Part 11 (1/2)

Alice Palmer reached the State Senate by appointment, replacing Richard Newhouse, the first African-American ever to run for mayor of Chicago, who had to step down because of illness. Palmer, the local Democratic committeewoman, was a welcome choice among local activists. Her background as an activist and in local politics was unimpeachable. She had a doctorate in education from Northwestern and went to Springfield determined to win greater funding for Chicago schools. She became popular among her const.i.tuents--popular enough, she believed, to win a seat in Congress.

In the late spring of 1995, after a series of conversations, Obama won Alice Palmer's support. Alan Dobry, a former Democratic Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman and a fixture in Hyde Park politics, had been concerned about the open State Senate position until, at a meeting to kick off her campaign for Congress, Palmer told him, ”I found this wonderful person, this fine young man, so we needn't worry that we'd have a good state senator.” ward committeeman and a fixture in Hyde Park politics, had been concerned about the open State Senate position until, at a meeting to kick off her campaign for Congress, Palmer told him, ”I found this wonderful person, this fine young man, so we needn't worry that we'd have a good state senator.”

Before announcing his intention to run, Obama wanted to be absolutely sure that Palmer was committed to the congressional race and that she would not get back in the State Senate race, even if she lost in the Democratic primary to Emil Jones or Jesse Jackson, Jr.

”I hadn't publicly announced,” Obama recalled. ”But what I said was that once I announce, and I have started to raise money, and gather supporters, hire staff and opened up an office, signed a lease, then it's going to be very difficult for me to step down. And she gave me repeated a.s.surance that she was in [the congressional race] to stay.”

Palmer doesn't dispute that. He ”did say that to me,” she said. ”I certainly did say that I wasn't going to run [for State Senate]. There's no question about that.”

Obama also understood that he had her endors.e.m.e.nt. (”I'm absolutely certain she ... publicly spoke and sort of designated me.”) On that point, Palmer disagrees: ”I don't know that I like the word 'endors.e.m.e.nt.' An endors.e.m.e.nt, to me, having been in legislative politics ... that's a very formal kind of thing. I don't think that describes this. An 'informal nod' is how to characterize it.” certain she ... publicly spoke and sort of designated me.”) On that point, Palmer disagrees: ”I don't know that I like the word 'endors.e.m.e.nt.' An endors.e.m.e.nt, to me, having been in legislative politics ... that's a very formal kind of thing. I don't think that describes this. An 'informal nod' is how to characterize it.”

Palmer announced her candidacy for Congress on June 27th, and, the following week, the local papers announced Obama would run to succeed her. Her intentions, as she stated them at the time, could not have been clearer. ”Pray for Mel Reynolds ”Pray for Mel Reynolds and vote for me,” she told reporters. and vote for me,” she told reporters. In the last paragraph In the last paragraph of a story in the Hyde Park of a story in the Hyde Park Herald Herald, the reporter, Kevin Knapp, took up the subject of a successor, mentioning Obama, ”an attorney with a background in community organization and voter registration efforts,” as the likeliest possibility. Later that month, Obama filed the necessary papers to create a fund-raising committee. He received his first campaign contributions He received his first campaign contributions on July 31, 1995: three hundred dollars from a downtown lawyer, a five-thousand-dollar loan from a car dealer, and two thousand dollars from two fast-food companies owned by an old friend, Tony Rezko. on July 31, 1995: three hundred dollars from a downtown lawyer, a five-thousand-dollar loan from a car dealer, and two thousand dollars from two fast-food companies owned by an old friend, Tony Rezko.

In many ways, it was a trying time to want to be a Democratic legislator. Bill Clinton was in the White House, but the Party had suffered major losses in the 1994 midterm elections. Newt Gingrich had declared a conservative counterattack and Clinton had begun to rely more heavily on illiberal advisers like Mark Penn and d.i.c.k Morris, who were disdained by the more progressive aides and const.i.tuencies that had supported him in 1992. In Illinois, the governor was a Republican and both houses of the legislature had Republican majorities. Legislators in the minority in Springfield had very little to do: the governor set the agenda and his party fell into line.

But for all the limitations of the office, Obama had to start somewhere. He had to get in the game and learn its skills and hidden rules. As he began to think about fund-raising and organization, he called on dozens of local politicians at the ward, city, and county levels, as well as on neighborhood activists who might support him. With Palmer committed to the congressional race, Obama had every reason to believe that he would face little opposition in the March Democratic primary; and, in his district, the chance of a Republican winning was about as likely as an African-American winning the White House.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were among the many neighbors and acquaintances in Hyde Park who were interested in Obama. Ayers and Dohrn were former leaders of S.D.S. and the Weather Underground, and were unapologetic about their support for violent resistance to the Vietnam War. They were now known as community activists, mainly in the field of education. Collectively, they were also the Elsa Maxwell of Hyde Park, frequently inviting guests to their house for readings, discussions, and dinners, and many people in the neighborhood, whether they approved of their behavior in the sixties or not, came.

”Some of us draw a line between what Bill and Bernardine did when they were young and now, when they are doing unimpeachable work in the community,” the novelist Rosellen Brown said. ”Hyde Park is a pretty small, insular community, and everyone, from Studs Terkel to schoolteachers working on juvenile-justice issues, came to their house to meet interesting people.”

The son of a wealthy Chicago business executive, Ayers was a professor at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and was one of the founders of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation that distributes grants to educational programs. Ayers helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg board. One guest at a dinner at Ayers's house remembers sitting next to Mich.e.l.le, who had taken a community-relations job at the university. The discussion was about race, cla.s.s, and family, and Mich.e.l.le talked about her grandmother's final days. Her grandmother was immensely proud of the fact that Mich.e.l.le and Craig had graduated from Princeton, and, in Mich.e.l.le's case, Harvard Law School. They were thriving. They had broken through. On her deathbed, the old woman told Mich.e.l.le, ”Don't you start the revolution with my great-grandchildren. I want them to go to Princeton, too!”

”She knew that her Princeton education was valuable, and no one, having had advantages, wants to give them up,” the guest said, recalling the conversation. ”She knew that having stepped up to the cla.s.s defined by a privileged education, she obviously did not have everything in common with the people she grew up with.”

Before Obama formally announced his candidacy, Ayers and Dohrn were asked to throw a small informal reception for him. According to Ayers, Alice Palmer made the request. And although Ayers and Dohrn were not particularly interested in electoral politics--they believed that real change came from popular movements and viewed Obama as someone far more to the center than they were--they agreed. ”It was Alice's initiative to have the event in order to hand over the baton,” Ayers recalled. ”She was running for Congress and she wanted to introduce him to the political community. It was good for her and it was good for him.... The thing about Obama was, he struck me from the first moment as the smartest sort of guy. He was compa.s.sionate and clear and a moderate, middle-of-the-road Democrat. How into him was I? Not very. I liked him as a person. I did it because I was asked. We had lots of things: readings, book signings, dinners, talks. For us, it's part of being a citizen.”

The guests at the reception included Quentin Young, a doctor who had long campaigned for a single-payer health-care system, the Palestinian-American professor Ras.h.i.+d Khalidi, the novelist Rosellen Brown, and Kenneth Warren, who teaches literature at the university, and his wife, Maria Warren, who writes a blog called Musings & Migraines. Young remembered that Palmer introduced Obama as her successor. When Obama was introduced to Rosellen Brown, he told her that he had read Civil Wars Civil Wars, her novel about a couple of refugees from the civil-rights movement and their lives a decade later. (”After that, like any novelist, I probably would have voted for him for anything,” Brown said.) Most of the guests either liked Obama's short talk or had no real objections, but a few, like Maria Warren, were frustrated.

”I remember him saying very generic things and one of the people there said, 'Can't you say something of more substance?'” Warren recalled. ”He didn't generate that much excitement, and a few people were saying, 'It's too bad Alice isn't going to run for her seat again.' I remember Barack getting kind of defensive and shaking his head.” In 2005, long before Obama In 2005, long before Obama was a Presidential candidate, Warren wrote on her blog, ”His 'bright eyes and easy smile' struck me as contrived and calculated--maybe because I was supporting another candidate. Since then, I've never heard him say anything new or earthshaking, or support anything that would require the courage of his convictions.” was a Presidential candidate, Warren wrote on her blog, ”His 'bright eyes and easy smile' struck me as contrived and calculated--maybe because I was supporting another candidate. Since then, I've never heard him say anything new or earthshaking, or support anything that would require the courage of his convictions.”

Thirteen years later, during the Presidential campaign, this brief, otherwise forgettable gathering would be introduced into evidence by the Republican Party that Obama had a dangerously radical background, that leaders of the Weather Underground had ”launched” his political career. Which was ridiculous. It is true that Obama saw Ayers in the years to come at quarterly board meetings and other occasions. Obama praised Ayers's book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court in the in the Tribune Tribune, though his own views on education were much less left-wing. They once spoke on the same panel about juvenile justice---an event put together by Mich.e.l.le Obama in 1997, when she was a.s.sociate dean of student services at the University of Chicago. But no matter what one thought of Ayers's past--and Obama said that Ayers had been guilty of ”despicable” acts during the antiwar movement--the notion that the two men were close friends or ideological soul mates was false.

As Obama continued to call on various politicians and activists in the district, he sometimes got perplexing advice. One African-American politician One African-American politician suggested that he change his name; another suggested he make sure to put his picture on all his campaign materials, ”so people don't see your name and think you're some big dark guy.” Another adviser told him sternly to make sure that he was never photographed holding a gla.s.s--even if it was filled with water or juice--lest the electorate take him for a drinker. suggested that he change his name; another suggested he make sure to put his picture on all his campaign materials, ”so people don't see your name and think you're some big dark guy.” Another adviser told him sternly to make sure that he was never photographed holding a gla.s.s--even if it was filled with water or juice--lest the electorate take him for a drinker.

”Now all of this may be good political advice,” Obama told Hank De Zutter, a writer for the Chicago good political advice,” Obama told Hank De Zutter, a writer for the Chicago Reader Reader, ”but it's all so superficial. I am surprised at how many elected officials--even the good ones--spend so much time talking about the mechanics of politics and not matters of substance. They have this poker-chip mentality, this overriding interest in retaining their seats or in moving their careers forward, and the business and game of politics, the political horse race, is all they talk about.”

On September 19, 1995, at the Ramada Lakesh.o.r.e, in Hyde Park, Obama formally announced his candidacy. Cliff Kelley, a former alderman and the host of the most popular call-in show on WVON, was master-of-ceremonies. ”Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days,” Obama told the packed room. ”They fall somewhere lower than lawyers.... I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf.”

Palmer may not have used the word ”endors.e.m.e.nt” to describe her enthusiasm for Obama, but, at the Ramada that day, there was no mistaking her enthusiasm for the thirty-four-year-old organizer and lawyer. ”In this room, Harold Was.h.i.+ngton ”In this room, Harold Was.h.i.+ngton announced for mayor,” she said. ”It looks different, but the spirit is still in the room. Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with State Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a pa.s.sing of the torch, because he's the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district.” announced for mayor,” she said. ”It looks different, but the spirit is still in the room. Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district, a tradition that continued with me and most recently with State Senator Newhouse. His candidacy is a pa.s.sing of the torch, because he's the person that people have embraced and have lifted up as the person they want to represent this district.”

Carol Anne Harwell looked for a campaign office. She thought she had found something affordable and adequate on Seventy-first Street. ”It was clean and had a bathroom, and the important thing was that it had phone jacks,” Harwell recalled. ”Mich.e.l.le walked in there and she just went, 'No, no, no. Uh-uh.' We ended up farther west in a nicer place. Mich.e.l.le was determined to run a top-notch campaign, no cheesiness. She brought elegance and cla.s.s to the campaign. She was the taskmaster and she was very organized, even if she didn't know a lot about politics then. When we started collecting pet.i.tions, we would set a goal for, say, two hundred signatures that day. There would be a blizzard and we would come back with only a hundred and fifty. Mich.e.l.le would be furious and we'd have to go out and get the rest.”

On Sat.u.r.day mornings, Mich.e.l.le Obama and her friend and the campaign's issues coordinator, Yvonne Davila, went out knocking on doors to collect signatures to get on the ballot. They were much more efficient than Obama, who went out in the evenings with Harwell. ”It was so slow,” Harwell said. ”The old ladies loved him. He would introduce himself and ask them what they needed. They wanted to mother him. They would go on forever about their grandchildren. Barack was not Chicago-smart yet. He didn't know how to keep moving. He even went out campaigning in a leather jacket, no gloves, no hat. I think I had to introduce him to the concept of long underwear.”

By the modest standards of a campaign for State Senate, Obama's started unevenly. He was not much of a speaker at first. He was stentorian, professorial, self-serious--a cake with no leavening. In the most critical speaking realm of all, the black churches of the South Side, he came off as flat and diffident; it would take hundreds of speeches in pulpits around the city before he acquired the sense of cadence, Biblical reference, and emotional connection that marked his performances later on.

But he was lining up the support he needed. Sam and Martha Ackerman, an influential family of Hyde Park independent Democrats, held a coffee for Obama. Ministers in the area were welcoming. Palmer, his alderman, Toni Preckwinkle, and the local ward chairman, Ivory Mitch.e.l.l, were all on his side, along with a group of longtime liberal Hyde Park activists. Since the end of the Second World War, the neighborhood had been the center of political defiance of the machine. The Independent Voters of Illinois was the most important political organization in Hyde Park, and anti-Daley politicians, like the legendary alderman Leon Despres, carried its banner. Veterans of numerous I.V.I. campaigns, like Alan Dobry and his wife, Lois Friedberg-Dobry, canva.s.sed door-to-door. A chemist with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Alan Dobry was a typical old-line Hyde Park independent, working for Despres when he ran for reelection as alderman in 1959, in the Fifth Ward, which includes Hyde Park, as well as in black neighborhoods in Woodlawn.

”Everything seemed to be falling into place that autumn,” Dobry recalled. ”Obama had friends who would put up the money for him: people from Judd Miner's law firm, Harvard people, colleagues at the University of Chicago. He knew people in the habit of funding independent political campaigns.” Harwell was from the West Side but she was managing this South Side campaign with evident skill. She brought in Ronald Davis, a math professor at Kennedy-King College who had also been a Project Vote coordinator, to be the field coordinator. Young volunteers, like Will Burns, who soon became a political-science graduate student at the University of Chicago, handed out flyers and, with Obama, campaigned door-to-door. Burns later wrote a master's thesis on how Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, a machine politician, turned himself into a spokesman for black empowerment and how he built coalitions. After Was.h.i.+ngton's death, there had been a vacuum in black politics in Chicago; Burns thought that he saw in Obama a kind of successor, free of the old language and cronyism.

In mid-October, Obama took a break from campaigning and went to Was.h.i.+ngton for the Million Man March, a ma.s.s demonstration on the Mall organized princ.i.p.ally by Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam. Many of the issues that the march was intended to highlight were on Obama's mind: the soaring incarceration rates among young black men; disproportionate levels of poverty, unemployment, and high-school dropouts; the distorted portrayal of African-Americans in the media. But because of the central role played by Farrakhan, who had made hateful statements about Jews and white America, it was a complicated event for Obama, a liberal African-American running for office in a district that was mainly black but also heavily Jewish, especially near the university. The speakers in Was.h.i.+ngton included Gus Savage, Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, and, of course, Farrakhan.

When he returned, Obama spoke gingerly of the events he had witnessed in Was.h.i.+ngton. Rather than give the reporter Hank De Zutter a pithy quote for his story in the Reader Reader, he delivered a measured, nuanced view of race in America that sounds very much like what he said thirteen years later, at a crisis point in his run for the Presidency: What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society.... There was a profound sense that African-American men were ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and lives. of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society.... There was a profound sense that African-American men were ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and lives.But what was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate. Just as holding hands and singing ”We shall overcome” is not going to do it, exhorting youth to have pride in their race, give up drugs and crime, is not going to do it if we can't find jobs and futures for the 50 percent of black youth who are unemployed, underemployed, and full of bitterness and rage. Exhortations are not enough, nor are the notions that we can create a black economy within America that is hermetically sealed from the rest of the economy and seriously tackle the major issues confronting us....Any solution to our unemployment catastrophe must arise from us working creatively within a multicultural, interdependent, and international economy. Any African-Americans who are only talking about racism as a barrier to our success are seriously misled if they don't also come to grips with the larger economic forces that are creating economic insecurity for all workers--whites, Latinos, and Asians. We must deal with the forces that are depressing wages, lopping off people's benefits right and left, and creating an earnings gap between C.E.O.s and the lowest-paid worker that has risen in the last 20 years from a ratio of 10 to 1 to one of better than 100 to 1.This doesn't suggest that the need to look inward emphasized by the march isn't important, and that these African-American tribal affinities aren't legitimate. These are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a ”lock 'em up, take no prisoners” mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn't care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.But cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done. Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up. We've got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do. We've got communities to build.

Obama's a.n.a.lytical, unemotional, intricate, Farrakhan-free, yet sincere response echoed his reaction to Rafiq, the nationalist in his memoir, his comments a few years earlier about the death of Harold Was.h.i.+ngton, and his discussions of the pressures of a global economy on local destiny. Obama was increasingly directing his attention to the problems of cla.s.s, systemic change, and elective politics. As a younger man, he was paying his respect to the elders of the movement, but he clearly felt that the days of nationalism and charismatic racial leaders.h.i.+p were outdated and played out.

At around the same time, Obama got the news that he would not be alone on the ballot. The Hyde Park The Hyde Park Herald Herald reported reported that there would be at least two other candidates: Marc Ewell, a thirty-year-old real-estate inspector and the son of a former state legislator, Raymond Ewell, and Gha-is Askia, a community-affairs liaison in the Illinois attorney general's office. Askia was the more interesting of the two. Born a Baptist, Askia was the sixteenth of eighteen children and a Muslim convert. His name means ”One who relieves those in distress.” Askia won the endors.e.m.e.nt of several local politicians; his friend Muhammad Ali promised to have a fundraiser for him. that there would be at least two other candidates: Marc Ewell, a thirty-year-old real-estate inspector and the son of a former state legislator, Raymond Ewell, and Gha-is Askia, a community-affairs liaison in the Illinois attorney general's office. Askia was the more interesting of the two. Born a Baptist, Askia was the sixteenth of eighteen children and a Muslim convert. His name means ”One who relieves those in distress.” Askia won the endors.e.m.e.nt of several local politicians; his friend Muhammad Ali promised to have a fundraiser for him.

As the campaign began to develop, Obama learned that his mother was gravely ill. In 1992, living in Indonesia, Ann Dunham had finished her thousand-page doctoral dissertation on the craftsmen of Java, dedicating it to her mother, to her mentor Alice Dewey, and ”to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field.” In 1992 and 1993, she lived in New York City and was a policy coordinator for Women's World Banking, where she worked on issues of microfinancing for women in the developing world. (One of her jobs was to help generate policy materials for the 1995 United Nations International Women's Conference in Beijing; Dunham and her colleagues believed that the best advocate for microfinancing at the Beijing meeting would be Hillary Clinton.) In the fall of 1994, while visiting some friends in Jakarta, Dunham felt intense abdominal pains. Her Indonesian doctors diagnosed a digestive malady. At first, she barely spoke of her illness to Barack, in Chicago, or to Maya, who was studying secondary education at New York University. Finally, at the urging of her family and friends, she went to see doctors at Kaiser Permanente in Honolulu, who determined that she had advanced uterine cancer. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, specialists told her that the cancer was too advanced for effective treatment.

Dunham returned to Hawaii. One of her colleagues in Indonesian studies, Bronwen Solyom, recalled, ”She was tough, she was very brave. She went on staying interested in what we always talked about and not about being sick. But by the time she came home from Indonesia it was probably too late.”

In early November, she was admitted to the Straub Clinic in Honolulu. ”I was working on my master's degree in New York at the time when the doctors in Hawaii said there was no hope,” Maya Soetoro-Ng said. ”My goal was to finish my degree and go live with her in Hawaii for her last days. But because she was so young, I thought we had more time. I was in a state of denial and thought she might last for years. But when I returned one day from cla.s.s she called and made it clear she didn't have much time. I told her that I was scared and she said, 'Me, too.' I got on a flight that day.”

Maya arrived in Honolulu on the afternoon of November 7th. ”When I got to my mother's hospital room, she was surrounded by my grandmother and some friends,” Soetoro-Ng said. ”My grandmother was so tired, so I sent her home. It was clear that things were ending. I read to my mother from a book of Creole stories that I had been reading with my students. I read her a story about taking flight, because it was clear that she wasn't coming back. I told her that it was time to go.” That night, at around eleven, Ann Dunham died. She was fifty-two.

To his great distress, Obama did not arrive in Honolulu until the next day. He had been in constant contact with his mother, with visits, telephone calls, and letters. Dunham wrote her son many letters encouraging him in his pursuits. More and more, he had come to admire his mother not only for the moral example she had set but also for the room she had given him to explore his own ident.i.ty. Only as he grew older could he appreciate how young she was when she gave birth to him and how resilient she had been when Barack, Sr., left. She was just a teenager, a smart, sweet-tempered nineteen-year-old pus.h.i.+ng a stroller and her African-American toddler along the sidewalks of Honolulu and Seattle in 1963. She never thought twice about it. Dipping in and out of one culture after another, Ann was an idealist about race, not least when it came to her own family. Finis.h.i.+ng her dissertation and nearing fifty, she half-seriously told Alice Dewey that she was thinking of adopting a third child--the more ethnically complicated the better.

”She thought having an African-American kid was wonderful,” Dewey recalled. ”When she was in Hawaii, Americans were starting to adopt Asian kids. It had started in Korea, children of American soldiers. They were awfully cute. She saw one on TV and she said, 'Oh, I want one!' That really would have completed the set! And I wouldn't have been surprised.”

”She was a superb mother in a number of ways,” Maya said. ”In spite of not being able to provide us with a stable two-parent household or a big house or any of those things, she gave us a sense of wonder and curiosity, empathy, a sense of responsibility and service, a love of literature. She was incredibly kind, so we had a steady, loving voice around us at all times, which helped us to be brave, and helped my brother to be brave when he had enormous decisions to make. Those things were present in her work. You see it in the empathy for the people whom she writes about. It's a grounded voice that balances idealism and pragmatism.”

A few days later, Obama and Maya attended a memorial service for their mother held in a j.a.panese garden at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center conference building, on campus. Maya and Barack gave short speeches recalling Ann's nature, her travels, and her scholarly pa.s.sions. Afterward, they drove to a cove near Lanai Lookout, on the south sh.o.r.e of Oahu, where the cliff is steep and the waves crash into the rock and swirl in pools of foam. They climbed down the rocks and stood near the waves. Barack and Maya cast the ashes of Stanley Ann Dunham into the waters of the Pacific.

On November 28th, Jesse Jackson, Jr., walloped the Democratic compet.i.tion in the special primary for the Second Congressional District. His father's celebrity, his network of connections in the black community, ranging from Operation PUSH to the churches, and his capacity to raise money far outstripped that of Emil Jones, who finished second, and Alice Palmer, who, coming in third, received barely five thousand votes, around ten per cent. Disappointed as she was, Palmer told her supporters that she had no intention of changing her mind and running to reclaim her State Senate seat. At fifty-six years old, Palmer seemed more likely to return full-time to education.

”Barack called her, they spoke several times, and Alice said, 'I gave my word and I am not going to [get back in the race],'” Carol Anne Harwell recalled.

Besides, rejoining the race would be complicated. To get on the ballot, candidates had to get the signatures of seven hundred and fifty-seven registered voters in the district. On December 11th, the first filing day for nominating pet.i.tions, Obama handed in more than three thousand signatures collected by his campaign. By now, however, a small but influential circle of community activists and friends of Alice Palmer--the journalist Lu Palmer; the political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr.; the historian Timuel Black and his wife, Zen.o.bia; the academic and journalist Robert Starks; the state legislators Lovana Jones and Donne Trotter; the alderman Barbara Holt--had started to form a Draft Alice Palmer Committee intended to persuade Obama to withdraw in favor of Palmer. These were mainly veterans of the civil-rights movement and the Harold Was.h.i.+ngton campaigns. Alice Palmer was one of them. Obama, in their view, was a callow newcomer from Hawaii and Harvard, too smooth, too willing to dismiss what he called ”the politics of grievance.” They did not trust him to be nearly as progressive as Palmer had been. He could wait his turn. Even Jesse Jackson, Jr., appeared to support Alice Palmer and sent his field organizer to her meetings.

The Chicago Defender Defender and the black-oriented tabloid and the black-oriented tabloid N'Digo N'Digo began to run articles sympathetic to Palmer. began to run articles sympathetic to Palmer. The The Defender Defender reported reported that some of her supporters were now calling on Obama to ”step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity and to release Palmer from her commitment.” The that some of her supporters were now calling on Obama to ”step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity and to release Palmer from her commitment.” The Defender Defender had a long history with Palmer and an even longer one with Buzz Palmer, who had been the strongest voice for reform inside the Police Department for many years. Local politicians began to choose sides: Toni Preckwinkle stayed with Obama, citing Palmer's promises; Emil Jones went with Palmer. had a long history with Palmer and an even longer one with Buzz Palmer, who had been the strongest voice for reform inside the Police Department for many years. Local politicians began to choose sides: Toni Preckwinkle stayed with Obama, citing Palmer's promises; Emil Jones went with Palmer. Writing in the Writing in the Defender Defender, Robert Starks, who taught political science at Northeastern Illinois University and was well known on the South Side, raised the unlikely prospect that the seat would be lost to a machine politician: ”If [Palmer] doesn't run, that seat will go to a Daley supporter. We have asked her to reconsider not running because we don't think Obama can win. He hasn't been in town long enough.... n.o.body knows who he is.”

In early December, the informal pro-Palmer committee invited Obama to a meeting at Lovana Jones's house. Obama went to the meeting with his field coordinator Ron Davis. They knew what was coming. Appealing to Obama's sense of propriety, the members of the committee asked him to get out of the race.

”He said he had enough pet.i.tions and would not pull away,” Timuel Black recalled. ”I was kind of angry. When we asked Barack to withdraw, for reasons of seniority, members.h.i.+p on important committees, and so on, we didn't know him the way we knew her. Our confidence in her was deeper. We promised if he ran for anything else, he would get our support. But he said he was already organized and had money.”

Some of Obama's supporters saw a motive other than loyalty behind the Draft Alice Palmer Committee: funding. Linda Randle, the veteran South Side activist who had worked with Obama on the anti-asbestos campaign at Altgeld Gardens, said that Palmer had helped her supporters get money for their community projects. ”They could see with Barack that wasn't getting ready to happen,” she said. ”They worried about losing their funding, because Barack was less sympathetic to them--much less. Barack is cheap. If he puts money out there, he wants to see how you use it. Alice less so, because those were her friends.”