Young Mr. Obama (18 page)

At the time, the journalist who covered Obama most closely was Todd Spivak, a twenty-five-year-old cub reporter for the
Hyde Park Herald
. As the neighborhood state senator, Obama was on Spivak's beat, and Spivak usually made a story out of the press releases politicians faxed into their local papers.
CURRIE AND OBAMA BILLS SEEK TO CLEAN UP COURTS. SENATOR OBAMA HELPS DEFEAT A CANCELED FIREARM BILL
. Or simply,
OBAMA BILL PASSES SENATE
.

Spivak also covered city hall, where he was used to encountering evasive, antagonistic aldermen. Obama was the complete opposite. He gave Spivak his cell phone number and always returned phone calls the same day, even if it was late in the evening. Whenever Spivak tried to call Obama “senator” or “sir,” he'd hear, “Please, call me Barack.” Most politicians become curt or hostile when asked about campaign contributions. They take the questions as affronts to their integrity. Not Obama. It was his style to bemoan the seamier aspects of Chicago politics while at the same time benefiting from them, so he would complain to Spivak that raising money was a necessary evil, but yes, he'd held a fund-raiser, and yes, developers were there, but no, they hadn't gotten anything from him in return. Even worse, Obama was usually right. Spivak was used to writing about hinky South Side pols, but he couldn't dig up any dirt on Obama. One of the few times he tried, by crashing an Obama fund-raiser at Allison Davis's house, he was thrown out by the host.

A year after the congressional primary, I interviewed Obama again for the
Reader
. It was early 2001, and he was trying to pass a bill to ensure that what had happened to Al Gore in Florida would never happen in Illinois. After the 2000 election, Cook County installed ballot-counting machines that spat back overvotes and undervotes, allowing voters a chance to correct their mistakes. In some inner-city precincts, this reduced spoiled ballots by 90 percent. Republicans objected. Kicking back undervotes, they complained, would violate the privacy of people who chose to skip a race. Looming precinct captains might order voters back into the booth to complete the ballot. A Republican senator introduced a bill to turn off the ballot-checking software, thus preventing machines from identifying undervotes. Obama saw that as an effort to suppress the big-city vote. Suburbanites were voting on fill-in-the-bubble ballots, which were hard to screw up. Chicagoans were still punching out chads.

Obama countered with his own bill, which would have given counties the option of kicking back undervotes. After it died in the Elections Subcommittee, he came up with an ingenious compromise: add a “None of the above” line to every race. That would allow voters to skip a race without undervoting. (The issue became moot when a judge allowed Cook County to identify both overvotes and undervotes.)

Ever since Florida had replaced Illinois as the election fraud capital of America, I'd been writing about what our state was doing to avoid taking back the title. So I called Obama. I suspected he was unhappy about my
Chicago Reader
story on the First Congressional District race, which had been full of his enemies' accusations that he wasn't black enough for the South Side. But he returned my phone call.

“The principal reason is partisanship,” he told me, in his clipped diction, when I asked about the Republican bill. “Privately, I don't think any of the Republican legislators would deny that. Why would they want to encourage an additional ten percent in Cook County? That's a direct blow against them in statewide races.”

When I thanked Obama for his time, he responded with an icy “You're welcome”—the iciest I'd ever heard from a politician. (Curtness is Obama's favorite method of displaying anger.) My first thought was, That guy's got some great ideas. If he ever learns how to act like a human being, he may go someplace in politics. Later, I realized that Obama's “You're welcome” was a smooth move. Blowing me off would have done him no good. The
Reader
had a following among white liberals, an important constituency for Obama in a statewide race. Berating a writer would have invited more bad publicity. Just by using a peevish tone of voice, he'd let me know he was unhappy with my work and ensured his displeasure didn't make the paper. Obama was the most media-conscious politician I had ever met. During the congressional race, whenever I showed up at a campaign event, he always made a point of walking up to me, touching my arm, and asking, “How are you doing?” in a manner that came off as collegial rather than desperate for publicity. Politicians rarely pursue reporters. Most have to be chased across the room or approached as though they are living altars. Obama tried to bond with the press. When it mattered, the press would return the compliment.

In the spring of 2002, Obama's testy relationship with Ricky Hendon finally blew up into an angry, shoving, profane brawl, right on the senate floor.

After five years of working together—even sponsoring some bills together—Hendon was still needling Obama about his blackness.

“Hey, Barack,” he'd taunt, “you figure out if you're black or white yet?”

Obama tried to brush it off. Once, in a black caucus meeting, Hendon told him, “You have to stay black all the time. You have to be black on all issues.”

“This is not a black or white issue,” Obama responded tersely.

Obama had nominated Senator Kimberly Lightford, a young woman from the western suburbs, as chairman of the black caucus. They were allies. After Lightford's first race, Obama wrote her a $500 check to cover campaign debts. Lightford and Emil Jones tried to keep the peace between Obama and Hendon, but there were days when Obama didn't show up for meetings because he didn't feel like being hassled.

On the senate floor, Obama sat alongside three white Democrats from the Chicago area—Terry Link, Carol Ronen, and Lisa Madigan. Their arrangement was called Liberal Row, and it only deepened Hendon's conviction that Obama's true home was in the white progressive community.

On June 11, the senate voted on a proposal to close a Department of Children and Family Services office in Hendon's district. Anguished that the state was snatching another social program from the impoverished West Side, Hendon stood up to speak. He delivered an emotional plea for the children of his neighborhood.

“It just bothers me that you're cutting education to the core, you're destroying lives of the—of the children of this state and nobody's even paying no damn attention,” Hendon said. “It's like you don't even care. Well, I care. And it makes a difference what we do here in this chamber out there in the real world…stop cutting everything from the children of this state.”

When the roll was called, every Democrat voted to keep the office open—except the four liberals. Hendon was furious. He stalked down the Row, demanding answers at every desk. Madigan explained that she was running for attorney general and needed to appear tough on government spending. Link admitted he had voted with the rest of Liberal Row. Ronen apologized and asked for Hendon's forgiveness. Then Hendon confronted Obama.

“Well, we have to be fiscally prudent,” Obama said.

“What that mean?” Hendon demanded.

“Tight economy,” Obama replied. “We need to watch our coffers.”

When the next round of budget cuts came up—including a million-dollar grant to the Chicago for Summer Youth jobs—Obama rose to speak. He acknowledged that budget cuts were necessary but chided the Republicans for portraying themselves as pork busters while keeping alive a $2 million program to train students in video production and $250,000 for suburban recreation.

“It is not true that somehow that side of the aisle has been purely above politics or pork or partisanship in this process,” Obama said. “In fact, I think when we start looking at the votes, we'll—it'll turn out that the governor's office has its favorites, and it's looking after the—its favorites. And that's fair. That's the nature of the political beast, but I don't want the—the public to be fooled into thinking that somehow, you-all have a monopoly on responsible budgeting.”

That was too much sanctimony for Hendon to bear. Obama, he was sure, was building a record to present to white voters when he ran for higher office. He needed a few “fiscally conservative” votes, so he was selling out the poor folks on the West Side to secure his political future. Hendon pressed his light, demanding recognition from the chair.

“I just want to say to the last speaker, you got a lot of nerve to talk about being responsible and then you voted for closing the DCFS office on the West Side, when you wouldn't have voted to close it on the South Side,” he raged. “So I apologize to my Republican friends about my bipartisanship comments, 'cause clearly there's some Democrats on this side of the aisle that don't care about the West Side either, especially the last speaker.”

Then Obama pressed
his
light. He apologized for the vote, but he also made it clear he didn't take kindly to being called out in front of the entire senate.

“I understand Senator Hendon's anger at—actually—the—I was not aware that I had voted no on that last—last piece of legislation. I would have the record record that I intended to vote yes. On the other hand, I would appreciate that next time my dear colleague Senator Hendon ask me about a vote before he names me on the floor.”

The words were acid with sarcasm and false collegiality. Once Obama's microphone was off, he confronted Hendon directly.

“You embarrassed me on the senate floor,” Obama hissed. “If you ever do it again, I'll kick your ass.”

“Really?” Hendon retorted.

“You heard me, and if you come back here by the telephones, where the press can't see, I'll kick your ass right now.”

At five foot seven, Hendon was half a head shorter than Obama, but he was also from the toughest district in the senate. He couldn't go back to the West Side and tell his constituents he'd backed off a fight with a Harvard grad—from Hyde Park.

“OK,” Hendon said. “Let's go.”

Hendon led the way to the telephone area, where he dared Obama to hit him. The Illinois senate chamber was designed in the nineteenth century, with as much flourish and pomposity as that era's oratory: marble Ionic columns capped with gilded scrolls rose behind the rostrum. Glass chandeliers dangled from the ceiling. A thick burgundy carpet, patterned with goldenrod accents, absorbed the loafers of senators as they walked to their polished wooden desks, which were arranged in expanding semicircles. Obama and Hendon were treating this noble room like the sidewalk outside a tavern. The two men shoved and swore at each other until Emil Jones noticed the fight and sent Donne Trotter to break it up. Jones told Hendon, an assistant minority leader, to go back to his seat and start acting like a member of the leadership. He told Obama that a major misconduct penalty wasn't going to look good on his legislative record. Even that didn't end the dispute. A TV reporter had seen the donnybrook and asked Obama about it. It had been no big deal, Obama insisted. He and Hendon had worked out their differences.

Hendon wouldn't talk about the fight on TV, but he denied making up with Obama. There was nothing to apologize for. This was relayed to Obama, who wasn't happy to hear it. Those long legs strode back to Hendon's desk, and that long, lean face loomed in to say something. Before Obama could speak, Hendon shouted for Jones, sitting three seats away.

“Get this guy out of my face!”

Jones dragged Obama off the floor.

After that day, the two senators never discussed their showdown, but Hendon began treating Obama with more respect, less antagonism. The name-calling stopped. Obama had shown the West Sider that he was a fighter, not just a passionless lawyer/professor who wouldn't stand up for himself. Some senators, who could never imagine Obama losing his cool, wondered if the entire fight had been calculated to make just that point.

Chapter 11

“YOU HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE A U.S. SENATOR”

B A R A C K   O B A M A
'
S   B I G G E S T   P R O B L E M
in running for the Senate was money. He didn't have any. In fact, he had less than no money. His credit cards were still maxed out, because of the congressional race, and he and Michelle were paying off student loans so steep they exceeded the mortgage. One day, after he became famous,
Dreams from My Father
would hit the bestseller list, but in the early 2000s, it was an out-of-print book that generated no royalties for its author. On his trips to Springfield, Obama drove a Dodge Neon, one of the smallest, cheapest cars a patriotic American politician could own.

Of course, thanks to his attendance at ABLE meetings, Obama knew people with money. When he finally decided to run, in 2002, he approached black business owners for help.

Black Chicago wanted that Senate seat back. And many members of the city's Talented Tenth saw Obama as the ideal candidate. The city's bankers, lawyers, and investors weren't interested in simply catering to the ghetto trade, like the generation of black entrepreneurs before them. They wanted to do business with whites, too. In Obama, they recognized a character with the same crossover dreams.

There were intraracial politics at work, too. In the black community, preachers had always been the leading power brokers. They had money, and they had voters. Many successful black politicians, such as Adam Clayton Powell Jr., had used a pulpit as a platform to achieve office. During segregation, that had been essential, because the church was the center of black life, the only place blacks could gather to express their aspirations. But segregation was long gone, so it was time to replace that old model. White politicians got their money from businesspeople. Blacks should do the same, especially if they wanted to win among the wider electorate. It was time to follow the American way of politics. The ministers could be a source of money, but not the leading source. Let them focus on the clergy role, while businesses took over the financial role.

Throughout 2002, Obama held a series of lunches and meetings with black professionals. He told Hermene Hartman he was thinking of running for the Senate but would step aside if Jesse Jackson Jr. or Carol Moseley Braun decided to run. Both had bigger followings in the black community, and Obama didn't want to be part of another primary in which the “black enough” issue might come up.

John Rogers first heard about Obama's Senate plans during a Sunday brunch at the home of Valerie Jarrett, who had been close to the Obamas for a decade. As Mayor Daley's chief of staff, she hired Michelle to work in city hall. Jarrett, who went on to become chairwoman of the Chicago Transit Authority and vice president at the Habitat Company, wasn't just well connected in the black professional world, she was its center. When Obama told Jarrett, “There's something I want to bounce off you,” she also invited Rogers and Nesbitt to the meeting, knowing that he was going to entertain them all with his fool dream of being a United States senator. Obama came to Sunday brunch at Jarrett's house, with Michelle in tow.

Jarrett thought running for the Senate was a terrible idea—Obama just lost to Rush, he was broke, he had two toddlers at home, and Michelle didn't like him traveling all over the state. So Obama went to work on the small gathering, begging for one last chance to satisfy his addiction to politics. This race would be different from the last, he promised.

“I've talked to Emil Jones,” Obama said. “He's a huge political force, and he's prepared to support me. When I ran for Congress, I didn't have that kind of support. And if I lose, then, Michelle, I'll give up politics. If I can't do it this time, I promise I'll get a normal job in the private sector, so this'll be the last time I ask you to do this, unless I win. And money's a problem, so, Valerie, I think you should help me, because you're in the business community, you and John. You two should think about helping me do this.”

“So what if you lose?” Jarrett challenged him.

“If I'm not worried about losing, why are you?” Obama said. “If I lose, I lose. But I think I'll win.”

Jarrett wasn't convinced Obama could win, but she was convinced she should support him. Rogers was an easier sell. His friend was about to take a huge chance, so how could he do anything but throw all his personal and financial resources behind the campaign?

Rogers's first task was to get Carol Moseley Braun out of the race. He'd been finance chairman of her successful Senate campaign, so he could tell her the truth: She didn't have the support to run again. Black Chicago's excitement over Moseley Braun's 1992 victory—she was the first African-American Democrat in the Senate's history—had turned to disappointment during her six years in Washington. Carol had been given the chance to become the most respected black politician in America, and she'd blown it. Paul Simon, her Senate seat mate for four years, summed up Moseley Braun's problems in one sentence: “She fell in love with the wrong person.” Her campaign manager/boyfriend, Kgosie Matthews, earned $15,000 a month while other staffers weren't getting paid. After the election, Moseley Braun and Matthews jetted off on a monthlong trip to Africa. Worst of all, he took her to visit Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, a trip she made without informing the State Department.

Obama insisted, publicly and privately, that if Moseley Braun was in, he was out. How could he win? Her name recognition in Illinois was 92 percent. His was 18 percent. And they would both be competing for black votes, which would be decisive in a primary sure to be full of white politicians.

“If Carol runs, I won't run,” he told a reporter. “I just won't have a chance. We're too similar, or we're seen as too similar: two potentially nonthreatening black politicians from the South Side of Chicago.”

To give Moseley Braun a reason not to run, Rogers called Jamie Dimon, CEO of Bank One, and asked if he would give her a job. Dimon wouldn't. Obama invited Moseley Braun to his district office to discuss the race. With the same high-handedness that caused her to run through five chiefs of staff in six years, Moseley Braun made it clear that running for her old Senate seat was her prerogative. Obama would just have to wait for her decision.

But Moseley Braun wouldn't make one. Todd Spivak of the
Hyde Park Herald
, Moseley Braun's neighborhood paper, talked to her nearly every week.

“She always talked about she's waiting for this, she's looking at this, and she would not come out,” Spivak would recall. “She put everything on hold. Carol became more and more paranoid and upset with me. She came to my office once to yell at my editor for a story I wrote where I was pretty much just parroting what the dailies were saying. She wasn't being embraced by her old supporters. It took her a while to realize, ‘My political career is really over.' ”

Obama was having better success asking his senate colleagues for support. As he'd told Valerie Jarrett, he started by approaching Emil Jones. If the Democrats took over the state senate in 2002, as they seemed likely to do, Jones would become senate president.

“You know,” Obama told his caucus leader, “you're a pretty powerful guy. You have the power to make a U.S. senator.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jones said. “Who?”

“Me,” Obama told him.

Jones agreed to help. He had opposed Obama in his races for the state senate and the U.S. Congress, but this time the young man was playing by the rules: He wasn't challenging an incumbent Democrat. Obama's poker buddies were on board, too. In the spring of 2002, Obama met Larry Walsh for breakfast at the Renaissance Center in Springfield.

“I want to ask you some very difficult questions,” he told Walsh. Then he laid out his plan for a Senate run and asked if Walsh would support him.

“Absolutely,” Walsh said.

Not only had the two senators served together—and played cards together—for five years, but Obama had once done Walsh a big political favor. In 1998, Walsh won a difficult primary against an African-American opponent. To mend fences with the black community, he organized a luncheon for African-American leaders in Joliet. Obama had once told Walsh, “If you ever need me, if you'd like me to speak to black ministers or business leaders or whatever, I'd be more than glad to come down.” So Walsh invited Obama to keynote the luncheon. Obama's speech resonated with the audience. That fall, Walsh received strong black support.

Walsh, Link, and Jacobs all represented districts that were anchored by a city with a significant black population. Obama was going to do well in Chicago, but to win the entire state, he also needed to do well in Joliet, Waukegan, and Rock Island. Those three old white guys could help.

While Obama waited for Moseley Braun to announce her plans, he started a fund-raising committee. Raising money couldn't wait. Winning the Senate seat was going to cost at least $4 million, most of it for TV ads to introduce himself to Illinois. Peter Fitzgerald had spent $14 million of his family wealth, an amount Obama considered obscene.

Once he had his inner circle behind him, Obama made an appeal to the ABLE crowd. At a gathering at Jim Reynolds's house, he told a group of forty wealthy blacks that he was running for the Senate. He didn't talk about money that night. Instead, he talked about making the campaign a group effort.

“Don't let me get lost,” he implored his fellow buppies. “You are my friends. Tell me the truth, keep me real. Don't let me get out there and get the big head. Let's still kick off our shoes and talk.”

Everyone at the party agreed that Obama was the right candidate for the Senate. They also agreed his stump speech was terrible. It was all about local issues—he sounded like he was throwing his hat in the ring for alderman—and Obama was
still
using that stilted, professional style that had bored the First Congressional District.

“You've got to broaden it,” Martin King, the chairman of Rainbow PUSH, urged him. “You've got to speak larger. You should go see Jesse.”

Obama took King's advice and began attending the Saturday morning rallies at “Jesse's Place,” the Grecian-temple Rainbow PUSH headquarters on Drexel Avenue in Kenwood. There will always be some tension between Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson. By becoming president, Obama eventually succeeded where Jackson failed. Jackson's politics of black empowerment made him a candidate for one race only. Obama, who was trying to build a multiracial coalition, couldn't associate himself too closely with that message. But before he could reach out to whites, he needed a base in his own community. Jackson and his son Junior, who had enough cred to cover the South Side, the West Side, and the south suburbs, would become important allies in Obama's effort to sell himself to blacks.

Obama's black friends weren't the only ones urging him to be a little more pulpit and a little less lecture hall. Abner Mikva was on his case about it, too. Preaching wasn't Obama's natural style, but he was going to have to learn if he wanted to light up black audiences outside Hyde Park.

“You've got to get into those black churches,” Mikva ordered Obama. “You've got to spend more time there. You know, Dr. King never pulled his punches, but he said it in a way black people understood.”

Then Mikva told a story from his own day, about something Cardinal Richard Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, said to John F. Kennedy after the 1960 West Virginia primary.

“Jack,” Cushing had said, “Jack, from now on be more Irish and less Harvard.”

Obama, he was suggesting, needed to be more black and less U of C.

Even by mid-2002, Obama was getting an idea of whom he'd be facing in the Democratic primary. Gery Chico, a Latino lawyer who had served as president of the Chicago Board of Education, was talking about running. So was Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas. His most formidable opponent looked to be state comptroller Dan Hynes, the scion of a Southwest Side Irish political family. Hynes would be the Machine candidate: His father, former Illinois senate president Thomas Hynes, had served with the current Mayor Daley in Springfield. They'd even shared an apartment. The labor unions, ward bosses, and Downstate county chairs, with their battalions of door knockers, would be backing Hynes, who was only thirty-three years old but already having a political midlife crisis as he tried to escape his second-tier state office.

Obama could see the constituencies he'd need to win: blacks and liberal whites, the same folks who'd elected Harold. That fall, as President George W. Bush began threatening Iraq with war, Obama got his chance to impress the latter crowd.

There were already plenty of connections between Obama and the white progressives who'd learned their politics in the 1960s antiwar movement. Jerry Kellman liked to joke that he'd “majored in protesting” at the University of Wisconsin. Judd Miner practically embodied white liberalism in Chicago. And, of course, there was Bill Ayers. Although Obama was an Alinsky organizer, many of the community groups he worked with had been formed during the sixties, as expressions of the era's People Power ethos. The Progressive Chicago Area Network, born from the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, produced some of the biggest players in Harold Washington's campaign, including Al Raby, another of Obama's mentors.

The Democratic convention and the election of Harold Washington had been left-wing Chicago's greatest moments. After Washington died, the movement became dormant, its members concentrating on their careers as journalists, professors, lawyers, politicians, and foundation presidents. They kept up with each other through the pages of the
Reader
, an alternative weekly founded in 1971. (And, of course, the first citywide paper to notice Obama.)

While at Davis, Miner, Obama had met an advertising/PR professional named Marilyn Katz, who had run the media campaign for Harold Washington's mayoral run. Katz was a friend of Bettylu Saltzman, the daughter of a megamillionaire real estate developer. A former aide to Paul Simon, Saltzman had used her family fortune to become one of Chicago's most benevolent Democratic donors. She was also acquainted with David Axelrod, Chicago's number one political consultant, who had begun his career on Simon's 1984 Senate campaign. Saltzman was exactly the kind of white person Obama wanted to meet.