Young Mr. Obama (9 page)

Later, when he became a senior lecturer, Obama taught constitutional law. Jim Madigan, a student who later became a law school lecturer himself, took Obama's class in the late 1990s. Madigan was worried that a black professor teaching a roomful of white kids about slavery would make for some uncomfortable mornings. Obama flashed his liberal leanings by approaching cases from the point of view of the aggrieved party, whether it was Dred Scott, the slave suing for his freedom, or Michael Hardwick, a homosexual convicted of sodomy in Georgia in 1982. But even in the Dred Scott case, Obama was able to credit the concerns of slave owners, who expected to see their property rights respected, and of the Supreme Court, which worried that ruling in favor of a black man would incite the Southern states to secede. Overall, though, he believed that courts should play an active role in righting injustices.

As a gay man, Madigan was interested in how Obama would approach
Bowers v. Hardwick
, the sodomy case. Obama was not just a straight, married man. He was a smooth, handsome guy. Women crushed on Obama. That set him apart from the gray, abstracted professors who made up most of the law faculty.

“I remember myself, as a gay guy, when the
Bowers
case was on the horizon, I was a little interested in how it would be taken up, because he just had the vibe of a ladies' guy,” Madigan would remember. “I guess I was surprised at how well he handled it. It was pretty consistent that he approached that case the same way that he approached the Dred Scott case, taking the perspective of this African-American guy, taking the perspective of this gay guy. I think there was a model of consistency there that I always found pretty impressive, because the thing that was very personal for me, but was pretty alien for him, he handled in the same way that something that seemed very personal to him but was pretty alien to me, like a race-based law.”

Obama's preoccupation with the human consequences of a case, rather than simply legal doctrine, was just one way he cut against the grain of the law school's culture. U of C professors are sharply intellectual: At lunch in the faculty lounge, they enjoy a bloodthirsty debate on the merits of a Supreme Court decision far more than a discussion of how the case will affect a poor South Side family living a few miles from campus. In the classroom, the give-and-take is equally aggressive: One professor, who is now a federal judge, once reduced a student to tears. (Obama's lectures were more conversational. He was less interested in pontificating than in drawing students into the discussion. Unlike judges, politicians want to be liked.) U of C is a citadel of legal thought, known especially for its conservative thinkers. Richard Posner, the school's most prominent scholar, was appointed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals by Ronald Reagan. Richard Epstein, a corporate law expert, became an Obama critic who took the negative in a debate titled “Should Conservatives Vote for Obama?” Still, U of C is an urban, intellectual, cosmopolitan institution, so its professors tend to be libertarians rather than social conservatives. They are more devoted to free markets than traditional values. (The economics school, whose many Nobel Prize winners share the same viewpoint, has a research institute named for Milton Friedman, a former faculty member.)

“The idea of being fervent about personal liberties is not really that out of sync with a lot of civil rights issues, at least civil rights issues as they emerged in the sixties and seventies” is Baird's explanation of how the faculty squares its philosophic conservatism with the personal liberalism that prevails in Hyde Park. “Everyone in the law school would be absolutely committed to not tolerating racial discrimination at all, not tolerating gender discrimination, or discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, or anything like that.”

Conservative liberalism sounds like an academic affectation, but “if you try to use the word ‘conservative liberal,' you're missing the point,” Baird would say. “They're against big government, but that's not the same as being against voting rights.”

As a teacher, Obama was well liked, but he wasn't a star, even after he was elected to the state senate. Most students were more excited about taking classes from federal judges or full-time professors. A legislator just wasn't as glamorous. When Obama auctioned off a day in Springfield for a law school charity auction, it went for a few hundred dollars. Obama didn't spend a lot of time in the faculty lounge, either. Lecturers weren't expected to join in the law school's intense repartee. They had day jobs. Obama could be spotted early in the mornings drinking coffee in the downstairs Green Lounge, or playing basketball in the gym after work.

“Conservative liberalism” had no appeal to a lecturer who'd learned his politics in Altgeld Gardens. But Obama did find like-minded allies at the law school. Cass Sunstein, a constitutional law expert who became the most-cited legal expert in America, was Obama's closest friend there. (Obama would appoint Sunstein to his administration as “regulatory czar.”) Both were progressive Democrats, but they were pragmatists, too. Sunstein hardened Obama's practical streak, testing his ideas with exacting debates and nudging him in the direction of judicial minimalism, the idea that judges should decide cases as narrowly as possible, rather than boldly remaking the law. At the University of Chicago, no answer is ever deemed definitive, and every answer begets further questions. That intellectual rigor could later be seen in the way Obama approached his work as a legislator, trying to find common ground by bringing together parties with conflicting views.

Obama also met Elena Kagan at U of C. She went on to serve as dean of Harvard Law School, until he appointed her U.S. solicitor general then Supreme Court justice.

If you walk through the main lobby of the law school today, the first room to the left has this plaque outside the door:

B
ARACK
O
BAMA

S
ENIOR
L
ECTURER 1996–2004

L
ECTURER IN
L
AW 1992–1996

F
ELLOW IN
L
AW AND
G
OVERNMENT 1991–1992

F
ORTY-FOURTH
P
RESIDENT OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES

U
NITED
S
TATES
S
ENATOR 2005–2008

I
LLINOIS
S
TATE
S
ENATOR 1997–2004

D
URING HIS TWELVE YEARS AT THE
U
NIVERSITY OF
C
HICAGO
L
AW
S
CHOOL,
M
R.
O
BAMA TAUGHT
C
ONSTITUTIONAL
L
AW
III, C
URRENT
I
SSUES IN
R
ACISM
AND THE
L
AW, AND
V
OTING
R
IGHTS AND THE
D
EMOCRATIC
P
ROCESS.
C
LASSROOM
V
WAS HIS
FAVORITE ROOM IN WHICH TO TEACH.

Classroom V, a tiered amphitheater seating eighty students, is also where Obama developed the eloquence that, when seasoned with the call-and-response rhythms of the black church, made him the greatest political speaker of his generation. As a constitutional law professor, his job was to encourage open conversation among students of vastly differing political views.

“Where in the Constitution do we find justification for
Roe v. Wade
?” he would ask. “How do we reconcile this understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment as it applies to sexual orientation?”

No other presidential candidate ever spent so much time thinking deeply about the fundamental doctrines of American legal thought or the nuances of the American Constitution. His public voice, the soaring rhetoric of the 2004 convention speech or Election Night 2008, grew naturally out of the legal discussions in that classroom. Obama taught the Emancipation Proclamation there, speaking the words of Lincoln. The oratory of an earlier era of American thinkers was familiar to him, as to no other politician, but he would use those antique cadences to express a worldview more modern than any other politician's. Lincoln had done the same, freeing the slaves with a document that could have been composed by Cicero. It's an advantage of being a lawyer-president, but it was only part of Obama's education as a public speaker. As he would learn, in a later campaign for office, a politician can't simply talk like a professor. A speech and a lecture are not the same thing.

Chapter 6

HYDE PARK

A S   A   H A R V A R D   L A W   S T U D E N T
, Obama had rebuffed Abner Mikva's offer of a job interview. As a U of C lecturer and an aspiring politician, he was much more interested in putting his networking skills to work on the judge. In the years since their non-encounter, Mikva had resigned from the bench, served two years as Bill Clinton's White House counsel, and returned to Hyde Park. Now semiretired, he lived in a lakefront penthouse, where the doorman addressed him as “Judge Mikva,” and lectured part-time at his alma mater.

One day, as Mikva was arriving to teach his class on the legislative process, Obama spotted him walking in the door and introduced himself.

“We've met before,” Obama said. “At a reception.”

Mikva had ribbed Obama about turning down the job interview. Obama, afraid he'd offended the judge, had assured him it was because he was so eager to get back to Chicago.

“Of course I remember you,” Mikva said. Obama was easy to spot on the law faculty.

This time, Obama suggested they meet for breakfast. They did, and before long he was calling the older man “Ab.” Obama could not have chosen a more reliable friend or a better model for his political career. Mikva was an avatar of the independent liberalism that defines politics in Hyde Park. Like Obama, he was an outsider to Chicago, having grown up in Milwaukee. In most neighborhoods, where the path to office is a degree from a local high school and years of ringing doorbells for the Democratic ward organization, that would have been a handicap. Not in Hyde Park. The University of Chicago welcomes outsiders—especially if they come from the Ivy League.

“We've got a lot of people who came from Harvard,” as one political veteran puts it.

In a city notorious for segregation, Hyde Park was the first white neighborhood to welcome blacks—and to vote for them. In the 1950s, after the Supreme Court struck down restrictive covenants in
Shelley v. Kraemer
, middle-class professionals began moving from the Black Belt down to Hyde Park. They encountered no resistance, partly because the neighborhood was dominated by racially tolerant Jews and liberal professors, and partly because the new residents had college degrees. Hyde Parkers may be snobs, but they're not bigots. As the saying goes, they don't judge a man by the color of his skin, they judge him by how many books he's read. The newcomers—sophisticated First Migration blacks who listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday—found Hyde Park more congenial than their old neighborhoods, which were filling up with cotton pickers who loved that raunchy country blues played by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

Hyde Park may be on the South Side, but it is not of the South Side. Crowded with expensive high-rises overlooking Lake Michigan, Hyde Park resembles the tony North Side neighborhoods at the other end of Lake Shore Drive far more than the weary ghettos a few miles inland, with their threadbare corners occupied by liquor stores and chicken shacks. The neighborhood is defined by the U of C, which sees itself as an island of culture surrounded by water on the east and slums in the other three directions. Students have long been warned not to stray beyond certain barrier boulevards. In the 1950s, the university became so alarmed by the impinging urban rot that it first threatened to move out of Hyde Park, then began an aggressive urban renewal project on its borders. Resentful South Siders called the project “Negro removal,” and comedian Mike Nichols cracked that “Hyde Park is where the black middle class and the white middle class stand arm in arm against the lower class.” (Saul Alinsky—not surprisingly a Hyde Parker—founded the Woodlawn Organization to fight the university's efforts.)

Blacks and whites also stood arm in arm against the Machine. Hyde Park maintained its independence because Mayor Daley had nothing to offer its doctors and professors. On Election Day, winos got muscatel, poor blacks got a turkey, and white ethnics got a patronage job as a bridge tender or a sewer inspector. The best Daley could offer a surgeon was a post in the Health Department, which wouldn't pay half what he made at the U of C hospital. Paul Douglas, the economics professor who became a United States senator, was Hyde Park's most celebrated officeholder. But Douglas was backed by the Machine, which needed a liberal reformer on the ticket as a loss leader to distract attention from its grubby regulars. Hyde Park's most beloved politician, the man who set the template for all the independents who followed, was Alderman Leon Despres. An old acquaintance of Leon Trotsky's (he had spent time at the Communist's Mexican villa), Despres was elected to the city council on the same day Daley was elected mayor and spent the next twenty years as a pain in the Boss's ass, the lone dissenter on countless 49–1 votes. Despres spoke out for civil rights and introduced an open housing bill, which only he voted for.

“We've got the only black alderman on the city council,” Hyde Parkers boasted, “and he's white.”

Normally, Daley punished rebellious aldermen by cutting off their patronage. But Hyde Parkers didn't want patronage. They wanted potholes filled, water mains repaired, and police on the street—which were actually easier to get if their alderman didn't have to beg the mayor for jobs, too. So Daley just cut off Despres's microphone whenever the alderman launched into an anti-Machine rant on the council floor. In the eyes of Hyde Parkers, who couldn't stand Daley's racism and election fraud, that merited a medal in the crusade for good government.

In 1966, Hyde Park elected its first black state senator, Richard Newhouse. He was a U of C Law grad, which made him good people. That was also the year Martin Luther King Jr. protested segregation in Chicago—the year before the suit-and-tie civil rights movement was succeeded by urban riots—and Hyde Park was full of whites who belonged to the Urban League and got a warm, self-satisfied feeling when they voted for a black man.

Mikva was already in the legislature by then. When a state representative seat had opened up a few years earlier, the Independent Voters of Illinois had gone looking for a candidate. The IVI, a group founded to smite the Machine, was influential in Hyde Park and a few North Side wards full of young professionals and folk music devotees. (It later merged with the Independent Precinct Organization to form the IVI-IPO.) The white Protestants had fled to the suburbs, taking their Republican votes with them, so independents were the only opposition to Daley's rule of Chicago. The Boss's men dubbed them “goo-goos,” a derisive term for good-government types.

Mikva didn't let his sponsors down. He joined a liberal bloc in Springfield that fought for open housing. When he voted with Republicans on an antipatronage measure, regular Democrats rolled their eyes. Patronage was the source of the Machine's power, providing an army of political appointees to get out the vote.

“He has to vote crazy like that,” complained a Southwest Sider. “He comes from that crazy Hyde Park.”

Mikva was elected to Congress in 1968. When Illinois lost a congressional seat in the next census, Machine legislators decided that Hyde Park belonged in Ralph Metcalfe's historically black First Congressional District. Mikva wasn't chased out of Washington that easily. He moved to the North Shore, whose liberal suburbanites were not so different from Hyde Parkers: They would vote for a Democrat as long as he wasn't allied with the mayor. Soon he was back in Congress, where he remained until Jimmy Carter made him a federal judge.

One of Mikva's successors in the state legislature was Carol Moseley Braun. It's no coincidence that two of the first three black senators since Reconstruction had their political beginnings in Hyde Park. There's no better place in America for a black politician to learn how to represent white constituents. The Voting Rights Act created more opportunities for blacks to win high office, but it also ghettoized Americans in segregated districts. Hyde Park is such a checkerboard that it can't be labeled black turf or white turf.

Moseley Braun “wasn't afraid of white people,” said a white supporter. “She could be comfortable speaking to them and not having it in her head all the time that ‘They're looking at me as a black.' She operated on the level that, ‘Well, I'm the same as you are, and I have the same training and abilities that you have.' The one thing about communities like Hyde Park is everybody takes that as, ‘Well, okay, that's the way it is.' The fact that you happen to be black doesn't undercut that.”

By the time Obama arrived in Hyde Park, its biracial character could be seen at Valois Cafeteria (“See Your Food,” their neon sign tells customers invitingly), where the short ribs special was priced for the budgets of winos and grad students alike. Valois was the subject of the book
Slim's Table
, which examined the wary relationship between the campus and the ghetto. (Obama ate breakfast there often. After he became president, the owners began setting out a placard each morning listing his favorite meal: eggs, sausage, and pancakes.) But Obama's favorite Hyde Park restaurant was the Cajun-themed Dixie Kitchen & Bait Shop. As a state senator, he would sing its praises for a local TV show called
Check, Please
. (The episode never aired because Obama didn't let anyone else on the panel get a word in.) On the chess tables in Harper Court, black hustlers played aggressive five-minute blitz games against nerdy math majors. The hustlers brought street slang into the chess vernacular, hooting, “Gimme them panties! I want them panties off!” after capturing a rook or a bishop. The tables were torn up after the chess scene got too rowdy. The Hyde Park Hair Salon, Obama's barbershop, laid out
Ebony
and
Jet
for waiting customers, but the owner, Zariff, could cut straight or kinky.

Barack and Michelle bought a two-bedroom condo on East View Park, a fenced-off block of identical three-flats a few hundred yards from Lake Michigan. Obama was often seen at the Hyde Park Co-op with his wife's grocery list—an errand that gave him a chance to sneak a cigarette—or on the basketball courts near Promontory Point, where high-flying ballers look as though they're soaring into the empty sky over the lake.

Obama was also building his visibility in Hyde Park's political and intellectual circles. In hip North Side neighborhoods, lampposts and kiosks are covered with flyers for indie rock concerts. In Hyde Park, they're papered with lecture notices. The life of the mind is big-time entertainment. The Democratic Socialists of America invited Obama to appear on a panel called “Employment and Survival in Urban America”—a coup for a law lecturer. The headliner was sociologist William Julius Wilson, a U of C idol who always drew a big crowd on campus. (In the mid-1990s, the
Princeton Review
named U of C America's worst party school, inspiring this joke: “Q: How many University of Chicago students does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Quiet! I'm trying to study in the dark.” They do cut loose once a year, around Hanukkah, when the university sponsors a debate on the tastiness of latkes vs. hamantaschen.)

Obama also appeared on a panel with fellow Hyde Parker William Ayers, to discuss the question “Should a child ever be called a ‘super predator'?”

Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were the sixties' most glamorous radical couple: The Bonnie and Clyde of the Weather Underground, they spent eleven years in hiding after an accidental bombing that destroyed a Greenwich Village town house, killing three of their comrades. Ayers came from an upper-class background—his father, Thomas Ayers, was CEO of Commonwealth Edison, Chicago's biggest utility—so when the couple came in from the cold, they didn't do time, the way some biker toolbox bomber and his old lady would have. Their case was dropped, due to FBI misconduct, and Ayers père used all his social clout to restore Bill to respectability. Dad's campaign was successful. Ayers became a highly regarded professor of education at the University of Illinois–Chicago, while his wife joined the faculty at Northwestern University Law School. As a professor, Ayers advocated “social justice teaching,” a philosophy that gives students more control over their curriculum and parents more control over schools. Like Obama, he lobbied for the creation of local school councils in the late 1980s, although the two men never worked together on that effort.

Ayers and Dohrn settled in Hyde Park, where they were embraced in liberal circles. They became generous contributors to left-wing causes and sent their children to the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, a private academy that educates the offspring of Ph.D.s, J.D.s, M.D.s, and even a few successful B.A.s. Its old boys and girls, who include Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and thrill killer Richard Loeb, are known as “Labbies.” (Besides their own sons, Malik and Zayd, the Ayerses also raised Chesa Boudin, the son of Kathy Boudin, a fellow bomb-thrower imprisoned for her role in a bank robbery that killed two police officers.)

“Bill and Bernardine are respected members of the community,” says a friend of the couple who edits a radical magazine.

Another acquaintance, though, dismisses Ayers as a “narcissist” because he promoted his memoir,
Fugitive Days
, by saying, “I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.” On the book's publicity tour, Ayers posed for
Chicago
magazine with an American flag wadded at his feet.

Obama wrote a brief review of Ayers's book
A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court
for the
Tribune
, calling it “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.” Ayers spent five years teaching in Cook County's juvenile court system, which was founded by Jane Addams, Chicago's proto-do-gooder, a pioneer in both education reform and community organizing.