penalty reform and other criminal justice issues. Smart guy, Giangreco had thought. Now, after hearing Ax so excited about Obama—more excited than Ax had ever been about a candidate—Giangreco said, “You know, I’ve only met him once or twice, but I kind of feel the same way.”
Axelrod replaced Dan Shomon as Obama’s political alter ego. As much as Ax and Obama had in common—their U of C backgrounds, a love of pickup basketball, a calm demeanor—they still fit the classic roles of candidate and consultant. Axelrod was tall, hangdog, and walked with a slow, heavy, splay-footed shamble. Every year, his unkempt forelock grew thinner, his droopy mustache grayer. But those who had worked with both men considered them equals in discipline, intelligence, and temperament—“a match made in heaven.”
Once he was hired as chief strategist, Axelrod also replaced Dan Shomon as Obama’s campaign manager, bringing in Jim Cauley, a Kentuckian he had worked with on a mayoral campaign in Baltimore. Shomon was given the job of Downstate coordinator. He had been reluctant to spend nearly two years managing a Senate campaign and suggested that Obama find a new right-hand man. That was fine with Obama’s new crew of professionals. They didn’t think Shomon had the policy or organizational skills to run a statewide race.
Loyalty to old allies is not one of Barack Obama’s long suits. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose White House chief of staff was a kindergarten classmate, or Lyndon Johnson, who was served as an aide for three decades by a high school debate student he’d coached in Houston, Obama has no deep native ties to the state where he made his political career. Throughout Obama’s rise, most of his relationships were expedient: Once he had no more use for supporters, he dropped them from his circle, sometimes telling perplexed functionaries to stop calling his cell phone and start calling his people. There was no one he could point to and say, “We’ve been tight for twenty years.” It was the unflattering side of Obama’s detached intellectualism. Johnnie Owens was Obama’s closest friend during the community organizing days and a best man at his wedding. But once Obama began moving among lawyers, politicians, and professors, the old compatriots rarely saw each other. Obama lost touch with Jerry Kellman until a reporter reconnected them during his U.S. Senate run. Carole Anne Harwell, Obama’s first campaign manager, had no significant role in his subsequent races. During Obama’s run for president, Shomon would attempt to exploit the Obama connection to benefit his lobbying business. The campaign scolded him publicly.
“There were a number of people who worked for Barack in the early days, then found Barack was working with a different group of people,” as one old supporter would put it. “They felt kind of squeezed out.”
While that suggests a coldness to Obama’s ambition, it did help him avoid the corruption and cronyism that would have ensnared a traditional Chicago politician, brought up in the code of fidelity to the ones that brung him. Obama needed Chicago to put him in a position to run for president, but he couldn’t be too Chicago if he wanted to win.
When Axelrod took over the campaign, in mid-2003, Obama was polling at 9 percent among the few Illinoisans paying attention to the Senate primary. The front runner, Dan Hynes, was supported by a quarter of the primary voters and had already enlisted the great majority of the state’s 102 county chairmen. Still, Axelrod believed that Obama could crank his numbers as high as 43 percent by Election Day if he swept the black community in Chicago, captured wealthy suburban whites, and won Downstate counties with colleges or large black populations. If the campaign met its goal of raising $4 million, they’d be able to start airing television ads in January, two months before the primary—just enough time to transform Obama into a Prairie State idol.
At the time, though, he was still an obscure state senator (a redundancy if there ever was one) with a name uncomfortably close to that of the leader of al-Qaeda. Shortly after 9/11, a Chicago political consultant who’d been sizing Obama up as a Senate prospect told him, “The name thing is going to be a problem.” (Capitol Fax publisher Rich Miller once teasingly told Obama that he should change his name to “Barry O’Bama” if he wanted to run for statewide office.) When Representative Jan Schakowsky wore an Obama button to the White House, President George W. Bush did a double take