ticket. I will be doing all I can to elect the entire ticket.”
It was a victory equal to Oscar DePriest’s in 1928, Harold Washington’s in 1983, or Carol Moseley Braun’s in 1992. At the age of forty-two, less than two decades after arriving as a stranger, with no money and no roots in Chicago, Obama had joined the roll of the city’s great black politicians. That night, he won for the entire community, and the entire community embraced him.
Epilogue
THE BIRTHPLACE OF POST-RACIAL POLITICS
O B A M A ’ S V I C T O R Y in the Democratic primary made him a political celebrity. As a man who was likely to become the nation’s only black senator, he was interviewed the next day on CNN and Today. Bigfoot pencils from the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal flew into Chicago to write the first of the fawning profiles that must have made them wonder, What was I thinking? when they saw their prose in the morning papers. (Newhouse News Service called Obama “tall, fresh and elegant.” The campaign staff gave him no end of grief over that description.)
Carol Moseley Braun had gotten similar attention after winning her primary, but there was a feeling that Obama might be more than a token black face in an all-white chamber. He might be the guy who finally climbed over the barrier that had blocked African-Americans from power for nearly four hundred years. Race had been the one undying issue in American politics, from the writing of the Constitution, through the Civil War, the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement, and the white flight from the cities. Maybe Obama could begin to change that, too.
“Obama has the potential to become the most significant political figure Illinois has sent to Washington since Abraham Lincoln,” wrote Mark Brown of the Chicago Sun-Times.
It was an apt statement, and not only because it came true. Lincoln’s Illinois was a state divided between Southerners who’d migrated up from Kentucky and Tennessee, and Yankees who’d arrived via the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. Those two factions took up the question of slavery a generation before the rest of the country, settling the issue in 1824 with a bitter plebiscite that banned the sale and ownership of human beings. A generation before Obama became president, his Chicago was led by a black mayor who proved to hostile whites that he wasn’t going to turn the city into a Midwestern Zimbabwe. Chicago survived as a multicultural metropolis, evenly divided between whites and blacks.
Obama’s belief that the Democratic primary would determine the election was right on the mark. The winner of the Republican primary, Jack Ryan, was forced to withdraw from the race for the exact same reason as Blair Hull: because of embarrassing disclosures in his divorce file. Ryan, who had been married to Star Trek: Voyager actress Jeri Ryan, tried to pressure his wife into having sex in front of strangers at swingers’ clubs. For the second time that year, the Chicago Tribune published the marital secrets of an Obama rival.
Without a general election opponent, Obama was free to work on becoming a star. His campaign lobbied John Kerry’s staff for a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. Kerry, who watched Obama own the crowds at two Chicago campaign events, offered him the keynote address. In Boston, Obama delivered the greatest maiden speech since William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” in 1896, introducing America to the message of inclusion and shared responsibility he had been preaching across Illinois all that winter and spring. As one of his speech coaches later put it, “He walked onto that stage as a state senator, and he walked off as the next president of the United States.”
Realizing that Obama was unbeatable, the Illinois Republican Party asked conservative commentator Alan Keyes to serve as its sacrificial nominee. Keyes, who had run two campaigns for president, was thrilled to step into Obama’s spotlight. He used the attention to condemn homosexuals as “selfish hedonists” and insist that Jesus Christ would never vote for Obama (a moot point, since Jesus was not registered in Illinois).
In spite of Keyes’s clownishness, the general election was significant: It was the first time two black candidates had competed for a U.S. Senate seat.
“Illinois has a record of such innovation,” wrote columnist Amity Shlaes, a graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory School. Neither candidate was campaigning on a black agenda, which meant that Illinois