Young Mr. Obama (8 page)

“How about ‘It's a Power Thing'?” suggested a staffer named Bruce Dixon, who'd been hired to organize the North Side.

Obama loved it. He added “Register and Vote” and had the slogan framed in a red, yellow, and green kente border. It was a coveted T-shirt and poster that summer.

Project Vote! made Obama a small-time celebrity in the black community. He spoke from the pulpits of churches, addressed a rally in Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH headquarters, and was interviewed on WVON (originally Voice of the Negro, now Voice of the Nation), Chicago's black talk radio station. Since Obama was responsible for raising money to supplement Newman's contribution, he was introduced, for the first time, to the wealthy Chicagoans who would one day fund his campaigns for the U.S. Senate and the presidency. Ed Gardner, founder of Soft Sheen Products, an African-American hair care manufacturer, donated thousands of dollars. John Rogers, an investment banker who is now one of Obama's closest friends, was the fund-raising cochair. The chair, John Schmidt, was a Harvard-educated lawyer who had served as Mayor Richard M. Daley's first chief of staff. Schmidt organized events at the University Club, where Obama met big-time Democratic donors Lewis Manilow and Bettylu Saltzman, who eagerly wrote him checks. Chicago's liberal elite was enchanted by the articulate young black man with the Harvard Law degree.

“In front of that kind of audience, he was as good as he was going to get,” Schmidt would recall. “He learned how effective he could be in a room full of lawyers.”

At Project Vote! headquarters, Obama was an intense, disciplined, but low-key boss. He would sit in his tiny office, chain-smoking Pall Malls and studying tallies, always with one figure in mind: the 150,000 voters he'd promised Newman.

“How many registrations to get to where we need?” he'd ask his field organizers at their weekly meetings. “In order to get this funding, we gotta have these registrations.”

Brian Banks, a Harvard grad and Altgeld Gardens native, was in charge of the South Side. When Banks tried to hire his live-in girlfriend to work on a freelance project for the campaign, he got a reminder that his boss wasn't from Chicago.

“Look, you can't do this,” Obama told him quietly but firmly.

Banks responded with a “you're crazy” look, but Obama continued.

“We're not going to run this with people from your family getting paid,” he said.

Obama was also learning to use his sex appeal as a political tool. With his baritone voice; tall, lean figure; brilliant smile; and Ivy League intellect, Obama was enormously attractive to females. To the middle-aged women of the DCP, he had presented himself as a surrogate son. But now he was a thirty-year-old man, running a citywide program with a six-figure budget. The head of Project Vote! was going to have to suggest a deeper relationship with his female followers, and Obama did. In politics, 1992 was the Year of the Woman. Most Project Vote! volunteers were women, as excited about Moseley Braun's gender as her race. They were also motivated by Obama's magnetism. One loyal registrar came back to the office with over a thousand sheets that summer.

Banks had played basketball in high school and college, so he knew about groupies, and he also knew when guys were exploiting their female admirers. Obama was aware of his charisma, but he was too focused on voter registration to fool around.

“One of the reasons this project was so successful is there were a lot of women who wanted to spend time with him,” Banks would say. “He'd walk into a room, and there'd be people swooning. I've seen a lot of guys who used that to have sex, but he just wanted to use that to do something.”

Project Vote! added more than 150,000 new voters to the rolls—a record for a Chicago registration drive. For the first time, voters in black-majority wards outnumbered voters in white-majority wards. And they came out in November, thanks to get-out-the-vote phone calls made from Teamsters headquarters. Over half a million blacks voted, the highest turnout since Harold Washington's first election. Carol Moseley Braun defeated her Republican opponent 53 percent to 47 percent, and Bill Clinton became the first Democrat to carry Illinois since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Illinois became a blue state that year. It has not changed colors since.

Moseley Braun not only inherited Harold Washington's movement, she expanded on his achievements. Before Harold, a black Chicago pol's highest aspiration was U.S. representative. After Harold, it became senator, and ultimately president. Plenty of other cities have had black mayors—Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore—but in none of those places have blacks achieved so much statewide political success. (Moseley Braun was actually the second black politician to win a statewide election in Illinois. In 1978, Roland Burris, a product of the South Side Machine, was elected to the first of three terms in the minor office of comptroller. Burris later served as attorney general, then became notorious when Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed him to complete Obama's term in the U.S. Senate.)

Chicago has two unique advantages. First, it's in Cook County, which contains nearly half of Illinois's voters. Second, the local Democratic Party is a countywide organization. After Moseley Braun won the primary, precinct captains in white Chicago neighborhoods
and
the suburbs whipped up votes for her in the general election.

“They had to go out and sell the black person to demonstrate that the party was still open,” political consultant Don Rose would explain. “It was a hard-fought thing. If you use Harold Washington's election as the pivot point, what you begin to see is black politicians making challenges to the regular organizations, and then the organizations having to support them.”

Obama's success won him his first notice in the
Chicago Tribune
. In a special Black History Month section, he was named one of “25 Chicagoans on the road to making a difference.”

“Barack Obama, 31, Attorney,” the agate-type profile read. “A community activist who headed Project Vote!, a voter registration effort responsible for signing up many of the 150,000 new African-American voters added to the rolls for last November's historic election. In 1990, he was the first black editor of the
Harvard Law Review
.”

Obama's wedding took place at Trinity United Church of Christ, with a reception at the South Shore Country Club, a once-segregated institution on the lakefront, just south of Hyde Park. By marrying Michelle, he was binding himself to black Chicago, where he'd chosen to make his home and career. The Obamas would eventually become members of the city's black elite, a community of entrepreneurs, doctors, publishers, attorneys, and politicians. Their Harvard degrees would help them conquer that world, but they hadn't conquered it just yet. Michelle had grown up middle-class, in the Highlands, an enclave of South Shore: Her father worked at the city's water filtration plant, and she attended Whitney Young, a public high school for overachievers.

Obama had two best men: his Kenyan half brother, Malik, and Johnnie Owens. The guest list represented both the life he was leaving behind and the one he was about to enter: Jerry Kellman was at the wedding. So were Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Margaret Bagby. The only elected officials present were Sam Burrell and Toni Preckwinkle, a pair of aldermen who'd worked on Project Vote! Jesse Jackson Jr. attended because his wife, Sandi, was a childhood friend of Michelle's.

The DCP women were thrilled to see Obama marry Michelle. They'd been worried that their promising young man would be prey for “some jezebel or some bimbo.” But Michelle was clearly as brilliant as Barack. When the couple made the rounds at the reception, Bagby told Michelle that her new husband was destined for the White House.

“Ahh, yeah, right,” Obama laughed, the same as he'd always done when Margaret insisted he'd be president someday. Then he moved on to the next table. As a law student, he'd visited Roseland whenever he returned to Chicago, and as head of Project Vote!, he'd enlisted DCP members as volunteers. But after the wedding, those three women would rarely see him again.

Chapter 5

THE YOUNG LAWYER

I N   E A R L Y   1 9 9 3
, Obama went to work full-time at Davis, Miner. He was given a narrow office at the head of the stairwell on the second floor, right next to Judd Miner's. He hung up a photo of Harold Washington—the same tinted studio portrait seen in so many South Side parlors—and set about doing the late mayor's unfinished business.

Davis, Miner carried the banner for Chicago's white liberals and black nationalists. A decade before they had united to put Washington in office. Now, they were out of power. In 1989, Richard M. Daley had been elected to complete Washington's unfinished term, defeating Alderman Timothy Evans, who skipped the Democratic primary to run as the candidate of the Harold Washington Party. It was another racially divisive election. Unable to hold Washington's multiethnic coalition together, Evans got only 7 percent of the white vote, a third of what his party's namesake had received. With the Daleys restored to the mayor's office, battles once won in the city council had to be argued in court.

“Judd Miner basically made his living by suing the city,” said a man who served as an expert witness in one of his cases.

That's exactly what Miner was doing when Obama joined his firm. One of Obama's first cases was
Barnett v. Daley
, which alleged that the city's 1991 ward map was racially biased and should be redrawn to ensure the election of more black aldermen. This was essentially a continuation of “Council Wars”: Harold Washington had won his council majority in a special election, after a federal judge ordered that the 1980s ward map be reconfigured for racial balance. The plaintiffs were members of Washington's old council bloc, the defendants mostly white ethnic aldermen who had sided with Edward Vrdolyak.

The 1990 census was the first in which blacks outnumbered whites in Chicago. Yet the city council had twenty-three whites, twenty African-Americans, and seven Latinos. The new Daley administration had maintained a white majority by creating wards where blacks made up more than 90 percent of the population, the suit argued. The Southwest Side—one of the city's most bitter racial battlegrounds—was 68 percent African-American. Yet it had two white wards and two wards that were 98 and 99 percent black, respectively.

“To this day, electoral politics in Chicago is infected by racial bias and racial appeals, and it has touched on the right of African-Americans to participate in the electoral process and to elect candidates of their choice unless they have voting control of a ward,” argued Miner's brief, which charged that the redistricting violated the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act.

On
Barnett v. Daley
, Obama did associate work: he prepared discovery documents, joined Miner in taking depositions, and wrote memos. The case dragged on through the federal courts until 1998, long after Obama had left the firm for the state senate. The plaintiffs won—sort of. The U.S. District Court of Appeals ordered one Southwest Side ward redrawn to add more black voters. The Irish incumbent won the special election.

Most of Obama's work at Davis, Miner had a racial or social-justice angle. He won an out-of-court settlement for a black medical equipment salesman who accused his employer of racial harassment. He sued a bank for redlining in black neighborhoods. Obama was deeply involved in a voting rights case,
ACORN v. Edgar
, in which he sued Illinois's Republican governor Jim Edgar for refusing to implement the federal National Voter Registration Act. The act, better known as Motor Voter, required states to register voters at the library, the Public Aid Department, and the secretary of state's office. It forbade purging voters who skipped an election. Given his leadership of Project Vote!, the case was a natural for Obama—a bridge between law and politics, as Project Vote! had been a bridge between community organizing and politics. Having worked with ACORN on Project Vote! Obama saw that registering poor folks would be that much harder if the state refused to obey Motor Voter.

Obama authored
ACORN v. Edgar
's final brief, filing it on January 19, 1995, less than a month after Motor Voter took effect.

“ACORN as an organization is aggrieved by the State of Illinois' failure to comply with the mandatory provisions of the NVRA by January 1, 1995, because such failure significantly impedes ACORN's ability to effectively promote voter registration which would be much enhanced by the NVRA's streamlined procedures for mail-in registration and agency-based registration at motor vehicle, public assistance, disability, and other designated offices,” Obama wrote.

“A significant number of ACORN members are registered to vote, but have not voted in the last two preceding calendar years because of a lack of candidates addressing their needs or for other reasons. These members wish to remain registered to vote and would be significantly harmed by being purged from the voting registration rolls, including being deprived of their rights to serve as jurors in federal cases. A significant number of ACORN members are not registered to vote, are not registered at their current residence addresses, or are likely to change their addresses in the foreseeable future. A significant number of ACORN members go to motor vehicle departments to obtain or renew drivers' licenses, or go to state offices to receive public assistance or disability services. These members would likely register to vote or have their addresses upgraded on their current voter registration if the registration procedures were implemented at these offices in the manner required by the NVRA.”

The Republican-controlled state senate and the state board of elections countered that allowing people to register just anywhere would lead to vote fraud in Chicago—a timeless bugaboo for Illinois Republicans.

While drafting the brief, Obama organized meetings and traded faxes with a half-dozen other civil rights attorneys, soliciting opinions. But he was still a cub lawyer, and this was a hot case. Right after he filed, the League of Women Voters and the Justice Department jumped in. Obama stepped aside, allowing their lawyers to make oral arguments. In fact, he only spoke once during the entire proceedings, when he asked the governor's attorney whether the state planned to comply with Motor Voter by setting up a two-tier system that would only allow people to register for federal elections at the secretary of state's.

“Other people really took the lead in court,” Steve Melton, an attorney for the Cook County clerk's office, would recall. “He was younger. Some of us were older than him. Other attorneys were from large firms, so it was natural to defer to them. Once the suit was filed, and it got some momentum, he still attended court hearings. It became evident early on that the judge was on our side. Others took more of a role in pushing the case forward.”

A federal judge ordered Illinois to implement Motor Voter. The victory won Obama some attention from a good-government group that would later support his political career: the Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization. As its doubly independent title suggests, IVI-IPO represents the anti-Daley strain in Chicago politics. The group is especially influential in Hyde Park, where it was founded. For his work on
ACORN v. Edgar
, Obama won the IVI-IPO's Legal Eagle Award. During a dinner at the Blackstone Hotel, he was handed the plaque by Senator Paul Simon, every do-gooder's favorite political Boy Scout and a man who would one day play a big role in making Obama a United States senator.

Winning the
Harvard Law Review
presidency may have been the most important election of Obama's life. It provided him with a golden ticket to Chicago's upper class, preparing the way for all his later achievements. Had Obama simply been a black Harvard Law grad—or a white
Law Review
president—he wouldn't have been offered so much publicity, so much money, and so many jobs, from journalists, publishers, law firms, and political donors. But as the first black man to hold the world's most prestigious law school post, Obama was a blue-chip prospect, especially in Chicago, which is used to losing its brightest law students to New York and Washington. The
Law Review
presidency scored him a fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he taught until his election to the U.S. Senate and where he finally met Judge Abner Mikva, who became his first political mentor.

Obama's great-uncle Charles Payne was a librarian at the U of C. Payne, the brother of Obama's grandmother Madelyn Dunham, boasted to a law librarian that his nephew was the first African-American president of the
Law Review
. The law librarian passed the intelligence on to Douglas Baird, chairman of the law school's Appointment Committee. Baird was perplexed, because Payne was a WASP.

“Sorry, you must be mistaken,” he told the librarian. “I know Charles Payne, and he may have a nephew who's the president of the
Harvard Law Review
, but he doesn't have a nephew who is the first
black
to hold that position.”

Shortly after, Baird received a visit from Michael McConnell, a colleague who would one day be named a federal judge by George W. Bush. McConnell had just published an article in the
Harvard Law Review
and raved about this kid named Obama who'd done a brilliant job editing it.

“He should be on our radar screen,” McConnell suggested. “He might be interested in teaching law.”

Baird dialed the same Cambridge phone number that so many other lawyers were calling that spring and got Obama on the line.

“I'm not interested in teaching law,” Obama told Baird. “I've got a contract to write a book on voting rights. That's going to occupy most of my first year after law school.”

(After the
New York Times
published an article about Obama's
Law Review
presidency, a literary agent landed him a $125,000 contract with Simon and Schuster. Due to the demands of law school, Obama was unable to finish the project. He later took a more modest advance from Times Books, for the book that became
Dreams from My Father
.)

“Why don't you write the book here?” Baird suggested. “We'll make you a law and government fellow. We can pay you a token salary and give you an office with a word processor.”

If Obama did decide to teach law, Baird calculated, he'd already be on the U of C campus. And as every attorney knows, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Obama accepted Baird's offer and hunkered down to work inside the law school, a six-story glass building with an inch-deep fountain in the courtyard. Its boxy frame and dark reflective windows rhyme not at all with the Oxonian courtyards on the main campus, built in the early twentieth century with John D. Rockefeller's fortune. After Obama had been at the school about a month, he returned to Baird's office and told him the book had taken an unexpected turn.

“It's really less a book about voting rights than it is my autobiography,” he reported.

Baird was a little surprised—Obama seemed awfully young to be writing an autobiography—but he wanted to indulge his prize catch.

“That's not a problem,” Baird said. “You should write the book you're going to write.”

In the fall of 1992, as Obama was winding up Project Vote! and typing away on
Dreams from My Father
, Baird prevailed on him to teach a seminar called “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” The assignment came with a new title, lecturer in law, which Baird hoped would be the first step toward a professorship.

U of C is one of American academia's most expensive gigs. It's not quite the Ivy League, but your bank account can't tell the difference. At that time, both the faculty and the student body were 90 percent white. Obama's fifteen-student seminar drew a disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latinos. Not only were they excited about a class on minority rights, they were inspired to see a black teacher. Baird told a Latino student named Jesse Ruiz to go see Obama. Ruiz found the new lecturer sitting in his office, working on his autobiography. Taking time out to talk, Obama told Ruiz he had worked as an organizer in Roseland.

“I grew up in Roseland,” Ruiz said, astonished.

Obama mentioned his
Law Review
presidency—he mentioned it often in those days, before he entered political circles where the
Law Review
presidency wasn't enough to get him what he wanted and where bragging about it actually turned people off. Ruiz realized he'd heard of the guy before. Prior to law school, Ruiz had worked at a steel mill in Indiana. He was sitting at his desk one day when he read about the first black
Law Review
president. I'm not going to be in the steel industry forever, Ruiz had thought, and if this African-American guy who worked in Chicago could be head of the
Law Review
, I could go to law school. Soon after, he enrolled at U of C.

Although his students might have welcomed it, Obama didn't use the seminar to preach liberal remedies for racial ills. That has never been his political style, and it wasn't his teaching style, either. He covered Supreme Court decisions from
Plessy v. Ferguson
to
Brown v. Board of Education
to
Plyler v. Doe
, a Texas case that granted rights to all schoolchildren, regardless of immigrant status. He asked his students to see whites' side of the issues—“Sometimes people have an inherent belief in some things,” he explained, perhaps thinking back to his grandmother's suspicion of black men. And he warned the minority students not to carry their grievances into the courtroom.

“Just don't go with your gut,” he told them. “As a Latino or African-American or an Asian lawyer, you're going to have issues, but you're going to have to keep that out of thinking like a lawyer.”