by David Garrow
The League announced it was investing more than $100,000 into airing the ad, and Barack’s campaign now had out its third and final ad, entitled “Hope.” Images of both Paul Simon and Harold Washington invoked two strong legacies. “There have been moments in our history when hope defeated cynicism, and the power of people triumphed over money and machines. The Tribune says Barack Obama rises above the field with ‘a proven record of spirited, principled and effective leadership.’ The Sun-Times calls Obama ‘the man for this time . . . and place.’ The Daily Herald backs Obama for his ‘sense of decency and justice.’ On Tuesday, let’s make this moment count: Barack Obama for the U.S. Senate.” Barack uttered only the required closing: “I’m Barack Obama, and I approve this message.”
Barack’s campaign also produced its last flyer, which cited the Daily Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Tribune endorsements. “We need to rise above partisan politics and powerful interests,” and “Barack Obama says Yes We Can!” it declared. “Barack Obama offers Illinois hope, opportunity, and a chance to believe again.” Little came of an Associated Press query asking Barack to detail his history of drug use. Reporters were excited by Hull’s admission of extensive cocaine use as an adult, and Barack said he had used cocaine “a few times” and “primarily smoked pot” during high school and his first two years of college. “Drugs and divorces. That’s what it has turned into. It’s very depressing,” Barack told the AP.
In Thursday’s Chicago Defender, Emil Jones Jr. called on all African Americans to unite behind Barack. “It’s important for our children, our nation, and it disturbs me that you’ve got so-called black elected officials,” like Bobby Rush, not supporting Barack. “I’m calling on the community to repudiate those individuals and vote strongly for Barack Obama.” Jones especially called out five black state representatives who, like Speaker Madigan, were backing Dan Hynes. “They are all concerned about Tom Hynes’ son. Well, Barack Obama is my son. . . . When do we get a chance? When are they going to make up their mind? He’s been endorsed by practically every major newspaper in this state, and he’s the most qualified. We need to integrate the U.S. Senate. There’s not a black face in the U.S. Senate, and I think a black male going to the Senate will inspire a lot of young black people in this state and across the nation with some pride and hope. . . . I’m calling on the people in those respective districts and wards to come out strong and support the most qualified person for the office and that is Barack Obama.”
Axelrod warned Barack’s campaign staff that “it’s important that we have balance in our schedule for the final few days. I know we have to get our base going, but we really have TWO bases, and we can ill-afford stories about how we are concentrating only in the black community.” They should consider “what pictures do we want?” on Sunday and Monday’s local TV news programs. “We need events in a variety of communities each day to reflect the broad coalition we are building,” Axelrod stressed. “If the story is merely us trying to rally the black community, it doesn’t help us.” That night, a South Side campaign rally at Liberty Baptist Church drew a largely black crowd of more than fifteen hundred. “Nothing like this has happened to us since Harold Washington,” U.S. representative Danny Davis proclaimed.61
Just a few hours before that rally, Rod McCulloch, John Borling’s campaign manager, went public about the Jack Ryan divorce records he had seen a week earlier. McCulloch had spoken with state treasurer and Republican Party chair Judy Baar Topinka, who told him: “If you believe what you saw is true, you have to go forward.” In a written statement faxed to news organizations from a suburban Kinko’s, McCulloch stated that the documents “have nothing to do with his son” but instead detailed ex-wife Jeri’s allegations that Jack had had an affair with a colleague and “took her to various sex clubs” in New York, New Orleans, and Paris. McCulloch told the Sun-Times, “My conscience tells me that this must be aired before the primary next Tuesday” and that “my motivation is limited to my belief that voters deserve full disclosure.”
Friday’s newspapers all carried the story, omitting the most lascivious details, but Barack’s campaign quickly learned the contents of McCulloch’s statement. “Everybody’s hearing for the first time that he’s taken his wife to swingers’ clubs, and they’re saying, ‘This is the thing that’s going to come out,’” and that it would be “a nail in the coffin,” one young volunteer recalled. “What I distinctly remember is me not knowing what a swingers’ club is, and everybody’s like, ‘Oooh.’ I remember feeling like a little kid at the dinner table” when she asked “‘What’s a swingers club?’ . . . and I remember Obama saying, ‘We’ll tell you after the meeting.’” A Tribune editorial revealed that four days earlier the paper had petitioned the court to unseal the records. Noting how one prior filing suggested the documents might contain “inflammatory, inappropriate and embarrassing material,” the Tribune called upon Ryan to “share it with voters now,” because “this issue won’t disappear” if he won the Republican nomination.
Ryan refused opponents’ requests that a neutral figure like former governor Jim Edgar privately review the file and reassure Illinois Republicans. Sunday’s newspapers featured poll results showing Ryan and Barack leading their respective races, with Barack at more than double Dan Hynes’s 18 percent. Tribune reporter Rick Pearson upbraided Barack’s opponents for not highlighting his missed gun vote in 1999, but a whirlwind day awaited the candidate. A trio of Far South Side church visits preceded an appearance at the Southwest Side’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. With Hynes supporters in charge, Barack’s cohort had been relegated to the rear of the parade, but Barack quickly improved his place upon seeing Senate Republican colleague Dave Sullivan in the front rank. “Barack put his arm around me and said, ‘Okay, Sully, let’s go!’” Sullivan was amazed at the onlookers who cheered Barack. “This election’s over. Barack’s going to win,” Dave told his wife.
From there, Barack hopped a chartered two-engine plane to fly first to Peoria and then East St. Louis for more appearances at African American churches. Aware of how many American politicians had died in single-engine plane crashes, Barack had always refused free trips to or from Springfield on the state aircraft available to the governor and the Four Tops. When Barack returned to Chicago late that evening, he met with Jim Cauley, who had just seen new polling numbers showing Barack’s support surging close to 50 percent thanks to a big jump among downstate voters now seeing his TV ads. Cauley was astonished. Given Barack’s name, “I thought he had a ceiling,” and “I thought 45 would be a huge number for him,” Cauley explained. “Barack, I don’t think you can break 50,” Cauley told his candidate. “Oh yes I can,” Barack replied. “Before that, it was me and him. After that, he became Barack,” Cauley remembered.
For months Cauley had headed to Garrett Ripley’s bar at 712 North Clark Street, close to his Chicago apartment. Field director Nate Tamarin often joined him, as did SEIU politico Jerry Morrison, consultant Pete Giangreco, young Obama campaign staffers, and occasionally Mike Henry, Blair Hull’s campaign manager. “That was Jimmy’s sort of home away from home,” Pete explained. “When I think of Jim, I think of Garrett Ripley’s,” volunteer coordinator Adam Stolorow remembered. “Late nights with Jim and Nate.” As Tuesday neared, all the regulars wrote down their Senate race predictions, with the most optimistic participant giving Barack a 7-point win over Dan Hynes.
Hynes was worried. “Obama had all the buzz” and “the trends were very, very disturbing.” Barack’s “numbers were moving, Blair Hull’s were plummeting, and mine were flatlined,” Hynes remembered. Monday morning his concern intensified. “I opened the newspaper and looked at the picture from the St. Patrick’s Day parade. I mean, St. Patrick’s Day, that’s my day. And there was Barack Obama surrounded by every single Irish politician in town. I’m cropped out of the picture. And I thought to myself, ‘That’s not good!’”
In a room at the Schwab Rehabilitation Center, eighty-five-year-old columnist Vernon Jarr
ett filled out his absentee ballot while struggling to recover from major cancer surgery. His son Bill, the former husband of Barack and Michelle’s friend Valerie Jarrett, had died ten years earlier at age forty. No one had championed Harold Washington more fervently during the 1980s than Vernon Jarrett. In Monday’s Chicago Defender, in the last column he would write before dying several weeks later, Jarrett invoked the cherished mayor’s legacy to instruct black Chicago to embrace Barack. “Obama is one of the highest qualified young men that this country can present regardless of race, creed or color. He is a superior Harold Washington at an early age. All those fine qualities that we have saluted in Harold Washington are magnified in Obama, including his intellectual, academic and moral conduct,” Jarrett wrote. “I am here to tell you that you have another Harold Washington in Obama. Only he’s younger, brighter and equally committed.”62
Barack told reporters “we are in the position to potentially win this thing,” and Monday morning he began by greeting potential voters at the South Side’s 87th Street L station. Tom Lindenfeld and Greg Naylor’s robust Election Day effort aimed to have more than two thousand paid workers hit the streets on Barack’s behalf, while Dan Hynes’s campaign boasted that it would deploy at least eight thousand experienced volunteers. As any politically experienced Chicagoan knew, Election Day was a homeless person’s favorite day of the year, because anyone able to walk could win a cash return for a day’s work from one or another campaign. Blair Hull’s operation had signed up fifty homeless black men at a Bronzeville shelter, promising $75 plus meals on Tuesday.
On the West Side, Barack’s campaign had quietly channeled tens of thousands of dollars to ward-level political organizations to help mobilize black voters there. In total, several hundred thousand dollars would be devoted to maximizing the African American percentage of the overall Democratic vote, an expenditure Jim Cauley and Tom Lindenfeld had persuaded David Axelrod, Pete Giangreco, and the other media-focused consultants to agree to at a meeting with top finance committee members Valerie Jarrett and Marty Nesbitt. Cauley remembered that after eight months of fiscal discipline, all of a sudden “I was spending money like a drunken sailor,” and most of all “a fortune on the turnout operation.” On the vast South Side, Tom Lindenfeld’s massive GOTV effort was logistically mind-boggling. In addition to the 175 or so fifteen-passenger rental vans that on Tuesday would fan out across scores of neighborhoods, port-o-potties and a big RV command center supported the all-outdoors operation. With temperatures below freezing and snow in the forecast, ponchos and hand warmers for the army of day workers were last-minute additions to a budget that also included thousands of dollars in fast-food coupons. On Monday night, Lindenfeld and his out-of-town veterans struggled to stock the vans with campaign literature and other supplies, and as midnight approached, Lindenfeld realized, “I don’t have enough people on the lot to be able to get the work done by 8:00 A.M.” Wandering out onto Stony Island Avenue, he accosted a homeless man. “Want to make $20?” met with eager acceptance. “‘You got some other buddies who want to make some money?’ ‘Yeah, but we’ve got to go get them.’” So “we drive to an underpass,” and “he jumps out of the van, he disappears into the dark, he comes back with different people,” more than enough people to fill the fifteen-person van. Working through the early-morning hours, Lindenfeld’s homeless army got the vans fully stocked, but Tom needed additional cash to pay his recruits. “There are no ATMs where there’s poor people,” so Tom drove northward to Hyde Park to get the cash. “That was just part of life on the South Side.”
As Tuesday dawned, Lindenfeld’s operation swung into action. The van drivers, all recruited from among South Side Obama supporters, quickly trained and then supervised the day workers assigned to their vehicle. The canvassers would do a midday sweep, then one in the late afternoon, and finally a third one just before the polls closed. Anyone needing a ride would be picked up by another vehicle. Only at the end of the day, when the vans reported back to base, would the drivers receive their $100 in cash and the other workers $75 each. It was a hectic as well as expensive day, with multiple sites, plus Al Kindle’s similar effort and the various West Side operations. Operations director Madhuri Kommareddi oversaw the funding for the Election Day effort. With tens of thousands of dollars in cash on hand, Madhuri, a Lindenfeld aide, and an armed bodyguard worked out of Valerie Jarrett’s ninth-floor lakefront apartment at 4950 South Chicago Beach Drive. “We were doing the cash distribution that would go to the different sites out of Valerie’s apartment,” Madhuri explained. Jarrett had advanced $8,160 for Lindenfeld’s troops’ hand warmers, plus an additional $16,869 for more van rentals, but as the polls closed and Barack’s top supporters gathered in the ballroom at the downtown Hyatt Regency, both Lindenfeld’s command post and Al Kindle’s South Side office made emergency requests for more cash to cope with higher-than-expected costs. Frantic phone calls were made, with Lindenfeld telling Cauley that chaos would erupt if another $10,000 was not delivered to his site. “They were just being dicks,” Tom thought, and although a quick delivery did arrive, a similar crisis also played out at 54th and Wentworth. Kindle’s “was a mob scene,” Greg Naylor recalled, but “some additional cash” was delivered there too, and the hundreds of workers all headed home happy.63
At the Hyatt Regency, Barack’s consultants had carefully planned the evening’s schedule. Former Democratic National Committee chairman David Wilhelm, Emil Jones Jr., Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., and U.S. representatives Jesse Jackson Jr., Jan Schakowsky, Lane Evans, and Danny Davis would speak to the crowd before Barack made his first appearance, hopefully a little before 10:00 P.M. David Axelrod arranged for camera crews to film the event for use in general election ads, but strict orders were issued about who should appear in camera shots with Barack and his family members and who must not. Sheila Simon and Rev. Jeremiah Wright joined Barack, Michelle, their daughters, Maya Soetoro, and close family friend Kaye Wilson onstage, but Axelrod was adamant that Jackson Sr. not appear alongside Barack. “The one thing Ax didn’t want was him in the shot,” so there were “explicit orders to tackle Jesse Jackson if he got near the stage,” Jim Cauley recounted. “There’s no less than ten staffers that were told to take him out, and Valerie Jarrett was assigned to stand next to him and hold his hand and not let him on the stage.”
Anticipating victory, Barack had spent a good portion of the day committing to memory his prepared remarks once he and Michelle, accompanied by their daughters, had voted early that morning in Hyde Park. While Dan Shomon hosted a Springfield party at Floyd’s Thirst Parlor, Barack’s campaign staffers from around Chicagoland headed for the Hyatt as soon as their Election Day tasks ended. David LeBreton, who had been coordinating phone bank efforts in a trio of collar counties, asked his parents to meet him at the Hyatt with a clean pair of socks so that the pair he had worn nonstop for the previous three days could go into the men’s room trash can.
Amid the hustle of election night, one donor made demands. “Tony Rezko wanted a suite” there at the Hyatt, Jim Cauley remembered, but the hotel was sold out. Rezko called finance assistant Kaleshia Page to reiterate his request, but Kaleshia said no. Then her phone rang again: “Find him a room,” Barack ordered. “‘Kaleshia, I know you’re busy, but see what you can do.’ So I screamed at a whole bunch of hotel people and found him a room,” Kaleshia recalled. “I might have handed him the keys.” On what would be one of the most momentous nights of his life, Barack took the time to make sure his aides did everything they could to make Tony Rezko happy.
Polls closed at 7:00 P.M., but none of the campaigns were prepared for as quick a verdict as TV newscasters delivered. “It was over in the blink of an eye,” a dejected Dan Hynes remembered. “Three minutes after the polls closed. That was a bit disappointing.” Chris Mather, Hynes’s communications director, got worried when Barack’s TV ads went up on downstate stations, but on Election Day, “I thought we still had a good chance to win.” But in the hour after 7:00 P.M.,
Mather’s reaction was just like her candidate’s: “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”
At the Hyatt, Barack’s warm-up speakers paused when first Blair Hull publicly conceded the race and called Barack shortly before 9:00 P.M., and then Hynes did the same twenty minutes later. “All I can say is I will never read the newspapers the same way again,” Hull told reporters, while a magnanimous Hynes praised Barack. “He ran a great campaign. He’s an unbelievably talented individual.” Other congratulatory calls came in, including one from presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. As 10:00 P.M. approached, Sheila Simon presented Barack with one of her father’s trademark bow ties as everyone prepared for Barack to speak to the big crowd that had gathered. The numbers on the TV newscasts were astonishing: Barack was winning a majority of the vote, with projections showing him winning as much as 53 percent, despite the presence of six other candidates on the ballot. In the corridor outside the ballroom, Barack encountered pollster Paul Harstad. “Did you poll this?” Barack asked in amazement. “I told David 47 percent,” Paul responded. “Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I really do,” Barack replied.
Following Sheila Simon’s introduction, Barack took the stage at 10:14 P.M. “Sixteen months ago”—actually fourteen—“I stood in the Allegro Hotel with some of you and announced my candidacy for the United States Senate. And although the announcement was respectfully received, I think it’s fair to say that the conventional wisdom was we could not win. We didn’t have enough money, we didn’t have enough organization. There was no way that a skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name like Barack Obama could ever win a statewide race.” Barack took a long pause. “Sixteen”—again—“months later we are here as Democrats from all across Illinois to say, ‘Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can,’” as the crowd joined in, picking up the chant. “We are all connected as one people,” Barack stated, and victory must result “in some concrete good for ordinary people out there. . . . That is our end goal. It’s not just winning an election, it’s making a change in this country.” Saying, “I am fired up,” Barack called for “a politics of hope,” invoked “the audacity of hope,” and declared that “I am absolutely positive that we can change the course of this country.”
