campaign manager, he hired another Project Vote! veteran, Carol Anne Harwell, who had run races for Alderman Sam Burrell, County Clerk David Orr, and Danny Davis, a county commissioner who would later go to Congress. Harwell had been baffled by Obama’s interest in the seat.
“Why do you want to do that?” she’d said when Obama told her he planned to run.
“We can make some changes,” he responded. Then he added, “Alice asked me.”
Harwell’s job was to transform Obama from a law lecturer to a Chicago politician. Despite Palmer’s endorsement, his election was not a sure thing. There were two other candidates: Marc Ewell, the son of a former state representative, and Gha-is Askia, who had the support of Senator Emil Jones and a name as exotic as Obama’s. Outside of Hyde Park, Obama was unknown in the district. Not only did he have to get known, he had to overcome the rest of the South Side’s suspicion toward uppity U of C types. He decided to spend most of his time campaigning in Englewood. Starting every evening around suppertime, he’d doff his suit coat so he could roll up his sleeves and don the leather jacket he’d worn as a law student.
“Where are you going?” Harwell would ask.
“We’re going to circulate some petitions.”
“It’s cold, Barack.”
Undaunted, Obama would drive his Saab into the hood. He didn’t bother to wear a hat or gloves, even as Chicago sank into winter. That was something else he needed to learn about local politics. After he caught a cold, Harwell scolded him.
“Barack, this is Chicago,” she said. “You have to learn how to dress.”
Obama was a big hit with the little old ladies who answered the doors of Englewood’s worn two-flats and decaying houses. They were just as eager as the women of the DCP to mother this skinny young man. He was offered fried chicken sizzling in stovetop pans and invited to sit down and explain where he’d gotten that funny name.
“My father was from Africa,” he explained, and that led to even more conversation, until Obama had spent fifteen minutes to get a single name on his petition. Door-knocking hours were six P.M. to eight P.M., and sometimes Obama would leave an apartment house with only three signatures.
“Barack, you can’t sit and talk to them,” Harwell lectured. “I’m gonna give you a goal. We’re gonna do two sheets.”
As with everything else he’d ever attempted, Obama proved a quick learner. His forays into Englewood also reawakened street smarts he hadn’t needed in Hyde Park or at Harvard. One Saturday, as he was walking a precinct with Jesse Ruiz, a group of campaign volunteers ran up to Obama with serious news.
“There’s a bunch of thugs coming over and asking us who gave us permission to walk in their neighborhood, and one of them flashed a gun,” a volunteer reported.
Ordinarily, Obama didn’t hesitate to approach gangbangers on street corners. But these were his volunteers. And there was a gun involved.
“It’s time to go,” he snapped.
Obama got a boost from another old colleague when Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn hosted a Sunday brunch for a dozen Hyde Parkers at their house. Again, Palmer was there and introduced Obama as her chosen successor, touting his bona fides as a community organizer, a Harvard graduate, and a law school teacher.
During the campaign, Obama found time to attend the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. And he was the subject of his first feature-length profile, a flattering, 4,300-word cover story in the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly that served as a house organ for the city’s independent movement. Obama told writer Hank DeZutter that he was running for office to empower ordinary citizens, just as he’d done as a community organizer.
“What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer,” he wondered, “as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.”
The quote hearkened back to that long-ago conversation with John McKnight in the Wisconsin cabin. Obama had quit community organizing not