Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side (part 1)
Marc PoKempner
By JO BECKER and CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: May 11, 2008
In August 1999, Barack Obama strolled amid the floats and bands making their way down Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Billed as the largest African-American parade in the country, the summer rite was a draw over the years to boxing heroes like Muhammad Ali and jazz greats like Duke Ellington. It was also a must-stop for the city’s top politicians.
Back then, Mr. Obama, a state senator who was contemplating a run for Congress, was so little-known in the community’s black neighborhoods that it was hard to find more than a few dozen people to walk with him, recalled Al Kindle, one of his advisers at the time. Mr. Obama was trounced a year later in the Congressional race — branded as an aloof outsider more at home in the halls of Harvard than in the rough wards of Chicago politics.
But by 2006, Mr. Obama had remade his political fortunes. He was a freshman United States senator on the cusp of deciding to take on the formidable Hillary Rodham Clinton and embark on a long-shot White House run. When the parade wound its way through the South Side that summer, Mr. Obama was its grand marshal.
The secret of his transformation, which has brought him to the brink of claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, can be described as the politics of maximum unity.
He moved from his leftist Hyde Park base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city’s all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathized with the views of his Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city’s politically potent Jewish community.
To broaden his appeal to African-Americans, Mr. Obama had to assiduously court older black leaders entrenched in Chicago’s ward politics while selling himself as a young, multicultural bridge to the wider political world.
“There are some people who say he’s not strong enough on this or that, that he’s wishy-washy, that he’s trying to have it both ways,” said Abner J. Mikva, a former congressman and mentor to Mr. Obama. “But he’s not looking for how to exclude the people who don’t agree with him. He’s looking for ways to make the tent as large as possible.”
Mr. Obama’s ability to replicate the eclectic coalition he built in Chicago and expand it to the national stage has allowed the one-term senator to match the Clintons at their signature game: collecting influential friends and supporters.
An untraditional politician who at times uses traditional political tactics, Mr. Obama, 46, was portrayed in dozens of interviews with political leaders and longtime associates in Chicago as
the ultimate pragmatist, a deliberate thinker who fashions carefully nuanced positions that manage to win him support from people with divergent views.
“Most Americans are getting a small glimmer into the rough and tumble world of the South Side of Chicago politics, which is very, very difficult to navigate,” said Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat and ally of Mr. Obama’s. But
Mr. Obama did it with skill: “It’s very unusual to have various factions agreeing with you and your politics,” Mr. Jackson added
Others see his deft movements as a politician’s shifting of positions and alliances for strategic advantage, leaving some disappointed and baffled about where he really stands.
“He has a pattern of forming relationships with various communities and as he takes his next step up, kind of distancing himself from them and then positioning himself as the bridge,” said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American author and co-founder of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who became acquainted with Mr. Obama in Chicago.
Even moments that supporters see as his boldest are tempered by his political caution. The forceful speech he delivered in 2002 against the impending Iraq invasion — a speech that has helped define him nationally — was threaded with an unusual mantra for a 1960s-style antiwar rally: “I’m not opposed to all wars.” It was a refrain Mr. Obama had tested on his political advisers, and it was a display of his ability to speak to the audience before him while keeping in mind the broader audience to come.
Perfect for Hyde Park
When Judson H. Miner invited a third-year Harvard Law School student named Barack Obama to lunch at the Thai Star Cafe in Chicago before his 1991 graduation, Mr. Miner thought he was recruiting the 29-year-old to work for his boutique civil rights law firm. Instead, Mr. Obama recruited him.
Mr. Obama made it clear that he was less interested in a job than in learning the political lay of the land from a man who had served at the right hand of the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. Mr. Miner, who had helped with the historic 1983 election of Mr. Washington and served as his corporation counsel, proved a willing tutor.
The confident younger man
“cross-examined” Mr. Miner about how Mr. Washington had managed to emerge from an election riven by bigotry to form a governing coalition in which he “got along with all these different types of folks,” Mr. Miner recalled.
Mr. Obama, who had spent time in Chicago as a community organizer in the 1980s and already knew he wanted to run for office, openly weighed the pros and cons of working for the law firm. On the one hand it was beloved by many of the city’s liberals and black leaders for its work on issues like voting rights and housing equality. On the other, the firm had clashed with Chicago’s powerful mayor, Richard M. Daley, who presided then and now over the city’s sprawling Democratic organization.
“During the course of our talking, it came out that people who knew he was having lunch with me were trying to convince him that this was the worst place for him to go. He shared this with me — he was amused,” Mr. Miner said, laughing. “This isn’t where you land if you want to curry favor with the Democratic power structure.”
It was, however, exactly where an aspiring politician might land if he happened to want to run for office from Hyde Park, a neighborhood with a long history of electing reform-minded politicians independent of the city’s legendary Democratic machine. Mr. Obama chose to put down roots in the neighborhood after graduating law school and marrying Michelle Robinson, a Chicago native and fellow lawyer.
A tight-knit community that runs through the South Side, Hyde Park is a liberal bastion of integration in what is otherwise one of the nation’s most segregated cities. Mayor Washington had called it home, as did whites who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and wealthy black entrepreneurs a generation removed from the civil rights battles of the 1960s.
At its heart is the University of Chicago; at its borders are poor, predominately black neighborhoods blighted by rundown buildings and vacant lots. For Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii to a white Kansan mother and an African father and who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, it was a perfect fit.
“He felt completely comfortable in Hyde Park,” said Martha Minow, his former law professor and a mentor. “It’s a place where you don’t have to wear a label on your forehead. You can go to a bookstore and there’s the homeless person and there’s the professor.”
Mr. Obama quickly grounded himself in the community.
He led a successful drive that registered nearly 150,000 black voters for the 1992 campaign. He became a part-time professor at the University of Chicago Law School. And, in 1993, he finally decided to join the law offices of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
The choice sent a signal that
Mr. Obama was “allying himself with the independents, which is what you have to be if you’re going to be elected from the Hyde Park area,” said Don Rose, a longtime Democratic political consultant.
Making Connections
The decision to accept Mr. Miner’s job offer quickly paid off. By the time Mr. Obama announced his candidacy for the Illinois Senate in 1995 — at the very Hyde Park hotel where Mr. Washington had kicked off his mayoral campaign — he had cultivated a network of influential supporters.
Mr. Miner was “enormously helpful” in introducing Mr. Obama to the liberal coalition of blacks and whites that had helped elect Mr. Washington, said Valerie Jarrett, a longtime friend and close adviser. “It brought in a whole new circle of people.”
Mr. Obama cultivated clients like Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, the influential pastor of an 18,000-member black church and founding president of the Woodlawn Organization, which focuses on improving conditions for blacks in a neighborhood adjacent to Hyde Park. The two men began talking politics over tennis games at Chicago’s elite East Bank Club, Mr. Brazier recalled.
Mr. Obama also worked on housing redevelopment projects involving Antoin Rezko, who became one of Mr. Obama’s most generous donors. Mr. Rezko is currently on trial for corruption charges unrelated to Mr. Obama.
It was through the law firm that Mr. Obama met Marilyn Katz, who gave him entry into another activist network: the foot soldiers of the white student and black power movements that helped define Chicago in the 1960s.
As a leader of Students for a Democratic Society then, Ms. Katz organized Vietnam War protests, throwing nails in the street to thwart the police. But like many from that era, Ms. Katz had gone on to become a politically active member of the Chicago establishment, playing in a regular poker game with Mr. Miner while working as a consultant to his nemesis, Mayor Daley.
“For better or worse, this is Chicago,” said Ms. Katz, who has held fund-raisers for Mr. Obama at her home. “Everyone is connected to everyone.”
Mr. Obama was comfortable attending performances of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with city scions like Newton N. Minow, the father of Martha Minow. Mr. Minow, who had served in the Kennedy administration and managed the white-shoe law firm of Sidley Austin when Mr. Obama worked there after his first year of law school, began introducing him to Chicago’s business titans.
Mr. Obama also fit in at Hyde Park’s fringes, among university faculty members like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, unrepentant members of the radical Weather Underground that bombed the United States Capitol and the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Mr. Obama was introduced to the couple in 1995 at a meet-and-greet they held for him at their home, aides said.
Now, along with Mr. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Ayers has become a prime exhibit in the effort by Mr. Obama’s presidential rivals to highlight what could be politically radioactive associations. In 2001, Mr. Ayers said he did not regret the Weatherman bombings. Even so, in Hyde Park, he and his wife were viewed favorably for their work in addressing city problems. Mr. Ayers was just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Mr. Obama said recently.
The two men were involved in efforts to reform the city’s education system. They appeared together on academic panels, including one organized by Michelle Obama to discuss the juvenile justice system, an area of mutual concern. Mr. Ayers’s book on the subject won a rave review in The Chicago Tribune by Mr. Obama, who called it “a searing and timely account.”
Running and Winning
Mr. Obama further expanded his list of allies by joining the boards of two well-known charities: the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation.
These memberships have
allowed him to help direct tens of millions of dollars in grants over the years to groups that championed the environment, campaign finance reform, gun control and other causes supported by the liberal network he was cultivating. Mr. Brazier’s group, the Woodlawn Organization, received money, for instance, as did antipoverty groups with ties to organized labor like Chicago Acorn, whose endorsement Mr. Obama sought and won in his State Senate race.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama hewed closely to liberal orthodoxy, positions that have become controversial in the presidential race. A candidate questionnaire from one liberal group, for instance, detailed his views on hot-button issues like the death penalty (opposed) and a ban on handguns (in favor).
Today, Mr. Obama espouses more centrist views and says a campaign aide had incorrectly characterized his views on those issues — a shift that does not sit well with some in the group, the Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization.
“We certainly thought those were his positions,” said David Igasaki, the group’s chairman, who noted Mr. Obama had also interviewed with the group. “We understand that people change their views. But it sort of bothers me that he doesn’t acknowledge that. He tries to say that was never his view.”
In any event, the group endorsed Mr. Obama, and he was easily elected to the State Senate in 1996.
In the state Capitol in Springfield, Mr. Obama was guided through the political thicket by powerful mentors. It was not long into Mr. Obama’s first term when Mr. Mikva recalled getting a telephone call from Paul Simon, the recently retired United States senator. Mr. Mikva had become friends with Mr. Obama after returning from a stint as White House counsel for President Bill Clinton to teach law at the university.
Mr. Simon suggested Mr. Mikva play matchmaker between Mr. Obama and Emil Jones Jr., the powerful Democratic leader of the State Senate. For the better part of a quarter century, Mr. Mikva had played in a golfing foursome that included Mr. Jones.
“ ‘Say, our friend Barack Obama has a chance to push this campaign finance bill through,’ ” Mr. Mikva recalled Mr. Simon’s telling him. “ ‘Why don’t you call your friend Emil Jones and tell him how good he is.’ ”
Mr. Mikva obliged, and in 1998,
Mr. Obama passed one of his signature achievements in the Illinois Senate: sweeping legislation that banned most gifts from lobbyists and the personal use of campaign money by state lawmakers. His Hyde Park base applauded, but Mr. Obama would soon learn the limits of his appeal.
Learning His Lessons
The next year, Mr. Obama called Mr. Minow, his former boss, asking to see him. Mr. Obama was eyeing the Hyde Park Congressional seat held by Bobby L. Rush, a former Black Panther leader. “Are you nuts?” Mr. Minow recalled telling the younger man. “Barack, I think this is a mistake.”
Mr. Minow flipped through his Rolodex, calling black businesspeople and asking them if they would help finance Mr. Obama’s bid. He said he received a uniform answer: “No — let him wait his turn.” Nevertheless, the impatient Mr. Obama jumped into the race.