The Amateur Read online

  PART I

  CHICAGO, THAT TODDLIN’ TOWN

  Chicago, Chicago that toddlin’ town

  Chicago, Chicago I will show you around—I love it

  Bet your bottom dollar you lose the blues in

  Chicago, Chicago

  The town that Billy Sunday could not shut down

  —“Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town)”

  by Fred Fisher

  CHAPTER 1

  HOLLOW AT THE CORE

  Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last.... I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  Of all the Chicago people I interviewed, none got to know Barack Obama quite the way David Scheiner, MD, did. Scheiner was Obama’s personal physician for twenty-two years—from the mid-1980s, when Obama was a community organizer, until he was elected president of the United States.

  Today, at the age of seventy-three, Dr. Scheiner is a rail-thin, spunky, unreconstructed old lefty. He belongs to Physicians for a National Health Program, a far-leftwing organization that lobbies for single-payer national health insurance—or, in Dr. Scheiner’s own words, “socialized medicine.” He had great hopes for Obama in the White House, because when Obama was his patient he made no secret of the fact that he favored the kind of socialized medicine that is practiced in Canada and Western Europe.

  Given Dr. Scheiner’s leftist leanings, I expected him to be a champion of his former patient. To my surprise, however, he turned out to be one of Obama’s most severe and unforgiving critics.

  “I look at his healthcare program and I can’t see how it can work,” Scheiner said. “He has no cost control. There would be no effective cost control in his program. The [Congressional Budget Office] said it’s going to be incredibly expensive ... and the thing that I really am worried about is, if it is the failure that I think it would be, then health reform will be set back a long, long time.

  “When Barack Obama planned this health program, he didn’t include on his healthcare team anyone who actually practiced medicine in the trenches the way I do,” Dr. Scheiner continued. “I’m an old-fashioned doctor. I still make house calls. I still use the first black bag that I got out of medical school. My patients have my home phone number. It’s true that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of Rahm Emanuel, was on the healthcare team, but Ezekiel is a medical oncologist, not a general physician.”

  Dr. Scheiner’s grievances against Obama went well beyond Obama’s policies to the very nature of the man.

  “My main objection to Barack Obama is that he is a great speaker and a lousy communicator,” Dr. Scheiner said. “He isn’t getting his message across to people. He isn’t showing that he really cares. To this day he hasn’t communicated with members of Congress.

  “He’s got academic University of Chicago-type people around him who don’t care. Where is our Surgeon General, the obese Dr. Regina Benjamin? Why hasn’t she said anything during this healthcare debate? Ronald Reagan had C. Everett Koop as his surgeon general. Believe me, Regina Benjamin is no Everett Koop. In fact, Obama’s whole cabinet has been a disappointment. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is a joke.”

  I asked Dr. Scheiner why he thought Obama had been such a dismal failure as president. He thought for a moment, then said:

  “I can really relate to people, but I never really related to him. I never had the closeness with him that I had with other patients. It was a purely professional relationship. He was always gracious and polite. But I never really connected to him. He was distant. When I think of why he’s had problems in the White House, I think there is too much of the University of Chicago in him. By which I mean he’s academic, lacks passion and feeling, and doesn’t have the sense of humanity that I expected.

  “Obama has an academic detachment,” he continued. “I treat many patients from the University of Chicago faculty, and I’ve been able to crack through their academic detachment. Not Obama. We never got to the point where we’d discuss intimate things. For instance I never heard anything about his family life. Other patients invited me to dinner and their homes, but Obama never did. Obama invited his barber to his inauguration—his barber! But I wasn’t invited. Believe me, that hurt.”

  CHAPTER 2

  A GHOSTLY PRESENCE

  It’s not about charisma and personality, it’s about results…

  —Steve Jobs

  One morning in the spring of 1991, a telephone rang in Gannett House, a white, Greek Revival-style building that serves as the headquarters of the Harvard Law Review, the prestigious student-run journal of legal scholarship. The caller was Douglas Baird, dean of the University of Chicago Law School. He was looking for Barack Obama, who had gained national fame as “the first black president of the Review.”

  Actually, Obama was not the first person of color to be president of the Review. That distinction belonged to Raj Marphatia, who was born and raised in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), India, and who had become the Review’s president four years earlier. But while Marphatia’s presidency went largely unnoticed, Obama’s attracted a great deal of attention in the liberal mainstream media. That publicity, in turn, led to a publishing contract for a book on race relations and several offers of prestigious clerkships and lucrative jobs. The liberal world was already beating a path to Barack Obama’s door.

  “I made a cold call to the Harvard Law Review and spoke to Barack,” recalled Baird, who is no longer the dean of the Chicago Law School but is still a member of its faculty. “I asked him, ‘Do you have an interest in teaching law?’ and he said, ‘No. My plan is to write a book on voting rights.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you write that book here at the University of Chicago. I can give you an office and a word processor and make you a Visiting Law and Government Fellow.’

  “He accepted,” Baird continued, “and several months after he arrived, he came to my office and said, ‘Boss’—he called me boss—‘that book I told you about—well, it’s taken a slightly different direction. It’s my autobiography.’ I was astonished. He was all of thirty years old and he was writing his autobiography!”

  For the next twelve years, Obama taught at the Law School—first as a Lecturer, then as a Senior Lecturer. He earned about $60,000 a year and was given an office, a secretary, and health benefits. He was, by all accounts, a ghostly presence on the faculty—rarely seen and virtually never heard from.

  “You just never saw him at a lunch or at a workshop,” said Richard Epstein, who was made interim dean of the Law School in 2001, while Obama was still there. “I did not see any signs of intellectual curiosity or power. He did not have a way of listening to you that drew you in. But it was rarely the case that you could figure out what he thought. An inaccurate story was published that claimed Obama was given a tenured offer to join the faculty. But it never came to the faculty for approval. How could you make a tenured offer to a man who had never written a scholarly article?

  “At the time,” Epstein continued, “Obama saw himself as a serious intellectual, which he definitely was not. His course was very popular and he was an engaging teacher, but not one with a serious academic set of interests. The members of the faculty reserved a round table for ten in the Quadrangle Club, where we had lunch and engaged in an intense intellectual exchange. We had a no-sports and no-politics rule and a single-topic rule. Everybody bashed everybody. You put yourself once more into the breach and prepared to have the guillotine come down on your head.

  “But Barack Obama never attended these lunches. I firmly believe that his systematic withdrawal from engagement with other members of the faculty stemmed from his not wanting to put himself at intellectual risk. He was always a political actor with
many irons in the fire.”

  Interestingly enough, Douglas Baird—the man who hired Obama—had a slightly different take on Obama than Richard Epstein.

  “I should also say that, like Richard, I’d have liked it if Barack had been more involved,” Baird said. “But that wasn’t what he was about. He was spending his time as a law lecturer, a member of a law firm, and a writer. He was an excellent teacher. I had access to his teacher evaluations. The students loved him. He was a charismatic figure.

  “Of course, I grant you that it’s one thing to be a charismatic figure and walk into a room and excite students, and quite another thing to be a leader—to hire people, motivate people, and manage decision-making. That’s not something Barack experienced or learned at the Chicago Law School. I know people in the White house, and I don’t get a sense from my conversations with them that there’s anything in Barack’s experience as a law professor that prepared him for the leadership part of the presidential job.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “YOU KEEP OUT OF THIS!”

  A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks th’ Lord wud do if He knew th’ facts iv th’ case.

  —Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley

  In 1996, while he was still teaching law, Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate. During most of his seven years in the state capital of Springfield, the Republicans were in the majority, and as was his custom at the University of Chicago, Obama was conspicuous by his absence.

  “He hardly showed up at all,” said Laura Anderson, who at the time served as deputy chief of staff to the Republican leader of the Senate. “He didn’t even show up for picture day, and he didn’t go to committee. He had no interest in the process, or in learning the process of being a good senator. He had no interest in government itself. He just wanted to stand on the Senate floor and give speeches.”

  Obama did, however, have an interest in opposing a law that would have banned late-term partial birth abortions, a gruesome procedure that was once condemned by the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as “too close to infanticide.” All across the state of Illinois, people were riveted by the controversial debate. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a cartoon showing God reaching down from heaven to a baby in front of Obama, who is holding a sign that reads “Live Birth Abortions” and yelling at God, “You keep out of this!”

  Courtesy of Chicago Sun-Times / Jack Higgins

  An Illinois nurse named Jill Stanek testified before the Health and Human Services Committee that she had discovered that babies were being aborted alive and allowed to die in soiled utility rooms. One baby was accidentally thrown into the trash. Though Obama never showed up at the committee hearings, he voted against the bill—not once, but twice.

  When, after a decade in the political wilderness, Illinois Democrats gained a majority in the legislature, Obama became chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee. As chairman, he prevented the “Live Baby Bill” from getting a committee hearing, guaranteeing that the legislation would die, much as the late-term babies were dying in the state’s hospitals.

  CHAPTER 4

  “YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER WHEN POLITICIANS MAKE PROMISES”

  Almost by definition, charismatic leaders are unpredictable, for they are bound by neither tradition nor rules; they are not answerable to other human beings.

  —Eileen Barker, New Religious Movements

  Obama always believed he was destined for great things, and after a few short years as a state senator, he felt frustrated and eager to move on. And so, in 2000, against the advice of his wife, friends, and colleagues, he challenged Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther and four-term member of the House of Representatives, for Rush’s seat from Chicago’s black South Side.

  During the Democratic primary, most African-American political leaders stuck by Rush, who treated his upstart opponent with contempt, once remarking, “Barack Obama went to Harvard and became an educated fool.”

  Rush walloped Obama, winning the primary by a margin of two to one. “[Obama] was blinded by his ambition,” Rush said later. “Obama has never suffered from a lack of believing that he can accomplish whatever he decides to try. Obama believes in Obama.”

  After Obama’s humiliating defeat, he was broke and deeply in debt, and it looked as though he might be finished in public life. For a narcissist like Obama, this was a calamitous turn of events, and during the dark days that followed his defeat, he turned to Michelle for comfort. But she was in no mood to offer him sympathy. After all, he had refused to listen to her warnings about taking on the formidable Bobby Rush. He had put his family in a precarious financial position. And he had dashed Michelle’s hopes of creating a stable and secure future. As a result, their marriage was on the rocks, and Obama confided to friends that he and Michelle were talking about divorce.

  “Michelle actually had divorce papers drawn up,” one of her friends told me.

  Obama was so depressed that some of his friends worried that he was suicidal. One day, while he was playing basketball at the East Bank Club, a vast fitness center and Chicago institution, Obama was approached by Jim Reynolds, the co-founder and CEO of Loop Capital Markets, a global investment firm, and a mover and shaker in Chicago’s wealthy African-American community.

  “Is this you?” Reynolds asked, holding up a copy of Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father.

  “Yeah,” Obama replied.

  “Let’s go and have a cup of coffee,” Reynolds said.

  Over coffee, Obama bared his soul. He told Reynolds that Michelle was “kicking my butt,” and he didn’t know what his next move should be.

  “What do you want to do?” Reynolds asked.

  “I don’t want to be a burden to my wife,” Obama said. “I want to make her proud. But no matter what, I’m determined to be successful in politics. I want to go national. I want to run for the United States Senate.”

  “Come hang with me,” Reynolds said. “I know a couple of people. I’ll introduce you around town.”

  Obama’s meeting with Jim Reynolds was a decisive turning point in his political career, for it marked the beginning of his relationship with Chicago’s African-American moneyed elite. As we shall see, this relationship would blossom for several years, then turn sour, degenerating into bitterness, rancor, and resentment.

  Early in his campaign for the United States Senate, Obama appeared at the offices of N’DIGO, Chicago’s leading African-American magazine. Only months before, Hermene Hartman, N’DIGO’s dynamic founder and publisher, had put Obama on the cover of her magazine—a first for the state senator. This time, however, Obama was looking for more than mere publicity. He desperately needed money to fund his campaign.

  “He came to me and said, ‘I need you to raise $50,000 for me,’” Hartman recalled in an interview for this book. “I said, ‘You’re out of your mind. I don’t have $50,000, and if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.’ And he said, ‘But I gotta get it. I opened up an office, turned the phones on, the lights are on, and I gotta move forward. C’mon, think of something.’

  “He said, ‘I’ve got one more shot,’” Hartman continued. “Michelle’s going to kill me.” He couldn’t tell Michelle that he had gone ahead and secretly opened an office even though they didn’t have any money. He knew that she would be furious. She was fed up and wasn’t going to take it anymore. He had to be successful. It was do or die.

  “So I called a friend named Al Johnson, who was the first African-American to have a General Motors dealership,” Hartman went on. “Al, who’s now deceased, was a political player, a supporter of politicians, and he had his own political action committee. I said, ‘Al, I have a wonderful person I want you to meet and support.’ And Al met Barack at the East Bank Club. Afterward, Al called me and said, ‘We hit it off. I gave your boy $50,000. I think he’s going to go far.’

  “Now, in Chicago, ‘far’ is the mayor’s office,” Hartman went on. “And I said to Al, ‘I don’t see Barack in the mayor’s office. This is
a national guy. He can cross over and appeal to both blacks and whites.’”

  In addition to being the publisher of N’DIGO, Hermene Hartman is also the past president of the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs, a powerful group of African-Americans in Chicago. The members of ABLE, as the group is known, were the first to get behind Obama’s bid for the United States Senate.

  “Barack was launched by black business people,” Hartman told me. “I call them Day One People. Jim Reynolds, who had met Barack on the basketball court and introduced him around, held a fundraiser for him in his living room. The next day, Barack called me to ask, ‘How did I do?’ I said, ‘You sounded like you’re running for dogcatcher.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘If you’re running for United States senator, you have to broaden your view beyond neighborhood concerns. You have to go sit with Jesse Jackson. He knows these subjects—Africa, Europe, the whole international scene.’

  “So I called Jesse and said, ‘Barack needs to talk to you. He needs some broadening.’ And Jesse said, ‘Sure, I’ll meet with him.’ Barack lived not far from Jesse’s Operation PUSH [People United to Save Humanity], and for the next year Jesse invited Barack to speak at PUSH every Saturday so that he could hone his speaking skills.”

  Perhaps out of fear of alienating white voters, Obama never acknowledged his debt to Jesse Jackson. Nor, for that matter, did Obama show much gratitude to the many other African-Americans who had helped him ascend from obscurity to national acclaim. As Hartman put it to me: “Barack is not necessarily known for his loyalty.”