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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Before Washington, a black Chicagoan pol's highest aspiration was U.S. representative. After Washington, it became senator, and finally, president. Plenty of other cities have had black mayors -- Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore -- but in none of those places have blacks achieved as much statewide political success. Chicago has two unique advantages, says political consultant Don Rose. First, it's in Cook County, which contains nearly half of Illinois' voters. Second, the local Democratic Party is a countywide organization. After Chicago's Carol Moseley Braun beat two white men to win the 1992 Democratic Senate primary, precinct captains in white Chicago neighborhoods and the suburbs whipped up votes for her in the general election.
"They had to go out and sell the black person to demonstrate that the party was still open," says Rose, who sees "direct links" from Washington to Moseley Braun to Obama.
"It was a hard-fought thing. If you use Harold Washington's election as the pivot point, what you begin to see is black politicians making challenges to the regular organizations, and then the organizations having to support them."
The other, non-Cook County, half of Illinois also plays an important role. When Obama stood before the Democratic National Convention in 2004 to deliver the keynote address, he kicked off his speech with a nod to "the great state of Illinois -- crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln." That wasn't just a shout-out to the home folks. It was an acknowledgment of how the entire state had placed him on that stage.
Much as it dominates Illinois, Chicago can't elect a senator by itself. Black candidates also need support in downstate Illinois, which happens to be a region with a history of working out racial questions for the rest of the country. The prairie towns still cherish the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. When I lived in Decatur, smack in the middle of the state, I drank in the Lincoln Lounge, passed a courthouse statue depicting Lincoln as a young lawyer, and fished in the Sangamon River at the Lincoln homestead, west of town. It's no coincidence that two Illinoisans ended slavery -- Lincoln, by signing the Emancipation Proclamation, and Ulysses S. Grant, by accepting Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Before the Civil War, Illinois was evenly divided between Southerners who'd migrated up from Kentucky and Tennessee, and Yankees who'd reached the state through the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. More than a generation before the rest of the nation took up the dispute, Illinois held a bitter plebiscite on slavery. The southern counties voted aye, the northern counties nay. The argument was continued in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. In his Senate primary, Obama finished second downstate, but ran well in central Illinois, where Lincoln had traveled as a circuit-riding lawyer. He even won Lincoln's hometown of Springfield.
"It's clear that white voters in this state are willing to vote for qualified black candidates statewide," says John Jackson of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University. "You just don't find very many states where white voters are willing to vote for black candidates." Part of it is Chicago's ability to groom those candidates, part is the moderate character of the state's Republicans and independents, and part is the Yellow Dog Democratic vote in poor, rural southern Illinois, Jackson says.
Later, when Obama faced Alan Keyes in the nation's first black-on-black Senate contest, columnist Amity Shlaes wrote that "Illinois has a record as host to such innovation" and was "yet again emerging as the venue for a shift on race."
It was an election in which skin color was not an issue, won by a black candidate who has shown unprecedented appeal to white voters. That Illinois would become the birthplace of post-racial politics was no surprise to Obama. Early in his Chicago years, he realized his adopted home was a perfect training ground for solving America's problems, racial and otherwise. Last year, the Associated Press crowned Illinois "most average state" because its demographics so closely match the nation's. The United States is 13.4 percent black. Illinois is 14.9 percent black.
"Part of what attracts me about Illinois generally is I think it's a microcosm of the country: north, south, east, west, black, white, urban, rural, southern, northern," Obama once said. "For somebody who cares deeply about the country, and about the issues and struggles this country's going through, I can't think of a better laboratory to work on some of the pressing issues we confront."
Barack Obama came to Chicago decades after the Great Migration, but for a young black man with political ambitions, it still turned out to be the promised land.
