by David Garrow
On the campaign trail, Barack held a March 15 press conference to announce that he was channeling some $400,000 in state “member initiative” funding to a job training program at Englewood’s Kennedy-King College, where his and Michelle’s close friend Kaye Wilson’s husband Wellington was president. Barack told the Chicago Defender’s Chinta Strausberg that “Rush is fast to issue press releases on economic development but slow or totally absent when it comes to helping real people with their day to day needs and issues in the First District.” To another reporter Barack said, “nothing’s tougher, I think, than running against an incumbent in a primary.” Rush told the Sun-Times that Barack’s “criticisms are empty” and that he “curses the darkness rather than lighting a candle.” Barack met with the Sun-Times editorial board, giving each member a paperback copy of Dreams From My Father that he took from the remaindered copies he had bought for $1.00 apiece from Chicago book dealer Brad Jonas. But the Sun-Times endorsed Rush, saying that Obama and Trotter, while “both impressive figures, have not presented an argument worthy of removing a four-term congressman. . . . Rush deserves re-election for the valuable work he has done in Washington for his district and for Chicago.”
On March 17, Ted McClelland’s long article “Is Bobby Rush in Trouble?” appeared in the weekly Chicago Reader. First it quoted Barack: “Congressman Rush exemplifies a politics that is reactive, that waits for crises to happen and then holds a press conference, and hasn’t been particularly effective at building broad-based coalitions.” Then Rush was much harsher: “Barack is a person who read about the civil rights protests and thinks he knows all about it. . . . He went to Harvard and became an educated fool” in the university’s “ivory tower.” Rush added that “we’re not impressed with these folks with these eastern elite degrees.” McClelland repeated the belief that Mayor Daley “is said to fear Barack Obama’s appeal as a citywide candidate,” while Barack declared that “Chicago in many ways is the capital of the African-American community in the country.”
Some days earlier, in a 43rd Street juice bar, Donne Trotter had uttered a line that would never be forgotten: “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community.” McClelland reported that Trotter “detests” Obama, and aging black nationalist Lu Palmer recounted Barack seeking his support for Project VOTE! seven years earlier. “He came to our office and tried to get us involved, and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn’t like his arrogance, his air,” and “I said, ‘Man, you sound like Mel Reynolds.’” Echoing Rush’s view, Palmer said that “if they name you head of these elite institutions, the Harvard Law Review, that makes one suspect.” McClelland wrote that “there are whispers that Obama is being funded by a ‘Hyde Park mafia,’ a cabal of University of Chicago types, and that there’s an ‘Obama Project’ masterminded by whites who want to push him up the political ladder.” Even years later, Rush was utterly unapologetic: “my whole effort was to make sure that people knew that Barack Obama was being used as a tool of the white liberals.”
These fevered imaginings of nationalists were less cutting than Rich Miller’s statement that Barack “hasn’t had a lot of success here, and it could be because he places himself above everybody. He likes people to know he went to Harvard.” Neither Barack nor Miller had made any effort to get to know the other because, as one lobbyist wisecracked, “they both saw each other as irrelevant, and one of them was right.” Trotter tried to make the Senate’s one-vote failure to override Governor Ryan’s veto of Barack’s child support payments bill an indication of his legislative track record, but moderate Republican Dave Sullivan forcefully rebutted that claim. “No one could have tried any harder than Barack Obama. . . . It would not have gotten out of the Senate in the first place without Barack.”19
Barack’s campaign was less than thrilled with McClelland’s article spewing such bad blood to a citywide readership. Everyone understood, as Will Burns explained, that the nationalists’ Hyde Park and U of C comments were “code words for both whites and Jews.” A more pressing problem, with the election four days away, was how “overextended” the campaign’s finances were, as Dan Shomon put it. Their only choice in order to keep going was “deficit spending.” On March 15, Shomon, Will Burns, Cynthia Miller, Amy Szarek, and Summer Samuels-Piggee all received their final paychecks, covering the first two weeks of March, but on March 17 a crucial boost arrived in the form of at least five $1,000 checks from Tony Rezko’s employees and business partners. The Chicago Defender endorsed Rush, declaring that the incumbent has “done much for his constituents and his reelection promises even grander things to come for 1st Congressional District residents.” The paper said Obama and Trotter “are both highly qualified . . . but still have much to do” in Springfield.
National coverage of the race accorded Barack significant attention. National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition featured Barack reiterating the long-term political perspective he had developed more than a decade earlier. “One of the things we need to learn from the Harold Washington era is the importance of institution-building,” Barack explained. “When he died, in much the same way as when Martin Luther King was shot, you didn’t have strong institutional structures in place and a broad-based set of collective leaders who could carry that work forward.” Capitol Hill’s Roll Call termed Barack “a rising star” while quoting the Rush campaign’s claim that “we are not worried in the least.” In USA Today, longtime Chicago political commentator Don Rose noted that Rush’s opponents were “dividing the votes, and they don’t have any hard issues against him.”
On Sunday, Barack told the Sun-Times that “our people are energized, they’re interested and I think they will come out to vote.” Monday’s Tribune carried two separate columns both suggesting that even if Barack lost, “Obama has a future,” as John Kass put it. Salim Muwakkil further publicized Donne Trotter’s “white man in blackface” insult before concluding that Barack “clearly is a man on the way up. Even if he loses Tuesday, it will just be a bump in the road.”
Tuesday morning, Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller asserted that “the late word is that Sen. Barack Obama may be surging,” but no one in the 1st Congressional District, including Barack’s own campaign staffers and volunteers, believed any such thing. On 55th Street, a huge billboard featuring the “We’re Sticking with Bobby” slogan greeted anyone exiting the Dan Ryan Expressway and turning east toward Hyde Park. Serious money problems continued to plague Barack’s campaign, and he wrote an Election Day check for a $5,500 loan, bringing his and Michelle’s personal indebtedness in the race to $9,500. Chris Sautter flew in from D.C. to help work polling places and realized that Barack, like Dan Shomon, knew he was not going to win. Barack visited a number of precincts and was struck by how older black women would “shake my hand and pat me on the back and say ‘You know, you seem like a really nice young man. You’ve got a bright future ahead. We just think it’s not quite your turn yet.’ I knew at that point that I wasn’t going to win the race.”
Dozens of young volunteers spent Election Day working various precincts and making get-out-the-vote phone calls before heading to an evening gathering at the Hyde Park Ramada Inn once polls closed. Will Burns and several friends had recruited dozens of poor people to distribute leaflets in exchange for a day’s pay and evening meal money, but the campaign literally ran out of money as Election Day ended. Ron Davis, who had been so crucial back in 1995–96, chipped in $1,000, but “people are literally emptying their own bank accounts to try and back Barack up,” one participant recalled, so that Burns and his friends could avoid serious trouble with the “army of drug users” they had assembled.
Some of the volunteers were shocked by news reports declaring Bobby Rush the winner even before they reached the Ramada. Fund-raiser Amy Szarek had begged her closest girlfriends to come, telling them “I don’t want the room to be empty,” but while Szarek and Cynthia Miller staffed the Ramada gathering, Dan Shomon stayed at headquarters tabulating returns.
Young lawyer Jesse Ruiz remembered a “very somber” scene at the Ramada, with hardly fifty people gathered. For some young volunteers, like enthusiastic Northwestern law student Joe Seliga, the speed with which the race was called, plus Rush’s two-to-one margin over Barack, came as “an absolute shock.” Michelle Obama was “looking very distraught,” and one of Amy Szarek’s friends remembered Amy being “so upset” and “devastated” that “she hid herself in the bathroom crying the whole night” with girlfriends “trying to console her.”
State representative Tom Dart knew Barack had done well enough in his western portion of the district that he thought Barack might win, until Barack telephoned him to say, “Tom, we got shellacked.” At the Ramada, Barack looked “very disappointed,” and Craig Huffman, who as assistant treasurer had signed most of the campaign’s checks, remembered thinking to himself, “‘I wonder if this is it?’ because I knew Michelle was very clear” about wanting Barack to abandon electoral politics. Her brother Craig Robinson had the same thought as Huffman: “Wow, I guess that’s it.”20
When Barack spoke to his supporters and a few reporters, he acknowledged the obvious: “I confess to you: winning is better than losing,” although “I thought maybe we could pull this off.” Barack thanked them for their efforts: “we just had such support with such a diverse base of folks that we can walk away from this feeling proud. What it tells us is that people are hungry for a new kind of politics.” Regarding his own future, “I’ve got to make assessments about where we go from here,” Barack volunteered. “We need a new style of politics to deal with the issues that are important to the people. What’s not clear to me is whether I should do that as an elected official or by influencing government in ways that actually improve people’s lives.”
Bobby Rush was astonishingly magnanimous at his own event. “I want to thank my opponents . . . for the way they conducted their races,” Rush told the crowd. “The 1st Congressional District is a better district because of Donne Trotter and Barack Obama,” he declared. “Reverend Jackson often tells me that only diamonds can sharpen other diamonds,” and “my two opponents in this race are diamonds indeed. They’ve helped me become a better congressman and a better individual.” When the final returns came in, Rush had won 61 percent—59,599 out of the 97,664 votes cast, with Barack obtaining 29,649 votes, good for 30.3 percent. Donne Trotter trailed with 6,915, representing 7 percent, and little-known George Roby attracted 1,501.
Some supporters, taking into consideration the sympathy Rush gained from the deaths of his son and father, Barack’s missed gun-bill vote, and the earlier polling numbers, felt that Barack had achieved “a moral victory to get 30 percent. I thought we were going to get like 18 percent,” young organizer John Eason reflected. Dan Shomon told a reporter “it’s difficult to get name recognition” as a challenger in a primary without the $200,000 needed for a television advertising campaign, and Dan expressed regret that Trotter had not cut into Rush’s overwhelming support in the heavily black 6th and 8th Wards, where the aldermanic organizations had backed Rush. Barack won a remarkable 72.4 percent of the vote in the mostly white 19th Ward, and 64 percent in the suburban portion of the district, but he received only 17.8 percent in the 6th. In the two most diverse wards, where he was supported by both aldermen, Barack won just 37 percent in Toni Preckwinkle’s 4th Ward and 33 percent in Leslie Hairston’s 5th. Barack carried Hyde Park’s forty-four precincts by only a narrow, eight-hundred-vote margin over Rush.
Thurday’s Sun-Times featured a warm-hearted editorial commending the 1st District also-rans. “Some stars did not rise, but the efforts and ideas advanced in their losing efforts were impressive.” Congressman Rush “called Trotter and Obama ‘diamonds.’ We concur.” More vitally, Sun-Times political columnist Steve Neal, reviewing the ward-by-ward percentages, observed that “if Obama is a future candidate for state-wide political office, his impressive totals on the Southwest Side and in the suburbs would indicate that he’s got the potential to win.” Barack told the Chicago Defender’s Chinta Strausberg, “I went into this race knowing it would be an uphill battle,” and to another writer he said “the most difficult thing in politics is name recognition,” because throughout much of the district “people still didn’t know my name.”21
Looking back four years later, Barack observed that the race “taught me to never overestimate the degree to which voters know who you are.” Other knowledgeable observers had different reactions. Toni Preckwinkle and Dan Shomon thought Barack entered the race far too late, and David Axelrod’s partner John Kupper, who followed the campaign closely, thought “it didn’t seem to be very professionally run or frankly well thought out.” In time, Barack agreed. “The problem with that race . . . was in conception. There was no way I was going to beat an incumbent congressman with the limited name recognition that I had.”
Hyde Park state representative Barbara Flynn Currie, who believed Barack’s 30 percent showing was a “disaster,” thought the campaign’s fatal flaw was more fundamental, because “the kinds of arguments that he made in his own behalf are pretty subtle.” Asserting that Rush was not a policy leader was a difficult argument, for “it’s sort of inside baseball,” Currie explained. “When you call somebody a hack, you want to be able to identify ways in which hackery is their middle name,” something Barack’s campaign had failed to do. What’s more, “Bobby ran a textbook campaign . . . no mistakes.” Will Burns agreed with Shomon that Barack got in too late and that Trotter failed to cut into Rush’s base, but he also understood that “it was hard for us to make a persuasive argument to voters as to why they should vote for Barack Obama and effectively take away Bobby Rush’s job based on the idea of change” because “it was very abstract, it was not very concrete.”
In addition, top fund-raiser Judy Byrd explained, the campaign “miscalculated the strengths and the historical significance of who Bobby Rush was to that community.” Furthermore, as Toni Preckwinkle forthrightly said, Barack was “not a very good candidate. He behaves like a U of C professor, doesn’t have much of a common touch, and thinks he’s smarter than everybody, and that kind of thing doesn’t go over very well.” Byrd had “worried about that” too and realized, looking back, that Barack had been “learning on the job during that campaign” regarding “how he presented and how he related to the African American community.”
Even so, many of Barack’s black supporters were outraged by how widely the “white man in blackface” comment had been voiced. Burns recalled that “it got bad. It was real bad,” and school director Tim King was one of many young black professionals who were “very offended” that the Rush campaign promoted “this notion that Barack wasn’t one of us” because he had graduated from Harvard Law School and was teaching at the U of C. Barack ruefully told Jesse Ruiz, “Me being president of the Harvard Law Review, I never thought it could be a liability. But it was a liability in this race.” Elvin Charity, who had recruited Barack as a summer associate back in 1989–90, recognized that Rush had succeeded in portraying Barack “as an outsider and an elitist.” Carol Harwell, Barack’s campaign manager in 1995–96, recalled, “The biggest critique I heard was ‘Is he really black,’ ‘Is he one of us?’” Barack confronted “a lot of skeptical people,” Carol realized, who wondered, “Why are you doing this? . . . This is unrealistic,” including “in his own household.”
Michelle’s unhappiness had grown over the course of the campaign and was only heightened further by Barack’s landslide loss. They had continued their evening meals with Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and the Khalidis, and in the aftermath of Barack’s defeat, Michelle’s desire that he abandon electoral politics was often verbalized. “Michelle had lost her appetite for it by that point and was ready to give it up. She hated it,” Bill remembered.22
In subsequent years, Barack blamed his shellacking on “impatience” and “hubris,” and acknowledged that it had been “a terrible race . . . everything that could go wrong in that race went wrong.” It
was “a humbling experience and a useful one,” and at another time he admitted, “I was completely mortified and humiliated, and felt terrible.” In the course of the campaign, Dan Shomon and Barack had become even closer colleagues, in part because of Michelle’s clear disinterest. In the aftermath, Dan saw that Barack “went through kind of a rough period” and was “kind of morose.” On one occasion Barack told Shomon that “I don’t really know” if politics is “what I want to do” anymore, and Barack later told Cynthia Miller he went through “a dark period” and “did a lot of soul-searching” following his defeat. Barack sounded a similar note to Carol Harwell. “‘The hell with this. I could be making money. I’ve given my all and this is what people think of me,’” Carol recounted Barack telling her. “I think he got so hurt in that election,” and while he said “he wanted to get out” of politics, “I think he was just having a super pity party.”
Although Barack’s campaign had raised more than half a million dollars, the election’s immediate aftermath left unpaid bills of more than $50,000, on top of the outstanding $9,500 loan from Barack and Michelle. Barack made up for some of the unpaid salaries by channeling up to $2,000 from his state political fund to Shomon and Will Burns. Dan was quickly hired by a Chicago marketing communications firm, but Will went on unemployment before landing a job at the Metropolitan Planning Council. Among the supportive calls Barack received was one from Mayor Daley, who asked Barack why he had challenged Rush. Barack cited Rush’s landslide loss to Daley, but the mayor replied that Rush’s defeat in the mayor’s race had not meant Rush’s congressional seat was vulnerable. “Don’t take a defeat as a complete loss. You learn something in defeat,” Daley said.