antagonistic aldermen. Obama was the complete opposite. He gave Spivak his cell phone number and always returned phone calls the same day, even if it was late in the evening. Whenever Spivak tried to call Obama “senator” or “sir,” he’d hear, “Please, call me Barack.” Most politicians become curt or hostile when asked about campaign contributions. They take the questions as affronts to their integrity. Not Obama. It was his style to bemoan the seamier aspects of Chicago politics while at the same time benefiting from them, so he would complain to Spivak that raising money was a necessary evil, but yes, he’d held a fund-raiser, and yes, developers were there, but no, they hadn’t gotten anything from him in return. Even worse, Obama was usually right. Spivak was used to writing about hinky South Side pols, but he couldn’t dig up any dirt on Obama. One of the few times he tried, by crashing an Obama fund-raiser at Allison Davis’s house, he was thrown out by the host.
A year after the congressional primary, I interviewed Obama again for the Reader. It was early 2001, and he was trying to pass a bill to ensure that what had happened to Al Gore in Florida would never happen in Illinois. After the 2000 election, Cook County installed ballot-counting machines that spat back overvotes and undervotes, allowing voters a chance to correct their mistakes. In some inner-city precincts, this reduced spoiled ballots by 90 percent. Republicans objected. Kicking back undervotes, they complained, would violate the privacy of people who chose to skip a race. Looming precinct captains might order voters back into the booth to complete the ballot. A Republican senator introduced a bill to turn off the ballot-checking software, thus preventing machines from identifying undervotes. Obama saw that as an effort to suppress the big-city vote. Suburbanites were voting on fill-in-the-bubble ballots, which were hard to screw up. Chicagoans were still punching out chads.
Obama countered with his own bill, which would have given counties the option of kicking back undervotes. After it died in the Elections Subcommittee, he came up with an ingenious compromise: add a “None of the above” line to every race. That would allow voters to skip a race without undervoting. (The issue became moot when a judge allowed Cook County to identify both overvotes and undervotes.)
Ever since Florida had replaced Illinois as the election fraud capital of America, I’d been writing about what our state was doing to avoid taking back the title. So I called Obama. I suspected he was unhappy about my Chicago Reader story on the First Congressional District race, which had been full of his enemies’ accusations that he wasn’t black enough for the South Side. But he returned my phone call.
“The principal reason is partisanship,” he told me, in his clipped diction, when I asked about the Republican bill. “Privately, I don’t think any of the Republican legislators would deny that. Why would they want to encourage an additional ten percent in Cook County? That’s a direct blow against them in statewide races.”
When I thanked Obama for his time, he responded with an icy “You’re welcome”—the iciest I’d ever heard from a politician. (Curtness is Obama’s favorite method of displaying anger.) My first thought was, That guy’s got some great ideas. If he ever learns how to act like a human being, he may go someplace in politics. Later, I realized that Obama’s “You’re welcome” was a smooth move. Blowing me off would have done him no good. The Reader had a following among white liberals, an important constituency for Obama in a statewide race. Berating a writer would have invited more bad publicity. Just by using a peevish tone of voice, he’d let me know he was unhappy with my work and ensured his displeasure didn’t make the paper. Obama was the most media-conscious politician I had ever met. During the congressional race, whenever I showed up at a campaign event, he always made a point of walking up to me, touching my arm, and asking, “How are you doing?” in a manner that came off as collegial rather than desperate for publicity. Politicians rarely pursue reporters. Most have to be chased across the room or approached as though they are living altars. Obama tried to bond with the press. When it mattered, the press would return the compliment.
In the spring of 2002, Obama’s testy relationship with Ricky Hendon finally blew up into an angry, shoving, profane brawl, right on the