Message #91562

[Kristina]

Obama seems to have been meticulous about constructing a political identity for himself. He visited churches on the South Side, considered the politics and reputations of each one, and received advice from older pastors. Before deciding on Trinity United Church of Christ, he asked the Reverend Wright about critics who complained that the church was too “upwardly mobile,” a place for buppies. Though he admired Judson Miner, he was similarly cautious about joining his law firm. Miner once told me that it took “a series of lunches” and hours of discussion before Obama made his decision. At the time, Obama was working on “Dreams from My Father.”

Many have said that part of the appeal of “Dreams” is its honesty, pointing out that it was written at a time when Obama had no idea that he would run for office. In fact, Obama had been talking about a political career for years, musing about becoming mayor or governor. According to a recent biography of Obama by the Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, he even told his future brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, that he might run for President one day. (Robinson teased him, saying, “Yeah, yeah, okay, come over and meet my Aunt Gracie—and don’t tell anybody that!”) Obama was writing “Dreams” at the moment that he was preparing for a life in politics, and he launched his book and his first political campaign simultaneously, in the summer of 1995, when he saw his first chance of winning.

Many people who knew Obama then remember him for his cockiness. He had good reason to be self-assured. A number of his accomplishments had been accompanied by adoring press coverage. When he was named president of the Harvard Law Review, in 1990, he was profiled by, among others, the Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, and the Associated Press. Even then, the essential elements of Obama-mania were present: the fascination with his early life, the adulatory quotes from friends who thought that he would be President one day, and Obama’s frank, though sometimes ostentatious, capacity for self-reflection. (“To some extent, I’m a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been made,” he told the Boston Globe in 1990.)

His work for Project Vote was similarly applauded. In 1993, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that Obama had “galvanized Chicago’s political community, as no seasoned politico had before,” and an alderman told Crain’s, “Under Barack’s leadership, we had the most successful, cost-effective and orderly voter registration drive I’ve ever been involved with.” When “Dreams from My Father” was published, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive; Booklist included the memoir in a “guide to some of the best books of 1995.”

Obama knew that Hyde Park, despite its reputation as the center of anti-machine progressives, was not exempt from other Chicago political traditions. During the first half of 1995, when he was preparing for his campaign for the State Senate, a big story in the neighborhood was a race for alderman marked by accusations of dirty tricks (endorsement flyers from a phony group of gay African-Americans were distributed the day before the election, apparently in an effort to stoke homophobia) and anti-Semitism (the campaign of one of the candidates was accused of being run by “Jewish overseers”).