bills passed, they would have Obama's name on them, as sponsor, and potentially help him in a run for higher office.
"We attained the majority in the seventh year and I passed twenty-six bills in a row," Obama told me. "In one year, we reformed the death penalty in Illinois, expanded health care for kids, set up a state earned-income tax credit. It wasn't that I was smarter in year seven than I was in year six, or more experienced; it was that we had power.... You can have the best agenda in the world, but if you don't control the gavel you cannot move an agenda forward."
Eventually, Jones was known around the Senate chamber as Obama's "godfather." (And when Obama became a national political phenomenon, Jones set the ring tone on his cell phone to play the opening bars of Nino Rota's theme for the "Godfather" films.) Donne Trotter said that there were days when nearly every bill had Obama's name on it. Jones, for example, let Obama be the main sponsor of a bill insisting that police videotape interrogations as a check on brutality cases and false confessions. Obama was able to bring on board not only Republicans but also police associations that had initially balked at such legislation. Even Blagojevich had initially opposed the measure, which was the first of its kind in the country. In May, 2003, it passed the Senate unanimously and Blagojevich withdrew his objections. "I had reservations about supporting it without the participation of law enforcement," the Governor said. "But Senator Obama ironed out some of the practical challenges that concerned me."
Obama also co-sponsored legislation banning ephedra, a diet supplement that had led to the death of a Northwestern University football player. He won a ban on the use of pyrotechnics in nightclubs after scores of people were killed in two tragic incidents. Forging a compromise between police associations and civil-liberties organizations, he crafted a series of racial-profiling measures that demanded that police record the race of every motorist they pulled over and send the records for analysis to the Department of Transportation. ("Driving while black, driving while Hispanic, and driving while Middle Eastern are not crimes.") He sponsored a bill that allowed twenty thousand children to be included in Kid Care, a program for kids without health insurance. And he passed legislation that provided added tax relief for low-income families with the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Working with health-care providers, insurance lobbyists, and other interest groups, Obama led a commission that studied expanding care to more citizens of the state. He had repeatedly expressed support for single-payer health care, but the commission was limited to modest reform. Obama, who had played poker with lobbyists and taken legal campaign contributions from insurance lobbyists, said in a debate during the U.S. Senate campaign that he had "worked diligently with the insurance industry" and with Republicans after concerns were raised about across-the-board state health coverage. "The original presentation of the bill was the House version, that we radically changed--we radically changed--and we changed in response to concerns that were raised by the insurance industry," he said.
Jones also extracted promises from black politicians like Hendon and Trotter, who had not shown Obama much love, to endorse Obama. They agreed only after many loud discussions. "I made them an offer," Jones recalled telling Obama. "And you don't want to know."
As he grew more experienced, Obama was also recognizing that, in order to rise in Illinois politics, in order to transcend the hermetic, somewhat independent base of Hyde Park, he needed to play ball with people higher up than Jones: in particular, with Richard M. Daley. To remain pristine in Chicago politics--to follow the path of someone like the independent alderman Leon Despres--was to put a cap on ambition. To advance, to have the means to win a statewide election, meant navigating the murky politics of Chicago. The city under the Daleys had avoided the fate of other industrial Midwestern cities like Detroit. Just as his father had built highways, O'Hare Airport, the convention center, parks, and countless office buildings, Richard M. Daley had transformed the Loop, building projects like Millennium Park, complete with its magnificent Frank Gehry-designed bandshell. Daley the Younger had been a far better mayor than his father when it came to schools, allowing more experimentation and building magnet schools and charter schools; he also leveled many of the city's horrendous high-rise projects, which housed tens of thousands of people and had become centers of gang violence. Daley showed no predilection for amassing a personal fortune. But Daley, also like his father, failed to transform the political culture of legalized bribery, the routine funneling of huge city contracts to friends of City Hall--the reality known as "pay to play." Millennium Park may be a source of civic pride and a great tourist attraction, but it was also millions over-budget. Chicago is no less a one-party political city than Beijing; only one of the fifty aldermen is a Republican. And so the impulse to reform these practices is minimal. Stories of corruption, enormous and banal, regularly appear in the Tribune and Sun-Times, but the citizenry kept increasing Daley's margins of victory.
Sooner or later, any ambitious Chicago politician had to do business with the Mayor and had to think many times before criticizing him. In 2005, in the midst of a series of corruption investigations, which had been described at length in the Sun-Times, Obama told the paper that the articles gave him "huge pause." An hour later, though, he called the paper back and told the reporter that he wanted to clarify his remarks. Daley, he now said, was "obviously going through a rough patch" but the city "never looked better." To talk about endorsing Daley, or not, was "way premature." In January, 2007, Obama endorsed Daley, praising him as "innovative" and "willing to make hard decisions."
When Obama was not in Springfield or teaching or spending time with his family, he was back to networking. Sometimes that meant making more trips downstate. Sometimes it meant attending the myriad events going on in Chicago: lunches at the business clubs, cultural events, fundraisers on the Lakefront and in the suburbs. After losing so badly to Rush, he started mending fences with black community leaders, clergy, Democratic committeemen, aldermen, and city officials. He attended a regular discussion group at Miller Shakman & Beem, a law firm where Arthur Goldberg and Abner Mikva had practiced. There Obama would talk politics with Abner Mikva, David Axelrod, Newton Minow, Don Rose, Bettylu Saltzman, and various other Democratic activists. Obama wanted to re-establish himself as a Democrat independent of the Daley circle and organization, but also as someone who would not wage an overtly anti-Daley race. He was willing to make common cause with the activists on the South Side as well as with Party regulars like Emil Jones. "This was a guy who was a quick learner," Don Rose said of that period between the congressional and Senate races. "When Obama makes a mistake, he only makes it once."
The return of the Democrats to power in 2002 also helped Obama in a more subtle way. Like that of many other state senators, his district--the Thirteenth--was reconfigured. In the spring of 2001, anticipating a Democratic sweep, Obama had gone to see a Democratic Party consultant named John Corrigan in a room at the Stratton Office Building, in Springfield, known as the "inner sanctum." The room is locked down; to get in it was necessary to use a fingerprint scanner and tap a code into a keypad. Inside was an array of computer monitors. The Senate Democratic caucus in the legislature had hired Corrigan to look into the details of re-aligning districts in the state to the Party's advantage. This was perfectly legal. The majority party has the right, within legal guidelines, to rearrange legislative borders. The Republicans, of course, preferred to maximize the percentage of African-Americans in a particular district. Because blacks voted almost solely for Democrats, it was better to have one district be close to a hundred-per-cent black and a neighboring district have a minimum number of blacks. The Democrats preferred to spread out their black voters. As Corrigan showed Obama on a computer screen, the best thing that could happen to his district would be to retain the Hyde Park base, along with Englewood and other black neighborhoods, but to push the district north toward the Loop rather than west into poorer black neighborhoods. The district would remain reliably majority African-American and Democratic, but it would also provide more black voters for another district. For Obama, there was an added bonus as he looked forward to a race for the U.S. Senate: his constituency would now include many more wealthy, liberal whites--many of them Jewish--along Lake Michigan. As far as Corrigan could tell, his friend was no longer depressed about the loss to Bobby Rush. He was preparing for the next act.
"I have seen people who have run for lesser office than Congress and just disappear after losing," Corrigan said. "Barack has always been calm, cool, and collected. Nothing seems to faze him. He doesn't get mad. He is always creative when someone presents a barrier to get through. He can always think or talk his way through things."
In October, 2002, Obama was touring downstate with Dan Shomon again. One evening, they were standing beside Route 4 in Carlinville, a town of about seven thousand in Macoupin County. The town was known for houses ordered from the Sears catalogue. The two men, who were heading to a political dinner, were discussing what effect a Senate race would have on Obama's family. Shomon knew that Obama was the kind of person who tends to feel guilty, and he thought the race would end up making him feel guilty for the pressures it would put on Michelle. He was already feeling bad that he was missing so much of his little girls' childhood. When they pulled over to the side of the road, Shomon said, "I don't think you should run."
"I'm running anyway," Obama replied.