Young Mr. Obama

by Edward McClelland

  Originally, Obama wanted to create a progressive state income tax. That was impossible, because the Illinois constitution requires a flat tax. Everyone from the chicken cook to the banker pays the same 3 percent. So Obama proposed an earned income tax credit for Illinois. At first, he asked for 20 percent, since the state income tax was a fifth of the 15 percent that low-income workers pay the federal government. He got 5 percent. Obama also proposed increasing the personal exemption, which was only $1,000 when he joined the legislature. He wanted to stagger it, with the poor getting a bigger exemption, but that probably would have been unconstitutional, too. Instead, the Republicans raised the exemption to $2,000 on everyone. That meant a family of four living at the poverty level didn’t have to pay state taxes on half its income.

  Obama also lobbied hard for a bill to increase the amount of money welfare parents received from child support payments. The old law gave 25 percent to the custodial parent, with the rest going to the state and federal government as a reimbursement for welfare payments. The Democrats wanted that increased to two-thirds as long as the parent was working. They saw it as a way to reward people for getting off welfare. The bill passed the house, but Governor George Ryan was a stone wall of opposition. Working with Senator David Sullivan, a Republican from the Chicago suburbs, Obama lobbied the other members of the Public Health and Welfare Committee. The committee chairman opposed the measure, but Obama and Sullivan flipped enough senators to move it to the floor, where it passed. It was a yeoman’s job of legislating, especially for a senator with a reputation for disdaining the dirty work of cloakroom deal making.

  Governor Ryan vetoed the bill. When it came back to the senate, the override failed by one vote—that of a Democratic senator stuck in traffic. Several Republicans voted “present.” Seeing his chamber’s support for the bill, the senate president struck a deal with the governor: Single parents could keep half the money.

  Throughout his time in Springfield, Obama had called on Abner Mikva for advice on how to get along in the legislature. Now he called with another question: What would Mikva think of his running against Bobby Rush, the First District’s congressman? He’s getting restless already, Mikva thought. It wasn’t a surprise. Springfield can be a narrow, parochial place for someone who has great ideas, wants to do great things. Mikva had spent ten years there before seizing his chance to move up to Washington. Obama was trying to do it in four. The kid had obviously made up his mind. He wasn’t asking for an opinion. He was asking for help.

  Rush had made a serious blunder that year by running for mayor of Chicago against Richard M. Daley, who enjoyed a monarchical popularity in the city. Coming out of that election with 28 percent of the vote, Rush looked like a weakened politician. Even so, he would be hard to beat—any incumbent is. But Mikva had lost races before. Sometimes, losing taught you more about your friends, your enemies, and yourself than winning did. Mikva wanted to do whatever he could to advance his protégé’s career. So he agreed to help Obama against Bobby Rush.

  Obama got a different reaction from his poker buddies. Don’t do it, they warned him. You’ll be breaking a cardinal rule of politics: Never run against an incumbent of your own party.

  Chapter 9

  DEFEAT

  W H I L E O B A M A ’ S P A T H T O P O W E R had gone through Columbia and Harvard, Bobby Lee Rush learned politics on the streets. Rush’s entire life had been a series of escapes from the fates that destroyed so many black men of his generation. He was born in rural Georgia to parents who were too proud to endure segregation. They moved the family to Chicago when Rush was a young boy. At seventeen, he dropped out of his inner-city high school to join the army but went AWOL during the Vietnam War to help found the Illinois Black Panther Party.

  As the Black Panthers’ deputy minister of defense, Rush was the sole survivor of the party’s ruling triumvirate. His compatriots, Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, were gunned down by the police in the 1969 raid that catalyzed the black political rebellion against the Machine. A photo of Rush wearing a fur hat and wielding a long-barreled pistol became one of the best-known images of 1960s militance in Chicago.

  Rush left his radical past behind to earn two masters’ degrees, become an ordained Baptist minister, and win election as an alderman, standing with Harold Washington against the Twenty-nine, who tried to maintain white control of the city council. All along, he saw himself as an underdog, bent on self-improvement. Describing Rush as a boy, his father told him, “You wanted to read so bad and study so much that you said you wanted to die in a classroom.” As a man, he was a disciple of motivational guru Tony Robbins, who urged his listeners to “awaken the giant within.” Rush was a hero of the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Washington years, and he was proof that a black man could succeed. You couldn’t out-ghetto Bobby Rush in Chicago.

  Obama didn’t intend to try. He didn’t think he’d have to. In that disastrous run for mayor, Rush even lost his own ward, which hadn’t voted for a white candidate since before Harold Washington. To many, the election was a sign that Daley had finally brought an end to “Beirut on the Lake”—the city’s black vs. white political wars—and that Rush’s style of racial confrontation had had its day.

  The First District is a bellwether of black politics, not only in Chicago, but in the nation. Rush had won the seat by unhorsing Representative Charles Hayes, an elderly veteran of Martin Luther King’s voter registration drives. Obama thought the district was ready for another generational change, to a postracial politician who could reach out to whites.

  Plus, for an old firebrand, Rush was a surprisingly bland figure. He had worked hard to overcome a childhood stutter, and while he spoke fluidly, he rarely raised his voice on the stump. To Obama, Rush was an uninspiring, ineffectual congressman who had ridden to Washington, D.C., on his public image and was now doing little for his district. But fighting on his home turf—the South Side—Rush turned out to be wilier and more potent than Obama expected.

  On a Sunday in late September 1999, after attending a children’s book fair in Hyde Park, Obama held a press conference announcing his candidacy for Congress. He promised to focus on issues he thought Rush had neglected: crime, education, health care, and economic development. Then he basically called Rush a washed-up revolutionary whose addiction to identity politics prevented him from passing meaningful bills.

  “Rush represents a politics that is rooted in the past, a reactive politics that isn’t very good at coming up with concrete solutions,” Obama argued.

  Rush was passionate about one issue: gun control. The Black Panthers romanticized weapons, but Rush had renounced his old pistol-toting image to cosponsor thirty-one gun control bills in Congress, including the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban.

  That fall, Rush was given a personal reason to loathe guns. On October 18, 1999, his twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey, was shot by two men who believed he was holding money for a drug dealer. He died four days later.

  After Huey’s death, Rush went on a media tour to condemn the “glorification” of firearms. His was an irresistible story: the ex–Black Panther who had once served six months on a weapons charge but now understood firsthand the evil that guns do. Rush was in Newsweek and People, on National Public Radio, Queen Latifah, and Today.

  Huey’s murder brought enormous sympathy to Rush. Plenty of South Siders had lost sons, grandsons, nephews, or cousins to street violence. Obama heard the news on the radio, while he was driving to a meeting at which he hoped to win the support of one of the few South Side politicians who hadn’t endorsed Rush. Afterward, he got a phone call from Jesse Jackson, who told him, “You realize, Barack, the dynamics of this race have changed.” Obama got the message and suspended his campaign for a month.

  Obama had another, more tangible problem. At the beginning of the campaign, he had spent a small amount of his four-figure war chest to commission a poll. The result: Rush had 90 percent name recognition in the district. Obama had
11 percent.

  Obama had some dirt on Rush’s relationship with Huey, who was born out of wedlock to a fellow Black Panther and raised by an aunt. Now he couldn’t use that. So he tried attacking Rush politically. From the beginning, though, Obama’s campaign was off-key and out of touch with the South Side.

  I got my first sight of Obama early that winter, at a church in the Bronzeville neighborhood. I was writing about the race for the Chicago Reader. It was a Saturday afternoon—as a greenhorn challenger, Obama wasn’t getting the Sunday pulpit invitations—and maybe a dozen people were scattered in the worn pews. Weak December sunlight strained through the stained glass. Obama wore a suit and tie—he had not yet pioneered open-necked campaign casual. Posing uncomfortably before the baptismal, he tried to relax the crowd with self-deprecating wit.

  “The first thing people ask me is, ‘How did you get that name, “Obama,” ’ although they don’t always pronounce it right,” he said lightly. “Some people say ‘Alabama,’ some people say ‘Yo Mama.’ I got my name from Kenya, which is where my father’s from, and I got my accent from Kansas, which is where my mother’s from.”

  Obama’s standard gag came off as just the sort of awkward, beginning-of-the-semester joke you’d expect from a law professor trying too hard to prove he has a sense of humor. If anyone caught that Obama was trying to connect himself to both the birthplace of civil rights and a time-honored party joke, they didn’t laugh or nod.

  Obama went on to deliver this not-so-devastating dig at his opponent: “Congressman Rush exemplifies a politics that is reactive, that waits for crises to happen then holds a press conference, and hasn’t been particularly effective at building broad-based coalitions.”

  He even talked like a law professor.

  Obama criticized Rush for not reaching outside the black community in his campaign for mayor. It was time for blacks to stop cursing whites and Latinos and figure out what the races had in common. I’ve been a community organizer, Obama argued, so I can walk into a housing project. And I’ve been to Harvard Law, so I can walk into a corporate boardroom, too.

  “I’m more likely to be able to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people, and that’s how you get things accomplished in Congress,” he said.

  But the Democratic primary wouldn’t be decided by a broad range of people. It would be decided by South Side blacks—mainly older blacks who had grown up in the Jim Crow South or in a Chicago of restrictive covenants and color lines. Among those voters, Obama’s connections to rich white colleges aroused suspicion.

  Rush and his allies fed that suspicion, portraying Obama as a lackey of elite whites. They didn’t just attack Obama’s credentials. They attacked his education, his neighborhood, and his political allies. They even questioned his blackness. Any opposition research must have begun with Dreams from My Father, so Rush knew that black identity was a sensitive spot for the young man who had grown up in a white family. To Rush, a night-school graduate of Roosevelt University and the University of Illinois–Chicago Circle, Obama’s Ivy League degrees divorced him from the community he was trying to represent.

  “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool!” Rush ranted during an interview in his campaign office, which was decorated with a photo of John Coltrane. “We’re not impressed with these folks with these Eastern elite degrees.”

  During a debate on WVON, Chicago’s black radio station, Rush, the old street fighter, talked about leading marches to urge punishment of an off-duty cop who had killed a homeless man.

  “It’s not enough for us just to protest police misconduct without thinking systematically about how we’re going to change practice,” Obama responded in measured, mellow tones.

  Rush jumped on him.

  “We have never been able to progress as a people based on relying solely on the legislative process, and I think that we would be in real critical shape when we start in any way diminishing the role of protest,” Rush argued. “Protest has got us where we are today.”

  After the debate, Rush was still rankled by Obama’s suggestion that the black community’s marching days were past.

  “Barack is a person who read about the civil rights protests and thinks he knows all about it,” he said. “I helped make that history, by blood, sweat, and tears.”

  The black nationalist community, the old bulls who had demonstrated against the Black Panther killings and registered voters for Harold Washington, also resented Obama for his association with another white institution of higher learning: the University of Chicago. Black activists still harbored hard feelings about the university’s slum clearance in the 1950s and 1960s. It had been a campaign to drive poor blacks from Hyde Park’s academic island, they believed.

  There were whispers that a “Hyde Park mafia” was bankrolling an “Obama project” to push the young man up the political ladder. Mikva, whose old North Shore congressional district was the wealthiest in the Midwest, tried to connect Obama with the lawyers and Jewish donors essential to the success of any liberal Democrat, black or white. Mikva wrote Obama a $250 check and held a party in Hyde Park, inviting friends and old law partners from outside the neighborhood. (“It didn’t raise much money,” Mikva would recall.) Obama was getting money from some of Chicago’s most prominent white political givers: $1,000 from former Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow; $1,000 from Tony Rezko. Authors Scott Turow and Sara Paretsky chipped in money. So did some of Obama’s Harvard professors. Rashid Khalidi hosted a coffee for Obama at his apartment, serving Lebanese delicacies prepared by his wife, Mona. Obama hired his Springfield sidekick Dan Shomon to manage the campaign.

  But Obama also used his run for Congress to build the network of young, rich blacks who would support his Senate campaign a few years later. More than half the members of his finance committee were black entrepreneurs under fifty. They included John Rogers Jr., the millionaire founder of Ariel Investments. Rogers had grown up in Kenwood, just north of Hyde Park, as a Republican—his mother, Jewel LaFontant, was a deputy solicitor general in the Nixon administration and later testified before Congress for the Supreme Court nomination of her old boss Robert Bork. But, as an ambitious Chicagoan, Rogers had drifted toward the Democratic Party. He was finance chairman of Carol Moseley Braun’s campaign for Cook County recorder of deeds. When Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, Rogers officially switched teams.

  Rogers had played basketball at Princeton with Obama’s brother-in-law, Craig Robinson. He had served on the finance committee of Project Vote! and was at the Ramada Inn when Obama announced his campaign for state senate. That’s when he decided Obama was a “magical talent.” Rogers was excited to see someone his own age sacrifice a lucrative law career for public service.

  Of course, the other half of Obama’s finance committee was made up of whites like John Schmidt, who had also raised funds for Project Vote! The more Obama tried to reach outside the black community, the more he was attacked from inside. Because of his academic success, he was even compared to imprisoned ex-congressman Mel Reynolds.

  Lu Palmer, an outspoken black journalist, had dismissed Obama as “arrogant” when the young man was organizing Project Vote! and later tried to dissuade him from running against Alice Palmer.

  “I said, ‘Man, you sound like Mel Reynolds,’ ” Palmer told me in an interview for the Reader. “There are similarities. If you get hung into these elite institutions, and if you so impress white folks at these elite institutions, and if they name you head of these elite institutions, the Harvard Law Review, that makes one suspect.”

  Nobody played the Oreo card more aggressively than State Senator Donne Trotter, the third candidate in the Democratic primary. Trotter, who promoted himself as “Chicago’s Native Son,” sprang from a more elite strain of the city’s black community than Rush. The Trotters had arrived in Chicago around 1900 and were pillars of the South Side’s middle class. Trotter’s grand
father had been one of the city’s most prominent ministers, leading a congregation in Hyde Park. Trotter upheld the family image with tailored suits, bow ties, soul food lunches, and smooth jazz oozing from the speakers of his Jeep.

  When it came to racial innuendo, though, Trotter was anything but smooth. He had already developed a disdain for Obama in Springfield, dubbing him “Senator Yo Mama.” In an interview at a juice bar on Forty-third Street, in the heart of Bronzeville, Trotter let fly with the campaign’s most infamous slur.

  “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community,” Trotter said. “You just have to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It’s these individuals in Hyde Park, who don’t always have the best interests of the community in mind.”

  (Making those nasty remarks was Trotter’s job. He wasn’t trying to win. He was a hatchet man. Emil Jones had put him in the race to split the anti-Rush vote.)

  Alderman Toni Preckwinkle tried to help Obama connect to the streets. Preckwinkle held a grudge against Rush, because he had run several candidates against her in the last aldermanic elections. When Obama came to Preckwinkle’s office to talk about running for Congress, she told him, “Look, I’ve tried to stay out of Bobby’s way. I don’t do him any harm. He sent all these people after me this time. I’ll be happy to help you, but you’ve got to decide right away what to do and get going.”

  Obama didn’t make up his mind until the summer. Preckwinkle thought that was awfully late, but she still loaned him her chief of staff, Al Kindle, a veteran fixer who had begun his career organizing wards for Harold Washington. Kindle had actually met Obama back in 1985, when he was working for a gang prevention project that started an after-school program in Altgeld Gardens. Back then, Kindle had been a bigger deal on the South Side than this skinny organizer all the old ladies loved. They’d all said Obama was going places, but Kindle hadn’t seen the potential. Not at the time.