The Bridge: The Life And Rise Of Barack Obama Part 11

Alice Palmer reached the State Senate by appointment, replacing Richard Newhouse, the first African-American ever to run for mayor of Chicago, who had to step down because of illness. Palmer, the local Democratic committeewoman, was a welcome choice among local activists. Her background as an activist and in local politics was unimpeachable. She had a doctorate in education from Northwestern and went to Springfield determined to win greater funding for Chicago schools. She became popular among her const.i.tuents--popular enough, she believed, to win a seat in Congress.

In the late spring of 1995, after a series of conversations, Obama won Alice Palmer's support. Alan Dobry, a former Democratic Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman and a fixture in Hyde Park politics, had been concerned about the open State Senate position until, at a meeting to kick off her campaign for Congress, Palmer told him, "I found this wonderful person, this fine young man, so we needn't worry that we'd have a good state senator." ward committeeman and a fixture in Hyde Park politics, had been concerned about the open State Senate position until, at a meeting to kick off her campaign for Congress, Palmer told him, "I found this wonderful person, this fine young man, so we needn't worry that we'd have a good state senator."

Before announcing his intention to run, Obama wanted to be absolutely sure that Palmer was committed to the congressional race and that she would not get back in the State Senate race, even if she lost in the Democratic primary to Emil Jones or Jesse Jackson, Jr.

"I hadn't publicly announced," Obama recalled. "But what I said was that once I announce, and I have started to raise money, and gather supporters, hire staff and opened up an office, signed a lease, then it's going to be very difficult for me to step down. And she gave me repeated a.s.surance that she was in [the congressional race] to stay."

Palmer doesn't dispute that. He "did say that to me," she said. "I certainly did say that I wasn't going to run [for State Senate]. There's no question about that."

Obama also understood that he had her endors.e.m.e.nt. ("I'm absolutely certain she ... publicly spoke and sort of designated me.") On that point, Palmer disagrees: "I don't know that I like the word 'endors.e.m.e.nt.' An endors.e.m.e.nt, to me, having been in legislative politics ... that's a very formal kind of thing. I don't think that describes this. An 'informal nod' is how to characterize it." certain she ... publicly spoke and sort of designated me.") On that point, Palmer disagrees: "I don't know that I like the word 'endors.e.m.e.nt.' An endors.e.m.e.nt, to me, having been in legislative politics ... that's a very formal kind of thing. I don't think that describes this. An 'informal nod' is how to characterize it."

Palmer announced her candidacy for Congress on June 27th, and, the following week, the local papers announced Obama would run to succeed her. Her intentions, as she stated them at the time, could not have been clearer. "Pray for Mel Reynolds "Pray for Mel Reynolds and vote for me," she told reporters. and vote for me," she told reporters. In the last paragraph In the last paragraph of a story in the Hyde Park of a story in the Hyde Park Herald Herald, the reporter, Kevin Knapp, took up the subject of a successor, mentioning Obama, "an attorney with a background in community organization and voter registration efforts," as the likeliest possibility. Later that month, Obama filed the necessary papers to create a fund-raising committee. He received his first campaign contributions He received his first campaign contributions on July 31, 1995: three hundred dollars from a downtown lawyer, a five-thousand-dollar loan from a car dealer, and two thousand dollars from two fast-food companies owned by an old friend, Tony Rezko. on July 31, 1995: three hundred dollars from a downtown lawyer, a five-thousand-dollar loan from a car dealer, and two thousand dollars from two fast-food companies owned by an old friend, Tony Rezko.

In many ways, it was a trying time to want to be a Democratic legislator. Bill Clinton was in the White House, but the Party had suffered major losses in the 1994 midterm elections. Newt Gingrich had declared a conservative counterattack and Clinton had begun to rely more heavily on illiberal advisers like Mark Penn and d.i.c.k Morris, who were disdained by the more progressive aides and const.i.tuencies that had supported him in 1992. In Illinois, the governor was a Republican and both houses of the legislature had Republican majorities. Legislators in the minority in Springfield had very little to do: the governor set the agenda and his party fell into line.

But for all the limitations of the office, Obama had to start somewhere. He had to get in the game and learn its skills and hidden rules. As he began to think about fund-raising and organization, he called on dozens of local politicians at the ward, city, and county levels, as well as on neighborhood activists who might support him. With Palmer committed to the congressional race, Obama had every reason to believe that he would face little opposition in the March Democratic primary; and, in his district, the chance of a Republican winning was about as likely as an African-American winning the White House.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were among the many neighbors and acquaintances in Hyde Park who were interested in Obama. Ayers and Dohrn were former leaders of S.D.S. and the Weather Underground, and were unapologetic about their support for violent resistance to the Vietnam War. They were now known as community activists, mainly in the field of education. Collectively, they were also the Elsa Maxwell of Hyde Park, frequently inviting guests to their house for readings, discussions, and dinners, and many people in the neighborhood, whether they approved of their behavior in the sixties or not, came.

"Some of us draw a line between what Bill and Bernardine did when they were young and now, when they are doing unimpeachable work in the community," the novelist Rosellen Brown said. "Hyde Park is a pretty small, insular community, and everyone, from Studs Terkel to schoolteachers working on juvenile-justice issues, came to their house to meet interesting people."

The son of a wealthy Chicago business executive, Ayers was a professor at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and was one of the founders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation that distributes grants to educational programs. Ayers helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg board. One guest at a dinner at Ayers's house remembers sitting next to Mich.e.l.le, who had taken a community-relations job at the university. The discussion was about race, cla.s.s, and family, and Mich.e.l.le talked about her grandmother's final days. Her grandmother was immensely proud of the fact that Mich.e.l.le and Craig had graduated from Princeton, and, in Mich.e.l.le's case, Harvard Law School. They were thriving. They had broken through. On her deathbed, the old woman told Mich.e.l.le, "Don't you start the revolution with my great-grandchildren. I want them to go to Princeton, too!"

"She knew that her Princeton education was valuable, and no one, having had advantages, wants to give them up," the guest said, recalling the conversation. "She knew that having stepped up to the cla.s.s defined by a privileged education, she obviously did not have everything in common with the people she grew up with."

Before Obama formally announced his candidacy, Ayers and Dohrn were asked to throw a small informal reception for him. According to Ayers, Alice Palmer made the request. And although Ayers and Dohrn were not particularly interested in electoral politics--they believed that real change came from popular movements and viewed Obama as someone far more to the center than they were--they agreed. "It was Alice's initiative to have the event in order to hand over the baton," Ayers recalled. "She was running for Congress and she wanted to introduce him to the political community. It was good for her and it was good for him.... The thing about Obama was, he struck me from the first moment as the smartest sort of guy. He was compa.s.sionate and clear and a moderate, middle-of-the-road Democrat. How into him was I? Not very. I liked him as a person. I did it because I was asked. We had lots of things: readings, book signings, dinners, talks. For us, it's part of being a citizen."

The guests at the reception included Quentin Young, a doctor who had long campaigned for a single-payer health-care system, the Palestinian-American professor Ras.h.i.+d Khalidi, the novelist Rosellen Brown, and Kenneth Warren, who teaches literature at the university, and his wife, Maria Warren, who writes a blog called Musings & Migraines. Young remembered that Palmer introduced Obama as her successor. When Obama was introduced to Rosellen Brown, he told her that he had read Civil Wars Civil Wars, her novel about a couple of refugees from the civil-rights movement and their lives a decade later. ("After that, like any novelist, I probably would have voted for him for anything," Brown said.) Most of the guests either liked Obama's short talk or had no real objections, but a few, like Maria Warren, were frustrated.

"I remember him saying very generic things and one of the people there said, 'Can't you say something of more substance?'" Warren recalled. "He didn't generate that much excitement, and a few people were saying, 'It's too bad Alice isn't going to run for her seat again.' I remember Barack getting kind of defensive and shaking his head." In 2005, long before Obama In 2005, long before Obama was a Presidential candidate, Warren wrote on her blog, "His 'bright eyes and easy smile' struck me as contrived and calculated--maybe because I was supporting another candidate. Since then, I've never heard him say anything new or earthshaking, or support anything that would require the courage of his convictions." was a Presidential candidate, Warren wrote on her blog, "His 'bright eyes and easy smile' struck me as contrived and calculated--maybe because I was supporting another candidate. Since then, I've never heard him say anything new or earthshaking, or support anything that would require the courage of his convictions."

Thirteen years later, during the Presidential campaign, this brief, otherwise forgettable gathering would be introduced into evidence by the Republican Party that Obama had a dangerously radical background, that leaders of the Weather Underground had "launched" his political career. Which was ridiculous. It is true that Obama saw Ayers in the years to come at quarterly board meetings and other occasions. Obama praised Ayers's book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court in the in the Tribune Tribune, though his own views on education were much less left-wing. They once spoke on the same panel about juvenile justice---an event put together by Mich.e.l.le Obama in 1997, when she was a.s.sociate dean of student services at the University of Chicago. But no matter what one thought of Ayers's past--and Obama said that Ayers had been guilty of "despicable" acts during the antiwar movement--the notion that the two men were close friends or ideological soul mates was false.

As Obama continued to call on various politicians and activists in the district, he sometimes got perplexing advice. One African-American politician One African-American politician suggested that he change his name; another suggested he make sure to put his picture on all his campaign materials, "so people don't see your name and think you're some big dark guy." Another adviser told him sternly to make sure that he was never photographed holding a gla.s.s--even if it was filled with water or juice--lest the electorate take him for a drinker. suggested that he change his name; another suggested he make sure to put his picture on all his campaign materials, "so people don't see your name and think you're some big dark guy." Another adviser told him sternly to make sure that he was never photographed holding a gla.s.s--even if it was filled with water or juice--lest the electorate take him for a drinker.

"Now all of this may be good political advice," Obama told Hank De Zutter, a writer for the Chicago good political advice," Obama told Hank De Zutter, a writer for the Chicago Reader Reader, "but it's all so superficial. I am surprised at how many elected officials--even the good ones--spend so much time talking about the mechanics of politics and not matters of substance. They have this poker-chip mentality, this overriding interest in retaining their seats or in moving their careers forward, and the business and game of politics, the political horse race, is all they talk about."

On September 19, 1995, at the Ramada Lakesh.o.r.e, in Hyde Park, Obama formally announced his candidacy. Cliff Kelley, a former alderman and the host of the most popular call-in show on WVON, was master-of-ceremonies. "Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days," Obama told the packed room. "They fall somewhere lower than lawyers.... I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf."

Palmer may not have used the word "endors.e.m.e.nt" to describe her enthusiasm for Obama, but, at the Ramada that day, there was no mistaking her enthusiasm for the thirty-four-year-old organizer and lawyer. "In this room, Harold Was.h.i.+ngton "In this room, Harold Was.h.i.+ngton announced for mayor," she said. "It looks different, but the spirit is still in the room. Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with State Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a pa.s.sing of the torch, because he's the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district." announced for mayor," she said. "It looks different, but the spirit is still in the room. Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with State Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a pa.s.sing of the torch, because he's the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district."

Carol Anne Harwell looked for a campaign office. She thought she had found something affordable and adequate on Seventy-first Street. "It was clean and had a bathroom, and the important thing was that it had phone jacks," Harwell recalled. "Mich.e.l.le walked in there and she just went, 'No, no, no. Uh-uh.' We ended up farther west in a nicer place. Mich.e.l.le was determined to run a top-notch campaign, no cheesiness. She brought elegance and cla.s.s to the campaign. She was the taskmaster and she was very organized, even if she didn't know a lot about politics then. When we started collecting pet.i.tions, we would set a goal for, say, two hundred signatures that day. There would be a blizzard and we would come back with only a hundred and fifty. Mich.e.l.le would be furious and we'd have to go out and get the rest."

On Sat.u.r.day mornings, Mich.e.l.le Obama and her friend and the campaign's issues coordinator, Yvonne Davila, went out knocking on doors to collect signatures to get on the ballot. They were much more efficient than Obama, who went out in the evenings with Harwell. "It was so slow," Harwell said. "The old ladies loved him. He would introduce himself and ask them what they needed. They wanted to mother him. They would go on forever about their grandchildren. Barack was not Chicago-smart yet. He didn't know how to keep moving. He even went out campaigning in a leather jacket, no gloves, no hat. I think I had to introduce him to the concept of long underwear."

By the modest standards of a campaign for State Senate, Obama's started unevenly. He was not much of a speaker at first. He was stentorian, professorial, self-serious--a cake with no leavening. In the most critical speaking realm of all, the black churches of the South Side, he came off as flat and diffident; it would take hundreds of speeches in pulpits around the city before he acquired the sense of cadence, Biblical reference, and emotional connection that marked his performances later on.

But he was lining up the support he needed. Sam and Martha Ackerman, an influential family of Hyde Park independent Democrats, held a coffee for Obama. Ministers in the area were welcoming. Palmer, his alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, and the local ward chairman, Ivory Mitch.e.l.l, were all on his side, along with a group of longtime liberal Hyde Park activists. Since the end of the Second World War, the neighborhood had been the center of political defiance of the machine. The Independent Voters of Illinois was the most important political organization in Hyde Park, and anti-Daley politicians, like the legendary alderman Leon Despres, carried its banner. Veterans of numerous I.V.I. campaigns, like Alan Dobry and his wife, Lois Friedberg-Dobry, canva.s.sed door-to-door. A chemist with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Alan Dobry was a typical old-line Hyde Park independent, working for Despres when he ran for reelection as alderman in 1959, in the Fifth Ward, which includes Hyde Park, as well as in black neighborhoods in Woodlawn.

"Everything seemed to be falling into place that autumn," Dobry recalled. "Obama had friends who would put up the money for him: people from Judd Miner's law firm, Harvard people, colleagues at the University of Chicago. He knew people in the habit of funding independent political campaigns." Harwell was from the West Side but she was managing this South Side campaign with evident skill. She brought in Ronald Davis, a math professor at Kennedy-King College who had also been a Project Vote coordinator, to be the field coordinator. Young volunteers, like Will Burns, who soon became a political-science graduate student at the University of Chicago, handed out flyers and, with Obama, campaigned door-to-door. Burns later wrote a master's thesis on how Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, a machine politician, turned himself into a spokesman for black empowerment and how he built coalitions. After Was.h.i.+ngton's death, there had been a vacuum in black politics in Chicago; Burns thought that he saw in Obama a kind of successor, free of the old language and cronyism.

In mid-October, Obama took a break from campaigning and went to Was.h.i.+ngton for the Million Man March, a ma.s.s demonstration on the Mall organized princ.i.p.ally by Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam. Many of the issues that the march was intended to highlight were on Obama's mind: the soaring incarceration rates among young black men; disproportionate levels of poverty, unemployment, and high-school dropouts; the distorted portrayal of African-Americans in the media. But because of the central role played by Farrakhan, who had made hateful statements about Jews and white America, it was a complicated event for Obama, a liberal African-American running for office in a district that was mainly black but also heavily Jewish, especially near the university. The speakers in Was.h.i.+ngton included Gus Savage, Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, and, of course, Farrakhan.

When he returned, Obama spoke gingerly of the events he had witnessed in Was.h.i.+ngton. Rather than give the reporter Hank De Zutter a pithy quote for his story in the Reader Reader, he delivered a measured, nuanced view of race in America that sounds very much like what he said thirteen years later, at a crisis point in his run for the Presidency: What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society.... There was a profound sense that African-American men were ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and lives. of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society.... There was a profound sense that African-American men were ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and lives.But what was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate. Just as holding hands and singing "We shall overcome" is not going to do it, exhorting youth to have pride in their race, give up drugs and crime, is not going to do it if we can't find jobs and futures for the 50 percent of black youth who are unemployed, underemployed, and full of bitterness and rage. Exhortations are not enough, nor are the notions that we can create a black economy within America that is hermetically sealed from the rest of the economy and seriously tackle the major issues confronting us....Any solution to our unemployment catastrophe must arise from us working creatively within a multicultural, interdependent, and international economy. Any African-Americans who are only talking about racism as a barrier to our success are seriously misled if they don't also come to grips with the larger economic forces that are creating economic insecurity for all workers--whites, Latinos, and Asians. We must deal with the forces that are depressing wages, lopping off people's benefits right and left, and creating an earnings gap between C.E.O.s and the lowest-paid worker that has risen in the last 20 years from a ratio of 10 to 1 to one of better than 100 to 1.This doesn't suggest that the need to look inward emphasized by the march isn't important, and that these African-American tribal affinities aren't legitimate. These are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a "lock 'em up, take no prisoners" mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn't care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.But cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done. Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up. We've got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do. We've got communities to build.

Obama's a.n.a.lytical, unemotional, intricate, Farrakhan-free, yet sincere response echoed his reaction to Rafiq, the nationalist in his memoir, his comments a few years earlier about the death of Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, and his discussions of the pressures of a global economy on local destiny. Obama was increasingly directing his attention to the problems of cla.s.s, systemic change, and elective politics. As a younger man, he was paying his respect to the elders of the movement, but he clearly felt that the days of nationalism and charismatic racial leaders.h.i.+p were outdated and played out.

At around the same time, Obama got the news that he would not be alone on the ballot. The Hyde Park The Hyde Park Herald Herald reported reported that there would be at least two other candidates: Marc Ewell, a thirty-year-old real-estate inspector and the son of a former state legislator, Raymond Ewell, and Gha-is Askia, a community-affairs liaison in the Illinois attorney general's office. Askia was the more interesting of the two. Born a Baptist, Askia was the sixteenth of eighteen children and a Muslim convert. His name means "One who relieves those in distress." Askia won the endors.e.m.e.nt of several local politicians; his friend Muhammad Ali promised to have a fundraiser for him. that there would be at least two other candidates: Marc Ewell, a thirty-year-old real-estate inspector and the son of a former state legislator, Raymond Ewell, and Gha-is Askia, a community-affairs liaison in the Illinois attorney general's office. Askia was the more interesting of the two. Born a Baptist, Askia was the sixteenth of eighteen children and a Muslim convert. His name means "One who relieves those in distress." Askia won the endors.e.m.e.nt of several local politicians; his friend Muhammad Ali promised to have a fundraiser for him.

As the campaign began to develop, Obama learned that his mother was gravely ill. In 1992, living in Indonesia, Ann Dunham had finished her thousand-page doctoral dissertation on the craftsmen of Java, dedicating it to her mother, to her mentor Alice Dewey, and "to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field." In 1992 and 1993, she lived in New York City and was a policy coordinator for Women's World Banking, where she worked on issues of microfinancing for women in the developing world. (One of her jobs was to help generate policy materials for the 1995 United Nations International Women's Conference in Beijing; Dunham and her colleagues believed that the best advocate for microfinancing at the Beijing meeting would be Hillary Clinton.) In the fall of 1994, while visiting some friends in Jakarta, Dunham felt intense abdominal pains. Her Indonesian doctors diagnosed a digestive malady. At first, she barely spoke of her illness to Barack, in Chicago, or to Maya, who was studying secondary education at New York University. Finally, at the urging of her family and friends, she went to see doctors at Kaiser Permanente in Honolulu, who determined that she had advanced uterine cancer. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, specialists told her that the cancer was too advanced for effective treatment.

Dunham returned to Hawaii. One of her colleagues in Indonesian studies, Bronwen Solyom, recalled, "She was tough, she was very brave. She went on staying interested in what we always talked about and not about being sick. But by the time she came home from Indonesia it was probably too late."

In early November, she was admitted to the Straub Clinic in Honolulu. "I was working on my master's degree in New York at the time when the doctors in Hawaii said there was no hope," Maya Soetoro-Ng said. "My goal was to finish my degree and go live with her in Hawaii for her last days. But because she was so young, I thought we had more time. I was in a state of denial and thought she might last for years. But when I returned one day from cla.s.s she called and made it clear she didn't have much time. I told her that I was scared and she said, 'Me, too.' I got on a flight that day."

Maya arrived in Honolulu on the afternoon of November 7th. "When I got to my mother's hospital room, she was surrounded by my grandmother and some friends," Soetoro-Ng said. "My grandmother was so tired, so I sent her home. It was clear that things were ending. I read to my mother from a book of Creole stories that I had been reading with my students. I read her a story about taking flight, because it was clear that she wasn't coming back. I told her that it was time to go." That night, at around eleven, Ann Dunham died. She was fifty-two.

To his great distress, Obama did not arrive in Honolulu until the next day. He had been in constant contact with his mother, with visits, telephone calls, and letters. Dunham wrote her son many letters encouraging him in his pursuits. More and more, he had come to admire his mother not only for the moral example she had set but also for the room she had given him to explore his own ident.i.ty. Only as he grew older could he appreciate how young she was when she gave birth to him and how resilient she had been when Barack, Sr., left. She was just a teenager, a smart, sweet-tempered nineteen-year-old pus.h.i.+ng a stroller and her African-American toddler along the sidewalks of Honolulu and Seattle in 1963. She never thought twice about it. Dipping in and out of one culture after another, Ann was an idealist about race, not least when it came to her own family. Finis.h.i.+ng her dissertation and nearing fifty, she half-seriously told Alice Dewey that she was thinking of adopting a third child--the more ethnically complicated the better.

"She thought having an African-American kid was wonderful," Dewey recalled. "When she was in Hawaii, Americans were starting to adopt Asian kids. It had started in Korea, children of American soldiers. They were awfully cute. She saw one on TV and she said, 'Oh, I want one!' That really would have completed the set! And I wouldn't have been surprised."

"She was a superb mother in a number of ways," Maya said. "In spite of not being able to provide us with a stable two-parent household or a big house or any of those things, she gave us a sense of wonder and curiosity, empathy, a sense of responsibility and service, a love of literature. She was incredibly kind, so we had a steady, loving voice around us at all times, which helped us to be brave, and helped my brother to be brave when he had enormous decisions to make. Those things were present in her work. You see it in the empathy for the people whom she writes about. It's a grounded voice that balances idealism and pragmatism."

A few days later, Obama and Maya attended a memorial service for their mother held in a j.a.panese garden at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center conference building, on campus. Maya and Barack gave short speeches recalling Ann's nature, her travels, and her scholarly pa.s.sions. Afterward, they drove to a cove near Lanai Lookout, on the south sh.o.r.e of Oahu, where the cliff is steep and the waves crash into the rock and swirl in pools of foam. They climbed down the rocks and stood near the waves. Barack and Maya cast the ashes of Stanley Ann Dunham into the waters of the Pacific.

On November 28th, Jesse Jackson, Jr., walloped the Democratic compet.i.tion in the special primary for the Second Congressional District. His father's celebrity, his network of connections in the black community, ranging from Operation PUSH to the churches, and his capacity to raise money far outstripped that of Emil Jones, who finished second, and Alice Palmer, who, coming in third, received barely five thousand votes, around ten per cent. Disappointed as she was, Palmer told her supporters that she had no intention of changing her mind and running to reclaim her State Senate seat. At fifty-six years old, Palmer seemed more likely to return full-time to education.

"Barack called her, they spoke several times, and Alice said, 'I gave my word and I am not going to [get back in the race],'" Carol Anne Harwell recalled.

Besides, rejoining the race would be complicated. To get on the ballot, candidates had to get the signatures of seven hundred and fifty-seven registered voters in the district. On December 11th, the first filing day for nominating pet.i.tions, Obama handed in more than three thousand signatures collected by his campaign. By now, however, a small but influential circle of community activists and friends of Alice Palmer--the journalist Lu Palmer; the political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr.; the historian Timuel Black and his wife, Zen.o.bia; the academic and journalist Robert Starks; the state legislators Lovana Jones and Donne Trotter; the alderman Barbara Holt--had started to form a Draft Alice Palmer Committee intended to persuade Obama to withdraw in favor of Palmer. These were mainly veterans of the civil-rights movement and the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton campaigns. Alice Palmer was one of them. Obama, in their view, was a callow newcomer from Hawaii and Harvard, too smooth, too willing to dismiss what he called "the politics of grievance." They did not trust him to be nearly as progressive as Palmer had been. He could wait his turn. Even Jesse Jackson, Jr., appeared to support Alice Palmer and sent his field organizer to her meetings.

The Chicago Defender Defender and the black-oriented tabloid and the black-oriented tabloid N'Digo N'Digo began to run articles sympathetic to Palmer. began to run articles sympathetic to Palmer. The The Defender Defender reported reported that some of her supporters were now calling on Obama to "step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity and to release Palmer from her commitment." The that some of her supporters were now calling on Obama to "step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity and to release Palmer from her commitment." The Defender Defender had a long history with Palmer and an even longer one with Buzz Palmer, who had been the strongest voice for reform inside the Police Department for many years. Local politicians began to choose sides: Toni Preckwinkle stayed with Obama, citing Palmer's promises; Emil Jones went with Palmer. had a long history with Palmer and an even longer one with Buzz Palmer, who had been the strongest voice for reform inside the Police Department for many years. Local politicians began to choose sides: Toni Preckwinkle stayed with Obama, citing Palmer's promises; Emil Jones went with Palmer. Writing in the Writing in the Defender Defender, Robert Starks, who taught political science at Northeastern Illinois University and was well known on the South Side, raised the unlikely prospect that the seat would be lost to a machine politician: "If [Palmer] doesn't run, that seat will go to a Daley supporter. We have asked her to reconsider not running because we don't think Obama can win. He hasn't been in town long enough.... n.o.body knows who he is."

In early December, the informal pro-Palmer committee invited Obama to a meeting at Lovana Jones's house. Obama went to the meeting with his field coordinator Ron Davis. They knew what was coming. Appealing to Obama's sense of propriety, the members of the committee asked him to get out of the race.

"He said he had enough pet.i.tions and would not pull away," Timuel Black recalled. "I was kind of angry. When we asked Barack to withdraw, for reasons of seniority, members.h.i.+p on important committees, and so on, we didn't know him the way we knew her. Our confidence in her was deeper. We promised if he ran for anything else, he would get our support. But he said he was already organized and had money."

Some of Obama's supporters saw a motive other than loyalty behind the Draft Alice Palmer Committee: funding. Linda Randle, the veteran South Side activist who had worked with Obama on the anti-asbestos campaign at Altgeld Gardens, said that Palmer had helped her supporters get money for their community projects. "They could see with Barack that wasn't getting ready to happen," she said. "They worried about losing their funding, because Barack was less sympathetic to them--much less. Barack is cheap. If he puts money out there, he wants to see how you use it. Alice less so, because those were her friends."

"In Chicago you wait your turn, like in the Chinese Communist Party, when you take into account who was with Mao on the Long March--and Barack wasn't even from Chicago," Will Burns said. "But he was a very different kind of cat. He wouldn't walk away."

"They wanted to bully Barack but he wasn't going to be punked like that," Carol Anne Harwell said.

Palmer decided to run to retain her seat, saying that if Michael Jordan could make a comeback, so could she. She and her supporters believed that no matter what was said about a deal, the seat was rightly hers. "Not to belittle it or anything, but Obama did not have the representative experience of a black man on the South Side," Buzz Palmer said. "We were the activists of the South Side and we had never heard heard of Barack Obama. He said he was an organizer, but I would have heard about it if he was something important. Obama came to politics completely out of the blue. We felt he could wait it out. And if they ran against each other, there wasn't any way Alice could lose to Barack Obama." of Barack Obama. He said he was an organizer, but I would have heard about it if he was something important. Obama came to politics completely out of the blue. We felt he could wait it out. And if they ran against each other, there wasn't any way Alice could lose to Barack Obama."

Palmer's supporters scrambled to get the signatures required to get on the ballot, and by December 18th, the deadline, they filed 1,580 signatures, twice what she needed. Palmer held a press conference at a banquet hall in Woodlawn saying that the "draft" effort was too compelling to resist.

That day, Obama told the Tribune Tribune that Alice Palmer had pressured him to drop out but that he had refused. "I am disappointed that she's decided to go back on her word to me," he said. that Alice Palmer had pressured him to drop out but that he had refused. "I am disappointed that she's decided to go back on her word to me," he said.

During the holidays, Obama and his team decided to take part in a long Chicago political tradition--they would challenge the signatures on his opponents' pet.i.tions. This is a routine, and often effective This is a routine, and often effective, tactic: in 2007, sixty-seven out of a total of two hundred and forty-five candidates for alderman were eliminated because of insufficient or bad signatures on their pet.i.tions. It is less common, however, in the case of an inc.u.mbent.

Palmer's volunteers had had only a few days to collect signatures, increasing the likelihood that they had acc.u.mulated "bad names": signatures that were either fakes, had addresses outside the district, or were not from registered voters. Some were printed rather than written in cursive script, as required. In campaigns where signatures were a problem, it was common Chicago practice to "roundtable the sheets"--meaning that volunteers would get together in a closed room, sit around a table with a telephone directory, scour the book for potential names and addresses, and forge the signatures they needed. On the day after Christmas, the Obama campaign filed challenges against all of his opponents: Palmer, Askia, Ewell, and Ulmer D. Lynch, Jr., a retired laborer and precinct captain who had been trying, without success, to win a spot on the City Council for decades. Ron Davis went by train to Springfield, where all pet.i.tions had to be filed. He brought back copies of Palmer's pet.i.tion lists and everyone could see that they were especially slipshod, containing names like Superman, Batman, Squirt, Katmandu, Pookie, and Slim.

On January 2nd, Harwell and other volunteers went to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners--an office on the third floor of City Hall--and asked to see the pet.i.tion sheets for Obama's opponents. They spent the next week carefully combing through the lists. The Obama campaign was hardly alone: the Commission office was filled with campaign officials and volunteers checking signatures against registration rolls. "It's like old home week," said Alan Dobry, who, along with his wife, Lois, joined the pet.i.tion review effort.

Obama, who was relatively new to Chicago politics, was ambivalent about the process. "He really wanted to win a race," Harwell said. "He didn't understand that people challenge pet.i.tions all the time. People have a right to battle. We told him that they couldn't hand in garbage pet.i.tions. Once we showed him the Superman and Pookie sheets, he came around."

Obama and his supporters knew that he could easily lose to Palmer in a head-to-head primary. If he agonized over the decision to challenge the pet.i.tions, he did not agonize for long. "To my mind, we were just abiding "To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up," Obama recalled. "I gave some thought to ... should people be on the ballot even if they didn't meet the requirements.... My conclusion was that if you couldn't run a successful pet.i.tion drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be." In private, Obama absorbed a less righteous sense of tactics: by the rules that had been set up," Obama recalled. "I gave some thought to ... should people be on the ballot even if they didn't meet the requirements.... My conclusion was that if you couldn't run a successful pet.i.tion drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be." In private, Obama absorbed a less righteous sense of tactics: "If you can get 'em, get 'em "If you can get 'em, get 'em," Davis told Obama. "Why give 'em a break?" To help with the pet.i.tion survey, Davis brought in Thomas Johnson, a Harvard-educated lawyer who had been involved in the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton campaigns and had helped Obama on Project Vote.

As Obama's campaign workers reviewed the pet.i.tions, it soon became clear that all of Obama's opponents had done, at best, a sloppy job of gathering signatures. There were addresses in the wrong district, bogus names, printed names.

"My wife and I worked on the pet.i.tions and we remember how the machine used to do this to our independents and knock us off the ballot, so we had to learn in order to protect ourselves," Alan Dobry recalled. "When I ran for ward committeeman in 1986, against Mike Igoe, the son of a federal judge, one of his precinct captains put in a clumsy forgery for the dean of students at the University of Chicago--which was a problem because they misspelled his name and and he was on sabbatical in France at the time they collected it. he was on sabbatical in France at the time they collected it.

"Alice did not believe she would lose," Dobry continued. "She is a nice person and a real expert on educational issues, but she was not a good politician. She is not good at organizing campaigns."

Marc Ewell filed 1,286 names and Obama's challenge found him eighty-six short. Askia filed 1,899 names and was sixty-nine names short. Askia admitted that he had paid Democratic Party precinct workers five dollars a sheet for some of the pet.i.tions and that they had likely used "roundtabling" to fill out the effort. "That's a standard thing in Chicago--you pay people to circulate pet.i.tions," Askia said. "Even the mayor does it." He said that the Obama campaign was wrong to use "loopholes" if Obama was going to claim to be a new kind of politician.

Palmer had filed about twice the number of names required, but Obama's people a.s.serted that two-thirds of them were invalid, leaving her two hundred shy of the required seven hundred and fifty-seven. According to Robert Starks, one of her main supporters, "We were in too much of a rush and that leads to bad signatures."

Even some of Palmer's friends in the State Senate could see she was in trouble. Rickey Hendon, a self-described "street guy" whose district was on the West Side near the United Center, said that he had no objection to Obama's tactics: "h.e.l.l, I do it and people have tried to do it to me. It's the Chicago way. People can make stuff up in this town. You can't let it slide. That's bulls.h.i.+t. Alice should have taken care of business." Hendon, who was one of Obama's antagonists in Springfield, also had no doubts about the repercussions of the incident. Obama, he said, "wouldn't be President if Alice had stayed on the ballot. I don't know anyone who thinks Alice wouldn't have won at that time and in that era. She was the queen. She was loved."

The Obama volunteers filled out long forms describing each challenge, and, in the end, the government upheld their case. When the result arrived, eliminating Palmer from the ballot, Obama told his volunteers not to betray any glee. "It was very awkward "It was very awkward," Obama recalled. "That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."

"This was not the optimal outcome," Will Burns said. "He didn't want us backslapping like we had done something great." (Nonetheless, Alice Palmer always resented Barack Obama, and privately she said that he ended up disappointing her, that he was not the progressive she thought he was when she first endorsed him. In 2008, Palmer supported Hillary Clinton for President.) With the pet.i.tion drama over, the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO), the most important anti-machine group to emerge in Chicago after the Second World War, endorsed Obama. There was now no way that he could lose the primary save for some unforeseen disaster. From his law partners and friends like Valerie Jarrett, who was now chairman of the board of the Chicago Transit Authority, he had raised more than sixty thousand dollars. His two opponents in November were insignificant: a sixty-seven-year-old Republican teacher named Rosette Caldwell Peyton; and David Whitehead, for the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton Party, who had run unsuccessfully for a slew of offices, including, four times, for alderman. The Chicago Tribune Tribune and the Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times Sun-Times both endorsed Obama. both endorsed Obama.

In the end Obama won, with eighty-two per cent of the vote.

What kind of politician did Obama intend to be? The most comprehensive portrait of him that appeared during the campaign was Hank De Zutter's long article in the Chicago did Obama intend to be? The most comprehensive portrait of him that appeared during the campaign was Hank De Zutter's long article in the Chicago Reader Reader. An almost completely sympathetic piece, it portrayed Obama as a young man who admired Harold Was.h.i.+ngton but was critical of him as a leader whose dream of a principled coalition politics fell apart the day he died, in 1987. "He was a cla.s.sic charismatic leader "He was a cla.s.sic charismatic leader," Obama said, "and when he died all of that dissipated."

At one point, De Zutter watched Obama teaching a workshop for "future leaders" in the Grand Boulevard community, on the South Side, organized by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons. Dressed "casually prep" and looking like an "Ivy League graduate student," Obama met with eight black women to discuss the way power was organized in the city. For a while, the women talk about "they" and "them," and how these unnamed people have come to control the lives and wealth of Chicago. Obama cuts it off.

"Slow down now. You're going too fast now," he says. "I want to break this down. We talk 'they, they, they' but don't take the time to break it down. We don't a.n.a.lyze. Our thinking is sloppy. And, to the degree that it is, we're not going to be able to have the impact we could have. We can't afford to go out there blind, hollering and acting the fool, and get to the table and don't know who it is we're talking to--or what we're going to ask them--whether it's someone with real power or just a third-string flak catcher."

At that point, Obama saw himself trying to bridge his activity during his first sojourn in Chicago to the world of practical politics, a bridge between the church-bas.e.m.e.nt meetings of the South Side and the conference rooms of the Loop. He offered De Zutter a kind of credo for his career: What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? ... The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it's always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.Now we have to take this same language--these same values that are encouraged within our families--of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other--and apply them to a larger society. Let's talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values. Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.

Obama's idealism was part of what attracted young people like Will Burns, who eventually ran for office himself on the South Side, to the campaign. Obama seemed to promise a new kind of politics or, at least, a marriage of conventional liberal-policy positions to a temperament that relied on reconciliation rather than on grievance. The problem was that Obama was also given to a certain naivete. In a tone of rueful apology In a tone of rueful apology, he admitted that he would have to raise money from people of means in order to win the election, but, "once elected, once I'm known, I won't need that kind of money, just as Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, once he was elected and known, did not need to raise and spend money to get the black vote." As a Presidential candidate, Obama not only raised an unprecedented amount of cash, from both the wealthy and ordinary supporters, but also dropped a promise to abide by spending limits, and then outspent his Republican opponent by a gigantic margin.

Obama had won his first elected office, but he alienated some on the left, both whites and blacks. They were suspicious not only of his shallow roots in the community but also of his post-civil-rights liberalism. He lacked a certain authenticity, some of them felt; he was too privileged, too willing to compromise on the "black agenda." "Chicago politics, whether it was the old Daley or Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, is a gutsy, boots-on-the-ground game and it's got to reflect the community," Robert Starks said. "It could be Daley from Bridgeport or Was.h.i.+ngton from the South Side. Now here comes Obama and he turns that idea upside down--he escapes the whole Chicago tradition of coming from the bowels of the community."

Adolph Reed, Jr., a professor of political science who was then teaching at Northwestern, and who had also been involved in the attempt to draft Palmer, published an article in the Village Voice Village Voice that was the clearest expression of the deep and early suspicion of Obama, his origins, and his ideological makeup: that was the clearest expression of the deep and early suspicion of Obama, his origins, and his ideological makeup: In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program--the point where ident.i.ty politics converges with old-fas.h.i.+oned middle-cla.s.s reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn't been up to the challenge.

Obama's unseating of Palmer had planted some bitter seeds. He discovered that when, in Springfield, he joined the Black Caucus and again, to greater distress, in 2000, when he challenged the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for his seat in Congress. The Palmer affair, Will Burns said, had a dual effect on the South Side. On the one hand, Burns said, "people learned that he was going to play hardball. They learned that just because you write an editorial and tell him to do something, doesn't mean he is going to do it. It put people on notice." On the other hand, the resentment against him lingered, especially in the communities where the percentage of African-Americans was highest and the income level lowest. "The seeds of the 'not-black-enough' stuff started as a consequence of that first election," Burns said.

Despite the wide margin of his victory, Obama knew that he needed to expand his base of recognition. He understood that Hyde Park was a special sort of enclave--it was not considered the real South Side. So he established his district office in South Sh.o.r.e, the working-and middle-cla.s.s black neighborhood where his wife had grown up. of his victory, Obama knew that he needed to expand his base of recognition. He understood that Hyde Park was a special sort of enclave--it was not considered the real South Side. So he established his district office in South Sh.o.r.e, the working-and middle-cla.s.s black neighborhood where his wife had grown up.

Obama was sworn in on January 8, 1997. In the light of his future, it is all too easy to look at this first office with a portentous sense of gravity. After all, just seven years later, while he held the same office, people would hear him give a speech in Boston and start to wonder if he, "a black man with a funny name," just might be the future of Presidential politics in the Democratic Party. A state senator! But in 1997 being a Democratic state senator in Illinois was to hold an office without status. (Even in the best of times, Democratic state senators in Chicago with ambitions dreamed of becoming aldermen and congressmen or holding state office.) The Republican leader, or president, James (Pate) Philip, was an aging hack given to racist innuendo, and any Democrat rash enough to initiate a piece of progressive legislation found that initiative buried forever in the rules committee. Philip was the sort of racist who would first announce his lack of political correctness and then blunder on about the deficiencies of blacks: "It's probably a terrible thing to say "It's probably a terrible thing to say, but I'll say it: some of them do not have the work ethics we have.... I don't know what you do about that, but it's kind of a way of life."

Pate Philip, Obama once told me, "was not a neoconservative but the original paleo-conservative. He was a big, hulking guy. He looked like John Murtha, but had very different politics, and would chomp on cigars and make politically incorrect statements, and he had adopted Newt Gingrich's--not just the Contract with America--he had adopted Newt Gingrich's rules for running the House. As a consequence, you couldn't even amend a bill without his approval."

The two legislative chambers in Springfield were almost entirely controlled by "the Four Tops": the Senate president, the House speaker, and the two minority leaders. They controlled committee a.s.signments, legislative agendas, staff, and even campaign money. Run-of-the-mill Democratic legislators were known as "mushrooms" because they were kept in the dark and made to eat s.h.i.+t. Obama was a newly sprouted mushroom.

Ideology was a simple matter for the Republicans. Pate Philip, who was a Marine veteran and a sales manager for Pepperidge Farm, worked mainly to keep taxes low and to make any plans for reform "dead on arrival." The minute he took over The minute he took over the leaders.h.i.+p seat, in 1992, he called for the abolition of bilingual education ("Let 'em learn English"). the leaders.h.i.+p seat, in 1992, he called for the abolition of bilingual education ("Let 'em learn English").

Obama commuted to Springfield. Most weeks when the Senate was in session, he made the three-plus-hours' drive to Springfield, along Interstate 55, late Monday and returned Thursday night. He usually stayed in the President Abraham Lincoln Hotel, on East Adams Street, a short walk from the Old State Capitol. Within a couple of days of arriving in Springfield for the first time, he called Judd Miner and asked him to take him off salary; he would be paid by the hour for any work he did for the firm.

Even in Springfield, where many of his colleagues were suburban and downstate senators who could not have cared less about the internecine battles of the South Side, there was still a price to be paid for knocking Alice Palmer off the ballot and out of the Senate. Two African-American senators in particular, Rickey Hendon, from the West Side, and Donne Trotter, who represented a district that extended from the South Side into the south suburbs, were not keen to give Obama a warm welcome. They viewed him as too lawyerly, too Harvard, too much in a hurry, insufficiently Chicago, and insufficiently black. Theirs was a less ideologically sophisticated version of the view taken by Adolph Reed, Jr.: that Obama was "vacuous" and inauthentic. Obama's book had been reviewed and even excerpted in the Hyde Park Herald Herald, and so some of his colleagues already knew about his background. They teased him about smoking dope as a kid and about being reared by his white mother and grandparents. They asked him if he had figured out what race he belonged to. Hendon teased Obama that he was from Hawaii and lived in Hyde Park: "What do you know about the street?"

Hazing is a first-year ritual in Springfield. Obama's turn took place on the Senate floor in mid-March. To help the unemployed, Obama had introduced a bill to create a guide to community-college graduates for potential local employers--a bill of relatively small significance. Rickey Hendon jumped on it.

HENDON: Senator, could you correctly p.r.o.nounce your name for me? I'm having a little trouble with it.OBAMA: Obama.HENDON: Is that Irish?OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill's still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 s.e.x line numbers in this directory?PRESIDING OFFICER: Senator Obama.OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn't paying Senator Hendon any attention.HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn't pay it much attention, either. My question was: Are the 1-800 s.e.x line numbers going to be in this directory?OBAMA: Basically this idea came out of the South Side community colleges. I don't know what you're doing in the West Side community colleges. But we probably won't be including that in our directory for the students.HENDON: I wish--I wish Senator Collins was here to make that--hear that comment. Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer--much easier to p.r.o.nounce than Obama--and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don't have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And--and you don't even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did.... I'm missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that make absolutely no sense. I--I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.

Hendon said later that part of his motive was just a ritual of sarcastic welcome--"He wasn't going to be above freshman hazing, as far as I was concerned. It's been a tradition forever"--but Obama definitely irritated him. Hendon, Trotter, and others quickly determined that Obama had his eyes fixed on higher office: alderman, congressman, mayor, governor. Hendon joked that Obama would likely run for "president of the world." Hendon had marched in support of the Black Panther Party in 1971, after the murder of Fred Hampton. He remembered the first Mayor Daley, Dr. King, the riots on the West Side--he was a real real Chicagoan, he insisted, and not from Hyde Park. Hendon didn't take Obama's main claim to authenticity--his three years as a community organizer--seriously. Street cred, he said, "is something you really earn and it takes some time. He didn't have the time in as a community organizer. I was Chicagoan, he insisted, and not from Hyde Park. Hendon didn't take Obama's main claim to authenticity--his three years as a community organizer--seriously. Street cred, he said, "is something you really earn and it takes some time. He didn't have the time in as a community organizer. I was in in the streets. I stood up. Look, I have friends like Barack. I understood him. He was not any kind of mystery to me: I have friends from Africa, biracial friends, college-educated lawyer friends, and sometimes we have battles and differences. My friends with all those degrees like to compromise and live in nice rich neighborhoods. They don't see things as they really are. You're not as willing to compromise if you see the poverty all the time. When we were talking about racial profiling, he told us he'd never been pulled over. I've been pulled over a the streets. I stood up. Look, I have friends like Barack. I understood him. He was not any kind of mystery to me: I have friends from Africa, biracial friends, college-educated lawyer friends, and sometimes we have battles and differences. My friends with all those degrees like to compromise and live in nice rich neighborhoods. They don't see things as they really are. You're not as willing to compromise if you see the poverty all the time. When we were talking about racial profiling, he told us he'd never been pulled over. I've been pulled over a lot lot."

Donne Trotter, a more polished legislator and given to natty bow ties, was no less contemptuous of his new colleague in the Black Caucus. "Barack didn't have a clue," Trotter said. "He was a new kid on the block, an unknown ent.i.ty, a blank sheet of paper. I'm not into conspiracy theories but no one knew who was backing him. It sure wasn't the community he was trying to represent. Who was this guy?"

Like Hendon, Trotter had no compunction about getting in Obama's face. "As Harold Was.h.i.+ngton said, 'Politics ain't beanbag,' it's a contact sport, so it's not as if what I was talking about was so out of line," he said. ("Beanbag" was actually a coinage of Mark Twain's Chicago friend the journalist Finley Peter Dunne.) "It wasn't a question of black enough. What we did know, by his own admission in his book, was that he grew up in Hawaii. It wasn't the issue of a white mother, that's not so unusual, but he didn't have our black experience. On the South Side, it's twenty below zero. In Hawaii, it's eighty degrees--and he's supposedly roughing it."

Obama brushed off the insults from Trotter and Hendon, and he focused instead on forming useful alliances where, and with whom, he could. One of the first things he did in Springfield was to call on the Democratic leader, Emil Jones, whom he had first met as an organizer while staging a street demonstration near Jones's house. Emil Jones was far more important than Hendon and Trotter. A legislator since 1973, he was one of eight children. His father had been a truck driver, a bailiff in the Cook County Circuit Court, and a Democratic precinct captain in the Thirty-fourth Ward organization on the far South Side. Gruff, earthy, and a chain-smoker, Jones made it his business in the Senate not only to pa.s.s progressive legislation but to bring home the pork to the African-American community. He helped to build inst.i.tutions like Kennedy-King College, in Englewood, the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Bronzeville Children's Museum, and the Beverly Arts Center. Jones was an old-style apparatchik, and Obama had a lot to learn from him. Jones, in turn, realized that in Barack Obama he had a unique, if raw, talent that he could mold. It was not every day, he told an aide, that a black Harvard Law School graduate--earnest, sincere, ready to work--showed up on his doorstep.

"Barack was very idealistic when we first met," Jones said. "He wanted to get things done but didn't know how to solve the problem. He thought you could press a b.u.t.ton and it would be done." Jones easily sensed the animosity of senators who had been friends with Alice Palmer and felt that Obama had somehow betrayed her. "I knew the feeling was there, but they didn't know that I'd known Barack for a long time," he said. Pedigree was also a problem--"Harvard and all the rest"--but Jones did not feel threatened. Instead, when Obama came asking for hard a.s.signments, Jones gave them to him. Democrats could not easily initiate legislation, but they could get involved in the negotiations, and Jones made Obama his lead negotiator on a welfare-to-work package being pushed by the Republicans. This annoyed Hendon and Trotter, but Obama knew that Jones's favor was invaluable in Springfield.

Obama also formed friends.h.i.+ps among white legislators from the suburbs and downstate. During his freshman orientation session, he met a Democrat named Terry Link, who had just pulled off an upset in a district north of Chicago. Link was white, ran a forklift business, and "barely got out of high school," but, he said, "We hit it off right away."

"One thing Barack has is the ability to adapt, and in the State Senate he discovered that things weren't clear-cut," Link recalled. "We were sitting on the floor at eleven-forty-five on the last night of our first session and we were handed the budget, a foot thick, at that time. We broke it up into five bills and had to vote on it. We were in the minority and we had just minutes before we had to vote. Barack had such a stern face, and he said, 'Do you really think our forefathers designed our Const.i.tution to do the state's business like this?' That's when I think it hit him that things weren't being done the way he