Young Mr. Obama

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Young Mr. Obama Page 24

by Edward McClelland


  That only led to more questions. Women’s groups demanded details. A week later, Hull admitted the order had resulted from an incident in which he was accused of striking Sexton on the shin. In a televised debate at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, every candidate except Obama attacked Hull’s unwillingness to open his divorce records. (Obama attacked Hull for misrepresenting his opposition to the Iraq war: “The fact of the matter is, Blair, that you were silent when these decisions were being made. You were AWOL on this issue.”)

  “You know, you’re responsible for this,” Axelrod told Mendell during the debate.

  “David,” Mendell replied, “if it wasn’t through me, you folks would have figured out another way to get the mess out there. I just fired the first bullet loaded into the chamber.”

  Realizing that his marriage had become the campaign’s biggest issue, Hull asked a judge to make the divorce file public. It ended his hopes of becoming a senator. Hull’s ex-wife had accused him of being “a violent man” who “hung on the canopy bar of [her] bed, leered at [her] and stated, ‘Do you want to die? I am going to kill you.’ ” According to Sexton, Hull had thrown fake punches in an attempt to make her flinch and punched her “extremely hard in the left shin.”

  Since the divorce, Hull and Sexton had become good friends. In a touching Chicago gesture, he’d even used his clout to find her a job. As a six-figure contributor to Rod Blagojevich, Hull got the governor to appoint his ex-wife head of the Illinois Film Board. But the tales of domestic violence were more memorable than any of Hull’s ads. To the average Illinoisan, Blair Hull, champion of prescription drugs for seniors, was now Blair Hull, wife beater.

  The wreck of Hull’s campaign ended up benefiting Obama, not Hynes. Although Hynes had won two statewide elections, they were for comptroller, an uninspiring office that pays the state’s bills. Hynes was uninspiring in other ways, too. He owed his political career to his father, boss of a powerful Irish ward. At thirty-five, his only apparent signs of maturity were a few gray hairs above his elfin ears. And his airless, colorless, odorless personality was not redeemed by a TV ad in which he wore an apron and cracked an egg to symbolize how Republicans wanted to scramble seniors’ nest eggs by reforming Social Security. Hynes had the support of the Daley family and even a few black ward committeemen. In his father’s day, that would have been enough to carry a candidate as bland as Dan Hynes. But Hynes’s image as a prince of the Machine was a liability against Obama, whose personal story was getting through to voters now that his ads were on TV. Hynes represented Chicago’s provincial past—political dynasties, ethnic loyalties, unadulterated Irishness, precinct captains ringing doorbells for a kid from the neighborhood. Obama reflected the modern Chicago, a cosmopolitan city made so by ambitious migrants like himself.

  Axelrod’s strategy of saving it all for the last six weeks was working. If any one event put Obama over the top, it was the airing of the Sheila Simon ad. State Senator Jeffrey Schoenberg, an Evanston Democrat who by early March was regretting that Hynes had asked him for an endorsement before Obama, thought Simon’s endorsement was the most powerful thirty seconds of political television he had ever seen.

  “It was a tremendous difference,” Schoenberg would say. “It reached into your chest and grabbed you by the heart and never let go.”

  Hull had been doing well among African-Americans because of his TV ads, his signs in the ghetto, and his support among the black politicians still resisting Obama’s ascendance. (Even during the last week of the primary, there was still an “anybody but Obama” sentiment in the capitol, especially among house members.) All those black voters were now shifting to Obama.

  Obama’s campaign could not afford nightly polling, but Hull’s could. His staffers watched their candidate tumble down a hill, while Obama sprinted up a mountain. Even without numbers, Axelrod, Giangreco, and Cauley could sense something big was happening: Suddenly, money was pouring in through the mail, over the phone, and on the Internet. Politicians who had once been coyly neutral were now jumping on Obama’s bandwagon. And wherever their candidate went, the crowds were bigger and louder. Still unsure of the black vote, Obama ran a last-minute ad titled “Hope,” with clips of Paul Simon addressing a veterans’ group and Harold Washington hugging an old white man.

  “There have been moments in our history when hope defeated cynicism, when the power of people triumphed over machines,” the narrator intoned.

  The message to black Chicago was clear: Let’s make this like 1983 all over again.

  Illinois held its primaries in mid-March for two reasons: to make life difficult for upstart candidates, who had trouble finding people to ring doorbells all winter, and to coincide with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which always showcased the Irish candidates.

  The Irish Machine candidate wasn’t getting the help he’d expected that day. There’s another tradition in Chicago politics, summed up by the motto, “Don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers.” By six A.M., when the libraries, churches, and school gymnasiums unlocked their doors for the voters, everyone in Illinois politics knew Obama was going to win.

  Hynes was a lost cause. Union heavies in quilted White Sox jackets were still handing out palm cards with his name, but a lot more guys would have stood in the cold for Hynes if he’d been a contender. Where was the reward in working for an also-ran?

  On the South Side, the scene was different. The Obama campaign had collected so much money in the last few weeks it was able to pay people $25 to knock on doors and leave Obama hangers on the knobs. Over a hundred vans sat in the parking lot of an abandoned department store at Seventy-sixth Street and Stony Island Avenue, each with room for a supervisor and fourteen “flushers.” Word had gotten around the hood that you could work for Obama and get paid, so the lot was mobbed. Before sunrise, Obama’s street organizers worried about finding enough workers. They ended up turning people away. The two-bit door hangers who emerged from the two-flats and housing projects that morning overwhelmed the organizations of the few black bosses who were supporting Hynes out of loyalty to the mayor. This day wasn’t quite like the day that elected Harold Washington, when some South Side precincts reported 100 percent turnout, but almost every African-American who voted was voting for Obama. When the first spindle counts came in, around ten A.M., turnout was low everywhere but in the black community, which was showing moderate to moderately high activity. John Kerry had already sewn up the Democratic nomination for president, so many white voters figured the primary didn’t matter.

  Obama and his family awaited the election results in a suite at the Hyatt Regency, which was owned by the Pritzker family. They didn’t have to wait long. At seven o’clock, the moment the polls closed, news anchors began announcing, “Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination for United States Senate.” His victory was that decisive. It was bigger even than Axelrod, who was wonking out on returns at the Cook County clerk’s office, could have imagined. Forty-three percent, he’d told Obama. That’s the best we’ll do, if everything goes perfectly. But now, in a seven-candidate field, against experienced politicians, Obama was winning 53 percent of the vote. In some South Side wards, his margins were running over 90 percent. One Hyde Park precinct cast all 124 ballots for its neighborhood son. Hynes won only the Southwest Side wards controlled by white political dynasties: the Daleys, the Madigans, the Lipinskis, and his own family. Obama ran respectably in all four, which would have been unimaginable for a black candidate when he arrived in Chicago. Harold Washington had been lucky to win one percent in those neighborhoods. Chicago was changing, and a multiracial candidate was helping to change it.

  Obama took two-thirds of the vote in Chicago. Outside the city, he won every county in the metropolitan area. Hynes won most of Downstate, but Obama took a few college towns and Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield. In St. Clair County, Obama got eight thousand votes—twice what Carol Moseley Braun had won and just what Roy Williams, his county coordinator, had promised to deliver. Obama
’s final tally—655,923—was only a few thousand short of all the ballots cast in the Republican primary.

  As the night went on and rivals called to concede, Obama gradually revealed himself to a wider and wider circle of supporters. When the polls closed, he was sequestered in his thirty-fourth-floor suite with thirty or so family members and friends. Michelle celebrated her husband’s projected victory by slapping him a high five.

  “They like you!” she teased. “They really like you!”

  An hour later, Obama was hugging and shaking hands with two hundred of his biggest donors in a VIP room. Obama didn’t make his victory speech until after ten o’clock, when the late local news airs in Chicago. As he paced back and forth in a hallway behind a ballroom crammed with five hundred supporters, he was introduced by Sheila Simon, who had done as much as anyone to bring about this moment. Simon named all her father’s friends who were there that night—Ax, Ab Mikva, Rahm Emanuel—firmly passing on the Paul Simon legacy.

  “Barack was a long shot,” Simon said. “His campaign was against the odds, but when you’ve got a lot of guts, you can get things done.”

  Obama calmly studied his notes until Simon announced his name. Then, the crowd burst into an enormous cheer and an aide threw open the door separating the candidate from his followers.

  “You’re on, Barack!” the aide shouted. “You’re on!”

  Suddenly, he was on: the smile, the wave, the smooth stride, the grasping handshake. In an instant, Obama switched from intellectual to politician. In his victory speech, he was both.

  “I am fired up!” he shouted. “There’s no way a skinny guy from the South Side with a name like Barack Obama could win, but here we are sixteen months later.”

  Then the room quieted, and he read from notes he had written out by hand.

  “At its best,” he declared, “the idea of this party has been that we are going to expand opportunity and include people that have not been included, that we are going to give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless, and embrace people from the outside and bring them inside, and give them a piece of the American dream.”

  In politics, as Denny Jacobs liked to say, when you are, you are. All of Obama’s old supporters were at the Hyatt—Emil Jones, Toni Preckwinkle, and Jesse Jackson Jr., who called Obama “the light that challenges the darkness” in one of the introductory speeches. But Obama’s triumph meant that even his most vitriolic enemies were forced to acknowledge that he now stood at the pinnacle of black politics in Chicago.

  “I am supportive of Mr. Obama,” Bobby Rush told a reporter that week. Despite Rush’s endorsement of Blair Hull, Obama won 82 percent of the vote in the Second Ward. “We need everyone to be on board and come around for the Democratic ticket. I will be doing all I can to elect the entire ticket.”

  It was a victory equal to Oscar DePriest’s in 1928, Harold Washington’s in 1983, or Carol Moseley Braun’s in 1992. At the age of forty-two, less than two decades after arriving as a stranger, with no money and no roots in Chicago, Obama had joined the roll of the city’s great black politicians. That night, he won for the entire community, and the entire community embraced him.

  Epilogue

  THE BIRTHPLACE OF POST-RACIAL POLITICS

  O B A M A ’ S V I C T O R Y in the Democratic primary made him a political celebrity. As a man who was likely to become the nation’s only black senator, he was interviewed the next day on CNN and Today. Bigfoot pencils from the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal flew into Chicago to write the first of the fawning profiles that must have made them wonder, What was I thinking? when they saw their prose in the morning papers. (Newhouse News Service called Obama “tall, fresh and elegant.” The campaign staff gave him no end of grief over that description.)

  Carol Moseley Braun had gotten similar attention after winning her primary, but there was a feeling that Obama might be more than a token black face in an all-white chamber. He might be the guy who finally climbed over the barrier that had blocked African-Americans from power for nearly four hundred years. Race had been the one undying issue in American politics, from the writing of the Constitution, through the Civil War, the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and the white flight from the cities. Maybe Obama could begin to change that, too.

  “Obama has the potential to become the most significant political figure Illinois has sent to Washington since Abraham Lincoln,” wrote Mark Brown of the Chicago Sun-Times.

  It was an apt statement, and not only because it came true. Lincoln’s Illinois was a state divided between Southerners who’d migrated up from Kentucky and Tennessee, and Yankees who’d arrived via the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. Those two factions took up the question of slavery a generation before the rest of the country, settling the issue in 1824 with a bitter plebiscite that banned the sale and ownership of human beings. A generation before Obama became president, his Chicago was led by a black mayor who proved to hostile whites that he wasn’t going to turn the city into a Midwestern Zimbabwe. Chicago survived as a multicultural metropolis, evenly divided between whites and blacks.

  Obama’s belief that the Democratic primary would determine the election was right on the mark. The winner of the Republican primary, Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw from the race for the exact same reason as Blair Hull: because of embarrassing disclosures in his divorce file. Ryan, who had been married to Star Trek: Voyager actress Jeri Ryan, tried to pressure his wife into having sex in front of strangers at swingers’ clubs. For the second time that year, the Chicago Tribune published the marital secrets of an Obama rival.

  Without a general election opponent, Obama was free to work on becoming a star. His campaign lobbied John Kerry’s staff for a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. Kerry, who watched Obama own the crowds at two Chicago campaign events, offered him the keynote address. In Boston, Obama delivered the greatest maiden speech since William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” in 1896, introducing America to the message of inclusion and shared responsibility he had been preaching across Illinois all that winter and spring. As one of his speech coaches later put it, “He walked onto that stage as a state senator, and he walked off as the next president of the United States.”

  Realizing that Obama was unbeatable, the Illinois Republican Party asked conservative commentator Alan Keyes to serve as its sacrificial nominee. Keyes, who had run two campaigns for president, was thrilled to step into Obama’s spotlight. He used the attention to condemn homosexuals as “selfish hedonists” and insist that Jesus Christ would never vote for Obama (a moot point, since Jesus was not registered in Illinois).

  In spite of Keyes’s clownishness, the general election was significant: It was the first time two black candidates had competed for a U.S. Senate seat.

  “Illinois has a record of such innovation,” wrote columnist Amity Shlaes, a graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory School. Neither candidate was campaigning on a black agenda, which meant that Illinois was “yet again emerging as the venue for a shift on race.” “The big show of 2004 may well take place in the Land of Lincoln,” she added.

  It was a race in which skin color was not an issue, won by a black candidate who had shown unprecedented appeal to white voters. That Illinois would become the birthplace of postracial politics was no surprise to Obama. Early in his Chicago years, he realized his adopted home was the perfect training ground for solving America’s problems, racial and otherwise. Barack Obama came to Chicago decades after the Great Migration, but for a young black man with political ambitions, it still turned out to be the promised land.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been written without the guidance of two editors. The first is Patrick Arden of the Chicago Reader, who in 1999 sent me down to the South Side to check out this guy Obama who was trying to take Bobby Rush’s congressional seat. “Is Bobby Rush in Trouble?” the story that came out of that reporting, is the basis for chapter 9.
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  The second is Mark Schone, who was news editor of Salon.com in 2007, when Obama declared his presidential candidacy. I pitched a story about Obama’s “lost campaign” and how it helped him mature as a politician to over a dozen national news outlets. Only Mark was interested. Throughout the 2008 campaign, I wrote a number of stories about Obama and Chicago for Salon. The essay “Chicago is Barack Obama’s kind of town” is where I first developed the idea that certain historical forces made Chicago the perfect home base for a black presidential candidate.

  My agent, Jeff Gerecke, responded enthusiastically to my book proposal when I e-mailed him after the 2008 election. Jeff then used his knowledge of the New York publishing world to find the perfect editor: Pete Beatty, who had just moved to Bloomsbury Press from the University of Chicago Press. As a former Hyde Parker, Pete understood exactly what I meant when I said that Obama wouldn’t have become president if he hadn’t moved to Chicago.

  Most of the people I interviewed are named in this book, but there are a few whose help was especially important: Jerry Kellman, Brian Banks, Alan Dobry, Douglas Baird, and Todd Spivak all reviewed sections of the manuscript for factual accuracy. (Alan also told me I could find Abner Mikva in the phone book, which is the last place someone of my generation thinks to look.) Hermene Hartman, publisher of N’DIGO, was an invaluable guide to the worlds of black business, media, and politics. Cheryl Johnson always made me feel welcome when I visited Altgeld Gardens and allowed me to attend meetings of her group, People for Community Recovery.

 

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