Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Top Illinois Republicans faced the same questions as Barack, and some were eager to respond. Ray LaHood said he was “shocked” and that Ryan “needs to immediately withdraw from the race. There is no way Republicans in Illinois will vote for somebody with this kind of activity in their background.” Tuesday’s Chicago Sun-Times reported that state party chair Judy Baar Topinka “believes Ryan lied to her,” and former governor Jim Edgar was “stunned” and “furious.” Until that evening, Edgar had been defending Ryan, but Edgar said that what came out “was far worse than what he had told me.” Ryan had “misrepresented what was in there to me” and “what he had told me was completely wrong.”

  A wire service correspondent asserted that “a married man trying to have kinky sex with his wife seems tame,” but an Illinois Republican told Roll Call that “it’s not so much what’s in the files, it’s the fact that he lied about it” that left GOP leaders so angry. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller wrote that “most everyone has figured for weeks now that Ryan couldn’t beat Barack Obama. The big fear now, though, is that Ryan might bring down the rest of the Republican ticket.” Miller predicted that “this is going to get very ugly, very fast,” and by late Tuesday, Ryan and Topinka were publicly disagreeing about their prior conversations. “I remember her asking me whether there was anything in the documents that would preclude me from being a U.S. Senator, and no, there isn’t,” Ryan asserted. “What’s in those documents at its worst is that I propositioned my wife in an inappropriate place. That’s the worst.” Topinka’s version was that “I said, very specifically, twice, so that I would hear it twice, ‘Is there anything in your divorce document that would be personally embarrassing to you or to the Republican Party?’ He said ‘no’ both times.”

  Wednesday’s Sun-Times featured an unnamed Illinois Republican saying, “I don’t think anyone can overstate the impact of the lying and misleading statements he made. It’s not just to Judy. It’s to a whole host of people. That’s severely damaged his credibility.” The Tribune’s editorial page declared that “Ryan was not honest with Republican primary voters,” and the Sun-Times explicitly called for “Ryan to Hit the Road,” castigating “his unprincipled behavior.” Downstate papers like the Bloomington Pantagraph chimed in similarly, saying “Ryan should withdraw.” At midmorning Wednesday, Illinois Republican U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert canceled a Ryan fund-raising event scheduled for that evening, and on The Tonight Show host Jay Leno joked that Ryan was “going after the ‘swing vote.’”

  By Thursday, some Republicans were speaking up on Ryan’s behalf. A column in the conservative Illinois Leader asserted that “the real problem the ILGOP had with Jack Ryan is he wants to keep U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald,” the federal prosecutor who had unraveled former governor George Ryan’s bribe-filled tenure as secretary of state. Then lame-duck U.S. senator Peter Fitzgerald said he had told Ryan to stay in the race and that the lack of support from party leaders like Topinka was doing Ryan more harm than the divorce documents. Fitzgerald complained that “she was so supportive of George Ryan and was never offended by the indictments or the corruption there, but she is so offended” by the “unproven allegations” in Jack Ryan’s divorce. “It does not add up to me.”

  In the Tribune, an op-ed contributor asked why shouldn’t Ryan “be judged on the quality of his ideas and the positions he would advocate in the Senate, rather than on divorce negotiations?” Blair Hull also had a second question: “why under the circumstances would anyone who hasn’t spent his or her entire life planning a political career and cautiously behaving accordingly . . . ever run for office?” Instead of pursuing divorce pleadings, “the Chicago press corps should be hounding Jack Ryan with questions” about “why he supports a Bush White House policy in Iraq that is so clearly a costly failure” and “why he supports a Medicare prescription drug bill that was a taxpayer giveaway to the pharmaceutical special interests.” Just like Barack, Hull also said that questions about Ryan’s divorce were not among “the issues that make a difference to Illinois families,” and he criticized “a press obsession with personal lives when so many public policy issues demand a thorough debate.”

  In Springfield, where the legislature was still in session thanks to the ongoing state budget standoff, Barack remarked that it was “probably not surprising” that the press had fixated on Jeri Ryan’s claims. “So much of our culture is caught up in celebrity and sensationalism. It’s an unfortunate aspect of our culture generally, and our politics ends up taking on that same flavor.” Barack said, “I do regret the personalization of politics of this kind. It’s not something that I wish on anybody.” Ryan’s salacious problem drew new national attention to the Illinois contest, with Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne noting speculation that his former Saguaro Seminar colleague “may be the first African-American president of the United States.” Similarly, a New York Times news story stated that Barack “is widely regarded as a rising Democratic star” who in a few months’ time would be a U.S. senator.

  Ryan’s campaign was polling to learn how much damage had been done. A new Daily Southtown poll showed Ryan trailing Barack 54–30, and while 49 percent of respondents viewed Ryan unfavorably, 57 percent said he should remain in the race. In hypothetical matchups, Barack led former governor Edgar by 45–42 percent and Senator Fitzgerald 47–40. Republicans publicly compared notes on who could replace Ryan, but neither Edgar, Fitzgerald, nor Topinka expressed interest. Conservative state senators Kirk Dillard and Dave Syverson supported Steve Rauschenberger, whose underfinanced primary campaign had led him to a third-place finish behind Ryan. Neither Topinka nor Republican national committeeman Robert Kjellander had any love for Rauschenberger, who, like Fitzgerald, had publicly attacked Republican insiders for profiteering off state government business.

  On Friday morning, the Ryan campaign’s poll mirrored the Southtown numbers, with Barack holding a better than 20-point lead. Ryan summoned his top staff to his Gold Coast apartment to discuss the results. “This can be done, but it’s going to get ugly,” one participant argued, advocating that if they “go nuclear on Obama for four months” it could become a competitive race. “There is enough good opposition research to defeat Barack Obama, to make clear to the voters of Illinois that he should not be a member of the United States Senate.” But Ryan rejected that course. “This is not the way I saw this race,” he explained. “I don’t want to be remembered as the guy that ran that kind of campaign.” Peter Fitzgerald called, and Ryan told him he would soon issue a statement withdrawing from the race. Ryan assembled his full staff to tell them his decision. “I believe that one man, living for purposes larger than himself, can make a difference,” Ryan told the press. He rebuked the Tribune for its “truly outrageous” pursuit of the divorce file and said he had no interest in mounting “a brutal, scorched-earth campaign.” Jim Edgar stated that Ryan had “made the right decision,” and Topinka announced that Republicans would select a replacement within three weeks. Steve Rauschenberger declared that “if the circumstances are right, and we can organize a campaign to win, I’m very interested,” but the Daily Herald reported that Peter Fitzgerald “hopes Rauschenberger is too smart to enter a race that is already lost. ‘I would not encourage anyone who is my friend to accept the nomination.’”77

  Barack offered compassionate words. “I can only imagine what Jack and his family have gone through over the last several days. I admire Jack’s commitment to public service,” and “I deeply admire the work that he has done as a teacher” at Hales Franciscan High School. Although Barack was now without an opponent, his campaign team plowed ahead, with policy director Amanda Fuchs relying on long-standing volunteers like Raja Krishnamoorthi and new ones like law professors Cass Sunstein and Elizabeth Warren to prepare position papers on everything from homeland security to consumer protection policies. On Saturday, June 26, Barack delivered the Democratic response to President Bush’s weekly radio address, recording a text about job loss that had been wri
tten by David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs. His delivery was flat and uninspired, and Gibbs recalled that “it was kind of obvious that he was recording the words of somebody else.”

  Michelle Obama had begun making occasional campaign appearances by herself, extolling her husband’s virtues to small audiences in downstate towns like Charleston. Darrel Thompson had taken the lead in organizing more than 130 “Ba-Rock the House” fund-raising parties all across Illinois for Tuesday evening, June 29, and that morning John Kerry let slip that Barack would address the Democratic National Convention, telling reporters, “I cannot wait to hear his voice.” Late that afternoon as Barack, Darrel, Robert Gibbs and Mike Signator headed west to the suburban Wheaton house party Barack would attend, Gibbs received a message that within moments, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill would be calling to speak with Barack.

  “Jack Corrigan probably mentioned him first to me,” Cahill remembered, after first Pete Giangreco’s mid-April call to talk up Barack as a prime-time DNC speaker and then an early June conversation Jack had with another old friend from the 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign—Lisa Hay, who had then entered Harvard Law School and become the Law Review’s treasurer. Corrigan had asked Hay to support John Kerry, but Lisa told Jack she wanted to contribute to her old friend Barack Obama. “You know him?” Corrigan responded. “I think he’s great,” Lisa replied, and she recounted how Barack’s remarks at the Law Review’s April 1990 banquet had been so powerful that even the waiters at Boston’s Harvard Club had paused to listen. “It was the most moving speech about the promise of America that I had ever heard. And I remember it struck me that Barack touched everyone in the room,” Hay told Corrigan. “That’s when I put him on the list for keynote,” Corrigan remembered. Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm had been Corrigan’s top pick, but Lisa’s account altered Corrigan’s plan. “I’m thinking about making a pretty unusual recommendation for the keynote speaker, and I could really be stepping in it here,” Jack told Vicky Rideout, a lifelong friend whom he had recruited “to come and be the head of speechwriting for the convention.”

  Together they watched the video of Barack that Jim Cauley and Darrel Thompson had given the Kerry team, and Corrigan shared his thinking with campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, who spoke with Kerry every day. “I told him that I was leaning toward this,” Cahill remembered, and Kerry responded affirmatively. “He was happy with the recommendation of Obama” because Barack had “definitely made an impression upon him” back in April when they had campaigned together. Shortly before June 29, Pete Giangreco again called Corrigan to lobby for Barack, but missed the point when Corrigan said something like, “I think you’re going to be pretty pleased.” Jack’s “being opaque, and I don’t get it,” Pete explained.

  In the SUV headed to Wheaton, Barack’s end of the conversation with Cahill was simple. “Thank you . . . Thank you . . . Thank you.” But Barack was overjoyed. “I know exactly what I want to say. I really want to talk about my story as part of the larger American story,” and he immediately told his aides that unlike the radio address, this one he would write himself “in a way that was personal,” Robert Gibbs recalled. That evening, speaking to the one-hundred-plus house parties all across Illinois via conference call, Barack told his supporters, “I didn’t get into this race to run against anyone. I got into this race to run for something: a set of ideals, a set of values.”

  Barack was back in Springfield for most of the rest of the week because of the ongoing state budget deadlock. “After I’d scribbled some notes, I wrote it in about three nights” on a yellow legal pad in his room on the twelfth floor of the Renaissance Hotel. “I just sat in a hotel room watching a basketball game and wrote it up, most of it, sort of in one sitting,” Barack recalled. His initial draft was about twenty-four hundred words long, and with little of substance taking place on the Senate floor, Barack could sit at his desk, tinkering with the language. On Friday, he and a camera crew headed forty-five miles south to Carlinville to film a conversation David Axelrod hoped to use in fall television ads. Barack boasted about his skill at poker, saying, “I’m using it to bankroll my kids’ education, because I’m a pretty good player so I usually win.” But he also spoke with unusual frankness about his family’s financial struggles. “My wife . . . if we could afford it, she would stay at home until the three-year-old is in first grade, but we had to make sure that she was still working just because I’m in public service, so I don’t make a lot of money, and we just couldn’t afford a situation where she wasn’t working. But what that means is that we are paying someone to come in the house and look after the kids. It’s like having someone on payroll—it’s like you’re paying somebody, but you’re not making a profit on it. You’ve got to pay their taxes, their Social Security, you’ve got to pay workers’ compensation. So it’s a huge challenge, a huge struggle.”

  Shifting to policy issues, Barack noted that “our child support system in Illinois is terrible and it’s been terrible for like a decade now.” The state was not “going after these fathers and making sure that they take responsibility for their kids. My mother was a single mother . . . and so I know how hard it is for a single parent to try to raise kids. It’s a struggle.” Changing tack, Barack stated that the Patriot Act “requires you speaking out and voting no. We only had one U.S. senator, Russ Feingold from Wisconsin, vote against the Patriot Act out of one hundred. And that really is a shame.” Barack’s remarks were of mixed value for advertising purposes, but with his campaign having taken in $4 million from more than eighty-five hundred donors between April and June, his fall media bankroll was hefty indeed. The new issue of Time magazine described him as “the hottest property in this year’s Senate races,” and a Chicago Tribune story reporting his fund-raising windfall observed that “Obama’s apparent strategy is to ward off a deep-pocketed or popular Republican from seeking the GOP nomination.”78

  With state senator Kirk Dillard saying that Steve Rauschenberger is the “overwhelming choice of suburban Republicans,” public discussion focused on the Elgin legislator. Yet Rauschenberger wisely hesitated, seeking assurances from national Republican campaign committees that funding would be available for a serious race. “I did not have the financial resources to get the campaign going,” and given Barack’s huge head start, it soon became clear that it would be “impossible to raise the kind of money needed.” Rauschenberger declined, and while some young Republican activists called for Jack Ryan to reenter the race, speculation next turned to fiery former Chicago Bears football coach Mike Ditka.

  Some of Barack’s staff were initially “really, really worried” about facing an opponent who was universally known, but with the Tribune reporting that Ditka was not registered to vote and columnists highlighting his explosive temper, he too stood aside. Ditka later said that not challenging Barack was the “biggest mistake I’ve ever made,” and Barack professed disappointment, saying, “I was looking forward to what was sure to be a fun, exciting race with the coach.” Even the New York Times covered Ditka’s withdrawal, describing Barack as “highly popular and lavishly financed.” With Illinois Republicans becoming desperate, Barack teasingly asked his Senate friend Dave Sullivan to enter the race. “‘Sully, why don’t you run against me?’ ‘Sure, Barack. The first thing your campaign will do is produce the check I wrote to you when you ran against Bobby Rush.’”

  Eager to burnish his slim record on foreign policy, Barack delivered an address to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. He singled out “Iran, which the Bush Administration has correctly targeted as a dangerous cheater in the nuclear game,” as a top concern, and stated that “our first and immutable commitment must be to the security of Israel, our only true ally in the Middle East and the only democracy.” Journalists covering John Kerry’s presidential campaign reported that Barack, “a rising African-American star,” would deliver a prime-time DNC speech, but only on July 14 did the Kerry campaign publicly announce that Barack would deliver the convention’s muc
h-coveted keynote address on Tuesday evening, July 27. Kerry termed Barack “an optimistic voice for America,” and Mary Beth Cahill, noting that the three major networks were not planning live coverage on Tuesday, told reporters she hoped Barack’s selection would change their minds. Barack called the selection “an enormous honor and enormous responsibility,” admitting “it’s not something that I would have ever anticipated this early in my career. As my wife said, I better not screw it up.” Barack wanted to “move past the politics of division toward the politics of hope,” and he distinguished himself from President Bush by saying that “my philosophy is that there’s nobody you shouldn’t talk to.” He complained to reporters that “there’s been a corporate takeover of my life,” and the next morning, on NBC’s Today Show, host Katie Couric introduced Barack to viewers as “a rising star.”

  By then, David Axelrod and especially John Kupper had been hard at work trying to shorten the draft Barack had shared with them via a 1:00 A.M. e-mail. Axelrod and his wife were vacationing in Florence, Italy, and everyone was concerned that Barack’s text was longer than what DNC speechwriting chief Vicki Rideout was looking forward to receiving. Kupper recalled that “I would cut out parts of the speech and send him the revised draft, and it would come back with almost all of them restored. This was a painstaking process. Eventually we got it down to seventeen minutes.” Barack wanted to emphasize the resonant phrase “the audacity of hope,” and in one exchange, Axelrod passed along word that Barack had to reference Kerry’s military service. Almost daily, new, slightly tweaked drafts were created, with shifting word counts—“2,370 words”—noted on many of the thirteen successive drafts Kupper reviewed. At the convention in Boston, Barack would deliver the speech using a teleprompter, and his campaign leased one so Barack could begin practicing with the unfamiliar device. An initial Sunday-morning run-through in the big volunteer room at campaign headquarters in Chicago was “very good,” Darrel Thompson thought, and then the teleprompter was moved to a conference room in the building housing Axelrod and Kupper’s offices, so that Barack could continue working on his delivery in quiet quarters.79