he wore an apron and cracked an egg to symbolize how Republicans wanted to scramble seniors’ nest eggs by reforming Social Security. Hynes had the support of the Daley family and even a few black ward committeemen. In his father’s day, that would have been enough to carry a candidate as bland as Dan Hynes. But Hynes’s image as a prince of the Machine was a liability against Obama, whose personal story was getting through to voters now that his ads were on TV. Hynes represented Chicago’s provincial past—political dynasties, ethnic loyalties, unadulterated Irishness, precinct captains ringing doorbells for a kid from the neighborhood. Obama reflected the modern Chicago, a cosmopolitan city made so by ambitious migrants like himself.
Axelrod’s strategy of saving it all for the last six weeks was working. If any one event put Obama over the top, it was the airing of the Sheila Simon ad. State Senator Jeffrey Schoenberg, an Evanston Democrat who by early March was regretting that Hynes had asked him for an endorsement before Obama, thought Simon’s endorsement was the most powerful thirty seconds of political television he had ever seen.
“It was a tremendous difference,” Schoenberg would say. “It reached into your chest and grabbed you by the heart and never let go.”
Hull had been doing well among African-Americans because of his TV ads, his signs in the ghetto, and his support among the black politicians still resisting Obama’s ascendance. (Even during the last week of the primary, there was still an “anybody but Obama” sentiment in the capitol, especially among house members.) All those black voters were now shifting to Obama.
Obama’s campaign could not afford nightly polling, but Hull’s could. His staffers watched their candidate tumble down a hill, while Obama sprinted up a mountain. Even without numbers, Axelrod, Giangreco, and Cauley could sense something big was happening: Suddenly, money was pouring in through the mail, over the phone, and on the Internet. Politicians who had once been coyly neutral were now jumping on Obama’s bandwagon. And wherever their candidate went, the crowds were bigger and louder. Still unsure of the black vote, Obama ran a last-minute ad titled “Hope,” with clips of Paul Simon addressing a veterans’ group and Harold Washington hugging an old white man.
“There have been moments in our history when hope defeated cynicism, when the power of people triumphed over machines,” the narrator intoned.
The message to black Chicago was clear: Let’s make this like 1983 all over again.
Illinois held its primaries in mid-March for two reasons: to make life difficult for upstart candidates, who had trouble finding people to ring doorbells all winter, and to coincide with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which always showcased the Irish candidates.
The Irish Machine candidate wasn’t getting the help he’d expected that day. There’s another tradition in Chicago politics, summed up by the motto, “Don’t make no waves, don’t back no losers.” By six A.M., when the libraries, churches, and school gymnasiums unlocked their doors for the voters, everyone in Illinois politics knew Obama was going to win.
Hynes was a lost cause. Union heavies in quilted White Sox jackets were still handing out palm cards with his name, but a lot more guys would have stood in the cold for Hynes if he’d been a contender. Where was the reward in working for an also-ran?
On the South Side, the scene was different. The Obama campaign had collected so much money in the last few weeks it was able to pay people $25 to knock on doors and leave Obama hangers on the knobs. Over a hundred vans sat in the parking lot of an abandoned department store at Seventy-sixth Street and Stony Island Avenue, each with room for a supervisor and fourteen “flushers.” Word had gotten around the hood that you could work for Obama and get paid, so the lot was mobbed. Before sunrise, Obama’s street organizers worried about finding enough workers. They ended up turning people away. The two-bit door hangers who emerged from the two-flats and housing projects that morning overwhelmed the organizations of the few black bosses who were supporting Hynes out of loyalty to the mayor. This day wasn’t quite like the day that elected Harold Washington, when some South Side precincts reported 100 percent turnout, but almost every African-American who voted was voting for Obama. When the first spindle counts came in, around ten A.M., turnout was low everywhere but in the black community, which was showing moderate to moderately high activity. John Kerry had already