The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  On January 2nd, Harwell and other volunteers went to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners--an office on the third floor of City Hall--and asked to see the petition sheets for Obama's opponents. They spent the next week carefully combing through the lists. The Obama campaign was hardly alone: the Commission office was filled with campaign officials and volunteers checking signatures against registration rolls. "It's like old home week," said Alan Dobry, who, along with his wife, Lois, joined the petition review effort.

  Obama, who was relatively new to Chicago politics, was ambivalent about the process. "He really wanted to win a race," Harwell said. "He didn't understand that people challenge petitions all the time. People have a right to battle. We told him that they couldn't hand in garbage petitions. Once we showed him the Superman and Pookie sheets, he came around."

  Obama and his supporters knew that he could easily lose to Palmer in a head-to-head primary. If he agonized over the decision to challenge the petitions, he did not agonize for long. "To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up," Obama recalled. "I gave some thought to ... should people be on the ballot even if they didn't meet the requirements.... My conclusion was that if you couldn't run a successful petition drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be." In private, Obama absorbed a less righteous sense of tactics: "If you can get 'em, get 'em," Davis told Obama. "Why give 'em a break?" To help with the petition survey, Davis brought in Thomas Johnson, a Harvard-educated lawyer who had been involved in the Harold Washington campaigns and had helped Obama on Project Vote.

  As Obama's campaign workers reviewed the petitions, it soon became clear that all of Obama's opponents had done, at best, a sloppy job of gathering signatures. There were addresses in the wrong district, bogus names, printed names.

  "My wife and I worked on the petitions and we remember how the machine used to do this to our independents and knock us off the ballot, so we had to learn in order to protect ourselves," Alan Dobry recalled. "When I ran for ward committeeman in 1986, against Mike Igoe, the son of a federal judge, one of his precinct captains put in a clumsy forgery for the dean of students at the University of Chicago--which was a problem because they misspelled his name and he was on sabbatical in France at the time they collected it.

  "Alice did not believe she would lose," Dobry continued. "She is a nice person and a real expert on educational issues, but she was not a good politician. She is not good at organizing campaigns."

  Marc Ewell filed 1,286 names and Obama's challenge found him eighty-six short. Askia filed 1,899 names and was sixty-nine names short. Askia admitted that he had paid Democratic Party precinct workers five dollars a sheet for some of the petitions and that they had likely used "roundtabling" to fill out the effort. "That's a standard thing in Chicago--you pay people to circulate petitions," Askia said. "Even the mayor does it." He said that the Obama campaign was wrong to use "loopholes" if Obama was going to claim to be a new kind of politician.

  Palmer had filed about twice the number of names required, but Obama's people asserted that two-thirds of them were invalid, leaving her two hundred shy of the required seven hundred and fifty-seven. According to Robert Starks, one of her main supporters, "We were in too much of a rush and that leads to bad signatures."

  Even some of Palmer's friends in the State Senate could see she was in trouble. Rickey Hendon, a self-described "street guy" whose district was on the West Side near the United Center, said that he had no objection to Obama's tactics: "Hell, I do it and people have tried to do it to me. It's the Chicago way. People can make stuff up in this town. You can't let it slide. That's bullshit. Alice should have taken care of business." Hendon, who was one of Obama's antagonists in Springfield, also had no doubts about the repercussions of the incident. Obama, he said, "wouldn't be President if Alice had stayed on the ballot. I don't know anyone who thinks Alice wouldn't have won at that time and in that era. She was the queen. She was loved."

  The Obama volunteers filled out long forms describing each challenge, and, in the end, the government upheld their case. When the result arrived, eliminating Palmer from the ballot, Obama told his volunteers not to betray any glee. "It was very awkward," Obama recalled. "That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."

  "This was not the optimal outcome," Will Burns said. "He didn't want us backslapping like we had done something great." (Nonetheless, Alice Palmer always resented Barack Obama, and privately she said that he ended up disappointing her, that he was not the progressive she thought he was when she first endorsed him. In 2008, Palmer supported Hillary Clinton for President.)

  With the petition drama over, the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO), the most important anti-machine group to emerge in Chicago after the Second World War, endorsed Obama. There was now no way that he could lose the primary save for some unforeseen disaster. From his law partners and friends like Valerie Jarrett, who was now chairman of the board of the Chicago Transit Authority, he had raised more than sixty thousand dollars. His two opponents in November were insignificant: a sixty-seven-year-old Republican teacher named Rosette Caldwell Peyton; and David Whitehead, for the Harold Washington Party, who had run unsuccessfully for a slew of offices, including, four times, for alderman. The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times both endorsed Obama.

  In the end Obama won, with eighty-two per cent of the vote.

  What kind of politician did Obama intend to be? The most comprehensive portrait of him that appeared during the campaign was Hank De Zutter's long article in the Chicago Reader. An almost completely sympathetic piece, it portrayed Obama as a young man who admired Harold Washington but was critical of him as a leader whose dream of a principled coalition politics fell apart the day he died, in 1987. "He was a classic charismatic leader," Obama said, "and when he died all of that dissipated."

  At one point, De Zutter watched Obama teaching a workshop for "future leaders" in the Grand Boulevard community, on the South Side, organized by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons. Dressed "casually prep" and looking like an "Ivy League graduate student," Obama met with eight black women to discuss the way power was organized in the city. For a while, the women talk about "they" and "them," and how these unnamed people have come to control the lives and wealth of Chicago. Obama cuts it off.

  "Slow down now. You're going too fast now," he says. "I want to break this down. We talk 'they, they, they' but don't take the time to break it down. We don't analyze. Our thinking is sloppy. And, to the degree that it is, we're not going to be able to have the impact we could have. We can't afford to go out there blind, hollering and acting the fool, and get to the table and don't know who it is we're talking to--or what we're going to ask them--whether it's someone with real power or just a third-string flak catcher."

  At that point, Obama saw himself trying to bridge his activity during his first sojourn in Chicago to the world of practical politics, a bridge between the church-basement meetings of the South Side and the conference rooms of the Loop. He offered De Zutter a kind of credo for his career:

  What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? ... The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.

  Now we have to take this same language--these same values that are encouraged within our families--of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other--and apply them to a larger society. Let's talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values. Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibi
lity of teens getting pregnant, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.

  Obama's idealism was part of what attracted young people like Will Burns, who eventually ran for office himself on the South Side, to the campaign. Obama seemed to promise a new kind of politics or, at least, a marriage of conventional liberal-policy positions to a temperament that relied on reconciliation rather than on grievance. The problem was that Obama was also given to a certain naivete. In a tone of rueful apology, he admitted that he would have to raise money from people of means in order to win the election, but, "once elected, once I'm known, I won't need that kind of money, just as Harold Washington, once he was elected and known, did not need to raise and spend money to get the black vote." As a Presidential candidate, Obama not only raised an unprecedented amount of cash, from both the wealthy and ordinary supporters, but also dropped a promise to abide by spending limits, and then outspent his Republican opponent by a gigantic margin.

  Obama had won his first elected office, but he alienated some on the left, both whites and blacks. They were suspicious not only of his shallow roots in the community but also of his post-civil-rights liberalism. He lacked a certain authenticity, some of them felt; he was too privileged, too willing to compromise on the "black agenda." "Chicago politics, whether it was the old Daley or Harold Washington, is a gutsy, boots-on-the-ground game and it's got to reflect the community," Robert Starks said. "It could be Daley from Bridgeport or Washington from the South Side. Now here comes Obama and he turns that idea upside down--he escapes the whole Chicago tradition of coming from the bowels of the community."

  Adolph Reed, Jr., a professor of political science who was then teaching at Northwestern, and who had also been involved in the attempt to draft Palmer, published an article in the Village Voice that was the clearest expression of the deep and early suspicion of Obama, his origins, and his ideological makeup:

  In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program--the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn't been up to the challenge.

  Obama's unseating of Palmer had planted some bitter seeds. He discovered that when, in Springfield, he joined the Black Caucus and again, to greater distress, in 2000, when he challenged the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for his seat in Congress. The Palmer affair, Will Burns said, had a dual effect on the South Side. On the one hand, Burns said, "people learned that he was going to play hardball. They learned that just because you write an editorial and tell him to do something, doesn't mean he is going to do it. It put people on notice." On the other hand, the resentment against him lingered, especially in the communities where the percentage of African-Americans was highest and the income level lowest. "The seeds of the 'not-black-enough' stuff started as a consequence of that first election," Burns said.

  * * *

  Despite the wide margin of his victory, Obama knew that he needed to expand his base of recognition. He understood that Hyde Park was a special sort of enclave--it was not considered the real South Side. So he established his district office in South Shore, the working-and middle-class black neighborhood where his wife had grown up.

  Obama was sworn in on January 8, 1997. In the light of his future, it is all too easy to look at this first office with a portentous sense of gravity. After all, just seven years later, while he held the same office, people would hear him give a speech in Boston and start to wonder if he, "a black man with a funny name," just might be the future of Presidential politics in the Democratic Party. A state senator! But in 1997 being a Democratic state senator in Illinois was to hold an office without status. (Even in the best of times, Democratic state senators in Chicago with ambitions dreamed of becoming aldermen and congressmen or holding state office.) The Republican leader, or president, James (Pate) Philip, was an aging hack given to racist innuendo, and any Democrat rash enough to initiate a piece of progressive legislation found that initiative buried forever in the rules committee. Philip was the sort of racist who would first announce his lack of political correctness and then blunder on about the deficiencies of blacks: "It's probably a terrible thing to say, but I'll say it: some of them do not have the work ethics we have.... I don't know what you do about that, but it's kind of a way of life."

  Pate Philip, Obama once told me, "was not a neoconservative but the original paleo-conservative. He was a big, hulking guy. He looked like John Murtha, but had very different politics, and would chomp on cigars and make politically incorrect statements, and he had adopted Newt Gingrich's--not just the Contract with America--he had adopted Newt Gingrich's rules for running the House. As a consequence, you couldn't even amend a bill without his approval."

  The two legislative chambers in Springfield were almost entirely controlled by "the Four Tops": the Senate president, the House speaker, and the two minority leaders. They controlled committee assignments, legislative agendas, staff, and even campaign money. Run-of-the-mill Democratic legislators were known as "mushrooms" because they were kept in the dark and made to eat shit. Obama was a newly sprouted mushroom.

  Ideology was a simple matter for the Republicans. Pate Philip, who was a Marine veteran and a sales manager for Pepperidge Farm, worked mainly to keep taxes low and to make any plans for reform "dead on arrival." The minute he took over the leadership seat, in 1992, he called for the abolition of bilingual education ("Let 'em learn English").

  Obama commuted to Springfield. Most weeks when the Senate was in session, he made the three-plus-hours' drive to Springfield, along Interstate 55, late Monday and returned Thursday night. He usually stayed in the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel, on East Adams Street, a short walk from the Old State Capitol. Within a couple of days of arriving in Springfield for the first time, he called Judd Miner and asked him to take him off salary; he would be paid by the hour for any work he did for the firm.

  Even in Springfield, where many of his colleagues were suburban and downstate senators who could not have cared less about the internecine battles of the South Side, there was still a price to be paid for knocking Alice Palmer off the ballot and out of the Senate. Two African-American senators in particular, Rickey Hendon, from the West Side, and Donne Trotter, who represented a district that extended from the South Side into the south suburbs, were not keen to give Obama a warm welcome. They viewed him as too lawyerly, too Harvard, too much in a hurry, insufficiently Chicago, and insufficiently black. Theirs was a less ideologically sophisticated version of the view taken by Adolph Reed, Jr.: that Obama was "vacuous" and inauthentic. Obama's book had been reviewed and even excerpted in the Hyde Park Herald, and so some of his colleagues already knew about his background. They teased him about smoking dope as a kid and about being reared by his white mother and grandparents. They asked him if he had figured out what race he belonged to. Hendon teased Obama that he was from Hawaii and lived in Hyde Park: "What do you know about the street?"

  Hazing is a first-year ritual in Springfield. Obama's turn took place on the Senate floor in mid-March. To help the unemployed, Obama had introduced a bill to create a guide to community-college graduates for potential local employers--a bill of relatively small significance. Rickey Hendon jumped on it.

  HENDON: Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I'm having a little trouble with it.

  OBAMA: Obama.


  HENDON: Is that Irish?

  OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.

  HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill's still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?

  PRESIDING OFFICER: Senator Obama.

  OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn't paying Senator Hendon any attention.

  HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn't pay it much attention, either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?

  OBAMA: Basically this idea came out of the South Side community colleges. I don't know what you're doing in the West Side community colleges. But we probably won't be including that in our directory for the students.

  HENDON: I wish--I wish Senator Collins was here to make that--hear that comment. Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer--much easier to pronounce than Obama--and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don't have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And--and you don't even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did.... I'm missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that make absolutely no sense. I--I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.