need?” he’d ask his field organizers at their weekly meetings. “In order to get this funding, we gotta have these registrations.”
Brian Banks, a Harvard grad and Altgeld Gardens native, was in charge of the South Side. When Banks tried to hire his live-in girlfriend to work on a freelance project for the campaign, he got a reminder that his boss wasn’t from Chicago.
“Look, you can’t do this,” Obama told him quietly but firmly.
Banks responded with a “you’re crazy” look, but Obama continued.
“We’re not going to run this with people from your family getting paid,” he said.
Obama was also learning to use his sex appeal as a political tool. With his baritone voice; tall, lean figure; brilliant smile; and Ivy League intellect, Obama was enormously attractive to females. To the middle-aged women of the DCP, he had presented himself as a surrogate son. But now he was a thirty-year-old man, running a citywide program with a six-figure budget. The head of Project Vote! was going to have to suggest a deeper relationship with his female followers, and Obama did. In politics, 1992 was the Year of the Woman. Most Project Vote! volunteers were women, as excited about Moseley Braun’s gender as her race. They were also motivated by Obama’s magnetism. One loyal registrar came back to the office with over a thousand sheets that summer.
Banks had played basketball in high school and college, so he knew about groupies, and he also knew when guys were exploiting their female admirers. Obama was aware of his charisma, but he was too focused on voter registration to fool around.
“One of the reasons this project was so successful is there were a lot of women who wanted to spend time with him,” Banks would say. “He’d walk into a room, and there’d be people swooning. I’ve seen a lot of guys who used that to have sex, but he just wanted to use that to do something.”
Project Vote! added more than 150,000 new voters to the rolls—a record for a Chicago registration drive. For the first time, voters in black-majority wards outnumbered voters in white-majority wards. And they came out in November, thanks to get-out-the-vote phone calls made from Teamsters headquarters. Over half a million blacks voted, the highest turnout since Harold Washington’s first election. Carol Moseley Braun defeated her Republican opponent 53 percent to 47 percent, and Bill Clinton became the first Democrat to carry Illinois since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Illinois became a blue state that year. It has not changed colors since.
Moseley Braun not only inherited Harold Washington’s movement, she expanded on his achievements. Before Harold, a black Chicago pol’s highest aspiration was U.S. representative. After Harold, it became senator, and ultimately president. Plenty of other cities have had black mayors—Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore—but in none of those places have blacks achieved so much statewide political success. (Moseley Braun was actually the second black politician to win a statewide election in Illinois. In 1978, Roland Burris, a product of the South Side Machine, was elected to the first of three terms in the minor office of comptroller. Burris later served as attorney general, then became notorious when Governor Rod Blagojevich appointed him to complete Obama’s term in the U.S. Senate.)
Chicago has two unique advantages. First, it’s in Cook County, which contains nearly half of Illinois’s voters. Second, the local Democratic Party is a countywide organization. After Moseley Braun won the 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,” political consultant Don Rose would explain. “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.”
Obama’s success won him his first notice in the Chicago Tribune. In a special Black History Month section, he was named one of “25 Chicagoans on the road to making a difference.”
“Barack Obama, 31, Attorney,” the agate-type profile read. “A community activist who headed Project Vote!, a voter registration effort responsible for signing up many of the 150,000 new African-American voters added to the rolls for last November’s historic election. In 1990, he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.”
Obama’s wedding took place at Trinity United Church of Christ, with a reception at the South