On Monday afternoon, Tom Johnson jotted notes as the Cook County Electoral Board hearings concluded. Of Alice Palmer’s 1,580 signatures, objections to 1,031 had been sustained, leaving her with 549 valid ones, and a recheck of the so-called “master file” had added back only 10 more, giving her a grand total of 559, 198 less than the 757 necessary to make the ballot. Ulmer Lynch had also fallen woefully short, while Marc Ewell was 86 shy of 757 and Gha-Is Askia 69. Wednesday’s Hyde Park Herald was first to report that the Senate race “may become no contest at all” because Obama’s opponents “may not have the required amount of valid nominating petition signatures.” The next morning a Sun-Times gossip columnist picked up the news: “Watch for state Sen. Alice Palmer to be knocked off the ballot in her re-election bid” as “she is going to be a couple of hundred short. Unbelievable.”
Later that day Barack met with another group whose backing he sought, Madeline Talbott and Keith Kelleher’s ACORN-based Chicago chapter of the nascent “New Party” progressive fusion group. The meeting’s minutes recorded that Barack made a statement and answered questions. He “signed the New Party ‘Candidate Contract’” and requested their endorsement. He “also joined the New Party.” One attendee later remembered that Barack “was blunt about his desire to move the Democratic Party off the cautious center where Bill Clinton had it wedged,” but another member recalled that he “seemed to measure every answer to questions put to him several times” before finally responding. Years later critics tried to make Barack’s “membership” in the New Party a matter of controversy, but neither Keith Kelleher, who tried multiple times to interest Barack, nor national cofounder Joel Rogers, whose wife Sarah Siskind was a Madison-based partner in the Davis Miner law firm, ever had succeeded in winning Barack’s cooperation. “I think Barack always was very strategic,” Keith’s wife Madeline Talbott explained, and “it was obvious that he was not going to participate in the New Party.”11
On January 17 the Hyde Park Herald reported that Alice Palmer would not be on the primary ballot unless her supporters produced at least 198 “signed and notarized affidavits from the registered voters who signed her nominating petitions.” Realizing how impossible that was, Palmer announced prior to the electoral board’s final review that she was withdrawing. Senate colleagues like Howard Carroll were “shocked” that such a “wonderful person” was now a lame duck, and Barack told the Defender, “I got involved in this race based on Alice’s original endorsement, and I continue to respect her” and the “significant contributions” she had made as a senator. Palmer’s former consultant Don Wiener noted that “Alice could have won if someone competent had handled her petitions,” and Robert Starks later confessed that “we were in too much of a rush and that leads to bad signatures.” As Palmer’s Senate colleague Rickey Hendon stressed, “no one thinks Barack could have ever beaten Alice Palmer” had she made it onto the March 19 primary ballot.
Like Palmer, Gha-Is Askia stood down, admitting he had paid his petition circulators $5 per sheet, and that “they round-tabled me,” signing most of the names themselves. By January 20, the electoral board’s review confirmed that Marc Ewell was short by eighty-six signatures, and on January 24, Ulmer Lynch filed a somewhat illiterate pro se lawsuit in federal district court against the state and city boards of election, as well as Tom Johnson and “Barak,” alleging that “Johnson, and Mr. Obama, used there political connections to influence some Board of Election Commissioner officers and employees, to tamper with authority to remove voter’s files out of board binders.” The board soon filed a motion to dismiss, which led Tom to tell Barack that they could “sit back and see what happens.”
Marc Ewell, represented by his father Ray, tried to argue that registrants whose names appeared on the prepurge, February 1995 list of voters should count as valid signatories, but on February 9 the board formally held that Ewell had submitted only 671 valid signatures. Four days later, Ray Ewell filed suit in federal court against the city election board, challenging its purge of previously registered voters and seeking an injunction to prohibit Marc’s name from being taken off the ballot. Ewell’s filing was a more professional effort than Lynch’s, but it referenced “Barach Obamo,” and when the case was assigned to U.S. district judge Ruben Castillo, Ewell’s filings repeatedly cited “Judge Castello.”12
Obama’s successful challenge against Palmer received public blowback in both the Hyde Park Herald and then the Chicago Sun-Times. An angry Adolph Reed denounced the challenge as “vicious and underhanded” and lambasted the IVI-IPO for failing to support “open access to the ballot.” Lois Dobry said that “the sad thing is that we’ve lost a person of this caliber” from elected office, and prominent black Chicago political commentator Salim Muwakkil authored a Sun-Times op-ed headlined “Candidate Not What He Seems, Foes Insist.” Muwakkil wrote that Robert Starks “says Obama is the tool of forces outside the black community,” and quoted Alice Palmer as saying of Obama that “I’ve since discovered that he’s not as progressive as I first thought.”
Palmer refused to say whether she would support Barack if he became the Democratic nominee, but she and Senate colleague Donne Trotter introduced SB 1554 to require that boards of elections publish the names of voters whom they purged from registration rolls. The bill went nowhere, but the animosity Palmer’s nationalist supporters felt toward Barack would endure for years. Barack’s Project VOTE! mentor John Schmidt remembered Barack mentioning how “the black nationalists were really going after him,” but that “he found it kind of liberating because he realized that he didn’t need them.”
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge board chairmanship continued to take a lot of Barack’s time, but whenever someone, like his friend Ellen Schumer, asked how applications should be crafted, he emphasized that proposals should focus solely on improving “student academic achievement in the classroom.” In late February Barack joined a Sunday-evening “town meeting” on “Economic Insecurity: Employment and Survival in Urban America” sponsored by the University of Chicago’s student chapter of DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, whose parent Chicago-wide chapter had endorsed Barack’s state Senate candidacy.
Barack, or “Bracco Obama,” as the university’s student newspaper spelled his name, reminded the crowd of more than three hundred how “jobs, workers, and unions were at the front and center” of the civil rights movement’s famous 1963 March on Washington. Since then, “this emphasis on the centrality of jobs” had been lost. Barack stated that “resources, training and education . . . are the bare minimums of the American Dream . . . and right now these are not being provided.” Referencing the federal welfare reform proposal President Bill Clinton was backing, Barack criticized “welfare elimination and reduction under the guise of reform.” He argued that “it is not enough to maintain the status quo . . . it is not tolerable” and declared that “how jobs are allocated among respective geographic and ethnic communities” was a pressing issue.13
At a February 21 hearing, Judge Ruben Castillo expressed serious doubt as to whether Raymond Ewell’s challenge of the electoral board’s decision that his son was short eighty-six signatures should have been filed in federal as opposed to state court. James M. Scanlon, representing the board, and Tom Johnson, for Obama, highlighted how Illinois state law expressly gave rejected candidates ten days to challenge such a decision in Cook County Circuit Court. Ewell belatedly filed suit there on February 23, albeit in an incorrect division, and failed to notify Scanlon and Johnson of the filing, but on March 4, Judge Castillo granted Scanlon and Johnson’s motions for summary judgment and dismissed the Ewells’ lawsuit.
Tom Johnson immediately faxed Castillo’s ruling to Barack with a handwritten cover note declaring “Victory!” One week later, the federal judge handling Ulmer Lynch’s case dismissed his claims, and the elections board moved to dismiss the Ewells’ tardy state court suit as untimely. One South Side biweekly newspaper noted that a race that had looked like “a major task” for
Barack now had him “running unopposed for his first elected job of many public service stops.” Only a Saturday traffic ticket for an illegal U-turn, resulting in a $95 fine and four hours of mandatory attendance at traffic school, marred Barack’s run-up to Election Day.
Barack deployed campaign volunteers to help get out the vote, telling the Defender that “It’s important to let people know who I am.” His Springfield agenda “will focus on public school financing, ensuring fairness if welfare and Medicaid are bloc-granted to a state level” by President Clinton’s reform legislation, and “job creation and economic development.”
Six months to the day after Barack first declared his candidacy, the election night tally showed him receiving 16,279 votes—100 percent of those cast. Barack owed his unanimous triumph both to the professionalism of his three top advisers—Carol Harwell, Ron Davis, and Tom Johnson, who never even billed him for all his work—and also to the sloppiness of Palmer’s and Ewell’s signature gatherers.14
With only pro-forma Republican opposition anticipated for November’s general election, Barack now had almost ten months as a senator-elect prior to his actual swearing-in in January 1997. He shuttered his campaign office and turned his attention to his U of C teaching, as the fourth iteration of Current Issues in Racism and the Law got under way on March 25 with about two dozen students enrolled. Mary Ellen Callahan, a 2L, found it a “provocative class,” with Barack ready to challenge “traditionally liberal assumptions.” She found Barack “quite approachable,” as did 2L Hisham Amin, who thought he was “very open, very genuine, very thoughtful.” The syllabus remained the same as before, and when the quarter concluded on May 21, the students’ evaluations gave the class a rating of 9.5 on UCLS’s 10-point scale.
As soon as classes ended, Barack, Michelle, and Maya flew to Europe. He and Maya had talked about such a trip in the wake of their mother’s death, and Bob Bennett, who had stepped down as Northwestern Law School’s dean and was on leave for the year, invited the Obamas to spend a week with him and his wife Harriet Trop in the Italian countryside near Grassina, southeast of Florence. Starting in Paris, they took the train to Nice, staying with Barack’s old Occidental friend Laurent Delanney at his home in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, near Monaco, before continuing eastward to Florence. “He was a great big brother,” Maya recalled, and the trip was a good tonic in the aftermath of Ann’s painful demise.
Knowing that his state Senate role would require much of his time, Barack moved to recalibrate his two other main professional commitments. Judd Miner and everyone at Davis Miner had supported Barack’s Senate race, envisioning that he could move to a flexible, part-time “Of Counsel” role. Barack had continued working on Judd’s big municipal redistricting lawsuits concerning Chicago and St. Louis’s city councils, and he also remained a secondary participant in the ongoing “motor voter” registration case that progressive groups including ACORN were successfully concluding against the recalcitrant Illinois governor, Jim Edgar. Only after another court order in May 1996 did state officials begin exhibiting “the kind of compliance with their duties that should have been forthcoming from the outset,” wrote U.S. district judge Milton Shadur. John Belcaster, George Galland, and Barack were also assisting a Peoria attorney with a sexual harassment lawsuit against a Mitsubishi auto plant in Normal, Illinois, and in April 1996 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission joined the litigation with a class action suit of its own against Mitsubishi.
The University of Chicago Law School had always wanted more from Barack than his one-course-per-year adjunct lecturer role, and in the spring of 1996, Barack approached Douglas Baird, who had succeeded Geoffrey Stone as dean after Stone became university provost, and asked if they could have dinner. They met downtown at the Park Avenue Café, and Baird remembered that Barack wore an Armani tie and made a surprising proposal. Once in office, he would no longer draw his full Davis Miner salary, and the modest pay accorded a state senator would not make up the difference. Barack wanted to combine his new post with a larger law school teaching load, because “Michelle insisted on making the numbers work,” and “the whole point of the dinner is he has to figure out how to make the numbers work in order to become a state senator,” Baird recalled. “I’m frankly a bit skeptical,” and “I spend a lot of time during that dinner saying ‘okay, wait a second, what’s your schedule in Springfield going to be like? Are you going to have to cancel too many classes?’”
The Illinois Senate’s spring session began in January each year and expanded some during February and March before intensifying significantly in April and May. But until late each spring, the Senate usually met only Tuesday through Thursday, and each fall the Senate convened only for a brief six-day “veto session” to reconsider bills the governor had rejected. Given the law school’s schedule of fall, winter, and spring quarters, fall and winter classes, especially if timed to avoid midweek sessions, could comport quite nicely with a state senator’s schedule.
Satisfied that the timing might work, Baird raised two other issues. One was curricular. Racism and the Law, just like a small Voting Rights course Judd Miner was teaching, was a worthwhile elective, but in Baird’s eyes Barack would need to teach something central to the law school’s curriculum, not ancillary, in order to merit an expanded appointment. Unique among law schools, Chicago divided Constitutional Law into four distinct courses, one of which, Con Law III, covered the Fourteenth Amendment doctrinal issues of equal protection and substantive due process. For Baird, Barack’s agreeing to teach an annual section of Con Law III “was absolutely essential . . . because that’s a real course” where “he’s really holding down part of the curriculum.”
There was also the question of title, because as Geof Stone put it, “titles matter.” During dinner, Baird told Barack, “We can’t make you an assistant professor,” the normal title for a beginning appointment, “unless you do scholarship,” and Barack immediately responded, “That’s not me.” Baird would remember that Barack “was crystal clear” that any “idea that he was going to be a law scholar was just not him.” The law school did have one special title, senior lecturer, for instructors with significant teaching roles who were not full-time law faculty, but that august rank was held only by three members of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit—Richard A. Posner, Frank H. Easterbrook, and Diane P. Wood, all of whom had been on the faculty before becoming federal judges—and the distinguished legal historian Dennis J. Hutchinson, who held a joint appointment. Baird knew it would be “very unusual” to give Barack that title, along with a decent salary and faculty benefits not accorded mere lecturers, and “I talked about this extensively with Geof Stone,” who as provost “was completely supportive.”
Baird and Barack tussled over how long the initial appointment would be, and Baird “insisted on it being two years rather than four years because I was worried that he would simply be a touch-and-go lecturer and not really be involved.” But by late May 1996, the terms of Barack’s expanded new appointment as a senior lecturer were set, and that fall, he would teach Con Law III and Racism and the Law; in winter 1997, he would take on Voting Rights as his third regular course.15
While Barack was negotiating a new relationship with the university, so too was Michelle. In her three years as executive director, she had built Public Allies Chicago into a highly regarded internship and training program for young people interested in public service, and the Chicago chapter was “the most mature and advanced” Public Allies site of all. Chicago board chairman Ian Larkin knew the chapter was “this huge bright star” within the Public Allies network, and as a result Michelle had become the de facto leader of the chapter directors who pushed back against the excessive “top-down” behavior of D.C.-based cofounder Vanessa Kirsch. Michelle “was the leader of the cabal,” North Carolina executive director Jason Scott explained, and although Michelle “knew that she was basically unfireable,” the conflict between the five local chapters and the national office was “re
ally stressful, and it took a lot out of you.”
In Chicago, Michelle had created a warm, yet challenging esprit de corps among her mid-twenties staffers, inviting them to East View for potluck dinners that sometimes involved Barack cooking the chicken dish he had learned from his Pakistani friends years earlier. Michelle was “paradoxically direct and warm,” Milwaukee director Paul Schmitz recalled, while Barack, who each year still did a training for Allies, was just a “somewhat aloof guy married to a colleague.” Larkin had a similar view, thinking Michelle’s “star was about a thousand times brighter than Barack’s.” In early 1996, Kirsch was replaced by Chuck Supple, who made “a pilgrimage to Chicago” to meet the best-regarded chapter director. He thought Michelle was “this wonderful mix of poise and professionalism and competency with an activist’s passion and desire to bring about change.”
For Michelle’s third year, 1995–96, she had forty-eight young Allies, and it was by far her most draining, primarily because of the sudden illness and all-too-fast death of Michelle’s beloved young assistant. Twenty-four-year-old Richard Blount was a highly active but largely closeted gay man who was “Michelle’s right hand” for much of her time at Public Allies. Richard’s illness became apparent in November 1995, right after Ann Dunham’s death, and Public Allies board member Jan Anne Dubin remembered that she and Michelle were “both sobbing on the phone” over Thanksgiving as they discussed Richard’s condition. Another of Michelle’s young protégés, Craig Huffman, recalled that time as “enormously stressful for her,” with financial worries on the home front also pressing in. Richard died on February 8, and Dubin described it as “like losing a child,” while emphasizing that Richard was equally close to Michelle. Richard’s funeral service was held at Trinity United Church of Christ, with Barack there and Michelle as one of the speakers.
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