Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Dan Shomon had first come to Springfield eight years earlier as United Press International’s bureau chief before moving into state government, eventually working for Illinois treasurer Pat Quinn and then shifting to the Senate Democratic staff in early 1995. With Debbie Halvorson’s office in the same four-senator suite as his, Barack could easily see how much effort Dan was putting into assisting Debbie. When Hoffmann called to say, “I need you to staff Obama,” Shomon responded, “You’re kidding. I don’t have time for Obama. I don’t even know if I like Obama. He wants to change the world in five minutes. I have a lot of other things to do.” Hoffmann sweet-talked Shomon, just as Barack had persuaded him. “He just needs a little strategic advice, he doesn’t really need you to do any work. He does his own writing. He just needs you to help with strategy.”

  Soon after Hoffmann’s call, Barack caught up with Dan. “I’m overloaded,” Shomon insisted, but Barack said, “Let me take you out to dinner,” and a night or two later, they met up at Sebastian’s, one of Springfield’s best restaurants. Barack reiterated Mike’s line—“I just want some strategic help. I just want you to give me some advice”—and in the course of dinner, Dan decided, “This is a really nice guy” and agreed to staff Barack.31

  Soon after the swearing-in, Barack received his committee assignments: Judiciary, following directly from his Harvard and U of C law school pedigree; Public Health and Welfare, which he had specifically requested; and State Government Operations, which was minor in comparison. Senate Judiciary was the least partisan committee in the General Assembly, primarily because independent-minded Republican Carl Hawkinson of Galesburg, who had been chairman since 1993, brought to it an even-handed style. Hawkinson had a good friendship with ranking Democrat John Cullerton, a Loyola Law School graduate who had spent five years as a Cook County public defender. Cullerton, like everyone else, viewed Hawkinson as “very fair, very thoughtful,” and “real bright.” Judiciary handled both criminal and civil law issues, and lobbyists, such as Illinois Sheriffs Association executive director Greg Sullivan, viewed Hawkinson as “very, very well respected” throughout state government. Other Republican members included razor-sharp former Will County state’s attorney Ed Petka, whom a Joliet reporter had nicknamed “Electric Ed” for the number of murderers he had sent to death row.

  Dan Cronin and Kirk Dillard were two younger, suburban Republicans. Cronin, a true moderate, saw Judiciary as “a heady committee” with “a nice collegiality” and “a rather significant workload.” Dillard, whose warm demeanor masked resolutely conservative views like all-out opposition to abortion, had worked in Jim Edgar’s administration before entering the Senate as a protégé of Pate Philip. Among committee Democrats, live wire Bobby Molaro was “a funny guy” who one colleague said provided “a little comic relief,” while George Shadid had served twenty-four years as a Peoria police officer before overcoming voter discomfort with his Lebanese ancestry to win election as Peoria County sheriff. After seventeen years, he had entered the Senate in 1993.

  Judiciary was significantly better staffed than most committees, with two young attorneys from each caucus assigned to its work: Democrats Gideon Baum and Mike Marrs, and Republicans Matt Jones and John Nicolay, handled the criminal and civil legislation, respectively. Baum realized immediately that Barack was “very smart, very political, very pragmatic,” and Nicolay immediately pegged Barack as an “absolutely political, ambitious animal,” “one of the most political people I’ve ever met, from day one.” Marrs was impressed when Barack wanted to go over bills prior to the committee’s first meeting. But watching Barack on the Senate floor during one of the first days, Marrs thought “he seemed a little bit crestfallen at seeing the process and the fact that there’s not these weighty substantive debates going on,” that what transpired was “very politically driven and not issue driven.” Barack “seemed visibly sort of like ‘Is this all there is?’” Marrs remembered. One evening early in the session, “before he really knew anybody,” Marrs ran into Barack at a reception. “What’s the story on that guy over there?” Barack asked. “Tell me about that person.” It was readily apparent that Barack wanted to “soak it all up.” Republican Matt Jones had spent four years as a prosecutor in Peoria County before going on Senate staff, and he saw Barack as “trying to fit in and figure things out” in committee. John Nicolay agreed that Barack “was still finding his feet” and “knew his place in the world,” yet “from day one” it was clear he was “extremely impressive, very smooth, very bright.”

  Barack’s second committee, Public Health and Welfare, was sometimes called “Nia’s committee,” because over the previous sixteen years Democratic staffer Nia Odeoti-Hassan had acquired an unequaled reputation for her policy expertise. A Muslim woman who had taught for six years at a small Iowa college before arriving in Springfield in 1981, Nia had become close to Margaret Smith, the aging black Chicago Democrat who was the committee’s ranking minority member, as well as Alice Palmer. Nia knew Barack had requested the committee, and with Smith’s failing memory, Emil Jones quietly told Nia “to make sure that everything that she knew as minority spokesman that Barack knew too.”

  At one point, Smith asked Nia, “Why are you down in that young man’s office all the time?” but staffers and lobbyists noted that Barack treated Smith with unerring deference and respect. “She had earned her stripes,” Republican committee staffer Debbie Lounsberry explained. Barack “was actually functioning as the co-minority spokesman,” Nia explained, and while some staffers found Barack’s Harvard and U of C credentials intimidating, Nia, who often advised progressive lobbyists like John Bouman and Doug Dobmeyer on how best to handle things, was happy to have such a bright African American senator, one who reminded her of “Dick Newhouse in his early years.”

  Public Health and Welfare’s chairman was Rockford conservative Dave Syverson, who entered the Senate in 1993 as one of the Republicans’ Fab Five. Syverson had the committee meet on Tuesday at 8:00 A.M., which meant Barack had to make the more-than-three-hour drive to Springfield on Monday evenings rather than Tuesday mornings, as he had hoped. As Lounsberry could see, Barack was “not an early morning person, and he was not happy” with the unpleasant schedule. But with Margaret Smith effectively sidelined, Syverson and Barack met “before committee so there wasn’t any blindsiding the other person,” Syverson recalled, and, according to Lounsberry, they quickly developed “a very cordial professional working relationship.” Barack was “pretty quiet when he first started out,” she remembered, but gradually he emerged as “the voice of the committee,” asking “a lot of questions of the witnesses” when testimony was being heard for and against various bills. But Lounsberry believed the committee was well functioning and collegial because Nia Odeoti-Hassan “knew the issues inside and out.”

  The chairman of the State Government Operations committee was young Republican Fab Five banker Peter Fitzgerald, who readily admitted that its “housekeeping” tasks made it “one of the least desirable committees” to chair. Barack was the Democratic spokesman, but Fitzgerald, who was distracted by trying to win the 1998 Republican nomination to challenge Democratic U.S. senator Carol Moseley Braun, found Barack overly diligent. “He would make it take up more time than I thought it should,” carefully scrutinizing bills even though “there was no partisan material or issues involved.” Fitzgerald believed that Barack had “a degree of suspiciousness that I thought was excessive,” although he recognized that Barack was “very bright” and “very gifted.”32

  By early March, Emil Jones Jr. and his staff had a clearer sense of how Barack was adjusting. Jones believed “he was naive, totally naive,” and communications director Lori Joyce Cullen thought Barack was visibly “pie in the sky: ‘I’m going to change the world.’” Her deputy Cindy Huebner remembered that Barack “was really, really wanting to get things done,” and Dan Shomon saw that Barack could rub people the wrong way because “he wanted to fix the process too quickly.” Citizen Action lobb
yist John Cameron thought Barack was “pretentious” and “insufferably ambitious,” and recalled how he would “sit in committee and roll his eyes if he thought the testimony was below him.”

  Dave Gross, Jones’s deputy chief of staff, knew that “there were very few opportunities for Democrats to actually participate” in crafting legislation given Pate Philip’s control. Shomon’s communications colleague Adelmo Marchiori explained that Democrats “had to spend some time eyeing some of the Republicans’ bills” to find attractive legislation to cosponsor and claim credit for if it won enactment. Most Democrats’ bills were relegated to the Senate’s Rules Committee, chaired by Philip’s top lieutenant, Urbana undertaker Stan Weaver, where they would quietly die. Mike Hoffmann appreciated that Barack “was quick to understand that in the minority you weren’t going to get anything done unless you could partner up with somebody on the other side.” Barack spoke frequently with Hoffmann, “probably more so than just about any other member,” and clearly understood that his initial months in the capitol were “a learning experience, and he didn’t say a lot. I think he tried to keep his ambitions in check,” even if others like John Cameron felt otherwise.

  A few months later, Barack recounted that “when I first arrived, I anticipated my caucus would meet and discuss what issues we really wanted to focus on and then structure bills for the problems we identified.” Instead, he quickly realized that “every legislator is somewhat of an independent contractor, searching out issues that will play well in the district.” That produced “a lot of duplicative bills and bills that really hadn’t been thought through or thoroughly researched. That was discouraging,” yet most Springfield veterans “are resigned to the fact that the work of the legislature is piecemeal and sporadic. I don’t think it has to be that way.” A few years later, Barack explained that he had been most disappointed by “the degree of control that leadership exerted over the process,” which gave Pate Philip, “the original paleoconservative,” really “exclusive power to control the flow of legislation and to control the debate.” With progressive bills held in the Rules Committee, “you wouldn’t even get a debate, much less get a vote,” and “that was disappointing and frustrating for someone like myself who was down there to work and discovered that most of my bills were going to get killed before they had even been debated . . . that is not something that I anticipated.”

  Barack shared his disappointment with Michelle and friends back in Chicago, who could contrast Barack’s reaction to the political realities of the capitol with the high expectations for policy innovation he had voiced months before. “He was naive about it,” Michelle’s young protégé Craig Huffman recalled. “He thought he was getting into the AP class, and he’d really been admitted to the Special Ed class . . . I think it was eye-opening.”33

  On Tuesday, March 4, Barack cast his first notable vote when he and John Cullerton both opposed SB 230, a “partial-birth” abortion ban measure that the Senate Judiciary Committee sent to the floor by a 7–2 margin. The meeting witnessed “spirited testimony from activists but little discussion by lawmakers,” with Barack telling reporters that the bill’s lack of a health exception meant it was “clearly unconstitutional.” Barack remained far more interested in the upcoming welfare law changes that would remove the “safety net” of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and on March 11 the Public Health and Welfare Committee approved Barack’s SB 755, which mandated a study of the impact of those changes on Illinois recipients of public assistance.

  The next day, Senate Judiciary approved Barack’s SB 574, authorizing administrative hearings for alleged violations of municipal ordinances, but Thursday, March 13, was Barack’s rookie debut on the Senate floor, as his SB 837, authorizing the directory of graduating Chicago city college students, came up for passage. The Senate had a long tradition of “roasting” new members when they rose to request passage of their first bill, but Barack suffered a far rougher debut than most. This was due in part to how he had knocked Alice Palmer off the 1996 primary ballot, but to a far greater degree it illustrated the stark dislike several Chicago African American senators had for their new young upstart colleague.

  “I come humbly before you on this extremely humble bill,” Barack began, explaining that it “authorizes the community colleges to develop and distribute a directory of graduating vocational and technical school students,” an idea that someone at Kennedy-King College had suggested to Barack.

  Rickey Hendon, a forty-three-year-old West Sider who had entered the Senate four years earlier after serving as 27th Ward alderman, was quick on the attack. “Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I’m having a little trouble with it,” perhaps because Hendon and his buddy Donne Trotter had under their breaths already been mouthing a variety of insulting quips like “Yo Mama,” targeting the visibly self-confident, or arrogant, new hotshot.

  After Barack answered, Hendon said, “Is that Irish?”

  “It will be when I run countywide,” Barack replied.

  “That was a good joke, but this bill’s still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?” Hendon queried.

  Walter Dudycz, often the presiding officer, called on Barack to answer Hendon’s question, and Barack replied, “I apologize. I wasn’t paying Senator Hendon any attention.”

  Hendon responded, “Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn’t pay it much attention, either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?”

  Barack stumbled, citing where the idea came from and declaring that those numbers would not be included.

  Hendon proceded. “I seem to recall a very lovely senator by the name of Palmer—much easier to pronounce than Obama—and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don’t have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And you don’t even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did.”

  Minutes earlier, fellow freshman Debbie Halvorson had presented her first bill, and Hendon had alluded then to how he missed the man she had ousted. Now Hendon said, “The same day that I’m missing Senator Aldo DeAngelis, now I’m missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that make absolutely no sense. I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.”

  Friendlier colleagues like Republican Brad Burzynski immediately came to Barack’s aid. “First of all, Senator Obama, I’d like to thank you for not wearing perfume that Senator Hendon likes.” He continued with a series of gently needling questions, joined by veteran Democrats Denny Jacobs and Howie Carroll. Then fellow Harvard Law School graduate Carl Hawkinson asked Barack, “How do the quality of these questions compare with those that you received from Professors Dershowitz, Tribe, or Nesson?”

  Now Barack was in the spirit. “I must say that they compare very favorably. In fact, this is the toughest grilling that I’ve ever received. If I survive this event, I will be eternally grateful and consider this a highlight of my legal and legislative career.”

  Downstate warhorse Vince Demuzio joined in. “Let’s not forget, his name ends in a vowel. Senator Obama, let me congratulate you on your first bill. I was sitting here, and as Rickey Hendon was asking you those questions and making those statements, I recalled back to Rickey’s first bill. I closed my eyes; I held my nose; I couldn’t find the right switch so the staff had to vote me. This time I will keep my eyes open and vote in the affirmative.”

  Moderate senior Republican Adeline Geo-Karis spoke similarly. “I certainly commend him for his fortitude today, because if you had fortitude at Harvard, you don’t know this body yet. But I want to commend you for trying, because you have Mr. Hendon, who never ceases to attack you.”

  SB 837 then passed unanimously, and five months later Governor Edgar signed it into law.34

  Hendon’s hostility was readily apparent, and the “Yo Mama” comments were “audible” very early on, according to secr
etary of the Senate Linda Hawker, who remembered Donne Trotter joining in with Hendon. Years later, Hendon cited his “true love for” Alice Palmer to explain his animus, but black lobbyist and former House member Paul Williams was one of many who said the reasons for Hendon and Trotter’s performance had deeper and more complex roots. “Everybody wasn’t thrilled about Mr. Goody Two-Shoes coming in here and imposing all his great ideas on how we need change, when nobody was begging for it,” Williams recalled. “Barack’s trying to find his way,” but “Barack’s a little bit arrogant.” Williams believed Barack exhibited an “I’m-smarter-than-these-guys” demeanor, and he recalled that once that spring, Barack told him, “You know, Paul, this forum’s a little small for me.” Williams thought Barack was “overly intellectual” in an institution that had what another lobbyist called “a very anti-intellectual culture.” But to Williams, even more crucial was how “Barack doesn’t have the same community experience we do” as black men who had grown up in Chicago.

  Early on, Williams introduced Barack to the Senate’s only African American member from outside Chicago, thirty-three-year-old James Clayborne, who was from “Metro East,” the heavily minority area in southwest Illinois just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Williams thought Barack and Clayborne, an attorney who had entered the Senate two years earlier, “had a lot in common,” but Clayborne’s downstate roots gave him a worldview that was very different from black Chicagoans’. “I can remember specifically Donne Trotter, more so than anybody,” Clayborne recalled, “expressing some reluctance, I guess, on the part of accepting Barack and saying that—I’ll never forget this—Donne Trotter said to me, ‘Can you believe . . . this guy’s thirty-some years old [and] he’s already written a book about himself?’”

  Resentment and jealousy were significant factors, especially toward someone who “had never paid his dues” and who sometimes reminded people of Mel Reynolds. Hyde Park state representative Barbara Flynn Currie recalled that “there was a lot of anger about Mel Reynolds,” as well as “a concern that Barack was going to lord it over them in the same kind of way” that the onetime Rhodes Scholar turned convicted felon had. “Here comes another outsider who’s got the class and the smarts and the polish that a lot of the rest of us don’t,” Currie explained. African American AFSCME lobbyist Ray Harris knew Barack “was looking ahead almost from the moment he stepped into the capitol,” and he was aware of how Hendon and Trotter “were just senseless in their dislike for the man, because he was everything that they wished they could be.” On the Senate floor or off, “they made it their mission in life to make certain people knew that they hated this guy.” Southwest Side senator Lou Viverito agreed that for someone so focused on “moving so rapidly,” Barack was seen as “an up-and-coming guy that didn’t earn his way.” Not only was he “more of an outsider,” it was also clear “they didn’t consider him black enough.” Fellow freshman Terry Link, whose office adjoined Barack’s and who also sat in the back row in the Senate chamber, agreed that it came down to origins. “Barack wasn’t born and raised in Chicago” so “he was considered an outsider more than anything else. . . . There’s the part that was more of the problem than anything else.”35