Anyone who goes into elective office, especially in a big city like
Chicago, nearly always has to have a "sponsor" - a mentor who,
usually for ulterior motives, takes a promising potential politician under
his/her wing and tutors them in the way of "gaining favor" and
"making a reputation" for themselves. Barack Obama was no
exception, in this story told by Todd Spivak, who knew him when they were
both young, idealistic and relatively inexperienced in the ways of the
political world.
Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of
Obama's seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that
went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years,
Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative achievements.
Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on
the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every
lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years,
Illinois Democrats controlled the governor's office as well as both
legislative chambers.
The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate
Majority Leader James "Pate" Philip was replaced by Emil Jones
Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for
chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.
Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He
represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama's.
He became Obama's kingmaker.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones
called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now
hosts the city's most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation
as follows:
"He said, 'Cliff, I'm gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'"
"Oh, you are? Who might that be?"
"Barack Obama."
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece
of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had
more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
"I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist
comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,"
State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial
profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and
given to Obama, complained to me at the time. "Barack didn't have
to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.
"I don't consider it bill jacking," Hendon told me.
"But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the
one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit
and the stats in the record book."
During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama's stats
soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including
many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as
inexperienced.
It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of
national politics — and he couldn't have done it without Jones.
Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown
even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of
Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.
Jones further helped raise Obama's profile by having him craft
legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local
news headlines.
For instance. Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet
supplement ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football
player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or
pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during
a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national
attention and extensive local coverage.
I spoke to Jones earlier this week and he confirmed his conversation
with Kelley, adding that he gave Obama the legislation because he
believed in Obama's ability to negotiate with Democrats and Republicans
on divisive issues.
So how has Obama repaid Jones?
Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama
released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year
2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois,
including tens of millions for Jones's Senate district.
Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his
view on pork-barrel spending.
I'll never forget what he said:
"Some call it pork; I call it steak." ...
The communities surrounding Hyde Park were predominantly black and
impoverished, marked by high crime, boarded-up storefronts and vacant
lots. In some residential areas, banks and grocery stores were several
miles away.
On the stump, Obama has frequently invoked his experiences as a
community organizer on the Chicago South Side in the early 1990s, when
he passed on six-figure salary offers at corporate law firms after
graduating from Harvard Law School to direct a massive
voter-registration drive.
But, as a state senator, Obama evaded leadership on a host of
critical community issues, from historic preservation to the rapid
demolition of nearby public-housing projects, according to many South
Siders.
Harold Lucas, a veteran South Side community organizer who remembers
when Obama was "just a big-eared kid fresh out of school,"
says he didn't finally decide to support Obama's presidential bid until
he was actually inside the voting booth on Super Tuesday.
"I'm not happy about the quality of life in my community,"
says Lucas, who now heads a black-heritage tourism business in Chicago.
"As a local elected official, he had a primary role in that."
In addition to Hyde Park, Obama also represented segments of several
South Side neighborhoods home to the nation's richest African-American
cultural history outside of Harlem.
Before World War II, the adjacent Bronzeville community was known as
the "Black Metropolis," attracting African-American migrants
seeking racial equality and economic opportunity from states to the
south such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
Storied jazz clubs such as Gerri's Palm Tavern regularly hosted Duke
Ellington, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker and many others. In the
postwar era, blues legends Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King all
regularly gigged in cramped juke joints such as the Checkerboard Lounge.
When the City of Chicago seized the 70-year-old Gerri's Palm Tavern
by eminent domain in 2001, sparking citywide protests, Obama was silent.
And he offered no public comments when the 30-year owner of the
Checkerboard Lounge was forced to relocate a couple years later.
Even in Hyde Park, Obama declined to take a position on a years-long
battle waged by hundreds of local community activists fighting against
the city's plan to replace the historic limestone seawall along Lake
Michigan — a popular spot to sunbathe and swim — with
concrete steps.
It would be comparable to representing Barton Creek in Austin, and
sidestepping any discussion about conservation.
Obama's aloofness on key community issues for years frustrated Lucas
and many other South Siders. Now they believe he was just afraid of
making political enemies or being pigeonholed as a black candidate.
Lucas says he has since become an ardent Obama supporter.
"His campaign has built a momentum of somebody being born to the
moment," Lucas says. "He truly gives the perception that he
could possibly pull us all together around being American again. And the
hope of that is worth the risk when you look at the other candidates. I
mean, you can't get away from old school when you look at Hillary."
Lucas even believes Obama made the right choice by declining PBS
talk-show host Tavis Smiley's invitation to speak at this week's State
of the Black Union 2008 conference in New Orleans.
"Obama can't bring those issues up if he wants to be
elected," Lucas says. "And that's the travesty of the
situation that we find ourselves in as African-Americans." ...
Though it didn't make national news, Obama inflamed many residents in
his old state Senate district last March when he endorsed controversial
Chicago alderman Dorothy Tillman in a runoff election.
Flamboyant and unpredictable, Tillman is perhaps best known for once
pulling a pistol from her purse and brandishing it around at a city
council meeting. The ward she represented for 22 years, which included
historic Bronzeville, comprised the city's largest concentration of
vacant lots.
Just three months before Obama made his endorsement, the Lakefront
Outlook community newspaper ran a three-part investigative series
exposing flagrant cronyism and possible tax-law violations that
centered on Tillman and her biggest pet project, a taxpayer-funded
cultural center built across the street from her ward office that had
been hemorrhaging money since its inception.
The series won a national George Polk Award, among the most coveted
prizes in journalism. Not bad for a 12-page rag with a circulation of
12,000 and no Web site. I had already left the Outlook and had
nothing to do with the project.
In the end, Tillman lost the election despite Obama's endorsement,
which critics said countered his calls for clean government. Obama told
the Chicago Tribune that he had backed Tillman because she was an
early supporter of his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.
Many speculate Obama only bothered to weigh in on a paltry city
council election during his presidential campaign as a gesture to
Chicago's powerful Mayor Richard M. Daley, a Tillman supporter. Even so,
Obama should have remained neutral, says Timuel Black, a historian and
City Colleges of Chicago professor emeritus who lived in Obama's state
Senate district.
"That was not a wise decision," Black says. "It was
poor judgment on his part. He was operating like a politician trying to
win the next step up." ...
Obama has spent his entire political career trying to win the next
step up. Every three years, he has aspired to a more powerful political
position.
He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for political
office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as Black, still
resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his seat in the
Illinois Legislature.
Obama hired fellow Harvard Law alum and election law expert Thomas
Johnson to challenge the nominating petitions of four other candidates,
including the popular incumbent, Alice Palmer, a liberal activist who
had held the seat for several years, according to an April 2007 Chicago
Tribune report.
Obama found enough flaws in the petition sheets — to appear on the
ballot, candidates needed 757 signatures from registered voters living
within the district — to knock off all the other Democratic
contenders. He won the seat unopposed.
"A close examination of Obama's first campaign clouds the image
he has cultivated throughout his political career," wrote Tribune
political reporters David Jackson and Ray Long. "The man now
running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless
first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by
clearing it."
This story of how Obama eliminated his competition from the ballot is
also told by the Chicago Tribune, which when I lived in the Windy
City was a staunch Republican paper, as opposed to the more liberal Sun-Times
and Daily American. The Tribune story is more sympathetic,
even though some its columns, like its blog, The Swamp, are
decidedly less so.
