When Washington asked about capital punishment, Barack cited his videotaping bill and said, “the key thing we need at the federal level is to stop all executions,” because without a moratorium, “we are going to continue to have people who are on death row who are innocent.” When Washington shifted to more personal questions, she asked Barack about his “unusual name.” “It’s a name that I am very proud of, it’s the name that my father gave me, and one that I feel very blessed to have.” In a brief television appearance, Barack cited his “wonderfully productive career in the state Senate” and said that “early childhood education is the next big step that we need to take as a society.”25
In mid-July, Chicago’s newspapers gave prominent coverage to all of the Democratic candidates’ FEC filings. Most attention focused on Blair Hull, whose campaign had already spent $3.5 million and now employed thirty-three paid staffers. Dan Hynes’s fund-raising had slightly outpaced Barack’s, leaving Hynes with more than $1.5 million in hand, while Gery Chico’s second-quarter contributions badly lagged both Hynes and Barack. The millionaires’ amendment was providing their campaigns with a major boost, and a Sun-Times analysis showed that twenty-one donors had given Barack between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, while Hynes had twenty-nine such donors. Barack told the Hyde Park Herald that Hull had “squandered” his early millions, and a Chicago Defender news story stated that Barack “and his staff are looking confident and optimistic.”
One weekday evening, Barack spoke at the prominent law firm Jenner & Block’s annual “Diversity Dinner” for summer associates. Former Harvard Law Review colleague Bruce Spiva had invited him, and Bruce remembered that Barack gave a “very cerebral speech.” He tried to joke about how summer associates might meet their future spouses through the program, but the result was “dead silence.” The next day brought Barack yet another bevy of publicity as Governor Blagojevich signed a half dozen criminal justice reform bills, including Barack’s videotaping, racial profiling, and employment for ex-offenders measures. Barack told the Chicago Tribune that the “landmark” videotaping program “can be a very powerful tool to convict the guilty,” while a Chicago Defender story stated that “the three landmark bills are profoundly important to the community.” Hyde Park Herald reporter Todd Spivak wrote of Barack’s “hugely successful spring session,” but in the Defender Barack stressed that “this year we had the juice,” and “Emil Jones was the juice.”
On three Friday mornings in a row—July 11, 18, and 25—Barack met fund-raising dynamo Tony Rezko for 7:30 A.M. breakfasts. An entirely unexpected new candidate entered the Senate race on June 20 when Nancy Skinner, an articulate, white, thirty-eight-year-old progressive talk-radio host, jumped into the contest and was put on leave by WLS-AM. Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn gave Skinner a warm welcome to electoral politics, but much greater reaction ensued the next day when Blair Hull’s campaign announced that Bobby Rush had agreed to chair Hull’s effort. The campaign’s press release cited the millionaire’s and the former Black Panther’s “remarkably similar backgrounds” as a reason for Rush’s endorsement. “Rush will play an integral role in campaign strategy,” the release stated, but Rush quickly sought to rebut most observers’ suspicions by telling the Sun-Times that “there has not been a red cent—not one red cent—exchanged between Blair Hull and myself with regards to this campaign.” Asked for comment, Barack responded, “Why would I stir up something unnecessarily? You can draw your own conclusions,” before magnanimously telling the Hyde Park Herald that “I have great respect for Congressman Rush and look forward to his support in the general election.” A bit later, Barack said, “I was not surprised by Congressman Rush’s unwillingness to endorse me” while pointedly adding, “I am surprised at his endorsement of an individual who has no track record of community service” and “has never been involved in the political process.” In a column headlined “Bobby Rush a Sellout,” the Sun-Times’s Steve Neal declared that Rush “has exposed himself as a small-time hack and petty grudge-holder” while reminding readers that Rush’s 2002 support of Republican state treasurer Judy Baar Topinka had netted his wife Carolyn a job in Topinka’s office.26
Inside Hull’s campaign, lead consultant Rick Ridder critiqued their existing game plan and its downstate focus. The Chicago media market reached 73 percent of Illinois voters, while St. Louis accounted for just 7 percent, but the plan envisioned spending 20 percent of their advertising budget in that “Metro East” market and only 43 percent in Chicago. “Our winning scenario involves garnering a huge percentage of downstate votes, but it also requires being competitive in Chicago and running up pretty big numbers in the collar counties.” Yet Ridder appreciated that the campaign faced a more existential challenge. “In order for Blair to win, he must ride a wave of change. We have to define him as someone who will change Washington in ways that will benefit the average Illinois family. The advantages that Obama (black & progressive vote) and Hynes (state-wide & machine) have over us cannot be overcome simply by having a better run, better funded campaign.” They must “define Blair as someone who is ‘above’ politics, yet can get things done . . . in a way that sets him apart from all other politicians.”
Barack’s campaign consultants were likewise strategizing, and two successive meetings, first with AFSCME, then with SEIU, were held so that they could detail just how Barack could win the primary. At the July 22 AFSCME session, Barack intended to lead off with his “stump speech and overview,” but before he could, Roberta Lynch confronted him about his May “present” vote on SEIU’s HB 2221. Barack parried. “Maybe somebody hit my switch,” he claimed, and “Roberta lost it,” AFSCME’s Ray Harris remembered. “She goes insane,” and Barack “took it.” Then the meeting got back on track, with David Axelrod explaining “how we win with a name like Barack Obama.” Pete Giangreco addressed “targeting—how we get to 35 percent.” Newly arrived campaign manager Jim Cauley described how funds would be husbanded for 2004 advertising, and Audra Wilson detailed outreach efforts toward the campaign’s African American base. Two days later Barack, John Kupper, Pete, Jim, and Audra did a similar presentation for top SEIU staffers.
The centerpiece of both meetings was Pete Giangreco’s finely honed analysis based upon prior elections’ vote totals. Barack began with a fundamental advantage in a multicandidate field: “no major African American candidate in a major state-wide campaign has won less than 29 percent” of the statewide primary vote. In Chicago, “Obama will be able to win at least 43 percent of the vote,” or about 204,000 votes—a total derived from Roland Burris’s 2002 numbers in African American wards and John Schmidt’s 1998 ones in white ones, each discounted somewhat in light of Joyce Washington, Nancy Skinner, and imaginably Maria Pappas’s presence on the ballot. In the balance of Cook County, Barack’s target would be about 75,000 votes, in the surrounding “collar” counties, some 47,000, and in the balance of Illinois—“downstate”—a further 58,000, for a raw vote total of approximately 384,000—33 percent of the anticipated primary turnout. “Measurable portions of the downstate vote are African American,” so “Obama’s tactical goal for downstate is to win the majority of African American voters and leave it to the other candidates to compete for the rest.” Giangreco stressed that all of these numbers were “conservative, realistic estimates,” tallied with an eye toward convincing AFSCME and SEIU that they should see Barack as the likely winner.
The evening after the SEIU presentation, Barack was interviewed by suburban cable-TV host Jeff Berkowitz, who began by asking Barack about the Iraq war. “Saddam Hussein was a genuinely dangerous despot,” but “my analysis said that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat” and that “vigorous inspections” targeting Saddam’s suspected weapons programs could have contained the danger. Stressing that he had spoken publicly when others had not, Barack argued that “what absolutely we can’t have out of our U.S. senator from Illinois is somebody who waffles on the issue and somebody who ducks on the issue and puts their fin
ger out to the wind and waits to find out how the wind is blowing before they make a statement.”
Berkowitz asked whether Barack supported Senate Democrats’ filibuster of President Bush’s nomination of a highly credentialed Hispanic attorney for a circuit court judgeship. “It’s perfectly appropriate for a senator to oppose a nominee even if they’re smart, even if they’re nice, if their fundamental vision of the Constitution is flawed. If somebody doesn’t believe in the protection of civil liberties, if somebody does not believe in the promotion of civil rights, then that I think is a rationale. . . . Look at the way that the federal bench has generally caved in the face of John Ashcroft and the Executive Branch and the Patriot Act. It’s a disgrace. And that is the bulwark that we have to protect ourselves from an overreaching—” Berkowitz interrupted before Barack could say “presidency.” “So you are opposed to the Patriot Act?” he asked. “Absolutely. Absolutely. Would have voted against it. And I think it is a shame that we had only one U.S. senator in the entire U.S. Senate who voted against it.”
Then Berkowitz shifted to school vouchers, which he had previously pressed Barack on. “Can’t we put the old tape on?” Barack replied. “We have to consider every possibility of improving what admittedly is an intolerable school system for a lot of inner-city kids. I do not believe in vouchers. I am a strong supporter of charter schools” because “we do have to innovate and experiment to encourage competition in the school systems.” In contrast, over time vouchers would “reduce the options available particularly for the hardest-to-teach kids, because a private market system will not ultimately try to reach the toughest-to-teach kids.”27
In August, the Hull campaign launched additional television advertising downstate, with their candidate declaring that “every American deserves quality, affordable health care.” In Chicago, the campaign debuted on seven black-oriented stations a sixty-second radio ad featuring Bobby Rush. “My friend Blair Hull,” Rush proclaimed, “is an independent voice who will make sure that we get our fair share.” Barack acerbically told the Sun-Times that “the nice thing about actually having a track record of service in the community is that you don’t have to pay for all of it.” Skepticism was in order, for “whether the message is coming from Bobby Rush or anybody else, one would be hard pressed to believe that an individual who has never worked on issues important to the African American community during the first sixty years of his life has suddenly discovered these issues.”
Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller reported that “all the talk now on the Democratic side is about Barack Obama and Dan Hynes.” Like Rick Ridder, Miller believed Democratic voters wanted candidates “who will shake up Washington.” Dan Hynes “can be painted as a cautious careerist, which is the kiss of death in the current atmosphere. Obama could be seen as too cerebral and maybe even unelectable because of his race and his different name. Democratic primary voters don’t trust unknown millionaires . . . like Blair Hull. Gery Chico is mostly unknown” and faced dire questions about the collapse of Altheimer & Gray. Treasurer Maria Pappas “is well-liked and well-known in Cook County,” but “she hasn’t raised any money, she has no campaign infrastructure,” and “insiders generally dismiss her.”
Barack continued his day-in, day-out rounds of small public appearances and donor solicitation meetings. A few months earlier his good friend Rashid Khalidi had accepted Columbia University’s offer of a prestigious academic chair. As he and Mona prepared to leave Chicago for New York, Barack spoke at a Friday-night good-bye party that doubled as a fund-raiser for Mona’s Arab American Action Network. Rashid, like Mona, had remained a public political voice, telling one U of C forum that George W. Bush “uses ‘terrorism’ to justify measures which are blatantly unconstitutional” and observing that “the office of the President is the costliest to buy.”
As Barack’s Senate candidacy had intensified over the previous twelve months, Barack and Michelle’s attendance at the almost nightly dinners at the Khalidis’ or Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s home declined. “Sometimes it was just her,” Mona recalled, because “we would call her when she was alone.” Michelle always seemed “more natural, less reserved” than Barack, Mona thought, but “all our kids were very taken by him.” Malia and then Sasha too had often come along, especially to Bill and Bernardine’s home, because “our children were great with younger children,” Bernardine explained, “and so it just worked for them to come for dinner because the children would be carried around and would be busy and would be happy.” Bill remembered Barack from those years as “a decent, compassionate, lovely person: pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, and ambitious.” Bernardine recalled that by 2003 it was “so clear that he’s driven, he’s a politician . . . a politician, heart and soul.” At the Khalidis’ August 1 good-bye party, Mona remembered that in his remarks, Barack “never said the word Arab, he never said the word Palestine,” which at the time, given the setting, seemed “very strange.”28
By mid-July, Barack’s team of consultants had prepared a second comprehensive poll that Paul Harstad and his partner Mike Kulisheck conducted later that month. Sixteen months had passed since Harstad’s exceptionally encouraging first “benchmark,” and the 806 likely Democratic primary voters who responded to this one showed that potential candidate Maria Pappas was notably popular among black Democrats, with 50 percent viewing her positively, only 7 percent negatively, and 24 percent saying “don’t know.” Dan Hynes’s numbers came in at 33–5–34, while Barack trailed at 20–2–64. With the other 14 percent of respondents responding “neutral,” 78 percent of African Americans remained unfamiliar with Barack, only slightly better than the 84 percent who were unfamiliar with Blair Hull. Among all respondents, Dan Hynes polled 24 percent support, and Barack and Pappas each 15, when voters were asked to choose a candidate. Among African Americans, Barack led Pappas 34 to 16 percent.
The poll then proceeded to candidate descriptions, with half of respondents being told that Barack was “a proven progressive voice” who had “passed landmark laws to help working families” and the others hearing that “he brings fresh thinking” and “innovative, new ideas.” Following the biographical recitations, Hynes led Barack among all respondents 26–17, while among African Americans Barack led Joyce Washington 39–16. When a question about Barack’s name was posed, responses turned from negative to mildly positive after “named for his late father” was added. Barack’s status as a U of C law professor outdid even “first African American president of the Harvard Law Review” as a positive, and once Barack’s many legislative achievements were cited, respondents’ support for him grew to 46 percent, including 71 percent of blacks. Additionally, the 203 African American respondents in the Chicago media market were asked the positive-neutral-negative-don’t-know question about a host of mainly African American names, with Father Mike Pfleger coming in tops at 70–0, Rev. Clay Evans 69–3, former judge Eugene Pincham 69–5, and Emil Jones Jr. 54–5.
In preparation for an all-day August 4 meeting of Barack’s team of consultants, Harstad prepared a graphical presentation highlighting particular findings. In response to the initial vote-choice question, 42 percent of black men, but only 28 percent of black women, chose Barack, and while 44 percent of South Side African Americans named Barack, only 20 percent of other blacks did so. But, after all of the biographical information had been offered, not only had Barack’s overall support risen from 15 percent to 46, among African American men it had jumped from 42 to 73, and among black women from 28 percent to 69. Looking at the entire sample, “the Most Movable Voters to Obama,” once his background had been fleshed out, were white women in relatively prosperous households. Another summary chart highlighted how both Dan Hynes and Maria Pappas had 66 percent name recognition statewide, with Pappas at 86 percent and Hynes 69 in the Chicago media market, while Barack was 36 and 45 percent. Interestingly, among Democratic voters who knew all three candidates, Barack led both Hynes and Pappas 39–21–13.
Obviously “Obama has maj
or room for growth” as voters learned more about him. A cover memo that Paul gave his colleagues in advance of the August 4 meeting stated that Barack “is already fully competitive with” Hynes and Pappas, “even though Obama is only known to half as many voters.” Barack “is by far the preferred favorite of African Americans,” but also “has tremendous room for growth once he becomes better known in this community.” Barack “also has a lot of room for growth in downstate Illinois,” where at present only 15 percent of voters had heard of him. Overall, the poll documented “that to know Barack Obama is to like him,” for Barack “has broad appeal and a lot of room for growth.” Harstad rendered his bottom-line finding in headline fashion: “Obama Has Potential to Reach as High as 46% in Multi-Candidate Primary.”
In the wake of Harstad’s upbeat presentation, Cauley circulated a memo to the consultants and the staff that he said was “the beginnings of the campaign plan.” In his first four weeks in Chicago, Cauley initially was stunned that “everybody in the campaign” had a credit card. “I went in there, and all those kids had credit cards, and I cut them all up” as one way of husbanding precious funds. “All those kids” was a bit of an overstatement because in addition to Dan Shomon, Claire Serdiuk, and deputy campaign managers Audra Wilson and Nate Tamarin, only on August 1 had Obama for Illinois’s tiny staff grown from six to seven when intern Liz Drew went on salary to join Randon Gardley as another finance assistant for Claire. A recent graduate of Brown University, Liz had been recommended to Barack by Tom Hazen, a family friend whom Judd Miner had successfully represented in an age-discrimination case. Along with University of Illinois junior Lauren Kidwell, who was about to return to school, Liz had supported Claire and Randon in staffing events, to which Barack insisted upon driving himself rather than having a driver.
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