Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

As Quickly as Overnight, a Democratic Star Is Born

In his quest for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, Barack Obama was, by many measures, supposed to lose. One opponent was a multimillionaire pouring his own cash into the race. Another was a loyal statewide official who was expected to bring the party's ward troops out in force on election day.

But Mr. Obama, a state senator from Chicago, awoke Wednesday to a deluge of national attention, a result of his overwhelming victory the night before by margins unforeseen by any polls or guesses. John Kerry called. So did Senator Tom Daschle and Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman. And the phone kept ringing.

Overnight, Mr. Obama, a former civil rights lawyer, has become a treasured commodity in the Democratic Party nationally, in part because Democrats see the Illinois seat as one they may easily snatch back from Republicans in November, and in part because Mr. Obama would be the only black member of the Senate.

''I think it's fair to say that the conventional wisdom was we could not win,'' Mr. Obama told a ballroom packed with his supporters late Tuesday night. ''We didn't have enough money. We didn't have enough organization. There was no way that a skinny guy from the South Side with a funny name like Barack Obama could ever win a statewide race.

''Sixteen months later we are here, and Democrats from all across Illinois -- suburbs, city, downstate, upstate, black, white, Hispanic, Asian -- have declared: Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!''

If Mr. Obama had drawn little notice outside of his home state, that began changing within hours of the polls' closing. ''This is like being shot from a cannon, in terms of the demands on your time,'' said David Axelrod, a political consultant for the Obama campaign.

Party leaders began speculating where Mr. Obama, a Harvard-educated, polished orator, might fit into a national political scene if he defeated Jack Ryan, the Republican nominee for the seat that a fellow Republican, Peter G. Fitzgerald, had decided to give up. And political experts mulled history: there have been only two black members of the Senate since Reconstruction, including one from Illinois, Carol Moseley Braun.

''I think Barack Obama is one of the most interesting and capable individuals that is running this time, if not in any election,'' Senator Jon Corzine of New Jersey, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Wednesday. ''Frankly, he will be one of the easier candidates to raise resources for.''

But if Mr. Obama, 42, was feeling the heat of rising national expectations, he did not show it as he flew around the state Wednesday afternoon to thank voters in places like Springfield, Quincy and Marion. He said he saw matters of race as less important to his primary victory than the issues he had talked about: a mostly liberal collection of ideas about health care, education and the economy, all sharply critical of the Bush administration.

''This election probably signals the maturing of not just black voters but Illinois voters across the board,'' Mr. Obama said in a telephone interview in between his downstate stops. People showed, he said, that they ''are more interested in the message than the color of the messenger.''

''I have an unusual name and an exotic background, but my values are essentially American values,'' Mr. Obama said. ''I'm rooted in the African-American community, but I'm not limited by it. I think this election shows that.''

Mr. Obama (pronounced oh-BAH-mah), whose father was Kenyan and whose mother was a white American, worked hard during the primary campaign to pursue the constituencies of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, and of Paul Simon, a white senator from downstate known for his independent views. So he had been expected to do well among black voters and liberal whites.

The results showed that he had succeeded at that, but also that he had won unexpected support from centrist white Chicagoans and white suburbanites in the counties that surround Chicago.

In a field of seven, Mr. Obama received more than 52 percent of the vote statewide while his closest competitor, State Comptroller Dan Hynes, whose family has long held power within Chicago's Democratic Party, had less than 24 percent. Mr. Obama even won in Mr. Hynes's predominantly white home ward on Chicago's North Side.

As recently as three weeks ago, polls showed both Mr. Obama and Mr. Hynes trailing Blair Hull, who spent $29 million of his own money on the race. But Mr. Hull's campaign suddenly imploded over his former wife's accusations that he had behaved violently toward her.

In the end, Mr. Hull received just 10 percent of the vote. But many analysts had presumed that his onetime supporters would vote for Mr. Hynes, who like Mr. Hull is white. They turned instead to Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii, raised mainly by his mother and his grandparents. He graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law, and was the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review.

As a young adult, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer in struggling neighborhoods, then as a civil rights lawyer in cases involving voting rights and employment discrimination. He and his wife, Michelle, have two young girls and live in Hyde Park, a South Side neighborhood. He lectures at the University of Chicago Law School.

In the State Senate, Mr. Obama has pressed to overhaul the Illinois death penalty system, to add more health care services for the poor, to expand early childhood education programs, to improve the state's system of juvenile justice and to create a state earned-income tax credit.

In 2000, Mr. Obama ran for the United States House, facing a Democratic incumbent, Representative Bobby L. Rush. Mr. Rush won the primary, and in this year's race supported Mr. Hull -- a sign, some here thought, that there would be a rift among black leadership in Chicago.

On Wednesday, all of Mr. Obama's opponents of the day before met with him for breakfast. So did the Democratic leaders statewide. Even Mr. Rush was there, Mr. Obama said. From here on, the State Senate's president, Emil Jones Jr., maintained after the meeting, ''this will be one unified force.''

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the National edition with the headline: As Quickly as Overnight, a Democratic Star Is Born. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT