Illinois: Junior Senator

Sen. Barack Obama (D)

Barack Obama (D) Elected 2004, 1st term up 2010
Born:	08-04-1961, Honolulu, HI
Home:	Chicago
Education:	Attended Occidental College, 1979-81, Columbia U., B.A. 1983, Harvard U., J.D. 1991
Religion:	United Church of Christ
Marital Status:	married (Michelle)
Elected  Office:	IL Senate, 1996-2004.
Professional Career:	Dir., Illinois Project Vote!, 1992; Practicing atty.; Lecturer, U. of Chicago, 1993-2004.
DC Office	713 HSOB, 20510 202-224-2854 Fax: 202-228-4260 Website: obama.senate.gov
State Offices	Chicago:312-886-3506; Marion:618-997-2402; Moline:309-736-1217; Springfield:217-492-5089;
Additional Info
Recent Articles · Offices · Committees · Ratings · Key Votes · Election Results
More On Illinois
At A Glance · State Profile Senior Senator ·Almanac Home
Recent News Coverage
Search the CongressDaily, Hotline, House Race Hotline, and National Journal archives using the form above:

Barack Obama, Illinois’s junior senator, was a national political celebrity even before he was elected to the Senate in November 2004. His background is unusual, quite different from that of most black politicians, yet as quintessentially American as that of Tiger Woods. Obama’s father was from Kenya, his mother from Kansas; they met in Hawaii, where her parents had gone to live and where Barack Jr. was born in 1961. When he was 2, Obama’s father left to get a degree at Harvard, then returned to Kenya where he was a prominent politician and then, after a downward spiral, died in an auto accident in 1982; Obama recalls meeting him only once, when he was 10. Obama’s mother married an Indonesian, and the family moved there, where he attended both Muslim and Catholic schools; he lived there from age 6 to 10, during the years 1967–71 that were so turbulent in U.S. politics. He returned to Hawaii and, when his mother moved back to Indonesia, stayed and lived with his maternal grandparents and attended the elite Punahou Academy. Classmates remember him as a bright and cheerful young man who played basketball and helped the team win a state championship in 1979. His memories, as recounted in his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, are that he was preoccupied and almost tormented by his racial background, even in multiracial and tolerant Hawaii, and that he got into drugs (marijuana and cocaine but not heroin). “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.” He went to the Mainland to college, first to Occidental College in Los Angeles, then to Columbia University in New York. After graduation he worked as a community organizer in Chicago from 1985 to 1988. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review (and was also a classmate of former Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman). He and his wife, also a Harvard Law graduate, then moved to Chicago, her hometown, where in 1993 he became a lecturer at the University of Chicago law school.

Politics always seems to have been on his mind. In 1992 he worked on voter registration for the Democratic ticket. In 1996 he ran for the state Senate and was unopposed in the decisive Democratic primary. Next came a political misstep: in 2000 he ran in the primary against 1st District Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush, who the year before had lost the February 1999 race for mayor to incumbent Richard M. Daley by 72%-28%. Obama was attacked for missing a vote on a gun control measure sought by Daley and Governor George Ryan because he was in Hawaii, visiting family, and one of his daughters was ill. Rush was endorsed by Bill Clinton and won 61%-30%. Obama compiled an impressive record in the state Senate. He played important roles in welfare legislation, on the state earned income tax credit and on the 2003 ethics legislation. In 2003 he pushed successfully for a law requiring electronic recording of interrogations and confessions in homicide cases; prosecutors resisted it, but he argued persuasively that it would ensure convictions in the large majority of cases. He voted against requiring medical care for fetuses who survived abortions, for allowing retired police to carry concealed weapons and against allowing people who used banned handguns to defend against intruders in their houses to be exempt from prosecution for possessing the guns. He sponsored a bill against job and housing discrimination against gays and got a study of racial profiling in traffic stops. He provided the key vote in 2004 to pass Governor Rod Blagojevich's bill to raise $300 million in taxes after first voting against it. In October 2002 he made a public statement opposing the Iraq war resolution. "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences," he said at an anti-war rally. "I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars."

Looming not too far ahead was the 2004 Senate race. Illinois has one of the earliest filing deadlines and state primaries in the nation, in December 2003 and in March 2004 in this case, and the incumbent senator, Republican Peter Fitzgerald, was obviously in trouble. Elected in 1998 in large part because of the ethical shortcomings of incumbent Democrat Carol Moseley Braun, he had compiled an attractive record on ethics himself. But Fitzgerald would have to run in an increasingly Democratic state, and without the support of leading Illinois Republicans; the Republican state committee declined to support Fitzgerald for reelection. In 1998 Fitzgerald had largely self-financed his campaign, but his wealth would have been seriously diminished by another such race, and in April 2003 he announced he would not seek reelection.

With Democratic Senator Richard Durbin comfortably reelected in 2002 and still in the prime of life, it seemed that another Illinois Senate seat would not come open for many years, perhaps a generation, so a host of candidates—eight Democrats and eight Republicans, many of them capable of self-financing a campaign—entered the 2004 race. Initially Obama did not stand out. As an African-American he had an edge with black voters, who would probably make up 25% of the primary electorate. But some prominent black politicians, notably Bobby Rush, endorsed other candidates, though Obama was backed by state Senate Majority Leader Emil Jones, 2d District Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. and 1984 and 1988 presidential candidate Jesse Jackson Sr. His positions on issues were not particularly distinctive among Illinois Democrats—he favored abortion rights, background checks on all gun sales and was willing to filibuster Bush judicial nominees. He was for civil unions but against same-sex marriage; he backed only the middle-class Bush tax cuts and favored pay-as-you-go budgeting, which is consistent with tax increases on the wealthy.

Other candidates seemed better positioned. State Comptroller Dan Hynes, elected to that office in 1998 at age 30, from a prominent Cook County Democratic family, was backed by Cook County Board President John Stroger and Cook County Commissioner John Daley, brother of Mayor Richard M. Daley. Blair Hull, who sold his trading firm to Goldman-Sachs in 1999 for $531 million, had contributed $260,000 to Governor Rod Blagojevich in 2002 and announced that he was willing to spend $40 million of his own money on his campaign. He imitated Blagojevich’s 2002 tactic by buying Downstate TV starting in June 2003 and spent $29 million by the March primary, including $75 a day for anyone who would put up a lawn sign. Also running were Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas and former Chicago School Board President Gery Chico, each with plausible claims on the nomination. Hull turned out to have serious problems. It was revealed that he had struck his first wife in the shin in 1998 and that she had sought a protection order, calling him “a violent man with an ungovernable temper.” His lead in the polls collapsed. Hynes was unable to translate his support from prominent officeholders in the face of Obama’s poised performances in endorsement meetings. Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war resolution and his dismissive criticism of some Bush policies helped establish a bond with the Bush-hating Dean supporters of his party. And he had some other endorsements—a $10,000 contribution from Michael Jordan and an ad featuring Sheila Simon, daughter of former (1984–96) Senator Paul Simon, a fondly remembered and thoughtful politician who had died in December 2003. Obama was endorsed by the Chicago Tribune, no reflexive backer of Democrats, as “one of the strongest Democratic candidates Illinois has seen in some time”—something of a slap in the face to Senator Durbin and Governor Blagojevich. The March primary was a blowout victory for Obama. He won 53% of the vote in an eight-candidate race, to 24% for Hynes, 11% for Hull, 6% for Pappas and 4% for Chico. In metro Chicago, where 74% of the votes were cast, and where the race received the most coverage in the free media, Obama led Hynes 63%-17%. Hull, benefiting from his early ads, won a plurality of 24% Downstate, but that didn’t matter. As Obama said on election night, “I think it is fair to say the conventional wisdom was we could not win. We didn’t have enough money. We didn’t have enough organization. There was no way that a skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name like Barack Obama could ever win a statewide race. Sixteen months later we are there.” Moreover, the primary turnout showed huge Democratic strength. Some 1,242,000 voted in the Democratic primary, while only 661,000 voted in the Republican primary—just a tad bit over the 656,000 votes Obama won.

The Senate race was over except for the shouting—but there turned out to be quite a lot of that. The Republican nominee was Jack Ryan, who led the eight-candidate field with 35% of the vote and, like Obama, had an attractive life story. He had graduated from Harvard Law and Harvard Business schools, made a fortune working for Goldman Sachs and had then gone to teach in an inner city school. He and Obama might have had a series of civil exchanges on the issues. But Ryan, like Hull, had a divorce problem. Before the primary he released the records of his California divorce from television actress Jeri Ryan, except for some passages which he said would be harmful to his nine-year-old son. After the primary the Chicago Tribune pressed for full disclosure. In June a California judge agreed. It turned out that Ryan had pressed his former wife, against her wish, to go to sex clubs in Paris. Republican party leaders were furious that Ryan had not told them of this vulnerability, and pressed him to get out of the race. After an agonizing interval he did—and then the Republicans had to figure out who to put in his place. The candidates who lost the primary proved either unwilling or unacceptable. Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka thought about it, and said no.

While this was going on, Obama delivered the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. In quietly elegant prose, with echoes of the rhythms of black preachers, Obama proclaimed to delegates of a party that tends to divide its ranks into discrete constituencies, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America, there is the United States of America.” Drawing on his own experiences campaigning in Illinois, he said, “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States, and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States.” And, echoing Bill Cosby, he spoke about the black community. “Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn—they know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectation and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know these things.” Immediately, and not without justification, commentators were hailing this state senator from Hyde Park as a national leader and possible future president.

Republicans still did not have a candidate against him, and it was clear none could do very well. As Peter Fitzgerald said, “Taking the Republican nomination in Illinois for the U.S. Senate would be akin to accepting a cancer transplant.” Cultural conservatives, including 16th District Congressman Don Manzullo, put forward the name of Alan Keyes, the fiery conservative who had run for president in 1996 and 2000. Keyes is a Harvard Ph.D. who believes that the purpose of America is defined by the Declaration of Independence and that abortion is a violation of the Declaration’s principle of respect for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He had run for the Senate twice before, in Maryland, losing 62%-38% to Paul Sarbanes in 1988 and 71%-29% to Barbara Mikulski in 1992. Inconveniently, he still lived in Maryland and in 2000 had sharply criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton’s move into New York to run for the Senate. But this was different, Keyes said; he was being invited to run by the Illinois Republican party. On August 4 he became its nominee.

In a state where liberal cultural views had moved critical suburban votes to the Democrats, Keyes chose to campaign primarily on abortion and same-sex marriage. Polls showed Obama with huge majorities, and the state Republican party sent out mailers omitting Keyes’s name. Former Governor Jim Thompson said he wouldn’t vote for him; former Governor Jim Edgar and Speaker Dennis Hastert said they’d vote for the Republican ticket; Manzullo said he was still for Keyes, but “I don’t like the way he says some things”; state Republican Chairman Judy Baar Topinka said one of his comments was “idiotic.” In mid-October the FEC fined Keyes $23,000 for receiving $180,000 in illegal donations to his 2000 presidential campaign. Obama meanwhile was confident enough to contribute $283,000 to other campaigns and send volunteers into Wisconsin to campaign for the Kerry-Edwards ticket.

Obama won 70%-27%, the widest victory margin in Illinois history. Keyes carried 9 heavily Republican counties in southern Illinois; Obama carried the other 93. Obama carried blacks 92%-8% and whites 66%-31%; he won 70% or more from all income groups; Keyes carried Republicans by only 56%-40% and, in a state where there are almost as many liberals as conservatives, carried conservatives by only 61%-33%. Obama appeared on Meet the Press and This Week and was featured on the cover of Newsweek. Dreams from My Father was brought out in paperback and sold more than half a million copies, and he got a $1.9 million book contract for The Audacity of Hope, which appeared in 2006 and also sold well.

In the Senate he proceeded cautiously. He compiled a mostly liberal voting record, but was one of 18 Democrats to support the class action bill that passed in 2005. He voted against the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito and against CAFTA. His first bill, introduced in April 2005, was to increase the maximum Pell grant to $5,100; he noted that he hadn’t paid off his school loans till he received the advance for The Audacity of Hope. In March, he pushed successfully in the Foreign Relations Committee to get $25 million for research and responses to avian flu and got the support of Chairman Richard Lugar. He worked with Lugar on the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program Lugar had started in 1991 with Sam Nunn; in August they went together to Russia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine to investigate weapons facilities, and in November they sponsored a bill to add shoulder-fired missiles, abandoned land mines and other conventional weapons to the program originally aimed at nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. He delivered his first major foreign policy speech in November 2005 in Chicago, calling for a phased withdrawal from Iraq starting in 2006. He worked with Republican Sam Brownback on response to the slaughter in Darfur. He co-sponsored a comprehensive immigration package with Republican Mel Martinez. He worked on investigating no-bid contracts to recover from Hurricane Katrina with Republican Tom Coburn. With Hillary Rodham Clinton he sponsored a bill to encourage health professionals to disclose errors early on and analyze them. He worked on changing Senate ethics rules with John McCain, but when in February 2006 he sent a letter favoring going through committee rather than a task force, McCain wrote back angrily. He “apologized” for taking Obama seriously. “I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness.” Obama replied, “The fact that you have now questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable, but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you, nor my willingness to find a bipartisan solution to this problem,” and they quickly made up.  While the Senate voted to ban meals and gifts from lobbyists and full disclosure of privately funded travel in March, it did not include Obama’s proposal for a special outside panel to police members’ ethics. He and McCain were among the eight senators who voted against the final bill.

Despite his national prominence, Obama took care to hold nearly 50 town meetings in Illinois, mostly Downstate, in his first 16 months as a senator. He sponsored a bill for a 50% tax credit for gas stations that installed E-85 pumps with ethanol fuel, co-sponsored another with funding for Mississippi and other river locks and dams and got more VA claims specialists in Chicago. He tried to get agreement between Will County officials and Jesse Jackson, Jr., on the governing body for the airport in Peotone that Jackson had long been promoting and which he supported in the 2004 campaign. He and Dick Durbin challenged the Defense Department’s shutdown (out of concern they would interfere with radar) of new wind farms in Illinois, and he sponsored a successful amendment to get the Air Force to report on the future missions of the 183rd Fighter Wing after it was transferred from Springfield to Fort Wayne, Indiana. With Durbin, he opposed ethanol imports from Brazil and other countries. He and Kentucky’s Jim Bunning sponsored a coal liquefication bill, noting that “Illinois basin coal has more untapped energy potential than the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined.” With his book advance and royalties, and his wife’s promotion to vice president of the University of Chicago Hospitals, they bought a large house in Kenwood and also, from neighbor and lobbyist Tony Rezko, part of a lot next door. After Rezko was indicted in October, Obama said he had used bad judgment in making the purchase. "There's no doubt I should have seen some red flags in terms of me purchasing a piece of property from him."

In early 2005 Obama downplayed his presidential prospects. He was urged to run by the New Republic and by Oprah Winfrey, who said, “He’s really more than a politician. He is the real deal.” He started a PAC, Hopefund, in January 2005, to encourage young people, especially blacks and Latinos, to work on political campaigns, and maintained a small staff. By mid-2005 he had visited 25 states and was receiving 300 requests a week to make speeches. He stumped for governor candidates Tim Kaine in Virginia and Jon Corzine in New Jersey in October and November 2005 and, despite his stated dislike of fundraising, raised $1 million for Robert Byrd and $6.5 million for other Democrats. He spoke to 10,000 in Detroit upon receiving an NAACP lifetime achievement award in May 2005, went to Omaha to visit with billionaire Warren Buffett in November 2005, spoke (with Sam Brownback) at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in December 2006, gave the Democratic response at the Gridiron Dinner in Washington in March 2006. He took the time to tape a reading of Dreams From My Father and won a Grammy for it. His first eight podcasts averaged 10,000 downloads each by fall 2005. He posted on the liberal website Daily Kos and urged Democrats to tone down their rhetoric and not to “exaggerate or demonize” their opponents. Time put him on the cover in October 2006, with a very positive cover story by Joe Klein. There was some less favorable coverage. The liberal writer Ezra Klein called him “a leader who’s never led” in the Los Angeles Times. Some partisan Democrats criticized him for not taking up major issues; some Republicans complained that he had little experience. Some blacks complained that he was not “really black,” and he is not, like most American blacks, the descendant of American slaves and he grew up not in a black ghetto but in the nation’s most multiracial state.

Nonetheless in January 2006 Obama told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that, “I will serve out my full six-year term” and “I will not” run for president or vice president in 2008. But in 2005 he hired Anita Dunn, one of Bill Bradley’s top staffers in his 2000 presidential campaign, and he spoke at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry in September 2006. That same month, as he was campaigning for Democrats around the country, his 2004 primary opponent Dan Hynes wrote him an open letter urging him to run. On October 22, Obama appeared again on Meet the Press and told Russert that he had “thought about the possibility” of running for president. In December 2006 he went, for the first time in his life, to New Hampshire, where he spoke to crowds of thousands. In January 2007 he announced he was setting up an exploratory committee, and in February he went to Springfield and announced he was indeed running. The choice of Springfield naturally evoked the memory of Abraham Lincoln, whom Obama often cites, who ran for president with less experience in public office and only a tad more experience in military affairs than Obama. At the beginning of his campaign he, like almost all the other candidates of both parties, had little in the way of a specific issues platform, and didn’t have much to say on complex issues like health care. In his stump speeches he had been attacking the Bush tax cuts for favoring the rich, calling for energy independence and criticizing the administration’s handling of Iraq—and sounding the themes of his 2004 convention speech. “We’ve come to be consumed by a 24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative ad, bickering, small-minded politics that doesn’t move us forward. Sometimes one side is up and the other side is down. But there’s no sense that they are coming together in a common sense, practical, non-ideological way to solve the problems we face.” With black audiences, as he has explained, he takes a slightly different approach. “I know if I’m in an all-black audience that there’s going to be a certain rhythm coming back at me from the audience. They’re not just going to be sitting there. That creates a different rhythm in your speaking.” He is not the first black candidate for president: Shirley Chisholm ran in 1972, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Alan Keyes in 1996 and 2000, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton in 2004. But he is the first black candidate whose showing in the polls suggests he has a chance to win. Polls after the November 2006 election and up through August 2007 showed him running second to Hillary Rodham Clinton nationally and in most states; his support from black voters increased as the months went on, with no diminishment in support from others; he polled well against the leading Republicans in general election pairings. Many who watched his 2004 convention speech thought they were looking at a future President of the United States; there is some considerable chance that they may turn out to be right.

Committees

• Foreign Relations (7th of 11 D)
  European Affairs (Chmn.); African Affairs; East Asian & Pacific Affairs; International Development & Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs & International Environmental Protection.
• Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (9th of 11 D)
  Employment & Workplace Safety; Children & Families.
• Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs (7th of 9 D)
  Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services & International Security; Investigations (Permanent); State, Local & Private Sector Preparedness & Integration.
• Veterans' Affairs (4th of 8 D).