Chapter 10

“I’LL KICK YOUR ASS RIGHT NOW”

A F T E R   H I S   F A I L E D   C A M P A I G N against Bobby Rush, Obama’s reputation in the black political community was worse than ever. First, this young punk had knocked a little old lady schoolteacher off the ballot and taken her senate seat. Then, he’d tried to beat an incumbent congressman who’d been marching in the streets for civil rights when Obama was a kindergartener in Hawaii.

On Election Night, Rush called Obama and Trotter “very important individuals” and invited them “to work together on the issues that are of concern to the residents of the First Congressional District”: “Let’s work on the transportation issues. Let’s work on the health issues. Let’s work on the economic development, and I think we can accomplish a lot together,” he said.

Those were just the words of a winner who wanted to sound gracious in the press. In reality, Rush had developed a deep grudge against Obama. Rush had mortgages and children in college, and Obama had tried to take away his livelihood. (Of course, Rush himself had won the seat by beating an elderly incumbent in an election that was also about generational change, from the preachers and funeral directors of the civil rights era to the militants of the black power movement.) When the congressional districts were redrawn after the 2000 census, Obama’s condo was a few blocks outside the First District. Rush claimed he’d had nothing to do with the gerrymandering, which divided Hyde Park between himself and Jesse Jackson Jr. Obama pretended not to care, telling the Tribune he had no plans to run for Congress again.

In fact, Obama was thinking of quitting politics altogether. During what friends would call his “pity party” after losing to Rush, he almost accepted a job as executive director of the Joyce Foundation. He didn’t want to leave politics, he told Ab Mikva, but it was a six-figure job, and Michelle was worried about the family’s finances, especially since the congressional campaign had put the Obamas even deeper in debt. The Joyce Foundation had supported the Developing Communities Project, so it was a place where Obama could work to improve the inner city, maybe more so than a politician could. If he couldn’t beat Bobby Rush, how was he ever going to get out of the state senate?

Mikva urged Obama to stay in the legislature. If he couldn’t afford to do that, Mikva said, he should take the professorship the law school was pushing on him. That would pay as well as the foundation and offer more freedom to keep his hand in politics.

Obama spent the first few months after the primary stewing over his defeat. Once he got over it, he realized that if he was going to have a political future, he would have to repair his relationship with the black community. Bobby Rush’s crowd—the nationalists, the militants, the folks who wanted to rail against the white man—would never embrace him now. During the campaign, Obama had made it clear he considered their brand of politics self-defeating.

“On issues of job creation, education, health care, we have more in common with the Latino community and the white community than we have differences,” he’d said. “And we have to work with them, just from a practical political perspective. It may give us psychic satisfaction to curse out people outside the community and blame them for our plight, but the truth of the matter is if we want to get things accomplished politically, then we’ve got to be able to work with them.”

There was a segment of black Chicago that was ready to hear Obama’s vision of pan-racial politics: the business community. Although Obama was not wealthy—at best, the family was upper-middle-class—he already socialized with members of the city’s black bourgeoisie. John Rogers was a close friend, as was Marty Nesbitt, a vice president of the Pritzker Realty Group. (Nesbitt’s wife, an obstetrician, delivered both of Obama’s daughters.) Obama was also a member of the East Bank Club, a downtown gym/networking salon popular with Chicago’s professional class. He played pickup basketball with Jim Reynolds, CEO of Loop Capital Markets, an investment banking firm. Reynolds knew only that Obama was a state senator, which wasn’t enough to impress him. Then, one day, he was browsing at Borders and found Dreams from My Father in the discount bin. Surprised that one of his basketball partners had written a book, Reynolds bought a copy. The next time he saw Obama on the court, Reynolds mentioned Dreams.

“Hey, you know, I read your book,” he told Obama. “You’re a pretty good writer. You had an interesting background.”

“Well, I know I’m a good writer!” Obama shouted back.

After that, Obama and Reynolds became regular teammates. They also met up for golf at the South Shore Country Club, where Obama always won by keeping the ball in the fairway and hitting no errant shots. When Reynolds was in Springfield, he used Obama’s state senate office as his own.

Reynolds, who was one of the buppies on the Obama for Congress finance committee, also helped Obama plot his next political move: a run for the U.S. Senate. On the night Obama lost to Rush, Reynolds tried to buck up his friend by assuring him there would be other races, for bigger offices.

“Hey, man, don’t feel bad,” he told Obama. “Let’s figure out what we’re going to do next.”

It wasn’t long before they did. Obama and Reynolds sat down with Marty Nesbitt and ran through the list of statewide offices. Attorney general would be open in 2002, but Obama’s fellow state senator Lisa Madigan had her eye on it. And Madigan was the daughter of the state’s most powerful Democrat, House Speaker Michael Madigan. The Senate looked more promising. The Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, was seen as a one-term fluke. Fitzgerald had not so much beaten Carol Moseley Braun (herself a one-term fluke) as been in the right place to benefit from her missteps. Once in office, he alienated his party by appointing a U.S. attorney from out of state. Unfamiliar with the Chicago Way, Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation) prosecuted corrupt Republicans and Democrats with equal ardor. Senator Fitzgerald had even tried to block funding for a new Lincoln museum in Springfield, figuring it was just pork for Governor George Ryan and his lobbyist pals. As a result, he had no friends in the Illinois GOP, and the word was he would either step down or face a primary challenge from a Republican more willing to play the game.

Reynolds began bringing Obama to meetings of the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs, an all-black business group that met for a monthly luncheon at the Chicago Club. Obama was one of the few politicians among a crowd of investors, bankers, publishers, and attorneys. Whenever anyone questioned his presence, Reynolds made one thing clear: “If you want to be a friend of mine, you have to be a friend of his.” While Obama never gave a speech at the ABLE meetings, he was meeting people whose money he would need to run for higher office.

Chicago’s black business community has a history as long and rich as that of its black political class. Like the politicians, the entrepreneurs got their first opportunities because of segregation. Whites wouldn’t bury blacks or sell them life insurance policies, so storefront funeral parlors and insurance offices sprang up in the ghetto. Whites couldn’t cut African hair, so blacks opened their own barbershops and beauty parlors. The downtown dailies ignored life in the Black Belt (Tribune editors ordered reporters not to write “blue” news—a code word for African-American.) So blacks communicated with each other through their own network of newspapers, magazines, and radio stations.

Some of America’s first black millionaires were Chicagoans, operating businesses that catered only to other blacks. John H. Johnson published Ebony and Jet magazines from a Michigan Avenue office tower that now bears his company’s logo. Ed Gardner sold his Soft Sheen and Ultra Sheen hair care products in drugstores across the nation.

In Chicago, business and politics are inseparable. Wealthy blacks have always been expected to contribute a share of their fortunes to black politicians. In return, they benefit from pinstripe patronage, the practice of handing out big government contracts to big political donors. And, of course, some of that big money ends up back in the campaign funds of the politicians who handed out the contracts.

When Harold Washington was running for mayor, he was backed by the city’s black grocers, auto dealers, undertakers, and tavern owners. Once he got into office, he tried to create a new class of black professionals by cutting his people into city business that had once been reserved for the Irish and the WASPs. Washington made sure that blacks got a bigger share of city contracts than they’d received from white mayors. This was a huge boon to black developers and contractors. Once they’d proven they could build a school in the city, why couldn’t they build a shopping center in the suburbs? The mayor also made it clear that he would steer more of the city’s lucrative bond counsel business to law firms with black partners. Maynard Jackson, who later became mayor of Atlanta, was then a partner with Chapman and Cutler, the city’s premier bond firm. After Jackson left to start an Atlanta office in the mid-1980s, the firm needed another black bond lawyer to stay on city hall’s good side. It trained a young partner named Stephen Pugh, who eventually started his own public finance law firm, Pugh, Jones, and became an ABLE member.

Washington’s campaign to bring blacks into traditionally white businesses was so important because black entrepreneurs had actually been damaged by the civil rights movement. Once blacks could shop downtown at Marshall Field’s, they didn’t need the clothing boutique on Forty-seventh Street. Once they could go to the show at any movie theater, the neighborhood picture palace shut down (or started screening kung fu or porno movies). Black dollars were leaving the community, but white dollars weren’t coming in. The next generation of black millionaires couldn’t depend on the ghetto trade; they would have to do business with all races.

As a state senator, Obama was valuable to the members of ABLE. Along with Emil Jones (who was also invited to ABLE meetings), he worked to open up the state’s pension fund to minority investment firms.

“We wanted to, as black businessmen, have a relationship with everybody, so they would know our needs and where we were coming from, and be responsive to us,” Pugh would say. “In the public finance area, I’m sure that as he went down and looked at the deals that were coming through the state, he made sure that firms like Pugh, Jones were at least put on the list so that we could bid or be selected if we won the competition. It was never a thing that I knew him to say, ‘Pugh, Jones needs to get this next bond deal.’ Nothing like that. But the state workers knew we were out there. There were people like Emil who were making sure that they just didn’t ignore, as they had in the past, minority business in the process.”

However Obama and Jones worked, Pugh, Jones got more business from the state of Illinois. In 2002, Pugh’s firm was involved in a $10 billion bond deal to support the state retirement system. It also worked on a deal to privatize the state lottery. When the time came, Pugh would find a way to help Obama in return.

During the congressional campaign, Obama had been caricatured as an ineffectual state senator, a man so consumed with his own ambition, so eager to use Springfield as a stepladder to Washington, that he didn’t bother to learn the ins and outs of legislating. Despite his success with welfare reform and child support, Obama was still seen as an idealist who thought cloakroom negotiations were beneath his dignity.

When Obama returned to the capitol, he began taking his work—and his colleagues—more seriously. Before, he’d been a résumé in search of an office. Now he was determined to make a name for himself on issues important to his urban district. Some senators thought that Obama had been humbled by his loss to Rush. Donne Trotter didn’t quite see it that way. He had to admit his fellow senator was working harder, but humble? Barack Obama? Obama was a competitor, and competitors don’t like to lose. The once-impatient young man immersed himself in the legislative process, learning the “get-along” qualities necessary to pass a bill. No longer a loner, Obama was taking advice from colleagues he’d ignored during his first four years.

Obama, Trotter, and Rickey Hendon cosponsored a racial profiling bill that would have required police to record the race, age, and gender of every driver they pulled over. (It never got out of the Judiciary Committee.) Obama also argued, unsuccessfully, against a bill that made gangbangers eligible for the death penalty if they committed a murder as part of gang activity. It’s never popular to look as though you’re sticking up for the Vice Lords, so Obama voted “present” on the bill, but only after insinuating it was racially motivated.

“I’m concerned about us targeting particular neighborhoods or particular types of individuals for enhancements, as opposed to others,” he said on the senate floor.

The bill was more or less symbolic. Governor Ryan had declared a moratorium on the death penalty after thirteen death row prisoners—one more than the state had executed since 1976—were proven innocent. Unlike many black legislators, Obama never declared himself an opponent of capital punishment, but he supported Ryan’s moratorium, and he always supported death penalty reform, such as allowing DNA evidence to review cases.

Obama did pass two women’s health bills. One required all hospitals to tell rape victims about the morning-after pill. (It passed after the sponsors made an exception for Catholic hospitals, who didn’t have to provide the information if the victim was ovulating.) He also passed a bill expanding Medicaid to cover breast and cervical cancer screening.

But Obama’s biggest success in the year after the congressional race was an affordable-housing bill that ended up exposing his relationships with South Side developers and slumlords. Having worked in Altgeld Gardens, Obama saw the folly of housing projects: how they corralled the poor into isolated communities where joblessness, drug dealing, and shootings became ways of life, passed on from one generation to the next. Obama believed private developers could do a better job of managing low-income apartments than the Chicago Housing Authority. The profit motive made them superior landlords, and their buildings were more likely to be located in middle-class neighborhoods.

Obama’s bill, which he sponsored with William Peterson, a suburban Republican, gave a 50-percent tax credit to donations toward developing affordable housing, setting aside $13 million a year from the state’s coffers.

Throughout his career in Chicago, Obama took hundreds of thousands of dollars from developers. Some, like Tony Rezko and Allison Davis, were guilty of building low-cost apartments that almost instantly deteriorated into slums: rat haunted, freezing in winter, occupied by squatters and drug dealers.

As an associate at Davis, Miner, Obama had worked with nonprofit groups that helped developers win government grants to build affordable housing. Among them was the Woodlawn Preservative and Investment Co., which was headed by Bishop Arthur Brazier, a Saul Alinsky protégé and influential black pastor who preached on television every Sunday morning. Brazier’s group partnered with Rezko in redeveloping slum properties. Rezko was so closely associated with Davis, Miner that Allison Davis eventually left the law firm to go into the real estate business with him. In all, Davis, Miner represented three community groups in partnership with Rezko’s company, Rezmar Inc. Through those groups, the firm helped Rezko obtain $43 million in government funds. Obama did only five hours of legal work for Rezko, under the supervision of more experienced attorneys, but he had met the developer even before joining the firm.

During his rise through Illinois politics, it was inevitable that Obama would encounter a suckerfish like Rezko. Illinois has more governments than any other state—over five hundred in Cook County alone—and therefore more opportunities for grafters. Antoin “Tony” Rezko arrived in Chicago from Syria in 1971. He barely spoke English, and he belonged to an ethnic group—Arab Christians—too small to elect even an alderman. There’s only one way a guy like that can obtain political power. He has to buy it.

Rezko began his career as a civil engineer but was soon investing in real estate and fast food restaurants. He built houses on the South Side and opened Subway sandwich shops and Papa John’s pizzerias. Those deals provided Rezko with the money to connect with his first powerful patron: Muhammad Ali. In 1983, at the urging of Ali’s business manager, Jabir Herbert Muhammad, Rezko held a fund-raiser for Harold Washington. After that, he was invited to join Ali’s entourage as a business consultant. Rezko put together endorsement deals for the Greatest and was executive director of the Muhammad Ali Foundation, a group devoted to spreading Islam.

Rezko used his connection with Ali to expand his fast food holdings. After Washington became mayor, Jabir Herbert Muhammad’s company, Crucial Concessions, won the contract to sell food and drinks at the Lake Michigan beaches. Rezko took over the company’s operations. In 1997, Crucial opened three Panda Express restaurants at O’Hare, under the city’s Minority Set-Aside Program. It would be stripped of those franchises in 2005, when investigators determined the company was a front for Rezko.

In 1989 Rezko and a business partner founded Rezmar Inc., a real estate company that aimed to rehabilitate South Side apartment buildings. Partnering with community groups, Rezmar purchased thirty properties. The company’s work was done on the cheap, but that was at the urging of the city, which figured rehabbers could develop more units if they installed low-grade appliances and cabinetry. When boilers and refrigerators wore out after six or seven years, Rezmar hadn’t banked enough money to repair them. Eventually, the city stepped in and forced Rezmar to turn up the heat on six properties, including one that went unheated for five weeks.

Rezko’s partner oversaw day-to-day maintenance. Rezko’s job was to raise equity and cultivate politicians. He was a master at leveraging political contacts for contracts and grants. Rezko scouted young talent as skillfully as a basketball coach sitting in the stands of a high school field house. In 1990, a Rezmar executive read an article about Obama’s election as president of the Harvard Law Review. Intrigued by Obama’s interest in housing issues and his plans to return to Chicago, the executive phoned the young law student and struck up a friendship. When the executive learned that Obama was interested in politics, he introduced him to Rezko, who was as blown away as everyone else Obama lunched with in those years.

“He’s great,” Rezko raved to the executive. “He’s really going places.”

Around the same time he was courting Obama, Rezko was also cultivating an ambitious young state legislator named Rod Blagojevich. Like Obama, Blagojevich was a self-made politician—his immigrant steelworker father raised the family in an apartment. Guys like that were easy targets for Rezko, who could provide the money they hadn’t inherited. The day Obama announced his campaign for state senate in 1995, he received $2,000 from two of Rezko’s fast-food businesses.

When Davis and Rezko wanted to build a senior apartment house in Obama’s senate district, Obama wrote letters to the city and state supporting loans for the project. Both developers would later hold fund-raisers for Obama at their homes.

Rezko built part of his fortune by exploiting the black community Obama served in the state senate. But Obama took Rezko’s money, even after the businessman was sued by the city of Chicago for failing to heat his low-income apartments, even after he was caught using a black business partner to obtain a minority set-aside for a fast-food franchise at O’Hare Airport, and even after he was under grand jury investigation on charges he had demanded kickbacks from investment firms seeking money from the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System.

During his first year in the U.S. Senate, flush with the book advance for The Audacity of Hope, Obama and his wife would decide to trade up from a condo to a bigger, more secure home in Kenwood, a neighborhood of Edwardian piles popular with U of C econ professors looking to blow their Nobel Prize loot. They found a $1.65 million house with four fireplaces, a wine cellar, and a black wrought-iron fence. The doctor who lived there also owned the vacant lot next door and, although the properties were listed separately, wanted to sell both at the same time. Despite their new income, the Obamas could not have afforded both parcels. The Obamas closed on their house in June 2005. On the same day, Rezko’s wife, Rita, purchased the vacant lot for $625,000. They later sold a portion of the lot to the Obamas, for $104,500, so the family could expand its yard. The Rezkos then paid $14,000 to build a fence along the property line.

At the time, Obama knew that Rezko was under a legal cloud but told the Tribune “as long as I operated in an open, up-front fashion, and all the T’s were crossed and I’s were dotted, that it wouldn’t be an issue.”

Obama believed so strongly in his own integrity that he thought he could associate with a grifter while maintaining his Senator Galahad self-image. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Why would you want to go into a dirty business like politics?’ ” he often said in his speeches. So the business will have one less corrupt, cynical politician, was the implication. He was convinced he could work alongside Chicago politicians while not becoming one himself, as long as he maintained a sense of higher purpose. This is a common delusion among officeholders, especially those as idealistic as Obama.

“In the state senate, he had a real sense of personal mission,” said James L. Merriner, author of several books on Illinois politics. “I think he thought he was just above it. He seemed to think he was on a plane above that.”

Tony Rezko taught Obama that you can’t go into a dirty business like politics—especially Chicago politics—without losing some of your innocence.

Obama also took contributions from condo developers. Every South Side politician did. If you want to run for office, you need money, and who has more money than a real estate tycoon? Those donations were controversial, too, because Obama’s district was being gentrified from two directions. On the northern end, whites who enjoyed downtown living were moving into the South Loop, which had once been a Skid Row district of taverns, men’s hotels, and missions. (The South Loop’s Second Ward had been represented by a black alderman since Oscar DePriest won there in 1915. Bobby Rush lived in the Second Ward. Before the decade’s end, it would elect a white alderman.) On the southern end, middle-class whites and blacks were pushing out of Hyde Park, redeveloping run-down areas around the University of Chicago campus. Despite the urging of preservation groups, Obama did not object to a plan to demolish Geri’s Palm Tavern, a historic Forty-seventh Street nightclub, and replace it with an upscale restaurant. Harold Lucas, who ran tours of Bronzeville through his company Black Metropolis Convention and Tourism, tried to get Obama involved in the fight to save Geri’s, but “that was too controversial,” he would recall. “He did not step up to that fight.”

Obama didn’t want to step on the toes of the local alderman, Dorothy Tillman, who favored the demolition. Tillman, an outspoken politician known for wearing broad-brimmed Sunday-best hats and carrying a gun in her purse, had a strong following among black nationalists.

“There’s nothing that jumps out in my mind that he did to risk political capital for my community,” Lucas would say years later. “I don’t recall anything he did as state senator that empowered the black community.”

In that respect, he was the completely opposite of Bronzeville’s state representative, Lou Jones. Jones was indigenous to the South Side, having begun her political career as president of the resident council in the T. K. Lawless Gardens housing project. As a politician, Jones never forgot where she had come from; Obama never forgot where he was trying to go. Appearing too black might cost him the white votes he needed for statewide office. As Obama’s political career advanced, Harold Lucas came to understand the tricky course Obama was following and always supported his campaigns. Obama might not have been the voice of black empowerment, with a raised fist and a copy of The Wretched of the Earth on his bookshelf, but he was at least in a position to bring the community’s concerns to the white mainstream.

Toni Preckwinkle, who represented a portion of Bronzeville on the city council, also believed that Obama neglected the neighborhood for purposes of political ambition. Every state senator is given a budget for “member initiatives.” It’s a goodie fund to spread around the district however he sees fit. In the early 2000s, as Obama was recovering from his loss to Rush and incubating his Senate ambitions, he gave the largest chunk of his member initiative money—$1.1 million—to the Seventeenth Ward, in the southeastern corner of his senate district. The money went mainly for park improvements. Preckwinkle’s Fourth Ward got $275,000.

Obviously, every alderman wants more money for her ward, but Preckwinkle was incensed because Obama represented the entire Fourth Ward, while he only represented a small corner of the Seventeenth. She concluded he was trying to score points with Seventeenth Ward alderman Terry Peterson. Like Preckwinkle, Peterson had endorsed Obama in his run for Congress. But Peterson was close to Mayor Daley, whose support could guarantee Obama victory in a Senate primary. (Daley would later appoint Peterson to head the Chicago Housing Authority.) Preckwinkle had backed Obama in his dispute with Alice Palmer and his challenge to Rush, and now she was getting leftovers while Obama fattened up a new friend. Using member initiative money to advance his career was evidence of the disloyalty and opportunism that were becoming Obama’s modus operandi as he grasped for higher office.

Preckwinkle was particularly frustrated because Obama claimed he didn’t have the money to help the city buy and relocate a church that was standing in the way of a proposed pedestrian bridge across Lake Shore Drive.

“We asked him to do things, and it didn’t happen, and, subsequently, we discovered that his resources were going other places,” she would later complain. “To people who would be useful to him in the future versus people who had helped him in the past.”

Even though she considered Obama a social-climbing ingrate, Preckwinkle continued to support his campaigns, lending him staff members and putting his name on her ward organization’s Election Day palm cards. As an alderman, she had learned to make a distinction between candidates she liked personally and candidates whose politics she liked. A black U.S. senator would be important to her community.

As a committeeman, though, Preckwinkle was in a position to take some revenge. After Obama won the U.S. Senate seat, he would personally ask Preckwinkle to support Will Burns—his former student and legislative staffer—as his successor in Springfield. Preckwinkle would refuse. Instead, she voted to appoint a lawyer named Kwame Raoul. (Burns eventually won a seat in the state house, representing Bronzeville. There, he finally gave Preckwinkle the money to move that church.)

Obama didn’t make the daily papers often during his early years in the senate. He wasn’t in the leadership, so he was never involved in budget negotiations, which is always the biggest story out of Springfield. If Barack Obama and Emil Jones walked out of a room together, reporters were going to ignore Obama and surround Jones. Occasionally, he was mentioned in a page 5 metro section story about a bill to crack down on payday loan operations. Like any ambitious politician, though, he cultivated the media. There was an affinity between Obama and journalists. He was a published author, so he had a literary sensibility and knew the toil that went into writing. Obama also shared the press corps’s political outlook: He was a liberal reformer who believed in open government. His bill to post campaign contributions on the Internet was a boon to investigative journalism in Illinois. Beyond that, he was articulate, quotable, and accessible, willing to leave the senate floor to talk to a newsman waiting by the Rail, the reporters’ and lobbyists’ nickname for the third-floor rotunda.

Obama took whatever media attention he could get. He was a frequent guest on Public Affairs, a one-on-one talk show that aired on public television stations around the state. Al Kindle put him on a public access show in Chicago. In other words, the name “Barack Obama” was unknown to anyone except wonks who read the Illinois Blue Book, a legislative directory. Illinois is a state with a vibrant political culture, but that’s still a small following.

At the time, the journalist who covered Obama most closely was Todd Spivak, a twenty-five-year-old cub reporter for the Hyde Park Herald. As the neighborhood state senator, Obama was on Spivak’s beat, and Spivak usually made a story out of the press releases politicians faxed into their local papers. CURRIE AND OBAMA BILLS SEEK TO CLEAN UP COURTS. SENATOR OBAMA HELPS DEFEAT A CANCELED FIREARM BILL. Or simply, OBAMA BILL PASSES SENATE.

Spivak also covered city hall, where he was used to encountering evasive, antagonistic aldermen. Obama was the complete opposite. He gave Spivak his cell phone number and always returned phone calls the same day, even if it was late in the evening. Whenever Spivak tried to call Obama “senator” or “sir,” he’d hear, “Please, call me Barack.” Most politicians become curt or hostile when asked about campaign contributions. They take the questions as affronts to their integrity. Not Obama. It was his style to bemoan the seamier aspects of Chicago politics while at the same time benefiting from them, so he would complain to Spivak that raising money was a necessary evil, but yes, he’d held a fund-raiser, and yes, developers were there, but no, they hadn’t gotten anything from him in return. Even worse, Obama was usually right. Spivak was used to writing about hinky South Side pols, but he couldn’t dig up any dirt on Obama. One of the few times he tried, by crashing an Obama fund-raiser at Allison Davis’s house, he was thrown out by the host.

A year after the congressional primary, I interviewed Obama again for the Reader. It was early 2001, and he was trying to pass a bill to ensure that what had happened to Al Gore in Florida would never happen in Illinois. After the 2000 election, Cook County installed ballot-counting machines that spat back overvotes and undervotes, allowing voters a chance to correct their mistakes. In some inner-city precincts, this reduced spoiled ballots by 90 percent. Republicans objected. Kicking back undervotes, they complained, would violate the privacy of people who chose to skip a race. Looming precinct captains might order voters back into the booth to complete the ballot. A Republican senator introduced a bill to turn off the ballot-checking software, thus preventing machines from identifying undervotes. Obama saw that as an effort to suppress the big-city vote. Suburbanites were voting on fill-in-the-bubble ballots, which were hard to screw up. Chicagoans were still punching out chads.

Obama countered with his own bill, which would have given counties the option of kicking back undervotes. After it died in the Elections Subcommittee, he came up with an ingenious compromise: add a “None of the above” line to every race. That would allow voters to skip a race without undervoting. (The issue became moot when a judge allowed Cook County to identify both overvotes and undervotes.)

Ever since Florida had replaced Illinois as the election fraud capital of America, I’d been writing about what our state was doing to avoid taking back the title. So I called Obama. I suspected he was unhappy about my Chicago Reader story on the First Congressional District race, which had been full of his enemies’ accusations that he wasn’t black enough for the South Side. But he returned my phone call.

“The principal reason is partisanship,” he told me, in his clipped diction, when I asked about the Republican bill. “Privately, I don’t think any of the Republican legislators would deny that. Why would they want to encourage an additional ten percent in Cook County? That’s a direct blow against them in statewide races.”

When I thanked Obama for his time, he responded with an icy “You’re welcome”—the iciest I’d ever heard from a politician. (Curtness is Obama’s favorite method of displaying anger.) My first thought was, That guy’s got some great ideas. If he ever learns how to act like a human being, he may go someplace in politics. Later, I realized that Obama’s “You’re welcome” was a smooth move. Blowing me off would have done him no good. The Reader had a following among white liberals, an important constituency for Obama in a statewide race. Berating a writer would have invited more bad publicity. Just by using a peevish tone of voice, he’d let me know he was unhappy with my work and ensured his displeasure didn’t make the paper. Obama was the most media-conscious politician I had ever met. During the congressional race, whenever I showed up at a campaign event, he always made a point of walking up to me, touching my arm, and asking, “How are you doing?” in a manner that came off as collegial rather than desperate for publicity. Politicians rarely pursue reporters. Most have to be chased across the room or approached as though they are living altars. Obama tried to bond with the press. When it mattered, the press would return the compliment.

In the spring of 2002, Obama’s testy relationship with Ricky Hendon finally blew up into an angry, shoving, profane brawl, right on the senate floor.

After five years of working together—even sponsoring some bills together—Hendon was still needling Obama about his blackness.

“Hey, Barack,” he’d taunt, “you figure out if you’re black or white yet?”

Obama tried to brush it off. Once, in a black caucus meeting, Hendon told him, “You have to stay black all the time. You have to be black on all issues.”

“This is not a black or white issue,” Obama responded tersely.

Obama had nominated Senator Kimberly Lightford, a young woman from the western suburbs, as chairman of the black caucus. They were allies. After Lightford’s first race, Obama wrote her a $500 check to cover campaign debts. Lightford and Emil Jones tried to keep the peace between Obama and Hendon, but there were days when Obama didn’t show up for meetings because he didn’t feel like being hassled.

On the senate floor, Obama sat alongside three white Democrats from the Chicago area—Terry Link, Carol Ronen, and Lisa Madigan. Their arrangement was called Liberal Row, and it only deepened Hendon’s conviction that Obama’s true home was in the white progressive community.

On June 11, the senate voted on a proposal to close a Department of Children and Family Services office in Hendon’s district. Anguished that the state was snatching another social program from the impoverished West Side, Hendon stood up to speak. He delivered an emotional plea for the children of his neighborhood.

“It just bothers me that you’re cutting education to the core, you’re destroying lives of the—of the children of this state and nobody’s even paying no damn attention,” Hendon said. “It’s like you don’t even care. Well, I care. And it makes a difference what we do here in this chamber out there in the real world…stop cutting everything from the children of this state.”

When the roll was called, every Democrat voted to keep the office open—except the four liberals. Hendon was furious. He stalked down the Row, demanding answers at every desk. Madigan explained that she was running for attorney general and needed to appear tough on government spending. Link admitted he had voted with the rest of Liberal Row. Ronen apologized and asked for Hendon’s forgiveness. Then Hendon confronted Obama.

“Well, we have to be fiscally prudent,” Obama said.

“What that mean?” Hendon demanded.

“Tight economy,” Obama replied. “We need to watch our coffers.”

When the next round of budget cuts came up—including a million-dollar grant to the Chicago for Summer Youth jobs—Obama rose to speak. He acknowledged that budget cuts were necessary but chided the Republicans for portraying themselves as pork busters while keeping alive a $2 million program to train students in video production and $250,000 for suburban recreation.

“It is not true that somehow that side of the aisle has been purely above politics or pork or partisanship in this process,” Obama said. “In fact, I think when we start looking at the votes, we’ll—it’ll turn out that the governor’s office has its favorites, and it’s looking after the—its favorites. And that’s fair. That’s the nature of the political beast, but I don’t want the—the public to be fooled into thinking that somehow, you-all have a monopoly on responsible budgeting.”

That was too much sanctimony for Hendon to bear. Obama, he was sure, was building a record to present to white voters when he ran for higher office. He needed a few “fiscally conservative” votes, so he was selling out the poor folks on the West Side to secure his political future. Hendon pressed his light, demanding recognition from the chair.

“I just want to say to the last speaker, you got a lot of nerve to talk about being responsible and then you voted for closing the DCFS office on the West Side, when you wouldn’t have voted to close it on the South Side,” he raged. “So I apologize to my Republican friends about my bipartisanship comments, ’cause clearly there’s some Democrats on this side of the aisle that don’t care about the West Side either, especially the last speaker.”

Then Obama pressed his light. He apologized for the vote, but he also made it clear he didn’t take kindly to being called out in front of the entire senate.

“I understand Senator Hendon’s anger at—actually—the—I was not aware that I had voted no on that last—last piece of legislation. I would have the record record that I intended to vote yes. On the other hand, I would appreciate that next time my dear colleague Senator Hendon ask me about a vote before he names me on the floor.”

The words were acid with sarcasm and false collegiality. Once Obama’s microphone was off, he confronted Hendon directly.

“You embarrassed me on the senate floor,” Obama hissed. “If you ever do it again, I’ll kick your ass.”

“Really?” Hendon retorted.

“You heard me, and if you come back here by the telephones, where the press can’t see, I’ll kick your ass right now.”

At five foot seven, Hendon was half a head shorter than Obama, but he was also from the toughest district in the senate. He couldn’t go back to the West Side and tell his constituents he’d backed off a fight with a Harvard grad—from Hyde Park.

“OK,” Hendon said. “Let’s go.”

Hendon led the way to the telephone area, where he dared Obama to hit him. The Illinois senate chamber was designed in the nineteenth century, with as much flourish and pomposity as that era’s oratory: marble Ionic columns capped with gilded scrolls rose behind the rostrum. Glass chandeliers dangled from the ceiling. A thick burgundy carpet, patterned with goldenrod accents, absorbed the loafers of senators as they walked to their polished wooden desks, which were arranged in expanding semicircles. Obama and Hendon were treating this noble room like the sidewalk outside a tavern. The two men shoved and swore at each other until Emil Jones noticed the fight and sent Donne Trotter to break it up. Jones told Hendon, an assistant minority leader, to go back to his seat and start acting like a member of the leadership. He told Obama that a major misconduct penalty wasn’t going to look good on his legislative record. Even that didn’t end the dispute. A TV reporter had seen the donnybrook and asked Obama about it. It had been no big deal, Obama insisted. He and Hendon had worked out their differences.

Hendon wouldn’t talk about the fight on TV, but he denied making up with Obama. There was nothing to apologize for. This was relayed to Obama, who wasn’t happy to hear it. Those long legs strode back to Hendon’s desk, and that long, lean face loomed in to say something. Before Obama could speak, Hendon shouted for Jones, sitting three seats away.

“Get this guy out of my face!”

Jones dragged Obama off the floor.

After that day, the two senators never discussed their showdown, but Hendon began treating Obama with more respect, less antagonism. The name-calling stopped. Obama had shown the West Sider that he was a fighter, not just a passionless lawyer/professor who wouldn’t stand up for himself. Some senators, who could never imagine Obama losing his cool, wondered if the entire fight had been calculated to make just that point.