Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  In Washington the next weekend, Barack joined Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney as one of the two keynote speakers for the exclusive Gridiron Club’s humorous winter dinner. Barack joked that his 70 percent statewide victory had included “102 percent in Chicago,” and offered an update on his DNC speech. “Since the election, that gay couple I knew in the red states? They’ve moved back to the blue states.” A low-key announcement indicated that Barack’s committee assignment hopes had been met only in part: Foreign Relations and Environment and Public Works were his two major ones, with Veterans Affairs as a third. But the media and Gridiron hoopla produced some pushback, with congressional prognosticator Stuart Rothenberg writing in Roll Call that he was “a bit tired of the fawning” over Barack. Noting that “I’ve even heard his name floated as a potential Democratic presidential nominee in 2008,” Rothenberg exclaimed, “C’mon, let’s get real. It’s silly to be talking about him as a national figure—or for higher office—at this point.”

  A few days later, Barack and his family flew to Honolulu for a three-week vacation. Madelyn Dunham was hospitalized but was soon released, and a week passed before Barack made the first of two public appearances, addressing an enthusiastic crowd of 850 at a $100-per-person Democratic fund-raiser in Waikiki following a tearful introduction by his father’s old friend U.S. representative Neil Abercrombie. Barack autographed scores of copies of Dreams From My Father, telling reporters, “this is a place where I always replenish my spirits.” The next day he spoke to four hundred students at Punahou, telling them to “dream big” and recalling his eighth-grade ethics class. At much the same time, Crown Publishers in New York issued a press release announcing that Barack was well on his way to becoming a millionaire. The new paperback of Dreams had more than three hundred thousand copies in print, and Crown had now signed Barack to a new contract that would pay him $850,000 apiece for two future books, the first of which would appear in 2006. The proceeds of a third volume, for children, would go to charity.

  On Christmas Day, Michelle and Maya Soetoro-Ng cooked breakfast for all the family members at Madelyn’s tenth-floor apartment at 1617 South Beretania Street, where Barack had lived throughout high school. Following their annual game of Scrabble, everyone except Madelyn then went to the beach, followed by dinner at a nice restaurant. All the downtime allowed Barack and Michelle to discuss the challenges that lay ahead, particularly whether the family should remain in Chicago once the school year ended or move to Washington. The new January issue of Vanity Fair had a two-page photo spread featuring Barack and Michelle, and on the Monday after Christmas, Barack graced the cover of Newsweek. Michelle told reporter Jonathan Alter that Barack “is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” Michelle also said she believed her husband had no hidden skeletons. “We’ve been married thirteen years, and I’d be shocked if there was some deep, dark secret.” Barack declared that Democrats need to “reassert in very explicit language that our best ideas rise out of communal values,” and dismissed talk of being on the 2008 Democratic ticket. “This speculation is almost comically premature for an incoming senator.”3

  On the day after New Year’s, Barack and his family were in Washington preparing for his official swearing in on Tuesday, January 4. Half a dozen Illinois reporters were in town to cover the ceremony, and when Barb Ickes of the Quad-City Times asked Barack to autograph her copy of Dreams From My Father, she reminded him, “You wrote in here that Congress is ‘compliant and corrupt.’ What if you were right?” Wielding his pen, Barack replied, “I suspect it is.” On Monday morning, he signed a six-month lease on an unfurnished one-bedroom apartment at 300 Massachusetts Avenue NW, a building populated mostly by Georgetown University law students, and asked a staffer to help him buy a mattress. Meeting with thirty journalists in his temporary basement office, Barack said again, “I will not be running for president in 2008.” When one reporter asked him what he thought his place in history was, Barack caviled. “I don’t think I have a place in history yet. I’ve just been elected. I haven’t done anything yet. Making a speech and getting elected isn’t historical. When you start talking about history, that’s measured over decades, over a lifetime of accomplishment.”

  Expected at the White House for a meeting between President Bush and the newly elected legislators, Barack’s unfamiliarity with Capitol Hill led him to miss the bus that would take them down Pennsylvania Avenue. “I’ve got to figure out how to get to the White House. Should I be driving on my own? I don’t want Bush to think I’m blowing him off,” he told a staffer before an SUV materialized. Smoking a cigarette en route, Barack arrived just in time. Except for Madelyn Dunham, all of Barack’s family was arriving in Washington for Tuesday’s events, and Monday evening, they all had dinner together. Malik Abon’go and Granny Sarah flew in from Nairobi, Auma from London, and Maya and Konrad from Honolulu. “When you have relatives all over the planet, and you can’t afford to get together on a regular basis, this is an excellent excuse to get them together,” Michelle observed. Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. told the Chicago Tribune that “if we keep faith and keep hope alive, they will be the First Family of the United States,” and Tuesday’s Tribune described Barack as “an almost unprecedented national celebrity,” someone “akin to an African-American version of JFK” and representing “a new Camelot.”

  Emil Jones Jr., Jeremiah Wright, and several relatives joined the Obama family for Tuesday’s festivities. At midday Barack took the formal oath of office from Vice President Dick Cheney on the Senate floor. As family and friends then walked across the Capitol grounds to a reception at the Library of Congress, Malia asked her father, “Are you going to try to be president? Shouldn’t you try to be the vice president first?” Taking a far more dyspeptic view was Michelle, who remarked within journalists’ earshot that “Maybe one day he will do something to warrant all this attention.” As Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet wrote that evening, “on Google, enter ‘Barack Obama’ and ‘rising star’ and out will pop about 15,500 entries.”

  Before heading back to Chicago, Barack and Michelle looked at several homes for sale in the posh Maryland suburb of Chevy Chase and spoke with a school principal or two, but Michelle was strongly inclined to stay in Hyde Park rather than move to Washington. Her mother Marian, still living in nearby South Shore, enjoyed helping out with Malia and Sasha, and both girls were doing well at the U of C Lab School. Barack, who initially had wanted his family to join him in D.C. in the summer, now agreed. “This is a healthier environment to raise kids in,” he explained. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows us, and they knew us before, and they knew the girls before, and they’re not going to start acting different with them.”4

  With $330,000 soon coming in royalties from Dreams’ republication, the Obamas could afford to move from their East View condominium to a larger family home. Along with Miriam Zeltzerman, the real estate agent who had sold them the condo twelve years earlier, Michelle looked at almost a dozen houses that were for sale in Hyde Park and in neighboring Kenwood. Narrowing that group to four, she asked Barack to look at them, including her favorite, a grand house at 5046 South Greenwood Avenue whose asking price, $1.95 million, “was above what we’d originally intended to pay,” Barack recalled. “So I went with Miriam to take a look at the house. It was a wonderful house.”

  Originally built in 1910, 5046 South Greenwood had once been the home of the founder of Chess Records, the legendary blues label. By the late 1990s, when former hospital executive F. Scott Winslow bought it, the huge home was in “terrible, unlivable disrepair,” its third floor full of old vinyl records and the autographed master discs used to produce them. Winslow oversaw a painstaking, yearlong, $1 million restoration, subdivided the large property into two separate lots, and late in 1999 put the 6,199-square-foot house on the market for $1.8 million. “The restored mansion,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “has six bedrooms, a 28-foot-long glass c
onservatory, three fireplaces, a formal library with built-in Honduran mahogany glass-door bookcases, double red oak pocket doors, a 30-foot-by-40-foot entertainment loft with a 15-foot-high cathedral ceiling and several large stained glass windows.” It also featured “brand new windows, a whole-house stereo and video system . . . oak floors, a 600-bottle wine and cigar cellar, a new four-car garage with an indoor, half-court basketball court and an 800-square-foot roof deck.” On the new southerly lot, which buffered the big home from busy 51st Street, a second house could eventually be built.

  In the summer of 2000, Fredric Wondisford and Sally Radovick, two Harvard endocrinologists who were joining the U of C’s medical faculty, purchased both properties, paying $1,650,000 for the mansion and $621,000 for the adjoining lot. By January 2005, Wondisford and Radovick had accepted new appointments at Johns Hopkins University, beginning in the fall, and put both up for sale, at $1.95 million and $625,000, specifying simultaneous closings in June. Listing agent Donna Schwan Jackson was well acquainted with Tony Rezko, who maintained an apartment just across 51st Street at 5109 South Ellis, and Barack asked Tony to join him and Zeltzerman on a second tour of the home. “He thought it was a good house,” Barack recalled, and Rezko asked about the adjoining lot, which Barack said was not worth its $625,000 asking price to him and Michelle. Tony said he might be interested in acquiring it, and Barack replied, “That would be fine.” As Barack later explained, “my basic view at that time was having somebody who I knew, a friend of mine, who would be developing the lot if he could, would be great. It would be somebody who we know.”

  “We were eager to make a purchase, make a decision,” and with Miriam Zeltzerman believing that the $1.95 million asking price was too high, Barack and Michelle on January 15 made an initial lowball offer of $1.3 million, agreeing to a delayed June closing. Rezko wanted to involve another close friend’s wife, Patti Blagojevich, a part-time real estate agent, in the transaction, her husband Rod remembered. “Rezko was talking to Patti about a property, a friend of his, who was buying a house in Hyde Park,” and “actually almost had Patti do the real estate deal for Obama’s house,” but was unable to interject her into the sale. The sellers responded to Barack and Michelle’s initial offer with a counteroffer, and on January 21, the Obamas increased their bid to $1.5 million. The sellers immediately replied, and on January 23, the Obamas again increased their offer, this time to $1.65 million, the same price Wondisford and Radovick had paid five years earlier. The sellers accepted, and soon after they accepted a list-price offer of $625,000 for the adjoining lot from Rita Rezko, Tony’s wife. Neither Barack nor the sellers knew how deeply troubled Rezko’s finances were, with GE Commercial Finance Corporation having obtained an unreported $3.5 million judgment against him just two months earlier. The $1.65 million price was significantly more than the Obamas had intended to pay, but Michelle’s enthusiasm for 5046 South Greenwood carried the day. After the previous eight years, and especially the past two, “Barack felt he owed Michelle the home,” David Axelrod explained.5

  With Senate business getting off to a slow start, Barack spent much of January in Illinois. Opening a Springfield office, Barack also visited the state capitol, telling House members that “the Democrats are better-looking here than they are in Washington. The Republicans are tougher here than they are in Washington.” At a town hall meeting in Lockport, Barack received a greeting “usually reserved for movie and rock stars,” the Tribune reported, and a Daily Herald journalist who watched a second one in Waukegan wrote that the “sharp, engaging and often witty” yet “humble” senator “hasn’t lost any of the charisma and energy he exuded” during the 2004 campaign. Returning to Washington for his first Senate hearing, Barack said “how grateful I am” to join the Foreign Relations Committee given its “wonderful reputation for bipartisanship.”

  In Chicago, Oprah Winfrey took a camera crew to East View to spend a day with the Obamas. When the show was broadcast, Winfrey introduced Barack as “a man for our time” and “our electrifying new senator” who “is fast becoming America’s favorite son.” Oprah told Barack that his DNC speech had “felt monumental and momentous to me,” but Barack was self-deprecating, worrying “if you don’t have people around you who can remind you that actually ‘What you just said makes no sense,’ and fortunately I have my wife to do that continually.” Michelle joined in, telling Winfrey, “Barack is absolutely the messiest person in the household,” and reminding him, “You had dirty clothes on top of the basket this morning. And I’m just like, ‘There’s a basket with a lid. Lift it up, put it in.’” Michelle reminisced that “Friday night was always date night,” but “we’re too tired now to do a dinner and a movie, so it’s usually just dinner.” Barack agreed. “Yeah. We’re getting too old to do both.”

  The next day Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, the lead voice in the takedowns of Blair Hull and Jack Ryan, published a piece predicting that “Obama Will Run for President” in 2008 and would win. Dismissing Hillary Clinton as “a poisonously polarizing figure who will build a bridge back to the 20th century and those dreadful Clinton Wars,” Zorn noted that “among average Democrats, Obama’s is the only name that doesn’t tend to provoke either a yawn, a puzzled look or an anguished cry of ‘Please, God, not again!’” On the Republican side, “John McCain’s time will have passed.” While Barack’s communications director Robert Gibbs “denied again Wednesday that Obama will run in 2008,” Zorn told readers, “Don’t you believe it.”

  After holding additional town hall meetings at VFW posts in Evergreen Park and Springfield, Barack was soon back in Washington, where he used his seat on the Veterans Affairs Committee to grill a Bush administration nominee about a seeming disparity in how much funding Illinois veterans were receiving. When the nomination of Condoleezza Rice for secretary of state came to the Senate floor, Barack joined thirty-two other Democrats in voting to confirm her. Thirteen Democrats, including California’s outspoken Barbara Boxer, Illinois’s Dick Durbin, and Massachusetts’s Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, voted against Rice. When progressive Illinois representative Jan Schakowsky asked Barack about his vote, citing Rice’s role in instigating the war in Iraq, Barack explained, “I want to be able to cross party lines. . . . I don’t want to just be a Barbara Boxer.”6

  In late January, Barack launched his own individual PAC, Hopefund, as a vehicle for political fund-raising and contributing to other Democrats’ campaigns. Former Senate campaign fund-raisers Jenny Yeager and Jordan Kaplan, plus staffers Nate Tamarin and Tarak Shah, came on board, with Valerie Jarrett serving as the PAC’s treasurer. On February 1 Barack had a long private conversation about life as a famous yet junior U.S. senator with New York’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, and two days later Barack joined Clinton and thirty-four other Democrats in voting against the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be U.S. attorney general. “If we are willing to rationalize torture through legalisms and semantics,” no longer would the U.S. represent “a higher moral standard” in the world. The next week Barack was one of nineteen Democrats joining unanimous Senate Republicans in approving President Bush’s Class Action Fairness Act by a 72–26 margin.

  In Barack’s Senate office, chief of staff Pete Rouse sketched out a “Strategic Plan” for Barack’s first year as a U.S. senator. The top priority “was demonstrating that he was serious about being a senator for Illinois and delivering for Illinois.” Most weeks Barack flew back to Chicago on Thursday afternoons to hold regular town hall meetings across the state while also spending at least Sundays at home with his family. At one session in Naperville, Republican state senator Kirk Dillard introduced Barack, telling the crowd that working with him in Springfield had been “one of the highlights of my life.”

  Rouse and Barack were in firm agreement that he should modulate his national profile by limiting his national speechmaking and declining interviews to appear on television talk shows. Rouse’s second focus was for Barack “to fit into the Senate and to . . . show that he was a team playe
r, that he was not a headline hunter, that he deserved better committee assignments, that he could help the leadership.” Barack “was very aware of the importance of being a team player and not raising people’s hackles.” As Barack told his aides, “I think it’s important to take it slow. I want to be liked.” Only a year or more in would Barack begin to seek a national stage, but in reviewing Rouse’s game plan with other aides, Barack complained that his busy weekly schedule already allowed him insufficient time to study the major issues coming before the Senate.

  Barack’s newfound wealth led him to dip a toe into the stock market, with wealthy black investor George W. Haywood recommending a broker who purchased about $90,000 worth of stock in SkyTerra Communications and about $10,000 in AVI BioPharma for Barack. Haywood and his wife Cheryl were major investors in both firms, as were two other men, John J. Gorman of Texas and Jared Abbruzzese of New York, both of whom had contributed generously to Barack’s 2004 Senate race. In Chicago, it took Barack and Michelle less than two weeks to obtain an attractive rate commitment from Northern Trust for the 80 percent, $1.32 million mortgage their purchase of 5046 South Greenwood would require, but Tribune stories busily detailed how Barack’s friend Tony Rezko was the beneficiary of insider dealings that had led the Illinois Tollway to award its fast-food franchises to two chains closely linked to Tony and his friend Chris Kelly, Rod Blagojevich’s top fund-raiser.7

  Barack made a special exception to his low-national-profile stance to fly to Atlanta to address a $500-per-person sixty-fifth-birthday fund-raiser for Congressman John Lewis, but Barack’s next three speaking appearances were at town hall meetings in Columbus, Rock Island, and Bloomington, Illinois. A Washington Post Style Section profile of the “rising star” proclaimed that Barack’s “signature quality is the ease with which he inhabits his charisma,” but it was senior senator Ted Kennedy’s comment in the story—“He seems to be keeping his head down and doing everything right”—that most pleased Pete Rouse and Barack’s other aides, who now finally moved into his permanent offices on the top floor of the Hart Senate Office Building. Further good news came when U of C Hospitals’ president Michael Riordan promoted Michelle to a new post as one of seventeen vice presidents. With Michelle now ready to resume full-time work, and her mother Marian reducing her work hours to pick Malia and Sasha up from school each weekday, the promotion promised to raise Michelle’s annual salary from $120,000 to upward of $300,000.