Young Mr. Obama (11 page)

“What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer,” he wondered, “as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.”

The quote hearkened back to that long-ago conversation with John McKnight in the Wisconsin cabin. Obama had quit community organizing not because he disagreed with its goals, but because he wanted to be on the inside, making decisions. As a community organizer, he had protested decision makers. As a lawyer, he had sued them. As a state senator, he would finally be one of them.

As payback for Palmer's support, Obama acted as an adviser to her congressional campaign. He attended strategy meetings and helped develop a position paper on building a freight-handling airport in the south suburbs. Still, Obama felt conflicted about supporting Palmer, for both personal and political reasons. He wanted to help a mentor, but Michelle was an old schoolmate of Jesse Jackson Jr.'s wife, Sandi. Harwell had advised him not to take sides in the congressional race, to avoid making enemies of the Jacksons, or of Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was supporting Emil Jones.

Against those powerful Chicago dynasties, Palmer's campaign was floundering. By nature, she was an academic, not a politician, driven more by the need to change public policy than by the ego gratification of winning elections. This shared wonkiness was one reason she and Obama had hit it off, but it made her ill-suited for a congressional race. As a committeeman, Palmer had done little to build her ward organization. As a result, she was unknown even to some of her own constituents.

Jesse Jackson Jr. had no problems with name recognition. His father was one of the most famous black men in Chicago, and he used that connection astutely, collecting money from Rainbow PUSH donors and spending it on expensive mailers and phone banks. Most of his money came from out of state. Bill Cosby and Johnnie Cochran wrote checks. Jones, a son of the Machine, was depending on ward organizations. True to her background in community groups, Palmer ran a grassroots campaign. She tried to dismiss Jackson as a young upstart trading on his family name.

“Politics, like good cooking, needs some seasoning,” she said, following up with a jibe against Jackson's father. “I came out of a tradition of taking people seriously, that not everything can be reduced to a sound bite that rhymes.”

“Junior,” as he was called then, and still is, had inherited his father's gift for oratory, although he came off as more disciplined, less passionate, enunciating each word as though he'd been trained in elocution. Yes, he conceded, he was half the age of his rivals, but that was an asset. A congressman needed years to build seniority, and he had those years. His goal was to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, like Chicago's own Dan Rostenkowski, who was also elected to Congress at age thirty. Why elect an old man like Emil Jones, who was more valuable in his current job as leader of the state senate Democrats? In a flourish that no doubt made his father proud, Junior took a swipe at Jones while working in Chicago's biggest sports stories of 1995: Bulls forward B. J. Armstrong's expansion draft loss to the Toronto Raptors and Michael Jordan's retirement from basketball.

“I'm not running against Emil Jones,” he insisted. “I am trying to build a stronger team. B. J. should never have been traded, M. J. should have stayed in basketball, E. J. should stay in Springfield, and J. J. should be sent to Congress.”

Jones didn't have much of an answer for that. He was an ineffective public speaker who talked in a deep mumble best suited for giving orders in the back room of a ward office.

“If he was named Jesse Smith, he wouldn't even be on the radar screen,” Jones groused, ignoring the fact that nepotism had never bothered Chicago voters. (When Jones himself retired from the senate, he was succeeded by Emil Jones III.)

A week before the election, a
Chicago Tribune
poll found that Jackson had 97 percent name recognition in the district, compared with 69 percent for Jones and 61 percent for Palmer. Palmer was leading among white voters, who had a strongly negative view of the Jackson family. She tried to take advantage of that by locating her campaign headquarters in the suburbs. Whites had helped Mel Reynolds overthrow Gus Savage, but they could make a difference only in a close race. And this race wasn't close at all.

On November 28, the night of the special election, Palmer and her supporters gathered at a hotel in the suburb of Harvey. Her defeat was obvious as soon as the first returns came in, and it only looked worse as the numbers piled up. Jackson got 50,600 votes; Jones, 38,865; and Palmer 9,260. She lost her own ward, even her own precinct.

Obama and Harwell followed the returns from Obama's campaign office. To Harwell, Palmer's loss meant nothing for the state senate race.

“We need to move forward,” she told Obama.

Obama, however, was genuinely conflicted. Palmer had endorsed him, and he wasn't going to make a decision without talking to her first.

“We need to call Alice,” he said. “She's still the senator, and if she wants the senate seat, she should have it back.”

Obama drove to the hotel where Palmer was making her concession speech.

“I wanted to build a coalition that bridges city and suburbs, young and old, men and women and ethnic groups in order to forge a new social contract,” Palmer told her small crowd. Of the fact that not many people had voted, she said, “I'm not disappointed for myself, but for the missed opportunities people had to say change was needed.”

Once she left the podium, Palmer repeated to Obama and Hal Baron that she did not plan to reenter the race for state senate. That satisfied Obama.

“If she's not running, then I'm still running,” he told Baron.

It did not, however, satisfy Palmer's husband, Edward “Buzz” Palmer, a politically active Chicago police officer who had helped found the African-American Patrolman's Union.

“What the shit is she saying?” Buzz Palmer exploded to Baron. “Go up there and tell her to take it back!”

The filing deadline for the March primary was on December 18. That was three weeks away, plenty of time for a politician with her own ward organization to gather the 757 signatures necessary to appear on the ballot. The next morning, the
Tribune
reported that Palmer was “undecided” about reclaiming her seat.

Palmer's husband was not alone in wanting to keep his wife in Springfield. State Representative Lou Jones, an influential member of the Legislative Black Caucus, thought Palmer was too valuable to lose. The easiest way to avoid a fight, they figured, was to talk this young upstart Obama into stepping aside. Without Alice Palmer's knowledge, Obama was summoned to a meeting at Jones's house. Buzz Palmer was there, as were historian Timuel Black and Adolph Reed, who taught political science at Northwestern. These were elders of Chicago's black community. They told Obama that he was a promising young man, but it was not yet his turn. The senate seat belonged to Alice. In Chicago, you get ahead by working your way up through an organization. If Obama stepped aside now, they would support him for another office down the road.

Obama shook his head.

“I'm not gonna do that,” he said.

He had made a deal with Palmer, he said, and she had told him on Election Night that she wasn't running. He'd opened a campaign office and collected thousands of dollars from supporters.

If anything, the sit-down made Obama more determined to stay in the race. He left Jones's house livid at the condescending, bullying tone of the lectures he'd just heard. By the time he caught up with Harwell, he was still angry. It was one of the few times she'd ever seen him vent his emotions.

“They talked to me like I was a kid,” Obama sputtered. “They said, ‘You don't know what you're doing.' It was ‘Alice said this, Alice said that.' ”

Since Obama refused to yield, the Draft Alice Palmer Committee was formed. Headed by Black, it also included state Senator Donne Trotter and one of Obama's old supporters, Alderman Barbara Holt. The unexpected primary fight put many Hyde Park independents in a quandary. Obama and Palmer were both progressives. Both had been endorsed by the IVI-IPO in their races. The voters had to ask themselves which was more important: Palmer's pledge to Obama or her experience in Springfield.

“Like many, I supported Obama as a successor to Alice,” former IVI-IPO chairman Sam Ackerman told the
Hyde Park Herald
. “But now we don't need a successor.”

A week after losing the congressional election, Palmer decided she would attempt to reclaim her state senate seat, and asked her supporters to begin collecting signatures. Suddenly forced to play hardball politician, Obama found a way to call Palmer an Indian giver without actually using that politically incorrect term. The primary, he predicted to the
Herald
, would be determined by how voters felt about his message.

“I'm not going to win because people feel Palmer went back on her word,” he said, using his rival's last name, in case anyone thought they were still friends.

Privately, though, Obama was uncomfortable with the aggressive political maneuvers his locally born and bred supporters told him were necessary to defeat Alice Palmer. On December 18, Palmer filed her petitions. The next day, an old Hyde Park politico named Alan Dobry went downtown to the board of elections and began paging through the sheets. Dobry was a longtime supporter of Palmer's. As Fifth Ward committeeman, he had encouraged Palmer to take the state senate seat, assuring her she could do more for education as a politician than as a nonprofit executive. Dobry had even knocked on doors for Palmer during her congressional run. But he had also pledged to support Obama's state senate campaign and he wasn't going back on his word just because Palmer had lost her race for Congress. Hyde Parkers respected Dobry's political judgment, so he'd look like a fool if he went around the neighborhood telling people, “Oh, we made a bad mistake. We're going to do it differently and we're not going to run Barack. We're going to run Alice again.”

As an Obama supporter, Dobry felt obligated to do whatever he could to help his candidate win. In Chicago, challenging petitions is a tactic that goes back to the days when voters signed their names with fountain pens. Politicians pay good money to election lawyers who specialize in disqualifying signatures. As a member of an independent organization, Dobry had fought the Machine's efforts to knock his candidates off the ballot. By answering their challenges, he had learned to raise his own. Now, he and his wife, Lois, were examining Palmer's petitions, looking for mistakes. Right away, he found errors that suggested a hurried, slapdash effort. One sheet was filled with signatures from an adjacent district. On some petitions, entire households had signed, even though not everyone at the address was registered to vote. Dobry suspected Palmer's campaign had enlisted students from South Shore High School, who had then gone out and signed up their friends. Palmer's petitions contained 1,580 signatures, more than twice the number required to place her name on the ballot, but if these first sheets were any indication, there were enough duds to knock that figure below the minimum.

State Senator Rickey Hendon was also at the board of elections that day, looking to knock off challengers for his own West Side seat. He wasn't surprised to see the Dobrys—they were well-known political operatives—but he thought they were acting funny. When they left the room, he sidled over to peek at their papers and couldn't believe what he saw.

Oh, Lord, Hendon thought. Alice Palmer.

Hendon and Palmer were friends and allies in Springfield. They shared similar inner-city backgrounds and progressive politics. Hendon loved the fact that Palmer still behaved more like a schoolteacher than a politician—some days, she brought cookies onto the senate floor. So he found a phone and called her at home.

“Alice,” he told her, “the Dobrys are down here going through your petitions.”

“But they circulated for me,” Palmer protested, recalling the couple's support in her run for Congress.

“They are knocking you off the ballot.”

Palmer realized then that she had blundered. She had ignored that old Chicago maxim “We don't want nobody nobody sent.” Nobody had sent her Barack Obama. He'd been introduced by Brian Banks—a fellow Harvard man. As for the Dobrys, they were part of the Hyde Park political cabal. Like Harvard grads, Hyde Parkers always stuck together.

The next meeting of the IVI-IPO was scheduled for January 6. The Draft Alice Palmer Committee decided to make an appearance to insist the organization switch its endorsement. The meeting, held in the basement of a Lutheran church, was so acrimonious that a fistfight nearly broke out between Palmer's supporters and allies of Toni Preckwinkle, who was still backing Obama. But the organization stuck by its original endorsement. This was far more important for Obama than for Palmer. He needed all the support he could get. If both candidates appeared on the ballot, Obama would be the underdog: a political novice with an exotic handle running against an incumbent. “Barack Obama” sounded like a name adopted by one of those self-converted Muslims who ran their own storefront mosques and appeared on the public access TV show
Muhammad and Friends
in robes, beards, and kufis. Would voters see any difference between Obama and Gha-is Askia, the actual black Muslim running for state senate? Realistically, eliminating Palmer was the only way to win.