Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  From Springfield, Barack headed south to Edwardsville and Marion. State senator Bill Haine, his retired predecessor Evelyn Bowles, and Sheila Simon all praised Barack at a series of campaign events. “Barack and my dad were cut from the same cloth,” Sheila told a Williamson County crowd, using a phrase that tens of thousands of TV viewers would soon hear her use in Barack’s second ad. Paul Simon “was a mentor and role model for me,” Barack told reporters. “I can’t say what he was going to say, but it had been scheduled. He was somebody who I think felt confident that I would carry on the work that he did.”

  In Chicago, the impact of Barack’s first television ad was immediately apparent. An automated SurveyUSA poll of fifteen hundred Democratic voters conducted Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, February 22–24, showed Barack jumping ahead of Blair Hull by 27 to 25 percent, with Dan Hynes at 18. Then SurveyUSA separated out the respondents by day. Among those polled on Sunday and Monday, Hull led Barack 32 to 23 percent, but on Tuesday, the numbers flipped dramatically, with Barack ahead of Hull 32 to 22 percent and now backed by 59 percent of African Americans. Privately, the Hull campaign’s twice-weekly tracking polls told much the same story: Barack now had better than 50 percent support among Cook County white liberals, enough to win the primary with a 35 percent or better plurality. In Thursday morning’s Chicago Tribune, metro columnist Eric Zorn kept up his attack on the now-fading former front-runner, asserting that Blair Hull has “made a mess of his first big test of character.” At midmorning, Hull’s campaign decided to reverse course, reluctantly issuing a pair of statements from Hull and Brenda Sexton announcing that they would jointly ask Cook County Circuit Court to immediately unseal their 1998 divorce file.

  In the midst of the Hull firestorm, the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday made the first major newspaper endorsement in the race, praising Barack as “a rising star with impressive political skills and a keen intellect.” Sun-Times gossip columnist Michael Sneed told readers that three months earlier, a young woman had been found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in a property owned by Blair Hull, but that story passed almost unnoticed as all attention focused on the divorce file. Only on Thursday had Jason Erkes, Hull’s latest communications director, become privy to Brenda Sexton’s 1998 affidavit that Rick Ridder had read six months earlier. “Wow—this is sensational,” Erkes realized, and he immediately began calling Chicago journalists, asking to speak to them off the record in advance of Friday’s formal release of the affidavit. “There’s some sensational words there,” Erkes explained, and “it read much more sensational” than Hull’s frank comments to his aides had led them to anticipate.

  Brenda Sexton also told several of her closest friends about what was coming, and longtime Obama supporter Laura Hunter immediately phoned Dan Shomon, who was on the road with Barack northwest of Chicago. “Holy fuck, Blair is going down. He doesn’t survive this,” Laura told an astonished Shomon, who switched his cell to speakerphone. The most explosive revelation was one single four-letter word: Hull had called Sexton a “cunt” while allegedly threatening her with violence. Shomon immediately called David Axelrod, who was amazed by the specifics. “That’s impossible. Nobody would ever run for Senate with that in their record.” Barack had a more pressing concern. “Call Fred Lebed,” he told Dan. “Find out if Hull’s dropping out, because if he drops out, we’re screwed.” Six years earlier, in 1998, Barack had held off on backing Dan Hynes for comptroller when Lebed was mulling the race, and Shomon referenced that history as soon as Fred answered his phone. “I have a message for you from Barack Obama: You fucking owe us! You better keep Blair in this race!”55

  “Barack’s big concern was that the stuff on Hull was going to come out too soon,” deputy campaign manager Nate Tamarin recalled. “He spent a lot of time worrying about when it was going to come out, and the timing of it and what it would mean for Hynes” if Hull’s departure from the race allowed Hynes to run up a huge margin among white downstate voters. Michelle Obama put it similarly. “As the candidate, you know more about the potential stuff than the public does . . . so you go into this race knowing all your opponents’ issues . . . whether their house is made of bricks or glass. The things that came to pass were completely known to everybody except the public. These were things we talked about at the outset,” even if Sexton’s specific allegations were more explosive than Axelrod, Barack, or most of Hull’s own campaign team had anticipated.

  In her March 12, 1998, affidavit, Brenda Sexton had declared, “Blair is a violent man with an ungovernable temper,” and “I fear for my emotional and physical well-being.” One night in September 1997, “Blair threw a remote control across the room and called me a ‘fucking cunt.’” In early December, he had called her an “evil bitch” and “‘a fucking cunt,’ repeatedly,” rhetorically asking “‘Do you want to die? I am going to kill you, you fucking bitch.’ I was deathly afraid of him.” In early February, she had ordered Blair out of bed, and he “held one of my legs and punched me extremely hard in the left shin. After that, he swung at my face with his fists a couple of times in a menacing manner just missing me.” She had called the police, who arrested Hull, but after Sexton obtained an initial order of protection, prosecutors dismissed it after reviewing the February police report detailing how she had first kicked Hull.

  Friday evening’s newscasts and Saturday morning’s headlines were predictable, if demure on the specific alleged language: “Hull’s Dirty Laundry on Line,” blared the Sun-Times. The Tribune’s Eric Zorn was not alone in wondering why Hull had not made “a full and apologetic disclosure back last summer,” but Hull told the suburban Daily Herald that he had raised that option with his children as well as Sexton. “We felt that the benefit of getting somebody like me in the United States Senate was so much greater” that the political dangers “paled in comparison, and I had to take that risk.” The Sun-Times wrote that Sexton had dropped the protection order within forty-eight hours after a divorce agreement gave her “more than $3 million in cash and property,” and the female friend who had first introduced her to Hull told the paper “it was all about money for Brenda.”

  Sunday morning the Tribune joined the Sun-Times in endorsing Barack as an “outstanding candidate” who “has a proven record of spirited, principled and effective leadership in the legislature.” Even more important, by Sunday Barack’s second TV ad, featuring Sheila Simon, had been on the air since Friday. Entitled “Mentor,” the first two-thirds of the spot featured Sheila’s unidentified voice and old footage of her father. “For half a century, Paul Simon stood for something very special in public life: integrity, principle, and a commitment to fight for those who most needed a voice. State senator Barack Obama is cut from that same cloth. With Paul Simon, Barack led the fight to stop wrongful executions and to pass new ethics and campaign finance laws to clean up our politics.” Then Sheila appeared on camera for the final ten seconds. “I know Barack Obama will be a U.S. senator in the Paul Simon tradition. You see, Paul Simon was my dad.” The FEC-required closing helped too. “I’m Barack Obama, and I proudly approve this message.”

  “It was really lovely the way they put it together,” Sheila thought. Barack’s consultants all realized the importance of the ad. It “may have been a more effective endorsement than had Paul done it himself, because of the emotion involved,” John Kupper thought. Dan Shomon agreed, explaining that Barack “got something better: he got him speaking from the grave.” Crucial to the spot’s power was that Sheila “looks just like him,” Kupper noted. Pete Giangreco understood “how important Paul Simon’s brand was to the emerging Obama brand,” as the two early January focus groups with white suburban women had demonstrated: “that’s what they wanted: they wanted another Paul Simon.” Young African American campaign aide Randon Gardley recalled that “at that point, he was a different kind of candidate. He was no longer a black candidate because he had Sheila Simon’s face and images of her father.”

  Reporters praised Barack’s first two ads. The
suburban Daily Herald said the first one “highlights his accomplishments in Springfield in a quick-hit, easy-to-understand way that makes Obama seem like a candidate of accomplishment.” Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller commended Barack’s “well-produced TV ads,” especially “his ‘beyond the grave’ TV endorsements by the sainted Paul Simon.” For Barack, the depiction of him to tens of thousands of strangers produced a palpable change in his life. Just before the ads started, Barack had told Jim Cauley, “Don’t leave me with any debt” on March 17. “That was his lesson from the congressional” race, Cauley realized: “‘Don’t wake up the day afterwards, if we should lose, and have me owing any money,’” Barack insisted. But the debut of Barack’s first ad, followed just four days later by the affidavit that seemed to torpedo Hull’s chance of victory, led Barack to realize that he might win. “It starts at that moment,” Jim Cauley thought, when Laura Hunter first called Shomon and Barack with the Hull details, but as increasing numbers of passersby now recognized him, Barack began to grasp just what winning would entail. “All of a sudden folks recognize him,” Nate Tamarin remembered, and “he said he couldn’t go to the store without people noticing him,” Cauley added. “He seemed stunned by it,” and Jimmy was “amazed at his incredulousness.” Cauley had come to think that Barack was “more naive than people would care to know,” but “it was quite stunning to watch” Barack comprehend that he was now a public figure. “I’ve been running around this damn state for two years and ain’t nobody known who I am, and now all of a sudden everybody knows who I am.” Jimmy responded with sarcasm: “Well, it’s called TV, son.”56

  The Hull campaign quickly conducted a pair of female focus groups that suggested Sexton’s allegations were not fatal, although Hull feared they were. Rick Ridder, Anita Dunn, and Mike Henry met with Hull and his adult daughters to discuss whether to cut back or suspend the campaign. Dunn and Henry were reluctant to go forward, yet Hull’s daughters felt strongly that their father should not drop out, and Hull agreed, believing that the additional money the campaign would spend would make no difference in his or his children’s future lifestyles. But by early the next week, the Hull campaign’s daily tracking polls showed Barack’s support among both white educated Cook County Democrats and African Americans was above 60 percent. Even among non-Cook whites, Barack’s support moved up to about 25 percent, and in overall statewide tallies, Barack moved upward to 36 percent, then 38, and then 40, with Hull and Hynes mired in the upper teens.

  Paul Harstad completed his second tracking poll for Barack’s campaign on March 1, and his numbers confirmed what Hull’s pollsters were seeing. Barack’s TV ads had dramatically increased both his name recognition and his positive-regard scores. Only 20 percent of black Democrats remained unfamiliar with him, and Joyce Washington’s support among African Americans, once as high as 10 percent, had plummeted to just 1, while Maria Pappas had dropped from 19 to 7. Blair Hull’s negative-regard tally had jumped from 6 to 26 percent, and black voters appeared to be moving to support Barack almost en masse. Sixth Ward alderman Freddrenna Lyle explained that once they learned his life story, “he made my seniors proud. They talked about that. He was everything that they had wanted for their children.”

  Maria Pappas, Dan Hynes, and even Gery Chico now joined Hull and Barack in running TV ads, with a new Hynes spot featuring his wife Christina, a physician. “I know Dan understands the problems of our health care system that I see every day,” she said before an announcer stated that “Hynes has a detailed plan to lower health care costs, insure every child, and protect your insurance coverage when you change jobs.” The ad closed with Dan saying, “I believe we can fix our broken health care system,” but relations between Hynes’s campaign staff and their media consultants were on the verge of breakup too, with observers believing that the quality of Hynes’s excellent 2003 debut ad had not been equaled by subsequent spots. “It became a vacuum of guidance, and that was problematic,” Hynes’s communications director Chris Mather recalled. All the campaigns had to submit a March 1, preprimary FEC filing, and reporters noticed that while Barack still had $1,277,000 cash on hand even after laying out almost $1.8 million since January 1, Hynes’s campaign had only $635,000 available. Hynes’s downstate strategy meant that he had never budgeted for a late TV splurge in the Chicago media market, yet Hull’s collapse now left Hynes unable to respond. “When that vacuum happened, I didn’t have the money to go up on TV in Chicago,” Dan recalled.

  Barack’s campaign had taken in $1,274,000 during the first eight weeks of 2004, with a bevy of $12,000 donors jumping out from Barack’s FEC filing. Some were old friends like John Rogers Jr. and prominent Chicago donor Lewis Manilow, and three more members of the Crown family had each contributed the maximum. Texas junk-bond salesman John Gorman, whom Vernon Jordan had introduced to Barack, and his wife each donated $12,000, as did Sara Lee CEO John Bryan’s wife Neville, financier Sam Zell’s wife Helen, and Abby McCormick O’Neil’s son Conor. Numerous friends like Bettylu Saltzman and Stephen Pugh fell just shy of the ceiling, and two business associates of Tony Rezko, M. A. Dabbouseh and Joseph Aramanda, each kicked in $10,000. In Aramanda’s case, the entire donation actually came from Rezko, another undisputed violation of federal law. The $10,000 apiece from Dabbouseh and Aramanda attracted no attention whatsoever, but a March 2 check in a similar amount from famed basketball star Michael Jordan, a friend of top Barack backer Peter Bynoe, led to a Chicago Sun-Times headline as well as an editorial.57

  Barack continued to attract plaudits. Suburban Daily Herald columnist Burt Constable wrote that Barack “has the best qualifications and the worst name” among the Senate contenders. “Given a chance on the national scene, he’ll soon be on a short list to become our nation’s first African-American president.” In the Sun-Times, African American columnist Mary Mitchell expressed disgust that former U.S. representative Cardiss Collins had joined Bobby Rush in endorsing Blair Hull. “When a black person has a real chance of going to the U.S. Senate, and a former Black Panther campaigns for the other guy, you have to wonder whether black politics has really made much progress.” Mitchell noted that “a candidate who is embraced by many as a rising star on the political scene has to prove to some voters that he is not too black and to others that he is black enough.”

  In the wake of Hull’s divorce allegations, journalists began asking why court documents concerning Republican Senate front-runner Jack Ryan’s 1999 divorce from his ex-wife Jeri were also sealed. Ryan cited issues involving the couple’s young son, but Jeri, an actress and former Miss Illinois better known for her roles in Star Trek: Voyager and Boston Public than for TV films like Co-Ed Call Girl, was even more of a celebrity than Jack. Behind the scenes, journalistic curiosity was piqued because Rod McCulloch, the campaign manager for Republican long shot John Borling, had quietly begun spreading the word about what the documents contained. Three years earlier, when Ryan had been considering a 2002 Senate run, McCulloch had spoken with him about that possibility. “What if my ex-wife comes to Illinois and accuses me of being a sexual deviant?” Ryan had asked a startled McCulloch. “What the hell does that mean?” McCulloch wondered, but Ryan pulled back. At the outset of the current race, Ryan had required his consultants and top staffers to sign confidentiality agreements, but one day McCulloch received a phone call from a consultant who asked, “Do you want to see what Jack Ryan’s hiding?” McCulloch said yes, and “they come to my office . . . they lay it out and open it up to the pages in question, and there it is.” Given the agreement, McCulloch was allowed to read quickly but not copy the documents, and he immediately called his candidate, who then discussed the situation with at least two other Republican contenders. A March 4 Sun-Times headline signaled what was going on: “Senate Rivals Urge Ryan to Unseal Divorce Records.” Borling stated that “Jack Ryan is going to have to own up with respect to some of those questions about sealed court records,” and Tribune divorce specialist Eric Zorn took Ryan aside to ask whether Ryan had forced hi
s ex-wife “to go to sex clubs.” Ryan denied it, but when Sangamon County Republican Party chairman Irv Smith queried the candidate about rumors of “kinky sex,” Ryan had responded: “How do you define ‘kinky sex’?” Smith remembered. “He didn’t deny anything.”

  On Thursday evening, March 4, all the Democratic candidates assembled for a televised debate at Chicago’s WTTW. Everyone had been asked to arrive by 6:30 P.M. for the 7:00 P.M. live start, but Barack arrived several minutes late following a drive from Springfield. Dan Hynes reached over to smooth Barack’s jacket collar just as host Phil Ponce began by immediately confronting Blair Hull about what Hull acknowledged was a “messy divorce” from a “financially motivated” spouse. Ponce followed up twice before asking Maria Pappas whether Hull should quit. Pappas demurred, saying that one of Hull’s daughters had just spoken to her in the ladies’ room in defense of her father. When Ponce asked Barack to address domestic violence, Barack cited his recently passed Victims’ Economic Security and Safety Act. Then Ponce shifted to gay marriage, with Barack evading the first question. When Ponce followed up, Barack said, “we have to make sure that people have the rights that they deserve: to transfer property, to visit hospitals” before adding that “I’m very mindful of the moral implications of this—my parents were of different races” and could not have married in southern states, “so this is not something that is a distant abstraction for me. I recognize its importance.” Commending 1960s civil rights proponents for prioritizing the landmark 1964 and 1965 statutes, “I’m not necessarily going to lead the issues with a repeal of the anti-miscegenation act because we are trying to consolidate rights for those people who need them right now.”