At first Barack did not reject their request. He told the older gentlemen—many of whom had resisted his efforts at community organizing in earlier years—that he would think about it. He hadn’t decided what he was going to do.
After Alice Palmer went down to crushing defeat at the hands of Jesse Jackson Jr. in the November 28, 1995, congressional primary, her backers again demanded that Barack withdraw from the State Senate race so that she could reclaim her old seat. “We don’t think Obama can win,” said Northeastern Illinois University political science professor Robert Starks. “He hasn’t been in town long enough. Nobody knows who he is.”
This time Barack refused. “I’ve gone out and raised money, opened an office, recruited people, put my name out there,” he said. “And I’m supposed to take that back because you now want to change the agreement we already had? That just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Alice was furious that the young upstart she had backed now refused to step aside for her. Armed with an endorsement from the very man who had just beaten her in the congressional race, Jesse Jackson Jr., Palmer dispatched volunteers to collect the signatures from registered voters necessary to get her on the ballot for the March 1996 State Senate election. On the December 18 deadline, she filed nominating petitions containing 1,580 signatures—twice the number required.
Based on his own experience signing people up for Project Vote, Barack knew that in Chicago (“where three out of two registered voters is a Democrat”), politicians took a less than punctilious approach to signing up prospective voters. It also struck Barack that Palmer’s volunteers had gathered the necessary signatures in an extraordinarily short period of time.
Barack ordered his campaign operatives—actually called “operators” in Chicago—to check out Palmer’s petitions filed at the Chicago Board of Elections. Comparing the names on the petitions with those on the actual voter registry, they uncovered scores of irregularities—enough to disqualify two-thirds of the signatures.
Palmer argued that in most cases the disqualifications hinged on such technicalities as the misspelling of a street name or whether or not an individual printed, rather than signed, his or her name on the petition.
No matter. Palmer was denied a spot on the ballot. Seeing how easy it was to knock one opponent off by challenging her petitions, Barack had his operators check his other opponents as well. By the time they were finished, all of his opponents had been knocked off the ballot. In his first bid for office, Barack ran unopposed.
“To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up,” Barack said in defense of what some viewed as an underhanded tactic. Was it fair to deny the voters a choice of more than one candidate? he was asked by the Chicago Tribune. “I think they ended up,” he replied, “with a very good State Senator.”
Michelle could not have agreed more. She was immensely proud of her husband’s election victory and stood beaming by his side at all his public events. But as thrilled as she was that Barack now held elective office, she worried that the manner in which he had won might come back to haunt him. Michelle had, in fact, begged her husband not to challenge Alice Palmer’s petitions. “It will just leave a bitter taste in everybody’s mouth,” she told him. “The big Harvard lawyer comes here and uses his legal tricks to knock poor old Alice and everybody else off the ballot. Who the hell does he think he is?”
Moreover, even though she campaigned at his side—showing up in the living rooms of strangers for neighborhood coffee klatches and charming potential donors like the Rezkos over dinner—Michelle still believed that the State Senate would only sidetrack her husband. “She felt it was just too small-time,” one friend said. “They both already know so many important people, she just wanted him to go straight to the national stage. Either that, or make tons of money.”
As it sank from sight, it soon became apparent that Barack’s book Dreams from My Father was not going to provide the windfall they had hoped for. Between his salary at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland and hers at Public Allies, they were grossing about $250,000 a year—still not enough to pay off their student loans. “I worried a lot,” she said of this period, “about where the money was coming from. Somebody had to.”
Barack floated above such petty concerns. “There will be plenty of time to make money—lots of it,” he assured his wife. “Right now is the time to make a difference.” Besides, he liked to say with a sly wink as he held up one of his credit cards, “have plastic, will travel.”
As was the case in many families, the Obamas’ household finances were handled by Michelle. While he was three and a half hours away in Springfield, she did the bookkeeping, wrote out the checks, filled out the insurance forms, even assembled records for tax purposes. Barack was asked only to submit his receipts so he could be reimbursed for legitimate business expenses, and that he did only sporadically. “It made her a little crazy that he had such a cavalier attitude toward money,” an aide said. “She was very grateful when we’d remind him every once in a while about keeping track of his expenses. But it was something that he had no interest in doing.”
According to his banker grandmother Toot, Barack, like his mother and grandfather, was “clueless” when it came to handling his personal finances. “Barry has no head for money,” said Toot, who sympathized with her daughter-in-law’s mounting sense of frustration in that department. She even apologized to Michelle for “not emphasizing that more” when Barack was growing up.
Michelle was also fretting about her husband’s personal habits. Barack did not pick up his socks and underwear, and was less than religious about hanging up his clothes at all. He left wet towels on the bathroom floor, cups and glasses scattered about the house, and the toilet seat up. Dirty dishes were left in the sink until Michelle placed them in the dishwasher, and all the laundry, ironing, vacuuming, and dusting was left to her. “And,” she told her mother and anyone else who cared to hear, “Barack never, ever replaces the paper towels—or the toilet paper.”
Early-bird Michelle, who was usually in bed by ten, also resented the fact that he stayed up alone until two in the morning, then slept in. And he snored.
For Michelle, Barack’s chain-smoking was particularly annoying. Aside from the obvious health concerns—“Buddy, did you ever hear of secondhand smoke?” she would tease—Michelle was fed up with the sheer messiness inherent in Barack’s nasty habit. Ashtrays brimmed with cigarette butts—which could also be found stubbed out in coffee cups and saucers—and there were cigarette burns in the carpet. The acrid smell of smoke lingered on their clothes, in the drapes, in the upholstery, in her hair. She moved a framed picture on the wall to reveal that the walls of their condo were turning a sickly yellow, along with his teeth and fingertips.
“Michelle is a very meticulous person,” Valerie Jarrett said. “Whether it’s the clothes she wears or her home, she maintains a very high standard.” A standard that her husband, much to Michelle’s near-constant frustration, was either unable or simply unwilling to live up to.
Absorbed in his nascent political career, Barack was oblivious to the trouble brewing at home. When Michelle did erupt, it often triggered arguments that seemed to last for days. “Like a lot of husbands,” said one of her friends, “Barack couldn’t figure out what her problem was. All her complaints about him being a slob—which I heard her call him many times, sometimes joking, sometimes not—well, he thought they were petty. You know, it was ‘Why are you bothering me with this crap while I’m busy changing the world?” That attitude “only made Michelle crazier. She was just as accomplished as he was, and she was out there changing the world, too. So why, she wanted to know, was she cleaning up after him?”
Underlying Michelle’s dissatisfaction was a deeper, more pressing concern. Not long after their marriage in 1992, Michelle and Barack began trying to start a family. “When it didn’t happen right away,” said Marian Robinson, “she got a little worried.”
By the time Barack went to Springf
ield to be sworn in as a State Senator in the spring of 1996, Michelle was frantic. When a physician friend pointed out that the stress of working sixty hours a week running Public Allies might be a factor in her inability to conceive, Michelle quit.
Instead, she took a job as associate dean of student services and the first Director of Community Relations and Community Service at the University of Chicago. When she arrived to interview for the job, she startled the dean of student services by announcing that, although she grew up just blocks from the university, she had never set foot on the campus. “All the buildings have their backs to the community,” she explained later. “The university didn’t think kids like me existed, and I certainly didn’t want anything to do with that place.”
Unfortunately for her husband, who lectured at “that place,” most blacks shared Michelle’s hostile attitude toward the University of Chicago. Viewed as a bastion of white intellectual elitism smack-dab in the middle of one of Chicago’s grittiest minority communities, the university had made little effort to connect with the working-class people who encircled it. “The University of Chicago is not a brand that helps you,” said Obama’s friend and onetime aide Will Burns, “if you’re trying to get votes on the South Side of Chicago”—votes he would need if, say, he wanted to run for Congress.
But for the time being, the votes from Hyde Park would be enough to keep him ensconced in the State Senate. When Barack arrived in Springfield, it was with a built-in reputation as, in Burns’s words, “a threat.” Precinct worker Ron Davis agreed: “He knocked off the incumbents, so that right there gave him some notoriety. And he ran unopposed—which for a rookie is unheard-of.”
When he landed at the state capitol in January of 1997, the high-minded, Ivy League-educated freshman Senator seemed like something of a hothouse flower to his backroom-dealing, often literally cigar-chomping colleagues. “What the hell are you doing here? You don’t belong here,” fellow Democrat Denny Jacobs said bluntly. Barack, he said, just “looked at me sort of strange.”
Corruption was as rampant as ever in the Illinois legislature, and to make matters worse, Republicans controlled the Senate when Barack arrived—and they would continue to control it for the next six years. Since state government was firmly controlled by the “Four Tops”—the Senate President, the House Speaker, and the two minority leaders—run-of-the-mill lawmakers like Barack were held in especially low regard. They were called “mushrooms” because, as Barack would explain with a laugh, “We are kept in the dark and fed shit.”
From the moment he set foot in Springfield, Barack was determined not to fall into that category. Right after being sworn into office, he approached the powerful Democratic leader Emil Jones, a friend from his organizing days.
“You know me,” Barack told Jones. “You know me quite well.”
“Yes? And?” Jones asked tentatively, squinting through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“You know I like to work hard,” Barack continued. “So feel free in giving me any tough assignments.”
“Good,” said Jones, who promptly saddled him with legislation on campaign finance reform. In his caucus, Barack, who assiduously courted his Republican counterparts in search of a viable compromise, was the object of boos and catcalls.
“He caught pure hell,” Jones remembers of his protégé’s performance. “I actually felt sorry for him at times.”
Barack’s toughest critics were fellow African American Senators who viewed him as a know-it-all snob. “Just because you’re from Harvard,” Senator Donne Trotter would snipe, “you think you know everything.” Rickey Hendon, whose district was on Chicago’s West Side, frequently squabbled with Barack on and off the Senate floor. “What do you know, Barack?” he asked during one debate. “You grew up in Hawaii and you live in Hyde Park. What do you know about the street?”
One verbal sparring match on the Senate floor nearly escalated to the real thing. At one point, after yelling at each other for fifteen minutes, the normally unflappable Barack strode over to Hendon’s desk with fists clenched. “I’m gonna kick your ass!” he told Hendon before someone stepped in to break them up.
For the most part, Barack avoided his fellow African American Senators from Chicago, and instead befriended his fellow legislators—mostly white—from the suburban and rural southern part of the state. In addition to taking up golf (“An awful lot happens on the golf course,” he told his friend Jean Rudd), Barack joined fellow Senators and a few lobbyists for their weekly poker game. He quickly proved himself to be a methodical, if cautious, cardplayer. “I’m putting his kids through college,” complained Republican Terry Link.
One of Obama’s earliest allies in Springfield was Denny Jacobs, a self-described “old-school, backroom politician” and a member of Barack’s tight-knit circle of poker players. At first, Jacobs recalled, Barack was “always asking questions for the sake of asking questions. So I got up and said, ‘Listen, go learn on your own goddamned time. We’re doing business here.’ And he didn’t get ticked. He just listened, and took in the advice, and from then on when he asked a question it was right to the point. That’s the thing about Barack: he has a tremendous capacity to grow—to learn and to retain.”
At the urging of his new political adviser Dan Shomon, Barack also decided to test the waters outside Chicago—to see if he would stand a chance with white middle-class voters in the event he tried for statewide office. In order to make him seem like less of an elitist, Shomon played Pygmalion to Barack’s Galatea. Gone was Barack’s casual uniform—worn with obsessive-compulsive consistency—of a wide-collared black silk shirt, jeans, and Bass Weejuns with no socks. Now, when he played golf with the local Kiwanis and Rotary Club members, he donned polo shirt, khakis, golf shoes, and cap.
He made similar adjustments in his food preference when he was courting “downstaters”: now he drank beer instead of Chablis, used French’s yellow mustard squeezed out of a plastic bottle instead of Dijon, and was careful to order doughnuts, not croissants, when he dropped in to chat with town burghers at the local coffee shop.
More important than these cosmetic changes was the fact that, in the faces of these mostly white middle-class midwesterners, Barack saw Toot, Gramps, and his mother. He understood them just as easily as he understood the inner-city black population he represented, and they responded in kind. “I learned if you’re willing to listen to people,” he reflected, “it’s possible to bridge a lot of the differences that dominate the national political debate. I pretty quickly got to form relationships with Republicans, with individuals from rural parts of the state, and we had a lot in common.”
Back in Springfield, Barack labored in relative obscurity to get a handful of bills through. Between these efforts and his relentless network building, there was little time left for Michelle.
With Barack away from home in Springfield as many as four days a week during the legislative session and lecturing once a week at the University of Chicago Law School, Michelle would see him only on weekends. She did what she could to keep busy—up at four thirty to work out at the gym, then off to work at the university, lunch with friends, back to work, sometimes dinner with her mother, then home to television, some reading, and bed by nine thirty.
When Barack was in Springfield, he and Michelle shared the details of their days apart over the phone. While he said he would “fall asleep content in the knowledge of our love,” Michelle hung up feeling, she told one friend, “frustrated and sad.”
Unlike Barack, who lived in abject fear of ever leading a humdrum nine-to-five existence, Michelle cherished order and routine. These were the things that had sustained the Robinsons through her father’s long illness. But they could not disguise the fact that she missed her husband. “Michelle was feeling lonely,” Valerie Jarrett told a mutual friend. “Desperately so.”
The fact that they had been trying to have a baby for over four years now was also weighing heavily on Michelle’s mind. She was talking to friends about fer
tility clinics and adoption when, in November of 1997, a visit to her doctor confirmed the results of a home pregnancy test.
“Hey! You’re kidding!” Barack shouted when she broke the news to him over the phone. “Wow! Wonderful, wonderful.” Barack’s first impulse was to share the good news with the one person who, next to Michelle, meant the most to him. “Got to call Mom,” he said, reaching for the phone before reality struck. “Oh…”
Photographic Insert
Associated Press
Associated Press
Associated Press
Kenyan Barack Obama Sr. abandoned his wife and son before the boy’s first birthday, leaving Barry to be raised by his mother, Ann and his maternal grandparents. On a beach near their home in Hawaii, Stanley Dunham frolicked with his only grandson. Half a world away, Michelle Robinson, shown here at age five, was growing up on Chicago’s South Side.
Polaris
Associated Press
By age nine, Barry was living in Jakarta with his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, his mom, and his baby sister, Maya. Back in Hawaii the following year, Ann and Barry were visited by Barry’s dad for the first—and last—time.
Associated Press
Associated Press
Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Chicago
Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Chicago
“We go play hoop,” Barry wrote in his high school yearbook. Meanwhile, “Miche” Robinson was performing at dance recitals and earning high enough marks at Chicago’s Whitney M. Young Magnet High School to be inducted into the National Honor Society.
Barack and Michelle Page 19
