Young Mr. Obama

by Edward McClelland

  Jones had to work just as hard on members of the black caucus, who resented Obama’s preferential treatment. There wasn’t much Jones could do about a house member like Monique Davis, but he called Hendon and Trotter into his office, over and over again, asking them why they couldn’t support a fellow senator, a fellow black man. Hendon finally gave in after hearing Obama speak at a West Side church. The rally was packed, and Michelle Obama sat next to Hendon the entire time, assuring him that she wouldn’t let her husband forget about issues important to black Chicago.

  “I’ve got him,” Michelle told Hendon.

  Hearing a homegrown black woman say “I’ve got him” was enough for Hendon. He stood up, walked to the front of the church, and endorsed Obama. The folks in the pews went wild. Obama’s staff left piles of literature at the church, and Hendon pledged his street organization to his senate colleague.

  Obama chalked up his colleagues’ resentment to jealousy. They’d failed on racial profiling and death penalty reform. Once he took over, the bills passed within months. Todd Spivak, Obama’s chronicler at the Hyde Park Herald, joined the Illinois Times around the time the Democrats took over the senate and witnessed Obama’s ascendance there.

  “He didn’t think too highly of Rickey Hendon and some of those older black legislators,” Spivak would recall. “ ‘They couldn’t get it done’ was the message. ‘They had it for years. They couldn’t get it done. I got it done. What does that tell you? If they have something against me, that’s their problem. They were ineffective in their position.’ ”

  Nearly every Democratic state senator ended up endorsing Obama. It was just practical politics. If he won, with their support, they’d have a friend in Washington. And if he lost, without their support, he might make life uncomfortable when he came back to the capitol.

  The Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired during his last term in Springfield, was the most liberal body in the senate, a popular assignment for blacks, Latinos, and big-city whites. It was the perfect platform for Obama to advance his cause of guaranteeing health care to everyone in Illinois.

  Two weeks after the 2002 elections, Obama phoned Jim Duffett, the executive director of the Campaign for Better Health Care. Duffett had spent over a decade fighting to expand health care in Illinois.

  “You might know this or not,” Obama told him, “but I’m now going to be the chair of the senate health committee. I’d like to sit down with you.”

  The Campaign for Better Health Care had chapters in most of Illinois’s cities: Rock Island, Bloomington, Peoria, and Carbondale, among others. Obama wanted to hold town hall meetings to build support for universal health care. Illinois had just elected a Democratic senate and its first Democratic governor in twenty-six years, so this was the moment.

  “You guys have these local committees all around the state,” he told Duffett. “I want to go out there. I want to use this as a tool, as a chairman.”

  Duffett pitched him on the Health Care Justice Act, a bill that would require the legislature to come up with a plan for covering the 1.4 million Illinoisans who still didn’t have health insurance. Obama loved the idea. In the winter of 2003, they hit the road. To Obama, this was another community organizing project. On cold weeknights, dozens of people shuffled into libraries or union halls to hear the senator from Chicago speak.

  Obama described the act, and then, hearkening back to his days as an organizer, he told the gatherings, “You have to put political pressure on these politicians and you’ve got to keep on pushing and pushing. If they say no, don’t give up. If they’re a Republican, and they don’t support this thing, keep on putting pressure on them, because they go back to the district and they say, ‘Oh, my God, I’m really getting beat up on this issue. What’s going on?’ Same thing with Democrats.”

  Afterward, Obama went out to dinner with the local chapter’s executive committee, telling its members, “We need you as leaders for this movement.” That not only built support for the Health Care Justice Act, it built a network of union brass and liberal activists who would back Obama’s just-announced Senate campaign.

  The insurance industry was adamantly opposed to the act. Its lobbyists found the bill’s fatal flaw: It required the legislature to come up with a universal health care plan. That was unconstitutional. A General Assembly can’t dictate to a future General Assembly. Obama shelved the act and brought it back in 2004, with less demanding language that “strongly urged” a plan to cover all Illinoisans and created a task force to come up with a proposal.

  Even the softened version was a tough sell. Conservative Democrats resisted. Denny Jacobs was an old friend of Obama’s, but he was an even older friend of the insurance companies. Obama lobbied hard in the cloakroom. He forced Duffett’s group to sit down with insurance lobbyists and overcome their mutual loathing to craft language both groups could tolerate. Obama even changed the panel’s name from the Health Care Justice Task Force—which sounded like a left-wing pressure group—to the moderate Bipartisan Health Reform Commission.

  Unlike his efforts to end racial profiling or reform capital punishment, Obama did not win bipartisan support for the Health Care Justice Act. Republicans saw it as a back-door attempt to bring single-payer coverage to Illinois. The bill contained no specifics, and the commission could only offer recommendations, but the GOP compared it to President Bill Clinton’s failed health care plan. During the final debate, Peter Roskam, the Republican spokesman on health care, led his party’s attack on the Senate floor.

  “The Illinois Life Insurance Council is opposed,” Roskam argued. “The Illinois State Association of Health Underwriters is opposed, the National Federation of Independent Business is opposed, and the Illinois Chamber Employment Law Council is opposed. You know, this concept was one that Hillary Clinton took on in 1994 and it created such a stirring that there was a sea change, ultimately, in the politics of the United States. And it’s a bill that—while it is not as draconian as what the Clinton administration tried to do, which was basically a nationalization of health care, it is a bill that you’re being asked to consider today that has a lot of similar characteristics.”

  Obama was taken aback and angered by the accusations, especially the suggestion that he was trying to push a single-payer plan on the state. Obama favored a single-payer plan—he’d said so at an AFL-CIO forum in December 2003—but his bill left the details up to the task force and the legislature. Although he never raised his voice—shouting was not his style—Obama defended his integrity passionately.

  “The original bill on the house side, I think, would have legitimately raised some concerns with respect to some who might have been fearful that it was a mandate to introduce a single-payer plan,” he said. “I modified this. Insurance lobbyists here in Springfield have been engaging in such fearmongering among its agents, suggesting that this was a single-payer bill, that, in fact, a lot of concerns were raised that had nothing to do with the bill that was before the body today.”

  Obama, who was campaigning for the U.S. Senate by then, told of meeting a Galesburg man who was about to be laid off from the Maytag plant after thirty years. The man didn’t know how he could afford $4,500 a month for the drugs his son needed to survive after a liver transplant.

  “The majority of people who do not have health insurance are not welfare recipients who are covered by Medicaid,” Obama said. “They’re folks who work every single day, doing their best to make ends meet and try to raise a family, and the single biggest cause of bankruptcy is when they get sick.”

  All his bill would do, he argued, is say, “Let’s all sit down and try to figure out how to solve a problem.”

  The Health Care Justice Act passed on a party-line vote, 31–26, but it ultimately accomplished very little. It certainly didn’t bring universal health care to Illinois. After more than two years of meetings, the commission issued a report recommending a “hybrid” health care model that would require individuals to obtain coverage
, either through their employers (who would have to provide health care) or by taking advantage of a state-funded subsidy. A minority of the members recommended a single-payer plan. The minority group included Dr. Quentin Young, who had supported Obama since his first run for the state senate. Young had always considered Obama a single-payer advocate, so he was disappointed that Obama had stripped the universal health care requirement from the bill.

  John Bouman, who had worked with Obama on poverty and health care legislation, was more forgiving. “I think he was in favor of universal, affordable, comprehensive care for all, and not necessarily a disciple of one means of doing it over another,” Bouman would say. “He’s ever the pragmatist, and single payer is ever the ideal. That’s his particular genius, and it causes him to take it in the neck from the left as well as the right.”

  By the time the commission reported back to the legislature, Obama had gone to the U.S. Senate. Some of its recommendations were adopted by Governor Blagojevich, for a plan he called Illinois Covered. But Illinois Covered never passed. It became a casualty of Blagojevich’s inability to work with the legislature (as, eventually, did his entire governorship).

  During his last two years in the state senate, Obama did achieve some expansions of health care. He passed a bill to change the eligibility for the Children’s Health Insurance Plan—AllKids—from 185 percent of the federal poverty level to 200 percent. The new rules added twenty thousand children to the state-run health insurance program. Obama’s bill also lowered the threshold for low-income parents to 90 percent of the poverty level—double where it had stood during the past two Republican administrations. That brought health care to sixty-five thousand poor people and helped solve the problem of welfare recipients refusing jobs or raises because they were afraid of losing Medicaid.

  Through his committee chairmanship, and the patronage of Emil Jones, Obama sponsored twenty-two bills that became law that session, one of the highest success rates of any senator. Making the earned income tax credit permanent. Providing HIV testing for pregnant women. Requiring insurers to cover colorectal cancer exams. Forcing public bodies to tape-record closed meetings. None were as glamorous as reforming the death penalty, but it was still an extraordinary achievement for a senator who, a year before, had been an unknown backbencher. Now Obama had more than a résumé and a biography to sell the voters. He had finally done something.

  Chapter 13

  THE OBAMA JUICE

  L I B E R T Y B A P T I S T C H U R C H, at Forty-ninth Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, is an inspiring combination of the modern and the eternal. Its parabolic roof, supported from within by rust-colored beams that soar over the congregants, looks like a quonset hut or an airline terminal designed by a Scandinavian architect. Behind the altar is a stained glass mosaic of a risen Christ, attended by angels and apostles of all races. Despite its modish design, Liberty is one of Chicago’s oldest African-American congregations. Its pastor, D. L. Jackson, inherited the pulpit from his father, who had in turn inherited it from his father. With a vast sanctuary that accommodates over a thousand worshippers, Liberty is an essential Sunday-morning stop for any South Side politician.

  Liberty was where Obama finally showed he could connect with an audience—a black audience. For years, his friends and advisers had been beating up on him about stepping out of his professor’s gown and putting on a preacher’s robe, and now the stubborn SOB was finally doing it. The flip-down seats were filled with black folks, all excited to hear the tall, good-looking young brother running for the United States Senate. They’d been primed by their pastor, and by their alderman, Dorothy Tillman, who’d been fighting for black empowerment so long she could sign a hood pass for a half-white lawyer from Hyde Park.

  Obama mounted the red-carpeted steps to the pulpit with his long-legged stride, pointing and waving. When he began to talk, he didn’t use bureaucratic, academic terms like “bring together institutions from various sectors.” That was the Obama of 2000. The new Obama had studied his audience—hardworking, churchgoing blacks—studied their aspirations, and the way they liked to hear those aspirations expressed every Sunday morning. This was going to be a sermon, not a lecture. It was going to quote Jesus, not the Brookings Institution.

  “My name is Barack Obama, and everywhere I went, I would always get the same two questions. Didn’t matter where I went. First question was ‘Where did you get this funny name, “Barack Obama”?’ Though people wouldn’t always say it right. They would call me Alabama. They’d call me ‘Yo Mama.’ ” Here, the congregation laughed. “And those were my supporters who called me that. I won’t even talk about the folks running against me. The second question was ‘Why would you want to get into a dirty business like politics?’ There is another tradition of politics, and that tradition says we are all connected. If there is a child on the South Side that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life, even if it’s not my child.”

  The pews murmured with approval.

  “If there is a senior citizen on the West Side that can’t afford their prescription medicine, having to choose between buying medicine and paying the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent.”

  They were standing and clapping now, responding to the rhythms of his oratory.

  “I believe that we can be a better nation,” Obama shouted. “I believe that we can provide homes to the homeless and food to the hungry and clothes to the naked. I believe that we can defeat George Bush.”

  There were moments when he sounded like a parody of a jackleg preacher, his voice dipping into a guttural approximation of street talk, as though he were about to add “mm-hmm!” to the end of every sentence. Obama never spoke that way in private, but as a candidate, he wanted to be black when he needed to be black and white when he needed to be white. (Only whites were embarrassed by Obama’s attempts to sound ghetto. “It can be painful to hear Barack Obama talk jive,” wrote Todd Spivak in the Illinois Times, ridiculing Obama for using the word “homeboy” in church. Obama responded to Spivak’s article with a wrathful phone call, which suggested that racial identity was still a touchy subject with him.)

  Al Kindle was at Liberty that day, and he thought, This is the candidate I’ve been trying to bring out for years. This Obama is a black man who can go to the Senate—and maybe beyond.

  Kindle realized how much was at stake, not just for Obama, but for Chicago’s black political movement. Before he even announced his candidacy, Obama had confided, “Once you get elected senator, who knows where you can go? You can even get to president.”

  Black Chicago had already lifted its politicians higher than any minority community in the country, but this was the guy it could lift to the highest office of all. He was an African-American who could govern for everyone. It was the perfect match of a man and a city. As Kindle would put it much later, “We were looking for someone to do it, and he was looking for a place to do it in.” If Obama had to be taught to sound like a black man, that was part of the lifting.

  David Axelrod was just as high on Obama. A University of Chicago graduate, Axelrod had begun his working life as a reporter for the Hyde Park Herald before moving up to the Chicago Tribune. He quit journalism to manage Paul Simon’s 1984 U.S. Senate campaign. In the two decades since, he’d become one of the best-known political consultants in the country. Axelrod had worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, but his specialty was big-city races, especially those that involved selling black candidates to white voters. Every consultant wants to discover the next John F. Kennedy, but Axelrod had another motivation for finding a candidate who could go all the way. As a political pro who chose to live in Chicago, he felt he wasn’t taken seriously by the D.C. wonks. It was the Second City complex, caused by a different city than usual.

  Ax, as everyone called him, was also being courted by big-spending millionaire Blair Hull, but he was getting the hard sell on Obama from Bettylu Saltzman, an organizer of the antiwar rally in F
ederal Plaza. Axelrod agreed to meet the candidate and was immediately smitten. Most white liberals lost it during their first encounter with Obama. Dan Shomon had a term for this phenomenon: “drinking the Obama Juice.”

  Axelrod got drunk easily. Right after agreeing to work for Obama, he received a phone call from Pete Giangreco, a Chicago media consultant who was helping organize John Edwards’s media campaign.

  “Listen,” Axelrod asked Giangreco, “while I’ve got you on the phone, what are you doing in the Senate race?”

  “Well, Dan Hynes is a former client,” Giangreco said. “I haven’t heard from those guys, but it looks like he’s gonna go. He’s ahead in the polls, and he’s going to have labor and the county chairmen behind him.”

  “You know, all that’s probably true,” Axelrod said, “but I’ve got to tell you, I think there’s something special about this guy Obama. This guy’s the real deal. This is the guy we try to make all our candidates sound like, this really genuine and heartfelt appeal to people’s sort of reclaiming their citizenship, and the value of people coming together behind a set of ideals to get things done. There’s some there there.”

  Giangreco knew Obama slightly. As a consultant to Rod Blagojevich’s gubernatorial campaign, he had given a poll briefing to a group of state senators. Obama had been very inquisitive about the numbers and offered unsolicited advice about death penalty reform and other criminal justice issues. Smart guy, Giangreco had thought. Now, after hearing Ax so excited about Obama—more excited than Ax had ever been about a candidate—Giangreco said, “You know, I’ve only met him once or twice, but I kind of feel the same way.”

  Axelrod replaced Dan Shomon as Obama’s political alter ego. As much as Ax and Obama had in common—their U of C backgrounds, a love of pickup basketball, a calm demeanor—they still fit the classic roles of candidate and consultant. Axelrod was tall, hangdog, and walked with a slow, heavy, splay-footed shamble. Every year, his unkempt forelock grew thinner, his droopy mustache grayer. But those who had worked with both men considered them equals in discipline, intelligence, and temperament—“a match made in heaven.”