Young Mr. Obama (19 page)

In late September, Saltzman called Katz to talk about Bush's drive for war. Chicago hadn't seen a big demonstration in years. In January 2001, only a few dozen people showed up in Daley Plaza to protest Bush's inauguration. But the president's talk of weapons of mass destruction sounded as bogus as Lyndon Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin incident. Maybe, Katz suggested, they should apply the lessons they'd learned from Vietnam and protest the war
before
it started.

A few days later, fifteen middle-aged activists met at Saltzman's house to plot an antiwar strategy. Some were scared. Bush's approval ratings were in the eighties. Speaking out against the president might be seen as unpatriotic, might lose them work. Others feared they'd look foolish if nobody showed up.

“Look,” Katz argued. “In 'sixty-five, there was nobody against the war. I remember going to demonstrations as a kid and there were, like, ten people. If we only get fifty people, so be it. The space for public dissent is really narrow, and if we don't take action against the war now, there won't be any space left.”

The group agreed to hold a rally on Sunday, October 2, in Federal Plaza. Saltzman called Obama that Friday and asked him to speak. She also called Jesse Jackson and County Clerk David Orr.

Obama was the only state senator at the rally. Some of his friends warned him against attending. As a legislator, he wasn't expected to have a position on foreign policy. As a Senate candidate, he could hurt himself Downstate by speaking out against what might be a quick, popular war. Obama, however, understood that you win a primary—especially a crowded primary—by motivating special interests. He was already the most liberal candidate in the field. An antiwar, anti-Bush speech would make him even more appealing to Democrats who were feeling distraught and powerless over the country's race to war and were still angry about the 2000 presidential election. These were the activists who wrote checks, stood in front of supermarkets with petitions, made phone calls, and always voted.

Obama had less than two days to write the speech, but it was the first great address of his career. He challenged his audience. Even though he was speaking to an antiwar crowd, he made it clear that he was not a pacifist. In fact, he told them, some of America's wars had made the world a better place. Obama was talking to people who sported
PEACE IS PATRIOTIC
stickers on the bumpers of their rusty Audis, but he wanted them to know life wasn't that simple: Sometimes war was patriotic, too.

Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don't oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

I don't oppose all wars.

That last phrase demonstrated that Obama had been listening to the preachers, just as his advisers had told him. He would repeat it over and over again as he built to the speech's climax. It was actually more of an evangelical's trick than anything he'd heard in his own church: Jeremiah Wright was a storyteller, not a shouter. But Obama, who would surpass Wright as an orator, was discovering how to use emotion to sell an intellectual point. And he was adding concrete images that had been missing from his earlier, legalistic speeches.

After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

I don't oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots or patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. A rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in median income—to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

A dumb war. Obama was expressing himself with a simplicity that his old self might have found simpleminded. Most of the three thousand people in the plaza had never heard of this state legislator from Hyde Park, but as he spoke, they nodded and asked each other, “Who is that?” It was, one listener would remember, a “quiet barn raising”—well timed, with cadence. Obama ended with a challenge to the president, suggesting that he'd chosen the wrong enemy in Saddam Hussein, a weakened dictator who posed no threat to the United States. Over and over, he asked, “You want a fight, President Bush?”

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves of Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles we need to fight. Those are the battles we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance, corruption and greed, poverty and despair.

The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom and pay the wages of war. But we ought not—we will not—travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

The speech had its intended effect, not just on Federal Plaza, but on Obama's public profile. In the days afterward, the text was circulated on the Internet, where such sites as Democratic Underground, Truthout, BuzzFlash, and Daily Kos were becoming important forums for opponents of the Bush administration. The speech cemented the support of Saltzman and Julie Hamos, a state representative who also spoke at the rally. After Obama announced his candidacy, Hamos threw him a fund-raiser in her wealthy North Shore district, and Saltzman lobbied Axelrod to take him on as a client.

In most of the country, 2002 was a Republican year. President George W. Bush used the fear of terrorism to win his party the U.S. Senate and increase its margin in the House of Representatives. It wasn't so in Illinois. The Republicans had occupied the governor's mansion for twenty-six years, but their incumbent, George Ryan, was involved in a scandal shocking even for a state where corruption is a hallowed tradition. The U.S. attorney was investigating driver's licenses issued for bribes when Ryan was secretary of state, including one to a trucker who caused an accident that killed six children. It was time, the voters felt, to throw out the Republican crooks and give some Democratic crooks a chance.

Ryan's unpopularity wasn't all the Democrats had going for them. Illinois was one of the first states to experience the partisan transformation that would, when it spread nationwide, result in Obama's election as president.

As a Midwestern state, near the population center of the U.S., with demographics almost exactly matching the national average, Illinois is as good a bellwether of political movements as any. It's a radically moderate state. Extremists do not thrive in Illinois. The religious right is regularly crushed in Republican primaries, and the activist left is confined to a few neighborhoods of shabby three-flats near the Chicago lakefront. The state's political culture is practical, not idealistic.

Illinois voted Republican for president in six consecutive elections, from 1968 to 1988, an era when Republicans dominated the White House, Jimmy Carter's post-Watergate win notwithstanding. It elected Republican governors for most of that period, too.

The state began to change its colors with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. You can actually trace the state's movement from Republican to Democrat by following the political journey of Clinton's wife, Hillary, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. As a young woman, Hillary followed her father's politics, dressing as a Goldwater Girl for the 1964 election. Then she went to Wellesley, where she made the same ideological journey as so many well-educated suburban children who would become the Democratic Party's brain trust: civil rights lawyers, consumer advocates, college professors, political consultants, nonprofit executives, and newspaper editors. She wrote her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky. In 1968, she staffed a Rockefeller suite at the Republican convention and was appalled by Richard Nixon's hustling of the Southern conservative vote. After sneaking out of her parents' house to witness the riots at the Democratic convention, Hillary became convinced the Vietnam War was a mistake.

Hillary Clinton didn't just presage suburbia's shift to the Democrats—she helped make it happen. The Clinton administration's moderate politics—signing NAFTA and reforming welfare—helped make well-to-do homeowners more comfortable with the party. The Clintons were seen as fiscally responsible, a timeless suburban value. The classic battle line of Illinois politics—Democratic Chicago versus Republican suburbia—was disappearing, one voter at a time. In 2002, the authors of the book
The Emerging Democratic Majority
used Illinois as a case study, identifying the Chicago area as an “ideopolis” whose professionals had benefited from the prosperity of the Clinton years, especially the shift from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge-based economy. The Cook County suburbs where Hillary Clinton had grown up were now “irretrievably Democratic.” Obama, who would do very well among rich suburbanites in his U.S. Senate campaign, had his future rival for the presidency to thank for making some of those people Democrats in the first place.

The governor's scandals and blue-ing of suburbia put the Democrats in a good position to take over state government in 2002. But a lucky break, based on a quirk in the state's constitution, made it a certainty. Split between a Republican senate and a Democratic house, the General Assembly failed to draw a new legislative map based on the 2000 census. So Secretary of State Jesse White appointed an eight-member committee, with four Democrats and four Republicans. The committee also stalemated. White asked each party to submit a candidate for a ninth member. He placed the slips in a replica of Abe Lincoln's stovepipe hat and drew the name of Michael Bilandic, the former Democratic mayor of Chicago.

That meant the Democrats got to draw the map. Obama had a very specific idea of what he wanted his new district to look like: a narrow band following the Lake Michigan shoreline from Ninety-fifth Street to downtown. Obama got rid of Englewood, the poorest neighborhood in Chicago, and added the Gold Coast, the richest and one of the most Republican. No longer would he be a South Side senator. He'd be a lakefront senator. Along with Hyde Park, Obama would represent most of Chicago's monuments—Soldier Field, the Adler Planetarium, Grant Park—as well as its priciest shopping district, the Magnificent Mile, and its multimillion-dollar high-rise condos. Mayor Daley would be a constituent. So would Oprah Winfrey. This suited the Democrats' mapmaking strategy. Population growth on the South Side had been stagnant. So the districts had to move north and west, and, of course, the mapmakers wanted to corral as many Republicans as possible into Democratic-leaning districts. It also suited Obama's personal strategy for political advancement. Losing to Bobby Rush had taught Obama that his natural constituency wasn't inner-city blacks but well-educated eggheads of all races. Also, he'd be representing some of the most generous Democratic donors in the state. Abner Mikva had already introduced him to those rich folks, but now they'd see his name on a ballot and his face on the “Legislative Update” every senator sends home. For a politician who was still in debt from law school and past campaigns, their money would be essential.

The Democratic takeover was such a sure thing that the
Illinois Times
, a Springfield alternative weekly, ran a cover story titled “The Great Thaw.” Blagojevich was elected governor, and Democrats won a majority in the state senate, increasing their membership by five seats. In the new General Assembly, Obama would be chairman of the Health and Welfare Committee, putting him in a position to advance his most cherished political goal: universal health care. Emil Jones would be senate president, the second African-American to occupy that post. The president decides which legislation reaches the senate floor. For years, the black caucus had suffered the Republican Party's indifference as its pet issues—racial profiling, death penalty reform—ended each session sine die, the legislative term for “dead.” Jones would make sure they passed, and he'd make sure Obama, who'd cosponsored the bills, got plenty of credit. Already, Jones was describing himself as the fatherless young man's “godfather.”

Chapter 12

THE GODFATHER

O B A M A   H A D   B E E N   M O V E D
to go into law, and ultimately into politics, by his failure to pry more funding out of Emil Jones for the Career Education Network, one of his South Side community organizing projects. After Obama requested half a million for the dropout prevention program, Jones delivered $150,000. Pocketing that chump change convinced Obama that the place to be was on the inside, where the money was handed out.

Now, fifteen years later, he was inside—but he wanted to go farther. And because of Jones, he was in a position to do so. The senate president had a paternal fondness for Obama and was ready to do whatever he could to make the young man a U.S. senator. Obama was the only legislator in the Democratic primary, so Jones planned to use his newly acquired power to provide him with the record he'd been unable to build while the Democrats were in the minority. They had fourteen months to make up for six years of frustration.

The day the new senate was sworn in, Obama's political sidekick Dan Shomon worked the room at a postinauguration party thrown by Denny Jacobs and Terry Link. Shomon was handing out business cards that read “Obama for Illinois. Dan Shomon, campaign manager.”

“Obama's going to be the guy,” he insisted to the politicians and reporters present. “Obama's going to be the guy.”

Yeah, thought a skeptical journalist at the party, call me when he beats Dan Hynes.

In
Dreams from My Father
, Obama had mocked Jones as “an old ward heeler” begging to introduce Harold Washington at the opening of the Mayor's Office of Employment and Training in Roseland.

Jones had “made the mistake of backing one of the white candidates in the last mayoral election,” Obama wrote. Desperate to be seen alongside Washington, he “promised to help us get money for any project we wanted if we just got him on the program.”

It was true. Emil Jones had endorsed incumbent mayor Jane Byrne over Harold Washington. He was a man who owed his entire career to the Machine, and he didn't believe in challenging the powers that be. Jones's father had been a truck driver and precinct captain who used clout to land his boy a job as a sewer inspector in the Department of Streets and Sanitation, an arm of city government that's practically an employment service for the sons and nephews of the politically connected. From those subterranean beginnings, Jones rose to state representative, then state senator, but after losing his race for Congress to Jesse Jackson Jr., he realized that Springfield was as far from the South Side as he would ever go. Jones was not an inspiring speaker, and he didn't think much of anyone else's oratory, either. His advice to new senators was, “You pass more bills when you're brief.” The ward heeler had worked to defeat Obama in his races against Alice Palmer and Bobby Rush because the kid had broken the wait-your-turn rules of Chicago politics. But there was no incumbent Democrat in the Senate race. (In fact, there was no incumbent at all. The unpopular Senator Fitzgerald wasn't running for reelection.) And Obama was young, educated, articulate, and beloved by white liberals—strong in all the areas where Jones was weak. Dark, heavyset, phlegmatic, Jones had only one touch of flamboyance about him: His first name, which he pronounced ay-MEEL, in the Gallic style.

In the same month that Emil Jones became senate president, Carol Moseley Braun finally accepted the fact that her old supporters wouldn't be with her if she tried to reclaim her Senate seat. Instead, she decided on a symbolic campaign for the presidency of the United States, which no one would expect her to win. That was Obama's cue. On January 29, in a ballroom at the Hotel Allegra (a step up from the Ramada Inn Lakeshore), Obama announced his entry into the Democratic primary, still more than a year away. As he stood on the podium before a few curious newspaper reporters, Obama was flanked by Chicago's most powerful black politicians. Jones was there. So were U.S. representatives Jesse Jackson Jr. and Danny Davis, a West Side progressive. The only black congressman missing was Bobby Rush, who still hadn't forgiven Obama for 2000. To show this was a multicultural campaign, Obama brought along Terry Link and Denny Jacobs.

“Four years ago, Peter Fitzgerald bought himself a Senate seat, and he's betrayed Illinois ever since,” Obama said. “But we are here to take it back on behalf of the people of Illinois.”

He wasn't the favorite. Not only would he have to beat Hynes, winner of two statewide elections, he had a new opponent: Blair Hull, a blackjack player turned options trader who was prepared to put down $30 million—twice Peter Fitzgerald's “obscene” expenditure.

Comparing himself to David, fighting Goliath with a slingshot and a stone, Obama said, “I don't have wealth or a famous name. But I have a fire in my belly for fairness and justice.”

When he made his announcement, Obama had so little money on hand that he could barely afford to open a campaign office. In need of a loan, he went looking for someone with wealth—and maybe a famous name. He called Hermene Hartman, whose office was not far from Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios.

“Do you know Oprah?” Obama asked. “Can we get Oprah to give $50,000?”

“Are you crazy?” Hartman said. “I don't know Oprah, but I can call her.”

Hartman got through to one of Winfrey's assistants.

“Do you really expect Oprah to meet with a state senator?” the staffer asked.

“That's exactly why I called,” Hartman said. “Let me tell you about this guy. He's different. He's going all the way.”

Miss Winfrey was unable to spare $50,000. So Hartman went to a more traditional source of money for black politicians: Al Johnson, a wealthy car dealer who had donated to Harold Washington's campaigns. Johnson agreed to meet Obama for lunch at the East Bank Club the following Monday. He was impressed enough to lend the new candidate fifty grand—which the campaign eventually paid back. That covered the rent and the phone bill for a two-room office on Michigan Avenue, which was run by Dan Shomon.

As hard as Obama was working to get into the bank accounts of Bettylu Saltzman and Penny Pritzker, the money that launched his Senate campaign came from a black businessman.

Hartman also tried to help Obama with a less tangible problem: what came to be known as his “Uncle Leland” issue. Just before the Senate announcement,
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Laura Washington wrote a piece contrasting how her white and black relations reacted to Obama. Muriel, her Jewish aunt by marriage, met Obama on the set of the
Public Affairs
TV show and thought, Wow. Her uncle Leland “Sugar” Cain, a retired railroad worker from the South Side, was skeptical. At a family dinner, he called Obama an “elitist” who'd visited a housing project in “a thousand-dollar coat.” (Obama was not the kind of guy who would spend $1,000 on an overcoat, but he was the kind of guy who could make an overcoat
look
like it had cost $1,000.)

“Whether that's true,” Washington wrote, “perception can be reality. The charge is a challenge that Obama will have to overcome if he is to snare the Senate nomination. His weakest appeal is to the working class. He has to balance his time between the shops and community centers of Bronzeville, the churches in Chatham and the diners in Cairo, and the money pitches in the boardrooms of the Loop.

“Getting Aunt Muriel's vote is a damn good start. Uncle Leland is going to take some work.”

Obama tried to reach Uncle Leland by sitting in as a guest host on Cliff Kelley's popular WVON radio program. But most of Chicago's black media were suspicious of this new Senate candidate. Hartman and Melody Spann-Cooper, WVON's owner, organized a meeting of neighborhood newspaper editors and radio program directors at a restaurant called Sweet Mabel. They heard hostile questions about Obama: “Is he black enough?” “Who is this stranger in town?”

“Hey, guys, you all aren't supportive,” Hartman told the gathering. “Why can't we support our own? He's got a real opportunity to go all the way. You guys are saying, ‘Because he wasn't born in Chicago, because he's of mixed parentage, because he's from Harvard, he's not black.' You want to talk about mixed parentage? That's everyone in this room! What I'm hearing is he's not the traditional Chicago politician. He's not Harold Washington. It's true. He can cross over. Let him go!”

After that, the black press gave Obama a pass. And Hartman put him on the cover of
N'DIGO
. That got his story out to the middle-class blacks whose votes he needed. Eight years before, Hartman had declined to review
Dreams from My Father
because she'd thought Obama's life story was too exotic for her readers. Now she saw how that could be an advantage—not just for Obama, but for black Chicago, which wanted another senator.

“The key element for an African-American candidate seeking to run successfully statewide,” Obama told
N'DIGO
, “is to be rooted in the African-American community, recognize it as your base, and yet not be limited to it.”

Rickey Hendon had been trying for years to get a racial profiling bill through the state senate. Hendon had been pulled over by the police himself, so he'd shared the humiliation of black drivers who were treated like criminal suspects because of their color. But Hendon's proposal—which would have mandated sensitivity training for officers guilty of profiling and yanked state funds from departments that wouldn't comply—never won the support of Republicans or police chiefs. At the beginning of the new session, Emil Jones approached Hendon with a demand.

“I want you to give Barack that bill,” he said.

“Bullshit,” Hendon shot back. “I've been working on that bill forever. When the Republicans were in charge, we couldn't pass it.”

Hendon saw what was about to happen. He'd carried the ball ninety-nine yards on the racial profiling issue, and now Obama was going to score the touchdown. But Hendon gave up the bill. As he would later tell a reporter, “Mama didn't raise no fool.” Going along with the senate president could only help his political career.

Obama began his lobbying campaign with the Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP and the black caucus had an antagonistic relationship. Whenever they'd tried to discuss racial profiling in the past, the blacks had accused the cops of racism, and the cops had folded their arms, refusing to even consider a bill. Ted Street, the FOP president, was still irked about a meeting in Chicago when 125 black ministers crowded into a small conference room: an obvious ploy to intimidate the police, he thought. Street's organization saw Emil Jones as a cop basher more interested in playing the race card than working out a deal with law enforcement.

When Obama arrived at the FOP's office, Street realized immediately that this was a different kind of black legislator. Obama wasn't hostile, first of all. He wasn't there to accuse the cops of targeting black motorists. He was there to draft a bill that would satisfy law enforcement
and
the black caucus. Street wasn't used to that approach. During a series of meetings in Chicago and Springfield, Obama tempered Hendon's bill, making it easier for the cops to accept. The state would conduct a four-year study of traffic stops, keeping records of every driver's race. All police officers would go through diversity training. The punishments were gone. The cops were happy. They were sure the study would prove they'd been engaged in law enforcement, not racial profiling.

“From a layman's perspective, Barack was able to reduce the sting to make it palatable,” Street would say. “He was able to get it down to where our view in the end was, ‘It's another piece of paper to fill out.' ”

Obama lobbied hard for the bill. His senate desk was in the back of the chamber, near the bathrooms. Whenever a senator came out, Obama would ask for a moment. Once, Obama got into a heated argument
in
the bathroom with a black colleague who demanded to know if he
really
understood what it was like to be a young black man getting a pat-down from the police just because he'd been standing on a street corner. The implication was that he didn't understand the streets or the black experience. So Obama talked about the tough neighborhoods he'd seen as a boy in Honolulu and the projects he'd worked in as a community organizer.

Three months into the session, the bill came up for a vote. Kirk Dillard, Obama's most devoted Republican admirer, rose to speak in favor.

“About two to two-and-a-half years ago, Senator Obama and myself began working with Senator Hendon on this particular topic,” he said. “Barack and I had many, many early morning, seven
A.M.
, breakfast meetings with former attorney general Jim Ryan, who along with a cast of—of—of—of hundreds from law enforcement from throughout America, helped us understand the difficult issues which Senator Obama has put together so well to make this difficult subject workable.”

The bill passed unanimously. While Hendon thought it was watered-down, he would come to see that it was effective. Random stops of black motorists decreased, because the police knew someone was counting.

(On the other hand, Obama's success intensified the antipathy some black legislators still felt toward him. State representative Monique Davis, who had spent years working on a racial profiling bill in the house, felt “snubbed” and “shut out of history.” Davis and Obama both belonged to Trinity United Church of Christ, but she was so infuriated by his bill-jacking that she endorsed Dan Hynes in the Senate primary.)

After he passed the racial profiling bill, Obama was able to use his new relationships with law enforcement on a far more important issue: death penalty reform.

No one disputed that Illinois's system of capital punishment needed an overhaul. After thirteen death row prisoners turned out to be innocent, Governor George Ryan halted all executions and appointed a task force to study the problem. (In January 2003, during his final week in office, Ryan commuted every death sentence.) Even law-and-order types had an interest in reform. Unless there were changes, Illinois would never execute another murderer.