his urbane, overeducated boss to rural life, and, frankly, he also wanted to teach Obama to behave like a commoner. Obama already had a reputation for haughtiness around the capitol. If voters saw him the same way, he’d never get ahead in politics. Obama and Shomon made an unusual-looking pair—Obama was tall and lean, while Shomon was squat and bushy haired, with squinty eyes behind thick glasses. But their partnership, which would last until Obama ran for the U.S. Senate, fit into a long tradition of smooth, charismatic politicians and brilliant, untidy sidekicks, each contributing a necessary element for political success. Think of Louis Howe and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Sorensen and John F. Kennedy, or Karl Rove and George W. Bush. That’s who Shomon was to Obama early in his career.
In its four-hundred-mile run from Lake Michigan to the Ohio River, Illinois encompasses three American regions, each culturally and linguistically distinct from the others. The northern third of the state was settled by Yankees from New England and western New York. Highly educated, utopian, they built small religious colleges and supported abolition, prohibition, and women’s suffrage. After these settlers came millions of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Russia: Peasant stock, Catholic and Jewish, they were less idealistic about politics, allowing ward bosses to substitute themselves for old-world lairds and dukes. The prairies of Central Illinois are corn and soybean country, where people still say “warsh” for “wash,” go to evangelical churches on Wednesday night and Sunday morning, and hunt pheasant in the fall. Lincoln lived there, and his memory is revered with statues and plaques in every town where he practiced law. (Springfield has restored his entire block to its 1850s glory; in Charleston, where he debated Stephen A. Douglas, visitors can view a chip from a rail he split, displayed like a sliver of the true cross.) And then there is Little Egypt. The oldest part of the state, it was settled by migrants who arrived from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia in the age of Andrew Jackson. It is a landscape of deep coal mines, forests, and shadowed hollows. The name’s origin is uncertain: Some say it comes from the meeting of the Ohio and the Mississippi, similar to the Nile Delta, others from a hard winter when northern farmers were, like the sons of Jacob, forced to go down to Egypt to get corn. Wherever the term came from, it is reflected in the town names—Cairo, Karnak, Thebes—and the SIU mascot, the Saluki. Paul M. Angle, the author of Bloody Williamson—which details the region’s family feuds, Ku Klux Klan activity, and a massacre of twenty-two scabs by striking miners—compared it to Appalachia in its “family hatreds, labor strife, religious bigotry, atavistic narrowness.”
True to its Southern roots, Little Egypt has a history of racial conflict—a 1967 riot in Cairo resulted in a years-long black boycott that drove white businesses out of town. Also true to its Southern roots, it is poor—the poorest part of Illinois—and ancestrally Democratic. Black Democrats had won there before. Roland Burris, a native of Centralia, carried Little Egypt in his races for comptroller and attorney general. Carol Moseley Braun swept the region in 1992, running on a ticket with Bill Clinton and Al Gore, two Southern Democrats whose famous bus tour stopped in Vandalia. Obama’s task wasn’t as difficult as it seemed.
Shomon had worked as the Downstate coordinator on several statewide campaigns, so he tried to get Obama to go native—as much as that was possible for a black Harvard lawyer in coal country. As Obama would recount in The Audacity of Hope, Shomon, the perfect political mate, even nagged him about his clothes and his condiments.
Four times he reminded me we have to pack—just khakis and polo shirts, he said; no fancy linen trousers or silk shirts. I told him I didn’t own any linens or silks. On the drive down, we stopped at a TGI Fridays and I ordered a cheeseburger. When the waitress brought the food I asked her if she had any Dijon mustard. Dan shook his head.
“He doesn’t want Dijon,” he insisted, waving the waitress off. “Here,” he shoved a yellow bottle of French’s mustard in my direction—“here’s some mustard right here.”
The waitress looked confused. “We got Dijon if you want it,” she said to me.
In Shawneetown, Obama and Shomon toured Scates’s fifteen thousand acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat, which were spread across two counties. As far as Scates could tell, Obama had never been on a