by police for no apparent reason, except that you fit a racial profile secretly used by police. It’s called racial profiling, and it’s an unethical and dangerous practice that needs to end. Now state senator Barack Obama, candidate for Congress in the First District, is leading the fight to end racial profiling.
OBAMA: This is state senator Barack Obama. Racial profiling is not only wrong and degrading, it’s dangerous and can lead to unexpected confrontations. Not only that, it erodes confidence in law enforcement. That’s why I’ve introduced legislation to address the problem of racial profiling and protect you from those who would abuse your rights.
VOICE-OVER: Barack Obama, Democrat for Congress. New leadership that works for us.
OBAMA: Paid for by Obama for Congress 2000.
Primary day is always cold in Chicago, but Obama stood dutifully in front of elementary schools and park field houses, shaking hands with voters. He cut a lean, handsome figure in his black topcoat and gray scarf. Over and over, the old ladies shuffling to the polls told him the same thing: “You seem like a nice young man, but Bobby hasn’t done anything wrong.”
If Obama had known in his bones that he was going to lose, now he was hearing the bad news to his face. The local TV stations called the race even before Obama arrived at his Election Night party. The final tally was 61 percent for Rush, 30 percent for Obama, and 7 percent for Trotter. Obama barely won his own neighborhood, taking 55 percent of the vote in Hyde Park.
“There’s no more difficult play in politics than running against an incumbent,” Obama told his supporters in a concession speech at the Ramada Inn Lakeshore. “I think we did it very well.”
But later, talking to a reporter at the party, Obama sounded fed up with politics. He wasn’t sure whether he’d ever run for office again.
“I’ve got to make some assessments about where we go from here,” he said. “We need a new style of politics to deal with the issues that are important to people. What’s not clear to me is whether I should do that as an elected official or by influencing government in ways that actually improve people’s lives.”
Obama was dejected, demoralized, and bitter about his opponents’ personal attacks.
“Me being president of the Harvard Law Review, I never thought it could be a liability,” he told Jesse Ruiz, “but it was a liability in this race.”
Obama didn’t lose because he was “too white.” He lost because he was a presumptuous young man challenging a popular incumbent. If anything, his whiteness spared him a bigger beating. He ran strongly in Beverly and the southwest suburbs. Obama also hemmed and hawed too long before committing himself to the campaign, and once he was in, he didn’t devote enough time to building a grassroots organization or raising money. Calling his Harvard classmates was no substitute for cultivating donors on the South Side.
Winning the seat in the historic First Congressional District would have added Obama’s name to a lineage of powerful black leaders: Oscar DePriest, William Dawson, Ralph Metcalfe, and his own political inspiration, Harold Washington. It would also have put him in line for the job he had coveted ever since arriving on the South Side: mayor of Chicago.
Defeat always smarts for a politician, especially one who has never before failed at anything.
It stung Obama to have his credentials as a black man questioned, and it stung him even more to lose. But in losing, he absorbed a lesson that would carry him far higher than he could have risen as the First District’s congressman. Obama was never meant to be a voice of black empowerment, in the way that Rush and Jesse Jackson were. It wasn’t just a racial thing. It was generational, too. Confrontational sixties-style politics were not his bag. With his biracial heritage, Obama was born to reconcile the interests of blacks and whites. He tried to sell that message in 2000, but he was running against a civil rights icon in the blackest congressional district in America. It was the wrong race, and the wrong time, for the emergence of Barack Obama.
The week of his defeat, Obama returned to Springfield, where he sat down to his regular poker game at Terry Link’s house. The same words were on the lips of every pol at that table: “I told you so.” Obama didn’t need to hear it. He knew he’d blundered.
Around that time, Obama also had a soul-searching drink with Rich