How Obama learned to be a natural | page 2
Back in 2000, when I interviewed Obama in his cubicle-size office at a downtown law firm, he started the meeting by checking his watch. Then he dissed his congressional district, half-joking that he was more committed to the South Side than his opponents, because, number one, he'd moved there from Hawaii, and number two, he could have been raking it in on Wall Street.
"I really have to want to live here," he said. "I'm like a salmon swimming upstream on the South Side of Chicago. At every juncture of my life, I could have taken the path of least resistance but much higher pay. Being the president of the Harvard Law Review is a big deal. The typical path for someone like myself is to clerk for the Supreme Court, and then basically you have your pick of any law firm in the country."
Didn't the people appreciate the sacrifices he'd made? To grind out a voter registration drive when he could have been earning $200K a year at a white-shoe firm? They didn't. On Primary Day, Obama received 31 percent of the vote. He didn't lose because he was "too white." He lost because he was a presumptuous young man challenging a popular incumbent. If anything, his whiteness spared him a bigger beating. He ran strongly in Beverly, an enclave of Irish cops who had never forgiven Rush for his Black Panther past.
Trotter, who is plenty black, got 7 percent. In fact, Obama may be lucky he didn't win. It's harder to get to the U.S. Senate -- or the cover of Men's Vogue, or the drawing rooms of Manhattan donors -- from a black-majority district.
Obama returned to Springfield a loser. The week of his defeat, he sat down to his regular poker game at the home of state Sen. Terry Link, a fellow Democrat from the Chicago suburbs. The same words were on the lips of every pol at that table: I told you so. Obama didn't need to hear it. He knew he'd blundered.
"He made a lot of mistakes, and he learned," Link says now. "He forgot who he was. That he's Barack. He tried to sell to a crowd who wasn't buying."
Around that time, Obama also had a soul-searching drink with Miller, the Capitol Fax publisher. He was upset about the way Miller had characterized him, but "he took that criticism the right way," Miller remembers six years later, "and he could have taken it the wrong way."
"A lot of politicians, they know that they're smart," Miller says. "They know that they're capable. It messes with their minds. Politics is not a game of qualifications. It's a game of winning. That congressional campaign really showed that to him."
On the state Senate floor, Miller saw a more focused, more collegial Obama, who began to take his work -- and his fellow legislators -- seriously. Using his experience in constitutional law, he passed legislation to curtail racially motivated traffic stops and to require police to videotape murder confessions. He sponsored legislation that added 20,000 children to the state's health insurance program.
"I just can't emphasize enough how much this guy became respected, and how transformative it was," Miller says. "By 2004, he just had this aura about him."
Even black legislators, who had resented Obama in his early years, were won over. He earned the respect of Trotter, who watched his fellow senator mature from a résumé in search of an office to an effective legislator. Trotter was so impressed, he now sits on Obama's presidential exploratory committee.
"I wouldn't say losing humbled him," Trotter says, swatting away a term used by many of his white colleagues. "Barack is a competitor, and being a competitor, you don't like to lose. When he came back, he really immersed himself in the process. He learned he had to get an agenda, to get issues he felt passionately about. He also learned some of those 'get-along' qualities you need to get a bill passed. He has proven himself to me that he can take advice. He's not a one-man operation."
I'd thought Obama had campaigned like an ass, but I expected him to run for the U.S. Senate. And I expected him to win. His white upbringing would appeal to suburbanites, while South Siders might figure that Obama was as black a senator as they were going to get, after the Carol Moseley Braun debacle. His braininess, his haughtiness, his sense of entitlement -- they could only be pluses in a Senate campaign. They don't call that place Ego Mountain for nothing.
In 2004, I went down to his Michigan Avenue campaign office to interview him for the Reader. His press secretary had already scolded me for the "negative" quotes in my last article. I was expecting another preening, insecure performance. But Obama charmed me right away. He did it to dozens of reporters that year. "Good to see you again," he intoned, casually, gliding across the room like Fred Astaire playing Abe Lincoln. He had doffed his suit coat for shirtsleeves.
We went into his office, where, sitting under a giant photo of Muhammad Ali knocking out Sonny Liston, Obama tried out some lines he would use at the Democratic National Convention.
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