Young Mr. Obama

by Edward McClelland

  Once he had his inner circle behind him, Obama made an appeal to the ABLE crowd. At a gathering at Jim Reynolds’s house, he told a group of forty wealthy blacks that he was running for the Senate. He didn’t talk about money that night. Instead, he talked about making the campaign a group effort.

  “Don’t let me get lost,” he implored his fellow buppies. “You are my friends. Tell me the truth, keep me real. Don’t let me get out there and get the big head. Let’s still kick off our shoes and talk.”

  Everyone at the party agreed that Obama was the right candidate for the Senate. They also agreed his stump speech was terrible. It was all about local issues—he sounded like he was throwing his hat in the ring for alderman—and Obama was still using that stilted, professional style that had bored the First Congressional District.

  “You’ve got to broaden it,” Martin King, the chairman of Rainbow PUSH, urged him. “You’ve got to speak larger. You should go see Jesse.”

  Obama took King’s advice and began attending the Saturday morning rallies at “Jesse’s Place,” the Grecian-temple Rainbow PUSH headquarters on Drexel Avenue in Kenwood. There will always be some tension between Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson. By becoming president, Obama eventually succeeded where Jackson failed. Jackson’s politics of black empowerment made him a candidate for one race only. Obama, who was trying to build a multiracial coalition, couldn’t associate himself too closely with that message. But before he could reach out to whites, he needed a base in his own community. Jackson and his son Junior, who had enough cred to cover the South Side, the West Side, and the south suburbs, would become important allies in Obama’s effort to sell himself to blacks.

  Obama’s black friends weren’t the only ones urging him to be a little more pulpit and a little less lecture hall. Abner Mikva was on his case about it, too. Preaching wasn’t Obama’s natural style, but he was going to have to learn if he wanted to light up black audiences outside Hyde Park.

  “You’ve got to get into those black churches,” Mikva ordered Obama. “You’ve got to spend more time there. You know, Dr. King never pulled his punches, but he said it in a way black people understood.”

  Then Mikva told a story from his own day, about something Cardinal Richard Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, said to John F. Kennedy after the 1960 West Virginia primary.

  “Jack,” Cushing had said, “Jack, from now on be more Irish and less Harvard.”

  Obama, he was suggesting, needed to be more black and less U of C.

  Even by mid-2002, Obama was getting an idea of whom he’d be facing in the Democratic primary. Gery Chico, a Latino lawyer who had served as president of the Chicago Board of Education, was talking about running. So was Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas. His most formidable opponent looked to be state comptroller Dan Hynes, the scion of a Southwest Side Irish political family. Hynes would be the Machine candidate: His father, former Illinois senate president Thomas Hynes, had served with the current Mayor Daley in Springfield. They’d even shared an apartment. The labor unions, ward bosses, and Downstate county chairs, with their battalions of door knockers, would be backing Hynes, who was only thirty-three years old but already having a political midlife crisis as he tried to escape his second-tier state office.

  Obama could see the constituencies he’d need to win: blacks and liberal whites, the same folks who’d elected Harold. That fall, as President George W. Bush began threatening Iraq with war, Obama got his chance to impress the latter crowd.

  There were already plenty of connections between Obama and the white progressives who’d learned their politics in the 1960s antiwar movement. Jerry Kellman liked to joke that he’d “majored in protesting” at the University of Wisconsin. Judd Miner practically embodied white liberalism in Chicago. And, of course, there was Bill Ayers. Although Obama was an Alinsky organizer, many of the community groups he worked with had been formed during the sixties, as expressions of the era’s People Power ethos. The Progressive Chicago Area Network, born from the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, produced some of the biggest players in Harold Washington’s campaign, including Al Raby, another of Obama’s mentors.

  The Democratic convention and the election of Harold Washington had been left-wing Chicago’s greatest moments. After Washington died, the movement became dormant, its members concentrating on their careers as journalists, professors, lawyers, politicians, and foundation presidents. They kept up with each other through the pages of the Reader, an alternative weekly founded in 1971. (And, of course, the first citywide paper to notice Obama.)

  While at Davis, Miner, Obama had met an advertising/PR professional named Marilyn Katz, who had run the media campaign for Harold Washington’s mayoral run. Katz was a friend of Bettylu Saltzman, the daughter of a megamillionaire real estate developer. A former aide to Paul Simon, Saltzman had used her family fortune to become one of Chicago’s most benevolent Democratic donors. She was also acquainted with David Axelrod, Chicago’s number one political consultant, who had begun his career on Simon’s 1984 Senate campaign. Saltzman was exactly the kind of white person Obama wanted to meet.

  In late September, Saltzman called Katz to talk about Bush’s drive for war. Chicago hadn’t seen a big demonstration in years. In January 2001, only a few dozen people showed up in Daley Plaza to protest Bush’s inauguration. But the president’s talk of weapons of mass destruction sounded as bogus as Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin incident. Maybe, Katz suggested, they should apply the lessons they’d learned from Vietnam and protest the war before it started.

  A few days later, fifteen middle-aged activists met at Saltzman’s house to plot an antiwar strategy. Some were scared. Bush’s approval ratings were in the eighties. Speaking out against the president might be seen as unpatriotic, might lose them work. Others feared they’d look foolish if nobody showed up.

  “Look,” Katz argued. “In ’sixty-five, there was nobody against the war. I remember going to demonstrations as a kid and there were, like, ten people. If we only get fifty people, so be it. The space for public dissent is really narrow, and if we don’t take action against the war now, there won’t be any space left.”

  The group agreed to hold a rally on Sunday, October 2, in Federal Plaza. Saltzman called Obama that Friday and asked him to speak. She also called Jesse Jackson and County Clerk David Orr.

  Obama was the only state senator at the rally. Some of his friends warned him against attending. As a legislator, he wasn’t expected to have a position on foreign policy. As a Senate candidate, he could hurt himself Downstate by speaking out against what might be a quick, popular war. Obama, however, understood that you win a primary—especially a crowded primary—by motivating special interests. He was already the most liberal candidate in the field. An antiwar, anti-Bush speech would make him even more appealing to Democrats who were feeling distraught and powerless over the country’s race to war and were still angry about the 2000 presidential election. These were the activists who wrote checks, stood in front of supermarkets with petitions, made phone calls, and always voted.

  Obama had less than two days to write the speech, but it was the first great address of his career. He challenged his audience. Even though he was speaking to an antiwar crowd, he made it clear that he was not a pacifist. In fact, he told them, some of America’s wars had made the world a better place. Obama was talking to people who sported PEACE IS PATRIOTIC stickers on the bumpers of their rusty Audis, but he wanted them to know life wasn’t that simple: Sometimes war was patriotic, too.

  Good afternoon. Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.

  The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don’t oppose all wars.

  My grandfather signed up for a
war the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

  I don’t oppose all wars.

  That last phrase demonstrated that Obama had been listening to the preachers, just as his advisers had told him. He would repeat it over and over again as he built to the speech’s climax. It was actually more of an evangelical’s trick than anything he’d heard in his own church: Jeremiah Wright was a storyteller, not a shouter. But Obama, who would surpass Wright as an orator, was discovering how to use emotion to sell an intellectual point. And he was adding concrete images that had been missing from his earlier, legalistic speeches.

  After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

  I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots or patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. A rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and hardships borne.

  What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in median income—to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

  That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

  A dumb war. Obama was expressing himself with a simplicity that his old self might have found simpleminded. Most of the three thousand people in the plaza had never heard of this state legislator from Hyde Park, but as he spoke, they nodded and asked each other, “Who is that?” It was, one listener would remember, a “quiet barn raising”—well timed, with cadence. Obama ended with a challenge to the president, suggesting that he’d chosen the wrong enemy in Saddam Hussein, a weakened dictator who posed no threat to the United States. Over and over, he asked, “You want a fight, President Bush?”

  You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

  You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves of Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

  Those are the battles we need to fight. Those are the battles we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance, corruption and greed, poverty and despair.

  The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom and pay the wages of war. But we ought not—we will not—travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

  The speech had its intended effect, not just on Federal Plaza, but on Obama’s public profile. In the days afterward, the text was circulated on the Internet, where such sites as Democratic Underground, Truthout, BuzzFlash, and Daily Kos were becoming important forums for opponents of the Bush administration. The speech cemented the support of Saltzman and Julie Hamos, a state representative who also spoke at the rally. After Obama announced his candidacy, Hamos threw him a fund-raiser in her wealthy North Shore district, and Saltzman lobbied Axelrod to take him on as a client.

  In most of the country, 2002 was a Republican year. President George W. Bush used the fear of terrorism to win his party the U.S. Senate and increase its margin in the House of Representatives. It wasn’t so in Illinois. The Republicans had occupied the governor’s mansion for twenty-six years, but their incumbent, George Ryan, was involved in a scandal shocking even for a state where corruption is a hallowed tradition. The U.S. attorney was investigating driver’s licenses issued for bribes when Ryan was secretary of state, including one to a trucker who caused an accident that killed six children. It was time, the voters felt, to throw out the Republican crooks and give some Democratic crooks a chance.

  Ryan’s unpopularity wasn’t all the Democrats had going for them. Illinois was one of the first states to experience the partisan transformation that would, when it spread nationwide, result in Obama’s election as president.

  As a Midwestern state, near the population center of the U.S., with demographics almost exactly matching the national average, Illinois is as good a bellwether of political movements as any. It’s a radically moderate state. Extremists do not thrive in Illinois. The religious right is regularly crushed in Republican primaries, and the activist left is confined to a few neighborhoods of shabby three-flats near the Chicago lakefront. The state’s political culture is practical, not idealistic.

  Illinois voted Republican for president in six consecutive elections, from 1968 to 1988, an era when Republicans dominated the White House, Jimmy Carter’s post-Watergate win notwithstanding. It elected Republican governors for most of that period, too.

  The state began to change its colors with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. You can actually trace the state’s movement from Republican to Democrat by following the political journey of Clinton’s wife, Hillary, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. As a young woman, Hillary followed her father’s politics, dressing as a Goldwater Girl for the 1964 election. Then she went to Wellesley, where she made the same ideological journey as so many well-educated suburban children who would become the Democratic Party’s brain trust: civil rights lawyers, consumer advocates, college professors, political consultants, nonprofit executives, and newspaper editors. She wrote her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky. In 1968, she staffed a Rockefeller suite at the Republican convention and was appalled by Richard Nixon’s hustling of the Southern conservative vote. After sneaking out of her parents’ house to witness the riots at the Democratic convention, Hillary became convinced the Vietnam War was a mistake.

  Hillary Clinton didn’t just presage suburbia’s shift to the Democrats—she helped make it happen. The Clinton administration’s moderate politics—signing NAFTA and reforming welfare—helped make well-to-do homeowners more comfortable with the party. The Clintons were seen as fiscally responsible, a timeless suburban value. The classic battle line of Illinois politics—Democratic Chicago versus Republican suburbia—was disappearing, one voter at a time. In 2002, the authors of the book The Emerging Democratic Majority used Illinois as a case study, identifying the Chicago area as an “ideopolis” whose professionals had benefited from the prosperity of the Clinton years, especially the shift from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge-based economy. The Cook County suburbs where Hillary Clinton had grown up were now “irretrievably Democratic.” Obama, who would do very well among rich suburbanites in his U.S. Senate campaign, had his future rival for the presidency to thank for making some of those people Democrats in the first place.

  The governor’s scandals and blue-ing of suburbia put the Democrats in a good position to take over state government in 2002. But a lucky break, based on a quirk in the state’s constitution, made it a certainty. Split between a Republican senate and a Democratic house, the General Assembly failed to draw a new legislative map based on the 2000 census. So Secretary of State Jesse White appointed an eight-member commi
ttee, with four Democrats and four Republicans. The committee also stalemated. White asked each party to submit a candidate for a ninth member. He placed the slips in a replica of Abe Lincoln’s stovepipe hat and drew the name of Michael Bilandic, the former Democratic mayor of Chicago.

  That meant the Democrats got to draw the map. Obama had a very specific idea of what he wanted his new district to look like: a narrow band following the Lake Michigan shoreline from Ninety-fifth Street to downtown. Obama got rid of Englewood, the poorest neighborhood in Chicago, and added the Gold Coast, the richest and one of the most Republican. No longer would he be a South Side senator. He’d be a lakefront senator. Along with Hyde Park, Obama would represent most of Chicago’s monuments—Soldier Field, the Adler Planetarium, Grant Park—as well as its priciest shopping district, the Magnificent Mile, and its multimillion-dollar high-rise condos. Mayor Daley would be a constituent. So would Oprah Winfrey. This suited the Democrats’ mapmaking strategy. Population growth on the South Side had been stagnant. So the districts had to move north and west, and, of course, the mapmakers wanted to corral as many Republicans as possible into Democratic-leaning districts. It also suited Obama’s personal strategy for political advancement. Losing to Bobby Rush had taught Obama that his natural constituency wasn’t inner-city blacks but well-educated eggheads of all races. Also, he’d be representing some of the most generous Democratic donors in the state. Abner Mikva had already introduced him to those rich folks, but now they’d see his name on a ballot and his face on the “Legislative Update” every senator sends home. For a politician who was still in debt from law school and past campaigns, their money would be essential.

  The Democratic takeover was such a sure thing that the Illinois Times, a Springfield alternative weekly, ran a cover story titled “The Great Thaw.” Blagojevich was elected governor, and Democrats won a majority in the state senate, increasing their membership by five seats. In the new General Assembly, Obama would be chairman of the Health and Welfare Committee, putting him in a position to advance his most cherished political goal: universal health care. Emil Jones would be senate president, the second African-American to occupy that post. The president decides which legislation reaches the senate floor. For years, the black caucus had suffered the Republican Party’s indifference as its pet issues—racial profiling, death penalty reform—ended each session sine die, the legislative term for “dead.” Jones would make sure they passed, and he’d make sure Obama, who’d cosponsored the bills, got plenty of credit. Already, Jones was describing himself as the fatherless young man’s “godfather.”