The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Before the campaign began, a tragedy took place that altered the emotional texture of the race and paralyzed Obama for months. On October 18th, Rush's twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey, was shot by two robbers outside his home, on the South Side. Named for Huey Newton, the young man died four days later. Bobby Rush was devastated by his son's death. ("I always thought it was me who wouldn't get to thirty.") As a Panther leader, Rush had been part of an ostentatiously armed revolutionary group; as a mainstream politician, he supported strict gun-control laws. "Our responsibility--my responsibility--is to eliminate violence from our neighborhoods and from our nation," he said. This had always been, for Bobby Rush, a message that resonated with the voters in his district, but now it was all the more powerful after the death of his son. Rush formally announced his candidacy for re-election three days after Huey's funeral.

  Not long afterward, Rush's elderly father died in Georgia. "I know my faith is being tested," Rush said after learning the news. "However, it is only that faith and the loving support of my wife, family, and friends that supplies me with the strength to keep going."

  From then on, Rush ran a minimalist, Rose Garden campaign, avoiding most invitations to appear alongside his opponents, Obama and Donne Trotter, Obama's nemesis in the State Senate. Trotter did not have the money or the support to win the race, but he had deep roots in the South Side. His great-grandfather had arrived in Chicago from Mississippi in 1900 and his grandfather, Walter Trotter, had been a prominent minister in Hyde Park. A resident of South Shore, Trotter had even worked with the Black Panthers. And since he loathed Obama, he seemed almost as intent on damaging Obama as he did on beating Bobby Rush.

  Rush mainly stayed in Washington and relied on his precinct workers and sympathetic interviews with the local press. When he did appear on the South Side, it was most often to campaign for gun control, tying his personal tragedy to gun deaths across the country. He had already co-sponsored dozens of gun-control bills in Congress, but now the press, including the national press, could not resist the story of a former Black Panther, who used to advocate armed resistance, mourning the loss of his son to gun violence and campaigning for greater restrictions. "I believe that this glorification of a gun is something that has to be dealt with," he said. "Many males don't feel as if they're empowered unless they're packing."

  Obama knew that he could not go on the full offensive against Rush. For several weeks, he effectively suspended his campaign. Then, around the year-end holidays, he was severely mocked for missing a crucial vote in Springfield on a crime bill called the Safe Neighborhoods Act, which included gun-control provisions. The bill had the support of both the Democratic mayor, Richard M. Daley, and the Republican governor, George Ryan. As he did every year at Christmas, Obama took his family to Hawaii to visit his grandmother, who was approaching eighty. The Obamas left on December 23rd and planned to return five days later in time for the resumption of the legislative session. On the day of the flight back to Chicago, Malia Obama woke with a high fever. She had the flu. Barack and Michelle decided to wait another day and then either they would fly back together or Barack would return while Michelle and Malia stayed behind a little longer.

  The gun-control measure might have lost anyway, but Obama was slammed for missing the vote. The Tribune ran an editorial criticizing him and other legislators who failed to vote. "What a bunch of gutless sheep" it began. In one of his columns in the Hyde Park Herald, Obama tried to appeal to his constituents' sympathies, pointing out that if he hadn't gone to Hawaii, his ailing grandmother would have had to spend Christmas alone. "We hear a lot of talk from politicians about the importance of family values," he wrote. "Hopefully, you will understand when your state senator tries to live up to those values as best he can."

  It did no good. The sympathy was all for Bobby Rush.

  "The black community doesn't turn its back on you when you are down," Will Burns, who was now a deputy campaign manager, said. "The campaign was suspended effectively almost to January. We had to be respectful. You couldn't attack a man who was grieving, who was mourning. Then there was the vote in Hawaii. We had asked him not to go. We were worried that something would happen. Between all those things, we had trouble. And we had come in so late."

  Obama soldiered on, campaigning door to door and on freezing subway platforms, wearing no hat, no gloves. "We called him 'the Kenyan Kennedy,'" Will Burns said. But the complications continued. Jesse Jackson, Sr., still an influential figure on the South Side, was among the many black leaders who endorsed Rush. Jackson and the others saw no reason to throw their old comrade out in favor of someone whose most memorable act had been to maneuver one of their own, Alice Palmer, into retirement. What was more, Jackson was not eager to see Obama elevated and become a rival to his son. "Bobby had deeper roots," Jackson said. "We knew Bobby in ways that we did not know Barack."

  One of the saving graces of Obama's campaign was that while he was constantly running into older African-Americans who found him diffident or lacking deep roots in the community or possessing insufficient commitment to a traditional "black agenda," he attracted a core of younger people, including well-educated black men and women, who saw that he represented something different from Rush's generation of leaders. Even as they trailed behind Rush and, in their most clear-headed moments, anticipated a loss, Obama and his team acquired a certain spirit. They were a "random-ass mix," Burns said, of "guys with no teeth waiting to get their next Old Grand-Dad and then these Shiraz-drinking, Nation-reading, T.N.R.-quoting young black folk."

  One of those devoted young volunteers, a black lawyer named Mike Strautmanis, who had met Obama through Michelle, later became an intimate friend of the family and, in the White House, Valerie Jarrett's chief of staff. "I came back after my senior year of college to Sidley to work as a paralegal," he said. "There were probably five black lawyers there and I went knocking on doors trying to meet all of them. One day, I knocked on Michelle's door to introduce myself. At that time, she was doing intellectual-property law. She was looking over the storyboard for Keystone Beer--the ad about 'Bitter Beer Face.' Sometimes we talked about Barack. I'd heard about him. Everyone had heard of him after he became president of the Harvard Law Review.

  "So we developed a friendship. What we talked about most was fundamental questions about what we were doing, how we wanted to make a larger difference in the world. I was trying to figure out how to use my law degree to do something useful for other people."

  Strautmanis's parents were from the South Side. His father left the family before he was born but his mother was a commanding presence in his life. "She made me think that I could be in a room and someone's entire impression of African-Americans might depend on me, how I behaved," he said. "I was always trying hard to be polite, to be intelligent, to work hard, to be perfect. I used that to motivate myself. My friends and family were mostly on the South Side because I chose to identify as an African-American, to culturally identify. My white liberal teachers put pressure on me to do really well. I was important to them, and it made them feel good."

  Strautmanis grew up with the model of a black mayor battling a stubbornly conservative, and often racist, City Council. "Harold Washington was like the Lone Ranger to me," he said. "There were the bad guys and the good guys and every day you tuned in to see who won on the next episode. I still have my Harold Washington button--it was blue with white rays, like the rays of the sun."

  As a volunteer canvassing door-to-door for Obama, Strautmanis was among a small group of young, educated African-Americans who saw their candidate as the incarnation of generational change. "I thought it was just so obvious: Barack was brilliant. Barack felt that Bobby Rush was politically weakened by his unsuccessful mayoral race and he hadn't done shit in Congress. He thought, What is Bobby Rush doing there? What had he put his stamp on? What was his crusade? I mean, why was he there at all?"

  As a campaigner, Obama was an awkward, if earnest, novice. He was pedantic, distant, a little condesce
nding at times, a better fit for the University of Chicago seminar room than for the stump or the pulpit of a black church in Englewood. In debates, he was in the habit of crossing his legs and holding his chin up at an imperious angle while an opponent spoke, as if his mind were elsewhere or the proceedings were beneath consideration. Too often, Obama reminded reporters and voters of the great sacrifice he had made by forgoing a Supreme Court clerkship or a mega-salary downtown to engage in public service. This was not a choice that a civil servant was likely to view with sympathy.

  "He went to an elite institution like Harvard and spoke with twenty-five-cent words, and so he had that tendency to talk over, or down to, people," said Al Kindle, who, among Obama's campaign operatives, had the keenest ear for the street.

  Ron Davis, who had worked with Obama in 1996 and was working for him again, would tell Obama, "Motherfucker, you got to talk better, you got to talk to the people!" Davis, Kindle said, "would talk nasty to get Obama mad."

  Newton Minow, who held a fundraiser for Obama, remembers, "Barack wasn't that good. Someone would ask a question and he would give a professorial answer. His answers were just too long and boring. I never thought he could defeat Rush. I've represented a number of black businesses in Chicago, and when I called fifteen or twenty of them, including the publisher of Ebony, none of them would contribute. They all said the same thing: 'Let him wait his turn.'"

  Dan Shomon, Ron Davis, Al Kindle, Toni Preckwinkle, and Will Burns all urged Obama to keep things simple, to avoid lecturing, to loosen up and show some emotion, to be a little more aggressive. "Originally he was short with us about that," Kindle said. "He didn't like the fact that people were telling him he was arrogant. And there was all this talk that he was 'sent by the white man,' that he really is white in black clothing, that his job was to break up and rape the black community."

  Kindle, who was in and out of barbershops, beauty parlors, and coffee shops, who talked with ministers and gang leaders, knew that precinct workers for both Bobby Rush and Donne Trotter were putting the word out that Obama was an effete outsider, a product of a rich Jewish "cabal" from the Lakefront and the near North Side, that he had been brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia by his white mother and grandparents, that he "wasn't black enough."

  "Barack wasn't raised in the black community, his mother was white, and the question was whether he was another Clarence Thomas," Kindle said. "You couldn't come out and say it on TV, but it was in the streets. That's why he needed me to get out in the neighborhood and try to validate him in the neighborhoods. We could say, yes he knows about poor people, yes he is black enough.

  "There is a lot of mistrust in the community and so for someone from Hyde Park it's easy to generate it," Kindle went on. "The University of Chicago had a history of financing operations that were land grabs and he worked there. And there was that money coming in that was Jewish money, so it was an issue of class struggle."

  Carol Anne Harwell, who had been with Obama from the beginning, recalled that the campaign was deflating for him. "Barack took a lot of stuff," she said. "They talked about his mama; they talked about his speech; they said he wasn't a brother--it was really hard. They saw him as a carpetbagger from Hyde Park in a district that had the 'hood in it."

  Those sentiments would often emerge on WVON, a local black radio station whose call letters once stood for "the Voice of the Negro" but were later changed to "the Voice of the Nation." "The WVON audience is not huge but it has people who are hubs of information within discrete communities," Will Burns said. Callers on Cliff Kelley's popular show on WVON slammed Obama, drawing a humiliating comparison between the heroic elder, Bobby Rush, and the entitled young man who wanted to unseat him. "There were no flyers or stuff stuck in doors, but there was a steady drumbeat," Burns said. "Part of this was Barack's comeuppance for what the nationalists felt he had done to Alice Palmer."

  Rush's and Trotter's grassroots campaign workers kept up an effective whispering campaign. They pointed to campaign contributions from prominent white supporters like Minow, Mikva, Schmidt, and the novelists Scott Turow and Sara Paretsky, saying that it reeked of an "Obama Project," a shadowy plan by moneyed whites to propel their favored, and obedient, black man up the political ladder. It hardly mattered that Obama's finance committee was made up of younger black businessmen or that he had the support of some important black aldermen--Toni Preckwinkle, Ted Thomas, and Terry Peterson. Rush's and Trotter's supporters dismissed such people as "buppies."

  Mike Strautmanis recalled, "I went to my grandmother and I told her I was working for Barack and we were going to take Bobby Rush's congressional seat. Barack was on the cover of the Sun-Times and I showed it to my grandmother. She looked up at me with this look and she said, 'Why is he gonna take Bobby's job?' For a while, I was lost for anything to say. I thought, Oh, shit. If I can't convince my grandmother to vote for Barack, we're in trouble."

  By the New Year, Obama had a bad feeling about the campaign. He had raised almost as much money as Rush--including a ninety-five-hundred-dollar loan to himself--but there seemed no way he could win. The campaign could do little about Rush's strategy of exalting his own racial authenticity and, through surrogates, questioning Obama's. "Less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going to lose," Obama recalled. "Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense of dread, realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan."

  With coverage of the race dominated by the murder of Huey Rush, Obama often seemed to lose focus and motivation. "Barack in that first race didn't show the commitment you need to win," Obama's media consultant, Chris Sautter, said. "He had never had to run in a competitive race before. He hadn't appreciated the grueling hours you have to put in. He didn't appreciate the scale of time needed for raising money or going door-to-door. And after Huey Rush's murder, he was just not enthusiastic about anything."

  Obama didn't run negative ads or mail pieces. He mainly just kept talking about his experience as an organizer, his work as a lawyer on voting-rights cases, his experience in Springfield on welfare reform, gun control, ethics, racial profiling, and aid to poor children. Inevitably, he began his speeches with well-practiced self-deprecation: "The first thing people ask me is, 'How did you get that name, Obama?' although they don't always pronounce it right. They say 'Alabama,' or 'Yo Mama.'" Then he would recount his multi-ethnic journey and detail his liberal credentials. He never lost his cool, and he radiated a feeling that, even if he lost, he was a new kind of African-American politician.

  "He never gave you the sense he felt he was going to go down in flames," Burns said. "Maybe he felt we needed that or we might want to pack it up. He's funny. He's got a dry wit, a wicked sense of humor. There had been a shooting in one of the wards we were trying to win. I was in charge of a rally for gun control at a church. We had walked the flyer, we'd made phone calls, we really put a lot of time and energy into it. We had the meeting. And the cameras are there--and there were like ten people. The buses never showed up. It was a disaster. The one thing you don't want with Barack is to fail on a mission. Some politicians start screaming and throwing shit. He tapped me on the shoulder after he spun it out as a press conference. He said to me, 'You know, Will, when I call a rally, normally you have people there. That's a rally.'"

  In private, as the campaign floundered, Obama even talked with Ron Davis and Al Kindle about his ultimate ambition. "He has always wanted to be President--it's like a waking dream," Kindle said. "The first time it came up was the summer he was running for Congress. Ron would say, 'Don't tell anyone, but this boy wants to be President.' We laughed and Ron would say, 'He's loony!'"

  Obama did get one break. On March 6th, the Tribune endorsed him:

  Eight years ago, the Tribune endorsed Rush with these words criticizing Hayes: "He's a politician who can't shake the old ideas of government interventionism even though it is so clear in his distric
t that the old ideas have failed." The same now seems true of Rush. He touts experience and seniority, but his approach to problems has not produced many results. And maybe that would be good enough, if he did not have an outstanding opponent.

  Obama is smart and energetic. He was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, and he is committed to his community. He has fresh ideas on governing and he understands that, as congressman for the 1st District, he would become a spokesman for African-American concerns nationally and an important voice in shaping urban politics in Chicago and the nation.

  On Sunday, March 12th, Obama got a friendly reception in Beverly when he marched, along with three hundred thousand others, in the annual South Side Irish Parade. Over the years, the parade had become known as a drunken bacchanal and Obama was anxious about participating. Shomon convinced him to do it. "It's great," Shomon said. "You have corned beef and cabbage with your family and then you march around the block and have a beer with your cousin Jimmy." Obama began the day at a Catholic Mass and a soda-bread-and-casserole brunch at the home of Jack and Maureen Kelly, and with neighborhood volunteers like John and Michelle Presta, who ran a bookstore in the area. Obama marched on Western Avenue alongside the beer-drinking bagpipers and the teenaged kids with Mardi Gras beads and their green-dyed hair. A couple of nights later, he gamely fought to another draw with Rush and Trotter at a dull candidates' forum hosted by "Chicago Tonight," a program on WTTW.

  The Tribune endorsement and the parade were boosts to the spirit, but Obama was not deluded. At the time, working-class blacks, the heart of the Democratic electorate in the district, tended to read the Sun-Times. On March 16th, the paper's editorial declared that Obama and Trotter had "failed to make their case" and endorsed Rush. Obama could not even win over the liberal alternative press. Ted Kleine's article in the Chicago Reader, entitled "Is Bobby Rush in Trouble?," appeared just before the primary on March 21st; it was balanced but contained some lethal moments. Rush was quoted as saying that Obama "went to Harvard and became an educated fool.... We're not impressed with these folks with these eastern elite degrees."