a goodie fund to spread around the district however he sees fit. In the early 2000s, as Obama was recovering from his loss to Rush and incubating his Senate ambitions, he gave the largest chunk of his member initiative money—$1.1 million—to the Seventeenth Ward, in the southeastern corner of his senate district. The money went mainly for park improvements. Preckwinkle’s Fourth Ward got $275,000.
Obviously, every alderman wants more money for her ward, but Preckwinkle was incensed because Obama represented the entire Fourth Ward, while he only represented a small corner of the Seventeenth. She concluded he was trying to score points with Seventeenth Ward alderman Terry Peterson. Like Preckwinkle, Peterson had endorsed Obama in his run for Congress. But Peterson was close to Mayor Daley, whose support could guarantee Obama victory in a Senate primary. (Daley would later appoint Peterson to head the Chicago Housing Authority.) Preckwinkle had backed Obama in his dispute with Alice Palmer and his challenge to Rush, and now she was getting leftovers while Obama fattened up a new friend. Using member initiative money to advance his career was evidence of the disloyalty and opportunism that were becoming Obama’s modus operandi as he grasped for higher office.
Preckwinkle was particularly frustrated because Obama claimed he didn’t have the money to help the city buy and relocate a church that was standing in the way of a proposed pedestrian bridge across Lake Shore Drive.
“We asked him to do things, and it didn’t happen, and, subsequently, we discovered that his resources were going other places,” she would later complain. “To people who would be useful to him in the future versus people who had helped him in the past.”
Even though she considered Obama a social-climbing ingrate, Preckwinkle continued to support his campaigns, lending him staff members and putting his name on her ward organization’s Election Day palm cards. As an alderman, she had learned to make a distinction between candidates she liked personally and candidates whose politics she liked. A black U.S. senator would be important to her community.
As a committeeman, though, Preckwinkle was in a position to take some revenge. After Obama won the U.S. Senate seat, he would personally ask Preckwinkle to support Will Burns—his former student and legislative staffer—as his successor in Springfield. Preckwinkle would refuse. Instead, she voted to appoint a lawyer named Kwame Raoul. (Burns eventually won a seat in the state house, representing Bronzeville. There, he finally gave Preckwinkle the money to move that church.)
Obama didn’t make the daily papers often during his early years in the senate. He wasn’t in the leadership, so he was never involved in budget negotiations, which is always the biggest story out of Springfield. If Barack Obama and Emil Jones walked out of a room together, reporters were going to ignore Obama and surround Jones. Occasionally, he was mentioned in a page 5 metro section story about a bill to crack down on payday loan operations. Like any ambitious politician, though, he cultivated the media. There was an affinity between Obama and journalists. He was a published author, so he had a literary sensibility and knew the toil that went into writing. Obama also shared the press corps’s political outlook: He was a liberal reformer who believed in open government. His bill to post campaign contributions on the Internet was a boon to investigative journalism in Illinois. Beyond that, he was articulate, quotable, and accessible, willing to leave the senate floor to talk to a newsman waiting by the Rail, the reporters’ and lobbyists’ nickname for the third-floor rotunda.
Obama took whatever media attention he could get. He was a frequent guest on Public Affairs, a one-on-one talk show that aired on public television stations around the state. Al Kindle put him on a public access show in Chicago. In other words, the name “Barack Obama” was unknown to anyone except wonks who read the Illinois Blue Book, a legislative directory. Illinois is a state with a vibrant political culture, but that’s still a small following.
At the time, the journalist who covered Obama most closely was Todd Spivak, a twenty-five-year-old cub reporter for the Hyde Park Herald. As the neighborhood state senator, Obama was on Spivak’s beat, and Spivak usually made a story out of the press releases politicians faxed into their local papers. CURRIE AND OBAMA BILLS SEEK TO CLEAN UP COURTS. SENATOR OBAMA HELPS DEFEAT A CANCELED FIREARM BILL. Or simply, OBAMA BILL PASSES SENATE.
Spivak also covered city hall, where he was used to encountering evasive,