Obama snapped. His baritone went full fathom five, but he never unbent from his patrician pose.
When I interviewed Obama at his downtown law office, in early February, his answers only reinforced the accusation that he was arrogant. Obama had always seen himself as a special figure, bound for a bigger destiny than the people around him. In Dreams from My Father, even the portraits of his family members—a dreamy, hippie-ish mother, an ineffectual grandfather—were a little patronizing. He was bound for a big destiny, but that’s no way to portray yourself to the voters, especially in one of the nation’s poorest congressional districts.
Obama had been a golden boy for so long: embraced by the Ivy League, profiled in the New York Times, a published author at thirty-four, a state senator a year later. For the first time in his life, his ambitions were being blocked. The world was pushing back. His impatience showed in a condescension to his surroundings.
Why, I asked him, should the voters choose a newcomer to the South Side over two men who had grown up in Chicago?
Obama struggled for an answer, then joked that his willingness to move from Balmy Hawaii to frozen Chicago showed he was more committed to the city than many natives.
“I really have to want to be here,” he said. “I’m like a salmon swimming upstream in the South Side of Chicago. At every juncture in my life, I could have taken the path of least resistance but much higher pay. Being the president of the Harvard Law Review is a big deal. The typical path for someone like myself is to clerk for the Supreme Court, and then basically you have your pick of any law firm in the country.”
Didn’t the people appreciate the sacrifices he’d made? To grind out a voter registration drive when he could have been earning $200K a year at a white-shoe firm? To pick his way over an ice-glazed Chicago sidewalk when he could have been bodysurfing back home in Honolulu?
Bobby Rush understood the struggles and aspirations of the high school dropout or the hotel maid trying to raise three children in a way that was impossible for Obama. Obama’s blackness had been an advantage with his Law Review colleagues and his New York publisher. Rush’s blackness had been another handicap to overcome, like his stutter or his poverty.
When Rush was invited to speak from the pulpit of Southwestern Baptist Church, on South Michigan Avenue, he urged the congregation to buy computers and hook up to the Internet, so knowledge would flow into their homes. Using his seminary training, he made a religious connection for his audience, comparing the Web to the Gutenberg Bible, which allowed all Christians to read what only the “high-class, super-elite” priests had seen.
“At one time, the Bible was only read and understood by a very few people,” Rush told his listeners. “These folks intimidated those that didn’t have access to the Bible. God in his wisdom created the printing press. Then the Bible was mass-produced, so common ordinary folk snatched the power from the elite. I look at the Internet the same way. If we are computer literate, we are on the same level as Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. We are on common ground with the wealthy and powerful. You can bring the libraries of the world to your living room, whether your living room is on South Michigan Avenue or in the richest suburbs.”
Obama had gotten some good press for a proposal to spend $50 million on computers for South Side schools, but he’d never expressed the need that eloquently, in the language of black empowerment.
Rush’s success in the churches—he held a “Clergy for Rush” rally at which over a hundred ministers gathered in front of a WE ARE STICKING WITH BOBBY! banner—revealed another of Obama’s miscalculations. He had assumed that Rush’s mayoral defeat meant he was vulnerable in his congressional district. But Rush was clobbering Obama for the same reason he’d lost the mayoral race—he was a South Sider to his bones. Rush had flopped as a citywide candidate because he couldn’t see beyond the needs of his community. As a congressman, he didn’t have to.
Trotter’s campaign had no money, but he could use his family name, and his neighborhood background, to connect with audiences. Trotter had been a Boy Scout with Ralph Metcalfe’s son and later worked on one of the congressman’s campaigns. At fifty, he was old enough to remember the heyday of