trying to build a multiracial coalition, couldn’t associate himself too closely with that message. But before he could reach out to whites, he needed a base in his own community. Jackson and his son Junior, who had enough cred to cover the South Side, the West Side, and the south suburbs, would become important allies in Obama’s effort to sell himself to blacks.
Obama’s black friends weren’t the only ones urging him to be a little more pulpit and a little less lecture hall. Abner Mikva was on his case about it, too. Preaching wasn’t Obama’s natural style, but he was going to have to learn if he wanted to light up black audiences outside Hyde Park.
“You’ve got to get into those black churches,” Mikva ordered Obama. “You’ve got to spend more time there. You know, Dr. King never pulled his punches, but he said it in a way black people understood.”
Then Mikva told a story from his own day, about something Cardinal Richard Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, said to John F. Kennedy after the 1960 West Virginia primary.
“Jack,” Cushing had said, “Jack, from now on be more Irish and less Harvard.”
Obama, he was suggesting, needed to be more black and less U of C.
Even by mid-2002, Obama was getting an idea of whom he’d be facing in the Democratic primary. Gery Chico, a Latino lawyer who had served as president of the Chicago Board of Education, was talking about running. So was Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas. His most formidable opponent looked to be state comptroller Dan Hynes, the scion of a Southwest Side Irish political family. Hynes would be the Machine candidate: His father, former Illinois senate president Thomas Hynes, had served with the current Mayor Daley in Springfield. They’d even shared an apartment. The labor unions, ward bosses, and Downstate county chairs, with their battalions of door knockers, would be backing Hynes, who was only thirty-three years old but already having a political midlife crisis as he tried to escape his second-tier state office.
Obama could see the constituencies he’d need to win: blacks and liberal whites, the same folks who’d elected Harold. That fall, as President George W. Bush began threatening Iraq with war, Obama got his chance to impress the latter crowd.
There were already plenty of connections between Obama and the white progressives who’d learned their politics in the 1960s antiwar movement. Jerry Kellman liked to joke that he’d “majored in protesting” at the University of Wisconsin. Judd Miner practically embodied white liberalism in Chicago. And, of course, there was Bill Ayers. Although Obama was an Alinsky organizer, many of the community groups he worked with had been formed during the sixties, as expressions of the era’s People Power ethos. The Progressive Chicago Area Network, born from the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, produced some of the biggest players in Harold Washington’s campaign, including Al Raby, another of Obama’s mentors.
The Democratic convention and the election of Harold Washington had been left-wing Chicago’s greatest moments. After Washington died, the movement became dormant, its members concentrating on their careers as journalists, professors, lawyers, politicians, and foundation presidents. They kept up with each other through the pages of the Reader, an alternative weekly founded in 1971. (And, of course, the first citywide paper to notice Obama.)
While at Davis, Miner, Obama had met an advertising/PR professional named Marilyn Katz, who had run the media campaign for Harold Washington’s mayoral run. Katz was a friend of Bettylu Saltzman, the daughter of a megamillionaire real estate developer. A former aide to Paul Simon, Saltzman had used her family fortune to become one of Chicago’s most benevolent Democratic donors. She was also acquainted with David Axelrod, Chicago’s number one political consultant, who had begun his career on Simon’s 1984 Senate campaign. Saltzman was exactly the kind of white person Obama wanted to meet.
In late September, Saltzman called Katz to talk about Bush’s drive for war. Chicago hadn’t seen a big demonstration in years. In January 2001, only a few dozen people showed up in Daley Plaza to protest Bush’s inauguration. But the president’s talk of weapons of mass destruction sounded as bogus as Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin incident. Maybe, Katz suggested, they should apply the lessons they’d learned from Vietnam and protest the war before it started.
A few days later, fifteen middle-aged activists met at Saltzman’s house to plot an antiwar strategy. Some were scared. Bush’s approval ratings were in the eighties. Speaking out against the president might be seen as