Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  As the 6:00 P.M. affair got under way, “a standing-room-only audience of 200 supporters” packed the modest-sized room. Aldermen Toni Preckwinkle and Barbara Holt were present, as were Barack’s old organizing colleague David Kindler and Robinson family friend John Rogers Jr. Alice Palmer had asked her most committed supporters to attend, and for longtime Hyde Park political activists Alan and Lois Dobry, it was their first opportunity to meet Barack. Kathy Stell, a young UC dean who previously had worked at the law school, had mentioned Barack and the kickoff to Will Burns, a twenty-two-year-old UC graduate who was interested in politics. When Burns arrived, field director Ron Davis was staffing a sign-in table replete with volunteer forms, and as Will filled one out, Ron asked him to specify “Field” rather than “Policy” as his preference.

  Alice Palmer was the leadoff speaker, and she began by reminding the crowd that “In this room, Harold Washington announced for mayor. It looks different, but the spirit is still in the room.” Then she offered her protégé a ringing endorsement. “Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a passing of the torch, because he’s the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district.”

  Then Barack stepped to the podium and almost apologetically announced his candidacy. “Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days. They fall somewhere lower than lawyers,” perhaps an implicit reference to Mel Reynolds’s tattered legacy. But Barack promised to be better. “I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf.” John Rogers had never heard Barack speak, and he was impressed by his “total confidence” and his ability to “capture the audience the way he did.”

  Neither the Tribune, the Sun-Times, nor the Defender covered Barack’s declaration of candidacy, and only a modest page-3 story in the weekly Hyde Park Herald chronicled the event: “Hyde Parker Announces Run for State Senate Seat.” The next day, the newly declared thirty-four-year-old politician headed to the airport to fly to Boston for a Wednesday-night book reading, but on the way he stopped at the Chicago Board of Elections to perform his first act as a candidate for office. Four years earlier, when he registered to vote after returning from law school, Barack had signed his name “Barack H. Obama.” On September 20, 1995, he amended that registration to read simply “Barack Obama.” For a politician, having “Hussein” as your middle name clearly merited a calculated effort to minimize the odds of anyone potentially asking a worrisome question: “What’s the ‘H’ stand for?”41

  Chapter Seven

  INTO THE ARENA

  CHICAGO AND SPRINGFIELD

  SEPTEMBER 1995–SEPTEMBER 1999

  The newly declared candidate’s trip to Boston featured two attractive speaking venues: a Wednesday-night reading at the Cambridge Public Library and a Thursday-night appearance at the nearby Concord Festival of Authors. Barack realized when he arrived that a far more prominent African American author was also in town promoting his brand-new autobiography. Former general and potential presidential candidate Colin Powell, who was signing his My American Journey at a downtown bookstore, attracted a midday crowd of two thousand.

  That evening Barack drew several dozen interested listeners to a modest-sized room at the Cambridge library, where he told them that Dreams From My Father was “not so much a memoir, I think, as sort of a journey of discovery for me.” Barack read Dreams’ exaggerated account of Mike Ramos and Greg Orme’s supposedly intense racial discomfort at the mostly black Schofield Barracks party. “This sense of betrayal” that he felt from their uneasiness, Barack explained, mirrored his reaction to Stan and Madelyn’s argument over the aggressive black panhandler: “I’m feeling that same sense of betrayal from my family.”

  Barack also read Dreams’ account of his subsequent conversation with his sole African American confidant, whom he named in full—“Frank Marshall Davis”—and described as “a close friend” of his grandfather, whom he expressly characterized as “poor white trash.” One questioner remarked that earlier that day he had heard Cornel West speak, and that West sounded very pessimistic compared to Obama.

  “Cornel West has to go back to his Bible,” Barack responded. “You’ve got to have faith,” and the audience laughed as Barack quickly added, “I say that facetiously.” Returning to Dreams, he explained that “as I was writing, I really wanted this to be a work of the imagination,” and “I wanted it to read like a story and not a memoir.”

  In Chicago, political eyes were fixed on the contest to replace Mel Reynolds, although Barack was momentarily distracted a day after returning when he received a $75 traffic ticket for failure to stop. Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal wrote that state Senate Democratic minority leader Emil Jones Jr. “has a fair chance to win” the November 28 primary, in part because state representative Monique Davis’s long-shot candidacy might cut into Alice Palmer’s presumed strength among women voters, thereby helping Jones. When Jones finally announced his candidacy on September 30, the Tribune reported that “he is widely viewed as the person to beat” and is “heavily favored to win,” especially because his Senate district comprised one-quarter of the congressional one.

  Three days later, everyone’s attention turned to California when a Los Angeles jury astonishingly acquitted former football star O. J. Simpson of murdering his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, with many African Americans celebrating that verdict. Barack was crestfallen, later remarking that it “was pretty clear that O.J. was guilty, and I was ashamed for my own community to respond in that way.”

  Alice Palmer’s congressional campaign bragged that it had raised more than $100,000, with major unions like the Service Employees (SEIU) contributing as much as $5,000, but Palmer booster Steve Neal was dismayed by the candidate’s poor performance during a televised debate, writing that Palmer “talked in slogans and was unresponsive to questions.” Far worse news for Palmer came from polling that all three major campaigns—hers, Jones’s, and young upstart Jesse Jackson Jr.’s—were conducting. Neal, privy to the results, reported that “Palmer has dropped to a distant third” as “voters seem to know a lot more about Jackson and Jones.” Palmer had been in the race longer than her opponents, but, Neal wrote, “after nearly a year of campaigning, she has failed to make much headway. . . . Jackson is known by 85 percent of probable Democratic voters in the 2nd District, and Jones is known by 67 percent,” while “Palmer’s poor performance is largely due to her lack of name identification.” Jones’s own polling showed Jackson with 24 percent, Jones with 20, and 29 percent of voters undecided. Still, Palmer told reporters she was not worried, citing a thirteen-thousand-piece mailing, ads on three radio stations, and the endorsement of the independent, anti-machine Independent Voters of Illinois–Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO) coalition. A Sun-Times op-ed praised her “serious demeanor” and said she “clearly is the superior choice.”

  For Barack, Michelle’s longtime friendship with Jesse Jackson Jr.’s sister Santita, plus their attendance at each other’s weddings, added tension to a relationship that was now outweighed by Barack’s and Alice Palmer’s public support of each other’s campaigns. Barack was “in a really difficult dilemma,” Jackson explained years later, and one of Michelle’s Public Allies alumni, Malik Nevels, who worked on Jackson’s campaign, was present when Barack told a sympathetic Jackson that he could not endorse him. Indeed, when Jackson’s best friend, Marty King, told one young woman that Jesse’s backers could not support someone who was not supporting them, Jr. was so displeased by Marty’s tone that he called the Obamas and had Marty apologize in person later that same day at a Hyde Park restaurant they all liked, Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop. Jackson later explained that “we could think short term, or we could think long term, because we’ll be in Chicago together for a long time.”

  As
Alice Palmer’s campaign headed into its final month, friends and supporters more politically savvy than Palmer told her to reconsider the race. African American lobbyist Mike Lieteau, who had attended the late August barbecue at which Palmer had introduced Barack as her successor, told her that Jackson’s high-profile candidacy meant she should stand down. Research consultant Don Wiener and longtime progressive activist Don Rose both advised likewise. Fifth Ward activists Alan and Lois Dobry knew that Alice had “never built up a political base in the 7th Ward,” and African American AFSCME lobbyist Ray Harris believed that “Alice was really naive when it came to politics.” Her state Senate colleague Lou Viverito admired Palmer as “a very dignified lady,” but he spoke for many when he said she “was not the most astute political animal.” Campaign chairman Hal Baron realized that young, new-to-Chicago campaign manager Darrel Thompson had relatively little to work with given the skimpiness of Palmer’s own political base, plus Alice herself was “not good at organization.” Her most influential adviser was her husband Buzz, and despite a good number of upper-middle-class supporters both black and white, the actual Palmer campaign was not well organized. As much as Baron admired Alice Palmer, there was no denying that Buzz was just a classic Chicago street operator, Baron explained.

  Some observers and Palmer backers were perplexed by her promise of her Senate seat to Barack when she had no need to surrender it. African American lobbyist and former state representative Paul Williams warned Barack that “there’s going to be a moment when she’s going to realize what she’s done,” and that “it made absolutely no sense” to give up her state post if Jones or Jackson won the congressional primary. Cook County Board member Danny Davis, the African American favorite for a West Side congressional seat from which the incumbent was retiring, bluntly said: “Who’s this Barack Obama? What plane did he come off of?”

  On the South Side, the Hyde Park Herald reported that Gha-Is Askia, the African American Muslim who had announced his candidacy for Palmer’s state Senate seat four months earlier, was endorsed by boxer Muhammad Ali as well as by Emil Jones and black state representative Connie Howard. In addition, Marc Ewell, a thirty-year-old Howard University graduate who was the son of former state representative Raymond Ewell, a machine loyalist and sixteen-year legislative veteran whose surname was well known on the South Side, was also entering the race. In Barack’s modest campaign office on East 71st Street in South Shore, sister-in-law Janis Robinson, now mothering a three-year-old son, joined campaign manager Carol Harwell part-time to schedule more than a dozen small receptions in supporters’ homes. Barack also traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the October 16 Million Man March that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan had taken the lead in organizing. Some of the lesser-known speakers, such as Rev. Al Sampson and former congressman Gus Savage, were figures Barack was familiar with from Chicago. The historic gathering attracted widespread coverage even though only about four hundred thousand actually attended.1

  Barack’s campaign account, Friends of Barack Obama, was in decent shape thanks to $2,000 apiece from enthusiastic backers Al Johnson and Tony Rezko, as well as $1,000 donations from other developers like William Moorehead and Leon Finney and from personal friends such as Judd Miner and Bernard Loyd, plus smaller contributions from a bevy of relatives and colleagues including maternal uncle Charles Payne, Father Mike Pfleger, and the Hope Center’s Sokoni Karanja. Michelle’s Public Allies board member Sunny Fischer hosted a fund-raiser up in Evanston that drew more than twenty people, Barack’s former law students Jesse Ruiz, Jeanne Gills, and Brett Hart hosted one at Ruiz’s girlfriend’s apartment that attracted about ten, and Davis Miner colleagues Jeff Cummings and John Belcaster, with Harvard basketball buddy Greg Dingens, cohosted a small late-October one at mutual friend Steve Derks’s River City apartment building, where the only guest Barack did not already know was Jeff’s friend Michael Parham.

  Alice Palmer actively aided Barack’s efforts. Davis Miner’s Allison Davis remembered “her coming up to the office and asking if we would support Barack, give him money,” and former 4th Ward alderman Tim Evans likewise recalled that “at the time, one of his biggest boosters was Alice Palmer.” Palmer also called her fellow education advocate Bill Ayers to ask that he and his wife Bernardine Dohrn host a coffee where she could introduce Barack to Hyde Parkers who did not yet know him. Ayers had met Barack multiple times thanks to his lead role in staffing the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, whose evaluation committee played a far more consequential role in deciding which proposals the Chicago Annenberg Challenge would fund than did the CAC board of “Chicago worthies” that Barack chaired. Bill thought Barack was “enormously intelligent, bright, attractive,” and so “of course” they readily agreed.

  Dohrn, a 1967 University of Chicago Law School graduate who had worked at Sidley & Austin from 1984 to 1988, had met Michelle there and from 1993 forward had supervised one of Michelle’s young Public Allies at Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, which she directed. Bill’s infamous role in the Weather Underground two decades earlier had not hindered his professorial status at the University of Illinois at Chicago nor his activism in Chicago school reform circles, but Bernardine’s criminal record had prevented her admission to the Illinois State Bar. A lengthy 1993 profile in Chicago Magazine had described them as “a lively, thoughtful, loving couple” who host “high-profile dinner parties” and stated that all across the city there was “a widespread willingness to disregard” their radical pasts.

  Bill and Bernardine invited twenty to thirty people to their town house on East 50th Street, which they had purchased a year earlier. “It was Alice’s initiative to have the event,” Bill explained, and Bernardine recalled that “the room was packed.” Bernardine welcomed everyone and introduced Alice Palmer, who, as Bill remembered, “gave a little talk” saying that Barack’s “a great guy. He’s wonderful. Support him.” Dr. Quentin Young, a progressive physician whose partner Dr. David Scheiner had been Barack’s doctor since 1987, recalled Palmer saying that Barack was “a very promising young man who will serve the district well.” Young thought Obama was “extremely impressive,” but a young black woman whose husband had joined UC’s English faculty four years earlier later wrote that Barack’s “bright eyes and easy smile” struck her “as contrived and calculated.”

  This gathering led to several other similar Hyde Park events. Local activists Sam and Martha Ackerman hosted one in their Hyde Park condo. Martha was exceptionally impressed with Barack, telling her husband that she could imagine him as a future president of the United States. Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, a civil rights supporter who had served as Yale University’s Jewish chaplain before returning to Chicago in 1980 to lead KAM Isaiah Israel Temple, the city’s oldest synagogue, hosted another one and was almost as impressed as Martha Ackerman. “I said to him, Mr. Obama, someday you will be vice president of the United States,” and he remembered that Barack responded, “‘Why vice president?’”

  But running for a seat in the Illinois state legislature was a decidedly low-profile and mundane task. One crucial requirement was getting the signatures of at least 757 Democratic voters registered at addresses within the 13th Senate District in order to appear on the upcoming March 19 Democratic primary ballot. Chicago’s Democratic machine was famous for disqualifying independent challengers whose petition circulators did not follow all the arcane rules while gathering these signatures at front doors and on street corners. But Ron Davis, whom Carol Harwell had recruited as field director and whom Barack had known since 1992’s Project VOTE!, was a master of the intricacies of the nominating petition process.

  Before the end of October, Barack reached out to the city’s top progressive election lawyer, Tom Johnson, whom he also had first met during Project VOTE! Judd Miner and George Galland at Davis Miner knew Johnson well, because in the 1980s, Johnson had represented first Harold Washington and then Tim Evans during the political warfare of those ye
ars. Between Davis and Johnson, Barack’s petition circulators were in golden hands, and by the end of October, Barack, plus young U of C graduate Will Burns, former law students like Brett Hart and Jesse Ruiz, and young U of C dean Kathryn Stell were going door to door collecting the best possible signatures, those of people who clearly lived at the addresses the petition circulators were visiting.

  Also tagging along was journalist Hank DeZutter, whom the weekly Chicago Reader alternative newspaper had commissioned to write a long profile of Barack, as well as photographer Mark PoKempner. DeZutter sat in one day when Barack did a Hope Center training session for eight Bronzeville women, and PoKempner snapped photos of Barack, who wore a winter coat and scarf, holding a clipboard as a similarly attired middle-aged black woman signed his petition sheet. One weekday morning, PoKempner also photographed a pensive but relaxed Barack talking on the phone in his office at Davis Miner, a framed photograph of Harold Washington and a 1992 Project VOTE! “It’s a POWER Thing” poster on the wall above his computer station.

  Sometime early in November, ten or so of Alice Palmer’s most devoted supporters, worried about her congressional prospects, summoned Barack to the Bronzeville home of state representative Lovana “Lou” Jones, Palmer’s closest legislative colleague. Jones was “the senior person there,” Timuel “Tim” Black, a highly respected teacher and historian, recalled, and “Lou was very anxious to have Alice back” in Springfield if indeed she lost. “We asked him if he would step aside” if that came to pass, and “we told him, ‘Whatever else you run for, we will be with you.’” Black said that Jones laid out Palmer’s superior merits. “Our rationale was she’s got a reputation, she’s got a record already, she’s well known, you are not. We want her to stay there, and we will support you in anything else.”