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For Obama, bipartisan aims, party-line votes

A desire to build cross-party consensus in Senate rubs up against political perils of compromise.

from the April 17, 2008 edition

Page 2 of 4

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Early on, a collaborative approach

Twenty-three-year-old Obama arrived in Chicago in 1985 with no easy task: enlisting fiercely independent churches on the city's South Side to work together to improve neighborhoods ravaged by steel plant closings.

The nonprofit Developing Communities Project hired him in part because his life abroad and lack of local ties – to the African-American community, to churches – gave him a "sense of being an outsider," says Gerald Kellman, DCP director at the time. "It helped him identify with other people who might be outsiders, people who faced discrimination and poverty," he recalls.

Mr. Kellman had been schooled in the teachings of Saul Alinsky, a Chicago radical who preached confrontation and pressed organizers to appeal to authority figures' self-interest. But Obama believed in a more collaborative approach that borrowed from the civil rights movement and drew on long-nurtured relationships and a rhetoric of ideals, Kellman says.

When Obama learned that housing officials had removed asbestos from the manager's office but not the apartments at the Altgeld Gardens projects, he roused residents with an appeal to justice rather than a lecture on the health effects of toxins.

"If he came in and said, 'Your kids are affected by the environment,' he wouldn't have gotten anywhere," Kellman says. "So he framed the issue out of their own broader story of struggling against discrimination."

Another neighborhood cause was summer jobs, and Yvonne Lloyd, a mother of 11 who lived across from the projects, remembers that on a bus trip to the mayor's office Obama counseled civility. "He would say, 'You have to go in and be dignified,' " she recalls in a phone interview. " 'Don't raise your voice because you antagonize people that way.' " Before long, she says, a job intake center opened in the neighborhood.

Obama has called his three years on the South Side "the transformative experience of my career." "It allowed me," he wrote in an e-mail this month to campaign supporters, "to see that real change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up, when ordinary people come together around a common purpose."

Even so, Kellman says, the DCP's accomplishments under Obama were limited. "Poverty remains. Structural unemployment remains. Bad schools remain," says Kellman, now a Catholic lay minister in Chicago. "We were able to whittle around the edges of it but not successfully change things."

Perhaps more lasting, he says, were the "individual success stories" of the local residents Obama worked with, many of whom gained the skills and self-confidence to find new jobs and move to better neighborhoods.

Obama left for Harvard Law School in 1988 on the belief that he needed to work at a higher level – as a lawyer, a public official – to bring about broader change.

But the decision was not straightforward. In his 1995 memoir "Dreams from My Father," he questions whether in leaving Chicago he was partly fleeing the reality of his own "inconsequence." "Maybe once you stripped away the rationalizations, it always came down to a simple matter of escape."

He returned to Chicago after law school and worked as a civil rights lawyer and university lecturer before running for state Senate in 1996. He pledged to bring his collaborative approach to Springfield.

But there was little evidence of collegiality in that first campaign. Alice Palmer, a state senator and fellow community organizer on the South Side, had decided to run for Congress and encouraged Obama to seek her seat. After Ms. Palmer lost, her supporters asked Obama to step aside so she could keep her Senate post. Not only did Obama refuse, but he challenged the signatures on her election petitions, driving her out of the race.

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