Young Mr. Obama by Edward McClelland

Author:Edward McClelland
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

DEFEAT

W H I L E O B A M A ’ S P A T H T O P O W E R had gone through Columbia and Harvard, Bobby Lee Rush learned politics on the streets. Rush’s entire life had been a series of escapes from the fates that destroyed so many black men of his generation. He was born in rural Georgia to parents who were too proud to endure segregation. They moved the family to Chicago when Rush was a young boy. At seventeen, he dropped out of his inner-city high school to join the army but went AWOL during the Vietnam War to help found the Illinois Black Panther Party.

As the Black Panthers’ deputy minister of defense, Rush was the sole survivor of the party’s ruling triumvirate. His compatriots, Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, were gunned down by the police in the 1969 raid that catalyzed the black political rebellion against the Machine. A photo of Rush wearing a fur hat and wielding a long-barreled pistol became one of the best-known images of 1960s militance in Chicago.

Rush left his radical past behind to earn two masters’ degrees, become an ordained Baptist minister, and win election as an alderman, standing with Harold Washington against the Twenty-nine, who tried to maintain white control of the city council. All along, he saw himself as an underdog, bent on self-improvement. Describing Rush as a boy, his father told him, “You wanted to read so bad and study so much that you said you wanted to die in a classroom.” As a man, he was a disciple of motivational guru Tony Robbins, who urged his listeners to “awaken the giant within.” Rush was a hero of the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Washington years, and he was proof that a black man could succeed. You couldn’t out-ghetto Bobby Rush in Chicago.

Obama didn’t intend to try. He didn’t think he’d have to. In that disastrous run for mayor, Rush even lost his own ward, which hadn’t voted for a white candidate since before Harold Washington. To many, the election was a sign that Daley had finally brought an end to “Beirut on the Lake”—the city’s black vs. white political wars—and that Rush’s style of racial confrontation had had its day.

The First District is a bellwether of black politics, not only in Chicago, but in the nation. Rush had won the seat by unhorsing Representative Charles Hayes, an elderly veteran of Martin Luther King’s voter registration drives. Obama thought the district was ready for another generational change, to a postracial politician who could reach out to whites.

Plus, for an old firebrand, Rush was a surprisingly bland figure. He had worked hard to overcome a childhood stutter, and while he spoke fluidly, he rarely raised his voice on the stump. To Obama, Rush was an uninspiring, ineffectual congressman who had ridden to Washington, D.C., on his public image and was now doing little for his district. But fighting on his home turf—the South Side—Rush turned out to be wilier and more potent than Obama expected.

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