a civic eating festival that draws six-figure crowds to Grant Park, the great lakefront commons. Obama signed up voters at the Bud Billiken Parade, which marches through the South Side’s black neighborhoods each July.
But not everyone embraced Project Vote! Obama got the brush-off from Lu Palmer, a militant journalist and radio host who ran the Black Independent Political Organization, a group that considered itself the torchbearer of Harold Washington’s legacy. Palmer, who was practically a separatist, was suspicious of the half-white, half-Kenyan guy with the Harvard degree and the Hyde Park apartment.
“When Obama first hit town, my recollection is that he came here running some voter registration drive,” Palmer would say a few years later. “He came to our office and tried to get us involved, and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn’t like his arrogance, his air.”
As a former organizer, Obama’s instinct was to bypass politicians and work with community groups. Moseley Braun made that power-to-the-people ideal easy to achieve. Her primary campaign had been an insurgency against a regular Democrat: Alan Dixon, a former Illinois secretary of state, was a genial, undistinguished solon who went by the nickname “Al the Pal.” The ward bosses would have pushed harder for Dixon in the general election. But the NAACP chairmen and the church ladies in white gloves and feathered hats were thrilled to sign up voters for Moseley Braun. There had only been one black senator since Reconstruction. And there had never been a black woman. Project Vote! was officially nonpartisan, but it practically became an arm of the Moseley Braun campaign. “We have got to get Carol elected” was in the mind of every volunteer. All over town, blacks were telling registrars, “I want to register. Carol Moseley Braun is running for Senate.” Bill Clinton was also on the ballot that year, but in black Chicago, he hardly figured as a selling point.
Black pride was running high all over the country in 1992. It was the summer of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Young people wore silver X baseball caps and black power T-shirts. One shirt bore the in-your-face motto IT’S A BLACK THING, YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. Another featured a triptych of three black idols, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Nelson Mandela (who had just been released from prison and would soon be elected president of South Africa), with the legend MARTIN, MALCOLM, MANDELA AND ME.
Obama wanted to tap into that spirit, so he asked his staff for a slogan that would connect Project Vote! to the legacy of Malcolm X.
Someone came up with “Register and Vote by Any Means Necessary.”
“It’s kind of harsh,” said Obama, showing an ear for what would sound too militant to whites.
“How about ‘It’s a Power Thing’?” suggested a staffer named Bruce Dixon, who’d been hired to organize the North Side.
Obama loved it. He added “Register and Vote” and had the slogan framed in a red, yellow, and green kente border. It was a coveted T-shirt and poster that summer.
Project Vote! made Obama a small-time celebrity in the black community. He spoke from the pulpits of churches, addressed a rally in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH headquarters, and was interviewed on WVON (originally Voice of the Negro, now Voice of the Nation), Chicago’s black talk radio station. Since Obama was responsible for raising money to supplement Newman’s contribution, he was introduced, for the first time, to the wealthy Chicagoans who would one day fund his campaigns for the U.S. Senate and the presidency. Ed Gardner, founder of Soft Sheen Products, an African-American hair care manufacturer, donated thousands of dollars. John Rogers, an investment banker who is now one of Obama’s closest friends, was the fund-raising cochair. The chair, John Schmidt, was a Harvard-educated lawyer who had served as Mayor Richard M. Daley’s first chief of staff. Schmidt organized events at the University Club, where Obama met big-time Democratic donors Lewis Manilow and Bettylu Saltzman, who eagerly wrote him checks. Chicago’s liberal elite was enchanted by the articulate young black man with the Harvard Law degree.
“In front of that kind of audience, he was as good as he was going to get,” Schmidt would recall. “He learned how effective he could be in a room full of lawyers.”
At Project Vote! headquarters, Obama was an intense, disciplined, but low-key boss. He would sit in his tiny office, chain-smoking Pall Malls and studying tallies, always with one figure in mind: the 150,000 voters he’d promised Newman.