 Barack Obama (AP) |
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If some African-Americans speak two languages to function in society, Barack Obama, Illinois' Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, speaks many.
One of them was on display last month in an East St. Louis lecture hall when he spoke to a mostly black audience of high school and college students. "I know that sometimes . . . you get out in the neighborhood, and your friends . . . think that if you're doing well in school, you're not, you know, 'down,' you're not 'keeping it real.' . . . You've got to have a higher standard of excellence than the scumbag folks back in the neighborhood expect of you."
Three weeks later, Obama stood in a church pulpit and again touted the importance of education, but to a very different audience: mostly white, well-educated, upper-middle-class residents of Naperville, Ill. To them, he spoke in precise, polished language. He talked about a disturbing strain of anti-intellectualism in America today. "It starts in the White House and 'trickles down,' " he said dryly, prompting an explosion of laughter.
Obama's closest friends maintain that his message of progressive politics is always consistent, but they admit the messenger often seems like a different man from setting to setting, depending on his audience. It isn't duplicity, they insist, but the natural result of a life that has taken Obama from the exotic streets of Indonesia to the halls of Harvard to the gritty front lines of Chicago politics.
"Barack flows from one community to another very easily. He has his own personal diversity, if you will," said Marty Nesbitt, an Obama campaign adviser, longtime friend and neighbor in Hyde Park, on Chicago's Near South Side. "He is genuine. He's just being Barack."
Obama, 43, was born to a black college student from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas who met while they were both at the University of Hawaii. His unabashedly liberal world view - that government should be a champion of the weak and disaffected - springs from a childhood of unusual challenges: spending part of it as a foreigner in Indonesia, where his mother moved him to live with her second husband; dabbling with street culture and drugs; and most of all, confronting society's attitudes toward mixed-race families.
Black Americans "know too much, we have all seen too much, to take my parents' brief union - a black man and a white woman, an African and an American - at face value," Obama wrote in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance."
"As a result, some people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don't know me well, black or white, discover my background. . . . I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am."
Looking for "connectors"
Obama's default public-speaking voice offers few answers to that question: Authoritative but neutral, devoid of any ethnic or geographic accent, the kind of voice you might hear dubbed over a television news report.
"My mother is from Kansas . . . which is why I talk the way I do," he quipped to one audience on the campaign trail this month.
It's the perfect vocal palette for adding shades of street slang, partisan jabs or policy-speak, depending on the audience.
"He looks for connectors," said Abner Mikva, a retired federal judge and ex-congressman who is a political mentor to Obama. "He looks for things he can talk to people about that won't scare them or turn them off. He can rap with University of Chicago professors, then go out to the neighborhoods and do just as well."
Obama's communication skills are among the attributes that Republicans acknowledge, along with his intelligence and likability.
"He's a gifted speaker. He often reminds me of a cross between Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson," says state Sen. David Luechtefeld, R-Okawville, who has found himself on the opposite side of Obama in floor debates in the Illinois Senate, where both men serve. "I like him. I just don't agree with his positions."
Luechtefeld and others worry that Obama's communication skills, his unusual life story, and some of the most astounding luck in recent political history have combined to give him a pass with the voters regarding issues.
They maintain he is far to the left of average Illinoisans on issues such as abortion, guns and taxes - but that those issues are being lost amid the bright light of political stardom that has engulfed Obama since his rousing keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention this summer in Boston.
"He's pro-choice, he's anti-gun. He really is basically the opposite of what most Southern Illinoisans believe in, even Democrats . . . (but) he is very good at telling people what he thinks they want to hear," said Luechtefeld. "Look at his speech (in Boston). He wanted to be a centrist in that one. I don't think that's really what he is . . . but he was very good at communicating that."
"OK, guys, I'm running"
The speech July 27 made Obama a national political sensation overnight. In particular, his description of himself as "a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too," was quoted all over the world as the quintessential description of the American Dream.
Adding to the new national mystique around Obama (who stands 6-foot-1 and weighs 173 pounds) is an educational and political resume that sounds as if it were conjured up by a political consultant. "The initial tendency when you meet him is to think, 'He can't be for real. What's the catch?' " says Mikva.
Obama's connection to Chicago began in 1985, when he came to the city, fresh out of Columbia University in New York, to head a community development program. He left for Harvard Law School in 1988, became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, then returned to Chicago in 1992 to register voters and practice civil rights law.
He gravitated toward the grass-roots political scene in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, a haven for independent, anti-"machine" Democrats that produced Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor. He was elected to the state Senate in 1996 and soon began leading legislative fights on death penalty reform, gun control, abortion rights and other high-profile issues.
Obama lives in Hyde Park with his wife, Michelle, who is also a lawyer, and their two daughters. He has been re-elected to the state Senate twice in the district, which is anchored by the racially integrated, unapologetically liberal middle-class area around the University of Chicago, where he teaches constitutional law.
Obama and his family live near the lake in a condominium complex of classic dark-brick buildings, wrought-iron fences and old-fashioned lamps lining leafy streets. It's one of those vibrant urban neighborhoods where progressive social politics melds with economic comfort, if not wealth.
"It's very comfortable and quiet. Very diverse. There are a lot of mixed couples, mixed families," said a neighbor of Obama's, Jennette Rader, a retired librarian at the University of Chicago, as she walked across the complex on a recent afternoon. Like many neighbors, she knows the Obamas only in passing but describes them as "a perfectly normal family."
The private Obama that Hyde Park friends describe echoes the public one in key ways: smart-verging-on-nerdish, prone to turning light social gatherings into earnest policy discussions, easily adaptable to various cultures and settings. He likes playing basketball but is better at Scrabble.
"That's when you really get to see how smart he is," said Nesbitt, the Hyde Park neighbor and adviser. "I always try to be on the same team. His command of the language is incredible."
Obama's ambitious side is well-known among his friends. That ambition wasn't muted by defeat in his first attempt at higher office. In 2000, he challenged the re-election of Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., in the primary and lost soundly. Conventional wisdom dictated that his next campaign would aim at or below that mark. Instead, Obama would go higher.
"He called us together and said, 'OK, guys, I'm running for the U.S. Senate,'" recalled Nesbitt, whose living room was the setting for that first announcement. It was the height of ambition for a state legislator, especially since Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill., hadn't yet announced his intention to retire.
"We talked about all the things that had to happen for (Obama) to have a chance" during that first discussion, Nesbitt recalled. They talked about Fitzgerald's vulnerability in polls; about whether that might draw other, more powerful Democrats out against him; about whether former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun would be one of them, cutting into Obama's black-liberal base. "We told him . . . 'A lot would have to happen for you to have a chance.' "
Confluence of luck
"Barack" is an African word meaning "blessed," which aptly describes Obama's bid for the Senate.
A confluence of political luck has followed Obama throughout the campaign. There was Fitzgerald's announcement that he wouldn't seek re-election, opening up a free-for-all in both parties for the vacancy. There was the self-destruction of millionaire front-runners Blair Hull (accused of hitting his ex-wife) and Jack Ryan (accused of coercing his ex-wife to attend "bizarre" sex clubs). There was the surprise failure of state Comptroller Dan Hynes, the Chicago "machine" candidate, to win even the traditionally safe city wards in the Democratic primary.
And then there was the Republican Party's decision to draft controversial conservative Alan Keyes, a Maryland resident with no Illinois base, to move to the state and run for the seat.
Polls have since shown Obama with voter support approaching 70 percent.
"Look, there's no doubt there's been serendipity involved in this," Obama said in a recent interview with the Post-Dispatch editorial board.
Mikva, the retired judge, said, "unquestionably, luck plays a big role" in Obama's current political situation. "But on the other hand, a good politician is one who takes advantage of that luck when it happens."
Mikva and others cite the Boston speech as an example. To be offered a national convention keynote speech in the first place is the political equivalent of winning the lottery. But there's little debate that in his oratory about "the audacity of hope," Obama successfully adjusted his pitch to his widest audience ever.
"If you listen to Barack talk to different people, he's very good at talking a different kind of language," said Lois Dobry, a friend in Hyde Park. "His ear is very, very good. He's attuned to the fact that people want their own background respected."
The reason, she theorized, is that "he's sort of been 'outside' every place he's been."
Reporter Kevin McDermott
E-mail: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 217-782-4912
