right,” he said lightly. “Some people say ‘Alabama,’ some people say ‘Yo Mama.’ I got my name from Kenya, which is where my father’s from, and I got my accent from Kansas, which is where my mother’s from.”
Obama’s standard gag came off as just the sort of awkward, beginning-of-the-semester joke you’d expect from a law professor trying too hard to prove he has a sense of humor. If anyone caught that Obama was trying to connect himself to both the birthplace of civil rights and a time-honored party joke, they didn’t laugh or nod.
Obama went on to deliver this not-so-devastating dig at his opponent: “Congressman Rush exemplifies a politics that is reactive, that waits for crises to happen then holds a press conference, and hasn’t been particularly effective at building broad-based coalitions.”
He even talked like a law professor.
Obama criticized Rush for not reaching outside the black community in his campaign for mayor. It was time for blacks to stop cursing whites and Latinos and figure out what the races had in common. I’ve been a community organizer, Obama argued, so I can walk into a housing project. And I’ve been to Harvard Law, so I can walk into a corporate boardroom, too.
“I’m more likely to be able to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people, and that’s how you get things accomplished in Congress,” he said.
But the Democratic primary wouldn’t be decided by a broad range of people. It would be decided by South Side blacks—mainly older blacks who had grown up in the Jim Crow South or in a Chicago of restrictive covenants and color lines. Among those voters, Obama’s connections to rich white colleges aroused suspicion.
Rush and his allies fed that suspicion, portraying Obama as a lackey of elite whites. They didn’t just attack Obama’s credentials. They attacked his education, his neighborhood, and his political allies. They even questioned his blackness. Any opposition research must have begun with Dreams from My Father, so Rush knew that black identity was a sensitive spot for the young man who had grown up in a white family. To Rush, a night-school graduate of Roosevelt University and the University of Illinois–Chicago Circle, Obama’s Ivy League degrees divorced him from the community he was trying to represent.
“He went to Harvard and became an educated fool!” Rush ranted during an interview in his campaign office, which was decorated with a photo of John Coltrane. “We’re not impressed with these folks with these Eastern elite degrees.”
During a debate on WVON, Chicago’s black radio station, Rush, the old street fighter, talked about leading marches to urge punishment of an off-duty cop who had killed a homeless man.
“It’s not enough for us just to protest police misconduct without thinking systematically about how we’re going to change practice,” Obama responded in measured, mellow tones.
Rush jumped on him.
“We have never been able to progress as a people based on relying solely on the legislative process, and I think that we would be in real critical shape when we start in any way diminishing the role of protest,” Rush argued. “Protest has got us where we are today.”
After the debate, Rush was still rankled by Obama’s suggestion that the black community’s marching days were past.
“Barack is a person who read about the civil rights protests and thinks he knows all about it,” he said. “I helped make that history, by blood, sweat, and tears.”
The black nationalist community, the old bulls who had demonstrated against the Black Panther killings and registered voters for Harold Washington, also resented Obama for his association with another white institution of higher learning: the University of Chicago. Black activists still harbored hard feelings about the university’s slum clearance in the 1950s and 1960s. It had been a campaign to drive poor blacks from Hyde Park’s academic island, they believed.
There were whispers that a “Hyde Park mafia” was bankrolling an “Obama project” to push the young man up the political ladder. Mikva, whose old North Shore congressional district was the wealthiest in the Midwest, tried to connect Obama with the lawyers and Jewish donors essential to the success of any liberal Democrat, black or white. Mikva wrote Obama a $250 check and held a party in Hyde Park, inviting friends and old law partners from outside the neighborhood. (“It didn’t raise much money,” Mikva would recall.) Obama was getting money from some of Chicago’s most prominent white political givers: $1,000 from former Federal Communications Commission