based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
A dumb war. Obama was expressing himself with a simplicity that his old self might have found simpleminded. Most of the three thousand people in the plaza had never heard of this state legislator from Hyde Park, but as he spoke, they nodded and asked each other, “Who is that?” It was, one listener would remember, a “quiet barn raising”—well timed, with cadence. Obama ended with a challenge to the president, suggesting that he’d chosen the wrong enemy in Saddam Hussein, a weakened dictator who posed no threat to the United States. Over and over, he asked, “You want a fight, President Bush?”
You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.
You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves of Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn’t simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.
Those are the battles we need to fight. Those are the battles we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance, corruption and greed, poverty and despair.
The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom and pay the wages of war. But we ought not—we will not—travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.
The speech had its intended effect, not just on Federal Plaza, but on Obama’s public profile. In the days afterward, the text was circulated on the Internet, where such sites as Democratic Underground, Truthout, BuzzFlash, and Daily Kos were becoming important forums for opponents of the Bush administration. The speech cemented the support of Saltzman and Julie Hamos, a state representative who also spoke at the rally. After Obama announced his candidacy, Hamos threw him a fund-raiser in her wealthy North Shore district, and Saltzman lobbied Axelrod to take him on as a client.
In most of the country, 2002 was a Republican year. President George W. Bush used the fear of terrorism to win his party the U.S. Senate and increase its margin in the House of Representatives. It wasn’t so in Illinois. The Republicans had occupied the governor’s mansion for twenty-six years, but their incumbent, George Ryan, was involved in a scandal shocking even for a state where corruption is a hallowed tradition. The U.S. attorney was investigating driver’s licenses issued for bribes when Ryan was secretary of state, including one to a trucker who caused an accident that killed six children. It was time, the voters felt, to throw out the Republican crooks and give some Democratic crooks a chance.
Ryan’s unpopularity wasn’t all the Democrats had going for them. Illinois was one of the first states to experience the partisan transformation that would, when it spread nationwide, result in Obama’s election as president.
As a Midwestern state, near the population center of the U.S., with demographics almost exactly matching the national average, Illinois is as good a bellwether of political movements as any. It’s a radically moderate state. Extremists do not thrive in Illinois. The religious right is regularly crushed in Republican primaries, and the activist left is confined to a few neighborhoods of shabby three-flats near the Chicago lakefront. The state’s political culture is practical, not idealistic.
Illinois voted Republican for president in six consecutive elections, from 1968 to 1988, an era when Republicans dominated the White House, Jimmy Carter’s post-Watergate win notwithstanding. It elected Republican governors for most of that period, too.
The state began to change its colors with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. You can actually trace the state’s movement from Republican to Democrat by following the political journey of Clinton’s wife, Hillary, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. As a young woman, Hillary followed her father’s politics, dressing as a Goldwater Girl for the 1964 election. Then she went to Wellesley, where she made the same ideological journey as so many well-educated suburban children who would become the Democratic Party’s brain trust: civil rights lawyers, consumer advocates, college professors, political