Barack and Michelle

by Christopher Andersen

  Her husband was more than happy to oblige, giving the nod to hiring a full-time live-in housekeeper. Michelle also took her mother up on her long-standing offer to help her take care of Malia and Sasha.

  No longer quite as stressed-out as she had been, Michelle felt free to consider yet another job switch. When University of Chicago Hospitals President Michael Riordan offered her a job as executive director of community affairs, she showed up with Sasha in a car-seat carrier and breast-fed her in the ladies’ room. “It was probably the most unique interview I’ve ever had,” Riordan conceded.

  With a starting salary of around $110,000, Michelle set out to accomplish at the University of Chicago Hospitals what she had accomplished at the main campus and, before that, at Public Allies. She wanted to build bridges between the medical center’s staff and the surrounding neighborhood. Toward that end, she placed volunteers from the hospital in the community, and volunteers from the community in the hospital.

  Periodically, Michelle would visit South Side health clinics, sometimes with Sasha in tow, and simply ask the administrators, “What do you need?” Within a matter of days, a volunteer from the hospital would show up and pitch in. “She was getting down with us…. She really wanted us to tell her right then and right there, how can I help?” said Berneice Mills-Thomas, who runs several health care centers in Chicago. “We’d never really seen that before.”

  Michelle’s superiors were no less impressed. “I have seen her in a meeting with the board of trustees giving a presentation,” said her boss, Susan Sher. “I have seen her with angry patients and community residents. I have seen her talking down a two-year-old in the middle of a temper tantrum. She can handle them all.”

  Now that Michelle had given him the green light to run for the U.S. Senate, Barack set out to collect as many IOUs as he could from party leaders. Part of his strategy was to get squarely behind his party’s nominee for Governor. Barack backed Illinois’s African American attorney general, Roland Burris. But when Burris lost to mop-topped Congressman Rod Blagojevich—thanks largely to the machinations of Blagojevich’s powerful alderman father-in-law—Barack joined Blagojevich’s inner circle of advisers. According to then-Congressman Rahm Emanuel, he and Barack “participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for Governor. We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and two other advisers.”

  On June 27, 2002, Barack appeared on a local TV news show to push Blagojevich’s candidacy. “Right now, my main focus is to make sure that we elect Rod Blagojevich as Governor, we—”

  “You working hard for Rod?” host Jeff Berkowitz interrupted.

  “You betcha,” Barack answered.

  “Hot Rod?”

  “That’s exactly right,” Barack shot back.

  When Blagojevich became Governor in November of 2002, Barack was one of the first people he thanked. Behind the scenes, Blagojevich was in awe of his new political ally—not because of Barack’s vision, but because of his political savvy. He was particularly impressed with the finesse Barack had displayed in gerrymandering his district. “Barack is a classy guy,” he told a member of his staff, “but beneath it all he’s a real street fighter. He knows how to work the system…. You’d never guess it to look at him.”

  Along with his new friend and colleague Rahm Emanuel, Barack was emerging as something of a political mastermind. “He thinks strategically,” Emanuel observed. “He sees the big picture.”

  As a campaigner, however, Barack needed work. The measured, intellectual approach that had gone over so well with his fellow academics and foundation board members had been no match for Bobby Rush’s earthy, booming delivery.

  Once again, he could count on Michelle to tell him the truth. “You take too long to answer questions,” she told him, “and sometimes you just sound snooty, like you’re talking down to your audience. If you’re going to get through to people in the community, then you’ve got to speak their language.” She suggested he emulate the most effective speaker they knew—Jeremiah Wright.

  On September 16, 2001—the first Sunday after 9/11—millions of Americans went to church to share their grief and pray for the victims and their families. At Trinity United Church, Wright offered a very different take on the terrorist attacks that had taken nearly three thousand American lives. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon,” he thundered, “and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens,” Wright said, jabbing the air with his finger, “are coming home to roost.”

  That day, Barack and Michelle were at home caring for Sasha, who was still recovering from viral meningitis. But they were hardly surprised when they learned of Wright’s incendiary remarks a few days later. The reverend’s rants against so-called American imperialism, especially as it related to Palestine, Southeast Asia, and Africa, were standard fare at Trinity United.

  “Michelle and Barack were there practically every Sunday, with Malia and Sasha,” said one longtime church member. “Nobody walked out when Reverend Wright was saying those things—they were cheering.” The Obamas were also apparently enthusiastic participants in the tradition of call-and-response that is the hallmark of black churches throughout the United States.

  Barack carefully studied Wright’s oratorical flourishes, as well as his gestures and his pacing. He employed all these devices, liberally sprinkled with down-home aphorisms and gritty street vernacular, when addressing predominantly black audiences.

  “There’s going to be a certain rhythm you feel from the audience,” he told reporter David Mendell. “An all-black audience is going to respond in a different way. They are not going to just sit there.”

  Barack tried out his new, more laid-back, more rhythmic and idiom-filled style in the same South Side churches and meeting halls where, just three years earlier, he had been putting his audiences to sleep. He began every speech with the same nod of gratitude to his mentor and revered father figure: “I bring you greetings from my pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.” It was the same greeting Michelle would use when, in future campaigns, she spoke at churches on behalf of her husband.

  Between speeches, Barack and Michelle focused on raising the ten million dollars that would, Barack insisted, make him an unbeatable candidate. Since Marty Nesbitt owed the existence of his airport parking empire to one of the richest women in the country, Penny Pritzker, Barack asked Nesbitt if he would set up a meeting.

  A granddaughter of Hyatt Hotel founder Abram Nicholas Pritzker (as well as onetime chairman of Superior Bank, which was closed by federal regulators because of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2001), Penny Pritzker shared in a family fortune estimated at over twenty billion dollars. She had met Barack and Michelle socially but was by no means convinced that he was a viable candidate for the U.S. Senate. Still, that August she invited Barack, Michelle, and the girls up to the Pritzkers’ sprawling lakefront summer “cottage” about fifty miles outside Chicago.

  When they arrived, Obama sauntered coolly up the front steps, slipped off his black sunglasses, took Pritzker’s hand, and leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. At that moment, it seemed unlikely that the billionairess would deny him the support he sought.

  Pritzker and her husband, Bryan Traubert, were equally impressed with Michelle and their attractive, well-behaved offspring. After the Obamas departed for Chicago, Pritzker and Traubert went for a run and spent the whole time talking about Barack. In the end, they concluded that while he might lack a thorough knowledge of some important issues, he was so confident and so persuasive that he might just pull it off. “Michelle was also an enormous part of the equation,” Pritzker said. It was right after their weekend meeting with Barack and Michelle, Pritzker said, that she decided she would support “them.”

 
Once Barack was anointed by the Pritzkers, one major contributor after another fell into line. Playboy Enterprises Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Christie Hefner, daughter of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, came on board after Barack’s friend Bettylu Saltzman brought him to meet the “Ladies Who Lunch”—nineteen well-to-do Chicago women with an interest in backing liberal candidates and causes. Christie then introduced him to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, and to TV producer Norman Lear, who in turn put Barack in touch with his powerful entertainment industry friends in Los Angeles and New York.

  Suddenly, money was no longer a problem. Throughout 2002, the biggest obstacle to Barack recapturing Carol Moseley Braun’s old Senate seat was Carol Moseley Braun. The former Senator toyed with the idea of running herself, and Barack knew that he stood no chance of getting his party’s nomination if she entered the race.

  Frustrated that he could not announce his candidacy as long as Braun vacillated, Barack decided to attend the annual Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington. Michelle encouraged the trip; perhaps, she said, he could garner support from some of the bigger names in Congress.

  What he discovered was something quite different. When he returned, he was so shaken by what he had encountered that he felt obliged to tell his pastor. Wright had attended the Black Caucus weekends before, so he was well aware of what went on there. Barack, Wright told writer Manya Brachear, “had gone down there to get support and found out it was just a meat market. He had people say, “If you want to count on me, come on to my room. I don’t care if you’re married. I am not asking you to leave your wife—just come on.” All the women hitting on him. He was like, in shock. He’s there on a serious agenda, talking about running for the United States Senate. They’re talking about giving him some pussy.”

  Wright looked at Barack in amazement. “Barack, c’mon, man. Come on!” the reverend said. “It’s just a nonstop party, all the booze you want, all the booty you want. That’s all it is.” According to Wright, Barack went to meet Washington’s African American Congressmen and Congresswomen “with this altruistic agenda, trying to get some support. He comes back shattered. I thought to myself, ‘Does he have a rude awakening coming his way.”

  While he waited impatiently for Moseley Braun to make up her mind, Barack was invited in October of 2002 to speak at a rally against U.S. military involvement in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq would not take place until the following March, but Barack was already lining up with others in his party to oppose it. While future presidential hopefuls like Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton would be persuaded that only U.S. military action could prevent Saddam Hussein from unleashing his “weapons of mass destruction,” Barack thought otherwise.

  As he was poised to run for the Senate, he had to think long and hard about whether this was a gamble worth taking. Sentiment in the country was running two-to-one in favor of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, and President George W. Bush’s approval ratings were at 65 percent.

  Once again, he turned to Michelle for advice. She had nodded in agreement when Jeremiah Wright preached that young black men were being used as fodder for “another unjust war.” She also knew that that message resonated with South Side voters.

  Besides, she reminded her husband, the very people he was counting on to fund his campaign were the ones that had invited him to speak at the rally.

  “Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally,” he told the crowd, “I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union…. I don’t oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war after Pearl Harbor was bombed…. What I am opposed to is a dumb war…a rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.”

  The speech would serve Barack well as the American public gradually soured on the war; he would be one of the few leaders of either party who could claim he opposed the invasion from the beginning. At the time, however, he wasn’t so sure his stance would pay off politically. “What if,” he asked Michelle, “it turns out like the Persian Gulf War and everybody comes home a hero?”

  “It won’t,” she told him. “And even if it did,” she went on, “you’ve got to say what you believe.”

  By this point, Barack had managed to persuade one of Chicago’s top campaign strategists to join his team. A longtime pal of Clinton-adviser-turned-Congressman Rahm Emanuel and one of Mayor Daley’s most trusted advisers, the endearingly disheveled, mustachioed David Axelrod was a seasoned practitioner of Chicago’s take-no-prisoners brand of politics.

  At the same time, Axelrod fancied himself a “progressive,” and it was that same streak of practicality mixed with idealism in Barack that most appealed to him. For her part, Michelle viewed all Chicago politicos with no small degree of suspicion—and Axelrod was no exception. “Barack,” she would tell her husband repeatedly, “this is not a noble business.”

  Periodically, Michelle still found herself harboring doubts about the wisdom of Barack’s decision to pursue a life in politics—and what it was costing her family in terms of financial security. When he called home from the campaign trail ecstatic about the response he was getting from crowds, the response he got from Michelle was frosty at best.

  “They’re drinking the juice,” he told her immediately after delivering one of his rafter-rattling speeches. “I feel like I’m inspiring people.”

  “You don’t even have enough money,” she shot back, “to drink your own juice.”

  As he did every December, Barack took the family to Hawaii for Christmas. Still stymied by Moseley Braun’s indecision, he told Toot that maybe this was the end of his political career. But on Christmas Eve, things changed. Instead of trying to regain her Senate seat, Moseley Braun, who was even more cocky than Barack, announced that she was making a run for the White House.

  It was just the first of several breaks—some lucky, some calculated—that would go Barack’s way in the coming months. In April of 2003, Republican incumbent Peter Fitzgerald announced that he was relinquishing his seat for family reasons. “I thought I could beat him, and still think I could have beaten him,” Barack later said. “But the fact that he did not end up running, obviously, left the field wide open.”

  That same month, Jeremiah Wright was delivering one of his most incendiary sermons to date. “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America,’” he bellowed as church members shouted “amen” in reply. “No, no, no, God damn America—that’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

  For Barack, who according to several church members was present at Trinity United with Michelle and the girls when Wright gave his infamous “God Damn America” sermon, such comments were hardly surprising. It was the kind of over-the-top rhetoric that Wright had indulged in for years. Moreover, downstaters and white liberal voters who had already succumbed to Barack’s considerable charms would remain unaware of his ties to Wright, and there was essentially no chance that Wright’s sermons would ever be covered in Chicago’s mainstream press.

  Now that the Democrats had finally wrested control of the State Senate from the Republicans, Barack approached his political godfather with a proposition. “You’re now the Senate President,” he told Emil Jones. “You have a lot of power.”

  “I do?” Jones replied coyly.

  “Yes.”

  Jones continued to play along. “Tell me,” he said, “what kind of power I have.”

  “You have the power to make a U.S. Senator,” Barack said.

  “I do?”

  “You do,” Barack answered with a nod.

  “If I’ve got that kind
of power,” Jones said, “do you have anyone in mind?”

  “Yeah,” Barack answered brightly. “Me!”

  Over the coming months, Jones ushered through several pieces of legislation crafted by Barack and aimed squarely at his core African American constituency. Among them: a bill that increased the number of poor children covered by Illinois’s health insurance program, a law that forced the videotaping of criminal confessions, and, in response to complaints by African American motorists of being harassed for “driving while black,” a law that required police to collect data on the race of every driver they pulled over as a way to monitor racial profiling.

  Just as important, Jones’s backing meant that other Democratic Party heavyweights—most notably Mayor Daley—would refrain from endorsing any other candidates in the primary. (Because Barack was so instrumental in getting Blagojevich elected, the Governor was one of his earliest and most enthusiastic supporters.) And while Barack sold himself as an antimachine politician, at the same time he took Michelle’s advice and privately approached not only Daley but Daley’s brother Michael asking for their support if he won the primary. “Barack had some chameleon in him,” Mike Jacobs observed. “He’ll be what he has to be to garner support, but in the end you get the sense that he’ll try to do the right thing.”

  In addition to his political savvy, David Axelrod would soon provide Obama with some valuable ammunition for use against his most formidable Democratic adversary. Before he was hired by Barack, Axelrod was being wooed by Blair Hull, a flamboyant Las Vegas cardplayer who had turned his skills into a fortune on Wall Street. Hull had sold his company to Goldman Sachs for more than half a billion dollars, and was now willing to spend whatever it took to get elected to the U.S. Senate. He wanted Axelrod on board—at any price.