Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Meeting with newspaper editorial boards prior to their endorsement decisions, Barack mentioned to Daily Herald journalists his disappointment that Republican colleague Steve Rauschenberger had criticized him over the summer. Called for comment, Steve praised Barack personally while asserting that in Springfield he had been “a show horse, not a workhorse.” Barack is “brilliant, his potential is unlimited,” and his ambition knew no bounds. “I don’t think even the U.S. Senate will be enough for Barack,” Rauschenberger exclaimed. Speaking with Tribune editors about foreign policy dangers, Barack said that “launching some missile strikes into Iran is not the optimal position for us,” but “on the other hand, having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse.” Barack felt similarly about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. If “certain elements” gained power, “I think we would have to consider going in and taking those bombs out.” Yet Barack said that health care reform, not foreign policy, would be his top Senate priority.

  A justifiably proud Emil Jones Jr. told Tribune reporters that “Obama’s the future” and that Barack “embodies all that I dream for and work for.” An essay in the leftist weekly In These Times said that Barack’s Senate “campaign points toward a new era . . . of progressive politics in search of a new majority,” and when Barack appeared at a Saturday event in suburban Bolingbrook, the Joliet Herald News reported that he was “greeted like a film star.” Campaigning in Philadelphia for Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate Joe Hoeffel, Barack attracted a fervent crowd. “I am quite confident he could be the first African American president,” one college student told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, and an undergraduate journalist for the Daily Pennsylvanian was struck by how Barack “stayed and mingled with the crowd for more than 30 minutes.” Back in Illinois, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch poll showed Barack leading Keyes 68–23, with 54 percent of Illinois voters viewing Keyes unfavorably. A Tribune poll gave Barack a 51-point lead, 68–17, with 39 percent of Republicans viewing Barack favorably and 38 percent calling Keyes “too extreme.” Rich Miller wrote that at one otherwise-unreported event in Quincy, “Keyes led the crowd in a chant of ‘Obama been lyin’,’ which sounded to some ears like ‘Osama bin Laden.’” Miller believed that “‘arrogant’ is perhaps too soft a word to describe Mr. Keyes,” and former governor Jim Edgar recounted a similar reaction that month from the president of the United States. “I ran into Bush, and he said, ‘I’m not coming to Illinois. You guys are nuts out there. Alan Keyes?’”87

  Barack continued to receive more fawning profiles than tough questions. Black Enterprise magazine put him on its cover, heralding “the birth of a new political star” who may “one day become America’s first African American president.” Chicago Sun-Times reporter Scott Fornek got both Michelle and Barack’s sister Maya to describe Barack’s behavior during their annual Christmastime games of Scrabble. Michelle called him “a big trash talker,” and Maya termed her brother “an indelicate winner” who “would crow like a rooster and flap his wings and make slam-dunk motions.” Barack confessed that “when it comes to Scrabble I just can’t help myself. . . . I’ve got a competitive nature.”

  Television host Oprah Winfrey interviewed Barack and Michelle, telling him that when he had called out “the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white” in his DNC speech, “I stood up and cheered.” Michelle told Oprah that if she had met the Ryan campaign’s video stalker, “I would’ve punched him,” and in the face of Barack’s many accolades, she emphasized that “we’re clear on the fact that we have to stay humble and prayerful.” Barack lamented “the people I meet in these little towns who have lost their jobs” and “are struggling and occasionally slipping into bitterness,” but he also revealed that “I’ve had ten days off in the last three years, and that includes weekends. My workdays are often sixteen hours.” Barack told Winfrey, “I think the biggest mistake politicians make is being inauthentic.”

  Traveling north to Madison to praise Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, the sole U.S. senator to vote against the Patriot Act, Barack said, “I like to think that, had I been in the Senate, I would have cast the second vote against the Patriot Act,” although “I wasn’t there in the pressure of that moment.” A Cleveland reporter who had first met Barack eight years earlier was now struck by Barack’s “detached skepticism.” Barack told him that “there is value to considering the possibility that you may be wrong,” but in his Tribune questionnaire, Barack bluntly declared that “the global community cannot tolerate nuclear technology in the hands of a radical theocracy.”

  Barack continued to spend a disproportionate amount of time downstate, appearing at events like Macoupin County’s thirtieth annual Country Fun Day on a farm just west of Gillespie. Top Democrats like Dick Durbin, Rod Blagojevich, and Emil Jones Jr. were all there that Sunday, and Jones recalled an elderly white woman, in what was an almost all-white corner of Illinois, turning to him after Barack finished speaking and saying, “This young man is going to be president of the United States some day. I just hope I live long enough to vote for him.” On Monday, speaking at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign a day before his first debate with Alan Keyes, Barack vented some of the anger he felt toward his challenger. “When they’re not being bombarded by messages from Michael Moore or Fox News, citizens today have to deal with politicians who habitually lie, blatantly mischaracterize their opponents, and do other things that would not be accepted at all in any other aspect of society” beyond politics.

  The fifty-three-minute, radio-only debate turned out to be a major letdown for Illinois journalists. “Not only were there no fireworks, there weren’t even many sparks,” wrote Sun-Times reporter Scott Fornek. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller lambasted the questioners for posing “almost nothing but softballs” and failing to confront Keyes with any of his outlandish prior statements. A Los Angeles Times correspondent found Barack’s performance “calm and analytical,” and his most notable statement was that “with terrorists I have a very hawkish position. I think we should hunt them down, kill them, dismantle their operations.” Miller reported that “several of Obama’s advisors privately admitted disappointment with their guy’s performance,” and by now David Axelrod and John Kupper knew all too well that Barack was “a guy who just never really took debates seriously.”

  National and Chicago journalists marveled that “Obama Extends Reach Beyond Illinois Race,” as a USA Today headline put it. The paper said Barack had campaigned in fourteen states since the DNC, raising more than $1.2 million for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. A Tribune analysis showed that Barack had donated at least $268,000 from Obama for Illinois to other Democratic candidates, including $53,000 to embattled Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, but with contributions to Barack’s campaign now totaling more than $14 million, such generosity came easily.

  Michelle now was making campaign appearances of her own, despite having just lost valued babysitter Sonja Hawes, with a young African American U of C student, Marlease Bushnell, taking her place. Michelle told an Edwardsville audience that “I grew up as a poor girl” and described how she had to escape black anti-intellectualism as a youngster. “I confronted it growing up. I had to duck and dodge to cover up the fact that I enjoyed school and excelled in it so I didn’t get my butt kicked on the way home from school.” In a Springfield conversation, Michelle again emphasized the centrality of religion in her and her husband’s lives. “We’ve been guided by faith throughout the course of this political campaign, a faith that says to whom much is given, much is expected . . . a faith that says we’re all put on this earth for a higher purpose, a faith that tells us that we can always do better.” In place of the disdain with which Michelle had viewed Barack’s political aspirations in earlier years, she now seemed to embrace a loftier mission. “Winning is just a small part,” she told the Journal-Register. “This campaign is about so much more—it’s about changing the tone of politics.”88

  Sinc
e his primary win, Barack also exhibited a greater religious faith than close acquaintances had ever previously sensed. After the DNC, Tribune reporter David Mendell covered Barack almost everywhere in Illinois, noticing that “along his Senate campaign trail, Obama would never fail to carry his Christian Bible. He would place it right beside him, in the small compartment in the passenger-side door of the SUV, so he could refer to it often.” When Mendell asked Barack about his “ever-present Bible,” he was “a bit hesitant to answer” and was “uncharacteristically short” in saying he read it a “couple times a week.” “It’s a great book and contains a lot of wisdom,” Barack added.

  Campaigning in Denver for Democratic Senate candidate Ken Salazar, Barack was christened a “rising star” by the Denver Post, the same phrase Soledad O’Brien used to introduce him to viewers of CNN’s American Morning. Barack told O’Brien that all of the attention is “a little over the top” because “I know how hard it is to actually get stuff done in politics,” but in the Denver crowd, one African American woman told her children, “Look hard, honey. That man might be your president someday.”

  The Chicago Tribune commented on what an artfully balanced position Barack took on affirmative action. “Promoting diversity is a compelling national interest, but it has to be done in a way that is not a back-door use of quotas and takes into account the full record of the students, not just race and test scores,” Barack stated. Barack’s increasing fame attracted a number of attempts to plumb the impact of his racial identity. St. Louis Post-Dispatch correspondent Kevin McDermott observed that Barack “often seems like a different man from setting to setting, depending on his audience,” but McDermott took special note when Barack told a group of black students, “You’ve got to have a higher standard of excellence than the scumbag folks back in the neighborhood expect of you.”

  Even before his DNC speech, the Springfield State Journal-Register had run an editorial observing that Barack “could just as easily be considered white” as black, and as his election as the first-ever black male Democrat in the U.S. Senate neared, additional commentators weighed in. Political figures like Colin Powell and Barack “give off the sense that they have transcended traditional racial categories” by virtue of “their speech and demeanor, their personal narratives and career achievements,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in the Washington Monthly. For them, “race had been an advantage because whites see in them confirmation that America, finally, is working.” An idiosyncratic African American commentator, emphasizing what he believed was Barack’s “substantially more dominant white heritage,” argued that “Obama has adopted a bizarre practice that might be most accurately described as passing in reverse” by asserting his African American identity.

  Veteran black journalist Don Terry interviewed Barack and a number of other Chicagoans before concluding that Barack “is a Rorschach test. What you see is what you want to see.” Barack understood that dynamic. “I’d describe myself as coming from several cultures, and feel I belong to all of them,” he told Terry. “I think people project a lot of their racial questions onto me.” Barack nicely captured the complexity of American blackness when telling an Ebony magazine writer that “All of us had parents or grandparents who were the subject of much greater discrimination. That’s true whether they were from the Caribbean, or Africa or Mississippi.” When Don Terry asked Chicago black activist Bamani Obadele about Barack, he answered that “to black people he’s black. To some whites, they don’t see him as a black man. They see him almost as one of them.” A middle-aged white female told Terry that Barack could well be the first “minority” president. Why that rather than black, Terry asked. “I guess it’s because I don’t think of him as black.”89

  All across Illinois, newspapers endorsed Barack for election to the U.S. Senate. The Chicago Sun-Times lauded his “meteoric rise” as “a walking advertisement for the American dream,” and Bloomington’s Pantagraph, which had backed Dan Hynes in the primary, praised Barack’s “pragmatic, bipartisan approach to problem solving.” The Chicago Tribune embraced him as “a rare example of someone who is able to rise above ethnic and racial divides and political partisanship,” and the Chicago Defender proclaimed that “Obama Will Do Us Proud” in the U.S. Senate. Speaking to voters east of the Mississippi River, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch commended Barack’s “nuanced understanding of the issues facing the nation” and said that “over the course of the long senatorial campaign, Mr. Obama has skyrocketed from an obscure northern Illinois legislator to national celebrity.”

  Only on October 19 did Barack’s campaign begin running its first Chicagoland TV ad, a thirty-second spot featuring his DNC keynote declaration that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America.” The prepaid $2 million expenditure demonstrated “we are not taking any vote for granted,” David Axelrod told the Sun-Times. On Thursday night, October 21, Barack and Alan Keyes met for their first televised debate, though the viewing audience was modest given that the St. Louis Cardinals, whom most downstate baseball fans rooted for, were hosting the Houston Astros for Game 7 of the National League Championship Series at the same time. Early on, Barack emphasized his legislative goal of “setting partisanship aside and seeking common ground.” After Keyes at almost endless length spoke about Christianity and the Lord, Barack expressed exasperation in what journalists unanimously thought was the night’s best statement. “I’m not running to be the minister of Illinois. I’m running to be its United States senator.” Barack also declared that “everyone who lives in the United States knows that race still matters. It matters powerfully. I think that we still suffer from the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and this has been the single biggest blight on the history of this nation.”

  In a long preelection profile in the Tribune, David Mendell called Barack “the voice of a new generation of politicians” and potentially “the country’s first black president.” David Axelrod acknowledged that “Barack has been shot out of a cannon” and that “I think Barack understands that he has been on an incredible ride.” In a similar piece in the Daily Herald, Barack joked about Dreams From My Father’s presence on the New York Times bestseller list. “I was feeling pretty good about that until I read that actually the fastest-growing best seller on the list was Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” which showed that “there’s not necessarily any correlation between celebrity and accomplishment.”

  Associated Press correspondent Chris Wills, citing Michelle’s “unusually high-profile role” in the fall campaign, devoted a story to her as well. “Barack was not as cynical about politics as I was. Unlike me, Barack always had faith in the American people,” Michelle told him. Speaking at Illinois State University, Michelle reprised her Springfield remarks that “this race means much more to us than winning,” because “it’s about changing the tone of politics.” Barack “wasn’t going to do this if he couldn’t tell the truth, if he couldn’t operate with dignity, if he couldn’t treat his opponents with some respect and if he couldn’t change the discourse.” Sounding multiple notes, Michelle stated that “the only thing I’m telling people in Illinois is that Barack is not our savior. I want to tell it to the whole country, and I will if I get the opportunity.” She added that “Barack can’t do a thing if Bush is in office,” but that if the Democrats won the presidency, and “Barack gets in under Kerry, the possibilities are endless.”

  On CNN, Barack praised Michelle as “tougher” than him. “I love to write,” he told host Carlos Watson. “I love fiction. I love to read fiction, but I’m not sure I have enough talent to write fiction,” and he attributed Dreams’ phoenixlike rebirth to “luck, happenstance, God’s blessings.” Barack said, “I think there’s a direct line between Harold Washington, to Carol Moseley Braun, to myself,” emphasizing that “I stand on the shoulders of Harold Washington. I got the Ivy League degrees because somebody in Selma, Alabama, or Birmingham was willing to make enormous sacrifices.”<
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  In Kenya, a New York Times correspondent visited the “rising star’s” relatives in Nyang’oma, and with just ten days to go before the November 2 election, a Tribune poll showed Barack leading Keyes 66 to 19 percent. Among Republicans, 32 percent said they would vote for Barack, and among African Americans only 3 percent favored Keyes. Given such an overwhelming lead, Barack spent that Sunday speaking first in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and then stoking Democratic GOTV efforts in Daytona Beach, Florida, one of the most tightly contested states in John Kerry’s close race against George Bush.90

  WTTW’s assertive Phil Ponce moderated the third and final debate between Barack and Keyes on Tuesday evening, October 26. Whenever Barack spoke, Keyes exhibited a smirky smile that many viewers might have found inappropriate. Ponce put Barack on the defensive by asking if as a public official, his children would attend public school. Barack responded by saying they attended the Lab School at the U of C, “where I teach, and my wife works, and we get a good deal for it,” which was witty enough to draw laughter from the studio audience. “We’re gonna choose the best possible education for our children,” Barack replied. Asked about gay equality, Barack said, “we have an obligation to make sure that gays and lesbians have the rights of citizenship,” the “same set of basic rights.” On an easier note, Ponce asked Barack where his family would live after his election. “We haven’t decided yet,” Barack replied. “My priority is gonna be making sure I’ve got as much time as possible with my wife and children,” and he lauded Michelle as “an extraordinary wife who carries more than her load.”