by David Garrow
The day after the Health Care Justice Act passed, the presence of Justin Warfel, the Ryan campaign videographer, in Barack’s life became a top statewide story. Warfel “has stalked him for ten days,” Chicago’s local ABC news telecast told viewers. Barack wanted Warfel to “keep a respectful distance” so that “you can actually have a quiet conversation,” but astonishingly Warfel usually remained “literally a foot away” until a bevy of press questions led him to disappear. “He has a tape recorder, so if I’m calling my wife at home, I’ve got a guy a foot and a half away,” Barack told reporters. “I think an expectation of some basic personal space that when I call my wife or I’m calling my kids to wish them good night” was not unreasonable. “It’s this kind of incivility in politics that turns people off to politics.” The Chicago Sun-Times told readers that Warfel “interrupted Obama several times with heckling questions,” but only Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller reported that Warfel was “tailing the candidate in his car.” Barack told reporters that so far “he hasn’t come into the restroom,” but Senate Republican leader Frank Watson and state party chair Judy Baar Topinka publicly criticized Warfel’s behavior. Rich Miller termed it “truly creepy” and a Sun-Times editorial proclaimed “Ryan Takes Campaign to New Low.”
When Ryan’s team issued a press release calling Barack “the criminals’ good friend,” Barack said that claim was “a little wacky,” and the Journal-Register’s Bernie Schoenburg observed that “Ryan needs to get control of the people working for him.” Before long, Republican congressman Ray LaHood publicly criticized Ryan for running “a boneheaded campaign” and singled out Warfel’s conduct as “the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in a high-profile campaign.”74
In Springfield, Barack was far less involved in the spring session’s legislative work than he had been in his seven previous years. Colleagues and staffers remember that “he was always on the phone,” and while campaign events sometimes kept him away from Wednesday night’s poker games, on some afternoons, he still managed to escape to the golf course. Playing in a foursome with lobbyist friends Phil Lackman and Dave Manning plus young campaign photographer David Katz, Barack’s cell phone rang. It was Michelle, so he had to answer, but he pretended he was outside the statehouse. “She’d just kill me if she knew I was playing golf,” he explained after hanging up.
The legislature failed to agree on a state budget by May 31 even though all three central players—Governor Blagojevich, House Speaker Mike Madigan, and Senate president Jones—were Democrats. Two deep fissures were responsible, one of which everyone understood: Jones’s long-held anger over the disrespect Madigan exhibited toward him. The second was the even stronger animus between Blagojevich and Madigan. Capitol Fax’s Rich Miller rued Blagojevich’s “complete refusal to engage in even minimal governance,” and even one of the governor’s top supporters spoke about Blagojevich’s “immaturity” and “lack of seriousness.” Madigan had concluded that he could not trust Blagojevich, and the governor’s top aides had come to believe he was a “selfish, insecure narcissist” who “had some sort of learning disability that made him incapable of focusing.” On May 31, the last day of session before a constitutional supermajority would be required to adopt a tardy budget, Emil Jones allowed Barack to be the only Democrat who opposed his and the governor’s spending plan, which Madigan’s House would not approve. Barack told reporters, “My instinct is we are close enough that if we eliminated the egos and the politics, we could come up with a deal relatively quickly.” Rich Miller rightly observed that “ultimately, it’s the governor’s fault,” but he also castigated Jones for “embracing Blagojevich far too closely and leading his members over the cliff” and into overtime. Miller reported that Blagojevich was hankering for a televised speaking appearance at the Democratic National Convention, but predicted that “the Washington folks will want to showcase their newest rock star, Barack Obama.”
Barack’s new status as the heavily favored candidate for a U.S. Senate seat had not altered his self-discipline issues. “He was late everywhere,” scheduler Peter Coffey remembered, and sometimes almost a no-show, even for meetings with prospective donors. Dan Shomon and Jim Cauley had tried to instill greater discipline, but as Nate Tamarin had learned, Barack “doesn’t respond to enforcer behavior” and regularly put off necessary tasks until the last possible moment. With Mike Signator replacing Lyndell Luster as Barack’s regular driver, matters went from bad to worse. Darrel Thompson explained that “Mike was Barack’s back door” during times when “Barack didn’t want to be found.” Signator quickly became “Barack’s buddy” and “biggest enabler,” and “with Mike in the car” the campaign “was a lot less able to keep Barack doing the things that he was supposed to be doing.” The “Mike and Barack show” became a particular problem for Cauley. One day the fallout was explosive when Barack was a no-show for Malia’s end-of-the-year parent-teacher conference. Cauley remembered that Michelle “lit into me,” “really reaming me out,” because “in his infinite wisdom” Barack had “told her it was my fault. But it was another one of those things where him and fucking Signator were out dicking around, so he throws me under the bus.” Cauley realized that Barack “was balancing a lot of crap in his life,” but he objected to Barack interjecting him into his marital tensions. “Dude, you got problems there?” Jimmy asked.
Kevin Thompson, who on campaign trips often served as the candidate’s “body man,” thought Barack now seemed “a little more pensive” than in previous years. In part that was because he still had to do call time during the drives to and from Springfield, seeking out-of-state donors for a race promising a Democratic Senate pickup. But it also reflected how much his life had changed since his campaign first went up on television four months earlier. “The level of coverage that he was getting,” with national reporters now joining an increased cast of Illinois journalists, was “a little stunning to him,” Kevin realized. “It certainly had an impact on him, and it was noticeable.” Articles in The New Yorker and The New Republic discussed Barack’s “miraculous” primary triumph, with TNR’s Noam Scheiber citing academic findings that white Americans regard non-American blacks more favorably than native African Americans. “Obama’s name—or at least its provenance—may have actually helped him, by distinguishing him from other African Americans,” Scheiber suggested. “The power of Obama’s exotic background to neutralize race as an issue, combined with his elite education and his credential as the first African American Harvard Law Review president, made him an African American candidate who was not stereotypically African American,” Scheiber argued.
The number of complete strangers who recognized Barack now made his desire for downtime more insistent. “His favorite little hideout was going to the East Bank Club,” Kevin explained, because he could get a daily workout there away from public view. “He’d get violent with me if he didn’t get his two hours at the East Bank Club, or an hour,” Jim Cauley remembered. “There would be huge fights in scheduling meetings about his workout time,” which Barack, though not his campaign team, insisted was a priority over call time. The impact of the Senate race was also visible in how Barack now “smoked a lot,” Kevin recalled, and Dan Shomon agreed that Barack “became a chain smoker in ’04.” When Barack was at his campaign headquarters, he smoked outside the building, often alongside a new young African American finance staffer, Clinton Latimore Jr., who was struck by “how down to earth” and “very personable” Barack was. “You couldn’t get him away from his BlackBerry,” Latimore remembered, a device Cauley had first introduced Barack to ten months earlier.
The arrival of all the new, mainly white, nationally experienced staffers meant that relationships at campaign headquarters “changed overnight,” Kevin Thompson remembered. There was “a cultural shift,” indeed “a cultural war going on between the national people and the local Illinois people,” and the veterans who had signed on when Barack was a little-known long shot were the casualties. When Cauley first arrived, he ha
d developed a good accord with Dan Shomon, and Cauley’s “very strong personality” had enabled him to ride herd on Barack just as the consultants had hoped. But Robert Gibbs’s arrival was entirely different. He sought to exert authority from the start despite being a newcomer to Illinois. The contrast—and conflict—was sharpest with Shomon, who everyone realized “knows everyone you’re supposed to know” in Illinois politics. But Gibbs and Shomon “didn’t get along” and “it was kind of a pissing match,” one staffer recalled. “Nobody works harder, nobody brings more energy, nobody knows more people” than Dan Shomon, Peter Coffey said, and everyone who respected Shomon took offense when “Gibbs disdains him.” Unlike Dan and Jimmy, Gibbs indulged Barack rather than challenged him, but as Barack’s shift to a beckoning national stage accelerated, his need for Shomon’s expertise dissipated. “Dan was one of the only people who truly cared about what was best for Barack,” one supporter explained, and “I became very disenchanted with Barack” over his failure to appreciate how absolutely essential Shomon had been to his political success. As Jimmy put it, Dan “took him a long ways on his journey.”
The tensions between Gibbs and Shomon were mild compared to the problems generated by newly hired African American fund-raiser Vera Baker. As soon as she arrived in Chicago, it became clear she was “very, very high maintenance,” because whether it was her apartment or a health club membership, “nothing was good enough,” one supervisor recalled. “It was so unpleasant,” and “the person who had to deal with it day to day,” Joe McLean explained, was new national fund-raising director Susan Shadow. “It was extremely difficult to work with a prima donna,” and even worse with someone who “didn’t seem to have any common sense” and whose ability to organize events fell woefully short of what DSCC officials had said she could do. Two events Baker had responsibility for “were disasters,” with the far more able duo of Jenny Yeager and Jordan Kaplan picking up the slack. “It was just a frigging nightmare constantly,” and “Barack was very upset with one of the D.C. events she did.” At least a trio of superiors urged that Baker be terminated, but fears of offending the DSCC, where Baker had once been deputy political director, stood in the way.
But more than Baker’s professional competence was at issue. “It was a disaster on a lot of levels,” one consultant explained, and “we knew immediately” that there was an additional problem “that was not fixable” and that posed a risk to the candidate. The campaign’s most inimitable voice put it bluntly: “she liked hanging off his elbow and being in the rooms” when Barack met with famous donors like George Soros. “It was touchy,” one witness explained, and “it took us a long time to fix it” given the DSCC’s role. Then one remark by an unfamiliar stranger sealed it. Cauley recalled that “Vera was off his elbow and somebody went up to Valerie Jarrett and said, ‘Wow, Michelle looks great tonight.’ That was the beginning of the end of Vera Baker.” A trio of top campaign members all attested to Jarrett’s decisive role in the “hard decision” to relocate Baker from Chicago back to D.C. as soon as possible. As Joe McLean phrased it, “we eliminated the risk fairly early, but the problem was still there.”75
In public, Barack’s campaign was going incredibly well. A Chicago Tribune poll showed him with a commanding 52–30 percent lead over Jack Ryan. Barack’s favorability ratio was 46–9, with 20 percent of voters saying they had not heard of him, while Ryan’s favorable-to-unfavorable score was a worrisome 29–25. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert instructed readers to “remember the name Barack Obama,” and a Manhattan fund-raiser hosted by George Soros was soon followed by one in Washington at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s home. Simultaneously, Jim Cauley and Darrel Thompson called on top figures in John Kerry’s campaign to lobby for a prime-time speaking slot at the convention on one of the evenings when network television would broadcast the proceedings. They left a videotape of Barack’s three TV spots plus footage of Barack speaking at his March 16 victory celebration. “We were really making a strong case and a strong pitch,” Darrel recalled.
On June 13 Barack publicly challenged Ryan to six debates between August and October, and Ryan responded by calling for ten. Ryan also asserted that Barack favored universal health care, and Barack inaccurately replied, “I have never advocated” for what he called “a much larger national program,” saying, “there are a whole host of ways to do it.” Barack’s campaign team was “eager to do some qualitative research downstate,” as John Kupper explained, to learn how best to present their oddly named biracial candidate to white voters who remained largely unfamiliar with him and his record. “We were kind of astounded that Barack did so well with downstate voters in the primary” and “wanted to find out if that possibility extended to general election voters as well,” Kupper recalled. Paul Harstad and Mike Kulisheck organized two focus groups in Peoria for the evening of June 16. Among thirteen women in the first, eight professed support for Jack Ryan and only one for Barack, with another asking, “Isn’t he Iranian?” But once Harstad played video excerpts of the two candidates, seven expressed support for Barack, with Ryan drawing five. When one woman compared “Obama” to “Osama,” Paul asked if Barack’s name was a real barrier, and multiple women said yes.
Among the ten men in the second group, three expressed support for Democrat John Kerry and five for President George Bush, with one volunteering that “it’s unfortunate that Senator Fitzgerald . . . is leaving. . . . I think he did a good job. He took stands on issues.” Turning to Barack and Jack Ryan, one man said, “the fact that he won’t let Obama go to a restroom without a cameraman tells me he’s an ass, frankly. That’s why I won’t vote for him.” When Harstad played the videos, two participants liked how Barack spoke of “we” rather than “I,” with one calling Barack “very charismatic” and a second terming him “a strong presence.” In the end, six of the men favored Ryan and four Barack. Reviewing the evening’s full transcripts and the participants’ numerical score sheets, Harstad and Kulisheck highlighted participants’ “longing for candidates who bring people together” and Barack’s high marks for seeking “common ground” and avoiding “negative politics.” Barack’s greatest vulnerability was the charge that he “favors a Hillary Clinton–style universal health” care program, and among other dangers, “the guns issue was totally eclipsed by the gay marriage issue in these groups.” Although “it did not take too much information to swing” a majority of the women “to support Obama at the end,” such a shift did not occur among the men.76
Early in June, a court-appointed referee recommended unsealing only a small portion of Jack Ryan’s divorce file. Ryan told reporters that the documents would cause “no problems for the campaign. Would there be something that might be embarrassing to me? Maybe.” But when the Chicago Tribune challenged that recommendation and sought a full unsealing, Los Angeles Superior Court judge Robert A. Schnider sided with the newspaper rather than the referee. “In the end, the balance tips slightly to the public,” Schnider held, because “protection from embarrassment cannot be a basis for keeping from the public what’s put in public courts.” Schnider accepted Jack Ryan’s argument that release of the file would harm his young son, acknowledging that “the nature of the publicity generated will become known to the child and have a deleterious effect on the child,” but he set release for twelve days later. The Tribune gave its victory front-page coverage and reported that Ryan privately had told top Republicans that the file would be embarrassing but he could “weather” the disclosures. Ryan announced he would not appeal the decision and sought the judge’s approval for quicker release of the file the following Monday.
On June 21, reporters were notified that copies of the documents would be made available at a 4:00 P.M. Ryan press conference at the Chicago Hilton. That hour came and went with no candidate and no copies, but at 5:00 P.M. waiters brought in flowers and food. “Was this a party?” columnist Carol Marin wondered. Two more hours passed before the documents arrived, accompanied by a raft of Ryan supporters at
testing to his virtues before the candidate appeared at 8:00 P.M. Inarticulate and unwilling to admit the documents were highly embarrassing, Ryan’s hour-long appearance devolved into what the suburban Daily Herald called a “marathon, often surreal news conference.”
The next morning’s Tribune declared “Ryan File a Bombshell—Ex-Wife Alleges GOP Candidate Took Her to Sex Clubs.” In New York, “respondent wanted me to have sex with him there with another couple watching. I refused,” Jeri Lynn Ryan had stated in a sworn declaration. “Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset.” At the Paris club Ryan took her to, “people were having sex everywhere. I cried. I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me and said it was not a ‘turn-on’ for me to cry.”
On Monday, Barack had been on a “Downstate Jobs Tour,” with appearances in Springfield and East Alton preceding a dinner in far south Carbondale, where Dan Hynes introduced him as “one of the greatest United States senators this country will ever see.” Early in the day, Barack had rebuffed reporters’ questions about Ryan’s divorce by saying it was not among the issues impacting downstate families. In Carbondale, Barack went out of his way to insist, “I’ve said clearly and unequivocally, I’m not in favor of gay marriages.” When reporters then pressed him on the evening’s new Ryan revelations, Barack again emphasized that “people are not talking to me about Jack Ryan’s personal life.”
