Across the Divide

Back in the Illinois Senate, Obama made a name for himself as someone who could work both sides of the aisle. He befriended an eclectic group of lawmakers, including Kirk Dillard, a conservative Republican. Dillard specifically recalls Obama's work to reach a compromise on the death penalty. Gov. George Ryan had commuted every death sentence in the state after a series of flawed cases had come to light; the legislature was deeply split. Conservative law-and-order types were incensed, while black legislators, in particular, thought it was about time that the state stopped executing prisoners who had been wrongly convicted. Obama was handed the herculean task of reaching a compromise. He did so by getting conservatives to embrace the idea of videotaping police interrogations and suspects' confessions. Among Obama's toughest opponents: Illinois state Sen. Ed Petka, a former prosecutor who had put so many men on death row that his friends called him Electric Ed. "Ed Petka was the hardest person for Obama to convince that he was the real deal, but even Petka became an Obama convert with respect to these criminal-law issues," says Dillard. (Petka, now a Will County judge, declined to comment.)

Yet Obama's drive to find consensus also raised the suspicions of some black colleagues. At the same time as the death-penalty debate, Obama worked to pass legislation on racial profiling; it required police to record information on the race of people pulled over during traffic stops. Obama's seat on the Senate floor was close to the bathroom, a lowly place he'd taken as a freshman. But he learned how to use it to his advantage: he would watch legislators going into the restroom and buttonhole them on their way out. In the heat of the racial-profiling debate, however, the argument spilled into the facilities. Dillard recalls watching as an African-American legislator from Chicago, who wanted even stricter requirements on racial reporting, confronted Obama. "He was questioning Senator Obama's toughness and, frankly, his blackness, as to whether Barack really understood what it was like to be a teenage African-American standing on a street corner in Chicago and being harassed by police officers," recalls Dillard. Obama stood his ground, evoking his childhood in tough neighborhoods of Honolulu and his work as a community organizer in Chicago. But Dillard was struck by Obama's discomfort. "I remember thinking, 'I feel sorry for this guy because he's got to justify himself to blacks and whites alike'."

On the campaign trail, Obama doesn't seek sympathy; he evokes hope. He's especially fond of a story from his 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. Obama is riding on a bus in southern Illinois with Sen. Dick Durbin, his mentor in Congress, when they approach the hardscrabble town of Cairo. Durbin tells him that his first visit to Cairo was in the 1970s, when it was still one of the most segregated towns in Illinois, with a history of lynchings, cross burnings and riots. Durbin, then a young state lawyer on a mission to promote racial harmony, was worried when his driver warned him not to use the telephone because the operator was a member of the White Citizens Council; when he checked in to his motel, a visitor knocked on his door demanding to know what the hell he was doing in town. After the story, Obama and Durbin are apprehensive as their bus pulls into Cairo. But as they turn the corner, they see a crowd of 300 supporters wearing blue buttons saying OBAMA FOR U.S. SENATE. Some in the crowd are black; most are white. To Obama, the story of Cairo confirms Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.

In the real world, the arc of Cairo has not led so clearly toward racial harmony. Until recently, city politics were deadlocked for several years by a mean-spirited dispute between its white, Republican mayor and the majority black Democrats over patronage and the firing of city workers. Paul Farris (whose term as mayor ended in May) blames his opponents for exploiting racial divisions for their own political ends. The story of Cairo is an example, perhaps, of Obama's portraying the glass as half full—oversimplifying a complicated racial and economic divide to score rhetorical and political points. Still, Farris says he's supporting Obama in the presidential race because he tried to bring biodiesel and liquid-coal plants to the economically depressed town. "Say he gets elected president of the United States, he'll have a lot of support from this region," says Farris. "Hopefully he won't forget his trip into this underprivileged ghetto community."

Obama can be idealistic about race, but he can also be blunt in ways that few white politicians could ever pull off. On Father's Day in 2005, before he began his presidential campaign, the freshman senator stepped into a South Side church to talk about what it means to be a responsible black father. "There are a lot of folks, a lot of brothers, who are walking around and they look like men," Obama said. "They've got whiskers, they might even have sired a child, but it's not clear to me that they are full-grown men." The senator urged them not just to get a job, but to start a business; not just to stay at home, but to turn off the TV. Above all, he urged the community to aim high for its kids. "Sometimes," he said, "I go to an eighth-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. It's just eighth grade, people. Just give them a handshake. Congratulations. Now get your butt in the library."

There wasn't much pre-planning for that talk, which got a lot of attention. His speechwriter had forgotten about the event, so Obama jotted down some notes on the back of a few sheets of paper, based on family conversations around the kitchen table. In his own mind, Obama was trying to walk the middle ground between the need for personal duty and the imperative of social action. "I talk about these things not out of shock value," he tells NEWSWEEK. "I also am not at all interested in what some conservative commentators are interested in, which is to use the issue of personal responsibility as an excuse for governmental inaction. It is very much a both-and [approach] as opposed to an either-or approach. When you talk about it in those terms, then the African-American community is responsive." (When Bill Cosby made stronger comments about black responsibility a year earlier, he left out mention of society's duty, and got seared by the reaction of fellow African-Americans.)