The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  On Primary Day, March 16th, Obama's campaign focused on maximizing the African-American turnout. It sent fifteen-seat vans all over the South Side to get people to the polls. If someone wasn't home, volunteers put a sticker on the door. Later, if the sticker was gone, they'd know the resident was home. Then they would knock on the door again and try to persuade the person to vote--and then call the van.

  Eric Zorn, the Tribune columnist, spent time with Obama on Primary Day and wrote that he "carried himself with the engaged serenity you often see at a wedding in the father of the groom: focused, but not preoccupied; happy, but not ecstatic." The Obama family camped out in a suite on the thirty-fourth floor of the Hyatt Regency Chicago, a hotel operated by the Pritzker family. When, just after 7 P.M., the call came that WBBM-TV had projected him the landslide winner, Michelle Obama gave her husband a high-five and took on the voice of Sally Field at the Academy Awards: "They like you! They really like you!"

  In the last three weeks of the campaign, Obama had gone from sixteen per cent to fifty-three per cent. As the television news crews filed in to film the scene, Obama pointed to Malia and Sasha, who were wearing their Sunday best for the victory party. Obama said his biggest concern was if "these dresses will hold up until ten o'clock." At 8:13 P.M., Hull called Obama to concede. When Paul Simon's daughter, Sheila Simon, introduced Obama later that night to the cheering crowd, she held up one of her father's signature bow ties and said that the tie was the only real difference between the winner and her father.

  "I think it's fair to say that the conventional wisdom was we could not win," Obama told his supporters. "We didn't have enough money. We didn't have enough organization. There was no way that a skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name like 'Barack Obama' could ever win a statewide race. Sixteen months later we are here, and Democrats all across Illinois--suburbs, city, downstate, upstate, black, white, Hispanic, Asian--have declared: Yes, we can!"

  Joining Obama on the stage that night with his family was Jesse Jackson, Sr. The Obama-Jackson relationship was deeply complicated. Jackson, who had been an impetuous protege of Martin Luther King both in the South and in Chicago, had made history in 1984 and 1988 with his Presidential campaigns. Now he was witnessing the rise of a generation that, he knew, viewed him with ambivalence. They were displacing him. Jackson had spurned Obama before, endorsing Alice Palmer for State Senate and then Rush for Congress, but this time he stood with Obama for the U.S. Senate. On primary night he told the crowd, "Surely Dr. King and the martyrs smiled upon us."

  The next morning, Obama had breakfast with his opponents, and with the state's Democratic Party leadership. A triumphant Emil Jones was there, and so was a chastened Bobby Rush.

  Later in the day, Obama flew around the state--to Springfield, to Quincy, to Marion--to thank the voters. And for perhaps the thousandth time, he told reporters that he would not be held back by race even as he prepared for a general election campaign to become the only African-American in the U.S. Senate. "I have an unusual name and an exotic background, but my values are essentially American values," he said (not for the first time, and not for the last). "I'm rooted in the African-American community, but not limited by it."

  About a week after the primary, Obama witnessed the most dramatic evidence possible that his appeal was not limited by race. With Senator Durbin, he traveled to the southernmost tip of Illinois, to the small town of Cairo. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Cairo had been a center for the White Citizens Council. The schools were segregated. There were cross burnings and harassment of blacks and Jews. As Obama and Durbin were driving into town, Durbin said, "Let me tell you about the first time I went to Cairo. It was about thirty years ago. I was twenty-three years old and Paul Simon, who was lieutenant governor at the time, sent me down there to investigate what could be done to improve the racial climate in Cairo." When Durbin arrived in town, a resident picked him up and brought him to a motel.

  As Durbin was getting out of the car, the man said, "Excuse me, let me just give you a piece of advice. Don't use the phone in your motel room because the switchboard operator is a member of the White Citizens Council, and they'll report on anything you do." Durbin checked into the room and unpacked. A few minutes later there was a knock on his door and there was a man at the door who said, "What the hell are you doing here?" Then he just walked away.

  "Well, now Dick is really feeling concerned and so am I because, as he's telling me this story, we're pulling into Cairo," Obama recalled the following year, at an N.A.A.C.P. dinner in Detroit. "So I'm wondering what kind of reception we're going to get. And we wind our way through the town and we go past the old courthouse, take a turn and suddenly we're in a big parking lot and about three hundred people are standing there. About a fourth of them are black and three-fourths are white and they all are about the age where they would have been active participants in the epic struggle that had taken place thirty years earlier. And as we pull closer I see something. All of these people are wearing these little buttons that say 'Obama for U.S. Senate.' And they start smiling. And they start waving. And Dick and I looked at each other and didn't have to say a thing. Because if you told Dick thirty years ago that he, the son of Lithuanian immigrants born into very modest means in East St. Louis, would be returning to Cairo as a sitting United States senator, and that he would have in tow a black guy born in Hawaii with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas named 'Barack Obama,' no one would have believed it. But it happened."

  Chapter Eleven

  A Righteous Wind

  The Illinois Senate race of 2004 did not take place in a political vacuum, of course; that same year, George W. Bush was running for re-election. Bush had come to office in 2000 only after a five-to-four vote of the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended the Florida recount with Bush in the lead. The vote denied the Presidency to Al Gore, who had, by nearly any rational count, won the popular vote both nationally and in Florida. In the race for the 2004 Democratic nomination, John Kerry, the junior senator from Massachusetts, fended off the early challenge of Vermont's governor, Howard Dean, and, after a string of primary victories, was able to start planning for the race against Bush.

  One of the best and earliest opportunities that a challenger has to frame his candidacy--to project his political ideas, and his character, to millions of people all at once--is at the nominating convention. Television audiences for the Conventions have diminished over time, but the candidates for President and Vice-President can still make an important initial impression not only with their acceptance speeches but also with speeches and theatrics on the first nights of the Convention.

  The Kerry campaign chose Jack Corrigan, a Boston lawyer who was a Party veteran, to help run the Convention, which was to take place in late July at Boston's FleetCenter. Corrigan was in his late forties. As a student, he had taken off so much time to work for various Democratic candidates that his friends joked that he would be on Social Security before he got his law degree. He had been an aide to Edward Kennedy, Geraldine Ferraro, Michael Dukakis, and Walter Mondale, and he had been one of Al Gore's point men in Palm Beach County during the 2000 recount fight. Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, asked Corrigan to play a larger role in the campaign, but he preferred to stay home and take the job of running the Convention: by early spring, he had started working on stagecraft, media arrangements, union contracts, and the list of potential speakers.

  "One of the things you have to figure out is a keynote speaker, which is just one domino in a complicated mosaic," Corrigan said. He had done his first serious political work when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and volunteered for Abner Mikva in his 1976 and 1978 congressional races. During those campaigns, Corrigan became friendly with Henry Bayer, a former teacher and union organizer. Whenever Corrigan and Bayer got together they would have five-hour dinners and talk politics. By 2003, Bayer was running the Illinois chapter of A.F.S.C.M.E., the biggest union in the country for public employees and health-care
workers. Bayer called his friend and said, "You really have to raise money for this guy, Barack Obama. He's running for Senate in Illinois and he's the real deal."

  "Why would I want to get involved in that?" Corrigan asked.

  "Because," Bayer answered, "Ab Mikva says he is the most talented politician in fifty years."

  Mikva not only came from the state of Douglas, Stevenson, and Simon; he had also worked as White House counsel to Bill Clinton. The best politician in fifty years? This moment of hyperbolic praise caught Corrigan's attention. Corrigan called Elena Kagan, a classmate at Harvard Law School and one of Mikva's former law clerks. He had learned that Obama had been president of the Law Review and thought that Kagan might have known him there. As it turned out, Kagan knew him not from Harvard but because they were both teaching at the University of Chicago. She praised Obama to Corrigan in terms nearly as extravagant as the ones Mikva had used.

  So now, Corrigan recalled, "I'm thinking: this is really interesting." He resolved to do something for Obama's Senate campaign, maybe assemble some phone banks and put together a fundraiser at the home of Larry Tribe, Obama's mentor at Harvard. But he was distracted by his law practice and the Presidential race and, by early February, other friends were telling him that Blair Hull was a decent candidate and, using his vast pile of cash, had built a lead over Dan Hynes and Obama.

  "I visited Mary Beth Cahill in Washington," Corrigan recalled, "and I said, 'Listen, there is this kid in Chicago who is great and he is about to lose his primary. We should hire him.' Mary Beth nodded and we moved on. This was just one of about ten things I had to tell her." Cahill had also heard encouraging things about Obama.

  Corrigan went back to Boston and, after a few weeks, Obama pulled ahead to win the primary. "And so by then," Corrigan went on, "I've got a lot of problems with the Convention. Construction is running behind. The schedule is tight, a lot of headaches. So I thought, Well, Obama could give a speech, but maybe not the keynote. I threw him on a list. When you think about the speakers at a Convention, you have to take a lot of things into consideration: demographics, states that are in play, local races. He was worth thinking about.

  "And then," Corrigan continued, "I got a call from an old friend in the Dukakis campaign, Lisa Hay, who'd become a public defender in Portland, Oregon. She was attending a conference in Boston and we had a cup of coffee and she was really on me about how Kerry wasn't strong enough against the war in Iraq. And so I said, 'Lisa, you've got to get with the program and help out.' Finally, she said, 'O.K., I'll help, but I'm saving my money to help my friend Barack Obama.' It turns out she ran against him for president of the Law Review and lost." Hay told Corrigan about the banquet celebrating the new officers of the Law Review at the Boston Harvard Club, and how, at the end of Obama's speech, the black waiters put down their trays and joined in the applause.

  "If you really want someone who can speak, he's your guy," Hay told Corrigan.

  "The whole story was moving and a little eerie," Corrigan said. "I had a vision in my mind. Lisa's story had reminded me of Mario Cuomo." In the long history of Convention speeches, from F.D.R.'s eloquent endorsements of Al Smith, in 1924 and 1928, to Barbara Jordan's performance in 1976 ("My presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American dream need not forever be deferred"), perhaps none was as exquisitely crafted or as movingly delivered as Mario Cuomo's 1984 keynote, "A Tale of Two Cities." The speech debunked Ronald Reagan's "Shining City on a Hill" as a chimerical and exclusive land for the rich and the lucky. Cuomo talked about "another city"--a city of the poor and the middle class watching their dreams "evaporate." His use of direct address to the sitting President was a solemn yet effective technique: "There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit, in your shining city." Corrigan and Cahill started thinking of Obama as someone capable of speaking in those emotionally memorable terms.

  In late May, Corrigan, together with Mary Beth Cahill, put Obama on a list of possible keynote speakers that also included the Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm, Janet Napolitano, of Arizona, and Mark Warner, of Virginia. "We were also thinking about having an Iraq veteran or a teacher," Cahill recalled. "It was a long process and we started looking at videos of all of them."

  Cahill and others made calls to get full reports on the possible keynoters; in Obama's case, she spoke to Rahm Emanuel, Richard Durbin, and both Richard and William Daley in Chicago. "The reports on Obama," she said, "were glittering." Obama himself was hardly passive in the process. Axelrod and the campaign's chief of staff, Darrel Thompson, began to lobby for Obama with Kerry's people once they heard that his name was under consideration. Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, and Alexis Herman--African-American women who had played significant roles in the Party during the Clinton and Gore campaigns--also lobbied for Obama to deliver the keynote.

  Obama's drawbacks were obvious. Even though he was the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Illinois, he was still only a state legislator. There was also the matter of his outright condemnation of the war in Iraq, which conflicted with Kerry, who, like Hillary Clinton and many other Democrats, had voted, in 2002, to authorize military action. In Obama's favor was his youth, his race, and the Party's desire for a Democrat to win back the second Illinois Senate seat. In April, 2004, Kerry had spent a couple of days campaigning in Chicago with Obama, appearing with him at a vocational center, a bakery, a town-hall meeting, and a fundraiser at the Hyatt downtown. As Kerry watched Obama speak at the town hall and at the Hyatt, his national finance chairman, a Chicago-based investment banker named Louis Susman, whispered to him, "This guy is going to be on a national ticket someday." Kerry told Susman that he was considering him for a spot at the Convention. "He should be one of the faces of our party now," Kerry said, "not years from now."

  In the Republican primary, Jack Ryan, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, had defeated a crowded field, but he began the general election lagging far behind Obama, who was starting to attract national attention. The prospect of a young politician of the post-civil-rights era becoming the sole black senator in the midst of a close battle between Bush and Kerry was an irresistible story. In a Profile published in The New Yorker, William Finnegan portrayed Obama as he went to visit A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders in Springfield. In the primary campaign, the union had endorsed Dan Hynes.

  "This is a kiss-and-make-up session," Obama told Finnegan as they entered a room of twenty-five white union leaders in windbreakers and golf shirts. He spoke about the jobs lost during the Bush Administration, federal highway funding, non-union companies homing in on big contracts. Finnegan, who was not alone in being struck by Obama's ease in front of all-white crowds, followed Obama to central Illinois and a community center near Decatur, where two major factories had closed. Obama began with his usual riff about his name and then gave a rousing speech about the Bush Administration's instinct to protect the interests of the powerful and abandon the powerless to feed on cliches about self-reliance. As they drove from the rally in the flatlands of central Illinois toward Chicago, Obama said, "I know those people. Those are my grandparents. The food they serve is the food my grandparents served when I was growing up. Their manners, their sensibility, their sense of right and wrong--it's all totally familiar to me."

  Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from the northern suburbs of Chicago, told Finnegan that she had recently been to the White House for a meeting with President Bush. As she was leaving, she noticed that the President was looking at her Obama button. "He jumped back, almost literally," she said. "And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was 'Obama,' with a 'b.' And I explained who he was. The President said, 'Well, I don't know him.' So I just said, 'You will.'"

  Bush was already aware of Jack Ryan, the attractive Republican candidate. Ryan was as handsome as a surgical resident on daytime television; he was intelligent and financially fixed--a Goldman Sachs partner who made his fortune and then went off to teach on the South Side of
Chicago at Hales Franciscan, an all-male nonprofit high school that was almost entirely African-American. He grew up in the suburb of Wilmette and earned graduate degrees in both law and business from Harvard. He was a pro-life, pro-gun, free-market conservative. Ryan said the school where he taught was an example of economic freedom in action--an independent school helping people. And since he was giving his time, not just his money, Ryan radiated credibility; in the era of "compassionate conservatism," he could argue that his was more than a slogan. Although he, too, had helped finance his own race, Ryan was more appealing, and less technocratic, than Blair Hull.

  Ryan's fortunes collapsed, however, in late June, when Robert Schneider, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, ruled in favor of the Tribune and WLS-Channel 7 in their lawsuit to unseal Jack and Jeri Ryan's divorce records. Ryan had long maintained that the papers should remain closed to public inspection in order to protect their nine-year-old son. Although the Ryans' divorce lacked the suggestion of violence featured in Blair Hull's documents, it was instant fodder for cable news and the Internet, which unfailingly provided photographs of Jeri Ryan in various states of immodest dress. Smoking Gun and other sites quickly posted Jeri Ryan's testimony:

  I made clear to Respondent that our marriage was over for me in the spring of 1998. On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, Respondent insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. These were surprise trips that Respondent arranged. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways.

  The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. Respondent had done research. Respondent took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to.... It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. Respondent wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. We left the club, and Respondent apologized, said that I was right and he would never insist I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system.