In the early 1990s, Chicago’s black political community was in a funk. Washington had been dead for four years, and the new mayor, Richard M. Daley, had beaten black candidates two elections in a row. Blacks created the Harold Washington Party in an attempt to keep control of city hall, but the movement foundered without its namesake political genius. Washington had drawn in Latinos and white liberals with a message of inclusion; his would-be successors drove them away by shouting about black empowerment. Worn-out and discouraged by their loss of power, by 1991 Chicago blacks were voting at their lowest rate ever. As a transient community with a high proportion of renters, blacks needed continual reminders to register. It had been nearly a decade since anyone had given them a good reason. Newman thought a Project Vote! chapter might reverse that trend.
In search of a director, Newman called his community organizing contacts in the city. They kept mentioning this ex-organizer who’d just returned to town from Harvard Law School. So Newman hired Barack Obama.
Even before Obama registered a voter, Project Vote! got a huge break. Carol Moseley Braun was the Cook County recorder of deeds, an obscure clerical office, but she decided to seek the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate out of anger toward the incumbent, Alan Dixon, who had voted to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. A wealthy trial lawyer also ran, making it a three-way race. When the two white guys eviscerated each other, Moseley Braun slipped between them to win the March primary. Blacks were thrilled by the prospect of electing a sister to the all-white Senate.
As a grassroots campaign, Project Vote! was a bridge between Obama’s past as a community organizer and his future as a politician. It was also a chance to duplicate the effort that had brought his idol Harold Washington to power.
Still a rube about the mechanics of Chicago politics, Obama went to see a West Side alderman who had worked on Washington’s registration drive. He walked into Sam Burrell’s office carrying a book bag, looking like a law student.
“You’ve been successful at this,” Obama said to Burrell.
Burrell gave Obama an explanation he probably didn’t want to hear.
“The reason I’m so successful is that I reimburse them for expenses,” he explained. “I pay a dollar a vote.”
Burrell offered Obama the services of his office manager, Carol Anne Harwell. They set up headquarters on Michigan Avenue with a five-person staff. Officially, Harwell was a secretary, taking care of “the female things” around the office, but she became one of Obama’s first guides to black Chicago politics. As a West Sider, she taught him that her part of town was different from the South Side he’d gotten to know. West Side blacks were even poorer than South Side blacks, she explained. Closer to their Southern roots. South Siders looked down on West Siders as “country,” while West Siders thought South Siders were stuck-up, “bourgeois.” That was all new to Obama.
“He didn’t know anything,” Harwell would recall. “He was so naive. I gave him the address of a meeting on the West Side. We didn’t have cell phones or pagers. Barack is very punctual. He was a couple of minutes late. He has this Kansas City twang. He said, ‘Y’all didn’t think I was ever gonna get there. I had no idea Chicago is that big.’ ”
It may have been the most intense summer of Obama’s life, a test of the discipline and organization he had already shown as a community organizer and a law student. Not only was he running a voter registration drive, he was writing his memoir, studying for the bar exam, and preparing for his wedding to Michelle that fall. In exchange for $200,000 in seed money, Obama had promised Newman 150,000 new voters. In spite of Burrell’s advice, he was adamant that he wasn’t going to buy those names, Chicago-style. But Obama needed Burrell’s operation, the United Voter Registration League, to sign up voters on the West Side. So he worked out an accounting trick that allowed him to look honest while still acknowledging the realities of inner-city politics. Burrell’s workers were paid “expenses” for car fare and lunch. Inevitably, those expenses worked out to a dollar a voter.
On the South Side, with its older, more prosperous black community and better-established civic groups, Obama had an easier time finding volunteers. He started at his own church. Once Obama got Reverend Wright behind the campaign, he could count on forty or fifty bodies every weekend. (Trinity was the largest church in the Twenty-first Ward, so that was one alderman Obama didn’t have to ask for help.) The NAACP and Operation PUSH contributed volunteers. So did ACORN, beginning Obama’s long involvement with that activist group. They stood outside L stations, supermarkets, and welfare offices. They trolled Taste of Chicago, a civic eating festival that draws six-figure crowds to Grant Park, the great lakefront commons. Obama signed up voters at the Bud Billiken Parade, which marches through the South Side’s black neighborhoods each July.
But not everyone embraced Project Vote! Obama got the brush-off from Lu Palmer, a militant journalist and radio host who ran the Black Independent Political Organization, a group that considered itself the torchbearer of Harold Washington’s legacy. Palmer, who was practically a separatist, was suspicious of the half-white, half-Kenyan guy with the Harvard degree and the Hyde Park apartment.
“When Obama first hit town, my recollection is that he came here running some voter registration drive,” Palmer would say a few years later. “He came to our office and tried to get us involved, and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn’t like his arrogance, his air.”
As a former organizer, Obama’s instinct was to bypass politicians and work with community groups. Moseley Braun made that power-to-the-people ideal easy to achieve. Her primary campaign had been an insurgency against a regular Democrat: Alan Dixon, a former Illinois secretary of state, was a genial, undistinguished solon who went by the nickname “Al the Pal.” The ward bosses would have pushed harder for Dixon in the general election. But the NAACP chairmen and the church ladies in white gloves and feathered hats were thrilled to sign up voters for Moseley Braun. There had only been one black senator since Reconstruction. And there had never been a black woman. Project Vote! was officially nonpartisan, but it practically became an arm of the Moseley Braun campaign. “We have got to get Carol elected” was in the mind of every volunteer. All over town, blacks were telling registrars, “I want to register. Carol Moseley Braun is running for Senate.” Bill Clinton was also on the ballot that year, but in black Chicago, he hardly figured as a selling point.
Black pride was running high all over the country in 1992. It was the summer of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Young people wore silver X baseball caps and black power T-shirts. One shirt bore the in-your-face motto IT’S A BLACK THING, YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. Another featured a triptych of three black idols, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela (who had just been released from prison and would soon be elected president of South Africa), with the legend MARTIN, MALCOLM, MANDELA AND ME.
Obama wanted to tap into that spirit, so he asked his staff for a slogan that would connect Project Vote! to the legacy of Malcolm X.
Someone came up with “Register and Vote by Any Means Necessary.”
“It’s kind of harsh,” said Obama, showing an ear for what would sound too militant to whites.
“How about ‘It’s a Power Thing’?” suggested a staffer named Bruce Dixon, who’d been hired to organize the North Side.
Obama loved it. He added “Register and Vote” and had the slogan framed in a red, yellow, and green kente border. It was a coveted T-shirt and poster that summer.
Project Vote! made Obama a small-time celebrity in the black community. He spoke from the pulpits of churches, addressed a rally in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH headquarters, and was interviewed on WVON (originally Voice of the Negro, now Voice of the Nation), Chicago’s black talk radio station. Since Obama was responsible for raising money to supplement Newman’s contribution, he was introduced, for the first time, to the wealthy Chicagoans who would one day fund his campaigns for the U.S. Senate and the presidency. Ed Gardn
er, founder of Soft Sheen Products, an African-American hair care manufacturer, donated thousands of dollars. John Rogers, an investment banker who is now one of Obama’s closest friends, was the fund-raising cochair. The chair, John Schmidt, was a Harvard-educated lawyer who had served as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s first chief of staff. Schmidt organized events at the University Club, where Obama met big-time Democratic donors Lewis Manilow and Bettylu Saltzman, who eagerly wrote him checks. Chicago’s liberal elite was enchanted by the articulate young black man with the Harvard Law degree.
“In front of that kind of audience, he was as good as he was going to get,” Schmidt would recall. “He learned how effective he could be in a room full of lawyers.”
At Project Vote! headquarters, Obama was an intense, disciplined, but low-key boss. He would sit in his tiny office, chain-smoking Pall Malls and studying tallies, always with one figure in mind: the 150,000 voters he’d promised Newman.
“How many registrations to get to where we need?” he’d ask his field organizers at their weekly meetings. “In order to get this funding, we gotta have these registrations.”
Brian Banks, a Harvard grad and Altgeld Gardens native, was in charge of the South Side. When Banks tried to hire his live-in girlfriend to work on a freelance project for the campaign, he got a reminder that his boss wasn’t from Chicago.
“Look, you can’t do this,” Obama told him quietly but firmly.
Banks responded with a “you’re crazy” look, but Obama continued.
“We’re not going to run this with people from your family getting paid,” he said.
Obama was also learning to use his sex appeal as a political tool. With his baritone voice; tall, lean figure; brilliant smile; and Ivy League intellect, Obama was enormously attractive to females. To the middle-aged women of the DCP, he had presented himself as a surrogate son. But now he was a thirty-year-old man, running a citywide program with a six-figure budget. The head of Project Vote! was going to have to suggest a deeper relationship with his female followers, and Obama did. In politics, 1992 was the Year of the Woman. Most Project Vote! volunteers were women, as excited about Moseley Braun’s gender as her race. They were also motivated by Obama’s magnetism. One loyal registrar came back to the office with over a thousand sheets that summer.
Banks had played basketball in high school and college, so he knew about groupies, and he also knew when guys were exploiting their female admirers. Obama was aware of his charisma, but he was too focused on voter registration to fool around.
“One of the reasons this project was so successful is there were a lot of women who wanted to spend time with him,” Banks would say. “He’d walk into a room, and there’d be people swooning. I’ve seen a lot of guys who used that to have sex, but he just wanted to use that to do something.”
Project Vote! added more than 150,000 new voters to the rolls—a record for a Chicago registration drive. For the first time, voters in black-majority wards outnumbered voters in white-majority wards. And they came out in November, thanks to get-out-the-vote phone calls made from Teamsters headquarters. Over half a million blacks voted, the highest turnout since Harold Washington’s first election. Carol Moseley Braun defeated her Republican opponent 53 percent to 47 percent, and Bill Clinton became the first Democrat to carry Illinois since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Illinois became a blue state that year. It has not changed colors since.
Moseley Braun not only inherited Harold Washington’s movement, she expanded on his achievements. Before Harold, a black Chicago pol’s highest aspiration was U.S. representative. After Harold, it became senator, and ultimately president. Plenty of other cities have had black mayors—Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore—but in none of those places have blacks achieved so much statewide political success. (Moseley Braun was actually the second black politician to win a statewide election in Illinois. In 1978, Roland Burris, a product of the South Side Machine, was elected to the first of three terms in the minor office of comptroller. Burris later served as attorney general, then became notorious when Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed him to complete Obama’s term in the U.S. Senate.)
Chicago has two unique advantages. First, it’s in Cook County, which contains nearly half of Illinois’s voters. Second, the local Democratic Party is a countywide organization. After Moseley Braun won the primary, precinct captains in white Chicago neighborhoods and the suburbs whipped up votes for her in the general election.
“They had to go out and sell the black person to demonstrate that the party was still open,” political consultant Don Rose would explain. “It was a hard-fought thing. If you use Harold Washington’s election as the pivot point, what you begin to see is black politicians making challenges to the regular organizations, and then the organizations having to support them.”
Obama’s success won him his first notice in the Chicago Tribune. In a special Black History Month section, he was named one of “25 Chicagoans on the road to making a difference.”
“Barack Obama, 31, Attorney,” the agate-type profile read. “A community activist who headed Project Vote!, a voter registration effort responsible for signing up many of the 150,000 new African-American voters added to the rolls for last November’s historic election. In 1990, he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.”
Obama’s wedding took place at Trinity United Church of Christ, with a reception at the South Shore Country Club, a once-segregated institution on the lakefront, just south of Hyde Park. By marrying Michelle, he was binding himself to black Chicago, where he’d chosen to make his home and career. The Obamas would eventually become members of the city’s black elite, a community of entrepreneurs, doctors, publishers, attorneys, and politicians. Their Harvard degrees would help them conquer that world, but they hadn’t conquered it just yet. Michelle had grown up middle-class, in the Highlands, an enclave of South Shore: Her father worked at the city’s water filtration plant, and she attended Whitney Young, a public high school for overachievers.
Obama had two best men: his Kenyan half brother, Malik, and Johnnie Owens. The guest list represented both the life he was leaving behind and the one he was about to enter: Jerry Kellman was at the wedding. So were Loretta Augustine, Yvonne Lloyd, and Margaret Bagby. The only elected officials present were Sam Burrell and Toni Preckwinkle, a pair of aldermen who’d worked on Project Vote! Jesse Jackson Jr. attended because his wife, Sandi, was a childhood friend of Michelle’s.
The DCP women were thrilled to see Obama marry Michelle. They’d been worried that their promising young man would be prey for “some jezebel or some bimbo.” But Michelle was clearly as brilliant as Barack. When the couple made the rounds at the reception, Bagby told Michelle that her new husband was destined for the White House.
“Ahh, yeah, right,” Obama laughed, the same as he’d always done when Margaret insisted he’d be president someday. Then he moved on to the next table. As a law student, he’d visited Roseland whenever he returned to Chicago, and as head of Project Vote!, he’d enlisted DCP members as volunteers. But after the wedding, those three women would rarely see him again.
Chapter 5
THE YOUNG LAWYER
I N E A R L Y 1 9 9 3, Obama went to work full-time at Davis, Miner. He was given a narrow office at the head of the stairwell on the second floor, right next to Judd Miner’s. He hung up a photo of Harold Washington—the same tinted studio portrait seen in so many South Side parlors—and set about doing the late mayor’s unfinished business.
Davis, Miner carried the banner for Chicago’s white liberals and black nationalists. A decade before they had united to put Washington in office. Now, they were out of power. In 1989, Richard M. Daley had been elected to complete Washington’s unfinished term, defeating Alderman Timothy Evans, who skipped the Democratic primary to run as the candidate of the Harold Washington Party. It was another racially divisive election. Unable to hold Washington’s multiethnic coalition together, Evan
s got only 7 percent of the white vote, a third of what his party’s namesake had received. With the Daleys restored to the mayor’s office, battles once won in the city council had to be argued in court.
“Judd Miner basically made his living by suing the city,” said a man who served as an expert witness in one of his cases.
That’s exactly what Miner was doing when Obama joined his firm. One of Obama’s first cases was Barnett v. Daley, which alleged that the city’s 1991 ward map was racially biased and should be redrawn to ensure the election of more black aldermen. This was essentially a continuation of “Council Wars”: Harold Washington had won his council majority in a special election, after a federal judge ordered that the 1980s ward map be reconfigured for racial balance. The plaintiffs were members of Washington’s old council bloc, the defendants mostly white ethnic aldermen who had sided with Edward Vrdolyak.
The 1990 census was the first in which blacks outnumbered whites in Chicago. Yet the city council had twenty-three whites, twenty African-Americans, and seven Latinos. The new Daley administration had maintained a white majority by creating wards where blacks made up more than 90 percent of the population, the suit argued. The Southwest Side—one of the city’s most bitter racial battlegrounds—was 68 percent African-American. Yet it had two white wards and two wards that were 98 and 99 percent black, respectively.
“To this day, electoral politics in Chicago is infected by racial bias and racial appeals, and it has touched on the right of African-Americans to participate in the electoral process and to elect candidates of their choice unless they have voting control of a ward,” argued Miner’s brief, which charged that the redistricting violated the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act.
Young Mr. Obama Page 7