Promised Land (9781524763183)

by Obama Barack

  That was me running for Congress. After numerous conversations, I had to concede that Michelle was right to question whether the difference I was making in Springfield justified the sacrifice. Rather than lightening my load, though, I went in the opposite direction, deciding I needed to step on the gas and secure a more influential office. Around this same time, veteran congressman Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther, challenged Mayor Daley in the 1999 election and got trounced, doing poorly even in his own district.

  I thought Rush’s campaign had been uninspired, without a rationale other than the vague promise to continue Harold Washington’s legacy. If this was how he operated in Congress, I figured I could do better. After talking it over with a few trusted advisors, I had my staff jerry-rig an in-house poll to see whether a race against Rush would be viable. Our informal sampling gave us a shot. Using the results, I was able to persuade several of my closest friends to help finance the race. And then, despite warnings from more experienced political hands that Rush was stronger than he looked, and despite Michelle’s incredulity that I would somehow think she’d feel better with me being in Washington instead of Springfield, I announced my candidacy for congressman from the First Congressional District.

  Almost from the start, the race was a disaster. A few weeks in, the rumblings from the Rush camp began: Obama’s an outsider; he’s backed by white folks; he’s a Harvard elitist. And that name—is he even Black?

  Having raised enough money to commission a proper poll, I discovered that Bobby had 90 percent name recognition in the district and a 70 percent approval rating, whereas only 11 percent of voters even knew who I was. Shortly thereafter, Bobby’s adult son was tragically shot and killed, eliciting an outpouring of sympathy. I effectively suspended my campaign for a month and watched television coverage of the funeral taking place at my own church, with Reverend Jeremiah Wright presiding. Already on thin ice at home, I took the family to Hawaii for an abbreviated Christmas break, only to have the governor call a special legislative session to vote on a gun control measure I supported. With eighteen-month-old Malia sick and unable to fly, I missed the vote and was roundly flayed by the Chicago press.

  I lost by thirty points.

  When talking to young people about politics, I sometimes offer this story as an object lesson of what not to do. Usually I throw in a postscript, describing how, a few months after my loss, a friend of mine, worried that I’d fallen into a funk, insisted that I join him at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in L.A. (“You need to get back on the horse,” he said.) But when I landed at LAX and tried to rent a car, I was turned down because my American Express card was over its limit. I managed to get myself to the Staples Center, but then learned that the credential my friend had secured for me didn’t allow entry to the convention floor, which left me to haplessly circle the perimeter and watch the festivities on mounted TV screens. Finally, after an awkward episode later that evening in which my friend couldn’t get me into a party he was attending, I took a cab back to the hotel, slept on the couch in his suite, and flew back to Chicago just as Al Gore was accepting the nomination.

  It’s a funny story, especially in light of where I ultimately ended up. It speaks, I tell my audience, to the unpredictable nature of politics, and the necessity for resilience.

  What I don’t mention is my dark mood on that flight back. I was almost forty, broke, coming off a humiliating defeat and with my marriage strained. I felt for perhaps the first time in my life that I had taken a wrong turn; that whatever reservoirs of energy and optimism I thought I had, whatever potential I’d always banked on, had been used up on a fool’s errand. Worse, I recognized that in running for Congress I’d been driven not by some selfless dream of changing the world, but rather by the need to justify the choices I had already made, or to satisfy my ego, or to quell my envy of those who had achieved what I had not.

  In other words, I had become the very thing that, as a younger man, I had warned myself against. I had become a politician—and not a very good one at that.

  CHAPTER 3

  AFTER GETTING DRUBBED BY Bobby Rush, I allowed myself a few months to mope and lick my wounds before deciding that I had to reframe my priorities and get on with things. I told Michelle I needed to do better by her. We had a new baby on the way, and even though I was still gone more than she would have preferred, she at least noticed the effort I was making. I scheduled my meetings in Springfield so that I’d be home for dinner more often. I tried to be more punctual and more present. And on June 10, 2001, not quite three years after Malia’s birth, we experienced the same blast of joy—the same utter amazement—when Sasha arrived, as plump and lovely as her sister had been, with thick black curls that were impossible to resist.

  For the next two years, I led a quieter life, full of small satisfactions, content with the balance I’d seemingly struck. I relished wriggling Malia into her first ballet tights or grasping her hand as we walked to the park; watching baby Sasha laugh and laugh as I nibbled her feet; listening to Michelle’s breath slow, her head resting against my shoulder, as she drifted off to sleep in the middle of an old movie. I rededicated myself to my work in the state senate and savored the time spent with my students at the law school. I took a serious look at our finances and put together a plan to pay down our debts. Inside the slower rhythms of my work and the pleasures of fatherhood, I began to consider options for a life after politics—perhaps teaching and writing full-time, or returning to law practice, or applying for a job at a local charitable foundation, as my mother had once imagined I’d do.

  In other words, following my ill-fated run for Congress, I experienced a certain letting go—if not of my desire to make a difference in the world, then at least of the insistence that it had to be done on a larger stage. What might have begun as a sense of resignation at whatever limits fate had imposed on my life came to feel more like gratitude for the bounty it had already delivered.

  Two things, however, kept me from making a clean break from politics. First, Illinois Democrats had won the right to oversee the redrawing of state districting maps to reflect new data from the 2000 census, thanks to a quirk in the state constitution that called for a dispute between the Democrat-controlled house and the Republican senate to be settled by drawing a name out of one of Abraham Lincoln’s old stovepipe hats. With this power, Democrats could reverse the Republican gerrymandering of the previous decade and vastly better the odds that senate Democrats would be in the majority after the 2002 election. I knew that with one more term, I’d finally get a chance to pass some bills, deliver something meaningful for the people I represented—and perhaps end my political career on a higher note than it was currently on.

  The second factor was an instinct rather than an event. Since being elected, I’d tried to spend a few days each summer visiting various colleagues in their home districts across Illinois. Usually I’d go with my chief senate aide, Dan Shomon—a former UPI reporter with thick glasses, boundless energy, and a foghorn voice. We’d throw our golf clubs, a map, and a couple of sets of clothes in the back of my Jeep and head south or west, winding our way to Rock Island or Pinckneyville, Alton or Carbondale.

  Dan was my key political advisor, a good friend, and an ideal road trip companion: easy to talk to, perfectly fine with silence, and he shared my habit of smoking in the car. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of state politics. The first time we made the trip, I could tell he was a little nervous about how folks downstate might react to a Black lawyer from Chicago with an Arab-sounding name.

  “No fancy shirts,” he instructed before we left.

  “I don’t have fancy shirts,” I said.

  “Good. Just polos and khakis.”

  “Got it.”

  Despite Dan’s worries that I’d be out of place, what struck me most during our travels was how familiar everything felt—whether we were at a county fair or a union hall or on the porch on som
eone’s farm. In the way people described their families or their jobs. In their modesty and their hospitality. In their enthusiasm for high school basketball. In the food they served, the fried chicken and baked beans and Jell-O molds. In them, I heard echoes of my grandparents, my mother, Michelle’s mom and dad. Same values. Same hopes and dreams.

  These excursions became more sporadic once my kids were born. But the simple, recurring insight they offered stayed with me. As long as the residents of my Chicago district and districts downstate remained strangers to one another, I realized, our politics would never truly change. It would always be too easy for politicians to feed the stereotypes that pitted Black against white, immigrant against native-born, rural interests against those of cities.

  If, on the other hand, a campaign could somehow challenge America’s reigning political assumptions about how divided we were, well then just maybe it would be possible to build a new covenant between its citizens. The insiders would no longer be able to play one group against another. Legislators might be freed from defining their constituents’ interests—and their own—so narrowly. The media might take notice and examine issues based not on which side won or lost but on whether our common goals were met.

  Ultimately wasn’t this what I was after—a politics that bridged America’s racial, ethnic, and religious divides, as well as the many strands of my own life? Maybe I was being unrealistic; maybe such divisions were too deeply entrenched. But no matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too early to give up on my deepest convictions. Much as I’d tried to tell myself I was done, or nearly done, with political life, I knew in my heart that I wasn’t ready to let go.

  As I gave the future more thought, one thing became clear: The kind of bridge-building politics I imagined wasn’t suited to a congressional race. The problem was structural, a matter of how district lines were drawn: In an overwhelmingly Black district like the one I lived in, in a community that had long been battered by discrimination and neglect, the test for politicians would more often than not be defined in racial terms, just as it was in many white, rural districts that felt left behind. How well will you stand up to those who are not like us, voters asked, those who have taken advantage of us, who look down on us?

  You could make a difference from such a narrow political base; with some seniority, you could secure better services for your constituents, bring a big project or two back to your home district, and, by working with allies, try to influence the national debate. But that wouldn’t be enough to lift the political constraints that made it so difficult to deliver healthcare for those who most needed it, or better schools for poor kids, or jobs where there were none; the same constraints that Bobby Rush labored under every day.

  To really shake things up, I realized, I needed to speak to and for the widest possible audience. And the best way to do that was to run for a statewide office—like, for example, the U.S. Senate.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I THINK back now on the brashness—the sheer chutzpah—of me wanting to launch a U.S. Senate race, fresh as I was off a resounding defeat, it’s hard not to admit the possibility that I was just desperate for another shot, like an alcoholic rationalizing one last drink. Except that’s not how it felt. Instead, as I rolled the idea around in my head, I experienced a great clarity—not so much that I would win, but that I could win, and that if I did win, I could have a big impact. I could see it, feel it, like a running back who spots an opening at the line of scrimmage and knows that if he can get to that hole fast enough and break through, there will be nothing but open field between him and the end zone. Along with this clarity came a parallel realization: If I didn’t pull it off, it would be time to leave politics—and so long as I had given it my best effort, I could do so without regret.

  Quietly, over the course of 2002, I began to test the proposition. Looking at the Illinois political landscape, I saw that the notion of a little-known Black state legislator going to the U.S. Senate wasn’t totally far-fetched. Several African Americans had won statewide office before, including former U.S. senator Carol Moseley Braun, a talented but erratic politician whose victory had electrified the country before she was dinged up by a series of self-inflicted wounds involving financial ethics. Meanwhile, the Republican who’d beaten her, Peter Fitzgerald, was a wealthy banker whose sharply conservative views had made him relatively unpopular across our increasingly Democratic state.

  I began by talking to a trio of my state senate poker buddies—Democrats Terry Link, Denny Jacobs, and Larry Walsh—to see whether they thought I could compete in the white working-class and rural enclaves they represented. From what they’d seen during my visits, they thought I could, and all agreed to support me if I ran. So did a number of white progressive elected officials along Chicago’s lakefront and a handful of independent Latino legislators as well. I asked Jesse Jr. if he had any interest in running, and he said no, adding that he was prepared to lend me his support. Congressman Danny Davis, the genial third Black congressman in the Illinois delegation, signed on too. (I could hardly fault Bobby Rush for being less enthusiastic.)

  Most important was Emil Jones, now poised to be state senate president and hence one of the three most powerful politicians in Illinois. At a meeting in his office, I pointed out that not a single current U.S. senator was African American, and that the policies that we’d fought for together in Springfield really could use a champion in Washington. I added that if he were to help get one of his own elected to the U.S. Senate, it would surely gall some of the old-guard white Republicans in Springfield who he felt had always sold him short, which was a rationale I think he particularly liked.

  With David Axelrod, I took a different tack. A media consultant who’d previously been a journalist and whose clients included Harold Washington, former U.S. senator Paul Simon, and Mayor Richard M. Daley, Axe had developed a national reputation for being smart, tough, and a skilled ad maker. I admired his work and knew that having him on board would lend my nascent campaign credibility not just around the state but with national donors and pundits.

  I knew, too, that he’d be a tough sell. “It’s a reach,” he said on the day we met for lunch at a River North bistro. Axe had been one of many who’d warned me against taking on Bobby Rush. Between hearty bites of his sandwich, he told me I couldn’t afford a second loss. And he doubted a candidate whose name rhymed with “Osama” could get downstate votes. Plus, he’d already been approached by at least two other likely Senate candidates—state comptroller Dan Hynes and multimillionaire hedge fund manager Blair Hull—both of whom seemed in much stronger positions to win, so taking me on as a client was likely to cost his firm a hefty sum.

  “Wait till Rich Daley retires and then run for mayor,” he concluded, wiping mustard off his mustache. “It’s the better bet.”

  He was right, of course. But I wasn’t playing the conventional odds. And in Axe I sensed—beneath all the poll data and strategy memos and talking points that were the tools of his trade—someone who saw himself as more than just a hired gun; someone who might be a kindred spirit. Rather than argue campaign mechanics, I tried to appeal to his heart.

  “Do you ever think about how JFK and Bobby Kennedy seemed to tap into what’s best in people?” I asked. “Or wonder how it must have felt to help LBJ pass the Voting Rights Act, or FDR pass Social Security, knowing you’d made millions of people’s lives better? Politics doesn’t have to be what people think it is. It can be something more.”

  Axe’s imposing eyebrows went up as he scanned my face. It must have been clear that I wasn’t just trying to convince him; I was convincing myself. A few weeks later, he called to say that after talking it over with his business partners and his wife, Susan, he’d decided to take me on as a client. Before I could thank him, he added a proviso.

  “Your idealism is stirring, Barack…but unless you rai
se five million bucks to get it on TV so people can hear it, you don’t stand a chance.”

  With this, I finally felt ready to test the waters with Michelle. She was now working as the executive director for community affairs at the University of Chicago hospital system, a job that gave her more flexibility but still required her to juggle high-level professional responsibilities with coordinating the girls’ playdates and school pickups. So I was a little surprised when instead of responding with a “Hell no, Barack!” she suggested we talk it through with some of our closest friends, including Marty Nesbitt, a successful businessman whose wife, Dr. Anita Blanchard, had delivered both our girls, and Valerie Jarrett, a brilliant and well-connected attorney who’d been Michelle’s boss at the city’s planning department and become like an older sister to us. What I didn’t know at the time was that Michelle had already gotten to Marty and Valerie and assigned them the job of talking me out of my foolishness.

  We gathered at Valerie’s Hyde Park apartment, and over a long brunch, I explained my thought process, mapping out the scenarios that would get us to the Democratic nomination and answering questions about how this race would be different from the last. With Michelle, I didn’t sugarcoat the amount of time I’d be away. But this was it, I promised, up or out; if I lost this one, we were done with politics for good.

  By the time I finished, Valerie and Marty had been persuaded, no doubt to Michelle’s chagrin. It wasn’t a question of strategy for her, aside from the fact that the thought of another campaign appealed to her about as much as a root canal. She was most concerned with the effect on our family finances, which still hadn’t fully recovered from the last one. She reminded me that we had student loans, a mortgage, and credit card debt to think about. We hadn’t started saving for our daughters’ college educations yet, and on top of that, a Senate run would require me to stop practicing law in order to avoid conflicts of interest, which would further diminish our income.