The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  It was not clear, at first, where all this traveling and exposure would lead, but one thing was clear--that Michelle Obama was concerned about what it meant for their future. When Barack called in from the road to report how well a speech had gone, she would, Shomon recalled, reply something on the order of, "Malia is sick, so that's what I'm concerned about."

  Obama was not deterred. Michelle's practiced dyspepsia was also part of the style of their relationship. She understood his ego and his self-involvement; this was her way of keeping it in check. Although politics was a strain on their relationship, it was never fatal. It is a mistake to make of her in those days, as some accounts have, a cartoonish nag; Michelle Obama was also proud of her husband and shared his desire to do good.

  "I don't think Barack ever worried that their marriage was going to end," Shomon said. "He was worried about his future, if he was electable, if he was going to be stuck in the minority, if Michelle was going to be mad at him for this or that. But I never sensed his marriage was really in trouble."

  "Without Michelle, there is no Barack," Al Kindle said. "He needed her as an image, and, of course, he really loved her. If she hadn't agreed to a political life, he wouldn't have run. A divorce would have killed him. After the congressional race, she wanted to know, 'Where are we going?' She needed him to make a decision. He decided, 'I am going to run one more time.' He was ready to leave the state legislature and he was looking for the next thing. He was evaluating his options. Some of what she was doing was forcing him to figure out what he wanted."

  * * *

  On September 19, 2001, the Hyde Park Herald published a gallery of reactions to the catastrophic terrorist attacks the week before at the World Trade Center in New York, and at the Pentagon. The two Illinois senators, Peter Fitzgerald and Richard Durbin; the House member for Hyde Park, Bobby Rush; the aldermen Toni Preckwinkle and Leslie Hairston; and the state representative Barbara Flynn Currie all provided fairly predictable messages of sympathy and vigilance. In 2001, Obama was still too insignificant a politician to be called on for comment in the national media, but in the Herald he provided a reaction to the events that is worth quoting in full for its attempt to explore the political meanings of the attacks:

  Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.

  We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

  We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe--children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and within our own shores.

  Years later, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, of many more incidents of terrorism, of warrantless wiretaps and prisoner abuse, of profiling and intensified security, Obama's comments might seem commonplace. But in the days and weeks after 9/11, any attempt to understand "the sources of such madness," to understand how a young man comes to be a terrorist--how he might be shaped by economic and political despair and the demagoguery of fanatical leaders--was viewed by many with tremendous suspicion, as if an attempt at understanding constituted a lack of outrage at the terrorists or grief for the thousands of victims. And, in a reaction of just three paragraphs, to raise the question of civilian deaths in any U.S. military action was not at all a common sentiment at the time.

  After the Al Qaeda attacks, Obama discovered that his name, never a great advantage in his political races, was, post 9/11, a kind of gruesome punchline. He had scheduled a meeting that month with Eric Adelstein, a media consultant for Democratic political candidates, to talk discreetly about the possibility of running for statewide office--possibly Illinois attorney general or U.S. senator. He had just been crushed by Bobby Rush and was deep in debt. Now his name rhymed with that of the most notorious terrorist alive. "Suddenly Adelstein's interest in the meeting had diminished!" Obama told the Tribune reporter David Mendell. "We talked about it and he said that the name thing was really going to be a problem for me now."

  As he waited for his next political opportunity, Obama was determined to be a more engaged legislator in Springfield. He had come a long way. When he first arrived in the State Senate, he struck his colleagues as stiff, academic, arrogant. Over time, he became friendlier, more collegial. He did not radiate, as he once had, a sense of superiority. Obama had studied Bill Clinton on television. He had even watched Rod Blagojevich, a mediocre intellect, but a gifted one-on-one campaigner. "Barack wasn't Mr. Personality when he first got to the State Senate," Dan Shomon said. "He learned the Mr. Personality aspect of politics, the charm, only later. He even learned to get around the camera at public events, that you weren't there if you weren't in the picture. He learned ways to bring people toward him."

  At the same time, Obama became a more effective advocate for serious issues. He was hardly on the left wing of his party, but he spoke out consistently for a moratorium on executions and against racial profiling. Like most Democrats in the legislature, he was especially wary of the conservative-era impulse to slash both social spending and income taxes--a far more concrete specter in the states, where budgets must be balanced. George Ryan, a moderate Republican who was elected governor in 1999, came to office with a glimmer of hope for the Democrats, and Obama was pleased that, in 2000, Ryan put a moratorium on capital punishment. He hoped that this signaled a more progressive trend in Illinois state politics, but in February, 2002, the state faced a budget crisis--a shortfall of more than seven hundred million dollars--and Ryan prepared to cut back on crucial state welfare programs. Writing in the Herald, Obama said that the state now faced one of the "paradoxes" of a recession. "The worst thing state government can do during a recession is cut spending," he wrote.

  And yet one incident during the Democratic attempt to hang on to as many social-service programs as possible showed that Obama's problems with some of his African-American colleagues were not over. On June 11th, Rickey Hendon made a heartfelt speech on the Senate floor urging that funding for a child-welfare facility in his West Side district be preserved. Hendon had been especially angered by two terrible incidents over the years--the cases of the Keystone 19 and the Huron 12--when children on the West Side were found living in the most desperate conditions. There was no way that Hendon could succeed in his appeal--the Republican majority voted against him--but what surprised him was that Obama voted against him, too. Incensed, Hendon, who sat up front with the minority leadership, headed back to what was known as Liberal Row, where Obama sat with three other Democrats: Terry Link, Lisa Madigan, the daughter of the speaker of the Illinois House, and Carol Ronen, who was particularly active on gay issues.

  "Rickey was very upset--screaming and hollering," Terry Link recalled.

  Obama tried to calm Hendon down, saying something about
keeping spending under control.

  "He explained to me that we had to show fiscal responsibility during tough budget times," Hendon recalled. "Before I could ask him about the poor children, I found myself walking back to my seat in a daze. I sat down, like in a daydream, or nightmare, kind of blur, and continued to vote no on cut after cut along with all the Democrats, including Liberal Row. Finally I heard the bill number called for a cut on the South Side in Senator Obama's district. Barack rose to give an emotional speech condemning this particular cut. He asked for compassion and understanding. Now, this facility they wanted to close was very similar to the one he just voted to close on the West Side. His fiscally prudent vote took place only about ten minutes earlier and now he wants compassion!"

  Hendon got up to speak and called out Obama on the floor of the Senate:

  HENDON: I just want to say to the last speaker, you got a lot of nerve to talk about being responsible and then you voted for closing the [Department of Children and Family Services] office on the West Side, when you wouldn't have voted to close it on the South Side. So I apologize to my Republican friends about my--bipartisanship comments, 'cause clearly there's some Democrats on this side of the aisle that don't care about the West Side either, especially the last speaker.

  PRESIDING OFFICER (SENATOR WATSON): Senator Obama, do you wish to speak? Senator Obama.

  OBAMA: Thank you, Mr. President. I understand Senator Hendon's anger at--actually--the--I was not aware that I had voted No on that last piece of legislation. I would have the record record that I intended to vote Yes. On the other hand, I would appreciate that next time my dear colleague, Senator Hendon, ask me about a vote before he names me on the floor.

  After Obama attempted, in vain, to have his vote changed, he angrily walked toward Hendon's seat on Leaders Row. As Hendon recalls it, Obama "stuck his jagged, strained face into my space" and told him, "You embarrassed me on the Senate floor and if you ever do it again I will kick your ass!"

  "What?"

  "You heard me," Obama said, "and if you come back here by the telephones, where the press can't see it, I will kick your ass right now!"

  The two men walked off the floor of the Senate to a small antechamber in the back. In Hendon's self-dramatizing version of the incident, the confrontation got physical and came just short of a real fight with Emil Jones dispatching Donne Trotter to break things up before they descended to the level of the World Wide Wrestling Federation. Terry Link and Denny Jacobs say that Hendon has hyped the incident--that Obama never cursed at Hendon and that no blows were exchanged--but no one denies it was an emotional schoolyard confrontation that could have gotten out of hand.

  In Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilemma, an often bitter book, Hendon writes that the incident proved that Obama was "bipartisan enough and white enough to be President of the United States." It also proved, in his dubious analysis, that Obama was sufficiently tough to occupy the Oval Office. "If we were attacked by terrorists, would he pull the trigger?" he wrote. "There's no doubt that he would." When asked what would have happened if Trotter and others hadn't separated the two men, he said, "I don't think anybody walking the face of the earth can whup me! It probably would have been the end of my career if I'd lost because of the neighborhood I represent. That's the kind of fight it would have been. Thank God cooler heads prevailed. I couldn't go back to the West Side getting beat up by a guy from Harvard. Or from the South Side. I would have been through." Such, on occasion, was the level of debate in Springfield, Illinois. And Barack Obama was eager to leave it behind.

  That same month, in June, 2002, Obama was campaigning for Milorad (Rod) Blagojevich, then a two-term congressman, who was the Democratic candidate for governor. The son of a Serbian-born steelworker from the Northwest Side, Blagojevich had been an indifferent law student at Pepperdine ("I barely knew where the law library was") and got his political start through his father-in-law, an alderman named Richard Mell. In 2002, Blagojevich was one of eighty-one Democrats in the House of Representatives who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. In the gubernatorial primary, Blagojevich had defeated the former state attorney general, Roland Burris, and the Chicago schools head, Paul Vallas. Obama had supported Burris in the primary but turned his support to Blagojevich in the general election. Rahm Emanuel, who was then a member of the House, told Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker that he and Obama "participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor.... We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two." (Blagojevich's campaign adviser, David Wilhelm, refined Emanuel's remarks later, telling Jake Tapper of ABC that Obama was a member of an advisory council, not one of the principal strategists.) Years later, when Blagojevich was facing federal corruption charges, Obama was circumspect about his relations with him, but during the campaign he proved a loyal party man. Appearing in June, 2002, on Jeff Berkowitz's local cable show ("Berkowitz is my name, politics is our game"), Obama said, "Right now, my main focus is to make sure that we elect Rod Blagojevich as Governor."

  BERKOWITZ: You working hard for Rod?

  OBAMA: You betcha.

  BERKOWITZ: Hot Rod?

  OBAMA: That's exactly right. You know, I think having a Democratic governor will make a big difference. I think that I am working hard to get a Democratic senate and Emil Jones president, replacing Pate Philip, and once all that clears out in November, then I think we'll be able to make some good decisions about the [U.S.] Senate race.

  In effect, Obama was closing his eyes and thinking of the Democratic Party. "He and Blagojevich had no relationship at all," Pete Giangreco, a direct-mail consultant who was working then for Blagojevich, said. "They came from two different planets politically. Barack was Hyde Park and the University of Chicago. Rod was an admitted C-student who had a not even thinly veiled contempt for intellectuals. He hated anyone from the North Shore or Hyde Park and he wore his contempt as a badge of honor. And there was some racial politics mixed up in there, too. They were not allies."

  In 2001, Richard Durbin, the state's senior senator, hosted a group of Democratic Party activists and politicians. For the occasion, Dan Shomon printed up buttons reading "Obama: Statewide in 2002." But what statewide office did he and Obama have in mind? Lisa Madigan, Obama's friend on Liberal Row, was a likely candidate for attorney general. Peter Fitzgerald's seat in the U.S. Senate was the only attractive possibility. Fitzgerald had got into battles with his own party in both Washington and Springfield, but so far he showed no sign of stepping aside and the fact of the family's enormous banking fortune meant that he was perfectly capable of financing another race.

  With the 2002 elections just over a month away, Obama confided to Abner Mikva that he was thinking about taking a run at Fitzgerald's U.S. Senate seat in 2004. Mikva told him, "You have to talk to the Jackson boys first." Jesse, Jr., who had won a seat in the House, in 1995, was also thinking about the Senate, Mikva said. Obama said he knew: "I'm working on that." At a lunch at 312, an Italian restaurant on LaSalle, Obama told Jackson that if Jackson was running he would not. Not to worry, Jackson replied; he was staying in the House.

  By the late summer of 2002, the Bush Administration was intensifying its public rhetoric about an invasion of Iraq. On September 12th, Bush went to the General Assembly of the United Nations and declared, "If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted." Within a month, he would have the support of Congress to use force in Iraq.

  On September 21st, Bettylu Saltzman, Obama's wealthy friend and patron on the near North Side, was having dinner with her husband and two other couples at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown called Pasteur. Saltzman, by then, had eight grandchildren and had not been to an antiwar rally of any kind since Vietnam, but as the group discussed their despair at the Administration's obvious desire to send troops to Iraq, Salt
zman said, "We've got to do something!" Early the next morning, she called an old friend who might know how to put together a rally: Marilyn Katz, a raspy-voiced, chain-smoking raconteur, who had been a leader of S.D.S. in her youth and now ran a communications firm that regularly won contracts with Mayor Daley. Part of Richard Daley's Machiavellian skill had been to modernize the Chicago political structure, removing its mailed fist but retaining its toleration of corruption in the name of making things work. Daley's loss to Harold Washington in 1983 had taught him that he could not govern in opposition to the African-American community; he had to bring African-Americans into the process. By making City Hall more inclusive, by doing business with people his father could not tolerate--African-Americans, Hispanics, Lakefront liberals, old leftists like Marilyn Katz and Bill Ayers, and independent Democrats--he built a far broader coalition. In 1989, just weeks after winning his first of six mayoral elections, Daley became the first Chicago mayor to march in the city's annual Gay Pride parade. In Richard M. Daley's Chicago, a city of strange bedfellows, it was only natural that a wealthy liberal like Bettylu Saltzman would find an ally in an ex-radical like Marilyn Katz.