Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

Madeline noted how policy success depended upon talented specialists, like Don Moore in the field of school reform, and Barack suggested having organizers from all around Chicago meet monthly over dinner to discuss specific issues. Reflecting that a powerful five-part Chicago Sun-Times series had painfully detailed how Roseland, with 21 percent male unemployment, was “losing the war against gang intimidation and recruitment” as violent crime there “skyrocketed,” “Barack, Sokoni, and Madeline all thought that success in creating alternative structures to the gangs is highly dependent on moving the jobs issue.”

  When Sandy O’Donnell wrote the panel’s report, one strongly worded “finding” encapsulated Barack’s sustained critique: “organizing has not been effective in many of the more fundamental scourges facing our low income communities” as economic change “eroded the jobs and wage bases” and “drugs, gangs, guns, crime,” etc. increased. “The prevailing organizing model reinforces localized, short term thinking,” and Woods resolved that organizing had to “move beyond individual neighborhood successes” and develop “links with broader coalitions.” Barack’s analysis had carried the day on all points, and the discussions repeatedly reflected strong continuities between the arguments he had articulated while at Harvard and his current political outlook.22

  In the wider world of Chicago electoral politics, the spring Democratic primary had seen U.S. representative Mel Reynolds defeat state senator Bill Shaw and 17th Ward alderman Allan Streeter with a respectable but not overwhelming 56 percent of the vote. African American state attorney general Roland Burris lost the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to sixty-eight-year-old state comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch, who was now a decided underdog in the general election matchup against incumbent Republican governor Jim Edgar. Exiting Cook County Board president Richard Phelan had finished third in that gubernatorial primary, and in a major upset, African American 8th Ward committeeman and longtime county board member John Stroger won the nomination for the county board presidency, defeating two well-known female contenders.

  A Chicago Sun-Times headline reported “Last-Minute Cash Netted Stroger Win” over a story detailing how two principal contributors were responsible for Stroger being able to mount a huge TV advertising blitz. Automobile dealer Al Johnson had been a crucial backer of the late Mayor Washington before becoming Mel Reynolds’s finance chairman, and now John Stroger’s. Johnson had given Stroger more than $50,000 and loaned his campaign another $5,000, but Stroger’s largest contributor by far was Syrian-born housing developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who had contributed more than $69,000 and loaned Stroger an additional $98,500. Rezko also had emerged as the top contributor to 4th Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle, who had received over $17,000 from a quintet of Rezko’s entities.

  City housing officials told the Hyde Park Herald that Rezko’s Rezmar Corp., which had received more than $12.8 million in city funds to rehab hundreds of apartments, was a “top-notch” developer managing “some of the best-maintained buildings in the city.” Preckwinkle said she was “grateful for the work he’s done” in her Kenwood neighborhood, and later explained that affordable housing development “in my mind is God’s work.” That view was shared by Barack’s colleagues at Davis Miner, who represented several nonprofit organizations that were partnering with Rezmar, which, as Laura Tilly remembered, “was a well-respected developer of affordable housing.”

  Looming over everything was the question of whether any truly credible candidate would step forward to challenge Mayor Richard Daley’s upcoming spring 1995 reelection bid, and both Judd Miner and former Project VOTE! chairman Joe Gardner had prominent roles in a Chicago Tribune story headlined “Anti-Daley Forces Start to Beat Campaign Drums.” State senator Alice Palmer, the Tribune said, has been “rumored for months to be a possible contender,” just as the Sun-Times earlier had asserted that Palmer “could have sent Reynolds into early retirement” had she, rather than Shaw and Streeter, challenged the congressman in the Democratic primary.

  Barack had met Preckwinkle and Palmer during Project VOTE!, and he had first met Tony Rezko four years earlier, in the summer of 1990, when David Brint had introduced Barack to his business partners. By summer 1994, Rezko was talking up Obama to political friends like Fred Lebed, who had managed Attorney General Roland Burris’s gubernatorial campaign before shifting into a similar role for John Stroger’s general election race. At one 7:00 A.M. Stroger finance committee meeting, Rezko turned to Lebed and said, “I know someone you should meet. He reminds me a lot of you—a guy named Barack Obama. I want you to meet him—he’s got political aspirations.” Fred’s reaction was what “a really goofy name,” but Tony “sets up a meeting,” and Lebed joined Obama at PK’s Place, the Greek family diner just across from Davis Miner, at 8:30 A.M. on Tuesday, August 9. “Within five minutes, I’m blown away,” Fred remembered, “just absolutely blown away.”

  Barack was interested in learning more about Chicagoland Democratic politics. Law firm colleague Paul Strauss remembered Barack talking about his interest in the congressional seat that Bobby Rush was challenging Charlie Hayes for back in 1992 when they ran into each other in Hyde Park, even before Barack joined Davis Miner, and George Galland thought Barack “was reasonably candid from the beginning that he had political ambitions.” Project VOTE! fund-raiser John Schmidt was “pretty sure that in 1994 Barack talked to me about possibly running for the Cook County Board,” which “I thought was a terrible idea” because “it wasn’t a place that allowed any scope for talent.” With a major donor like Tony Rezko talking up Barack to influential Democratic players like Fred Lebed, the purpose of their breakfast meeting “was to get to know each other,” and step by step Barack began exploring the possibilities that Chicago politics offered.23

  Just two days later South Side electoral politics were upended when Congressman Mel Reynolds held a “raucous press conference” at O’Hare Airport to denounce the Republican Cook County state’s attorney for investigating allegations by a young woman that Reynolds had had sex with her two years earlier when she was sixteen years old. Reynolds sought to discredit her as a “homosexual lesbian” and an “emotionally disturbed nut case,” and distributed copies of a sworn affidavit in which she recanted her story. Reynolds blasted the “racist justice system” for surveilling his telephone calls and told reporters, “this illustrates how . . . if you are an African American male, you are always vulnerable.”

  Two days later the Tribune reported that eighteen-year-old Beverly Heard was not Reynolds’s only problem. Federal investigators had discovered that Reynolds had four campaign bank accounts, including one containing as much as $85,000, that he had failed to report to the Federal Election Commission. “Chicago’s top business families, from the Pritzkers to the Crowns,” the Tribune noted, have “poured money into Reynolds’ coffers,” and so long as the charges proved unfounded, the former Rhodes Scholar “has the potential to be an important figure in Washington,” the Tribune editorialized.

  Then, eight days after Reynolds’s preemptive press conference, a Cook County grand jury indicted the congressman on twenty felony counts, ranging from sexual assault to obstruction of justice, involving his relationship with Beverly Heard. Tribune reporters expressed surprise at the “sweeping nature” of the charges, saying that “prosecutors have worried privately about the strength of the case and the veracity of” Heard. National coverage noted how Reynolds was “a rising star” who had been “the first black person from Illinois to win a Rhodes scholarship.” Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal, who months earlier had praised state senator Alice Palmer as “among the brightest and most capable members of the Illinois General Assembly,” soon reported that Palmer was “emerging as the leading candidate” to replace or challenge Reynolds, who would be unopposed on the November general election ballot.

  Neal again commended Palmer as “one of the more intelligent, articulate, and productive members” of the state legislature, and the Tribune’s John Kass highlighted how the p
rospect of Reynolds’s congressional seat might dissuade Palmer from any further mayoral thoughts, even though she stood alone among black legislators in “never having sought an accommodation with Daley.”24

  Four days after Reynolds’s indictment, the federal appeals court handed Judd Miner and his colleagues a major victory by unanimously reinstating the lawsuit challenging Chicago’s existing city council districts. That would mean more voting rights work for Barack, but Barack also had an unusual paid speaking appearance coming up in Lincoln, Nebraska, as part of Nebraska Wesleyan’s “University Forum.” Barack’s topic was “Community Revitalization,” and he was identified as the author of the forthcoming book Mixing Blood: Stories of Inheritance. Barack began informally, acknowledging the importance of football in Nebraska, remarking, “I often don’t trust Bill Clinton talking about values,” and confessing that his wife enjoyed watching old TV reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show and Ozzie and Harriet. But the subject Barack wanted to focus on was values. “It’s easy to believe in civil rights and integration and busing if you send your kids to a private school,” but “it’s harder to believe in these values when you actually test them out.” Barack’s fundamental point was a challenging one: “it’s not easy to live up to your ideals and your values. It requires sacrifice.” He argued that point strongly:

  If you don’t live out those values, they don’t mean much. And I think part of the cynicism we have about politics right now is a politics of symbolism that talks about values but does not live them out. And we all know that, and that’s why people don’t listen to politicians, and we don’t get involved, because we know that we say one thing, and we do another thing, both personally and in the society. And so I would challenge you, first to think about what your values are, and think about whether you’re living them out . . . whether you’re contributing to the promotion of these values, or whether you’re just giving lip service to them and not living them out.25

  On October 7, Barack tardily updated his voter registration to reflect his move to East View Park from South Shore over a year earlier. A week or so later, ACORN formally retained him as its attorney in anticipation that Illinois Republican governor Jim Edgar’s administration would fail to implement the new National Voter Registration Act, commonly called the motor voter law, which required states to offer the opportunity to register to vote to all citizens applying for or renewing a driver’s license or public assistance and which would take effect on January 1.

  An editor at National Public Radio’s flagship program All Things Considered invited Barack to prepare a broadcast review of social scientists Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s brand-new book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which was generating huge controversy over its discussion of the relationship between race and human intelligence. Barack was happy to sign on, but when he submitted his review, an NPR editor objected to his statement that race was not a biological construct, only a social one. She “wouldn’t let him make the point,” and “he was very offended,” Rob Fisher recalled. Barack vented his dismay about “Some Things Considered” to Rob, but NPR did allow Barack, who was introduced as a “civil rights lawyer,” to state that The Bell Curve featured “good old-fashioned racism” that was “artfully packaged.” But Barack also said that the authors were

  right about the growing distance between the races. The violence and despair of the inner city are real. So’s the problem of street crime. The longer we allow these problems to fester, the easier it becomes for white America to see all blacks as menacing and for black America to see all whites as racists. To close that gap . . . we’re going to have to take concrete and deliberate action. For blacks, that means taking greater responsibility for the state of our own communities. Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior. Too many of our young people think education is a white thing, and that the values of hard work and discipline and self-respect are somehow outdated.

  But at the same time, Barack went on, Americans must acknowledge “that we’ve never even come close to providing equal opportunity to the majority of black children,” such as having “well-funded and innovative public schools for all children” and jobs “at a living wage for everyone . . . jobs that can return some structure and dignity to people’s lives.” Such “ladders of opportunity,” Barack concluded, would be costly in the short term, but a wise investment in the long run, and a national failure to pursue them would reflect not “an intellectual deficit” but “a moral deficit.”26

  With Mel Reynolds awaiting his upcoming criminal trial sometime in mid-1995, Alice Palmer on November 21 announced her all-but-official candidacy for Reynolds’s 2nd District congressional seat. Taking the high road, Palmer made no mention of Reynolds’s legal problems and instead said she was “very disappointed” with his voting record, particularly his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal proclaimed that Palmer had “preempted the field” of possible Reynolds challengers with her announcement. He also reported that Jesse Jackson Sr. had been “gently warned by South Side activists that he shouldn’t promote his son” Jesse Jr., who recently had bought a home in the district after finishing law school, “as an alternative to Palmer.” Once again praising Palmer as “probably the most intelligent member of the Illinois General Assembly,” Neal declared that Jackson Jr. “would be viewed as an interloper by the South Side black community” if he ran but that if “Jackson joins forces with Palmer,” he “could win Palmer’s seat in the Illinois Senate.” Palmer’s announcement sounded like a warning shot aimed at the twenty-nine-year-old Jackson: “I am not a newcomer to hard work . . . I am not a newcomer to coalition building . . . I am not a newcomer to independent politics . . . I am not a newcomer to the 2nd District.”

  Ten days after Palmer’s announcement, Barack had a long conversation with his friend Ellen Schumer, a former UNO organizer with whom he had been speaking regularly for months as she began building a new organization of her own, Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI). Schumer previously had worked for former congressman (and now judge) Abner Mikva and U.S. senator Paul Simon, so Ellen and Barack often talked about politics as well as COFI. Ellen’s notes from that conversation reflected that they “Spoke re: Election—B.O. interest in ‘organizing’ or politics. How to build or renew a movement—turn around Dem. party? B.O. not interested in Spfld [Springfield] or in running against Alice Palmer.”

  Barack instead talked more about his discussions with Sokoni Karanja about a prospective leadership training and development project that the Bronzeville-based Karanja was calling the “Hope Center,” in honor of early-twentieth-century African American social reformer Lugenia Burns Hope. Eighteen months earlier Sokoni had been awarded a $320,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and the Woods Fund already had committed a further $72,000 toward his effort. Karanja wanted the Hope Center to rebuild the strength of the once-vibrant Bronzeville, the social center of black Chicago during the age of segregation. “This community was literally vacuumed by the integration movement,” Sokoni had told a Washington Post reporter eighteen months earlier. “All of these people—the doctors, the lawyers, the business owners—moved out of here, and all they left were people.”

  Barack was still doing a Friday training and offering other supportive input as Michelle, who that summer had shifted her law license to inactive status, shepherded her second-year class of forty Public Allies through their organizational placements. She also was busy building up an advisory board to help expand the program’s reach, one that included personal friends and former city colleagues Valerie Jarrett, Yvonne Davila, and Cindy Moelis, as well as early supporters such as Jacky Grimshaw and Sunny Fischer, young banker Ian Larkin, and youthful Morehouse College graduate Craig Huffman.

  Barack’s range of acquaintances was growing too, and one of the most significant new ones was Deborah Leff, a 1977 University of Chicago Law School graduate who had bec
ome an award-winning producer at ABC News before being recruited as president of the Joyce Foundation in 1992. Thanks to a family timber fortune, Joyce for a quarter century had been a significant grant maker in the Great Lakes region that was its predominant focus. Several partners from Chicago’s Lord, Bissell & Brook law firm, including Harvard Law School graduate John T. “Jack” Anderson, and two Kennedy administration alumni, Richard K. Donahue and Charles U. Daly, Joyce’s president from 1978 to 1986, formed the core of the foundation’s board. Daly’s friend Lewis Butler, a former corporate lawyer greatly interested in the environment and health policy, and African American businessman Carlton Guthrie, a member of Trinity Church who, like Jack Anderson, had played high school basketball in Gary, Indiana, were also active mainstays, as was Paula Wolff, the president of south suburban Governors State University, who had a University of Chicago Ph.D. and strong ties to a trio of Republican Illinois governors.

  Butler and Donahue shared Anderson and Guthrie’s passion for basketball, and Debbie Leff’s strong interest in adding diversity to Joyce’s board led her to University of Wisconsin labor law professor Carin Clauss and to Barack. Board members like Lew Butler thought that Debbie was an “extraordinary woman,” and when Leff recommended Barack to Jack Anderson as a desirable new board member, Anderson was duly impressed by his Law Review presidency and by Barack at an introductory breakfast. Barack’s election to Joyce’s board was announced just after Thanksgiving 1994.

  Equally significant was Debbie Leff’s recommendation of Barack to a pair of fellow presidents of prominent Chicago foundations, Adele Smith Simmons at MacArthur and Patricia A. Graham at Spencer. One year earlier publishing billionaire Walter Annenberg had pledged $500 million from his personal fortune toward improving America’s public schools. Brown University and its president, Vartan Gregorian, would oversee how most of the money would be spent over a five-year period. Just months earlier, Wieboldt Foundation executive director Anne Hallett had left that post to create a new national network of urban school reformers, and University of Illinois at Chicago education professor Bill Ayers, one of the city’s most energetic reform advocates, immediately queried Hallett and new Joyce Foundation education program officer Warren Chapman about Annenberg’s potential for Chicago.