of motivational guru Tony Robbins, who urged his listeners to “awaken the giant within.” Rush was a hero of the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Washington years, and he was proof that a black man could succeed. You couldn’t out-ghetto Bobby Rush in Chicago.
Obama didn’t intend to try. He didn’t think he’d have to. In that disastrous run for mayor, Rush even lost his own ward, which hadn’t voted for a white candidate since before Harold Washington. To many, the election was a sign that Daley had finally brought an end to “Beirut on the Lake”—the city’s black vs. white political wars—and that Rush’s style of racial confrontation had had its day.
The First District is a bellwether of black politics, not only in Chicago, but in the nation. Rush had won the seat by unhorsing Representative Charles Hayes, an elderly veteran of Martin Luther King’s voter registration drives. Obama thought the district was ready for another generational change, to a postracial politician who could reach out to whites.
Plus, for an old firebrand, Rush was a surprisingly bland figure. He had worked hard to overcome a childhood stutter, and while he spoke fluidly, he rarely raised his voice on the stump. To Obama, Rush was an uninspiring, ineffectual congressman who had ridden to Washington, D.C., on his public image and was now doing little for his district. But fighting on his home turf—the South Side—Rush turned out to be wilier and more potent than Obama expected.
On a Sunday in late September 1999, after attending a children’s book fair in Hyde Park, Obama held a press conference announcing his candidacy for Congress. He promised to focus on issues he thought Rush had neglected: crime, education, health care, and economic development. Then he basically called Rush a washed-up revolutionary whose addiction to identity politics prevented him from passing meaningful bills.
“Rush represents a politics that is rooted in the past, a reactive politics that isn’t very good at coming up with concrete solutions,” Obama argued.
Rush was passionate about one issue: gun control. The Black Panthers romanticized weapons, but Rush had renounced his old pistol-toting image to cosponsor thirty-one gun control bills in Congress, including the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban.
That fall, Rush was given a personal reason to loathe guns. On October 18, 1999, his twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey, was shot by two men who believed he was holding money for a drug dealer. He died four days later.
After Huey’s death, Rush went on a media tour to condemn the “glorification” of firearms. His was an irresistible story: the ex–Black Panther who had once served six months on a weapons charge but now understood firsthand the evil that guns do. Rush was in Newsweek and People, on National Public Radio, Queen Latifah, and Today.
Huey’s murder brought enormous sympathy to Rush. Plenty of South Siders had lost sons, grandsons, nephews, or cousins to street violence. Obama heard the news on the radio, while he was driving to a meeting at which he hoped to win the support of one of the few South Side politicians who hadn’t endorsed Rush. Afterward, he got a phone call from Jesse Jackson, who told him, “You realize, Barack, the dynamics of this race have changed.” Obama got the message and suspended his campaign for a month.
Obama had another, more tangible problem. At the beginning of the campaign, he had spent a small amount of his four-figure war chest to commission a poll. The result: Rush had 90 percent name recognition in the district. Obama had 11 percent.
Obama had some dirt on Rush’s relationship with Huey, who was born out of wedlock to a fellow Black Panther and raised by an aunt. Now he couldn’t use that. So he tried attacking Rush politically. From the beginning, though, Obama’s campaign was off-key and out of touch with the South Side.
I got my first sight of Obama early that winter, at a church in the Bronzeville neighborhood. I was writing about the race for the Chicago Reader. It was a Saturday afternoon—as a greenhorn challenger, Obama wasn’t getting the Sunday pulpit invitations—and maybe a dozen people were scattered in the worn pews. Weak December sunlight strained through the stained glass. Obama wore a suit and tie—he had not yet pioneered open-necked campaign casual. Posing uncomfortably before the baptismal, he tried to relax the crowd with self-deprecating wit.
“The first thing people ask me is, ‘How did you get that name, “Obama,” ’ although they don’t always pronounce it