Young Mr. Obama (23 page)

Simon had worked with Obama on the ethics reform bill and served on the death penalty task force that recommended videotaping interrogations. Obama showed courage and skill in promoting that, Simon thought. Illinois had a tradition of progressive senators going back almost to World War II: Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson III, Simon, Durbin. Obama fit that lineage. Simon's only reservation about making an endorsement was his long friendship with Dan Hynes's father, who had served in the state senate when Simon was lieutenant governor.

Abner Mikva also thought Obama fit the state's senatorial tradition. At a private fund-raiser on the North Side, Mikva heard Adlai Stevenson III give a powerful speech about Obama's virtues as a candidate. That gave him an idea. Excitedly, he called Simon.

“You know, it would be a great press opportunity and marvelous publicity for Barack if we could have a press conference with you and Adlai endorsing him,” Mikva said, giving him the pitch.

It would, Simon agreed.

“If you can get Adlai, I obviously will do it,” Simon told Mikva. “I've tried to avoid a public endorsement because of Dan, but if you get Adlai, I'll absolutely help you.”

So Mikva called Stevenson. So enthusiastic at the fund-raiser, Stevenson now hemmed and hawed about making a public statement.

“Well, I know the Hynes family so well,” he said. “They've been so good to me.”

“Adlai,” Mikva responded, “Paul's in the same position. He's going to do it.”

“I'm going to have to think about it some more,” Stevenson said finally.

While Stevenson dithered, Simon checked into a Springfield hospital for open heart surgery. He was still hale enough for a press conference. In a phone call to reporters, Simon endorsed Howard Dean for president from his sickbed. Mikva phoned Stevenson every day but couldn't get him off the fence. Then, suddenly, it didn't matter. On December 9, 2003, Simon died on the operating table at age seventy-five.

It was a tremendous blow to the Obama campaign, both politically and personally. Simon's endorsement would have validated the reformer image Obama was trying to project. It would have impressed suburban liberals, the white faction of his hoped-for coalition. Simon's death was a personal loss because so many of Obama's staffers and fund-raisers had begun their careers with him. Axelrod and Bettylu Saltzman were attracted to Obama for the same reasons they'd loved Paul Simon: intelligence, integrity, and a progressive spirit.

After enough time passed, Axelrod approached Simon's daughter, Sheila, a Carbondale city councilwoman and guardian of her father's political legacy. Would she be willing to film an ad saying her father had planned to endorse Obama?

Simon had reservations. She didn't want to speak for her late father. On the other hand, she knew how he'd felt about Obama, and she was an Obama supporter herself, eager to help him win.

“I don't know if I'm really comfortable with that,” she told Axelrod. “I don't know if I want to say who Dad endorsed.”

“Why don't we just talk about the parallels of the things they worked on together?” Axelrod suggested.

To that, Simon agreed. In the ad, she talked about her father's career, over film clips of Paul Simon campaigning throughout Illinois.

“For half a century, Paul Simon stood for something very special in public life: integrity, principle, and a commitment to fight for those who most needed a voice,” Simon said. “State Senator Barack Obama is cut from that same cloth. With Paul Simon, Barack led the fight to stop wrongful executions and to pass new ethics and campaign finance laws to clean up our politics.”

In the final ten seconds, Sheila Simon appeared on camera. She had her father's dark hair, his rubbery smile. The resemblance was unmistakable. As Sheila herself once admitted, neither father nor daughter was much more than plain. A homely face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a bow tie were all part of Paul Simon's appeal. Like Lincoln, he wasn't handsome, but he was honest.

“I know Barack Obama will be a U.S. senator in the Paul Simon tradition,” she said. “You see, Paul Simon was my dad.”

The Sheila Simon ad was one of three TV spots the Obama campaign recorded that winter. Axelrod's strategy was to start airing the ads in late January, six weeks before the primary. With $4 million, that was the longest window Obama could afford. Hull had already been on TV for months. But Axelrod—who had turned down an offer to run Hull's campaign, for far more money than Obama was paying—was confident that he had a better candidate. He was crossing his fingers that Obama's limited means would give the campaign just enough time to make that case.

While Obama worked the black churches—he was attending five services every Sunday—Axelrod and Giangreco tried to win over white suburbanites. They tested the ads before a focus group on the North Shore, the wealthy, socially liberal suburbs depicted in
Ordinary People
,
Risky Business
, and
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
. North Shore residents aren't likely to live next door to a black person, but they are willing to vote for one.

As Obama's consultants watched from behind a one-way window, the Democratic voters viewed three advertisements, in the order the campaign planned to air them. The first was a biographical spot. It mentioned (of course) that Obama had been the first African-American president of the
Harvard Law Review
. It touted his record in the state senate—on education, on expanding the children's health insurance program.

“They said we couldn't insure every kid, but we did,” Obama said, addressing the camera. Then, for the first time, he uttered his now-famous campaign slogan: “I'm Barack Obama, and I paid for this ad to say, ‘Yes, we can.' ”

When Obama spoke, the voters—especially the women—leaned forward to listen.

(Al Kindle had an explanation for Obama's appeal to suburban women. “He was so good-looking that they can have him in the bed with them without having him in the bed,” he would say. “He was the dream they wished they could take home. In Glencoe and Evanston, all of these areas where there were rich white females, there were more Obama posters than in Chicago. Once people got past his race, it was cute and niche-y that he was African-American.”)

The second ad, designed to emphasize Obama's multiracial appeal, was a dual endorsement by Jesse Jackson and Jan Schakowsky, who represented the northern suburbs in Congress.

Finally, the focus group saw the Simon ad. The campaign intended to run it last. Paul Simon's endorsement, from beyond the grave, would validate everything voters heard about Obama in the first two ads and in a direct mail piece that offered him as “finally, a chance to believe again.” After seeing the Simon ad, everyone in the room got the connection.

“He
reminds
me of Paul Simon,” one woman said effusively.

During that primary season, there was no better place to see Obama work both his bases at once than the Heartland Café, a restaurant in Rogers Park, Chicago's most integrated neighborhood. Founded by hippies, the Heartland was renowned for its vegan dishes, its folk music concerts, and a magazine rack that carried
Dissent
and the
Nation
. By bringing in Obama, the restaurant was trying to re-create the spirit of 1983, Chicago progressives' greatest year. Harold Washington spoke at the Heartland during his first campaign for mayor. A photo of that appearance still hung on a brick wall.

In the crowded dining room, Obama was awaited by punk rockers, gray-haired war protestors, and dreadlocked West Indians. The local ward organization had been expecting a hundred people. Over three hundred showed up—so many that latecomers were turned away. As Obama moved from whites to blacks, he adjusted his language, just as he adjusted his speeches for a Southern Illinois farm cooperative and a Chicago Baptist church.

“You've got some pretty blue eyes,” he said, hoisting a baby boy. “I'm gonna have to introduce you to my daughter. She's a little older than you. You like older women?”

After handing the child back to his father, Obama turned and gave dap to a black guy.

“How are you?” he asked in his deepest voice. “What's goin' on?”

Obama was introduced by the local alderman, Joe Moore, who had also spoken out against the Iraq War in 2002, appearing on the
Today
show to argue for diplomacy.

“Barack Obama is not the son of a powerful politician,” Moore said. “He is not a multimillionaire. What he is is a man of courage, a man of conviction, a man who will stand with his principles regardless of which way the political winds were blowing. I was here some twenty-one years ago, almost to the date, the last time this room was as filled as it is today, and that was for Harold Washington. He had this room filled with the same kind of energy that is here today because people in this neighborhood have great political instincts.”

Obama's three-syllable name lends itself to a chant, so the candidate mounted the step-high stage to a rolling “O-BA-ma! O-BA-ma!”

“You guys, you guys, you're making me blush,” he protested.

Anyone who had listened to the pedantic lecturer of 2000 would have been bowled over by the camp-meeting speech Obama gave that Saturday morning. And anyone who subsequently heard him speak at the convention in Boston would have recognized the rhetoric and felt the same energy, in that small room, that Obama later projected across the Fleet Center.

“I came to Chicago to work among the least of these,” Obama began.

Communities that needed help after the devastation caused by the closing of steel mills on the South Side of Chicago. The best education I ever received was working with people in the community on a grassroots level. What it taught me was ordinary people, when they are working together, can do extraordinary things. A lot of people ask me, ‘Why would you want to go into politics?' Even in this room that is full of activists, there is a certain gnawing cynicism about the political process. We have a sense that too many of our leaders are long on rhetoric but short on substance. We get a sense that, particularly here in Illinois, that politics operates as a business rather than a mission, and certainly, we have the sense that in Washington, power always trumps principle. What I suggest to you today is what I told people when I first ran: that there is another tradition of politics, and that tradition says that we are all connected. If there is a child on the South Side of Chicago that cannot read, it makes a difference in my life even if it's not my child. If there is a senior citizen in Downstate Illinois that cannot buy their prescription drugs, or is having to choose between medicine or paying the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there is an Arab-American family that is being rounded up by John Ashcroft without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties, even if I'm not Arab-American. So, it's that idea that we have a set of mutual obligations toward each other. That I am my brother's keeper. That I am my sister's keeper. That I am not an island unto myself. It is that concept that makes this country work. It is why all of us can be in this room together. Black folks and white folks. Men, women, gay, straight, Asian, Hispanic, poor, well-to-do. The reason we can share this space is because we have a sense of mutual regard, and that's the basis for this country.
E pluribus unum
. Out of many, one.

Obama was a fight announcer, a preacher, and a motivational speaker, all in the same lean frame. Full of conviction, he drove his words into his listeners' ears like a carpenter shooting nails. The white folks loved Obama because he was a reformer, and because a multiracial candidate appealed to their ideal of black and white coexistence. The black folks loved him because the white folks loved him.

“We need someone who can reach beyond the race,” one woman said after the speech. “He can go to Washington and speak their language.”

Axelrod had brought a camera crew to the Heartland Café. (Footage from the speech would be used in some of Obama's ads.) He was thrilled with the turnout.

“When I felt the enthusiasm in that room,” Ax later told the local ward committeeman, “that was when I felt the tide had turned for Obama.”

Thanks to a quirk of geography and the presidential primary schedule, the Quad Cities are very appealing to an Illinois politician who's already thinking about where he can go from the U.S. Senate. Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, lie across the Mississippi River from Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa. The towns may be in different states, but they're all in the same media market. The big newspaper—the
Quad-City Times—
and the big TV station, WQAD, are both in Davenport, but they cover Illinois news.

With Denny Jacobs at his side, Obama campaigned in union halls and picnics all over Illinois's half of the Quad Cities. As a state senator from Chicago, he wasn't drawing big crowds, but those who showed up felt the same star power Jacobs had sensed when Obama first walked onto the state Senate floor.

“I don't know what the hell it is about you,” Jacobs complained to Obama, “but when we walk into a room, they look at you like you're the greatest, and they look at me like, ‘Get out of here, prick.' ”

“Jacobs, that's 'cause you're short,” Obama explained.

Obama would lose Rock Island County to Hynes, but he got his face on WQAD, and he was endorsed by the
Quad-City Times
. Four years before winning the Iowa caucuses, he introduced himself to Iowa voters, without even leaving his home state.

If Obama could win the primary, he was bound for the Senate. Of that, he was certain. Illinois was a blue state, hostile to George W. Bush's reelection. The Republican front-runner, Jack Ryan, had earned millions as an investment banker but lacked political experience.