Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  On Sunday, September 20, Clinton and Moseley Braun appeared together at a late-night “voter registration rally” at the New Regal Theater on 79th Street. Project VOTE! chairman Joe Gardner proudly told the crowd that he knew of “85,000 reasons” why they would help elect Moseley Braun and Clinton. Gardner vowed to add more in the final two weeks, and Clinton then thanked the “packed house of approximately 1,000 supporters for registering more than 115,000 new voters,” Monday’s Defender reported. That 115,000 number represented Chicago’s total number of new registrants since mid-March, with eighty-five thousand of them submitted by Project VOTE!’s network. Six days later the Tribune stated that more than half of new registrants lived in predominantly black wards, and on Saturday, October 3, with forty-eight hours to go, the Sun-Times reported that “radio spots using the ‘Power Thing’ slogan have been blitzing stations serving predominantly black audiences.”8

  October 3 had been set as the date of Barack and Michelle’s wedding weeks before he had agreed to direct Project VOTE! With Monday the 5th as the final registration day for November’s election, Barack had little time to devote to wedding preparations. He had called old friends like Mike Ramos and encouraged them to attend, and Michelle took the initiative to send Barack’s sister Auma a black bridesmaid’s dress for her role in the ceremony. Both a limousine and a tuxedo were rented, but at Project VOTE!’s office, Carol Harwell had to keep reminding Barack of other necessary tasks. In particular, “he kept forgetting to go buy his shoes,” Carol remembered. “‘Barack, you gotta go get shoes,’” and also “‘You need to get this hair cut,’” she reminded him. “Barack didn’t buy his shoes until Friday night for the wedding on Saturday.”

  By Friday a large raft of friends from every chapter of Barack’s life were gathering in Chicago. From Punahou came Mike, Greg Orme, and Bobby Titcomb; from Oxy came Hasan Chandoo, Wahid Hamid, Vinai Thummalapally, and Laurent Delanney, plus Beenu Mahmood of New York. From the world of organizing came Jerry Kellman, Greg Galluzzo, Mike Kruglik, David Kindler, Sokoni Karanja, Ken Rolling, and Jean Rudd; from DCP came Johnnie Owens, Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Margaret Bagby. Rob Fisher, Mark Kozlowski, Dan Rabinovitz, Ken Mack, Tom Perrelli, and Jan-Michele Lemon represented Barack’s Harvard years, plus a number of Michelle’s women friends from the law school’s 1988 class. Mutual friends Gerry Alexis, Tom Reed, and Kelly Jo MacArthur came from Sidley, plus soon-to-be colleagues Allison Davis, Paul Strauss, and Laura Tilly from Davis Miner—“he must have invited the whole firm,” Laura said. From Project VOTE! came John Schmidt, Carol Harwell, and Brian Banks, and from among Michelle’s mayoral office colleagues there were Valerie Jarrett, Yvonne Davila, and Kevin Thompson. In addition to Auma, Abon’go came from D.C. and Ann, Madelyn, and Maya from Hawaii, where Maya had now resumed her undergraduate education at the U of H. Madelyn’s brother Charles Payne and his wife Melanie attended, as did Marian and Craig Robinson, Craig’s wife Janis, Michelle’s close high school friend Santita Jackson and her brother Jesse Jr., and Michelle’s Princeton friend Angela Kennedy.

  On Friday night, Kelly Jo MacArthur took Maya, Auma, and the Punahou guys out to a jazz club in her red BMW; Hasan Chandoo played cards with some of the Oxy crowd and drank so much that the next day “at the ceremony I was so fucking hungover.” Auma stayed with Barack and Michelle at the Robinsons’ family home, and at midday on Saturday, family members gathered there prior to the late-afternoon ceremony at Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street.

  Barack remembered noticing how uncomfortable Madelyn seemed, with her daughter Ann being the only other entirely white person present at the Robinsons’ house, until she realized how familiar all of Marian Robinson’s food dishes were. “There was an immediate connection there,” Barack wrote, because Marian’s “stoicism” toward life “reminds me very much of my grandmother.” At Trinity, Jeremiah Wright was joined in his office by Barack and his two best men, Abon’go and Johnnie Owens, a duo that many guests viewed with surprise. Barack had never grown close to his older brother, and his relationship with Johnnie was by now “pretty strained” given Johnnie’s ongoing personal struggles and the problems DCP was having as a result. Multiple guests recalled Reverend Wright speaking at considerable length, and his metaphor comparing the partners in a marriage to the pillars of Trinity’s sanctuary veered toward the phallic when Jeremiah described Barack as a fine pillar of African American manhood.

  With the ceremony complete, a limousine drove Barack and Michelle to the South Shore Cultural Center, just north of 71st Street, where a large and eclectic crowd gathered to celebrate the Obamas’ marriage. Barack spoke briefly and movingly about how sad he was that the man who had raised him, Stanley Dunham, was not there with them. Carol Harwell remembered how good the champagne was, and how after multiple rounds of toasts to the new couple, she had offered one telling Michelle she should enjoy their two-week honeymoon in Northern California because she had married someone who was going to go far and whose name one day would be in lights. Michelle seemed less than thrilled by Carol’s prediction, but to Laura Tilly the crowd at the reception seemed “like the who’s who of African American Chicago and liberal Chicago.” Craig Robinson’s wife Janis remembered it as “one of the best weddings I’ve ever been to,” yet to Laura it also “was kind of like a coronation: here’s a man who was already designated by many people as somebody of huge potential.”

  Barack and Michelle had chosen Stevie Wonder’s “You and I” as their wedding song, and as everyone milled about and sat down to eat, old friends who were strangers to each other mixed and mingled. Gerry Alexis was struck by “what a rainbow of people” were there and was especially happy to meet Ann Dunham. Barack and Michelle, Gerry said, “introduced me as the person that brought them together” three years earlier at Sidley. To Barack’s Punahou friends the reception “seemed kind of formal,” but Mike Ramos recalled that “we had a blast.” Loretta, Yvonne, and Margaret were sitting together at Table 4—Yvonne saved her place setting—and Barack “came over to us and asked if there was anything we needed,” Loretta recalled. “I just said ‘Barack, all I want is a ticket to your inaugural presidential ball,’” and he laughingly replied, “You’ve got it.”9

  With Monday the final day for preelection registration, Project VOTE! deployed hundreds of deputy registrars at fast-food restaurants across Chicago and staged a midday event in the Loop to attract holdouts. Only then did Barack and Michelle fly to San Francisco to begin their honeymoon in the Napa Valley and along the California coast. In Barack’s absence, Carol Harwell took charge of sending the final registration numbers to Sandy Newman in Washington, and the verified total—111,000—was so good that Newman had to be convinced that deputy registrars indeed had not been paid per-signature bounties. With Illinois fund-raising having reached $200,000, enough money remained for Carol to plan large-scale get-out-the-vote phone banking for the final days before the fall election. Each new registrant had supplied a phone number, and working largely from Soft Sheen’s offices, Project VOTE! callers used a nonpartisan script while firmly asking, “You do plan to vote on Election Day, don’t you?”

  Some new registrants received multiple calls, and with Project VOTE!’s Illinois success matched by similar numbers in Pennsylvania and Michigan, top national political reporters like David Shribman and James Perry at the Wall Street Journal wrote front-page stories about how “surging registration” in big cities in battleground states would mean tens of thousands of new votes for Democrat Bill Clinton. In Project VOTE!’s own publicity materials, that 111,000 documented tally was supplemented by Barack and Joe Gardner’s “estimate” that news of their effort had “produced an extra 40,000 registrations” through other channels, thus allowing Illinois Project VOTE! to claim that it had enrolled 150,000 new voters.

  Everyone who had interacted with Barack during those six months came away impressed. John Schmidt, who soon took the Justice Department’s third-ranked post in incoming president Bill Clinton’
s new administration, felt that Barack had a “remarkable presence” and “was extraordinary.” AFSCME political director Bill Perkins found Barack “very impressive” and was struck by how utterly legitimate Illinois Project VOTE!’s registration numbers were. Twenty-ninth Ward alderman Sam Burrell told a local journalist that “the sky’s the limit for Barack,” and new 4th Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle took note of him too. Chicago Reporter editor Laura Washington, whose office was also at CRS, thought Barack was a “young impressive guy.” Father Mike Pfleger, whose St. Sabina Youth Organization had averaged 125 new registrants a week for Project VOTE!, was just as dazzled as he had been five years earlier.

  Phil Mullins, still at UNO, realized Barack was “more detached” than he had been five years earlier, that “he had internalized something.” AFSCME’s Roberta Lynch felt “he was a different person” than the young organizer she had first met in 1986. At DCP new organizer Michael Evans found Barack “a regular guy” who took the time to “shoot hoops with us on a Friday night,” and Barack still regularly got to the UC’s gym as well. A black female U of C graduate student who was contemplating law school took note of an African American man whose “Real Men Marry Lawyers” sweatshirt indicated a connection to Harvard Law School. When she asked, he confirmed that his wife had gone there but said nothing about himself, and he told the younger woman that she too could succeed at Harvard. For Erika George it was a life-altering conversation because she followed the stranger’s advice and became a member of Harvard Law’s 1996 class. Only later would she realize who her self-effacing adviser was.

  Bettylu Saltzman, who had first pointed Sandy Newman toward John Schmidt, remembered her first conversation with Barack that year. “I immediately thought, he’s going to be president some day.” Bettylu said exactly that first to her husband and then to several close friends, including Mayor Daley’s media consultant, David Axelrod, who like Saltzman had worked for U.S. senator Paul Simon. “I’ve just met the most remarkable young guy, and I think you ought to meet him,” Bettylu told Axelrod the next morning on the phone. “I know this is going to sound silly, but I think he could be the first black president.” Axelrod thought, “Well, that’s a little grandiose,” but he agreed to have lunch with Barack and remembered the thirty-one-year-old’s “earnest self-assurance.”

  Other people who met Barack during Project VOTE!, including Kennedy-King community college math instructor Ron Davis, a black 1974 UC graduate who had played a significant role in Harold Washington’s 1987 reelection campaign, carried none of the national cachet of a major Democratic donor like Saltzman. But as grassroots organizers like DCP’s Michael Evans realized, Project VOTE!’s noteworthy success gave Barack “some significant political notoriety” among a wide range of Chicago political players. A journalist for Chicago Magazine asked Barack whether he would run for office sometime in the future. “Who knows?” he replied. “But probably not immediately,” though he hoped to have Journeys finished by January. “Was that a sufficiently politic ‘maybe’? My sincere answer is, I’ll run if I feel I can accomplish more that way than agitating from the outside. I don’t know if that’s true right now. Let’s wait and see what happens in 1993. If the politicians in place now at city and state levels respond to African-American voters’ needs, we’ll gladly work with and support them. If they don’t, we’ll work to replace them. That’s the message I want Project VOTE! to have sent.”

  A few years later, Barack acknowledged that Project VOTE! was “really how I started to make a lot of connections with . . . political operatives and elected officials around the city” and how it had “immersed me . . . in the mechanics of the political process” for the first time. “It was a useful education for me in learning how politics worked.” Earlier, “when I was organizing, I was always pretty suspicious of politicians and politics,” but by 1992 Barack had come “to appreciate the need for a more effective political movement within the African American community, the need to mobilize around an agenda and not just individuals,” just as he had said three years earlier at that roundtable discussion of organizing. And that Chicago Magazine reporter had no doubts as to what Barack’s future would entail. Obama was “the political star the Mayor should perhaps be watching for” in a reprise of Harold Washington’s multiethnic reform triumph a decade earlier.10

  Months earlier, Mayor Daley had promoted Valerie Jarrett from deputy chief of staff to commissioner of the newly conjoined departments of Planning and Economic Development. Shortly before the Obamas’ wedding, Jarrett had offered Michelle the opportunity to join her as economic development coordinator, and Michelle readily accepted. She would be “the new point person responsible for monitoring the city’s major business expansion and retention effort,” the Sun-Times reported during the Obamas’ Northern California honeymoon. When they returned, Michelle took up her new post, but for Barack their return home immediately presented him with truly disastrous news: on October 20, Simon & Schuster had canceled his book contract. Rather than the pleasant prospect of receiving the additional $85,000 of his advance once his manuscript was complete and then published, Barack now owed Simon & Schuster’s Poseidon Books the initial $40,000 it had paid him two years earlier when he had signed the contract. Agent Jane Dystel reassured him that she almost certainly could resell the proposal, although not likely for the grand $125,000 figure Poseidon had offered in 1990. Barack now faced the grim fact that he needed to finish “Journeys in Black and White” if he hoped to recoup from a horrific financial disaster.

  Prior to the end of Project VOTE!’s registration drive, Barack had sent a good chunk of manuscript to Poseidon’s Elaine Pfefferblit, conscious that he ought to turn in as much as he could before too many months elapsed after his June 15 deadline. He also had made firm plans to turn his attention to the manuscript full-time once he and Michelle returned from their honeymoon. “He wanted to get away and write,” Jean Rudd remembered, and Jean and her husband Lionel Bolin had a friendly neighbor out in Beverly Shores who went south each winter. “I told Barack that he could use her house,” but Project VOTE! fund-raising chair John Schmidt and his brother shared an even more distant vacation house on Lake Geneva, in southern Wisconsin. “Barack had decided that he wanted an isolated place where he could go by himself and finish the book,” Schmidt recounted. “He had the idea that he would get married, he’d come back from his honeymoon, and then he would go by himself up to Lake Geneva.” Indeed, “my brother and I drove him up to Lake Geneva prior to the wedding to show him the house, and we gave him the key.”

  Barack’s plan was to head up there for as long it took him to finish, and then he would begin work at Davis Miner. But the dire news from New York threw him for a loop. Most but not all of the fault for this turn of events was Barack’s. What he tardily had submitted to Elaine Pfefferblit represented only about half of the promised manuscript, and the combination of personal storytelling and civil rights policy discussions left it bloated in some parts and dull in others. Both Elaine and her assistant Laura Demanski read it, and agreed that “it wasn’t a publishable manuscript,” Ann Patty was told. “It sort of read like it was phoned in.”

  Normally an incomplete manuscript that is three or four months late would not prove fatal, but Barack’s failure to execute what his earlier proposal had promised came at a time when Poseidon’s parent, Simon & Schuster, was actively seeking to reduce the number of titles published each year by a good 15 percent. A few months earlier a New York Times profile of Patty reported that “her bosses have reassured her that Poseidon is safe,” yet not long after Barack’s contract was canceled, Elaine Pfefferblit’s job was eliminated, and a month later Patty left as well. Poseidon was no more.

  Barack now had to rethink just what Journeys would be, and he turned to Rob Fisher for critical input. The two friends had continued to talk occasionally about the long-discussed policy book they had begun coauthoring back in Cambridge, and months earlier Rob had read the chapters of Journeys that Barack pl
anned to send to Poseidon. Rob felt strongly that the personal parts read far better than the policy ones. “The best story here is about you. Make it about you,” Rob argued. “Those are the best chapters, those are the chapters that sing.” Rob realized that the book had become “a real struggle” for Barack, and “we talked about it endlessly, and I gave him a tremendous amount of editorial notes,” both “detailed line-by-line edits and big-picture edits.”

  Rob’s law firm colleague Tom Reed, who had known Barack at Sidley, and Rob’s girlfriend Lisa both knew that Rob was “looking at drafts,” and Lisa heard enough about the process to realize that “it was a bunch of different books, and the struggle was to figure out which book it really was.” Rob had no doubt what the right answer was—“I edited it, and then gave it to him”—and in the wake of the cancellation, Barack acknowledged that he faced a forebodingly difficult challenge he had to overcome before he could begin work at Davis Miner.

  Barack told an apologetic Sandy Newman what had happened while they were wrapping up Project VOTE!, but when he headed north to John Schmidt’s home on Lake Geneva, he quickly concluded that the setting actually would not be conducive. “He drove up there by himself, and he lasted one night,” Schmidt remembered. Just like Rob, Michelle’s boss Valerie Jarrett knew “how much he was struggling” with what the book should be. “I just can’t get it down on paper. I’d much rather hang out with Michelle than focus on this,” Barack confessed to Jarrett. “He wanted to be monkish—he wanted to be away,” Jean Rudd recalled, and “he wanted to get away from Michelle too.” From both his years in Indonesia and his friends in Hawaii, one perfect place beckoned, a place where his mother Ann had said she would be headed soon after attending the Chicago wedding: Bali.