Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  On March 19 and 20 the Senate passed Barack’s administrative hearings bill and then his welfare-study one. Later that day the “partial-birth” abortion ban measure Barack had voted against in committee came to the floor, and Barack remained silent while John Cullerton explained why it was clearly unconstitutional. Then, when the bill received forty-four yes votes and seven nos, Barack joined four other colleagues—Bobby Molaro, Miguel del Valle, Chuy Garcia, and Margaret Smith—in voting “present.” Illinois senators actually had three buttons on their desks: red, yellow, and green—and a “present” vote was understood as a no, but it offered senators political cover from criticism that they truly had voted against the measure in question. “What it did was give cover to moderate Democrats who wanted to vote with us but were afraid to do so,” Planned Parenthood lobbyist Pam Sutherland explained, and she was happy that Barack chose that option rather than a no. “‘If you vote “present,” we’re going to pick up “present” votes,’” she reassured him, “which we did.”

  From mid-March to mid-April, the Senate met in only perfunctory sessions. That gave Barack a respite from spending three nights a week in Springfield, where he stayed at the Renaissance Hotel, six blocks from the capitol. Early on Wednesday and Thursday mornings Barack played pickup basketball at the Springfield YMCA. “He had a decent shot, and he liked to talk trash, and he’d throw plenty of elbows,” African American lobbyist Vince Williams remembered. “He liked to push and shove,” but most of the other regular players, including African American House members Calvin Giles and Art Turner, gave better than they got. Returning to his hotel in sweatclothes, Barack had a cigarette outdoors and got tea, bananas, cereal, and milk from the breakfast buffet to take up to his room before showering and dressing for the day.36

  Speaking with reporters, Barack willingly voiced disappointment with the Senate. “What I’m surprised at is the lack of an overarching issues strategy” in a legislature where leaders “exert control without a clear road map.” Eager to show he was not just a “brainiac,” Barack boasted that he could “knock down scotch and tell a dirty joke with the best of them.” But he remained focused on the harms that might come from President Clinton’s federal welfare reform. “We have to make sure that the families are intact and have some order. If the parents don’t have their lives together, a lot of times they’ll take it out on their kids.” When Aid to Families of Dependent Children ended, “we’re going to have real problems placing these folks into jobs,” particularly ones that paid a living wage, because “there aren’t enough jobs out there.”

  In late March Barack was shocked to see hundreds of young African American men protesting outside the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago chanting, “Free Larry.” They were supporters of Gangster Disciples leader Larry Hoover, a convicted felon who was again on trial in federal court. In one of his occasional columns for the Hyde Park Herald Barack wrote, “Something is terribly wrong” when “an ever growing percentage of our inner-city youth are alienated from mainstream values and institutions, and regard gangs as the sole source of income, protection and community feeling.” He realized that “a large proportion are functionally illiterate,” thanks to the sorry state of most Chicago public high schools, and since it was mainly “the drug trade that supports the gangs,” prosecutors were “locking up these youth in record numbers.” Post-incarceration, their chance for gainful employment was “even slimmer than it was when they went in.” Barack asserted that “we need to send a strong message to our youth that poverty is never an excuse for violence, individuals are responsible for their behavior, and there are consequences to criminal activity.” But, he argued, Illinois needed to revise its “juvenile justice code so as to balance incarceration with prevention.”

  In mid-April, Barack flew to Boston for the first meeting of Harvard professor Robert Putnam’s thirty-person Saguaro Seminar. Then he was back in Springfield for the final five weeks of the spring session, which would be the busiest, although more for Senate Republicans than for minority party backbenchers. “Springfield is 80 percent after-hours,” one experienced female lobbyist explained, but, as progressive Chicago representative Tom Dart recounted, nightlife regulars realized that Barack “definitely was not in the night crowd.” African American Commonwealth Edison lobbyist Frank Clark and even Senate president Pate Philip used almost identical phrases: “You didn’t see him at night.”

  The 1997 session was an unusually light one, and the unofficial mayor of Springfield’s late-night scene, political newsletter publisher Rich Miller, whose Capitol Fax was the weekday bible for state politicos, reported that “Senators spent more time at Springfield’s eating and drinking establishments . . . than they did conducting actual business.” Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, when everyone was in town, usually featured one or more early-evening receptions that might go on until as late as 8:30 P.M., after which most legislators adjourned to one or another of downtown’s many late-night watering holes. Young Democratic Senate staffer John Corrigan described Barack’s approach: “I would see him out at these events, and he would squeeze every bit out of Springfield that was good and legitimate for his career. So he would go out, and he’d network, and he would work real hard, and he’d be at all these events. . . . But then, around nine thirty or ten o’clock, you couldn’t find him. He was gone.”

  Corrigan explained that “you can get a bad reputation quickly in Springfield” and “Obama understood that.” The small world of the statehouse was “a big gossip thing,” and Barack “knew that it doesn’t matter if he is completely innocent: if it’s midnight, and he’s talking to a twenty-six-year-old staffer at a bar where everybody’s swilling beer, that those kinds of rumors were going to go around about him.” Democratic staffer Cindy Huebner had the same view of Barack: “when you would hear the stories from the night before, you never heard any about him.”

  One progressive female lobbyist was disappointed that Barack “was never at the places,” but given how some women lobbyists viewed Barack, that was perhaps wise. “I can clearly remember the first time I saw him,” Planned Parenthood’s Pam Sutherland recalled. “He’s walking down the big stairs” in the capitol. “‘Oh my god! He’s gorgeous,’” she exclaimed to a female colleague. Barack was “engaging and friendly . . . one of those guys you can’t help but like,” plus “he’s a very attractive man. He had a presence about him . . . his swagger,” and “we hit it off right off the bat.” One female Republican senator called it “an air of self-confidence, a certain swagger.” League of Women Voters lobbyist Cindi Canary put it more bluntly: “women thought Barack was hot.” SEIU’s Carole Travis, who already knew Barack from their dinners with Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mona and Rashid Khalidi, saw the same thing: “a lot of women found Barack attractive and were after Barack.” But “there was never any sense at all that he was cheating,” Carole explained, and it was “very unusual,” as one lobbyist euphemistically put it, that Barack “did not participate in Springfield activities.”37

  One Wednesday night in mid-April a trio of business lobbyists—Phil Lackman from the Independent Insurance Agents of Illinois, Dave Manning of the Community Bankers Association, and African American Mike Lieteau of AT&T—invited Barack and fellow freshman Terry Link, plus newly arrived senator Larry Walsh, the Will County Democratic chairman, to join them for dinner, followed by poker at Panther Creek Country Club. Walsh, a lifelong farmer, had arrived in Springfield just a week earlier after appointing himself to a newly vacant seat whose prior occupant had resigned to take a judgeship. Walsh already knew Lake County party chairman Link, a rare legislative teetotaler, and outgoing lobbyists like Lackman and Manning, both of whom were Panther Creek members, were always looking to get to know new senators. Playing cards in the country club’s bar, with the Chicago Bulls game against the Miami Heat on the large-screen TV, the group of six was an ideal size for poker, and they had “a great time” until about midnight. They agreed to reconvene the next week, and for
the balance of the spring session each Wednesday night they gathered out at Panther Creek.

  “There was no shop talk allowed” at these gatherings, Link explained; “nobody talked about their jobs or politics.” They played “low-stakes poker: a dollar stake, three-dollar top raise.” Someone might win or lose $25 or $30 over the course of a night, but “on the whole it was a thousand laughs,” Dave Manning recalled. Smoking was definitely allowed, but teasing humor was the center of the weekly gatherings. Barack was a cautious and careful card player “and would study and study” before making a move. “Barack, it’s two bucks. Call, fold, or raise,” Phil Lackman would tell him. “Barack enjoyed a couple of beers, he enjoyed a couple of Marlboro Reds,” Phil remembered, and that Barack and Mike Lieteau were black was no issue. Lieteau, fourteen years Barack’s senior at age fifty, had grown up in Englewood in a family of eight children, attending Catholic schools and then Northern Illinois University. Married to an African American psychiatrist and the father of two daughters, Lieteau lived in South Shore’s Jackson Park Highlands enclave. He had begun lobbying for AT&T seven years earlier, and by May 1997 younger daughter Triste, already a graduate of Harvard Medical School, was about to join her sister Michelle as a fellow graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, where she had taken Racism and the Law and Con Law III with Barack.

  “It seemed like we were accepted because we were more white” than other statehouse African Americans, Mike Lieteau said in explaining the easygoing biracial poker games. “Barack talked the King’s English,” as could Mike, but Barack “was never ghetto like me, ’cause I speak Ebonics too.” Lieteau had watched all spring as “Trotter and Hendon would just endlessly say, ‘yo mama’” to Barack, until eventually Mike asked, “Why don’t you say something?” and Barack replied, “I would be stooping to their level if I responded.”

  Lieteau thought “they resented him because he was a very bright, intelligent person” who “brought his points across objectively rather than emotionally.” Barack “was more of an intellectual” and “was more comfortable with people who were of the same intellectual level” as himself. “It was a difference in culture,” for Barack “did not fit the stereotype of the typical African American legislator,” i.e., a lifelong Chicagoan. “They thought he was arrogant,” but Mike believed Barack “was not arrogant, he was confident,” even though at times it did appear as if Barack was asking himself, “Why am I here with these idiots?”

  Lieteau “felt that Barack was more comfortable with Caucasians, or white people, than he was with ghetto black people,” but Lieteau quickly developed an ease of interaction with Barack that was unrivaled not only in Springfield but also with any other black friend. Mike recalled that during the Wednesday-night poker sessions, he humorously sought to knock the other players off their games. “I would try and disturb all of them,” he recounted, either by insisting that they “explain the game” when they shifted to some exotic type of poker or simply by holding his cards to irritate them. Barack would demand, “Either call or fold,” and Mike responded with ersatz anger: “I’ll playing my fucking game and you play yours!” His two favorite targets for teasing were Walsh and Obama. To Larry, “I would make comments about farmers,” such as saying “their first experience with sex was with an animal.” As expected, “Larry just got very, very angry,” declaring that “‘I’ve never fucked a chicken!’” to which Mike replied, “Larry, anybody who responds like that had to fuck a chicken!” With Barack, the obvious target was his ears, which are “like Spock’s.” Barack “never cursed,” and “would never use bad language,” but one night Lieteau got him sufficiently riled that Barack called Mike an “anvil head motherfucker,” which Mike said was accurate because “my head was like an anvil.” But Mike replied, “Barack, you can’t even say motherfucker right. . . . You sound just like a fuckin’ white boy!”

  Mike and Barack’s easy friendship had understandable limits. With Lieteau representing AT&T, and with Barack being “very consumer-oriented,” he seldom voted with Lieteau. Barack was also a stickler for refusing to accept anything of value from lobsters. “You couldn’t buy him a Coke,” one progressive lobbyist recalled, and the first time Barack had dinner with Mike, he asked, “What do I owe you?” Lieteau responded, “You don’t owe me anything,” but Barack objected, knowing that lobbyists filed comprehensive expenditure reports with the secretary of state’s office. “You can’t report me. What do I owe you? What is my share?” Mike also recalled Barack asking, “How much was that?” even if Mike handed him a can of soda. “This is how bad he was,” Mike recounted, but ten years later Barack would boast on national television, “I was famous in Springfield for not letting lobbyists even buy me lunch.”38

  Black lobbyist Ray Harris had warned Barack that as a Democratic rookie, “you’re going to have a lot of time on your hands” even during the Senate’s busiest weeks, given Republicans’ legislative dominance. Many afternoons the day’s work, whether in committee or on the floor, was over by 2:30 P.M. Terry Link was “an avid golfer,” and Barack already appreciated that in Illinois politics “an awful lot happens on the golf course,” as he told his friend Jean Rudd. Springfield offered The Rail, an eighteen-hole public course just north of town that had been designed by the famous Robert Trent Jones Sr., and on weekday afternoons, the fee was just $19 for all you could play, fellow black Democrat James Clayborne remembered. Barack was happy to skip out along with Link, but “when he first started, you couldn’t call him a golfer. He left a lot to be desired,” Terry recalled. Clayborne and lobbyist Dave Manning sometimes joined them, and Barack also played with Poverty Law Project lobbyist John Bouman, Illinois progressives’ lead representative on the federally mandated welfare law changes Barack was so concerned about. He was “pretty much a beginner,” Bouman recalled, but by late spring Barack had also recruited Dan Shomon, the high-energy staffer whose assistance he had lobbied for, to take up golf as well.

  Shomon’s savvy paid off almost immediately when he asked his next-door neighbor, Dave Heckelman, a reporter for the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, the newspaper read by most of the city’s lawyers, to write a profile of Barack. Heckelman asked Barack about Dreams From My Father and his father, and Barack said, “I suspect that part of my interest in politics, and a particular brand of politics, can be traced back to who he was and what he wanted.” For example, Barack believed the tribal rivalries that hindered his father’s career in Kenya illustrated that “race and ethnicity can be a destructive force in politics.” Barack also said he was very interested in juvenile justice issues, and that tax credits for investors who developed low-income housing, something he had worked on at Miner Barnhill, was “an example of a smart policy.” Rejecting the notion that all politics is dirty, Barack mistakenly asserted that “I would argue that Martin Luther King was essentially a politician.”

  Heckelman asked two of Barack’s Judiciary Committee Republican colleagues about him, and both praised him. “He asks very intelligent questions, he has an in-depth understanding of the law, and I think he’s going to make a top-notch senator,” chairman Carl Hawkinson said. Barack had made “an extremely positive” impression, Kirk Dillard added, and “is a tremendous addition to the Judiciary Committee and to the Senate as a whole.” Longtime booster Newton Minow predicted that “he’s going places.”

  Shomon was understandably proud of the story and tried to introduce Barack more widely around town. Ed Wojcicki, the publisher of Illinois Issues, a monthly politics and public policy magazine that was a must-read for state politicos, talked with Barack about life in the capitol. “I was expecting to come down here to Springfield and engage in serious debates about the big issues of the day . . . ,” Ed recounted Barack complaining to him. “But those discussions aren’t happening around here, and nobody seems interested. Am I missing something, or is this just the way it is?” Barack was also exasperated that statehouse reporters displayed little interest in major policy issues. “Ed, why don’t we organi
ze a meeting for all the reporters who work down here, and I just want to talk to them about why they’re not covering my issues,” Barack suggested. Wojcicki replied, “If you try to set up a meeting like that, they’re not going to come. They’re not going to have that conversation with a public official like you. It’s just not what they do.” Barack found that “very frustrating,” just like he reluctantly grasped Wojcicki’s argument that “with leadership like Pate Philip,” being in the minority meant “you don’t really have much of a chance” to advance any meaningful priorities.