point during the dinner, Obama leaned over and revealed he was wearing an Armani tie. A guy in an Armani tie, Baird thought, asking me for money.
Obama wanted to run for the legislature with Alice Palmer’s blessing. But despite his political involvement, Obama had never met his state senator. He had an in, though: Brian Banks, his old colleague from Project Vote!, was managing Palmer’s campaign. Obama called him.
“I want to run,” he told Banks. “I want to talk to Alice.”
Banks arranged a meeting at the North Side home of Hal Baron. Baron, who had been Harold Washington’s policy director, was chairing Palmer’s campaign. At the meeting, Obama told Palmer of his plans.
“Do you have any problem with that?” he asked, wanting assurance, “and will you come back if you lose?”
The second question was especially important to Obama. By the time he met Palmer, Mel Reynolds had been convicted, been imprisoned, and resigned his seat in Congress. That meant Palmer was no longer running in the March 1996 primary. She was running in a special election, scheduled for November 28, 1995, which would give her enough time to refile for the state senate if she lost. And defeat was a real possibility because two better-known challengers had entered the race: Emil Jones Jr., minority leader of the state senate, and Jesse Jackson Jr., the thirty-year-old son and namesake of the civil rights leader. Palmer assured Obama she was all in. It was going to be Congress or bust.
Alice Palmer wasn’t a Hyde Parker—she lived in nearby South Shore—but she was perfectly attuned to the neighborhood’s character. She had begun her career as an academic, earning a Ph.D. from Northwestern and serving as that university’s director of African-American student affairs. Although she was politically active—she founded the Chicago Free South Africa Committee—Palmer didn’t get into electoral politics until she was forty-nine, joining in a rebellion against the remnants of the Machine. Her committeeman had supported Jane Byrne for mayor against Harold Washington. After Washington’s death, progressives all over the city set out to defeat black and Latino politicians who hadn’t had Harold’s back. In 1984, Palmer was swept into office as part of the New Ward Committeeman Coalition, a gang of liberals who held regular meetings at a Mexican restaurant and supported pro-Washington candidates for city council.
Seven years later, Palmer was running a nonprofit called Cities in Schools, which brought mentors and money to inner-city students. Richard Newhouse, the long-serving state senator from the Thirteenth District, fell ill and resigned from his seat. It was up to the committeemen to appoint a replacement. They wanted Palmer.
“I’m writing a grant,” she protested. “I’m busy.”
But she was drafted anyway and went to Springfield, where she served as an independent Democrat, helping to ensure that lottery money funded education and holding hearings on universal health care.
Palmer did more than give Obama her blessing and promise to get out of the way. She introduced him as her successor. On September 19, 1995, Obama announced his candidacy before two hundred supporters at the Ramada Inn Lakeshore. Palmer preceded him to the microphone, where she anointed him as a scion of the lakefront liberal movement.
“In this room,” she declared, “Harold Washington announced for mayor. It looks different, but the spirit is still in this room. Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a passing of the torch because he’s the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district.”
It wasn’t just Palmer who signaled that Obama was the independent movement’s choice. In attendance were both Hyde Park aldermen, Barbara Holt and Toni Preckwinkle. Also in the crowd was Cook County clerk David Orr, who as an alderman had been one of Washington’s few white allies on the city council.
Obama began his first run for office with a lawyer joke. “Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days—they fall somewhere lower than lawyers,” he said, before delivering the message Hyde Parkers wanted to hear: “I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf.”
Obama opened a campaign office on Seventy-first Street, far from Hyde Park but close to the center of the district, which reached south into South Shore and west into Englewood, one of the city’s poorest, most barren neighborhoods. As his