chairman Newton Minow; $1,000 from Tony Rezko. Authors Scott Turow and Sara Paretsky chipped in money. So did some of Obama’s Harvard professors. Rashid Khalidi hosted a coffee for Obama at his apartment, serving Lebanese delicacies prepared by his wife, Mona. Obama hired his Springfield sidekick Dan Shomon to manage the campaign.
But Obama also used his run for Congress to build the network of young, rich blacks who would support his Senate campaign a few years later. More than half the members of his finance committee were black entrepreneurs under fifty. They included John Rogers Jr., the millionaire founder of Ariel Investments. Rogers had grown up in Kenwood, just north of Hyde Park, as a Republican—his mother, Jewel LaFontant, was a deputy solicitor general in the Nixon administration and later testified before Congress for the Supreme Court nomination of her old boss Robert Bork. But, as an ambitious Chicagoan, Rogers had drifted toward the Democratic Party. He was finance chairman of Carol Moseley Braun’s campaign for Cook County recorder of deeds. When Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, Rogers officially switched teams.
Rogers had played basketball at Princeton with Obama’s brother-in-law, Craig Robinson. He had served on the finance committee of Project Vote! and was at the Ramada Inn when Obama announced his campaign for state senate. That’s when he decided Obama was a “magical talent.” Rogers was excited to see someone his own age sacrifice a lucrative law career for public service.
Of course, the other half of Obama’s finance committee was made up of whites like John Schmidt, who had also raised funds for Project Vote! The more Obama tried to reach outside the black community, the more he was attacked from inside. Because of his academic success, he was even compared to imprisoned ex-congressman Mel Reynolds.
Lu Palmer, an outspoken black journalist, had dismissed Obama as “arrogant” when the young man was organizing Project Vote! and later tried to dissuade him from running against Alice Palmer.
“I said, ‘Man, you sound like Mel Reynolds,’ ” Palmer told me in an interview for the Reader. “There are similarities. If you get hung into these elite institutions, and if you so impress white folks at these elite institutions, and if they name you head of these elite institutions, the Harvard Law Review, that makes one suspect.”
Nobody played the Oreo card more aggressively than State Senator Donne Trotter, the third candidate in the Democratic primary. Trotter, who promoted himself as “Chicago’s Native Son,” sprang from a more elite strain of the city’s black community than Rush. The Trotters had arrived in Chicago around 1900 and were pillars of the South Side’s middle class. Trotter’s grandfather had been one of the city’s most prominent ministers, leading a congregation in Hyde Park. Trotter upheld the family image with tailored suits, bow ties, soul food lunches, and smooth jazz oozing from the speakers of his Jeep.
When it came to racial innuendo, though, Trotter was anything but smooth. He had already developed a disdain for Obama in Springfield, dubbing him “Senator Yo Mama.” In an interview at a juice bar on Forty-third Street, in the heart of Bronzeville, Trotter let fly with the campaign’s most infamous slur.
“Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community,” Trotter said. “You just have to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It’s these individuals in Hyde Park, who don’t always have the best interests of the community in mind.”
(Making those nasty remarks was Trotter’s job. He wasn’t trying to win. He was a hatchet man. Emil Jones had put him in the race to split the anti-Rush vote.)
Alderman Toni Preckwinkle tried to help Obama connect to the streets. Preckwinkle held a grudge against Rush, because he had run several candidates against her in the last aldermanic elections. When Obama came to Preckwinkle’s office to talk about running for Congress, she told him, “Look, I’ve tried to stay out of Bobby’s way. I don’t do him any harm. He sent all these people after me this time. I’ll be happy to help you, but you’ve got to decide right away what to do and get going.”
Obama didn’t make up his mind until the summer. Preckwinkle thought that was awfully late, but she still loaned him her chief of staff, Al Kindle, a veteran fixer who had begun his career organizing wards for Harold Washington. Kindle had actually met Obama back in 1985, when he was