out of the South Side community colleges. I don’t know what you’re doing on the West Side community colleges. But we probably won’t be including that in our directory for the students.”
Then Hendon reminded the body how this Hyde Park senator with the unpronounceable name had come to join them.
“I seem to remember a very lovely senator by the name of Palmer—much easier to pronounce than ‘Obama’—and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don’t have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And—and you don’t even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did…I’m missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that make absolutely no sense. I—I definitely urge a no vote. Whatever your name is.”
By the standards of freshman hazing, this was incredibly hostile. Other senators asked silly, good-natured questions. “In the bill, you talk about fostering employment,” joshed Denny Jacobs, a Democrat from Rock Island. “How does this relate to a foster child, or whatever the case may be? What is a foster employment?” Carl Hawkinson of Galesburg, the only other Harvard Law graduate in the chamber, asked, “How do the quality of these questions compare to those you received from Professors Dershowitz, Tribe, or Nessen?”
“I must say they compare favorably,” Obama assured him. “In—in fact, that is the—this is the toughest grilling that I’ve ever received. If I survive this event, I will be eternally grateful and consider this a highlight of my legal and legislative career.”
In the end, the bill passed unanimously. Even Rickey Hendon voted aye.
But Obama’s friction with Hendon—and other black legislators—went far deeper than a tough primary against a popular incumbent. Politics is a business, and politicians learn to work with the newcomers, just as a ballplayer learns to play alongside the rookie who replaced his best friend in the lineup. Hendon, who had just begun his second term, was aiming for a spot in the senate leadership, and he saw this obviously intelligent, talented newcomer as a threat. Hendon was also a much more traditional politician—and a more traditional black man—than Obama. He had come up on Chicago’s West Side, which has the city’s most violent chapters of the Gangster Disciples, its earthiest blues taverns, its loudest bid whist games, and its busiest heroin street corners. Hendon had been a teenager during the 1968 riots that burned out storefronts on Madison Street. He earned his first office—alderman—by producing TV shows and plays for big-shot politicians who then slated him as a candidate. Unlike Obama, he had paid his dues. Wherever he went, he carried the West Side attitude, that the bourgeois blacks on the South Side take eight or nine slices of pie while the West Side gets the crust. That South Siders look down on West Siders, and that nowhere do they look down from a greater height than Hyde Park. That no self-respecting West Sider can ever let a South Sider punk him.
After that hazing, Hendon began needling Obama in the black caucus. When Obama brought up a proposal, Hendon would dismiss it with, “You think you’re so smart, you went to Harvard.” After-hours, Hendon sat in his office, smoking cigars with Senator Donne Trotter, who represented the far South Side of Chicago. Together, they’d malign Obama as “arrogant” and “Harvard.” Behind his back they called him “Senator Yo Mama.” They even bought a copy of Dreams from My Father to mine for embarrassing tidbits. Paying Obama a royalty was worth it for the extra ammunition.
Obama tried to brush off the criticism. “Ah, Hendon, you’ve always got something to say.” In caucus meetings, Emil Jones tried to keep peace between the senators.
“Focus on the issues,” he’d order them.
But even that increased the tension. Jones was minority leader. As the most powerful Democrat in the chamber, he was essential to any senator’s advancement. And, from Obama’s first year in Springfield, it was obvious that Jones saw him as a comer.
Obama’s black colleagues may have been jealous, but Obama’s behavior, and his overall demeanor, didn’t help the relationships. He enjoyed telling people he’d gone to Harvard, as if the whole capitol didn’t know already. And he had a habit of listening to a debate with his chin cocked in the air, like a setter catching a far-off scent. Put together with his education and his neighborhood, the pose made him seem haughty. He sometimes gave the impression that he was slumming, killing time in the legislature