Chapter Ten
Reconstruction
In the generation after the Civil War, men of color--some born free, some born into slavery--began to fight their way into statehouses and the halls of Congress. These were, in the main, men of intelligence and bravery: There was Robert Smalls, who stole a Confederate ship in Charleston Harbor and handed it over to Union forces; in Philadelphia, after the war, he caused a sensation when he was thrown off an all-white streetcar and then led a black boycott of the city's transit system. In 1875, Smalls was elected a member of the South Carolina delegation to the House of Representatives. There was Hiram Revels, of Mississippi, a brilliant seminarian and itinerant minister, who had been imprisoned in 1854 in Missouri for preaching to blacks; in 1870, the Mississippi State Senate voted to send him to Washington to serve out the term for a U.S. Senate seat left vacant during the war. Revels, the first African-American in the Senate, served just one year. And there was Blanche Kelso Bruce, a wealthy landowner in Mississippi, who was born to a slave in Virginia. In 1875, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he fought for open immigration and the rights of Native Americans; at the 1880 Republican National Convention, Bruce received eight votes for Vice-President.
For black men and women, however, Reconstruction was a short-lived interregnum between slavery and Jim Crow, between iron subjugation and the rise of insidious voting restrictions and the lynching parties of the Ku Klux Klan. The ability of blacks to run for, and hold, higher office faltered miserably after neo-Confederate insurrection and terror in the mid-eighteen-seventies finally forced Washington to withdraw federal protection of blacks from white violence; by 1900, Southern states began to deny blacks, de facto and de jure, their right to vote. As Eric Foner, the leading historian of Reconstruction, points out, the resistance to black political empowerment was well and cruelly embodied by one of the country's greatest filmmakers and a best-selling historian: D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915) and Claude Bowers's best-seller The Tragic Era (1929) depicted black office-holders as flamboyantly corrupt mountebanks and helped justify disenfranchisement of black citizens and the brutality of the Klan.
On January 29, 1901, a black representative from North Carolina, George H. White, stepped forward to give his last speech in the Capitol--and what proved to be the last speech of any black lawmaker in Washington for a generation. White had initiated anti-lynching legislation, but his efforts had come to nothing. The racism that he now faced at home was unbridled. The Raleigh News and Observer expressed parochial shame that "North Carolina should have the only nigger Congressman." The paper's anxieties were soon relieved.
"This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the Negroes' temporary farewell to the American Congress," White told his congressional colleagues, "but let me say, Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people, rising people, full of potential force.... The only apology I have for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness, and manhood suffrage for one-eighth of the entire population of the United States."
The next time an African-American was elected to Congress was in 1929--this was Oscar De Priest of Chicago. There were no black Southerners in the House until 1973, with the arrival of Barbara Jordan, of Texas, and Andrew Young, of Georgia. The first African-American senators elected in the modern era were Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, in 1966, and Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat from Illinois, in 1992. It was Carol Moseley Braun who was very much on Barack Obama's mind in the fall of 2002.
Moseley Braun had served only one six-year term in the Senate--a term troubled by allegations of financial impropriety and by an unsanctioned meeting with the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. Moseley Braun lost her bid for re-election in 1998 to the wealthy conservative Republican Peter Fitzgerald, who spent fourteen million dollars of his own money on his campaign. When that race was over, she accepted an offer from Bill Clinton to serve as an ambassador--to New Zealand. Fitzgerald's career, it appeared, would be just as brief as Moseley Braun's. After battling for six years with his own state party organization and the Bush White House, Fitzgerald was rumored to be going back to private life and his career as a banker. After losing in 1998, Moseley Braun had said that she would never return to elective politics--"Read my lips. Not. Never. Nein. Nyet."---but she was anything but predictable. Now, in late 2002, Obama was waiting to see if she would attempt to return to the Senate. Operatives in the Democratic Party organization tried to find her a lucrative job offer, but that went nowhere. And Moseley Braun, for her part, cared no more for Obama than, in the end, Alice Palmer did.
Obama's dilemma was plain: in the 1992 Democratic primary, Moseley Braun won a narrow victory against two white candidates--the incumbent Alan Dixon and a personal-injury lawyer, Albert Hofeld. The way for Obama to win a primary in a crowded field would be to dominate the black and progressive votes in Chicago and the suburbs and to get at least some votes among the more conservative electorate downstate. Moseley Braun's presence in the race would be problematic and probably prohibitive. "Our bases overlapped so much--not just that she was African-American, but that she came out of the progressive wing of the party ... and our donor bases would have been fairly similar," Obama said. "So it would have been difficult, I think, to mobilize the entire coalition that was required for me to run." If Moseley Braun decided to run, he said, "I would probably have stepped out of politics for a while."
Obama had been traveling the state, alone and with Dan Shomon, from Rockford to Cairo, from East St. Louis to Paris, for many months as an undeclared candidate, but he had not yet sold his closest circle of friends and advisers--much less his wife--on the wisdom of running. Both Valerie Jarrett, who had become a close and trusted friend of the Obamas, and David Axelrod, who was now advising Obama informally, told him that after his loss to Bobby Rush, to lose in a Senate race would finish him in politics. Jarrett and Axelrod felt that Obama would be better off waiting for Richard M. Daley, who had been mayor for more than twelve years, to retire and then run to replace him. He could transform Chicago in a way that Harold Washington hadn't. After all, Obama had been thinking about City Hall since his days as a community organizer.
Jarrett conspired with Michelle Obama to organize a breakfast at her house and, together with two other friends, the investor John Rogers and the parking-lot magnate Martin Nesbitt, they planned an intervention. Jarrett said that she carefully "stacked the deck" to tell Obama the disappointing news: "We were all against him. We all thought it was a big mistake for his career and that he shouldn't do it.
"But unlike what he normally does, which is to go around the room and say, 'Tell me what you think,' Barack started out by saying, 'I want to run, and let me explain to you why,'" Jarrett recalled. "We were all kind of taken a little bit aback, because we thought the purpose was to talk about it, not that he'd made a decision. He went through all of his logic. He said, 'I didn't have a big political supporter when I ran for Congress. Now I have Emil Jones. I've already lined him up. I think I can get the necessary aldermanic support. I think it's going to be a crowded field, and that will work to my advantage.'"
Obama said that he had learned from the mistakes he'd made against Bobby Rush. In that race, he had challenged a powerful black politician with deep roots in a heavily black district--an act of impiety without sufficient justification. Congressional campaigns are waged door-to-door; they are neighborhood battles that often hinge on longstanding name recognition, ethnic solidarity, and personal connections. In a Senate race, Obama's particular talents--his ability to reach out to white suburbanites as well as to blacks and Hispanics; his increasingly evident talent to project on television--would be crucial, especially if he could raise enough money. Obama believed that if Moseley Braun stayed out of the race, he had a chance. According to Jarrett, Obama said, "I told Michelle if I lose, I'm out of politics. That would make her happy." He added, "If what you're worried about is fear, if I'm not afraid to fail, then you shouldn't be afraid to fail. And I need you in order to be successful. So why don't you step up and decide you're going to help me raise some money, because that's the one piece that I don't have worked out."
By the end of the breakfast, Jarrett had agreed to chair Obama's finance committee. Rogers and Nesbitt agreed to donate both time and money. Nesbitt, in addition to running a parking-lot management company, was a vice-president of the Pritzker Realty Group, a division of the Pritzker empire, one of the biggest fortunes in Chicago. Not long after the breakfast, in the summer of 2002, Nesbitt got the Obama family invited to Penny Pritzker's country house, on Lake Michigan. After talking with the Obamas, Pritzker and her husband, Bryan Traubert, went for a run near their house and, along the way, decided to play a key role in financing Obama's race. They were soon joined in the campaign by other wealthy Chicagoans: John Bryan, the head of the Sara Lee Corporation, James Crown, and old friends of Obama's like Newton Minow and Abner Mikva.
Michelle also agreed to go forward, though her anxieties were hardly allayed. "The big issue around the Senate for me was, how on earth can we afford it?" she said. "I don't like to talk about it, because people forget his credit card was maxed out. How are we going to get by? O.K., now we're going to have two households to fund, one here and one in Washington. We have law-school debt, tuition to pay for the children. And we're trying to save for college for the girls.... My thing is, is this just another gamble? It's just killing us. My thing was, this is ridiculous, even if you do win, how are you going to afford this wonderful next step in your life? And he said, 'Well, then, I'm going to write a book, a good book.' And I'm thinking, 'Snake eyes there, buddy. Just write a book, yeah, that's right. Yep, yep, yep. And you'll climb the beanstalk and come back down with the golden egg, Jack.'"
John Rogers, who had helped Moseley Braun re-establish herself in Chicago after she returned from Auckland, thought that he could sound her out about her plans. "My role was to talk to Carol and determine whether she was going to run and to even nudge her away from it," he said. But Moseley Braun was infuriatingly inscrutable. All Obama could do was continue to make contingency plans, travel around the state speaking at one event after another, and wait.
Finally, on February 18, 2003, Moseley Braun ended her indecision and announced that, in fact, she was running for office. The office was President of the United States.
Eric Zorn, an influential liberal columnist for the Tribune, was among the dumbstruck, writing that Moseley Braun was "ethically challenged" and was now "making reservations for fantasy land." In any event, the Senate race, for both parties, was absolutely open with no incumbent and not a single dominant candidate on the horizon. Obama called David Axelrod for advice and planned a press conference. He was in.
Obama's intentions did not yet impress everyone as entirely serious. Some of his colleagues at the University of Chicago still thought that he could be persuaded to give up politics for good and accept a tenured teaching position. At a fundraiser for Bill Clinton's charitable foundation, Obama's law-school colleague Geoffrey Stone watched his friend work the room. Stone felt pity for Obama. "After the defeat by Bobby Rush, people here thought Barack's political career was over," Stone recalled. "At the reception, I saw Barack in the crowd, and he was doing the politician thing, shaking hands, looking people in the eye, and I was thinking, What a waste! What is he doing this for? Twenty minutes later, we were at the shrimp bowl. I said to him, 'As your friend, I tell you, I was watching you work the room and I can't believe you're doing this. Why not settle down and be a law professor?' He says, 'Geoff, I appreciate that, but I really have to do this. I think I can make a difference. I've got to try.' As he disappeared into the crowd, I thought, What a putz. What a waste."
Luck is not the least of the many factors that figured into the rise of Barack Obama. First came the unseemly fall, in 1995, of Mel Reynolds, which led to Alice Palmer's decision to run for Congress and Obama's subsequent decision to succeed her in the Illinois State Senate. As a candidate for the statehouse, Obama enjoyed an easy path to office: he faced nominal competition in his first two campaigns and none at all in his third. Following the decisive loss to Bobby Rush--a campaign in which everything that could go wrong did--Obama was, in his run for the U.S. Senate, the beneficiary of one fantastic stroke of fortune after another. The first was Moseley Braun's unforeseen decision to run for President.
At the press conference opening his campaign, Obama declared that Peter Fitzgerald had done "zilch" for the general welfare. "Four years ago, Peter Fitzgerald bought himself a Senate seat, and he's betrayed Illinois ever since," he said. "But we are here to take it back on behalf of the people of Illinois." But before he had to answer any return volleys Fitzgerald retired from the Senate. He had recommended Patrick Fitzgerald, a crusading prosecutor from New York, as U.S. Attorney--whose appointment led to the indictments of corrupt officials in both parties. Peter Fitzgerald's biggest opponents to that appointment had been the Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and George W. Bush. He had battled his own party on everything from environmentalism (he was for it) to the funding of the Lincoln Library. After six years, he had tired of bankrolling a life in politics.
In the nearly three years since losing to Bobby Rush, Obama had, like an athlete in training or a musician woodshedding, worked hard at his craft. Not only had he become a far more engaged legislator (especially after the Democrats came into the majority); he had also lost his diffident bearing when it came to retail politics. After countless speeches, cocktail parties, panel discussions, fund-raising dinners, business lunches, and state fairs, after speaking in the pulpits of black churches in Chicago and in V.F.W. halls downstate, he had become a better orator, a smoother campaigner, a more disciplined fundraiser. Obama was beginning to develop his signature appeal, the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal, a conceit both sentimental and effective. He was no longer straining to be someone he was not. Instead, he was among those politicians who were forging a new identity for the next generation of black leaders, men and women with no direct connection to the civil-rights movement except in the ways the movement had helped them to gain greater access to the best colleges and law schools and other realms of American opportunity. Unlike the elder generation of black politicians, many Southern-born and educated at historically black colleges and seminaries, Obama navigated Harvard and Roseland, the Loop and Altgeld Gardens. He was adept at pitching his cadences one way in black churches, another way at a P.T.A. meeting downstate, and yet another at a living-room gathering in Hyde Park or the near North Side. Some of his critics took notice of these differences in intonation and body language and counted Obama as a phony, but there was no doubt that for the vast majority of his audiences he was developing into a fresh, compelling candidate. What was more, he was utterly aware of his shape-shifting capacities.
"The fact that I conjugate my verbs and speak in a typical Midwestern newscaster voice--there's no doubt that this helps ease communication between myself and white audiences," Obama said. "And there's no doubt that when I'm with a black audience I slip into a slightly different dialect. But the point is, I don't feel the need to talk in a certain way before a white audience. And I don't feel the need to speak a certain way in front of a black audience. There's a level of self-consciousness about these issues the previous generation had to negotiate that I don't feel I have to."
Salim Muwakkil, the left-wing columnist who had come to know Obama in the early nineties, noticed that Obama had also become much more comfortable campaigning in the kinds of lower-income black communities where he had lost so badly in his 2000 congressional race. "One day, Barack was at Wallace's Catfish Corner on the West Side, an outpost where black politicians met, run by a former alderman, Wallace Davis," Muwakkil recalled. "His talk was interrupted by a radical group composed of ex-inmates who said, 'We're tired of you uppity Negroes treating us like trash. No one cares about ex-inmates. We're growing in strength and we want to be dealt with.' Barack acknowledged their plight. He gave a calm, well-grounded response, in words they could understand, how they were barking up the wrong tree if they thought this was aiding their cause. They didn't buy it all, but it was hard-won respect."
Obama was also proving to be an African-American politician who made white voters--white voters who could never have imagined themselves voting for a black man for senator--come around to him. Eric Zorn, of the Tribune, followed Obama into various receptions and marveled at his ease with everyone in the room. "Obama was somehow all about validating you," Zorn said. "He was radiating the sense that 'You're the kind of guy who can accept a black guy as a senator.' He made people feel better about themselves for liking him." Obama's manner, his accent, his pedigree, his broad approach to the issues, told white voters, among other things: I am not Jesse Jackson. Jackson was a man of his time and place and history: he was born in the segregationist South, steeped in the civil-rights movement. Jackson certainly learned to navigate the broader world, but the difference in generation, psychology, speech, politics, and history was unmistakable. Jackson demanded painful change; the largest part of his history was one of heated rebuke, the rightful demand for redress. It was an illusion to think that all the victories were won, but Obama, so much younger, fluent in so many languages, possessed a manner of cool, yet winning embrace.
Obama seemed capable of making whites forget even the most alien detail about him--his name. Early on, Dan Shomon had polled Obama's name, asking voters if they would not prefer "Barack (Barry) Obama." They did, by a small percentage. "From the start of Obama's career, a lot of people mistakenly thought he was a Muslim from his name, especially a lot of blacks," Shomon recalled. "But Barack refused to change it. He was who he was and that was it."
Emil Jones, a creature of the South Side and the statehouse, accompanied Obama on one of his trips to southern Illinois and was amazed at the younger man's talent. "A little old lady said to me, 'I'm eighty-six years of age. I hope I live long enough because this young man's going to be President and I want to be able to vote for him,'" Jones recalled. "It was a little old white lady! It was astounding. There were three thousand people there. There were three blacks: him, me, and my driver."
Obama was at ease even doing what he liked least--raising money. "I remember one of Barack's first fund-raisers," his direct-mail consultant Pete Giangreco recalled. "It was in Evanston in the backyard of Paul Gaynor, a left-leaning lawyer. He's from an old lefty family: his father was a big lawyer, Mickey Gaynor, and his mother, Judy, a great fund-raiser. Their block seceded from the United States of America during the Vietnam War; it was that kind of block in the People's Republic of Evanston. Anyway, the fund-raiser was packed with the old-time progressive establishment people--but regular people, not stars. It was a warm, late-summer night. And Obama gave that riff about how if there was a senior downstate who can't get her prescription drugs, it matters to me even if it's not my grandmother; if a kid on the South Side can't read it matters to me even if it's not my kid; if a Muslim is hassled unjustly at the airport it affects my freedoms, too. It was one of those rare moments: goosebumps. And to a person they all walked out of there saying, 'Sign me up.' It was not a high-dollar thing but the buzz was there. These were people who had memories of Paul Simon, Harold Washington, Bobby Kennedy, and they were waiting and wanting to believe again. The word went out: this was the guy."
David Wilkins, the Harvard Law School professor who grew up in Hyde Park, threw one of the earliest out-of-state fund-raising events for Obama at his house in Cambridge. "I had to beg people to come and pay a hundred dollars," Wilkins recalled. "We got about twenty-five people to come and I remember feeling so bad. Collectively, we probably got about ten thousand dollars. And Barack sat right over there, right against that window, and he talked with us for three hours. He was dazzling. This was before he was a thing. It was like seeing Hendrix in a club before he was Hendrix."
To win, Obama needed top-level professional help. At first, his campaign manager was Dan Shomon, who had a keen understanding of the state and long experience with the candidate. Al Kindle took a leave of absence from Toni Preckwinkle's staff to make sure that Obama had an effective ground operation in Chicago's black neighborhoods. Kindle, who had worked for Harold Washington and Carol Moseley Braun, was especially adept at get-out-the-vote operations on Election Day. But, much more important, Obama now had the guidance of David Axelrod, who had established himself as the leading Democratic political and communications strategist in the state. A shambling, easygoing personality, Axelrod was a great believer in the use of narrative and biography to put across a candidate to the public; he was also not at all reluctant to use negative ads if the situation required it. Axelrod had first met Obama through Bettylu Saltzman during Project Vote in 1992, and had spent plenty of time learning the details of Obama's story and his personality in preparation for a campaign.
Obama and Axelrod remained friends and talked frequently about politics, but when it came time to hire a staff, Obama did not immediately leap into Axelrod's embrace. Axelrod was unblemished, but he was also a close associate of the Daley family, a certified member of the city's political establishment. Just as Obama wanted to meet Valerie Jarrett before Michelle accepted her offer of a job at City Hall, he also wanted to think through signing on with David Axelrod. In the end, though, it was not an agonizing decision: Obama wanted to win. He liked and trusted Axelrod. Going with Axelrod made him less of an outsider, perhaps, but it also helped make him a serious candidate for the United States Senate.
Born in 1955, Axelrod grew up in Stuyvesant Town, a post-war middle-class apartment development in Manhattan, just north of the East Village. His parents were liberal Jewish intellectuals and the household was full of talk about politics. Axelrod's mother was a reporter for the left-leaning newspaper P.M. and his father was a psychologist. In 1960, when he was five, his parents separated; he remembered seeing John Kennedy make a campaign speech near his building to a crowd of five thousand people that same year. When he was thirteen, he and a friend sold campaign materials at the Bronx Zoo supporting Robert Kennedy's Presidential campaign. R.F.K.'s assassination in 1968 was, outside of his parents' separation and divorce, the most devastating memory of his childhood.
As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Axelrod became obsessed with the city's politics and managed to get a job writing a column called "Politicking" for the Hyde Park Herald. In one fantastical column published in 1974, he described having a dream about Chicago and then waking to see a headline in the newspaper: "Daley in 20th year as Mayor." In fact, Richard J. Daley died two years later; Axelrod eventually worked not only for political independents but for the resumption of the Daley dynasty.
The year Axelrod started working for the Herald, his father committed suicide. Soon afterward, Axelrod decided to make his life in Chicago. On the recommendation of the political strategist Don Rose, who lived in Hyde Park and read the Herald, the Tribune gave Axelrod an internship right after his graduation, in 1976. After covering crime and other city stories for three years, Axelrod started working as a political reporter and soon became the paper's lead political writer.
At the Tribune, Axelrod's favorite editors included an ex-Marine who had penetrated a crime syndicate for a story. "It was a real 'Front Page' cast of characters," he said, "and they could get you excited about your work. They made you feel that journalism was really a calling."
Axelrod was an aggressive reporter with a future at the Tribune, but, after a while, he started to lose his taste for the paper. "The news side became much more permeated by the business side," he said. "In other words you could see the warning signs of where the news business was going." Axelrod and his wife, Susan, have a daughter, Lauren, who suffered irreparable brain damage from years of seizures caused by epilepsy. "The H.M.O.s wouldn't cover a lot. We were paying eight, ten thousand dollars out of pocket, and I was making forty-two thousand a year. It was a lot. The only reason I could even think about leaving is because my wife is a saint. She basically said, 'You've got to be happy or otherwise what's the point?' ... Besides, I always thought that the only two jobs worth having at the paper were writer and editor. The rest was middle management."
Axelrod left the Tribune in 1984 and helped manage Paul Simon's successful Senate campaign against the incumbent, Charles Percy. The Simon campaign attracted a group of young people who soon became fixtures in Illinois politics, including Rahm Emanuel. After the election, Axelrod turned down a chance to work for Simon in Washington and set up his own political consulting business and worked for Democrats, both independents like Harold Washington and "organization" candidates, most notably Richard M. Daley. Axelrod turned down roles in both Bill Clinton's and Al Gore's Presidential campaigns--his daughter's seizures were still too severe for him to travel as often as would have been necessary--but his reputation grew as he helped with successful campaigns for African-American mayoral candidates in Detroit, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Houston, and Philadelphia.
Among the recent campaigns that Axelrod had worked on before joining Obama was that of Rahm Emanuel, in 2002, when he ran for Congress from the Fifth District, on the North Side--the seat abandoned by Rod Blagojevich when he was elected governor. Although Emanuel was born and reared in Chicago, he spent many years working in Washington, as an aide to Bill Clinton, and then making a fast fortune as an investment banker. When he ran for Congress, he faced accusations of being a "millionaire carpetbagger." Axelrod helped silence those charges when he did a television ad for Emanuel featuring a Chicago police sergeant named Les Smulevitz. The setting was a Chicago diner. "I've been a Chicago police officer for a long time, and I've seen it all--the guns, the gangs, the drugs," the officer said. Then he praised Emanuel's crime-fighting bona fides as an aide to Clinton. "That's why the Fraternal Order of Police and Chicago firefighters backs Rahm Emanuel for Congress. And I'd tell you that even if I weren't his uncle."
Axelrod was a magnet for first-rate help. With Shomon, he brought in Peter Giangreco, the direct-mail expert, who had just advised Rod Blagojevich's successful run for governor; Paul Harstad, a polling expert who had helped Tom Vilsack, of Iowa, in his gubernatorial race; and, as deputy campaign manager, Nate Tamarin, who worked for Giangreco. Axelrod was Obama's chief strategist and media guru, but he could not manage the campaign. In the spring of 2003, he invited Jim Cauley, a tough, plainspoken political operative from the Appalachian territory in Kentucky, to talk with him and Obama about replacing Dan Shomon as campaign manager. The relationship between Shomon and Obama had grown more distant, and it was time, some in the campaign believed, to bring in someone with wider experience.
Cauley had impressed Axelrod when, in 2001, he helped Glenn Cunningham, an African-American and a former police officer and U.S. marshal, become mayor of Jersey City. The challenge of electing an African-American where blacks were not in the majority was something that Cauley had spent years thinking about and he had succeeded brilliantly with Cunningham.
When Cauley first met Obama at his modest campaign offices, he told him, "If you want to run an old-school African-American race, it's not my thing. I don't know how to do it."
But after listening to Obama talk for a while, Cauley could see that he was far less attuned to the generation of Jesse Jackson, Sr., and Bobby Rush. His natural cohort included younger African-American office-holders like Harold Ford, Jr., of Tennessee; Deval Patrick, of Massachusetts; Artur Davis, of Alabama; and, eventually, Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, D.C., and Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark. These were young men who had little, if any, direct memory of the civil-rights movement, but who possessed a distinct sense of debt to that past. Their experiences were hardly uniform: Ford, for instance, grew up in a prominent Memphis family and, as the son of a congressman, attended the St. Albans School for Boys and the University of Pennsylvania. Patrick was born in the Robert Taylor Homes projects on the South Side of Chicago and his father, a musician in the Sun Ra Arkestra, left the family. Patrick got a boost from A.B.C.--a nonprofit organization called A Better Chance, which helped send him to Milton Academy--and that led to Harvard College and then Harvard Law School. Cauley and Axelrod were eager to work with Obama. They agreed that he was not only individually gifted and politically progressive, but also that he was an exemplar of this new generation of black politicians who could potentially win elections--governorships, Senate seats--that had always been considered out of reach.
Even with Moseley Braun out of the Illinois Senate race, Obama faced a dizzying array of opponents in the Democratic primary. In more or less ascending order of importance:
Vic Roberts, a retired coal miner from southern Illinois.
Joyce Washington, an African-American health-care consultant from Chicago, who had once run for lieutenant governor.
Nancy Skinner, a liberal radio-talk-show host on WLS-AM, who had a degree in business from the University of Michigan but no experience at all in politics.
Gery Chico, a Hispanic former school-board president and top aide to Richard M. Daley.
Maria Pappas, the Cook County treasurer, whom the Tribune described as "known for such public eccentricities as twirling a baton and carrying a poodle in her purse."
Dan Hynes, the thirty-five-year-old Illinois comptroller, was a serious candidate and had the greatest name recognition in the field. Hynes had traditional union support and the endorsement of establishment politicians loyal to his father, Tom Hynes, the former Cook County assessor and president of the State Senate, who was also the Democratic Party boss on the Southwest Side. With his father's connections, Dan Hynes had lined up the support of Democratic stalwarts including the Democratic Party chairman, Michael Madigan; the Cook County Commissioner (and the Mayor's brother), John Daley; and John Stroger, the Cook County Board president. (Richard Daley did not make endorsements.) Hynes was earnest and decent, but he was also self-defeatingly cautious, a reluctant self-promoter, a poor campaigner, and irredeemably dull. In the Obama campaign's earliest poll, Hynes led the field by a wide margin, but that seemed mainly an indicator of name recognition.
Finally, there was Blair Hull. Of all Obama's opponents, he was the one whom Obama's team took most seriously. Hull was proof that, just when you believed that the politics of Illinois could get no stranger, there was always tomorrow. Hull grew up in Los Gatos, California. His father was a judge. After studying mathematics, computer science, and business, he taught high-school science and math for a year and then worked as a securities analyst. In the early nineteen-seventies, Hull took an interest in the blackjack theories of Ed Thorp, the author of Beat the Dealer, a cult classic for card-counters. Visiting Las Vegas several days a month, Hull refined his technique. Using a method called the "Revere Advanced Point Count," an even more sophisticated system than Thorp's, Hull and some teammates started to make thousands of dollars each. The run came to an end in 1977, when one of Hull's teammates, Ken Uston, published a memoir called The Big Player.
Hull used his winnings to start a computerized options firm. This proved more lucrative than blackjack. In 1999, he sold the firm to Goldman Sachs, for three hundred and forty million dollars. Living in Illinois, where there was no legal limit on the amount of money a candidate could spend on his own campaign, Hull figured that he could go far in politics--even though he never expressed any compelling reason for wanting to be elected. "He was rich and bored," one of his consultants said. "He thought being a senator might be cool. That was the whole thing."
Hull had thought first about running for the House of Representatives against Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Kaszak, in the Fifth District. According to Hull, Emanuel had made a fund-raising call to him and was so abrasive--"He was just being Rahm, which is why he is loved by so many people!"--that he decided to run himself. Hull paid to have some polling done, however, and he realized that he couldn't win. "So I went to see Richie Daley in City Hall and Daley wanted to be with Rahm," Hull said. "He says, 'You don't want to be in the House. It takes forever to get seniority and get anything done. You should be in the Senate. You don't have to work as hard.'... I would never have thought about the Senate. It was way above my league."
But the Democratic side of the race was so wide open and Hull's pockets were so deep that he decided to run. Like Michael Bloomberg in New York, or Jon Corzine in New Jersey, he would run as an "anti-politician," someone who lacked a political past but was so wealthy and accomplished in business that the voters might see him as incorruptible and somehow "above" ordinary politics. This was the traditional conceit of such candidates; to be "above" things. The problem was that Hull often came off as yet another in a long line of eccentric technocrat-businessmen who thought that all problems of policy and politics could be solved using the same equations with which they had made financial fortunes. When Joshua Green, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly, asked Hull if he could devise an algorithm for political success, Hull said, "Sure! You'd create a persuasion model based on canvassing that says 'The probability for voting for Hull is ... plus some variable on ethnicity ... with a positive coefficient on age, a negative coefficient on wealth, and that gives us an equation ... '" Hull then wrote down an equation in Green's notebook that he thought was a kind of mathematical map to victory:
Probability = 1/(1 + exp ([?]1 x ([?]3.9659056 + (General Election Weight x 1.92380219) + (Re-Expressed Population Density x .00007547) + (Re-Expressed Age x .01947370) + (Total Primaries Voted x [?].60288595) + (% Neighborhood Ethnicity x [?].00717530))))
Then he said to Green, "That's the kind of innovation I will bring to problems in the United States Senate." Years later, when asked if he had been joking by providing a regression analysis for winning a seat in the Senate, Hull was quiet for a while, then said, "Well, no. That wasn't lighthearted."
If Hull had been a man of ordinary means, his bizarre reliance on probability theory and his utter lack of knowledge about policy would have been disqualifying. But in Illinois, there was fresh experience of a candidate purchasing his seat as if it were on a sale rack at Marshall Field's. In 1998, Peter Fitzgerald had spent fourteen million dollars of his family's banking fortune to defeat Carol Moseley Braun. Hull declared that he was ready to spend triple that amount.
Hull hired veritable armies of consultants: issues experts; direct-mail, media, and Internet gurus; a communications director in Chicago; a communications director downstate; two separate teams of pollsters--all for top-dollar fees. Few of them came to work for Hull because they believed in him. There was nothing to believe in. In the summer of 2002, Hull's advisers taped a mock interview with Hull and played portions of it for a focus group of potential voters. Hull struck everyone in the room as almost comically banal and unpolished. "One woman thought she was being punked for an episode of 'Candid Camera,'" Mark Blumenthal, one of Hull's pollsters, said.
Hull needed help. He had approached David Axelrod before deciding whether to run against Emanuel for a House seat or against Obama, Hynes, and the others for Senate. Axelrod, who had not yet signed on with Obama, was not immune to the charms of a rich, self-financing client; in 1992, he had helped run the woeful campaign of Al Hofeld, a wealthy attorney, who had spent a great deal of money trying to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Alan Dixon. Axelrod met with Hull several times. Like many others, Axelrod had heard rumors about Hull: that he had been treated for substance abuse, that he had been through an ugly divorce, in 1998, from a successful real-estate broker named Brenda Sexton (whom he had married twice). There were even rumors that Hull had hit Sexton. In long, frank discussions, Hull confirmed the rumors about his troubled divorce and admitted that he had also had a problem with alcohol and cocaine.
In the end, however, Hull decided to run for the Senate and Axelrod went to work for his friend Obama. Axelrod was already convinced that he had signed on with a "once in a lifetime" politician, though Obama had a less than even chance of getting the Democratic nomination.
"Into the teeth of those two winds, Hynes and Hull, stepped Barack Obama, whose only real electoral history was getting the shit kicked out of him by Bobby Rush," Pete Giangreco said. "People who knew him loved him. The question was: Could we get his story out? Would we have the money? Could we get people to know him the way we knew him?"
Since many voters were unfamiliar with the candidates, the early focus in the 2004 primary race was on endorsements, particularly among labor unions and the traditional political organizations. More than a hundred elected officials in Chicago and downstate came out for Dan Hynes, and, thanks to his family name, so did the most traditionally minded unions, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. But Obama surprised the Hynes campaign by picking up the support of three activist unions, the Service Employees International Union (S.E.I.U.), the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (A.F.S.C.M.E.). Obama's reputation as a left-of-center politician skilled in the arts of compromise--especially his work on health care, child-care benefits, and judicial and ethics reform--appealed to the labor leaders, and he had courted them for years in Springfield and Chicago.
Obama had also, of course, established himself as an early opponent to the Iraq war. By the beginning of 2004, the war had lasted far longer than the Bush Administration had predicted and there was no sign at all of the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons that had been the main premise for invasion. The contrast between Hynes's support for the war and Obama's early opposition to a "dumb war" at the rally in October, 2002, on Federal Plaza, served Obama well as he picked up strength in liberal suburbs like Evanston.
Obama also impressed reporters and his small audiences with his performance on the stump. He began his speeches with some form of the now familiar riff on his "funny" name: "People call me 'Alabama.' They call me 'Yo Mama.' And that's my supporters! I won't say what my opponents call me." And then he would weave his own story into the larger story of community and the American future. His were not especially original liberal sentiments and positions, but when they came from the mouth of a young biracial man named Barack Obama audiences absorbed them at a different emotional level.
"The thing about Barack was that there were some aspects of campaigning that he enjoyed, like test-driving new devices in speeches," Giangreco said. "But he would complain sometimes about the campaigning. He wasn't like Bill Clinton, who loved the retail stuff and the strategizing. He just didn't have that relish for the game. He wasn't the happy warrior. But he was still damned good at it."
One of Obama's commercials ended with a peroration of hope and possibility: "Now they say we can't change Washington? I'm Barack Obama and I am running for the United States Senate and I approve this message to say, 'Yes, we can." Yes, we can. It was a phrase that resonated with Obama's career in community organizing. In 1972, the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, had used the slogan "Si, se puede": "Yes, we can," or "Yes, it can be done." A few years later, the second baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, Dave Cash, started the rallying cry "Yes, we can" after the team swept the Montreal Expos in a double-header. At first, Obama was dismissive of the phrase, thinking it exceedingly banal, a mode of cynical packaging. "He thought it was a little schlocky at first," Giangreco recalled. But both Axelrod and Michelle Obama convinced him that it would help rouse the spirits of African-Americans and other voters who had grown so accustomed to hard times and their own sense of resignation. Obama's first direct-mail piece was also meant to summon a certain emotional sense of resurgence in African-Americans and progressives. "Finally, a Chance to Believe Again" was the rubric; it was a phrase that later became "Change We Can Believe In."
Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign had enlightened the world of political operatives about the benefits of the Internet, but Obama's Senate campaign didn't have the money for a major effort on the Web--and certainly not for the kind of daily tracking polls that would allow them to calibrate their progress. Obama was frustrated by the campaign's initial approach to the Internet. "We are technologically illiterate," Obama told some volunteers at a parade in Evergreen Park, in July, 2003. Later in the campaign volunteers organized Dean-style "meetups" and an Obama for Senate Yahoo Group, but the efforts were modest.
Hull's pollster, Mark Blumenthal, and his media consultant, Anita Dunn, thought that, even though Obama began the race far behind, his appeal to African-Americans and Lakefront liberals, a significant sector of the Illinois Democratic electorate, would eventually make him the man to beat. "I remember being on the conference call when the opposition researcher talked about Obama," Blumenthal said. "There was nothing. Nice family, no trouble with the law, Columbia, Harvard. There was the mention of drugs in his book, but there was no way Blair Hull, with problems in the past with cocaine and alcohol, could do anything about that. Then the oppo guy finally said, 'Well, Obama is really liberal. His record in Springfield was really liberal.' And we said, 'So? We're not Republicans. That doesn't help.'"
Not long afterward, the Hull campaign organized a focus group to analyze Obama's potential appeal. It showed people a clip of his announcement speech, then footage of a black clergyman and Jesse Jackson, Jr., praising Obama at the event. Obama's kickoff event had been aimed, at least in part, at the African-American base. After the loss to Bobby Rush--who had, vindictively, come out for Hull--Obama could not just assume black support. At the focus group, Hull's team noticed that the whites in the room reacted poorly to the film. They didn't mention race, but they said they wanted "something new" or "That's Chicago politics." Hull's advisers suspected that they were reacting to Jackson, whose family was unpopular with many moderate and conservative whites. When they showed those same white voters footage of Obama alone and emphasized his biography--especially the lines about being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and teaching at the University of Chicago--his numbers increased dramatically, particularly among liberal, well-educated voters.
Over the fall and winter of 2003, Hull had spent heavily on media all over the state to get from zero to the mid-teens in the polls--a strategy his campaign called the "steady burn"--but then he stalled. The Hull team also carried around the secret about their candidate's divorce. In the summer of 2003, he had told his lawyers, pollsters, and consultants even more details than he had revealed to David Axelrod. The question was, should they tell the story early and let any controversy die down long before the primary or should they try to keep it all quiet? If they released the facts, would the news immediately and conclusively damage Hull's candidacy? At a marathon meeting with Hull, his advisers and lawyers said that the divorce records could not be unsealed without legal permission--and such permission was unlikely. Hull also assured his team that Brenda Sexton would be on his side should there be a leak. He made no mention of a damning deposition that she had given at the time of the divorce. Hull asked his aides about running a poll in Ohio, in which they would test public opinion in the event that the news got out, but they quickly assured him that he could save his money. A poll would surely tell him that news of spousal abuse would be fatal.
Hull decided to stay in the race and keep the records sealed as long as he could. There had been disagreement among the consultants, but they all stayed with him--and kept receiving their monthly checks. "We should have been screaming at him louder than we were," Blumenthal said. "The amount of money people were making was a factor."
The primary date was March 16th. All winter, Hull spent heavily on television, radio, and print advertising. The ads portrayed him as a loyal union member, a veteran (the only one in the race), a smart businessman, a protector of women and the elderly, an anti-politician fit to lead. It was the best campaign that money could buy. Hull traveled the state in a luxurious private jet and in a chartered red-white-and-blue R.V. nicknamed Hull on Wheels. He handed out "Give 'em Hull" baseball caps by the thousands. He employed more than a hundred people, and a squad of workers, who pounded in yard signs for seventy-five dollars a day. Even some people who came to cheer for him at campaign stops got money from the Hull organization.
The Tribune's lead writer covering the campaign, David Mendell, was so deeply struck by the expensive emptiness of the Hull campaign that he described it in the paper as "'The Truman Show' meets 'The Candidate.'"
Mendell enjoyed covering Obama. In the world of Chicago politics, Obama seemed unsullied, intelligent, committed; even his sometimes thin-skinned self-regard, which Mendell found to be outsized at times, was interesting. "The only thing he had a hard time laughing at was himself," Mendell recalled. "During the campaign, some of his opponents were criticizing him for casting all of those 'present' votes in Springfield. Once we were in an elevator and Obama pressed the button and it didn't light up. He did it again and it still didn't light up. Finally, I said, 'It's like all those present votes you cast! It won't commit.' Obama just stared at me. He wouldn't crack a smile."
But the truth was that Obama, at first, was not the center of the story. Hull was. Hynes, Pappas, and Chico, in particular, were all but ignored by the press in favor of Hull. For months, Hull appeared confident in his capacity to purchase victory and he seemed on his way. His efforts downstate undermined Dan Hynes. Unlike many of his consultants, Hull did not consider Obama to be a strong competitor. "Barack, at the end of the campaign, was a strong candidate, but at the beginning he wasn't," Hull recalled. Money, the Hull campaign believed, would keep the candidate safely ahead of Hynes and Obama.
Obama tried to overcome Hull's financial advantage with wry dismissals. "I don't begrudge extraordinarily wealthy people spending their money," he said. "But what I do know is that although you can buy television time, you can't buy a track record and you can't buy the experience that's necessary to hit the ground running when you get to the United States Senate." Laura Washington, a columnist at the Sun-Times and an ardent Obama supporter, wrote on February 15th, "There's some good and bad news there for Obama. My aunt Muriel, a Jewish grandmother in Highland Park, has been in Obama's corner for months. But these days she's feeling the heat from friends who have been wooed by Hull's commercials. She says Obama needs to get on TV--right now. 'You sense his honesty, you sense his commitment, you sense his brilliance. If he were on television, you'd fall in love with him,' she said." Laura Washington's aunt Muriel proved herself one of the keenest analysts of the race.
Dan Hynes, mystified that his campaign was stuck despite his many endorsements, watched the Hull ascension with despair. Hynes's campaign spokesman, at lunch with David Mendell, handed over a folder of opposition research. The folder contained papers indicating that the records of Hull's divorce from Brenda Sexton were sealed, but that she had filed a restraining order against him. "The Hynes people were doing the dirty work," Mendell said.
Soon after the meeting with the Hynes aide, Mendell interviewed Hull for a profile for the Tribune and he asked him about the divorce, the restraining orders, and much else. Hull refused to talk about any personal matters. "He was squirming in his chair but he just wouldn't address it," Mendell said. Mendell referred to the restraining order deep in his story. David Axelrod mentioned it to the Tribune's liberal columnist, Eric Zorn, who had already seen it, and who then wrote about it. At the same time, Mike Flannery, an aggressive reporter for WBBM, the CBS affiliate, started pressing Hull on the same documents.
For months Axelrod had been absorbed in figuring out how to present Obama in a media campaign that he was conceiving for late in the race. He and Cauley were mapping out the electoral math and the timing of the campaign. Their strategy was based on a set of simple premises: around two-thirds of the Illinois electorate lived within range of the Chicago media market. Obama's success would rest on capturing nearly the entire African-American vote and attracting progressive whites in the city, Cook County, and perhaps in the "collar counties" surrounding Chicago: DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will, and McHenry Counties. In Illinois, the black vote was ordinarily twenty-two or twenty-three per cent of the primary vote; by making sure that more African-Americans registered and got to the polls, Obama stood to gain tens of thousands of votes. The campaign also thought that Obama should focus as well on white liberal women, who vote in high numbers. Obama's team figured that in a seven-person primary race he shouldn't need much more than thirty-five per cent overall to win.
"We had done a focus group in Evanston with thirty-five-year-old-and-up white women," Jim Cauley said. "We showed them footage of Blair Hull, Dan Hynes, and Obama. When we showed them Hynes, one lady said, 'Dan Quayle.' When we showed them Hull we heard 'Mr. Potato Head' and 'embalmed.' Then we showed them Obama and we heard 'Denzel.' Another woman said, 'No, Sidney Poitier.' That was my eureka moment when I thought, Shit, we're gonna win this thing. This was five weeks out."
The race was shifting. At a radio debate in Springfield in late February, Hull's Democratic opponents started to call on Hull to release his divorce records and to attack him personally. One of the candidates, Maria Pappas, told Hull that he and his ex-wife "need to get inside of a room" and hash out their problems. Obama preferred to jab at Hull on the issue of the Iraq war. "The fact of the matter is, Blair, that you were silent when these decisions were being made," Obama said, rebutting Hull's contention that he had been an opponent of the war. "You were AWOL on this issue."
In mid-February, Hull's tracking polls had showed him slightly ahead. But on February 25, a CBS 2/Newsradio 780 poll showed that Obama had started to edge in front of Hull, twenty-seven per cent to twenty-five--not a decisive statistic but the beginning of a trend. Not long afterward, Obama gleefully announced that he had received a ten-thousand-dollar check from Michael Jordan, easily the biggest celebrity in Chicago. ("We debated whether to frame it in the office but--pragmatists that we were--we decided to go ahead and cash it.")
Early in the campaign, Hull had gambled that his divorce records would remain a secret. Now he tried to let the steam out of the story with a foolish maneuver. His spokesman, Jason Erkes, called in David Mendell to look at the divorce documents--but off the record. Mendell refused to cooperate under those terms. The Tribune and WLS-TV prepared to sue to get the papers unsealed by a judge. "What we discovered now was that everyone had the divorce deposition--everyone except for us in the campaign," Anita Dunn said. "And we knew now that we weren't going to win a case in court to keep it sealed."
On February 27th, Hull and his ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, decided to unseal the divorce papers themselves. Five years later, Hull said that he was woefully late in making the move. "I knew there was a chance this would come out," he said. Holding on to the files, he added, "was a risk that I thought was worth taking." Once he released them, it was easy to see why his consultants had hoped they would remain a secret. The documents revealed that on March 12, 1998, Sexton had asked a Cook County Circuit Court judge for protection because her husband had threatened to kill her. "I am in great fear that if this court does not enter a protective order in my favor and against Blair, as well as exclude him from my residence in which I am residing with my child ... Blair will continue to inflict mental, emotional and physical abuse upon me as he has done in the past," it said. "At this point, I fear for my emotional and physical well-being, as well as that of my daughter." The papers described multiple allegations of verbal and physical abuse, including one, from December 2, 1997, in which Sexton said, "Blair and I were calmly talking about trust issues, and I remarked everyone has a trust issue with him. Blair suddenly responded by saying, 'You evil bitch. You are a f---- c----,' repeatedly. He then hung on the canopy bar of my bed, leered at me and stated, 'Do you want to die? I am going to kill you, you f---- bitch.'" Reporting an incident from February 9, 1998, Sexton said, "He then held one of my legs and punched me extremely hard in the left shin. After that, he swung at my face with his fists a couple of times in a menacing manner just missing me."
Sexton had asked for a ten-million-dollars settlement, and eventually agreed to three million dollars plus half the value of their house, on the North Side. Hull informed the Tribune that he and Sexton "remain friends." At the same time, people inside Hull's campaign were telling reporters that Hull and Sexton could not bear to be in each other's company.
Hull insisted that the documents should not disqualify him from the Senate. "It is my total reputation in my life, my sixty-one years, that you should look at," he told reporters gamely.
But he knew. Hull called one of his advisers and kept saying, "We're done, right?" He was devastated. Blumenthal recalls that the morning after the story broke in the Tribune, Hull went to the same coffee shop he had been going to for a decade for a cup of coffee and a muffin. The people there had always greeted him with a friendly word. Now they looked away. "He felt like a pariah," Blumenthal said.
Hull now claims that Sexton's allegations in the files were false or exaggerated, merely part of a complex struggle for a financial resolution to an unhappy union. "Divorces are about two things: money and children," he said. "And there were no children." Hull insisted that any of the abuses recounted in the file were fiction.
Publicly, Obama kept his distance from Hull's personal travails. (Privately, he told Dan Shomon, "If you want to be in politics, do not beat your wife.") But one Tribune account suggested that the Obama campaign was not wholly innocent in the affair, and that its operatives had encouraged the press to look more deeply into the matter before Hull and Sexton finally decided to make a full disclosure. When I asked about that, Hull said only, "I'll let you come to your conclusions." He then hastened to describe his financial and political support of Obama's Presidential campaign. In 2004, the Obama Senate campaign paid for "books"--full-scale studies and opposition research--on its leading opponents, Hull and Hynes, but that was routine. (Each book cost around ten thousand dollars.) Obama's aides deny taking any strong or sneaky action to press the story about Hull's divorce records. Two key members of Obama's team insisted that the rumors about Hull were so current around Chicago, especially in political circles, that "everyone" knew about them.
"Ax didn't leak the story, but he might have fanned the flames to help our candidacy," Dan Shomon said. "Barack actually thought that if Blair Hull dropped out it would be a negative for us. We wanted Hynes and Hull to split the more conservative white vote."
Obama's advisers, like everyone else in Chicago politics, could readily see that, with just a few weeks left before the primary, the damage to Hull was probably fatal. "Women were not thrilled to read in the Sun-Times that [Hull] had called his wife the c-word," Jim Cauley recalled. "They peeled away from him in no time and went to where they were comfortable. Barack was a non-threatening, charismatic, intelligent guy with a beautiful wife and kids."
The revelation about Hull's ugly divorce came just after the start of the Obama media blitz that Axelrod had been planning for months. Axelrod's strategy from the start had been to hold off until the closing weeks of the campaign, and then, when voters were paying attention, spend on a round of ads for Obama. The strategy, whether or not it was informed by Axelrod's knowledge of Hull's past and the suspicion that it might eventually go public, worked in swift and remarkable fashion.
First came an introductory ad with Obama talking about his success at Harvard Law School and his progressive votes in Springfield. Obama's presence on the screen is soothing, competent, and dynamic. Compared with Hull or Hynes, he was Jack Kennedy. And Axelrod got the ending he wanted from his reluctant candidate: "I'm Barack Obama, I'm running for the United States Senate, and I approved this message to say, 'Yes, we can.'"
The Hull campaign showed the first Obama ad to a focus group to assess its potential effect. They were astonished. "It was a fabulous spot, Obama just exploded off the screen," Blumenthal said. "The people were saying, 'Wow, I want to know more about him.' Anita Dunn says that's where it all changed. At that moment, he stopped being a typical South Side politician for people. Now they were seeing someone who transcended race and the old racial politics. After that, Obama just shot up and out of sight."
Axelrod thought that he could deepen Obama's image as the inheritor of a progressive legacy in the state by enlisting Paul Simon, who was widely admired even in conservative downstate counties for his integrity and his lack of pretension. Simon agreed to come out for Obama, but just before the endorsement was announced, he suffered complications during surgery to repair a heart valve and died--a terrible blow to old friends and colleagues like Axelrod, whose first campaign had been Simon's Senate race twenty years earlier. After the funeral, Axelrod came up with an idea to "replace the irreplaceable," Pete Giangreco said. Simon's daughter Sheila appeared in a thirty-second spot, saying that Obama and her father were "cut from the same cloth."
"That ad was so effective," Dan Shomon said. "Barack had always had Paul Simon's endorsement if he wanted it, but he got something better: he got him speaking from the grave."
A final commercial featured archival footage of both Simon and Harold Washington, evoking the proudest moment in the history of progressive politics in Chicago. "There have been moments in our history when hope defeated cynicism, when the power of people triumphed over money and machines," the narrator said while images of Simon and Washington appeared and dissolved on the screen.
The campaign had originally planned to use these commercials during a two-week television blitz in the Chicago market at a cost of around eight hundred thousand dollars. But the combination of Blair Hull's nose-dive and Obama's increasingly impressive fund-raising machinery changed everything. As if overnight, the campaign raised enough money to intensify the media effort in the vote-rich Chicago media market and also run ads downstate. They were able to run ads on stations in Carbondale and even Paducah, Kentucky, which broadcasts into southern Illinois. "The money was pouring in," Cauley said. "We just kept adding markets." The ad campaign, one of Hull's advisers admitted to Giangreco, put the Obama campaign "on a rocket sled."
The money hadn't just fallen out of the sky. One of the things that Obama had learned since the congressional campaign was to sit down and make a long string of fund-raising calls. And when he went on fund-raising missions to the living rooms of wealthy supporters, he refused to stop at giving his usual stump speech and taking questions. Many candidates let their hosts or surrogates make the appeal for funds, but Obama would often say, "I like to do my own dirty work" and put the arm on his supporters himself. To donors who told Obama that they could "do five"--meaning donate five thousand dollars--Obama would say, "I need your help. Can you do ten?" "Go the extra mile!" "I need you to feel some pain!" He was not shy. Steven Rogers, a businessman who taught at Northwestern, told the New York Times that he was once paired with Obama in a golf game and, by the sixth hole, Obama had told him that he wanted to run for Senate--"and by the ninth hole, he said he needed help to clear up some debts."
Hull's presence had complicated the financial picture of the race. According to the so-called millionaire amendment in federal election laws, if a wealthy self-financing candidate is in the race, his opponents can accept contributions many times the usual limit. Among those who donated the maximum, or close to it, to Obama's campaign were members of the Pritzker and Crown families, the developer Antoin Rezko, and members of the George Soros family, as well as friends such as John Rogers, Valerie Jarrett, and Marty Nesbitt; classmates from Harvard; and colleagues at the University of Chicago. Because of the millionaire's amendment, nearly half of Obama's total funds came from fewer than three hundred donors. At the start of the campaign, Obama had told Nesbitt, "If you raise four million, I have a forty-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise six million, I have a sixty-per-cent chance of winning. You raise ten million, I guarantee you I can win." In the end, Obama and his team raised more than five million for the primary alone. Sometimes, during the final media blitz, the campaign would run out of cash and they would have to hold their commercials for a day or two; but, in general, the funds were there to run strong to the end.
Obama had started out the campaign riding around the state in his Jeep Cherokee, often alone, barely able to draw crowds downstate of fifty or a hundred. He'd ride around from one event to the next, smoking cigarettes, talking on his cell phone, listening to books on tape. But as the money came in and as his chances increased, Cauley and the others persuaded Obama to stop driving himself--"The guy was wasting time looking for parking spaces!"--and sell the Jeep. By Thanksgiving of 2003, he was being driven around in an S.U.V.
By early March, it was all but over for Blair Hull--and he knew it. He skipped one of his own press conferences, leaving his spokesman to explain that the candidate had been spending time taking senior citizens to Canada to buy cheaper prescription drugs. The disasters kept coming for Hull: a little more than a week before the Democratic primary, he admitted that he had smoked marijuana and used cocaine "occasionally" in the nineteen-eighties and had been treated for alcohol abuse.
As if Hull's downfall had not been lurid enough, a story in the Tribune revealed that Jack Ryan, the Republican frontrunner, had sealed his 1999 divorce records and that the paper was trying to gain access to them. Ryan had been married to a Hollywood actress named Jeri Ryan, the star of two major television series: "Boston Public," an earnest high-school drama series in which she played a teacher named Ronnie Cooke, and "Star Trek: Voyager," in which she played an equally earnest former Borg drone named Seven of Nine from the home planet of Tendara Colony, where everyone apparently wears form-fitting one-piece Lycra suits. Jeri Ryan met her husband in 1990, when she was dealing blackjack at a charity event.
For Obama, victory in the primary was assured. Hull was spiraling downward, Hynes was stuck, and the rest of the candidates never got much traction. Obama had all but escaped criticism in the press. Not only did he impress voters and the media with his intelligence and seriousness, he had also avoided being the focus of attention until late in the race. He was never the subject of a negative ad. "When you are at sixteen percent, no one is kicking your ass because no one thinks you are for real," Jim Cauley said. One of the few criticisms of Obama that Cauley could recall from late in the race came when a conservative Jewish group complained that, in filling out a questionnaire, Obama had referred to Israel's security "wall" rather than calling it a "fence."
Just before the primary vote, Obama collected glowing endorsements from the Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Chicago Defender, and many outlets in the suburbs and downstate. With Hull's candidacy in ruins, downstate voters were migrating not to Hynes, as everyone expected, but to Obama. "The conventional wisdom even as late as 2004 was that there were hardly any African-Americans downstate and people there would never dream of voting for a black man named Barack Obama," Anita Dunn said. "This was a part of the country where the Klan had been active in the nineteen-twenties. But it turned out that when people were suffering economically, they were ready for a change. You saw the phenomenon of people feeling better about themselves for supporting an African-American. It was a real harbinger of the future." Dunn went on to become a close aide to Obama during his Presidential run four years later and his first White House communications director.
On the Sunday night before the primary, Obama was at his campaign headquarters with Jim Cauley, discussing his prospects. "A survey we had said he was at forty-eight, and I thought, No way in hell," Cauley said. "I thought we had a ceiling--in a seven-way race you can't get over forty-five. Barack said, 'You think we're at forty-five?' But now we weren't this tiny campaign anymore. Now there were four hundred people on board. He had run around the state and no one in the press would talk to him, but once he was on TV in those ads his life changed. And I said, 'Yeah, dude, you're a different human now.'"
On Primary Day, March 16th, Obama's campaign focused on maximizing the African-American turnout. It sent fifteen-seat vans all over the South Side to get people to the polls. If someone wasn't home, volunteers put a sticker on the door. Later, if the sticker was gone, they'd know the resident was home. Then they would knock on the door again and try to persuade the person to vote--and then call the van.
Eric Zorn, the Tribune columnist, spent time with Obama on Primary Day and wrote that he "carried himself with the engaged serenity you often see at a wedding in the father of the groom: focused, but not preoccupied; happy, but not ecstatic." The Obama family camped out in a suite on the thirty-fourth floor of the Hyatt Regency Chicago, a hotel operated by the Pritzker family. When, just after 7 P.M., the call came that WBBM-TV had projected him the landslide winner, Michelle Obama gave her husband a high-five and took on the voice of Sally Field at the Academy Awards: "They like you! They really like you!"
In the last three weeks of the campaign, Obama had gone from sixteen per cent to fifty-three per cent. As the television news crews filed in to film the scene, Obama pointed to Malia and Sasha, who were wearing their Sunday best for the victory party. Obama said his biggest concern was if "these dresses will hold up until ten o'clock." At 8:13 P.M., Hull called Obama to concede. When Paul Simon's daughter, Sheila Simon, introduced Obama later that night to the cheering crowd, she held up one of her father's signature bow ties and said that the tie was the only real difference between the winner and her father.
"I think it's fair to say that the conventional wisdom was we could not win," Obama told his supporters. "We didn't have enough money. We didn't have enough organization. There was no way that a skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name like 'Barack Obama' could ever win a statewide race. Sixteen months later we are here, and Democrats all across Illinois--suburbs, city, downstate, upstate, black, white, Hispanic, Asian--have declared: Yes, we can!"
Joining Obama on the stage that night with his family was Jesse Jackson, Sr. The Obama-Jackson relationship was deeply complicated. Jackson, who had been an impetuous protege of Martin Luther King both in the South and in Chicago, had made history in 1984 and 1988 with his Presidential campaigns. Now he was witnessing the rise of a generation that, he knew, viewed him with ambivalence. They were displacing him. Jackson had spurned Obama before, endorsing Alice Palmer for State Senate and then Rush for Congress, but this time he stood with Obama for the U.S. Senate. On primary night he told the crowd, "Surely Dr. King and the martyrs smiled upon us."
The next morning, Obama had breakfast with his opponents, and with the state's Democratic Party leadership. A triumphant Emil Jones was there, and so was a chastened Bobby Rush.
Later in the day, Obama flew around the state--to Springfield, to Quincy, to Marion--to thank the voters. And for perhaps the thousandth time, he told reporters that he would not be held back by race even as he prepared for a general election campaign to become the only African-American in the U.S. Senate. "I have an unusual name and an exotic background, but my values are essentially American values," he said (not for the first time, and not for the last). "I'm rooted in the African-American community, but not limited by it."
About a week after the primary, Obama witnessed the most dramatic evidence possible that his appeal was not limited by race. With Senator Durbin, he traveled to the southernmost tip of Illinois, to the small town of Cairo. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Cairo had been a center for the White Citizens Council. The schools were segregated. There were cross burnings and harassment of blacks and Jews. As Obama and Durbin were driving into town, Durbin said, "Let me tell you about the first time I went to Cairo. It was about thirty years ago. I was twenty-three years old and Paul Simon, who was lieutenant governor at the time, sent me down there to investigate what could be done to improve the racial climate in Cairo." When Durbin arrived in town, a resident picked him up and brought him to a motel.
As Durbin was getting out of the car, the man said, "Excuse me, let me just give you a piece of advice. Don't use the phone in your motel room because the switchboard operator is a member of the White Citizens Council, and they'll report on anything you do." Durbin checked into the room and unpacked. A few minutes later there was a knock on his door and there was a man at the door who said, "What the hell are you doing here?" Then he just walked away.
"Well, now Dick is really feeling concerned and so am I because, as he's telling me this story, we're pulling into Cairo," Obama recalled the following year, at an N.A.A.C.P. dinner in Detroit. "So I'm wondering what kind of reception we're going to get. And we wind our way through the town and we go past the old courthouse, take a turn and suddenly we're in a big parking lot and about three hundred people are standing there. About a fourth of them are black and three-fourths are white and they all are about the age where they would have been active participants in the epic struggle that had taken place thirty years earlier. And as we pull closer I see something. All of these people are wearing these little buttons that say 'Obama for U.S. Senate.' And they start smiling. And they start waving. And Dick and I looked at each other and didn't have to say a thing. Because if you told Dick thirty years ago that he, the son of Lithuanian immigrants born into very modest means in East St. Louis, would be returning to Cairo as a sitting United States senator, and that he would have in tow a black guy born in Hawaii with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas named 'Barack Obama,' no one would have believed it. But it happened."