The Bridge_The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Part Three
So he tested these truths of his against the blight of Chicago.
--Saul Bellow, The Dean's December



Chapter Seven
Somebody Nobody Sent
In the summer of 1991, Barack Obama moved back to Chicago and waited for his public life to begin. Abner Mikva, a fixture of liberal independent politics in Chicago and a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, had offered him a clerkship, and although Obama turned him down, the two men became friends, having breakfast or lunch downtown or at the Quadrangle Club in Hyde Park to talk politics. Obama confided that at some point--soon, he hoped--he wanted to run for office. Mikva was coming to see that, while Obama was more serene than Bill Clinton, far less grasping and needy, he was immodest in his ambition. "I thought, this guy has more chutzpah than Dick Tracy," Mikva said. "You don't just show up in Chicago and plant your flag."
By way of avuncular counsel, Mikva told Obama one of the most famous stories in the history of Chicago politics. Mikva grew up in Milwaukee, where the political culture was so open that, legend had it, someone who volunteered at party headquarters in the morning could wind up county chairman by nightfall. In 1948, Mikva, a student at the University of Chicago Law School, wanted to work for the Democratic Party, which was running two liberals: Paul Douglas for the Senate and Adlai Stevenson for governor. On the way home from class one night, Mikva stopped by the ward headquarters. "Timothy O'Sullivan, Ward Committeeman" was painted on the window. Mikva went in and asked if he could work for Stevenson and Douglas. The ward committeeman took the cigar out of his mouth and asked, "Who sent you?"
"Nobody sent me," Mikva replied. "I just want to help."
The committeeman jammed the cheroot back in his mouth and frowned.
"We don't want nobody that nobody sent," he said and dismissed the young law student.
Recalling the story and Obama's resigned reaction, Mikva said, "That's Chicago. It's a place where people put their relatives in jobs, where the machine ruled and, to an extent, still does. You just don't show up and come barging in."
Obama did his best to steer clear of the machine. He spent a dozen years as a lawyer and as a teacher. His part-time work in both professions also helped shape his political sensibility, deepen his thinking (especially about the law and race), and widen his web of associations. Judson Miner, who was Obama's mentor at Davis Miner, was a model of anti-establishment, anti-machine politics. In 1969, two years after graduating from law school and a year after the riots at the Democratic Convention, he founded the Chicago Council of Lawyers, an organization of progressive attorneys intent on creating an alternative bar association to challenge the failings of the legal system and improve services for the poor. The council issued reports analyzing candidates for the bench, campaigned for judicial reforms, and placed articles in the local press. Miner did not cultivate the radical reputation of a William Kunstler, but, when he was still in his thirties, he gained a singular reputation in civil rights. In Chicago, he was the civil-rights lawyer, known for representing plaintiffs in sex- and race-discrimination suits, voting-rights suits, tenants'-rights and corporate-whistleblower cases. Among African-Americans, especially, Miner was celebrated for having been Harold Washington's corporation counsel--the top legal job in City Hall--in his final two years in office.
Davis Miner was a boutique firm with around a dozen lawyers. As with all small civil-rights firms, one of its biggest problems was that, when it sued the city or a large corporation, it was almost always in opposition to a huge LaSalle Street firm that was able to throw armies of associates into the fray, filing one defense motion after another, swamping the plaintiff under an avalanche of work and accumulating fees.
From 1992 to 1995, Obama was an ordinary associate at Davis Miner, even though he spent a great deal of time writing and some time teaching. From 1997 until 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, he was "of counsel," a part-time position paid by the hour. Obama rarely went to court and his overall legal record was modest. He appeared in court as counsel in five district-court cases and five cases heard by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. All told, Miner said, Obama "contributed" to thirty cases, often in a secondary or tertiary role. Mainly, he drafted memoranda and motions, and prepared depositions. "I was one of the better writers," Obama recalled. "I ended up doing the more cerebral writing, less trial work. That's actually something I regret, not doing more trial work."
Obama may not have compiled a voluminous case record, but the cases he worked on reflected the sense of virtue he sought when he turned down corporate jobs and judicial clerkships. Unlike so many of his Harvard classmates, who were making six-figure salaries at corporate firms and expecting more, Obama, at a salary of around fifty thousand dollars a year, was battling corporations in court rather than defending them. In 1994, he worked on a suit against Citibank and its mortgage practices regarding minorities. The same year, he was on a team of lawyers that, in the Seventh Circuit, defended a securities trader named Ahmad Baravati, who had been blackballed by his employer, Josephthal, Lyon & Ross, after reporting fraudulent practices at the firm. Arguing that an arbitrator had the right to award Baravati a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in punitive damages, Obama parried with Judge Richard Posner, one of the leading conservative jurists in the country. In the end, Posner sided with Obama's client. ("I wrote the opinion on the case, but I don't remember any of the lawyers," Posner said. "It wasn't a memorable case.")
In 1995, the governor of Illinois, Jim Edgar, refused to implement legislation that allowed citizens to register to vote when they applied for a driver's license. Edgar, a Republican, was wary of the legislation, for it was sure to lead to the registration of many more Democrats than Republicans. A number of progressive groups, including the League of Women Voters and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), represented by Obama, joined the Justice Department in a lawsuit. Obama, whose keenest legal interest at Harvard and Chicago was voting rights, did not speak during the courtroom proceedings but his side won its case.
As a lecturer at the University of Chicago, Obama entered a world quite apart from community organizing on the South Side, civil-rights law downtown, and even Harvard Law School. Obama had known plenty of conservatives at Harvard; he won the presidency of the Law Review in part because the conservative minority thought that he was a liberal who would listen to them. The law-school faculty at Chicago was ideologically diverse--and prided itself, above all, on an atmosphere of fierce and open argument--but the conservative strain ran deep.
There were plenty of liberals on the faculty; Geoffrey Stone, Abner Mikva, Lawrence Lessig, Elena Kagan, David Strauss, Diane Wood, Martha Nussbaum, and Cass Sunstein were among Obama's acquaintances and friends. But, like the department of economics, the law school had a strong contingent of "law and economics" libertarians, like Richard Epstein, Alan Sykes, and Reagan-appointed jurists like Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook. Just as the economics school attracted students wanting to get a full dose of the monetarist theory developed there by Milton Friedman and George Stigler, many Chicago students set aside acceptances at Harvard, Yale, or Columbia in order to study with the contingent of right-leaning rationalists in Hyde Park. Their views were no less varied than the liberals', but they were, as a whole, far less interested in terms like "justice" and "fairness" ("terms which have no content," according to Posner) than in the economic liberty and interests of the individual. Since the late nineteen-seventies, generally speaking, the conservatives at Chicago had disdained what they saw as a vapid consensus among liberal legal academics. They opposed government regulation, judicial activism, and legislation that aimed at redistributing income. They spoke as much about markets as they did about legal precedent. They argued in favor of a less restricted Presidency and against social policy imposed by judicial decree.
Chicago's law school is a third the size of Harvard's, but, proportionally, the number of conservatives on the faculty and of students active in the Federalist Society was far greater. One consequence of the Reagan revolution, however, was that the Chicago faculty had lost members to the federal bench, the Justice Department, and the regulatory agencies. As a result, some of the conservatives who remained when Obama arrived thought that the school's uniqueness had eroded several years earlier. "The height of the conservatism was in the late nineteen-seventies, which was a bad period, a lot of disorder, with a sense of the country declining and a lot of over-regulation," Posner said. "There was a fair amount of resistance to affirmative action and to the relaxing of academic standards, and the conservatives, even into the eighties, were outspoken and distinctive. But even as elements of conservatism persisted at Chicago, it's important not to exaggerate it, that it is a relative matter. In every election, a majority of the Chicago faculty votes for the Democrat, whereas at Harvard or Yale law school it's probably closer to ninety percent." In 2008, Posner, perhaps the most distinguished conservative on the federal bench, came to admire Obama--"especially," he said, "after one of my clerks, who had worked with him at the Harvard Law Review, told me that he wasn't even all that liberal. I was reassured."
At Chicago, the constitutional-law curriculum is divided into separate courses on structural questions and individual rights. Obama taught the latter, focusing on such issues as equal protection, voting rights, and privacy, rather than on such questions as the separation of powers.
Obama also taught a seminar course called Current Issues in Racism and the Law. He had small groups of students prepare presentations on one of a range of complicated questions: interracial adoptions; all-black, all-male schools; the gerrymandering of voting districts according to race; discriminatory sentencing; hate crimes; welfare policy; the reproductive freedom of women who have taken drugs during pregnancy or neglected their children; reparations for the descendants of slaves; hate speech; school financing. Rather than assign whole books, Obama, like many other professors, assembled a thick packet of readings. To establish a historical and theoretical understanding of race, he assigned excerpts from George Fredrickson's The Arrogance of Race and Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race. Both readings deal with historical arguments over whether race is a matter of biology or of social construction. In order to confront Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal policy, of shifting Native American populations west of the Mississippi River, he assigned not only court cases and Jackson's proclamation but also excerpts from The Law of Nations, by Emeric de Vattel, a Swiss legal philosopher of natural law, who exerted a strong influence on the American Founders. He assigned the essential court cases on slavery, a speech by the nationalist Martin Delany, and two texts by Frederick Douglass: "Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?" and "The Right to Criticize the American Institutions." Similarly, he covered Reconstruction, retrenchment, and the rise of Jim Crow by assigning the essential legislation and court cases--the Emancipation Proclamation, the South Carolina Black Codes, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, Plessy v. Ferguson--and a series of documentations of lynchings, and excerpts from Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, and speeches by Marcus Garvey, the leading figure of early black nationalism. In covering the civil-rights era, Obama assigned King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and speeches by Malcolm X but also conservative critiques like Robert Bork's "Civil Rights--A Challenge." He included an ideologically pitched exchange on affirmative action and civil-rights law among Randall Kennedy, the liberal African-American law professor at Harvard; Charles Cooper, a conservative litigator who worked in the Reagan Justice Department; and Lino Graglia, a law professor at the University of Texas who refers to affirmative action as a "fraud." The three essays that Obama assigned were first presented by the Federalist Society at Stanford in 1990, at a symposium on the future of civil-rights law, and published the following year in a special issue of the right-leaning Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
In the final part of the course, Obama's students read another series of ideologically opposed texts: Shelby Steele's conservative essay "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?"; Derrick Bell's radical critique in Faces at the Bottom of the Well; Bart Landry's analysis of the scale and nature of the new black middle class; John Bunzel's study of racial tension at Stanford University; and an excerpt from William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged, a sociological examination of the social isolation of the African-American poor.
When, during the Presidential campaign, the New York Times published Obama's syllabus online, the reporter Jodi Kantor solicited opinions of the course from four prominent law professors across the ideological spectrum. Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale, praised the "moral seriousness" of Obama's syllabus for the race seminar and went so far as to compare Obama to Lincoln as a legal and moral thinker, a politician who, Amar said, understood the Constitution better than the Supreme Court justices of his era. "Some of the great mysteries and tragedies of human life and American society--involving marriage, divorce, childbearing, cloning, the right to die with dignity, infertility, sexual orientation, and yes, of course, race--are probed in these materials in ways that encourage students to think not just about the law, but about justice, and truth, and morality," Amar wrote. The results were effusive on the right as well. John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University and a former clerk to Clarence Thomas, said that Obama was "leading his students in an honest assessment of competing views," and a libertarian, Randy Barnett, a professor of law at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, remarked that Obama's summaries of key legal questions of race and the law were "remarkably free of the sort of cant and polemics that all too often afflicts academic discussions of race." Overall, Pamela S. Karlan, a voting-issues specialist at Stanford Law School, inferred from reading Obama's syllabus and his examination questions for the constitutional-law class that he "could have been a first-rate academic had his interests gone in that direction."
The extravagance of these professional opinions was undoubtedly influenced by the emotions of the 2008 election campaign, but they accord with what Obama's students say about their experiences in his classes over the years. Liberal students considered Obama a "godsend," one former student said, for his open-mindedness and his personality. His teaching ratings were among the highest at the law school and invariably gave him credit for a capacity to get students to see the complexities of a given question, and for a cool yet welcoming demeanor. One student, Byron Rodriguez, who took courses with Obama in both racism and the law and voting rights, said that he was especially sympathetic to students from disadvantaged backgrounds and was clearly liberal, but his style was always to try to present all views and challenge the students to argue with them without being dismissive. "I remember reading Bork's opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Obama even putting that into the best light," Rodriguez said.
"He was different from other professors at Chicago," Daniel Sokol, a student in Obama's class on Race and the Law, who teaches law at the University of Florida, said. "A lot of the faculty was heavily Socratic in method, even in upper-level courses. Obama was demanding with questions, but he wouldn't just stick on one student. It was a small seminar. It felt more pleasant when he asked tough questions. It wasn't the inquisition model of teaching, which was so popular at U. of C."
One senior faculty member, Richard Epstein, a libertarian known for his corrosive wit and his fire-hose Socratic style, laughed as he acknowledged stylistic differences with Obama, saying that some professors--"guys like me"--listen to a student make a wrong-headed analysis and pounce on it, goading the student into studying, and thinking, harder. Obama, Epstein said, was more the kind of teacher who listened to a wrong-headed analysis and then, by way of reframing it, corrected and deepened it, always careful to make the student feel listened to.
In a fairly traditional way, Obama insisted that students learn to understand and argue all sides of a question. "But there was a moment when he let his guard down," one former student recalled. "He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn't think it was really workable. You could tell that he thought he had let the cat out of the bag and felt uncomfortable. To agree with reparations in theory means we go past apology and say we can actually change the dynamics of the country based on other situations where you saw reparations. For example, the class talked about reparations in other settings: Germany and the State of Israel. American Indians. We talked about apology and the South African Truth Commission. After fifteen minutes of this, as the complexities emerged--who is black, how far back do you go, what about recent immigrants still feeling racism, do they have a claim--finally, he said, 'That is why it's unworkable.'"
As he was as an organizer and as a law student, Obama was known for his impulse to reconcile opposing points of view, to see where the convergences were, and, by doing so, to form alliances. Cass Sunstein, a prolific legal scholar who taught at Chicago and later also at Harvard, was one of Obama's closest friends at the law school. Sunstein regards himself as both a liberal and a judicial minimalist, and shares Obama's intellectual temperament--a reluctance to be too far ahead of the electorate on a prevailing legal and moral question. During the Presidential campaign, when Sunstein was asked about Obama's view of legal ideology, it seemed that there was not a great deal of difference between the attitudes he expressed in the classroom at Chicago and those he expressed as a politician. "If there's a deep moral conviction that gay marriage is wrong, if a majority of Americans believe on principle that marriage is an institution for men and women, I'm not at all sure [Obama] shares that view, but he's not an in-your-face type," Sunstein told the writer Larissa MacFarquhar. "To go in the face of people with religious convictions--that's something he'd be very reluctant to do," he added. "[John] Rawls talks about civic toleration as a modus vivendi, a way that we can live together, and some liberals think that way.... But I think with Obama it's more like Learned Hand when he said, 'The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.' Obama takes that really seriously. I think the reason that conservatives are O.K. with him is both that he might agree with them on some issues and that even if he comes down on a different side he knows he might be wrong. I can't think of an American politician who has thought in that way, ever."
Obama was not much involved in the workshops, seminars, and lunches at which faculty members regularly exchanged ideas and discussed their works-in-progress. He was somewhat removed: first because he was working on Project Vote, his book, and his own law cases, and later because of his life as a politician. "My sense is that he was really close only to Cass Sunstein and a couple of other liberals," Richard Posner said. Nevertheless, he was well known and well liked. "He always had that aura: He said 'good morning' and you thought it was an event," Epstein said. "He has that kind of charisma--just like Bill Clinton, but without the seediness of Clinton. He makes you feel embraced and listened to. Clinton was always seducing you. This is a more wholesome version of the experience."
Obama was a consistent presence in Hyde Park for a dozen years; when he won a seat in the state legislature and had to be in Springfield for much of the week, he moved his class schedule to Monday mornings and Friday afternoons. Although he was a devoted teacher, he showed little interest in becoming a legal academic. He never published a single academic article. Nevertheless, the deans at Chicago regarded him so highly, and were so eager to increase the diversity of their faculty, that they eventually gave him the rank of "senior lecturer," a title that had been given to three judges on the Seventh Circuit, two conservatives (Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook) and a liberal (Diane Wood). Even though he had no publications to his name, they hinted at the possibility of tenure. Obama politely demurred. "Barack did not focus on academic publication, because he knew where he was going, and that was to public service," the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who teaches at the law school, said. "That's what made him happy. That's what made his eyes light up."
Before embarking on the story of the political rise of Barack Obama, it may be useful to take time out for a mental exercise. Here it is:
Name your state senator.
No, not the two legislative titans who represent your state in Washington, D.C. The question is, who represents your district in your state capital?
Fine. Now that you have Googled the name and are trying to wrap your mind around the pronunciation and other such details, imagine that this undoubtedly decent, if generally anonymous, man or woman emerges in a very few years from Trenton or Harrisburg, Tallahassee or Lansing to become, as if in a reality television show, President of the United States. Add into the equation that he or she is African-American, while every previous resident of the White House, for more than two centuries, has been a white male Protestant, except for the thousand-day interregnum when the President was a white male Roman Catholic.
Who could have predicted it? As it happens, one of Barack Obama's friends from Hawaii. In his memoir, Livin' the Blues, the poet and radical sage of the Waikiki Jungle, Frank Marshall Davis, wrote, "Until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, we could aim our hope no higher than selection for what was termed the president's 'Kitchen Cabinet.' Since then we have been inching our way slowly toward the oval room." Still, it's hard to imagine that Davis had in mind the skinny, disaffected kid who used to come around for advice in Waikiki about how to live his life as a black man in America.
As late as 1994, Barack Obama's ambitions for public life existed mainly in the realm of fantasy; the avenues of approach, the paths to office, seemed blocked. All the interesting political positions, and even most of the dull ones, were taken.
Starting a political career requires a great deal more than the desire to do so. It requires an opportunity, and a network to seize it. When Obama returned to Chicago in 1991, it was not at all clear where the opportunity would be. City Hall, where his closest organizing friends thought that he would wind up, was out of the question, perhaps for many years to come. Richard M. Daley, who had vastly improved his skills since losing to Harold Washington and had adapted to the racial diversity of the city in a way that his father never could, seemed a permanent fixture. City Hall had become no less dynastic than the House of Habsburg. The congressman in Obama's district, the former Black Panther Bobby Rush, routinely won re-election with minimal campaigning. The alderman in the Fourth Ward--Obama's ward, in Hyde Park--was a former high-school history teacher, an African-American woman named Toni Preckwinkle. It had taken a couple of tries before she won the post, in 1991, but Preckwinkle was popular, her seat secure. The fact that she was light-skinned and married to a white man, a teacher named Zeus Preckwinkle, was sometimes a source of nasty talk in some parts of the ward, but it wasn't much of a problem; she was seen as honest, independent, liberal, with deep roots in the community. Finally, the state senator in Obama's area, another former educator, Alice Palmer, was no less beloved than Rush and Preckwinkle. She was known for supporting progressive legislation in Springfield and helping to lead anti-apartheid rallies in Chicago. A veteran of the Harold Washington campaigns, Palmer had especially solid support among civil-rights-era leaders in town, including an influential contingent of black nationalists. Palmer's husband was also a source of her popularity. Edward (Buzz) Palmer had been a leader of the Afro-American Patrolmen's League, a progressive organization in a police department with a reputation for racism and unwarranted violence.
And so Obama had to practice patience.
In the meantime, he went about meeting people. Obama, it turned out, was a world-class networker. Just as he had gone from church to church as an organizer, now he and Michelle accepted countless invitations to lunches, dinners, cocktail parties, barbecues, and receptions for right-minded charities. They also joined the East Bank Club, downtown, a vast gym and social center on the Chicago River, where so many Chicagoans of a certain class gathered to exercise, eat lunch, get their nails done or their hair cut, and, as if by total accident, run into one another. The East Bank Club was, as one member described it, the "world's first urban country club," a place where you would see Oprah Winfrey in her sweats, members of the Joffrey Ballet stretching out; you saw local politicians, business people, Jews, African-Americans--a place, according to one prominent member, that "reinforces a center to this provincial town and provides a nexus of relationships for people obsessed with being buff." The membership price, by the standards of New York or Los Angeles, was modest, and so, too, was the level of snobbery.
The Obamas' social world began to expand exponentially. They were intelligent, attractive, eager, and ambitious, and they entered many worlds at once: the liberal, integrated world of Hyde Park; the intellectual world of the University of Chicago; the boards of charitable foundations; the growing post-civil-rights world of African-Americans who went to prestigious universities and were making their fortunes and ready to exert political influence. The Obamas were young and idealistic, and older people wanted to befriend and guide them. Despite Obama's rejection of a job offer at Sidley Austin and Michelle's decision to quit the firm, Newton Minow took them to the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival, where they ran into prominent friends. Bettylu Saltzman, the heiress and political activist who befriended Obama during Project Vote, helped guide Barack and Michelle to some of the wealthiest people in town. And, through his teaching colleagues, Obama became increasingly familiar with the professors, attorneys, physicians, and executives at the central intellectual institution in town.
An example: one of the partners at Obama's law firm, Allison Davis, was a member of a small, elite coterie in Hyde Park--African-American families who had compiled records of achievement over two or three generations. Davis's great-grandfather was an abolitionist lawyer; his grandfather chaired the anti-lynching commission of the N.A.A.C.P.; his father was valedictorian at Williams (though, as a black man, he was not allowed to live in the dorms) and an anthropologist who was the first African-American scholar to be awarded a full, tenured position at the University of Chicago or any major American research university. In 1947, Davis's father brought the family to Hawaii, so that he could study the uniquely integrated school system there. Davis is light-skinned, so much so that he became a kind of anthropologist himself, tuning in to what whites say about blacks when there are, seemingly, no blacks around to overhear them.
Allison Davis was an elder in a new breed. There had long been a moneyed black elite in the city, like the real-estate man Dempsey Travis, who was active in old-line Democratic politics and wrote histories of black politics and jazz in the city. On the South Side, there had been well-to-do black doctors, lawyers, car dealers, and merchants. Now there was a critical mass of African-Americans who, having gone to the country's best universities, were intent on creating a new elite. Davis hosted many dinner parties and, around the Christmas-New Year holiday, he threw a huge bash; he invited the younger people from the university, from City Hall, from among Cook County pols, from the foundations and the arts. "The Old Guard wasn't there--this was the next generation," Marilyn Katz, a former S.D.S. radical who was running a public-relations business, with clients from City Hall, said. "You would see a range of people from black professionals, the white progressive intelligentsia, the North Side-development scene people like Buzzy Ruttenberg, people from the University of Chicago, the parents at private schools like Parker, St. Ignatius, and the Lab School, in Hyde Park. Eventually, years later, there would be a big overlap of these schools and the finance committee of the Obama campaign in Illinois. Early on, Barack was there, but he wasn't a star yet."
Davis knew everyone, it seemed, and everyone came to his parties: John Rogers, who had grown up in Hyde Park--a street there is named for his mother, Jewel Lafontant, a lawyer and a prominent figure in Republican politics--and founded the investment firm Ariel Capital Management. Jim Reynolds, Jr., of Loop Capital Markets. Robert Blackwell, Jr., of the tech-consultancy firm Electronic Knowledge Interchange. The publisher Hermene Hartman. All of them became Obama's friends. "I tried to include Barack and Michelle in everything," Davis said.
Obama also met some Chicago operators of dubious value and intent. When he was still in law school, he got a job offer from the Rezmar Corporation, a developer of low-income housing run by a Syrian immigrant named Antoin (Tony) Rezko. Rezko came to Chicago when he was nineteen, intending to study civil engineering. He made a fortune setting up fast-food franchises--Panda Express Chinese restaurants and Papa John's pizzerias--and even did some business with Muhammad Ali. Rezko could see that one of the swiftest ways to riches in Chicago was through political connections, and he soon began to climb. At Ali's request, he held a fundraiser in 1983 for Harold Washington. In 1989, Rezko and his associate Daniel Mahru set up Rezmar and, partnering with various community groups, got government loans to develop apartments on the South Side. In 1990, one of Rezko's vice-presidents, David Brint, called Obama at Harvard, after reading about him in the newspaper, and offered him a job--one of many that he turned down. As it happened, Allison Davis was appointed by the mayor to the Chicago Plan Commission and Davis Miner did the legal work for a joint venture between the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation and Rezmar. Obama did not do much real-estate work at Davis Miner; in all he spent just five hours on work for Rezmar. But the contact was made and a friendship was formed. When the time came for Obama to enter politics, Tony Rezko was ready.
If Obama was on the make politically, his new friends and acquaintances thought, he carried it off with a certain elan. "Barack made lots and lots of alliances," Davis said, "but he was so affable and gregarious that I never had the sense that he was mining the invitees for future campaign contributions." Davis felt that, given the proper opening, Obama could make a political career in Chicago. "All the deals have been made in New York, everything has been divided up and dealt out," he said. "If you look at the social page of the New York Times on Sundays, it's stagnant, more European in terms of traditions and entry into positions of influence. Here in Chicago, you don't confront the same barriers."
By far the most important new friend in Barack and Michelle Obama's lives was Valerie Jarrett. A graduate of Stanford and Michigan Law School, Jarrett began her professional life working for a corporate law firm. The work was so dull, so detached from her desire to make a social and political impact, that she often just closed the door and stared out the window of her office on the seventy-ninth floor of the Sears Tower, crying, wondering what she was doing with her life.
Jarrett came from perhaps the most talented and prestigious African-American family in the city. Her great-grandfather was Robert Taylor, one of the first accredited African-American architects. One of her grandfathers was Robert Rochon Taylor, the head of the Chicago Housing Authority; ironically, one of Daley's most hideous public housing projects was named for him. Jarrett was born in Shiraz, in Iran, where her father, James Bowman, a prominent pathologist and geneticist, was running a hospital. Valerie's mother, Barbara, was a specialist in early-childhood education. When the Bowmans returned home to Chicago, Valerie was fluent in Farsi and French, as well as in English.
On Election Day in 1983, she had campaigned door-to-door for Harold Washington at a housing project near Cicero. When she wore her "Washington" button to work she took note of the suspicious glances of many of the white lawyers in the firm. After his victory at the polls, Washington persuaded many of the black professionals in town to come to work at City Hall. In 1987, Jarrett went to work for Judson Miner in the corporation counsel's office on various redevelopment projects near O'Hare Airport. After Washington's death, many of the committed black professionals at City Hall, disenchanted with his successor, Eugene Sawyer, who was so much weaker, so much more pliant to the will of the machine, left, and, if they didn't leave then they left when Daley was elected, in 1989. Jarrett, who came to believe that the younger Daley was not a racist like his father, stayed on, eventually becoming a deputy chief of staff in Daley's office and the Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development. Working for Daley, in the view of some of Jarrett's friends, was a form of selling out, of racial betrayal, but she was soon one of the best-connected people in Chicago.
The Harvard law professor David Wilkins, a native of Hyde Park, spent between 1995 and 1999 working on a research project about blacks in the legal profession. Most of the lawyers in town, he discovered, knew Jarrett. "No one in my generation of black people in Chicago is more respected than Valerie," Wilkins said. "Valerie was the liaison between the white North Shore elites and the black South Side elites. Daley was smart enough to realize that he needed black people supporting him in order to rule. He knew that there had to be another Harold Washington out there, and he had to position himself against that threat. In the meantime, Valerie saw the real way that power is wielded. She knew everyone. And after a while she ran the housing authority, the transit authority, and the Chicago stock exchange--all quasi-independent regulatory bodies with a lot of power."
In July, 1991, a colleague of Jarrett's at City Hall, a lawyer named Susan Sher, handed her the resume of an impressive young woman at Sidley Austin: Michelle Robinson. Someone had written across the resume that Robinson wanted to leave the firm; she was bored and wanted to "give back."
"They said she was a terrific young woman, disenchanted with the practice of law," Jarrett recalled. "And I thought, I know that type, because that's exactly what I was. I thought that sounds like somebody I would get along with."
"She is made for you," Sher told Jarrett.
Jarrett met with Robinson and, almost immediately, offered her a place in her office. But, before Robinson accepted, she asked Jarrett if she would have dinner with her and her fiance, Barack Obama.
Although Jarrett was older and infinitely more experienced in the public life of Chicago, she was nervous about meeting Obama. She had already heard a lot about him. As the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, she said, "he was a really big deal within the African-American legal community."
They met at a restaurant called Cafe Le Loup and immediately fell into a long discussion of their childhood travels. "Barack felt extraordinarily familiar," Jarrett said. "He and I shared a view of where the United States fit in the world, which is often different from the view people have who have not traveled outside the United States as young children." Through her travels, Jarrett felt that she had come to see the United States with a greater objectivity as one country among many, rather than as the center of all wisdom and experience. "We were also both, in a sense, only children," she went on, "because his sister is so much younger than he is, and I am an only child. We were forced to be with adults at a very young age, and, therefore, if not to participate, be in the room where there were adult conversations going on about world politics. We were both inundated with a lot of diverse information, which gives you a lot of appreciation for diversity of thought and how that shapes you. And I think that's why we clicked."
Jarrett also observed Barack and Michelle together. They were not yet married, but it seemed to her that they were already "kindred spirits."
"I was struck then by how you could have people that were raised in such different worlds, yet have the same values," she said. "Michelle had a lot of what Barack missed in childhood: two parents, everyone home for dinner, a brother, family unity, a place to call their own. It was a nuclear family grounded in one neighborhood, but with the same values of work, personal responsibility, treating each other the way you want to be treated, and compassion, and just core decency. That's how they both were raised in the end. Barack's father abandoned him, and that left, I think, a hole in his heart. By finding Michelle and her dad and seeing their really close relationship, he thought, This is what I want in my life. Often times, you re-create your childhood. Often people say that children who had alcoholics as parents become alcoholics. And I think sometimes you decide that I'm going to do the opposite. In this case Barack said, I want to be the opposite kind of husband and father that my father was."
Michelle Robinson took the job with Jarrett, and Jarrett soon began inviting her and Obama to numerous social occasions. She wanted to open up to them the various worlds of Chicago that she knew so well through her parents and through her own work. Eventually, Jarrett became their emissary to everyone from the leaders of the growing black business community to media titans like Linda Johnson Rice, the publisher of Ebony and Jet, and to various city and state politicians.
"I wasn't shy about calling people and saying, You've got to meet this guy: coffee, or lunch, or whatever," Jarrett recalled. "Sometimes I'd go along, sometimes I wouldn't. My parents have a big backyard, and we're always inviting people over, and Michelle and Barack were there all the time, and so they met a lot of people. I always felt that I was doing someone a favor by introducing that person to him. It wasn't like I was doing this just to help his political career.
"I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is.... He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability--the extraordinary, uncanny ability--to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them, and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. I mean, he's the kind of guy you'd hate in law school, who would pick up his book the night before the final, read it, and ace the test. So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy." Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father. "He's been bored to death his whole life," she said. "He's just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do."
Mike Strautmanis, a young lawyer who had met Michelle when he worked as a paralegal at Sidley Austin, became friends with the Obamas--and eventually a trusted aide to both Obama and Jarrett. A native Chicagoan, Strautmanis could see how Jarrett was linking her new proteges to one social and political circle after another. "Valerie is the one," he recalled. "She was the one who could lead him to the black aristocracy. The lawyers. The business people. The politicians, even. And not only the black aristocracy but all the movers and shakers in Chicago. She invited them to Martha's Vineyard for vacation. She had dinner parties where she had all kinds of important people for Barack and Michelle to meet. She invited them to charity events, to sit on the boards of foundations. Without Valerie, it would have taken Barack a lot longer."
Judd Miner's networks were less business-oriented. He introduced Obama to people who worked for various liberal foundations and to progressives like Salim Muwakkil, an African-American journalist who had written for the Chicago Tribune, and, at various points, for the newspaper of the Nation of Islam and the democratic socialist paper In These Times. Miner, Muwakkil recalled, "wanted to hook [Obama] into progressive networks."
Before Obama ran for any office, he had a long conversation with Muwakkil at the Davis Miner offices. "We talked a lot about the esoterica of the black movement," Muwakkil said. They discussed the long-running debates between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass, between Washington and DuBois and their points of convergence. Obama talked about the Black Arts Movement of the nineteen-sixties and seventies and how, in his view, racial dogma had suffocated its vitality. Obama said that he identified with Douglass and saw the limits of a nationalist politics.
"I sensed that he was vaguely on the left," Muwakkil said. "His ambitions were well disguised. His cool manner was always there, and it underplayed his ambition. One reason that he was so knowledgeable about the arcana of black politics is that he studied it and he crafted himself. He doesn't share the traditional ancestral narrative. That's not part of his being. One of the reasons he is so attractive to a lot of people is that he doesn't have this sense of cultural grievance. He never had that sense of a family being socialized to subservience. He has an ease of interaction with whites that a lot of African-Americans don't have. He had to learn that cultural repertoire of African-Americans. The notion that you are socialized in an environment that insisted that you were inferior, that you spend much of your energy proving that you aren't inferior, that kind of double consciousness--he didn't have to deal with that. He has Malcolm's capacity for self-creation. That's what Barack did. He made himself, like a kind of an existential hero. He picked this out and that out, and he created himself."
A crime opened the political door for Barack Obama.
On August 21, 1994, Mel Reynolds, representing the Second Congressional District of Illinois, was indicted by a Cook County grand jury for witness tampering and for an array of sexual crimes, including having sex with a sixteen-year-old campaign worker named Beverly Heard and asking her to take lewd photographs of an even younger girl. Reynolds, born in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, the son of a preacher, seemed a young man of great promise: he graduated from a public university in Illinois, won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, and earned a master's in public administration at Harvard. For five years, he fought to unseat Gus Savage, a nationalist whose penchant for anti-Semitic pronouncements proved so outrageous to the Jewish community that Reynolds had been able to win support not only from the Pritzkers and the Crowns, in Chicago, but from contributors across the country. Savage had also referred to Ron Brown, the first black head of the Democratic National Committee, as "Ron Beige" and to his critics as "faggots"; mocked "the suburban Zionist lobby"; and embraced Louis Farrakhan's depiction of Adolf Hitler as a "great man." Reynolds, who had worked on the Presidential campaigns of Edward Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, failed to unseat Savage in 1988 and 1990; in 1989 he was accused of sexually assaulting a twenty-year-old college student, but was acquitted. He won election to the House in 1992. Now, as he watched his brief career in Congress implode, he referred to Beverly Heard as an "emotionally disturbed nut case." During the trial in the summer of 1995, the judge ruled as admissible a series of tapes of Reynolds talking to Heard in the most obscene terms. The transcripts ran in the Tribune. Admitting that he made "mistakes" but denying to the end that he had had sex with an under-age girl, Reynolds went on "Larry King Live," on September 1, 1995, to announce his resignation from Congress. "You can't discuss race in Chicago," Reynolds said, casting about for excuses. "If you do, you will be relegated to the fringe." Beverly Heard, he added manfully, "set me up."
In November, 1994, three months after the Reynolds indictment, Alice Palmer, the respected state senator in Obama's district--the thirteenth--formed a fund-raising committee to "explore" her prospects for succeeding Reynolds in Congress. On June 27, 1995, she formally announced her candidacy. In September, when the governor, Jim Edgar, announced a special election, for November 28th, to fill Reynolds's seat, Palmer hoped that she would run unopposed. She miscalculated. The opposition was plentiful and tough. Emil Jones, the most powerful Democrat in the State Senate and a savvy machine politician from Morgan Park, on the far South Side, declared, and so, too, did a teacher named Monique Davis, and, most significant, Jesse Jackson, Jr. After his two Presidential races, Jesse Jackson, Sr., had hoped that his son would succeed him as the preeminent black politician in the city, and that he would pursue a national career. Jesse, Jr., who was just thirty and not anything like the academic star Obama had been, did not heed his father's advice to start modestly, with a run for alderman or the State Senate.
Obama was watching these events closely, and, with Palmer's seat in the thirteenth district now open, he sounded out local politicians, like his alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, and state representative, Barbara Flynn Currie, about running. He needed to get the support of the politicians and committeemen who had the capacity to raise money and marshal the door-to-door volunteers who were crucial in a local race. Obama approached Ivory Mitchell, a political veteran on the South Side, who was chairman of the Fourth Ward's Democratic organization. On the third Saturday of each month, Mitchell held an open bacon and egg breakfast to discuss the ward's problems and to hear from local officials. In election years, Mitchell mobilized those people to work on behalf of the candidates the local party organization had endorsed. "In other words, I come with a ready-made army," Mitchell said.
Obama told Mitchell that he wanted to run for office, probably the seat that Alice Palmer was leaving behind.
"O.K.," Mitchell said. "How much money do you have?"
"I don't have any money," Obama replied.
"Well, if you don't have any money, we're going to have to finance the campaign for you," Mitchell said.
Mitchell had a good feeling about Obama--"He was intelligent and he was hungry"--so he sent him to see Preckwinkle. She remembered Obama from Project Vote and told him that she, and others in the area, would support him as long as he got Alice Palmer's blessing. Obama was confident that, with a little time and persuasion, he could do just that.
Obama invited Carol Anne Harwell, his old friend and aide at Project Vote, to his apartment to talk. Harwell had run successful campaigns for two judges and for Sam Burrell, an alderman on the West Side, in the Twenty-ninth Ward. She had also kept on file much of the voter information she and Obama and their colleagues had accumulated during Project Vote--information that could prove valuable in a political race. By the end of their conversation, Harwell agreed to manage Obama's campaign.
Obama had a more difficult time trying to persuade his wife of the wisdom of a race for State Senate. He had just finished writing his memoir, a project that had kept him locked up alone in small rooms for endless hours. Michelle wanted a family and a career, and now her husband proposed to spend much of his time in Springfield? "I married you because you're cute and you're smart," she recalled telling him, "but this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do." What was more, she was dubious about the entire enterprise of electoral politics. "I wasn't a proponent of politics as a way you could make change," she said. "I also thought, Was politics really a place for good, decent people?"
Harwell recalled, "Michelle felt that Barack wasn't going to make any money. He'd be away from home all the time. She felt that he could accomplish more by teaching and by working at the law firm. She was not a happy camper." But, finally, Obama prevailed. And once the decision was made, Michelle worked hard on the campaign, not least because the neighborhood that her husband was hoping to represent was her own. "She knew those people," Harwell said. "They were her people."
Alice Palmer, like Michelle Obama's family, lived in one of the modest bungalows of South Shore. In the eyes of her constituency--the African-American neighborhoods of Englewood, South Shore, Woodlawn, and Hyde Park--she was from unassailably heroic stock. One of her grandfathers, Joseph Henry Ward, was a slave. In the late nineteenth century, he left North Carolina for Indianapolis where he cleaned stables for doctors. When Ward was twenty, one of the doctors took a liking to him and helped him learn to read. Ward went to medical school and later, in segregated Indianapolis, opened a hospital for African-Americans. One of Palmer's grandmothers, Zella Louise Locklear Ward, was a free black who arrived in Indianapolis in the late nineteenth century, helped found the Colored Women's Improvement Club, and ran a tent city for black tuberculosis patients.
Alice Palmer reached the State Senate by appointment, replacing Richard Newhouse, the first African-American ever to run for mayor of Chicago, who had to step down because of illness. Palmer, the local Democratic committeewoman, was a welcome choice among local activists. Her background as an activist and in local politics was unimpeachable. She had a doctorate in education from Northwestern and went to Springfield determined to win greater funding for Chicago schools. She became popular among her constituents--popular enough, she believed, to win a seat in Congress.
In the late spring of 1995, after a series of conversations, Obama won Alice Palmer's support. Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman and a fixture in Hyde Park politics, had been concerned about the open State Senate position until, at a meeting to kick off her campaign for Congress, Palmer told him, "I found this wonderful person, this fine young man, so we needn't worry that we'd have a good state senator."
Before announcing his intention to run, Obama wanted to be absolutely sure that Palmer was committed to the congressional race and that she would not get back in the State Senate race, even if she lost in the Democratic primary to Emil Jones or Jesse Jackson, Jr.
"I hadn't publicly announced," Obama recalled. "But what I said was that once I announce, and I have started to raise money, and gather supporters, hire staff and opened up an office, signed a lease, then it's going to be very difficult for me to step down. And she gave me repeated assurance that she was in [the congressional race] to stay."
Palmer doesn't dispute that. He "did say that to me," she said. "I certainly did say that I wasn't going to run [for State Senate]. There's no question about that."
Obama also understood that he had her endorsement. ("I'm absolutely certain she ... publicly spoke and sort of designated me.") On that point, Palmer disagrees: "I don't know that I like the word 'endorsement.' An endorsement, to me, having been in legislative politics ... that's a very formal kind of thing. I don't think that describes this. An 'informal nod' is how to characterize it."
Palmer announced her candidacy for Congress on June 27th, and, the following week, the local papers announced Obama would run to succeed her. Her intentions, as she stated them at the time, could not have been clearer. "Pray for Mel Reynolds and vote for me," she told reporters. In the last paragraph of a story in the Hyde Park Herald, the reporter, Kevin Knapp, took up the subject of a successor, mentioning Obama, "an attorney with a background in community organization and voter registration efforts," as the likeliest possibility. Later that month, Obama filed the necessary papers to create a fund-raising committee. He received his first campaign contributions on July 31, 1995: three hundred dollars from a downtown lawyer, a five-thousand-dollar loan from a car dealer, and two thousand dollars from two fast-food companies owned by an old friend, Tony Rezko.
In many ways, it was a trying time to want to be a Democratic legislator. Bill Clinton was in the White House, but the Party had suffered major losses in the 1994 midterm elections. Newt Gingrich had declared a conservative counterattack and Clinton had begun to rely more heavily on illiberal advisers like Mark Penn and Dick Morris, who were disdained by the more progressive aides and constituencies that had supported him in 1992. In Illinois, the governor was a Republican and both houses of the legislature had Republican majorities. Legislators in the minority in Springfield had very little to do: the governor set the agenda and his party fell into line.
But for all the limitations of the office, Obama had to start somewhere. He had to get in the game and learn its skills and hidden rules. As he began to think about fund-raising and organization, he called on dozens of local politicians at the ward, city, and county levels, as well as on neighborhood activists who might support him. With Palmer committed to the congressional race, Obama had every reason to believe that he would face little opposition in the March Democratic primary; and, in his district, the chance of a Republican winning was about as likely as an African-American winning the White House.
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were among the many neighbors and acquaintances in Hyde Park who were interested in Obama. Ayers and Dohrn were former leaders of S.D.S. and the Weather Underground, and were unapologetic about their support for violent resistance to the Vietnam War. They were now known as community activists, mainly in the field of education. Collectively, they were also the Elsa Maxwell of Hyde Park, frequently inviting guests to their house for readings, discussions, and dinners, and many people in the neighborhood, whether they approved of their behavior in the sixties or not, came.
"Some of us draw a line between what Bill and Bernardine did when they were young and now, when they are doing unimpeachable work in the community," the novelist Rosellen Brown said. "Hyde Park is a pretty small, insular community, and everyone, from Studs Terkel to schoolteachers working on juvenile-justice issues, came to their house to meet interesting people."
The son of a wealthy Chicago business executive, Ayers was a professor at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and was one of the founders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation that distributes grants to educational programs. Ayers helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg board. One guest at a dinner at Ayers's house remembers sitting next to Michelle, who had taken a community-relations job at the university. The discussion was about race, class, and family, and Michelle talked about her grandmother's final days. Her grandmother was immensely proud of the fact that Michelle and Craig had graduated from Princeton, and, in Michelle's case, Harvard Law School. They were thriving. They had broken through. On her deathbed, the old woman told Michelle, "Don't you start the revolution with my great-grandchildren. I want them to go to Princeton, too!"
"She knew that her Princeton education was valuable, and no one, having had advantages, wants to give them up," the guest said, recalling the conversation. "She knew that having stepped up to the class defined by a privileged education, she obviously did not have everything in common with the people she grew up with."
Before Obama formally announced his candidacy, Ayers and Dohrn were asked to throw a small informal reception for him. According to Ayers, Alice Palmer made the request. And although Ayers and Dohrn were not particularly interested in electoral politics--they believed that real change came from popular movements and viewed Obama as someone far more to the center than they were--they agreed. "It was Alice's initiative to have the event in order to hand over the baton," Ayers recalled. "She was running for Congress and she wanted to introduce him to the political community. It was good for her and it was good for him.... The thing about Obama was, he struck me from the first moment as the smartest sort of guy. He was compassionate and clear and a moderate, middle-of-the-road Democrat. How into him was I? Not very. I liked him as a person. I did it because I was asked. We had lots of things: readings, book signings, dinners, talks. For us, it's part of being a citizen."
The guests at the reception included Quentin Young, a doctor who had long campaigned for a single-payer health-care system, the Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi, the novelist Rosellen Brown, and Kenneth Warren, who teaches literature at the university, and his wife, Maria Warren, who writes a blog called Musings & Migraines. Young remembered that Palmer introduced Obama as her successor. When Obama was introduced to Rosellen Brown, he told her that he had read Civil Wars, her novel about a couple of refugees from the civil-rights movement and their lives a decade later. ("After that, like any novelist, I probably would have voted for him for anything," Brown said.) Most of the guests either liked Obama's short talk or had no real objections, but a few, like Maria Warren, were frustrated.
"I remember him saying very generic things and one of the people there said, 'Can't you say something of more substance?'" Warren recalled. "He didn't generate that much excitement, and a few people were saying, 'It's too bad Alice isn't going to run for her seat again.' I remember Barack getting kind of defensive and shaking his head." In 2005, long before Obama was a Presidential candidate, Warren wrote on her blog, "His 'bright eyes and easy smile' struck me as contrived and calculated--maybe because I was supporting another candidate. Since then, I've never heard him say anything new or earthshaking, or support anything that would require the courage of his convictions."
Thirteen years later, during the Presidential campaign, this brief, otherwise forgettable gathering would be introduced into evidence by the Republican Party that Obama had a dangerously radical background, that leaders of the Weather Underground had "launched" his political career. Which was ridiculous. It is true that Obama saw Ayers in the years to come at quarterly board meetings and other occasions. Obama praised Ayers's book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court in the Tribune, though his own views on education were much less left-wing. They once spoke on the same panel about juvenile justice---an event put together by Michelle Obama in 1997, when she was associate dean of student services at the University of Chicago. But no matter what one thought of Ayers's past--and Obama said that Ayers had been guilty of "despicable" acts during the antiwar movement--the notion that the two men were close friends or ideological soul mates was false.
As Obama continued to call on various politicians and activists in the district, he sometimes got perplexing advice. One African-American politician suggested that he change his name; another suggested he make sure to put his picture on all his campaign materials, "so people don't see your name and think you're some big dark guy." Another adviser told him sternly to make sure that he was never photographed holding a glass--even if it was filled with water or juice--lest the electorate take him for a drinker.
"Now all of this may be good political advice," Obama told Hank De Zutter, a writer for the Chicago Reader, "but it's all so superficial. I am surprised at how many elected officials--even the good ones--spend so much time talking about the mechanics of politics and not matters of substance. They have this poker-chip mentality, this overriding interest in retaining their seats or in moving their careers forward, and the business and game of politics, the political horse race, is all they talk about."
On September 19, 1995, at the Ramada Lakeshore, in Hyde Park, Obama formally announced his candidacy. Cliff Kelley, a former alderman and the host of the most popular call-in show on WVON, was master-of-ceremonies. "Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days," Obama told the packed room. "They fall somewhere lower than lawyers.... I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf."
Palmer may not have used the word "endorsement" to describe her enthusiasm for Obama, but, at the Ramada that day, there was no mistaking her enthusiasm for the thirty-four-year-old organizer and lawyer. "In this room, Harold Washington announced for mayor," she said. "It looks different, but the spirit is still in the room. Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with State Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a passing of the torch, because he's the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district."
Carol Anne Harwell looked for a campaign office. She thought she had found something affordable and adequate on Seventy-first Street. "It was clean and had a bathroom, and the important thing was that it had phone jacks," Harwell recalled. "Michelle walked in there and she just went, 'No, no, no. Uh-uh.' We ended up farther west in a nicer place. Michelle was determined to run a top-notch campaign, no cheesiness. She brought elegance and class to the campaign. She was the taskmaster and she was very organized, even if she didn't know a lot about politics then. When we started collecting petitions, we would set a goal for, say, two hundred signatures that day. There would be a blizzard and we would come back with only a hundred and fifty. Michelle would be furious and we'd have to go out and get the rest."
On Saturday mornings, Michelle Obama and her friend and the campaign's issues coordinator, Yvonne Davila, went out knocking on doors to collect signatures to get on the ballot. They were much more efficient than Obama, who went out in the evenings with Harwell. "It was so slow," Harwell said. "The old ladies loved him. He would introduce himself and ask them what they needed. They wanted to mother him. They would go on forever about their grandchildren. Barack was not Chicago-smart yet. He didn't know how to keep moving. He even went out campaigning in a leather jacket, no gloves, no hat. I think I had to introduce him to the concept of long underwear."
By the modest standards of a campaign for State Senate, Obama's started unevenly. He was not much of a speaker at first. He was stentorian, professorial, self-serious--a cake with no leavening. In the most critical speaking realm of all, the black churches of the South Side, he came off as flat and diffident; it would take hundreds of speeches in pulpits around the city before he acquired the sense of cadence, Biblical reference, and emotional connection that marked his performances later on.
But he was lining up the support he needed. Sam and Martha Ackerman, an influential family of Hyde Park independent Democrats, held a coffee for Obama. Ministers in the area were welcoming. Palmer, his alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, and the local ward chairman, Ivory Mitchell, were all on his side, along with a group of longtime liberal Hyde Park activists. Since the end of the Second World War, the neighborhood had been the center of political defiance of the machine. The Independent Voters of Illinois was the most important political organization in Hyde Park, and anti-Daley politicians, like the legendary alderman Leon Despres, carried its banner. Veterans of numerous I.V.I. campaigns, like Alan Dobry and his wife, Lois Friedberg-Dobry, canvassed door-to-door. A chemist with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Alan Dobry was a typical old-line Hyde Park independent, working for Despres when he ran for reelection as alderman in 1959, in the Fifth Ward, which includes Hyde Park, as well as in black neighborhoods in Woodlawn.
"Everything seemed to be falling into place that autumn," Dobry recalled. "Obama had friends who would put up the money for him: people from Judd Miner's law firm, Harvard people, colleagues at the University of Chicago. He knew people in the habit of funding independent political campaigns." Harwell was from the West Side but she was managing this South Side campaign with evident skill. She brought in Ronald Davis, a math professor at Kennedy-King College who had also been a Project Vote coordinator, to be the field coordinator. Young volunteers, like Will Burns, who soon became a political-science graduate student at the University of Chicago, handed out flyers and, with Obama, campaigned door-to-door. Burns later wrote a master's thesis on how Harold Washington, a machine politician, turned himself into a spokesman for black empowerment and how he built coalitions. After Washington's death, there had been a vacuum in black politics in Chicago; Burns thought that he saw in Obama a kind of successor, free of the old language and cronyism.
In mid-October, Obama took a break from campaigning and went to Washington for the Million Man March, a mass demonstration on the Mall organized principally by Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam. Many of the issues that the march was intended to highlight were on Obama's mind: the soaring incarceration rates among young black men; disproportionate levels of poverty, unemployment, and high-school dropouts; the distorted portrayal of African-Americans in the media. But because of the central role played by Farrakhan, who had made hateful statements about Jews and white America, it was a complicated event for Obama, a liberal African-American running for office in a district that was mainly black but also heavily Jewish, especially near the university. The speakers in Washington included Gus Savage, Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, and, of course, Farrakhan.
When he returned, Obama spoke gingerly of the events he had witnessed in Washington. Rather than give the reporter Hank De Zutter a pithy quote for his story in the Reader, he delivered a measured, nuanced view of race in America that sounds very much like what he said thirteen years later, at a crisis point in his run for the Presidency:
What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society.... There was a profound sense that African-American men were ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and lives.
But what was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate. Just as holding hands and singing "We shall overcome" is not going to do it, exhorting youth to have pride in their race, give up drugs and crime, is not going to do it if we can't find jobs and futures for the 50 percent of black youth who are unemployed, underemployed, and full of bitterness and rage. Exhortations are not enough, nor are the notions that we can create a black economy within America that is hermetically sealed from the rest of the economy and seriously tackle the major issues confronting us....
Any solution to our unemployment catastrophe must arise from us working creatively within a multicultural, interdependent, and international economy. Any African-Americans who are only talking about racism as a barrier to our success are seriously misled if they don't also come to grips with the larger economic forces that are creating economic insecurity for all workers--whites, Latinos, and Asians. We must deal with the forces that are depressing wages, lopping off people's benefits right and left, and creating an earnings gap between C.E.O.s and the lowest-paid worker that has risen in the last 20 years from a ratio of 10 to 1 to one of better than 100 to 1.
This doesn't suggest that the need to look inward emphasized by the march isn't important, and that these African-American tribal affinities aren't legitimate. These are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a "lock 'em up, take no prisoners" mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn't care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.
But cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done. Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up. We've got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do. We've got communities to build.
Obama's analytical, unemotional, intricate, Farrakhan-free, yet sincere response echoed his reaction to Rafiq, the nationalist in his memoir, his comments a few years earlier about the death of Harold Washington, and his discussions of the pressures of a global economy on local destiny. Obama was increasingly directing his attention to the problems of class, systemic change, and elective politics. As a younger man, he was paying his respect to the elders of the movement, but he clearly felt that the days of nationalism and charismatic racial leadership were outdated and played out.
At around the same time, Obama got the news that he would not be alone on the ballot. The Hyde Park Herald reported that there would be at least two other candidates: Marc Ewell, a thirty-year-old real-estate inspector and the son of a former state legislator, Raymond Ewell, and Gha-is Askia, a community-affairs liaison in the Illinois attorney general's office. Askia was the more interesting of the two. Born a Baptist, Askia was the sixteenth of eighteen children and a Muslim convert. His name means "One who relieves those in distress." Askia won the endorsement of several local politicians; his friend Muhammad Ali promised to have a fundraiser for him.
As the campaign began to develop, Obama learned that his mother was gravely ill. In 1992, living in Indonesia, Ann Dunham had finished her thousand-page doctoral dissertation on the craftsmen of Java, dedicating it to her mother, to her mentor Alice Dewey, and "to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field." In 1992 and 1993, she lived in New York City and was a policy coordinator for Women's World Banking, where she worked on issues of microfinancing for women in the developing world. (One of her jobs was to help generate policy materials for the 1995 United Nations International Women's Conference in Beijing; Dunham and her colleagues believed that the best advocate for microfinancing at the Beijing meeting would be Hillary Clinton.) In the fall of 1994, while visiting some friends in Jakarta, Dunham felt intense abdominal pains. Her Indonesian doctors diagnosed a digestive malady. At first, she barely spoke of her illness to Barack, in Chicago, or to Maya, who was studying secondary education at New York University. Finally, at the urging of her family and friends, she went to see doctors at Kaiser Permanente in Honolulu, who determined that she had advanced uterine cancer. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, specialists told her that the cancer was too advanced for effective treatment.
Dunham returned to Hawaii. One of her colleagues in Indonesian studies, Bronwen Solyom, recalled, "She was tough, she was very brave. She went on staying interested in what we always talked about and not about being sick. But by the time she came home from Indonesia it was probably too late."
In early November, she was admitted to the Straub Clinic in Honolulu. "I was working on my master's degree in New York at the time when the doctors in Hawaii said there was no hope," Maya Soetoro-Ng said. "My goal was to finish my degree and go live with her in Hawaii for her last days. But because she was so young, I thought we had more time. I was in a state of denial and thought she might last for years. But when I returned one day from class she called and made it clear she didn't have much time. I told her that I was scared and she said, 'Me, too.' I got on a flight that day."
Maya arrived in Honolulu on the afternoon of November 7th. "When I got to my mother's hospital room, she was surrounded by my grandmother and some friends," Soetoro-Ng said. "My grandmother was so tired, so I sent her home. It was clear that things were ending. I read to my mother from a book of Creole stories that I had been reading with my students. I read her a story about taking flight, because it was clear that she wasn't coming back. I told her that it was time to go." That night, at around eleven, Ann Dunham died. She was fifty-two.
To his great distress, Obama did not arrive in Honolulu until the next day. He had been in constant contact with his mother, with visits, telephone calls, and letters. Dunham wrote her son many letters encouraging him in his pursuits. More and more, he had come to admire his mother not only for the moral example she had set but also for the room she had given him to explore his own identity. Only as he grew older could he appreciate how young she was when she gave birth to him and how resilient she had been when Barack, Sr., left. She was just a teenager, a smart, sweet-tempered nineteen-year-old pushing a stroller and her African-American toddler along the sidewalks of Honolulu and Seattle in 1963. She never thought twice about it. Dipping in and out of one culture after another, Ann was an idealist about race, not least when it came to her own family. Finishing her dissertation and nearing fifty, she half-seriously told Alice Dewey that she was thinking of adopting a third child--the more ethnically complicated the better.
"She thought having an African-American kid was wonderful," Dewey recalled. "When she was in Hawaii, Americans were starting to adopt Asian kids. It had started in Korea, children of American soldiers. They were awfully cute. She saw one on TV and she said, 'Oh, I want one!' That really would have completed the set! And I wouldn't have been surprised."
"She was a superb mother in a number of ways," Maya said. "In spite of not being able to provide us with a stable two-parent household or a big house or any of those things, she gave us a sense of wonder and curiosity, empathy, a sense of responsibility and service, a love of literature. She was incredibly kind, so we had a steady, loving voice around us at all times, which helped us to be brave, and helped my brother to be brave when he had enormous decisions to make. Those things were present in her work. You see it in the empathy for the people whom she writes about. It's a grounded voice that balances idealism and pragmatism."
A few days later, Obama and Maya attended a memorial service for their mother held in a Japanese garden at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center conference building, on campus. Maya and Barack gave short speeches recalling Ann's nature, her travels, and her scholarly passions. Afterward, they drove to a cove near Lanai Lookout, on the south shore of Oahu, where the cliff is steep and the waves crash into the rock and swirl in pools of foam. They climbed down the rocks and stood near the waves. Barack and Maya cast the ashes of Stanley Ann Dunham into the waters of the Pacific.
On November 28th, Jesse Jackson, Jr., walloped the Democratic competition in the special primary for the Second Congressional District. His father's celebrity, his network of connections in the black community, ranging from Operation PUSH to the churches, and his capacity to raise money far outstripped that of Emil Jones, who finished second, and Alice Palmer, who, coming in third, received barely five thousand votes, around ten per cent. Disappointed as she was, Palmer told her supporters that she had no intention of changing her mind and running to reclaim her State Senate seat. At fifty-six years old, Palmer seemed more likely to return full-time to education.
"Barack called her, they spoke several times, and Alice said, 'I gave my word and I am not going to [get back in the race],'" Carol Anne Harwell recalled.
Besides, rejoining the race would be complicated. To get on the ballot, candidates had to get the signatures of seven hundred and fifty-seven registered voters in the district. On December 11th, the first filing day for nominating petitions, Obama handed in more than three thousand signatures collected by his campaign. By now, however, a small but influential circle of community activists and friends of Alice Palmer--the journalist Lu Palmer; the political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr.; the historian Timuel Black and his wife, Zenobia; the academic and journalist Robert Starks; the state legislators Lovana Jones and Donne Trotter; the alderman Barbara Holt--had started to form a Draft Alice Palmer Committee intended to persuade Obama to withdraw in favor of Palmer. These were mainly veterans of the civil-rights movement and the Harold Washington campaigns. Alice Palmer was one of them. Obama, in their view, was a callow newcomer from Hawaii and Harvard, too smooth, too willing to dismiss what he called "the politics of grievance." They did not trust him to be nearly as progressive as Palmer had been. He could wait his turn. Even Jesse Jackson, Jr., appeared to support Alice Palmer and sent his field organizer to her meetings.
The Chicago Defender and the black-oriented tabloid N'Digo began to run articles sympathetic to Palmer. The Defender reported that some of her supporters were now calling on Obama to "step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity and to release Palmer from her commitment." The Defender had a long history with Palmer and an even longer one with Buzz Palmer, who had been the strongest voice for reform inside the Police Department for many years. Local politicians began to choose sides: Toni Preckwinkle stayed with Obama, citing Palmer's promises; Emil Jones went with Palmer. Writing in the Defender, Robert Starks, who taught political science at Northeastern Illinois University and was well known on the South Side, raised the unlikely prospect that the seat would be lost to a machine politician: "If [Palmer] doesn't run, that seat will go to a Daley supporter. We have asked her to reconsider not running because we don't think Obama can win. He hasn't been in town long enough.... Nobody knows who he is."
In early December, the informal pro-Palmer committee invited Obama to a meeting at Lovana Jones's house. Obama went to the meeting with his field coordinator Ron Davis. They knew what was coming. Appealing to Obama's sense of propriety, the members of the committee asked him to get out of the race.
"He said he had enough petitions and would not pull away," Timuel Black recalled. "I was kind of angry. When we asked Barack to withdraw, for reasons of seniority, membership on important committees, and so on, we didn't know him the way we knew her. Our confidence in her was deeper. We promised if he ran for anything else, he would get our support. But he said he was already organized and had money."
Some of Obama's supporters saw a motive other than loyalty behind the Draft Alice Palmer Committee: funding. Linda Randle, the veteran South Side activist who had worked with Obama on the anti-asbestos campaign at Altgeld Gardens, said that Palmer had helped her supporters get money for their community projects. "They could see with Barack that wasn't getting ready to happen," she said. "They worried about losing their funding, because Barack was less sympathetic to them--much less. Barack is cheap. If he puts money out there, he wants to see how you use it. Alice less so, because those were her friends."
"In Chicago you wait your turn, like in the Chinese Communist Party, when you take into account who was with Mao on the Long March--and Barack wasn't even from Chicago," Will Burns said. "But he was a very different kind of cat. He wouldn't walk away."
"They wanted to bully Barack but he wasn't going to be punked like that," Carol Anne Harwell said.
Palmer decided to run to retain her seat, saying that if Michael Jordan could make a comeback, so could she. She and her supporters believed that no matter what was said about a deal, the seat was rightly hers. "Not to belittle it or anything, but Obama did not have the representative experience of a black man on the South Side," Buzz Palmer said. "We were the activists of the South Side and we had never heard of Barack Obama. He said he was an organizer, but I would have heard about it if he was something important. Obama came to politics completely out of the blue. We felt he could wait it out. And if they ran against each other, there wasn't any way Alice could lose to Barack Obama."
Palmer's supporters scrambled to get the signatures required to get on the ballot, and by December 18th, the deadline, they filed 1,580 signatures, twice what she needed. Palmer held a press conference at a banquet hall in Woodlawn saying that the "draft" effort was too compelling to resist.
That day, Obama told the Tribune that Alice Palmer had pressured him to drop out but that he had refused. "I am disappointed that she's decided to go back on her word to me," he said.
During the holidays, Obama and his team decided to take part in a long Chicago political tradition--they would challenge the signatures on his opponents' petitions. This is a routine, and often effective, tactic: in 2007, sixty-seven out of a total of two hundred and forty-five candidates for alderman were eliminated because of insufficient or bad signatures on their petitions. It is less common, however, in the case of an incumbent.
Palmer's volunteers had had only a few days to collect signatures, increasing the likelihood that they had accumulated "bad names": signatures that were either fakes, had addresses outside the district, or were not from registered voters. Some were printed rather than written in cursive script, as required. In campaigns where signatures were a problem, it was common Chicago practice to "roundtable the sheets"--meaning that volunteers would get together in a closed room, sit around a table with a telephone directory, scour the book for potential names and addresses, and forge the signatures they needed. On the day after Christmas, the Obama campaign filed challenges against all of his opponents: Palmer, Askia, Ewell, and Ulmer D. Lynch, Jr., a retired laborer and precinct captain who had been trying, without success, to win a spot on the City Council for decades. Ron Davis went by train to Springfield, where all petitions had to be filed. He brought back copies of Palmer's petition lists and everyone could see that they were especially slipshod, containing names like Superman, Batman, Squirt, Katmandu, Pookie, and Slim.
On January 2nd, Harwell and other volunteers went to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners--an office on the third floor of City Hall--and asked to see the petition sheets for Obama's opponents. They spent the next week carefully combing through the lists. The Obama campaign was hardly alone: the Commission office was filled with campaign officials and volunteers checking signatures against registration rolls. "It's like old home week," said Alan Dobry, who, along with his wife, Lois, joined the petition review effort.
Obama, who was relatively new to Chicago politics, was ambivalent about the process. "He really wanted to win a race," Harwell said. "He didn't understand that people challenge petitions all the time. People have a right to battle. We told him that they couldn't hand in garbage petitions. Once we showed him the Superman and Pookie sheets, he came around."
Obama and his supporters knew that he could easily lose to Palmer in a head-to-head primary. If he agonized over the decision to challenge the petitions, he did not agonize for long. "To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up," Obama recalled. "I gave some thought to ... should people be on the ballot even if they didn't meet the requirements.... My conclusion was that if you couldn't run a successful petition drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be." In private, Obama absorbed a less righteous sense of tactics: "If you can get 'em, get 'em," Davis told Obama. "Why give 'em a break?" To help with the petition survey, Davis brought in Thomas Johnson, a Harvard-educated lawyer who had been involved in the Harold Washington campaigns and had helped Obama on Project Vote.
As Obama's campaign workers reviewed the petitions, it soon became clear that all of Obama's opponents had done, at best, a sloppy job of gathering signatures. There were addresses in the wrong district, bogus names, printed names.
"My wife and I worked on the petitions and we remember how the machine used to do this to our independents and knock us off the ballot, so we had to learn in order to protect ourselves," Alan Dobry recalled. "When I ran for ward committeeman in 1986, against Mike Igoe, the son of a federal judge, one of his precinct captains put in a clumsy forgery for the dean of students at the University of Chicago--which was a problem because they misspelled his name and he was on sabbatical in France at the time they collected it.
"Alice did not believe she would lose," Dobry continued. "She is a nice person and a real expert on educational issues, but she was not a good politician. She is not good at organizing campaigns."
Marc Ewell filed 1,286 names and Obama's challenge found him eighty-six short. Askia filed 1,899 names and was sixty-nine names short. Askia admitted that he had paid Democratic Party precinct workers five dollars a sheet for some of the petitions and that they had likely used "roundtabling" to fill out the effort. "That's a standard thing in Chicago--you pay people to circulate petitions," Askia said. "Even the mayor does it." He said that the Obama campaign was wrong to use "loopholes" if Obama was going to claim to be a new kind of politician.
Palmer had filed about twice the number of names required, but Obama's people asserted that two-thirds of them were invalid, leaving her two hundred shy of the required seven hundred and fifty-seven. According to Robert Starks, one of her main supporters, "We were in too much of a rush and that leads to bad signatures."
Even some of Palmer's friends in the State Senate could see she was in trouble. Rickey Hendon, a self-described "street guy" whose district was on the West Side near the United Center, said that he had no objection to Obama's tactics: "Hell, I do it and people have tried to do it to me. It's the Chicago way. People can make stuff up in this town. You can't let it slide. That's bullshit. Alice should have taken care of business." Hendon, who was one of Obama's antagonists in Springfield, also had no doubts about the repercussions of the incident. Obama, he said, "wouldn't be President if Alice had stayed on the ballot. I don't know anyone who thinks Alice wouldn't have won at that time and in that era. She was the queen. She was loved."
The Obama volunteers filled out long forms describing each challenge, and, in the end, the government upheld their case. When the result arrived, eliminating Palmer from the ballot, Obama told his volunteers not to betray any glee. "It was very awkward," Obama recalled. "That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."
"This was not the optimal outcome," Will Burns said. "He didn't want us backslapping like we had done something great." (Nonetheless, Alice Palmer always resented Barack Obama, and privately she said that he ended up disappointing her, that he was not the progressive she thought he was when she first endorsed him. In 2008, Palmer supported Hillary Clinton for President.)
With the petition drama over, the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO), the most important anti-machine group to emerge in Chicago after the Second World War, endorsed Obama. There was now no way that he could lose the primary save for some unforeseen disaster. From his law partners and friends like Valerie Jarrett, who was now chairman of the board of the Chicago Transit Authority, he had raised more than sixty thousand dollars. His two opponents in November were insignificant: a sixty-seven-year-old Republican teacher named Rosette Caldwell Peyton; and David Whitehead, for the Harold Washington Party, who had run unsuccessfully for a slew of offices, including, four times, for alderman. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times both endorsed Obama.
In the end Obama won, with eighty-two per cent of the vote.
What kind of politician did Obama intend to be? The most comprehensive portrait of him that appeared during the campaign was Hank De Zutter's long article in the Chicago Reader. An almost completely sympathetic piece, it portrayed Obama as a young man who admired Harold Washington but was critical of him as a leader whose dream of a principled coalition politics fell apart the day he died, in 1987. "He was a classic charismatic leader," Obama said, "and when he died all of that dissipated."
At one point, De Zutter watched Obama teaching a workshop for "future leaders" in the Grand Boulevard community, on the South Side, organized by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons. Dressed "casually prep" and looking like an "Ivy League graduate student," Obama met with eight black women to discuss the way power was organized in the city. For a while, the women talk about "they" and "them," and how these unnamed people have come to control the lives and wealth of Chicago. Obama cuts it off.
"Slow down now. You're going too fast now," he says. "I want to break this down. We talk 'they, they, they' but don't take the time to break it down. We don't analyze. Our thinking is sloppy. And, to the degree that it is, we're not going to be able to have the impact we could have. We can't afford to go out there blind, hollering and acting the fool, and get to the table and don't know who it is we're talking to--or what we're going to ask them--whether it's someone with real power or just a third-string flak catcher."
At that point, Obama saw himself trying to bridge his activity during his first sojourn in Chicago to the world of practical politics, a bridge between the church-basement meetings of the South Side and the conference rooms of the Loop. He offered De Zutter a kind of credo for his career:
What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? ... The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.
Now we have to take this same language--these same values that are encouraged within our families--of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other--and apply them to a larger society. Let's talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values. Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.
Obama's idealism was part of what attracted young people like Will Burns, who eventually ran for office himself on the South Side, to the campaign. Obama seemed to promise a new kind of politics or, at least, a marriage of conventional liberal-policy positions to a temperament that relied on reconciliation rather than on grievance. The problem was that Obama was also given to a certain naivete. In a tone of rueful apology, he admitted that he would have to raise money from people of means in order to win the election, but, "once elected, once I'm known, I won't need that kind of money, just as Harold Washington, once he was elected and known, did not need to raise and spend money to get the black vote." As a Presidential candidate, Obama not only raised an unprecedented amount of cash, from both the wealthy and ordinary supporters, but also dropped a promise to abide by spending limits, and then outspent his Republican opponent by a gigantic margin.
Obama had won his first elected office, but he alienated some on the left, both whites and blacks. They were suspicious not only of his shallow roots in the community but also of his post-civil-rights liberalism. He lacked a certain authenticity, some of them felt; he was too privileged, too willing to compromise on the "black agenda." "Chicago politics, whether it was the old Daley or Harold Washington, is a gutsy, boots-on-the-ground game and it's got to reflect the community," Robert Starks said. "It could be Daley from Bridgeport or Washington from the South Side. Now here comes Obama and he turns that idea upside down--he escapes the whole Chicago tradition of coming from the bowels of the community."
Adolph Reed, Jr., a professor of political science who was then teaching at Northwestern, and who had also been involved in the attempt to draft Palmer, published an article in the Village Voice that was the clearest expression of the deep and early suspicion of Obama, his origins, and his ideological makeup:
In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program--the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn't been up to the challenge.
Obama's unseating of Palmer had planted some bitter seeds. He discovered that when, in Springfield, he joined the Black Caucus and again, to greater distress, in 2000, when he challenged the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for his seat in Congress. The Palmer affair, Will Burns said, had a dual effect on the South Side. On the one hand, Burns said, "people learned that he was going to play hardball. They learned that just because you write an editorial and tell him to do something, doesn't mean he is going to do it. It put people on notice." On the other hand, the resentment against him lingered, especially in the communities where the percentage of African-Americans was highest and the income level lowest. "The seeds of the 'not-black-enough' stuff started as a consequence of that first election," Burns said.
* * *
Despite the wide margin of his victory, Obama knew that he needed to expand his base of recognition. He understood that Hyde Park was a special sort of enclave--it was not considered the real South Side. So he established his district office in South Shore, the working-and middle-class black neighborhood where his wife had grown up.
Obama was sworn in on January 8, 1997. In the light of his future, it is all too easy to look at this first office with a portentous sense of gravity. After all, just seven years later, while he held the same office, people would hear him give a speech in Boston and start to wonder if he, "a black man with a funny name," just might be the future of Presidential politics in the Democratic Party. A state senator! But in 1997 being a Democratic state senator in Illinois was to hold an office without status. (Even in the best of times, Democratic state senators in Chicago with ambitions dreamed of becoming aldermen and congressmen or holding state office.) The Republican leader, or president, James (Pate) Philip, was an aging hack given to racist innuendo, and any Democrat rash enough to initiate a piece of progressive legislation found that initiative buried forever in the rules committee. Philip was the sort of racist who would first announce his lack of political correctness and then blunder on about the deficiencies of blacks: "It's probably a terrible thing to say, but I'll say it: some of them do not have the work ethics we have.... I don't know what you do about that, but it's kind of a way of life."
Pate Philip, Obama once told me, "was not a neoconservative but the original paleo-conservative. He was a big, hulking guy. He looked like John Murtha, but had very different politics, and would chomp on cigars and make politically incorrect statements, and he had adopted Newt Gingrich's--not just the Contract with America--he had adopted Newt Gingrich's rules for running the House. As a consequence, you couldn't even amend a bill without his approval."
The two legislative chambers in Springfield were almost entirely controlled by "the Four Tops": the Senate president, the House speaker, and the two minority leaders. They controlled committee assignments, legislative agendas, staff, and even campaign money. Run-of-the-mill Democratic legislators were known as "mushrooms" because they were kept in the dark and made to eat shit. Obama was a newly sprouted mushroom.
Ideology was a simple matter for the Republicans. Pate Philip, who was a Marine veteran and a sales manager for Pepperidge Farm, worked mainly to keep taxes low and to make any plans for reform "dead on arrival." The minute he took over the leadership seat, in 1992, he called for the abolition of bilingual education ("Let 'em learn English").
Obama commuted to Springfield. Most weeks when the Senate was in session, he made the three-plus-hours' drive to Springfield, along Interstate 55, late Monday and returned Thursday night. He usually stayed in the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel, on East Adams Street, a short walk from the Old State Capitol. Within a couple of days of arriving in Springfield for the first time, he called Judd Miner and asked him to take him off salary; he would be paid by the hour for any work he did for the firm.
Even in Springfield, where many of his colleagues were suburban and downstate senators who could not have cared less about the internecine battles of the South Side, there was still a price to be paid for knocking Alice Palmer off the ballot and out of the Senate. Two African-American senators in particular, Rickey Hendon, from the West Side, and Donne Trotter, who represented a district that extended from the South Side into the south suburbs, were not keen to give Obama a warm welcome. They viewed him as too lawyerly, too Harvard, too much in a hurry, insufficiently Chicago, and insufficiently black. Theirs was a less ideologically sophisticated version of the view taken by Adolph Reed, Jr.: that Obama was "vacuous" and inauthentic. Obama's book had been reviewed and even excerpted in the Hyde Park Herald, and so some of his colleagues already knew about his background. They teased him about smoking dope as a kid and about being reared by his white mother and grandparents. They asked him if he had figured out what race he belonged to. Hendon teased Obama that he was from Hawaii and lived in Hyde Park: "What do you know about the street?"
Hazing is a first-year ritual in Springfield. Obama's turn took place on the Senate floor in mid-March. To help the unemployed, Obama had introduced a bill to create a guide to community-college graduates for potential local employers--a bill of relatively small significance. Rickey Hendon jumped on it.
HENDON: Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I'm having a little trouble with it.
OBAMA: Obama.
HENDON: Is that Irish?
OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.
HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill's still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?
PRESIDING OFFICER: Senator Obama.
OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn't paying Senator Hendon any attention.
HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn't pay it much attention, either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?
OBAMA: Basically this idea came out of the South Side community colleges. I don't know what you're doing in the West Side community colleges. But we probably won't be including that in our directory for the students.
HENDON: I wish--I wish Senator Collins was here to make that--hear that comment. Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer--much easier to pronounce than Obama--and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don't have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And--and you don't even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did.... I'm missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that make absolutely no sense. I--I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.
Hendon said later that part of his motive was just a ritual of sarcastic welcome--"He wasn't going to be above freshman hazing, as far as I was concerned. It's been a tradition forever"--but Obama definitely irritated him. Hendon, Trotter, and others quickly determined that Obama had his eyes fixed on higher office: alderman, congressman, mayor, governor. Hendon joked that Obama would likely run for "president of the world." Hendon had marched in support of the Black Panther Party in 1971, after the murder of Fred Hampton. He remembered the first Mayor Daley, Dr. King, the riots on the West Side--he was a real Chicagoan, he insisted, and not from Hyde Park. Hendon didn't take Obama's main claim to authenticity--his three years as a community organizer--seriously. Street cred, he said, "is something you really earn and it takes some time. He didn't have the time in as a community organizer. I was in the streets. I stood up. Look, I have friends like Barack. I understood him. He was not any kind of mystery to me: I have friends from Africa, biracial friends, college-educated lawyer friends, and sometimes we have battles and differences. My friends with all those degrees like to compromise and live in nice rich neighborhoods. They don't see things as they really are. You're not as willing to compromise if you see the poverty all the time. When we were talking about racial profiling, he told us he'd never been pulled over. I've been pulled over a lot."
Donne Trotter, a more polished legislator and given to natty bow ties, was no less contemptuous of his new colleague in the Black Caucus. "Barack didn't have a clue," Trotter said. "He was a new kid on the block, an unknown entity, a blank sheet of paper. I'm not into conspiracy theories but no one knew who was backing him. It sure wasn't the community he was trying to represent. Who was this guy?"
Like Hendon, Trotter had no compunction about getting in Obama's face. "As Harold Washington said, 'Politics ain't beanbag,' it's a contact sport, so it's not as if what I was talking about was so out of line," he said. ("Beanbag" was actually a coinage of Mark Twain's Chicago friend the journalist Finley Peter Dunne.) "It wasn't a question of black enough. What we did know, by his own admission in his book, was that he grew up in Hawaii. It wasn't the issue of a white mother, that's not so unusual, but he didn't have our black experience. On the South Side, it's twenty below zero. In Hawaii, it's eighty degrees--and he's supposedly roughing it."
Obama brushed off the insults from Trotter and Hendon, and he focused instead on forming useful alliances where, and with whom, he could. One of the first things he did in Springfield was to call on the Democratic leader, Emil Jones, whom he had first met as an organizer while staging a street demonstration near Jones's house. Emil Jones was far more important than Hendon and Trotter. A legislator since 1973, he was one of eight children. His father had been a truck driver, a bailiff in the Cook County Circuit Court, and a Democratic precinct captain in the Thirty-fourth Ward organization on the far South Side. Gruff, earthy, and a chain-smoker, Jones made it his business in the Senate not only to pass progressive legislation but to bring home the pork to the African-American community. He helped to build institutions like Kennedy-King College, in Englewood, the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Bronzeville Children's Museum, and the Beverly Arts Center. Jones was an old-style apparatchik, and Obama had a lot to learn from him. Jones, in turn, realized that in Barack Obama he had a unique, if raw, talent that he could mold. It was not every day, he told an aide, that a black Harvard Law School graduate--earnest, sincere, ready to work--showed up on his doorstep.
"Barack was very idealistic when we first met," Jones said. "He wanted to get things done but didn't know how to solve the problem. He thought you could press a button and it would be done." Jones easily sensed the animosity of senators who had been friends with Alice Palmer and felt that Obama had somehow betrayed her. "I knew the feeling was there, but they didn't know that I'd known Barack for a long time," he said. Pedigree was also a problem--"Harvard and all the rest"--but Jones did not feel threatened. Instead, when Obama came asking for hard assignments, Jones gave them to him. Democrats could not easily initiate legislation, but they could get involved in the negotiations, and Jones made Obama his lead negotiator on a welfare-to-work package being pushed by the Republicans. This annoyed Hendon and Trotter, but Obama knew that Jones's favor was invaluable in Springfield.
Obama also formed friendships among white legislators from the suburbs and downstate. During his freshman orientation session, he met a Democrat named Terry Link, who had just pulled off an upset in a district north of Chicago. Link was white, ran a forklift business, and "barely got out of high school," but, he said, "We hit it off right away."
"One thing Barack has is the ability to adapt, and in the State Senate he discovered that things weren't clear-cut," Link recalled. "We were sitting on the floor at eleven-forty-five on the last night of our first session and we were handed the budget, a foot thick, at that time. We broke it up into five bills and had to vote on it. We were in the minority and we had just minutes before we had to vote. Barack had such a stern face, and he said, 'Do you really think our forefathers designed our Constitution to do the state's business like this?' That's when I think it hit him that things weren't being done the way he might have hoped."
Denny Jacobs, a Democrat from a downstate district, East Moline, recalled that Obama was long-winded in his early appearances on the floor, and his performances were sometimes greeted with eye-rolling, coughing, and annoyed muttering. "The state legislature is not a place for eloquence," Jacobs said. "You don't win with persuasive arguments. It's down-and-dirty politics, and he learned how to play that. You better be prepared to trade part of a bill if you are going to survive. If you want to get a little piece of a health-care bill, say, as Barack did, you had to give things up, because most people, including myself, were opposed to his all-out comprehensive bill. He had to withdraw his own beliefs." Early on, Jacobs said, Obama irritated him with constant requests for clarification and tutorials. In the midst of a revenue-committee hearing, Jacobs recalled, Obama was "asking all these damn questions. Finally, I leaned over and said, 'Do me a favor. Get your information on your own time.' Didn't fluster him at all. He just said, 'O.K., Jacobs, I will.'"
To make any progress, the Democrats had to form relationships with centrist Republicans. "We weren't treated as a hot commodity," Link said. "Without good relationships, you were never consulted or invited to meetings." And so Obama, Link, and others made a serious effort to learn more about the Republicans and then compare notes.
The social lives of Illinois lawmakers in Springfield were not, traditionally, an edifying spectacle. Some legislators treated the capital as a marital hideaway, carrying on affairs and staying out late with friends. Obama led a blameless and relatively spartan after-work existence. Most nights, when he was in Springfield, he would make a quick stop at one or two of the many receptions being held around town--lobbyists, interest groups, visiting groups from Chicago--and then get back to his hotel room where he would read, mark exams, watch a few cycles of SportsCenter on ESPN, spend up to an hour talking on the telephone with Michelle, and then, finally, fall off to sleep. Sometimes he went out to dinner with lobbyists or fellow legislators; he was never much of a drinker. Early mornings, he played basketball with a lobbyist from Ameritech at a local Y.M.C.A. or went running.
Link organized Wednesday night sessions of the Subcommittee Meeting: a dollar-ante poker game held first at Link's house in Springfield and, later, at the offices of a lobbying group, the Illinois Manufacturers Association. Link invited Obama, other legislators such as Denny Jacobs and Larry Walsh, a senator-farmer from Elmwood, and a few lobbyists. Everybody involved in the game says that Obama was a cautious player, folding hand after hand, waiting for his moment to bluff or go big on a good hand. The game was never high-stakes--to win or lose a hundred dollars was a dramatic night. Obama's caution, hidden behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, could be maddening. One Republican, Bill Brady, of Bloomington, told Obama, "You're a socialist with everybody's money but your own."
Obama enjoyed the poker games but he was also aware that for him, "Mr. Harvard," taking part in the game was a good thing to do. It made him seem more like a regular guy. He said, "When it turned out that I could sit down at [a bar] and have a beer and watch a game or go out for a round of golf or get a poker game going, I probably confounded some of their expectations."
Friends in Chicago had also told Obama that in Springfield a lot got done on the golf course, and so he often went with Link and others at the end of the day to play nine holes before dusk. But on Thursday afternoons, as soon as the bell rang for the end of the session, Obama climbed into his Jeep Cherokee, Illinois license-plate No. 13, and sped off to I-55 and Chicago. "He was on the road immediately--he didn't hang around," Link said.
Obama tried to form alliances with younger black senators who were not turned off by his education, his manner, or his ambition. In 1998, his second year in the Senate, a twenty-nine-year-old black woman named Kimberly Lightford won a seat in Oak Park and other suburbs west of Chicago. Lightford called on Emil Jones, who told her that she should go see Obama. "He's the future of the Senate," he told her.
Lightford visited Obama at his law office. "I saw this articulate handsome young man," she recalled. "All these other guys were older white males. He was very polite. He told me all about Michelle. They had their daughter Malia," who had been born in 1998. "I was engaged to be married, too. He told me all about my campaign, and I said, 'You were paying attention?' He asked me about resources: I'd won with twelve thousand five hundred dollars, going door-to-door in a seven-person race. He pulled out a checkbook and wrote me a check for five hundred dollars. I thought, This is my new big brother. When we arrived in Springfield that November, they were having elections, and he nominated me as chairman of the Senate Black Caucus."
Rickey Hendon, who had been chairman, went along with Lightford's nomination. But in sessions of the caucus he and Trotter continued to razz Obama. "If Barack got tired of them in the meeting, he would laugh them off, or he would just leave the meeting," Lightford said. "He avoided any blowouts. I'd never seen anyone keep his cool like that."
Lightford was especially impressed by Obama's manners. "I was the first in the Senate to have a baby," she said. "Barack nurtured me through my whole pregnancy in Springfield. I always got the shoulder massage, or 'Do you need a footrest, you need a blanket?' He had a wife at home pregnant, so he knew. We were two weeks apart."
Lightford, Jacobs, and Link all assumed that their friend would not make a career of Springfield. "The day I met Barack," Link recalled, "I knew I would be in the Illinois Senate a lot longer than him, and he would go on to something bigger and better: mayor or president of the Cook County Board or whatever. He wanted to go on to something else. He could see that what was going on in Springfield, especially being in the minority, he couldn't accomplish much." Lightford added, "It was too easy for him in Springfield. He had figured it all out. He was a step ahead."
In his first year, Obama took on a particularly thorny assignment from Jones. Paul Simon, the retired U.S. senator from Illinois, was running a public-policy institute at Southern Illinois University and trying to draft new state ethics guidelines. Illinois politics had long been an ethical bog. Under state law, legislators could spend their leftover campaign funds without much restriction; some bought cars, paid school fees for their children, added rooms to their houses, set up a retirement fund. Members were also free to accept gifts from lobbyists and constituents--golf trips, memberships in clubs and golf courses, lavish dinners. Abner Mikva suggested that Simon and Jones call on Obama; the Republicans called on Kirk Dillard, a moderate from DuPage County. Obama was not quite as lonely a warrior on the issue as he portrayed himself in 2008, but along with Dillard and two members of the lower house, he was a lead sponsor of the new ethics bill, making speeches on the floor and negotiating with recalcitrant legislators. Dillard recalled that Obama was mocked in his own party caucus when he tried to push a comprehensive bill limiting contributions from unions and corporations and the traditional ability of the Four Tops to distribute campaign funds to other members; Trotter called Obama "the knight on the white horse." Finally, in 1998, the legislature passed a bill that, while it grandfathered in funds that had already been collected, prohibited lawmakers in the future from mixing campaign and personal accounts and taking substantial gifts; the bill also called for far greater disclosure than had ever existed in Illinois. The legislation helped put Obama on the map as a reformer.
Obama had at least one consistent, if modest, outlet for his ideas: an occasional column in the Hyde Park Herald entitled "Springfield Report." Between 1996 and 2004, he published more than forty columns in the Herald. When he first announced for the Senate seat, he filled out a "general candidate questionnaire" issued by the I.V.I.-I.P.O. asking for his endorsements (Sierra Club, A.F.L.-C.I.O., the firefighters), a biographical sketch, and a series of "yes/no" questions on various issues. In that questionnaire, Obama reflected a fairly standard liberal Democratic profile: support for public-campaign financing, domestic-partnership legislation, a single-payer health plan for Illinois, Medicaid funding for abortion; opposition to electronic eavesdropping and legalized gambling for Cook County. In his columns, however, he was able to give these positions more texture.
In the spring of 1997, when a thousand young African-American men assembled at the Dirksen Federal Building, in Chicago, to protest the drug and conspiracy trial of Larry Hoover, a convicted felon and the head of a street gang known as the Gangster Disciples, Obama wrote, "Something is terribly wrong: at the very least, it should give us some indication of the degree to which an ever-growing percentage of our inner-city youth are alienated from mainstream values and institutions, and regard gangs as the sole source of income, protection, and communal feeling. The reason for such alienation isn't hard to figure out. Close to half--that's right, half--of all children in Chicago are currently growing up in poverty."
In other columns, he wrote about exorbitant utility rates, onerous welfare reform, drunk-driving legislation, the need to keep genetic-test results confidential, the forty million dollars in no-bid contracts extended to a Springfield contractor who---"it may not surprise you to hear"--was a major campaign contributor to various Republican politicians, including Governor Jim Edgar.
Obama shed his rookie idealism and now spoke readily of his willingness to compromise. During a debate, in Springfield, he said, "I probably would not have supported the federal legislation [on welfare reform], because I think it had some problems. But I'm a strong believer in making lemonade out of lemons." Once, as Obama and Jacobs were walking in the halls of the Old Capitol building they noticed a civics-lesson poster that listed the steps needed to pass a piece of legislation. Both men laughed and agreed that the poster might be more useful as toilet paper. "He realized that sometimes you can't get the whole hog, so you take the ham sandwich," Jacobs said. "Barack wised up pretty quickly." This willingness to take the ham sandwich when the whole hog was unavailable would characterize Obama's pragmatic view of politics straight into the Oval Office.
The more Obama learned to deal with Republicans, suburban and downstate senators, lobbyists, and other seeming antagonists, the less he cared about the approval of Trotter and Hendon. His capacity to listen, learn the rules, compromise, avoid taking offense, and move forward was winning the parental approval of Emil Jones. His performance on the ethics bill gave him a reputation as a conciliator, a negotiator.
Even as he was gaining a good reputation as a legislator, Obama could not conceal his feelings about the day-to-day work of a state senator. He didn't mind the modest salary--forty-nine thousand dollars a year--and the long drives between Chicago and the state capital gave him time to think, make phone calls, and listen to music and books on tape. And his seat was his as long as he wanted it. In 1998, Obama had to run again. His luck was such that he ran against, as Will Burns put it, "the one person with a name funnier than Barack's": Yesse Yehudah. A Republican, Yehudah managed to get just eleven per cent of the vote; Obama was now safely in office until 2002.
But to be in the minority in the State Senate, to glimpse the infantile resentments, the mulish infighting, and the sausage-factory atmosphere was hardly what Obama had hoped for. Sometimes he told Michelle stories about the playground atmosphere in Springfield, the carousing and late-night drinking, and she could hardly believe it. He was also bored--bored with the details of so much work that seemed without impact on the lives of people in his district.
"Springfield may be the most boring place on earth," Obama's friend the novelist Scott Turow said. "For someone who had been living in Hyde Park, it was an intellectual desert. He expressed that. He felt that he couldn't engage anyone down there in a policy discussion. I think he was unprepared for how basic the terms of debate were: this one wants this, the other wants that, and the leadership wants this.... In Springfield, his initial response was 'I think I wanna get out of here and be a writer.'"
One of Obama's colleagues at the law school, Dennis Hutchinson, recalled, "Obama was unhappy in the State Senate. He saw Springfield as something he had to go through in order to establish a public record. He knew that the real deal was in Washington. He chafed, too, at the control that Mayor Daley and the Democratic establishment exerted. I asked him once why there was no successor to Harold Washington. He said, 'That's easy,' as if I knew nothing and he was going to gently explain. 'Every time there is a vacancy or a death or a conviction, the Mayor handpicks a successor and creates his own power base in the black community.' He seemed deeply schooled in Chicago politics and history going back to the first Daley and Martin Luther King in the sixties and the co-opting of the black ministers. That was all in his intellectual inventory."
Back in Chicago, Obama took part in various panels and discussions. Between 1997 and 2000, he also took part in the Saguaro Seminars, on civic engagement, held every few months and led by Robert Putnam, a professor at the Kennedy School, at Harvard. Putnam, who was best known for a book on the decline of community called Bowling Alone, assembled a diverse group of scholars (William Julius Wilson, Martha Minow, Glenn Loury, and Amy Gutmann), evangelicals (Ralph Reed and Kirbyjon Caldwell), journalists (E. J. Dionne, George Stephanopoulos), artists (Liz Lerman), and conservative politicians (Vin Weber) to discuss everything from the lessons of the Progressive Era to religion and ways of increasing civic engagement in modern life. "We had a giant jigsaw puzzle in putting together the group--left, right, white, brown--and Obama fell in the category of young, urban, black, community organizer," Putnam said. "My son was on the Law Review and played basketball with him. He came home to say he had met the most impressive person he had ever met in his life."
Obama was among the least well-known people in the seminar but he immediately attracted attention. "Obama is the same person all the time. When we see him in public, it is not a face he is putting on--it's him," Putnam said. "There is no mask, or at least the mask is so well integrated in his life that it's disappeared. He was thoughtful, but not self-revealing. People who think they know him well are never unaware that he is restrained in self-revelation. The striking feature was his style in the discussion of hot topics with a lot of big egos. His style was to step back and listen. There were some important people who looked pretty bored; he was not, he was following. He carefully listened. Bill Clinton is also a power listener, but Obama, who has this capacity, is less forward than Clinton in letting you know what he thinks. But then he would say, 'I hear Joe Smith saying X, and Nancy saying Y, but I think Joe and Nancy actually agree on Z.' And it wouldn't be pabulum. It is not a trivial thing to listen for a whole day and see common themes in the midst of an arguing bunch. It's a personal skill or a personality trait. I don't think I have ever seen that same ability in anyone else." Putnam said that Obama seemed to the group "endearingly ambitious" as a politician, and they were soon referring to him as "the governor" and asking him what he was going to run for next.
By 1999, Obama was looking hard at his options on the South Side. The congressman in his district, Bobby Rush, had decided to challenge Mayor Daley for the Democratic nomination. Rush thought of himself as the second coming of Harold Washington, an authentic man of the streets poised to break a leader of the old machine; he was convinced that he could repeat the triumphs of 1983 and 1987 by drawing a record black vote, along with the Lakefront liberals. He barely got the black vote. Daley won by more than forty per cent. Suddenly, Bobby Rush seemed vulnerable and his congressional seat was up in 2000. Perhaps, Obama thought, the door to Washington was opening.