Rising Star

by David Garrow

  But he had two particular concerns, number one being “the issue of prevention dollars to go with this program” so that young offenders could receive “the support services they need to get on the right track.” Barack’s second worry was that by authorizing concurrent juvenile and adult sentences, with the latter kicking in if the offender failed to successfully complete the former, the bill “will result in more incarcerations of young people” if insufficient assistance was available. “We should be able to make distinctions between those young people who are serious offenders and do need to be locked up, and those young people who can still be salvaged, still be saved,” Barack emphasized. He feared Illinois would “continue down a path where our main strategy for dealing with juvenile crime is to lock kids up. That is an unsustainable, unconscionable approach. It is not smart in terms of crime fighting. It is not the kind of state I want to live in, where we are afraid of our children and we are continually building more prisons as opposed to building more schools.” With only Rickey Hendon and Donne Trotter voting no, the Senate passed the bill 50–2, with three other Democrats joining Barack in voting present.47

  On the campaign finance issue, Mike Lawrence in late January met privately with each of the four caucus designees as well as Jim Edgar’s youthful deputy chief of staff, Andy Foster, who would represent the governor, before bringing the group together for its first meeting. Lawrence’s initial conversation was with veteran House Democrat Gary Hannig, who recommended they start with the least controversial items, and Lawrence later explained, “I give Representative Hannig credit for the approach that we took.” On the eve of that first session, Lawrence told Paul Simon that “Foster and the four legislators have expressed optimism that consensus can be reached on some reforms,” such as banning fund-raising while the legislature was in session, strengthening disclosure laws, and prohibiting personal use of campaign funds. However, Lawrence believed “consensus will not be reached” on limiting the overall amounts of contributions or expenditures. In early February the group gathered for an initial discussion, and word of it quickly reached Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller, who described the members as “widely respected legislators who should have the ability to convince their respective caucuses to accept their recommendations,” including “up and coming state Sen. Barach Obama.”

  The fourth Saguaro Seminar meeting, on politics and civic engagement, took place in Los Angeles on February’s second weekend. In Springfield, Barack introduced nine bills and the proposed constitutional amendment he had announced months earlier. The most notable of the bills would increase the standard individual tax exemption from $1,000 to $2,500 for families with incomes below $25,000, to $2,000 for ones between $25,000 and $50,000 and to $1,500 for those between $50,000 and $75,000. The next Monday Barack used the bill to make a modest press splash, describing his proposal as a modest corrective to how Illinois’s state Constitution mandated a flat income tax rate—presently 3 percent—for everyone, regardless of income. Illinois “has one of the most regressive tax systems in the country,” one “where a millionaire pays the same tax rate as a single parent who’s making a minimum wage,” Barack emphasized. The proposed amendment, Senate Joint Resolution 48, would add a new section, Universal Health Care Coverage, to the state Constitution’s Bill of Rights: “Health care is an essential safeguard of human life and dignity, and there is an obligation for the State of Illinois to ensure that every person is able to realize this fundamental right. On or before May 31, 2002, the General Assembly by law shall enact a plan for universal health care coverage that permits everyone in Illinois to obtain decent health care on a regular basis.”

  Life in the capitol offered both levity and tragedy. Emil Jones, understandably displeased with how the Senate’s Republican president treated him, found some humorous revenge when a stranger said he looked familiar and asked, “‘Are you in politics?’ ‘I’m in the Senate,’” Jones replied. “What’s your name?” the person asked. “Pate Philip,” Jones shot back, delighted that at least one Illinoisan thought Pate Philip was a very dark-skinned African American. Far more unforgettable was the death of Decatur Democratic senator Penny Severns from breast cancer at age forty-six. Three years earlier Severns had been the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, and she had been hoping to run for secretary of state before her illness became publicly known in December. Although for eleven years she had represented the “conservative, working class, religious community” of Decatur, her constituents had not known that for five years Severns had been in a committed but deeply closeted relationship with a woman fourteen years her junior, former Associated Press Springfield bureau chief Terry Mutchler. Many people in the statehouse knew or suspected as much, and while Severns dreamed of being governor, she and Mutchler had to live “a life that we strove to kept hidden.” On February 24 Barack joined Senate colleagues at Penny’s funeral in Decatur.48

  The Wednesday-night poker games from the year before resumed with gusto that spring, although they were now in the kitchen of the simple 7th Street house where Terry Link stayed. Mike Lieteau explained that “some of the senators had reservations about going out to Panther Creek” because they played with chips “right off the bar,” which was “a little too public” for anyone worried “that you could be exposed.” The weekly gatherings now included Republican senator Tom Walsh, from Chicago’s western suburbs; veteran Democratic senator Denny Jacobs, from western Illinois’s Quad Cities area; Illinois Manufacturers’ Association lobbyist Boro Reljic; and occasionally Mike Lieteau’s cousin Fred Fortier, who had become one of Senate Democrats’ two Judiciary Committee staffers. Tommy Walsh was a playful jokester, who added “a lot of fun to the group,” remembered unrelated Larry Walsh. Denny Jacobs was one of the Senate’s most outspoken members. Widely viewed as the father of Illinois’s 1990 Riverboat Gambling Act, Jacobs had never resigned himself to Emil Jones’s leadership of the Democratic caucus. An old-style politician, Jacobs’s blow-ups were legendary. “‘They misquoted me in Peoria! They misquoted me in Peoria!’” Democratic staffer Cindy Huebner remembered him once screaming into a phone. “What did they say? ‘They said that I said this guy should be hung by his thumbs until he turns blue. I didn’t say that! I said he ought to be hung by his balls until he turns blue!’ He was furious.”

  Tommy Walsh quickly realized that Barack and Mike were “good friends, and he took liberties with Mike that he didn’t take with anybody else.” Walsh also recognized what a politically significant trio Barack’s Democratic poker buddies were. Waukegan’s Terry Link had made the Lake County Democratic Party a significant presence in state politics, and Larry Walsh’s Will County Democrats, just like Denny Jacobs’s power base in the Quad Cities, represented major areas of Democratic strength outside Chicago’s Cook County. Although Barack “never made it real obvious that what he was doing was networking for the future,” Walsh explained, “being a friend of Terry Link’s was a good thing” for any Democrat who might run statewide in Illinois. Tommy would bring a pack of cigarettes to the game, have one or two, but otherwise make them available to Barack and Denny. Barack “wore the same thing to every card game”: a sweatshirt and sweatpants that “looked like pajamas,” so his workday clothes would not reek of smoke. Six-packs of beer abounded, and come 10:30 P.M. or so, they ordered two big pizzas. They usually adjourned at midnight because Larry Walsh went to mass every day at 7:00 A.M.

  Everyone saw Barack as a conservative card player, who was never afraid to fold, but it “became a standing joke” that he would never admit he had lost money over the course of a night, even though he often did. “Maybe I broke even,” Barack would say as the others smirked. “The ego was that he could never lose,” Mike Lieteau explained, and when Barack did lose a hand, “I always remember him making a point of saying, ‘I played that hand right,’” Tommy Walsh recalled. “Yes sir, Senator, you played it like a champ!” Tommy teasingly replied. One night only Barack and Mike Lieteau remained in on a hand, with Barack insisten
tly raising before Mike surprised everyone by winning. Barack “became more agitated” once he realized “he had lost all his money.” Barack was “legitimately annoyed,” for “Mike should never have been in that hand,” but Barack called Lieteau “an idiot” for having stayed in. Mike defused the moment by saying, “I may be an idiot, but I’m not the one leaving mad with no money,” forcing even Barack to laugh.

  Even at the capitol, Mike could tease Barack in ways no one else did. Telecommunications bills were handled by the Energy and Environment Committee, and one morning Barack was listening to the policy arguments. Mike slid in beside him. “Why are you sittin’ in on grown folks’ conversations, brother?” he teasingly asked. A serious legislator indeed, “Barack wanted to actually hear the testimony,” Lieteau recalled.

  By early 1998, the paperback edition of Dreams From My Father had been out for eighteen months, a common time frame for publishers to offload their remaining copies of poorly selling titles onto the “remainder” market. Brad Jonas owned three Chicago-area used-book stores, including one in Hyde Park, and he regularly purchased remaindered books. He had met Barack at his daughter’s Hyde Park school and had been highly impressed. Early in 1998 Jonas acquired the last four thousand copies of Kodansha Globe’s edition of Dreams for the grand sum of $900—22 cents a copy—and in early 1998 Dreams From My Father was suddenly more visible around Chicago than at any time since its initial publication in hardcover.

  One bookstore browser who recognized the author’s name and bought a copy was Jim Reynolds Jr. Barack had begun playing pickup basketball every so often at the tony East Bank Club in River North in addition to Hyde Park, and Reynolds, an African American municipal bonds dealer, sometimes played there too. Reynolds had recently left Merrill Lynch to cofound his own firm, Loop Capital Markets. Seven years older than Barack, Reynolds had graduated from a South Side vocational high school before attending college in Wisconsin and taking his first job at Paine Webber. “You’re a pretty good writer,” Reynolds told Barack the next time he saw him. “I know I’m a good writer,” came the self-confident response.

  “From that,” Reynolds said, “we became friends. We really just started talking a lot. Our careers were mirroring each other’s because I had just started Loop Capital” the same year Barack had entered elected office. “We actually started spending a lot of time together. We started playing basketball together on a planned basis. I used to go to Springfield a lot because of my business, and every time I went, I would call him, and I would usually use his office as my home base. So we just became very close friends, very close,” playing nine holes of golf every few weeks at the Jackson Park Golf Course just below Hyde Park. Over the next six years, no one else in Chicago, or anywhere in Illinois, would be a more pivotally helpful figure in Barack’s life than Jim Reynolds.49

  In Springfield, Mike Lawrence’s campaign finance reform group met on successive Wednesday mornings. Paul Simon wrote and thanked the participants for their time, adding a handwritten note to Barack: “I also am enthusiastic about your political future!” Lawrence was increasingly confident that his group would agree to “bar use of campaign funds for personal benefit of candidate or his/her family, effective upon the bill becoming law,” as he told his participants in a memo asking them to assemble for a four-hour dinner meeting at the Renaissance on Tuesday, March 10. “The goal,” he wrote, “will be to come to agreement on a package” and “we then will refer our consensus legislation to staff for drafting.” In a subsequent memo to Senate Republican staffers Glenn Hodas and Peg Mosgers, who would write the bill, Lawrence explained that “the majority of those in our group believe the legislation should spell out as explicitly as possible what is not allowed.”

  The legislature took a one-week break for the March 17 primaries, with Barack receiving all 16,792 Democratic votes cast, far more than upcoming Republican opponent Yesse Yehuda’s 401. But other results sent shock waves through Illinois politics. Conservative downstate congressman Glenn Poshard defeated African American former attorney general Roland Burris and Barack’s friend John Schmidt for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination with just 38 percent of the vote. In Chicago, progressive Mexican-born state senator Chuy Garcia had faced an all-out challenge mounted by Mayor Richard Daley’s increasingly muscular political machine. Daley, furious at Garcia’s charges that the city was trying to gentrify the Little Village and Pilsen communities, had his top Latino operative marshal hundreds of organization loyalists against Garcia. A decade earlier Danny Solis had been Barack’s UNO organizing colleague, but by 1996, Solis had built UNO into a major political force that backed the mayor. Daley had appointed Solis the 25th Ward’s alderman when the seat became vacant, and Solis ally Tony Munoz, an otherwise unknown Chicago police officer, was slated against Garcia. Barack quietly had sent his hardest-working young supporter, Will Burns, and some other U of C youngsters to help Garcia, but on election night, Munoz and the Daley organization came out on top with 54 percent of the vote. The next morning Capital Fax observed that “Chicago state legislators will now fear Mayor Daley even more,” and Garcia told the Chicago Reader that the city now had “a new type of machine, and the mayor is the chairman.” Garcia’s Senate colleague Miguel del Valle called Solis Daley’s “mouthpiece,” but Solis insisted, “I don’t believe that I’ve sold out my philosophy of what I’d like to do for my community just because I am part of the Machine.” Al Miller, Harold Washington’s former press secretary, warned that “anytime anyone raises his head a little bit higher, the Daley folk want to knock it down.” Hyde Park’s decades of relative independence made it a unique exception to organization influence, but even a Hyde Park legislator had to be wary of drawing Daley’s anger.50

  Barack remained underwhelmed by the impact of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, asking his board colleagues whether there was evidence of positive trends in student achievement. When legislators returned to Springfield, Capitol Fax reported that Lawrence’s group was close to agreeing on “a sweeping campaign reform package,” including a ban on personal use of campaign funds, but Lawrence knew that the crucial question was whether he and his good friend Carter Hendren, Pate Philip’s chief of staff, could convince the Senate president to bring the agreed-upon package to a floor vote with his support. Even though the House had previously passed a broader bill, including a limit on the size of contributions, in private all four caucuses opposed such a ceiling, and everyone knew that passage by the House had occurred only because they were certain Philip would kill it in the Senate.

  At the end of March Barack joined U.S. senator Carol Moseley Braun, state representative Barbara Flynn Currie, and 4th Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle in speaking at a memorial service for Hyde Park political activist Saul Mendelson, who two years earlier had been an outspoken critic of Alice Palmer’s attempt to reclaim her Senate seat from Barack. On April 1, Barack resigned from the Senate’s State Government Operations Committee because Emil Jones had named him to the slightly more interesting Revenue Committee. Republican chairman Bill Peterson found Barack to be “cordial, conscientious,” and “easy to get along with,” but poker buddy Denny Jacobs took a dimmer view once Barack joined the committee. “He began asking the witnesses four million questions,” Jacobs recalled. “I leaned over and said, ‘Hey, enough already! Learn on your own damn time, will you?’” Barack, fellow Democrat Pat Welch realized, “didn’t really want to be on Revenue,” because the committee’s name was “a misnomer—it was a tax break committee, because every bill was to give somebody a tax break.” Welch recalled that he and Barack often voted “no” together. When Welch cast a surprising “yes,” Barack asked why. “That one helped my district, so I had to vote for it.” “Oh,” Barack lightheartedly responded. “So that’s how this committee works.” Jacobs disliked Revenue for a different reason, because “there’s no money on Revenue.” To “fund your campaigns,” he explained, a senator had to be on “committees where you could at least ask for contributions.”
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br />   In mid-April The Economist, the internationally respected British news weekly, published a one-page account of life in Springfield written by an unnamed former capitol aide. Asserting that the statehouse has “a code of ethics that makes Capitol Hill resemble a convent,” the magazine reported that “one local journalist responded to a complaint that his newspaper had not exposed a state legislator’s activities by saying ‘If we cover one mistress, we’d have to cover all of them.’ Exposure of all could fill several newspapers each week,” The Economist stated. It added that while some legislators “are serious and hardworking, a great many others come to Springfield to have a good time.” Some drank on the floor, “and at least one has been said to carry cocaine in his briefcase.” In the evening, “bars fill up quickly. Sex among the legislators, married or single, is so common as to be invisible. Higher-ranking members can put their girlfriends on the payroll” and “in many offices . . . low-grade sexual byplay is the order of the day.” Capitol Fax frowned on the story, but then reported that legislators were nervous that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was seeking access to logs of phone calls made from the floor of the House. “Calls to extramarital lovers could be detected,” publisher Rich Miller warned.

  In mid-April Barack had to write a check for $13,329 to the IRS to cover the balance of the $41,872 in federal taxes he and Michelle owed on a combined 1997 income of $168,903—putting them in a 36 percent tax bracket. With Barack earning only a few thousand dollars now from Miner Barnhill, his $50,000-plus from the U of C law school plus his additional $48,000 from the state Senate and $11,000 from the Joyce Foundation topped Michelle’s $60,000-plus salary at the University of Chicago. Only briefly by phone did Barack take part in the inaugural New York meeting of Charles Halpern’s nascent new think tank, but he did hold two consecutive Saturday town hall meetings for constituents as well as an evening fund-raiser at a downtown Chicago hotel.