Young Mr. Obama (22 page)

“Look, man,” Obama told him. “I want to talk to you because I want to run for the U.S. Senate.”

“Look, man, you need to go sit your ass down somewhere,” Rogers said, finally recognizing the name. “You just got your ass beat by Bobby Rush. You can't win. You got two damn African names. You need to be like my children: Akila Rogers. Or, instead of Barack Obama, you need to be Steven Obama or Barack Jones.”

They had a good laugh, but on the fourth hole, Obama again said, “I want to run for Senate.”

“Jesus Christ, man!” Rogers exploded. “What can I do for you?”

“My wife wants me to clear up debts from running for Congress.”

“How much debt do you have?”

“Eight thousand dollars.”

“I'll tell you what,” Rogers said. “I don't know you, but Greg White knows you. Greg brought you to my foursome. I'm gonna give you $3,000.”

After that, Rogers heard from Obama every week. As a man who believed that well-off blacks had a duty to support black political talent, Rogers ended up donating tens of thousands of dollars to Obama's campaigns. During the general election, when Obama was running away from Alan Keyes and didn't need the money himself, Rogers wrote five $2,000 checks to Democrats in close Senate races so Obama could collect chits in his new workplace.

The most important financial help Obama received came from a June 2003 fund-raiser held by attorney Stephen Pugh in the lobby of his LaSalle Street office tower. Obama needed to top $1 million by the July 1 campaign filing disclosure to prove he was a serious candidate. LaSalle Street is the main drag of Chicago's business and legal worlds, so Pugh was the ideal host. He introduced Obama as a future president of the United States, then said with a chuckle, “Let's not get ahead of ourselves.” With most of Pugh's fellow ABLE members in attendance (as well as Emil Jones), the event raised several hundred thousand dollars, more than enough for Obama to meet his goal. Pugh had been given a hand up by Harold Washington and Emil Jones, and now he was offering a hand up to Obama. It was the unspoken contract between black politician and black businessman, its terms fully executed.

Outside of Chicago, Illinois's largest concentration of African-Americans is in the region known as Metro East—the trans-Mississippi suburbs of St. Louis. East St. Louis, hometown of Miles Davis and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, is the blackest city in the United States—97 percent African-American.

Through his old friend Reverend Alvin Love, president of the Developing Communities Project, Obama had an in with the area's black pastors. As Obama had risen in politics, Love had advanced in ecclesiastical influence. By 2003, he was head of the state's Baptist Convention, which covered four hundred churches. That spring, Love invited Obama to address the convention's annual meeting, in Danville. After giving a biblically-themed speech—“A lot of people say this campaign is impossible, but with God, all things are possible”—Obama collected business cards from two hundred preachers.

Obama's Metro East coordinator was Ray Coleman, a state park supervisor who had been recruited to the campaign by Michael Pittman, a Springfield real estate developer Obama knew through a lobbyist. Downstate blacks never questioned Obama's racial authenticity. They had other reservations about his candidacy. Living in communities where whites were openly bigoted (the 1909 Springfield Race Riot is still a divisive issue in the state capital), they doubted their Caucasian neighbors would vote for Obama, and some even worried they'd look “too black” by supporting him. Springfield isn't Chicago, where blacks have their own machine-within-a-Machine. Dan Hynes and Rod Blagojevich controlled thousands of state jobs in Springfield. The first time Pittman met Obama, he thought, This guy is sharp. Then he thought, If this guy wasn't black, he could be president. Pittman held a fund-raiser for black professionals, which raised several thousand dollars, and he called black political junkies all over Central Illinois, spreading the word about Obama.

When Ray Coleman heard from Pittman, he, too, was skeptical.

“Mike,” he said, “the guy can't win with a name like that. It's too close to ‘Osama.' It's still close to Nine/Eleven.”

“I'm gonna send you an article from the
Chicago Sun-Times
,” Pittman replied. “It says if eighty-five percent of African-American voters support Obama, he'll win.”

Coleman read the article, was impressed with Obama's credentials, and agreed to run the local operation. When Obama and Shomon arrived in Metro East, Coleman took them around to the churches. At St. John Missionary Baptist, in Centerville, Obama got a few minutes in the study of Reverend Robert Jones. His first words to Jones were, “How are you doing? Alvin Love is a friend of yours. He said you're a good man to meet in this part of the state.”

Black pastors are used to politicians using their churches for campaign speeches. They usually allow it, but they're not always enthusiastic. Obama, though, had the endorsement of Reverend Love. That went a long way with the Baptist clergy. Jones invited Obama to speak at a youth revival at Mt. Zion Baptist in East St. Louis—the church where Jesse Jackson began his first presidential campaign in 1984. A crowd of fifteen hundred, Jones promised.

The church was packed. Obama started with his shopworn stump joke—“Some people call me Yo Mama, some people call me Alabama”—and the crowd roared with laughter. When he told them, “I'm not asking you to work for me because I'm African-American, but don't we deserve to have at least one in the Senate?” they nodded, and when he talked about folks who'd grown up in the age of Jim Crow but believed America could be a better place, they stood and cheered.

The powerful St. Clair County machine was supporting Hynes, and Hull was paying workers $10 an hour to staple his signs to every telephone pole in the American Bottom, as the area's alluvial lowlands are known. But Obama and Shomon thought the campaign could do at least as well as Carol Moseley Braun had in Metro East. Shomon asked Coleman if he could turn out four thousand votes in St. Clair County, which includes East St. Louis. It seemed like a reasonable goal, since Obama's only important local supporters were the state senators James Clayborne and Bill Haine.

“Dan, I'll get you that,” Coleman promised. “I think we're going to do better. I think we can get six or eight thousand.”

When Coleman started talking up Obama, in September 2003, people were asking him, “Who is this guy? Omar?” As the election drew closer, he was hearing from a lot of people who weren't supposed to be for Obama but had decided that electing a black senator was more important than obeying the county machine. East St. Louis precinct captains were ignoring the party line by asking for Obama yard signs and instructing printers to place “Obama” on their palm cards instead of “Hynes.” In most elections, the voters followed the precinct captains. But this was shaping up to be a people's election. The voters wanted Obama, so the precinct captains were following.

All over the South Side of Chicago, billboards were going up: Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson Jr., standing side by side, looking like a pair of cardboard cutouts. It was a message from the Jacksons to black Chicago: We've got him. Junior was developing one of the most powerful political organizations in the city—his wife would soon be an alderman—so Obama needed him for votes as well as cred.

Only one black congressman refused to support Obama: Bobby Rush. Still sore about 2000, Rush endorsed Blair Hull, assuring the millionaire that “blacks won't vote for Obama.” The endorsement wasn't motivated by payback, Rush insisted. After all, Rush was an independent, and Hull was the only candidate with the resources to beat the Machine's boy, Dan Hynes. (Hull was also the only candidate with the resources to hire Rush's half brother as a $12,000-a-month campaign adviser.)

Motivated by bitterness, Rush was misreading the black electorate as badly as Obama had done four years earlier. Elders who had supported Rush in 2000 were now behind Obama, for the very same reason: He was the black candidate with the best chance to win. Bishop Arthur Brazier endorsed Obama. So did historian Timuel Black, who publicly scolded the holdouts, asking, “Why can't we support one of our own?”

The black politician who most worried Obama was his fellow Senate candidate, Joyce Washington. A health-care consultant who had never held office, Washington was polling in the low single digits. But all her support was coming from the black community. In a close election, 1 or 2 percent might cost Obama the nomination. At one point, Obama, Giangreco, and Axelrod held a conference call to discuss whether to challenge Washington's petitions. Remembering Alice Palmer, Obama was reluctant. He didn't want to look like he was bullying another black woman off the ballot. He was supposed to be the inspirational candidate in this race, not the hack. The ill will over a petition challenge might end up costing him more votes than Washington, an innocuous candidate with no money. After a long discussion of the pros and cons, Obama finally said, “Guys, we're not gonna do it.”

Obama's Senate campaign office was in a suite near the top of a low-rise office building on South Michigan Avenue. The view of Lake Michigan was inspiring, but the walls were nearly bare. Obama's only adornments were a framed copy of his
Chicago Reader
profile and a poster of Muhammad Ali looming over Sonny Liston, which hung behind the candidate's desk.

I visited the office in January 2004, to interview Obama for the
Reader
. I hadn't seen him in four years, so I was expecting another preening, insecure performance. When I'd called to set up the meeting, Obama's press secretary, Pam Smith, had expressed her displeasure with the “negative comments” in my article on his congressional campaign.

If Obama was still dissatisfied, he didn't act that way. This was months before he became famous, so he was dealing with the press one-on-one. He greeted me outside his office.

“Good to see you again,” he intoned casually, gliding across the floor like Fred Astaire playing Abe Lincoln. His tie was firmly knotted, but he'd doffed his suit coat for shirtsleeves.

We walked into his office, where Smith sat by his side as note taker and timekeeper. I told him I'd seen a picture of Michelle in that morning's
Sun-Times
. “She was looking awfully cute,” Obama said, grinning.

It was only January, but Obama was already developing the themes he would use at that summer's Democratic National Convention. He gave me some of the same lines he'd used on the congregation at Liberty Baptist.

“There is a tradition of politics that says we are all connected,” Obama recited. “If there is a child on the South Side who cannot read, it makes a difference in my life, even if it's not my child. If there's an Arab-American family who's being rounded up by John Ashcroft without benefit of due process, that threatens my civil liberties. Black folks, white folks, gay, straight, Asian—the reason we can share this space is that we have a mutual regard. That's what this country's all about: E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.”

That was the mission statement of twenty-first-century Obama. As a black candidate, he'd been too inhibited, too embarrassed, to force out such phrases as “our community.” Finally, he was comfortable in his own skin, now that he'd accepted that the skin was half white. As a multicultural politician trying to find a unified theory of racial politics, he was rolling like Tiger Woods at the Masters. The aloofness was gone as well. Intently, he laid out his plan for a federal children's health insurance program.

“I think it'd be a good opportunity to lay the groundwork toward expanding health care to all the uninsured,” he said.

Obama was no longer selling himself. He didn't mention Harvard once. This time, he had a legislative goal and a strategy for making it happen. Or maybe, because he knew I'd been one of his skeptics, he was selling me on the idea that he wasn't selling himself. Just as he was looking two moves ahead politically, I'm sure he was two moves ahead of my expectations. It was working. I was impressed that he finally seemed to believe in something more than the fact that being president of the
Harvard Law Review
is a pretty big deal. He was a big-government liberal, and he was unafraid to confess it.

“How would you have voted on the Iraq war resolution?” I asked.

“I would have voted no.” And then, repeating his assertion from Federal Plaza, he said, “I'm not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.”

Finally, we got around to his race against Bobby Rush.

“I got a good spanking,” Obama said evenly. He'd obviously thought out that response. “I think that was youthful impatience on my part.”

Later, when I called his office for follow-up questions, Obama jumped on the line to drill me with more details of his health care plan. He also repeated his “E pluribus unum” speech, tweaking a few words. He was proud of that one.

In a
Chicago Tribune
poll taken that month, Obama was the choice of 14 percent of Democratic voters, tying him for the lead with Dan Hynes and Maria Pappas. Blair Hull was just behind, with 10 percent.

“Statewide, the poll showed some gains for Obama, who was the choice of only 9 percent of Democratic voters in October,” the
Tribune
reported. “Most of the growth in his support was among black voters, with 29 percent backing him.”

These were meaningful gains, but with two months until the primary, Obama had not broken out of the pack. He hadn't united the black vote behind him, either.

In the fall of 2003, Obama's campaign had been cultivating an endorsement that would have put him in the lead for good. Paul Simon had retired from the Senate in 1996, but his name and his word were still golden among Illinois liberals. Simon had even handpicked his successor, Dick Durbin. In this contentious primary, his blessing would be decisive.