Young Mr. Obama

by Edward McClelland

  Working with Simon and his institute, the panel came up with a bill that prohibited lobbyists from handing out donations on state property and banned fund-raisers within fifty miles of Springfield. If a lobbyist took a legislator or a state employee out to eat, he couldn’t spend more than $75. Legislators could no longer accept sports tickets or vacations. Obama wanted to limit campaign contributions, too, but that would have struck at the power of the house and senate leaders. They collected huge sums of money from lobbyists, then doled it out to grateful members. Finally, the bill required that contributions be posted on the Internet, which in 1997 was still a novelty to most politicians.

  The Gift Ban Act passed the Republican-controlled senate with no trouble. George Ryan was running for governor, and he didn’t want the newspapers harping on ethics. (Ryan won the election and served four years as governor, followed by six years in a federal prison for corruption.) It was a sensitive subject for the secretary of state, who had vacationed in Jamaica on a lobbyist’s dime. In the house, members worried that they’d be fined or jailed for niggling violations. One representative complained about the ban on using campaign funds for personal use. Would he be breaking the law by buying a patriotic shirt for a Fourth of July parade, then wearing it to a family picnic? Another wanted to know whether a contribution was “face-to-face” if he turned his back to receive it.

  The bill impressed editorial boards and made Obama a go-to guy for ethical reform groups, but inside the capitol, it reinforced his image as a self-righteous goo-goo.

  “Carrying the mantle of ethics in Springfield makes you a bit of an outsider,” says Cynthia Canary of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a group whose cause is as idealistic, and as hopeless, as temperance in Ireland. In the immortal words of Alderman Paddy Bauler, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!” (He later expanded on this with a quote that Obama’s detractors would have found amusing: “Christ! Who the hell would want to live here if it was? This is the big city, boy! This ain’t Honolulu!”)

  Denny Jacobs was the first to flout the new law. He held a fund-raiser at Norb Andy’s, a restaurant famous for serving that Springfield delicacy, the horseshoe: a hamburger patty on an open bun, smothered in French fries and gooey cheese. No idealist, Jacobs was always friendly to his political enemies: He took time out from his donors to offer soft drinks to the protesters on the sidewalk.

  The Gift Ban Act was declared unconstitutional by a friendly judge in Will County, but the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the law on appeal. Its most important legacy was electronic filing. Before the Internet, journalists and other busybodies had to fill out forms in triplicate to inspect campaign contributions. Afterward, anyone with a computer could learn that, say, the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee was taking money from a paving contractor. Lobbyists are still paying off legislators, but at least now everyone can watch it happen.

  In Chicago, a state senator is not a big wheel. Downstate, in rustic Central and Southern Illinois, legislators are local heroes. A Decatur housewife who sees her senator in the grocery store has a dinnertime story. Most Chicagoans can’t even name their state legislators. Obama could shop at the Hyde Park Co-op or browse at 57th Street Books without anyone whispering “There’s Senator Obama.” Aldermen don’t suffer the same anonymity. The city council—now that’s a big deal in Chicago. Both Mayors Daley began their political careers in the state senate, only to leave for more glamorous local offices.

  Why is the legislature such an ignoble political backwater? First of all, it meets in faraway Springfield. Chicagoans also assume that their legislators are sprockets in their local machines, puppets of the ward bosses who put them in office. (Rod Blagojevich got his start in politics because his father-in-law, a powerful alderman, wanted to demonstrate his clout by electing a state representative.) Once these half-bright hacks get to Springfield, most of the decisions are made by the “Four Tops”—the house and senate party leaders who control all the campaign funds.

  Hyde Parkers are less cynical about their politicians than most Chicagoans, but they’re also less starstruck. After all, a U of C English professor earns twice as much money as a state senator. And fawning over petty elected officials is not Hyde Park’s idea of sophistication. Obama worked hard to get attention. He served spaghetti at the IVI-IPO’s annual fund-raiser at the United Church of Hyde Park. He was a “celebrity judge” for the Harper Court Art Council’s Second Annual Creative Writing Contest. He flipped pancakes at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club’s annual fund-raiser and marched in colonial attire during the Fourth of July parade on Fifty-third Street.

  Obama also had a column in the Hyde Park Herald, “Springfield Report.” Every local pol got one. In an early “Springfield Report,” he attacked Republicans for refusing to pass limits on campaign contributions—“I, for one, continue to be a strong advocate of contribution limits and public financing of campaigns; without such limits and public investment, it’s hard to see how we can fully eliminate the influence of big money over the process.” It was not a surprising viewpoint for a junior member of the minority party representing a goo-goo district. Later on in the column, Obama added a rare personal note to his bureaucratic missive: “Some of you may have noticed my absence at this year’s Fourth of July parade. I had a good excuse: that was the day that my wife, Michelle, gave birth to our first child, Malia Ann Obama (8 pounds, 15 ounces). Both mother and daughter are doing great, and we wish to thank all of you who sent cards and called to wish us the best. Hopefully, Malia will be joining us at next year’s parade/birthday celebration!”

  For a freshman, Obama ran up an impressive record of bringing public works to his district. In 1998, for example, the state set aside $44.6 million to rebuild the eroding Lake Michigan shoreline south of Fifty-fifth Street. In reality, Obama wasn’t responsible for bringing home that big money. It was his state representative, Barbara Flynn Currie, who became house majority leader the year Obama joined the senate. Currie was a more effective state legislator, and as someone who’d represented Hyde Park since Obama was a high school senior in Hawaii, she was more in touch with neighborhood issues.

  Obama didn’t have a lot of power or influence in the capitol. He occupied a one-room office in a crowded suite on the mezzanine, a half floor where junior senators are hidden away. He wasn’t earning much money, either, especially for a young father with a mortgage and student loans from Harvard. The senate gig, which was part-time, paid $48,403 a year. Most legislators had a law practice, a family business, or a farm. At first, Obama thought he could continue as an associate at his law firm, but after a few weeks in Springfield, he called Judd Miner and told him the legislature was too much work.

  “Judd, this is unfair to you guys,” he said. “This is going to be much more time-consuming than I thought, and rather than get paid regularly while I’m here, I’d rather just keep track of my time. Let’s talk when I come back in May and see what a fair arrangement is.”

  Obama was turning down a salary he could have collected with very little effort. That was a testament to his honesty, Miner thought. Obama hung on to his corner office and the title of “counsel,” but his brief career as a practicing attorney was over.

  That meant he needed a job, though. There was an offer on the table from U of C. Obama went back to Douglas Baird with a proposal that would make him less than a full-time professor but more than a part-time lecturer: a two-thirds teaching load, no expectation of academic writing, and full benefits, which would include health insurance, and Lab School tuition for his children. He’d teach Mondays and Fridays, the days the senate wasn’t in session. It was an unusual request, but Obama was starting to get a sense of his own exceptionalism. Most schools, most law firms, would jump through hoops to keep the first black president of the Harvard Law Review around. U of C said yes. Baird had to clear it with the provost, whose only reservation was giving Obama the title “senior lecturer,” which was usually reserved for federal judges and other emine
nces. But Obama got the title, too. Baird thought it was a great deal. The school was getting more work out of a popular lecturer, and when Obama grew bored with the lowly position of state senator—as a man of his gifts was bound to do—he might consider teaching law full-time.

  Most Chicagoans look on any part of Illinois south of Interstate 80 as an underpopulated, uncultured rural appendage, good for growing corn and soybeans but not worth visiting. Obama, the hip urban senator who knew more about Kenyan village life than he did about small-town America, wanted to see the rest of the state. Through his work with Paul Simon, he got a chance. Simon lived in the southern marches of Illinois, a region known as Little Egypt. In the middle of 1997, his public policy institute held a fund-raising dinner in Chicago. Obama attended with John Schmidt, his chief money man from Project Vote! They sat with Steve Scates, a farmer from Shawneetown, across the Ohio River from Kentucky. A heavyset man with a bashful drawl, Scates had been appointed state director of the Farm Service Agency by his old friend Simon. Obama had never been to Little Egypt, which lies far below the Mason-Dixon Line, nearer to Nashville than Chicago. If he was ever going to run for statewide office, though, he’d have to make his Muslim name and his dark face known in all corners of the state. Best to start with Scates, who was an important Democratic donor in his region.

  “Even though I’m a state senator from Chicago, I want to know the rest of the state,” he told Scates at that dinner. “I’d like to visit you guys at your farm.”

  Scates invited him down. When Obama got back to Springfield, he proposed a trip to his legislative director, Dan Shomon. After session was over, he said, they should drive down south, hitting some of his colleagues’ golf outings. Shomon thought it was a grand idea. A former newspaper reporter who had worked eight years in the capitol, he wanted to expose his urbane, overeducated boss to rural life, and, frankly, he also wanted to teach Obama to behave like a commoner. Obama already had a reputation for haughtiness around the capitol. If voters saw him the same way, he’d never get ahead in politics. Obama and Shomon made an unusual-looking pair—Obama was tall and lean, while Shomon was squat and bushy haired, with squinty eyes behind thick glasses. But their partnership, which would last until Obama ran for the U.S. Senate, fit into a long tradition of smooth, charismatic politicians and brilliant, untidy sidekicks, each contributing a necessary element for political success. Think of Louis Howe and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Sorensen and John F. Kennedy, or Karl Rove and George W. Bush. That’s who Shomon was to Obama early in his career.

  In its four-hundred-mile run from Lake Michigan to the Ohio River, Illinois encompasses three American regions, each culturally and linguistically distinct from the others. The northern third of the state was settled by Yankees from New England and western New York. Highly educated, utopian, they built small religious colleges and supported abolition, prohibition, and women’s suffrage. After these settlers came millions of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Russia: Peasant stock, Catholic and Jewish, they were less idealistic about politics, allowing ward bosses to substitute themselves for old-world lairds and dukes. The prairies of Central Illinois are corn and soybean country, where people still say “warsh” for “wash,” go to evangelical churches on Wednesday night and Sunday morning, and hunt pheasant in the fall. Lincoln lived there, and his memory is revered with statues and plaques in every town where he practiced law. (Springfield has restored his entire block to its 1850s glory; in Charleston, where he debated Stephen A. Douglas, visitors can view a chip from a rail he split, displayed like a sliver of the true cross.) And then there is Little Egypt. The oldest part of the state, it was settled by migrants who arrived from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia in the age of Andrew Jackson. It is a landscape of deep coal mines, forests, and shadowed hollows. The name’s origin is uncertain: Some say it comes from the meeting of the Ohio and the Mississippi, similar to the Nile Delta, others from a hard winter when northern farmers were, like the sons of Jacob, forced to go down to Egypt to get corn. Wherever the term came from, it is reflected in the town names—Cairo, Karnak, Thebes—and the SIU mascot, the Saluki. Paul M. Angle, the author of Bloody Williamson—which details the region’s family feuds, Ku Klux Klan activity, and a massacre of twenty-two scabs by striking miners—compared it to Appalachia in its “family hatreds, labor strife, religious bigotry, atavistic narrowness.”

  True to its Southern roots, Little Egypt has a history of racial conflict—a 1967 riot in Cairo resulted in a years-long black boycott that drove white businesses out of town. Also true to its Southern roots, it is poor—the poorest part of Illinois—and ancestrally Democratic. Black Democrats had won there before. Roland Burris, a native of Centralia, carried Little Egypt in his races for comptroller and attorney general. Carol Moseley Braun swept the region in 1992, running on a ticket with Bill Clinton and Al Gore, two Southern Democrats whose famous bus tour stopped in Vandalia. Obama’s task wasn’t as difficult as it seemed.

  Shomon had worked as the Downstate coordinator on several statewide campaigns, so he tried to get Obama to go native—as much as that was possible for a black Harvard lawyer in coal country. As Obama would recount in The Audacity of Hope, Shomon, the perfect political mate, even nagged him about his clothes and his condiments.

  Four times he reminded me we have to pack—just khakis and polo shirts, he said; no fancy linen trousers or silk shirts. I told him I didn’t own any linens or silks. On the drive down, we stopped at a TGI Fridays and I ordered a cheeseburger. When the waitress brought the food I asked her if she had any Dijon mustard. Dan shook his head.

  “He doesn’t want Dijon,” he insisted, waving the waitress off. “Here,” he shoved a yellow bottle of French’s mustard in my direction—“here’s some mustard right here.”

  The waitress looked confused. “We got Dijon if you want it,” she said to me.

  In Shawneetown, Obama and Shomon toured Scates’s fifteen thousand acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat, which were spread across two counties. As far as Scates could tell, Obama had never been on a farm. He asked questions about the operation and wanted to learn what people who weren’t farmers did for a living in that country. Scates took him to the Greek-revival bank in Old Shawneetown—the oldest bank in Illinois—where he snapped a keepsake photo.

  “This young man has a fabulous future,” said Scates’s wife, Kappy, who worked in Senator Dick Durbin’s Marion office. Kappy bought a copy of Dreams from My Father, which she eventually lent to Paul Simon, who enjoyed it so much he ordered his own copy. Steve Scates thought their guest was “down-to-earth,” which spoke to Obama’s talent for adjusting his persona to that of a listener—common to all politicians but essential for a biracial legislator who represented a college campus and a housing project. Scates was just happy to see a Chicagoan in his part of the state. Little Egypt, which sits on the northernmost salient of the Ozarks, has the most dramatic scenery in Illinois, including the Garden of the Gods, a preserve of rock spires and waterfalls. But few city dwellers are willing to drive six hours through flat farm country to see it. They’d rather vacation in nearby Michigan or Wisconsin, both of which share Lake Michigan and don’t have locals with Dixie accents or GOD SAID IT. I BELIEVE IT. THAT’S THAT bumper stickers. (Obama went into culture shock when he passed a store offering “Good Deals on Guns and Swords.”) Downstaters like to complain that Chicago is a drain on the rest of the state, even though it provides the criminals who fill the prisons that offer the only good jobs in tapped-out coal counties. Scates, who had an office in Springfield, was always trying to organize legislative junkets to his hometown. In the house and senate, debates over hunting, guns, and animal rights often split along regional lines, not party lines, with Downstate Democrats and Republicans uniting against their urban and suburban colleagues.

  Obama repaid Scates by speaking at the Farm Service Agency’s Diversity Days. It’s not easy to get blacks and Latinos interested in working with farmers, but Scates was trying, and he
thought a black state senator could help.

  Obama’s tour of Little Egypt helped him see that his adopted home state was America in miniature, a fact he would repeat over and over again when he ran for higher office. As the Census Bureau will tell you, Illinois’s demographics match the nation’s more closely than any other state’s.

  “North, south, east, west, black, white, urban, rural, Southern, Northern,” he would say later. “For someone who cares deeply about the country and the struggles that this country’s going through, I can’t think of a better laboratory to work on the pressing issues we confront.”

  Obama faced no opposition when he ran for reelection in 1998. Nonetheless, he raised $46,000, most of it from small donors. He was going to need the campaign funds. After only two years in the state senate, he was already getting restless. Guys like Larry Walsh and Denny Jacobs were comfortable in Springfield, knowing their folksy acts would not play outside their hometowns. Walsh didn’t even mind being in the minority party. Without “the high pressure of legislation and all that” he had time to pal around, build friendships with other legislators, and meet with his constituents. Obama was frustrated. Walsh saw him as a guy who could never take a big enough bite of the apple. As a powerless Democrat, he was barely getting to nibble. His universal health care bill, which he now called the Bernardin Amendment, after the late Archbishop of Chicago, was again defeated. So were bills on fair pricing of prescription drugs, higher pay for nursing home aides, and domestic violence training for state employees. He did achieve one of his pet goals as a legislator: lowering taxes on the poor. It was easier to appeal to the Republicans on that one. Tax cuts are the GOP’s raison d’être.