Dan Hynes, mystified that his campaign was stuck despite his many endorsements, watched the Hull ascension with despair. Hynes's campaign spokesman, at lunch with David Mendell, handed over a folder of opposition research. The folder contained papers indicating that the records of Hull's divorce from Brenda Sexton were sealed, but that she had filed a restraining order against him. "The Hynes people were doing the dirty work," Mendell said.
Soon after the meeting with the Hynes aide, Mendell interviewed Hull for a profile for the Tribune and he asked him about the divorce, the restraining orders, and much else. Hull refused to talk about any personal matters. "He was squirming in his chair but he just wouldn't address it," Mendell said. Mendell referred to the restraining order deep in his story. David Axelrod mentioned it to the Tribune's liberal columnist, Eric Zorn, who had already seen it, and who then wrote about it. At the same time, Mike Flannery, an aggressive reporter for WBBM, the CBS affiliate, started pressing Hull on the same documents.
For months Axelrod had been absorbed in figuring out how to present Obama in a media campaign that he was conceiving for late in the race. He and Cauley were mapping out the electoral math and the timing of the campaign. Their strategy was based on a set of simple premises: around two-thirds of the Illinois electorate lived within range of the Chicago media market. Obama's success would rest on capturing nearly the entire African-American vote and attracting progressive whites in the city, Cook County, and perhaps in the "collar counties" surrounding Chicago: DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will, and McHenry Counties. In Illinois, the black vote was ordinarily twenty-two or twenty-three per cent of the primary vote; by making sure that more African-Americans registered and got to the polls, Obama stood to gain tens of thousands of votes. The campaign also thought that Obama should focus as well on white liberal women, who vote in high numbers. Obama's team figured that in a seven-person primary race he shouldn't need much more than thirty-five per cent overall to win.
"We had done a focus group in Evanston with thirty-five-year-old-and-up white women," Jim Cauley said. "We showed them footage of Blair Hull, Dan Hynes, and Obama. When we showed them Hynes, one lady said, 'Dan Quayle.' When we showed them Hull we heard 'Mr. Potato Head' and 'embalmed.' Then we showed them Obama and we heard 'Denzel.' Another woman said, 'No, Sidney Poitier.' That was my eureka moment when I thought, Shit, we're gonna win this thing. This was five weeks out."
The race was shifting. At a radio debate in Springfield in late February, Hull's Democratic opponents started to call on Hull to release his divorce records and to attack him personally. One of the candidates, Maria Pappas, told Hull that he and his ex-wife "need to get inside of a room" and hash out their problems. Obama preferred to jab at Hull on the issue of the Iraq war. "The fact of the matter is, Blair, that you were silent when these decisions were being made," Obama said, rebutting Hull's contention that he had been an opponent of the war. "You were AWOL on this issue."
In mid-February, Hull's tracking polls had showed him slightly ahead. But on February 25, a CBS 2/Newsradio 780 poll showed that Obama had started to edge in front of Hull, twenty-seven per cent to twenty-five--not a decisive statistic but the beginning of a trend. Not long afterward, Obama gleefully announced that he had received a ten-thousand-dollar check from Michael Jordan, easily the biggest celebrity in Chicago. ("We debated whether to frame it in the office but--pragmatists that we were--we decided to go ahead and cash it.")
Early in the campaign, Hull had gambled that his divorce records would remain a secret. Now he tried to let the steam out of the story with a foolish maneuver. His spokesman, Jason Erkes, called in David Mendell to look at the divorce documents--but off the record. Mendell refused to cooperate under those terms. The Tribune and WLS-TV prepared to sue to get the papers unsealed by a judge. "What we discovered now was that everyone had the divorce deposition--everyone except for us in the campaign," Anita Dunn said. "And we knew now that we weren't going to win a case in court to keep it sealed."
On February 27th, Hull and his ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, decided to unseal the divorce papers themselves. Five years later, Hull said that he was woefully late in making the move. "I knew there was a chance this would come out," he said. Holding on to the files, he added, "was a risk that I thought was worth taking." Once he released them, it was easy to see why his consultants had hoped they would remain a secret. The documents revealed that on March 12, 1998, Sexton had asked a Cook County Circuit Court judge for protection because her husband had threatened to kill her. "I am in great fear that if this court does not enter a protective order in my favor and against Blair, as well as exclude him from my residence in which I am residing with my child ... Blair will continue to inflict mental, emotional and physical abuse upon me as he has done in the past," it said. "At this point, I fear for my emotional and physical well-being, as well as that of my daughter." The papers described multiple allegations of verbal and physical abuse, including one, from December 2, 1997, in which Sexton said, "Blair and I were calmly talking about trust issues, and I remarked everyone has a trust issue with him. Blair suddenly responded by saying, 'You evil bitch. You are a f---- c----,' repeatedly. He then hung on the canopy bar of my bed, leered at me and stated, 'Do you want to die? I am going to kill you, you f---- bitch.'" Reporting an incident from February 9, 1998, Sexton said, "He then held one of my legs and punched me extremely hard in the left shin. After that, he swung at my face with his fists a couple of times in a menacing manner just missing me."
Sexton had asked for a ten-million-dollars settlement, and eventually agreed to three million dollars plus half the value of their house, on the North Side. Hull informed the Tribune that he and Sexton "remain friends." At the same time, people inside Hull's campaign were telling reporters that Hull and Sexton could not bear to be in each other's company.
Hull insisted that the documents should not disqualify him from the Senate. "It is my total reputation in my life, my sixty-one years, that you should look at," he told reporters gamely.
But he knew. Hull called one of his advisers and kept saying, "We're done, right?" He was devastated. Blumenthal recalls that the morning after the story broke in the Tribune, Hull went to the same coffee shop he had been going to for a decade for a cup of coffee and a muffin. The people there had always greeted him with a friendly word. Now they looked away. "He felt like a pariah," Blumenthal said.
Hull now claims that Sexton's allegations in the files were false or exaggerated, merely part of a complex struggle for a financial resolution to an unhappy union. "Divorces are about two things: money and children," he said. "And there were no children." Hull insisted that any of the abuses recounted in the file were fiction.
Publicly, Obama kept his distance from Hull's personal travails. (Privately, he told Dan Shomon, "If you want to be in politics, do not beat your wife.") But one Tribune account suggested that the Obama campaign was not wholly innocent in the affair, and that its operatives had encouraged the press to look more deeply into the matter before Hull and Sexton finally decided to make a full disclosure. When I asked about that, Hull said only, "I'll let you come to your conclusions." He then hastened to describe his financial and political support of Obama's Presidential campaign. In 2004, the Obama Senate campaign paid for "books"--full-scale studies and opposition research--on its leading opponents, Hull and Hynes, but that was routine. (Each book cost around ten thousand dollars.) Obama's aides deny taking any strong or sneaky action to press the story about Hull's divorce records. Two key members of Obama's team insisted that the rumors about Hull were so current around Chicago, especially in political circles, that "everyone" knew about them.
"Ax didn't leak the story, but he might have fanned the flames to help our candidacy," Dan Shomon said. "Barack actually thought that if Blair Hull dropped out it would be a negative for us. We wanted Hynes and Hull to split the more conservative white vote."
Obama's advisers, like everyone else in Chicago politics, could readily see that, with just a few
weeks left before the primary, the damage to Hull was probably fatal. "Women were not thrilled to read in the Sun-Times that [Hull] had called his wife the c-word," Jim Cauley recalled. "They peeled away from him in no time and went to where they were comfortable. Barack was a non-threatening, charismatic, intelligent guy with a beautiful wife and kids."
The revelation about Hull's ugly divorce came just after the start of the Obama media blitz that Axelrod had been planning for months. Axelrod's strategy from the start had been to hold off until the closing weeks of the campaign, and then, when voters were paying attention, spend on a round of ads for Obama. The strategy, whether or not it was informed by Axelrod's knowledge of Hull's past and the suspicion that it might eventually go public, worked in swift and remarkable fashion.
First came an introductory ad with Obama talking about his success at Harvard Law School and his progressive votes in Springfield. Obama's presence on the screen is soothing, competent, and dynamic. Compared with Hull or Hynes, he was Jack Kennedy. And Axelrod got the ending he wanted from his reluctant candidate: "I'm Barack Obama, I'm running for the United States Senate, and I approved this message to say, 'Yes, we can.'"
The Hull campaign showed the first Obama ad to a focus group to assess its potential effect. They were astonished. "It was a fabulous spot, Obama just exploded off the screen," Blumenthal said. "The people were saying, 'Wow, I want to know more about him.' Anita Dunn says that's where it all changed. At that moment, he stopped being a typical South Side politician for people. Now they were seeing someone who transcended race and the old racial politics. After that, Obama just shot up and out of sight."
Axelrod thought that he could deepen Obama's image as the inheritor of a progressive legacy in the state by enlisting Paul Simon, who was widely admired even in conservative downstate counties for his integrity and his lack of pretension. Simon agreed to come out for Obama, but just before the endorsement was announced, he suffered complications during surgery to repair a heart valve and died--a terrible blow to old friends and colleagues like Axelrod, whose first campaign had been Simon's Senate race twenty years earlier. After the funeral, Axelrod came up with an idea to "replace the irreplaceable," Pete Giangreco said. Simon's daughter Sheila appeared in a thirty-second spot, saying that Obama and her father were "cut from the same cloth."
"That ad was so effective," Dan Shomon said. "Barack had always had Paul Simon's endorsement if he wanted it, but he got something better: he got him speaking from the grave."
A final commercial featured archival footage of both Simon and Harold Washington, evoking the proudest moment in the history of progressive politics in Chicago. "There have been moments in our history when hope defeated cynicism, when the power of people triumphed over money and machines," the narrator said while images of Simon and Washington appeared and dissolved on the screen.
The campaign had originally planned to use these commercials during a two-week television blitz in the Chicago market at a cost of around eight hundred thousand dollars. But the combination of Blair Hull's nose-dive and Obama's increasingly impressive fund-raising machinery changed everything. As if overnight, the campaign raised enough money to intensify the media effort in the vote-rich Chicago media market and also run ads downstate. They were able to run ads on stations in Carbondale and even Paducah, Kentucky, which broadcasts into southern Illinois. "The money was pouring in," Cauley said. "We just kept adding markets." The ad campaign, one of Hull's advisers admitted to Giangreco, put the Obama campaign "on a rocket sled."
The money hadn't just fallen out of the sky. One of the things that Obama had learned since the congressional campaign was to sit down and make a long string of fund-raising calls. And when he went on fund-raising missions to the living rooms of wealthy supporters, he refused to stop at giving his usual stump speech and taking questions. Many candidates let their hosts or surrogates make the appeal for funds, but Obama would often say, "I like to do my own dirty work" and put the arm on his supporters himself. To donors who told Obama that they could "do five"--meaning donate five thousand dollars--Obama would say, "I need your help. Can you do ten?" "Go the extra mile!" "I need you to feel some pain!" He was not shy. Steven Rogers, a businessman who taught at Northwestern, told the New York Times that he was once paired with Obama in a golf game and, by the sixth hole, Obama had told him that he wanted to run for Senate--"and by the ninth hole, he said he needed help to clear up some debts."
Hull's presence had complicated the financial picture of the race. According to the so-called millionaire amendment in federal election laws, if a wealthy self-financing candidate is in the race, his opponents can accept contributions many times the usual limit. Among those who donated the maximum, or close to it, to Obama's campaign were members of the Pritzker and Crown families, the developer Antoin Rezko, and members of the George Soros family, as well as friends such as John Rogers, Valerie Jarrett, and Marty Nesbitt; classmates from Harvard; and colleagues at the University of Chicago. Because of the millionaire's amendment, nearly half of Obama's total funds came from fewer than three hundred donors. At the start of the campaign, Obama had told Nesbitt, "If you raise four million, I have a forty-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise six million, I have a sixty-per-cent chance of winning. You raise ten million, I guarantee you I can win." In the end, Obama and his team raised more than five million for the primary alone. Sometimes, during the final media blitz, the campaign would run out of cash and they would have to hold their commercials for a day or two; but, in general, the funds were there to run strong to the end.
Obama had started out the campaign riding around the state in his Jeep Cherokee, often alone, barely able to draw crowds downstate of fifty or a hundred. He'd ride around from one event to the next, smoking cigarettes, talking on his cell phone, listening to books on tape. But as the money came in and as his chances increased, Cauley and the others persuaded Obama to stop driving himself--"The guy was wasting time looking for parking spaces!"--and sell the Jeep. By Thanksgiving of 2003, he was being driven around in an S.U.V.
By early March, it was all but over for Blair Hull--and he knew it. He skipped one of his own press conferences, leaving his spokesman to explain that the candidate had been spending time taking senior citizens to Canada to buy cheaper prescription drugs. The disasters kept coming for Hull: a little more than a week before the Democratic primary, he admitted that he had smoked marijuana and used cocaine "occasionally" in the nineteen-eighties and had been treated for alcohol abuse.
As if Hull's downfall had not been lurid enough, a story in the Tribune revealed that Jack Ryan, the Republican frontrunner, had sealed his 1999 divorce records and that the paper was trying to gain access to them. Ryan had been married to a Hollywood actress named Jeri Ryan, the star of two major television series: "Boston Public," an earnest high-school drama series in which she played a teacher named Ronnie Cooke, and "Star Trek: Voyager," in which she played an equally earnest former Borg drone named Seven of Nine from the home planet of Tendara Colony, where everyone apparently wears form-fitting one-piece Lycra suits. Jeri Ryan met her husband in 1990, when she was dealing blackjack at a charity event.
For Obama, victory in the primary was assured. Hull was spiraling downward, Hynes was stuck, and the rest of the candidates never got much traction. Obama had all but escaped criticism in the press. Not only did he impress voters and the media with his intelligence and seriousness, he had also avoided being the focus of attention until late in the race. He was never the subject of a negative ad. "When you are at sixteen percent, no one is kicking your ass because no one thinks you are for real," Jim Cauley said. One of the few criticisms of Obama that Cauley could recall from late in the race came when a conservative Jewish group complained that, in filling out a questionnaire, Obama had referred to Israel's security "wall" rather than calling it a "fence."
Just before the primary vote, Obama collected glowing endorsements from the Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Chicago Defender, and many outle
ts in the suburbs and downstate. With Hull's candidacy in ruins, downstate voters were migrating not to Hynes, as everyone expected, but to Obama. "The conventional wisdom even as late as 2004 was that there were hardly any African-Americans downstate and people there would never dream of voting for a black man named Barack Obama," Anita Dunn said. "This was a part of the country where the Klan had been active in the nineteen-twenties. But it turned out that when people were suffering economically, they were ready for a change. You saw the phenomenon of people feeling better about themselves for supporting an African-American. It was a real harbinger of the future." Dunn went on to become a close aide to Obama during his Presidential run four years later and his first White House communications director.
On the Sunday night before the primary, Obama was at his campaign headquarters with Jim Cauley, discussing his prospects. "A survey we had said he was at forty-eight, and I thought, No way in hell," Cauley said. "I thought we had a ceiling--in a seven-way race you can't get over forty-five. Barack said, 'You think we're at forty-five?' But now we weren't this tiny campaign anymore. Now there were four hundred people on board. He had run around the state and no one in the press would talk to him, but once he was on TV in those ads his life changed. And I said, 'Yeah, dude, you're a different human now.'"
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 50