Young Mr. Obama (12 page)

At first, Obama was reluctant to challenge Palmer's petitions. Harwell had spent the week between Christmas and New Year's down at the board of elections and came to the same conclusion as Dobry: Palmer's sheets were full of errors and nonvoters. But to Obama, knocking his patroness off the ballot seemed so crude, so brass knuckled, so…Chicago. He had learned his politics from the great anti-Machine movements: Saul Alinsky's community organizing, the Hyde Park independents, and the Harold Washington crusade, represented by his boss, Judd Miner. Now he was being asked to bump aside a fifty-seven-year-old schoolmarm and win his first political office with a tactic that any thick-fingered hack might chortle about at the ward's annual smoker. A Chicagoan wouldn't have thought twice, but Obama was from Hawaii, a state that didn't even get politics until two years before he was born. He was finally persuaded by Harwell, and field coordinator Ron Davis, who cut through Obama's agonizing by growling, “The hell with this. The petitions are garbage.”

Obama went after all three of his rivals: Palmer, Ewell, and Askia. The board of elections agreed that none had collected enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Palmer had one last chance: If her supporters could collect two hundred affidavits from challenged voters, affirming they had signed her petitions, the board might approve her candidacy. Her campaign made an effort, but there wasn't enough time to track down all those people before a January 17 hearing. Palmer withdrew from the race. Six months earlier, she'd been first in line to challenge a kinky congressman. Now she'd lost her job to a thirty-four-year-old rookie.

Years later, asked about his challenge to Palmer, Obama would say glibly, “I think the district got a pretty good state senator.” Palmer disagreed. She never forgave Barack Obama for taking her seat. She cursed out Brian Banks for introducing him to her.

“This was all a plot,” she insisted.

“Look,” Banks said. “You sat down with him and you gave whatever support you gave to him.”

Still, Palmer felt Obama had stabbed her in the back. Her onetime protégé was “a betraying ingrate,” she told friends. After leaving the senate, Palmer resumed her academic career, going to work for the University of Illinois–Chicago, where she taught public affairs and was a special assistant in the office of the president.

Palmer stayed out of politics until 2008, when she let the world know what she thought of Obama by campaigning for Hillary Clinton. She even went to the Democratic National Convention in Denver as a Clinton delegate. When the delegates were asked to nominate Obama by acclamation, Palmer didn't raise her voice.

Chapter 8

STATE SENATOR OBAMA

O B A M A   W A S   E L E C T E D
to the state senate with no opposition—he knocked his Republican opponent off the ballot, too—but once he arrived in Springfield, he had to answer for his treatment of Alice Palmer. Palmer had been a beloved member of the Legislative Black Caucus, so some of its members held a grudge toward her replacement.

When a new senator introduces his first bill, it's traditional for senior members to haze the sponsor by asking ridiculous questions. On March 13, 1997, two months after he was sworn in, Obama stood up in the senate chamber to speak in favor of an innocuous measure: allowing community colleges to distribute a directory of graduating students to local businesses.

“Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen of the senate, I come humbly before you on this extremely humble bill”—those were Obama's first recorded words as an elected official.

After Obama described his humble bill, Senator Rickey Hendon asked to be recognized. He had a question for the freshman senator. Hendon was a flashy, theatrical politician, nicknamed “Hollywood” for his love of TV cameras and his background as the producer of an independent comedy called
Butterscotch and Chocolate
. He seemed like a natural to begin the fun.

“Senator, could you pronounce your name for me?” he asked Obama. “I'm having a little trouble with it.”

Obama pronounced his name.

“Is that Irish?” Hendon asked.

“It will be when I run county-wide,” Obama cracked.

“That was a good joke, but this bill's still going to die. This directory, would that have those one-eight-hundred sex line numbers in this directory?”

“I apologize,” Obama said. “I wasn't paying Senator Hendon any attention.”

“Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn't pay it much attention, either. My question was, are the one-eight-hundred sex line numbers going to be in this directory?”

Obama seemed flustered by Hendon's crude line of questioning. He answered with a jibe at his colleague's district.

“Not—not—basically this idea came out of the South Side community colleges. I don't know what you're doing on the West Side community colleges. But we probably won't be including that in our directory for the students.”

Then Hendon reminded the body how this Hyde Park senator with the unpronounceable name had come to join them.

“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.”

By the standards of freshman hazing, this was incredibly hostile. Other senators asked silly, good-natured questions. “In the bill, you talk about fostering employment,” joshed Denny Jacobs, a Democrat from Rock Island. “How does this relate to a foster child, or whatever the case may be? What is a foster employment?” Carl Hawkinson of Galesburg, the only other Harvard Law graduate in the chamber, asked, “How do the quality of these questions compare to those you received from Professors Dershowitz, Tribe, or Nessen?”

“I must say they compare favorably,” Obama assured him. “In—in fact, that is the—this is the toughest grilling that I've ever received. If I survive this event, I will be eternally grateful and consider this a highlight of my legal and legislative career.”

In the end, the bill passed unanimously. Even Rickey Hendon voted aye.

But Obama's friction with Hendon—and other black legislators—went far deeper than a tough primary against a popular incumbent. Politics is a business, and politicians learn to work with the newcomers, just as a ballplayer learns to play alongside the rookie who replaced his best friend in the lineup. Hendon, who had just begun his second term, was aiming for a spot in the senate leadership, and he saw this obviously intelligent, talented newcomer as a threat. Hendon was also a much more traditional politician—and a more traditional black man—than Obama. He had come up on Chicago's West Side, which has the city's most violent chapters of the Gangster Disciples, its earthiest blues taverns, its loudest bid whist games, and its busiest heroin street corners. Hendon had been a teenager during the 1968 riots that burned out storefronts on Madison Street. He earned his first office—alderman—by producing TV shows and plays for big-shot politicians who then slated him as a candidate. Unlike Obama, he had paid his dues. Wherever he went, he carried the West Side attitude, that the bourgeois blacks on the South Side take eight or nine slices of pie while the West Side gets the crust. That South Siders look down on West Siders, and that nowhere do they look down from a greater height than Hyde Park. That no self-respecting West Sider can ever let a South Sider punk him.

After that hazing, Hendon began needling Obama in the black caucus. When Obama brought up a proposal, Hendon would dismiss it with, “You think you're so smart, you went to Harvard.” After-hours, Hendon sat in his office, smoking cigars with Senator Donne Trotter, who represented the far South Side of Chicago. Together, they'd malign Obama as “arrogant” and “Harvard.” Behind his back they called him “Senator Yo Mama.” They even bought a copy of
Dreams from My Father
to mine for embarrassing tidbits. Paying Obama a royalty was worth it for the extra ammunition.

Obama tried to brush off the criticism. “Ah, Hendon, you've always got something to say.” In caucus meetings, Emil Jones tried to keep peace between the senators.

“Focus on the issues,” he'd order them.

But even that increased the tension. Jones was minority leader. As the most powerful Democrat in the chamber, he was essential to any senator's advancement. And, from Obama's first year in Springfield, it was obvious that Jones saw him as a comer.

Obama's black colleagues may have been jealous, but Obama's behavior, and his overall demeanor, didn't help the relationships. He enjoyed telling people he'd gone to Harvard, as if the whole capitol didn't know already. And he had a habit of listening to a debate with his chin cocked in the air, like a setter catching a far-off scent. Put together with his education and his neighborhood, the pose made him seem haughty. He sometimes gave the impression that he was slumming, killing time in the legislature until he could occupy an office better suited to his intelligence and education. Alderman Sam Burrell took a bus down to Springfield on a lobbying trip and saw an Obama far different from the young law school graduate who'd toted a backpack into his office a few years before to ask for advice on Project Vote! As Burrell stepped off his bus, Obama strode loosely across the capitol lawn, waving and calling out, “Hey, Sam.” That easy walk, that self-assured greeting. It's like he's white, Burrell thought. Every black man in America had a little voice in the back of his head that said, “You can't.” It was just part of growing up as part of a race that had been barred from the best schools, the best jobs, the best neighborhoods. Obama had never heard that voice. His white mother, his white grandmother, and his white grandfather had never told him, “You can't. The white man won't let you.” And now look at him. He was acting as though he owned everything under the capitol's pewter-colored dome.

In Springfield, Obama developed closer relationships with his white colleagues than his black colleagues, both on the senate floor and after hours. The Springfield of state government is a community entirely separate from the prairie city of the same name. Nicknamed “Springpatch,” or just “the Patch,” it is a temporary carnival of politicians, lobbyists, journalists, tourists, and legislative aides who swarm into town for a few days each week between January and May. Most are from the Chicago area, 180 miles away. That's too far to commute, so they kill their evenings at the Sangamo Club or the bar of the Abraham Lincoln Hotel. Others work late or drink with lobbyists in their hideaway offices. Obama played poker. A pair of lobbyists put the word out that they were organizing a game at the Panther Creek Country Club. Obama had learned to play cards in college, so he showed up at the club and, after dinner, sat down in an upstairs room with three small-town Democrats: Denny Jacobs of Rock Island, Terry Link of Vernon Hills, and Larry Walsh of Elwood. While a Bulls game flashed on TVs in the background, they played three-dollar-limit games of Omaha and seven-card stud. Obama was a different breed of politician than his partners: urban, a reformer, more intellectual than glad-hander. He was an ambitious thirty-five-year-old, while they were middle-aged men who'd peaked as state legislators. But Obama worked hard to fit in. The game, which came to be called the Committee Meeting, eventually moved over to Link's house. Obama brought beer, even though he wasn't much of a drinker, and chipped in for pizza.

In the 1990s, Senate Democrats were in the minority, so their members had a lot of free time. (Link, elected at the same time as Obama, couldn't even get a bill out of committee his first two years.) Through months and months of Tuesday nights, Obama built friendships with his poker buddies. Jacobs, whose best-known achievement was bringing riverboat gambling to Illinois, boasted to his wife that he'd met a future president of the United States.

“You better get your ass out of here,” he told Obama. “You're too smart for this place.”

Walsh, a corn and soybean farmer from Will County, south of Chicago, discovered that Obama was also a passionate White Sox fan. (Walsh admired Obama for the same reason black legislators disdained him: He wasn't a race man. When Obama considered a bill, his first question wasn't “How is this good for African-Americans?” but “How is this good for Illinois?”) Link and Obama became golf buddies, sneaking away from the capitol for a round at Panther Creek. Basketball was still Obama's game—he played every morning at the Springfield YMCA—but he saw that legislative deals were cut on Panther Creek's fairways, so he signed up for lessons, determined to be something more than a duffer. Even with the instruction, he had trouble breaking 90.

The four men didn't always agree politically. Obama was a big-government liberal. His poker pals were fiscal conservatives. At the beginning of every session, Obama introduced a constitutional amendment guaranteeing health care to everyone in Illinois.

“You think universal health care is the best thing since sliced bread,” Jacobs chided.

The amendment always failed, but it got the attention of Emil Jones, who named Obama the Democrats' spokesman on health care.

During his first year in Springfield, Obama also became the party's point man on welfare reform, which affected thousands of families in his inner-city district. In Washington, the Republican Revolution was still a powerful movement. Congress had passed a bill requiring every state to rewrite its welfare laws, with the aim of forcing public aid recipients to find jobs. It was the biggest change in welfare since the program began during the Great Depression. Liberals were determined to ensure that the poor received job training and child care while they looked for work. The Illinois senate Republicans were led by a pale, comfortably overweight suburbanite named James “Pate” Philip, who had publicly denigrated the black race's work ethic. They introduced a hard-line bill that placed a five-year limit on benefits, with little provision for training and education. The bottom line was look for a job or lose your check. As a freshman from the minority party, Obama had no say in writing the proposal. But any welfare bill also had to pass the state house of representatives, which was controlled by Chicago Democrats. Obama did have a role in drafting the compromise that reached the governor's desk. Working with Representative Barbara Flynn Currie, another Hyde Park liberal, and staffers from the National Center on Poverty Law, he produced amendments that gave poor people a chance to study for better jobs. Anyone working more than thirty hours a week was exempt from the five-year time limit, essentially qualifying for a perpetual earnings supplement. Only one-third of wages counted toward reducing welfare payments. And high-school students, or college students carrying at least a C average, were exempt from the time limit.

Even liberal welfare activists thought the new system was better than Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The caseload dropped dramatically, from 250,000 families to 30,000. Obama worked hard to ensure that the savings were spent on subsidies to child care centers. If the state was forcing mothers to go to work, it was only fair to give their children a place to go, too.

The welfare bill excluded immigrants. Obama wasn't happy about that, but he voted “aye” because the Republicans had refused to budge on the issue. (Latino senators voted “no” in protest.) It was a necessary compromise, but in a floor speech before the bill passed, Obama implored the senate to make sure no needy Illinoisan was left out of welfare reform. In its acknowledgment of liberal and conservative views and its use of anecdote, the speech showed that Obama was already developing the political rhetoric he would use in
The Audacity of Hope
and as a presidential candidate.

“This may be as important a bill as we pass in this session,” he began. “It will affect a huge number of people. I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare. Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation because I think it had some problems.”

Obama, the foreign student's son, asked the senate to revisit the ban on immigrants—“Everyone in this chamber, at some point, comes from an immigrant family. And I don't like the notion that those people who are here legally, contributing to our society, paying taxes, are not subject to the same benefits, the same social safety net that the rest of us are.”