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Obama, sharp suits and the sharp-shooters of Chicago
Former New Journal reporter Kim Janssen reflects on how the President-elect rose through Chicago’s political establishment, the city’s gun crime and its racial divisions
THE man in the sharp business suit spun out of the revolving door on to LaSalle Street just yards ahead of me, smiling, casually chatting on his mobile phone.
With his infuriatingly confident posture, handsome looks and aviator sunglasses, he could have been a GQ magazine model, or a character in a TV advertisement for a bank.
But oblivious passing pedestrians, downtown Chicago office workers and tourists ignored him as he strode unaccompanied down the skyscraper-lined street and into a waiting four-wheel drive with blacked-out windows. The man, I recognised, was Barack Obama.
That chance encounter on a sunny September afternoon was little more than two years ago, shortly after I moved from Camden to Chicago to work as a crime reporter, but a few months before Obama announced that he was running for the presidency of the United States.
I had to pinch myself last Tuesday night when I saw him again, addressing a victory rally of 200,000 adoring supporters in Grant Park (and millions more around the world), less than a mile from the spot where I had first seen him pass unnoticed.
As the crowd around me chanted “Yes we can, yes we can!” I saw that his new suit jacket did not fit him so well. It had been cut to accommodate a bulletproof vest, I realised.
Obama’s rise from lowly State Senator (roughly the equivalent of a British county councillor) to Senator to President-elect in four years was meteoric.
And the historic significance of his election as the nation’s first black president, in a country where 150 years ago he would have been condemned to life as a slave, and where 50 years ago he would in many states have been unable to vote, has rightly been heralded.
But most surprising of all, to me, is the way he has been able to escape, if not transcend, the ruthless racial politics of present-day Chicago.
Guidebooks refer to Chicago as “a city of neighbourhoods,” which is a polite way of saying that it is one of the most shockingly segregated places in America. Not that you’d know it from the election TV coverage.
Camera crews and immaculately coiffed presenters last Wednesday morning descended on Valois, an unpretentious working man’s canteen in Obama’s neighbourhood, Hyde Park, to interview an integrated crowd of jubilant diners.
But Hyde Park is the only place in the city where working-class blacks and educated whites mix.
On Chicago’s South Side, it is possible to drive for 100 blocks and see only black faces, many of them cripplingly poor.
On the North Side, you can do the same and see only white faces, most of them living comfortable, middle-class lives. On the West Side, where the largest Latino neighbourhoods are, you can walk for miles and hear only Spanish spoken.
In each case, the likeliest exception will be a Chicago police officer, the men and women of all races charged with keeping a lid on the powder keg.
The horrific murders last month of Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Hudson’s mother, brother and nephew made headlines around the world.
But the families of hundreds of other murder victims (447 so far this year, most of them black or Latino, killed by street gangs over drugs) are lucky if their loved ones merit even a passing mention in the Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times.
Black and brown defendants clog the Cook County courts, the busiest court system in the world, where I spend much of my time reporting this chronic gun violence.
Barely a week goes by in which the police do not shoot or kill a black resident. This is considered unexceptional and officers are almost never charged.
Chicagoans take a perverse pride in their politicians’ dirty reputation. And in this city, famous for its corruption and its crime, where the Mafia helped fix the 1960 presidential election for Kennedy, race is the unspoken subtext to every argument, every shady deal.
Euphemism rules: away from the anonymity of the internet, where open racism thrives, almost nobody mentions race directly.
At the suburban newspaper where I work, the publisher not long ago drew a map, coloured the black neighbourhoods yellow, and told staff: “Don’t cover the ‘yellow zone’.”
White voters tolerate the criminal conviction of corrupt senior officials in “Da Mare” Richard M Daley’s administration, just as they did the conviction of corrupt senior officials in the “machine” of his father, Mayor Richard J Daley. The alternative, they know, is a black mayor.
Black voters, meanwhile, shrug at the rampant cronyism of Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, who seems to find a new, under-qualified relative to hire into a high-paying government job every day, just as his father, John Stroger, handed him his own. White politicians invented the corrupt patronage system, they say.
It is from this depressing, supremely parochial, environment where every election is a landslide and change seems impossible, that Obama has almost miraculously emerged as a unifying international figure who symbolises hope.
Chicago residents black, brown and white have been celebrating all week, wearing an astonishing variety of bootleg Obama T-shirts, including one that shows the city’s flag flying over the White House, with the slogan “Chicago In The House”.
But they have the rest of America, and what Obama in his acceptance speech identified as its “true strength”, to thank.
America’s muscle, Obama said, “comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope”.
His supporters here and abroad may soon discover that his political instinct, like Tony Blair’s, is to act against his base and in his own electoral interest at every step.
Most poor black folk on the South Side will still be poor in four years’ time, whatever he says or does. Hundreds will still be killed on the city’s streets. The jails will still be packed with black and Latino Chicagoans, while the city’s wealthier neighbourhoods will still be overwhelmingly white. Only a fool would bet against attempts on Obama’s life.
But a generation of children will grow up knowing that the hoary cliché that “Anyone can grow up to be President” is finally true. Don’t kid yourself that it could happen in Britain.
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