Obama heard that Sam Burrell, an alderman on the far West Side, in the Twenty-ninth Ward, had done successful work registering voters and so he arranged to meet with one of Burrell's aides, a young woman named Carol Anne Harwell, and tried to enlist her to help with Project Vote. "I don't think Barack had ever been that far west," Harwell recalled. "He came to the office in his raggedy black car and he was wearing a leather bomber jacket and carried a briefcase and a satchel." Obama struck Harwell as intelligent and eager, but despite his years as an organizer, lacking in street savvy. "He didn't know all the slang," she said. "If you had said, 'Oh, that's dope,' he wouldn't have known that. Hip-hop wasn't his thing." After Harwell agreed to work as Obama's assistant, she discovered what Obama was carrying around in his satchel--a laptop and his book manuscript.
Obama had some money to work with. Ed Gardner, whose family owned the SoftSheen hair-products company, agreed to help underwrite the campaign. The co-chairs of the finance committee were Schmidt and John Rogers, the founder of Ariel Investments, one of the biggest black-owned businesses in town, and a teammate of Craig Robinson's at Princeton. Schmidt and Rogers called on wealthy Chicagoans like the developer and ex-alderman Bill Singer and the developer and arts patron Lewis Manilow.
Obama was more concerned with the apathy and the political disconnection of unregistered voters than with resources. "Today, we see hundreds of young blacks talking 'black power' and wearing Malcolm X T-shirts," he told the Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett early in the campaign, "but they don't bother to register and vote. We remind them that Malcolm once made a speech titled 'The Ballot or the Bullet,' and that today we've got enough bullets in the streets but not enough ballots." Obama had visited the one-party state of Kenya, and he told Jarrett that his African relatives and friends looked at their American brothers and sisters with envy: "They can't understand why we don't relish the opportunity to vote for whomever we please."
Obama set up an office on South Michigan Avenue and went looking for registrars who could be both persuasive and reliable. He himself trained seven hundred registrars--there were eleven thousand overall--and helped devise a public-relations campaign with a black-owned firm called Brainstorm Communications. Obama and his team thought that posters and registers using a straightforward slogan like "Register to Vote" would do nothing to appeal to young people. That year, Spike Lee had come out with his popular biopic of Malcolm X, and Obama and his colleagues thought for a while about using Malcolm's slogan, "By Any Means Necessary." They settled on "It's a Power Thing."
"We took the 'X' from Malcolm, put it on some kente paper, and made posters and T-shirts with the slogan 'It's a Power Thing' that were so popular that we ended up trademarking them," Carol Anne Harwell said. "Of course, people in the African-American community knew that the 'X' referred to Malcolm, but we also had white girls going around wearing them, and one told us, 'Look at this! I'm Number Ten!'"
Project Vote volunteers put up the posters all over African-American neighborhoods and in Hispanic areas like Pilsen. The two major black-owned radio stations in town, WVON and WGCI, ran ads that told people where they could sign up; black-owned fast-food restaurants allowed registrars to approach potential voters over their burgers and fries.
Obama faced generational resistance from some longtime activists and black nationalists. Lutrelle (Lu) Palmer, the head of the Black Independent Political Organization and a popular journalist-activist known as "the Panther with a pen," was one of a small contingent that saw Obama as too young, too haughty, and too inexperienced to be taken seriously. Palmer helped register thousands of voters for Harold Washington's 1983 campaign; he had no patience for Obama's desire to continue along the same lines. In an interview with the Chicago Reader, Palmer said that Obama "came to our office and tried to get us involved [in Project Vote], and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn't like his arrogance, his air."
But, relying on his connections with black church leaders and community activists from his organizing days, Obama more than overcame the resistance. Project Vote met its extraordinary goal of registering nearly a hundred and fifty thousand new voters. For the first time in the history of Chicago, registration in the majority-black wards was greater than that in the majority-white wards. Project Vote played a pivotal role in the election of Carol Moseley Braun, the first African-American woman ever elected to the Senate and only the second African-American to be elected to the chamber since Reconstruction. Bill Clinton, in a three-way race with George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot, became the first Democratic candidate to win Illinois since Lyndon Johnson overwhelmed Barry Goldwater, in 1964.
Obama, who was now thirty-one, was so successful in his leadership of Project Vote that Democratic Party political operatives in Chicago took notice. At the press conference announcing the results of Project Vote, Obama stood quietly to the side and let Jesse Jackson, Bobby Rush, and other senior Democratic Party politicians get the attention. "It wasn't modesty. Barack is not modest," Schmidt said. "But rather than grab the spotlight, it was more important to him to have these people as potential allies down the road. That was way more important than to be a star at a two-bit press conference in 1992. That is very rare. He has always had a level of assurance and foresight that was very unusual."
Obama's effort also attracted the attention of the business community. Crain's Chicago Business reported that Obama had "galvanized Chicago's political community, as no seasoned politico had before."
One of the more important connections Obama formed during Project Vote was with Bettylu Saltzman, the daughter of Philip Klutznick, a rich developer who had been Secretary of Commerce in the Carter Administration. Saltzman was a well-known member of the Lakefront Liberals, left-leaning Chicagoans, predominantly Jewish, who lived in the high-rises along Lake Michigan and were vital fund-raising sources over the years for Illinois Democrats like Paul Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, Paul Simon, and Harold Washington. Saltzman was a regular at a group called the Ladies Who Lunch--a group of influential women in Chicago who included Christie Hefner, the chairman of Playboy Enterprises; the philanthropist Marjorie Benton; Isabel Stewart, who ran the Chicago Foundation for Women; Amina Dickerson, of Kraft Foods; the columnist Laura Washington; and Julia Stasch, of the MacArthur Foundation. Saltzman was also friendly with the wealthiest Jewish business families in town: the Crowns and the Pritzkers. When Obama paid a visit to Saltzman to ask for help on Project Vote, she joined the growing contingent of people who came home to tell a spouse that she had just met the man who could be the first black President. "I told everyone I knew about this guy," she said. "Everyone," in Saltzman's case, turned out to be a core of wealthy Chicagoans who one day would help form the financial base of Obama's political campaigns.
The meeting with Saltzman, and others like it during Project Vote, was Obama's introduction to the northern reaches of Chicago. He already had an education in the diversity of the South Side---the churches, the African-American neighborhoods, the liberal politics of Hyde Park and the university. Now he was reaching to the Gold Coast, the near North Side, the northern suburbs--liberal enclaves, too, but with a great deal more money.
Don Rose, a political consultant who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., during his Chicago years and with a raft of Democratic politicians, said, "Obama is possibly the best networker I've ever seen. Bill Clinton might be his rival, but Barack is amazing. First, he comes to Chicago with a reference from Newton Minow's daughter, Martha. Then Newt introduces him to a circle of high-class liberal lawyers. He gets this job with the churches as an organizer, and he finds himself a network of pastors and people working in related non-profits and foundations. He also finds himself at the University of Chicago, and that has a network at the law school, the business school--and they are all bowled over to discover this brilliant black guy. There is also a Harvard network. There are also liberal, elite funders and agency heads: Bettylu Saltzman was also part of the Minow grouping and she has lots of friends. It's c
ircle after circle that sometimes touch--or they can be bridged. An ambitious young man can get to know a whole lot of people. If you've impressed one or two people in three or four of these groupings, and you make it your business to do this for business or politics or social prestige, you can really go far."
Saltzman also had friends in the political world. She made sure to contact David Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who had become a campaign consultant for Democratic candidates. Axelrod, a strategist who concealed his cunning behind a laconic charm, had worked for Simon, Stevenson, and Harold Washington, and, in 1991, was running the doomed Senate campaign of a personal-injury lawyer named Al Hofeld. He was especially involved with Richard M. Daley. "Bettylu called me up and said, 'I want you to meet this young guy who's running Project Vote,'" Axelrod recalled. "She said, 'I know this is an odd thing, but I think he could be the first black President.' She really did say it. And I thought, Well that's a little grandiose, but I'd like to meet him." Saltzman also knew people in the foundation world, the business world, and the political world. "Barack quickly became part of that circle, and they all took an interest in him, because he was an impressive young guy," Axelrod said.
When a reporter who was writing a profile of Obama for Chicago magazine after the success of Project Vote asked him about running for office, Obama answered coyly. This was clearly not the first time someone had raised the question. "Who knows?" he said. "But probably not immediately. Was that a sufficiently politic 'maybe'? My sincere answer is, I'll run if I feel I can accomplish more that way than agitating from the outside. I don't know if that's true right now. Let's wait and see what happens in 1993. If the politicians in place now at city and state levels respond to African-American voters' needs, we'll gladly work with and support them. If they don't, we'll work to replace them."
Obama married Michelle Robinson, on October 3, 1992, just as Project Vote was winding down before the election. Surrounded by guests from Kenya, Hawaii, and Chicago, Jeremiah Wright presided over the ceremony at Trinity. Wright talked about the importance of marriage and responsibility, especially for black men. Because Michelle's father, Fraser, had died the previous year, her brother Craig walked her down the aisle. At the reception, held at the South Shore Cultural Center, the music was "old-school stuff, music you could move to," Carol Anne Harwell recalled. Santita Jackson, Michelle's high-school classmate and Jesse Jackson's daughter, sang.
Obama's relationship with Michelle was not without its complications. Barack's ambitions and considerable ego often clashed with Michelle's desire for stability and a sense of partnership. But the relationship was his emotional anchor. A few years after the wedding, but before Obama declared his intention to run for his first political office, a photographer named Mariana Cook visited Barack and Michelle at their apartment in Hyde Park and photographed them sitting together on a couch under a couple of Indonesian prints. Cook also interviewed them for a book she was assembling about marriage.
Obama, for his part, clearly believed that he had found something profound in his wife. "All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas," he told Cook. "Michelle has had a very different background--very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country--the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, traveling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life."
Michelle's remarks were no less loving, but it was clear that she felt that her husband was headed into potentially dangerous waters. "There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it's unclear," she said. "There is a little tension with that. I'm very wary of politics. I think he's too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism. When you are involved in politics, your life is an open book, and people can come in who don't necessarily have good intent. I'm pretty private, and like to surround myself with people that I trust and love. In politics you've got to open yourself to a lot of different people."
With Project Vote and the election over, Obama again turned to his book. He had been committed to writing a book about race since his days at Harvard. Just after he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review, in February, 1990, Jane Dystel, a literary agent in New York, noticed the article in the New York Times about Obama's winning the post. Dystel called Obama in Cambridge and suggested that he write a book. She urged him to put together a proposal that she could submit to publishers. Dystel, whose father had been head of Bantam Books, clearly saw something in Obama, who came to visit her in New York. Her associate Jay Acton, who represented James Baldwin, said maybe they could get Obama to write a book like The Fire Next Time.
Later, when Obama recounted his discussions with publishers to his friend and law colleague Judd Miner, he was amused by the assumptions they made about him. He recalled that one publisher "asked me to write about being poor and rising from the ghetto of Chicago. I told them, 'I never did take that trip but I would like to write about the trip I have taken.'"
After conducting an auction with a few other publishers, Dystel sold Obama's book to Poseidon Press, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster run by an editor named Ann Patty. The advance was reportedly over a hundred thousand dollars. Obama received half that amount on signing the contract.
While Obama was still at Harvard, he made notes for a book. Fairly soon, he realized that he had no interest in writing a straight book about issues--about civil-rights law, affirmative action, or organizing. Instead, he wanted to write about himself, about his struggle with identity and the elusive ghost of his father. Relying on the journals that he had been keeping since his days as an undergraduate, he started working in earnest. After his wedding and honeymoon, he spent a month alone, writing, in a rented hut on Sanur Beach, in Bali.
Obama took a long time to finish. "He had to come to terms with some events in his life that some people pay years of therapy to get comfortable revealing," his friend Valerie Jarrett said. The writing went slowly, she said, "because everything was so raw."
Along the way, Obama experienced some minor dramas of the publishing trade. In the summer of 1993, Simon & Schuster closed Poseidon. When publishers close an imprint, they usually transfer books for which they have high hopes to another imprint inside the house and try to get rid of projects without much promise. Obama had missed deadlines and handed in bloated, yet incomplete, drafts. "We took fliers on things," Ann Patty said, "but, when Poseidon went down, Simon & Schuster kept the gold and got rid of the fliers."
Dystel took the book, now entitled Dreams from My Father, to Times Books, an imprint at Random House run by the former Washington Post reporter and editor Peter Osnos. Times Books paid Simon & Schuster forty thousand dollars for the book--a very good deal, it turned out, for Random House. Simon & Schuster ended up losing the rest of the advance it had paid.
Henry Ferris, the editor at Times Books who worked directly with Obama, communicated with him almost entirely by telephone and express mail. Obama proved receptive to editing. Ferris asked him to reduce one thirty-page episode to fifteen pages; Obama did it without complaint or hesitation. "He was a quick study," Ferris said. (In a preface to the 2004 paperback edition, Obama writes that he now winces when he reads the book and still has the "urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so" and get rid of "mangled" sentences and expressions of emotion that seem "indulgent or overly practiced.")
Ferris was impressed by his young author's sturdy ego and sense of his own potential. "He thought enough of himself and his story that he thought to write his autobiography at the age of thirty," Ferris said. "He knew his story was special, his parentage was interesting. He had that much of a sense of story. I saw him as a person who at that time was in a position to talk about race relations in this country in
a way that certainly I can't and few can. He understood the white world and the black world and he was tossed back and forth between them. That was something that I remember him talking about, being in a position to speak about things in a way that others couldn't."
With Dreams from My Father, Obama was working in the oldest, and arguably the richest, genre of African-American writing: the memoir. The memoir tradition begins with the first slave narratives: A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man, a pamphlet published in Boston in 1760; A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself, in 1770; and then, in 1789, an international best-seller, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Equiano recounted the story of his capture as a boy of eleven, his purchase by a sea captain, and then, after he buys his own freedom, his life in England as an abolitionist. There are more than six thousand slave narratives known to scholars, and, as the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes, these texts arose out of the writers' need to assert their own identity, and that of their people, as thinking human beings and not, as they were viewed by American law, as the animal possessions of white men: "Deprived of access to literacy, the tools of citizenship, denied the rights of selfhood by law, philosophy, and pseudo-science, and denied as well the possibility, even, of possessing a collective history as a people, black Americans--commencing with the slave narratives in 1760--published their individual histories in astonishing numbers, in a larger attempt to narrate the collective history of 'the race.'"
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 30
