for a press conference. In a phone call to reporters, Simon endorsed Howard Dean for president from his sickbed. Mikva phoned Stevenson every day but couldn’t get him off the fence. Then, suddenly, it didn’t matter. On December 9, 2003, Simon died on the operating table at age seventy-five.
It was a tremendous blow to the Obama campaign, both politically and personally. Simon’s endorsement would have validated the reformer image Obama was trying to project. It would have impressed suburban liberals, the white faction of his hoped-for coalition. Simon’s death was a personal loss because so many of Obama’s staffers and fund-raisers had begun their careers with him. Axelrod and Bettylu Saltzman were attracted to Obama for the same reasons they’d loved Paul Simon: intelligence, integrity, and a progressive spirit.
After enough time passed, Axelrod approached Simon’s daughter, Sheila, a Carbondale city councilwoman and guardian of her father’s political legacy. Would she be willing to film an ad saying her father had planned to endorse Obama?
Simon had reservations. She didn’t want to speak for her late father. On the other hand, she knew how he’d felt about Obama, and she was an Obama supporter herself, eager to help him win.
“I don’t know if I’m really comfortable with that,” she told Axelrod. “I don’t know if I want to say who Dad endorsed.”
“Why don’t we just talk about the parallels of the things they worked on together?” Axelrod suggested.
To that, Simon agreed. In the ad, she talked about her father’s career, over film clips of Paul Simon campaigning throughout Illinois.
“For half a century, Paul Simon stood for something very special in public life: integrity, principle, and a commitment to fight for those who most needed a voice,” Simon said. “State Senator Barack Obama is cut from that same cloth. With Paul Simon, Barack led the fight to stop wrongful executions and to pass new ethics and campaign finance laws to clean up our politics.”
In the final ten seconds, Sheila Simon appeared on camera. She had her father’s dark hair, his rubbery smile. The resemblance was unmistakable. As Sheila herself once admitted, neither father nor daughter was much more than plain. A homely face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a bow tie were all part of Paul Simon’s appeal. Like Lincoln, he wasn’t handsome, but he was honest.
“I know Barack Obama will be a U.S. senator in the Paul Simon tradition,” she said. “You see, Paul Simon was my dad.”
The Sheila Simon ad was one of three TV spots the Obama campaign recorded that winter. Axelrod’s strategy was to start airing the ads in late January, six weeks before the primary. With $4 million, that was the longest window Obama could afford. Hull had already been on TV for months. But Axelrod—who had turned down an offer to run Hull’s campaign, for far more money than Obama was paying—was confident that he had a better candidate. He was crossing his fingers that Obama’s limited means would give the campaign just enough time to make that case.
While Obama worked the black churches—he was attending five services every Sunday—Axelrod and Giangreco tried to win over white suburbanites. They tested the ads before a focus group on the North Shore, the wealthy, socially liberal suburbs depicted in Ordinary People, Risky Business, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. North Shore residents aren’t likely to live next door to a black person, but they are willing to vote for one.
As Obama’s consultants watched from behind a one-way window, the Democratic voters viewed three advertisements, in the order the campaign planned to air them. The first was a biographical spot. It mentioned (of course) that Obama had been the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. It touted his record in the state senate—on education, on expanding the children’s health insurance program.
“They said we couldn’t insure every kid, but we did,” Obama said, addressing the camera. Then, for the first time, he uttered his now-famous campaign slogan: “I’m Barack Obama, and I paid for this ad to say, ‘Yes, we can.’ ”
When Obama spoke, the voters—especially the women—leaned forward to listen.
(Al Kindle had an explanation for Obama’s appeal to suburban women. “He was so good-looking that they can have him in the bed with them without having him in the bed,” he would say. “He was the dream they wished they could take home. In Glencoe and Evanston, all of these areas where there were rich white females, there were more Obama posters than in Chicago. Once people got past his race,