The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  As Obama's boredom in Springfield deepened, he thought about his options. Was Bobby Rush, who was his congressman, vulnerable to a challenge? Could Obama convince the voters of his own rationale--that Rush was a relic of the old racial politics of Chicago, an out-of-touch legislator of little consequence in Washington? Hardly anyone Obama talked to thought that he could reasonably challenge Rush. Newton Minow, Valerie Jarrett, his close friends Marty Nesbitt and John Rogers, various local political allies on the South Side, his colleagues at the law firm and the university--almost no one, it seemed, thought it was even remotely a good idea.

  Arthur Brazier, one of the most prominent black ministers in Chicago and a friend of Obama's, told him that there was no way he could support him. "I didn't want to cross Bobby Rush," Brazier said, "and I didn't think Barack could win." Obama's three years of making friends with clergymen on the South Side was not enough. (In fact, early in the campaign, Rush held an event at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church at which a hundred ministers, including Brazier, stood in front of a banner reading, "We Are Sticking With Bobby!")

  "I thought it was a terrible idea," John Schmidt, Obama's old friend from Project Vote, said. "The State Senate was not a disgraceful place to be. But it goes to Barack's lack of modesty. The State Senate wasn't a big enough stage."

  Michelle Obama was also wary of the idea of her husband running for Congress. She was working hard at the University of Chicago on community-relations projects. When Barack was in Springfield, she was home alone with Malia. What if he won? Would they need two homes? They could barely afford the co-op they had, to say nothing of the college and law-school loans that they were still paying off. She admired her husband's passion to do good, but what law firm in town would not pay him the better part of a fortune to take on a mixture of corporate and pro-bono cases? Michelle Obama did not hide from her friends the fact that the pressures of work, family, separation, and her husband's ambition had put an enormous strain on the marriage. She did not hide her resentment. When the congressional campaign asked her to go to fundraisers, she usually refused.

  "Michelle wasn't around much during the campaign," Chris Sautter, Obama's media and direct-mail consultant, said. "She was there for the announcement and on Election Night, but I don't really remember her much other than that. There were times when Barack couldn't get back from Springfield for events and she was asked to stand in for him, but she mostly wouldn't do it. She didn't become really committed to his career until he was going to win the nomination for Senate four years later."

  Obama, who desperately wanted to graduate from Springfield, kept looking for a credible plan in order to run against Rush. The rule in American politics is that to unseat an incumbent member of the House the challenger has, in essence, to convince voters that the incumbent should be fired for cause. The incumbent needs to be vulnerable, embroiled in scandal or weakened politically. Black incumbents in black districts were especially hard to dislodge. Rush was hardly Daniel Webster--his speeches were clumsy, his legislative record was undistinguished--but his popularity in the district was close to unassailable. And yet Obama reasoned that he could form a base in places where Rush was weak, neighborhoods like Beverly and Mount Greenwood, in the Nineteenth Ward. This was an area with a lot of whites and city workers, and in the mayoral race Rush had run poorly there. Obama also had the support of four South Side aldermen: Toni Preckwinkle, Leslie Hairston, Terry Peterson, and Theodore Thomas.

  "The First Congressional District seat is a bellwether of black leadership in Chicago," Ted Kleine wrote in the Chicago Reader. "When Rush took it from 74-year-old Charles Hayes in 1992, his victory was seen as a sign that the militants who'd come of age in the late 1960s were taking over from the preachers and funeral directors who led the integration marches in the days of Dr. Martin Luther King." Could Obama, who was younger and more educated, now persuade enough voters that the days of the aging militant were over? Will Burns, who signed on to help Obama once more, said, "This was the first time he ran on a message of change, a different kind of leadership."

  When Obama called on his local Democratic organization chairman, Ivory Mitchell, for support, Mitchell said, "O.K., get your petitions drawn up and have a lawyer look at them." When Obama returned a few days later, he confessed that his wife didn't want him to run. So when another South Side state senator, Donne Trotter, decided to run against Rush and approached Mitchell, Mitchell gave him his support.

  "Then, when Michelle changed her mind and Barack decided to run, I told him that I had promised Donne I'd support him, and, besides, if Obama got in he would end up splitting the anti-Bobby vote and it would be a disaster," Mitchell recalled. "Barack said, 'No, I can beat them both.' He had his mind made up."

  When Rush heard that Obama might challenge him, he was unworried, despite his poor showing against Daley. "I first met Obama in 1992, late spring or summer," Rush recalled, in his Washington office, in the Rayburn Building, near the Capitol. "I was Clinton's national director of voter registration. It was my responsibility to monitor the voter-registration efforts and to see that the allocations of resources for friends of Clinton were going smoothly. Obama at that time was working for Project Vote in Illinois. I remember we met in an office in a town house on the near North Side. He was a very persuasive young man, and even then he had a certain charisma about him. He had a sunny disposition, too. I knew all about his community-organizing background, and so I felt he was an ally. I felt a kinship to him.

  "But when he decided to run against Alice Palmer," Rush continued, "I was well aware of the process that had gone on. Alice had a commitment from him, and he reneged on his promise. A lot of my comrades and colleagues were just outraged. I wasn't shocked, though. It takes a lot to surprise me. I felt that Barack had betrayed Alice and Alice's allies. He betrayed her faction of the progressives, and we were coming from a hotbed of liberal politics. She represented a challenge to the white liberal elites." Rush disliked the old Democratic independents like Leon Despres, Abner Mikva, and Newton Minow and saw Obama as their African-American plaything.

  "Barack was an instrument for their efforts to unseat Alice. His ambition became the force that they used to challenge Alice, to deny her the opportunity to run for her Senate seat," Rush said. "Barack was just no threat. The forces that created him were the same forces that were always coming after me. I could never reconcile why they came after me. Ideologically, we were on the same side. But Barack was backed by that same liberal elite cadre or cabal that came out of Hyde Park. These folks, they didn't like me. I wasn't upper crust. I came from the streets of Chicago. I'm not Harvard or Ivy League, although I've got two master's degrees. I'll never be accepted as a member of the elite. I'm a former Black Panther! I was a high-school dropout! And Barack was the antithesis of a street person. I saw this as racist. They wanted someone with a better pedigree.... Barack wasn't the first to come at me in that way. There were others of the same ilk. And I cleaned their clocks, too!"

  To Rush it was almost as if Obama's pedigree and his supporters' admiration were a personal rebuke. "It was evident then that there was this strain of elitism that existed--it wasn't necessarily racial, but that was an element," Rush continued. "These people were allies and friends, ideologically. Barack was so desirable to them, he was so in demand for these elitists, these white liberal elites. His ambitions and their desires coalesced. I didn't express anger at the time. I made a decision not to get involved. But people like Lu Palmer and Tim Black were really angry. See, you've got to have a history in Chicago politics, and if you want to challenge someone who has a history you better come strong, you better be bringing something of your own."

  Rush disdained not only Obama's association with the white Lakefront liberals but also his sense of racial identification. "It's amazing how he formed a black identity," Rush said, rising from his desk and starting, theatrically, to sashay across his office, mimicking Obama's sinuous walk. "Barack's walk is an adaptation of a strut that comes fr
om the street. There's a certain break at the knees as you walk and you get a certain roll going. Watch. You see?" Rush laughed at his own imitation. "And he's the first President of the United States to walk like that, I can guarantee you that! But, lemme tell you, I never noticed that he walked like that back then!"

  Rush sat down, smiling with satisfaction.

  "But this isn't new," he said. "I really admire the way he learned. I don't denigrate it. He's been adapting all his life. He had the discipline to accomplish it and the foresight to see what his vision of himself required, you know? Barack's calculating in almost every decision in terms of how he wanted to project himself. Life is not a bunch of accidents, especially for someone with a huge vision for himself. He planned it out. If you desire to be great, the projectile of your life has to be there, you have to map it out. And that's what he did in every sense. To his credit, Barack didn't deny his African-American identity. He desired it so much. He adapted, he took on a lot of the culture. His desire to be a community organizer was also a product of being too young to have been an activist in the civil-rights movement."

  Rush grinned and leaned back in his enormous chair. "If he'd been old enough, I could even see Barack being a Black Panther--especially the group that was really into the theoretical part," he said. "That would have fed his intellect. He might even have carried a gun, I wouldn't deny that!" (Rush seemed to delight in causing his old rival trouble.)

  Rush was not impressed with Obama's three years as a community organizer, dismissing it as the trivial pursuit of feckless youth, as if, in comparison to his own experiences with Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, it had been a junior year abroad. "I mean, you can't portray yourself as an activist if you are only a pale reflection of the real thing," Rush said. "You have to admit the truth--especially when you are running against the real thing."

  Obama decided to get into the race in July of 1999 and spent the summer trying to assemble a campaign team and appeal to potential donors. (The primary was the following March.) His campaign manager was Dan Shomon, a former reporter for U.P.I. and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Shomon, a street-smart, chunky, high-strung political operative, had quit journalism while working for the wires in Springfield and taken a job as a legislative aide to Emil Jones, the Democratic leader. In 1997, Jones, through his chief of staff Mike Hoffmann, had assigned Shomon to be Obama's legislative aide. At first, Shomon balked. He had spent some time shooting the breeze with Obama in the hallways of the Capitol, and he could readily tell that Obama was a hyper-ambitious freshman, someone with "wide eyes," as he put it, who wanted to pass landmark legislation covering health care, economic justice for the poor, job training, and many other issues. Shomon thought that Obama would be better off if he "stayed in the weeds," as the saying went in Springfield, "because if you stick out too much, too soon, you get whacked." Shomon didn't need the headache of dealing with an aggressive, starry-eyed freshman.

  "I don't want to deal with Obama," he told Hoffmann. "He's trying to change the world in fifty seconds and he's got a safe seat. I have five senators I need to take care of. I don't have time to deal with this guy."

  Hoffmann and Emil Jones persuaded Shomon to think otherwise, and Shomon went out to dinner with Obama. Like everyone else in the chamber, Shomon knew that Obama was a graduate of Harvard Law School, erudite and idealistic, but also that he was not very familiar with the counties of rural and suburban Illinois. Shomon knew, too, that Obama had been "spanked" by the black caucus and many of his fellow Democrats.

  "Have you ever been south of Springfield?" Shomon asked him.

  Obama admitted that he had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line.

  Shomon said, "Obama, I'm going to take you to southern Illinois and we're going to play some golf and we're going to meet some people."

  It was the early summer of 1998. Michelle was pregnant with Malia and Obama figured that this was his only chance before the baby arrived. Shomon crafted a trip around a week-long golf outing at a resort on Rend Lake, in Franklin County. In fact, they played every day, even though the temperature hovered around a hundred degrees all week. They went to barbecues and drank beer, though "Barack was never a big drinker," Shomon said. "One or two and that was it."

  Southern Illinois is closer to Arkansas and Tennessee than it is to Chicago, and the general political outlook on social issues like gun control is much more conservative. Both men saw the short journey as a meandering fact-finding mission. Shomon gave his charge a few tips: "Don't order anything crazy, like Dijon mustard." Don't wear fancy clothing. Driving downstate in Obama's green Jeep Cherokee, Shomon and Obama touched base with a political favorite in the area, State Senator Jim Rea, and went to a golf outing and fundraiser for him. They met one of the state's U.S. senators, Richard Durbin, at a barbecue in Du Quoin. They stopped to talk with small-town mayors. The state's attorney in Du Quoin told them about an all-white branch of the Gangster Disciples, which was selling drugs. They stopped in at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, and played golf with the athletic director, Jim Hart, a former quarterback for the St. Louis Cardinals. They visited one of the best-known farming families in southern Illinois, Steve and Kappy Scates, who were impressed with how outgoing and engaged Obama was. The Scates family grew beans and corn and their farm stretched across two counties at the southern end of the state. Obama, Kappy Scates joked, "learned that Illinois is a lot longer than he thought it was."

  "When he got back he realized these folks could vote for me--I mean, these folks could help me, they could support me," Shomon said. "I think it was really a revelation to him that he had a lot of appeal as a politician." Shomon thought that the diversity of Illinois--its differences of ethnicity, class, geography, and economy--would be a plus for Obama. If he had been from Wisconsin or Vermont, or even a black congressman absorbed in a traditional African-American district, he would not have encountered the same degree of differences. "What those trips proved is that he appealed to rural white people," Shomon said. "They would vote for him, they liked him. That was essential for a statewide race."

  But now Obama was asking Shomon, a white guy who got a master's in public administration at the University of Illinois in Springfield, to help him win a congressional district that was seventy per cent black.

  Shomon accepted, though an internal poll he took gave Obama only a limited chance to succeed. The campaign's biggest difficulty, it seemed at first, was to get Obama better known in the district. He was not, after all, running for the presidency of the University of Chicago. Except to the political aficionados of Hyde Park, he was a well-kept secret with a foreign-sounding name. The early poll showed Rush with ninety-percent name recognition, Obama with nine per cent. Another early poll showed that while Obama's Ivy League resume validated him with white voters, made him seem comfortably moderate, someone they could vote for, it had little effect on the African-American majority, which greatly esteemed Bobby Rush. That summer, Steve Neal, the dean of Chicago political columnists and an early fan of Obama's, wrote a piece in the Sun-Times praising him and the Tribune speculated that Obama would run for Congress.

  In mid-August, Obama took part in the annual Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, a tradition started on the South Side in 1929 by Robert S. Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender, to celebrate and organize the kids who delivered his paper. With hundreds of floats and tens of thousands of participants, the parade was a big event for politicians on the South Side, with loads of celebrities and wide television coverage. Obama gamely marched along in the vast crowd, attracting very little attention. Al Kindle, a gruff and wily African-American political operative who had been working on the South Side for various candidates for many years, was now doing field operations for Obama--a fancy way of saying that he was working the bars, the churches, even the gangs, to get the word out on the candidate. When he saw Obama at the parade, he said, "No one knew who he was. He seemed a little embarrassed." Obama spent much of the summer trying to increase h
is name recognition, attending coffees in private homes and dinners at small, neighborhood places all over the district.

  On September 26, 1999, Obama made his formal declaration in front of a few hundred people at a reception at the Palmer House, a famous old pile of a hotel in the Loop. "I'm not part of some longstanding political organization," Obama said at the kickoff rally. "I have no fancy sponsors. I'm not even from Chicago. My name is Obama. Despite that fact, nobody sent me," he said, echoing Mikva's story about the cigar-chomping committeeman. "The men on the corner in Woodlawn drowning their sorrows in alcohol ... the women working two jobs ... they're all telling me we can't wait."