it was cute and niche-y that he was African-American.”)
The second ad, designed to emphasize Obama’s multiracial appeal, was a dual endorsement by Jesse Jackson and Jan Schakowsky, who represented the northern suburbs in Congress.
Finally, the focus group saw the Simon ad. The campaign intended to run it last. Paul Simon’s endorsement, from beyond the grave, would validate everything voters heard about Obama in the first two ads and in a direct mail piece that offered him as “finally, a chance to believe again.” After seeing the Simon ad, everyone in the room got the connection.
“He reminds me of Paul Simon,” one woman said effusively.
During that primary season, there was no better place to see Obama work both his bases at once than the Heartland Café, a restaurant in Rogers Park, Chicago’s most integrated neighborhood. Founded by hippies, the Heartland was renowned for its vegan dishes, its folk music concerts, and a magazine rack that carried Dissent and the Nation. By bringing in Obama, the restaurant was trying to re-create the spirit of 1983, Chicago progressives’ greatest year. Harold Washington spoke at the Heartland during his first campaign for mayor. A photo of that appearance still hung on a brick wall.
In the crowded dining room, Obama was awaited by punk rockers, gray-haired war protestors, and dreadlocked West Indians. The local ward organization had been expecting a hundred people. Over three hundred showed up—so many that latecomers were turned away. As Obama moved from whites to blacks, he adjusted his language, just as he adjusted his speeches for a Southern Illinois farm cooperative and a Chicago Baptist church.
“You’ve got some pretty blue eyes,” he said, hoisting a baby boy. “I’m gonna have to introduce you to my daughter. She’s a little older than you. You like older women?”
After handing the child back to his father, Obama turned and gave dap to a black guy.
“How are you?” he asked in his deepest voice. “What’s goin’ on?”
Obama was introduced by the local alderman, Joe Moore, who had also spoken out against the Iraq War in 2002, appearing on the Today show to argue for diplomacy.
“Barack Obama is not the son of a powerful politician,” Moore said. “He is not a multimillionaire. What he is is a man of courage, a man of conviction, a man who will stand with his principles regardless of which way the political winds were blowing. I was here some twenty-one years ago, almost to the date, the last time this room was as filled as it is today, and that was for Harold Washington. He had this room filled with the same kind of energy that is here today because people in this neighborhood have great political instincts.”
Obama’s three-syllable name lends itself to a chant, so the candidate mounted the step-high stage to a rolling “O-BA-ma! O-BA-ma!”
“You guys, you guys, you’re making me blush,” he protested.
Anyone who had listened to the pedantic lecturer of 2000 would have been bowled over by the camp-meeting speech Obama gave that Saturday morning. And anyone who subsequently heard him speak at the convention in Boston would have recognized the rhetoric and felt the same energy, in that small room, that Obama later projected across the Fleet Center.
“I came to Chicago to work among the least of these,” Obama began.
Communities that needed help after the devastation caused by the closing of steel mills on the South Side of Chicago. The best education I ever received was working with people in the community on a grassroots level. What it taught me was ordinary people, when they are working together, can do extraordinary things. A lot of people ask me, ‘Why would you want to go into politics?’ Even in this room that is full of activists, there is a certain gnawing cynicism about the political process. We have a sense that too many of our leaders are long on rhetoric but short on substance. We get a sense that, particularly here in Illinois, that politics operates as a business rather than a mission, and certainly, we have the sense that in Washington, power always trumps principle. What I suggest to you today is what I told people when I first ran: that there is another tradition of politics, and that tradition says that we are all connected. If there is a child on the South Side of Chicago that cannot read, it makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my child. If there is a senior citizen in Downstate Illinois that cannot