on the day of the flight, Obama’s eighteen-month-old daughter, Malia, came down with the flu. He decided to stay in Hawaii one more day. If Malia seemed to be recovering, the Obamas would fly home together. If not, Barack would fly out alone. Governor Ryan’s office was frantically trying to get Obama back to Springfield, even offering him a private plane from Chicago. Obama sensed the vote was symbolic. Unless Republican senate president Pate Philip agreed to a compromise, the bill was going to flunk out of the senate and go back to committee for further negotiations. Despite that, Obama’s presence was important to his political career. If you supported a bill, you couldn’t skip the vote. Especially not for a Hawaiian vacation.
On Wednesday, December 27, Malia was well enough to fly, and the family returned to Illinois. (If they hadn’t made that flight, they wouldn’t have been able to get out until January 8.) The bill came up for a vote that day and failed by three votes. Obama was missing from the tally. Governor Ryan, grumpy even when he was in a good mood, was especially unhappy.
“I’m angered, frankly, that the senate didn’t do a better job,” he said.
Shomon wasn’t happy, either. He taunted his candidate with this vision of a negative ad: a man in a beach chair sipping a mai tai as ukulele music played in the background and a deep-voiced narrator sneered, “While Chicago suffered the highest murder rate in its history, Barack Obama…”
Obama never apologized for putting his daughter’s health above politics. Once he got back to Chicago, he called Abner Mikva, who supported his decision.
“Barack,” Mikva said, “when I was in Congress, there were times when you don’t want to, but your family is an issue, and we put our families through so many things, so many sacrifices in this process, anyway, that every once in a while, we have to make decisions in terms of what you think is best for your family, and I think that this was one of those decisions.”
Even more than the murder of Bobby Rush’s son, the Safe Neighborhoods Act vote convinced Obama that his campaign was a lost cause.
“Each morning from that point onward I awoke with a vague sense of dread,” he would write in The Audacity of Hope, “realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan.”
Obama’s opponents didn’t need to run that Hawaiian ad. The callow state senator was castigated in the Tribune’s “Inc.” column (the headline: D-U-M) and by callers to WVON. He had to answer for his missed vote during a candidates’ forum with Trotter in the dank basement of a park field house.
“If you initiate a lot of ideas and at the time of a vote you’re not there, how can we count on you?” a voter asked.
Obama answered curtly. “If you look at my record in Springfield, I don’t miss votes. I missed one as a result of my daughter being sick. That’s an exceptional situation that doesn’t arise often.”
The man didn’t buy Obama’s excuse.
“If you tell me this is one of your issues, and then you miss the vote, that concerns me,” he said afterward. “With that in mind, I’m very reluctant to support him for anything. I think he’s biting off a little more than he can chew. He’s got some good issues, but he’s too green.”
That was the debate where Obama finally lost his cool. Even his body language signaled it. He sat with his lanky legs crossed, chin cocked at a heroic angle. He wasn’t even trying to conceal his impatience with Trotter, a mere state senate peer, or with this grungy necessity of campaigning.
Trotter was a traditional Chicago politician, a cloakroom operator who knew how to pass a bill. He liked to brag about the pork he brought home to his district—$26 million for a library at Chicago State University, $75 million for resurfacing Lake Shore Drive. He’d been an architect of the state’s child health care system. Like many senators, Trotter thought Obama considered himself too cool for the chamber and disdained the hard work of digging up votes. That evening, he shared his perception with the voters in the folding chairs. Trotter hunched over his microphone, taking digs at his increasingly irritated rival. When he needled Obama for failing to corral enough votes to override Ryan’s veto of the child support bill, Obama’s calm finally dissolved.