Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  A more surprising call came from someone Barack had never met, but who had recognized his name in press reports, Hawaiian congressman Neil Abercrombie, who forty years earlier had been Obama Sr.’s good friend. Barack responded warmly, but, just as with Barack Echols a few years earlier, he brushed aside Abercrombie’s offer to tell him more about his father. “He didn’t want to pursue it,” Abercrombie explained, and even after they met each other years later, “we’ve never explored it, not even a little bit.” Barack more enthusiastically embraced a letter from former senator Paul Simon, who observed that the outcome was “not a great surprise” but also “shows clearly that you have an ability to reach out to the white community.” Simon said, “you should plan to run for state-wide office” rather than Congress, unless Rush stepped down, and added, “I would like to be of help to you if you run for state-wide office.”23

  Around Chicago, other supporters like Simon’s old friend Ab Mikva knew Barack was “very dejected.” Marty Nesbitt, the third member of Barack’s finance committee troika alongside Judy Byrd and Jim Reynolds, realized that he “was disappointed that he’d let so many people around him down.” On Wednesday, March 29, one week after his loss, Barack returned to Springfield. Former Senate chief of staff Mike Hoffmann happened by his office and Barack’s “not his usual upbeat self.” He was “really frustrated,” and disconsolately told Hoffmann, “My wife won’t let me run again.” He could stay in the state Senate, and perhaps aspire to become president if the Democrats won back the majority, or he could leave and “make a lot of money,” Hoffmann recounted. “He thought his political career was over.”

  Kim Lightford encountered Barack on the Senate floor. “I got my butt whipped from Bobby, but I whupped Donne,” he told her. Trotter’s abysmal performance gave Kim a new put-down to use when presiding at Black Caucus meetings. “Whenever he ended up being a smart mouth in caucuses from there on out, I’ll go, ‘Mr. 7 Percent,’” Lightford recalled. “The 7 percent man.” Emil Jones Jr.’s view was similar to Mayor Daley’s. Barack “ran a damned good race,” and “it was a good loss for him,” because “he learned a heck of a lot.” But Jones also realized that the election “hardened the feeling between he and Trotter because he got more than Trotter did in Trotter’s senatorial district.” That “just added fuel” to “all this hostility between Rickey and Donne Trotter and Barack that existed.”

  That evening, the regular poker players gathered at Terry Link’s house. Link had already spoken with Barack and immediately realized he was at “the lowest” Link had ever seen him. “I think he personally felt humiliated” and he was clearly “depressed. He thought it was the end of the world.” That evening no one mentioned the election so Barack took the initiative: “All right. I know you all want to say it. Don’t say it!” Everyone laughed and remarked almost in unison: “We told you so!” Recently appointed senator Ned Mitchell, who lived with Link but had just lost his own primary, was not a poker player but came down to the basement to visit “as long as I could stand the smoke.” Mitchell did not think Barack was a terribly good poker player, “simply because you could read his facial expressions,” but in addition to Barack’s “congenial, friendly” manner, he was struck that Barack was “really loyal to his family, and that impressed me about him, because you know you see things in Springfield” after dark.

  More openly with Kim Lightford than with anyone else, Barack “would talk about temptation in Springfield. And he would say, ‘No, no, no, I would never. Michelle would kick my butt. Not only would it not be worth it, but I would not want to have to deal with that.’” To one close acquaintance, Barack boasted about one long-ago conquest. “The only woman he ever talked about screwing was some really hot rich blond chick that he was still proud of.” The friend suspected Barack “may have been stretching the story a little bit,” although “he was really proud he’d banged some super-hot blonde from a super-rich family,” an exaggerated account of Alex McNear’s upbringing. Like others, Kim Lightford knew “you’d never see him out much in the evenings” in Springfield because Barack “was very selective about receptions that he went to, how long he was there.” Barack “comes and he stands in the doorway, and he glimpses the room, and he makes a decision where he wants to go,” Kim recounted. Barack would “work the room and get out,” telling Kim “‘it’s not worth it, going out and hanging out, and getting involved with other women.’ He says, ‘When I think about it, I just think about . . . how mad Michelle would be at me. I don’t want her jumping on me,’” because “‘I’m scared of her.’”

  Barack skipped the eighth and final Saguaro Seminar session and passed on taking part in reviewing the group’s final report. In Springfield the first week of April, Barack hosted five U of C law students, three of whom had volunteered on his congressional race. They had entered the winning bid—$600—for Barack’s item, a day in Springfield, in the law school’s new Chicago Law Foundation annual fund-raising auction. Joe Khan initiated the bid and found Barack “extremely gracious” during a day that included a committee meeting, a tour of the capitol, and lunch with Barack and Dan Shomon. Heather Sullivan, who had had two classes with Barack, recalled that “he just seemed kind of disengaged” in Springfield, because “it was clear that his ambitions were elsewhere.”

  On the Senate floor, Barack spoke in favor of a bill to expand free school breakfasts and lunches, saying it “should be a no-brainer” because “we’ve got hungry kids who are coming to school without enough food.” He also reminded his colleagues that “we have a burgeoning number of working poor in this state, who work every day but don’t have health insurance,” and a few moments later, he rose again to speak on behalf of a bill to provide state aid for the training of day care teachers. “There is a day care crunch all across the state,” Barack explained, one that he was personally familiar with because “I’ve got a two-year-old at home and know firsthand the expense and difficulties of child care.” When “there’s less turnover, the outcomes are better for the kids.” Both bills passed easily and were soon signed into law, but far bigger news, particularly for embattled governor George Ryan, was that Pate Philip finally allowed unanimous Senate passage of a compromise gun bill restoring the felony provision that had caused Barack such grief three months earlier.24

  In Chicago, Barack joined comedian Dick Gregory at a black women’s expo, telling the crowd that “we have a genuine criminal problem in our community. We need to have an agenda on how to rectify some of the things that force our youths to participate in this illegality.” A Hyde Park Herald reporter asked Barack what he intended to do next, and a lengthy conversation ensued. “Right now my plans are to finish this session and make sure that some priorities that we care about get passed out of the legislature and then to spend some time with my wife and child this summer. I don’t have any immediate political plans in the offing. . . . Obviously, after every election you end up needing some time to reflect on where you’ve been so you know where you’re going. Overall, we feel very positive about how the election turned out. I think we laid a terrific foundation for the future, and I think that for a first time out in a large scale, well-publicized race, I think people were favorably impressed. And so I think that options will present themselves as time goes on. I’m in no rush to make any immediate decisions about next steps.”

  Those comments reflected a significant emotional bounce-back from Barack’s state of mind just two weeks earlier, and he also was ready to fully reengage for the final week of an unusually brief spring session. “What I’m really pushing legislative leaders to look at is a proposal to institute a state Earned Income Tax Credit,” a “tax break for the working poor.” On April 11, the Four Tops and Governor Ryan reached a budget agreement that included creating a state EITC while also providing another $380 million split among the four caucuses for more “member initiative” pork-barrel projects. The next evening Barack appeared on Bruce DuMont’s Illinois Lawmakers TV show and said he was happy with the gun-bill
outcome but was concerned that Senate Republicans wanted to alter how Illinois disciplined correctional officers who were caught using drugs. Existing law gave prison employees “three strikes” before being fired; a bill being pushed by Pate Philip would reduce that to zero. Prison guards were AFSCME members, and Barack’s lobbyist friend Ray Harris had come to him to say that “Pate wants to do this drug testing on our members” and “I want to get it knocked out.” Barack reacted dubiously. “Ray, you want me to be against drug testing?” “Not on its merits,” Harris responded. “You’ve been doing this too long,” Barack replied.

  Barack reluctantly voted yes when the bill passed 45–3–10, since, as he told DuMont, three strikes “was too much.” House Democrats killed Philip’s measure, but Barack stressed to DuMont that creating an EITC “was something that I had pushed for since I first got down in Springfield.” Another of DuMont’s guests was Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller, and afterward, Barack joined Miller for a drink and told him how unhappy he was at Miller’s characterization of him in the Chicago Reader. But “he took that criticism the right way,” Miller later explained, when “he could have taken it the wrong way,” and in the aftermath of his defeat, Barack began to alter how he went about some statehouse interactions.

  On the session’s final day, only fiscally conservative Republican Chris Lauzen joined Barack in voting against a $6 billion bond authorization bill that senators approved 56–2, with more than a quarter of the funding targeted for state prisons. “We have a tremendous strain on our prison system, partly because of the laws that we pass in this legislature, and we need to build more facilities to house the inmates that we’re throwing in,” Barack said. Senators should “examine how it is that we’re spending such a huge proportion of our budget on corrections,” because “we are getting close to the point we are actually spending more money on corrections every year than we are in terms of new school construction, and I think that’s something that we need to take note of.”

  As careful observer Kent Redfield commented, the end-of-session budget negotiations highlighted how “the rank-and-file members of the legislature were largely irrelevant to the process.” Barack won a modest 5 percent EITC provision, which meant some 750,000 low-income families earning under $30,000 a year would receive an average credit of $55 at an annual cost to the state of $35 million. It had won approval only because Emil Jones forcefully pushed for its inclusion in a Christmas tree budget made possible by the state’s strong economy. Barack told the Hyde Park Herald he was “very disappointed” the credit was only 5 percent, and not the 20 percent he had sought, but he hoped to increase that percentage in future years. Barack’s only other spring session success was his bill requiring domestic violence training for state employees working with public aid recipients. As legislators left Springfield, eyes turned toward the upcoming general election. Senate Democrats had virtually no chance of erasing Pate Philip’s Republican majority, but in 2001, with new census figures, state redistricting might alter those prospects for 2002.25

  On April 15, the Obamas had to write a check to the IRS for nearly $17,500 to cover the balance of what they owed on their 1999 income of $181,000. Barack had again received board fees from Woods and Joyce on top of his Senate and UCLS salaries, but the congressional race had taken up so much time that he had earned no law firm income. A pair of Steve Neal columns in the Sun-Times heralded Barack’s future prospects, one headlined “Attorney General May Be Obama’s Calling.” The second described Barack as a possible mayoral candidate should Richard Daley step down, with Neal declaring that Barack’s congressional loss “hasn’t diminished his political stock.”

  But Barack still faced a daunting $60,000 debt from that race, and he turned his attention to reducing it as best he could. Former Democratic National Committee chairman David Wilhelm, who had started a Chicago political consulting firm two years earlier, hosted a “really desultory fund-raiser” on a humble ferry boat on Lake Michigan, with Dan Shomon feeling like “they were going to bring out a casket or something.” One attendee, Laura Russell Hunter, a former network news producer who had just moved to Chicago, met Barack and Dan for the first time, and Shomon eagerly recruited her as someone who could spread the word about Barack to other successful white professional women. Dollar-wise, Barack fared better with political colleagues than he had at the marina, receiving $1,000 apiece from the campaign committees of Democratic state senators Jimmy DeLeo and Lou Viverito, $500 each from Democrat Pat Welch and Republican Steve Rauschenberger, plus $1,000 each from lobbyist Al Ronan and Joyce Foundation board colleague Paula Wolff. African American lobbyists Frank Clark and John Hooker saw to it that Obama for Congress received $2,500 from Commonwealth Edison’s PAC, and by June Barack’s congressional debt had been reduced to $25,000 plus the still-outstanding $9,500 loan from the Obamas.

  In May Barack submitted the paperwork for a half dozen “member initiative” grants to the Chicago Park District totaling $1.1 million. Five of them were for improvements ranging from $50,000 to $200,000 at parks across the South Side; the largest by far, $590,000, would create a lovely new park on the north side of 79th Street, less than a block from Father Mike Pfleger’s St. Sabina church. Appearing on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight newscast with his Senate colleague Jimmy DeLeo to spar over state sponsorship of gaming, Barack said that “lower-income and working-class people who can least afford it” bought a disproportionate amount of lottery tickets. It was “troublesome” that Illinois “systematically targets what we know to be lower-income persons as a way of raising revenue” because that was not “the fairest way for us to raise revenue.” DeLeo noted that the state lottery contributed $515 million annually for education funding, and Barack leavened his criticism, saying, “I don’t want to come off as a scold, because as I mentioned, had I won on my ticket, I would not be here tonight.”

  But Barack had a more fundamental objection. “The lottery is part of a growing culture that (a) is money obsessed, two, defines success or happiness or even our fantasies are shaped around having lots of money. That’s not necessarily a healthy thing.” DeLeo stressed that gaming, unlike taxes, was entirely voluntary, and that many people supported riverboat gambling, which led Barack to note that the boats “wield tremendous influence down in Springfield that is probably disproportionate.” A few nights later, speaking at a panel discussion on criminal justice issues, Barack rued a political culture that tolerated “the police code of silence” and wrongful prosecutions yet “punished” elected officials who were “perceived as being soft on crime.” Again Barack had a more fundamental criticism: “poor folks generally get a raw deal in the criminal justice system,” although he also noted that “the only argument for the death penalty is vengeance, and that is a valid emotion.”26

  When the Chicago City Council passed a resolution asking the U.S. Congress to consider paying reparations for slavery to present-day African Americans, Barack appeared briefly on the CBS Evening News and firmly dismissed the possibility of that coming to fruition: “generally the Supreme Court has a philosophy that you have to identify a clear wrongdoer and a clear victim” in order to recover damages. In Illinois, almost everyone was astonished when Governor George Ryan, ostensibly a lifelong abortion opponent, vetoed a bill the Senate had passed 33–23–2, with Barack among the nos, ending Medicaid funding of abortions for poor women facing health risks. Ryan’s decision, just like his capital punishment moratorium and his unwavering gun-bill stance, left conservatives feeling “completely betrayed.”

  Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller, like Ryan a native of Kankakee, Illinois, was amazed that Ryan had “flip-flopped on so many long-held beliefs and campaign promises,” especially given “the reactionary environment he came from.” Kankakee was “one of the most close-minded, bigoted towns I’ve ever seen,” Miller explained. “It’s been segregated forever. I know educated Kankakeeans who regularly use the ‘N-word’ in everyday conversation.” Before becoming governor, Ryan had been “the quintessential Kan
kakee hack,” a “warm, genial man” who was “also one of the coldest, most calculating politicians.”

  Miller’s friend Steve Rhodes observed in Capitol Fax that Ryan had been so transformed that “our Republican governor is actually a Democrat.” In late June the governor called a one-day special session to ask the legislature to approve a six-month suspension of Illinois’s 5 percent gasoline tax in the run-up to the fall general election, given rising fuel prices. On the same morning the legislators gathered, Steve Neal published yet another column promoting Barack’s political future, again recommending him as the Democratic nominee for state attorney general in two years. Barack reluctantly voted in favor of Ryan’s supremely political gas-tax rollback, suggesting Illinois would be better served by not losing that revenue.

  The summer of 2000 was the most relaxing time Barack had had in more than a year. Michelle’s former Public Allies protégé Malik Nevels, now out of law school but still driving Barack’s former Saab, recruited him to join African American broadcaster Tavis Smiley at a Chicago Urban League conference aimed at encouraging one hundred African American teenagers to get “wired and tuned in.” In late June Barack attended his first Chicago Annenberg Challenge board meeting in six months. His departure as board chair a year earlier had coincided with the onset of the effort’s long-scheduled wind-down. By early 2000, CAC had only $4.5 million left to award after raising the full $59.8 million in required matching funds from Chicago-based foundations and receiving the entire $49.2 million commitment from the Annenberg Foundation.

  Only Barack and Pat Graham remained from CAC’s original board, and Barack’s four and a half years as chair had encompassed a dramatic reining-in of the program’s expectations. Initially envisioned as focusing its support on about a hundred schools, the forty-seven networks CAC funded instead included more than 210. “We could have done things more systematically,” executive director Ken Rolling confessed to Catalyst Chicago, which concluded that CAC “might have had more concrete results if they had invested more money in fewer projects.” One friendly critic said “it is extremely difficult to attribute any specific achievements or progress to the work of the Chicago Challenge,” and noted how “there was little contact between the Challenge and individual schools.” Three and a half million dollars was channeled to support research on the impact of the rest of CAC’s grants, a requirement that neither Barack nor Rolling welcomed. Graham repeatedly witnessed how some of the researchers “drove Barack absolutely berserk because they talked in educationese, without clarity,” but Pat came to think that “undoubtedly that research was the most lasting contribution of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.” Those researchers concluded that the CAC “provided too few resources and too little support to too many schools” and “had little impact on student outcomes,” which all along had been Barack’s insistent focus. Fred Hess, who along with Don Moore had the greatest impact on Chicago school reform throughout the two decades predating 2000, nonetheless believed at that time that “the quality of opportunity that kids are starting out with in Chicago today is significantly higher than it was fifteen years ago,” when Barack had first arrived in Roseland.