and over again, asking them why they couldn’t support a fellow senator, a fellow black man. Hendon finally gave in after hearing Obama speak at a West Side church. The rally was packed, and Michelle Obama sat next to Hendon the entire time, assuring him that she wouldn’t let her husband forget about issues important to black Chicago.
“I’ve got him,” Michelle told Hendon.
Hearing a homegrown black woman say “I’ve got him” was enough for Hendon. He stood up, walked to the front of the church, and endorsed Obama. The folks in the pews went wild. Obama’s staff left piles of literature at the church, and Hendon pledged his street organization to his senate colleague.
Obama chalked up his colleagues’ resentment to jealousy. They’d failed on racial profiling and death penalty reform. Once he took over, the bills passed within months. Todd Spivak, Obama’s chronicler at the Hyde Park Herald, joined the Illinois Times around the time the Democrats took over the senate and witnessed Obama’s ascendance there.
“He didn’t think too highly of Rickey Hendon and some of those older black legislators,” Spivak would recall. “ ‘They couldn’t get it done’ was the message. ‘They had it for years. They couldn’t get it done. I got it done. What does that tell you? If they have something against me, that’s their problem. They were ineffective in their position.’ ”
Nearly every Democratic state senator ended up endorsing Obama. It was just practical politics. If he won, with their support, they’d have a friend in Washington. And if he lost, without their support, he might make life uncomfortable when he came back to the capitol.
The Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired during his last term in Springfield, was the most liberal body in the senate, a popular assignment for blacks, Latinos, and big-city whites. It was the perfect platform for Obama to advance his cause of guaranteeing health care to everyone in Illinois.
Two weeks after the 2002 elections, Obama phoned Jim Duffett, the executive director of the Campaign for Better Health Care. Duffett had spent over a decade fighting to expand health care in Illinois.
“You might know this or not,” Obama told him, “but I’m now going to be the chair of the senate health committee. I’d like to sit down with you.”
The Campaign for Better Health Care had chapters in most of Illinois’s cities: Rock Island, Bloomington, Peoria, and Carbondale, among others. Obama wanted to hold town hall meetings to build support for universal health care. Illinois had just elected a Democratic senate and its first Democratic governor in twenty-six years, so this was the moment.
“You guys have these local committees all around the state,” he told Duffett. “I want to go out there. I want to use this as a tool, as a chairman.”
Duffett pitched him on the Health Care Justice Act, a bill that would require the legislature to come up with a plan for covering the 1.4 million Illinoisans who still didn’t have health insurance. Obama loved the idea. In the winter of 2003, they hit the road. To Obama, this was another community organizing project. On cold weeknights, dozens of people shuffled into libraries or union halls to hear the senator from Chicago speak.
Obama described the act, and then, hearkening back to his days as an organizer, he told the gatherings, “You have to put political pressure on these politicians and you’ve got to keep on pushing and pushing. If they say no, don’t give up. If they’re a Republican, and they don’t support this thing, keep on putting pressure on them, because they go back to the district and they say, ‘Oh, my God, I’m really getting beat up on this issue. What’s going on?’ Same thing with Democrats.”
Afterward, Obama went out to dinner with the local chapter’s executive committee, telling its members, “We need you as leaders for this movement.” That not only built support for the Health Care Justice Act, it built a network of union brass and liberal activists who would back Obama’s just-announced Senate campaign.
The insurance industry was adamantly opposed to the act. Its lobbyists found the bill’s fatal flaw: It required the legislature to come up with a universal health care plan. That was unconstitutional. A General Assembly can’t dictate to a future General Assembly. Obama shelved the act and brought it back in 2004, with less demanding language that “strongly urged” a plan to cover all Illinoisans and created a task force to come up with a proposal.