Young Mr. Obama (24 page)

“This is my election,” Obama told campaign volunteers. “I'm not worried about the Republicans. This is the battle.”

To anyone who picked up the
Chicago Tribune
on February 23, the battle must have looked hopeless. According to the paper's latest survey, Blair Hull was now leading the field, with 24 percent. His TV ads were omnipresent. Every hour, on every news channel, Hull was talking about his army service or his plan to improve schools. It was beginning to look as though the Senate seat that had gone for $14 million to Peter Fitzgerald was about to be sold to the man with thirty mil.

Obama was in second place, with 15 percent, but he had the lowest name recognition of any major candidate. Only a third of the voters knew who he was. A year before, Hull had been even more obscure, but he had bought his way into the public consciousness. Maria Pappas was Cook County treasurer, Dan Hynes was comptroller, Gery Chico had run the school district. Those jobs all had bigger constituencies than a state senator.

Once again, though, the disciplined, dispassionate Obama benefited from another politician's weakness. Mel Reynolds couldn't stay away from young girls. Alice Palmer had made the fatal error of giving Obama permission to run for her state senate seat. When Palmer changed her mind, she was unable to organize a petition drive. Against Bobby Rush, Obama had been the one who couldn't control himself, allowing his arrogance and impatience to lure him into a race he couldn't win.

This time, the tragic character was Blair Hull. Hull's relationship with his second wife, Brenda Sexton, had been volatile. The couple married and divorced twice. Before the final breakup, Sexton took out an order of protection against Hull. That was public record, but the nature of the couple's disagreement was sealed in their divorce file. Hull refused to talk about the file, but every political hack in Chicago knew there was something inside that could destroy his megamillion-dollar candidacy.

Kitty Kurth worked briefly on Hull's campaign but quit because he wouldn't come clean about the divorce.

“You need to talk about these records now, in July, because if you don't talk about 'em in July, David Axelrod is going to have somebody talking about 'em in February,” Kurth told Hull's staff.

During her career in Chicago politics, Kurth had worked both with and against Axelrod. Ax was the shrewdest operator in town. If Kurth knew the divorce papers were dynamite, Axelrod had to know, too. You can't keep a secret like that in a political campaign.

Axelrod did know. When he interviewed with Hull in 2002, Axelrod forced the millionaire to confess his most sordid secrets. If Ax signed on, he'd have to defend his candidate against anything the opposition dug up, so he wanted the dirt in advance. Hull told Axelrod that his ex-wife had alleged mental and physical cruelty as grounds for divorce.

Illinois was talking about Hull's divorce in February, but it wasn't Axelrod's or Obama's doing. An operative for Dan Hynes slipped the outside sheet of Hull's divorce file to David Mendell, a reporter for the
Tribune
. Hynes thought he had a lot to gain by knocking the other white guy down a peg. The sheet detailed Sexton's request for an order of protection. But when Mendell interviewed Hull for a campaign profile, Hull refused to discuss the divorce.

That only led to more questions. Women's groups demanded details. A week later, Hull admitted the order had resulted from an incident in which he was accused of striking Sexton on the shin. In a televised debate at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, every candidate except Obama attacked Hull's unwillingness to open his divorce records. (Obama attacked Hull for misrepresenting his opposition to the Iraq war: “The fact of the matter is, Blair, that you were silent when these decisions were being made. You were AWOL on this issue.”)

“You know, you're responsible for this,” Axelrod told Mendell during the debate.

“David,” Mendell replied, “if it wasn't through me, you folks would have figured out another way to get the mess out there. I just fired the first bullet loaded into the chamber.”

Realizing that his marriage had become the campaign's biggest issue, Hull asked a judge to make the divorce file public. It ended his hopes of becoming a senator. Hull's ex-wife had accused him of being “a violent man” who “hung on the canopy bar of [her] bed, leered at [her] and stated, ‘Do you want to die? I am going to kill you.' ” According to Sexton, Hull had thrown fake punches in an attempt to make her flinch and punched her “extremely hard in the left shin.”

Since the divorce, Hull and Sexton had become good friends. In a touching Chicago gesture, he'd even used his clout to find her a job. As a six-figure contributor to Rod Blagojevich, Hull got the governor to appoint his ex-wife head of the Illinois Film Board. But the tales of domestic violence were more memorable than any of Hull's ads. To the average Illinoisan, Blair Hull, champion of prescription drugs for seniors, was now Blair Hull, wife beater.

The wreck of Hull's campaign ended up benefiting Obama, not Hynes. Although Hynes had won two statewide elections, they were for comptroller, an uninspiring office that pays the state's bills. Hynes was uninspiring in other ways, too. He owed his political career to his father, boss of a powerful Irish ward. At thirty-five, his only apparent signs of maturity were a few gray hairs above his elfin ears. And his airless, colorless, odorless personality was not redeemed by a TV ad in which he wore an apron and cracked an egg to symbolize how Republicans wanted to scramble seniors' nest eggs by reforming Social Security. Hynes had the support of the Daley family and even a few black ward committeemen. In his father's day, that would have been enough to carry a candidate as bland as Dan Hynes. But Hynes's image as a prince of the Machine was a liability against Obama, whose personal story was getting through to voters now that his ads were on TV. Hynes represented Chicago's provincial past—political dynasties, ethnic loyalties, unadulterated Irishness, precinct captains ringing doorbells for a kid from the neighborhood. Obama reflected the modern Chicago, a cosmopolitan city made so by ambitious migrants like himself.

Axelrod's strategy of saving it all for the last six weeks was working. If any one event put Obama over the top, it was the airing of the Sheila Simon ad. State Senator Jeffrey Schoenberg, an Evanston Democrat who by early March was regretting that Hynes had asked him for an endorsement before Obama, thought Simon's endorsement was the most powerful thirty seconds of political television he had ever seen.

“It was a tremendous difference,” Schoenberg would say. “It reached into your chest and grabbed you by the heart and never let go.”

Hull had been doing well among African-Americans because of his TV ads, his signs in the ghetto, and his support among the black politicians still resisting Obama's ascendance. (Even during the last week of the primary, there was still an “anybody but Obama” sentiment in the capitol, especially among house members.) All those black voters were now shifting to Obama.

Obama's campaign could not afford nightly polling, but Hull's could. His staffers watched their candidate tumble down a hill, while Obama sprinted up a mountain. Even without numbers, Axelrod, Giangreco, and Cauley could sense something big was happening: Suddenly, money was pouring in through the mail, over the phone, and on the Internet. Politicians who had once been coyly neutral were now jumping on Obama's bandwagon. And wherever their candidate went, the crowds were bigger and louder. Still unsure of the black vote, Obama ran a last-minute ad titled “Hope,” with clips of Paul Simon addressing a veterans' group and Harold Washington hugging an old white man.

“There have been moments in our history when hope defeated cynicism, when the power of people triumphed over machines,” the narrator intoned.

The message to black Chicago was clear: Let's make this like 1983 all over again.

Illinois held its primaries in mid-March for two reasons: to make life difficult for upstart candidates, who had trouble finding people to ring doorbells all winter, and to coincide with the St. Patrick's Day Parade, which always showcased the Irish candidates.

The Irish Machine candidate wasn't getting the help he'd expected that day. There's another tradition in Chicago politics, summed up by the motto, “Don't make no waves, don't back no losers.” By six
A.M.
, when the libraries, churches, and school gymnasiums unlocked their doors for the voters, everyone in Illinois politics knew Obama was going to win.

Hynes was a lost cause. Union heavies in quilted White Sox jackets were still handing out palm cards with his name, but a lot more guys would have stood in the cold for Hynes if he'd been a contender. Where was the reward in working for an also-ran?

On the South Side, the scene was different. The Obama campaign had collected so much money in the last few weeks it was able to pay people $25 to knock on doors and leave Obama hangers on the knobs. Over a hundred vans sat in the parking lot of an abandoned department store at Seventy-sixth Street and Stony Island Avenue, each with room for a supervisor and fourteen “flushers.” Word had gotten around the hood that you could work for Obama
and
get paid, so the lot was mobbed. Before sunrise, Obama's street organizers worried about finding enough workers. They ended up turning people away. The two-bit door hangers who emerged from the two-flats and housing projects that morning overwhelmed the organizations of the few black bosses who were supporting Hynes out of loyalty to the mayor. This day wasn't quite like the day that elected Harold Washington, when some South Side precincts reported 100 percent turnout, but almost every African-American who voted was voting for Obama. When the first spindle counts came in, around ten
A.M.
, turnout was low everywhere but in the black community, which was showing moderate to moderately high activity. John Kerry had already sewn up the Democratic nomination for president, so many white voters figured the primary didn't matter.

Obama and his family awaited the election results in a suite at the Hyatt Regency, which was owned by the Pritzker family. They didn't have to wait long. At seven o'clock, the moment the polls closed, news anchors began announcing, “Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination for United States Senate.” His victory was that decisive. It was bigger even than Axelrod, who was wonking out on returns at the Cook County clerk's office, could have imagined. Forty-three percent, he'd told Obama. That's the best we'll do, if everything goes perfectly. But now, in a seven-candidate field, against experienced politicians, Obama was winning 53 percent of the vote. In some South Side wards, his margins were running over 90 percent. One Hyde Park precinct cast all 124 ballots for its neighborhood son. Hynes won only the Southwest Side wards controlled by white political dynasties: the Daleys, the Madigans, the Lipinskis, and his own family. Obama ran respectably in all four, which would have been unimaginable for a black candidate when he arrived in Chicago. Harold Washington had been lucky to win one percent in those neighborhoods. Chicago was changing, and a multiracial candidate was helping to change it.

Obama took two-thirds of the vote in Chicago. Outside the city, he won every county in the metropolitan area. Hynes won most of Downstate, but Obama took a few college towns and Abraham Lincoln's Springfield. In St. Clair County, Obama got eight thousand votes—twice what Carol Moseley Braun had won and just what Roy Williams, his county coordinator, had promised to deliver. Obama's final tally—655,923—was only a few thousand short of all the ballots cast in the Republican primary.

As the night went on and rivals called to concede, Obama gradually revealed himself to a wider and wider circle of supporters. When the polls closed, he was sequestered in his thirty-fourth-floor suite with thirty or so family members and friends. Michelle celebrated her husband's projected victory by slapping him a high five.

“They like you!” she teased. “They really like you!”

An hour later, Obama was hugging and shaking hands with two hundred of his biggest donors in a VIP room. Obama didn't make his victory speech until after ten o'clock, when the late local news airs in Chicago. As he paced back and forth in a hallway behind a ballroom crammed with five hundred supporters, he was introduced by Sheila Simon, who had done as much as anyone to bring about this moment. Simon named all her father's friends who were there that night—Ax, Ab Mikva, Rahm Emanuel—firmly passing on the Paul Simon legacy.

“Barack was a long shot,” Simon said. “His campaign was against the odds, but when you've got a lot of guts, you can get things done.”

Obama calmly studied his notes until Simon announced his name. Then, the crowd burst into an enormous cheer and an aide threw open the door separating the candidate from his followers.

“You're on, Barack!” the aide shouted. “You're on!”

Suddenly, he was on: the smile, the wave, the smooth stride, the grasping handshake. In an instant, Obama switched from intellectual to politician. In his victory speech, he was both.

“I am fired up!” he shouted. “There's no way a skinny guy from the South Side with a name like Barack Obama could win, but here we are sixteen months later.”

Then the room quieted, and he read from notes he had written out by hand.

“At its best,” he declared, “the idea of this party has been that we are going to expand opportunity and include people that have not been included, that we are going to give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless, and embrace people from the outside and bring them inside, and give them a piece of the American dream.”

In politics, as Denny Jacobs liked to say, when you are, you are. All of Obama's old supporters were at the Hyatt—Emil Jones, Toni Preckwinkle, and Jesse Jackson Jr., who called Obama “the light that challenges the darkness” in one of the introductory speeches. But Obama's triumph meant that even his most vitriolic enemies were forced to acknowledge that he now stood at the pinnacle of black politics in Chicago.