Rising Star

by David J. Garrow

  Back in Chicago for a weekend with his family, Barack joined Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. at an antiviolence service at Englewood’s Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church that drew more than two thousand people. Two young neighborhood girls, one aged ten and the other fourteen, had recently been killed by stray bullets from gang members’ shootouts. The gunmen “don’t have a sense of self-respect,” and “if we don’t change how we raise our children,” gang violence would continue, Barack warned. “There’s a reason they shoot each other, because they don’t love themselves, and the reason they don’t love themselves is we are not loving them, we’re not paying attention to them, we’re not guiding them, we’re not disciplining them. We’ve got work to do.”22

  The next day was Illinois’s 2006 primary election. Back in December, Barack had publicly endorsed twenty-nine-year-old basketball buddy Alexi Giannoulias for state treasurer. Early in Barack’s U.S. Senate race, Giannoulias had begun introducing Barack to potential contributors in Chicagoland’s vibrant Greek community, and Dan Shomon had agreed to move Obama for Illinois’s bank account to Alexi’s well-regarded, family-owned Broadway Bank. State Democratic Party chairman and House Speaker Michael Madigan had tapped Paul Mangieri, a little-known state’s attorney from Galesburg, for the Treasurer’s race, but Barack told Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business that “if someone has stepped out on my behalf, I think it’s important to reciprocate.” Asked if Giannoulias had sufficient experience to be treasurer, Barack said, “Alexi is qualified,” but “it’s important for you and others to put him through his paces and ask tough questions.” By early March, Barack was starring in a thirty-second Giannoulias TV ad, telling viewers “he’s one of the most outstanding young men that I could ever hope to meet. He’s somebody who cares deeply about people. He got that from his family. They really exemplify and embody the American dream. . . . Alexi Giannoulias—he’s going to be an outstanding treasurer.”

  Then, eight days before the primary, Hinz revealed that Broadway Bank had made loans to a man named Michael Giorango, whom the Miami Herald in 2002 had labeled an “alleged Chicago organized crime figure” and who in early 2004 had been convicted in Miami federal court of running a multistate prostitution ring. Two days later the Tribune reported that Giorango, a “Chicago crime figure” nicknamed “Jaws,” had also been convicted of bookmaking and gambling violations in 1989 and 1991. Still, Giorango had received more than $6 million in loans from Broadway Bank since the 1990s. Thanks to his TV campaign, Giannoulias easily defeated Mangieri, 62 to 38 percent. In another race, David Axelrod’s close friend and former partner Forrest Claypool had challenged Cook County Board president John Stroger.

  Axelrod had pressed Barack to endorse Claypool, who had volunteered his help during Barack’s 2004 Senate campaign, whereas Stroger had backed Dan Hynes. But Claypool’s past role as a top aide to Mayor Richard Daley made many black aldermen leery, and even progressives like the 5th Ward’s Leslie Hairston supported Stroger, whom everyone in black Chicago politics viewed as “a good soldier.” Fully aware of the racial divide, Barack had rebuffed Axelrod’s insistent pleading with a “flash of anger,” David recalled. A week before the primary Stroger suffered a massive stroke, and on election eve Barack told a newscaster he would vote for Claypool. On Tuesday the incapacitated Stroger eked out a 53–47 victory, and the contrast between Barack’s kingmaker role in Giannoulias’s victory and his hands-off stance in the Claypool-Stroger contest offended many progressives. One Claypool friend, Sunil Garg, wrote a strongly worded Tribune op-ed asserting that Barack “has weakened his moral authority by seemingly safeguarding his political career” rather than endorsing Claypool. “I—and many others—cannot understand how someone can be considered presidential when he refuses to take a stand on the most important race in recent memory in his own backyard.”23

  Back in Washington, Barack took to the Senate floor to say that he “didn’t anticipate the deafening silence” that had greeted his bill to create an independent congressional ethics watchdog. When a far weaker bill was called for a vote, Barack was one of eight senators—including Democrats Russ Feingold and John Kerry as well as Republicans John McCain and Tom Coburn—who voted no in protest. Every night when he was in Washington, Barack returned to his modest apartment to put in as much time as he could drafting chapters for his forthcoming book. His deadline for submitting a complete manuscript was March 31, but Barack was going to miss that by at least a month. Each time he completed a chapter, the draft was passed off to staff members and a few old friends for fact-checking and political vetting. Rob Fisher, who had contributed so much editorial help on Dreams, was among them, and Rob remembered that “we got into a deep back and forth about global warming.” After Rob left Barack a voice mail warning him that one chapter was “a mess,” Rob’s wife Lisa was the first to hear the message Barack left in response: “You don’t call a U.S. senator who has a deadline for a book and tell him his book’s a mess!”

  Barack’s hefty initial advance for that book, plus robust royalties from Dreams’ strong paperback sales, skyrocketed the Obamas’ annual income for 2005 to $1,670,000, more than they had earned in the previous seven years combined. In addition to Barack’s $1.2 million in author’s royalties, Michelle’s U of C Hospitals salary had jumped from $121,000 to $316,000, and she took in an additional $45,000 from her service on TreeHouse Foods’ two boards. The Obamas had upped their charitable contributions to $77,000, including $5,000 to Trinity Church, and were in the process of contributing a further $22,500 to Trinity in 2006, but in mid-April the Obamas’ 2005 windfall had Barack writing a check for a whopping $430,000 to the IRS.

  Barack remained often on the road, speaking at a Hartford dinner for Senate colleague Joseph Lieberman, who was facing a progressive primary challenger, and defending Lieberman even though he had supported the Iraq war. “I know that some in the party have differences with Joe. I’m going to go ahead and say it. It’s the elephant in the room. And Joe and I don’t agree on everything. But what I know is that Joe Lieberman’s a man with a good heart, with a keen intellect, who cares about the working families of America.” A week later, traveling to Minnesota to speak on behalf of Democratic Senate candidate Amy Klobuchar, a Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter covering Barack’s appearances wrote that some attendees were “talking about an Obama presidency as if it were a sure thing.”

  Barack’s full-throated support for Alexi Giannoulias’s candidacy reemerged as an issue when the Chicago Tribune reported that his family’s Broadway Bank had made additional loans totaling $11.8 million to convicted felon Michael Giorango in 2005. One of them, for $3.6 million, went to Giorango and a second convicted felon, Demitri Stavropoulos, for the purchase of a floating casino in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In 1994 Stavropoulos had been convicted of explosives possession, and a 2004 bookmaking conviction had had him in federal prison since that time. The “senior loan officer” and Democratic candidate for treasurer told reporters, “It’s a loan that I don’t know the details of,” as “I don’t cultivate the relationships. I don’t bring these deals in.” A Tribune editorial asked whether Giannoulias’s defense “is that he was clueless as to what his bank was doing?” and at a town hall meeting in Elmhurst, Barack told reporters, “I’m going to ask Alexi directly what is happening.” Several days later Barack said he had told Giannoulias that “appearances matter,” but “so long as these loans were legal” and “were not financing illegal activities . . . I’m not going to pass judgment on how the bank handled its loan portfolio.” Alexi finally told reporters that “I probably should have looked into it more,” and although journalists doubted the viability of Giannoulias’s candidacy, Barack’s support for him dipped from public view.24

  Across Illinois, Barack continued to hold town hall meetings that often drew overflow crowds. At Loyola University in Chicago he warned more than two thousand people that because of the country’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil, “we’re financing both sides of the
war on terrorism through our SUVs.” He told cable-TV interviewer Jeff Berkowitz, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons.” Illinois seatmate Dick Durbin told the State Journal-Register’s Bernie Schoenburg that he liked Barack’s judgment, style, and sense of humor. “He’s a bright guy. Being mixed-race, people feel comfortable with him,” and “he gets along well not only with our side of the aisle but with the other side as well.” In contrast, a Time magazine item asserted that Barack “has reached so often across the aisle . . . that some Democrats complain he won’t be their firebrand,” but Durbin had privately already told friends he believed Barack should run for president in 2008. To Schoenburg, Durbin hinted at just that. “Hanging around the Senate for an extra term may not make him a change agent.” Instead, “it may make him a person with a long voting record,” and Barack “shouldn’t rule out any possibility at this point.” When Harvard law professor Martha Minow ran into Barack at a May 5 Chicago dinner, she asked him directly, “Are you going to run?” and Barack’s response was anything but discouraging. “He said, ‘There’s one answer: It’s up to Michelle. Go talk to her.’” Minow did just that. “I said, ‘So, is Barack going to run?’ and she said, ‘We’re having serious family discussions about it.’” Minow replied, “It would be so great for the country,” and Rob Fisher recalled a long telephone conversation about that possibility while they were still wrestling with Barack’s book manuscript. Rob recalled that “when he made the decision to run for the presidency, he called me up” and “we talked for two or three hours. He was mostly concerned about his family,” but “we both came to the conclusion at the end of it that we thought he could win.”

  The morning after his exchange with Minow, Barack flew to Omaha to speak at the Nebraska Democratic Party’s annual dinner. Before that event, Barack addressed a cheering crowd of a thousand people at Salem Baptist Church, declaring that the Bush administration’s largesse in Iraq had left the United States with a national debt now totaling “$30,000 from every man, woman, and child in America” as well as inner-city “neighborhoods where rats outnumber computers.” At the evening dinner, which conservative Nebraska senator Ben Nelson had asked Barack to keynote, Nelson introduced Barack as “one of the most effective members of the U.S. Senate,” and Barack returned the compliment by telling the crowd that Nelson was the body’s most popular member. Pete Rouse was struck by Nelson’s private comment that Barack was the only national Democrat Nelson had considered inviting, and Barack told a local interviewer that Democrats “tend to talk in bullet points as opposed to telling the story of where we want to take the country and what our vision is for this country’s future.”

  Back in Washington, Barack continued to criticize the ballooning national debt, complaining on the Senate floor that the federal government’s behavior “simply passes the burden to our children and grandchildren” and spontaneously adding that “this place never ceases to amaze me.” On May 20 Barack told the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet that he finally had completed his book manuscript and now had time to work on it further. “The copyeditor needs it at the end of June. So I’m good. I have a month and a half to tool around with it and make changes.” Then a quick flight to Springfield allowed Barack to address the SIU School of Medicine’s commencement, and he warned the new doctors that “there is something fundamentally broken about our health care system.” The good news was that “Massachusetts just signed into law a groundbreaking plan that would cover most of its citizens,” and it was incumbent upon politicians and physicians alike to “ensure that every American has routine checkups and screenings and information about how to live a healthy lifestyle.”25

  In late May, when Barack hired former Blair Hull strategist Anita Dunn to head up his Hopefund PAC, journalists wondered what that said about his political plans, with a front-page Chicago Tribune headline asking “Obama in ’08?” Later that same day, Dick Durbin invited reporters to his Springfield home to tell them he hoped Barack would run. “People like Barack don’t come along very often,” and “he should seriously consider it. I think he could bring a great deal to the national race for the presidency.” Durbin’s statement drew little press attention, but other top Senate Democrats told Barack they felt the same. Minority leader Harry Reid had been impressed with Barack since soon after he first arrived on Capitol Hill. Reid recalled that after an early address on the Senate floor, Reid approached the new freshman and told him, “‘That speech was phenomenal, Barack.’” Then, “without the barest hint of braggadocio or conceit, and with what I would describe as deep humility, he said quietly: ‘I have a gift, Harry.’”

  After Durbin’s announcement, Reid and New York senator Chuck Schumer each told Barack he should run. “It was interesting that they felt as strongly as they do,” Barack told David Axelrod. In Chicago, Axelrod’s friend Eric Zorn, the Tribune columnist who had predicted an Obama presidential candidacy sixteen months earlier, echoed Durbin in saying, “if he’s ever going to run for president, 2008 is his year.” Zorn believed Barack was “bored and disillusioned by the Senate,” and the longer he remained a senator the more opportunities he would have “to alienate his core supporters with clumsy political moves such as turning his back on former close ally Forrest Claypool in the Democratic primary for the presidency of the Cook County Board, playing both sides of the gay marriage issue while more courageous Democrats in the Senate come out in support, and endorsing the lightweight, ethically obtuse Alexi Giannoulias in the Democratic primary for state treasurer as apparent payback for Giannoulias’ earlier financial help.”

  The Bloomington Pantagraph advised differently, asserting in an editorial headlined “Obama Presidential Talk Quite Premature” that “it takes more than an engaging smile and oratorical gifts to make a good president.” Time columnist Joe Klein reported that “close friends of Obama’s say he really doesn’t know yet what he’s going to do in 2008,” but “the discussions have grown more serious in recent months.” Klein believed that “the best reason for Obama to run is . . . that he is young and everybody else seems so old,” but in the left-wing Nation, blogger David Sirota warned that “because the media have not looked as closely at his political positions, Obama has taken on the quality of a blank screen on which people can project whatever they like.” Sirota understood that Barack “hasn’t discouraged this,” but a formal interview left Sirota admitting that “Obama has an impressive control of the issues and a mesmerizing ability to connect with people.” Barack also demonstrated “a remarkable ability to convince you that his positions are motivated purely by principles, not tactical considerations,” and Barack revealingly stressed to Sirota that “I don’t think in ideological terms. I never have.”26

  Barack seemed to exhibit how profoundly he was reflecting on his life’s course in a remarkably self-revealing commencement address he delivered at the University of Massachusetts Boston on June 2. He returned to the summer of 1985 and his two-day drive toward his new future in Chicago, and he recalled how he had “stopped for the night at a small town in Pennsylvania whose name I can’t remember anymore.” Barack proceeded to describe how the motel owner—Bob Elia—had told him to go into broadcasting rather than community organizing because “You can’t change the world, and people will not appreciate you trying.” Barack told his Boston audience that “objectively speaking, he made some sense . . . but I knew that there was something in me that wanted to try for something bigger.” What that “something bigger” would entail reached all the way back to Barack’s intimately revelatory comments first to Sheila and then to Lena in 1987–88, but what he had first envisioned as his destiny two decades earlier was now a reality that even long-experienced politicians like Dick Durbin and Harry Reid were telling him it was time to pursue.

  A few days later, Barack took to the Senate floor to oppose a constitutional amendment aimed at prohibiting gay marriages. “Decisions about marriage,” Barack stated, “should be left to the states,” but he stressed
that “personally, I do believe that marriage is between a man and a woman,” period. In mid-June, Michelle’s brother Craig, who had just been named head basketball coach at Brown University, married his longtime girlfriend Kelly McCrum in a ceremony at Chicago’s Hotel Allegro that Barack, Michelle, and their daughters happily attended. The next day a front-page Washington Post story announced that “Obama’s Profile Has Democrats Taking Notice.” Dick Durbin said, “I don’t believe there is another candidate I’ve seen, or an elected official, who really has the appeal that he does.” Durbin revealed he recently had told Barack, with reference to 2008’s first state, “‘Why don’t you just kind of move around Iowa and watch what happens?’ I know what’s going to happen,” Durbin asserted, “and I think it’s going to rewrite the game plans of a lot of presidential candidates if he makes that decision.” New York senator Chuck Schumer concurred. “I haven’t seen a phenomenon like this, where someone comes in so new and is so dazzling.” Barack told the Post that “at this stage, I haven’t changed my mind from previous demurrals,” although he confirmed that “we’ve visited 25 states since taking office.”

  Even a conservative Wall Street Journal contributor argued that Barack’s running for president in 2008 might be “the smartest thing he ever does,” because his “political stock may never be higher than it is right now.” At present, Barack was “part Clinton, part Roosevelt, part JFK and MLK, but in eight or twelve or sixteen years, he might be John Kerry.” In the Senate, Barack declined to join Kerry, Russ Feingold, and eleven other liberal Democrats in voting to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq within twelve months’ time, instead supporting a more widely backed measure calling for a withdrawal to begin before the end of 2006. In late June, Barack used a chapter on religious faith from his forthcoming book as the basis for a keynote address he delivered to a progressive believers’ symposium. It recounted Barack’s 2004 discomfort when Dr. Farr Curlin had e-mailed him to complain about how Obama for Illinois’s Web site dismissed abortion opponents as “right-wing ideologues.” Barack’s “Call to Renewal” speech attracted more press attention than anything he had done since his 2004 DNC keynote, with Washington Post columnist and fellow Saguaro Seminar alumnus E. J. Dionne heralding it as “the most important pronouncement by a Democrat on faith and politics since John F. Kennedy’s Houston speech in 1960,” in which Kennedy had discussed his own Roman Catholicism. Fellow Post columnist Dana Milbank warned that Barack “is enormously charismatic—and utterly undefined.” In the Chicago Defender, a left-wing contributor upbraided Barack for his Iraqi war stance, claiming “he was against it before he was for it,” and stating that “it is amazing that Obama is the recipient of so much praise when he says so little.”27