by David Garrow
In Springfield, the first weeks of the new legislative session were dominated by reports of Emil Jones Jr.’s “growing frustration” with Rod Blagojevich. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller wrote that “many insiders” believed that “Jones is flush with his new power and is far too anxious to wield it,” but Blagojevich’s almost complete absence from the statehouse also left most politicos perplexed. Committee action got under way on SB 15, Barack’s bill requiring videotaping of all police interrogations in murder cases, with him acknowledging that “obviously this is a controversial bill” for law enforcement, and he promised “to make sure all the parties concerned have as much input as possible.” Barack convened an initial meeting with Illinois Sheriffs’ Association executive director Greg Sullivan and other police representatives to lay out his plans. Sullivan said Barack “was very diplomatic about it,” but Barack told the fifteen or so attendees, “This is going to happen. Now you can either be part of the solution, or you can be part of the problem, and if you’re part of the problem, you’re not going to have a seat at the table, so let’s sit down, figure this out, figure out what we’ve got to do, and get this done.”
Barack also pushed forward with his “driving while black” racial profiling bill. New Judiciary Committee chairman John Cullerton’s top priority was to win approval of his long-sought “primary stop” seat belt bill, but early in the session “Emil says, ‘You can’t pass that unless you take care of driving while black’ . . . so I told Barack, ‘I’ll help you pass yours, and you help me pass mine.’” Barack agreed, joining Cullerton and John’s longtime friend Chuck Hurley, a top official of the National Safety Council (NSC), to plot strategy over dinner along with veteran lobbyist Paul Williams, whose clients included NSC. In prior years Pate Philip had refused to bring a seat belt bill to the floor, telling Hurley, “You know, Chuck, this is a fag bill,” but Hurley had won House passage after addressing black legislators’ unwillingness to expand police officers’ authority to pull over drivers. Hurley enlisted African American former California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who had sponsored such legislation, to address Illinois’s Black Caucus by speakerphone. Barack and Donne Trotter posed questions to Brown, with Trotter asking, “Knowing what you know, what would you have done differently?” Brown’s response highlighted the deaths that resulted from beltless auto wrecks: “I would have done it sooner. I would have saved more kids.”
Barack wondered out loud about linking his racial profiling bill to Cullerton’s seat belt measure and whether that might hurt his candidacy outside Chicagoland. “‘What about them bubbas downstate, you know? They ain’t gonna like this,’” he told Williams. “‘Barack, how many goddamn bubbas downstate . . . are voting for someone named Barack Obama in the first place? The second thing is, how many suburban mothers will vote for you for that seat belt?’” Williams replied. Barack embraced Williams’s analysis, and at dinner the two of them plus Cullerton discussed how Chicago’s fifty different Democratic ward organizations would line up among Dan Hynes, Gery Chico, Blair Hull, and Barack. Finally they turned to their legislative package. “Okay, Chuck, tell me about the belt bill,” Barack said, and Hurley agreed to use his law enforcement contacts to help move Barack’s racial profiling measure forward in tandem with the one authorizing officers to stop any driver not buckled up.
Every Monday Dan Shomon, Cynthia Miller, Claire Serdiuk, and the campaign’s five external consultants—David Axelrod, John Kupper, Pete Giangreco, Terry Walsh, and Joe McLean—convened a conference call to agree upon upcoming events and releases. On February 10, they planned a press conference for the next day, at which Barack, as chair of the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, would announce a series of statewide hearings to address Medicaid shortcomings. Thanks to Hull and the millionaires’ amendment, Shomon said the campaign was “confident to hit $1 million by June 30.” The next day’s press event led to a prominent story in the Chicago Defender headlined “Obama: ‘Medicaid Cuts Will Kill Hospitals,’” with Barack warning that “the federal government . . . is poised to run up record deficits, effectively borrowing from our children and grandchildren to pay for our own obligations that we don’t have the courage to face.” A subsequent e-mail from Shomon to pollster Paul Harstad and consultants Kupper and Walsh reiterated that Barack believed health care “is the centerpiece of the campaign.”3
On February 13, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Joyce Washington’s formal entry into the race, although the story also noted that Obama “has locked up the major black political leadership.” That day’s Chicago Tribune reported that Dan Hynes’s campaign would be cochaired by Mayor Daley’s brother John and influential downstate senator Vince Demuzio, but Barack’s public presence remained robust with another press conference, this one devoted to his bill to renew and expand Illinois’s earned-income tax credit. The Chicago Defender’s Chinta Strausberg obliged with another prominent news story, but as the thirteen-month primary campaign officially got started with Hynes, Hull, Chico, and Obama all appearing at a Sunday-night candidates’ forum in suburban DuPage County, Barack told one reporter that “it’s going to start seeming like ‘American Idol.’” Onstage, he targeted his remarks at Republicans, not his Democratic competitors. “We’ve been making some bad choices at the federal level, and we’ve also been making some bad choices internationally.” Realizing that many questions for prospective U.S. senators would involve federal, not state, policy topics, Obama Issues Committee chairman Raja Krishnamoorthi told his colleagues “we need to get him up to speed on these issues and help formulate his policy positions” by assembling “a briefing book for Barack.” The willingness of close to a dozen smart young lawyers like Krishnamoorthi and Andrew Gruber to invest scores of uncompensated hours on his behalf gave his campaign a highly skilled resource that Hynes, Chico, and Hull could not equal, and Barack asked his team to “look for specific initiatives/innovative ideas” he could propose. “People are going to want to know what separates me from the pack, not simply that I toe the progressive line on every issue.”
Friends who had known Barack over the previous decade saw some significant changes as he ascended a more public stage. “It was clear to me early on that this was an all-things-otherwise-equal, I’ll-do-the-right-thing kind of progressive, not a guy who had either strongly held beliefs or a vision of what he wanted to do with his political career, but rather someone who wanted a political career” and who now had “the politician’s annoying ability of telling everybody what they wanted to hear,” one progressive attorney who shared dozens of dinners with Barack later reflected. By early 2003 Barack “was already pretty clearly a rising star,” but one evening when the conversation turned to newly inaugurated Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Barack’s ability to turn on a dime was demonstrated all too starkly. Barack said it was “really troubling what’s happening down there with all of these anti-American politicians being elected.” A woman who knew much more about Latin America than he did objected. “Barack, given what the United States has done to those countries, they’re probably all much better off with the kind of leaders that they have ended up with than the kind of leaders they used to have or that our government would want them to have!” Then, “without missing a beat,” Barack “switched directions seamlessly” and “was agreeing with her.” “Un-fucking-believable,” the woman whispered to her equally astonished husband.4
As the spring legislative session moved into high gear in the third week of February, Barack introduced twenty-two bills on February 19, followed by an additional fifty-five the following day. Several dozen of them were entirely technical measures that fell under his purview as Health Committee chairman, but the breadth of Barack’s legislative agenda was impressive and almost overwhelming. Some, like SB 1417, mandating insurance coverage of examinations for colorectal cancer, were brought to Barack by interest groups like the American Cancer Society, but they carried a personal appeal too, in that case reminiscent of his mother’s ear
ly death from tardily diagnosed cancer. SB 1418, the Ephedra Prohibition Act, was championed by the parents of a young man who had died tragically after ingesting an unregulated dietary supplement. SB 1430, the Health Care Justice Act, would establish a Bipartisan Health Care Reform Commission, and SB 1586 would amend the Open Meetings Act to require all local government bodies to preserve verbatim recordings of any meetings closed to the public. SB 1763, the Victims’ Economic Security and Safety Act (VESSA) would require employers to provide leave to employees who had suffered domestic violence, and SB 1765, drafted by Obama Issues Committee volunteer Andrew Gruber, would create a Tax Expenditures Commission to plug corporate tax loopholes.
Behind the scenes, influential Cook County state’s attorney Dick Devine signaled his support for Barack’s bill mandating videotaping of police interrogations, and Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn praised the measure as “smart, cost effective and just public policy.” Barack quickly introduced a memorial resolution after twenty-one people died in a nightclub stampede in his district when a security guard used pepper spray in tight quarters. The E2 club had hosted fund-raisers for Carol Moseley Braun and Emil Jones Jr. as well as Barack, which even the New York Times highlighted. Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich noted that E2 was completely unknown to white Chicagoans, even though it was well known in the black community, and Barack called a press conference to announce a “commonsense” Nightclub Safety Act outlawing the use of mace, pepper spray, and pyrotechnics like those that had just left one hundred patrons dead in a Rhode Island club fire. “There’s something about a criminal law that gets people’s attention in a way that a city’s building ordinance does not,” he told reporters.5
With the Senate race now under way for real, Illinois as well as national news outlets began giving it greater attention. U.S. representative Jesse Jackson Jr. told Capitol Hill’s Roll Call that “I just don’t see how Barack Obama loses in a Democratic primary” where African Americans constitute 25 percent of voters. David Axelrod emphasized how Barack is “the progressive candidate in the race,” and in the campaign’s weekly conference call, Axelrod’s partner John Kupper stressed how Barack should emphasize his antiwar stance in challenging his competitors. Bobby Rush told Roll Call that “there’s just as much potential for the voting black community to support any of the candidates, as it is for them to support one or two of the African-Americans,” indicating that his endorsement was up for grabs.
In Illinois, the Bloomington Pantagraph commissioned the first poll on the race, with a small sample of 462 voters showing only 27 percent thinking U.S. senator Peter Fitzgerald merited reelection. In a head-to-head matchup against Comptroller Dan Hynes, the Democrat came out on top 34–31, with 35 percent undecided. Privately, Blair Hull’s campaign had just conducted their first and much more extensive poll. Among African American Democrats, Barack drew 24 percent, with Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas, whose entry into the race was uncertain, a close second with 18 percent. Both Dan Hynes and Joyce Washington had 12 percent. Among college-educated white Cook County voters, Pappas led Hynes 26 to 24 percent, with Barack at 13 percent. Among all other white voters, downstate as well as in Cook, Hynes topped Pappas 29 to 21, with Barack backed by just 2 percent. Overall, the Hull poll showed Hynes with 29 percent, Pappas 21, Barack 9, and Hull himself barely registering. None of those numbers would have surprised Paul Harstad, Axelrod, or Kupper: Pappas was well known in Chicagoland, only Hynes was known by most downstate Democrats, and Barack’s potential among both blacks and white progressives was sizable.6
Although Barack’s name was not mentioned, on February 24 Crain’s Chicago Business reporter Greg Hinz published the first story highlighting how Barack’s longtime friend Tony Rezko had parlayed his success in raising more than $500,000 for Rod Blagojevich’s successful campaign into a highly influential, behind-the-scenes role in the new chief executive’s already troubled administration. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller had repeatedly noted that Democratic legislators were angry “with the complete absence of communication with the governor’s office,” but Hinz highlighted how Rezko was taking a lead role in choosing members of Blagojevich’s cabinet and already had placed two of his former employees as the directors of the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and the Illinois Housing Development Authority. Several days later, Blagojevich’s top aide, Deputy Governor Doug Schofield, whom Capitol Fax called “one of the few good guys over there,” quit after less than two months, with an unknown twenty-nine-year-old from New York named as his successor. Unmentioned in Hinz’s story was how the leading candidate to become director of the state Department of Public Health, thirty-seven-year-old Dr. Eric Whitaker, had been recommended to Rezko for that job by Whitaker’s basketball buddy Barack.
Several weeks later, when Whitaker’s appointment was announced, the Associated Press stated that the young internist at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital had been “plucked from obscurity.” Whitaker recounted that when Blagojevich’s staff had called him, “I said, ‘Interview for what?’” but Barack told the AP that Eric was “an excellent selection.” By then, Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller was calling attention to Blagojevich’s “tight-knit inner circle of influence-peddling lobbyists and political players” and ruing that the new governor “has alienated so many people in Springfield so quickly,” in part thanks to “the growing perception that he doesn’t understand his job.”
Barack was almost constantly on the road, speaking to local Democrats in downstate counties like McLean and Champaign while juggling his Monday morning–Friday afternoon teaching schedule. Fortunately for him, the law school’s winter term classes ended on March 7, and student evaluations showed that the rigors of his campaign had not harmed his classroom performance, with twenty-eight out of twenty-nine students saying they would recommend his Voting Rights class to others. Several remembered how one class session devolved into a long discussion of “the then-imminent invasion of Iraq,” with Barack going “out of his way to insure that all different viewpoints were welcome to be heard.” Barack knew that one student, 3L Josh Pemstein, had a young daughter who faced serious medical challenges, and in a “very sensitive and empathetic way” Barack regularly asked “how things were going,” once mentioning that one of his daughters had been hospitalized. Down in Champaign, Barack focused his remarks on Iraq, just as his strategists had advised, and the headline on the resulting Associated Press story was just what John Kupper wanted: “Obama Challenges Opponents to Speak Out on War.”
Kupper and the Obama Issues Committee’s volunteers continued to flesh out the campaign’s strategies and positions. As the Champaign event exemplified, Kupper wanted at least “one message hit a week” while appreciating that Barack needed a “minimum of fifteen hours a week fund-raising phone time,” a figure that soon needed to ramp up to twenty-five. As Paul Harstad had recommended, they needed a regular mechanism by which to communicate to several thousand “top Democratic opinion leaders,” and in April they would launch an “Obama Weekly News” e-mail program. Looking twelve months ahead, Kupper envisioned six weeks of black radio station and four weeks of Chicago television advertising leading up to March 16, 2004. The young issues committee lawyers were churning out impressive seven-to-eight-page papers on topics such as “Homeland Security” and “Bush’s Tax Plan” for Barack to study. The latter lambasted how the president’s “huge tax cuts, primarily to wealthy individuals . . . will balloon the federal deficit and debt without significantly stimulating the economy.”7
In Springfield, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved Barack’s videotaping-of-murder-interrogations measure and his racial profiling bill. A Chicago Tribune editorial commended Barack for his “serious efforts” to accommodate law enforcement’s concerns about the taping protocol, and Barack stressed to reporters that “this is not a bill that is focused on the death penalty. Rather, it is focused on how do we get the right people arrested and convicted.” Virtually every newspaper in the state
ran stories on one or both bills’ progress, with a Chicago Defender headline stating “Obama’s Anti-Racial Bill Passes Panel.” Barack told reporter Chinta Strausberg, “I feel optimistic we’ll be able to pass both provisions out of the Senate,” and said the profiling measure will “cut down on the potential for discriminatory behavior on the part of law enforcement officers.”
A more explicit boost to Barack’s Senate candidacy came from his longtime fan Steve Neal at the Chicago Sun-Times. In a column headlined “Obama Worthy Heir to Washington Legacy,” Neal wrote that Barack was “coming on strong.” If he could unite African American voters behind his candidacy, Barack could win the multicandidate primary “with less than a third of the vote. That’s why so many Democratic politicians are giving him a solid chance to upset Hynes.” As “the most intelligent and articulate contender in a surprisingly strong Democratic field,” Barack was “likely to gain the most from televised debates” once the contest reached its final months. Barack “is a coalition builder” with “a record of accomplishment,” and “may impress undecided voters as a cut above his competition,” Neal predicted. Barack “has the potential to get more than 30 percent of the primary vote,” and that might be the tallest hurdle facing him, for among Republicans “there is growing doubt that Fitzgerald can win against any Democrat.” Potential donors on Barack’s call list could not help be impressed by press clips like that, and in a highly revealing comment to the black newsweekly N’Digo, Barack explained his candidacy by declaring, “I see this as a mission, not just as a way of elevating myself individually.”
Behind the scenes, Obama for Illinois (OFI) faced two difficult and painful personnel issues. For six years now, no two people had been more dedicated to Barack’s political advancement than Cynthia Miller and Dan Shomon. Cynthia had manned his district office before playing a top role in both Barack’s 1999–2000 congressional race and now in the first six months of his Senate run. Like her close friend Jen Mason, who had staffed Barack’s district office for the last four and half years, Cynthia’s religious affiliation was well known to all who worked with her, particularly each fall when she fasted during Ramadan, the Muslim month of prayer and reflection. One colleague remembered that “You walk into his district office, and there are women in there with head wraps on. Nice-looking young ladies with head wraps on. You don’t have to question how black he is—just look at his office.”