Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  In August 1996, Dreams From My Father was published as a $15 paperback, with a new cover featuring a photo of a beaming Barack seated next to Granny Sarah in Kogelo. Random House had been disappointed by the hardcover sales and eager to sell the paperback rights, which Deborah Baker, an editor at Kodansha Globe, had bought under a standard seven-year license for just $4,000. Baker spoke with Barack by phone about the jacket copy and cover design, which used a portion of the Marian Wright Edelman blurb on the front and brief excerpts from newspaper reviews on the back. Baker asked Barack whether he intended to write a second book, and he said that while he might, it could be a novel, just as Scott Turow had shifted to fiction following his memoir. The paperback reprint attracted little attention, although one new reviewer observed that Dreams “suffers at times from hints that this public-minded man writes too self-consciously before a reading public.”20

  Labor Day marked the beginning of Barack’s pro forma general election campaign. He would face Rosette Caldwell Peyton, a teacher at Hyde Park’s Kozminski Academy, the Republican nominee, plus third-party contender David Whitehead. Barack completed another questionnaire for Impact, writing, “I would support passage of a domestic partnership law,” and a week later he met with thirteen IVI-IPO members at his supporters Lois and Alan Dobry’s home to receive their unanimous endorsement. Barack completed a lengthy IVI-IPO questionnaire, saying that he wanted to “mobilize residents in the district” and that “my top priority is ensuring that our young people are nurtured and supported through fully-funded public schools.” The full questionnaire also confronted Barack with thirty-five sometimes multipart specific-issue queries. Number 22 asked, “Will you support a single-payer health plan for Illinois?” and Barack replied, “Yes, with Medicaid incorporated into a single, graduated system of services,” though he added that “such a program will probably have to be instituted at a federal level” and that in the interim states “can move more aggressively to expand coverage to the currently uninsured.” To question 26, regarding welfare and how the federal reform bill President Clinton had signed into law two weeks earlier would provide block grants to states to fund time-limited assistance in place of the previous Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, Barack responded, “I oppose arbitrary time limit or work requirements that fail to take into account the lack of entry-level jobs.” To the final three queries, Barack gave succinct, one word answers: “No” to both “Do you support electronic eavesdropping?” and “Do you support capital punishment?” and “Yes” to “Do you support legislation to (a) ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?” as well as assault weapons.21

  On the last day of September, Barack began teaching Con Law III as well as Current Issues in Racism and the Law. At a 1L welcoming reception Barack recognized one face: his paternal namesake Barack Echols, one of only two black men in the law school’s class of 1999. The race seminar’s syllabus remained unchanged, but the twenty-two students were impressed with “how thoughtful his choices” were, 2L African American Felton Newell said. Chapin Cimino, a 3L, remembered him “talking a lot about W. E. B. Du Bois . . . I came away from that course thinking of both Obama and Du Bois as middle-grounders: neither radical nor passivist, neither accommodationist nor separatist.” She recalled it as a “very engaged group,” and Barack “would play devil’s advocate” to ensure that all views were aired.

  Liberal and especially minority students sometimes felt uncomfortable in U of C classrooms, both because there were so many conservative students and also because many senior faculty members, personified most outspokenly by law and economics proponent Richard Epstein, never shied from propounding their own views. Epstein was “the defining presence” at the law school in the mid-1990s, his colleagues knew, yet he was far from alone. Prominent federal appellate judge Frank Easterbrook was “so intentionally intimidating” in another seminar that the atmosphere was “horrible” and “hostile.” In contrast, Barack was a “great” teacher” and one whose respectful and open-minded demeanor was “refreshing” when compared to the general “lack of politeness at Chicago.” Chapin Cimino recalled Barack responding with bemusement when she, an outspoken liberal, said that conservative justice Antonin Scalia was correct about the irrelevance of legislative history to judicial decision-making. Her paper for Barack on the hollowness of class-based affirmative action programs would become her published note in the U of C Law Review.

  In Con Law III, Barack assigned the new third edition of Geof Stone’s Constitutional Law casebook, an eighteen-hundred-page behemoth that was used in all of the law school’s Con Law courses, to his thirty-seven students. Triste Lieteau, a 3L medical school graduate whose lobbyist dad Mike had met Barack during Alice Palmer’s congressional campaign, thought Barack was “a great professor” and “very down to earth.” At such “a conservative bastion,” liberal professors were often challenged in class by outspoken conservative students, and Triste remembered that Barack handled one such incident “very well.” As an African American student, “you do feel this strong sense of isolation and that you’re really not fully a part” of the school, she explained. In that context, 3L Hisham Amin welcomed Barack as a black professor who exuded “confidence, presence, and knowledge.” At the end of the quarter, the students’ evaluations of Barack’s teaching registered 9.35 out of 10 for Racism and the Law and 8.71 out of 10 for Con Law III.22

  On the first Thursday in October, Barack’s campaign held a $100-per-person fund-raiser at a West African art gallery. Sponsors included attorneys Jeff Cummings, Allison Davis, Linzey Jones, and Elvin Charity; old Gamaliel colleague David Kindler; former students Jesse Ruiz, Brett Hart, and Jeanne Gills; and family friends Valerie Jarrett, Craig Huffman, and Kathy Stell. The invitation offered attendees the chance to meet “one of the nation’s most promising young leaders” and said the proceeds “will help Barack conduct voter registration and outreach efforts to constituents.” The next week Barack conducted “an intense discussion on power and self-interest” for the Hope Center, but there was a tension between Sokoni Karanja and Tracy Leary’s focus on energizing Bronzeville residents and Barack’s vision of a citywide network. “We had some differences of opinion around what it should look like,” Sokoni remembered, as Barack “wanted it to be less focused on Bronzeville and more of a citywide thing,” perhaps because “I always thought he wanted to be mayor.” Given the “dearth of leadership in Bronzeville, I thought this was the place to focus initially and then begin to build out from there,” Sokoni explained, while Barack “wanted to take it much more broadly.” Sandy O’Donnell and Tracy Leary observed many of their conversations, and young Gamaliel organizer John Eason, who knew how Sokoni and Barack “were thick as thieves,” came to realize “how much they differed in terms of how they think about community organizing and building community.” Jean Rudd, who knew them both as Woods Fund board members, understood how Barack “became frustrated with the limits of it, that it was going to be limited to a very restricted idea of what leadership development was about and that it was not going to become what he had hoped it would be.”

  Woods itself, where former UNO Southeast Chicago organizer Todd Dietterle had succeeded Ken Rolling when he became CAC executive director, had moved to make welfare-to-work policies a coequal priority along with the fund’s long-standing commitment to organizing. Woods appreciated “how the availability of child care and transportation to work sites affects employment prospects,” and with the passage of President Clinton’s welfare reform bill, state legislatures would have to devote significant attention to such policies in 1997. Woods, Wieboldt, and MacArthur all cohosted a fall 1996 “Community Organizing Award” ceremony, and Barack’s keynote address captured the evolution of his thinking about organizing toward a larger focus. Organizing taught that “we have a collective responsibility to make a better world” and anyone who identified as a victim was “disempowering” themselves. But the focus should not be on “getting concessions out of some power
out there,” in what John McKnight had called consumer-driven organizing, but upon generating new productivity, just as McKnight had emphasized a decade earlier. “We have to start thinking on a bigger scale,” and “organizing on a big scale requires coalition building,” Barack argued. “The core idea of organizing—the notion of mutual regard, and mutual responsibility, and collective action,” meant that “our individual salvation is tied to our collective salvation” and that “our individual stories are part of a larger story,” language Barack would directly echo to a vastly larger audience eight years later.23

  By mid-October, Michelle was well into her new job at the U of C, organizing an annual volunteerism summit that featured as a speaker her brother Craig’s good friend John Rogers Jr. With the general election only three weeks away, Barack had no need to campaign because, as the Hyde Park Herald noted, his two opponents “are nowhere to be found.” Neither responded to a League of Women Voters invitation to a Saturday candidates’ forum, and Barack won some goodwill with a possible new state Senate colleague, Debbie Halvorson, by campaigning for her in the south suburban district where she was challenging longtime Republican incumbent Aldo DeAngelis. Senate Democratic leader Emil Jones Jr., facing a 33–26 Republican majority, hoped to pick up the four seats needed to win control of the chamber. Jones had assigned the Senate Democrats’ best staffer, 1987 Georgetown University graduate and former UPI newsman Dan Shomon, to run Halvorson’s campaign, and one weekend day, a somewhat overdressed Barack, with Ron Davis and Will Burns in tow, showed up to go door to door for Halvorson.

  Both the Tribune and the Sun-Times endorsed Barack, with the Trib calling him “a worthy successor” to Palmer and someone who “has potential as a political leader.” Downstate U.S. congressman Dick Durbin, the Democratic candidate to succeed retiring U.S. senator Paul Simon, told reporters he was enjoying reading Dreams From My Father, but the only preelection interview request Barack fielded was from the U of C Law School’s student newspaper. He said his top priority would be implementing the state’s new role under the federal welfare reform measure, and also “the challenge of constructing non-traditional alliances with suburban and downstate legislators.”

  On Election Day, Barack triumphed with more than 82 percent of the vote, but the overall results were a defeat, because even though Halvorson defeated DeAngelis and Democrat Terry Link picked up another previously Republican seat in Waukegan, Senate Democrats came up two seats short of capturing the majority. The Republicans’ reduced margin of 31 to 28 was especially disheartening because two relatively inexperienced Republican candidates, Christine Radogno and recent appointee Dave Luechtefeld, had eked out very narrow victories. Had Emil Jones’s campaign staffers turned out another 214 Democratic votes in those two districts, Barack would have been a freshman member of the Senate’s majority rather than minority party.

  Democrats regained control of the state House of Representatives, 60–58, picking up six seats as part of President Clinton’s landslide victory in Illinois that also ensured Dick Durbin’s election to the U.S. Senate. The Senate Democrats’ narrow failure led to talk about a challenge to Jones’s leadership on the part of unhappy colleagues like Quad Cities senator Denny Jacobs, but when Barack went to Springfield for new-members’ orientation during the legislature’s brief mid-November veto session, his most poignant lesson was how personally popular the departing Alice Palmer was with colleagues, staffers, and progressive lobbyists. “I loved Alice Palmer,” assistant staff director Cindy Huebner explained, and although she was prepared to dislike Barack, he was “very nice, very down to earth” once he realized he needed to “mend those fences.”24

  In Chicago, Barack spoke at Jesse Jackson Sr.’s weekly Saturday-morning PUSH rally, brimming with optimism about his new role as a state senator. “If we can rally the community around education, welfare reform, health care, jobs and job training, then we can create a progressive state coalition that can serve not only Chicago’s interests but those who lack opportunity everywhere.” He said he was creating an issues committee, and he invited district residents to join, calling it a “vehicle for getting people more involved in the political process.” Interested citizens should call Cynthia Miller at the soon-to-be senator’s district office. “There are big pockets in this district that are underserved,” Barack stated, which was very true given how the 13th Senate District, which reached from 47th Street on the north to 81st Street on the south, encompassing Hyde Park and South Shore, also stretched more than five miles westward, encompassing parts of the Englewood, Chicago Lawn, and Marquette Park neighborhoods in a narrow finger between Marquette Road—67th Street—on the north and 75th Street on the south. The district was 20 percent white—largely Hyde Park—and more than 70 percent African American, but that western part of the district, especially Englewood, was a world away from the leafy blocks surrounding the university.

  “We plan to organize monthly town hall meetings at rotating locations around the district,” Barack announced, and he told the law school’s student newspaper that “hopefully I’ll be a voice that helps nudge the legislature towards a welfare system that not only recognizes the importance of moving people out of welfare and into work, but also recognizes that there are many barriers to that process,” such as the day care and transportation hurdles the Woods Fund’s work was highlighting. “We have to address those failures of the market and provide structures of support in those areas,” Barack explained, recalling the manuscript he and Rob Fisher had written while at Harvard. He also distinguished himself from his party’s president: “on the national level bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination, or environmental protection.”

  Ten days before Christmas Barack got his third traffic ticket in fifteen months when he was pulled over and fined $50 for going sixty-two miles per hour in a forty-five-mile-per-hour zone. His Springfield inauguration would take place on Wednesday, January 8, 1997, but first he had to grade his Con Law III exams and prepare himself to teach Voting Rights and the Democratic Process for the first time when winter quarter began on January 6. Barack knew that an upcoming visiting professor at the law school, Rick Pildes from the University of Michigan, was working on a voting rights casebook along with two other election law scholars, and well before January, Barack had asked Pildes for a copy of their manuscript. Barack’s advance description of his course made clear that he would bring to this new class the same relentlessly open-minded style students had experienced in his Racism class. “Does the Voting Rights Act, as amended, promote minority voices, or simply segregate them from the larger political discourse?” he suggestively asked in questioning the overall political utility of so-called minority-majority districts. Indeed, Barack’s description asked, “does voting even matter in a complex, modern society where campaigns are dominated by money and issues are framed by lobbyists?”

  Barack sounded a similar note regarding districting when the Associated Press asked him to comment on a Supreme Court order returning a challenge to Illinois’s oddly drawn, Hispanic-majority 4th Congressional District to the original trial court for reconsideration, a case he knew well because Davis Miner had represented some of the intervenors who were defending that district and three others with black majorities. “It’s fair to say that in all these congressional remap cases, the Supreme Court has not yet come up with a clear, manageable, comprehensive approach to determining whether or not a minority-majority district is permissible.” Barack again demonstrated a less than worshipful view of the high court in a twelve-page, single-space memo to his Con Law III students, explaining the best type of answers when he returned their mid-December exams. He had posed two questions, one involving a lesbian couple’s public employee benefits coverage, the second concerning municipal affirmative action programs, and he limited their answers to a total of fifteen typed double-spaced pages.

  Fo
r the first question, he cited “the remarkable opacity of Justice Kennedy’s opinion” in Romer v. Evans, a landmark antidiscrimination decision handed down seven months earlier. On the second, he pointed out how “the type of program at issue in” Adarand Constructors v. Pena, an important 1995 affirmative action ruling that applied highly demanding “strict scrutiny” to the federal government’s use of explicitly racial classifications, included an “irrebuttable presumption that any contractor who was a member of a minority group fell into this economically disadvantaged category.”

  Rick Pildes and Barack had dinner one night in Hyde Park, and Pildes got a sense of Barack’s approach to law teaching, which was “very different from most” young law professors because of “how independent-minded he was about the issues.” Barack “was much deeper and more reflective” than most legal academics. Regarding voting rights, Barack was “open-minded” and “very interested in the facts on the ground, how this stuff was really playing out, rather than ideology.” He was such “a wonderful presence” that Rick thought to himself, “I could see this guy as mayor of Chicago.”

  But another visiting colleague, John R. Lott Jr., had a different sense of Barack. In August 1996, Lott and a graduate student coauthor had presented an evidence-packed paper contending that increased possession of private firearms resulted in less violent crime. That seemingly counterintuitive argument outraged gun control advocates, who responded with angry denunciations of Lott’s work. Later that fall, Lott sought to introduce himself to Barack at the law school. “Oh, you’re the gun guy,” Barack responded coolly. “Yes, I guess so,” Lott replied, and he recalled Barack responding, “I don’t believe that people should be able to own guns.” Lott offered to talk about the issue, but Barack “simply grimaced and turned away, ending the conversation.”