LITTWIN: Obama's 'change' could be more than a coined phrase : rockymountainnews.com

CHICAGO - Barack Obama didn't come here to Chicago to find himself. He came to find a job. The rest of it - finding a family, church, profession, identity and, not incidentally, what could turn out to be the path taken by the first African-American to the presidency - is just what followed.

You can find it all in the book Dreams from My Father, now available, as they say, in paperback. I brought it with me as a guide to Barack Obama's Chicago, which is not to be confused with Bill Daley's Chicago or Carl Sandburg's Chicago or Richard Wright's Chicago.

It's the rare memoir by a presidential candidate that is actually revealing and maybe even mostly true, probably because it was written long before Obama thought - seriously, anyway - about running for president. (The second book, The Audacity of Hope, is by Obama the presidential candidate. Quick review: Read the first.)

Dreams is about the search by Obama for his father - a black Kenyan who married Obama's mother, a white Kansan, but who left the family when Obama was still in diapers. But what makes the book essentially American is that it is also about Obama's search to find a home.

He came to Chicago as a skinny 24-year-old, not long out of Columbia University, who was looking for a job as a community organizer. He was still in New York, frustrated by his inability to find anything suitable, when one day he spotted a want ad in what he would call a "do-gooder" magazine. And so it began, a journey that could end in victory at the Democratic National Convention in Denver a year from now.

It's the kind of story that suggests more a TV movie than a literary memoir. And it's one more piece of the Obama saga that leaves a voter wondering if everything about Obama is almost too good to be true.

In fact, Jerry Kellman, who placed the ad, was among the first to suspect as much.

He was looking for a young black organizer to work in communities where, in the '70s and '80s, the closing steel mills had put thousands out of work. Obama sent in a résumé. Kellman went to New York for what would be a two-hour interview.

"We met in a coffee shop," said Kellman, who still lives in Chicago. He doesn't organize any more. Kellman is a New York Jew who went to divinity school and now works as a counselor in the Catholic church. We're meeting in a rectory. If the Democratic theme this season is diversity - with a woman candidate, a black candidate, a Hispanic candidate - Kellman qualifies in his own peculiar way.

"I tried to convince him to come to a place where he'd never been, to work for $10,000 a year and a $2,000 car allowance in a very low-status job to help people who were out of work and living in a neighborhood that had been devastated," Kellman says.

He laughs at the idea. "I wasn't sure I wanted to hire anyone who would say yes to that proposition."

When Obama did say yes, Kellman hired him, of course. Still, he was puzzled.

"I wanted to know what his motives were, because it seemed like he must have had so many opportunities. He was good-looking and articulate and obviously very, very bright. The work was so hard and he wasn't getting any conventional rewards. You had to wonder why anyone would do this. Why would he do this?"

Kellman is "Marty" in the book. Obama changed names and places in order, I guess, to protect the innocent, but it's no problem getting the annotation right. The Obama campaign staff is happy to help. If presidential campaigns know nothing else, they know how mythologizing works.

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"When I got here 20 years ago, I didn't know a soul."

Obama, to a recent Chicago audience

Jerry Kellman came to Chicago, a product of the '60s and the anti- war movement, to learn how to organize under the legendary Saul Alinsky - who, interestingly, was the subject of an undergraduate thesis by another presidential candidate from Chicago, a woman named Hillary Clinton.

Kellman looks back at the job now, which he did for 20 years, and wonders why he stayed so long - so much work for so little gain, financial or otherwise - and why Obama would sign on.

"What he told me was that he wanted to make positive changes around economic equality, that kind of thing," Kellman says. "He was clearly an idealist. But I understood him better when I learned his story. His story kind of tells us why he ended up here."

As you've probably heard - and as you'll no doubt hear again - Obama was an American who spent four years of his childhood in Indonesia. He was an African-American who went to high school in Honolulu, where there were very few blacks. He went to Columbia, where most of the students are, in one way or another, privileged.

"Obama was an outsider," Kellman says, "and I think that's what helped him identify with people who face discrimination, with steelworkers who lost their jobs. And being African-American, he had this very courageous group of people who looked like him, people like Martin Luther King, who were worth emulating and worth trying to be like."

It was also the first time Obama had lived in a black community. The South Side of Chicago is, by some measures, the largest African-American community in the nation. Like much of Chicago, the South Side is home to children of immigrants - many of them, in this case, blacks from the South, particularly Mississippi, who found their way here in the early 20th century. To understand Chicago and its place in America, try reading Saul Bellow, who wrote in his famous opening line of The Adventures of Augie March: "I am an American, Chicago born."

If you look at Obama, in his open linen shirt, with his easy manner, his I-I-I stutter that makes him seem almost human, you see an American - Chicago reborn - who is running as the so-called "change" candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. For America to nominate in Denver and possibly elect a black candidate would be more than change. It would be tectonic change. America is ready to embrace Oprah and Tiger Woods and Colin Powell. But no one can say whether America is yet ready to elect a black president. And then there's the matter of whether Obama is ready for the job.

David Mandell, a Chicago Tribune reporter who covered Obama when he was no more than an obscure state senator, has written a book, Obama, in which he reveals that Obama can be ambitious and opportunistic. All politicians are ambitious and opportunistic, but Obama isn't supposed to be like all politicians. The quote people are using from the Mandell book, which is an evenhanded look at Obama, is that the candidate can be "imperious, mercurial, self-righteous and sometime prickly."

The Clinton campaign has tried to paint Obama, a first-term senator, as inexperienced, which seems easy enough. He is, in fact, a first-term senator. But the greater challenge is to paint Obama somehow like every other politician.

Here's the essence of the Obama phenomenon, as Mandell sees it: "He is an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see."

What people see is possibility and promise. It's what they saw in Kennedy and Reagan and in Clinton (Bill, that is). It works best when the message follows one that people no longer want to hear, which is what the polls show in the waning days of the Bush administration. What Obama has to do is convince that he can deliver the promise they see.

Obama - who left Chicago to go to Harvard Law School, who came back to Chicago to become a state senator, who lost a U.S. House primary race to former Black Panther Bobby Rush (when it was first whispered that Obama may not be black enough), who became a U.S. senator from Illinois when the Republican had to drop out because of a sex scandal - became that politician in the rough-and-tumble political waters off Lake Michigan.

"He found a home here," Kellman says. "He married here. He developed an extended family. He found a church. He developed a comfort within an African-American community. This an enormously diverse neighborhood. People think of the ghetto as monolithic, but it's not. There's real diversity here . . . and Obama, for a lot of people, represents the best of that diversity."

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"He's cool. I mean, he's really cool."

Barber Abdul Karim talking about Obama

These are the last days of the Hyde Park Salon and Barber Shop at its 53rd Street location, where Obama gets his hair cut. It has seven chairs and maybe 17 discussions going at once. Like the black church, the neighborhood black barbershop is a community center. It's a cliché - you've seen the movie - but it also happens to be true.

Obama walked in here one day 15 years ago to the shop where Muhammad Ali got his hair cut and Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, got his hair cut and where, now for $19, you can get a haircut and also help solve the problems of the world. They're moving the shop a few blocks away, still with seven chairs, and still with the same mission - affordable haircuts and philosophy on the cheap.

The Hyde Park Salon is in the middle of Hyde Park, an integrated neighborhood in South Chicago. It's home to the elite University of Chicago and to Frank Lloyd Wright houses and to Obama's own handsome house, with the friendly Secret Service in the driveway, and the portion of his yard that the squeaky-clean Obama bought from his neighbor, who just happened to be indicted for influence peddling. Even Obama admitted it was a "boneheaded" move.

It's a neighborhood, too, with subsidized housing as well as neighborhood shops that can only be described as "eclectic." And it's packed with young people. There are murals on the underpass and four-panel Obama posters - an Obama for all seasons? - on the sides of buildings. This is where Obama chose to live.

I walk into the barbershop to ask about Obama and the election and Hyde Park.

First come the complaints. Abdul Karim, wearing his Muslim skullcap, is cutting the hair of a young entrepreneur who is opening a gourmet popcorn business and is excited to learn that Obama gets his hair cut here.

"All we've had," Karim says, "is a few fundraisers and a few debates. There hasn't been any substance that I've seen."

I ask him if that means he's undecided in the primary race - and he laughs.

"Not me. I've been either at this chair or at the one next to it for years. Obama's been sitting in that chair (points to one next to him) for years.

"I'm a shoo-in. I've played basketball with the man. I know him. He owns my vote."

But there's owning and there's owning. Karim continues, and as he talks, you start to hear something like a Greek chorus from the customers. All conversations are open to everyone.

"I tell you what concerns me," he says. "We have a candidate who is strong by himself. We have a candidate who is strong by herself. If you were to put Mrs. Clinton and Obama together - now, that's a team. But it appears to me that neither one is willing to take the back seat to the other. That's a concern."

One man agrees. Another says Obama should be his own man.

Karim says, "It's like two players on a court and one has the ball, and he's not willing to throw the ball to the other side of the court. You know that player. You played with him. He won't throw the ball to nobody."

Abdul Rahman is cutting Eric Wilkinson's hair in the chair next to Karim's. He says the time is right in multicultural America for a multicultural candidate.

"The places he's lived. Where he grew up. That he came to live in this neighborhood. He cares about people not just in his own community. He's definitely someone who's going to care about the whole of America.

"Some black people may not like it. Some black people say that he's not black enough. But he came from Harvard to work in this community. This is where he lives. Go walk outside - there's everything here. You've got Asian people who own the business next door. Black people own the business across the street. Hispanics own the business down the street. There are white businesses here . . . "

Wilkinson, from his seat, chimes in. He's lived in the neighborhood for 41 years.

"This is the best neighborhood in the world. It's not like any place in the country. Like he said, just walk out in the street and you'll see . . . This is what America should be like. Right here."

I ask why it works here in Hyde Park, and Abdul Rahman says, "Because the people who live here want it to work."

The talk continues, and Karim gets to something that he admits is bothering him about Obama. "You know," he says, "he's changed a little bit. I'll be honest with you. He's not as vocal. He's not as natural as he used to be. There's two Baracks now.

"There's the Barack who comes in on a Sunday when we're all busy and he can't be himself. He has to be the politician, shake all the hands. And then there's the Barack who comes in here late on Saturday, nobody here. That's the guy we always knew. Talk a little basketball, talk about the Bulls, the fight that was on last night. You know what I'm saying? I know that Barack. I don't necessarily know the other one."

The conversation turns to whether a black man can be elected president in America. That's when the issue comes up. It's the issue that I hear in the black community wherever I go. It's the reason the Secret Service guy is guarding Obama's house.

"We're hopefully optimistic," says Abdul Rahman. "But it just takes one man. We talk about that all the time in the barbershop. All it takes is one bad guy - and that's it."

He stops for a minutes, a razor in his hand.

"This is about the dream. That's why he's doing it. I know he's a politician and he wants to be president. But for someone of his racial background to even run for president, that allows kids to dream. I've already seen that. Even if he doesn't win. Even for people who have a different point of view, it gives them an idea that the world can change."

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"To Loretta, one of my favorite people in the whole wide world."

Obama, autographing his book for an Altgeld Gardens activist

You drive deep into South Side of Chicago to get to Altgeld Gardens, where people live because, presumably, they don't have any place else to live. It's not an infamous Chicago project like Cabrini Green. But it is set near a landfill and a sewage plant and a paint factory. It was built in World War II to house black steelworkers. The steel mills are shut. The basketball courts are netless. Many of the homes are in stages of rehab. Many others have windows boarded up.

We come across a few girls practicing dance routines for the annual community parade they hold here. When I ask a woman who had two daughters dancing what there is to do here, she says, "Try to stay out of the heat." There's an indoor pool at the elementary school, and the kids are soon headed that way.

This is where Barack Obama came to work. When he announced for president, he said of Altgeld and similar neighborhoods, "It was in these neighborhoods that I received the best education I ever had."

There's no path to the presidency that has ever run through a community organizing job. If Obama is ambitious - and you don't run for president without being ambitious - this is not a résumé builder. It's hard work. It's work you do in which the best organizers empower others. Obama seemed to be a natural.

"He was young and maybe naive," says Loretta Augustine- Herron, who worked with Obama at Altgeld. "But he wanted to learn. And he caught on fast. I'd say it was some kind of baptism by fire, and he must have thought, 'How did I get myself into this?' but he didn't show it. He had a very gentle sensitivity to our needs."

He also learned Chicago politics, meaning he learned who made the decisions that mattered in the community, and which pastors wielded power, and which aldermen had to be sweet-talked and which had to be convinced. It's a sharp-elbows job and a sweet-talking job and a job where most people don't last.

Obama lasted three years before he left for Harvard and a different way to effect change.

Obama's biggest triumph, he would write, was in helping the Developing Communities Project (DCP) get the city to test the Altgeld apartments for asbestos contamination. The Los Angeles Times recently wrote that one of the community organizers there claimed Obama took too much credit in Dreams.

When I ask Augustine-Herron about that, she says she won't talk until I turn off the tape recorder. She says her piece and then, for the record, says the only thing Obama got wrong in the book was saying she had "orange hair." She laughs, "It was blond. What do men know?"

Actually, Obama is modest enough about his achievements. He calls the asbestos victory only "a victory of sorts." He credits the hundreds who showed up - after once calling a meeting where virtually no one showed - for the sort-of victory.

The Nation quotes Obama as saying this to a DCP meeting a few years ago: "I grew up to be a man, right here, in this area. It's as a consequence of working with this organization and this community that I found my calling. There was something more than making money and getting a fancy degree. The measure of my life would be public service."

In Dreams, he writes of the trip to confront the housing authority and what the sort-of victory meant: "I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way . . . That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does."

But Obama is no longer here. He went to Harvard. He's in the U.S. Senate. He's running for president. And Altgeld is still Altgeld.

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"More ice cream is made in Le Mars than any other place on the planet!"

Blue Bunny Web site

Barack Obama is standing in the parking lot of the Ice Cream Capital of the World Visitor Center's vintage-looking ice cream parlor, eating a double cone, coffee and chocolate mint. If you ever come through Le Mars, Iowa - and I know there's a chance you might not - you must go to the Blue Bunny ice cream store and dairy, which Fred Wells, according to the brochure, started in 1913. (I had the chocolate raspberry.)

If you run for president, you come to Le Mars, and you get the ice cream. First, though, you speak at an open-air barn at the Plymouth County fairgrounds, with the clock tower in the background, where a few hundred people show up. This is farmland, heartland, Republican-land.

If the question is whether America is ready to elect a black president, this seemed like a reasonable place to try to ask it - where almost no black people live.

The answers were mostly what you'd expect from a crowd of Iowa Democrats. Mike Murphy, a young lawyer in town, who went away to school but came back to join his dad in the family business, put it this way:

"I suppose there are probably some older individuals who might shy away from him, but on the whole, I don't think it will have much effect. I don't know if Hillary won't have a tougher time, being a woman . . . But they are No. 1 and 2 in the polls. It's an exciting time. It's a chance to make history. And I know people here are ready for a change."

He's deciding between John Edwards and Obama. Clayton Hodgson has decided for Obama - and against Hillary Clinton, whom he calls "divisive." He's an ex-Republican who's now a Democratic activist.

"I could give you a better answer after the caucuses," Hodgson says. "There are some things said from some friends of mine - Republican friends - about Mr. Obama that break my heart. Because they're totally irresponsible statements. And I told them so.

"Some of the hateful stuff comes over e-mail and people pick up on this stuff. I hope that doesn't make any difference."

Not on this day, at least. Obama owns the crowd, just as he does later at an elementary school down the road in Sioux City. He goes after Clinton, without mentioning her name, on the lobby issue. It's a now-practiced line: "If you don't think lobbyists have an effect in Washington, you've probably been in Washington too long." And he offers another stump-speech favorite: "They call me a hope-monger, a hope-peddler. They call me naive."

He trails Hillary Clinton in the polls and with the Democratic establishment. But you watch him speak and you know why the idea of change - which politicians always recommend - sounds different coming from him. It's the sound Hillary heard when Bill used to talk about it.

When Obama calls for less cynicism in politics, the crowd acts as if it's a new idea. They've come to see the charisma candidate, a notion that has been problematic at times for Obama.

Even his supporters admit he's up and down. He's had to amp it up - and, in doing so, he's tripped up a few times. He's been hit for talking about going into Pakistan after Osama bin Laden or for promising to talk to people like Chavez or Castro. Where Edwards can fire up a crowd and Clinton is almost unerringly steady, Obama sometimes comes off as too cerebral, or, as the kids say, just not into you.

But if he's the "change" candidate, there's another kind of change that's implicit here. He's the first black presidential candidate who's not of the civil rights generation. He doesn't speak like a preacher. In front of black audiences, you may hear a different cadence, but, if Obama has flair and charisma, you'll never mistake him for Jesse Jackson. Of course, Jackson was never going to be elected president.

I discuss this with George Boykin, who introduced Obama in Sioux City. He's been a county commissioner since 1984. He was the first black county commissioner in the state. He has been elected and re-elected again and again in a county with only a few thousand black people. He has some experience here.

"I would hope that the majority of people in this country would judge Barack Obama on the difference he would make rather than on the basis that he's a black man or has a funny kind of name," Boykin says.

He met Obama when the candidate came to the Sanford Center, where Boykin directs a nonprofit that is designed to keep kids in school and out of trouble.

His family came to Sioux City in the '20s from Mississippi. As he tells it, "My mother got off the train and looked around. They were on the way to Chicago. And she said if Chicago is bigger than this place, she didn't want to go."

I ask Boykin, who's 67, about the generational issue.

"Jesse Jackson and some of the other civil rights people came with a lot of baggage," he says. "They came from a time where you had to be confrontational to be heard. It prevented them from reaching a broad spectrum of people, like Obama is doing.

"Obama is a civil rights person. He gave a great speech in Selma. But people are looking for a different way of changing our society today. I think Obama has those qualities. What I like about him is the fact that he's really interested in bringing people together. It's not just talk."

Boykin has his own story to tell. His father grew up in Mississippi. "And he would tell me about how the plantation owners would come to the school and point to the black boys - you and you and you, you come with me - and they had to go out and pick cotton, and there was nothing my father or his father could do about it. He never got past the sixth grade. I told myself, no matter what happens, I would get my education."

He got his education. He ran for school board - and won. He ran for county supervisor - and won.

It's a powerful story - one that can't be told too often. And if Obama makes it all the way to Denver and beyond, it's the kind of story a black president in the White House could someday shout from the mountaintop.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com