The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Hendon said later that part of his motive was just a ritual of sarcastic welcome--"He wasn't going to be above freshman hazing, as far as I was concerned. It's been a tradition forever"--but Obama definitely irritated him. Hendon, Trotter, and others quickly determined that Obama had his eyes fixed on higher office: alderman, congressman, mayor, governor. Hendon joked that Obama would likely run for "president of the world." Hendon had marched in support of the Black Panther Party in 1971, after the murder of Fred Hampton. He remembered the first Mayor Daley, Dr. King, the riots on the West Side--he was a real Chicagoan, he insisted, and not from Hyde Park. Hendon didn't take Obama's main claim to authenticity--his three years as a community organizer--seriously. Street cred, he said, "is something you really earn and it takes some time. He didn't have the time in as a community organizer. I was in the streets. I stood up. Look, I have friends like Barack. I understood him. He was not any kind of mystery to me: I have friends from Africa, biracial friends, college-educated lawyer friends, and sometimes we have battles and differences. My friends with all those degrees like to compromise and live in nice rich neighborhoods. They don't see things as they really are. You're not as willing to compromise if you see the poverty all the time. When we were talking about racial profiling, he told us he'd never been pulled over. I've been pulled over a lot."

  Donne Trotter, a more polished legislator and given to natty bow ties, was no less contemptuous of his new colleague in the Black Caucus. "Barack didn't have a clue," Trotter said. "He was a new kid on the block, an unknown entity, a blank sheet of paper. I'm not into conspiracy theories but no one knew who was backing him. It sure wasn't the community he was trying to represent. Who was this guy?"

  Like Hendon, Trotter had no compunction about getting in Obama's face. "As Harold Washington said, 'Politics ain't beanbag,' it's a contact sport, so it's not as if what I was talking about was so out of line," he said. ("Beanbag" was actually a coinage of Mark Twain's Chicago friend the journalist Finley Peter Dunne.) "It wasn't a question of black enough. What we did know, by his own admission in his book, was that he grew up in Hawaii. It wasn't the issue of a white mother, that's not so unusual, but he didn't have our black experience. On the South Side, it's twenty below zero. In Hawaii, it's eighty degrees--and he's supposedly roughing it."

  Obama brushed off the insults from Trotter and Hendon, and he focused instead on forming useful alliances where, and with whom, he could. One of the first things he did in Springfield was to call on the Democratic leader, Emil Jones, whom he had first met as an organizer while staging a street demonstration near Jones's house. Emil Jones was far more important than Hendon and Trotter. A legislator since 1973, he was one of eight children. His father had been a truck driver, a bailiff in the Cook County Circuit Court, and a Democratic precinct captain in the Thirty-fourth Ward organization on the far South Side. Gruff, earthy, and a chain-smoker, Jones made it his business in the Senate not only to pass progressive legislation but to bring home the pork to the African-American community. He helped to build institutions like Kennedy-King College, in Englewood, the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Bronzeville Children's Museum, and the Beverly Arts Center. Jones was an old-style apparatchik, and Obama had a lot to learn from him. Jones, in turn, realized that in Barack Obama he had a unique, if raw, talent that he could mold. It was not every day, he told an aide, that a black Harvard Law School graduate--earnest, sincere, ready to work--showed up on his doorstep.

  "Barack was very idealistic when we first met," Jones said. "He wanted to get things done but didn't know how to solve the problem. He thought you could press a button and it would be done." Jones easily sensed the animosity of senators who had been friends with Alice Palmer and felt that Obama had somehow betrayed her. "I knew the feeling was there, but they didn't know that I'd known Barack for a long time," he said. Pedigree was also a problem--"Harvard and all the rest"--but Jones did not feel threatened. Instead, when Obama came asking for hard assignments, Jones gave them to him. Democrats could not easily initiate legislation, but they could get involved in the negotiations, and Jones made Obama his lead negotiator on a welfare-to-work package being pushed by the Republicans. This annoyed Hendon and Trotter, but Obama knew that Jones's favor was invaluable in Springfield.

  Obama also formed friendships among white legislators from the suburbs and downstate. During his freshman orientation session, he met a Democrat named Terry Link, who had just pulled off an upset in a district north of Chicago. Link was white, ran a forklift business, and "barely got out of high school," but, he said, "We hit it off right away."

  "One thing Barack has is the ability to adapt, and in the State Senate he discovered that things weren't clear-cut," Link recalled. "We were sitting on the floor at eleven-forty-five on the last night of our first session and we were handed the budget, a foot thick, at that time. We broke it up into five bills and had to vote on it. We were in the minority and we had just minutes before we had to vote. Barack had such a stern face, and he said, 'Do you really think our forefathers designed our Constitution to do the state's business like this?' That's when I think it hit him that things weren't being done the way he might have hoped."

  Denny Jacobs, a Democrat from a downstate district, East Moline, recalled that Obama was long-winded in his early appearances on the floor, and his performances were sometimes greeted with eye-rolling, coughing, and annoyed muttering. "The state legislature is not a place for eloquence," Jacobs said. "You don't win with persuasive arguments. It's down-and-dirty politics, and he learned how to play that. You better be prepared to trade part of a bill if you are going to survive. If you want to get a little piece of a health-care bill, say, as Barack did, you had to give things up, because most people, including myself, were opposed to his all-out comprehensive bill. He had to withdraw his own beliefs." Early on, Jacobs said, Obama irritated him with constant requests for clarification and tutorials. In the midst of a revenue-committee hearing, Jacobs recalled, Obama was "asking all these damn questions. Finally, I leaned over and said, 'Do me a favor. Get your information on your own time.' Didn't fluster him at all. He just said, 'O.K., Jacobs, I will.'"

  To make any progress, the Democrats had to form relationships with centrist Republicans. "We weren't treated as a hot commodity," Link said. "Without good relationships, you were never consulted or invited to meetings." And so Obama, Link, and others made a serious effort to learn more about the Republicans and then compare notes.

  The social lives of Illinois lawmakers in Springfield were not, traditionally, an edifying spectacle. Some legislators treated the capital as a marital hideaway, carrying on affairs and staying out late with friends. Obama led a blameless and relatively spartan after-work existence. Most nights, when he was in Springfield, he would make a quick stop at one or two of the many receptions being held around town--lobbyists, interest groups, visiting groups from Chicago--and then get back to his hotel room where he would read, mark exams, watch a few cycles of SportsCenter on ESPN, spend up to an hour talking on the telephone with Michelle, and then, finally, fall off to sleep. Sometimes he went out to dinner with lobbyists or fellow legislators; he was never much of a drinker. Early mornings, he played basketball with a lobbyist from Ameritech at a local Y.M.C.A. or went running.

  Link organized Wednesday night sessions of the Subcommittee Meeting: a dollar-ante poker game held first at Link's house in Springfield and, later, at the offices of a lobbying group, the Illinois Manufacturers Association. Link invited Obama, other legislators such as Denny Jacobs and Larry Walsh, a senator-farmer from Elmwood, and a few lobbyists. Everybody involved in the game says that Obama was a cautious player, folding hand after hand, waiting for his moment to bluff or go big on a good hand. The game was never high-stakes--to win or lose a hundred dollars was a dramatic night. Obama's caution, hidden behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, could be maddening. One Republican, Bill Brady, of Bloomington, told Obama, "You're a socialist with everybody's money but your own." />
  Obama enjoyed the poker games but he was also aware that for him, "Mr. Harvard," taking part in the game was a good thing to do. It made him seem more like a regular guy. He said, "When it turned out that I could sit down at [a bar] and have a beer and watch a game or go out for a round of golf or get a poker game going, I probably confounded some of their expectations."

  Friends in Chicago had also told Obama that in Springfield a lot got done on the golf course, and so he often went with Link and others at the end of the day to play nine holes before dusk. But on Thursday afternoons, as soon as the bell rang for the end of the session, Obama climbed into his Jeep Cherokee, Illinois license-plate No. 13, and sped off to I-55 and Chicago. "He was on the road immediately--he didn't hang around," Link said.

  Obama tried to form alliances with younger black senators who were not turned off by his education, his manner, or his ambition. In 1998, his second year in the Senate, a twenty-nine-year-old black woman named Kimberly Lightford won a seat in Oak Park and other suburbs west of Chicago. Lightford called on Emil Jones, who told her that she should go see Obama. "He's the future of the Senate," he told her.

  Lightford visited Obama at his law office. "I saw this articulate handsome young man," she recalled. "All these other guys were older white males. He was very polite. He told me all about Michelle. They had their daughter Malia," who had been born in 1998. "I was engaged to be married, too. He told me all about my campaign, and I said, 'You were paying attention?' He asked me about resources: I'd won with twelve thousand five hundred dollars, going door-to-door in a seven-person race. He pulled out a checkbook and wrote me a check for five hundred dollars. I thought, This is my new big brother. When we arrived in Springfield that November, they were having elections, and he nominated me as chairman of the Senate Black Caucus."

  Rickey Hendon, who had been chairman, went along with Lightford's nomination. But in sessions of the caucus he and Trotter continued to razz Obama. "If Barack got tired of them in the meeting, he would laugh them off, or he would just leave the meeting," Lightford said. "He avoided any blowouts. I'd never seen anyone keep his cool like that."

  Lightford was especially impressed by Obama's manners. "I was the first in the Senate to have a baby," she said. "Barack nurtured me through my whole pregnancy in Springfield. I always got the shoulder massage, or 'Do you need a footrest, you need a blanket?' He had a wife at home pregnant, so he knew. We were two weeks apart."

  Lightford, Jacobs, and Link all assumed that their friend would not make a career of Springfield. "The day I met Barack," Link recalled, "I knew I would be in the Illinois Senate a lot longer than him, and he would go on to something bigger and better: mayor or president of the Cook County Board or whatever. He wanted to go on to something else. He could see that what was going on in Springfield, especially being in the minority, he couldn't accomplish much." Lightford added, "It was too easy for him in Springfield. He had figured it all out. He was a step ahead."

  In his first year, Obama took on a particularly thorny assignment from Jones. Paul Simon, the retired U.S. senator from Illinois, was running a public-policy institute at Southern Illinois University and trying to draft new state ethics guidelines. Illinois politics had long been an ethical bog. Under state law, legislators could spend their leftover campaign funds without much restriction; some bought cars, paid school fees for their children, added rooms to their houses, set up a retirement fund. Members were also free to accept gifts from lobbyists and constituents--golf trips, memberships in clubs and golf courses, lavish dinners. Abner Mikva suggested that Simon and Jones call on Obama; the Republicans called on Kirk Dillard, a moderate from DuPage County. Obama was not quite as lonely a warrior on the issue as he portrayed himself in 2008, but along with Dillard and two members of the lower house, he was a lead sponsor of the new ethics bill, making speeches on the floor and negotiating with recalcitrant legislators. Dillard recalled that Obama was mocked in his own party caucus when he tried to push a comprehensive bill limiting contributions from unions and corporations and the traditional ability of the Four Tops to distribute campaign funds to other members; Trotter called Obama "the knight on the white horse." Finally, in 1998, the legislature passed a bill that, while it grandfathered in funds that had already been collected, prohibited lawmakers in the future from mixing campaign and personal accounts and taking substantial gifts; the bill also called for far greater disclosure than had ever existed in Illinois. The legislation helped put Obama on the map as a reformer.

  Obama had at least one consistent, if modest, outlet for his ideas: an occasional column in the Hyde Park Herald entitled "Springfield Report." Between 1996 and 2004, he published more than forty columns in the Herald. When he first announced for the Senate seat, he filled out a "general candidate questionnaire" issued by the I.V.I.-I.P.O. asking for his endorsements (Sierra Club, A.F.L.-C.I.O., the firefighters), a biographical sketch, and a series of "yes/no" questions on various issues. In that questionnaire, Obama reflected a fairly standard liberal Democratic profile: support for public-campaign financing, domestic-partnership legislation, a single-payer health plan for Illinois, Medicaid funding for abortion; opposition to electronic eavesdropping and legalized gambling for Cook County. In his columns, however, he was able to give these positions more texture.

  In the spring of 1997, when a thousand young African-American men assembled at the Dirksen Federal Building, in Chicago, to protest the drug and conspiracy trial of Larry Hoover, a convicted felon and the head of a street gang known as the Gangster Disciples, Obama wrote, "Something is terribly wrong: at the very least, it should give us some indication of the degree to which an ever-growing percentage of our inner-city youth are alienated from mainstream values and institutions, and regard gangs as the sole source of income, protection, and communal feeling. The reason for such alienation isn't hard to figure out. Close to half--that's right, half--of all children in Chicago are currently growing up in poverty."

  In other columns, he wrote about exorbitant utility rates, onerous welfare reform, drunk-driving legislation, the need to keep genetic-test results confidential, the forty million dollars in no-bid contracts extended to a Springfield contractor who---"it may not surprise you to hear"--was a major campaign contributor to various Republican politicians, including Governor Jim Edgar.

  Obama shed his rookie idealism and now spoke readily of his willingness to compromise. During a debate, in Springfield, he said, "I probably would not have supported the federal legislation [on welfare reform], because I think it had some problems. But I'm a strong believer in making lemonade out of lemons." Once, as Obama and Jacobs were walking in the halls of the Old Capitol building they noticed a civics-lesson poster that listed the steps needed to pass a piece of legislation. Both men laughed and agreed that the poster might be more useful as toilet paper. "He realized that sometimes you can't get the whole hog, so you take the ham sandwich," Jacobs said. "Barack wised up pretty quickly." This willingness to take the ham sandwich when the whole hog was unavailable would characterize Obama's pragmatic view of politics straight into the Oval Office.

  The more Obama learned to deal with Republicans, suburban and downstate senators, lobbyists, and other seeming antagonists, the less he cared about the approval of Trotter and Hendon. His capacity to listen, learn the rules, compromise, avoid taking offense, and move forward was winning the parental approval of Emil Jones. His performance on the ethics bill gave him a reputation as a conciliator, a negotiator.

  Even as he was gaining a good reputation as a legislator, Obama could not conceal his feelings about the day-to-day work of a state senator. He didn't mind the modest salary--forty-nine thousand dollars a year--and the long drives between Chicago and the state capital gave him time to think, make phone calls, and listen to music and books on tape. And his seat was his as long as he wanted it. In 1998, Obama had to run again. His luck was such that he ran against, as Will Burns put it, "the one person with a name funnier than Barack's": Yesse Yeh
udah. A Republican, Yehudah managed to get just eleven per cent of the vote; Obama was now safely in office until 2002.

  But to be in the minority in the State Senate, to glimpse the infantile resentments, the mulish infighting, and the sausage-factory atmosphere was hardly what Obama had hoped for. Sometimes he told Michelle stories about the playground atmosphere in Springfield, the carousing and late-night drinking, and she could hardly believe it. He was also bored--bored with the details of so much work that seemed without impact on the lives of people in his district.

  "Springfield may be the most boring place on earth," Obama's friend the novelist Scott Turow said. "For someone who had been living in Hyde Park, it was an intellectual desert. He expressed that. He felt that he couldn't engage anyone down there in a policy discussion. I think he was unprepared for how basic the terms of debate were: this one wants this, the other wants that, and the leadership wants this.... In Springfield, his initial response was 'I think I wanna get out of here and be a writer.'"

  One of Obama's colleagues at the law school, Dennis Hutchinson, recalled, "Obama was unhappy in the State Senate. He saw Springfield as something he had to go through in order to establish a public record. He knew that the real deal was in Washington. He chafed, too, at the control that Mayor Daley and the Democratic establishment exerted. I asked him once why there was no successor to Harold Washington. He said, 'That's easy,' as if I knew nothing and he was going to gently explain. 'Every time there is a vacancy or a death or a conviction, the Mayor handpicks a successor and creates his own power base in the black community.' He seemed deeply schooled in Chicago politics and history going back to the first Daley and Martin Luther King in the sixties and the co-opting of the black ministers. That was all in his intellectual inventory."