Jo Becker And Christopher Drew
31 October 2008
Nairobi — Barack Obama strolled amid the floats and bands making their way down Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago's South Side. This was in August 1999.
Billed as the largest African-American parade in the country, the summer rite was a draw over the years to boxing heroes like Muhammad Ali and jazz greats like Duke Ellington. It was also a must-stop for the city's top politicians.
Back then, Mr Obama, a state senator who was contemplating a run for Congress, was so little-known in the community's black neighbourhoods that it was hard to find more than a few dozen people to walk with him, recalled Al Kindle, one of his advisers at the time. Mr Obama was trounced a year later in the Congressional race -- branded as an aloof outsider more at home in the halls of Harvard than in the rough wards of Chicago politics.
But by 2006, Mr Obama had remade his political fortunes. He was a freshman United States senator on the cusp of deciding to take on the formidable Hillary Rodham Clinton and embark on a long-shot White House run. When the parade wound its way through the South Side that summer, Mr Obama was its grand marshal.
The secret of his transformation, which has brought him to the brink of claiming the US presidency, can be described as the politics of maximum unity.
He moved from his leftist Hyde Park base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city's all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathised with the views of his Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city's politically potent Jewish community.
To broaden his appeal to African-Americans, Mr Obama had to assiduously court older black leaders entrenched in Chicago's ward politics while selling himself as a young, multicultural bridge to the wider political world.
Wishy-washy
"There are some people who say he's not strong enough on this or that, that he's wishy-washy, that he's trying to have it both ways," said Abner J. Mikva, a former congressman and mentor to Mr Obama. "But he's not looking for how to exclude the people who don't agree with him. He's looking for ways to make the tent as large as possible."
Mr Obama's ability to replicate the eclectic coalition he built in Chicago and expand it to the national stage has allowed the one-term senator to match the Clintons at their signature game: collecting influential friends and supporters.
An untraditional politician who at times uses traditional political tactics, Mr Obama, 46, was portrayed in dozens of interviews with political leaders and longtime associates in Chicago as the ultimate pragmatist, a deliberate thinker who fashions carefully nuanced positions that manage to win him support from people with divergent views.
"Most Americans are getting a small glimmer into the rough and tumble world of the South Side of Chicago politics, which is very, very difficult to navigate," said Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., an Illinois Democrat and ally of Mr Obama's. But Mr Obama did it with skill: "It's very unusual to have various factions agreeing with you and your politics," Mr Jackson added.
Others see his deft movements as a politician's shifting of positions and alliances for strategic advantage, leaving some disappointed and baffled about where he really stands.
"He has a pattern of forming relationships with various communities and as he takes his next step up, kind of distancing himself from them and then positioning himself as the bridge," said Mr Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American author and co-founder of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who became acquainted with Mr Obama in Chicago.
Even moments that supporters see as his boldest are tempered by his political caution. The forceful speech he delivered in 2002 against the impending Iraq invasion -- a speech that has helped define him nationally -- was threaded with an unusual mantra for a 1960s-style antiwar rally: "I'm not opposed to all wars." It was a refrain Mr Obama had tested on his political advisers, and it was a display of his ability to speak to the audience before him while keeping in mind the broader audience to come.
When Judson H. Miner invited a third-year Harvard Law School student named Barack Obama to lunch at the Thai Star Cafe in Chicago before his 1991 graduation, Mr Miner thought he was recruiting the 29-year-old to work for his boutique civil rights law firm. Instead, Mr Obama recruited him.
Mr Obama made it clear that he was less interested in a job than in learning the political lay of the land from a man who had served at the right hand of the city's first black mayor, Harold Washington. Mr Miner, who had helped with the historic 1983 election of Mr Washington and served as his corporation counsel, proved a willing tutor.
Cross-examined
The confident younger man "cross-examined" Mr Miner about how Mr Washington had managed to emerge from an election riven by bigotry to form a governing coalition in which he "got along with all these different types of folks," Mr Miner recalled.
Mr Obama, who had spent time in Chicago as a community organiser in the 1980s and already knew he wanted to run for office, openly weighed the pros and cons of working for the law firm. On the one hand it was beloved by many of the city's liberals and black leaders for its work on issues like voting rights and housing equality. On the other, the firm had clashed with Chicago's powerful mayor, Richard M. Daley, who presided then and now over the city's sprawling Democratic organisation.
"During the course of our talking, it came out that people who knew he was having lunch with me were trying to convince him that this was the worst place for him to go. He shared this with me -- he was amused," Mr Miner said, laughing. "This isn't where you land if you want to curry favour with the Democratic power structure."
It was, however, exactly where an aspiring politician might land if he happened to want to run for office from Hyde Park, a neighbourhood with a long history of electing reform-minded politicians independent of the city's legendary Democratic machine. Mr Obama chose to put down roots in the neighbourhood after graduating from law school and marrying Michelle Robinson, a Chicago native and fellow lawyer.
A tight-knit community that runs through the South Side, Hyde Park is a liberal bastion of integration in what is otherwise one of the nation's most segregated cities. Mayor Washington had called it home, as did whites who marched with the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and wealthy black entrepreneurs a generation removed from the civil rights battles of the 1960s.
At its heart is the University of Chicago; at its borders are poor, predominantly black neighbourhoods blighted by rundown buildings and vacant lots. For Mr Obama, who was born in Hawaii to a white Kansan mother and a Kenyan father and who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, it was a perfect fit.
"He felt completely comfortable in Hyde Park," said Martha Minow, his former law professor and a mentor. "It's a place where you don't have to wear a label on your forehead. You can go to a bookstore and there's the homeless person and there's the professor."
Mr Obama quickly grounded himself in the community. He led a successful drive that registered nearly 150,000 black voters for the 1992 campaign. He became a part-time professor at the University of Chicago Law School. And, in 1993, he finally decided to join the law offices of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
The choice sent a signal that Mr Obama was "allying himself with the independents, which is what you have to be if you're going to be elected from the Hyde Park area," said Don Rose, a longtime Democratic political consultant.
Job offer
The decision to accept Mr Miner's job offer quickly paid off. By the time Mr Obama announced his candidacy for the Illinois Senate in 1995 -- at the very Hyde Park hotel where Mr Washington had kicked off his mayoral campaign -- he had cultivated a network of influential supporters.
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