by David Garrow
Chicagoans Against War on Iraq, as the organizers dubbed themselves, had secured Jesse Jackson Sr. as their marquee speaker, but otherwise the noontime program featured a lineup that only local progressives would know. Sitting on the podium as the rally got under way, Barack complained to Bettylu about the all-too-familiar musical selections like “Give Peace a Chance.” “Couldn’t they play something more modern?” he asked. Bettylu and Marilyn Katz got the rally started, reading supportive letters from U.S. senator Dick Durbin and Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich. Barack’s former Senate colleague Chuy Garcia was followed by former MacArthur Foundation president Adele Simmons, and after a musicial interlude, local performer and MC Aaron Freeman asked the crowd of about a thousand to “Please welcome state senator Barack Obama.”
Barack began with a reference to the U.S. Civil War before stating, “I don’t oppose all wars.” Then he mentioned his grandfather’s service in World War II before again saying, “I don’t oppose all wars.” That emphasis surprised many listeners in what organizer Jennifer Amdur Spitz knew was “a peacenik crowd.” Musician Peter Cunningham had led off the program and found Barack’s theme “a kind of contrarian message that made everybody stop and go, ‘What? What is this guy saying?’” Barack repeated his refrain: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war,” one “based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.” Barack argued that “Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors,” and he said that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” Additionally, intervention would “strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Barack concluded with a second refrain, one he repeated four times: “You want a fight, President Bush?” Then pursue Al Qaeda, pursue UN inspections, get U.S. allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia “to stop oppressing their own people,” and “wean ourselves off Middle East oil” at home.
The program closed with Jesse Jackson’s remarks and a sing-along, and as a local television news crew interviewed Jackson, Barack appeared alone in the background. Media estimates of the crowd varied from three hundred to three thousand, but Barack had not recognized one supportive couple, a very tall, now eighty-five-year-old black man accompanied by a short white woman: Frank and Bea Lumpkin. Only the suburban Daily Herald quoted “Barak Obama” as declaring “I don’t oppose all war, I oppose dumb war,” but the Chicago Sun-Times’ brief story devoted as much attention to the views of some nearby construction workers as to the rally’s speakers. “I think we should go to war and soon,” one ironworker explained.64
Two days before the rally, the U of C Law School’s autumn quarter had begun, with Barack again teaching Con Law III three mornings a week plus his Racism class on Thursday afternoons. Con Law attracted fifty-two students and Racism thirty-eight, and Barack again faced the challenge of running for office while juggling a heavy teaching schedule. Appearing on WVON’s Cliff Kelley radio show, Barack stressed the importance of Democrats winning control of the state Senate while acknowledging that people were “responsive” about “the possibility” of him running for U.S. Senate. “It’s important that Democrats at the national level ask serious questions about President Bush’s policies.”
The next day, after teaching his Con Law III class, Barack addressed three hundred attorneys at the Chicago Council of Lawyers’ annual luncheon before heading downstate to Macomb to speak on behalf of Democratic state Senate candidate John Sullivan, who was challenging Republican incumbent Laura Kent Donahue. Dan Shomon was recruiting friends and supporters to drive Barack whenever possible so as to mitigate the demands of his hectic schedule. Will Burns took the wheel on one trip to Champaign and back, and for the Macomb trip, Dan recruited Dave Feller, a former Senate staffer now working in the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, to accompany Barack and handle the late-night drive back to Chicago.
At Western Illinois University, Barack told the crowd that “government as it operates and government as it should operate are in conflict.” The return trip began inauspiciously when an Illinois state trooper pulled Feller and Barack over not long after leaving Macomb. Feller was at the wheel of Barack’s Jeep Cherokee, which had Senate plates, and Barack introduced himself to the trooper, who ran both men’s driver’s licenses before letting them go with a warning. Back on the road, Barack became worried when Feller began to nod off while driving. “Dave, wake up, wake up!” Feller woke up, but again nodded off a little bit later. An angry Barack insisted on taking the wheel. “He’s got the radio up, he’s chain smoking,” Feller remembered, and when Dave awoke from yet a third nap to suggest a place on Chicago’s outskirts where they could get a drink, an exhausted Barack responded simply, “Fuck you!” The two men made it home unscathed, and a few days later, Feller’s physician diagnosed him with sleep apnea.
On October 10, the “Obama Issues Committee” met at 7:30 A.M.; that evening would be Barack’s long-scheduled kickoff fund-raiser. Dan and Barack both addressed their “game plan/legislative strategy for 2003” with the issues volunteers. Everyone knew Illinois faced an annual budget deficit of $3.4 million, and “the important issue for Senator Obama is to determine which programs should receive further cuts,” the agenda explained. With Raja Krishnamoorthi taking the lead, issue assignments were parceled out, with reports due by January 30, before the substantive start of spring session. The fund-raiser that night was a notable success, with old friends like Miner Barnhill’s Jeff Cummings contributing $1,000 and several donors, like Valerie Jarrett’s boss Daniel Levin and his wife Fay Hartog-Levin, giving the maximum $2,000 per person.
The next day the U.S. Senate voted 77–23 in favor of a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq, with twenty-nine of fifty Senate Democrats siding with Republican president George W. Bush. Barack later observed that “with that vote, Congress became a co-author of a catastrophic war.” Barack and Michelle headed to Bloomington, Illinois, to attend the Saturday wedding of Amy Szarek, Barack’s congressional campaign fund-raiser. After the ceremony, a number of Barack’s current and former campaign aides teased him about his eating habits as everyone enjoyed drinks. Given the amount of time that Barack and Dan spent on the road crisscrossing Illinois beyond Chicagoland, eating in Barack’s Jeep Cherokee was almost a daily event. But patronizing drive-through windows had become more problematic as Barack got increasingly picky about what he ate. His strong aversion to cheese exemplified the difficulty. “He had a problem communicating the Whopper order,” Dan explained, because Barack asked to skip multiple condiments. “They would always get his order wrong,” and in time Dan and Barack gave up on drive-through windows entirely. In Springfield, Barack could always eat his favorite lunch, Cafe Andiamo’s vegetarian sandwich, either there or at the capitol, thanks to the young interns who fetched food for busy legislators. Democratic Judiciary Committee staffer Rob Scott remembered Barack cordially thanking the interns by name for such errands, but whenever he could, Barack used Andiamo “as a respite” from the capitol’s nonstop glad-handing. Owner Dave Stover, who was also the executive director of the Illinois Association of Rehabilitation Facilities, which represented service providers for people with disabilities, “interacted quite a bit” with Barack on the Public Health and Welfare Committee. Over at Andiamo, Barack “was always, always meticulously worried about getting a parking ticket” from Springfield’s aggressive meter attendants. Stover realized that Barack “was always a fairly private man” and “very cautious,” and “one of the more conservative liberals that I’ve ever known.” For Barack it was as if “everything had a yellow light on,” and not just his “present” button at his Senate desk. Others who saw Barack daily in Springfield, like officemate Terry Link’s secretary Bunny Fourez, noted that “he ate so healthy,” yet to people in the capitol, just like so many in Chicago,
it seemed puzzlingly out of character for someone who was so rigorously health focused and self-controlled to nonetheless be a moderately heavy smoker.
Barack and Dan Shomon had spent so much time together over the previous five years, particularly since 1999–2000, that their relationship had become by far the closest personal bond Barack had formed in his seven years in electoral politics. Dan’s friends knew how committed he was to Barack, and although some of them “questioned Shomon’s bromance with Obama,” no one doubted how devoted Dan was to Barack’s best interests, political and personal. As the pace of the nascent U.S. Senate run picked up after Labor Day, Barack asked Dan to sit down with Michelle. Shomon knew Michelle was not enthusiastic about Barack’s political career, and he realized things had only gotten worse during and after the 2000 loss to Bobby Rush. “I never sensed his marriage was really in trouble,” Dan recalled, but there was no question that “there was great tension on the home front,” as one Shomon friend remembered him saying. So “I talked to Michelle. She and I had a long conversation about what kind of an impact” a two-year statewide run—late 2002 to potentially late 2004—would have on Barack’s family life. Michelle’s distaste was at times matched by Barack’s guilt about how much he was away from home. “Don’t you fucking know I have kids?” Dan recalled Barack asking on more than one occasion when presented with an upcoming travel schedule.
Mulling over Michelle’s reluctance and Barack’s own regret about missing so much of his daughters’ childhoods, Dan took the initiative during one fall drive when they headed south from Springfield to Macoupin County to warn Barack that “if he was running for the U.S. Senate for two years morning, noon, and night, he wasn’t going to see his kids, and he was going to feel bad about it. I just knew the personal toll it would take on him,” and “I didn’t want him to feel guilty.” Dan remembered the moment. “We were on the side of the road on Illinois 4 in Carlinville, and I told Barack, ‘I don’t think you should run.’ I said I thought it was a bad idea because of Michelle and the kids.” But “Barack just looked at me and said, ‘I’m running anyway.’” As close as Barack and Dan were, Barack had never shared with Shomon his sense of destiny as he had with Michelle more than a decade earlier and previously with Sheila and Lena. That unspoken conviction explained why Dan’s carefully considered warning about the price to be paid was one Barack could not heed, just as he had been unable to truly pursue the Joyce Foundation presidency nine months earlier.65
With that conviction in mind, Barack declined an October invitation to become a candidate for the presidency of Common Cause, for which he had been recommended by former Joyce president Debbie Leff to search consultant and Barack’s former Demos board colleague Arnie Miller. Barack’s focus was now entirely on the U.S. Senate, and he remained on the road, traveling to places like Elgin to campaign for Democratic state Senate candidates, but Illinois’s dire state budget situation dampened the hopes of what could follow from a Democratic sweep. “We’re going to be finally driving the bus, and it’s got no gas,” Barack told one reporter, but he stressed how “it’s important that we have Democrats in power to make sure that the state budget is not balanced on the backs of poor people and African-Americans.”
On election night, Senate Democrats came away with 33–26 majority control of the chamber, and Rod Blagojevich won the governorship by a margin of more than 230,000 votes. Together with Speaker Michael Madigan’s continuing control of the state House, Illinois Democrats now assumed complete dominance of the capitol. But any semblance of unity was less than skin-deep, because “Blagojevich and Madigan despise each other,” as Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller put it. Appearing the next evening on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight telecast, Barack emphasized that as Senate president “Emil Jones is now another power center,” and one who would “have his own agenda.” With everyone on notice about Illinois’s gaping budget deficit, which was now projected at $2.2 billion annually, Barack said, “I was at the Blagojevich event last night and spoke to a labor leader who specifically said, ‘We are spending a lot of time telling our members not to expect too much on the money side.’” Fellow guest and former Republican governor Jim Edgar laid the blame for Republican losses on the commercial-driver’s-license scandal that was still dogging outgoing governor George Ryan.
In contrast, Barack cited the case of the best known of Illinois’s thirteen innocent death row inmates. Jim Ryan and unsuccessful Republican attorney general nominee Joe Birkett had continued to defend the faulty conviction of Rolando Cruz, even though DuPage County already had paid Cruz and two codefendants $3.5 million in damages. Weeks earlier, in a Chicago Tribune essay entitled “Memo to Voters: Remember the Cruz Case,” Barack’s friend Scott Turow had denounced “the pattern of prosecutorial misconduct that marked these prosecutions.” On television, Barack argued that “the Rolando Cruz case was something that moved a lot of not only Democrats, but independents, to go to the polls in a lot of the swing districts and collar counties” surrounding Chicago. “I think it was a genuine concern. People, even those who support the death penalty, don’t like the idea of unfairness,” and “I think it did end up becoming an issue in a lot of areas where traditionally you would have seen more Republican votes.”66
With the election over, Senate Democrats prepared to take charge. With Barack about to become chairman of the Public Health and Welfare Committee, he called lobbyist Jim Duffett, head of the Campaign for Better Health Care, to explain how his Bernardin Amendment aimed at requiring Illinois to move toward universal health care coverage could now be supplanted with actual legislation that Duffett would take the lead in drafting, the Health Care Justice Act. “I want to do hearings around the state” to stimulate public interest in the legislation, Barack told Duffett when they met to discuss a game plan. Barack likewise phoned criminal justice reformer Steven Drizin to inform him that incoming Senate president Emil Jones had tabbed Barack to take the lead on moving forward with legislation to require police interrogations in all potential capital cases be videotaped in full in order to be admissible in court. Drizin remembered that “What struck me was Barack’s confidence that he would make sure a bill was passed,” even before the session actually got under way.
Bills like those would spotlight a previously obscure, minority-party backbencher as much as any Springfield legislation could, and Barack moved to advance his Senate race prospects on other fronts too. Dan Shomon’s friend John Charles, who had quarterbacked the initial 1999 poll that had encouraged Barack’s congressional run, turned down a request to join Barack’s Senate campaign staff, asking himself “Can he pull this off?” and doubting an affirmative answer. Acutely aware that fund-raising would determine whether Barack could mount a credible campaign including television ads, David Axelrod called Democratic fund-raising consultant Joe McLean, who remembered that “I was skeptical, to say the least, about this young guy with the funny Islamic-sounding name.” But he flew to Chicago, “took an immediate liking to Shomon,” and “when I met Barack, I knew instantly that he was the real deal. . . . Ax, Dan, and Barack all recognized that fund-raising was going to be key,” and the candidate’s own willingness and self-discipline to spend hour upon hour calling prospective donors was the most crucial ingredient of all.
“The only resource you have in a political campaign is the candidate’s time,” McLean believed, and “call time” would determine whether a candidate had the wherewithal “to put yourself in people’s living rooms in that three-to-four-week window before the election.” McLean hoped to put his own operations director, Susan Shadow, who had just worked an unsuccessful Texas gubernatorial race, on the ground in Illinois, but Barack “wasn’t going to pay much” and “it was a crowded primary,” so Susan, just like John Charles, decided to give the race a pass. But with Claire Serdiuk joining Katrina Emmons, Barack had two fund-raising staffers ready to go, and the candidate understood McLean’s tough-love protocols. “Fund-raising is message delivery to political insiders, and the early game i
s all about building cred with the insiders,” McLean explained. “We wanted to be able to approach the political insiders with a persuasive message” about Barack’s potential, as Harstad’s poll had demonstrated. “Develop a universe” of “known contributors,” “assign a DOLLAR AMOUNT” based on their past giving, and “find phone numbers,” McLean’s instructions commanded. Most important of all was simply “Make the calls—DO THE WORK.” The candidate’s own “call room” desk was computer-free to avoid distraction because, McLean explained, “we want somewhere between 25 and 30 hours a week in the call room.” Speaking directly to a target, and avoiding voice mail messages, was essential. Then “get to the point . . . the longer the call the less likely you’ll get a commit. . . . Tell every prospect why you’re running and how you are going to win. . . . Give them the courtesy of asking for a specific amount . . . you can never offend anyone by asking for too much—but you can offend if you ask for too little.” Once someone agrees to give, “make it a contract—but gently. ‘Thank you for your personal commitment.’” Then hand it off to a finance assistant: “immediate confirmation is the key. E-mail within 5 minutes,” and follow up persistently should a check not arrive as promised.