ANOTHER RUN FOR NATIONAL OFFICE: THE U.S. SENATE

ANOTHER RUN FOR NATIONAL OFFICE: THE U.S. SENATE

After his stinging loss, Barack returned to his job at the University of Chicago and to Springfield as a state senator. It wasn’t long before he grew restless in his political career, and he began having conversations with his senate colleagues about a run for the U.S. Senate. One person he had to convince about yet another race was his wife, Michelle. Her agreement and support were vital.

In mid-2002, Barack announced to his friends that he planned to run for the United States Senate. Their first question was how he would ever

be able to raise the required millions of dollars, especially after the last campaign that left him paying off personal loans. According to the Sep- tember 15, 2003, edition of Crain’s Chicago Business, when Barack entered the U.S. Senate race, there was no doubt that he had “the makings of a formidable Democratic candidate—intelligent, articulate, progressive— with the potential for a strong base of support among African American

voters in the Chicago area.” 23 Despite these attributes, the question re- mained: could he raise enough money to mount the kind of statewide battle against several well-funded and better-known candidates? While in the state senate, he’d never had to spend more than $100,000 on a race. He had, in fact, coauthored the first campaign finance legislation

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to pass in 25 years; the bill called for refusing meals from lobbyists and rejecting checks from gaming and tobacco interests. Now in a race for the U.S. Senate, his budget called for heavy reliance on grassroots support and what is called “earned media,” meaning the ability of a candidate to make his or her own news. One week of advertising in the Chicago media market, Barack was told by his media adviser, would cost nearly half a million dollars; ad coverage in the rest of the state of Illinois for a week would cost approximately $250,000. To run a race to the primary, it would cost about $5 million. If he won the primary, the cost to run a general election campaign would be another $10 million to $15 million. For Barack, this information was daunting. He tallied the amount he might expect from supporters. That came to $500,000. The question of whether he could raise the money to make a run for the U.S. Senate was

a real one. For the first three months of his campaign, he and an assistant made cold calls for support. At the end of those three months, he had raised $250,000. To make matters worse, his two opponents comprised a candidate with seemingly bottomless pockets and another well-known state politician. 24

As petitions to get on the ballot began to circulate for the March pri- mary, Barack wasn’t winning in the money-raised category; however, he was making a surprisingly strong showing in the campaign reports. Many political observers began to take notice, wondering if he could or would keep it up. By the second quarter of the campaign season, Barack had raised twice as much as one of his opponents, and only $69,000 less than the front-runner, Daniel Hynes. Noting his success, Barack said that a lot of people were surprised at his efforts and that his fund-raising had exceeded his own expectations. He felt he could keep up the pace and be competitive with the other candidates. 25

While Barack was campaigning for the Senate, there was heated de- bate all across the country and within Congress and the Bush adminis- tration regarding Saddam Hussein and whether he possessed weapons of mass destruction. By the fall of 2002, most Americans were convinced that indeed Saddam had these weapons and that he had been person- ally involved in the 9/11 attacks. President Bush’s approval ratings were about 60 percent, and polls showed that a majority of Americans were behind his call to invade Iraq. In October 2002, the Senate voted to give the president the power to go to war. At the time, Barack ques- tioned this vote and the motives behind going to war. He felt, as most people did, that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons. He also believed, as did most people, that Saddam had snubbed the United Nations’ resolutions and weapons inspectors; he also believed that the

59 region and the world would be better off without such a vile dictator

T E A C H I N G C O N S T I T U T I O N A L L AW

known to have killed his own people. Barack just didn’t believe Saddam posed an imminent threat, and the administration’s reason for going to war wasn’t based on rationale that he could agree with. Barack knew that part of his campaign would include his stance on a possible war in Iraq. The question of whether he should take a position on the war was a big consideration. After all, an invasion and toppling Saddam Hussein were popular in Illinois and across the country. If this wasn’t his position, if

he couldn’t support such an invasion, would this hurt his chances to win the election? That same month, a group of antiwar activists invited Barack to speak at a rally in Chicago. His friends and supporters didn’t encourage his at- tendance at such a rally; however, Barack decided he would attend. At the October 2, 2002, rally, Barack took a position on what was a popular war. To a crowd of approximately 2,000 people, Barack said, “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war . . . what

I am opposed to is the attempt . . . to distract us from a rise in the unin- sured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income—to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to.

A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.” 26 While campaigning in 2003, Barack was adamantly liberal in his views, and he continued to be outspoken in his opposition to the Iraq war. He was proud of the legislation he’d passed as a state senator, including a bill to reduce the rate of wrongful executions by requiring homicide con- fessions to be videotaped and another that was intended to crack down on racial profiling. He also claimed some credit for extending the life of a state-sponsored health insurance program for children and empha-

sized his efforts to create a job-training program for unskilled workers. 27 As well, Barack used his community activism efforts, his heritage of a black father and white mother, and being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review to call attention to race and to provide, for some at least, a hopeful theme of pulling down barriers and, for others, appropriate credentials for being a legislator. White liberals and African Americans listened closely as Barack spoke about issues such as jobs, health care, and education. His campaign caught fire. In the election primary, running as

a black progressive in a field of seven candidates that included multimil- lionaire Blair Hull, Dan Hynes, the state comptroller and a member of

a prominent Chicago political family, another African American, and a prominent Latino candidate, Barack won the state primary election with

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53 percent of the vote. It was then on to the general election, where he would be the Democratic candidate against Republican Alan Keyes for the U.S. Senate.