Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  A few weeks later, Barack said the results “surprised everybody but me,” yet several months further on he stated, “I was as surprised as anybody in terms of the margin of victory. . . . I didn’t expect to win as well as we did.” David Axelrod told Barack that “Harold is smiling down on us tonight,” and Axelrod stressed to Chicago newsmen that “one of the great disciplines of the campaign was not to spend money early and waste those resources.” Some observers were surprised that Barack was not more visibly excited, and Michelle told one columnist, “he’s basically a calm guy. It takes a lot to push his buttons. He has incredibly low blood pressure.” WBBM’s late-evening newscast told viewers that “the size of his triumph in the suburbs is truly historic,” and WMAQ’s anchor said, “it’s as if once everyone realized just who Barack Obama was, that’s the person they tended to turn to.” At the Hyatt, David Wilhelm told local stations that Barack “ran an unfailingly positive campaign where he told a story about himself, he told a story about his experience, he told a story about his track record.”64

  Barack and his family spent the night at the Hyatt so he was more easily available for early Wednesday morning television news shows. Most of Barack’s campaign staff went to Garrett Ripley’s, where hardworking intern Alex Okrent “literally falls asleep at the bar,” student volunteer Tarak Shah remembered. “You couldn’t rouse him.” Wednesday’s Tribune declared Barack’s 52.8 percent victory a “landslide.” With 655,923 votes statewide, he easily outdistanced second-place Dan Hynes, who ended up with 23.7 percent. Blair Hull finished third, with 10.8 percent, having spent more than $200 for each vote he received. Maria Pappas, Gery Chico, Nancy Skinner, and Joyce Washington all trailed badly, receiving 6.0, 4.3, 1.3, and 1.1. percent, respectively.

  One national reporter predicted that “Obama is certain to be an overnight sensation in national Democratic circles,” and Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown declared that “Obama has the potential to be the most significant political figure Illinois has sent to Washington since Abraham Lincoln.” Retired jurist R. Eugene Pincham told one news service that Barack “has this tone that distinguishes him from the typical black, and yet he’s black.” A lady from Chicago’s 29th Ward put it differently to the Tribune: “for lack of a better word, it’s like he’s multi-colored.” Most Illinois commentators focused on the remarkable breadth of Barack’s support. In Chicago, black voter turnout was 41.4 percent, the highest in a Democratic primary since Carol Moseley Braun’s historic 1992 win. In primarily black wards, Barack received 88 percent of the vote, plus 78 percent in predominantly black areas of suburban Cook County. In county board president John Stroger’s 8th Ward, where the Democratic organization backed Dan Hynes, Barack received 15,684 votes—more than 91 percent—and Hynes just 649. Overall, Barack won forty-one of the city’s fifty wards and received more than 66.5 percent of the vote. Dan Hynes carried only five wards, and Gery Chico four, but even in the Hynes family’s home 19th Ward, Barack received more than 41 percent of the vote.

  Beyond Chicago’s city limits, Barack won 89 percent of the vote in Evanston and 87 percent in Oak Park. He carried both Cook County and Terry Link’s Lake County with more than 64 percent of the vote, and also won the other four collar counties, including a 57 percent majority in DuPage. Thanks to strong support in university communities like Champaign, Barack carried seven additional counties across Illinois, winning an astonishing 25 percent of the downstate vote. As Rich Miller wrote in Capitol Fax, “it looks like Obama won wherever people saw his TV ads.” Jack Ryan won the Republican nomination with 36 percent of the vote, but in the traditional Republican stronghold of DuPage, the raw vote comparison was striking: Barack received 35,770 votes, Ryan only 25,276. Yet Ryan’s victory threatened to prove hollow, for as Miller observed in Wednesday’s Capitol Fax, “if the Chicago Tribune wins its case and forces open Ryan’s divorce records, and the rumors are true, he could find himself off the ticket in a matter of weeks.”

  Even prior to Tuesday night’s resounding triumph, Barack and his consultants had turned their minds to a trio of concerns. First, Illinois tradition called for victorious candidates to do a day-after fly-around of the state, and Peter Coffey, who a year earlier had rebuffed Barack’s request to come on board the campaign, volunteered to organize that tour. Then the candidate and his family sought a much-deserved vacation. “They wanted to go to Florida,” finance director Claire Serdiuk remembered, but “we could not get them booked on a flight to Florida” because of spring break week. Claire instead recommended Scottsdale, Arizona, and particularly its famous Biltmore Resort. “Ooh, Michelle would love to stay at the Biltmore,” Barack replied, but that too was sold out, and a fallback was found. Third, the candidate and especially his consultants realized that once Barack was the Democratic nominee for a Republican-held U.S. Senate seat, his young, bare-bones campaign staff would require a major transfusion in the form of nationally experienced Democratic operatives.

  After Wednesday’s early TV shows and a quick call-in to WVON’s Cliff Kelley program, Barack was the star attraction at an Illinois Democratic Unity press conference. Both his vanquished primary opponents and even U.S. representative Bobby Rush attended, with Barack giving special thanks to his “political godfather,” Emil Jones Jr. Speaking with Chicago reporters before heading to Springfield and then four other downstate destinations, Barack said, “I have been chasing this same goal my entire adult career, and that is creating an America that is fairer, more compassionate and has a greater understanding between its various peoples.” Asked about Jack Ryan’s divorce, Barack expressed disinterest. “I think it’s important to define character issues broadly. Character is not just a matter of whom you’re sleeping with or what you did when you were a teenager,” and he instead targeted “Ryan’s embrace of George Bush’s agenda.” When reporters questioned him about his own admissions in Dreams, Barack explained that young men “engage in self-destructive behavior because they don’t have a clear sense of direction” and that he was able “to pull out of that and refocus” by “tying myself to something much larger than myself.”

  A young woman told the Chicago Tribune’s David Mendell that Barack’s campaign “feels like a movement,” and “for people of our generation, we haven’t been a part of something like this before.” Mendell thought Barack was “on the verge of becoming a significant voice for the black American, and perhaps even for the common American,” but Barack told the New York Times he believed voters “are more interested in the message than the color of the messenger.” Under a headline declaring that “Overnight, a Democratic Star Is Born,” the Times said Barack was now “a treasured commodity in the Democratic Party nationally.” USA Today agreed, titling a story “Dems See a Rising Star in Illinois Senate Candidate.” Some people “whisper about a presidential future,” the paper added, and the Boston Globe said that with his primary win, “Obama seemed to step into history.”65

  Amid all the kudos, one Wednesday-afternoon e-mail stood out. Dr. Farr A. Curlin, a young, quite religious U of C medical internist, had heard Barack speak and had voted for him, but he wrote to complain that ObamaForIllinois.com, in its section on “Protecting Choice and Achieving Gender Equity,” promised that Barack would oppose “right-wing ideologues who seek to overturn Roe v. Wade.” As someone who opposed “the systematic killing of human fetuses,” Curlin believed that Barack was “fair-minded and wise enough to know that the ad hominem, slanderous rhetoric that marks your website . . . demeans you even as it demeans those with whom you disagree. . . . I sense that you are above that.” Because “I believe you will win and may go on to be the President one day,” Curlin hoped that in the future Barack would address abortion “with plain reason and fairness.”

  At 1:14 A.M. Thursday, Barack replied, thanking Curlin for his “thoughtful letter” and agreeing “that the language in my website has fallen victim to some of the short-hand and jargon of the Democratic party,” which is “not always a healthy thing.” Barack said, “I do n
ot believe that the question of abortion is an easy one” and indeed was “a profoundly difficult” one. “I think it should be the woman, and not others, that acts as the final decision-maker,” because “the overwhelming majority of women do not make these decisions with the casualness that opponents of abortions sometimes portray.” Barack added that “I personally view the ethical issues involved in early term abortion as being fundamentally different from the issues raised by late term abortions, although I see no clear dividing line provided by science.” Two years later, Barack recounted that exchange, saying he had felt “a pang of shame” at Curlin’s complaint but incorrectly added that he immediately had the website language altered—it remained unchanged for at least seven weeks.

  On Friday Barack, Michelle, and their daughters flew to Arizona for a four-day vacation. “Scottsdale’s beautiful,” Barack told Claire Serdiuk in a thank-you phone call. It was his first brief respite in more than fourteen months, and it allowed him time to reflect on how much his life had changed since his initial television ad introduced him to hundreds of thousands of people. Asked four years later when he first thought about being president of the United States, Barack said, “it wasn’t until I won my Senate primary” that he began “believing . . . in a very concrete way” that “being president was something I would pursue.” Since “we had gotten a pretty powerful response while I was running in the primary . . . I had a sense that the message I was delivering might resonate with a broad cross section of the American people.”

  Barack’s aides understood that “things just changed overnight” for him after his victory, as Kevin Thompson put it. Finance assistant Liz Drew recalled that “his whole world just changed like the next day,” and “nothing is going to be the same again.” Barack’s consultants knew that a major ramp-up would quickly have to take place, and by the time Barack and his family returned to Chicago, two long memos were waiting. The first, written by the Strategy Group’s Pete Giangreco and Terry Walsh, analyzed the primary triumph. Their targeting had always anticipated that black voters would rally to Barack’s candidacy once they knew who he was, so their analysis argued that the scale of his victory was not within Chicago but outside the city’s borders. Pete and Terry were astonished by Dan Hynes’s “dramatic inability to capture undecided votes or other votes that came into play” when Blair Hull’s candidacy imploded and Maria Pappas failed to run a serious campaign. “Obama became the default candidate for uncommitted voters,” especially in suburban Cook and the surrounding collar counties. Their goal for suburban Cook County had been 42 percent, but Barack captured 61, and his overall 54 percent in the five collar counties, including an “extraordinary” 64 percent in Lake, outperformed the targeting by 15 percent. In rural counties in both northern Illinois and in true downstate, Barack ran only 4 to 6 percent ahead of expectations.

  Barack’s top staffers and outside observers all agreed that Hull’s triggering of the McCain-Feingold “millionaires’ amendment” had given Barack’s campaign an important although not decisive boost. Jim Reynolds recalled that “the thing that we were most afraid of in the Senate race”—whether Barack would be able to raise enough money to be a top-tier candidate—turned out to be no obstacle at all. “A huge amount of the black business community wrote the biggest checks they had ever written to a politician,” and thanks to the entrée Barack gained to other major donors like the Pritzker, Crown, and Soros families, by March 16, scores of donors had given five-figure amounts. Several slightly divergent analyses agreed that between $1.7 and $2 million represented donations above the $2,000-per-person normal limit. John Kupper felt that money was “hugely important,” for “otherwise we would never have gotten to the level of funding and thus media advertising that we were able to achieve.” Jim Cauley agreed: “If we didn’t have the millionaires’ amendment, we would have been on TV at ten days instead of three weeks” before March 16, “and maybe we wouldn’t have accelerated enough to win.” Yet far less attention was devoted to an even more important achievement: 95 percent of Obama for Illinois’s total expenditures occurred after December 31, 2003.

  John Kupper believed Barack benefited hugely from the absence of a truly strong female candidate, but Dan Hynes was not alone in thinking that Barack’s opposition to the Iraq war had proven decisive. “I think it was highly significant and had a huge impact,” Hynes explained, for “it defined him and his candidacy with some very key, important constituencies.” In progressive white suburbs like Evanston and Oak Park, Barack’s antiwar stance was “a major factor” in having “a whole lot of folks fall in love with him very quickly,” state senator Don Harmon believed. As North Side political commentator Russ Stewart cogently concluded, “Obama won because, unlike Hynes, he crafted an image that appealed to a liberal base.”

  After the primary, Hynes’s camp was left wondering “how did the Blair Hull voters in the polls all go to Barack?” once Hull’s candidacy imploded. “Maybe in our messaging we just weren’t getting things to stick enough,” Chris Mather conjectured. “I’m not sure that we could have done anything differently,” pollster Jef Pollock thought. “Obama picks up the Hull collapse, and we didn’t,” for Barack became “the agent of change that people were looking for.” As Mather put it, Barack’s campaign “had a narrative that was perfect.” Blair Hull realized that his “biggest mistake”—indeed a “fatal” one—was not pushing his consultants much harder to make the details of his 1998 divorce public six months before the primary. “It was clearly the right thing to do and we should have done it very early.” As Mather noted, Hull “had all the money in the world to rewrite the narrative” once that was old news. Hull walked away from the race with equanimity, even after one of Barack’s Springfield poker buddies ran into him in Mexico soon after the primary. “Blair! Blair Hull! You just spent tens of millions of dollars for someone to recognize you in a bar in Cabo San Lucas!” “Life is not always fair,” Blair Hull explained. “You don’t regret the things you did, you regret the things you didn’t do. I don’t regret that I ran for the Senate.”

  Consultants, staffers, and journalists all recognized that “a series of excellent, well-conceived television spots,” particularly the “enormously effective” Sheila Simon one, had boosted Barack’s appeal. “The turning point was the Sheila Simon commercial,” Raja Krishnamoorthi, Barack’s uber-volunteer policy director, believed. “People took notice right away.” Speaking with CBS Chicago reporter Mike Flannery, Barack’s Republican Senate colleague Kirk Dillard called it “a great ad,” and Flannery added, “which many people credit as one of the turning points of the campaign.” Anita Dunn explained that “what that ad accomplished for him downstate was that he became the alternative to Blair.” Capitol Fax agreed: “The Obama ads gave former Hull supporters and leaners a place to go right away.” Dunn understood “the phenomenon of people feeling better about themselves for supporting an African American,” and Axelrod’s “advertising was pitch-perfect for Obama.”66

  The second memo to Barack, titled “Finishing the Job,” critically analyzed his campaign to date and specified the changes needed for the general election race. Written by David Axelrod, his D.C.-based partner David Plouffe, and John Kupper, it warned that while Barack had won by “a margin that was inconceivable,” there would be no “free pass” for “an African-American nominee with a funny name and a seven-year legislative record.” Axelrod and Kupper’s involvement with the campaign over the previous fourteen months had been almost daily, while Plouffe had had just one long breakfast conversation with Barack a year earlier when he was struggling to do his necessary call time. “You have to be the candidate. Not the campaign manager, scheduler, or driver,” Plouffe told Barack, who replied, “I understand that intellectually, but this is my life and career. And I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it. It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known in my political life. But I hear you and will try to do better.”
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  The ensuing months had repeatedly demonstrated Barack’s difficulty in surrendering control over his daily life and schedule, a struggle highlighted by how long it took him to transition from driver to passenger. Now “the level of scrutiny facing you and your campaign will enter another magnitude,” because the Axelrod team assumed that Jack Ryan’s “campaign will be taken over by skilled national operatives.” Four main staffing challenges loomed. First, Barack should bring “on board a senior communications strategist to oversee the entire press operation.” During the primary, “the press relationships of your consultants helped obscure the deficiencies of the campaign’s press operation,” and “a lot of talent” was now available. In place of Raja Krishnamoorthi’s band of volunteers, Barack would also need a full-time “professional research director.”

  Although “Joe McLean has done great work” and “Claire and your fundraising team obviously exceeded expectations,” Barack now had “close to a limitless fundraising potential.” Events in major cities across the nation needed to be scheduled, and going forward “your fundraising operation . . . should damn near be presidential.” The good news was that “with certain exceptions, your days of asking for individual contributions should be over. (We know you are unhappy to hear this),” but “a campaign fundraiser with serious national experience” should immediately be hired. Lastly, although Northwestern senior Madhuri Kommareddi “has done a terrific job” overseeing scheduling and operations, Barack needed both “a senior scheduling and advance director” and “a full-time ‘body’ person” in addition to whoever was driving Barack when he was on the road. “The pace and breakneck speed of the general will dwarf the primary,” Axelrod’s team warned.