Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  In mid-March a further deluge of critical news coverage hit Tony Rezko. The Tribune revealed that Tony operated two O’Hare Airport fast-food outlets that a minority-set-aside program had awarded to Rezko’s longtime business partner Jabir Herbert Muhammad, the seventy-six-year-old son of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. Those outlets had grossed $15.7 million from 1999 through 2002, but as the Chicago Sun-Times underscored, the city ordinance governing the set-aside program “requires that a minority not just own, but actually control and operate the business day-to-day.” Tony’s close relationship to Cook County Board president John Stroger and his championing of his large extended family were both reflected by the presence of “six Rezkos on Cook County payrolls.” Tony and Muhammad also owned another minority-set-aside firm that operated one thousand pay phones controlled by Cook County, but the Tribune discovered that Deloris Wade, its supposed African American chief executive, had actually died fourteen months earlier.8

  In a long Tribune profile, Barack told reporter Jeff Zeleny that in the Senate, “I feel very humble about what I don’t know” and said that his voting record “won’t be as easy to categorize as many people expect.” Barack expressed open ambivalence, saying that “it’s more fun being a governor or president” because in the Senate “one of the difficulties is that you’re constantly confronted with these votes that may not reflect your views.” At the end of March, Barack conducted a three-day statewide tour of college campuses to promote his first bill, the Higher Education Opportunity Through Pell Grant Expansion or “HOPE” Act. Highlighting how “college tuition is rising at a stunning rate of almost 10 percent a year,” the bill would increase need-based Pell Grants from a maximum of $4,050 a year to $5,100, a figure President Bush had embraced five years earlier. At SIU Edwardsville students “mobbed” Barack, “asking him for autographs,” and when his Hopefund team used his name to e-mail members of the progressive MoveOn.org network seeking donations to conservative West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, the results were astonishing. “In less than 24 hours, more than 15,000 contributors gave $634,000 to Byrd’s campaign,” a West Virginia newspaper reported.

  On April 15, with their modest, pre-royalties 2004 income totaling only $207,000, Barack and Michelle received a $6,200 IRS refund. Four days later Barack joined President Bush and other political luminaries to celebrate the opening of Springfield’s Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. At a grand dinner the evening before the public ceremony, Barack introduced old friends to Tony Rezko, and in his own remarks the next day, Barack complained that “image all too often trumps substance” while lauding Lincoln as “this man who was the real thing.” After hitching a ride back to Washington with President Bush on Air Force One, Barack told a National Press Club audience he already had held nineteen town hall meetings across Illinois and said that “Democrats have to be able to talk about faith and family and community in ways that resonate with the American people but also embrace tolerance and diversity.” He warned that “if the Democrats are dismissive or patronizing toward people’s genuine concerns about faith, family and community, we will lose.”

  Introducing his second and third bills, Barack demonstrated his desire to address important issues that had not received widespread attention. The E-85 Fuel Utilization and Infrastructure Development Incentives Act aimed to increase the small number of gas stations available for flexible fuel vehicles, and the Attacking Viral Influenza Across Nations (AVIAN) Act sought to prevent an avian flu pandemic. Sitting down with WTTW’s Phil Ponce in Chicago, Barack explained that he was receiving “about three hundred invitations a week” but was rigorously limiting his speaking appearances outside Illinois. “Most of the time that I’m spending right now is on policy,” he explained, and asked about the 2008 presidential race, Barack replied, “I’ve ruled that out.”9

  In the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, Tony Rezko was receiving far more coverage than Barack. Governor Rod Blagojevich’s estranged father-in-law, 33rd Ward alderman Dick Mell, had publicly alleged that the administration was trading state appointments for campaign donations, triggering investigations that led to grand jury subpoenas to gubernatorial fund-raisers like Chris Kelly and Rezko. One top Democratic lawmaker told the Tribune that Tony “seems to have a hand in everything Rod Blagojevich does,” and a front-page profile of Rezko noted that he had raised funds for Barack and Cook County Board president John Stroger as well as for the governor. “Tony’s the type of guy who is always helping host fundraisers and getting his friends to give you money,” Stroger told the Tribune. “But he’s real upfront with you, and I’ve never known him to ask for favors, which is unusual in this business.”

  Keeping up a busy speaking schedule all across Illinois, Barack expressed shock when he learned at a Thornton Township youth summit that south suburban high schools ended classes at 1:30 P.M. Such an abbreviated school day could spur youthful criminality, and Barack warned that a criminal record was often “an economic death sentence” for young adults’ job prospects. At Knox College’s commencement in Galesburg, Barack told graduates that “focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. . . . It’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential.” Recycling some of those remarks at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine’s commencement, Barack used that setting to bemoan how “the crushing cost of health care in America” as well as the nation’s “lack of collective will to ensure that every single American has access to effective, affordable health care” represented “a moral shame,” “an economic disaster,” and “a national crisis.”

  Barack and Republican Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar coauthored a New York Times op-ed warning of the danger of an avian flu epidemic, and speaking at Jesse Jackson Sr.’s Operation PUSH, Barack decried what he had learned in Thornton Township. “You’ve got high schools in the south suburbs that are letting children out at 1:30 P.M. because they can’t afford to keep them until 3:00 P.M. These young people were saying that they know they are being shortchanged and no one seems to be concerned about them.”

  When USA Today asked Barack about his life as a freshman senator, he expressed disappointment that “there very rarely is real debate” in the Senate. “Each of us is speaking to an empty floor and to C-SPAN and giving stock speeches.” Barack later explained, “I think fairly quickly I realized that it was going to be hard to get things done in the minority. But that wasn’t a surprise. That was true when I was in the state legislature.” But Washington nonetheless was a disappointment as compared to Springfield. “I was surprised by the slow pace of the Senate. In the state legislature, we could get a hundred bills passed during the course of a session. In the Senate, it was maybe twenty. And that I think made me realize how resistant to change Washington is.”

  With the Senate badly divided over several conservative appellate court nominees put forward by President Bush, Barack voiced disappointment that “this argument we have been having over the last several weeks about judicial nominations has been an enormous distraction from some of the work that is most important to the American people.” Highlighting that he was “speaking to an empty chamber for the benefit of C-SPAN,” Barack said, “the last thing I would like to be spending my time on right now is talking about judges.” Barack made clear his limited interest in the composition of the federal bench, but he did “express, in the strongest terms, my opposition to the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown,” a California African American whom Barack termed “a political activist who happens to be a judge.” When Barack’s Illinois seatmate Dick Durbin drew Republican criticism for comparing interrogation techniques used upon U.S. detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to those employed by the Nazis, Barack rose in support after Durbin returned to the Senate floor to apologize. “We have a tendency, perhaps because we don’t share as much time on the floor as we should, perhaps because our politics seemed to be ginned up by inte
rest groups and blogs and the Internet, we have a tendency to demonize and jump on and make a mockery of each other across the aisle. That is particularly pronounced when we make mistakes.”

  In late June, a front-page Tribune story examined Barack’s role as the Senate’s sole African American. “One of the things that I’m trying to be mindful of is not starting to get so comfortable or risk-averse that I end up sounding like everyone else,” Barack told reporter Jeff Zeleny. “One of the scripts for black politicians is that for them to be authentically black they have to somehow offend white people,” which Barack rejected. Zeleny believed that Barack “has purposely refrained from being a leading voice” on racial issues, and “he doesn’t want to be seen as the black conscience of the Senate.” When Zeleny asked Barack whether he believed the United States was ready for a black president, Barack said yes. “I think an African American candidate—if he’s the best candidate—can be president.”10

  In midsummer Barack rented a new D.C. apartment, this one on the second floor of a town house at Massachusetts Avenue and 6th Street NE. When his Hopefund PAC’s finance report covering the first half of 2005 was released, it showed that more than $851,000 had been raised, of which $406,000 had been spent, leaving a healthy balance of $445,000. About $234,000 in contributions came from within Illinois, and Hopefund had contributed $2,000 toward Dan Hynes’s 2004 Illinois campaign debt plus $10,000 to Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine. Barack also gave $4,200 to every Democratic senator who was up for reelection in 2006, including Florida Democrat Bill Nelson. In early July, Barack flew to Orlando to join Nelson at a black Baptist church, and his Senate colleague introduced Barack as “a rock star who carries himself with dignity and humility and is so smart.” Back in Washington before the Senate’s August recess, Barack outspokenly attacked “the misplaced priorities of the Senate leadership” on the floor. Warning that “we are not focusing on the problems that truly matter,” Barack asked “is giving liability protection to gun manufacturers really more important than passing the Department of Defense authorization bill during a time of war?” Barack sounded a similar theme the next day, highlighting “one of the most pressing problems of our time, our dependence on foreign oil” and calling “energy independence” a national priority.

  By August, Barack and Michelle had sold their East View condo to jazz musician Kurt Elling for $415,000—a nice return on their $277,500 1993 investment—closed on their $1.6 million purchase of 5046 South Greenwood, and moved to the spaciously luxurious new home. Michelle had further burnished her income by joining the board of TreeHouse Foods, which, along with its parent company, Bay Valley Foods, would pay her $45,000 annually in director’s fees. In mid-August, Barack joined former president Bill Clinton and other dignitaries in speaking at a lengthy memorial service for longtime Ebony publisher John H. Johnson and then sandwiched two days of downstate town hall meetings around Governor’s Day at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield. Most citizens asked about soaring gasoline prices and rising health care costs, but in Champaign a group of antiwar protesters were waiting in the parking lot with signs criticizing Barack’s unwillingness to call for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. At the forum, Barack’s responses left one critic complaining that “he dodged a lot of questions by giving noncommittal answers,” but when Barack remarked, “I am not the president—yet,” the crowd responded with “loud cheers.”

  Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar had long pursued the decommissioning of obsolete Soviet weapons of mass destruction, annually visiting Soviet bloc sites to monitor progress. Soon after joining the committee, Barack expressed interest in nuclear proliferation challenges, and Lugar readily agreed when Barack asked if he could join the chairman’s 2005 ten-day trip. On August 24 their fourteen-member group, including Barack’s new foreign policy staffer Mark Lippert and communications director Robert Gibbs, boarded a government DC-9 to fly to Moscow. From there they flew first to Saratov and then on to Perm, where aging nuclear warheads were being destroyed. Russian space agency officials greeted Lugar’s party with vodka toasts, but when the time came for them to fly to Ukraine, Russian border guards sought to search the U.S. aircraft.

  A standoff ensued, with Lugar, Barack, and their aides, minus their passports, locked in an airport lounge while frantic phone calls bounced between Washington, Moscow, and Perm. Barack napped on a sofa while Lugar remarked to Jeff Zeleny of the Chicago Tribune, the only journalist on the trip, that “it makes you wonder who really is running the country.” Diplomatic niceties were restored when the “Rod Blagojevich of Perm,” as Barack described the regional governor, took charge, and the U.S. group flew on to Kiev, where the senators toured a “dilapidated building” where bioterror viruses “were locked behind thin padlocks or not at all.” From Kiev, they headed to Donetsk, then southward to Baku, Azerbaijan, before making a final stop in London. Lugar and Barack called upon British prime minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street and then flew back to Washington.11

  By the time of their return, Hurricane Katrina had caused what Barack called a “crisis of biblical proportions” along the Gulf Coast, with massive flooding in low-lying areas of New Orleans leading to a disproportionately poor and African American death toll that topped eighteen hundred. On September 5 Barack joined Oprah Winfrey and Jesse Jackson Sr. to travel to Houston, where former presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, along with Barack’s Senate colleague Hillary Clinton, greeted evacuees who were being housed at the Astrodome. As commentators debated the extent to which the federal government’s tardy response to the disaster reflected disinterest in poor communities of color, Barack took to the Senate floor to denounce the “unconscionable ineptitude.” He said, “I think the ineptitude was colorblind,” and he quickly introduced a trio of bills aimed at helping refugees and those assisting them. Launching a series of podcasts, Barack spoke of “communities that had been abandoned before the hurricane” and called for the country to “close this divide between the wealthy and the poor.” Accepting a Sunday TV show invitation for the first time since his swearing-in, Barack told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the Bush administration’s response was “so detached from the realities of inner-city life” that it reflected the government’s “historic indifference” toward poor communities that “are disproportionately African American.” Federal officials exhibited “a terrific spin operation, but not the kind of soul-searching that I think you’d want to see from any administration, Democrat or Republican.”

  Barack emphasized to the Tribune’s Jeff Zeleny that “it is way too simplistic just to say this administration doesn’t care about black people,” but “I think it is entirely accurate to say that this administration’s policies don’t take into account the plight of poor people in poor communities.” Visiting Harvard to deliver keynote remarks at the law school’s “Celebration of Black Alumni,” Barack chided the criticism directed at President Bush. “We haven’t displayed the kind of cool, focused outrage that Charles Hamilton Houston displayed” when launching the NAACP’s legal campaign against school segregation. “In fact, our anger at Bush and the administration lets us off the hook. It allows us to say, ‘Well, I didn’t vote for him. I wrote John Kerry a check, so it’s not my problem.’ But of course it is our problem.” Barack’s friends joked about how Harvard president Larry Summers twice mispronounced his name as “Bare-ack” when introducing him, but Barack joked too about his colleagues in the U.S. Senate. “There are some folks there who you’re wondering, ‘How’d you get here?’”

  Out of public view, private fund-raisers were a staple of Barack’s schedule. A Philadelphia one featuring Barack produced more than $500,000 for Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate Bob Casey, and during Barack’s Harvard visit, a $1,000-per-person event increased Hopefund’s coffers. David Axelrod and his wife Susan were deeply devoted to an epilepsy research organization their daughter Lauren’s illness had led them to found, and for the second time since his e
lection to the Senate, Barack headlined a CURE fund-raiser, this one a roast of Chicago congressman Rahm Emanuel, a onetime ballet dancer who had lost part of a finger in a youthful accident. Rahm was “the first to adapt Machiavelli’s The Prince for dance,” Barack joked. “As you can imagine, there were a lot of kicks below the waist.” The loss of much of Emanuel’s middle finger “rendered him practically mute,” Barack asserted. “Has he ever flashed that little stubby thing at you?”12

  But Katrina’s aftermath remained the foremost national issue, with Barack telling NPR listeners that “most of the effects of race have to do with institutional and structural barriers to opportunity.” He explained that “we’ve got to see this as a twenty-, thirty-, forty-year project,” but “the last presidential election” had not included any “conversations about poverty.” Just as in his foreign affairs partnership with Indiana Republican Richard Lugar, so too on Katrina Barack partnered with conservative Oklahoma Republican freshman Tom Coburn to introduce a bill requiring careful oversight of federal recovery spending. Barack and Coburn had met during Senate orientation, and “our wives hit it off, and we became friends,” Coburn explained. “We both share a philosophy that whatever money is spent by the federal government should be well spent,” and Barack struck Coburn as “a very honest and sincere man.”