THE CANDIDATE: How the son of a Kenyan economist became an Illinois Everyman.

by WILLIAM FINNEGAN

The New Yorker

The climax of Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, "Dreams from
My Father," occurs in rural Kenya when the author sits
between the graves of his father and his grandfather
and weeps. Obama, then in his late twenties, hardly
knew his father and never met his grandfather, but in
the course of writing the book he had learned their
stories in devastating detail. Both were proud,
ambitious men who travelled far from the Luo-speaking
villages where they grew up—indeed, Obama’s
grandmother still has her son’s Harvard diploma hanging
in her house nearby. Their respective struggles in the
world ended painfully, in bitter loneliness. Beside
their graves, Obama, a middle-class American, both
mourns and, for the first time, understands his African
forebears.

People in Illinois seem largely unaware of Obama’s
long, annealing trip into their midst, although they
often remark on his unusual calm. Now forty-two and a
state senator, Obama emerged, in March, from a raucous
primary as the Democratic nominee for the United States
Senate. In a seven-person field, he received a
remarkable fifty-three per cent of the vote—he even
won the "collar" counties around Chicago, communities
that supposedly would never support a black candidate.
And everyone recalls that, as the votes were being
tallied at his headquarters on Election Night, he
seemed to be the least agitated person in the place.

Obama’s Republican opponent in November will be Jack
Ryan, a wealthy political neophyte. The seat they are
competing for is now held by a Republican, Peter
Fitzgerald, who is retiring. An Obama victory thus
would move the Senate Democrats, at present outnumbered
fifty-one to forty-eight, one seat closer to a
majority. It also would make Obama only the third
African-American to serve in the Senate since
Reconstruction.

On a raw, rainy late-April day in Springfield, the
state capital, Obama, who represents a district on
Chicago’s South Side, ducked out of the statehouse for
a meeting with labor leaders from southern Illinois at
an A.F.L.-C.I.O. building down the street. "This is a
kiss-and-make-up session," he told me as we entered a
ground-floor conference room—the state A.F.L.-C.I.O.
had supported one of his opponents in the Democratic
primary. Twenty-five white males, in windbreakers and
golf shirts, sat around the room. They represented the
building trades—the painters’ union, the carpenters.

Obama, lanky and dapper in a dark suit, his shoulders
almost strangely relaxed, seemed to know most of the
men there. He broke the ice with a joke at the expense
of Ed Smith, a huge, tough-looking delegate from Cairo.
Obama had met Smith’s mother on a recent downstate
swing and had discovered that "she’s the one who really
calls the shots there." Smith laughed, and the other
delegates said they wanted her phone number. Then Obama
gave a short, blunt, pro-labor speech. The men eyed him
carefully. Heads began nodding slowly, jaws set, as he
drove his points home: "two hundred thousand jobs lost
in Illinois under Bush; overtime rights under threat
for eight million workers nationally; the right to
organize being eroded." Then he said, "I need your
help," and took questions.

The questions were terse, specific, well informed. They
dealt with federal highway funding, non-union companies
coming in from out of state on big contracts, the
implications of the Free Trade Area of the Americas
agreement. Obama listened closely, and his answers were
fluent and dauntingly knowledgeable, but he kept his
language colloquial. "It’s not enough just to vote
right," he said. "You gotta advocate. You gotta reframe
the debate, use informal power. A lot of these bills
coming up now are lose-lose for Democrats."

"That’s right," somebody said.

"I have a reputation as this abstract guy talking about
civil rights," Obama went on. "But anybody who knows my
state legislative district knows I fight for our share
of resources. And I will fight for Illinois highway
dollars."

He mostly told the union men what they wanted to hear.
Then he said, "There’s nobody in this room who doesn’t
believe in free trade," which provoked a small recoil.
These men were ardent protectionists. A little later,
he said, with conviction, "I want India and China to
succeed"—a sentiment not much heard in the
outsourcing-battered heartland. He went on, however, to
criticize Washington and Wall Street for not looking
after American workers.

Later, I asked him if he wasn’t waving a red flag in
front of labor by talking about free trade. "Look,
those guys are all wearing Nike shoes and buying
Pioneer stereos," he said. "They don’t want the borders
closed. They just don’t want their communities
destroyed."

Back at the statehouse, Obama, who is chairman of the
Health and Human Services Committee, rushed from
meeting to floor vote to committee room. Everybody
seemed to want a word with him. Terry Link, the senate
majority whip, complained about Obama’s successes in a
long-running poker game. "I’m putting his kids through
college," Link said. Kirk Dillard, a leading Republican
senator from the Chicago suburbs, looked chagrined when
I asked him about Obama. "I knew from the day he walked
into this chamber that he was destined for great
things," he said. "In Republican circles, we’ve always
feared that Barack would become a rock star of American
politics." Still, Dillard was gracious. "Obama is an
extraordinary man," he said. "His intellect, his
charisma. He’s to the left of me on gun control,
abortion. But he can really work with Republicans."
Dillard and Obama have co-sponsored many bills. Though
Dillard was unwilling to concede the general election
to Obama, he described Illinois as "a major player in
recognizing African-Americans. We are proudly the state
that produced Abraham Lincoln."

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