Lively Thought

Months before his famous speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, I read about a young Chicago politician facing a rough and tough fight to become only the third black person elected to the United States Senate. The piece, written by the New Yorker’s William Finnegan, made an immediate impression on me. Here was a constitutional law professor who had been the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, he was clearly intelligent, but even beyond that, everyone agreed that there was something special about him. He was principled, charismatic, a natural leader and a self-professed “legislation nerd” whose main concern seemed to be the most pragmatic way to move legislation in the right direction. We wasn’t an ideologue, he has a man who wanted to get things done.

When I heard that he had been selected to give a keynote address at the Democratic Convention, I was excited to see him speak, and of course I wasn’t disappointed. No one was. No one could have been. I remembered reading this specific bit at the time and thinking how true it must be now:

Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “obama” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’ ”

I’ve often thought about this piece in the last couple of years as Obama made his triumphant run for the Office that Bush holds, but I had never gone back to read it. The New Yorker recently republished the profile on their website and it was just the opportunity I needed. Please take the time to read The Candidate.

One thing that is always mentioned about Obama is his preternatural calm. This is something he would be caught on tape mentioning about himself in preparation for the candidate debates. As reported in Newsweek’s remarkable “How He Did It“, Obama said, “There’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.”

This same aspect of his character is mentioned in the New Yorker piece:

People in Illinois seem largely unaware of Obama’s long, annealing trip into their midst, although they often remark on his unusual calm. Now forty-two and a state senator, Obama emerged, in March, from a raucous primary as the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate. In a seven-person field, he received a remarkable fifty-three per cent of the vote—he even won the “collar” counties around Chicago, communities that supposedly would never support a black candidate. And everyone recalls that, as the votes were being tallied at his headquarters on Election Night, he seemed to be the least agitated person in the place.

That’s exactly the sort of guy I want handling the financial crisis, or the three am phone call.

Here’s another thing I liked about him at the time: While he had his problems with NAFTA, he clearly understood the upside of trade. Finnegan writes:

He mostly told the union men what they wanted to hear. Then he said, “There’s nobody in this room who doesn’t believe in free trade,” which provoked a small recoil. These men were ardent protectionists. A little later, he said, with conviction, “I want India and China to succeed”—a sentiment not much heard in the outsourcing-battered heartland. He went on, however, to criticize Washington and Wall Street for not looking after American workers.

Later, I asked him if he wasn’t waving a red flag in front of labor by talking about free trade. “Look, those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying Pioneer stereos,” he said. “They don’t want the borders closed. They just don’t want their communities destroyed.”

David Axelrod makes a couple of appearances in the piece. This, of course, was long before I had any idea who David Alexrod was:

“He could have gone to the most opulent of law firms,” David Axelrod, a longtime friend who is now Obama’s media adviser, said. “After Harvard, Obama could have done anything he wanted.” What he wanted was to practice civil-rights law in Chicago, and he did, representing victims of housing and employment discrimination and working on voting-rights legislation for a small public-interest firm.

One thing that was played up in this piece that I didn’t hear about in either the primaries or the general election is that Obama is not the typical product of the Chicago political machine. If anything, he is a testament to the fading power of that machine.

To an outsider with only the broadest idea of Chicago politics, Obama’s victory in the Democratic primary actually looked like a victory over cynicism. He had not slimed his opponents. Nor was he the candidate of the fabled local machine—that was Dan Hynes, the state’s comptroller, who comes from a powerful Illinois political family. Precinct captains and party organizations and old-line labor unions (most of the Teamsters, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.) had supported Hynes. The machine, however, is an outdated conceit. “A few creaky parts still work,” David Axelrod told me. “They can still elect a few water commissioners or sub-circuit-level judges. But no precinct captain can tell people how to vote for President or the Senate.”

And here was the money-shot for me: Obama comparing a good piece of legislation to great writing or great music:

Obama seems to be a true legislation nerd. When he talks about the maneuvering it took to line up the state’s prosecutors behind the videotape bill, and to keep the police associations neutral, his eyes narrow in pleasure. “You can’t always come up with the optimal solution, but you can usually come up with a better solution,” he said over lunch one afternoon. “A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence.” He nodded. Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” was playing in the background. “Or a good piece of music,” he said. “Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‘Huh. It works. It makes sense.’ That doesn’t happen too often, of course, but it happens.”

In a short entry that accompanied the republication of this piece on the website, William Finnegan talks about why he left out talk of Obama having the talent to become the first black President.

What I didn’t include was something else Schakowsky said. “I think he’s got it,” she told me. “He can go the distance. He could be the first black President.” The quote was too bald, too broad, too bannerlike. Lots of other people in Illinois, including some Republicans, talked up Obama’s extraordinary promise, his possible future on the national stage, and I did use some of those remarks. But just coming out and saying “first black President” felt not only absurdly premature but like bad juju.

I guess we can all be happy that no bad juju got released.