Young Mr. Obama (25 page)

“I am supportive of Mr. Obama,” Bobby Rush told a reporter that week. Despite Rush's endorsement of Blair Hull, Obama won 82 percent of the vote in the Second Ward. “We need everyone to be on board and come around for the Democratic ticket. I will be doing all I can to elect the entire ticket.”

It was a victory equal to Oscar DePriest's in 1928, Harold Washington's in 1983, or Carol Moseley Braun's in 1992. At the age of forty-two, less than two decades after arriving as a stranger, with no money and no roots in Chicago, Obama had joined the roll of the city's great black politicians. That night, he won for the entire community, and the entire community embraced him.

Epilogue

THE BIRTHPLACE OF POST-RACIAL POLITICS

O B A M A
'
S  V I C T O R Y
in the Democratic primary made him a political celebrity. As a man who was likely to become the nation's only black senator, he was interviewed the next day on CNN and
Today
. Bigfoot pencils from the
New Yorker
, the
New Republic
, and the
Wall Street Journal
flew into Chicago to write the first of the fawning profiles that must have made them wonder, What was I thinking? when they saw their prose in the morning papers. (Newhouse News Service called Obama “tall, fresh and elegant.” The campaign staff gave him no end of grief over that description.)

Carol Moseley Braun had gotten similar attention after winning her primary, but there was a feeling that Obama might be more than a token black face in an all-white chamber. He might be the guy who finally climbed over the barrier that had blocked African-Americans from power for nearly four hundred years. Race had been the one undying issue in American politics, from the writing of the Constitution, through the Civil War, the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and the white flight from the cities. Maybe Obama could begin to change that, too.

“Obama has the potential to become the most significant political figure Illinois has sent to Washington since Abraham Lincoln,” wrote Mark Brown of the
Chicago Sun-Times
.

It was an apt statement, and not only because it came true. Lincoln's Illinois was a state divided between Southerners who'd migrated up from Kentucky and Tennessee, and Yankees who'd arrived via the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. Those two factions took up the question of slavery a generation before the rest of the country, settling the issue in 1824 with a bitter plebiscite that banned the sale and ownership of human beings. A generation before Obama became president, his Chicago was led by a black mayor who proved to hostile whites that he wasn't going to turn the city into a Midwestern Zimbabwe. Chicago survived as a multicultural metropolis, evenly divided between whites and blacks.

Obama's belief that the Democratic primary would determine the election was right on the mark. The winner of the Republican primary, Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw from the race for the exact same reason as Blair Hull: because of embarrassing disclosures in his divorce file. Ryan, who had been married to
Star Trek: Voyager
actress Jeri Ryan, tried to pressure his wife into having sex in front of strangers at swingers' clubs. For the second time that year, the
Chicago Tribune
published the marital secrets of an Obama rival.

Without a general election opponent, Obama was free to work on becoming a star. His campaign lobbied John Kerry's staff for a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. Kerry, who watched Obama own the crowds at two Chicago campaign events, offered him the keynote address. In Boston, Obama delivered the greatest maiden speech since William Jennings Bryan's “Cross of Gold” in 1896, introducing America to the message of inclusion and shared responsibility he had been preaching across Illinois all that winter and spring. As one of his speech coaches later put it, “He walked onto that stage as a state senator, and he walked off as the next president of the United States.”

Realizing that Obama was unbeatable, the Illinois Republican Party asked conservative commentator Alan Keyes to serve as its sacrificial nominee. Keyes, who had run two campaigns for president, was thrilled to step into Obama's spotlight. He used the attention to condemn homosexuals as “selfish hedonists” and insist that Jesus Christ would never vote for Obama (a moot point, since Jesus was not registered in Illinois).

In spite of Keyes's clownishness, the general election was significant: It was the first time two black candidates had competed for a U.S. Senate seat.

“Illinois has a record of such innovation,” wrote columnist Amity Shlaes, a graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory School. Neither candidate was campaigning on a black agenda, which meant that Illinois was “yet again emerging as the venue for a shift on race.” “The big show of 2004 may well take place in the Land of Lincoln,” she added.

It was a race in which skin color was not an issue, won by a black candidate who had shown unprecedented appeal to white voters. That Illinois would become the birthplace of postracial politics was no surprise to Obama. Early in his Chicago years, he realized his adopted home was the perfect training ground for solving America's problems, racial and otherwise. Barack Obama came to Chicago decades after the Great Migration, but for a young black man with political ambitions, it still turned out to be the promised land.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been written without the guidance of two editors. The first is Patrick Arden of the
Chicago Reader
, who in 1999 sent me down to the South Side to check out this guy Obama who was trying to take Bobby Rush's congressional seat. “Is Bobby Rush in Trouble?” the story that came out of that reporting, is the basis for chapter 9.

The second is Mark Schone, who was news editor of Salon.com in 2007, when Obama declared his presidential candidacy. I pitched a story about Obama's “lost campaign” and how it helped him mature as a politician to over a dozen national news outlets. Only Mark was interested. Throughout the 2008 campaign, I wrote a number of stories about Obama and Chicago for
Salon
. The essay “Chicago is Barack Obama's kind of town” is where I first developed the idea that certain historical forces made Chicago the perfect home base for a black presidential candidate.

My agent, Jeff Gerecke, responded enthusiastically to my book proposal when I e-mailed him after the 2008 election. Jeff then used his knowledge of the New York publishing world to find the perfect editor: Pete Beatty, who had just moved to Bloomsbury Press from the University of Chicago Press. As a former Hyde Parker, Pete understood exactly what I meant when I said that Obama wouldn't have become president if he hadn't moved to Chicago.

Most of the people I interviewed are named in this book, but there are a few whose help was especially important: Jerry Kellman, Brian Banks, Alan Dobry, Douglas Baird, and Todd Spivak all reviewed sections of the manuscript for factual accuracy. (Alan also told me I could find Abner Mikva in the phone book, which is the last place someone of my generation thinks to look.) Hermene Hartman, publisher of
N'DIGO
, was an invaluable guide to the worlds of black business, media, and politics. Cheryl Johnson always made me feel welcome when I visited Altgeld Gardens and allowed me to attend meetings of her group, People for Community Recovery.

I also want to thank Eithne McMenamin for serving as my guide at the state capitol in Springfield and Beth Milnikel for showing me around the University of Chicago Law School. Joan Walsh, Alison True, Anne Fitzgerald, and Lucinda Hahn are other editors who encouraged me to write about Obama. (Lucinda, I'm looking forward to seeing your memoir in print.) Jim Dye, my oldest friend, digitized the nine-year-old Obama interview tape I found in a desk drawer.

Finally, I want to thank my mother, Gail Kleine, for typing the manuscript, saving me a lot of time and money when both were in short supply. She worked as an editor after college and used those skills on this book, too. It is a better work because of her.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edward McClelland lives in Chicago. His previous books include
The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes
and
Horseplayers: Life at the Track
. A former staff writer for the
Chicago Reader
, he has contributed to the
New York Times
, the
Boston Globe,
Salon,
Slate
, and the
Nation
. He is currently working on a history of the Rust Belt, to be published by Bloomsbury Press. Find him on the Web at www.tedmcclelland.com.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Horseplayers: Life at the Track

The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers,
Long-Haired Ojibway Painters, and God-Save-the-Queen
Monarchists of the Great Lakes

Copyright © 2010 by Edward McClelland

Map copyright © 2010 by Douglas Hunter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

“Illinois Blues” by Skip James copyright © 1968 renewed 1994 Wynwood Music Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McClelland, Ted.
Young Mr. Obama : Chicago and the making of a black president / Edward McClelland. —1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-60819-060-7 (hardcover)
1. Obama, Barack. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. African American lawyers—Illinois—Chicago—Biography. 4. African American politicians—Illinois—Chicago—Biography. 5. African American legislators—Illinois—Biography. 6. Chicago
(Ill—Politics and government—1951-7. Illinois—Politics and government—1951- I. Title.
E908.M39 2010
973.932092—dc22
[B]
2010007976

First published by Bloomsbury Press in 2010
This e-book edition published in 2010

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-384-4

www.bloomsburypress.com