Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Barack’s Senate post had him speaking to small gatherings such as the Hyde Park Chamber of Commerce and the Park Manor Neighbors Community Council, but he still had time to attend the second Saguaro Seminar gathering in Boston. The next evening he and Michelle had dinner at the home of Northwestern Law School’s Bob Bennett, who had hosted them in Italy. Barack and Michelle also made a weekend visit to Washington, D.C., staying with old friend Rob Fisher and his wife Lisa and having an early dinner at a highly regarded restaurant just east of the White House. Michelle and Lisa enjoyed teasing their husbands “about having big heads and that they were lucky that they had us around so they wouldn’t get so big,” Lisa laughingly recalled. Rob remembered that after dinner, Barack “had some really nice cigars,” and with both men attired in olive suits and sporting sunglasses, the two couples strolled by the White House, with the women purposely staying behind. “We’re not walking next to you! You are too ridiculous!” Michelle declared. “Two weirdos in olive suits smoking cigars with sunglasses on!”

  Back in Chicago, Barack had breakfast one morning with Charles Halpern, president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and his colleague Stephen Heintz, who were launching a new public policy think tank and were looking to recruit a diverse board. Joyce Foundation president Debbie Leff had recommended Barack to Halpern, and he recalled being “extremely impressed” with Barack, who he thought had “this quality of presence—how grounded, focused, and centered he was.” Heintz felt similarly and said they had a “fabulous conversation” during which Barack consented to join their nascent board.

  That summer, Barack also agreed to become chairman of the Woods Fund’s board, as the foundation moved to focus its community organizing grants on “issues that require city-wide, state-wide or national attention,” including “reforms in the juvenile justice system.” In the Chicago Defender, Barack advocated a complete overhaul of political fund-raising. Democrats Bill Clinton and Al Gore have “raised huge sums of money the same way most Republicans did, by appealing to the various special interest lobbyists,” Barack observed, but “everyone recognizes that the system is broken and . . . I think the public wants the system fixed, which will require some form of public financing” of campaigns. That “would be an incentive for candidates to run without reaching out to the special interest groups.”

  On September 29, classes began at the U of C law school. Barack’s Racism and the Law drew twenty-five students and remained unchanged from prior years, although Barack did add two new readings at the end of the quarter. Michael Lind’s “The End of the Rainbow” appeared in the September–October issue of Mother Jones magazine, and “Affirmative Action’s Vortex” was a chapter from Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines’s new Reaching Beyond Race, which a Washington Post essay had highlighted the weekend Barack and Michelle were visiting Rob and Lisa Fisher. The Post said the political scientists’ findings were “very bad news for supporters of affirmative action as well as the Democratic party” because they indicated a pressing need to “return to color blind policies that appeal to America’s sense of fairness and historical commitment to equality.” In the chapter Barack assigned to his students, Sniderman and Carmines argued that affirmative action “represents a dilemma for liberalism,” because “even as many liberals reject affirmative action as a violation of fairness, it has come to symbolize the very commitment to fairness for many others. The liberal, Democratic coalition . . . is thus in danger of being politically damned if it continues its commitment to affirmative action, and damned if it does not.” They also contended that “the idea that class-based affirmative action provides a way out is an illusion,” the same argument Barack’s student Chapin Cimino had developed in her now-published paper for him the previous fall.

  Barack’s Con Law III attracted fifty-eight students, and to accommodate the upcoming Senate veto session in late October and mid-November, Barack arranged for it to meet on most but not all Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. He began the course by asking students “what do we mean by equality?” and threw out a basketball hypothetical including the possibility that “no white men under 6’5’’ can play,” one careful notetaker recorded. Then, beginning with the Constitution, the next eight class meetings traced the U.S. Supreme Court’s race cases from Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823) and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), through the post–Civil War era, with Barack telling his students that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) would “prove to be as pernicious as Dred Scott.” Considering that McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950) went “most of the way” toward holding that segregated schooling was unconstitutional, Barack asked students whether four years later “is Brown anything new?” He characterized Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as a “rare case of when the Supreme Court gets out ahead of society,” and since “the Court is political and needed support,” Barack questioned why the justices confronted school segregation before addressing voting rights. After Brown II in 1955, Barack asked “what are courts supposed to do with ‘all deliberate speed’?” and “what is the mandate from the Brown II Court?” He challenged students to consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s powerful critique of Brown’s implicit assumption that absent racial integration, black students were incapable of attaining educational parity with whites. By the 1970s, the Court was “looking at equality, not integration.”

  Then the course’s equal protection focus shifted to the familiar standards of “rational basis” and “strict scrutiny” before devoting three classes to the Court’s gender discrimination cases. The final third of the quarter tackled substantive due process, with Barack unsurprisingly asking, “Why is travel a fundamental right, but education is not?” When they reached the Court’s abortion cases, Barack asked, “should viability be the drawing line?” as the Court repeatedly had held, and how would students apply Planned Parenthood v. Casey’s (1992) opaque “undue burden” standard? He also challenged the class to consider William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia’s contention that Roe v. Wade (1973) should not have constitutionalized a right to abortion in the first place.

  Michael Risch, a careful 3L notetaker (and a future law professor), remembered Barack as “a prepared, engaged teacher who led very good discussions” and made sure all sides were aired. “I would not have been able to guess his personal viewpoints from the way he taught.” Andrew Trask, also a 3L, agreed that Barack “was just as likely to probe the logic of an argument he likely agreed with as one he did not,” and always gave “students who did not share his likely viewpoint a fair hearing,” such as when he “let an outspoken conservative student critique an affirmative action case” and himself pointed out “where the critique had particular strength.”

  At the end of autumn, student evaluations gave Barack a respectable 8.92 on UCLS’s 10-point scale in the Race class, but an unusually low 7.84 in Con Law III, with 7.27 for “guiding and controlling discussion.” The Con Law III final exam posed two questions, one about cloning and the other about a school district creating a boys-only Afrocentric academy, and answers could not total more than fifty-two hundred words. After grading the exams, Barack sent students a seventeen-page, single-spaced discussion of the best answers. “It might be argued that the moral judgments at issue with respect to cloning are far more profound than the moral questions involved in consensual sodomy,” Barack wrote. “A slim majority of you favored” the boys-only school, he told them, “based on a justifiable skepticism in the prospect of truly integrated schools and an equally justified concern over the desperate condition of many inner city schools.”44

  In October, Auma, her husband Ian Manners, and their five-month-old daughter Akinyi visited Chicago for a week and stayed with Barack and Michelle at East View. Maya, who had finished her master’s degree in education at NYU a few months earlier and was working at an experimental middle school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was there too, and Auma and her family also got to see Craig and Janis Robinson and their two young children. Barack played several rounds of golf with Ian at
the nearby Jackson Park course, but the beginning of veto session loomed.

  Barack hoped that the long-pending Juvenile Justice Reform Act could be improved, telling reporters, “what we haven’t addressed in this bill is the preventative side that prevents kids from getting into the system in the first place . . . we can’t just write off these kids at 14, 15, 16.” The Senate’s consideration of campaign finance reform would wait until the spring, but Barack emphasized that Illinois needed to authorize state matching funds for federally supported health care for uninsured children.

  In early November, there was joyful news at East View: after more than a year of trying, Michelle was pregnant. Yvonne Davila, one of Michelle’s closest friends from their time together in the mayor’s office, knew that it had been “hard for her to get pregnant” and remembered Michelle showing up at her front door with the good news. Barack was busy gathering the petition signatures he needed so he could appear on the uncontested March 1998 primary ballot. He and U of C grad student Will Burns competed to see who could get the most signatures. Barack would face Yesse Yehudah, a little-known Republican candidate, in the subsequent general election. The Hyde Park Herald reported that Yehudah was chosen “solely because of his unusual sounding name” in the hope of creating “voter confusion when confronted by the choice of Obama versus Yehudah.”

  Barack also was distracted by local and statehouse political tussles. In a Chicago Reader story chronicling the demise of IVI-IPO, Barack stated that “What it means to be an independent or progressive is less clear today than in the past . . . during the years of the Daley Machine.” But when he saw his comments in print, he immediately sent a letter to the editor declaring that “we continue to need strong, independent grassroots organizations.” In Springfield, the final week of veto session was marked by intense disagreements over lame-duck governor Edgar’s long-stalled education funding reforms. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller reported that “Several Senate Democrats said they couldn’t remember a more raucous caucus than yesterday’s knock-down-drag-out fight over school funding,” noting that the twenty-eight senators split seven yes and eleven no, with ten abstaining, in one private vote. The next day the Senate but not the House passed the funding bill, and Edgar called a one-day special session for December 2 so Chicago Democrats who supported his plan could pressure recalcitrant House members to approve it.

  Barack announced that in January he would introduce a proposed amendment to the Illinois Constitution guaranteeing health care coverage for all state residents, and he and Michelle teamed up to organize a University of Chicago panel to discuss the need for juvenile justice reform based on a newly published book by Bill Ayers. Bill had developed a strong interest in the subject as a result of his wife Bernardine Dohrn’s work directing Northwestern Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, and Bill’s book, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, like the Center, focused on the local Cook County Juvenile Court. Written in a conversational style, the book included a description of Hyde Park stating that “our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives a block from our home and adds, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of ‘safe neighborhood watch.’”

  At the November 20 U of C event, “Juvenile Justice: Predators or Children,” Bill read from his book before Barack, his law school colleague Randolph Stone, two teachers from the Cook County Temporary Detention Center, and a former offender who had spent seven years at that Center offered their comments. Bill made clear his stance that “We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn’t suddenly an adult.” Barack shared Bill’s view that the legal system treated too many juveniles as adults, telling the Defender that “the current bill unnecessarily incarcerates nonviolent offenders.” Barack also publicly recommended Bill’s book, telling the Chicago Tribune it was “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”45

  For the third Saguaro gathering, Barack had an easy drive to Indianapolis, where Mayor Stephen Goldsmith hosted the event, but in Illinois, momentum began to build to consider campaign finance reform during the legislature’s upcoming spring session. The Joyce Foundation and Southern Illinois University, the institutional home of former U.S. senator Paul Simon and his now-deputy Mike Lawrence, agreed to put a combined $100,000 behind “Making Campaign Finance Reform Happen.” With that funding, the widely respected Lawrence spoke with the chiefs of staff to all four legislative leaders, starting with Senate Republicans’ Carter Hendren, and had them ask that their bosses select a caucus member to take part in such a working group. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t give me a hotdog” eager for press coverage, Lawrence said, because he hoped to build consensus behind closed doors before going public with any specifics.

  Not by coincidence, Simon’s longtime friend Ab Mikva, the now-retired federal appellate judge who had served alongside Simon three decades earlier in Springfield, called Emil Jones and suggested that Jones name Barack as the Senate Democrats’ representative. Almost a year had passed since Barack first asked Jones to give him “tough assignments,” and Barack immediately said “sure” when Jones followed through on Mikva’s suggestion. Senate Republicans named Barack’s Judiciary Committee colleague Kirk Dillard, a former Edgar aide who was also close to Pate Philip, the most crucial of the Four Tops, to represent them. House Republicans chose Jack Kubik, a Cook County suburbanite who already had announced he would leave the legislature after 1998 and whom Illinois Common Cause executive director Jim Howard thought was “hugely trusted and respected on both sides of the aisle.” House Speaker Michael Madigan selected Gary Hannig, a trusted deputy from rural Montgomery County, south of Springfield. As Howard explained, “Gary was Mike Madigan.” Lawrence and Dillard knew each other from the Edgar administration, and a few months later Lawrence would remark that Barack, like Kirk, “was viewed as a rising star,” but Dillard and Carter Hendren wondered if Emil Jones’s selection of someone as junior as Barack meant “the Democrats really didn’t think it was going to go anywhere.”

  But Barack’s interest was sincere, and he devoted his last Hyde Park Herald column of 1997 to advocating “a tough gift ban prohibiting legislators and top state officials from receiving anything of value from someone who does business or lobbies with the state.” Barack also called for “a shorter campaign season” by moving Illinois’s primary elections from March to May or September.

  Over the holidays, Barack and Michelle made their annual trip to Honolulu to see Madelyn Dunham, who was now seventy-five years old. During the fall, Madelyn had been one of Barack’s top five campaign contributors, with her $1,000 equaling a Teamsters Union local plus two well-known Illinois donors, Irving Harris and Lewis Manilow, and topped only by Tony Rezko, who gave a total of $4,500. Right after New Year’s, the law school’s winter quarter began, with Barack’s Voting Rights class drawing an unusually small enrollment of eleven, perhaps because it met early Monday mornings and late Friday afternoons. It was “such an intimate class,” Indira Saladi remembered, and Felton Newell was impressed by “how well he knew the material.” Students’ grades were based on their twenty-plus-page papers, for which Barack met with them individually, and at the end of term Barack’s overall teacher-evaluation score returned to an impressive 9.6 out of 10.46

  Barack’s primary concern in Springfield remained the Juvenile Justice Reform Act. He told the Defender that the updated, 310-page draft “still doesn’t contain the kind of prevention strategies or mechanisms I think need to be more emphasized.” He also explained that he was backing John Schmidt, who had been an important supporter ever since Project VOTE!, over black gubernatorial contender Roland Burris because Schmidt had sought his endorsement before Burris entered the race. Both men also faced conservative southern Illinois congressman Glenn Poshard for the opportunity to take on Republican consen
sus candidate George Ryan in the November general election. Asked by the Defender to address the burgeoning controversy over President Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Obama “said it’s too early to tell if Clinton should resign.”

  On January 29, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Carl Hawkinson brought the Juvenile Justice Reform Act, on which he had worked for years and which the House had now overwhelmingly passed, to the Senate floor. The committee had approved the bill 9–0, with Barack voting present, the day before, and although Hawkinson expressly thanked Obama “for his work on the bill,” he knew Barack would again vote present—a polite no—on the Senate floor. Barack explained his position in the lengthiest remarks he had made since arriving in the Senate a year earlier.

  I think there are some wonderful things in this bill, and I think the basic principles underlying this bill are terrific. I think the notion that we should catch young people early and make sure that they understand that there are consequences to their actions is vital and critically important, particularly in urban areas. . . . I think the notion that we should get parents responsible for the actions of their children is vital.