Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Barack listened patiently and said he would consider their points, but he would not withdraw. “I can’t do that,” Barack remembered replying. “I told them we were already far into the race,” that his campaign had “spent a good deal of money,” that “I’ve been having these conversations with her for quite some time now,” and that Alice had never given any “indication she was going back on her commitment.”

  Black recalled Barack’s response similarly: “He said he had already begun to organize, and he would not be able to do that.” Barack “was matter-of-fact. He was not hostile,” and “it wasn’t argumentative. He was very firm.” No extensive discussion ensued. “It was a very brief meeting,” Black explained. However, Carol Harwell recalled Barack telling her “they talked to me like I was a kid.” Carol realized that by trying “to bully Barack,” the Jones group’s effort had backfired and “had they gone at it a little differently,” perhaps Barack might have agreed to stand aside. Instead their request strengthened his resolve to stand firm.2

  On Tuesday evening, November 7, Maya called from Honolulu. A few days earlier, she had telephoned their mother, who was in a Honolulu hospital, from New York, where Maya was now in graduate school. When she realized just how weak Ann sounded, Maya flew immediately to Honolulu. Barack had spoken with his mother several days earlier and had also realized that her time was relatively short. Sidley’s Gerry Alexis remembered Barack “calling me very anguished about his mother and that she had cancer and that she was dying,” but Maya’s call indicated that Ann’s time frame was now a matter of hours, not days. Barack booked a flight out of Chicago for the next day, but even before he could leave for the airport, word came that Ann had died hours earlier at 11:00 P.M., Honolulu time, with Maya at her bedside.

  That morning Barack left a message for his friend Ellen Schumer, telling her what had happened and saying he would be away from Chicago for the better part of two weeks. Years later, asked what had been the worst experience and biggest mistake in his life, Barack cited “the death of my mother” in answer to both questions. “The biggest mistake I made was not being at my mother’s bedside when she died,” because she died sooner than Barack expected. “I didn’t get there in time.” Ann’s body was cremated, and her children, her mother, and her Honolulu friends held a memorial service in the Japanese garden at the U of H’s East-West Center before taking her ashes to the rocky Halona lookout point near Hanauma Bay and Sandy Beach on Oahu’s southeast shore. There Barack cast Ann’s remains into the water after a huge wave washed over him and Maya.

  Barack stayed in Honolulu for more than two weeks, helping Maya and Madelyn with Ann’s difficult affairs. The federal lien of more than $17,000 in income taxes from 1979 and 1980 remained unpaid. Barack also felt guilty that Dreams From My Father had largely ignored her role in his life while portraying her as being clueless about her son’s experience, and now identity, as a black man in America. Barack later wrote that she had died “with a brutal swiftness,” and he recounted that she did not “comment on my characterizations of her” when she had seen drafts of Dreams but had been “quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character.”

  Barack would insist that “what is best in me I owe to her,” and later expanded that posthumous sentiment to say, “Everything that I am I owe to her. She was the kindest, most generous person I ever met,” and “when I am confronted with difficult choices, I have to ask myself, what would she expect of me?” He had never spoken so glowingly during Ann’s lifetime of her impact on his life, but in the years following her death at age fifty-two, his memories of her became far warmer than they had ever been when she was alive.3

  On November 21, Barack left another message for Ellen Schumer, telling her he would be back in Chicago by the end of Thanksgiving weekend. While he was away, the congressional race between Emil Jones Jr., young Jesse Jackson Jr., and Alice Palmer intensified as Election Day neared. Some anonymous “opposition research,” almost certainly from Jones’s camp, revealed that Jackson’s salary at his father’s Rainbow Coalition had come from the Hotel & Restaurant Employees International, or, as a Tribune headline put it, “Mob-Linked Union Paid Jackson.” But Jackson was demonstrating that he was the most adept of the contenders. When he and Jones were on the radio together, and Jones cited his impressive state legislative record, Jackson immediately said, “That’s why we need you to stay in Springfield.” After another joint taping turned “raucous,” Jackson’s campaign quickly created a television ad, with Jackson saying “they’re experienced politicians, but this is how they behave.” Then Jones was heard remarking, “Jesus Christ,” while Palmer uttered the phrase “sour grapes.” Then Jackson says: “Instead of talking about the issues, they’re talking about each other. Let’s put an end to politics as usual. The people of the 2nd Congressional District deserve better.”

  The Tribune “warmly endorsed” Palmer, praising her “political independence and wisdom.” The next day a Tribune profile cited her reputation “as one of the more intelligent, productive and respected members of the General Assembly,” although it also noted that she could seem “dull and deliberate.” In an audience vote after a candidates’ forum at Palmer’s church, Jackson outpolled her 43 to 26. A Tribune poll two weeks before the November 28 election confirmed that Jackson’s name recognition had helped him jump out to a healthy 33 to 20 percent lead over Jones, with Palmer trailing badly at 8 percent. Ninety-seven percent of voters knew Jackson, but Jones and Palmer were known by only 69 and 61 percent, respectively.

  Jones and Palmer appeared financially competitive with Jackson, and all three campaigns had raised more than $200,000. The Sun-Times endorsed Jones over Palmer, calling him “the most experienced and capable lawmaker” in the race. On the Sunday before Election Day, all three candidates visited dozens of churches, with Jackson attracting the most attention by invoking the language of Martin Luther King Jr. “I dream that one day the South Side and the south suburbs will look like the North Side and the north suburbs.” On election morning, the Sun-Times reported that “contributions to Palmer all but dried up during the past three weeks” after polls had shown her trailing. Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal wrote that “a close finish is anticipated” between Jones and Jackson, while Palmer and long-shot contender Monique Davis “have been left in the dust.” Neal, who had been a booster of Palmer’s, now underscored how Jesse Jackson Jr. had outshone his older, more experienced rivals, and he called Jackson “the most impressive newcomer on the local political scene.”4

  Kitty Kurth, Palmer’s media consultant, later recalled how on election morning there were still more than a thousand Palmer yard signs sitting in the campaign office. Fifth Ward activist Alan Dobry realized that “Alice didn’t have enough people to cover the precincts” all across the district. Even worse, at a South Shore precinct in Palmer’s own Senate district that Dobry was manning, “people there didn’t know who Alice was. She had built no base there,” while “everybody knew Jesse.” A good many Democratic state Senate staffers had been working on Emil Jones’s congressional campaign during vacation time and available weekends, and on Election Day, they realized that Jackson had “an amazing organization” with “such a coalition of people” that it seemed like “they were everywhere,” young John Charles remembered. That morning Barack and his campaign manager, Carol Harwell, aiming to secure more good signatures on his own nominating petitions, “traveled around, and we actually went to Alice’s home precinct,” Carol recalled. Voter turnout there was very low, and they realized “This is not good” for Alice’s already dim prospects. Indeed, every precinct they visited had handfuls of older women all wearing Jackson buttons.

  Jackson’s campaign had used a software program to identify every registered Democrat who had voted in both the 1994 and 1992 elections. Those fifty-eight thousand people, from forty-four thousand households, were concentrated in seventy-eight particular precincts, which Jackson’s campaign then targete
d. In the final weeks, Jackson’s father also began actively supporting his campaign. One person privy to the family’s internal dynamics explained, “Jesse Jackson Jr. going to Congress is a problem for another Jesse Jackson, who doesn’t support us until late in the campaign when the momentum is so overwhelmingly on our side that he supports us.”

  On Election Day afternoon, Barack chaired a meeting of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC)’s board of directors. The first actual grants to Chicago schools and their organizational partners were to be announced in three weeks, but board members plus executive director Ken Rolling were “all concerned about how things were proceeding,” the minutes noted. One concern was that “the Challenge may not be seeing new or different attempts at school reform.” Pat Graham emphasized how CAC’s top priority was “direct services to students,” and the board was “‘underwhelmed’ by the current proposals.” Although board members saw only summaries, and not the full applications, “they felt the proposals did not reflect much imagination or ‘breaking the mold’ in school reform efforts.”

  That evening Barack, Carol Harwell, Ron Davis, and campaign volunteers like Jesse Ruiz monitored the returns in their campaign office before Barack went to Alice Palmer’s election-night gathering. The results were even more dramatic than preelection polls had suggested: Jesse Jackson Jr. triumphed with more than 48 percent of the vote, Emil Jones was second with a respectable 38 percent, and Palmer trailed badly, winning only 10 percent. Monique Davis received just 2 percent. Jones and Jackson had run neck and neck in the south suburban part of the district, but within Chicago, Jackson carried ten of eleven wards, and even in Jones’s home ward, he prevailed by only 4,973 to 4,911. Jones accepted his opponent’s argument that voters “didn’t want to lose me in Springfield. That’s what I think cost me the election.”

  Wednesday morning’s Tribune reported that a “disappointed” Alice Palmer “told a small gathering at a Harvey hotel that she wouldn’t seek reelection to the state Senate,” and Barack was present to hear that. He told Hal Baron, Palmer’s campaign chairman, that he definitely would remain in the race, but minutes later, Palmer’s husband Buzz asked Baron for help in getting Alice to change her mind. Baron declined, but Buzz began recruiting other Palmer supporters who agreed that she should reclaim her seat: political science professors Robert Starks and Adolph Reed plus Alice’s legislative friend Lou Jones, an outspoken woman who forcefully upbraided her, “Are you a damn fool? Are you crazy?” Palmer continued to refuse the entreaties, but radio host and former alderman Cliff Kelley, who had presided at Barack’s announcement two months earlier, called Barack and asked him to step aside. Barack’s two top aides, Carol Harwell and Ron Davis, plus Michelle Obama, all argued that he should reject the unfriendly invitation. As Carol remembered, “I really saw turmoil in his face,” and Barack said, “we may think about not doing it.” Old Southeast Side organizing friend Rev. Bob Klonowski recalled having breakfast with Barack one morning as he debated, “what do I do about this?” But Carol and Ron kept reminding him how much money the campaign had raised and spent, and that Palmer had repeatedly and publicly said she would surrender her state Senate seat even if she lost the congressional race. Michelle Obama, no matter how ambivalent she was about her husband’s prospective political career, firmly agreed with Carol’s argument: “She gave her word. . . . You don’t let people just walk over you like that.”

  Many people in Chicago independent politics viewed stepping back in deference to someone senior as an almost automatic response. One progressive legislator said Barack’s refusal to do so was “a mortal sin,” and that, as Lou Jones had said a few weeks earlier, “your time will come.” Former legislator Paul Williams explained how the black nationalists who were close to Palmer shared that view, for “under the nation concept, Barack maybe should have stepped back because for the sake of the nation: Alice had the seniority, Alice had the ability to do things.” But savvy black onlookers believed that a decisive factor in why Barack did not do so was that he had not grown up black in a city like Chicago. “I think his attitude was different than a black man raised in black America,” Tim Black reflected. “We grew up in black communities and black neighborhoods,” so “we came up with self-imposed limits,” Paul Williams explained. “Barack didn’t have all those mental limitations that we had.” Carol Harwell, a quintessential strong black woman, put it even more bluntly: “Barack doesn’t know what it’s like to be a black man,” she recalled. “He grew up in a white world,” not in “a neighborhood where he feared the police officers,” she recounted. “He’s an African and an American, not an African American,” because “he doesn’t understand the hurt that black men feel.”

  Political scientist Adolph Reed, who had attended the earlier Lou Jones meeting, remembered that Barack “struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer” mouthing “empty rhetoric.” But more politically experienced Palmer backers, such as Lois and Allan Dobry, like Hal Baron, did not support her reentry into the Senate race and pulled back. Yet a small band of obstinate supporters—Professors Reed and Robert Starks, along with Lou Jones—continued to press Palmer to reclaim her seat. On Monday, December 4, they went public, and a story in the next morning’s Chicago Defender was headlined “Draft Palmer Campaign Launched.” Jones told the paper that “if she doesn’t run for the Senate, the organization gets the seat. I’m asking Obama to release Palmer from her commitment. We need her in Springfield.”

  Robert Starks said, “If she doesn’t run, that seat will go to a Daley supporter,” which was possible because many in Hyde Park had seen an “Elect Marc EWELL” vote-mobile advertising the candidacy of someone whose surname clearly marked him as an organization loyalist. “We have asked her to reconsider not running,” Starks explained, “because we don’t think Obama can win. . . . He hasn’t been in town long enough” and “nobody knows who he is.” Anyone with a memory could recall how nine years earlier two little-known Democratic statewide primary candidates with unusual surnames, George Sangmeister and Aurelia Pucinski, had lost to Lyndon LaRouche supporters with Anglo-Saxon, plain vanilla names: Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild. Marc Ewell’s familiar surname might serve him very well against Barack Obama.

  Barack told reporter Chinta Strausberg he was meeting with Alice Palmer Tuesday morning, and he planned to file more than three thousand petition signatures in Springfield the following Monday. The next day Barack told his friend Ellen Schumer that he had met with Palmer, and years later Barack said this ending of his relationship with Palmer “left a little bit of a bitter taste in my mouth.” He learned that “if you’re going to be involved in this process that you end up having to play hardball and battle it out.”

  Palmer has no memory of that meeting, but three days later, she agreed to enter the race to retain her seat. Her closest Springfield friend, longtime Senate Democratic policy staffer Nia Odeoti-Hassan, said, “She did not want to renege,” but Palmer bowed to her supporters’ insistence. Asked if “you’re never taking the initiative individually yourself?” Palmer replied “absolutely not.” After the congressional loss, “I wasn’t particularly engaged in this.” Palmer’s district aide, Constance Goosby, who supported the draft effort, attempted to justify Palmer’s move by saying that Barack “was supposed to help Alice with the congressional race by recruiting workers,” and “he didn’t fulfill his obligation at all.”5

  The same day Palmer affirmed her desire to keep her seat, the weekly Chicago Reader published an eight-page profile of Barack, accompanied by a long excerpt from Dreams From My Father. Hank DeZutter’s article offered a richly detailed portrayal of the first-time candidate’s political views, and Barack’s frank and revealing comments resonated with multiple echoes from his organizing days and from his years at Harvard. He also made clear how disappointed he was with Chicago electoral politics. “I am surprised at how many elected officials—even the good ones—spend so much time talking about the mechanics of politics and not matters of substan
ce. They have . . . this overriding interest in retaining their seats or in moving their careers forward, and the business and game of politics, the political horse race, is all they talk about. Even those who are on the same page as me on the issues never seem to want to talk about them. Politics is regarded as little more than a career,” and Barack wished officials instead would focus on “ways to use the political process to create jobs for our communities.”

  DeZutter had read Dreams in its entirety, and he commented that the book “reads more like a novel than a memoir.” DeZutter also located Johnnie Owens, who was no longer at the Developing Communities Project, but who praised Barack effusively. “He’s not about calling attention to himself. He’s concerned with the work. It’s as if it’s his mission in life, his calling, to work for social justice. . . . I’m one of the most cynical people you want to see,” Owens volunteered, “but I see nothing but integrity in this guy.”

  DeZutter also spoke with Jean Rudd at the Woods Fund and ACORN’s Madeline Talbott. Jean described Barack as one of Woods’s “most hard-nosed board members in wanting to see results. He wants to see our grants make change happen, not just pay salaries.” Madeline said that “Barack has proven himself among our members.” DeZutter recounted Barack conducting a Hope Center training: “We talk ‘they, they, they’ but don’t take the time to break it down. We don’t analyze. Our thinking is sloppy. And to the degree that it is, we’re not going to be able to have the impact we could have. We can’t afford to go out there blind, hollering and acting the fool, and get to the table and don’t know who it is we’re talking to—or what we’re going to ask them—whether it’s someone with real power or just a third-string flak catcher.”