Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Veto session in Springfield began contentiously with the status of Illinois’s payday loan draft regulations directly confronting JCAR. Barack told his colleagues, as well as an unusual crowd of onlookers, that it was “a difficult issue and a controversial one,” and he commended the Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) for having done “an admirable job on this.” But Barack added that JCAR unanimously believed “we need to make a few further refinements on these rules,” because even though “there is a need to institute some significant regulation in this area” in order to curb “the worst abuses,” the Illinois Small Loan Association (ISLA) had demonstrated that “some of these provisions will pose an unreasonable economic burden on small lenders,” of which Illinois had more than twelve hundred. Barack told reporters, “I’m optimistic that we’re going to end up with some rules that will allow these payday loan companies to operate profitably but at the same time curb the egregious abuses that we’ve been seeing in some neighborhoods.” ISLA executive director Steve Brubaker rhetorically asked, “why should a customer of a payday loan business be told by the government how much they can and cannot borrow?” but Barack’s Republican Senate JCAR colleague Doris Karpiel explained why the legislators were disagreeing with DFI: “We thought they were going too far, and the industry was upset.” In traditional Springfield fashion, JCAR exercised its maximum authority and imposed a six-month delay before DFI’s new rules could take effect.

  Barack finally won Senate passage of a bill extending the life of tax abatement “enterprise zones” by ten years, an effort that had been narrowly defeated eighteen months earlier. This time, Barack had recruited influential Republican senators Frank Watson and Carl Hawkinson as chief cosponsors, and the measure passed handily, with George Ryan signing it into law early in the new year. More consequentially, on the final day of the session, word spread that Barack’s young Senate colleague Lisa Madigan had her eyes on a statewide 2002 race, probably attorney general. During a brief conversation earlier in the session, Barack had heard from House Speaker—and state Democratic Party chairman—Mike Madigan that someone other than Barack was envisioned as the Democratic nominee for attorney general.

  In early December, Barack was again on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight as the battle over Florida’s recounting of disputed ballots intensified with a 4–3 state supreme court decision ordering a partial recount. “I was surprised,” Barack exclaimed. “I think the Florida state supreme court did the right thing,” but the incomplete approach to the recount “makes them a little more vulnerable potentially under Supreme Court review.” When a fellow guest observed that “whoever wins this victory is going to be tainted,” Barack added, “I think that’s true,” and several evenings later the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the state court’s action, resolving the presidential election in favor of Republican George W. Bush.32

  Before flying to Honolulu with Michelle and Malia for their annual visit with Toot and Maya, Barack began an effort that would over the following three years bear him very rich fruit. Loop Capital founder Jim Reynolds, who had worked as diligently as anyone at soliciting donations for Barack’s congressional race, was about to become president of the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs (ABLE), a low-visibility, thirty-odd-member roundtable of black financial professionals. Barack’s sister-in-law Janis Robinson had been ABLE’s part-time executive director for several years before taking a job at the U of C’s business school, and Barack already knew some members like John Rogers Jr. and Robert Blackwell Jr. After the congressional defeat, Reynolds had begun taking Barack to ABLE’s monthly meetings so more members could get to know him. In part the gatherings were gripe sessions, with the energetic business leaders discussing “what the new Black entrepreneur was really up against,” publisher Hermene Hartman recalled.

  Barack “was usually quiet and more observant than talkative,” Hartman said, but “we asked Barack to help us identify business opportunities with the state.” Bond attorney Stephen Pugh remembered that Barack “wanted to understand what our needs were,” and Barack recalled them in particular telling him that “we are not getting any business from our own state” pension funds regarding asset management as well as equity and fixed-income trading. Barack told Reynolds to reach out to House Speaker Michael Madigan, and both Madigan and Emil Jones Jr. recognized these financial services leaders as potentially valuable new campaign supporters. Shortly before Christmas, Barack accompanied John Rogers and several other ABLE members to an initial meeting with representatives of the Teachers’ Retirement System, one of Illinois’s three huge public pension investment entities.

  Barack also remained highly concerned about his own finances. By the end of 2000, his congressional race debt had been reduced to $23,803, plus the $9,500 that the campaign owed him and Michelle, and Barack told the Hyde Park Herald that asking for contributions was “the least attractive part of being an elected official.” With a second child on the way, Barack’s modest state Senate and law school salaries, plus Michelle’s from the U of C, did not make for an easy life, especially since his Miner Barnhill income had dried up entirely during his congressional race. Child care costs topped $1,500 a month, and payments on their student loans were higher than their monthly mortgage tab. Old friend John Schmidt, who was now planning a 2002 gubernatorial bid, tried without success to get Barack some foundation work, but a far better opportunity presented itself thanks to Robert Blackwell Jr., the young ABLE member and IBM veteran who was CEO of Electronic Knowledge Interchange Inc. (EKI), a management and technology consulting firm.

  Blackwell offered Barack an $8,000-a-month retainer to serve as EKI’s general counsel, reviewing contracts and offering input on “general business strategy.” The handsome monthly fee would pass through Miner Barnhill rather than be paid directly to Barack, though Barack often went to EKI’s office at 100 South Wacker Drive. Barack was “one of the three smartest people I have ever met,” Blackwell recalled, someone who prefers “peaceful relationships” and “nonconfrontational people” while being “hard on the inside and soft on the outside.” Raja Krishnamoorthi, a new Harvard Law School graduate who had worked on former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, had first met Barack some months earlier and that winter began visiting him at Miner Barnhill. Raja asked Barack why he was now working so hard, and Barack’s reply summed up his life as 2000 ended: “I have a lot of bills to pay down.”33

  Before the spring 2001 legislative session got started, the U of C Law School’s winter quarter began, with Barack teaching Voting Rights for the first time since 1999. Meeting on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, the course drew only a dozen students, and Barack asked them to read the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore before the first class. Each student had to write a long paper, and Barack told them the first day that “no one’s getting an A from me whose paper doesn’t argue for a new idea . . . your theory, and you argue it,” he explained. “You have to have an original idea to get an A.” Three 2Ls remembered it as “a really great class” and recalled Barack as a “terrific” professor who “wanted to hear what people thought” and was “so interested and open to competing viewpoints.” Nat Edmonds recalled Barack “pushing me, testing me on my ideas and my logic and my arguments,” and Kristen Seeger found it “a really rewarding classroom experience.” In addition, Barack “always took the time to chat after class,” and “you could not miss how much he loved his wife” and family. When another 2L asked Barack to participate in a faculty-hosted weekly law-related film series, Barack agreed and chose The Verdict, a 1982 movie starring Paul Newman. “What I like about this movie is that it’s about redemption,” Barack explained.

  In Springfield, a number of issues regarding JCAR required more of Barack’s time than usual. He objected to a proposed new rule regarding high-risk loans because it would be “unduly burdensome” to lenders, and he queried whether not enough job-training funds were being spent on actual skills training for t
he unemployed. JCAR also intervened in a long-running dispute between the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) and U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman, who three years earlier, in response to a 1992 lawsuit filed by Chicago special education advocates against the state, had ordered major reforms in how Illinois certified special education teachers. “ISBE continues to deny the undeniable and defend the undefendable,” an angry Gettleman had held in 1998, and in 2000 “ISBE’s failure to fulfill its responsibilities to ensure that children with disabilities are educated in the least restrictive environment” led Gettleman to order that the board override its normal rule-making process to institute new certification standards. ISBE complied while protesting that it lacked the authority to do so, and now JCAR moved to suspend the new rules, placing the committee in direct confrontation with Judge Gettleman.

  On January 10, Barack seconded Emil Jones’s nomination for Senate president, a pro forma proceeding given Republicans’ unchanged thirty-two-seat majority. Barack told his colleagues that “the reason we’re down here” is “to try to make the lives of our constituents, our children, our grandchildren, our parents and grandparents a little bit better.” Then, a few moments later, Jones upended the Senate without any forewarning by announcing Senator Lou Viverito as one of his five assistant minority leaders in place of an astonished—and now deposed—Jimmy DeLeo. Only insiders fully appreciated the drama and intrigue because DeLeo, along with his close ally John Cullerton and Barack’s poker buddy Denny Jacobs, had never been an enthusiastic supporter of Jones as the Senate Democrats’ leader. Only Capitol Fax publicized the contretemps, but Jones’s unexpected move, like JCAR’s confrontation with Gettleman, would roil the statehouse once the spring session picked up steam in late March.34

  In Chicago, Barack appeared again on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, objecting to President Bush’s selection of conservative former Missouri senator John Ashcroft as attorney general. Barack noted that Ashcroft’s record revealed a bevy of politically questionable associations, including his acceptance of an honorary degree from racially “offensive” Bob Jones University. Barack said he could not imagine former President Clinton nominating someone who had “received an honorary award from the Nation of Islam.” The next day Barack joined his law school colleague Dennis Hutchinson on WBEZ Radio’s Odyssey program for a long discussion of the Supreme Court’s record on civil rights. Barack explained that “Brown v. Board of Education may be one of those rare circumstances where the court is willing to get slightly beyond conventional opinion,” but he added that “very little” actual school desegregation took place over the next decade. During the 1960s, “you’ve got a cultural transformation that changes how states operate and how states think about the protection of individual rights in ways that didn’t exist prior to the Warren Court, and I think that is an important legacy to keep in mind.”

  Where the court helped African American petitioners, Barack said, “was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order, and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society, and to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way.” The Constitution “doesn’t say what the federal government or the state governments must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted, and I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.” Barack stressed that “I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts,” but “organizing’s hard. Litigation is hard, but organizing’s harder. Part of it is just that it’s difficult to mobilize change at the local level.”

  Aiming to mobilize some tangible financial change, in mid-January, Barack, House Speaker Mike Madigan, Jim Reynolds, and three other black financial executives met with the members and staff of the Illinois State Board of Investment (ISBI), the largest of the state’s three major pension investment bodies. The four business leaders had a detailed, written request for ISBI, and the presence of Madigan and Barack demonstrated that Illinois Democrats, black and white, were behind the firms’ proposal. Barack later recalled that all he did by way of introduction was say, “Listen to what these folks have to say,” and the executives had four specific demands: “1. Immediately require that all current ISBI money managers do 15 percent of their brokerage business . . . with African-American owned broker/dealers.” “2. Allocate 15 percent of total ISBI assets to African-American owned investment management firms,” which would represent $1.4 billion of ISBI’s overall assets of $9.3 billion. ISBI at present had only $107 million, representing 1.2 percent of its assets, invested with one single African American–owned firm. “3. . . . place no less than 50 percent” of those two allocations with Illinois-based firms. “4. Accomplish the above three requests in a 90–120 day timeframe.”

  As one ISBI staff member noted, the black finance professionals “argued that since the Fund has many African-American beneficiaries, the make up of the fund should be similar to the make up of the beneficiaries.” The board members agreed to appoint a committee to “recommend a policy regarding minority investment managers and broker/dealers,” and “the guests thanked the Board for their time.” Several weeks later, Madigan alone appeared before the Investment Committee of the Teachers’ Retirement System to support a similar request to that pension fund.35

  As spring session geared up, Barack had in hand, thanks to Dan Shomon, Andrew Gruber, and other Obama Issues Committee volunteers, a pair of well-drafted bills that would require state officials to monitor Illinois employers’ compliance with the federal WARN—Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification—Act. One furniture company had recently laid off more than a hundred workers without providing the sixty days notice required by federal law, and a joint press conference with 4th Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle announcing the legislation drew coverage in all three of Chicago’s major daily newspapers. Barack also had a trio of gun-control bills aimed at depriving anyone with a record of domestic violence allegations from possessing a firearm, and by early February, Barack had introduced ten bills. In tandem with Emil Jones, Barack also championed a Senate bill banning seventeen types of high-powered firearms, limiting handgun purchases to one per month, and providing for handgun registration. “It’s hard to find a rationale as to why anyone would want an AK-47 or need more than twelve handguns a year, unless the intent was to distribute,” Barack told reporters.

  On the political horizon, Barack told the Chicago Sun-Times, “I don’t think Mayor Daley could be defeated any time soon,” even though “African Americans constitute the single largest voting bloc in the city.” Steve Neal kept an eye on the Democrats who might run for attorney general in 2002. Obama “has stronger credentials than anyone else in the field,” Neal wrote, and though “he has discussed running . . . he may not want to give up his legislative seat for another race that he might not win.” Less than two weeks later, Speaker Madigan’s daughter Lisa began asking Senate colleagues to support her bid for the office, and with his own possibilities now clearly on hold, Barack devoted much of one mid-February Friday to the longest interview he had ever given.

  Julieanna Richardson was a 1980 Harvard Law School graduate who had worked in cable television before deciding in early 2000 to launch a video-interviewing project to record the life experiences of successful African Americans. A year later, The HistoryMakers was still
a nascent operation, but Richardson already had filmed interviews with Emil Jones, Alice Palmer, and Bobby Rush, among many others, so an up-and-coming state senator was well within her purview. Richardson began with some formulaic personal questions—favorite vacation spot? “Bali,” of course, and Barack volunteered that lately he had been tired and sleepy.

  He retraced his childhood upbringing and travels, exaggerating his high school misbehavior and his political activism at Oxy and Columbia. He spoke movingly about his work in Roseland before discussing his years at Harvard, his leadership of Project VOTE!, and his frustration with the state Senate. Barack decried the absence of “thoughtful independent voting” and the extent of partisan “jockeying and gamesmanship” by legislative leaders. He also spoke critically about Chicago’s African American community. “We don’t have a well-defined agenda in terms of what are the issues that we might move forward,” and he rued that “we have a personality-driven politics as opposed to an agenda-driven politics. . . . When you look at those groups that are able to accomplish significant things through the political process, it’s not because of the charisma of any particular leader, but it’s because they have a clear agenda. Certainly that’s how the business community operates. They are dogged in pursuit of a particular agenda,” which in Springfield often worked to the disadvantage of underrepresented populations because “state government has much more influence on the day-to-day lives of people than the federal government does.”

  Again echoing John McKnight, Barack stated that African Americans “have to focus on how do we become productive as a community and not just consumers.” Finally, Richardson asked Barack about his own legacy and formative influences. “I would like to, first of all, be able to say that I was a good husband and a good father along with being a good elected official.” He believed “my career is still largely ahead of me as opposed to behind me,” and he intriguingly stated that “most of my influences probably are not so much people that I knew personally as people whose words I’ve internalized.”36