Believer: My Forty Years in Politics (18 page)

As prescient and meaningful as Obama’s analysis would prove to be, there was precious little at the time to mark its historical significance. All of fourteen seconds of his remarks made it to the evening news. Newspapers did little more than note his presence. For the activists who witnessed it, however, he had laid down a marker that would separate him from the other major Senate contenders.

Still, Obama was forced to play a waiting game. The mercurial Moseley Braun held his plans hostage as she pondered her options. All he could do was touch base with potential supporters, asking for their provisional backing.

Obama had spoken with Moseley Braun to try to assess her intentions, indicating that he would defer to her plans; he gleaned little. Also, while Carol’s prospects of winning a general election were dim, I assumed her huge primary advantage would draw her into the race and bar an Obama candidacy. So I was shocked in January 2003 when the
Sun-Times
reported that Moseley Braun would not seek her old Senate seat. She had something bigger in mind: Carol was planning a race for president.

It seemed like a preposterous idea, but I was all for it. Now Obama had a shot. I called him to chew over the news.

“Game on,” he said.

T
HERE
WAS
LITTLE
TIME
to waste.

Befitting her grand ambition, Moseley Braun timed her surprise announcement for the beginning of the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. Though the Senate primary was more than a year away, Barack agreed that he should stake his claim quickly, before a more prominent African American filled the vacuum Carol’s stunning decision had created. So the Tuesday after the King holiday, we gathered at my office, hammered out an announcement statement, and headed to a downtown hotel for a hastily called press conference.

Looking back, I find it quaint to think of pulling off such an important announcement without weeks of planning and deliberation. Yet in January 2003, Barack Obama was just a small speedboat trying to launch before some battleship came along and capsized his ambitions.

“Four years ago, Peter Fitzgerald bought himself a Senate seat, and he’s betrayed Illinois ever since,” Obama said. Fitzgerald came from a wealthy banking family, and had spent his millions on his ’98 campaign. “But we are here to take it back on behalf of the people of Illinois.”

The announcement took place in a cramped meeting room at the Allegro Hotel, just a block from City Hall, convenient enough to reporters to guarantee at least a little coverage. Flanking Barack were two of the city’s three black congressmen, Danny Davis and Jesse Jackson Jr. Jackson’s presence was particularly meaningful. He was a popular young officeholder, widely regarded as the black community leader with the most potential for higher office. It was noteworthy that the ambitious young heir to the most famous name in African American politics had deferred his ambitions to Obama, whom young Jackson would generously refer to in a subsequent ad as “the best our community has to offer.”

Additionally, Obama was joined by his patron and the newly elected state senate president, Emil Jones Jr. Several white state senate colleagues from suburban and downstate Illinois surrounded Obama at the press conference, as did a handful of luminaries from Chicago’s progressive and reform communities. All in all, it was an impressive tableau, especially given the short notice we’d had to pull it together.

One notable absentee was Michelle Obama. With a community relations position at the University of Chicago, and two small children at home, Michelle appeared rarely during this campaign—and certainly not at spur-of-the-moment events. It was clear that she and Barack had an understanding: she would tolerate one last political adventure with all the long absences that the campaign and his work in Springfield demanded of him, but he could not expect her to play a big role in it.

By April, Fitzgerald was out. Perhaps spooked by the polls, or disillusioned by the experience, he announced that he would quit the U.S. Senate after one term. Now that we were vying for an open seat, the prospects for Democrats were even better. It was a presidential year, which would bring out a big Democratic turnout in a state that had become solidly blue. Whoever won the Senate primary would be the odds-on favorite to win the seat. Our challenge was to persuade a skeptical political and donor community that a little-known black man with an alien name and unproven campaign skills—a man who just a few years earlier had been trounced by Bobby Rush—could topple a formidable primary field.

With his career on the line, Obama dedicated himself completely to the task at hand. When he wasn’t in Springfield or on the road, he spent hour upon hour in his cramped, downtown campaign office, dialing for dollars and support. Maybe he drew inspiration from the iconic photo he had hanging on the wall behind him, showing a young and improbable heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali, standing triumphantly over the once-indomitable Sonny Liston.

I would like to believe that Obama pursued me simply because he had a keen eye for talent and kindred spirits. Still, he also knew that I had credibility with the state’s political players and press corps. If I were willing to bet on him, Obama bluntly acknowledged, others would give him a longer look. Obama wanted to use me, and I was more than willing to be used. For much of 2003, my job was to meet with potential supporters and make the case for how Barack could win and why I believed he could pull it off.

Another critical ally was Jones, the state senate president who had taken Obama under his wing. In many ways, they were an odd pair. Nearly seventy, Jones was a gruff, plainspoken ward heeler—which is how Obama refers to him in his memoirs of his days as a community organizer—who patiently rose through the ranks of the Democratic machine. Obama was the Hawaiian-born, Harvard-educated law school instructor, a young man in a hurry, audaciously trying to jump to the front of the line. Yet there grew between them a strong personal relationship. Jones took an almost filial pride in Obama, who, from day one, had shown the potential to be a great asset in the state senate. Obama found in the streetwise senate president a political guardian angel and father figure. When John Stroger, a powerful South Side committeeman, told Jones that he was committed to young Hynes over Obama because of his political debt to Hynes’s father, Jones exploded. “How many generations do we have to pay off these debts, John?” Jones demanded. “What about our sons? Barack is like a son to me.”

The senate president’s zeal was not lost on those who would have to deal with him in Springfield. Obama had been a strong ally to the state’s powerful public employee unions, and shared their progressive bent on the issues. Yet he was no sure bet, and the state AFL-CIO was tilting toward Hynes, whose father had long-standing ties to the mostly white building trades unions. Still, with strong encouragement from Jones, the SEIU and AFSCME would split with their labor brethren, giving Obama their endorsement and a bounty of campaign cash and foot soldiers.

I saw in these first months the two sides of Barack Obama. As he demonstrated years earlier when he shoved Palmer off the ballot, and as he had shown in Springfield, he was no dreamy reformer. He was idealistic in his aspirations, but pragmatic in pursuit of them—ready and willing to do what was necessary to advance his political and legislative goals. At the same time, as the campaign evolved, I saw the emergence of the inspiring tribune of hope for change in America and its relationship to the world. It was a preview of the man the nation would come to know and embrace.

For much of the U.S. Senate campaign, Barack’s companion and traveling aide on the trail was David Katz, a kid from Hyde Park who had recently graduated from the University of Michigan. Katz had many virtues, but I think the one Obama most appreciated was his proficiency in golf. Once, during the spring, I called Barack in Springfield and caught him on the golf course. “I’m in the middle of a match with Katz and we’re playing for money, can I call you back?” When he did, I told him he had worried me. “I backed you because I thought you were a smart guy. But now you tell me you’re playing golf for money against a scratch golfer who was on the team at Michigan?” Barack was incredulous. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “He was on my team. We just took a nice dinner from a couple of my colleagues.”

In addition to his value as a ringer, Katz was a skilled photographer and had a good ear to go along with his keen eye. One day, I called him to check on the progress of Obama’s swing through the small towns of Southern Illinois. We didn’t expect to do well there, in what was akin to the rural South, but in a close contest, we couldn’t afford to surrender that turf completely. Katz’s report caught me by surprise.

“We’ve had a great day down here,” he said. “Visited a veterans’ hall. He did well. The reaction was really positive.”

I scratched my head, and mentioned it to Obama when I spoke with him at the end of the day.

“Why do you sound so surprised?” he asked.

“Let me see,” I said, “I guess because you’re a black guy named Barack Obama in an all-white section of deep Southern Illinois. Maybe I’m nuts, but I thought it might be a little challenging.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Obama said. “These folks? They’re just like my grandparents from rural Kansas. I talk about my grandfather, and how he marched in Patton’s army. And I talk about my grandmother, who was a Rosie the Riveter. And we have a great time.”

Listening to Barack, I reflected on how comfortable he seemed with people wherever he found them. He moved as easily in a VFW hall downstate as he did in an inner-city church in Chicago or a tony suburban parlor. He had lived in so many different worlds that he felt comfortable in all of them. Born to an interracial couple in Hawaii, he was raised by a single mother, partly in Indonesia, but also by his white, working-class grandparents. He had won scholarships to exclusive schools, but spent three years working to lift impoverished communities. His ability to navigate all these worlds so seamlessly was a gift few politicians—few people, generally—shared. Also, at a time when our politics had grown so divisive, he was the rare politician who genuinely could transcend race and class divides with a remarkable ability to appeal to our common values, hopes, and dreams.

This was evident not just on the campaign trail but also in Springfield, the capital of our large, diverse state. Illinois spans from the quintessential big city and sprawling suburbs in the north to the farms and coal mine country of the south, the tip of which is closer to Little Rock than Chicago. In between are many small industrial towns that had been battered through the decades by drastic changes in the economy. The legislature reflects that diversity, which, in many ways, reflects our nation. Part of Obama’s success in navigating this terrain, I learned, was rooted in another of his rare qualities that too many politicians lack: empathy.

“My mother drummed into me that I should always try to put myself in the other person’s shoes,” Obama told me. “I try to understand what people are saying, and where they’re coming from.”

It was not a quality he was taught in the classroom, but an innate virtue that he had honed in the hallowed halls of Harvard and on the gritty Chicago streets. So I was not surprised when I heard about a debate in Springfield over gun control in which Obama, whose inner-city district was ravaged by violence, engaged a colleague from a rural district, where guns were a cherished way of life. Instead of confronting his colleague, Barack sought common ground.

“I understand that, for you, hunting has been a tradition passed on from generation to generation,” Obama said. “Your father probably took you out at dawn to hunt, like his dad did with him. And now, you’re doing the same with your own kids. But where I come from, mothers sit by the window, anxiously waiting for their kids to come home from school, hoping they don’t get shot in some gang crossfire. There has to be a way we can find to both preserve your traditions and save our children.”

As president, he later would be criticized for valuing dinners with his family over socializing with politicians and donors. Yet, as a legislator stuck in Springfield, three hours from home, Obama made the most of dinners, golf outings, and poker games with colleagues from both parties, developing warm relationships that crossed the aisle and opened the door to constructive dialogue when it came time to do business.

In the spring of 2003, as he geared up for the Senate race, Obama had a new opportunity to bring those relationships to bear. For the first time in twenty-six years, Democrats held both the governor’s office and a majority in the state senate. With an ally in the senate president’s chair, Obama was determined to tackle legislation that he never could have contemplated under Republican control.

Among the dozens of bills he took up, two were potentially explosive. The death penalty and racial profiling were issues that could strengthen Obama as he sought to galvanize the black electorate. They also were knotty, emotional questions fraught with difficulty and political peril.

In 2000, then-governor George Ryan suspended the Illinois death penalty shortly after a death row inmate became the thirteenth person in Illinois to be acquitted or to have his charges dropped since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1977. Some were exonerated by DNA testing; a number were convicted on the basis of coerced confessions during police interrogations. In 2003, Obama convened a series of meetings between police and prosecutors, defense attorneys and civil libertarians to thrash out thorny issues surrounding the Illinois law before the death penalty would be reinstated. After months of negotiation, he passed a landmark bill with strong bipartisan support requiring police interrogations to be videotaped in all homicide cases.

Another bill Obama passed that spring dealt with racial profiling in traffic stops by police. “If you’re a young black man behind the wheel, you’re going to get stopped by the police at some point,” Barack said. “Everyone in the community knows it.” Yet, passionate as he was about rectifying this practice that stigmatized and, in some cases, traumatized young black men, he followed the same disciplined process as he had on the death penalty, bringing disparate interests together to hammer out a compromise. The final bill required police to keep records of every traffic stop, including the race of the motorists, and submit these to the state. It also mandated sensitivity training for police to reduce incidents of profiling and needless confrontations.

Neither bill fully satisfied either side of the debate. Death penalty opponents preferred an outright ban, which would come later. Police were wary of any taping at all. Some opponents of racial profiling wanted stronger proscriptions than the Obama bill would yield. Law enforcement feared that the new law would hamstring them. Yet Barack persuaded critics on the left that these laws, while imperfect, were a big step forward, and he argued to police and prosecutors that the laws would protect all those officers who were doing things by the book from being tarred by a few bad actors.

To be sure, it was shrewd and deft politics, yielding key achievements that we would tout in the campaign. Beyond those victories, however, was a larger portrait of Obama, who pursued progressive goals in a pragmatic way. He gave all sides a fair hearing and refused to allow the perfect solution to stand in the way of a good one. He was an idealist but not an ideologue. And while his openness to compromise occasionally annoyed the Left, he was a bridge builder at a time when so many were dismayed by the withering partisanship that had descended on Washington.