Even with Moseley Braun out of the Illinois Senate race, Obama faced a dizzying array of opponents in the Democratic primary. In more or less ascending order of importance:
Vic Roberts, a retired coal miner from southern Illinois.
Joyce Washington, an African-American health-care consultant from Chicago, who had once run for lieutenant governor.
Nancy Skinner, a liberal radio-talk-show host on WLS-AM, who had a degree in business from the University of Michigan but no experience at all in politics.
Gery Chico, a Hispanic former school-board president and top aide to Richard M. Daley.
Maria Pappas, the Cook County treasurer, whom the Tribune described as "known for such public eccentricities as twirling a baton and carrying a poodle in her purse."
Dan Hynes, the thirty-five-year-old Illinois comptroller, was a serious candidate and had the greatest name recognition in the field. Hynes had traditional union support and the endorsement of establishment politicians loyal to his father, Tom Hynes, the former Cook County assessor and president of the State Senate, who was also the Democratic Party boss on the Southwest Side. With his father's connections, Dan Hynes had lined up the support of Democratic stalwarts including the Democratic Party chairman, Michael Madigan; the Cook County Commissioner (and the Mayor's brother), John Daley; and John Stroger, the Cook County Board president. (Richard Daley did not make endorsements.) Hynes was earnest and decent, but he was also self-defeatingly cautious, a reluctant self-promoter, a poor campaigner, and irredeemably dull. In the Obama campaign's earliest poll, Hynes led the field by a wide margin, but that seemed mainly an indicator of name recognition.
Finally, there was Blair Hull. Of all Obama's opponents, he was the one whom Obama's team took most seriously. Hull was proof that, just when you believed that the politics of Illinois could get no stranger, there was always tomorrow. Hull grew up in Los Gatos, California. His father was a judge. After studying mathematics, computer science, and business, he taught high-school science and math for a year and then worked as a securities analyst. In the early nineteen-seventies, Hull took an interest in the blackjack theories of Ed Thorp, the author of Beat the Dealer, a cult classic for card-counters. Visiting Las Vegas several days a month, Hull refined his technique. Using a method called the "Revere Advanced Point Count," an even more sophisticated system than Thorp's, Hull and some teammates started to make thousands of dollars each. The run came to an end in 1977, when one of Hull's teammates, Ken Uston, published a memoir called The Big Player.
Hull used his winnings to start a computerized options firm. This proved more lucrative than blackjack. In 1999, he sold the firm to Goldman Sachs, for three hundred and forty million dollars. Living in Illinois, where there was no legal limit on the amount of money a candidate could spend on his own campaign, Hull figured that he could go far in politics--even though he never expressed any compelling reason for wanting to be elected. "He was rich and bored," one of his consultants said. "He thought being a senator might be cool. That was the whole thing."
Hull had thought first about running for the House of Representatives against Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Kaszak, in the Fifth District. According to Hull, Emanuel had made a fund-raising call to him and was so abrasive--"He was just being Rahm, which is why he is loved by so many people!"--that he decided to run himself. Hull paid to have some polling done, however, and he realized that he couldn't win. "So I went to see Richie Daley in City Hall and Daley wanted to be with Rahm," Hull said. "He says, 'You don't want to be in the House. It takes forever to get seniority and get anything done. You should be in the Senate. You don't have to work as hard.'... I would never have thought about the Senate. It was way above my league."
But the Democratic side of the race was so wide open and Hull's pockets were so deep that he decided to run. Like Michael Bloomberg in New York, or Jon Corzine in New Jersey, he would run as an "anti-politician," someone who lacked a political past but was so wealthy and accomplished in business that the voters might see him as incorruptible and somehow "above" ordinary politics. This was the traditional conceit of such candidates; to be "above" things. The problem was that Hull often came off as yet another in a long line of eccentric technocrat-businessmen who thought that all problems of policy and politics could be solved using the same equations with which they had made financial fortunes. When Joshua Green, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly, asked Hull if he could devise an algorithm for political success, Hull said, "Sure! You'd create a persuasion model based on canvassing that says 'The probability for voting for Hull is ... plus some variable on ethnicity ... with a positive coefficient on age, a negative coefficient on wealth, and that gives us an equation ... '" Hull then wrote down an equation in Green's notebook that he thought was a kind of mathematical map to victory:
Probability = 1/(1 + exp ([?]1 x ([?]3.9659056 + (General Election Weight x 1.92380219) + (Re-Expressed Population Density x .00007547) + (Re-Expressed Age x .01947370) + (Total Primaries Voted x [?].60288595) + (% Neighborhood Ethnicity x [?].00717530))))
Then he said to Green, "That's the kind of innovation I will bring to problems in the United States Senate." Years later, when asked if he had been joking by providing a regression analysis for winning a seat in the Senate, Hull was quiet for a while, then said, "Well, no. That wasn't lighthearted."
If Hull had been a man of ordinary means, his bizarre reliance on probability theory and his utter lack of knowledge about policy would have been disqualifying. But in Illinois, there was fresh experience of a candidate purchasing his seat as if it were on a sale rack at Marshall Field's. In 1998, Peter Fitzgerald had spent fourteen million dollars of his family's banking fortune to defeat Carol Moseley Braun. Hull declared that he was ready to spend triple that amount.
Hull hired veritable armies of consultants: issues experts; direct-mail, media, and Internet gurus; a communications director in Chicago; a communications director downstate; two separate teams of pollsters--all for top-dollar fees. Few of them came to work for Hull because they believed in him. There was nothing to believe in. In the summer of 2002, Hull's advisers taped a mock interview with Hull and played portions of it for a focus group of potential voters. Hull struck everyone in the room as almost comically banal and unpolished. "One woman thought she was being punked for an episode of 'Candid Camera,'" Mark Blumenthal, one of Hull's pollsters, said.
Hull needed help. He had approached David Axelrod before deciding whether to run against Emanuel for a House seat or against Obama, Hynes, and the others for Senate. Axelrod, who had not yet signed on with Obama, was not immune to the charms of a rich, self-financing client; in 1992, he had helped run the woeful campaign of Al Hofeld, a wealthy attorney, who had spent a great deal of money trying to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent, Alan Dixon. Axelrod met with Hull several times. Like many others, Axelrod had heard rumors about Hull: that he had been treated for substance abuse, that he had been through an ugly divorce, in 1998, from a successful real-estate broker named Brenda Sexton (whom he had married twice). There were even rumors that Hull had hit Sexton. In long, frank discussions, Hull confirmed the rumors about his troubled divorce and admitted that he had also had a problem with alcohol and cocaine.
In the end, however, Hull decided to run for the Senate and Axelrod went to work for his friend Obama. Axelrod was already convinced that he had signed on with a "once in a lifetime" politician, though Obama had a less than even chance of getting the Democratic nomination.
"Into the teeth of those two winds, Hynes and Hull, stepped Barack Obama, whose only real electoral history was getting the shit kicked out of him by Bobby Rush," Pete Giangreco said. "People who knew him loved him. The question was: Could we get his story out? Would we have the money? Could we get people to know him the way we knew him?"
Since many voters were unfamiliar with the candidates, the early focus in the 2004 primary race was on endorsements, particularly among labor unions and the traditional poli
tical organizations. More than a hundred elected officials in Chicago and downstate came out for Dan Hynes, and, thanks to his family name, so did the most traditionally minded unions, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. But Obama surprised the Hynes campaign by picking up the support of three activist unions, the Service Employees International Union (S.E.I.U.), the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (A.F.S.C.M.E.). Obama's reputation as a left-of-center politician skilled in the arts of compromise--especially his work on health care, child-care benefits, and judicial and ethics reform--appealed to the labor leaders, and he had courted them for years in Springfield and Chicago.
Obama had also, of course, established himself as an early opponent to the Iraq war. By the beginning of 2004, the war had lasted far longer than the Bush Administration had predicted and there was no sign at all of the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons that had been the main premise for invasion. The contrast between Hynes's support for the war and Obama's early opposition to a "dumb war" at the rally in October, 2002, on Federal Plaza, served Obama well as he picked up strength in liberal suburbs like Evanston.
Obama also impressed reporters and his small audiences with his performance on the stump. He began his speeches with some form of the now familiar riff on his "funny" name: "People call me 'Alabama.' They call me 'Yo Mama.' And that's my supporters! I won't say what my opponents call me." And then he would weave his own story into the larger story of community and the American future. His were not especially original liberal sentiments and positions, but when they came from the mouth of a young biracial man named Barack Obama audiences absorbed them at a different emotional level.
"The thing about Barack was that there were some aspects of campaigning that he enjoyed, like test-driving new devices in speeches," Giangreco said. "But he would complain sometimes about the campaigning. He wasn't like Bill Clinton, who loved the retail stuff and the strategizing. He just didn't have that relish for the game. He wasn't the happy warrior. But he was still damned good at it."
One of Obama's commercials ended with a peroration of hope and possibility: "Now they say we can't change Washington? I'm Barack Obama and I am running for the United States Senate and I approve this message to say, 'Yes, we can." Yes, we can. It was a phrase that resonated with Obama's career in community organizing. In 1972, the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, had used the slogan "Si, se puede": "Yes, we can," or "Yes, it can be done." A few years later, the second baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, Dave Cash, started the rallying cry "Yes, we can" after the team swept the Montreal Expos in a double-header. At first, Obama was dismissive of the phrase, thinking it exceedingly banal, a mode of cynical packaging. "He thought it was a little schlocky at first," Giangreco recalled. But both Axelrod and Michelle Obama convinced him that it would help rouse the spirits of African-Americans and other voters who had grown so accustomed to hard times and their own sense of resignation. Obama's first direct-mail piece was also meant to summon a certain emotional sense of resurgence in African-Americans and progressives. "Finally, a Chance to Believe Again" was the rubric; it was a phrase that later became "Change We Can Believe In."
Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign had enlightened the world of political operatives about the benefits of the Internet, but Obama's Senate campaign didn't have the money for a major effort on the Web--and certainly not for the kind of daily tracking polls that would allow them to calibrate their progress. Obama was frustrated by the campaign's initial approach to the Internet. "We are technologically illiterate," Obama told some volunteers at a parade in Evergreen Park, in July, 2003. Later in the campaign volunteers organized Dean-style "meetups" and an Obama for Senate Yahoo Group, but the efforts were modest.
Hull's pollster, Mark Blumenthal, and his media consultant, Anita Dunn, thought that, even though Obama began the race far behind, his appeal to African-Americans and Lakefront liberals, a significant sector of the Illinois Democratic electorate, would eventually make him the man to beat. "I remember being on the conference call when the opposition researcher talked about Obama," Blumenthal said. "There was nothing. Nice family, no trouble with the law, Columbia, Harvard. There was the mention of drugs in his book, but there was no way Blair Hull, with problems in the past with cocaine and alcohol, could do anything about that. Then the oppo guy finally said, 'Well, Obama is really liberal. His record in Springfield was really liberal.' And we said, 'So? We're not Republicans. That doesn't help.'"
Not long afterward, the Hull campaign organized a focus group to analyze Obama's potential appeal. It showed people a clip of his announcement speech, then footage of a black clergyman and Jesse Jackson, Jr., praising Obama at the event. Obama's kickoff event had been aimed, at least in part, at the African-American base. After the loss to Bobby Rush--who had, vindictively, come out for Hull--Obama could not just assume black support. At the focus group, Hull's team noticed that the whites in the room reacted poorly to the film. They didn't mention race, but they said they wanted "something new" or "That's Chicago politics." Hull's advisers suspected that they were reacting to Jackson, whose family was unpopular with many moderate and conservative whites. When they showed those same white voters footage of Obama alone and emphasized his biography--especially the lines about being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and teaching at the University of Chicago--his numbers increased dramatically, particularly among liberal, well-educated voters.
Over the fall and winter of 2003, Hull had spent heavily on media all over the state to get from zero to the mid-teens in the polls--a strategy his campaign called the "steady burn"--but then he stalled. The Hull team also carried around the secret about their candidate's divorce. In the summer of 2003, he had told his lawyers, pollsters, and consultants even more details than he had revealed to David Axelrod. The question was, should they tell the story early and let any controversy die down long before the primary or should they try to keep it all quiet? If they released the facts, would the news immediately and conclusively damage Hull's candidacy? At a marathon meeting with Hull, his advisers and lawyers said that the divorce records could not be unsealed without legal permission--and such permission was unlikely. Hull also assured his team that Brenda Sexton would be on his side should there be a leak. He made no mention of a damning deposition that she had given at the time of the divorce. Hull asked his aides about running a poll in Ohio, in which they would test public opinion in the event that the news got out, but they quickly assured him that he could save his money. A poll would surely tell him that news of spousal abuse would be fatal.
Hull decided to stay in the race and keep the records sealed as long as he could. There had been disagreement among the consultants, but they all stayed with him--and kept receiving their monthly checks. "We should have been screaming at him louder than we were," Blumenthal said. "The amount of money people were making was a factor."
The primary date was March 16th. All winter, Hull spent heavily on television, radio, and print advertising. The ads portrayed him as a loyal union member, a veteran (the only one in the race), a smart businessman, a protector of women and the elderly, an anti-politician fit to lead. It was the best campaign that money could buy. Hull traveled the state in a luxurious private jet and in a chartered red-white-and-blue R.V. nicknamed Hull on Wheels. He handed out "Give 'em Hull" baseball caps by the thousands. He employed more than a hundred people, and a squad of workers, who pounded in yard signs for seventy-five dollars a day. Even some people who came to cheer for him at campaign stops got money from the Hull organization.
The Tribune's lead writer covering the campaign, David Mendell, was so deeply struck by the expensive emptiness of the Hull campaign that he described it in the paper as "'The Truman Show' meets 'The Candidate.'"
Mendell enjoyed covering Obama. In the world of Chicago politics, Obama seemed unsullied, intelligent, committed; even his sometimes thin-skinned self-regard, which Mendell f
ound to be outsized at times, was interesting. "The only thing he had a hard time laughing at was himself," Mendell recalled. "During the campaign, some of his opponents were criticizing him for casting all of those 'present' votes in Springfield. Once we were in an elevator and Obama pressed the button and it didn't light up. He did it again and it still didn't light up. Finally, I said, 'It's like all those present votes you cast! It won't commit.' Obama just stared at me. He wouldn't crack a smile."
But the truth was that Obama, at first, was not the center of the story. Hull was. Hynes, Pappas, and Chico, in particular, were all but ignored by the press in favor of Hull. For months, Hull appeared confident in his capacity to purchase victory and he seemed on his way. His efforts downstate undermined Dan Hynes. Unlike many of his consultants, Hull did not consider Obama to be a strong competitor. "Barack, at the end of the campaign, was a strong candidate, but at the beginning he wasn't," Hull recalled. Money, the Hull campaign believed, would keep the candidate safely ahead of Hynes and Obama.
Obama tried to overcome Hull's financial advantage with wry dismissals. "I don't begrudge extraordinarily wealthy people spending their money," he said. "But what I do know is that although you can buy television time, you can't buy a track record and you can't buy the experience that's necessary to hit the ground running when you get to the United States Senate." Laura Washington, a columnist at the Sun-Times and an ardent Obama supporter, wrote on February 15th, "There's some good and bad news there for Obama. My aunt Muriel, a Jewish grandmother in Highland Park, has been in Obama's corner for months. But these days she's feeling the heat from friends who have been wooed by Hull's commercials. She says Obama needs to get on TV--right now. 'You sense his honesty, you sense his commitment, you sense his brilliance. If he were on television, you'd fall in love with him,' she said." Laura Washington's aunt Muriel proved herself one of the keenest analysts of the race.
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 49