The debate received little attention, and the Chicago Tribune ignored it entirely. Sun-Times columnist Steve Neal wrote that Dan Hynes “is maintaining a steady lead” in the Democratic race while saying that Barack and Chico had turned in the two best debate performances. The next Sunday Barack campaigned in suburban Oak Park before attending a fund-raiser hosted by Oak Park acquaintances Susan Himmelfarb and Mike and Susan Klonsky. Tuesday was Barack’s SEIU endorsement interview, where he again apologized for his present vote five months earlier. At 7:00 A.M. on Wednesday, Barack did his first rush-hour campaigning at a Chicago L station, at the busy North Side Fullerton stop. A campaign press release announced “Obama Breaks $2 Million Fundraising Barrier” thanks to raising $775,000 between July and September. His campaign had almost $1.5 million in hand, and the next day, Barack again had breakfast with Tony Rezko before heading to Metro East’s St. Clair County and rescheduling his Racism class from Thursday to Friday. On Sunday morning, Barack attended Trinity’s 7:30 A.M. service, and early on Monday, he was at the South Side 95th Street Red Line terminus before meeting with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.37
By mid-October, even while on vacation in Mexico, David Axelrod was drafting a script for the first of Barack’s two initial sixty-second radio ads, scheduled to debut on WVON 103 FM and WGRB 1390 AM the week of October 20. He sent John Kupper an e-mail suggesting “State Senator Barack Obama, candidate for U.S. Senate, talks about his family, his faith and his mission.” His unusual name was explained immediately—“My father was from Kenya”—just as Paul Harstad’s poll results had instructed. “I’ve been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ for fifteen years” established Barack’s Christian bona fides. Axelrod’s suggested closing declared, “Join the movement. Barack Obama for the U.S. Senate.”
The final version, which would air for six weeks, began with a black female announcer using Axelrod’s opening line—“his family, his faith, and his mission”—word for word as David had drafted it. That was followed by Barack saying: “My father was from Kenya, and he was a part of that first generation who came to the United States right after independence. I teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I’ve been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ for the last fifteen years, and my faith as a Christian is deeply important to me; it provides me with the values that inform my politics.” Then back to the announcer: “In Springfield, Barack Obama won battles to extend health coverage to tens of thousands of uninsured children, tax relief for the working poor, a ban on racial profiling, and historic death penalty reforms.” Barack again: “Every person in this country should have basic health care coverage, every child should have a chance to have a decent education, every able-bodied person who wants to work should be able to get a job.” The announcer proclaimed Axelrod’s slogan—“Join the movement. Barack Obama, Democrat for the U.S. Senate”—before the required closing: Barack said, “This is Barack Obama, and I approve this message,” and the announcer said, “Paid for by Obama for Illinois Inc.”
Two overlapping versions of the second ad featured four figures well known throughout black Chicago: Father Michael Pfleger, Operation PUSH’s female Rev. Willie Barrow, Far South Side state senator Rev. James Meeks, and West Side congressman Danny K. Davis. In one, Rev. Barrow called Barack “a proven leader” and “the most qualified candidate.” She declared that “Barack Obama stands up for us,” and Barack said, “On health care, the war in Iraq, and so much more, our voices haven’t been heard,” before the announcer again invited listeners to “Join the movement.”
The second began with the announcer saying, “Respected voices within our community agree. State senator Barack Obama for the United States Senate. Here’s Reverend and Senator James Meeks.” “Barack Obama is a leader among leaders. We look to him in the state Senate when there is a tough and a difficult decision,” Meeks asserted. “Barack Obama will be a voice for the little guy, for the common person, a senator who’s concerned about those who are unemployed, about those with no health care, about those who are paying these high prices for prescription drugs.” “Here’s Congressman Danny K. Davis,” the announcer said. “All of us will benefit from a Barack Obama in the Senate. As Barack begins to talk, America will say, ‘Here is another great voice, another great possibility, another great potential to move this country forward,’” Davis intoned. “Join the movement. Barack Obama, Democrat for U.S. Senate,” the announcer declared.
Barack’s campaign began organizing a rally for Saturday, November 1, at Pleasant Ridge Missionary Baptist Church on the West Side, where they hoped to garner footage for future ads. Ten days earlier, Barack was at an evening planning meeting at the popular MacArthur’s Restaurant when “some young men came in, sort of crashed the meeting,” Barack recounted. “They came in, and they said, ‘You know what, Senator Obama, you should have respected us in coming here. You should have contacted us first.’ I said ‘Well, I didn’t know about you.’ And one of them I did know, and I said ‘I’ll give you the number.’ And they were kind of confused, and they’re frustrated and angry . . . ‘We feel as if we’ve been ignored too long . . . that all the politicians . . . y’all don’t care, and y’all have failed us.’ That’s what they said: ‘Y’all have failed us,’” and “I told them, I said, ‘You’re right. I agree. We have failed. We failed because somewhere along the line we decided that it was standard operating procedure for half of the young men in Chicago to be out of work and out of school.’” Barack promised them, “Just because we’ve failed in the past does not mean that we have to fail in the future,” and the gang members left.38
The next morning, Barack flew to Washington for a fund-raising event at the home of African American power broker Vernon E. Jordan. About fifty Democratic insiders, including fund-raising consultant Joe McLean, old Law Review friend Julius Genachowski, and well-known attorney Greg Craig listened as Barack spoke from Jordan’s staircase. For some, it was their first exposure to Barack, and Craig was hugely impressed. Back in Illinois, Emil Jones Jr. and Jill Rock, Jones’s staff operations director, reenergized Democrats’ public pension investment reform efforts, which had lain largely dormant since 2001. The Illinois State Board of Investment (ISBI) had a new executive director, William Atwood, and several new board members, including Barack’s close friend and former law firm colleague Allison Davis, whom Tony Rezko had proposed. The ISBI board moved to allocate a minimum of 5 percent of its funds to minority-owned firms, and Jones’s staff pressed the board of the State Universities Retirement System (SURS) to detail its use of minority fund managers. SURS reported that 7.1 percent of its broker commissions were going to African American firms, but Jones moved to add further oversight, creating a special Senate Select Committee on Public Pension Investments and naming Barack as one of four Democratic members. Bill Atwood remembered Barack asking, “How are we doing with emerging managers?” whenever they ran into each other, and John Rogers of Ariel Capital recalled that Barack “did a great job of coming and helping us as African American business leaders connect into Springfield.”
On Saturday morning, Barack and his five Democratic opponents all addressed Citizen Action of Illinois’s eighty-nine-member policy council. “You need a U.S. senator who’s not going to be thinking ‘How’s this going to play?’ but one who leads,” Barack told the sympathetic group, and he won their Senate endorsement with 88 percent support. The Chicago Tribune’s first Senate poll found the yet-to-declare Maria Pappas drawing 16 percent support. Dan Hynes and Barack trailed with 12 and 9 percent, respectively, but 45 percent of Democrats said they were undecided. Hynes launched his first television ad that same day, telling viewers that “if building schools, roads, and hospitals is right for Iraq, then it’s right for America too.” The diversity of Barack’s campaign outreach was highlighted on two back-to-back days when he delivered the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Illinois State Baptist Convention and then held a press conference to publicize his support in the gay and lesbian com
munity. Michelle’s longtime friend Kevin Thompson had taken the lead in pulling the group together, and although only one reporter, Tracy Baim from the LGBT Windy City Times, attended, “Obama addressed the room as if it was full,” Baim remembered.
On Friday, October 31, Steve Neal reported that Maria Pappas would finally enter the race the next week. While Dan Hynes “has already raised more than $2 million, has locked in the endorsements of key Northwest and Southwest side Democratic organizations, and has lined up significant Downstate support,” Pappas’s high name recognition and personal popularity throughout the Chicago media market immediately made her a top-tier contender.
Barack’s big Saturday-morning rally drew a bevy of West Side politicians, but Pleasant Ridge Missionary Baptist Church was only half full for the Obama campaign’s cameras. Cook County commissioner Earlean Collins told the crowd, “We have a separate set of laws and justice for African American people in this country,” while praising Barack’s fortitude. “I know that he will deal with the terrorists in the White House because we got a lot of them up there. We talk about terrorists and all of this stuff. We better look at the White House first when we talk about terrorism around this country.” When Barack took the podium, he ran through his Springfield achievements before turning to the Senate race. Referencing how Blair Hull’s wealth could manifest itself on Election Day in what Chicagoans called “street money,” Barack cited the late Mayor Washington: “I remember what Harold said: ‘Take the money, then vote for me.’” Saying “we’ve got five months left in this race,” he promised that “I will go to Washington, and we will start taking this country back.”39
Forty miles to the north, the Illinois Federation of Teachers’ forty-one-member executive board was meeting in Gurnee to decide the powerful union’s Senate race endorsement. Barack’s seven-page IFT questionnaire, recounting his positions during “six long and sometimes lonely years” in Springfield, had raised no hackles and bore several personal touches. “My experiences with my five- and two-year-olds confirm that their brains are sponges,” and Barack rued “teachers who have left the profession out of frustration and enter law school.” A “slam-dunk endorsement” for Barack passed overwhelmingly. Media outlets across the state noted that the IFT’s endorsement undercut both Dan Hynes’s stature as labor’s favorite son and Gery Chico’s efforts to stress education. “It’s a tremendous boost to my campaign,” Barack told State Journal-Register political reporter Bernard Schoenburg. Capital Fax described the IFT’s decision as “potentially huge,” with Miller soon adding that further major union endorsements of Barack’s candidacy—namely SEIU and AFSCME—loomed as well.
As the IFT press conference ended, Bernie Schoenburg asked Barack about his history of illegal drug use, and Barack said that during high school and college, he had smoked marijuana, and “I did inhale.” Schoenburg followed up, asking about anything else, and Barack responded, “I haven’t done anything since I was twenty years old.” Three days later, Schoenburg reported that conversation at the end of a catch-all piece, but within a day or two, someone told him he should look at Dreams From My Father. Schoenburg went to the library and quickly realized that Barack’s abrupt ending of their chat—“That’ll suffice”—cloaked how his response contradicted how Dreams said he had done “a little blow.” Schoenburg reached Barack on his cell phone seeking clarification, and Barack quickly apologized, saying that “I had caught him off guard,” and he “didn’t want to step on” the IFT endorsement by creating other news. “My life is literally an open book,” Barack told Schoenburg, and the next Monday a follow-up story headlined “Frank Talk About Drug Use in Obama’s ‘Open Book’” appeared on page 17 of the Journal-Register.
In a taped interview with journalist Terry Martin that ran statewide on the Illinois Channel, Barack emphasized that the federal Patriot Act had caused “fundamental principles” to be violated thanks to the widespread, warrantless electronic surveillances it allowed. Asked about his Harvard Law Review editing experience, Barack said, “I haven’t read a law review article probably in quite some time.” His hardworking issues team had prepared a sophisticated tax incentive program that would reward “REAL USA Corporations”—REAL as in “Responsible, Accountable, Loyal”—for creating new U.S. manufacturing jobs, provided those companies “limit top management compensation to 50 times the lowest-paid full-time worker.” That press release drew no attention at all, but at a Saturday South Loop candidates’ forum for one hundred top Chicago high school students, Barack’s “outreach director” Randon Gardley was swamped with interested teenagers following Barack’s remarks. “I don’t like to base my decisions on auras of people,” fifteen-year-old Andrew Miller told the Chicago Tribune, but Barack “could be president in 15 years.”40
Capitol Hill’s Roll Call profiled the Illinois race, calling Barack “poised and charismatic” while reporting that Dan Hynes is “widely regarded as the favorite.” Crain’s Chicago Business predicted that in twelve months “Barack Obama narrowly beats Jack Ryan,” but a quick fund-raising trip to Boston was a huge disappointment for Barack. Harvard law professor David Wilkins, who already had donated $5,000, hosted a fund-raiser, but Barack’s former teacher Martha Minow recalled that hardly five people attended. Her law school colleague Elizabeth Warren was one of them, writing a $250 check, and several weeks later David’s wife Ann Marie, a successful music manager, contributed $10,000 to Barack’s campaign too.
Back in Illinois, Barack continued to resist having a driver for his often-hectic schedule of appearances. When Lyndell Luster, a Chicago State University police officer and part-time student, turned up to volunteer after hearing about Barack from a professor close to Emil Jones, both Dan Shomon and Jim Cauley took notice. With the primary race moving into its last four months and more attention focusing on the candidates, neither Dan, Jimmy, nor especially Michelle Obama were keen on Barack being on the road by himself. Randon Gardley often accompanied Barack to African American events, and in late October AFSCME veteran Kevin Watson arrived on staff as base vote director, but Luster’s CSU job meant he routinely carried a sidearm. When Lyndell drove Barack a time or two, mentioning that “I never knew my father” and had experienced some earlier troubles, the two developed a good rapport. Both men smoked, and when Lyndell drew Barack out a bit, seeking assurance that no “secret stuff” would torpedo his campaign, Barack reassured him: “Look, brother, I promise you, none of that stuff will ever surface about me.” Lyndell thought Barack shared his view that “I never have a bad day,” because “I never saw him lose it. He never lost his cool.” Over time Lyndell realized that Barack “had this self-checking mechanism” on his emotions, because “I never saw him get upset.”
No one except Michelle knew Barack better than Dan Shomon, and as the campaign intensified, Dan saw that the increased stress was taking a toll. The most evident indication was that Barack was smoking even more. Almost a decade had passed since Michelle had first made Barack promise to quit smoking once Dreams From My Father was finished, but as Dan knew, Michelle “wasn’t successful as an enforcer.” Barack “would smoke in front of Michelle,” but he especially smoked while driving, and he was “smoking a lot in the Senate campaign.”
Compared to years earlier, Barack also had become more finicky about what he ate. On one downstate drive, Barack “just blew up” because “he wanted some healthy food, and there wasn’t healthy food” anywhere to be found. “We were tired and stressed,” Dan explained, but young Randon Gardley experienced the same thing. Randon too knew that Barack was “pretty even-keeled,” but “the weight of the campaign” plus how “at home it was just a real challenge for him financially” led to “a lot of cigarettes.” Under stress, Barack could “be snappy” and “not a very pleasant person to be around.” Some staffers thought Barack barked more at African American men than at others. “There were some of us that he was a lot more unpleasant with than others,” one put it, and “I noticed the difference and didn’t appreciate
it.”
With the veto session’s final week about to start, a Chicago Tribune profile lambasted Bobby Rush for his “suspiciously punitive” support of Blair Hull over Barack. Noting that Rush’s brother Marlon was drawing a handsome salary as Hull’s deputy campaign manager, African American journalist Don Wycliff wrote that Rush’s behavior “has inspired bitter anger and deep suspicion among many opinion leaders in Chicago’s black community.” Barack tried to persuade veteran Citizen Action leader William McNary to join his campaign to give it further African American heft, but McNary demurred, telling Barack he needed to be less professorial in front of black audiences.
On Monday, November 17, the second big union endorsement fell into place, with SEIU announcing its widely expected endorsement of Barack. House Speaker and state Democratic Party chairman Michael Madigan quickly made official his support for Dan Hynes, but Rockford Register Star political editor Chuck Sweeny warned that “when Hynes’ ward bosses battle Hull’s dollars, the two men could cancel each other out,” allowing Barack to win. Barack joined Jesse Jackson Sr. and other black political leaders at a small pre-Thanksgiving rally in the Loop protesting the Bush administration’s record on job creation, but Jackson was shouted down by the same young black men who had interrupted Barack’s meeting at MacArthur’s a month earlier. Kevin Watson was with Barack and watched as one protester “snatched a microphone” from Congressman Danny Davis while several others were “tearing up people’s signs.” They “were really shouting at Barack,” and Kevin thought “it was such a scary scene,” but Barack was “calm and cool and he’s talking to them.” A Tribune reporter heard Barack say, “I understand you’re angry, brother, and I want to talk to you—please call me” as he handed one young man his card. Barack “was the only one that they allowed to go up there and speak that day,” Kevin remembered.
Rising Star Page 132