by Obama Barack
“Told ya,” Carol said, taking a drag from her cigarette and blowing a thin plume of smoke to the ceiling.
I felt disheartened and betrayed, but I figured all was not lost. We had built up a good organization over the previous few months, and almost all the elected officials who’d endorsed me said they’d stick with us. Ron and Carol were less sanguine.
“Hate to tell you, boss,” Carol said, “but most folks still have no idea who you are. Shit, they don’t know who she is either, but—no offense, now—‘Alice Palmer’ is a hell of a lot better ballot name than ‘Barack Obama.’ ”
I saw her point but told them we were going to see things through, even as a number of prominent Chicagoans were suddenly urging me to drop out of the race. And then one afternoon Ron and Carol arrived at my house, breathless and looking like they’d won the lottery.
“Alice’s petitions,” Ron said. “They’re terrible. Worst I’ve ever seen. All those Negroes who were trying to bully you out of the race, they didn’t bother actually doing the work. This could get her knocked off the ballot.”
I looked through the informal tallies Ron and our campaign volunteers had done. It was true; the petitions Alice had submitted appeared to be filled with invalid signatures: people whose addresses were outside the district, multiple signatures with different names but the same handwriting. I scratched my head. “I don’t know, guys…”
“You don’t know what?” Carol said.
“I don’t know if I want to win like this. I mean, yeah, I’m pissed about what’s happened. But these ballot rules don’t make much sense. I’d rather just beat her.”
Carol pulled back, her jaw tightening. “This woman gave you her word, Barack!” she said. “We’ve all been busting our asses out here, based on that promise. And now, when she tries to screw you, and can’t even do that right, you’re going to let her get away with it? You don’t think they would knock you off the ballot in a second if they could?” She shook her head. “Naw, Barack. You’re a good guy…that’s why we believe in you. But if you let this go, you might as well go back to being a professor and whatnot, ’cause politics is not for you. You will get chewed up and won’t be doing anybody a damn bit of good.”
I looked at Ron, who said quietly, “She’s right.”
I leaned back in my chair and lit a cigarette. I felt suspended in time, trying to decipher what I was feeling in my gut. How much did I want this? I reminded myself about what I believed I could get done in office, how hard I was willing to work if I got the chance.
“Okay,” I said finally.
“Okay!” Carol said, her smile returning. Ron gathered up his papers and put them in his bag.
It would take a couple of months for the process to play out, but with my decision that day, the race was effectively over. We filed our challenge with the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and when it became clear the board was going to rule in our favor, Alice dropped out. While we were at it, we knocked several other Democrats with bad petitions off the ballot as well. Without a Democratic opponent and with only token Republican opposition, I was on my way to the state senate.
Whatever vision I had for a more noble kind of politics, it would have to wait.
I suppose there are useful lessons to draw from that first campaign. I learned to respect the nuts and bolts of politics, the attention to detail required, the daily grind that might prove the difference between winning and losing. It confirmed, too, what I already knew about myself: that whatever preferences I had for fair play, I didn’t like to lose.
But the lesson that stayed with me most had nothing to do with campaign mechanics or hardball politics. It had to do with the phone call I received from Maya in Hawaii one day in early November, well before I knew how my race would turn out.
“She’s taken a bad turn, Bar,” Maya said.
“How bad?”
“I think you need to come now.”
I already knew that my mother’s condition had been deteriorating; I’d spoken to her just a few days before. Hearing a new level of pain and resignation in her voice, I had booked a flight to Hawaii for the following week.
“Can she talk?” I asked Maya now.
“I don’t think so. She’s fading in and out.”
I hung up the phone and called the airline to reschedule my flight for first thing in the morning. I called Carol to cancel some campaign events and run through what needed to be done in my absence. A few hours later, Maya called back.
“I’m sorry, honey. Mom’s gone.” She had never regained consciousness, my sister told me; Maya had sat at her hospital bedside, reading out loud from a book of folktales as our mother slipped away.
We held a memorial service that week, in the Japanese garden behind the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. I remembered playing there as a child, my mother sitting in the sun and watching me as I tumbled in the grass, hopped over the rock steps, and caught tadpoles in the stream that ran down one side. Afterward, Maya and I drove out to the lookout near Koko Head and scattered her ashes into the sea, the waves crashing against the rocks. And I thought about my mother and sister alone in that hospital room, and me not there, so busy with my grand pursuits. I knew I could never get that moment back. On top of my sorrow, I felt a great shame.
* * *
—
UNLESS YOU LIVE at the southern tip of Chicago, the quickest route to Springfield is via I-55. During rush hour, heading out of downtown and through the western suburbs, traffic slows to a crawl; but once you get past Joliet things open up, a straight, smooth spread of asphalt cutting southwest through Bloomington (home of State Farm insurance and Beer Nuts) and Lincoln (named after the president, who helped incorporate the town when he was still just a lawyer) and taking you past miles and miles of corn.
For almost eight years I made this drive, usually alone, usually in about three and a half hours, trekking back and forth to Springfield for a few weeks in the fall and through much of the winter and early spring, when the Illinois legislature did the bulk of its work. I’d drive down Tuesday night after dinner and get back home Thursday evening or Friday morning. Cell phone service dropped about an hour outside of Chicago, and the only signals that registered on the dial after that were talk radio and Christian music stations. To stay awake, I listened to audiobooks, the longer the better—novels mostly (John le Carré and Toni Morrison were favorites) but also histories, of the Civil War, the Victorian era, the fall of the Roman Empire.
When asked, I’d tell skeptical friends how much I was learning in Springfield, and, for the first few years at least, it was true. Of all fifty states, Illinois best represented the demographics of the nation, home to a teeming metropolis, sprawling suburbs, farm country, factory towns, and a downstate region considered more southern than northern. On any given day, under the high dome of the capitol, you’d see a cross section of America on full display, a Carl Sandburg poem come to life. There were inner-city kids jostling one another on a field trip, well-coiffed bankers working their flip phones, farmers in seed caps looking to widen the locks that allowed industrial barges to take their crops to market. You’d see Latina moms looking to fund a new day-care center and middle-aged biker crews, complete with muttonchops and leather jackets, trying to stop yet another legislative effort to make them wear helmets.
I kept my head down in those early months. Some of my colleagues were suspicious of my odd name and Harvard pedigree, but I did my homework and helped raise money for other senators’ campaigns. I got to know my fellow legislators and their staffers not just in the senate chamber but also on the basketball court and at golf outings and during the weekly bipartisan poker games we organized—with a two-dollar, three-raise limit, the room thick with smoke, trash talk, and the slow fizz of yet another beer can being opened.
It helped that I already knew the senate minority leader, a hefty Blac
k man in his sixties named Emil Jones. He’d come up through the ranks of one of the traditional ward organizations under Daley Sr. and represented the district where I’d once organized. That’s how we first met: I’d brought a group of parents to his office, demanding a meeting to get a college prep program funded for area youth. Rather than stiff-arm us, he invited us in.
“You may not know it,” he said, “but I been waiting for y’all to show up!” He explained how he’d never had the chance to graduate from college himself; he wanted to make sure more state money was steered to neglected Black neighborhoods. “I’m gonna leave it up to you to figure out what we need,” he told me with a slap on the back as my group left his office. “You leave the politics to me.”
Sure enough, Emil got the program funded, and our friendship carried over to the senate. He took an odd pride in me and became almost protective of my reformist ways. Even when he badly needed a vote on a deal he was cooking up (getting riverboat gambling licensed in Chicago was a particular obsession), he would never squeeze me if I told him I couldn’t do it—though he wasn’t above uttering a few choice curses as he charged off to try someone else.
“Barack’s different,” he once told a staffer. “He’s going places.”
For all my diligence and Emil’s goodwill, neither of us could change one stark fact: We were in the minority party. Republicans in the Illinois senate had adopted the same uncompromising approach that Newt Gingrich was using at the time to neuter Democrats in Congress. The GOP exercised absolute control over what bills got out of committee and which amendments were in order. Springfield had a special designation for junior members in the minority like me—“mushrooms,” because “you’re fed shit and kept in the dark.”
On occasion, I found myself able to shape significant legislation. I helped make sure Illinois’s version of the national welfare reform bill signed by Bill Clinton provided sufficient support for those transitioning to work. In the wake of one of Springfield’s perennial scandals, Emil assigned me to represent the caucus on a committee to update the ethics laws. Nobody else wanted the job, figuring it was a lost cause, but thanks to a good rapport with my Republican counterpart, Kirk Dillard, we passed a law that curbed some of the more embarrassing practices—making it impossible, for example, to use campaign dollars for personal items like a home addition or a fur coat. (There were senators who didn’t talk to us for weeks after that.)
More typical was the time, toward the end of the first session, when I rose from my seat to oppose a blatant tax giveaway to some favored industry when the state was cutting services for the poor. I had lined up my facts and prepared with the thoroughness of a courtroom lawyer; I pointed out why such unjustified tax breaks violated the conservative market principles Republicans claimed to believe in. When I sat down, the senate president, Pate Philip—a beefy, white-haired ex-Marine notorious for insulting women and people of color with remarkably casual frequency—wandered up to my desk.
“That was a hell of a speech,” he said, chewing on an unlit cigar. “Made some good points.”
“Thanks.”
“Might have even changed a lot of minds,” he said. “But you didn’t change any votes.” With that, he signaled to the presiding officer and watched with satisfaction as the green lights signifying “aye” lit up the board.
That was politics in Springfield: a series of transactions mostly hidden from view, legislators weighing the competing pressures of various interests with the dispassion of bazaar merchants, all the while keeping a careful eye on the handful of ideological hot buttons—guns, abortion, taxes—that might generate heat from their base.
It wasn’t that people didn’t know the difference between good and bad policy. It just didn’t matter. What everyone in Springfield understood was that 90 percent of the time the voters back home weren’t paying attention. A complicated but worthy compromise, bucking party orthodoxy to support an innovative idea—that could cost you a key endorsement, a big financial backer, a leadership post, or even an election.
Could you get voters to pay attention? I tried. Back in the district, I accepted just about any invitation that came my way. I started writing a regular column for the Hyde Park Herald, a neighborhood weekly with a readership of less than five thousand. I hosted town halls, setting out refreshments and stacks of legislative updates, and then usually sat there with my lonesome staffer, looking at my watch, waiting for a crowd that never came.
I couldn’t blame folks for not showing up. They were busy, they had families, and surely most of the debates in Springfield seemed remote. Meanwhile, on the few high-profile issues that my constituents did care about, they probably agreed with me already, since the lines of my district—like those of almost every district in Illinois—had been drawn with surgical precision to ensure one-party dominance. If I wanted more funding for schools in poor neighborhoods, if I wanted more access to primary healthcare or retraining for laid-off workers, I didn’t need to convince my constituents. The people I needed to engage and persuade—they lived somewhere else.
By the end of my second session, I could feel the atmosphere of the capitol weighing on me—the futility of being in the minority, the cynicism of so many of my colleagues worn like a badge of honor. No doubt it showed. One day, while I was standing in the rotunda after a bill I’d introduced went down in flames, a well-meaning lobbyist came up and put his arm around me.
“You’ve got to stop beating your head against the wall, Barack,” he said. “The key to surviving this place is understanding that it’s a business. Like selling cars. Or the dry cleaner down the street. You start believing it’s more than that, it’ll drive you crazy.”
* * *
—
SOME POLITICAL SCIENTISTS argue that everything I’ve said about Springfield describes exactly how pluralism is supposed to work; that the horse trading between interest groups may not be inspiring, but it keeps democracy muddling along. And maybe that argument would have gone down easier with me at the time if it weren’t for the life I was missing at home.
The first two years in the legislature were fine—Michelle was busy with her own work, and although she kept her promise not to come down to the state capital except for my swearing in, we’d still have leisurely conversations on the phone on nights I was away. Then one day in the fall of 1997, she called me at the office, her voice trembling.
“It’s happening.”
“What’s happening?”
“You’re going to be a daddy.”
I was going to be a daddy. How full of joy the months that followed were! I lived up to every cliché of the expectant father: attending Lamaze classes, trying to figure out how to assemble a crib, reading the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting with pen in hand to underline key passages. Around six a.m. on the Fourth of July, Michelle poked me and said it was time to go to the hospital. I fumbled around and gathered the bag I’d set by the door, and just seven hours later was introduced to Malia Ann Obama, eight pounds and fifteen ounces of perfection.
Among her many talents, our new daughter had good timing; with no session, no classes, and no big pending cases to work on, I could take the rest of the summer off. A night owl by nature, I manned the late shift so Michelle could sleep, resting Malia on my thighs to read to her as she looked up with big questioning eyes, or dozing as she lay on my chest, a burp and good poop behind us, so warm and serene. I thought about the generations of men who had missed such moments, and I thought about my own father, whose absence had done more to shape me than the brief time I’d spent with him, and I realized that there was no place on earth I would rather be.
But the strains of young parenthood eventually took their toll. After a blissful few months, Michelle went back to work, and I went back to juggling three jobs. We were lucky to find a wonderful nanny who cared for Malia during the day, but the addition of a full-time employee to our family enterprise
squeezed the budget hard.
Michelle bore the brunt of all this, shuttling between mothering and work, unconvinced that she was doing either job well. At the end of each night, after feeding and bath time and story time and cleaning up the apartment and trying to keep track of whether she’d picked up the dry cleaning and making a note to herself to schedule an appointment with the pediatrician, she would often fall into an empty bed, knowing the whole cycle would start all over again in a few short hours while her husband was off doing “important things.”
We began arguing more, usually late at night when the two of us were thoroughly drained. “This isn’t what I signed up for, Barack,” Michelle said at one point. “I feel like I’m doing it all by myself.”
I was hurt by that. If I wasn’t working, I was home—and if I was home and forgot to clean up the kitchen after dinner, it was because I had to stay up late grading exams or fine-tuning a brief. But even as I mounted my defense, I knew I was falling short. Inside Michelle’s anger lay a more difficult truth. I was trying to deliver a lot of things to a lot of different people. I was taking the hard way, just as she’d predicted back when our burdens were lighter, our personal responsibilities not so enmeshed. I thought now about the promise I’d made to myself after Malia was born; that my kids would know me, that they’d grow up knowing my love for them, feeling that I had always put them first.
Sitting in the dim light of our living room, Michelle no longer seemed angry, just sad. “Is it worth it?” she asked.
I don’t recall what I said in response. I know I couldn’t admit to her that I was no longer sure.
* * *
—
IT’S HARD, in retrospect, to understand why you did something stupid. I don’t mean the small stuff—ruining your favorite tie because you tried to eat soup in the car or throwing out your back because you got talked into playing tackle football on Thanksgiving. I mean dumb choices in the wake of considerable deliberation: those times when you identify a real problem in your life, analyze it, and then with utter confidence come up with precisely the wrong answer.
