Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Four days after the supreme court’s decision, Governor Ryan, joined by Daley, state attorney general Jim Ryan, and three of the Four Tops—House Speaker Mike Madigan, House minority leader Lee Daniels, and Senate minority leader Emil Jones Jr., but not Senate president and NRA enthusiast Pate Philip—held a news conference to announce that he was summoning the legislature back to Springfield for a special session beginning on Monday, December 13. All of those officials called for reenactment of the felony provision, with Daley proclaiming that “families are going to be less safe” with that stiffer penalty off the books. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller highlighted that Philip’s absence signaled an upcoming tong war between the Senate president and Governor Ryan, with Philip’s close sidekick Ed Petka pointing out that Republican senators would refuse to reenact the felony measure they insisted had been snuck into the 1994 bill. Warning that “this session may last a while,” with “a long stalemate that lasts until Christmas,” Miller predicted that the chances of a compromise between Ryan and Philip over such a binary issue—felony versus misdemeanor—were very slim.7

  Before Barack returned to Springfield, he held a press conference with ACLU and Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund leaders to announce that in January he would introduce a bill that would require police officers statewide to record the race of every driver they stopped. “Racial profiling may explain why incarceration rates are so high among young African-Americans,” Barack asserted. Both the Tribune and the Defender covered his initiative, and the next weekend Barack appeared on WGCI’s Cliff Kelley Show and addressed an anti-gun rally in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood. On the radio, Barack endorsed the state supreme court’s application of the single-subject rule, and he told the Hyde Park Herald it was “most important” to retain the felony provision, adding that “there should not be too much difficulty in passing the law in a constitutional fashion” despite “some resistance from the NRA and pro-gun legislators.” At Park Manor Christian Church, Barack said he would introduce legislation to restrict gun purchases to one a month and ban most sales at gun shows.

  On Monday, December 13, Barack filed more than ten thousand petition signatures to qualify for the March primary ballot, even though only 880 valid ones were required. Collecting that many signatures had taken weeks of work by Will Burns and the campaign’s dozens of young volunteers. The Defender, the Tribune, and one black weekly newspaper reported Barack’s challenge that “when he ran for mayor, Rush said that debates are important. It is hypocritical to demand debates in one of his campaigns but hide from debates when he is running for re-election.” The petitions deadline also showed that there would be a fourth, long-shot candidate in the race, retired police officer George C. Roby, who contended that Rush, Trotter, and Obama “are from the same tree trunk.”8

  Efforts to work out some sort of compromise between George Ryan and Pate Philip went nowhere. Ryan refused to abandon the felony provision, and although he acceded to one proposal to allow prosecutors to choose between felony and misdemeanor charges on a case-by-case basis, most knowledgeable observers, including Barack, believed that would be held unconstitutional. A Chicago Tribune editorial stated the felony provision has “had a dramatic impact in reducing gun injuries and deaths” and proclaimed that Pate Philip “has gone soft on crime.” Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller observed that “everyone under the dome is feeling serious pressure from their spouses and families to get their rear ends home for the holidays,” and that included Barack, who was scheduled to fly to Honolulu with Michelle and Malia on Sunday, December 19, to spend the holidays with Madelyn Dunham. Ryan and Philip remained in regular contact, and each morning when the governor called the Senate president, he said, “This is Scrooge.” Pate replied, “Okay, this is the bad guy.” On Thursday, December 16, Philip called a vote on the prosecutorial discretion substitute, but no Democrats supported it, leaving it five votes under the three-fifths majority required for approval during a special session.

  Barack was content to leave it at that, telling his colleagues that “the public will know where each of us stand,” but Ryan ordered the Senate to remain in session. On Friday, December 17, as Ryan tried to recruit Republican senators to his side, Barack told his colleagues that “modest gun control works in making our streets safer,” adding, “I believe we have selective enforcement across a whole host of criminal laws.” In January, he would introduce “a racial profiling bill,” to determine “whether, in fact, stops are being selectively made with respect to race. I’m deeply concerned about that issue, having been the subject of stops that I suspect were selective and based upon my race.” Barack added that the legislature should consider allowing broad expungement of criminal convictions, for “it is impossible to find a job if you have a felony record.”

  Pate Philip, knowing Ryan did not have the thirty-six votes he needed to approve the felony measure, called that bill for a vote, and it fell seven votes under on a 29–18–7 tally. Among the three downstate Democrats supporting Philip was newly arrived Ned Mitchell, who had been appointed to replace the retiring Jim Rea. A friendly, humorous man, Mitchell was lodging in Terry Link’s Springfield poker house, and teasingly told Barack he needed to avoid discussing gun bills with him. “You’ll have me convinced into voting for that, and it won’t be good for me back home,” Mitchell warned. “If I were to vote for that bill, I couldn’t eat Sunday dinner at my folks’ house anymore—they’d break my plate.” Barack laughed, but Mitchell reminded him of the fundamental difference between downstate and Chicago: “Where I’m from, we’re not shooting one another,” and his gun-owning friends were hunters. “It’s a sport in southern Illinois!”

  On Saturday, December 18, senators left Springfield for a forty-eight-hour respite before returning on Monday. Barack postponed his family’s travel plans, warning his grandmother that they might have to cancel their trip entirely, and the Tribune reported that since the state supreme court’s December 2 ruling, 253 people in Chicago, and 60 in the rest of the state, who had been arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm were now facing misdemeanor rather than felony charges. On Tuesday, Barack told senators and spectators that “no one is more eager to get out of here than me. I’m supposed to be on a beach. It’s 85 degrees in Honolulu last I checked. I would prefer not being here.” He opposed any discretionary solution, explaining that “the notion of creating different punishments for the exact same offense, without any clarity as to why one person would be charged with a felony and another, misdemeanor, would present some constitutional problems.”

  Barack told one Springfield reporter that the single-subject rule was a good constitutional provision, but that the Illinois Supreme Court was applying it too inclusively, which “really wreaks havoc on the legislative process here.” Barack also wrote a Hyde Park Herald column blaming the standoff on Republicans who were “listening to extremists in the National Rifle Association” rather than to citizens “who want reasonable gun control.” Late Tuesday the Senate adjourned, with senators believing that Ryan would order them back to Springfield by Wednesday, December 29.

  On Thursday, December 23, Barack, Michelle, and eighteen-month-old Malia headed to Honolulu for Christmas with Toot. On Monday, Barack learned that the Senate was convening on December 29. He told Michelle they had to leave the next day, but by that evening, Malia had the flu as well as a very severe ear infection. “I tried to get him to come back,” Dan Shomon remembered, but maybe he was not “as forceful as I needed to be.” Barack also spoke with city of Chicago lobbyist Bill Luking, saying that “he didn’t think the votes were there” and that his daughter was more important. “I could not leave my wife alone with my daughter without knowing the seriousness of the baby’s condition,” Barack later explained, and he remained in Honolulu rather than return to Illinois for the 1:00 P.M. Wednesday vote on SB 224.

  By then, even the New York Times was covering the Springfield discord, and Illinois newspapers were reporting Ryan’s Tuesday claim that
“if the Senate calls this tomorrow, it will pass.” But when the votes were cast, Ryan came up five votes short, with the tally showing 31–17–2. Democrat Jimmy DeLeo immediately rose to say that his green button had malfunctioned, a claim also made by Republican Wendell Jones. Three absent senators—Tommy Walsh, who said he had stayed home because his pregnant wife was running a fever; Kathy Parker, who was on vacation in New Mexico; and Barack—plus the two claims of button malfunctions had kept Ryan from attaining the thirty-six votes he had anticipated. The governor was livid. “If these folks would have been here, I’d have had my votes,” Ryan told statehouse reporters. “We’d have passed this bill today.”

  Thursday’s Chicago Sun-Times told readers that “the absences of Obama, Walsh and Parker stunned Ryan,” and the Tribune stated that Obama and Parker had “decided to remain on vacation instead of returning.” Unnamed “aides to Obama, who was in Hawaii, refused to tell the governor’s staff how to find him,” the Tribune added, but Dan Shomon was quoted as saying “his daughter was his first priority.” The Tribune also featured Bobby Rush’s reaction to the news: “This vote was probably the most pivotal vote, one of the most important votes in memory before the General Assembly, and I just can’t see any excuse that Mr. Obama could use for missing this vote.”9

  Barack phoned Governor Ryan to apologize for his absence, but by Friday morning editorial denunciations were raining down. “Philip, Criminals Win Again,” the Tribune declared, calling the absentees “gutless sheep.” Obama “who has—had?—aspirations to be a member of Congress, chose a trip to Hawaii over public safety in Illinois.” The suburban Daily Southtown was no gentler, noting that Barack “was in Hawaii on vacation” when his daughter became ill. “This issue was too important for Obama to take a chance on missing the vote by traveling to the South Pacific in the first place.” Barack told Bernard Schoenburg, the political reporter for Springfield’s State Journal-Register, that “I take my legislative duties really seriously,” but “at some point you can’t just talk about family values, you actually have to exercise them.”

  A brief weekend respite allowed Barack to address issues other than his vacation controversy. “Ultimately, if we want to deal with the gun violence taking place in our community, we have to deal with the manufacturing and distribution” of guns and the dealers “who are selling guns to anyone with the cash.” A Tuesday-morning Tribune gossip column asserted that “those ocean breezes must have blown away the political instincts of state Sen. Barack Obama,” who “stayed on vacation in Hawaii instead of returning to Springfield for the post-Christmas vote on tough gun control.” Bobby Rush and Donne Trotter “will crucify Obama for his Hawaiian holiday if he persists in his plan to run in the Democratic primary for Rush’s congressional seat,” and in that day’s Chicago Defender, Trotter did just that. “I think it is irresponsible for Senator Barack Obama not to come back,” Trotter declared. “He and the others dropped the ball for their constituents.”

  Barack complained to the Tribune columnists, and the next morning they ran a follow-up item. “We have a lot of politicians who like to talk about family values. At some point you have to live those family values,” Barack argued. The Sun-Times ran a prominent story on the controversy, stating that “Obama’s absence could cost him dearly.” Barack claimed his vote would not have made a difference and that “family has to come first.” In the Hyde Park Herald, Donne Trotter kept up his assault, declaring that “for anyone not to show up to me is dereliction at the worst and certainly irresponsible,” especially because “I was really under the impression that the bill was going to pass.” Bobby Rush’s campaign spokesperson, Maudlyne Ihejirika, told the media that “while perhaps the most important piece of legislation that could have a significant impact on getting guns off the street was being debated in Illinois, Mr. Obama was on a beach in Hawaii.”

  Inside Barack’s campaign, Cynthia Miller recalled “a tense environment,” because “Dan was just so frustrated with Barack” since “once they knew the vote was going to be called, he should have turned around.” Media consultant Chris Sautter recognized that the missed vote was “a big deal,” and “I wondered whether or not he really wanted this . . . whether or not he appreciated what it took to win a race like this” and “the kind of sacrifice” it required. Chris realized that “Dan was always the taskmaster” for Barack, and Shomon blamed himself for not arguing more forcefully with Barack to come back. “There were other times when he tried to slough out of session . . . and I would really beat him up sometimes, say, ‘Look, you’ve got to show up! This is your job. You need to be there!’ But this time I let it slide probably too much. I should have been harder on him.”

  Bobby Rush’s media consultant Eric Adelstein understood that the Barack “on vacation in Hawaii” story played into the perception that the race was between a “dilettante versus the guy from the neighborhood.” By January it was clear that Donne Trotter lacked the funding to mount a real campaign. While he had known going in that his mentor John Stroger was backing Rush, over the holidays Stroger’s godson Orlando Jones told Donne that word had gone out that members of Stroger’s sizable organization should not contribute to Trotter’s campaign. “They were fearful,” since “many of them worked for the county,” and “I felt a little betrayed,” Trotter confessed. The “rug was pulled out,” but “once you’re in it, you’re in it.” Trotter would remain a candidate, albeit one without a campaign.10

  By the second week of January, legislators had begun the new spring session with no movement in the standoff between George Ryan and Pate Philip. The Senate president told the suburban Daily Herald he did not believe Senator Kathy Parker “deserves any criticism at all” for missing the gun vote because she was in New Mexico. “Our base is pro-guns,” Philip explained. “Our districts come first, the state comes second. I mean, people have to get re-elected, so they have to do what they have to do.” Concerning unlawful possession, “a first offense with no criminal background shouldn’t be a felony.”

  Barack presided at JCAR’s monthly meeting and then introduced his bill calling for a four-year study of traffic stop statistics and training of state police officers in “sensitivity toward racial and ethnic difference.” Only the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, none of whose Metro East readers lived within 250 miles of the 1st Congressional District, covered Barack’s initiative. “Nobody really knows how pervasive the practice of racial profiling is, and that puts a cloud over the able law enforcement officer,” Barack told the paper. “There is at least the perception in black communities that ‘driving while black’ is a crime.”

  Back in Chicago, Hyde Park’s IVI-IPO members voted 28–3–3 to endorse Barack rather than Bobby Rush. The Herald publicized the outcome and quoted a spokesman calling Barack “articulate and dedicated” and expressing hope that “Obama will be able to do a better job than the incumbent by bringing more resources into the district.” Barack used his Herald column to defend his absence for the gun vote, explaining that “my grandmother cannot travel” and that his family’s annual visit “is the only means to assure that my grandmother does not spend the holidays alone.” A Herald editorial robustly stood up for Barack, facetiously writing that he “should have moved his grandmother—and all other family members he might want to visit—to a less glamorous state than Hawaii.” A querulous letter mocking Barack as “some progressive, some leader!” was countered by one from former congressman Ab Mikva, whose lengthier letter appeared in the next day’s Chicago Tribune. Castigating the paper for calling Barack “gutless,” Mikva wrote that “the conflict between being a public servant and trying to be a good husband and father . . . is never easy. . . . The media ought not to make it harder by beating up on somebody when family values require priority.”

  Yet the controversy refused to die. One neighborhood weekly headlined its story “Obama Under Fire for Missing Gun Vote,” and another, in a trio of pieces profiling Rush, Trotter, and Obama, mentioned Barack’s absence in all three.
Bobby Rush told the Chicago Weekly News, “I was working on a public service campaign to prevent gun violence over New Year’s while Obama was vacationing. We have to keep fighting gun violence and that’s where my focus is even if that is not where Senator Obama’s focus is.” Donne Trotter noted that Barack’s “wife was on the trip, and she’s a capable individual. It wasn’t as if he was abandoning his child in a foreign land.” Trotter added that “to use your child as an excuse for not going to work also shows poorly on the individual’s character.” Barack responded icily. “Perhaps Senator Trotter would feel comfortable leaving his wife behind with a sick child thousands of miles away without any clear idea as to when they would be able to return to Chicago. It’s not something I felt comfortable doing,” and “for him to try and politicize my child’s illness is unfortunate.”

  In his Chicago Weekend profile, Barack said “my ultimate job is to create opportunities through education and employment that prevents youth from getting involved in the criminal justice system,” and “we need to devote our talents to keeping youth out of the system.” But even in mid-January, the Tribune ran a story headlined “Obama Defends Decision to Miss Anti-Crime Vote” and quoted Barack as insisting, “I cannot sacrifice the health or well-being of my daughter for politics.” Barack tried to draw attention elsewhere, unveiling a neighborhood beautification plan at Englewood High School and contributing a birthday column on “Why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Is Important to Me” to the Defender. “The violence within our community exacts as great a toll as any violence coming from outside our communities,” Barack stated. “My commitment to social justice and the sense that serving as an elected official is more than a mere job, but a mission, is largely informed by Dr. King’s life.”11