Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Friends far and wide sensed Barack’s disappointment. Democratic campaign consultant Eric Adelstein, who had first met Barack during Project VOTE!, remembered seeing Barack “coming back to the Renaissance” one night looking like “a guy who was not wanting to be in Springfield.” Even with legislative license plates, the drive between Chicago and Springfield was a boring three hours plus, and although cell phone coverage was spotty in places, Barack called his district office staffer Cynthia Miller and friends like Rob Fisher, Tom Johnson, and Scott Turow during his Thursday drives back to Chicago and vented about the statehouse. “He was very disappointed,” Cynthia recalled, especially with “the in-house fighting and the jealousies” he was encountering from colleagues like Hendon and Trotter. Rob remembered Barack explaining that 90 percent of state politics involved fairly technical issues of interest to some small group but to no one else. To Tom, Barack joked about another senator’s suggestion about what kind of extracurricular nightlife he might enjoy. Turow recalled Barack saying that the Senate “is different than I thought it would be,” and it was clear that “he was having a hard time adjusting to Springfield.”39

  The legislature’s annual House-Senate softball game took place on Tuesday evening, April 29. Senate announcer Adeline Geo-Karis said Barack “was fleet of foot, and he looked good in uniform,” but other colleagues recalled that Barack’s skills on the diamond were minimal, with Senate team manager Frank Watson saying “he was terrible.” Back on the floor, the Senate unanimously passed a House bill about drug counseling for which Barack was the lead sponsor, and when another “partial-birth” abortion ban measure returned to the Senate floor, Barack again voted “present,” just as he had in committee a week earlier.

  That evening Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who was in Springfield to join Republican governor Jim Edgar in seeking more state funding for public schools despite Senate Republicans’ reluctance to raise taxes, sponsored a “Taste of Chicago” reception featuring rib sandwiches, ice cream, and cheesecake plus the Lonnie Brooks Blues Band. A line of people gathered to meet and greet Mayor Daley, and Democratic Judiciary Committee staffer Mike Marrs remembered Barack being right behind him. “He introduced himself and posed for a picture with the mayor. I remember hanging back to watch,” since Barack indicated he had not previously met Daley.

  In the spring session’s final days, Barack reluctantly supported a bill authorizing civil commitment hearings for sex offenders whose prison terms were ending. He spoke in favor of a measure allowing state candidates’ campaign disclosure reports to be put on the Internet. “There has been a lot of talk about campaign finance reform during the course of this session,” with Senate Republicans naming a task force to study the issue rather than take up meaningful House-passed bills, but this “modest” measure, by making the reports “easily accessible,” would help “restore people’s confidence that in fact we are doing the people’s business and not simply the lobbyists’ business.” Governor Edgar’s education funding proposal passed the House and was supported in the Senate by Democrats plus a small handful of Republicans, but with a majority of his Republican caucus firmly opposed to a 25 percent state income tax increase, Pate Philip refused to call the bill for a floor vote.

  On Saturday, May 31, the session’s final day, the Senate finally moved toward passage of the state-level welfare reform proposal that Edgar had put forward in late April in response to the soon-to-be-implemented changes in federal law. Public Health and Welfare Committee chairman Dave Syverson rose to introduce a lengthy agreed-upon amendment and to “thank Senator Obama for the hours of time that he spent with us in trying to work out a plan that is acceptable and workable.” Barack’s biggest success was a $30 million increase, to $100 million, in new state funding for subsidized day care, though he failed to win similar support for job training programs. Barack then spoke at greater length than he had at any time that spring. HB 204 was “a huge bill that hasn’t received too much attention,” but “this may be as important a bill as we pass in this session. It will affect a huge number of people.” Barack said “I probably would not have supported the federal legislation” that President Clinton had signed into law nine months earlier, and HB 204 was not a complete response. “I want to emphasize that I continue to have concerns, and I think that those concerns are going to have to be dealt with over the coming months and the coming years.” Uppermost was the availability of job training for people lacking employment skills, and a close second was the Illinois program’s exclusion of legal immigrants. “I don’t like the notion that those people who are here legally, contributing to our society, paying taxes, are not subject to the same benefits, the same social safety net that the rest of us are.” Third—as Barack’s modest SB 755, now on the governor’s desk, would mandate—was a university study of the impact of all the changes on recipients of what would now be called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

  Barack then recounted a personal experience, confessing that late one night the previous weekend he had been smoking a cigar on his condominium’s back porch, which overlooked an alleyway in which men often collected recyclable cans. “What I saw that evening was an entire family, at midnight. A man with a shopping cart, behind him a mother pushing a baby cart, baby inside, at midnight. This was their visible means of support. This is the job that awaited them if they weren’t on welfare. We have an obligation to the family. We have an obligation to that child.”

  Subsequent speakers like moderate Republican Kathy Parker also thanked Barack for his work, and with only Miguel del Valle voting no, the Senate passed the measure by a vote of 56–1–1. Early Sunday morning the House did as well, but in Sunday’s news stories, Barack stressed that “it’s vital for us to see what we can do within our budget to make sure” the roughly twenty-two thousand legal immigrants in Illinois whose AFDC assistance was ending on July 1 were somehow protected by the state. Welfare recipients “generally are not represented down here in Springfield,” Barack drily told one reporter. “They don’t have powerful lobbies. They do not contribute to our political candidates.”40

  Unhappy senators voted 49–9, with Barack in the minority, to approve the state’s 1998 budget only minutes after receiving copies of the huge final bill. In his Hyde Park Herald column, Barack wrote that “this session will largely be remembered for what it failed to accomplish” because legislators “dropped the ball on issues that are critical.” Senate Republicans’ failure to pass Edgar’s Democratic-backed education funding reform was the greatest disappointment, because, Barack noted, the final budget bill “actually increased the percentage of state dollars going to the wealthiest school districts.” That was why “I chose to vote against the budget.” Barack also complained about Senate Republicans’ refusal to call a vote on a utility deregulation bill that would reduce residential rates by up to 15 percent. On welfare reform, “I spent a good deal of time this spring negotiating with the Governor’s office and Senate Republicans to come up with a welfare reform plan that would truly move people into jobs. To a large degree we were successful,” particularly with increased day-care funding plus $10 million for elderly and disabled legal immigrants who would lose their Supplemental Security Income due to the federal reforms.

  On the Judiciary Committee, Barack and Democratic staffer Gideon Baum had spent considerable time working with Republicans on a comprehensive, three-hundred-page Juvenile Justice Reform Act that might pass during the Senate’s brief “veto session” in the fall. “The vast majority of juvenile offenders are functional illiterates,” Barack told the Chicago Defender’s Chinta Strausberg, “high school dropouts who don’t feel comfortable in terms of succeeding in the marketplace or in school.” That meant “we have to put together prevention programs that work.”

  Barack told Herald readers that “I remain optimistic and enthusiastic,” but to another community newspaper he admitted being “disappointed that partisan bickering led by Republicans hurt our school children.” His voting record r
egistered 100 percent on “party support” as well as with the American Civil Liberties Union, and his personal scorecard showed that three Senate bills Barack had introduced would be signed into law: his community college student directory, the welfare impact study mandate, and the municipal administrative hearings measure. He told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin’s Dave Heckelman that the latter measure would “make sure that the courts don’t get clogged up with a lot of small cases involving quality-of-life issues that can better be handled in an adjudicative setting.”

  Barack told Illinois Issues that the hurried, last-minute passage of a state budget bill no one had had time to read symbolized “the major flaws” in Illinois’s legislative process. He cited Wisconsin and Minnesota as superior examples. “Those states have a strong tradition of progressive politics. State government is a leader in making things happen in the state. Illinois is more of a forum for dividing up the spoils and cutting deals. For me, at least, it doesn’t make sense to be here just to bring in a few pork projects for my district. The reason we are here should be to develop policies that help people, that make this state a more promising place for our children to live. And if you’re not possessed of that passion or vision, then you shouldn’t be here.”

  A few years later, Barack recalled that “I was surprised” during that first spring session “at the degree to which lobbyists, particularly for monied interests, had influence over the details of the legislative process. People probably overestimate the power of lobbyists and special interests on big, well-publicized issues . . . but probably nine-tenths of the legislation that we deal with is highly technical, unspectacular issues that affect people in ways that aren’t immediately apparent,” just as Barack had told Rob Fisher that spring. “It’s those kinds of issues where lobbyists exert a great deal of control,” because “they have the capacity to sustain their position down there because they’re paying attention to it and nobody else is, and they’re better informed about the issue than anyone else is.”

  Barack had also come to realize “how little the public pays attention to Springfield.” Chicagoans focused on city and national politics, “but they have very little awareness of state government.” Ironically, that “makes life easier on a lot of legislators here in Chicago because, as long as they don’t involve themselves in a scandal, it’s very hard for a challenger to mount a challenge against an incumbent legislator.” On the other hand, “you don’t have the court of public opinion to appeal to because nobody’s listening to you . . . and for me that’s frustrating I think because there are often times where I’m in debates in Springfield where my opponents will acknowledge that my position is the right one, at least privately, but there’s nothing that I can do to change their votes.”41

  Barack’s modest campaign fund allowed him to supplement the $47,000 in state Senate funds allocated for his district office and staff with modest additional payments to Cynthia Miller, U of C grad student Will Burns, and his 1995–96 campaign staffers Carol Harwell and Ron Davis for small amounts of their time, but the only donors who contributed as much as $1,000 to him were a trio of labor unions—AFSCME, SEIU, and the Chicago Teachers Union—plus regular benefactor John Schmidt, with Tony Rezko’s companies topping the chart at $2,000. Barack was unaware that Rezko simultaneously was failing for weeks at a time to provide heat to tenants of buildings like 7000 South Sangamon Street in Englewood that were owned by his Rezmar Corp. Lawsuits filed against Rezmar by the city drew no public attention.

  Prior to the session’s end, Dan Shomon told Barack, “You need to see the rest of the state,” one that stretched more than two hundred miles farther south from Springfield. When Barack asked why, Dan said, “you have to vote on bills for all of Illinois” and “you need to see how people vote in southern Illinois and what the issues are.” The two southernmost state Senate districts were represented by a pair of white Democrats who were sometimes jokingly called “the coal brothers,” because coal mining had long been an economic linchpin for the counties that sat just above the Ohio River to the east and the Mississippi River to the west. Senator Jim Rea of Christopher held a fund-raiser late each July at the Rend Lake Golf Course just north of Benton, and once Barack agreed to a weeklong road trip, Shomon told him to pack just khakis and polo shirts and planned an itinerary.

  Taking Barack’s Jeep Cherokee and their golf clubs, they visited Chester on the Mississippi; Metropolis—population six thousand—on the Ohio; Du Quoin, which hosted the southern Illinois state fair; plus Mt. Vernon and the appropriately named Carbondale. “It was really a great week,” Shomon recalled, even with the heat and humidity, and Barack was able to talk with Democratic activists like lawyer John Clemons and farmers Steve and Kappy Scates. When Barack one day asked for Dijon mustard at a TGI Friday’s, Shomon lamented his big-city tastes, but Jim Rea remembered that Barack “made a great impression” at the Rend Lake golf tournament. “We had a fabulous turnout,” including fellow senators Bruce Farley from Chicago and James Clayborne from Metro East.

  Farley, one of the Senate’s most popular characters, teased Barack and Clayborne about having to protect them, a joking allusion to the “Little Egypt” region’s longtime reputation for virulent racism and “sundown towns.” But Shomon recalled that “the whole trip was great,” and Barack “had a great time.” Barack remembered how white southern Illinoisans seemed “completely familiar to me” because “they were all like my grandparents.” Shomon thought “it was really a revelation to him that he had a lot of appeal as a politician” to people in such an unlikely locale.42

  In mid-June, a lengthy criminal trial got under way in federal court in Springfield, but only at the end of July, when Jim Edgar took the stand, did national newspapers like the New York Times pay any attention. On trial were a pair of businessmen who had contributed more than $270,000 to Edgar’s gubernatorial campaigns and then had received a $7 million contract for their company, Management Services of Illinois (MSI), from the state Department of Public Aid, whose officials they had plied with extravagant gifts. Edgar testified that he knew nothing about the contract, even though MSI had been his largest contributor during his 1994 reelection race. The Times noted what it called Illinois’s “regular intertwining of campaign finance and government business,” and on Saturday, August 16, both defendants were convicted. The Chicago Tribune said the case had “rekindled debate about reforming the state’s campaign finance” laws and represented “an ominous warning to the capital city’s government and political community.”

  Then, just four days later, Jim Edgar announced that he would not run for a third term as governor or challenge Senator Carol Moseley Braun, whose time in Washington had been plagued by controversies. The Washington Post stated that the MSI verdict had “cast a cloud over his administration,” while the New York Times cited how the “immensely popular” governor had suffered “a bruising legislative defeat for his education financing reform package” months earlier from Senate Republicans. In Springfield, most Republicans were privately ecstatic because the “cool and aloof” Edgar had endorsed Secretary of State George Ryan, a former House Speaker, as his designated successor. “Ryan’s down-to-earth demeanor and willingness to deal and compromise,” the Chicago Tribune reported, promised to make him a far more effective governor than the standoffish Edgar.

  Even before the MSI verdicts, Mike Lawrence, Edgar’s former press secretary and a longtime Illinois newsman, had been preparing a proposal for the Joyce Foundation’s Larry Hansen to extend the campaign finance reform effort that retired U.S. senator Paul Simon had cochaired six months earlier. Far more influential than his press secretary title might suggest, Lawrence had left the Edgar administration in midsummer to join Simon at Southern Illinois University’s Public Policy Institute. The MSI prosecution had begun with a letter to Lawrence from an anonymous whistleblower, and Simon’s earlier task force had “highlighted anew the question of whether law-making in Illinois is for sale.” Lawrence had already enlisted the
support of the League of Women Voters and the newly rejuvenated Illinois chapter of Common Cause, which had named canny, high-energy radio newsman Jim Howard as its new executive director just months earlier.

  Lawrence said the new effort would “work with representatives of the governor’s office and all four legislative caucuses to . . . help them find common ground” on reform proposals. All five chiefs of staff had agreed to cooperate with the bipartisan Simon-Lawrence duo, and the legislative chiefs pledged to “identify lawmakers who are sincerely interested in reform and enjoy the confidence of their caucus leadership.” But Lawrence told Joyce that although “many officeholders and their staffs perceive they must do something to avoid even more animosity toward incumbents” from voters, “legislative leaders are not excited about curbing their ability to fund the campaigns of their members because . . . vital re-election support helps keep their members in line.” But with the MSI convictions highlighting “the relationship between state contracts and contributors,” Lawrence hoped to build a consensus among the four caucuses’ representatives plus “a commitment to pursue legislation embodying that consensus.” A few weeks later, even House Speaker Michael Madigan stated that “action should be taken to eliminate the gravy train in Springfield,” but campaign finance expert Kent Redfield said, “I just think the chances of something passing the legislature until after the 1998 election is zero.”43

  In late August, Barack spoke at Robeson High School in his district’s Englewood neighborhood and praised a restructuring intended to provide “focused, individual attention,” since “that’s what students need here.” He stressed that “we have to see concrete improvement in student achievement, not for the school, not for the principal and the teacher but for the students themselves. If they want to succeed in a global, technological society such as ours, they are going to have to be able to read, write and compute and understand the sciences at a higher level.” The Chicago Annenberg Challenge reached the midpoint of its five years in mid-1997, just as the board made its largest allocation of dollars to date. Notable was a grant of $750,000 to Bill Ayers’s close friend and UIC colleague Michael Klonsky’s Small Schools Network, which had requested only $270,000 and was also receiving $337,000 that the Joyce Foundation’s board had approved in late July. As CAC board chair, Barack met with CPS CEO Paul Vallas and school board president Gery Chico to discuss a possible “Public Education Fund” that could boost CAC’s efforts by generating additional matching funds, and Joyce allocated $771,000 to the Consortium on Chicago School Research, which was evaluating the impact of CAC’s grants.