Don’t you think it would be cool to be a senator?
—BLAIR HULL, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR THE SENATE
The Senate contest of 2004 taught Dan Hynes how difficult it can be to be anointed front-runner in a high-profile political race. When something does not go your way, your spot at the top and the strength of your candidacy are instantly questioned. And few things went Hynes’s way in this campaign.
With his powerful father’s longtime ties to organized labor, a key Democratic Party constituency, Hynes was expected to lock up labor support far and wide. In fact, he had won the endorsement of nearly every trade union in the state, groups representing seven hundred thousand workers overall. But Hynes was the state comptroller, whose only real responsibility was cutting payments for the state’s bills. Throughout 2003, Barack Obama had been working in the legislature on behalf of various labor groups. And thanks to his tight friendship with senate president Emil Jones Jr., he was successful at pushing pieces of legislation that benefited labor interests. Jones had also given Obama the chairmanship of the senate’s Health Committee, which gave him a close working relationship with the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU had more than one hundred thousand members in Illinois, representing tens of thousands of nursing and other medical workers. So when Obama plucked the SEIU’s endorsement away from Hynes, it was a major coup. The SEIU was a younger, more racially diverse union than the mostly white trade unions. In the 1990s, the SEIU began building an effective grassroots political mechanism, running phone banks and amassing armies of volunteers to work on behalf of endorsed political candidates. On a cold, dreary Saturday morning in December 2003, Obama addressed the annual state convention of enthusiastic SEIU members at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. He donned a purple SEIU jacket and spoke passionately about the union movement in America. Impressively, thousands had turned out early that morning to hear Obama preach about how he could win the Senate race. But, of course, he needed their help, he told them. “I can’t do this alone,” he said.
“Barack has taken the lead on issues of significant importance to our members,” said Tom Balanoff, the SEIU president, in explaining the Obama endorsement. “He’s also been out there for us when we have been in trouble, during strikes and things like that.” In Springfield, Obama indeed had carried SEIU’s water. He was instrumental in expanding child-care benefits for workers and had been an ardent proponent of universal health care coverage. He was also a leader on the so-called hospital report card act, which, among other things, required hospitals to post staffing levels and mortality rates on the Internet. After the SEIU’s blessing, endorsements followed from the Chicago teachers’ union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. This shifted some momentum toward Obama and away from Hynes.
Hynes struck back with the hard-fought endorsement of the labor umbrella group, the AFL-CIO, as well as with John Stroger, the African-American president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners. But in the end, the Stroger endorsement was an empty gesture. Stroger even conceded that he was endorsing Hynes strictly as a favor to Hynes’s father, Thomas, Stroger’s longtime political friend. Hynes’s aides contended that this showed Obama’s weakness among black voters. But when I scanned the room during the Hynes event, it was clear from the lack of enthusiasm in their physical reactions that the two dozen blacks in attendance had come more because they were part of Stroger’s large political operation than because of any good feelings toward Hynes. I surmised that at least half of these blacks would ultimately vote for Obama if he were in contention on election day. Indeed, history shows that if there is a viable black candidate on the ballot, African Americans will overwhelmingly support that person in the privacy of the voting booth, no matter how many verbal endorsements the white candidates in the race have sewn up in the black community.
Hynes had other problems too. For one, like the various Democratic presidential candidates, Hynes supported giving President Bush the authority to invade Iraq. In the first debate in the race, Obama sought to exploit what he believed was an Achilles’ heel for a Democrat in a primary contest. He pressured Hynes about his support of the impending war in Iraq and tweaked him for having no legislative experience when Hynes seemed to waver on that support. “The legislature is full of tough calls,” Obama said in a lecturing tone. “It’s not like an administrative job; it requires tough calls.” Hynes was also dogged by questions from the panel about a story I had written in the Tribune about Hynes’s questionable bundling of campaign contributions from a donor who did business with his office. The donor had his employees give thousands of dollars to Hynes’s campaign fund and then reimbursed the workers from the company pot, something that federal elections officials ultimately found was illegal.
With all this controversy swirling around Hynes, I looked around for him when the radio debate was concluded, but he had ducked out of the postdebate Q&A with reporters. It’s never a good sign when a candidate for public office feels compelled to run from the press.
By December 2003, opinion polling showed that a great number of Illinois Democrats had no idea whom they would vote for in the contest, with “undecided” being the overwhelming favorite. Among voters with a preference, Hynes was leading, with about 20 percent of respondents saying they would cast a ballot for him. Blair Hull was coming up on Hynes’s heels on the strength of his massive television campaign. Gery Chico had raised a lot of cash and had spent almost as much as he had collected, but he was languishing in the single digits and looking more like an also-ran. Maria Pappas, who had been in politics for years and possessed high name recognition in Chicago, polled in the double digits, but had no discernible campaign operation. The still obscure Obama was around 10 percent, but he had two bases that he was working diligently, and Axelrod was singing his praises to people of influence.
So the burgeoning story was Hull. His steady movement in the polls from nowhere to just behind Hynes greatly concerned Hynes, as well as the other candidates. Most campaign strategists were aiming to get their candidate to 30 percent. With so many contenders, this thinking went, the first candidate to reach 30 would be hard to stop. It was increasingly looking as if only three candidates had a shot at getting to this point: Hynes, Hull and Obama.
But Hull’s rapid ascent had put Hynes and his staff into a mild panic. The problem for Hynes: Hull was grabbing voters downstate and in other rural corners of Illinois, where life was slower and his television advertising was seeping into the public consciousness. In Chicago, his ads were more likely to get lost amid the urban frenzy. But Hull’s name and message were gaining notice in these small towns even though he had never set foot in them. These were voters that Hynes was counting on. Obama would draw blacks in and around Chicago, lakefront liberals and perhaps college students. But if Hynes was to win, he needed rural voters on his side. Believing he had to blunt Hull’s early movement, Hynes dropped several hundred thousand dollars in television commercials in downstate markets in late 2003, months before the March primary election. Unfortunately, with voters still not engaged in the race, the brief ad campaign by Hynes had little penetration; in fact, it served only to take a chunk of money from his campaign fund that he would need down the stretch.
I turned my attention to Hull. I had heard from Tribune political writer Rick Pearson, among others, that Hull’s sketchy past deserved looking into at some depth. Hull had the oddest of political résumés, although it was becoming more commonplace for the excessively wealthy to enter electoral politics using their personal fortunes to bankroll a campaign. A federal campaign law, called the “Millionaires’ Amendment,” had been enacted to try to even the playing field for less well-heeled candidates in races with candidates of extreme personal wealth. The amendment allowed other candidates to surpass federal donation limits when raising money for such races. In the Illinois contest, this was quite advantageous to Obama, who relied heavily on wealthy lakefront donors like the Pritzkers. It seemed that every member of the Pritzker clan had given the new maximum of twelve thousand dollars to Obama. Hynes, meanwhile, was funded by labor unions and political action committees, which could not spread out their maximum contributions among friends and relatives.
Hull, who possessed a scarily keen mathematical mind, had been a professional blackjack gambler who turned his winnings into Wall Street success. At the urging of his partners, he had sold his securities firm for more than half a billion dollars and then, looking for a new professional interest, turned to Illinois politics. But what intrigued me was not his past but his current campaign. When I tracked him on the campaign trail for a few days, I was stunned by the extreme artificiality of both the candidate and his message. I had lunched with a longtime political source in the city who told me that, like Axelrod, he had interviewed with Hull but declined a job offer. Just as one line from Hull had frightened off Axelrod, this source offered a similar story. When he had asked Hull why he was seeking office, Hull responded: “Don’t you think it would be cool to be a senator?” The source was stunned: “How do you work for a guy whose sole purpose for running seems to be that it would be a cool job?” Moreover, in briefings with his many aides, Hull even expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of a representative democracy. “For goodness sake, don’t say that in public,” he was warned. “You are running for the U.S. Senate, after all.”
I didn’t find much more depth on the campaign trail. Hull had tapped his vast finances to construct one of the most sophisticated political operations anywhere in the country that campaign season. His staff and payroll were larger than those of any Democratic presidential contenders, and he had hired some of the most savvy consultants in the business at top-dollar wages. But this was also part of his undoing. His aides joked that they were working on the “Noah’s Ark” of campaigns because there were two of each of them: two pollsters, two communications directors, two campaign chairmen. This could often mean far too many conflicting voices around the strategy table. His campaign manager earned twenty thousand dollars a month and his policy director fifteen thousand a month. He had as many as twenty-eight consultants on the payroll in the last three months of 2003. He tooled around Chicago in a huge recreational vehicle that had cost the campaign forty thousand dollars. At a joint appearance of the candidates in suburban DuPage County, I was following Obama for the day when he spotted the RV with its huge red-white-and-blue lettering on the side: HULL FOR SENATE. “Gee, what’s that?” Obama asked with a sense of wonderment. “That’s Hull on Wheels,” I explained, using the Hull campaign’s moniker for the vehicle. “How do I compete with that?” he asked rhetorically.
It’s true that all political campaigns have something of an illusory quality, with candidates hiring consultants to craft and sell a certain image of the client. Hull’s skilled image makers had been paid handsomely to conjure a message and a vision of Hull as an independent fighter in Washington for common Illinoisans. But the media blitz was so dizzying that it was more reminiscent of a company building a brand, or of Hollywood marketing a blockbuster film. Hull’s campaign had shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars a week to run television commercials that touted his thick and detailed economic and health care plans. Hull billboards appeared in virtually every corner of the state. Even Internet surfers could not escape Hull’s bespectacled mug, with ads gracing websites as varied as the Washington Post and Yahoo e-mail pages. The media barrage was so relentless that even Hull wondered about the value of running a campaign this way. “Don’t you think people kind of, you know, get sick of you after a while?” he asked me. Because he had no prior grassroots operation in place and no political base, he paid supporters fifty dollars a day to act as volunteers and a cheering section for his public appearances. (In a weird irony, one of Michelle Obama’s distant relatives took a job in this capacity.) As Hull would step into an event, they would line up and yell, “Give ’em Hull!” But Hull was perhaps one of the most uncomfortable stump speakers in the history of U.S. Senate races. He would trip over his lines and rarely seemed to convey an extemporaneous thought. His supporters, however, would cheer him madly, even after a verbal flub. To me, all these staged theatrics gave the campaign a feeling of utter artificiality—and as a voter, I was aghast that his type of campaign seemed to be resonating in a democracy. As I wrote in the Tribune, it was “sort of like The Truman Show meets The Candidate.”
Nevertheless, Hull’s ads were working. And when Hynes’s quick hit of television had no effect, the Hynes brain trust began worrying even more about Hull. Hynes’s campaign spokesperson, Chris Mather, stepped up her phone calls to me and other reporters in hopes of slowing the Hull momentum. However, the intense lobbying effort actually had the opposite effect with me. Hynes’s obvious fear gave Hull even more credibility. At about this time, I met with a Hynes operative for lunch. When I had gone to meet Mather earlier in the campaign season, we convened near Hynes’s office. But this operative wanted to come to me, so we gathered at a North Michigan Avenue restaurant just a couple of doors from the Tribune Tower. Before I had taken a bite of my grilled chicken sandwich, I was handed a folder of opposition research on Hull. Among the papers was a copy of the outside sheet of the filing of one of Hull’s two divorces in Illinois. Hull, in fact, had been divorced three times. He was married to his first wife for nearly thirty years, raising three children with her. After moving to Chicago, he then twice married and divorced the same woman. The rest of the divorce file had been sealed, and this vague court order was the only document publicly available. The order contained only one salient fact: Hull’s second wife, Brenda Sexton, had once been granted an order of protection against him.
As this was occurring behind the scenes, Hull continued ascending in the polls, cruising past Hynes and the rest of the field. Hull was nearing the 30 percent mark when I interviewed him for my Sunday profile of him and his candidacy. Like many encounters with Hull, it was an uncomfortable experience for both subject and interviewer. In his campaign office, several aides and Hull sat at one end of a long table and I sat at the other. When I brought up the divorces, Hull squirmed in his chair, nervously shifting from leaning on an elbow to folding his arms to various other poses. He steadfastly refused to discuss the circumstances of his marriages, divorces or the court order, saying they were private matters. Because he had been reluctant to explain these issues, particularly the court order, I felt compelled to include this in my profile. I placed this nugget fairly deep inside the story, but it served the purpose of the other candidates—the behind-the-scenes gossip had now slipped into the largest circulation newspaper in the state. Other political reporters and pundits jumped at the tasty morsel. Tribune columnist Eric Zorn was the first on board, penning a column asking what Hull was hiding and maintaining that he owed it to the voters to release the divorce files. Mike Flannery, a political reporter at CBS-affiliated Channel 2 in Chicago, pressed Hull incessantly about the divorce files as Hull opened a campaign office on the city’s West Side. Flannery and Zorn were among Chicago’s more skilled political reporters, and yet I could not help but notice that both were also guests of Axelrod at his annual holiday party. For his part, Hull continued to stonewall, citing privacy concerns.
It was not long before the Hulls’ divorce story assumed a life of its own, dominating headlines, leading newscasts and consuming public debates. At a televised candidates’ forum on public television, Hull was peppered with questions about the sealed divorce files—and he stammered no-comments when prompted to talk about the issue. This was not pretty to watch, but Hull faced a legitimate question of a candidate for such an important public office: Had Sexton accused him of something untoward, and didn’t voters have a right to know if she had? His staunch resistance to answering questions seemed to indicate so. Yet Hull was a magnificently wealthy man, and his aides were suggesting off the record that she had made accusations against him to wrest more money from him in the divorce settlement. Nevertheless, I had to admit: witnessing this spectacle was not something that I enjoyed, even though my story had instigated the feeding frenzy.
At the TV debate, various reporters and campaign advisers watched from a nearby room. Axelrod and Giangreco, who had been on the road with the John Edwards campaign, had returned to Chicago to prepare and guide Obama through the forum. A grimacing Axelrod paced the floor as a bemused Giangreco watched more patiently from a chair. Axelrod had a habit of pacing whenever Obama began speaking in a public place. If he disliked what Obama was saying, his pacing would quicken. Even though he had been dealing with the issue for days, Hull looked like a man dying from a thousand cuts. Axelrod stopped in midpace and pulled up beside me. “You know, you’re responsible for this,” Axelrod told me, apparently trying to stroke my journalist’s ego. The comment did nothing of the sort. Seeing a man’s reputation unravel in slow motion in the glare of the public eye gave me little sense of accomplishment. “David,” I told Axelrod, “if it wasn’t through me, you folks would have figured out another way to get this mess out there. I just fired the first bullet loaded in the chamber.”
IN A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO CALM THE STORY, JASON ERKES, HULL’S campaign spokesman, offered to let me review the divorce records on an off-the-record, nonprintable basis. I declined the offer, saying that the information had become too vital to the Senate campaign to be kept from the public if a reporter had seen it. Soon, the Tribune and WLS-TV sued for the unsealing of the divorce records. When it became likely that a judge would have ruled in their favor before election day, Hull and Sexton jointly asked the judge to release the records.
After I spent thirty seconds with the documents, it was apparent that Hull’s chances of winning the race were over. The files showed that Sexton had accused Hull of becoming violent, profane and verbally abusive in the waning days of their second marriage. She accused him of calling her a “cunt.” During one incident, Sexton alleged that he “hung on the canopy bar of my bed, leered at me and stated, ‘Do you want to die? I am going to kill you. . . .’” Only once, however, did she accuse him of striking her, which led to Hull’s brief arrest. But authorities declined to press charges against Hull because they determined that “mutual combat” had occurred. Hull said he struck Sexton’s shin in retaliation for Sexton allegedly kicking him.
If this weren’t enough, in the post-debate press conference at a later TV forum, each candidate addressing the press was asked by Channel 2’s Flannery if he or she had ever used drugs or sought counseling for drug or alcohol abuse. Once again, Hull became the focus of the story when he answered that he had used cocaine and sought counseling in the 1980s for alcohol use. Hynes and Chico admitted to the minor infractions of having smoked marijuana in college, and Obama had already conceded in his memoir his drug activity as a youth. So Hull’s drug use as a Wall Street trader was the news of the night. Hull only made matters worse for himself when he sensed the news conference turning sour on him and abruptly stopped taking questions. Television cameras chased him from the TV studio like a defendant fleeing the courthouse. Reporters shouted questions at him. His adult daughter, who had come to Chicago to blunt criticism of her father as a violent man, scurried alongside her father and exclaimed, “Don’t answer that question! Don’t answer that question!” The bizarre scene was chaotic and every bit as surreal as Hull’s campaign. When I called the Tribune city desk to report what had transpired after the debate was over, my editors were incredulous. “Forget what you saw on TV during the debate,” I said. “Blair Hull just admitted that he used cocaine.” At the Tribune, my colleagues and I began referring to Hull as the “Velcro” candidate—everything stuck to him. “Each day we come in here determined not to write another Blair Hull story, and each night, here we are, writing a Blair Hull story!” said an exasperated Tribune colleague, John Chase, as he furiously recast the debate story into a drug story under deadline pressure.
As Hull fell into ignominy, voters were left looking for a candidate to support in the contest. Obama’s campaign had been following the simple strategy long advanced by Axelrod and Giangreco: Hold on to your money and TV advertising until the final weeks when voters finally are paying attention—and then blast the airwaves with as much force as you can. This was not as easy as it seemed. As Hull was rising and Hynes was still hovering around 20 percent in the polls, Obama was making only minor advancements. Just a month from the election, Obama was still an unknown commodity to most blacks and most Democrats in general. This made some supporters extremely anxious, and they began advising him to jettison Axelrod’s earlier strategy and start running TV ads immediately. “Barack was concerned that we needed to be out there,” Axelrod said. Obama talked to his advisers about these concerns but ultimately chose to follow their plan and “hold our powder,” he said.
Axelrod was privy to Hull’s messy divorce from their earlier interview, after all, and knew that his candidacy most likely would end at any moment—as soon as the divorce details went public. There was one concern, however. As Hull was falling fast, he seriously considered dropping out of the race altogether. One morning on my way in to the office, I received a frantic cell phone call from a panicked Giangreco concerned about just that. Had I heard if Hull was dropping? This could throw a monkey wrench into the racial dynamics of the contest. Obama needed for Hull to siphon white votes and downstate votes away from Hynes. “I sure hope we haven’t overshot the runway!” Giangreco worried.
MANAGING OBAMA’S HEALTHY EGO HAS BEEN ONE OF THE MORE trying tasks for his staff and paid consultants. As Obama himself will acknowledge, his mother went to great lengths to shore up her son’s confidence. She worried that because his father was absent and he was biracial he might fall prey to a lack of self-worth. “As a consequence, there was no shortage of self-esteem,” Obama told me with a wry smile.
In a politician, a show of grandiose ego can be off-putting and cost support from all quarters—media, colleagues and, in particular, constituents—and there were moments in the Senate campaign when I found myself in the midst of the effort to rein in Obama’s ego. In January 2004, for instance, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story about prominent Chicago-area politicians who had what the newspaper referred to as the “IT Factor.” Said the newspaper: “Some politicians acquire it. Some hire it. Others earn it. But for this coiffed crew . . . no spin doctor is required. Call it ‘charisma,’ if you prefer. Or ‘packaging,’ if you’re going to be cynical about it. But there’s one thing we look for in our political candidates, whether we admit it or not: Sex appeal.”
Bill Clinton headed the list of politicians who stirred the libido, according to the newspaper. But in Chicago, Obama was listed among the dozen or so politicos who had “IT.” Beneath a flattering photo of a smiling, confident-looking Obama, the Sun-Times breathed heavily: “The first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review has a movie-star smile and more than a little mystique. Also, we just like to say his name. We are considering taking it as a mantra.”
One can only imagine the reaction to this designation from Michelle, who considered it her personal mission to keep her husband’s ego from inflating beyond all proportion. Obama’s take on the story certainly drew rolled eyes from some staff members. Obama walked through the campaign office with a copy of the tabloid newspaper folded under his arm and open to the story. He proclaimed with glee, “See, told you I’ve got ‘IT’!”
When I brought up the story to an aide that day, the aide told me, “For god’s sakes, don’t mention that story to him. He’s walking around here with a huge grin on his face and saying ‘I’ve got IT, I’ve got IT.’ He sure doesn’t need any reinforcement in the IT department.”