Chapter Eight
Black Enough
By 1966, the nonviolent tactics and the churchly aura of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference no longer had a singular hold on the movement for black liberation. Stokely Carmichael, speaking the language of Black Power, had radicalized SNCC, and more militant organizations grabbed the attention of young black men and women. Martin Luther King, Jr., himself had ignored the advice of many of his closest advisers and deepened his critique of American society, denouncing the war in Vietnam; in the last year of his life he spoke out for a redistribution of American wealth that he referred to as democratic socialism.
In October, 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met as students at Merritt College in Oakland, California, formed the Black Panther Party. Newton was born in Monroe, Louisiana; his father was a sharecropper and a minister. In college, Newton read Marx, Lenin, and, especially, Malcolm X, studied the slave revolts of Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser, and helped campaign for a black-history course--a rarity in those days. Seale, who was born in Dallas, served four years in the Air Force and worked in a sheet-metal plant. Both young men were enraged by frequent cases of police abuse in Oakland and conceived the Panthers, initially, as an armed self-defense patrol to protect black neighborhoods in the city. They had been inspired by Carmichael--not only by the brazen style of his rhetoric but by his leadership of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which was registering voters in Alabama. The L.C.F.O.'s symbol was the black panther, and Newton and Seale adopted it.
Seale was the chairman of the Party, Newton was minister of defense; together they drafted a ten-point political manifesto calling for self-determination of black communities, full employment, restitution for slavery, and the release of black prisoners. Their brand of black nationalism, Newton said, "was structured after the Black Muslim program--minus the religion." The Panthers adopted the uniform of black leather jackets, starched blue shirts, and black berets--berets, Newton explained, "because they were used by just about every struggler in the Third World. They're sort of an international hat for the revolutionary."
As part of an ongoing counter-intelligence program known as COINTELPRO, the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover had been investigating the civil-rights movement and seeking to discredit Martin Luther King. The program was a well-funded symptom of government paranoia. In August, 1967, Hoover initiated a more comprehensive effort. "The purpose of this counterintelligence endeavor," Hoover wrote in a confidential memorandum, "is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black Nationalist, hate-type organizations...." Hoover was out to "prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who would unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a 'messiah'; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position." Hoover added the Panthers to his list. In September, 1968, five months after King's assassination in Memphis, Hoover called the Black Panther Party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."
The Panthers were not to be mistaken for the S.C.L.C. By the 1968 Presidential election, Newton was in jail--charged with the voluntary manslaughter of an Oakland police officer. He was also on the ballot for a California congressional seat. Kathleen Cleaver and Seale ran for seats in the California legislature. Eldridge Cleaver ran for President on the Peace and Freedom Party line and received thirty thousand votes. Symbolic runs all, but they infuriated the F.B.I. "This was all at a time when the F.B.I. was committed to wiping us out," Seale said. "Hoover knew we didn't care if they kept dragging us into court--we loved going to court, we had lots of bail funds--so they were committed to undermining us and killing us if necessary."
After the 1968 election, a charismatic young man named Fred Hampton helped open the Illinois chapter of the Panthers on the West Side of Chicago. As a teenager, Hampton had been president of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council in Maywood, an integrated suburb west of the city. He won a measure of local fame when he campaigned for the town to build a new swimming pool, since blacks were denied access to pools in white communities.
Hampton's closest allies in the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party were Bob Brown, a former SNCC organizer, and a young man named Bobby Rush. Born in Albany, Georgia, Rush moved with his family to Chicago, in 1953, when he was seven years old. His mother, a part-time teacher, opened a beauty salon on the South Side, and moved into an apartment near the Cabrini-Green public-housing complex. A Boy Scout as a child, Bobby dropped out of high school when he was seventeen and enlisted in the Army. He married two years later and moved with his wife to the Hilliard Homes, on the South Side. In 1968, deeply affected by the King assassination and disgusted with his superior officers, Rush joined SNCC and, when Stokely Carmichael encouraged him and others to organize a branch of the Black Panthers in Chicago, he responded immediately.
Under Fred Hampton's leadership, the Panthers in Chicago forged links with both street gangs and a range of multi-ethnic groups on the left: the Young Lords, the Young Patriots, S.D.S., and the Red Guard Party. In Chicago, the Panthers staged weekly demonstrations. They tried to win credibility among the working-class communities on the South and West Sides, setting up free breakfast programs, medical clinics, and political-education seminars. Armed and always ready to advertise their capacity for violence, the Panthers were not mistaken for a social welfare program, but they were, for the most part, welcomed in those neighborhoods.
"Being a Panther was a search for self-expression, an identity in a big world, a search for a relevant life--that's why I went to certain extremes," Rush recalled. "I read all these philosophical works by Nietzsche, Erik Erikson--who else did Huey have us read?--Hegel, Marx. Huey had us reading all this stuff and it satisfied my search for knowledge."
Everyone in the Illinois branch of the Black Panthers was in Hampton's thrall. He was handsome, brash, and physically brave. His speeches were not nearly as sophisticated as King's or Malcolm's---they were filled with invective against the "motherf*ckers" and the "pigs" and laced with half-digested clumps of Third-World revolutionary cliches--but he had a visceral presence that appealed to many young black men and women who, after witnessing so many incidents of brutality on their streets, after living through so many assassinations of their leaders and heroes, were receptive to a message of self-assertion, dignity, and armed defense. "Fred Hampton was, for me, the most dynamic person I'd ever known," Rush said. "He personified strength, maleness, life, and love."
As Black Panther organizations across the country marched in demonstrations, got into battles with the police, and served up militant rhetoric on the evening news, Hoover commanded the F.B.I. to step up its efforts to infiltrate the local chapters. On November 25, 1968, he ordered his men "to exploit all avenues of creating further dissension in the ranks of the B.P.P."
The F.B.I. tapped Hampton's mother's phone and put him high up on the agency's "agitator index." But what the bureau really needed was a spy, a snitch. In Chicago, police identified an African-American teenager named William O'Neal who had stolen a car and gone on an extended joyride. Roy Mitchell, an agent working in the Racial Matters division of the Chicago field office, recruited O'Neal as an informer. In exchange for dropping the felony charge and paying him a small monthly salary, Mitchell persuaded O'Neal to infiltrate the Panthers office and report to the bureau.
O'Neal became Hampton's bodyguard and he described for the F.B.I. details about the membership, their conversations and plans, their evening political-education sessions on Marx, Mao, Fanon, Malcolm X. "We'd go through political orientation, and we would read certain paragraphs, and then Fred Hampton and Bobby Rush would explain to us, the new membership, basically what it meant and what was happening," O'Neal said. "And they'd draw parallels to what was going on in the past revolutions in the various countries, for instance China or Russia."
In May, 1969, Hampton was convicted of stealing seventy-one dollars' worth of ice-cream bars from a Good Humor truck in Maywood. The judge denied him an appeal bond because he was deemed a supporter of "armed revolution." And, in November, two Chicago police officers were killed; the suspect was a Black Panther named Jake Winters. At this point, O'Neal said, law-enforcement officials were determined to crush the Panthers. At the same time, other dramas were playing out in Chicago: the trial of the Chicago 8 defendants--including Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Bobby Seale--who had been charged with trying to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the Days of Rage, an attempt by the Weather Underground to "bring the war home" and accelerate the uprising against the American presence in Vietnam.
On December 3, 1969, the Panthers held a political-education meeting at a church on the West Side that went late into the night. Afterward, Hampton; his pregnant girlfriend, Deborah Johnson; Mark Clark, the twenty-two-year-old head of the Panthers branch in Peoria; and a small group of friends and comrades went to Hampton's apartment on West Monroe Street. Weeks earlier, O'Neal had provided the F.B.I. with a detailed layout of the apartment.
Sometime after 4 A.M. on December 4th, a fifteen-man contingent of the Chicago police encircled Hampton's house. The pretext for the raid, organized by the Cook County state's attorney, Edward Hanrahan, an ally of Mayor Daley's who had been groomed as a potential successor or as a potential governor, was to serve a search warrant for illegal weapons. At around 4:45 A.M., the officers stormed the apartment from the front door and the back, spraying automatic weapon fire. Mark Clark, who had been sitting with a shotgun in the front room, got off one errant shot; he was killed instantly. The officers headed to Hampton's bedroom. Deborah Johnson tried to shake Hampton awake.
"Chairman, chairman, wake up!" someone shouted out. "The pigs are vamping! The pigs are vamping!"
The officers shot their way into the bedroom and wounded Hampton. Later, a Panther named Harold Bell testified that after the officers came through the door they found Hampton in his bed, bleeding from the shoulder. He said the following exchange between officers took place:
"That's Fred Hampton."
"Is he dead? Bring him out."
"He's barely alive. He'll make it."
Then, Bell said, two shots went off.
"He's good and dead now," one of them said.
The police held a press conference later that day and spoke of the arsenal in the apartment and, with self-admiration, their restraint in not killing all the Panthers present. At the Maxwell Street District lockup, some of the surviving Panthers told their lawyer Flint Taylor that they overheard police officers saying, "Rush is next."
Police officers raided Rush's apartment, in the Hilliard Homes complex, only to find it abandoned. Rush had been hiding in a Catholic church. He then went to the regular Saturday meeting of Jesse Jackson's group, Operation Breadbasket, the forerunner of Operation PUSH. In front of five thousand people and protected by members of the Afro-American Patrolmen's League, Rush turned himself in.
"You see this man?" Jackson told the crowd as he stood next to Bobby Rush. "We're turning him over with no scars, no marks, and we expect to get him back that way." Two black police officers quietly took Rush to the local precinct house.
After he was released, Rush led reporters on a tour of Hampton's house, which the police had failed to seal. Rush claimed that "a look at the holes in the walls would show anyone that all the shots were made by persons who entered the apartment and then went from room to room firing in an attempt to kill everyone there." Only the most loyal defenders of the police believed that the Panthers had engaged them in a firefight. The columnist Mike Royko wrote, "The Panthers' bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction--namely, at themselves."
In the eyes of the African-American community, Fred Hampton became a martyr and Bobby Rush a living symbol of black resistance. Thousands filed past Hampton's coffin at the Rayner Funeral Home on the South Side. Among the mourners at his funeral in the First Baptist Church of Melrose Park were Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Benjamin Spock, and leaders of various left-wing groups in the city including the Black Disciples, the Latin American Defense Organization, and the Young Lords. The church was crowded with people and overflowing with anger and grief--people shouted out slogans against the government, some fainted. Bobby Rush said, "Hampton had the power to make people see that the power structure has genocide in their minds." The service ended with the singing of "We Shall Overcome" while members of the Panthers chanted, "All power to the people."
A few weeks later, the F.B.I. gave William O'Neal a bonus for "uniquely valuable services, which he rendered over the past several months." It was a check for three hundred dollars.
The killing of Fred Hampton initiated the decline of the Black Panthers but became an emblematic moment in the history of race relations in Chicago. The murder thrust Bobby Rush, a far more awkward speaker than Hampton, into the leadership role of the Chicago Black Panthers. "Bobby is a good leader, but a quiet one," Seale said. Rush, who had worked hard to overcome a childhood stammer, did manage to express his insistence on bearing arms. At a speech to Chicago college students, he said, "I don't go around saying 'We shall overcome' unless I have a gun in my hand." In 1971, he served a six-month prison term for weapons possession.
The last real triumph of the Panthers before they left the political stage was the political defeat, in 1972, of Ed Hanrahan, who was running for re-election as state's attorney. The Panthers joined the conventional political campaign to throw him out of office. Hanrahan's defeat was hardly the only consequence of the police violence.
Hampton's murder was such a galvanizing event, Rush said, that it "laid the foundation" for Harold Washington's election as mayor. By 1974, though, the Panthers had played themselves out as a political force. "We'd gone from five thousand members to a few hundred at most," Seale said. In Chicago, at least, martyrdom was their most effective legacy. Rush quit the Black Panther Party to enroll at Roosevelt University, where he studied political science. He failed in an attempt to win a seat on the City Council and for a while he sold insurance to make a living. In 1983, the year of Washington's transformative victory, Rush, riding his coattails, was elected alderman from the Second Ward. On the City Council, Rush was a loyal Washington supporter in the endless "Council Wars," in which resentful white aldermen like "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak blocked Washington's initiatives at nearly every turn.
In 1992, Rush decided to run for Congress, in Illinois's First Congressional District, challenging Charles Hayes, who had succeeded Washington after he was elected mayor. Hayes had been a founding member of Operation PUSH with Jesse Jackson and a supporter of King. The First District has long been a seat of great importance in black politics, and, in addition to Washington, Oscar De Priest, William Dawson, and Ralph Metcalfe were among those who had held it. More than seventy per cent of the district's residents are black, and it has been represented by an African-American politician longer than any other district in the country. It includes portions of Englewood, Woodlawn, Douglas, Oakland, Avalon Park, Chatham, Beverly, South Shore, and Hyde Park, along with suburban Oak Forest, Evergreen Park, and Blue Island. Rush was able to beat Hayes by reminding voters of his role in the Black Panthers and of a banking scandal involving Hayes, who had been discovered to have more than seven hundred overdrafts on his House checking account. It was a contest of racial bona fides and authenticity, and it got national attention. Soon after entering Congress, Rush said of his colleagues, "Some were amazed I didn't have bandoliers or a gun." Once he took office, it seemed that he would win re-election, term after term, without serious challenge. "Bobby Rush went from being the vice-chairman of the Illinois Black Panther party to the vice-chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party," Clarence Page, the veteran Tribune columnist, said. "Only in America."
As Obama's boredom in Springfield deepened, he thought about his options. Was Bobby Rush, who was his congressman, vulnerable to a challenge? Could Obama convince the voters of his own rationale--that Rush was a relic of the old racial politics of Chicago, an out-of-touch legislator of little consequence in Washington? Hardly anyone Obama talked to thought that he could reasonably challenge Rush. Newton Minow, Valerie Jarrett, his close friends Marty Nesbitt and John Rogers, various local political allies on the South Side, his colleagues at the law firm and the university--almost no one, it seemed, thought it was even remotely a good idea.
Arthur Brazier, one of the most prominent black ministers in Chicago and a friend of Obama's, told him that there was no way he could support him. "I didn't want to cross Bobby Rush," Brazier said, "and I didn't think Barack could win." Obama's three years of making friends with clergymen on the South Side was not enough. (In fact, early in the campaign, Rush held an event at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church at which a hundred ministers, including Brazier, stood in front of a banner reading, "We Are Sticking With Bobby!")
"I thought it was a terrible idea," John Schmidt, Obama's old friend from Project Vote, said. "The State Senate was not a disgraceful place to be. But it goes to Barack's lack of modesty. The State Senate wasn't a big enough stage."
Michelle Obama was also wary of the idea of her husband running for Congress. She was working hard at the University of Chicago on community-relations projects. When Barack was in Springfield, she was home alone with Malia. What if he won? Would they need two homes? They could barely afford the co-op they had, to say nothing of the college and law-school loans that they were still paying off. She admired her husband's passion to do good, but what law firm in town would not pay him the better part of a fortune to take on a mixture of corporate and pro-bono cases? Michelle Obama did not hide from her friends the fact that the pressures of work, family, separation, and her husband's ambition had put an enormous strain on the marriage. She did not hide her resentment. When the congressional campaign asked her to go to fundraisers, she usually refused.
"Michelle wasn't around much during the campaign," Chris Sautter, Obama's media and direct-mail consultant, said. "She was there for the announcement and on Election Night, but I don't really remember her much other than that. There were times when Barack couldn't get back from Springfield for events and she was asked to stand in for him, but she mostly wouldn't do it. She didn't become really committed to his career until he was going to win the nomination for Senate four years later."
Obama, who desperately wanted to graduate from Springfield, kept looking for a credible plan in order to run against Rush. The rule in American politics is that to unseat an incumbent member of the House the challenger has, in essence, to convince voters that the incumbent should be fired for cause. The incumbent needs to be vulnerable, embroiled in scandal or weakened politically. Black incumbents in black districts were especially hard to dislodge. Rush was hardly Daniel Webster--his speeches were clumsy, his legislative record was undistinguished--but his popularity in the district was close to unassailable. And yet Obama reasoned that he could form a base in places where Rush was weak, neighborhoods like Beverly and Mount Greenwood, in the Nineteenth Ward. This was an area with a lot of whites and city workers, and in the mayoral race Rush had run poorly there. Obama also had the support of four South Side aldermen: Toni Preckwinkle, Leslie Hairston, Terry Peterson, and Theodore Thomas.
"The First Congressional District seat is a bellwether of black leadership in Chicago," Ted Kleine wrote in the Chicago Reader. "When Rush took it from 74-year-old Charles Hayes in 1992, his victory was seen as a sign that the militants who'd come of age in the late 1960s were taking over from the preachers and funeral directors who led the integration marches in the days of Dr. Martin Luther King." Could Obama, who was younger and more educated, now persuade enough voters that the days of the aging militant were over? Will Burns, who signed on to help Obama once more, said, "This was the first time he ran on a message of change, a different kind of leadership."
When Obama called on his local Democratic organization chairman, Ivory Mitchell, for support, Mitchell said, "O.K., get your petitions drawn up and have a lawyer look at them." When Obama returned a few days later, he confessed that his wife didn't want him to run. So when another South Side state senator, Donne Trotter, decided to run against Rush and approached Mitchell, Mitchell gave him his support.
"Then, when Michelle changed her mind and Barack decided to run, I told him that I had promised Donne I'd support him, and, besides, if Obama got in he would end up splitting the anti-Bobby vote and it would be a disaster," Mitchell recalled. "Barack said, 'No, I can beat them both.' He had his mind made up."
When Rush heard that Obama might challenge him, he was unworried, despite his poor showing against Daley. "I first met Obama in 1992, late spring or summer," Rush recalled, in his Washington office, in the Rayburn Building, near the Capitol. "I was Clinton's national director of voter registration. It was my responsibility to monitor the voter-registration efforts and to see that the allocations of resources for friends of Clinton were going smoothly. Obama at that time was working for Project Vote in Illinois. I remember we met in an office in a town house on the near North Side. He was a very persuasive young man, and even then he had a certain charisma about him. He had a sunny disposition, too. I knew all about his community-organizing background, and so I felt he was an ally. I felt a kinship to him.
"But when he decided to run against Alice Palmer," Rush continued, "I was well aware of the process that had gone on. Alice had a commitment from him, and he reneged on his promise. A lot of my comrades and colleagues were just outraged. I wasn't shocked, though. It takes a lot to surprise me. I felt that Barack had betrayed Alice and Alice's allies. He betrayed her faction of the progressives, and we were coming from a hotbed of liberal politics. She represented a challenge to the white liberal elites." Rush disliked the old Democratic independents like Leon Despres, Abner Mikva, and Newton Minow and saw Obama as their African-American plaything.
"Barack was an instrument for their efforts to unseat Alice. His ambition became the force that they used to challenge Alice, to deny her the opportunity to run for her Senate seat," Rush said. "Barack was just no threat. The forces that created him were the same forces that were always coming after me. I could never reconcile why they came after me. Ideologically, we were on the same side. But Barack was backed by that same liberal elite cadre or cabal that came out of Hyde Park. These folks, they didn't like me. I wasn't upper crust. I came from the streets of Chicago. I'm not Harvard or Ivy League, although I've got two master's degrees. I'll never be accepted as a member of the elite. I'm a former Black Panther! I was a high-school dropout! And Barack was the antithesis of a street person. I saw this as racist. They wanted someone with a better pedigree.... Barack wasn't the first to come at me in that way. There were others of the same ilk. And I cleaned their clocks, too!"
To Rush it was almost as if Obama's pedigree and his supporters' admiration were a personal rebuke. "It was evident then that there was this strain of elitism that existed--it wasn't necessarily racial, but that was an element," Rush continued. "These people were allies and friends, ideologically. Barack was so desirable to them, he was so in demand for these elitists, these white liberal elites. His ambitions and their desires coalesced. I didn't express anger at the time. I made a decision not to get involved. But people like Lu Palmer and Tim Black were really angry. See, you've got to have a history in Chicago politics, and if you want to challenge someone who has a history you better come strong, you better be bringing something of your own."
Rush disdained not only Obama's association with the white Lakefront liberals but also his sense of racial identification. "It's amazing how he formed a black identity," Rush said, rising from his desk and starting, theatrically, to sashay across his office, mimicking Obama's sinuous walk. "Barack's walk is an adaptation of a strut that comes from the street. There's a certain break at the knees as you walk and you get a certain roll going. Watch. You see?" Rush laughed at his own imitation. "And he's the first President of the United States to walk like that, I can guarantee you that! But, lemme tell you, I never noticed that he walked like that back then!"
Rush sat down, smiling with satisfaction.
"But this isn't new," he said. "I really admire the way he learned. I don't denigrate it. He's been adapting all his life. He had the discipline to accomplish it and the foresight to see what his vision of himself required, you know? Barack's calculating in almost every decision in terms of how he wanted to project himself. Life is not a bunch of accidents, especially for someone with a huge vision for himself. He planned it out. If you desire to be great, the projectile of your life has to be there, you have to map it out. And that's what he did in every sense. To his credit, Barack didn't deny his African-American identity. He desired it so much. He adapted, he took on a lot of the culture. His desire to be a community organizer was also a product of being too young to have been an activist in the civil-rights movement."
Rush grinned and leaned back in his enormous chair. "If he'd been old enough, I could even see Barack being a Black Panther--especially the group that was really into the theoretical part," he said. "That would have fed his intellect. He might even have carried a gun, I wouldn't deny that!" (Rush seemed to delight in causing his old rival trouble.)
Rush was not impressed with Obama's three years as a community organizer, dismissing it as the trivial pursuit of feckless youth, as if, in comparison to his own experiences with Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, it had been a junior year abroad. "I mean, you can't portray yourself as an activist if you are only a pale reflection of the real thing," Rush said. "You have to admit the truth--especially when you are running against the real thing."
Obama decided to get into the race in July of 1999 and spent the summer trying to assemble a campaign team and appeal to potential donors. (The primary was the following March.) His campaign manager was Dan Shomon, a former reporter for U.P.I. and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Shomon, a street-smart, chunky, high-strung political operative, had quit journalism while working for the wires in Springfield and taken a job as a legislative aide to Emil Jones, the Democratic leader. In 1997, Jones, through his chief of staff Mike Hoffmann, had assigned Shomon to be Obama's legislative aide. At first, Shomon balked. He had spent some time shooting the breeze with Obama in the hallways of the Capitol, and he could readily tell that Obama was a hyper-ambitious freshman, someone with "wide eyes," as he put it, who wanted to pass landmark legislation covering health care, economic justice for the poor, job training, and many other issues. Shomon thought that Obama would be better off if he "stayed in the weeds," as the saying went in Springfield, "because if you stick out too much, too soon, you get whacked." Shomon didn't need the headache of dealing with an aggressive, starry-eyed freshman.
"I don't want to deal with Obama," he told Hoffmann. "He's trying to change the world in fifty seconds and he's got a safe seat. I have five senators I need to take care of. I don't have time to deal with this guy."
Hoffmann and Emil Jones persuaded Shomon to think otherwise, and Shomon went out to dinner with Obama. Like everyone else in the chamber, Shomon knew that Obama was a graduate of Harvard Law School, erudite and idealistic, but also that he was not very familiar with the counties of rural and suburban Illinois. Shomon knew, too, that Obama had been "spanked" by the black caucus and many of his fellow Democrats.
"Have you ever been south of Springfield?" Shomon asked him.
Obama admitted that he had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Shomon said, "Obama, I'm going to take you to southern Illinois and we're going to play some golf and we're going to meet some people."
It was the early summer of 1998. Michelle was pregnant with Malia and Obama figured that this was his only chance before the baby arrived. Shomon crafted a trip around a week-long golf outing at a resort on Rend Lake, in Franklin County. In fact, they played every day, even though the temperature hovered around a hundred degrees all week. They went to barbecues and drank beer, though "Barack was never a big drinker," Shomon said. "One or two and that was it."
Southern Illinois is closer to Arkansas and Tennessee than it is to Chicago, and the general political outlook on social issues like gun control is much more conservative. Both men saw the short journey as a meandering fact-finding mission. Shomon gave his charge a few tips: "Don't order anything crazy, like Dijon mustard." Don't wear fancy clothing. Driving downstate in Obama's green Jeep Cherokee, Shomon and Obama touched base with a political favorite in the area, State Senator Jim Rea, and went to a golf outing and fundraiser for him. They met one of the state's U.S. senators, Richard Durbin, at a barbecue in Du Quoin. They stopped to talk with small-town mayors. The state's attorney in Du Quoin told them about an all-white branch of the Gangster Disciples, which was selling drugs. They stopped in at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, and played golf with the athletic director, Jim Hart, a former quarterback for the St. Louis Cardinals. They visited one of the best-known farming families in southern Illinois, Steve and Kappy Scates, who were impressed with how outgoing and engaged Obama was. The Scates family grew beans and corn and their farm stretched across two counties at the southern end of the state. Obama, Kappy Scates joked, "learned that Illinois is a lot longer than he thought it was."
"When he got back he realized these folks could vote for me--I mean, these folks could help me, they could support me," Shomon said. "I think it was really a revelation to him that he had a lot of appeal as a politician." Shomon thought that the diversity of Illinois--its differences of ethnicity, class, geography, and economy--would be a plus for Obama. If he had been from Wisconsin or Vermont, or even a black congressman absorbed in a traditional African-American district, he would not have encountered the same degree of differences. "What those trips proved is that he appealed to rural white people," Shomon said. "They would vote for him, they liked him. That was essential for a statewide race."
But now Obama was asking Shomon, a white guy who got a master's in public administration at the University of Illinois in Springfield, to help him win a congressional district that was seventy per cent black.
Shomon accepted, though an internal poll he took gave Obama only a limited chance to succeed. The campaign's biggest difficulty, it seemed at first, was to get Obama better known in the district. He was not, after all, running for the presidency of the University of Chicago. Except to the political aficionados of Hyde Park, he was a well-kept secret with a foreign-sounding name. The early poll showed Rush with ninety-percent name recognition, Obama with nine per cent. Another early poll showed that while Obama's Ivy League resume validated him with white voters, made him seem comfortably moderate, someone they could vote for, it had little effect on the African-American majority, which greatly esteemed Bobby Rush. That summer, Steve Neal, the dean of Chicago political columnists and an early fan of Obama's, wrote a piece in the Sun-Times praising him and the Tribune speculated that Obama would run for Congress.
In mid-August, Obama took part in the annual Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, a tradition started on the South Side in 1929 by Robert S. Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender, to celebrate and organize the kids who delivered his paper. With hundreds of floats and tens of thousands of participants, the parade was a big event for politicians on the South Side, with loads of celebrities and wide television coverage. Obama gamely marched along in the vast crowd, attracting very little attention. Al Kindle, a gruff and wily African-American political operative who had been working on the South Side for various candidates for many years, was now doing field operations for Obama--a fancy way of saying that he was working the bars, the churches, even the gangs, to get the word out on the candidate. When he saw Obama at the parade, he said, "No one knew who he was. He seemed a little embarrassed." Obama spent much of the summer trying to increase his name recognition, attending coffees in private homes and dinners at small, neighborhood places all over the district.
On September 26, 1999, Obama made his formal declaration in front of a few hundred people at a reception at the Palmer House, a famous old pile of a hotel in the Loop. "I'm not part of some longstanding political organization," Obama said at the kickoff rally. "I have no fancy sponsors. I'm not even from Chicago. My name is Obama. Despite that fact, nobody sent me," he said, echoing Mikva's story about the cigar-chomping committeeman. "The men on the corner in Woodlawn drowning their sorrows in alcohol ... the women working two jobs ... they're all telling me we can't wait."
Before the campaign began, a tragedy took place that altered the emotional texture of the race and paralyzed Obama for months. On October 18th, Rush's twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey, was shot by two robbers outside his home, on the South Side. Named for Huey Newton, the young man died four days later. Bobby Rush was devastated by his son's death. ("I always thought it was me who wouldn't get to thirty.") As a Panther leader, Rush had been part of an ostentatiously armed revolutionary group; as a mainstream politician, he supported strict gun-control laws. "Our responsibility--my responsibility--is to eliminate violence from our neighborhoods and from our nation," he said. This had always been, for Bobby Rush, a message that resonated with the voters in his district, but now it was all the more powerful after the death of his son. Rush formally announced his candidacy for re-election three days after Huey's funeral.
Not long afterward, Rush's elderly father died in Georgia. "I know my faith is being tested," Rush said after learning the news. "However, it is only that faith and the loving support of my wife, family, and friends that supplies me with the strength to keep going."
From then on, Rush ran a minimalist, Rose Garden campaign, avoiding most invitations to appear alongside his opponents, Obama and Donne Trotter, Obama's nemesis in the State Senate. Trotter did not have the money or the support to win the race, but he had deep roots in the South Side. His great-grandfather had arrived in Chicago from Mississippi in 1900 and his grandfather, Walter Trotter, had been a prominent minister in Hyde Park. A resident of South Shore, Trotter had even worked with the Black Panthers. And since he loathed Obama, he seemed almost as intent on damaging Obama as he did on beating Bobby Rush.
Rush mainly stayed in Washington and relied on his precinct workers and sympathetic interviews with the local press. When he did appear on the South Side, it was most often to campaign for gun control, tying his personal tragedy to gun deaths across the country. He had already co-sponsored dozens of gun-control bills in Congress, but now the press, including the national press, could not resist the story of a former Black Panther, who used to advocate armed resistance, mourning the loss of his son to gun violence and campaigning for greater restrictions. "I believe that this glorification of a gun is something that has to be dealt with," he said. "Many males don't feel as if they're empowered unless they're packing."
Obama knew that he could not go on the full offensive against Rush. For several weeks, he effectively suspended his campaign. Then, around the year-end holidays, he was severely mocked for missing a crucial vote in Springfield on a crime bill called the Safe Neighborhoods Act, which included gun-control provisions. The bill had the support of both the Democratic mayor, Richard M. Daley, and the Republican governor, George Ryan. As he did every year at Christmas, Obama took his family to Hawaii to visit his grandmother, who was approaching eighty. The Obamas left on December 23rd and planned to return five days later in time for the resumption of the legislative session. On the day of the flight back to Chicago, Malia Obama woke with a high fever. She had the flu. Barack and Michelle decided to wait another day and then either they would fly back together or Barack would return while Michelle and Malia stayed behind a little longer.
The gun-control measure might have lost anyway, but Obama was slammed for missing the vote. The Tribune ran an editorial criticizing him and other legislators who failed to vote. "What a bunch of gutless sheep" it began. In one of his columns in the Hyde Park Herald, Obama tried to appeal to his constituents' sympathies, pointing out that if he hadn't gone to Hawaii, his ailing grandmother would have had to spend Christmas alone. "We hear a lot of talk from politicians about the importance of family values," he wrote. "Hopefully, you will understand when your state senator tries to live up to those values as best he can."
It did no good. The sympathy was all for Bobby Rush.
"The black community doesn't turn its back on you when you are down," Will Burns, who was now a deputy campaign manager, said. "The campaign was suspended effectively almost to January. We had to be respectful. You couldn't attack a man who was grieving, who was mourning. Then there was the vote in Hawaii. We had asked him not to go. We were worried that something would happen. Between all those things, we had trouble. And we had come in so late."
Obama soldiered on, campaigning door to door and on freezing subway platforms, wearing no hat, no gloves. "We called him 'the Kenyan Kennedy,'" Will Burns said. But the complications continued. Jesse Jackson, Sr., still an influential figure on the South Side, was among the many black leaders who endorsed Rush. Jackson and the others saw no reason to throw their old comrade out in favor of someone whose most memorable act had been to maneuver one of their own, Alice Palmer, into retirement. What was more, Jackson was not eager to see Obama elevated and become a rival to his son. "Bobby had deeper roots," Jackson said. "We knew Bobby in ways that we did not know Barack."
One of the saving graces of Obama's campaign was that while he was constantly running into older African-Americans who found him diffident or lacking deep roots in the community or possessing insufficient commitment to a traditional "black agenda," he attracted a core of younger people, including well-educated black men and women, who saw that he represented something different from Rush's generation of leaders. Even as they trailed behind Rush and, in their most clear-headed moments, anticipated a loss, Obama and his team acquired a certain spirit. They were a "random-ass mix," Burns said, of "guys with no teeth waiting to get their next Old Grand-Dad and then these Shiraz-drinking, Nation-reading, T.N.R.-quoting young black folk."
One of those devoted young volunteers, a black lawyer named Mike Strautmanis, who had met Obama through Michelle, later became an intimate friend of the family and, in the White House, Valerie Jarrett's chief of staff. "I came back after my senior year of college to Sidley to work as a paralegal," he said. "There were probably five black lawyers there and I went knocking on doors trying to meet all of them. One day, I knocked on Michelle's door to introduce myself. At that time, she was doing intellectual-property law. She was looking over the storyboard for Keystone Beer--the ad about 'Bitter Beer Face.' Sometimes we talked about Barack. I'd heard about him. Everyone had heard of him after he became president of the Harvard Law Review.
"So we developed a friendship. What we talked about most was fundamental questions about what we were doing, how we wanted to make a larger difference in the world. I was trying to figure out how to use my law degree to do something useful for other people."
Strautmanis's parents were from the South Side. His father left the family before he was born but his mother was a commanding presence in his life. "She made me think that I could be in a room and someone's entire impression of African-Americans might depend on me, how I behaved," he said. "I was always trying hard to be polite, to be intelligent, to work hard, to be perfect. I used that to motivate myself. My friends and family were mostly on the South Side because I chose to identify as an African-American, to culturally identify. My white liberal teachers put pressure on me to do really well. I was important to them, and it made them feel good."
Strautmanis grew up with the model of a black mayor battling a stubbornly conservative, and often racist, City Council. "Harold Washington was like the Lone Ranger to me," he said. "There were the bad guys and the good guys and every day you tuned in to see who won on the next episode. I still have my Harold Washington button--it was blue with white rays, like the rays of the sun."
As a volunteer canvassing door-to-door for Obama, Strautmanis was among a small group of young, educated African-Americans who saw their candidate as the incarnation of generational change. "I thought it was just so obvious: Barack was brilliant. Barack felt that Bobby Rush was politically weakened by his unsuccessful mayoral race and he hadn't done shit in Congress. He thought, What is Bobby Rush doing there? What had he put his stamp on? What was his crusade? I mean, why was he there at all?"
As a campaigner, Obama was an awkward, if earnest, novice. He was pedantic, distant, a little condescending at times, a better fit for the University of Chicago seminar room than for the stump or the pulpit of a black church in Englewood. In debates, he was in the habit of crossing his legs and holding his chin up at an imperious angle while an opponent spoke, as if his mind were elsewhere or the proceedings were beneath consideration. Too often, Obama reminded reporters and voters of the great sacrifice he had made by forgoing a Supreme Court clerkship or a mega-salary downtown to engage in public service. This was not a choice that a civil servant was likely to view with sympathy.
"He went to an elite institution like Harvard and spoke with twenty-five-cent words, and so he had that tendency to talk over, or down to, people," said Al Kindle, who, among Obama's campaign operatives, had the keenest ear for the street.
Ron Davis, who had worked with Obama in 1996 and was working for him again, would tell Obama, "Motherf*cker, you got to talk better, you got to talk to the people!" Davis, Kindle said, "would talk nasty to get Obama mad."
Newton Minow, who held a fundraiser for Obama, remembers, "Barack wasn't that good. Someone would ask a question and he would give a professorial answer. His answers were just too long and boring. I never thought he could defeat Rush. I've represented a number of black businesses in Chicago, and when I called fifteen or twenty of them, including the publisher of Ebony, none of them would contribute. They all said the same thing: 'Let him wait his turn.'"
Dan Shomon, Ron Davis, Al Kindle, Toni Preckwinkle, and Will Burns all urged Obama to keep things simple, to avoid lecturing, to loosen up and show some emotion, to be a little more aggressive. "Originally he was short with us about that," Kindle said. "He didn't like the fact that people were telling him he was arrogant. And there was all this talk that he was 'sent by the white man,' that he really is white in black clothing, that his job was to break up and rape the black community."
Kindle, who was in and out of barbershops, beauty parlors, and coffee shops, who talked with ministers and gang leaders, knew that precinct workers for both Bobby Rush and Donne Trotter were putting the word out that Obama was an effete outsider, a product of a rich Jewish "cabal" from the Lakefront and the near North Side, that he had been brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia by his white mother and grandparents, that he "wasn't black enough."
"Barack wasn't raised in the black community, his mother was white, and the question was whether he was another Clarence Thomas," Kindle said. "You couldn't come out and say it on TV, but it was in the streets. That's why he needed me to get out in the neighborhood and try to validate him in the neighborhoods. We could say, yes he knows about poor people, yes he is black enough.
"There is a lot of mistrust in the community and so for someone from Hyde Park it's easy to generate it," Kindle went on. "The University of Chicago had a history of financing operations that were land grabs and he worked there. And there was that money coming in that was Jewish money, so it was an issue of class struggle."
Carol Anne Harwell, who had been with Obama from the beginning, recalled that the campaign was deflating for him. "Barack took a lot of stuff," she said. "They talked about his mama; they talked about his speech; they said he wasn't a brother--it was really hard. They saw him as a carpetbagger from Hyde Park in a district that had the 'hood in it."
Those sentiments would often emerge on WVON, a local black radio station whose call letters once stood for "the Voice of the Negro" but were later changed to "the Voice of the Nation." "The WVON audience is not huge but it has people who are hubs of information within discrete communities," Will Burns said. Callers on Cliff Kelley's popular show on WVON slammed Obama, drawing a humiliating comparison between the heroic elder, Bobby Rush, and the entitled young man who wanted to unseat him. "There were no flyers or stuff stuck in doors, but there was a steady drumbeat," Burns said. "Part of this was Barack's comeuppance for what the nationalists felt he had done to Alice Palmer."
Rush's and Trotter's grassroots campaign workers kept up an effective whispering campaign. They pointed to campaign contributions from prominent white supporters like Minow, Mikva, Schmidt, and the novelists Scott Turow and Sara Paretsky, saying that it reeked of an "Obama Project," a shadowy plan by moneyed whites to propel their favored, and obedient, black man up the political ladder. It hardly mattered that Obama's finance committee was made up of younger black businessmen or that he had the support of some important black aldermen--Toni Preckwinkle, Ted Thomas, and Terry Peterson. Rush's and Trotter's supporters dismissed such people as "buppies."
Mike Strautmanis recalled, "I went to my grandmother and I told her I was working for Barack and we were going to take Bobby Rush's congressional seat. Barack was on the cover of the Sun-Times and I showed it to my grandmother. She looked up at me with this look and she said, 'Why is he gonna take Bobby's job?' For a while, I was lost for anything to say. I thought, Oh, shit. If I can't convince my grandmother to vote for Barack, we're in trouble."
By the New Year, Obama had a bad feeling about the campaign. He had raised almost as much money as Rush--including a ninety-five-hundred-dollar loan to himself--but there seemed no way he could win. The campaign could do little about Rush's strategy of exalting his own racial authenticity and, through surrogates, questioning Obama's. "Less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going to lose," Obama recalled. "Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense of dread, realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan."
With coverage of the race dominated by the murder of Huey Rush, Obama often seemed to lose focus and motivation. "Barack in that first race didn't show the commitment you need to win," Obama's media consultant, Chris Sautter, said. "He had never had to run in a competitive race before. He hadn't appreciated the grueling hours you have to put in. He didn't appreciate the scale of time needed for raising money or going door-to-door. And after Huey Rush's murder, he was just not enthusiastic about anything."
Obama didn't run negative ads or mail pieces. He mainly just kept talking about his experience as an organizer, his work as a lawyer on voting-rights cases, his experience in Springfield on welfare reform, gun control, ethics, racial profiling, and aid to poor children. Inevitably, he began his speeches with well-practiced self-deprecation: "The first thing people ask me is, 'How did you get that name, Obama?' although they don't always pronounce it right. They say 'Alabama,' or 'Yo Mama.'" Then he would recount his multi-ethnic journey and detail his liberal credentials. He never lost his cool, and he radiated a feeling that, even if he lost, he was a new kind of African-American politician.
"He never gave you the sense he felt he was going to go down in flames," Burns said. "Maybe he felt we needed that or we might want to pack it up. He's funny. He's got a dry wit, a wicked sense of humor. There had been a shooting in one of the wards we were trying to win. I was in charge of a rally for gun control at a church. We had walked the flyer, we'd made phone calls, we really put a lot of time and energy into it. We had the meeting. And the cameras are there--and there were like ten people. The buses never showed up. It was a disaster. The one thing you don't want with Barack is to fail on a mission. Some politicians start screaming and throwing shit. He tapped me on the shoulder after he spun it out as a press conference. He said to me, 'You know, Will, when I call a rally, normally you have people there. That's a rally.'"
In private, as the campaign floundered, Obama even talked with Ron Davis and Al Kindle about his ultimate ambition. "He has always wanted to be President--it's like a waking dream," Kindle said. "The first time it came up was the summer he was running for Congress. Ron would say, 'Don't tell anyone, but this boy wants to be President.' We laughed and Ron would say, 'He's loony!'"
Obama did get one break. On March 6th, the Tribune endorsed him:
Eight years ago, the Tribune endorsed Rush with these words criticizing Hayes: "He's a politician who can't shake the old ideas of government interventionism even though it is so clear in his district that the old ideas have failed." The same now seems true of Rush. He touts experience and seniority, but his approach to problems has not produced many results. And maybe that would be good enough, if he did not have an outstanding opponent.
Obama is smart and energetic. He was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and he is committed to his community. He has fresh ideas on governing and he understands that, as congressman for the 1st District, he would become a spokesman for African-American concerns nationally and an important voice in shaping urban politics in Chicago and the nation.
On Sunday, March 12th, Obama got a friendly reception in Beverly when he marched, along with three hundred thousand others, in the annual South Side Irish Parade. Over the years, the parade had become known as a drunken bacchanal and Obama was anxious about participating. Shomon convinced him to do it. "It's great," Shomon said. "You have corned beef and cabbage with your family and then you march around the block and have a beer with your cousin Jimmy." Obama began the day at a Catholic Mass and a soda-bread-and-casserole brunch at the home of Jack and Maureen Kelly, and with neighborhood volunteers like John and Michelle Presta, who ran a bookstore in the area. Obama marched on Western Avenue alongside the beer-drinking bagpipers and the teenaged kids with Mardi Gras beads and their green-dyed hair. A couple of nights later, he gamely fought to another draw with Rush and Trotter at a dull candidates' forum hosted by "Chicago Tonight," a program on WTTW.
The Tribune endorsement and the parade were boosts to the spirit, but Obama was not deluded. At the time, working-class blacks, the heart of the Democratic electorate in the district, tended to read the Sun-Times. On March 16th, the paper's editorial declared that Obama and Trotter had "failed to make their case" and endorsed Rush. Obama could not even win over the liberal alternative press. Ted Kleine's article in the Chicago Reader, entitled "Is Bobby Rush in Trouble?," appeared just before the primary on March 21st; it was balanced but contained some lethal moments. Rush was quoted as saying that Obama "went to Harvard and became an educated fool.... We're not impressed with these folks with these eastern elite degrees."
The piece described how Rush had been able to turn the generational tables on Obama. At a debate on WVON, moderated by Cliff Kelley, Rush talked about leading a protest march in 1995 after an off-duty police officer killed a homeless man. Obama jumped in, saying, "It's not enough for us just to protest police misconduct without thinking systematically about how we're going to change practice." Rush found his opening, saying, "We have never been able to progress as a people based on relying solely on the legislative process, and I think that we would be in real critical shape when we start in any way diminishing the role of protest. Protest has got us where we are today."
"A week later," Kleine reported, "Rush was still rankled by Obama's suggestion that the black community's protest days are past. 'Barack is a person who read about the civil rights protests and thinks he knows all about it,' he said. 'I helped make that history, by blood, sweat, and tears.'" The exchange made Obama look callow and ungrateful.
Kleine interviewed the candidates at length and concluded that Obama spoke in "a stentorian baritone that sounds like a TV newscaster's." He also allowed Trotter to hold forth with a series of remarks that deepened the impression that Obama was insufficiently black. "Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community," Trotter told Kleine. "You just have to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It's these individuals in Hyde Park, who don't always have the best interests of the community in mind."
The article depicted Obama as being on the defensive during the campaign, fending off attacks that, to Obama, were not only offensive but reflected a tragic suspicion of higher education among some voters. Obama told the Reader that when his opponents ripped him for going to Harvard Law School or teaching law at the University of Chicago, they were sending a signal to black children that "if you're well educated, somehow you're not keeping it real." He insisted that his kind of background allowed him to live in more than one world--an essential quality for a modern politician.
"My experience being able to walk into a public-housing development and turn around and walk into a corporate boardroom and communicate effectively in either venue means that I'm more likely to be able to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people, and that's how you get things accomplished in Congress," he said. "We have more in common with the Latino community, the white community, than we have differences, and you have to work with them, just from a practical political perspective.... It may give us a psychic satisfaction to curse out people outside our community and blame them for our plight. But the truth is, if you want to be able to get things accomplished politically, you've got to work with them."
Obama's campaign raised over six hundred thousand dollars and spent some of it on a series of three radio spots that cast Obama as the new wave, an earnest idealist tough enough to work effectively in Congress. One of the spots, written by Chris Sautter and his brother, Craig, was called "Blackout":
MAN'S VOICE: Oh, man, there go the lights again.
WOMAN'S VOICE: Another blackout!
MAN'S VOICE: I'm tired of this. When's somebody going to do something?
WOMAN'S VOICE: Obama.
MAN'S VOICE: Say what?
WOMAN'S VOICE: State Senator Barack Obama. He's fighting for reforms that would force Con Ed to refund customers who lose power.
VOICEOVER: Barack Obama, Democratic candidate for Congress. As a community organizer, Obama fought to make sure that residents in Roseland and Altgeld Gardens received their fair share of services. Barack Obama. As a lawyer, Obama fought for civil rights and headed up Project Vote, registering over a hundred thousand minority voters. Barack Obama. Elected to the Illinois Senate, Barack Obama pushed to make health insurance available to everyone, regardless of income, and brought millions of dollars into our community for juvenile crime prevention.
MAN'S VOICE: Here come the lights. Con Ed must have heard from that Senator Bama.
WOMAN'S VOICE: That's Obama, Barack Obama. And they'll be hearing a lot more from him.
VOICEOVER: Barack Obama, Democrat for Congress. New leadership that works for us.
The play on Obama's name and the down-home "Say what?" had little effect. Neither did his rare appearances alongside his opponents. In debates sponsored by the Urban League and the League of Women Voters, Obama failed to draw a real distinction between himself and Bobby Rush. Obama's volunteers were encouraged by his ability to fence with Rush, but even to some allies, he seemed aloof to the point of arrogance. Obama "was kind of snotty," Toni Preckwinkle said. "His head was up in the air, he acted like he was too good to be there."
If there were any doubts where this primary was headed, they were shelved when Bill Clinton came to town just before the balloting to campaign for Bobby Rush.
Clinton's popularity on the South Side had only intensified during his impeachment saga. Rush had stood close to Clinton on the White House lawn after the House vote on impeachment. Clinton had not forgotten. He taped a thirty-second radio commercial for Rush that played constantly on WVON and other important stations. "Illinois and America need Bobby Rush in Congress," Clinton said, and even referred to the killing of Huey Rush to make the ad more emotionally resonant. "Bobby Rush has been an active leader in the effort to keep guns away from kids and criminals long before his own family was the victim of senseless gun violence."
The commercial ran on March 13th and Clinton campaigned for Rush in Chicago that day, dominating local television news. "Until then, for us to win, you had to find Bobby with a live boy or a dead girl," Will Burns said. "When Clinton came into the picture, it was game over."
On March 21st, Bobby Rush won sixty-one per cent of the vote. Obama got thirty percent, Trotter seven per cent, and a retired police officer from Calumet Heights, George Roby, won one per cent. The only area that Obama won was the Nineteenth Ward, with its Irish-Catholic teachers, firefighters, and police officers. He also scored well in the small part of the district that extended into southern suburbs like Evergreen Park and Alsip.
The next morning, Obama went around to the houses in the district that displayed blue "Obama for Congress" signs and knocked on doors, thanking his supporters.
In November, Rush beat the Republicans' sacrificial candidate, Raymond Wardingley, by seventy points. The last Republican to win the congressional seat in the First District had been a son of slaves, Oscar De Priest.
Nine years after beating Obama, Rush recalled the experience with an almost unseemly relish. "Barack was not a good debater," he recalled. "He was too academic. He'd lose the crowd. And I knew something about political theater, after all. The message was simple: Where did this guy come from? Who is he? What's he ever done? ... My whole effort was to make sure that people knew that Barack Obama was being used as a tool of the white liberals. Now, these people later on also helped launch him as a candidate to the U.S. Senate and as President. You cannot deny Obama's brilliance, his disciplined approach. He is a very political guy, very calculating."
The night of his defeat, Obama, speaking to his supporters at the Ramada in Hyde Park, said, "I confess to you, winning is better than losing."
It was not clear that Obama would ever run for office again. Steve Neal, in a column in the Sun-Times, said that Obama would surely be heard from again--maybe he would run for Illinois Attorney General or State Treasurer--but for Obama himself even the prospect of getting Michelle's support for another campaign was forbidding. "I've got to make assessments about where we go from here," he told his supporters. "We need a new style of politics to deal with the issues that are important to the people. What's not clear to me is whether I should do that as an elected official or by influencing government in ways that actually improve people's lives."
Long after the loss, Obama recalled the sting of it: "It's impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don't quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word 'loser' is flashing through people's minds."
Obama is not given to rages or to depression, but the loss to Bobby Rush was decisive in every way. Years later, Obama told me, "I was completely mortified and humiliated, and felt terrible. The biggest problem in politics is the fear of loss. It's a very public thing, which most people don't have to go through. Obviously, the flip side of publicity and hype is that when you fall, folks are right there, snapping away." Not only had he lost by a margin of more than two-to-one, he had been repeatedly insulted as "not black enough," as dull, professorial, effete. Was he stuck in Springfield? If Bobby Rush couldn't come close to beating Richard Daley, how could he? In addition to the professional anxieties, there were financial ones: thanks to the campaign, Obama was sixty thousand dollars in debt.
"He was very dejected that it might all be over," Abner Mikva said, "and he was thinking how else could he use his talents." Obama began to wonder if he, and his family, wouldn't be better off if he didn't have to deal with the "meaner" aspects of political life: "the begging for money, the long drives home after the banquet had run two hours longer than scheduled, the bad food and stale air and clipped phone conversations with a wife who had stuck by me so far but was pretty fed up with raising our children alone and was beginning to question my priorities."
Michelle Obama also had things to say post-Bobby Rush. She had been against the run in the first place and now she was wondering when her husband would settle down and figure out a practical way of reconciling his family's financial needs and the urge to contribute to the community. She did not see it in electoral politics. The family was hardly poor--their annual income was now more than two hundred thousand dollars--but the fact that they could be living immeasurably better was not lost on either of them. As graduates of Harvard Law School, both Obamas had serious earning potential, and Michelle had talked about spending all her time with the family if her husband would only tend to business. "My hope was that, O.K., enough of this," she said, "now let's explore these other avenues for having impact and making a little money so that we could start saving for our future and building up the college fund for our girls."
Michelle Obama had long been displeased with the life of a political wife. "She didn't understand Springfield," Dan Shomon said. "She worried that he was wasting his time. He could have been making so much money and here he was mired in mediocrity." Barack was always on the move, campaigning, traveling, working in Springfield, teaching, or practicing law, but Michelle did not hesitate to make it clear that she expected her husband to do his share at home when he was there. "I found myself subjected to endless negotiations about every detail of managing the house, long lists of things that I needed to do or had forgotten to do, and a generally sour attitude," Obama wrote later in his second book, The Audacity of Hope. Dan Shomon told a reporter for Chicago magazine that Michelle said to her husband, "'O.K., Barack, you're going to do grocery shopping two times a week. You're to pick up Malia. You're going to do blah, blah, blah, and you're responsible for blah, blah, blah.' So he had his assignments, and he never questioned her, never bitched about it. He said that Michelle knows what she's doing--I trust her child rearing and the family rearing." (Sasha, the Obamas' second child, was born in 2001.)
Obama certainly could have gone back to the University of Chicago or his law firm. Another option that he considered was leaving the State Senate and becoming the head of the Joyce Foundation, which was built on a great timber fortune and doled out around fifty million dollars a year to community projects in the city.
"It was a sweet job--around a million a year, two country-club memberships, and I thought, Here it is, finally the day that all our hard work would pay off," said Dan Shomon, who imagined working as Obama's chief aide at the foundation. "Barack could have given out money to all kinds of good, progressive groups. He went into the interview, though, and his hands were shaking for fear that he would get the job. He knew that if he got it, that was it--he would be out of the game, out of politics."
Obama sparkled in the interview, but, ultimately, both he and the board of directors knew that his heart wasn't in it. "For God's sake, Barack," one of the board members, Richard Donahue, said, "this is a great job. But you don't want it." Relieved, Obama promptly walked away from the foundation world.
"That was the one thing Michelle didn't quite understand yet," Shomon said. "As much as he complained about Springfield, Barack had the addiction. And the narcotic was politics. He wanted to be an elected official. No matter what, politics completed him as a person, and he wasn't finished with it. Even when Barack was morose, when he was down and out after the race with Bobby, I never thought he would chuck politics. He had to pick up the pieces. But, ultimately, if it hadn't been for that race, there would be no Barack Obama. That was boot camp. That's what got him ready to do what he had to do."