Rising Star

by David Garrow

  Cynthia and Jen were “both members of the Nation of Islam,” and up until the winter of 2002–2003, no one had made an issue of anyone’s private religious faith. But then “something happened,” one witness recalled. “I think there were some pictures that were a catalyst,” and “maybe she had also recently been appointed to a leadership position or something.” The bottom line was that “Obama felt that Cynthia’s affiliation was something that was going to impact her as well as him” if she remained on staff as the Senate race intensified. “She’s starting to have these very difficult conversations with Barack that are really painful for her,” and “I had the impression that it was as difficult for him as it was for her.” But Cynthia “was more wounded by it,” because “she didn’t think that it was going to impact her.” Yet Barack understandably felt that having a top staffer—indeed, his campaign treasurer—who was a member of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam was politically untenable, and in March 2003 Cynthia shifted to a job in state government. She remained actively involved at arm’s length, and several months passed before accountant Harvey Wineberg supplanted her as OFI treasurer. “It was really painful to watch that happen,” one fellow staffer explained. “When Cynthia left, I remember feeling that an injustice had occurred,” as apparently Barack did too, “maybe because he feels he did something wrong.”

  Almost simultaneously, super-energetic Dan Shomon was struggling in the weeks following his mother’s late January death. It had always been envisioned that as the Senate race ramped up, additional staff would be hired to reduce the burden on Dan, but the combination of Shomon’s absences in the wake of his mother’s death as well as his own emotional burnout led him to tell Barack they should hire a full-time campaign manager, which would let Dan shift into a less frenetic role as political director. “Dan was fine with it,” finance director Claire Serdiuk recalled, and David Axelrod and John Kupper concurred as well. Axelrod “wanted somebody that didn’t have as close a relationship to Barack as Shomon,” one colleague explained, and by mid-March, everyone was strategizing how to expand Obama for Illinois beyond simply Serdiuk and her deputy Randon Gardley.8

  In Springfield, Barack’s bills mandating hospital “report cards” and the taping of closed government meetings moved forward as he pressed interest group leaders like Illinois Hospital Association executive director Howard Peters and SEIU lobbyist Bill Perkins to come to accord on the union-drafted measure that was SEIU’s top legislative priority. Barack continued to win prominent coverage in the Defender, with another Chinta Strausberg story featuring his outspoken criticism of President Bush, whose “vision of America’s role in the world is fundamentally flawed. Our long-term safety and security is best accomplished by working with our allies, not trying to bully them.” Back in Chicago, Claire Serdiuk coordinated Barack’s meetings with prominent potential big donors like heiress Penny Pritzker, bank executive Jamie Dimon, Playboy publisher Christie Hefner, and arts patron Lewis Manilow.

  Democrats’ control of the Senate meant that controversial bills involving “infanticide” abortions and expanded gun rights could be defeated in committee, but energetic members of the National Rifle Association’s Illinois affiliate still flooded Senate offices with hundreds of phone calls, annoying and at times frightening senators’ aides like Barack’s Beverly Helm. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller reported that some calls included “personal threats” and “racial epithets,” and as soon as Barack learned what was happening he asked Beverly for NRA lobbyist Todd Vandermyde’s cell phone number. Beverly remembered that within a half hour the calls ceased, demonstrating Todd’s ability to silence the fringe. While Vandermyde knew that Barack would never be with him on any NRA-backed piece of legislation, he recalled that in one office conversation, Barack did volunteer that “I think the Second Amendment means something” when Todd asked him about it.

  Beverly Helm had been Barack’s Springfield assistant for three years, and with Barack now chairing the Health and Human Services Committee, she and expert staffer Nia Odeoti-Hassan took a lead role in shepherding committee business. Barack moved committee meetings from Tuesdays at 8:00 A.M. to the less burdensome Wednesdays at 9:00 A.M., but Republican staffer Debbie Lounsberry thought that he was “surprised with what it takes to be the chairman of that committee.” Given the number of interest groups following the committee’s agenda, there was “more pressure” than Barack had expected. Planned Parenthood lobbyist Pam Sutherland wished Barack had exercised a firmer hand because “you’d have the committee hearings on all these bad bills, and they’d go on forever. ‘Barack, why are you letting this go on? This is horrible,’” Sutherland would ask. “Pam, I can’t do that. They have a right to talk to the committee.” Barack “really believed that people could compromise,” but on issues like abortion, where that never came to pass, Barack’s tolerance “would drive me nuts.”

  By 2003, Springfield lobbyists knew they would have their hands full whenever they approached Barack about a bill. “You knew you were going to get twenty questions, on any issue,” Illinois Federation of Teachers lobbyist Steve Preckwinkle explained. “You always had to be prepared,” because “it was almost like giving him a briefing.” Utility lobbyist Frank Clark knew “you needed to give him data,” and that Barack was “very deliberate,” “never” gave an immediate yes-or-no answer, and preferred “policy discussions where he never committed himself.” When Mike Lieteau’s daughter and former law student Tristé Lieteau visited Barack at Miner Barnhill to tell him she had a job offer from Northwestern University’s Memorial Hospital, “we had a long talk about me becoming a lobbyist.” Barack wondered “why ever would I want to do that” because he considered it “somewhat of a waste of my talent.” When Triste and a colleague called on Barack in Springfield to discuss a hospital provider tax, he “asked several questions that we kind of didn’t have the answer for,” and Barack’s face showed disappointment. “Are you serious? Is this the best you have?” his expression asked. “He was all business,” and “I was just so embarrassed.”

  The new Republican spokesman for the Health Committee, Dale Righter, thought Barack was “genial” and believed “he managed people well” as chairman. Righter quickly realized that Barack was “more interested in reaching a consensus than . . . driving home a particular policy point,” and new Democratic vice chair Mattie Hunter saw that Emil Jones was making whatever bills could advance Barack’s Senate candidacy a top priority. Hunter thought Barack’s style as chairman was “direct,” “no nonsense,” and at times “domineering.” New Evanston Democrat Jeff Schoenberg felt Barack “took a far more Socratic approach” during hearings than most chairs, but just like Righter, he realized that Barack’s focus was on bringing “the competing parties to the table” in order to “identify where the commonalities were.” New Chicago Latina senator Iris Martinez thought Barack was a “very nurturing, almost teaching kind of person” with a rookie legislator, and, like Mattie Hunter, Martinez agreed to back Barack for U.S. Senate after Barack and Emil Jones asked her to do so. “I didn’t realize” that that would infuriate Richard Daley. “The mayor got really mad at me. ‘Why are you supporting Barack? Why not somebody else? Why Obama?’” Daley wanted Martinez to support Dan Hynes, just as he had asked 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis, Barack’s former organizing colleague, who willingly agreed. Hynes recruited Jeff Schoenberg before Barack or Jones made an approach, and Barack “was pissed,” and “it led to some words” when he found out. In addition, Bettylu Saltzman “chewed me out for not being with Barack,” Schoenberg recalled.

  Emil Jones’s support for Barack was visible to all. Inside the statehouse, the phrase “bill-jacking” was used when a leader like Jones mandated that one legislator’s bill would now be carried by someone else. “A lot of people were frustrated with the fact that Barack was getting all of this face time, and nobody else,” Donne Trotter remembered. “All of a sudden you’re the lead, you’re getting the press. . . . Why does the light always have to be on yo
u?” Jones was clear with both Trotter and Rickey Hendon that on measures like racial profiling and death penalty reform, Barack would be Senate Democrats’ top voice. “Emil was very, very influential in getting other people to go along with him,” Democratic freshman Ed Maloney realized, and veteran Denny Jacobs agreed that Emil “helped Barack tremendously.” Barack “became the ‘box guy.’ He had so many bills he had to carry them in a box on the floor,” Trotter recalled with exasperation. But by 2003 “you can see the drive in his face” and “an intensity in his eyes” that had not been apparent years earlier. Trotter believed Barack had become “a more committed legislator” and “a more outspoken one,” but some fellow senators felt they heard from him more than enough. “Tell that nigger to shut up,” one new Hispanic colleague recalled hearing a black senator stage-whisper when Barack spoke on the floor. “He became the fair-haired boy,” one friend explained, or what poker buddy Dave Luechtefeld termed “the favored child,” and the resulting “resentment” was apparent even to Republicans.

  Beverly Helm knew Barack’s Springfield routine: in the mornings he might run late, and in midafternoons, once the Senate adjourned, he often snuck away from the capitol if the weather was good. “I’d call him on his cell phone, and I could hear the wind whistling. I said, ‘You’re on the golf course, aren’t you?’ He’d say, ‘Yes, but don’t tell anyone where I am.’” In the evenings “he always talked to his girls every night before they went to bed,” and Wednesday’s poker games were his only late-night outings. “We never had to worry about whether there was going to be any rumors about him,” Beverly remembered. “Barack was a private person,” she realized. “He could be very outgoing, but he had a reserved portion about him.” In his Springfield office hung a photo of some Hawaiian sea cliffs, and when Beverly asked about it, Barack explained, “that’s where we spread my mother’s ashes.”

  Once when Lisa Madigan’s secretary told Barack that a Chicago gun enthusiast had bullied Bev after she declined to summon Barack from the Senate floor, Barack firmly reprimanded the fellow when he next appeared. “You will never talk to any woman like that. . . . You will not bully her again. You need to apologize to her,” Beverly recounted Barack saying. “Barack was very quiet, he was very composed. I did not see him raise his voice or anything; he just told the gentleman exactly what he wanted to tell him.”

  Early that spring Barack asked Beverly, whose unsuccessful school board race he had contributed to, if she could help him “meet some of the leaders here in Springfield in the black community.” With her pastor’s permission Beverly hosted a “meet and greet” one evening in the fellowship hall and introduced Barack. Bev knew that business lobbyists Phil Lackman and Dave Manning were as close to Barack as anyone in the statehouse, and he still attended the Wednesday-night poker gatherings. When Terry Link moved to a double-wide trailer five miles out, the game moved too, although everyone was nervous about driving back into town post-midnight after having had several beers. When a Sangamon County deputy sheriff pulled Barack over one late night, the need for a new venue was agreed upon, and Illinois Manufacturers’ Association lobbyist Dave Manning volunteered his downtown office. “The IMA is basically a Republican organization,” Mike Lieteau explained, and that, plus the convenient location, drew additional participants. Conservative Republican Bill Brady, who had entered the Senate a year earlier, found Barack a “nice guy” even with their huge political differences. “I always used to kid him that the only fiscally conservative bone in his body I ever saw was at the poker table with his own money,” Brady remembered. “I said to him, ‘If you were half as conservative with the taxpayers’ dollars as you are with your own, the people of Illinois would be a lot better off!’” By 2003, Barack seemed to be losing less often than he had in earlier years, and Beverly Helm recalled Dave Manning and Terry Link grousing that her boss was winning far too many hands.9

  On the campaign trail, Barack spoke to a group of young Democratic activists and then addressed a Sunday antiwar rally in the Loop as a U.S. attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq loomed. “It’s not too late,” Barack told the crowd of five thousand, but when military action began four days later, Barack’s criticism immediately ceased. “Once the president makes the decision to go in, our priority has to be with the safety and success of our troops,” Barack told the Associated Press. “Our prayers are with the families, and we have to hope for the best possible outcome in the shortest possible time.”

  In the state Senate, March 20 was rookie day for Republican Dale Righter and Democrat James Meeks, an African American pastor. Righter’s first bill extended the statute of limitations from one year to two for public hospital patients. Barack teasingly complained that “as a fellow lawyer, surely you know that anytime we extend the deadline for lawyers, that doesn’t give ’em more time to consider the case, it gives ’em more time to file lawsuits, frivolous lawsuits that are raising health care costs across the board.” Meeks’s bill prohibited the sale of tobacco from lunch carts near schools, and Barack asked, “I’m curious. Where did you get this bill? Did this come to you in a dream at night, or via some sort of divine intervention?” The American Lung Association and the American Public Health Association, Meeks replied. “I thought you had the direct line on this kind of legislation, that you didn’t have to refer to the American Lung Association, that you had higher sources in order to find out what kind of bills needed to be passed.” Meeks answered that “I chose not to use the direct line on this one,” and Barack responded, “I just wanted to establish that he does have a direct line. So if any of you need, at some point, advice or counsel, that you know where to go.”

  Later that day, the Senate unanimously approved Barack’s two bills banning the dietary supplement ephedra and prohibiting pyrotechnics and pepper spray in nightclubs. Kevin Riggins, whose sixteen-year-old son Sean had died after ingesting ephedra, “deserves enormous commendation,” Barack said as Riggins joined him on the Senate floor. “It’s the classic example of an ordinary citizen doing extraordinary things, and I really think he deserves all the credit for this legislation.” Barack also spoke in favor of a bipartisan resolution expressing support for U.S. military personnel. “The minute that the president makes a decision” to strike, “we all have to unify immediately” and “close ranks.”

  The next weekend Barack spoke to downstate Democrats in Canton and Macomb at events hosted by progressive U.S. representative Lane Evans, and “they hit it off,” Evans’s political director Jeremiah Posedel realized. Barack also continued to win good press both downstate and in Chicago, with the Defender highlighting his SEIU-backed bill targeting discriminatory hospital pricing. “The health care crisis is enormous and government isn’t going to solve this crisis today or tomorrow,” Barack acknowledged, but discriminatory pricing is “a fundamental injustice” that “we can solve immediately.” At the Macomb event, Mayor Tom Carper praised Barack as “one of the classy people in Springfield,” and a Bloomington Pantagraph story on Democratic Senate contenders featured Denny Jacobs praising Barack. “He has the right demeanor, he’s intelligent, articulate, and presents his arguments well . . . he’s been a tremendous state senator, but he’d be an even better U.S. Senator.”10

  Barack took a beautiful Sunday off and went to a nearby playground with his daughters before returning to a busy legislative calendar in Springfield. Barack’s SB 1415, to provide public funding for Illinois Supreme Court campaigns, would remedy “the unseemly process where judges have to raise . . . money typically from lawyers,” with “at least the appearance, if not the actuality, that this may be impacting the judges’ impartiality as they’re deciding cases.” Worried by “the appearance that the Court can be bought,” Barack warned of how “a well-heeled trial lawyer” could “write a $100,000 check,” thinking “I’ve got myself a judge.” The Senate passed the bill 39–17, but Speaker Madigan never called it for a vote in the House.

  Barack made a brief appearance on CNN’s Newsnight to talk about
the war in Iraq, and he pointedly told the Chicago Tribune, “I think there is a bedrock suspicion of George Bush among African-American voters,” who “are much more likely to feel that he is engaging in disruptive policies at home and using the war as a means of shielding himself from criticism on his domestic agenda” than white voters. Behind the scenes, negotiations on Barack’s “driving while black” racial profiling bill continued because “creating a piece of legislation that actually works in the real world requires that you talk to the people who are operating in the real world,” Barack explained. He made a one-night trip to Washington to attend the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual dinner, chatting with Harvard basketball buddy Nathan Diament and a reporter for the Jewish Daily Forward. Dan Hynes and Peter Fitzgerald attended too, and although AIPAC viewed Fitzgerald as “highly vulnerable,” with regard to Barack, Diament realized that “nobody knew who this guy was.”

  Steve Neal devoted a Chicago Sun-Times column to an unnamed campaign’s poll showing Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas, a likely but not yet declared candidate, trailing Dan Hynes just 24 to 21 percent, with Barack at 9. This showed “Pappas is a contender,” but Neal also wrote that “a third candidate could well emerge as the nominee” and reported that after respondents heard brief descriptions of all the contenders, Hynes led Barack by just 20 to 18, with Pappas now third at 14.11