Obama by David Mendell

Author:David Mendell
Language: ru
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-03T22:27:01+00:00

CHAPTER

15

Hull on Wheels

Don’t you think it would be cool to be a senator?

—BLAIR HULL, DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR THE SENATE

The Senate contest of 2004 taught Dan Hynes how difficult it can be to be anointed front-runner in a high-profile political race. When something does not go your way, your spot at the top and the strength of your candidacy are instantly questioned. And few things went Hynes’s way in this campaign.

With his powerful father’s longtime ties to organized labor, a key Democratic Party constituency, Hynes was expected to lock up labor support far and wide. In fact, he had won the endorsement of nearly every trade union in the state, groups representing seven hundred thousand workers overall. But Hynes was the state comptroller, whose only real responsibility was cutting payments for the state’s bills. Throughout 2003, Barack Obama had been working in the legislature on behalf of various labor groups. And thanks to his tight friendship with senate president Emil Jones Jr., he was successful at pushing pieces of legislation that benefited labor interests. Jones had also given Obama the chairmanship of the senate’s Health Committee, which gave him a close working relationship with the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU had more than one hundred thousand members in Illinois, representing tens of thousands of nursing and other medical workers. So when Obama plucked the SEIU’s endorsement away from Hynes, it was a major coup. The SEIU was a younger, more racially diverse union than the mostly white trade unions. In the 1990s, the SEIU began building an effective grassroots political mechanism, running phone banks and amassing armies of volunteers to work on behalf of endorsed political candidates. On a cold, dreary Saturday morning in December 2003, Obama addressed the annual state convention of enthusiastic SEIU members at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center. He donned a purple SEIU jacket and spoke passionately about the union movement in America. Impressively, thousands had turned out early that morning to hear Obama preach about how he could win the Senate race. But, of course, he needed their help, he told them. “I can’t do this alone,” he said.

“Barack has taken the lead on issues of significant importance to our members,” said Tom Balanoff, the SEIU president, in explaining the Obama endorsement. “He’s also been out there for us when we have been in trouble, during strikes and things like that.” In Springfield, Obama indeed had carried SEIU’s water. He was instrumental in expanding child-care benefits for workers and had been an ardent proponent of universal health care coverage. He was also a leader on the so-called hospital report card act, which, among other things, required hospitals to post staffing levels and mortality rates on the Internet. After the SEIU’s blessing, endorsements followed from the Chicago teachers’ union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. This shifted some momentum toward Obama and away from Hynes.

Hynes struck back with the hard-fought endorsement of the labor umbrella group, the AFL-CIO, as well as with John Stroger, the African-American president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

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