Young Mr. Obama (21 page)

Chapter 13

THE OBAMA JUICE

L I B E R T Y   B A P T I S T   C H U R C H
, at Forty-ninth Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, is an inspiring combination of the modern and the eternal. Its parabolic roof, supported from within by rust-colored beams that soar over the congregants, looks like a quonset hut or an airline terminal designed by a Scandinavian architect. Behind the altar is a stained glass mosaic of a risen Christ, attended by angels and apostles of all races. Despite its modish design, Liberty is one of Chicago's oldest African-American congregations. Its pastor, D. L. Jackson, inherited the pulpit from his father, who had in turn inherited it from
his
father. With a vast sanctuary that accommodates over a thousand worshippers, Liberty is an essential Sunday-morning stop for any South Side politician.

Liberty was where Obama finally showed he could connect with an audience—a
black
audience. For years, his friends and advisers had been beating up on him about stepping out of his professor's gown and putting on a preacher's robe, and now the stubborn SOB was finally doing it. The flip-down seats were filled with black folks, all excited to hear the tall, good-looking young brother running for the United States Senate. They'd been primed by their pastor, and by their alderman, Dorothy Tillman, who'd been fighting for black empowerment so long she could sign a hood pass for a half-white lawyer from Hyde Park.

Obama mounted the red-carpeted steps to the pulpit with his long-legged stride, pointing and waving. When he began to talk, he didn't use bureaucratic, academic terms like “bring together institutions from various sectors.” That was the Obama of 2000. The new Obama had studied his audience—hardworking, churchgoing blacks—studied their aspirations, and the way they liked to hear those aspirations expressed every Sunday morning. This was going to be a sermon, not a lecture. It was going to quote Jesus, not the Brookings Institution.

“My name is Barack Obama, and everywhere I went, I would always get the same two questions. Didn't matter where I went. First question was ‘Where did you get this funny name, “Barack Obama”?' Though people wouldn't always say it right. They would call me Alabama. They'd call me ‘Yo Mama.' ” Here, the congregation laughed. “And those were my supporters who called me that. I won't even talk about the folks running against me. The second question was ‘Why would you want to get into a dirty business like politics?' There is another tradition of politics, and that tradition says we are all connected. If there is a child on the South Side that can't read, that makes a difference in my life, even if it's not my child.”

The pews murmured with approval.

“If there is a senior citizen on the West Side that can't afford their prescription medicine, having to choose between buying medicine and paying the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent.”

They were standing and clapping now, responding to the rhythms of his oratory.

“I believe that we can be a better nation,” Obama shouted. “I believe that we can provide homes to the homeless and food to the hungry and clothes to the naked. I believe that we can defeat George Bush.”

There were moments when he sounded like a parody of a jackleg preacher, his voice dipping into a guttural approximation of street talk, as though he were about to add “mm-hmm!” to the end of every sentence. Obama never spoke that way in private, but as a candidate, he wanted to be black when he needed to be black and white when he needed to be white. (Only whites were embarrassed by Obama's attempts to sound ghetto. “It can be painful to hear Barack Obama talk jive,” wrote Todd Spivak in the
Illinois Times
, ridiculing Obama for using the word “homeboy” in church. Obama responded to Spivak's article with a wrathful phone call, which suggested that racial identity was still a touchy subject with him.)

Al Kindle was at Liberty that day, and he thought, This is the candidate I've been trying to bring out for years. This Obama is a black man who can go to the Senate—and maybe beyond.

Kindle realized how much was at stake, not just for Obama, but for Chicago's black political movement. Before he even announced his candidacy, Obama had confided, “Once you get elected senator, who knows where you can go? You can even get to president.”

Black Chicago had already lifted its politicians higher than any minority community in the country, but this was the guy it could lift to the highest office of all. He was an African-American who could govern for everyone. It was the perfect match of a man and a city. As Kindle would put it much later, “We were looking for someone to do it, and he was looking for a place to do it in.” If Obama had to be taught to sound like a black man, that was part of the lifting.

David Axelrod was just as high on Obama. A University of Chicago graduate, Axelrod had begun his working life as a reporter for the
Hyde Park Herald
before moving up to the
Chicago Tribune
. He quit journalism to manage Paul Simon's 1984 U.S. Senate campaign. In the two decades since, he'd become one of the best-known political consultants in the country. Axelrod had worked on Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign, but his specialty was big-city races, especially those that involved selling black candidates to white voters. Every consultant wants to discover the next John F. Kennedy, but Axelrod had another motivation for finding a candidate who could go all the way. As a political pro who chose to live in Chicago, he felt he wasn't taken seriously by the D.C. wonks. It was the Second City complex, caused by a different city than usual.

Ax, as everyone called him, was also being courted by big-spending millionaire Blair Hull, but he was getting the hard sell on Obama from Bettylu Saltzman, an organizer of the antiwar rally in Federal Plaza. Axelrod agreed to meet the candidate and was immediately smitten. Most white liberals lost it during their first encounter with Obama. Dan Shomon had a term for this phenomenon: “drinking the Obama Juice.”

Axelrod got drunk easily. Right after agreeing to work for Obama, he received a phone call from Pete Giangreco, a Chicago media consultant who was helping organize John Edwards's media campaign.

“Listen,” Axelrod asked Giangreco, “while I've got you on the phone, what are you doing in the Senate race?”

“Well, Dan Hynes is a former client,” Giangreco said. “I haven't heard from those guys, but it looks like he's gonna go. He's ahead in the polls, and he's going to have labor and the county chairmen behind him.”

“You know, all that's probably true,” Axelrod said, “but I've got to tell you, I think there's something special about this guy Obama. This guy's the real deal. This is the guy we try to make all our candidates sound like, this really genuine and heartfelt appeal to people's sort of reclaiming their citizenship, and the value of people coming together behind a set of ideals to get things done. There's some
there
there.”

Giangreco knew Obama slightly. As a consultant to Rod Blagojevich's gubernatorial campaign, he had given a poll briefing to a group of state senators. Obama had been very inquisitive about the numbers and offered unsolicited advice about death penalty reform and other criminal justice issues. Smart guy, Giangreco had thought. Now, after hearing Ax so excited about Obama—more excited than Ax had ever been about a candidate—Giangreco said, “You know, I've only met him once or twice, but I kind of feel the same way.”

Axelrod replaced Dan Shomon as Obama's political alter ego. As much as Ax and Obama had in common—their U of C backgrounds, a love of pickup basketball, a calm demeanor—they still fit the classic roles of candidate and consultant. Axelrod was tall, hangdog, and walked with a slow, heavy, splay-footed shamble. Every year, his unkempt forelock grew thinner, his droopy mustache grayer. But those who had worked with both men considered them equals in discipline, intelligence, and temperament—“a match made in heaven.”

Once he was hired as chief strategist, Axelrod also replaced Dan Shomon as Obama's campaign manager, bringing in Jim Cauley, a Kentuckian he had worked with on a mayoral campaign in Baltimore. Shomon was given the job of Downstate coordinator. He had been reluctant to spend nearly two years managing a Senate campaign and suggested that Obama find a new right-hand man. That was fine with Obama's new crew of professionals. They didn't think Shomon had the policy or organizational skills to run a statewide race.

Loyalty to old allies is not one of Barack Obama's long suits. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose White House chief of staff was a kindergarten classmate, or Lyndon Johnson, who was served as an aide for three decades by a high school debate student he'd coached in Houston, Obama has no deep native ties to the state where he made his political career. Throughout Obama's rise, most of his relationships were expedient: Once he had no more use for supporters, he dropped them from his circle, sometimes telling perplexed functionaries to stop calling his cell phone and start calling his people. There was no one he could point to and say, “We've been tight for twenty years.” It was the unflattering side of Obama's detached intellectualism. Johnnie Owens was Obama's closest friend during the community organizing days and a best man at his wedding. But once Obama began moving among lawyers, politicians, and professors, the old compatriots rarely saw each other. Obama lost touch with Jerry Kellman until a reporter reconnected them during his U.S. Senate run. Carole Anne Harwell, Obama's first campaign manager, had no significant role in his subsequent races. During Obama's run for president, Shomon would attempt to exploit the Obama connection to benefit his lobbying business. The campaign scolded him publicly.

“There were a number of people who worked for Barack in the early days, then found Barack was working with a different group of people,” as one old supporter would put it. “They felt kind of squeezed out.”

While that suggests a coldness to Obama's ambition, it did help him avoid the corruption and cronyism that would have ensnared a traditional Chicago politician, brought up in the code of fidelity to the ones that brung him. Obama needed Chicago to put him in a position to run for president, but he couldn't be
too
Chicago if he wanted to win.

When Axelrod took over the campaign, in mid-2003, Obama was polling at 9 percent among the few Illinoisans paying attention to the Senate primary. The front runner, Dan Hynes, was supported by a quarter of the primary voters and had already enlisted the great majority of the state's 102 county chairmen. Still, Axelrod believed that Obama could crank his numbers as high as 43 percent by Election Day if he swept the black community in Chicago, captured wealthy suburban whites, and won Downstate counties with colleges or large black populations. If the campaign met its goal of raising $4 million, they'd be able to start airing television ads in January, two months before the primary—just enough time to transform Obama into a Prairie State idol.

At the time, though, he was still an obscure state senator (a redundancy if there ever was one) with a name uncomfortably close to that of the leader of al-Qaeda. Shortly after 9/11, a Chicago political consultant who'd been sizing Obama up as a Senate prospect told him, “The name thing is going to be a problem.” (
Capitol Fax
publisher Rich Miller once teasingly told Obama that he should change his name to “Barry O'Bama” if he wanted to run for statewide office.) When Representative Jan Schakowsky wore an Obama button to the White House, President George W. Bush did a double take on first seeing his successor's name.

“I've never heard of him,” Bush explained.

“You will,” Schakowsky promised.

Even some well-educated voters were declaring, “I want to vote for someone with an American name.” Axelrod had not yet succeeded in spreading Obamamania to the suburbs. The foundations of Obama's campaign were black professionals and the black church. At the District, a West Loop nightclub, he threw a fund-raiser for the kinds of rich young folks who hung Alpha Phi Alpha paddles in their lofts and had their weddings featured in
Jet
.

“The crowd of 500 people were dressed to the hilt, sporting chic natural and relaxed hairdos, Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton accessories,” the
Hyde Park Herald
wrote of the event, which raised $50,000. “Party goers, including Hyde Park Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th) and Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, grooved to live jazz, R&B oldies from Chic and current neo-soul hits from Jill Scott, while munching on California rolls and fried chicken.”

Obama had always professed his distaste for fund-raising, but under pressure to collect $4 million, he was overcoming any reluctance about asking people for money. In fact, he was taking political style tips from Governor Blagojevich, who was well known for his two-handed approach to politicking: The right hand shakes while the left goes for the wallet. Obama and Blagojevich had little use for each other personally. Both wanted to be president, and Blagojevich, raised in a dreary Northwest Side apartment by a steelworker father, thought Hyde Parkers were pampered elitists. But as a loyal Democrat, Obama had sat in on Blagojevich's campaign strategy sessions and came to envy his skill at glad-handing donors while pestering them for cash. Blagojevich's charm, combined with Illinois's no-limit campaign contribution laws, had enabled him to suck up $24 million for his gubernatorial campaign.

As a Senate candidate, Obama was operating under federal funding laws, but Blair Hull's personal wealth meant that Obama could take advantage of the “millionare's exemption,” which allowed individuals to donate up to $12,500 to a candidate running against a self-financed swell. Steven Rogers, a business professor at Northwestern University, met the newly aggressive Obama at a golf outing for a West Side charter school. When Obama joined his threesome, on the second hole, Rogers had no idea who the new player was. He quickly found out.