district office to discuss the race. With the same high-handedness that caused her to run through five chiefs of staff in six years, Moseley Braun made it clear that running for her old Senate seat was her prerogative. Obama would just have to wait for her decision.
But Moseley Braun wouldn’t make one. Todd Spivak of the Hyde Park Herald, Moseley Braun’s neighborhood paper, talked to her nearly every week.
“She always talked about she’s waiting for this, she’s looking at this, and she would not come out,” Spivak would recall. “She put everything on hold. Carol became more and more paranoid and upset with me. She came to my office once to yell at my editor for a story I wrote where I was pretty much just parroting what the dailies were saying. She wasn’t being embraced by her old supporters. It took her a while to realize, ‘My political career is really over.’ ”
Obama was having better success asking his senate colleagues for support. As he’d told Valerie Jarrett, he started by approaching Emil Jones. If the Democrats took over the state senate in 2002, as they seemed likely to do, Jones would become senate president.
“You know,” Obama told his caucus leader, “you’re a pretty powerful guy. You have the power to make a U.S. senator.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jones said. “Who?”
“Me,” Obama told him.
Jones agreed to help. He had opposed Obama in his races for the state senate and the U.S. Congress, but this time the young man was playing by the rules: He wasn’t challenging an incumbent Democrat. Obama’s poker buddies were on board, too. In the spring of 2002, Obama met Larry Walsh for breakfast at the Renaissance Center in Springfield.
“I want to ask you some very difficult questions,” he told Walsh. Then he laid out his plan for a Senate run and asked if Walsh would support him.
“Absolutely,” Walsh said.
Not only had the two senators served together—and played cards together—for five years, but Obama had once done Walsh a big political favor. In 1998, Walsh won a difficult primary against an African-American opponent. To mend fences with the black community, he organized a luncheon for African-American leaders in Joliet. Obama had once told Walsh, “If you ever need me, if you’d like me to speak to black ministers or business leaders or whatever, I’d be more than glad to come down.” So Walsh invited Obama to keynote the luncheon. Obama’s speech resonated with the audience. That fall, Walsh received strong black support.
Walsh, Link, and Jacobs all represented districts that were anchored by a city with a significant black population. Obama was going to do well in Chicago, but to win the entire state, he also needed to do well in Joliet, Waukegan, and Rock Island. Those three old white guys could help.
While Obama waited for Moseley Braun to announce her plans, he started a fund-raising committee. Raising money couldn’t wait. Winning the Senate seat was going to cost at least $4 million, most of it for TV ads to introduce himself to Illinois. Peter Fitzgerald had spent $14 million of his family wealth, an amount Obama considered obscene.
Once he had his inner circle behind him, Obama made an appeal to the ABLE crowd. At a gathering at Jim Reynolds’s house, he told a group of forty wealthy blacks that he was running for the Senate. He didn’t talk about money that night. Instead, he talked about making the campaign a group effort.
“Don’t let me get lost,” he implored his fellow buppies. “You are my friends. Tell me the truth, keep me real. Don’t let me get out there and get the big head. Let’s still kick off our shoes and talk.”
Everyone at the party agreed that Obama was the right candidate for the Senate. They also agreed his stump speech was terrible. It was all about local issues—he sounded like he was throwing his hat in the ring for alderman—and Obama was still using that stilted, professional style that had bored the First Congressional District.
“You’ve got to broaden it,” Martin King, the chairman of Rainbow PUSH, urged him. “You’ve got to speak larger. You should go see Jesse.”
Obama took King’s advice and began attending the Saturday morning rallies at “Jesse’s Place,” the Grecian-temple Rainbow PUSH headquarters on Drexel Avenue in Kenwood. There will always be some tension between Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson. By becoming president, Obama eventually succeeded where Jackson failed. Jackson’s politics of black empowerment made him a candidate for one race only. Obama, who was