Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  After Peter Fitzgerald’s withdrawal, comptroller Dan Hynes’s pollster Jef Pollock surveyed both Democratic primary and general election voters with mixed results. Hynes led the undeclared Maria Pappas 23–16 among Democrats, with Barack third at 13 percent, but in a general election matchup, Jim Edgar topped Hynes 49–34 and all other Democrats by even more. “We felt good” in terms of the Democratic contest, Hynes’s communications director Chris Mather recalled, but in the Chicago Sun-Times, Steve Neal wrote that if Edgar accepted Republicans’ efforts to draft him, Hynes looked like Democrats’ strongest candidate to oppose him.

  Blair Hull and his top two consultants, Rick Ridder and Anita Dunn, had had campaign manager Mike Henry in place as 2003 began, but emphasized that candidate training was necessary for the publicly inexperienced millionaire. Given Hull’s willingness to fund a top-drawer campaign, “he had the best coaches money could buy,” pollster Mark Blumenthal explained, and communications director Mo Elleithee agreed to come on board after “they threw money at me.” Blumenthal found Hull “charmingly naive” about what a U.S. Senate candidacy entailed, and Dunn took the lead in doing on-camera training with Hull while Elleithee struggled to do issues Q&A prep. “Mike Henry ran a great operation,” Elleithee remembered, but Hull had difficulty articulating why he was running: “there was no core as to why he wanted to do this.” Barack made a similar comment when the suburban Daily Herald asked him to comment on Hull’s candidacy. “I think just by dint of money, he’s going to be an important factor in the campaign,” but “I think all of us are going to be waiting to see what kinds of proposals he makes and what his vision is for the United States Senate seat.”

  Hull’s spare-no-expense campaign also went overboard on the least publicly discussed aspect of most competitive races: opposition research. Ridder and Dunn engaged Andrew Kennedy’s Kennedy Communications to prepare a stunningly thorough research report on Barack, a twenty-five-chapter document totaling several hundred pages that plumbed every knowable corner of Barack’s life. Extensive on-the-ground research in Illinois—in-person examination of Chicago and Cook County property, election, and court records, as well as state Senate voting and office expense records in Springfield—was combined with a comprehensive review of online databases and Internet searches plus a criminal records check with the Illinois State Police. An introductory “Executive Summary” included “Top Obama Vulnerabilities,” and while many of the twenty-three substantive chapters were topical—Abortion, Education, Guns, Health Care, Taxes, etc.—others reviewed Dreams From My Father, “Personal and Court Records,” and “Personal Finances.”

  The Executive Summary, which showed a misunderstanding of the meaning of “present” votes in the state Senate, characterized Barack as “a timid politician often afraid to take a stand on the tough issues,” such as failing to vote no on more than half a dozen antiabortion bills. The Campaign Finance chapter noted that in his congressional race, Barack had received at least $6,000 from Tony Rezko and his associates, and the distillation of Dreams highlighted that “Obama attended Socialist conferences” in New York. Police records showed that “Obama has been cited for multiple moving violations,” but to readers like Ridder and Dunn the almost $19,000 report failed to unearth any notable dirt or powerful political ammunition. Yet pages 3 and 4 of Chapter 19—“Perks, Pay Raises and Office Expenses”—unknowingly contained political dynamite. Senate payroll records showed that “Obama has had several staffers over the years.” Anyone close to Barack would recognize Cynthia Miller, Will Burns, and Jennifer Mason’s names, but the report also showed that from August 1998 onward, the Senate Democratic caucus had been paying the nonexistent “William Higgins,” a supposed Obama staffer, monthly salaries that by February 2003 totaled $48,950. Had anyone in Hull’s campaign realized that one of the four payroll recipients was fictional, Barack’s political career—through no fault of his own—might have been over as fast as a Chicago newspaper could print the phrase “ghost employee.”17

  In Springfield, House passage of Barack’s racial profiling and videotaped-interrogations bills sent both measures to the governor’s desk. A Chicago Tribune editorial declared that “credit goes to Sen. Barack Obama, who spent months working with every interested constituency and making changes to accommodate their most credible concerns,” and a previously hesitant Rod Blagojevich embraced the videotape legislation. “Senator Obama, that was fine work,” the Tribune declared. “Take a bow.”

  A parent-teacher conference about five-year-old Malia had Barack and Michelle at the U of C’s Lab School early one Friday morning, just a few hours before news spread that former governor Jim Edgar would not run for Peter Fitzgerald’s Senate seat. Several considerations led to Edgar’s decision. “In Illinois, the governorship is much more important than the U.S. Senate seat,” and “after you’ve been a governor, it’s really hard to be a senator,” Edgar explained. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be one of a hundred in a debating society” and wondered “would I get bored?” But, just as Peter Fitzgerald had, he saw as his likely opponent the “very articulate, very bright” Barack Obama. “I was always very impressed with him” when they had interacted in prior years, and “I didn’t necessarily want to lock horns with Obama. I probably gave Obama more credit that he might be able to emerge as the nominee than most people did at that point in the process” because “I thought he’d appeal to the suburbs” in addition to drawing African American support. With both the incumbent and the heavily favored, widely popular former governor declining to run, Republicans worried about their chances of holding the seat as speculation turned to Elgin state senator Steve Rauschenberger and little-known businessman Andrew McKenna Jr.

  Barack mulled the news about Edgar during a Saturday photo shoot intended to get pictures of him in a variety of settings for later use in direct-mail flyers. “Barack should plan on having a few changes of clothes,” consultant Terry Walsh had recommended, and the long day started with family scenes at East View before moving to Marty Nesbitt’s Kenwood home to visit with a group of senior citizens. As the day progressed, Barack stopped at an East 71st Street barbershop, a hospital, and Kennedy-King College. Several days later, African American communications consultant Pam Smith pulled together ten or so black public relations professionals at Jim Reynolds’s Loop Capital Markets office so that Dan Shomon, John Kupper, and Pete Giangreco could hear their advice about how the campaign should present Barack to African American voters. “Integrity of politicians—address head-on. Why he is running > make clear,” Kupper jotted down. Challenges were flagged immediately: “Harvard as a barrier to people. Name: This is what it means; proud of it: okay for A-A audiences. Don’t treat it like a liability . . . mixed race/Harvard educated . . . Needs someone recognized as ‘street.’ Need to know who he is. Address Harvard education as proud of it, worked for it. More than Harvard grad > was an organizer/community activist.” Then Kupper wrote down a phrase someone had mentioned to Pete Giangreco, a phrase that subsequently would resonate far beyond Jim Reynolds’s conference room. “It’s Time to Believe Again > in what? Don’t tell us what to believe . . . Politics of Hope. A Chance to Believe Again.”18

  In Springfield, Barack spoke for a House bill that would limit gun purchasers to a maximum of one per month. On Chicago’s South Side, “the proliferation of handguns often used by gang members and other criminals is wreaking devastation throughout the community,” and “what we are targeting is the straw purchaser who is” fueling “the kinds of violence that we’re seeing devastate communities.” The bill failed badly, with only twenty-two Democrats—and no Republicans—joining Barack in voting for the restriction.

  The next weekend Barack held a press conference and spoke at a West Side Teamsters local before meeting at a coffee shop with Jim Cauley, a thirty-seven-year-old Kentuckian whom Pete Giangreco, Terry Walsh, and David Axelrod hoped to lure to Chicago as Obama for Illinois’s new campaign manager. Pete and Terry had worked on a 2001 Jersey City mayoral
race Cauley had managed, and Axelrod and Kupper’s other two partners, David Plouffe and John Del Cecato, as well as Nate Tamarin, had all previously been colleagues of Cauley at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. By 2003 Cauley was chief of staff to Maryland congressman C. A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger and was interested in managing a large statewide race.

  But when Axelrod first cold-called him, Cauley “blew him off,” because he had never heard of Barack and had never visited Chicago. Then former Axelrod partner Tom Lindenfeld upbraided Cauley, so he looked at ObamaForIllinois.com, designed by Shomon’s friend Bryan Siverly, and found it “less than stellar.” But Axelrod called again, as did Pete and Terry, so Jimmy agreed to fly to Chicago to meet Barack, figuring it was a free chance to see the city. By then “I’d already done a lot of research,” and “my concerns were whether Obama had the money for a campaign and his name. I didn’t think he could win” because “if he didn’t get on TV, there’s no race.” When Cauley and Barack met, Jimmy immediately voiced his doubts. “Your campaign looks like a state Senate race on steroids,” he bluntly told Barack. “If you’re going to run a traditional African American race and be poor, I’ve got no time for that.” Barack responded that by June 30, he would have raised at least $1 million, a goal that had just become eminently more reachable when word arrived that late on Friday May 9, Blair Hull’s campaign had notified the Federal Election Commission that Hull’s self-funding had broken through the second trigger provision in the millionaires’ amendment, allowing his primary opponents to accept up to $12,000 apiece from individual donors. Chicago newspapers had failed to report that news, but as their conversation stretched past the one-hour mark, Cauley found Barack “so impressive” and “extremely intelligent” that by the time Barack offered him the job, Jimmy had all but changed his mind. They haggled some over what Cauley’s monthly salary would be, but he told Barack, “I’m inclined to do this. I’ll let you know in the morning.” Pete Giangreco picked Cauley up and was overjoyed that Jimmy and Barack had each been impressed with the other. On Monday morning, Cauley formally accepted. “I knew if we put a black in the United States Senate that I was a made man for life,” and he told Barack he would arrive in Chicago right after July 4.19

  A Daily Southtown poll found 38 percent of statewide Democratic respondents unsure which U.S. Senate candidate they would support, with Dan Hynes drawing 19 percent support, Maria Pappas 17, and Barack 12. Two Teamster Joint Councils, comprised of dozens of union locals, announced their support for Hynes, while bad news continued for Gery Chico as more lawyers left Altheimer & Gray. The Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn devoted a column to young Republican Senate hopeful Jack Ryan, a 1985 Harvard Law School graduate who had spent fifteen years at Goldman Sachs before exploring a political career. Seeking to bolster his résumé, Ryan had been hired by Barack’s friend Tim King as a teacher at all-black Hales Franciscan High School, and some conservative activists saw Ryan as “the Illinois Republican Party’s incarnation of a young Jack Kennedy.” Zorn directly compared Ryan and Barack, writing that both have “impressive community service records and huge political futures.”

  As the spring session moved into its final eight days, Barack applauded Blagojevich’s announcement that he would veto any bill expanding gambling in Illinois. Many legislative Democrats saw increased gaming as a fertile source of much-needed state revenue, but Barack wanted “to take away some of the corporate tax breaks that exist right now,” which would “close the budget gap fairly easily.” For Barack, gaming was not about revenue, because “I think that the moral and social cost of gambling, particularly in low income communities, could be devastating” if Illinois made gaming devices available in “every tavern and bar across the state.”

  That same day, Emil Jones Jr. told a private Senate Democratic Caucus something that had already led to statehouse whispers: FBI agents under the direction of Springfield-based assistant U.S. attorney Joseph Hartzler, best known for having sent Oklahoma City terror bomber Timothy McVeigh to the electric chair, were investigating whether Senate Democratic staffers had performed partisan campaign work on state time in 2002. Similar allegations a year earlier had led House minority leader Lee Daniels to step down as chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, and since then the investigation had expanded to House Democrats as well. As Rich Miller soon detailed in Capital Fax, early in the 2002 election cycle several now-departed Senate staff members, including Ron Stradt, one of two attorneys assigned to the Judiciary Committee, had been “uncomfortable” with work assignments they received, particularly concerning candidates’ ballot petitions. “Morale on the Senate Democratic staff has been abysmal for months,” Miller reported, and several months earlier Rob Scott, who handled the committee’s criminal legislation and dealt extensively with Barack, had also taken a new job. “The level of griping for Senate Dem workers this spring has exceeded just about anything I’ve ever experienced,” Miller wrote, and federal subpoenas seeking Democratic staffers’ time sheets and e-mails reaching back to 1998 were just one factor.

  “When the FBI came knocking on my door” to ask about “campaigning being done on state time,” one staffer who had witnessed “all the illegal shit they were doing related to campaigns” was not surprised. “You’re breaking the fucking law,” he had warned more than one superior a year earlier, and as FBI agents fanned out across Springfield, “multiple people met with the feds.” Senate Democratic staffers all received a three-page memo stating that “any and all records reflecting or referring to your review of candidate petitions at any state work site” should be given to their supervisor, not destroyed or deleted. But at least one witness said “they came in and wiped everybody’s computers.” Years later, the story was that some departing staffer had maliciously deleted a huge amount of caucus files, but as FBI agents continued gathering information, their questions shifted to evidence of quid pro quo lawmaking.

  Emil Jones casually alerted his members to the probe. “It was almost like ‘Oh, by the way,’” one unnamed Democrat said, but the next day, Blagojevich infuriated Jones by heartily endorsing the federal inquiry. “This is part and parcel of investigations that are ongoing here because of a process that has been engulfed in corruption and cynicism for a long, long time,” Blagojevich declared. Legislators’ feelings about the governor had become increasingly negative as the spring session had progressed, and Capitol Fax’s Miller wrote that “the governor has ignored many of his professional responsibilities.” Blagojevich met with the Four Tops only twice all spring, and “his duplicity” had been highlighted by his stealthy support for a controversial bill benefiting SBC Communications, one Barack and only three other Democrats had opposed.20

  Dan Hynes’s Senate prospects appeared threatened when millionaire Madison County trial lawyer John Simmons announced he was entering the race. “I am planning to put a lot of money in it,” Simmons told the Chicago Sun-Times, and the possibility that Simmons might run strongly with downstate white voters “could dramatically reshape the contest,” the Sun-Times observed. Obama for Illinois’s slightly retitled Obama Weekly Report all but welcomed the news, saying Simmons’s entry “threatens the chances of Dan Hynes and Blair Hull.”

  Barack accompanied Michelle to a Friday-evening memorial service for her uncle Steve Shields’s wife Libby Brewer, who had died at age fifty of cervical cancer, then the next day attended Operation PUSH’s weekly Saturday rally. On Sunday, May 25, Rod Blagojevich signed Barack’s ephedra-ban bill into law, with Barack telling the Sun-Times that “we caught the industry off-guard because we mobilized quickly” thanks to the late Sean Riggins’s parents, Kevin and Debbie. Barack also delivered the commencement address at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, uttering many well-worn lines. “There are an awful lot of unhappy lawyers out there,” he warned, often because “the only thing that they were concerned about was making it for themselves.” An attempt at humor about someone telling him “you seem like a relatively ethical person, for a lawyer,”
elicited no laughter, but Barack also said that “we need a more equitable way of funding public education in this state.”

  On Memorial Day, Barack marched in a number of parades before heading back to Springfield for the spring session’s final five days. A House bill loosening Temporary Assistance to Needy Families’ “family cap” gave Barack an opportunity to praise the bill he helped craft six years earlier as “one of the most effective, least punitive welfare reform policies in the country” while acknowledging that “everything that was said with respect to the value of work over welfare is absolutely correct.” On Thursday, May 29, the Senate’s agenda included HB 2221, which two months earlier Capitol Fax had labeled “a potential nightmare for Democrats” because it addressed an ongoing battle over the organizing of home care workers between SEIU, the service employees union, and AFSCME, the two most powerful pillars on the party’s progressive wing. Blagojevich had already sided with SEIU, and Barack on April 9 had signed on as an alternate chief cosponsor of the bill, which would codify SEIU’s right to organize the workers in question.

  On the floor, Barack did not speak before it easily passed, 51–2–5, handing AFSCME a painful defeat. Waiting just off the floor was Barack’s old friend Keith Kelleher, who had devoted years to building SEIU Local 880 into a potent force for poorly paid home care workers. But AFSCME, which represented most state employees, did not want to surrender jurisdiction over so sizable a workforce, and AFSCME Council 31’s deputy director, Roberta Lynch, who two decades earlier had been the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC)’s first staffer, was notoriously feisty for not forgetting or forgiving disloyal politicians.