(Courtesy: barackobama.com)
For Democrat Barack Obama, the call for “change” is at least a 13-year-old mantra.
“The political debate is now so skewed,” Obama told the Chicago Reader in 1995, while campaigning for Illinois Senate. “People are hungry for community; they miss it. They are hungry for change.”
That has become the center piece of his presidential campaign against Republican John McCain. And much of that center piece was shaped in Obama’s years in Illinois.
Obama and those who knew him in Illinois recall the “change” theme starting in his formative political years in the state. There, they say, he learned and practiced adapting to change and doing so with ease. Those who knew Obama in Illinois paint him as down-to-earth, a capable leader and cool under pressure.
As an example of Obama’s calm, there’s this story told by one of his early political friends, Jack Franks. While campaigning for U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama couldn’t even use a bathroom in the Illinois Capitol Building without a cameraman at his heels. One was trying to get a rise out of Obama. He followed Obama everywhere during his campaign, said Illinois Assemblyman Jack Franks, (D- 63rd District.)
After seeing Obama followed into the bathroom by the cameraman, Franks stepped in. “I approached Barack and asked if he needed any help getting rid of the guy. He looked at me with this big, easy smile and said ‘Nah, don’t worry about it,’” Franks said in a phone interview. “If it were me I would have been going nuts!”
Franks is among those who worked with Obama when Obama was an Illinois state senator. Franks is chairman of the Committee on State Government Administration for the Illinois General Assembly. Obama chaired the same committee for the Illinois Senate. And the two worked closely on projects.
The joint-project that sticks out most to Franks was a bill that lowered prescription drug prices for senior citizens. “Barack’s position on the bill wasn’t popular in the Senate at first—everybody was against it,” Franks said. But it passed, and the two Illinois legislators met in Chicago for the governor’s signing of the bill.
Barack Obama’s life began far from Illinois. He was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii to an economist father from Kenya and an anthropologist mother from Kansas. He spent his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia. In 1983, Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983 with a degree in political science. In 1985, he moved to Chicago where he became a community organizer for a faith-based foundation dealing with a coalition of churches.
In 1991, Obama married Michelle Robinson, another lawyer. He began working as a law professor at the University of Chicago and practicing law with a Chicago firm. In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate, representing Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.
The Hyde Park neighborhood is ethnically diverse and lies between downtown Chicago and the city’s South Side. The district encompasses the University of Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry.
Obama began reporting to Springfield to represent Hyde Park. At first, he wasn’t well-received as a new senator. Many of the Illinois politicians were suspicious of the Ivy League-educated Obama. Some other African-American Chicago legislators considered Obama not “black enough.” Obama recalled those days, complaining, he was “getting it from all sides,” The Washington Post reported in early October.
Before his senate career, during his time on Chicago’s South Side, he took on the role of community organizer with a religious group. At the time, many South Side steel workers were losing their jobs to the closures of several mills. Obama’s role as a community organizer meant helping parishioners of Chicago churches find jobs and housing.
This experience greatly affected Obama’s politics. In the Chicago Reader interview, Obama explained that this way: “What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer? One who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?”
In 2004, Obama began campaigning for office in Washington. He was elected to the U.S. Senate and gave a highly praised speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. “Even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us. Well, I say to them, ‘There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America —there’s the United States of America’,” Obama said in the address.
After the speech, fellow Democrats began quietly floating ideas about Obama’s political future, The Associated Press reported in 2004. “Wowed by Barack Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic convention, admirers began tossing around some heavyweight words: even the p-word: president,” The AP said.
One point of controversy in Obama’s presidential bid has been his Illinois senate voting record. During the Democratic primary, rival Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) cast doubt on Obama’s decisiveness and political backbone by citing his Obama’s 129 “present” votes — neither yes or no votes — in the Illinois senate, The New York Times reported in 2007.
The present votes only matter if they’re important policy issues, said Syracuse University political scientist Danny Hayes. If the votes are on trivial matters, they don’t negatively mark Obama’s record. Either way, the present votes say something about Obama’s politics, Hayes said.
“One thing we’ve seen is that Obama has proved to be a very calculating and shrewd politician. These votes make one wonder about his ability to take tough stands on the issues,” Hayes said.
In the final presidential debate, Republican John McCain brought up a “present” vote that Obama cast in Illinois on a bill about partial-birth abortion. McCain criticized Obama’s vote, saying it contradicted his position on the issue.
Obama defended his vote by saying the bill, which would ban partial-birth abortions, did not “provide an exception for the mother’s health and life.” He voted present, Obama said, because he agreed that partial-birth abortions should be banned. But he couldn’t vote for a bill that didn’t provide an exception for the mother’s health, he said.
One common theme throughout the coverage of Obama by Illinois newspapers was his willingness to work with Republicans. The Chicago Tribune, known for its conservative editorial pages, recently endorsed Obama for president. This is the first time the paper has endorsed a Democratic candidate for president. The Tribune editors cited Obama’s ability to work with Republicans as one of the reasons for the endorsement.
“We know first-hand that Obama seeks out and listens to people who disagree with him. He was most effective in the Illinois Legislature when he worked with Republicans on welfare, ethics and criminal justice reform,” the Tribune wrote in the endorsement.
Papers outside of Illinois tended to draw another conclusion. A 2008 Washington Times article characterized Obama’s record in Illinois as more liberal than many of his fellow Democrats.
In 2004, the Chicago Tribune reported that Obama’s record in Illinois defied easy labels. The numbers of Obama’s record look like this:
•Obama cast roughly 4,000 votes in the Illinois Senate.
•He sponsored 823 bills as a member of the Illinois Senate, according to a 2007 New York Times study of Obama’s record.
•62.5 percent of the Obama-sponsored bills the study highlighted passed in the Illinois Senate.
Long-time friend Rep. Franks suggests that Obama has remained much the same as he moved from the Illinois senate to the presidential campaign trail. Franks credits much of Obama’s down-to-earth approach to the influence of his wife, Michelle.
“He’s still grounded—there are just more people looking at him now. Michelle is tough, and it’s good, because she wouldn’t let him be anything but grounded,” Franks said.
Obama hasn’t let politics get in the way of his friendships, says Franks. He cites his own work for Obama’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. In the primary season, Franks was Clinton’s campaign chairman for Illinois. But that didn’t phase Obama, said Franks. He recalled sitting near Obama at a dinner during the primary campaigns. “Here I am sitting back-to-back with my old friend, but I’m with Hillary’s people. I felt weird,” Franks said. Franks left the table and while he was gone, Obama greeted Franks’ wife with a hug and kiss.
“I contacted him the next day and said ‘You handled that so much better than I did. I’m so proud that you’re my senator.’”
(Jamie Munks is a senior with dual majors in newspaper and political science.)
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