Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Overall, Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller declared 1998 had been “the most boring legislative session in memory,” and with Illinois running an annual budget surplus of almost $1 billion, there had been a raft of “new spending plans . . . dreamed up.” Legislative leaders had allocated $200 million toward “member initiatives,” or what the Tribune called “a massive buffet of pork projects,” particularly for districts where legislators faced competitive fall races. Barack bragged that he and Hyde Park state representative Barbara Flynn Currie, the number-two House Democrat, had obtained $4.6 million for the rebuilding of the Lake Michigan shorefront between 55th and 79th Streets. Looking toward the fall, Barack’s Springfield aide, Dan Shomon, along with Courtney Nottage, Emil Jones’s chief legal counsel, prepared to challenge the prospective third-party Senate candidacy of Myra Handy, a South Shore podiatrist. Ron Davis and Tom Johnson, just like two years earlier, filed a challenge before the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. Handy failed to respond to multiple notices or to appear when a public hearing was convened, and the board barred her from the ballot for not filing the necessary paperwork.53

  Just after the spring session, Barack and Michelle attended the annual benefit dinner of the Arab American Action Network, a group their friends Mona and Rashid Khalidi had helped found several years earlier. Many of the group’s Palestinian and Jordanian American members lived or worked in the westernmost portion of Barack’s district. The Obamas wrote a tax-deductible check for $100 and sat at a table with the Khalidis to Michelle’s right and keynote speaker Edward Said and his wife on Barack’s left. Barack had heard Said speak many times before, at the front of a Columbia University classroom more than fifteen years earlier, when he and Phil Boerner had thought Said was a “flake.”

  Rashid Khalidi had just written an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune stressing that “much of the Palestinian population is today much worse off than when the Oslo accords were signed in 1993,” yet Khalidi was in no way anti-Jewish, explicitly noting that the Holocaust was “the modern era’s greatest human atrocity.” When conversing with Barack about Palestine, Mona Khalidi recalled, “you felt that he understood, and you felt that he was not taking an opposite position,” but he always seemed “very, very careful” about what he said. At home in East View, where the Obamas had a German-Jewish neighbor who was a passionate supporter of Israel and an active member of the NRA-affiliated Illinois State Rifle Association, it was much the same. Harry Gendler remembers Barack as a “very polite person” who willingly tolerated “me poking fun at him about environmental issues,” particularly Barack driving to and from Springfield all by himself in his Jeep Cherokee. “Barack and I had a running joke” about that not being green, and Gendler also watched as “Barack always hid his smoking,” often “smoking in the car.” Barack was “happy to talk about the Second Amendment,” but whenever Harry raised the subject of Israel, Barack’s demeanor changed. “He would turn poker face, turn ice cold” and “told me that we need a more balanced approach—that’s the term he used.” Barack “did not want to have an exchange of ideas or thoughts on that topic” and indeed “always walked away.”

  In early June Barack again participated by phone in the second steering committee meeting for Charles Halpern’s think tank. Halpern recently had had breakfast with Barack in Chicago, and Barack had “emphasized the importance of not becoming another centrist organization taking safe positions on safe issues.” He and Halpern had discussed the “serious possibility” of Barack “giving up law practice & teaching” and devoting “perhaps 75 percent” of his time to head up a Chicago office of the new organization while remaining in the Senate. The next Monday Barack was in Washington, D.C., to speak at a Brookings Institution event addressing “Cities and Economic Revitalization.” Barack focused on the “spatial mismatch between job growth and the people who are unemployed” and a parallel “skills mismatch” that was rooted in “an extraordinarily inequitable system of public education finance.” He also warned that “unless we . . . fundamentally restructure the public schools . . . it’s going to be very difficult to sustain whatever progress has been made” in the economic redevelopment of beleaguered cities. Most problematic were “extraordinarily poor and isolated communities” like Chicago’s Englewood, where residents needed access to transportation to locales where jobs were more available. Barack recounted how a recent meeting of the influential Commercial Club of Chicago’s Civic Committee had discussed “a fairly bold package of proposals to deal with the regionalism issue.” Major corporations had exhibited “some recognition of mutual self-interest” in the plan, but House Speaker Mike Madigan had said “‘it sounds Soviet’ . . . which indicates that there is going to be some political resistance,” Barack drily observed. Later that week in D.C. the Saguaro Seminar’s fifth meeting took place, focusing on faith and social capital. Martha Minow remembered that with participants like conservative Republican political operative Ralph Reed, there was “a big fight” featuring “fiery debates about religion and politics.” That “was not a happy meeting,” she recalled.

  In mid-June Barack was reelected chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge board, and he also joined the board of Leadership for Quality Education, the Commercial Club offshoot now headed by his friend John Ayers. In early July Barack completed a lengthy questionnaire for Project Vote Smart detailing his position on a large number of issues. “Abortions should be legally available in accordance with Roe v. Wade,” and affirmative action was desirable across the board, but Barack endorsed only three out of sixteen principles concerning crime, including “increase state funds for programs which rehabilitate and educate inmates” and “provide funding for military-style ‘boot camps’ for first-time juvenile felons.” On the economy, Barack checked “increase funding for state job-training programs,” and on education he endorsed charter schools but not vouchers for students’ parents. He also supported “state-funded tuition and fees” for students attending public institutions of higher education who maintain a B average. Barack chose “undecided” on term limits for legislators, on a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, and now, unlike in 1996, on same-sex marriage too. On a list of eight “social issues” such as “increase state funding for Head Start,” Barack endorsed all except “favor banning smoking in public places,” a reflection of his own ongoing addiction to cigarettes. On state taxes, he did check “greatly increase” for tobacco, and on state spending he chose “greatly increase” for both K–12 education and health care and “slightly increase” for welfare while endorsing a two-year limit on cash assistance.

  At 3:00 A.M. on Independence Day, July 4, Michelle woke Barack with the news that she was about to give birth. “Things went fairly smoothly” from there, and a few hours later Michelle gave birth to an eight-pound, fifteen-ounce girl whom they named Malia Ann, her middle name honoring Barack’s mother. The baby’s midsummer arrival allowed both doting parents to devote large amounts of time to the newborn, and following Michelle’s maternity leave the U of C allowed her to shift to part-time status once the new academic year began. A Chicago Sun-Times gossip column noted Malia’s birth, and among those sending congratulations was former U.S. senator Paul Simon, who reported that his wife was reading Dreams From My Father and said, “I want to be supporting you for statewide office one of these days.”

  Soon after Malia joined the family, Barack’s aunt Zeituni arrived back in Chicago after seeing Omar Onyango in Boston and then Abon’go Malik in Washington. Staying now at the nearby Ramada Inn where Barack had first announced his candidacy, Zeituni indulged in an excess of shopping, including a desktop computer. When Barack drove her to O’Hare for her return trip to Nairobi, her luggage was $300 overweight and Barack “used his credit card to pay the extra charges.” Zeituni recalled that Barack barely suppressed his anger at the cost, which “did not sit well with him” now that Malia’s birth would further stretch the couple’s already stressed finances.

  Michelle used Malia’s arriva
l to attempt again to get Barack to quit smoking, without success, and the baby’s arrival led to a significant decline in their increasingly spotty attendance at Trinity United Church of Christ. Two weeks after Malia’s birth, Barack again participated by phone in a third steering committee meeting for the new think tank. When a draft budget was prepared covering the next twelve months of the nascent start-up, Barack and another young steering committee member, David Callahan, were penciled in as committing 50 percent of their time to the new venture.

  Barack spent only a little time that summer at Miner Barnhill, but it was a banner season for the small law firm. In mid-June, the Mitsubishi auto company agreed to a $34 million settlement with the EEOC regarding the rampant sexual harassment at its Normal, Illinois, assembly plant, which had first been challenged in the lawsuit that George Galland, Jon Belcaster, and Barack had helped litigate on behalf of several dozen women employees. Mitsubishi had agreed a year earlier to pay $9.5 million to those plaintiffs, but the EEOC settlement benefited about 350 women in what the Tribune called “the biggest sexual-harassment case in U.S. history.” Then, in early August, Judd Miner finally achieved “a clear-cut win” in the long-running Barnett case, alleging that Chicago’s city council districts unfairly disadvantaged black voters. A newly hired Miner Barnhill paralegal, Scott Lynch-Giddings, termed it “a big day at the firm” in his diary, and just how big was documented only months later when the federal district judge hearing the case awarded attorneys’ fees and tax-free costs to Miner Barnhill. Judge Elaine Bucklo ordered Chicago to pay the firm $5,127,994 for attorneys’ time going back to 1992 and an additional $526,472 in documented costs.54

  In mid-August Barack traveled to Carbondale, in far southern Illinois, to witness Governor Jim Edgar sign the campaign finance reform Gift Ban Act into law at the Southern Illinois University Public Policy Institute that Paul Simon and Mike Lawrence directed. Earlier in the summer, Edgar had been sorely tempted to amendatory veto the legislation in an effort to bar the transfer of money from one campaign fund to another, a move that would defenestrate the Four Tops and require repassage of the bill during mid-November’s veto session. That would have guaranteed the easy death of the entire measure, and over the course of the summer, Mike Lawrence “pleaded me out of it,” Edgar recalled. He agreed to approve the bill as passed, as “kind of a favor to Mike and Paul Simon,” calling it “an important step forward” at the signing ceremony, where he thanked the four lead legislators by name. Barack devoted a Hyde Park Herald column to its enactment, noting how “the process was truly bipartisan” and succeeded only because “each of us was willing to take some heat from our respective caucuses.” Barack explained that limits “had no chance of passage,” but he would “continue to be a strong advocate of contribution limits and public financing of campaigns,” because “without such limits and public investment, it’s hard to see how we can fully eliminate the influence of big money over the process.”

  Over the summer, Barack’s district staffer, Cynthia Miller, moved his office seven blocks westward from 2152 East 71st Street to 1741, but Cynthia was “completely done and bored” with handling the minutiae of constituent requests that fell to a state legislator’s local aide. Barack’s district included a good part of the 6th Ward, which earlier that year had acquired an energetic new alderman, Freddrenna Lyle, who “started pushing legislators to come and do things besides legislate.” In mid-September Barack joined Lyle and two city Streets and Sanitation Department representatives to listen to and respond to a two-hundred-person crowd concerned about “garbage pickup, tree-trimming, vacant lots and bushes, weed-cutting, alley cleanliness and rodent control,” none of which a state senator had anything to do with.

  Cynthia recruited her close friend Jennifer Mason to replace her, and both women overlapped for a month in the early fall before Cynthia left for a months-long trip abroad. Both young women received about $2,750 a month in salary, but unknown to Barack, as of August 1998 he on paper acquired an additional district employee, one whom neither he nor anyone else ever met. In fact, “William Higgins” did not exist, but he represented a long-standing Illinois tradition, the “ghost employee.” From 1998 to mid-1999 the ever-elusive Mr. Higgins received $780 a month from the state Senate Democratic caucus, with the stipend increasing to $850 a month in 1999–2000 and $950 per month from July 2000 forward until at least February 2003. Who actually pocketed, or divvied up, the grand total of at least $48,950 in state funds that was paid to Mr. Higgins remains unknown, but Barack had no control over or easy access to the caucus payroll records, which were handled entirely by the Springfield-based Democratic leadership staff.55

  What did concern Democrats statewide were the poor prospects of gubernatorial nominee Glenn Poshard and incumbent U.S. senator Carol Moseley Braun. The southern Illinois congressman’s conservative views, especially on abortion, made him unappealing to many progressive Democrats, but his principled refusal to accept campaign contributions from political action committees left him at a huge disadvantage against his Republican opponent. George Ryan was extremely popular among Springfield insiders, who knew him well from his ten years in the House and eight years each as lieutenant governor and now secretary of state. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller praised Ryan as “a genuinely nice man,” someone who “has always understood that politics is about interpersonal relationships,” and “one of the most loyal politicians you’ll ever meet.” But a growing scandal in the sprawling bureaucracy that issued commercial driver’s licenses threatened to tarnish Ryan’s campaign with reports that up to $150,000 in bribes had been paid into Ryan’s campaign coffers. Three low-level state employees were soon indicted, but what gave the scandal indelible poignancy were reports that a fiery 1994 accident in which six children had died was caused by an illegally licensed truck driver. Polls still showed Ryan maintaining a lead of at least 10 points over Poshard, while Moseley Braun, who had attracted widespread criticism during her first six years in Washington, was trailing conservative young Republican state senator Peter Fitzgerald by a much narrower margin.

  In late September, Barack introduced U.S. representative Jesse Jackson Jr. at the annual dinner of the Chicago chapter of Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century. DL21C, as everyone called it, was a group for aspiring young politicos, so the Jackson-Obama pairing was a natural. Calling Jackson “one of our genuine rising political stars,” Barack said he “exemplifies all that’s good and right and hopeful about politics.” One of DL21C’s key figures, young lawyer John Corrigan, found Barack’s performance more memorable than the main speaker’s, remembering that he “blew me out of the water.”

  In early October the U of C law school’s autumn quarter commenced, with Barack again teaching both Con Law III and Racism and the Law. Con Law was unusually small, with only sixteen students, while the race seminar attracted twenty-eight. It “was packed entirely with people who were liberals,” 2L Jay Hines-Shah remembered, and Barack “would really challenge us, pushing us constantly to examine our beliefs.” Given the subject, the composition of the class was unsurprising, but a good many U of C law students were astonished to learn that the incoming class of 180 1Ls included only one self-identified African American. The number of black law students had been declining for several years, but the composition of the new class of 2001 made it starkly evident that the U of C law school “had a horrible track record for diversity,” as 2L Nat Piggee rightly observed. With Barack teaching only upper-class students and spending hardly any additional time in the building, that decline may have escaped his notice, and Barack’s own student evaluations remained excellent, with those two autumn classes garnering overall marks of 9.17 and 9.07.

  Barack taught both classes while running his own relatively modest reelection campaign against Republican Yesse Yehudah. A host of recently graduated law students, plus young community organizer John Eason, volunteered to do leafleting under the direction of Ron Davis, but when Barack saw a passel of yard signs jointly promotin
g both Yehudah and Moseley Braun, he overreacted. Dan Shomon was on leave managing a Democratic challenge to an incumbent Republican senator in the southwestern suburbs when Barack called. “You’re not going to believe it! There are Yehudah–Moseley Braun signs all over!” “So what?” Dan replied. “He’s a Republican.” “No, no. I could lose. I really could lose,” Barack insisted. “What is wrong with you? You’re not going to lose—you’re the Democrat!” Dan responded. Barack “was in panic mode,” Dan recalled, and Shomon had to call a graphic designer to order up some direct-mail pieces and yard signs so as to assuage Barack’s absurd nervousness. As Democratic chief of staff Mike Hoffmann observed, “Dan did a lot” for Barack.56

  In mid-October Barack submitted handwritten responses to questionnaires from two gay rights groups. He now answered “Undecided” to both “Do you support legalizing same-sex marriage?” and “Would you support a bill to repeal Illinois legislation prohibiting same-sex marriage?” Concerning abortion, he volunteered “perhaps for very young teens” when asked about parental notification requirements regarding pregnant minors. The Chicago Tribune “enthusiastically endorsed” Barack’s reelection, saying he “has emerged from his first term as one of the most impressive members of the General Assembly.” The next weekend, Barack headed to Tarrytown, New York, for the sixth Saguaro Seminar, and Martha Minow remembered Barack showing her a picture of three-month-old Malia and saying that “Michelle was not happy that he was away” from home. Participants were so impressed with Barack’s ability to synthesize and reframe others’ comments in ways that demonstrated their underlying common ground, Minow recalled, that “we started to nickname him ‘Governor’” and asked “‘When are you running for president?’ It became a joke.”

  Back in Chicago by Monday, one of Barack’s new soon-to-be Senate colleagues, Kimberly Lightford, came to Miner Barnhill to introduce herself. A trio of younger, Chicago-area senators—Lightford from the Far West Side and adjoining, mainly black suburbs; Ira Silverstein, an Orthodox Jew from the Far North Side; and Lisa Madigan, daughter of House Speaker Mike Madigan, from the Northwest Side—had won their March primaries and faced little more Republican opposition than Barack. Madigan, just thirty-two years old, had an introductory lunch with Barack over the summer, and Democratic leader Emil Jones Jr. told the thirty-year-old Lightford that she was too young for the Senate but should meet both Barack and James Clayborne, saying they were “the future of the Senate.” Barack warned Lightford to temper how much she should expect to accomplish in Springfield, advising her to concentrate on a few particular policy topics. Kim thought Barack was a “very charming, nice guy,” and was all the happier when he pulled out his Friends of Barack Obama checkbook and gave her a $250 campaign contribution.