Chapter 12
THE GODFATHER
O B A M A H A D B E E N M O V E D to go into law, and ultimately into politics, by his failure to pry more funding out of Emil Jones for the Career Education Network, one of his South Side community organizing projects. After Obama requested half a million for the dropout prevention program, Jones delivered $150,000. Pocketing that chump change convinced Obama that the place to be was on the inside, where the money was handed out.
Now, fifteen years later, he was inside—but he wanted to go farther. And because of Jones, he was in a position to do so. The senate president had a paternal fondness for Obama and was ready to do whatever he could to make the young man a U.S. senator. Obama was the only legislator in the Democratic primary, so Jones planned to use his newly acquired power to provide him with the record he’d been unable to build while the Democrats were in the minority. They had fourteen months to make up for six years of frustration.
The day the new senate was sworn in, Obama’s political sidekick Dan Shomon worked the room at a postinauguration party thrown by Denny Jacobs and Terry Link. Shomon was handing out business cards that read “Obama for Illinois. Dan Shomon, campaign manager.”
“Obama’s going to be the guy,” he insisted to the politicians and reporters present. “Obama’s going to be the guy.”
Yeah, thought a skeptical journalist at the party, call me when he beats Dan Hynes.
In Dreams from My Father, Obama had mocked Jones as “an old ward heeler” begging to introduce Harold Washington at the opening of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training in Roseland.
Jones had “made the mistake of backing one of the white candidates in the last mayoral election,” Obama wrote. Desperate to be seen alongside Washington, he “promised to help us get money for any project we wanted if we just got him on the program.”
It was true. Emil Jones had endorsed incumbent mayor Jane Byrne over Harold Washington. He was a man who owed his entire career to the Machine, and he didn’t believe in challenging the powers that be. Jones’s father had been a truck driver and precinct captain who used clout to land his boy a job as a sewer inspector in the Department of Streets and Sanitation, an arm of city government that’s practically an employment service for the sons and nephews of the politically connected. From those subterranean beginnings, Jones rose to state representative, then state senator, but after losing his race for Congress to Jesse Jackson Jr., he realized that Springfield was as far from the South Side as he would ever go. Jones was not an inspiring speaker, and he didn’t think much of anyone else’s oratory, either. His advice to new senators was, “You pass more bills when you’re brief.” The ward heeler had worked to defeat Obama in his races against Alice Palmer and Bobby Rush because the kid had broken the wait-your-turn rules of Chicago politics. But there was no incumbent Democrat in the Senate race. (In fact, there was no incumbent at all. The unpopular Senator Fitzgerald wasn’t running for reelection.) And Obama was young, educated, articulate, and beloved by white liberals—strong in all the areas where Jones was weak. Dark, heavyset, phlegmatic, Jones had only one touch of flamboyance about him: His first name, which he pronounced ay-MEEL, in the Gallic style.
In the same month that Emil Jones became senate president, Carol Moseley Braun finally accepted the fact that her old supporters wouldn’t be with her if she tried to reclaim her Senate seat. Instead, she decided on a symbolic campaign for the presidency of the United States, which no one would expect her to win. That was Obama’s cue. On January 29, in a ballroom at the Hotel Allegra (a step up from the Ramada Inn Lakeshore), Obama announced his entry into the Democratic primary, still more than a year away. As he stood on the podium before a few curious newspaper reporters, Obama was flanked by Chicago’s most powerful black politicians. Jones was there. So were U.S. representatives Jesse Jackson Jr. and Danny Davis, a West Side progressive. The only black congressman missing was Bobby Rush, who still hadn’t forgiven Obama for 2000. To show this was a multicultural campaign, Obama brought along Terry Link and Denny Jacobs.
“Four years ago, Peter Fitzgerald bought himself a Senate seat, and he’s betrayed Illinois ever since,” Obama said. “But we are here to take it back on behalf of the people of Illinois.”
He wasn’t the favorite. Not only would he have to beat Hynes, winner of two statewide elections, he had a new opponent: Blair Hull, a blackjack player turned options trader who was prepared to put down $30 million—twice Peter Fitzgerald’s “obscene” expenditure.
Comparing himself to David, fighting Goliath with a slingshot and a stone, Obama said, “I don’t have wealth or a famous name. But I have a fire in my belly for fairness and justice.”
When he made his announcement, Obama had so little money on hand that he could barely afford to open a campaign office. In need of a loan, he went looking for someone with wealth—and maybe a famous name. He called Hermene Hartman, whose office was not far from Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios.
“Do you know Oprah?” Obama asked. “Can we get Oprah to give $50,000?”
“Are you crazy?” Hartman said. “I don’t know Oprah, but I can call her.”
Hartman got through to one of Winfrey’s assistants.
“Do you really expect Oprah to meet with a state senator?” the staffer asked.
“That’s exactly why I called,” Hartman said. “Let me tell you about this guy. He’s different. He’s going all the way.”
Miss Winfrey was unable to spare $50,000. So Hartman went to a more traditional source of money for black politicians: Al Johnson, a wealthy car dealer who had donated to Harold Washington’s campaigns. Johnson agreed to meet Obama for lunch at the East Bank Club the following Monday. He was impressed enough to lend the new candidate fifty grand—which the campaign eventually paid back. That covered the rent and the phone bill for a two-room office on Michigan Avenue, which was run by Dan Shomon.
As hard as Obama was working to get into the bank accounts of Bettylu Saltzman and Penny Pritzker, the money that launched his Senate campaign came from a black businessman.
Hartman also tried to help Obama with a less tangible problem: what came to be known as his “Uncle Leland” issue. Just before the Senate announcement, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington wrote a piece contrasting how her white and black relations reacted to Obama. Muriel, her Jewish aunt by marriage, met Obama on the set of the Public Affairs TV show and thought, Wow. Her uncle Leland “Sugar” Cain, a retired railroad worker from the South Side, was skeptical. At a family dinner, he called Obama an “elitist” who’d visited a housing project in “a thousand-dollar coat.” (Obama was not the kind of guy who would spend $1,000 on an overcoat, but he was the kind of guy who could make an overcoat look like it had cost $1,000.)
“Whether that’s true,” Washington wrote, “perception can be reality. The charge is a challenge that Obama will have to overcome if he is to snare the Senate nomination. His weakest appeal is to the working class. He has to balance his time between the shops and community centers of Bronzeville, the churches in Chatham and the diners in Cairo, and the money pitches in the boardrooms of the Loop.
“Getting Aunt Muriel’s vote is a damn good start. Uncle Leland is going to take some work.”
Obama tried to reach Uncle Leland by sitting in as a guest host on Cliff Kelley’s popular WVON radio program. But most of Chicago’s black media were suspicious of this new Senate candidate. Hartman and Melody Spann-Cooper, WVON’s owner, organized a meeting of neighborhood newspaper editors and radio program directors at a restaurant called Sweet Mabel. They heard hostile questions about Obama: “Is he black enough?” “Who is this stranger in town?”
“Hey, guys, you all aren’t supportive,” Hartman told the gathering. “Why can’t we support our own? He’s got a real opportunity to go all the way. You guys are saying, ‘Because he wasn’t born in Chicago, because he’s of mixed parentage, because he’s from Harvard, he’s not black.’ You want to talk about mixed parent
age? That’s everyone in this room! What I’m hearing is he’s not the traditional Chicago politician. He’s not Harold Washington. It’s true. He can cross over. Let him go!”
After that, the black press gave Obama a pass. And Hartman put him on the cover of N’DIGO. That got his story out to the middle-class blacks whose votes he needed. Eight years before, Hartman had declined to review Dreams from My Father because she’d thought Obama’s life story was too exotic for her readers. Now she saw how that could be an advantage—not just for Obama, but for black Chicago, which wanted another senator.
“The key element for an African-American candidate seeking to run successfully statewide,” Obama told N’DIGO, “is to be rooted in the African-American community, recognize it as your base, and yet not be limited to it.”
Rickey Hendon had been trying for years to get a racial profiling bill through the state senate. Hendon had been pulled over by the police himself, so he’d shared the humiliation of black drivers who were treated like criminal suspects because of their color. But Hendon’s proposal—which would have mandated sensitivity training for officers guilty of profiling and yanked state funds from departments that wouldn’t comply—never won the support of Republicans or police chiefs. At the beginning of the new session, Emil Jones approached Hendon with a demand.
“I want you to give Barack that bill,” he said.
“Bullshit,” Hendon shot back. “I’ve been working on that bill forever. When the Republicans were in charge, we couldn’t pass it.”
Hendon saw what was about to happen. He’d carried the ball ninety-nine yards on the racial profiling issue, and now Obama was going to score the touchdown. But Hendon gave up the bill. As he would later tell a reporter, “Mama didn’t raise no fool.” Going along with the senate president could only help his political career.
Obama began his lobbying campaign with the Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP and the black caucus had an antagonistic relationship. Whenever they’d tried to discuss racial profiling in the past, the blacks had accused the cops of racism, and the cops had folded their arms, refusing to even consider a bill. Ted Street, the FOP president, was still irked about a meeting in Chicago when 125 black ministers crowded into a small conference room: an obvious ploy to intimidate the police, he thought. Street’s organization saw Emil Jones as a cop basher more interested in playing the race card than working out a deal with law enforcement.
When Obama arrived at the FOP’s office, Street realized immediately that this was a different kind of black legislator. Obama wasn’t hostile, first of all. He wasn’t there to accuse the cops of targeting black motorists. He was there to draft a bill that would satisfy law enforcement and the black caucus. Street wasn’t used to that approach. During a series of meetings in Chicago and Springfield, Obama tempered Hendon’s bill, making it easier for the cops to accept. The state would conduct a four-year study of traffic stops, keeping records of every driver’s race. All police officers would go through diversity training. The punishments were gone. The cops were happy. They were sure the study would prove they’d been engaged in law enforcement, not racial profiling.
“From a layman’s perspective, Barack was able to reduce the sting to make it palatable,” Street would say. “He was able to get it down to where our view in the end was, ‘It’s another piece of paper to fill out.’ ”
Obama lobbied hard for the bill. His senate desk was in the back of the chamber, near the bathrooms. Whenever a senator came out, Obama would ask for a moment. Once, Obama got into a heated argument in the bathroom with a black colleague who demanded to know if he really understood what it was like to be a young black man getting a pat-down from the police just because he’d been standing on a street corner. The implication was that he didn’t understand the streets or the black experience. So Obama talked about the tough neighborhoods he’d seen as a boy in Honolulu and the projects he’d worked in as a community organizer.
Three months into the session, the bill came up for a vote. Kirk Dillard, Obama’s most devoted Republican admirer, rose to speak in favor.
“About two to two-and-a-half years ago, Senator Obama and myself began working with Senator Hendon on this particular topic,” he said. “Barack and I had many, many early morning, seven A.M., breakfast meetings with former attorney general Jim Ryan, who along with a cast of—of—of—of hundreds from law enforcement from throughout America, helped us understand the difficult issues which Senator Obama has put together so well to make this difficult subject workable.”
The bill passed unanimously. While Hendon thought it was watered-down, he would come to see that it was effective. Random stops of black motorists decreased, because the police knew someone was counting.
(On the other hand, Obama’s success intensified the antipathy some black legislators still felt toward him. State representative Monique Davis, who had spent years working on a racial profiling bill in the house, felt “snubbed” and “shut out of history.” Davis and Obama both belonged to Trinity United Church of Christ, but she was so infuriated by his bill-jacking that she endorsed Dan Hynes in the Senate primary.)
After he passed the racial profiling bill, Obama was able to use his new relationships with law enforcement on a far more important issue: death penalty reform.
No one disputed that Illinois’s system of capital punishment needed an overhaul. After thirteen death row prisoners turned out to be innocent, Governor George Ryan halted all executions and appointed a task force to study the problem. (In January 2003, during his final week in office, Ryan commuted every death sentence.) Even law-and-order types had an interest in reform. Unless there were changes, Illinois would never execute another murderer.
The task force came up with eighty-five recommendations, including banning executions of retarded prisoners and requiring police to videotape interrogations of accused killers. Obama seized on the videotape proposal and determined to make it law. At first, almost everyone opposed taping, from police groups to the new governor, Rod Blagojevich.
“A criminal spends more time avoiding capture than sometimes we can spend [capturing them],” one prosecutor complained. “So if he lies for hours upon hours during his interview, now we’ve got eleven hours of videotape when finally the facts are so compelling that the defendant, the accused, says, ‘Okay, I did it,’ and tells us what happened. What happens then is that the prosecutor now has eleven hours of videotape, ten hours of lies. Am I to show that to a jury?”
But the bill was important to Obama. Video cameras would train an electronic eye on the Chicago police, whose detectives had obtained murder confessions by smothering suspects with typewriter covers, walloping them with telephone books, jolting them with cattle prods, and burning their flesh with cigarettes. The interrogations were so painful that innocent men confessed to murders they’d never committed. Four police torture victims were freed by Governor Ryan’s last-minute amnesty.
Obama met with the state police, the county prosecutors, the Illinois Sheriffs’ Association, and the FOP to answer every objection to videotaping. The state would offer grants to strapped cities, Obama promised. His bill would allow audiotaping. If the police forgot to turn on the equipment, the confession could still be used as long as there was, as Obama put it, “reliability and voluntariness shown.” Obama even dug up a Florida case in which videotape helped the cops nail a lying suspect. The man claimed he couldn’t have committed the crime because he was blind. When his interrogators left the room, he pulled out a sheet of notes.
Obama’s arguments even impressed the senate’s grimmest cheerleader for the death penalty, Edward Petka. As a state’s attorney, Petka had put so many criminals on death row he was nicknamed “Electric Ed.” The year before, Obama and Petka had offered opposing points of view for a PBS NewsHour report on death penalty reform. Petka was against nearly all the commission’s recommendations.
“The net effect, in my point of view, is simply to make it impossible for any prosecutor to seek the d
eath penalty,” Petka had said.
Yet even Electric Ed voted for videotaping and for the death penalty reform package.
Emil Jones was reveling in his exalted position in Springfield. To celebrate his newly acquired power, he changed his cell phone ringtone to the Godfather theme. From his office suite behind the senate’s Victorian chamber, Jones orchestrated his campaign to make Obama a senator—or, who knew, maybe more than a senator. That’s how much the senate president thought of Obama’s talent. Jones made sure Obama’s bills passed through the Rules Committee and on to the full senate. And he leaned on other senators to support his boy, offering perks in exchange for their endorsements.
Jones had to work over some of the Downstaters. “Barack Obama?” they’d say. “That’s a tough name down in Southern Illinois. How are we gonna sell him? An African-American is enough of a problem. But an African-American with a Muslim name? That’s a big problem.”
Sparta, Illinois, got a $29 million gun range as a way of encouraging its senator to support Obama. When black senators complained about voting for guns, Jones told them to suck it up.
“You want six million dollars for after-school programs, there’s gonna be a gun range in Southern Illinois,” the president rumbled.
Young Mr. Obama Page 20