In November, 1994, three months after the Reynolds indictment, Alice Palmer, the respected state senator in Obama's district--the thirteenth--formed a fund-raising committee to "explore" her prospects for succeeding Reynolds in Congress. On June 27, 1995, she formally announced her candidacy. In September, when the governor, Jim Edgar, announced a special election, for November 28th, to fill Reynolds's seat, Palmer hoped that she would run unopposed. She miscalculated. The opposition was plentiful and tough. Emil Jones, the most powerful Democrat in the State Senate and a savvy machine politician from Morgan Park, on the far South Side, declared, and so, too, did a teacher named Monique Davis, and, most significant, Jesse Jackson, Jr. After his two Presidential races, Jesse Jackson, Sr., had hoped that his son would succeed him as the preeminent black politician in the city, and that he would pursue a national career. Jesse, Jr., who was just thirty and not anything like the academic star Obama had been, did not heed his father's advice to start modestly, with a run for alderman or the State Senate.
Obama was watching these events closely, and, with Palmer's seat in the thirteenth district now open, he sounded out local politicians, like his alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, and state representative, Barbara Flynn Currie, about running. He needed to get the support of the politicians and committeemen who had the capacity to raise money and marshal the door-to-door volunteers who were crucial in a local race. Obama approached Ivory Mitchell, a political veteran on the South Side, who was chairman of the Fourth Ward's Democratic organization. On the third Saturday of each month, Mitchell held an open bacon and egg breakfast to discuss the ward's problems and to hear from local officials. In election years, Mitchell mobilized those people to work on behalf of the candidates the local party organization had endorsed. "In other words, I come with a ready-made army," Mitchell said.
Obama told Mitchell that he wanted to run for office, probably the seat that Alice Palmer was leaving behind.
"O.K.," Mitchell said. "How much money do you have?"
"I don't have any money," Obama replied.
"Well, if you don't have any money, we're going to have to finance the campaign for you," Mitchell said.
Mitchell had a good feeling about Obama--"He was intelligent and he was hungry"--so he sent him to see Preckwinkle. She remembered Obama from Project Vote and told him that she, and others in the area, would support him as long as he got Alice Palmer's blessing. Obama was confident that, with a little time and persuasion, he could do just that.
Obama invited Carol Anne Harwell, his old friend and aide at Project Vote, to his apartment to talk. Harwell had run successful campaigns for two judges and for Sam Burrell, an alderman on the West Side, in the Twenty-ninth Ward. She had also kept on file much of the voter information she and Obama and their colleagues had accumulated during Project Vote--information that could prove valuable in a political race. By the end of their conversation, Harwell agreed to manage Obama's campaign.
Obama had a more difficult time trying to persuade his wife of the wisdom of a race for State Senate. He had just finished writing his memoir, a project that had kept him locked up alone in small rooms for endless hours. Michelle wanted a family and a career, and now her husband proposed to spend much of his time in Springfield? "I married you because you're cute and you're smart," she recalled telling him, "but this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do." What was more, she was dubious about the entire enterprise of electoral politics. "I wasn't a proponent of politics as a way you could make change," she said. "I also thought, Was politics really a place for good, decent people?"
Harwell recalled, "Michelle felt that Barack wasn't going to make any money. He'd be away from home all the time. She felt that he could accomplish more by teaching and by working at the law firm. She was not a happy camper." But, finally, Obama prevailed. And once the decision was made, Michelle worked hard on the campaign, not least because the neighborhood that her husband was hoping to represent was her own. "She knew those people," Harwell said. "They were her people."
Alice Palmer, like Michelle Obama's family, lived in one of the modest bungalows of South Shore. In the eyes of her constituency--the African-American neighborhoods of Englewood, South Shore, Woodlawn, and Hyde Park--she was from unassailably heroic stock. One of her grandfathers, Joseph Henry Ward, was a slave. In the late nineteenth century, he left North Carolina for Indianapolis where he cleaned stables for doctors. When Ward was twenty, one of the doctors took a liking to him and helped him learn to read. Ward went to medical school and later, in segregated Indianapolis, opened a hospital for African-Americans. One of Palmer's grandmothers, Zella Louise Locklear Ward, was a free black who arrived in Indianapolis in the late nineteenth century, helped found the Colored Women's Improvement Club, and ran a tent city for black tuberculosis patients.
Alice Palmer reached the State Senate by appointment, replacing Richard Newhouse, the first African-American ever to run for mayor of Chicago, who had to step down because of illness. Palmer, the local Democratic committeewoman, was a welcome choice among local activists. Her background as an activist and in local politics was unimpeachable. She had a doctorate in education from Northwestern and went to Springfield determined to win greater funding for Chicago schools. She became popular among her constituents--popular enough, she believed, to win a seat in Congress.
In the late spring of 1995, after a series of conversations, Obama won Alice Palmer's support. Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman and a fixture in Hyde Park politics, had been concerned about the open State Senate position until, at a meeting to kick off her campaign for Congress, Palmer told him, "I found this wonderful person, this fine young man, so we needn't worry that we'd have a good state senator."
Before announcing his intention to run, Obama wanted to be absolutely sure that Palmer was committed to the congressional race and that she would not get back in the State Senate race, even if she lost in the Democratic primary to Emil Jones or Jesse Jackson, Jr.
"I hadn't publicly announced," Obama recalled. "But what I said was that once I announce, and I have started to raise money, and gather supporters, hire staff and opened up an office, signed a lease, then it's going to be very difficult for me to step down. And she gave me repeated assurance that she was in [the congressional race] to stay."
Palmer doesn't dispute that. He "did say that to me," she said. "I certainly did say that I wasn't going to run [for State Senate]. There's no question about that."
Obama also understood that he had her endorsement. ("I'm absolutely certain she ... publicly spoke and sort of designated me.") On that point, Palmer disagrees: "I don't know that I like the word 'endorsement.' An endorsement, to me, having been in legislative politics ... that's a very formal kind of thing. I don't think that describes this. An 'informal nod' is how to characterize it."
Palmer announced her candidacy for Congress on June 27th, and, the following week, the local papers announced Obama would run to succeed her. Her intentions, as she stated them at the time, could not have been clearer. "Pray for Mel Reynolds and vote for me," she told reporters. In the last paragraph of a story in the Hyde Park Herald, the reporter, Kevin Knapp, took up the subject of a successor, mentioning Obama, "an attorney with a background in community organization and voter registration efforts," as the likeliest possibility. Later that month, Obama filed the necessary papers to create a fund-raising committee. He received his first campaign contributions on July 31, 1995: three hundred dollars from a downtown lawyer, a five-thousand-dollar loan from a car dealer, and two thousand dollars from two fast-food companies owned by an old friend, Tony Rezko.
In many ways, it was a trying time to want to be a Democratic legislator. Bill Clinton was in the White House, but the Party had suffered major losses in the 1994 midterm elections. Newt Gingrich had declared a conservative counterattack and Clinton had begun to rely more heavily on illiberal advisers like Mark Penn and Dick Morris, who were disdained by the more progressive aides and constitue
ncies that had supported him in 1992. In Illinois, the governor was a Republican and both houses of the legislature had Republican majorities. Legislators in the minority in Springfield had very little to do: the governor set the agenda and his party fell into line.
But for all the limitations of the office, Obama had to start somewhere. He had to get in the game and learn its skills and hidden rules. As he began to think about fund-raising and organization, he called on dozens of local politicians at the ward, city, and county levels, as well as on neighborhood activists who might support him. With Palmer committed to the congressional race, Obama had every reason to believe that he would face little opposition in the March Democratic primary; and, in his district, the chance of a Republican winning was about as likely as an African-American winning the White House.
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were among the many neighbors and acquaintances in Hyde Park who were interested in Obama. Ayers and Dohrn were former leaders of S.D.S. and the Weather Underground, and were unapologetic about their support for violent resistance to the Vietnam War. They were now known as community activists, mainly in the field of education. Collectively, they were also the Elsa Maxwell of Hyde Park, frequently inviting guests to their house for readings, discussions, and dinners, and many people in the neighborhood, whether they approved of their behavior in the sixties or not, came.
"Some of us draw a line between what Bill and Bernardine did when they were young and now, when they are doing unimpeachable work in the community," the novelist Rosellen Brown said. "Hyde Park is a pretty small, insular community, and everyone, from Studs Terkel to schoolteachers working on juvenile-justice issues, came to their house to meet interesting people."
The son of a wealthy Chicago business executive, Ayers was a professor at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and was one of the founders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation that distributes grants to educational programs. Ayers helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg board. One guest at a dinner at Ayers's house remembers sitting next to Michelle, who had taken a community-relations job at the university. The discussion was about race, class, and family, and Michelle talked about her grandmother's final days. Her grandmother was immensely proud of the fact that Michelle and Craig had graduated from Princeton, and, in Michelle's case, Harvard Law School. They were thriving. They had broken through. On her deathbed, the old woman told Michelle, "Don't you start the revolution with my great-grandchildren. I want them to go to Princeton, too!"
"She knew that her Princeton education was valuable, and no one, having had advantages, wants to give them up," the guest said, recalling the conversation. "She knew that having stepped up to the class defined by a privileged education, she obviously did not have everything in common with the people she grew up with."
Before Obama formally announced his candidacy, Ayers and Dohrn were asked to throw a small informal reception for him. According to Ayers, Alice Palmer made the request. And although Ayers and Dohrn were not particularly interested in electoral politics--they believed that real change came from popular movements and viewed Obama as someone far more to the center than they were--they agreed. "It was Alice's initiative to have the event in order to hand over the baton," Ayers recalled. "She was running for Congress and she wanted to introduce him to the political community. It was good for her and it was good for him.... The thing about Obama was, he struck me from the first moment as the smartest sort of guy. He was compassionate and clear and a moderate, middle-of-the-road Democrat. How into him was I? Not very. I liked him as a person. I did it because I was asked. We had lots of things: readings, book signings, dinners, talks. For us, it's part of being a citizen."
The guests at the reception included Quentin Young, a doctor who had long campaigned for a single-payer health-care system, the Palestinian-American professor Rashid Khalidi, the novelist Rosellen Brown, and Kenneth Warren, who teaches literature at the university, and his wife, Maria Warren, who writes a blog called Musings & Migraines. Young remembered that Palmer introduced Obama as her successor. When Obama was introduced to Rosellen Brown, he told her that he had read Civil Wars, her novel about a couple of refugees from the civil-rights movement and their lives a decade later. ("After that, like any novelist, I probably would have voted for him for anything," Brown said.) Most of the guests either liked Obama's short talk or had no real objections, but a few, like Maria Warren, were frustrated.
"I remember him saying very generic things and one of the people there said, 'Can't you say something of more substance?'" Warren recalled. "He didn't generate that much excitement, and a few people were saying, 'It's too bad Alice isn't going to run for her seat again.' I remember Barack getting kind of defensive and shaking his head." In 2005, long before Obama was a Presidential candidate, Warren wrote on her blog, "His 'bright eyes and easy smile' struck me as contrived and calculated--maybe because I was supporting another candidate. Since then, I've never heard him say anything new or earthshaking, or support anything that would require the courage of his convictions."
Thirteen years later, during the Presidential campaign, this brief, otherwise forgettable gathering would be introduced into evidence by the Republican Party that Obama had a dangerously radical background, that leaders of the Weather Underground had "launched" his political career. Which was ridiculous. It is true that Obama saw Ayers in the years to come at quarterly board meetings and other occasions. Obama praised Ayers's book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court in the Tribune, though his own views on education were much less left-wing. They once spoke on the same panel about juvenile justice---an event put together by Michelle Obama in 1997, when she was associate dean of student services at the University of Chicago. But no matter what one thought of Ayers's past--and Obama said that Ayers had been guilty of "despicable" acts during the antiwar movement--the notion that the two men were close friends or ideological soul mates was false.
As Obama continued to call on various politicians and activists in the district, he sometimes got perplexing advice. One African-American politician suggested that he change his name; another suggested he make sure to put his picture on all his campaign materials, "so people don't see your name and think you're some big dark guy." Another adviser told him sternly to make sure that he was never photographed holding a glass--even if it was filled with water or juice--lest the electorate take him for a drinker.
"Now all of this may be good political advice," Obama told Hank De Zutter, a writer for the Chicago Reader, "but it's all so superficial. I am surprised at how many elected officials--even the good ones--spend so much time talking about the mechanics of politics and not matters of substance. They have this poker-chip mentality, this overriding interest in retaining their seats or in moving their careers forward, and the business and game of politics, the political horse race, is all they talk about."
On September 19, 1995, at the Ramada Lakeshore, in Hyde Park, Obama formally announced his candidacy. Cliff Kelley, a former alderman and the host of the most popular call-in show on WVON, was master-of-ceremonies. "Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days," Obama told the packed room. "They fall somewhere lower than lawyers.... I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf."
Palmer may not have used the word "endorsement" to describe her enthusiasm for Obama, but, at the Ramada that day, there was no mistaking her enthusiasm for the thirty-four-year-old organizer and lawyer. "In this room, Harold Washington announced for mayor," she said. "It looks different, but the spirit is still in the room. Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with State Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a passing of the torch, because he's the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district."
Carol Anne Harwell looked for a campaign office. She thought she had found something affordable and a
dequate on Seventy-first Street. "It was clean and had a bathroom, and the important thing was that it had phone jacks," Harwell recalled. "Michelle walked in there and she just went, 'No, no, no. Uh-uh.' We ended up farther west in a nicer place. Michelle was determined to run a top-notch campaign, no cheesiness. She brought elegance and class to the campaign. She was the taskmaster and she was very organized, even if she didn't know a lot about politics then. When we started collecting petitions, we would set a goal for, say, two hundred signatures that day. There would be a blizzard and we would come back with only a hundred and fifty. Michelle would be furious and we'd have to go out and get the rest."
On Saturday mornings, Michelle Obama and her friend and the campaign's issues coordinator, Yvonne Davila, went out knocking on doors to collect signatures to get on the ballot. They were much more efficient than Obama, who went out in the evenings with Harwell. "It was so slow," Harwell said. "The old ladies loved him. He would introduce himself and ask them what they needed. They wanted to mother him. They would go on forever about their grandchildren. Barack was not Chicago-smart yet. He didn't know how to keep moving. He even went out campaigning in a leather jacket, no gloves, no hat. I think I had to introduce him to the concept of long underwear."
By the modest standards of a campaign for State Senate, Obama's started unevenly. He was not much of a speaker at first. He was stentorian, professorial, self-serious--a cake with no leavening. In the most critical speaking realm of all, the black churches of the South Side, he came off as flat and diffident; it would take hundreds of speeches in pulpits around the city before he acquired the sense of cadence, Biblical reference, and emotional connection that marked his performances later on.
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama Page 37
