Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Two groups of fifteen suburban North Shore white women were invited to meet with Paul Harstad on the night of January 8. David Axelrod had stressed to Harstad that “our goal should be, first and foremost, how to sell Barack to white progressive voters.” He wanted “a great deal of probing about the war . . . to find out if it is, indeed, the trump card we think it is.” Harstad should also “explore the name issues, and see if it engenders any reaction,” because “the mission here is to focus on how to present Barack.” The first group of women were fifty-five and older, and featured four who intended to support Gery Chico, two apiece who backed Dan Hynes and Maria Pappas, one each favoring Barack and Joyce Washington, with the balance undecided. Harstad began by asking them about the state of the country and the upcoming Senate vacancy. One remarked that Peter Fitzgerald was “probably too honest” for Illinois politics, and a second singled out Barack. “I like Obama. He is a constitutional lawyer with very high credentials.”

  When Harstad zeroed in on the Senate race, one woman cited Jan Schakowsky’s endorsement of Barack and a profusion of Obama yard signs. “Young married man with family. Harvard.” Another said, “his name is so interesting. What is he? . . . Is he black?” Someone cited Gery Chico’s Altheimer & Gray debacle. “He took a multimillion business and threw it down the toilet.” When Harstad focused on what the women knew about Barack, several cited Schakowsky’s support, his educational background, and his U of C affiliation. Then Harstad showed the group video excerpts from the NAACP debate and sought their reactions. Various women said Barack sounded “very confident,” “knowledgeable,” “honest and real,” and that he “is easy on the eyes.” “Hynes sounded stiff” and Blair Hull “sounded embalmed,” one remarked. When Harstad asked whose endorsements mattered the most to them, Jan Schakowsky, Abner Mikva, and the Sierra Club topped the list. Did Barack remind them of any celebrities? “Denzel Washington, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier,” came the replies. “We can’t deny the fact that we are impressed by people’s looks,” one woman explained.

  Then Harstad probed for Barack’s negatives. “Many Democrats . . . are worried that a candidate named Barack Obama cannot win a statewide general election,” he asserted, eliciting little reaction. There was also little response when Paul mentioned Barack’s present votes. Harstad recited Barack’s evasive initial denial to Bernie Schoenburg about drug usage beyond marijuana, and one woman remarked, “it just seems like a weird thing to protect.” Finally Paul read a long, praiseful description of Barack’s background and issue positions, including that “Obama has pledged to repeal aspects of the Patriot Act that threaten our civil liberties” and asked for reactions. “Be still my heart.” “He sounds perfect.” “The first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. That impressed me.” “I like the fact that he is a constitutional law scholar.” Lastly, Harstad asked what advice they would give Barack, and the responses were “Answer the discrepancies on the drug thing,” “Answer the discrepancies on voting present,” and “He should explain how he got his name.”

  After a half-hour break, the evening’s second group was composed of women in their twenties to early fifties. Three supported Chico, with two each for Barack and Maria Pappas, one for Dan Hynes, and the balance unsure. For the Senate race, one immediately cited “Obama. He was in the Skokie parade. . . . Paul Simon was his mentor . . . professor of constitutional law.” When Harstad followed up, other participants embraced Barack because of the first speaker’s comments. “Obama, because I just learned here that he was associated with Paul Simon.” “Obama . . . I knew about Paul Simon, and I was always incredibly impressed with him.” “I have always liked Paul Simon, and if he is his protégé, I am interested.” “Obama . . . Aside from the Paul Simon connection, I also like that he was well educated, taught constitutional law.” “Obama. He sounds electable. . . . Look at what happened around this table: he can garner a coalition!”

  Then Harstad screened the debate excerpts. “Obama was very articulate,” one commented. “Hynes made me uncomfortable. Just another politician,” a second observed. “Do you think Obama’s race makes him more or less electable?” Harstad asked. “More” came the answer. “Hynes was so stiff,” another stated. “Hynes seemed like Dan Quayle,” someone added. At the Skokie parade, Barack “was as cool as a cucumber,” one recalled, but a second complained that Barack sounded “a little bit too street” on the video. Asked what endorsements mattered most, the women chose Planned Parenthood and IFT over Mikva and Schakowsky. Harstad closed by requesting their feelings about Barack, and one woman said “we all fell in love with him here tonight as Paul Simon’s protégé.”

  Both groups of women were asked what items in Barack’s biography most stood out to them, and two points concerning expanded health coverage scored even higher than first black president of the Review. Schakowsky’s endorsement proved the most significant, and when the women’s numerical ratings of the video excerpts on a 1-to-10 scale were averaged, Barack scored 8.4, with Chico, Hynes, Pappas, and Hull trailing with numbers ranging from 6.6 to 4.2. Harstad and partner Mike Kulisheck found it “incredibly promising” that the North Shore women had been so “extremely receptive and supportive” regarding Barack’s biography. John Kupper, who along with Pete Giangreco had joined Kulisheck to watch the two groups from behind a one-way window, found the women’s reactions “really exciting,” with that “be still my heart” response the most memorable of all. The evening’s comments would go a long way toward informing how Kupper and Axelrod would prepare Barack’s broadcast ads, and how Giangreco and his partner Terry Walsh would write and design Barack’s direct-mail flyers.45

  The next morning’s papers carried news that Dan Hynes had finally been endorsed by the state AFL-CIO. Hynes told reporters, “this is by far the most significant endorsement of the campaign,” and in Washington, The Hill said that it “could lock up the race for him.” The conservative National Review wrote that “Hynes appears well on his way to winning his party’s nomination” and that Illinois Republicans’ “best hope would be for state Sen. Barack Obama to upset him in the primary.” Far more knowledgeably, Capital Fax’s Rich Miller noted that Hynes “has been struggling to break out of the pack,” and “his unrepentant support for the Iraq war will probably be a big issue” as more Democratic voters focused on the campaign. With purposeful timing, the next day AFSCME announced its support for Barack. While the AFL-CIO endorsement would aid Hynes, the three big unions backing Barack—the IFT, SEIU, and AFSCME—“are incredibly active, organized and wealthy, and can field thousands of volunteers,” Miller stressed. Hynes had better use the AFL announcement “to create some much-needed momentum,” Miller warned, because “so far, his campaign has been on cruise control. The guy has held statewide office for 5 years and still hasn’t broken out of the pack. Not good.”

  With only eight weeks until the election, the blizzard of questionnaires and endorsement interviews increased significantly. The progressive IVI-IPO questionnaire ran sixteen pages, and in it Barack called “the so-called Patriot Act” “one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation to pass Congress in decades.” Barack reiterated his opposition to the Iraq war and called for “normalization of relations with Cuba” because U.S. “policies toward Cuba have been a miserable failure.” He noted that “our government is running an unsustainable budget deficit. We must move away from this perilous path of deficits.” Barack favored “a national moratorium” on the death penalty, even though “in theory, I support capital punishment for a very narrow band of heinous crimes, such as serial killing” and terrorist attacks. “What is occurring today in Guantanamo . . . is an affront to our Constitution. We cannot allow terrorists to cause us to sacrifice the very rights that make our nation special.”

  Barack told his staff and consultants to take particular care with the Chicago Tribune’s ten-item questionnaire because the paper might publish his responses. Both a NOW representative as well as Jan Schakowsky had upbraided Ba
rack for his “squirrelly” answers regarding gay rights on their earlier questionnaire, and Barack now realized that “we actually fudged more than Hynes, and a lot more than any of the other candidates.” Although he wanted “to make our position clear and unequivocal,” the next day Barack again faced the same troublesome questions when he met with the lesbian and gay editors of the Windy City Times. Barack started out safely by saying that “one of my top priorities is moving in the direction of universal health care.” When the questions moved to gay equality, Barack declared, “I am a fierce supporter of domestic partnership and civil union laws. I am not a supporter of gay marriage . . . primarily just as a strategic issue. I think that marriage, in the minds of a lot of voters, has a religious connotation. I know that’s true in the African American community.” Editor Tracy Baim remembered Barack asking her to turn the tape recorder off so that “we could have an off-the-record conversation about same-sex marriage” and what was “realistic and pragmatic.” Back on the record, “strategically, I think we can get civil unions passed,” Barack explained, and “to the extent that we can get the rights, I’m less concerned about the name.” Barack said, “I’ve walked the walk on every single issue that’s been important to the LGBT community” and believed he had “an ability to translate my passion for equality and justice into a language that a broad audience can relate to and understand.” But afterward Barack called Baim “to clarify that he opposes” any new measures to prohibit same-sex marriages.

  On January 15, the Chicago Tribune published the results of a small-sample poll that had been conducted a week earlier. It showed Dan Hynes, Maria Pappas, and Barack all tied with 14 percent apiece, Blair Hull at 10 percent, and 38 percent of Democratic voters undecided. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller was stunned. “How can Dan Hynes possibly be polling just 14 percent in this race? And how is a relative unknown with a stunningly awful ballot name like Barack Obama staying even with him?” Although “nobody seems to be paying attention to the campaign . . . on name recognition alone, Hynes ought to be far ahead of the pack.” Hynes had run strong campaigns in 1998 and 2002, when he was elected and then reelected as comptroller, and he “is well liked and respected by the party regulars,” Miller wrote. “You’d think that all of that ought to be worth a benchmark of at least 20 to 25 points. Maybe when people finally figure out that a Senate race is on the horizon and they’re reminded who Dan Hynes is, his numbers will start to rise. But there’s something missing from his campaign. Back in 1998, Hynes put together a remarkable, vibrant organization. . . . But so far, he’s been running this campaign like a cautious old man.” Criticizing Hynes’s “ultra-traditional, low-key” effort, Miller highlighted how “so far, almost nobody knows that Hynes supported the war in Iraq,” which is “a huge no-no for most Democratic primary voters.” Noting Blair Hull’s 10 percent showing, “you can bet good money that he is taking most of those votes away from Hynes,” Miller observed. While Hynes’s Web site declared that “elections are about inspiring people and bringing them together,” Miller stated that “the only candidate who seems to be inspiring Democratic primary voters these days is Barack Obama.”46

  Neither Hynes’s pollster Jef Pollock nor his communications director Chris Mather was worried. “The AFL was huge for us,” Mather recalled, and the campaign was untroubled that Barack was backed by IFT, SEIU, and AFSCME “because we got the AFL-CIO,” Mather emphasized. “We were premising a lot of what we had on a downstate strategy” featuring television advertising, Pollock explained, and he was more worried about competing with Blair Hull’s pocketbook there, not Obama. “We thought that downstate was where we would win it,” Mather agreed, “and we spent a lot of time down there,” for “downstate was absolutely key.” In Chicagoland, where Democratic ward and township organizations were at their strongest, “we were going to run more of a field campaign,” Mather remembered, and Pollock expected they would reap the benefits of “an amazing political infrastructure.”

  Dan Hynes was similarly optimistic. “I felt like I had a lot of advantages . . . statewide name recognition, a support base, some of the traditional Democratic organizational support,” so “everybody viewed me as the front-runner.” Hull’s millions concerned him, but he thought Maria Pappas would further fractionalize the Chicagoland vote. Given Hull’s big media effort, “I had decided I was going to spend a ton of money downstate” to “keep pace with Blair Hull.” Hynes’s campaign had just gone up on downstate television, with Dan’s campaign manager, his brother Matt, telling the Associated Press that while “you might have 25 percent undecided in Chicago,” that could well be “50 percent downstate.” Dan realized that “the unions that went with Barack brought a lot to the table in terms of producing,” and he appreciated too how “that one legislative session was defining for him,” because Barack’s long list of 2003 bills enabled him to “show that he could get things done.”

  Barack made just that argument in a campaign e-mail that went out the day the 2004 spring session got under way. The Senate race “will not be won by saturating the airwaves with commercials, nor will it be delivered by party insiders,” Barack wrote. “Instead, it will be won by communicating a record of real achievement on critical issues.” An astonishing three hundred people showed up at campaign headquarters for a Saturday volunteer rally, and Monday’s Martin Luther King holiday marked the opening of one Obama for Illinois office on the West Side and another on the South Side, just off the Dan Ryan Expressway at 5401 South Wentworth. A pair of College Democrats debates had Barack in Carbondale on January 20 and the next night at Northwestern University in Evanston. “I think the war on drugs has been a failure, and I think we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws,” Barack told the Northwestern crowd, adding, “I’m not somebody who believes in legalization of marijuana.” Friday morning at 7:00 A.M. Barack and Randon Gardley spent two hours greeting potential voters at the 87th and 79th Street South Side Red Line L stations.47

  One by one, the Chicago Tribune had been running Sunday profiles of each Democratic candidate, and the early “bulldog” edition of Barack’s first appeared on Saturday morning, January 24. Tribune reporter David Mendell had had a long, pre-Christmas interview with Barack at 310 South Michigan and had watched him at a good many campaign events. In their first conversation, Mendell asked Barack about the millions of dollars Mayor Daley’s administration had devoted to the glitzy Millennium Park project just across Michigan Avenue rather than to struggling residential neighborhoods. Mendell was struck by the candor of Barack’s response. “How do you really expect me to answer that? If I told you how I really felt, I’d be committing political suicide right here in front of you.” While several of Barack’s closest confidants, particularly Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, were well-known Daley loyalists—or “stone-cold machine operatives,” as one longtime organizer put it—Barack kept his distance from the mayor “without ever opposing Daley’s wishes.”

  Barack might mouth off to young aides about challenging Daley for mayor should he lose the Senate race, but Barack “never took on any issues about the functioning of Chicago,” school reform champion Don Moore explained. Moore saw Barack as “a very brilliant pragmatist” who had “worked his way up through the system.” Campaign reform advocate Cindi Canary, who had been disappointed by Barack’s complete deference to Emil Jones when the 2003 ethics bill was being weakened, agreed that Barack was “a very pragmatic politician.” That was true in Barack’s arm’s-length relationship with Daley’s “new machine” and in his close relationship with old-school Senate president Emil Jones, whom one top Illinois progressive termed “a very transactional guy.” As Canary said of Barack’s relationship to the Daley organization, “he was never really of it, or against it. He worked it, and it worked him. It was very mutually beneficial.”

  The same was true of the alliance between Barack and Emil Jones. By January 2004, Jones’s investment in Barack’s Senate candidacy was obvious to all who knew him. Everyone in
Illinois Democratic politics realized that Jones was “a very, very smart man,” and he was also seen as “warm and likable,” a stark contrast to his Springfield bête noire, the “icily calculating” Michael Madigan. Jones’s seething anger at the disrespect the House Speaker had shown him for years energized Jones in the legislature and in his fervent support for Barack over Madigan-backed Dan Hynes. “I think he wanted to send the message that there are multiple sources of power here in Illinois besides the traditional white Irish enclave of votes that had run Cook County politics for so long,” Jones’s number-two staffer Dave Gross explained. Unlike Madigan, Jones had some profound policy commitments, especially regarding increased education funding, and only Jones’s steadfast backing had allowed Barack to make the headway he had with his racial profiling and videotaping bills a year earlier. Some of Jones’s commitments, like his devotion to Chicago State University and his support for black business interests seeking increased public patronage, were indeed to differing degrees “transactional” relationships, but Jones’s newfound devotion to Barack’s advancement seemed heartfelt to everyone upon whom he leaned.

  Within the Senate Democratic caucus, Jones’s message was crystal clear: “You need to get behind your colleague,” and “I want everybody to support Barack.” While Terry Link, Denny Jacobs, Larry Walsh, and Bill Haine, as well as African Americans James Clayborne, Kim Lightford, and Jacqueline Collins had endorsed Barack, some liberal senators like Jeff Schoenberg and Susan Garrett had backed Dan Hynes. For organization loyalists like Martin Sandoval and Tony Munoz, the question of endorsing Barack never crossed their minds, but three white Southwest Side and south suburban senators who had warm relations with him—Lou Viverito, Ed Maloney, and Debbie Halvorson—felt they had to back Hynes. Maloney’s ties to Hynes’s father Tom were well known, and Viverito, who had supported Barack’s congressional run, was Mike Madigan’s state senator. “I understood my obligations,” Viverito explained, and “I tried to explain” to Barack “that it was not a personal decision,” but Barack took offense. “He was kind of bitter at the people that didn’t support him,” Barack’s friend Mike Lieteau remembered, and with the good-natured Viverito, “Barack treated him like shit,” Mike recalled. “Lou was very hurt.” For Debbie Halvorson, who had taken on lots of new, mostly white territory in the 2002 remap, it was even worse. “I had no choice” because several local officials “threatened me” if she did not back Hynes, Halvorson explained. Dan Shomon had managed Debbie’s 1996 upset victory, but once her name appeared on Hynes’s Web site, Dan “comes over to me and says, ‘You are now the enemy,’” Debbie recalled. “Dan was the worst. Barack took it better than Dan did.”