http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lizza
Some interesting tidbits about Obama's political experiences in Chicago prior to his US Senate run. Not sure if they're all true, but they certainly paint him in a different light than we usually see. Instead of the idealistic dreamer and agent of change from his acclaimed autobiographies, we find a shrewd, cunning insider who is very skilled at playing the connections and money games in politics. Actually, it seems he has gone with the flow and accommodated the establishment more than he has "worked for change". He is a cocky tactician who is able to reinvent himself when advantageous, adapting to various constituencies and aggressively pouncing on opportunities for upward movement. And his strategy has been tremendously successful. He came from nothing and has risen faster than most politicians in US history. In a sense, he is quite like Bill Clinton.
Since his early days walking the streets as a community organizer, he often took career advancements as springboards towards the next larger goal (some say that he dreamed of becoming president since the 1990's), instead of doing his best in the current position he had just won. Some former allies and supporters even felt that Obama was quite disloyal, shunning them and not showing appreciation for their help after they had outlived their usefulness to him. He often clashed with and sidestepped the "old guard" of black politicians who lived through the civil rights struggle, and actually he was more popular with white professionals in Chicago. I don't really fault him for these aspects of his record, as it mimics the biographies of 99% of politicians out there. The ascendancy stories of people like Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton, and Richard Nixon are fraught with conflicts. Obama still might become an excellent president, and frankly one needs a big ego and ruthless ambition to win the head of state job. But when his campaign and some in the media seek to paint him as cut from a different cloth and a visionary who will clean up Washington, I am now a little skeptical. Well, I guess a great leader has to be a tough-nosed asshole to fight his or her way out of obscurity, and once they reach the top, then they finally have the power to do a lot of good?
Excerpts from the long-ass New Yorker article in italics, my synopsies in normal text.
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Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago's churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. "You have the power to make a United States senator," he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.
Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.
Obama's establishment inclinations have alienated some old friends. During the 2004 Senate primary, Obama sometimes reminded voters of his anti-machine credentials, but at the same time he shrewdly wrote to Mayor Daley's brother, William, who had backed one of Obama's primary opponents, asking for his support if he won the primary. As he outgrew the provincial politics of Hyde Park, he became closer to the Mayor, and this accommodation, as well as his unwillingness to condemn the corruption scandals ensnaring Daley and Blagojevich, both of whom he supported for reëlection, have some of his original supporters feeling alienated and angry. "I am not thrilled with Barack, simply because we elected him as an Independent, and he switched over to Daley," Alan Dobry said. Ivory Mitchell, speaking of Obama's Senate race, said, "When he won the primary out here and he went downtown, it appears as though Daley took over the campaign for him. . . . We were excluded." David Axelrod told me, in response, that some of the Independents on the South Side blame Daley for just about anything. "I think there's kind of this Wizard of Oz mystique," he said. "Daley had virtually no role in the Senate campaign."
Another transition from primary to general election is now under way for Obama, and it is causing him a similar set of problems, all of which stem from a realization among his supporters that superheroes don't become President; politicians do. Judging by the reaction to Obama's most recent decisions—his willingness to support legislation to modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, his rightward shift on interpreting the Second Amendment, his decision to "refine" his Iraq policies—some voters will be crushed by this realization and others will be relieved. In another episode that has Obama's old friends feeling frustrated, Obama recently blamed his first campaign manager, Carol Anne Harwell, for reporting on a 1996 questionnaire that Obama favored a ban on handguns.
Obama's rise has often appeared effortless. His offstage tactics—when he is engaged in the sometimes combative work of a politician—are rarely glimpsed by outsiders. Penny Pritzker, a friend and fund-raiser for Obama, remembers meeting with him at her office in 2006 to discuss his Presidential campaign. "We were talking about whether he was ready to do this or not," Pritzker told me. She was blunt, telling Obama, "As I see it, the two things that you're going to need to address are your executive leadership skills, because your résumé doesn't have that in it, and the second would be your credentials in national security." Obama returned with an organizational chart indicating how the campaign would be structured—one of his great tactical advantages over the disorganized Clinton campaign—along with a list of advisers. Pritzker agreed to become his finance chair. Obama has frequently been one step ahead of his friends and the public in anticipating his own rise. Perhaps it is all those people he has met over the years who told him that he would be President one day.
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Although many of Obama's recent supporters have been surprised by signs of political opportunism, Preckwinkle wasn't. "I think he was very strategic in his choice of friends and mentors," she told me. "I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman. I finally got elected. This is a job I love. And I'm perfectly happy with it. I'm not sure that's the way that he approached his public life—that he was going to try for a job and stay there for one period of time. In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have."
On issue after issue, Preckwinkle presented Obama as someone who thrived in the world of Chicago politics. She suggested that Obama joined Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ for political reasons. "It's a church that would provide you with lots of social connections and prominent parishioners," she said. As we talked, it became increasingly clear that loyalty was the issue that drove Preckwinkle's current view of her onetime protégé. "I don't think you should forget who your friends are," she said.
There was also a more general belief that, after Obama won the 2004 United States Senate primary, he ignored his South Side base. Preckwinkle said, "My view is you have to bring your constituency along with you. Granted, you have to make some tough decisions. Granted, sometimes you have to make decisions that people won't understand or like. But it's your obligation to explain yourself and try to do your supporters the courtesy of treating them with respect." Ivory Mitchell, who for twenty years has been the chairman of the local ward organization in Obama's neighborhood—considered the most important Democratic organization on the South Side—was one of Obama's earliest backers. Today, he says, "All the work we did to help him get where he finally ended up, he didn't seem too appreciative." A year ago, Mitchell became a delegate for Hillary Clinton.
Some Obama supporters professed shock when, recently, he abandoned a pledge to stay within the public campaign-finance system if the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, agreed to do the same. Preckwinkle's concern about Obama—that he is a pure political animal—suddenly became more widespread; commentators abruptly stopped using the words "callow" and "naïve."
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In this early foray into politics, Obama revealed the toughness and brashness that this year's long primary season brought into view. As Burns, who has a mischievous sense of humor and a gift for mimicry, recalled, "Black activists, community folks, felt that he didn't respect their role"—Burns imitated a self-righteous activist—"in the struggle and the movement. He didn't engage in obeisance to them. He wanted to get the job done. And Barack's cheap, too. If you can't do it and do it in a cost-effective manner, you're not going to work with him." Ivory Mitchell, the ward chairman in Obama's neighborhood, says of Obama that "he was typical of what most aspiring politicians are: self-centered—that 'I can do anything and I'm willing to do it overnight.' "
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If Project Vote and Miner's firm introduced Obama to the city's lakefront liberals and South Side politicians, it was his wife who helped connect him to Chicago's black élite. One of Michelle's best friends was Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita, who became the godmother of the Obamas' first child. Michelle had worked as an aide to the younger Daley—hired by Valerie Jarrett, who is now one of Obama's closest advisers. It was also through Michelle that Obama met Marty Nesbitt, a successful young black entrepreneur who happened to play basketball with Michelle's brother, Craig. Nesbitt became Obama's closest friend and a bridge to the city's African-American business class.
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Many people who knew Obama then remember him for his cockiness. He had good reason to be self-assured. A number of his accomplishments had been accompanied by adoring press coverage. When he was named president of the Harvard Law Review, in 1990, he was profiled by, among others, the Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, and the Associated Press. Even then, the essential elements of Obama-mania were present: the fascination with his early life, the adulatory quotes from friends who thought that he would be President one day, and Obama's frank, though sometimes ostentatious, capacity for self-reflection.
His work for Project Vote was similarly applauded. In 1993, Crain's Chicago Business reported that Obama had "galvanized Chicago's political community, as no seasoned politico had before," and an alderman told Crain's, "Under Barack's leadership, we had the most successful, cost-effective and orderly voter registration drive I've ever been involved with." When "Dreams from My Father" was published, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive; Booklist included the memoir in a "guide to some of the best books of 1995."
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In October, he was one of the thousands of African-Americans from Chicago who travelled to Washington for the Million Man March. (Obama criticized the march, telling a local alternative newspaper that it was a waste of energy.) When he returned home, he had more immediate problems. In December, 1995, the South Side coalition that he had cobbled together began to fall apart. Palmer's congressional campaign was eclipsed by her Democratic-primary opponents—Jesse Jackson, Jr., who had star power, and Emil Jones, a longtime leader in the State Senate. The Chicago Defender reported that Obama was asked "to step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity and to release Palmer from her commitment"—so that she could reclaim her State Senate seat. Obama left the meeting noncommittal.
But, almost as fast as the threat to his campaign appeared, Obama stamped it out. The Dobrys were surprised that Palmer had so quickly gathered the signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot. They went to the Chicago board of elections and reviewed her petitions; as they suspected, they were filled with irregularities. One skill that the Independents had mastered in the years of fighting the first Mayor Daley was the machine's tactic of challenging ballot petitions, and the Dobrys were experts at this Chicago ritual. Publicly, Obama was conciliatory about the awkward political situation, telling the Hyde Park Herald that he understood that some people were upset about the "conflict between old loyalties and new enthusiasms." Privately, however, he unleashed his operators. With the help of the Dobrys, he was able to remove not just Palmer's name from the ballot but the name of every other opponent as well. "He ran unopposed, which is a good way to win," Mikva said, laughing at the recollection.
Instead of arriving in Springfield as the consensus candidate of his district, Obama was regarded as a troublemaker. "He had created some enemies," Emil Jones, who in 2003 became president of the Illinois Senate, said. Burns described the fallout of the Obama-Palmer race this way: "It established a reputation that 'you're not going to punk me, you're not going to roll me over, you're not going to jam me.' I think it established him as a threat. You have his independence with Project Vote, you have his refusal to knuckle under during the Alice Palmer thing, and so now you have a series of data points that have some established leaders in the black community feeling disrespected. And so the stage is now set for the comeuppance during the congressional race. That was their payback."
The payback refers to the 1999 US Congressional race between Obama and Bobby Rush in their home district of South Side Chicago. Obama thought he had a good chance, because Rush had recently lost a mayoral race against Richard Daley and was perceived to be politically weak. Then-Senator Obama was trailing badly in the fundraising battle (which, by the 1990's, became much more important to winning elections than the door-to-door get-out-the-vote battle), and eventually lost to Rush (who had the support of the established black community that was hostile to Obama) by 30 points. He was also plagued by bad luck, as Rush's son and father both died during the campaign, making him a sympathetic figure. Obama also went to Hawaii to visit his ill grandmother during a crucial gun-control debate in Springfield that failed without his vote, which caused a lot of negative press for him (the media accused him of going "on vacation" to the islands, instead of fighting for a bill that he had previously endorsed in the papers). This was his first big defeat, a defining moment in Obama's young political career, and he almost considered quitting politics.
But instead of leaving the game, he decided to play differently. He honed his oratory skills (before 2000, he rarely had a memorable speech). He shed his roots as an inner-city Hyde Park politician, and courted white voters more than blacks. And most importantly, he enlisted a Democratic consultant to help him redraw his Senate district in Chicago after the 2000 census. His old district encompassed poorer, black neighborhoods and the University of Chicago (a by-product of the 1990 Republican redistricting to concentrate black Democrat voters into the fewest districts). His new district still encompassed his home neighborhood and was majority black, but also contained some of the Gold Coast - richer North Side lakefront property. The poorer areas in the district also belonged to Tony Rezko and other developers friendly with Obama, who were in the process of gentrifying those blocks.
In an article in the Hyde Park Herald about how "partisan" and "undemocratic" Illinois redistricting had become, Obama was asked for his views. As usual, he was candid. "There is a conflict of interest built into the process," he said. "Incumbents drawing their own maps will inevitably try to advantage themselves."
The partisan redistricting of Illinois may have been the most important event in Obama's early political life. It immediately gave him the two things he needed to run for the Senate in 2004: money and power. He needed to have several times as much cash as he'd raised for his losing congressional race in 2000, and many of the state's top donors now lived or worked in his district. More important, the statewide gerrymandering made it likely that Obama's party would take over the State Senate in 2002, an event that would provide him with a platform from which to craft a legislative record in time for the campaign. Obama's political activity from 2001 to 2004 reveals a man transformed. The loss to Rush drained him of much of the naïveté he once exuded.
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Obama has benefitted from impeccable timing. As the national Party entered a period of ideological timidity, he was at the vanguard of a Democratic revival in Illinois that had begun in 1992, when Clinton and Braun won the state, and grew stronger when, four years later, Democrats took over the Illinois House of Representatives. It continued through 2002, when Democrats won the State Senate and the governor's office. By 2004, when Obama ran for the United States Senate, Illinois was a solidly blue state.
Not all of this was due to Democratic ingenuity; during this period the state Republican Party collapsed under the weight of corruption scandals. That is something of an Illinois tradition: four of the last nine governors have been indicted on charges of corruption, and three were convicted. As Saul Bellow once remarked, "Politics are politics, crime is crime, but in Chicago they occasionally overlap. The line between virtue and vice meanders madly—effective government on one side, connections on the other."
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E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, wrote about this transition in a 1999 column after Daley was reëlected. Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked: a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reëlection. "They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest," Obama told Dionne. It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself. Obama was learning that one of the greatest skills a politician can possess is candor about the dirty work it takes to get and stay elected.
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Almost as soon as he got to Springfield [as a State Senator], he was planning another move. He was bored there—once, he appeared to doze off during a caucus meeting—and frustrated by the Republicans' total control over the legislature. He seemed to believe, according to colleagues at the time, that he was destined for better things than being trapped in one of America's more notoriously corrupt state capitals. Obama spent little time socializing with "the guys basically from Chicago," the veteran senator Emil Jones said. "He hung around a lot of the downstaters. They became good friends."
Obama voted—a parliamentary error, Obama says—to block funding for a child-welfare facility in [rival Senator and Alice Palmer-ally Rickey] Hendon's district. Hendon rose and criticized Obama for the vote. The two men became embroiled in a yelling match on the Senate floor that looked as if it might become physical; they were separated by Courtney Nottage, then the chief of staff for Emil Jones. Nottage led Obama off the floor to a room that legislators used to make telephone calls. "It looked like two men that were having a serious disagreement and they had walked up to one another really close," Nottage told me. "I didn't think anything good could come of that."
Hendon told me, "He's the one that got mad, because he said I embarrassed him on the Senate floor. That's when he came over to my desk." Before Nottage broke them up, Obama, who had learned to box from his Indonesian stepfather, supposedly told Hendon, "I'm going to kick your ass!" Hendon said, "He said something like that." He added that more details will appear in a book that he's written, entitled "Black Enough, White Enough: The Obama Dilemma."
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Obama took at least one concrete step to turn this notion of the legislator as community organizer into a reality. In his first column in the Hyde Park Herald, the same one in which he addressed welfare, he announced that he was "organizing citizens' committees" to help him shape legislation. He asked his constituents to call his office if they wanted to participate. That kind of airy talk about changing politics gave way almost immediately to the realities of the job. I asked a longtime Obama friend what ever became of the committees. "They never really got off the ground," he said. By 2001, if there was any maxim from community organizing that Obama lived by, it was the Realpolitik commandment of Saul Alinsky, the founding practitioner of community organizing, to operate in "the world as it is and not as we would like it to be."
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In his biography of Obama, David Mendell, noting that Obama's speech occurred a few months before the official declaration of his U.S. Senate candidacy, suggests that the decision to publicly oppose the war in Iraq was a calculated political move intended to win favor with Saltzman. The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, "He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!"
The sensitive language of his September 11th statement was gone. Instead, Obama distanced himself from the pacifist activists who were surely present. "Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances," he told the crowd. He then went further, defending justifiable wars in almost glorious terms. "The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don't oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's Army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow-troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don't oppose all wars." It took some nerve to tweak the crowd in this way. After all, it was unlikely that many of the protesters knew who Obama was, and in a lengthy write-up of the event in the Chicago Tribune the following day he was not mentioned. Yet the speech reads as if it had been written for a much bigger audience.
During this period, Obama also became more of a strategist, someone increasingly comfortable discussing the finer points of polls, message, and fund-raising. According to his friends, Obama does not delegate campaign planning. This was in 2002, and things seemed to be going his way. The incumbent Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, was unpopular, and the race was attracting a large field of Democrats. "He didn't start telling people he was interested in running for Senate until he figured out what the road map was," Nesbitt said. "He had a good sense of the odds, and he knew there were certain things that had to happen. . . . The first thing he said was, 'O.K., nobody with approval ratings like this has ever been reëlected, so it's not gonna be him, right?' And then he said there's a bunch of candidates who can potentially run, one of whom was Carol Moseley Braun. And he said, 'If she runs, I probably don't have a chance, because there's gonna be certain loyalty within the African-American community to her, even though she had some mistakes, and I'm probably not gonna get those African-American votes, which I need as my base if I'm gonna win. So if she runs, I don't run.'
"Then he just laid out an economic analysis. It becomes about money, because he knew that if people knew his story they would view him as a better candidate than anybody else he thought might be in the field. And so he said, 'Therefore, if you raise five million dollars, I have a fifty-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise seven million dollars, I have a seventy-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise ten million dollars, I guarantee victory."
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In the State Senate, [Senator Emil] Jones did something even more important for Obama. He pushed him forward as the key sponsor of some of the Party's most important legislation, even though the move did not sit well with some colleagues who had plugged away in the minority on bills that Obama now championed as part of the majority. "Because he had been in the minority, Barack didn't have a legislative record to run on, and there was a buildup of all these great ideas that the Republicans kept in the rules committee when they were in the majority," Burns said. "Jones basically gave Obama the space to do what Obama wanted to do. Emil made it clear to people that it would be good for them." Burns, who at that point was working for Jones, was assigned to keep an eye on Obama's floor votes, which, because he was a Senate candidate, would be under closer scrutiny. The Obama-Jones alliance worked. In one year, 2003, Obama passed much of the legislation, including bills on racial profiling, death-penalty reform, and expanded health insurance for children, that he highlighted in his Senate campaign.
