It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone
screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks
ago, but not this garbage.
Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me
an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from
hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn't yet
hit local newsstands.
It's the first time I ever heard him yell, and I'm trembling as I set
down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.
...
This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before
he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father
has been out of print for years.
It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park
Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning
$19,000 a year covering politics and crime.
I talked with Obama on a regular basis — a couple times a month, at
least. I'd ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he
was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column
published in our papers. It ran with a headshot that made him look about
14 years old. ...
I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I
always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was
intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.
It was serendipity that I ever came to know Obama at all. Looking
back, I think of it as a Forrest Gump moment: History was unfolding and
I was at the center of it, clueless. It's a huge bummer to me that I
never taped our interviews. ...
A week after my profile of Obama was published, [in the Illinois
Times] I called some of my contacts in the Illinois Legislature. I
ran through a list of black Chicago lawmakers who had worked with Obama,
and was surprised to learn that many resented him and had supported
other candidates in the U.S. Senate election.
"Anybody but Obama," the late state Representative Lovana
Jones told me at the time.
State Representative Monique Davis, who attended the same church as
Obama and co-sponsored several bills with him, also did not support his
candidacy. She complained of feeling overshadowed by Obama.
"I was snubbed," Davis told me. "I felt he was
shutting me out of history."
In a follow-up report published a couple weeks later, I wrote about
these disgruntled black legislators and the central role Senate
President Emil Jones played in Obama's revived political life.
The morning after the story was posted online, I arrived early at my
new offices. I hadn't taken my coat off when the phone rang. It was
Obama.
The article began, "It can be painful to hear Ivy League-bred
Barack Obama talk jive."
Obama told me he doesn't speak jive, that he doesn't say the words
"homeboy" or "peeps."
It seemed so silly; I thought for sure he was joking. He wasn't.
He said the black legislators I cited in the story were off-base, and
that they couldn't have gotten the bills passed without him.
I started to speak, and he shouted me down.
He said he liked the other story I wrote.
I asked if there was anything factually inaccurate about the latest
story.
He repeated that his former colleagues couldn't have passed the bills
without him.
He asked why I wrote this story, then cut me off when I started to
answer.
He said he should have been given a chance to respond.
I told him I had requested an interview through his communications
director.
He said I should have called his cell phone.
I reminded him that he had asked me months ago to stop calling his
cell phone due to his busier schedule.
He said again that I should have called his cell phone.
Today I no longer have Obama's cell phone number. I submitted two
formal requests to interview Obama for this story through his Web site,
but have not heard back. I also e-mailed interview requests to three of
his top staffers, but none responded.
Maybe he'll call the day after this story runs. I'll get to the
office early just in case. And this time I'll have my recorder ready.
"Barack
Obama and Me" by Todd
Spivak Houston Press, February 28, 2008
todd.spivak@houstonpress.com