in the Hyde Park Herald, the neighborhood weekly. A lot of Hyde Parkers write books. It’s the local industry. To really impress someone with your intellectual achievements, you have to win a Nobel Prize, and even those are a bit commonplace in Hyde Park. Chicago has had more laureates than any city in the world—most of them connected to the U of C. Obama charmed the Herald’s reporter. She noted his “dark brown eyes” and quoted him as saying that working as a community organizer in Chicago had helped him resolve his racial identity crisis.
“I came home to Chicago,” Obama said. “I began to see my identity and my individual struggles were one with the struggles that folks face in Chicago. My identity problems began to mesh once I started working on behalf of something larger than myself. Through this work, I could be angry about the plight of African-Americans without being angry at all white folks.”
Obama tried to get his book reviewed by N’DIGO, a magazine for Chicago’s upscale blacks. He made weekly phone calls to the publisher, Hermene Hartman, but she turned him down. Obama was a bright, ambitious guy but awfully young to be writing an autobiography, Hartman thought. And the story, with its scenes from Hawaii and Kenya, seemed too exotic for her audience. N’DIGO’s rejection foreshadowed Obama’s later difficulty in convincing Chicago blacks that he was one of their own.
Dreams from My Father was a modest success, selling around ten thousand copies between the hardcover and a Kodansha International paperback edition that came out a year later. The book did little for Obama’s political career. He never mentioned it in his campaign literature, although it did come up in newspaper profiles as a helpful biographical source for reporters. Quite a few people who met Obama after 1995 had no idea he was an author and were surprised when they saw his name on a bookshelf. Dreams was available in Chicago bookstores for several years, but it eventually lapsed out of print, until 2004, when the publisher rushed out a new edition to take advantage of Obama’s star-making speech at the Democratic National Convention. After that, it sold enough copies to make Obama a millionaire. For a writer, there’s no better publicity tour than a presidential campaign.
While Obama struck out with N’DIGO, his networking was paying off elsewhere. A guy as skinny as Obama doesn’t eat out all the time because he’s hungry. In Chicago, he was establishing himself as the city champion of networking, a critical skill when you arrive as a twenty-three-year-old stranger in a place where everyone else started building friendships in grade school.
During his community organizer days, Obama often breakfasted at Mellow Yellow with Stephen Perkins, vice president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. When Obama went off to Harvard, Perkins thought the social change movement was losing a promising leader. Now that he was back in Chicago, Perkins asked him to join the center’s board. The center needed someone with Obama’s interest in inner-city economic development. Like any aspiring politician, Obama wanted to build a long résumé of civic involvement. Unfortunately, he didn’t stay long enough to make a contribution. Perkins had always admired Obama for being “strategic.” Almost as soon as he joined the board, he was running for the state senate.
Chapter 7
THE FIRST CAMPAIGN
A S E X S C A N D A L created the opening Barack Obama needed to get into politics.
Chicagoans are used to seeing their politicians misbehave, but usually the transgressions involve a lust for money. A secretary of state is found dead in his Springfield hotel room, alone except for $900,000 in kickbacks stuffed into shoeboxes. A congressman uses official funds to buy gift ashtrays and trades in postage for cash, as though he’s redeeming green stamps at the supermarket. An alderman shakes down a liquor license applicant for a bribe. The list of hinky officeholders is endless, repetitive, and forgettable.
Representative Mel Reynolds caused such a sensation because his sins were carnal, not financial. Reynolds, a second-term congressman from the South Side, was accused of having sex with a sixteen-year-old girl he’d met during his 1992 run for office. Reynolds had spotted the jail bait while driving around his district and pulled over to chat, even though he was supposed to be politicking and she was too young to vote. Soon after, she joined his campaign as volunteer and mistress. Two years later, the girl confessed to the affair to her next-door neighbor, who