Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Barack Obama has come to graceful terms with his mixed-race heritage. Now, as he runs for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, he's connecting with voters across the color spectrum.
Mar 30, 2004 | I met Barack Obama, the new Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, eight years ago, at the home of mutual friends. Making introductions, our hostess suggested we had a good deal in common. Like me, Obama was an author -- he had recently published an autobiography, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" -- and he was a graduate of Harvard Law School, my legal alma mater. Unlike me, however, Obama was about to step into politics as a candidate for the Illinois State Senate from Hyde Park, home of the University of Chicago and a stretch of poor neighborhoods that run west from there. I spent much of the evening speaking to Obama and his wife, Michelle, yet another Harvard Law School graduate, and bought Obama's book the next day, which I praised when we met again. In the ensuing years I have stayed in touch with him, observing the ups and downs of his political career.
At the moment, Obama's career is way up, the result of one of the more impressive political victories in recent Illinois history. Sixteen months ago, when he entered the U.S. Senate race here, the odds seemed decidedly against Obama, who was running in his first statewide contest and whose Kenyan last name rhymes uncomfortably with Osama. Yet on March 16, Obama captured 53 percent of the vote in a six-person field, more than double the vote garnered by his nearest competitor, Illinois' comptroller, Dan Hynes. Hynes, who comes across as quiet, competent and likable, had been elected statewide twice before, and as the son of the former Cook County assessor, he is a scion of Chicago's Democratic machine, whose apparatus was fully behind him throughout the campaign. Despite that, Obama outpolled Hynes even in Hynes' home ward in Chicago. Coming in a distant third in the race was Blair Hull, who made half a billion dollars in the brokerage business and who spent $29 million of it on the primary. As the result of an early TV blitz, Hull led in the polls, until a past that included spousal-abuse charges and chemical-dependency treatment sank him.
Barack Obama now becomes the national flag-bearer for Democratic hopes to retake the U.S. Senate, which the Republicans hold by one vote. He is hoping to win the seat being vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald, whose quixotic maneuvers in the Senate left him bereft of support at the end of one term. Handsome, poised, intelligent, Obama has already begun to attract national attention, as he moves toward becoming only the third African-American elected to the Senate in more than a century.
Having known Obama since the inception of his political career, I have watched his rise closely. We are hardly intimates, but we are certainly warm with each other, and I have been a political contributor and supporter of his. No one in these circumstances would regard himself as unbiased (except perhaps Justice Antonin Scalia). That said, I have many friends whose company I savor whom I would not commend for service in the U.S. Senate. Obama, though, has matured in plain view. He has gone from someone impatient with the legislative process to an effective and respected leader in the Illinois Senate, and from a candidate who once seemed to be getting ahead of himself politically, and whose base in the black community was shaky, to a figure who appeals to voters of all hues.
Obama is the early favorite in the race. Illinois has trended decidedly Democratic in recent years: Gore carried the state handily in 2000, and in 2002, when the Republicans scored elsewhere, the Democrats swept in Illinois, reelecting our senior U.S. senator, Richard Durbin (another rising Democratic star), capturing both houses of the General Assembly, and electing Rod Blagojevich as the state's first Democratic governor in 30 years. There is no sign of a turnaround. More than twice as many Democrats as Republicans voted in the primary elections on March 16, even though the Republicans ran a seven-person race for the Senate nomination that was highlighted by a barrage of TV advertising as a group of multimillionaires squared off against one another. If Obama capitalizes on these advantages and wins, he will become the highest-ranking African-American elected official in the country.
Obama's biography is both intriguing and inspiring, an American story for the 21st century. The résumé detail that initially caught wide attention was his election in 1990 as the first African-American president (that is, editor in chief) of the Harvard Law Review, the premier legal academic publication in the United States. Banish any lurking thought of an affirmative-action wind at his back. Exams at Harvard Law School are graded blind, and Obama graduated magna cum laude (also unlike me.) He has taught for many years at the University of Chicago Law School, along with many of the country's preeminent legal scholars.
But academic excellence is only one part of his story. "Dreams From My Father" is a beautifully crafted book, moving and candid, and it belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride's "The Color of Water" and Greg Williams' "Life on the Color Line" as a tale of living astride America's racial categories. No other figure on the American political scene can claim such broad roots within the human community. Obama is the very face of American diversity.
His parents met as college students in 1960. His father, also named Barack Obama, was from Kenya's Luo tribe, the first African exchange student at the University of Hawaii. His mother, Anna, had gone to Hawaii from Kansas with her parents. Even in Hawaii's polyglot culture a black and white couple remained at best an oddity in 1961, when Obama was born; at the time miscegenation was still a crime in many states. Nor was Obama Sr.'s marriage welcomed in Kenya. Under those pressures, Obama's father departed when Barack was 2 to pursue his Ph.D. at Harvard, leaving his son with mother and grandparents. When Obama was 6, Anna remarried. Her new husband was Lolo, an Indonesian oil company manager, and the new family moved to Djakarta, where Obama's sister Maya was born. (Obama describes her looks as those "of a Latin queen.")
After two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school, Obama was sent by his mother back to her parents' home so that he could attend Hawaii's esteemed Punahou Academy. Living with two middle-aged, middle-class white people (his grandfather was a salesman, his grandmother a bank employee trapped by a glass ceiling), Obama struggled as an adolescent with the realities of being African-American, an identity that was in part imposed by others, and yet one he also embraced as the legacy of a father for whom he yearned but with whom he enjoyed only sporadic contact. He attended California's Occidental College, then Columbia. After graduation he moved to Chicago, where he worked for a number of years as a community organizer on the city's South Side, employed by a consortium of church and community groups that hoped to save manufacturing jobs.
Obama's father died in a traffic accident in Nairobi in 1982, but while Obama was working in Chicago, he met his Kenyan sister, Auma, a linguist educated in Germany who was visiting the United States. When she returned to Kenya in 1986 to teach for a year at the University of Nairobi, Obama finally made the trip to his father's homeland he had long promised himself. There, he managed to fully embrace a heritage and a family he'd never fully known and come to terms with his father, whom he'd long regarded as an august foreign prince, but now realized was a human being burdened by his own illusions and vulnerabilities. With that, Obama began to feel more accepting of himself. Harvard, law practice, teaching and politics followed.
As a legislator and politician, Obama has had both missteps and triumphs. During his first year or two in the Illinois Legislature, he sometimes found it hard to connect with colleagues who occasionally seemed put off by his credentials, and even harder to get anything done. In 1999, after only three years as a state senator, Obama decided to challenge Bobby Rush, the longtime congressional representative, who had begun his public life as a leader of the local Black Panther Party. More than one veteran Democrat claims to have told Obama it was too soon to move on to another office, but he was eager to take on Rush, whose rhetorical victories have often outpaced his achievements as a representative. But Rush thrashed Obama in the 2000 Democratic primary, leading political insiders to speculate that Obama, with his Ivy League manner, was "not black enough" to make Chicago's large African-American community his political base.
The same period also produced Obama's most substantive political gaffe. Richard M. Daley, Chicago's Democratic mayor, had forged an alliance with the Republican governor, George Ryan, to promote a gun-control bill fiercely opposed by the National Rifle Association and the Republican majority leader of the state Senate. Intense pressure was mounted by both sides, and as final consideration approached at year's end in 1999, the nose-counting indicated that a few votes one way or the other would control the bill's fate. Despite being committed to the measure, Obama reportedly ignored entreaties to return from Hawaii, where he was visiting his family. The gun-control measure went down to defeat, and Obama's subsequent explanation for his absence, saying that his younger daughter had fallen seriously ill, did not play well either with the press -- the Chicago Tribune blasted him as "gutless" -- or his fellow politicians, who'd left plenty of sickbeds and vacations in their time for the sake of public duty.
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