Miller, the publisher of Capitol Fax, a Springfield newsletter. During the campaign, Miller had told me, “Barack is a very intelligent man, but he hasn’t had a lot of success here, and it could be because he places himself above everybody. He likes people to know he went to Harvard.”
Obama was upset about the way Miller had characterized him, but “he took that criticism the right way,” Miller would remember years later.
“A lot of politicians, they know that they’re smart,” Miller said. “They know that they’re capable. It messes with their minds. Politics is not a game of qualifications. It’s a game of winning. That congressional campaign really showed that to him.”
Losing that race helped Obama in another way: It humbled him. Before his encounter with Bobby Rush, Obama was a cocky young pol in a hurry. He needed the deepening experience of defeat to learn who he was as a politician. It wouldn’t be enough to present himself as Barack Obama, first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He was going to have to stand for something, too.
After the primary, Obama was broke—he had neglected his law practice for six months—and he was persona non grata in a party that had closed ranks around Rush. That summer, Obama flew to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, at the urging of friends who still believed he had a political future. When he landed, he had trouble even renting a car. Hertz rejected his American Express card. Obama eventually got his car but then couldn’t get a pass for the convention floor. Sorry, the chairman of the Illinois delegation told Obama. I’m getting a ton of requests. So Obama watched the speeches on TVs in the Staples Center concourse. Once in a while, he sneaked into a skybox by tagging along with friends. Lesson: In Chicago, you wait your turn, young man. Dispirited, Obama returned home before Al Gore was nominated.
Chapter 10
“I’LL KICK YOUR ASS RIGHT NOW”
A F T E R H I S F A I L E D C A M P A I G N against Bobby Rush, Obama’s reputation in the black political community was worse than ever. First, this young punk had knocked a little old lady schoolteacher off the ballot and taken her senate seat. Then, he’d tried to beat an incumbent congressman who’d been marching in the streets for civil rights when Obama was a kindergartener in Hawaii.
On Election Night, Rush called Obama and Trotter “very important individuals” and invited them “to work together on the issues that are of concern to the residents of the First Congressional District”: “Let’s work on the transportation issues. Let’s work on the health issues. Let’s work on the economic development, and I think we can accomplish a lot together,” he said.
Those were just the words of a winner who wanted to sound gracious in the press. In reality, Rush had developed a deep grudge against Obama. Rush had mortgages and children in college, and Obama had tried to take away his livelihood. (Of course, Rush himself had won the seat by beating an elderly incumbent in an election that was also about generational change, from the preachers and funeral directors of the civil rights era to the militants of the black power movement.) When the congressional districts were redrawn after the 2000 census, Obama’s condo was a few blocks outside the First District. Rush claimed he’d had nothing to do with the gerrymandering, which divided Hyde Park between himself and Jesse Jackson Jr. Obama pretended not to care, telling the Tribune he had no plans to run for Congress again.
In fact, Obama was thinking of quitting politics altogether. During what friends would call his “pity party” after losing to Rush, he almost accepted a job as executive director of the Joyce Foundation. He didn’t want to leave politics, he told Ab Mikva, but it was a six-figure job, and Michelle was worried about the family’s finances, especially since the congressional campaign had put the Obamas even deeper in debt. The Joyce Foundation had supported the Developing Communities Project, so it was a place where Obama could work to improve the inner city, maybe more so than a politician could. If he couldn’t beat Bobby Rush, how was he ever going to get out of the state senate?
Mikva urged Obama to stay in the legislature. If he couldn’t afford to do that, Mikva said, he should take the professorship the law school was pushing on him.