Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  The Senate on April 3 unanimously approved Barack’s racial profiling bill and his one requiring the taping of police interrogations in murder cases. On both measures, Barack’s many hours of private negotiations with law enforcement representatives had paid off so handsomely that no opposition remained to either of the once-controversial bills. New downstate senator Bill Haine, a veteran Madison County state’s attorney who had become the Judiciary Committee’s most conservative Democrat, was very involved in the videotaping discussions and felt Barack “did an extremely effective job in negotiating the bill with all parties.” Judiciary Committee chairman John Cullerton agreed, saying Barack “did a phenomenal job on it.” Democratic staff attorney Jim Dodge realized that Barack had focused on “trying to find a middle way through,” and Office of the State Appellate Defender representative Kathy Saltmarsh concurred, explaining that Barack’s “a negotiator and a compromiser.” Even Republican death penalty proponent and former state’s attorney Ed Petka termed the videotape bill “tremendous work,” admitting that “a year ago, if someone had said I would be supporting this, I would have told them they were bereft of their senses.” Barack’s hard work paid off politically too: while John Cullerton remained neutral between Barack and Dan Hynes, Bill Haine was so impressed that he readily agreed to support Barack’s Senate candidacy despite his conservative downstate district.

  Linking the racial profiling bill to Cullerton’s seat belt measure, which also was approved that same day, had been smart because the Illinois State Police’s strong desire for a provision that would reduce highway traffic deaths led law enforcement groups to agree to Barack’s requirement that officers record the apparent ethnic identity of every driver they stopped. During one decisive meeting, Barack articulated that the crux of the issue was officers’ perceptions, not census categories. “It doesn’t make any difference what race they are. What we’re looking for here is what race you think they are. So that’s why we want you to put down the race. So you don’t have to worry about getting it wrong—it’s what’s in your mind is what racial profiling is all about.” John Cullerton and Jim Dodge remembered the moment. “Whoa, you’re right,” someone responded. “It just really stopped the whole conversation, and everything sort of turned at that moment,” with law enforcement opposition evaporating.

  Barack told the Chicago Defender’s Chinta Strausberg that approval of both bills on the same day was “historic,” and he stressed the value of videotaping to Chicago’s suburban Daily Herald. “What we’re trying to do here is provide as much certainty as possible that when a confession is introduced that in fact it is airtight.” Later that afternoon, National Safety Council lobbyist Chuck Hurley, who had mustered crucial support for the seat belt and the profiling bills, was walking away from the capitol when he heard someone call out “Chuck!” He turned to see a black Jeep Cherokee stalled in the middle of South 2nd Street: Barack had run out of gas. Hurley and a friend helped Barack push it to the curb. “I hope your campaign doesn’t run out of gas,” Chuck teasingly remarked, but the day’s successes lingered long after that minor embarrassment. Soon a Chicago Tribune editorial heralded the bills’ passage, emphasizing that “an enormous amount of credit for the Senate videotaping bill goes to the diligence of state Sen. Barack Obama.”12

  In Chicago, Barack drove to his campaign’s first event for gay and lesbian supporters, arriving a bit late and parking illegally. Kevin Thompson, Michelle’s onetime City Hall colleague who now lobbied for the U of C Hospitals, had volunteered to organize the gathering at a Boystown bar, and Barack “just knocked it out of the park” when he addressed the fewer than twenty people who attended. Obama for Illinois knew it could announce more than $500,000 in total contributions to date in its mid-April FEC filing for the first quarter of 2003, and U.S. representative Lane Evans had been so impressed by Barack that he offered his endorsement. Equally important, as of April 1 the campaign staff almost doubled in size with the hiring of two new deputy campaign managers, Audra Wilson and Nate Tamarin. Audra, a 1998 law school graduate who had been working for John Bouman at Chicago’s National Center on Poverty Law, had offered to volunteer for the campaign before Dan and Barack recruited her to take a full-time post handling the issues coordination and financial tasks Cynthia Miller had overseen before her departure. Nate, a young campaign veteran who had worked under both Pete Giangreco and Terry Walsh, was recommended by them to Shomon, who hired him to handle field operations after Dan’s friend Andrew Boron, an issues volunteer who had just gotten married, declined to join the team. Barack and David Axelrod spoke with Peter Coffey, the politically well-connected director of government affairs for the Chicago Botanic Garden, about becoming campaign manager. Coffey declined, telling Barack he wanted to remain at the botanic garden until a bond authorization bill he had been working on became law. But Coffey told Axelrod, “I did not want to be unemployed in March,” after the primary, which Coffey expected Dan Hynes would win. “I was pretty blunt with David,” because “I didn’t believe Obama could raise enough money.”

  Barack continued to devote serious time to fund-raising, meeting two influential donors, Raghuveer Nayak, a wealthy owner of outpatient surgery centers, and Tony Rezko for lunch on back-to-back days. An evening event hosted by Andy Davis and a keynote speech at a United Auto Workers (UAW) conference were sandwiched in between. Just two days earlier, a Chicago Tribune story had reported that Rezko and his business partner Jabir Herbert Muhammad, the son of the late Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, continued to play major roles in Cook County politics thanks to their prominent alliance with county board president John Stroger. The drive to the UAW event in Ottawa, Illinois, was Nate Tamarin’s first real one-on-one exposure to Barack. “Look, when Shomon and I go on road trips, we like to fart, and we like to smoke cigarettes together,” Nate remembered Barack telling him. Barack was driving, but as Ottawa drew near, he began reading his notes as well, which “was kind of disconcerting.” But “I smoked, and he smoked,” Nate explained, “so we bonded over that.” Barack gave a “tremendously good speech,” and when Nate teased him about playing Jay Z songs on the drive back to Chicago, Barack switched to “Indonesian flute music.”

  Thanks to Barack’s hectic campaign schedule, he and Michelle were rarely attending Trinity church, and Trinity’s Sunday-evening services had never been their choice, so they were not present on April 13 for one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s most impassioned denunciations of the U.S. government. Titled “Confusing God and Government,” Wright’s stinging sermon culminated in a passage that would stir controversy years later: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no. Not ‘God Bless America!’ God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God, and she is supreme!”13

  Obama for Illinois bragged about its $522,000 fund-raising total to date in a news release and in Obama Weekly News, an information-packed e-mail that alerted some one thousand recipients to staff hirings and upcoming events. In comparison, the Associated Press reported that Gery Chico had raised $763,000 in the first quarter of 2003 and Dan Hynes $897,000, while Barack’s intake totaled just $232,000. Barack’s campaign had maintained minimal spending, so it had $356,000 on hand, but Hynes had $801,000 and Chico $1,220,000. Blair Hull reported a balance of only $237,000, but that was after his increasingly staff-heavy effort spent almost $900,000 during the quarter. Barack’s list of contributors showed four different members of the Crown family each giving $2,000, and Pritzker relatives likewise totaled $8,000, but thanks to Hull, the millionaires’ amendment had allowed John Rogers to chip in an additional $5,000 and both Andy Davis and young banker Alexi Giannoulias to give $4,000 apiece. Valerie Jarrett’s boss Dan Levin and his wife Fay Hartog-Levin each contributed $3,000, as did black financier Lou Holland. Old
friends Rob Fisher, Al Johnson, Newt Minow, Allison Davis, John Schmidt, and Bettylu Saltzman all added $1,000 or $2,000 apiece.

  With April 15 approaching, and Barack and Michelle owing the IRS more than $16,500 in additional federal tax payments on a combined income of $260,000, Obama for Illinois on April 10 finally paid them the $10,500 balance from Barack’s loans to his old congressional campaign. Michelle’s $98,000 salary at the U of C Medical Center topped Barack’s $69,000 at the law school, but his $58,000 as a state senator and $34,000 from Miner Barnhill plus Joyce Foundation board fees went a good way toward helping with the more than $23,000 they had paid to babysitter Sonya Hawes. Home life was a bit more convenient, with Barack having shifted his state Senate district office from East 71st Street to nearby 1013 East 53rd Street in Hyde Park, but every weekday he was in Chicago was spent at the Michigan Avenue campaign office, where he attempted to maximize his “call time.”

  A “Campaign Prospectus” prepared for potential donors envisioned raising up to $4 million by the March 2004 primary, enough to win the race with a projected 438,000 votes—190,000 from Chicago, 176,000 from suburban Cook and the surrounding collar counties, and 72,000 downstate. The prospectus said that “Barack is on the phone a minimum of four hours daily,” and listed three dozen finance committee members, including Robert Blackwell, Marty Nesbitt, Judy Byrd, Allison Davis, Judd Miner, Ab Mikva, Newt Minow, Jim Reynolds, Tony Rezko, John Rogers, Steven Rogers, Bettylu Saltzman, John Schmidt, and Al Johnson; wealthy Chicago worthies John Bryan, Dan and Fay Hartog-Levin, Christie Hefner, Abby O’Neil, Penny Pritzker, and Marjorie Benton; black financial world figures Lou Holland, Susan McKeever, Quintin Primo, Stephen Pugh, André Rice, and Stuart Taylor; plus well-known lobbyist Alfred Ronan.14

  On Monday, April 14, Capitol Fax noted that Peter Fitzgerald had released new poll results showing him leading Dan Hynes by 44 to 38 percent and Barack by 49 to 29 percent in hypothetical 2004 matchups. Then, that evening, word spread that Fitzgerald had begun telling friends he would not run for reelection. Many Republicans were astounded, with state senator Dave Syverson telling the Chicago Tribune, “I just can’t imagine that,” but privately Fitzgerald had long been mulling this decision, irrespective of any poll numbers. Not yet forty-three years old and the father of young children, Fitzgerald was now ambivalent about being a U.S. senator because “what it did to your family life I did not enjoy.” He returned to Illinois on more weekends than not to make appearances, ending up in “a Days Inn in Carbondale or Peoria” and missing out on a good portion of his children’s young lives. By fall 2002, Fitzgerald had begun questioning whether he had the appetite to run another statewide campaign. “Do I really want to spend the next two years away from my family, raising money, on the road? I thought it was a very hard life,” and as he pondered the choice, he increasingly thought that “I want to watch my son’s Little League games the next two years.” In addition, being a U.S. senator had turned out to be fairly underwhelming. “There were a lot of frustrations in the Senate” because “it seemed like nothing ever got done.”

  Then a third factor entered Fitzgerald’s mind. Five years earlier, when he and Obama overlapped in the state Senate, Peter had found Barack “so cool and passionless and serious.” But one winter Sunday morning, Fitzgerald was at an African American church in Roseland when Barack stopped by. “It was clear that he was going around to all the churches on the South Side,” but now, unlike in 1997–98, Fitzgerald was “incredibly impressed with how good a speaker” Barack had become, “much better than he had been years earlier.” Now Barack “really has the cadence,” and listening to him led Fitzgerald to think “what an asset a voice can be in politics,” that “an important part of Barack’s ability is his voice.”

  More important, listening to Barack that Sunday morning in Roseland “confirms my impression that Barack will win the Democratic primary. I’m already thinking that I’m not sure I want to run for reelection,” but having bested Carol Moseley Braun in 1998, Fitzgerald understood what an advantage a sole African American candidate had in a multicandidate Democratic primary. After that morning, “I knew his talents, and I don’t think they were generally known” then. In addition, Barack is “going to get all the editorial board support,” so to Peter it seemed “almost certain” that Barack would be his Democratic opponent if he ran for reelection. “I felt that I could beat all the others, but I really had no desire to have a piece of Obama in that campaign. I didn’t know how I would run against him. I knew he’d be very tough,” since Barack had been “very careful in his years in Springfield” and “I didn’t think there was anything to attack.” Reflecting on that anticipated matchup, “I thought, ‘Boy, this is going to be really hard,’” and why spend two years away from his family if the all-but-certain likelihood was a November 2004 loss to Barack.

  When Emil Jones heard that news about Fitzgerald’s decision, he said, “I guess he’s fearful of losing to Senator Barack Obama.” Speculation immediately focused on whether former governor Jim Edgar would run in Fitzgerald’s stead, but Barack told the Hyde Park Herald he was surprised by the news. “It’s rare for a U.S. Senator to step down after one term, but it indicates he had been disengaged from the job,” Barack stated. The Chicago Defender headlined its story “Fitzgerald’s Backing Out Pushes Obama in Front,” and Barack voiced an upbeat message to Chinta Strausberg: “If I am effective in presenting a message of change, if I am providing solutions to the health care crises that people are experiencing, the joblessness that exists in our community, the lack of education opportunity, then I can win irrespective of who else is in the race.” Barack also said he would have enough money to win: “When you combine those dollars with an energized African American voter base and effective coalition building with other progressive sectors of the population, we think we have a recipe for victory.” A few pages further on, a Defender editorial told readers that Barack was “the leading force in a battle to move Illinois closer to an enlightened health care system.”15

  Amid reports that President George W. Bush had called Jim Edgar to ask him to enter the Senate race, Barack devoted a Hyde Park Herald column to arguing for raising Illinois’s minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.50 per hour. When Rod Blagojevich extended his predecessor’s moratorium on executions, Barack told the Associated Press “it’s a reasonable position for the governor to take,” an unsurprising reaction which nonetheless appeared in the New York Times. But fund-raising remained Barack’s focus. He called on prominent Jewish attorney Alan Solow to pick up a $1,000 check. “We had a long conversation,” Solow recalled, and “talked a lot about terrorism,” with Barack saying that “the first duty of a government was to protect its own people from physical harm.” Barack explained that “I’m against the war in Iraq, but I’m not a pacifist,” and over the course of the conversation, he impressed Solow as “the most thoughtful politician and maybe the most thoughtful person about political things that I had ever spent any time with. I was really, really impressed,” and when Barack asked Alan to join his finance committee, Solow asked what was expected. When Barack answered simply a pledge to raise at least $10,000, Alan readily signed on: “I was pretty hooked.”

  The next evening Barack’s campaign held an “After Work Fundraising Reception for Young African American Professionals” at “a trendy new jazz and soul venue” in the West Loop featuring a live band and an open bar. Tickets were $100, and Senate colleagues Emil Jones and Jacqueline Collins, a St. Sabina member whom Father Mike Pfleger had encouraged to run for a newly drawn seat, joined Barack along with supportive aldermen Leslie Hairston and Ted Thomas. “I am your instrument potentially to create a new kind of politics,” Barack told the five-hundred-person crowd, and the event brought in more than $50,000. The next day Barack joined former U.S. senator Paul Simon on stage at a DeKalb County Democratic fund-raiser before making an overnight trip to Washington to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner. Back in Chicago, David Axelrod and h
is wife Susan hosted a Monday-evening, $250-per-person fund-raiser for Barack at their home on the forty-sixth floor of Lake Point Tower, overlooking Lake Michigan. “I’m confident I’ll have enough money to develop a message and motivate core voters,” Barack told one journalist, while admitting, “I don’t have the name of a Kennedy, Daley, or Hynes.” He boastfully added that “if I already had $5 million in the bank, this race would be over.”16

  Attention remained focused on Jim Edgar, with Capitol Fax reporting that GOP insiders believed the odds of him entering the race were about 60–40. Barack gave “a very moving talk” at the kickoff of the National Community Building Network’s tenth annual conference, and as combat operations in Iraq ended, he told the Chicago Defender that “winning the peace is going to be the major issue.” Raghuveer Nayak hosted a Sunday fund-raising brunch for Barack, after which Barack joined the other Senate candidates at Evanston Democrats’ annual meeting. Northwestern University’s student newspaper reported that when the contenders were asked to name their top issue, “Obama said he is most concerned with the USA Patriot Act.” Dan Hynes and Blair Hull cited the economy, Gery Chico education, and Joyce Washington prioritized universal health care. The next day, with the Defender’s Chinta Strausberg in the audience, Barack returned to a similar message at a Chicago hearing of his Health and Human Services Committee. Warning of “draconian cuts in health coverage” at the hands of the Bush administration, Barack argued that a pending reform plan would give states “a strong incentive to drop people from Medicaid to solve a future budget crisis.”

  While Barack headed downstate to speak to Adams County Democrats in Quincy, his top competitors faced other challenges. Gery Chico had had great fund-raising success early on, but now Crain’s Chicago Business was warning that Altheimer & Gray, the law firm that Chico headed, was “slashing jobs and salaries” after already having lost thirty-seven attorneys, and a retired managing partner wondered whether the firm might fold. Chico’s brother Craig “essentially ran the campaign” in tandem with consultant Eric Adelstein and newly hired manager Michael Golden, a former television newsman, but as Altheimer & Gray’s troubles mounted, Chico’s call time plummeted. “He was under an intense amount of pressure and stress,” finance director Kelly Dietrich remembered, and both Dietrich and operations director Megan Crowhurst, Chico’s first salaried staffer, saw their candidate becoming more withdrawn as the law firm’s crisis deepened.