Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Lott’s recounting of that exchange matched Barack’s frank statement about handguns on his September IVI-IPO questionnaire, but Barack’s personal disdain for Lott, exhibited on several subsequent occasions, differed from the warm and approachable professor Barack’s twenty-five students encountered in Voting Rights. He assigned photocopied readings from Pildes’s manuscript that began with “some early 19th century cases about the denial of the franchise” and continued up through current-day redistricting and campaign finance cases. Adam Bonin, a 3L, recalled that “we learned the law, but we also learned it on the level of real-world impact.” David Franklin, also a 3L, remembered that Barack “wasn’t interested in high theory at all,” and he emphasized that further when students wrote the lengthy papers that were the primary coursework. Bonin addressed racial gerrymandering, and Barack “made me look at this as a real-world issue, and not as a theoretical construct.”

  Bonin remembered that Barack would push a contrary view if it “wasn’t being expressed or students were too complacent in their liberal views.” Molly Garhart, another 3L, recalled Barack as “so calm, so level-headed, so fair and so equitable in his treatment of all of us and listening to everyone’s ideas.” African American 3L Carl Patten had met Barack months earlier in the gym and had lost a one-on-one game to him. In class, Patten was “very impressed” with how Barack “created an environment where people felt free to speak from their viewpoints whether or not they were perceived to be aligned with his.” When Carl had seen Barack at the law school after that one-on-one loss, he joshingly remarked, “Next time I’m going to get you.” Barack’s facial expression immediately said, “This is not the place for me to respond.” Patten realized “he’s very calculating, extremely calculating,” yet “calculating while being genuine.” When the quarter ended, the students gave Barack’s teaching an 8.71 score on the law school’s 10-point scale.25

  On Wednesday morning, January 8, Barack was sworn into office, signed his oath of office form for his two-year term, and began his true initiation into the world of the handsome Illinois State Capitol building. As a minority party freshman, Barack was assigned to one of the least desirable offices, 105D, a narrow, high-ceilinged ground-floor box in the capitol’s north wing. His political home in Springfield would be the Senate’s Democratic caucus, an uneasy assemblage whose twenty-eight members included several highly volatile personalities. Democratic leader Emil Jones Jr.’s only meaningful power was hiring staff members and assembling a caucus leadership team to support his role as minority leader. But there were three much more consequential figures in Springfield’s political world: newly reinstated Democratic House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, a lifelong politico from Chicago’s Southwest Side who had become 13th Ward committeeman at age twenty-seven in 1969 and entered the legislature in 1971; moderate, second-term Republican governor Jim Edgar, who had grown up in the small town of Charleston in eastern Illinois; and Senate Republican president James Peyton “Pate” Philip, from suburban DuPage County.

  To outsiders unfamiliar with Springfield, and especially with the capitol’s unusual lingo, a description of the city as a land of horseshoes, mushrooms, and lobsters might sound strange. A Springfield “horseshoe” was an often grotesque open-faced sandwich in which a piece of meat was covered first with french fries and then with a cheeselike sauce. Visitors knowledgeable enough to avoid the local delicacy felt rightfully proud. The statement that Springfield was a city of “bad hotels and worse food” was perhaps apocryphal, but there was no shortage of bars, because drinking was state politicos’ top recreational activity. Card playing came second, and golf was perhaps third, because the local courses were an everyman’s bargain compared to Chicago. But there was little doubt what ranked fourth, as one female lobbyist explained: “there’s a lot of people who fucked in Springfield. What else is there to do?”

  “Mushrooms” was the name given to rank-and-file members of Mike Madigan’s House Democratic caucus, as Madigan’s life mission was maintaining a viselike control over legislative decision-making. Madigan was a fervent admirer of former Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, and his description of Daley was one that fit Madigan himself: “every day of his life, he was about politics.” To say that House Democrats were “kept in the dark and fed shit” might slightly exaggerate their experience, but the disdain that senators of both parties exhibited toward their House colleagues was Illinois bipartisanship at its strongest. “We like to think of ourselves as the House of Lords,” African American Chicago senator Donne Trotter explained, and state representatives were political inferiors. “We talk about them like dogs, and we don’t really work together.” The two chambers sat just yards apart on the Capitol’s third floor, separated by a glorious open rotunda that gave the building much of its cathedral-like beauty, but in the capitol’s daily life, the two bodies were “very separate worlds,” with members interacting almost exclusively with colleagues from their own chamber.

  There were, of course, no real lobsters in the nearby Sangamon River, but the capitol’s notable “lobsters”—lobbyists—were most often found on “the rail,” the brass ring that encircled the rotunda in a building where seats were in short supply. More than legislators, more than legislative staffers, these lobbyists were the crucial players in a state government world where campaign cash and those who could provide it were always the top priority of legislative leaders. Many lobsters were former legislators who had parlayed their knowledge and personal relationships into far more remunerative work than public service. The most experienced lobsters often enjoyed a decisive advantage over part-time legislators, who were often not the sharpest tools in the shed. “Stupid people need representation too, and they’re very well represented in the Illinois legislature,” one corporate lobbyist acerbically declared. The centrality of lobbyists in Illinois politics was inseparable from the centrality of money in Illinois politics, and in Springfield most of the money flowed to the legislative caucus leaders, “The Four Tops,” who hired the staff members and funded the campaigns of those members who, unlike Barack, represented competitive districts.

  The power held by the Four Tops, particularly the Senate president and the House Speaker, was the single most defining factor in Illinois politics. Life in the statehouse had changed only in degree, not in kind, from the world that U.S. senator Paul Simon had described three decades earlier in an infamous Harper’s Magazine essay and that was best personified by Simon’s longtime rival, Illinois secretary of state Paul Powell, who died in 1970. Both men were from far downstate Illinois. Powell entered the Illinois House in 1935, at age thirty-three, and Simon in 1953, at age twenty-five. Powell served as Speaker of the House from 1949 to 1951 and again from 1959 to 1963, while Simon moved to the state Senate in 1963. His 1964 article, “The Illinois Legislature: A Study in Corruption,” stated that “one third of the members accept payoffs.” He quoted one lobbyist recounting that a legislator had said “it will cost you two hundred to five hundred dollars to get the bill out of committee” and another who was told that “for $7,500 I can get you nine votes” from legislative colleagues. Simon never mentioned Powell by name, but he did cite rumors that “under-the-table transactions provide an income of $100,000 a session for one prominent Representative when his party is in power.” Simon emphasized that “there are no controls on lobbyists in Springfield . . . they can hand out any amount of money to influence legislators,” and “legislators in turn need not account for campaign contributions or disclose their sources.”

  A year later, Simon wrote a brief follow-up piece, reporting that at the biennial Senate dinner, “I was presented with a ‘Benedict Arnold Award.’ Previous winners, they said, were Judas Iscariot and Aaron Burr.” In 1964, Paul Powell was elected Illinois secretary of state, and he was reelected four years later. In Springfield, he lived at the St. Nicholas Hotel, and when he died at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, in October 1970, at age sixty-eight, his suite at the St. Nicholas contained $800,000 in cash.


  Powell’s biographer later contended that some of that money represented “large amounts of dividend income from race-track investments.” Even if true, Powell’s career in Illinois politics was an indelible lesson in the realities of Springfield: as Barack already sensed, state politics was more concerned with money than it was with the betterment of the lives of Illinois citizens. Of the few people actively interested in changing that state of affairs, Barack already knew the most important one: Joyce Foundation vice president Larry Hansen, a fifty-six-year-old native of Elgin and a former Democratic political operative. At the Joyce board’s most recent meeting, Hansen’s Money & Politics effort had been elevated to a full-fledged program. But even before that, Hansen had supported University of Illinois at Springfield political science professor Kent Redfield, a former Democratic House staffer, in throwing new light on Cash Clout at the Illinois statehouse.

  Redfield’s 1995 monograph emphasized that “there are no limits on how much an individual, public official, political party, interest group, or corporate entity can contribute to a candidate or spend on behalf of a candidate,” even though a 1974 law did require candidates to report most contributions. Redfield noted how “putting campaign reports in an electronic database and making that database easily accessible to everyone would go a long way toward making the law operate as a sunshine law.” But Redfield stressed that equally if not more important was “the tremendous growth in the power of the legislative leaders. Their control over both the agenda and the content of policy outcomes has become almost absolute,” and went hand in hand with the dominant role they played in the campaigns of many of their caucus members.

  In an insightful subsequent essay, “What Keeps the Four Tops on Top?,” Redfield wrote that “the power of individual members has continued to decline” as the legislature “has become even more dominated by the legislative leaders.” Their “near monopolies on campaign fundraising and the mobilization of legislative staff efforts” allow them “to control the legislative process when the legislature comes into session.” Individual members “lack the personal and policy staff necessary to establish political and substantive autonomy apart from the leaders.” In Springfield Barack would have one personal secretary—Beverly Criglar, whom he was inheriting from Alice Palmer—and one-fifth of the time of one of the Democratic caucus’s Communications and Research staffers, who wrote press releases and such. Barack also had $47,000 to pay for his district office expenses, including Cynthia Miller’s part-time salary. As Redfield explained, “strong leaders and relatively weak members . . . mean that interest groups concentrate their campaign contributions on the leaders.”

  The dominance of the Four Tops and their close relationships with the best-heeled interest groups determined many statehouse decisions. “The 1990s have seen a wholesale retrenchment of the power and autonomy of individual members in the legislative process,” Redfield explained, as the Four Tops “control the legislative agenda and determine most of the outcomes.” Other observers agreed with Redfield’s analysis. “The extraordinary extent to which the Assembly’s staff is under the control of party leaders,” a University of Illinois report observed, “limits the information available to backbenchers, which forces many of them to look to interest groups for information or cues about policy.” With most staffers hired for their “political rather than their policy skills,” committees “are to a great degree under leadership control,” thus further magnifying “the loss of power by individual legislators.”26

  Those systemic factors would have a huge impact on Barack’s experiences as a freshman senator, but equally important, he had entered a body controlled day in, day out by one single man: as one lobbyist put it, in 1997 the Illinois state Senate “was Pate Philip’s world.” Philip, then sixty-six, was a former marine who never graduated from college and had begun his work life driving a Pepperidge Farm bread truck. Active in the DuPage County Republican Party by his mid-twenties, Philip was elected to the state House in 1966 and moved up to the state Senate in 1974. Seven years later he became the Republican minority leader, and when his party won majority control in 1992, Philip became Senate president. Philip was more than just the Republican Senate leader: since 1970 he had chaired DuPage County’s Republican Party, where more than one-third of the 630 precinct committeemen were on public payrolls. That made him the boss of what Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal called “the most effective political unit in the state,” and one that in 1988 had single-handedly won Illinois for Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush: he carried the state by just 95,000 votes while winning DuPage by more than 123,000.

  But Philip was best known for his undisciplined mouth. Neal wrote that “niggers” and “hooknoses” were parts of Philip’s regular vocabulary, and in October 1994, he set off a public controversy by telling a suburban newspaper’s editorial board that some black state employees at the Department of Children and Family Services “don’t have the same work ethics that we have.” African American state senator Donne Trotter responded that “these are the kind of comments you expect from the Grand Dragon of the KKK, not the president of the Illinois Senate,” and the Sun-Times condemned Philip’s “racist comments.”

  Inside the Illinois statehouse, it was universally known that Philip had little respect for Emil Jones Jr., a very dark-skinned African American. Some said that was Philip’s partisan nature, but Philip had had an entirely cordial relationship with Phil Rock, Jones’s white predecessor. One member of Philip’s Republican caucus who tussled with the leader more than most said he was “kind of like a teddy bear” who “said whatever was on his mind,” and multiple Republicans cited the amount of authority Philip gave his best committee chairmen, like Steve Rauschenberger on Appropriations and Harvard Law School graduate Carl Hawkinson on Judiciary. One of Philip’s deputies acknowledged that the Senate president “was Mr. Politically Incorrect,” but the conservative chairman of Public Health and Welfare put it bluntly: Pate Philip was “just an old white racist marine,” a view shared by black Democrats.

  Philip’s counterpart, Emil Jones Jr., grew up in Chicago’s Morgan Park neighborhood and got interested in politics at age twenty-five while watching John F. Kennedy’s first television debate against Richard M. Nixon. After volunteering in that 1960 presidential race, he became principal aide to 34th Ward alderman Wilson Frost, and in 1972 Jones won election to the state House. A father of four, Jones and his wife Patricia also from 1980 onward raised his war-damaged brother’s young son. In 1982 Jones was elevated to the state Senate, and the next year, like most organization loyalists, he backed Jane Byrne for mayor rather than Harold Washington. Jones’s husky, guttural voice led many people to seriously underestimate him, because as Governor Jim Edgar later stressed, Emil Jones is “much smarter than he sounds.”

  Jones recalled that entering the legislature had been an eye-opener. “One of the biggest surprises I found is that outside the city of Chicago, there’s a place called Illinois,” which “was an entirely different world altogether.” Jones said the two books that had had the greatest impact on him were Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince—“government as it is,” Jones remarked—and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The legislative process, Jones explained, “is constant war,” and he quoted from memory a rough translation of one of Sun Tzu’s principles: “do not depend on the enemy not coming, but rather be prepared for the enemy when he does come.” When highly popular Senate president Phil Rock retired after Senate Democrats lost their majority in 1992, Jones worked hard to succeed him as Democratic leader. With all seven African American senators and the two Hispanic members in his corner, Jones had nine of the fourteen necessary votes, but only after Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley intervened did Jones win the support of North Side contender Howard Carroll and downstate powerhouse Vince Demuzio. Several Democratic senators remained displeased, most notably Denny Jacobs from Quad Cities, and by early 1997 Jones had served four rocky years as Senate Democratic leader. The
narrow 1996 failure to recapture majority control was a huge disappointment to colleagues, and it made them doubt Jones’s skills.27

  If Pate Philip had a distant relationship with Jones, his rapport with his fellow Republican governor Jim Edgar was not much better. “Pate and I were different people,” Edgar later recalled. “We were just different cultures, different backgrounds . . . completely different.” As everyone in Springfield knew, Jim Edgar was a teetotaler, and he “rarely bothered to develop personal relationships with legislators” in a building that “thrives on personal contact.” Philip ran the Senate so that most days ended at 5:00 P.M., and the members adjourned to play cards, smoke a cigar, have a drink or two, and indulge in a little off-color humor. In contrast, the straitlaced governor stayed home with his wife and rarely socialized with fellow politicians. At the time, the outspoken Philip said “that sorry son of a bitch hasn’t got a friend in the world,” but years later Philip acknowledged that “Jim Edgar was a very good Governor—not much personality,” yet a fiscal conservative whose views often but not always matched Philip’s.

  Edgar realized that Philip was most often influenced by the last person he had spoken with, but Philip was far more attuned to his conservative caucus than he was to the state’s moderate Republican governor. Philip’s chief of staff, Carter Hendren, who had been Edgar’s campaign manager, was usually the glue that held things together. “Carter helped a lot with Pate,” Edgar later recalled, and in the eyes of Edgar’s top staffers, Hendren was an invaluable presence at the unpredictable Philip’s side: “he saved Pate from himself so many times,” deputy chief of staff Andy Foster explained. Disappointment was widespread among savvy Democrats like Senate Appropriations spokesman Donne Trotter that Edgar was not a more forceful counterbalance to Philip. Trotter saw Edgar as “an absentee governor” who “acquiesced his power to Pate Philip,” who “took full advantage of that.”