Chicago Straight

The arrest of Governor Rod Blagojevich in December cast a shadowy light on the relationships among four leading players in the Illinois Democratic Party—Blagojevich, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrod. The new president and his two aides would like to minimize their dealings with the disgraced ex-governor. But the record tells a more complex story

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By the time Democrats took full control of the General Assembly in January 2003, Obama was officially in the U.S. Senate race and he knew he needed some legislative successes in Springfield to beef up his relatively thin resumé. Eager as he was to build a record, Obama didn’t go out of his way to cozy up to the new governor. “At the end of the day, Rod is about Rod,” says Jim Cauley, a veteran Democratic operative who managed Obama’s U.S. Senate race. “Why bother?”

Instead, Obama focused on networking within the governor’s office and among the top policymakers inside the state agencies. He would talk shop with Lon Monk, Blagojevich’s chief of staff, at the East Bank Club, where they both worked out. More often, he’d call staffers in the governor’s office for long policy discussions. “He wanted to figure out how the levers of government could work for his legislation and his issues,” says Shomon. “He knew he needed to be productive, and he needed to know who’s who.”

Obama also drew on his political patron, senate president Emil Jones Jr., arguably the most powerful black politician in Illinois at the time. After the Democrats swept into power and Jones took the reins of the state senate, Obama went to see him. “He said to me, ‘You got a lot of power now,’” recalls Jones. “I said to Barack, ‘What kind of power do you think I have?’ He said, ‘You have the power to make a United States senator.’ And I said, ‘That sounds good. Do you know of anybody I can make?’ He said, ‘Me.’”

Jones threw his support to Obama for the Senate race, and since Jones and the governor were politically close, the senate president became the proxy between Blagojevich and Obama. With Jones’s help, Obama found real success for the two years that he was in the state legislature and Blagojevich was governor. During that time, Obama sponsored nearly 800 bills and Blagojevich signed more than 280 into law, by the Tribune’s count. By contrast, Obama’s biographer, David Mendell, says that Obama introduced, or had a hand in sponsoring, 116 bills in his first three years in Springfield, and 25 were signed into law.

Still, Obama suffered occasional run-ins with the Blagojevich team. In early 2004, as Obama maneuvered to pass a controversial measure that required police to tape homicide interrogations, he learned at the last minute that Blagojevich’s office was negotiating changes to the bill with the Fraternal Order of Police. Obama called the governor’s office and complained to a Blagojevich aide, who raised the concerns to Bradley Tusk, then the deputy governor. “You can tell Barack that we do the politics in this office,” barked Tusk, according to the second former Blagojevich aide, who witnessed the encounter. “He’s just a law-school professor! If he wants to pass this bill—or go anywhere in politics—he’s gotta work with us!” (Tusk, now the campaign manager for New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, did not return messages seeking comment.)

As two ambitious politicians, Obama and Blagojevich occasionally vied to claim credit for the state’s progressive agenda. “That is where the rivalry between Rod and Barack really started—who’s getting credit for all of this?” says Giangreco. At a signing ceremony for criminal-justice reforms—including Obama’s measures to tape interrogations and to curb racial profiling—Jim Cauley recalls that Blagojevich barely acknowledged Obama’s contribution. “Barack was like, ‘Damn, I did that bill and that’s the treatment I get,’” Cauley says. At the conclusion of the event, Obama started working the room, talking to any reporter he could corral. “[Obama] saw an opportunity to get on Chicago TV and Rod was trying to elbow us into the corner,” Cauley says.

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The federal indictment handed down in April charges that even before taking office Blagojevich orchestrated a scheme with his close friends and members of his inner circle to use the governor’s office to enrich themselves—an effort that prosecutors have dubbed the “Blagojevich Enterprise.” The associates charged include Lon Monk and the governor’s main moneyman, Christopher Kelly. Prosecutors allege that Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a Syrian-born real-estate developer who has already been convicted on corruption charges involving the Blagojevich administration, was a co-conspirator in the “Enterprise.”

Around the same time that he was allegedly co-managing the Blagojevich Enterprise, Rezko—who had a fondness for politicians—was also helping to fill the campaign coffers of Barack Obama. One of Obama’s earliest supporters and biggest fundraisers, Rezko raised at least $159,000 for Obama over the years, in some cases collecting from the same donors he was hitting up for Blagojevich. (Obama later donated to various charities an amount equal to the Rezko-tainted contributions.) In one respect, Rezko was even more valuable to Obama than to Blagojevich, providing crucial financial support when Obama was a political nobody. “When you’re an outsider and you’re trying to build relationships and you’re getting ‘No, no, no, no’ all the time—to have somebody come to you and say, ‘I believe in you, I want to help you, I want to raise money’—that’s irresistible,” says Giangreco.

Besides raising money for Obama’s campaigns, Rezko helped place one of Obama’s closest friends, Eric Whitaker, in the job as the state’s public health director. Then a state senator, Obama recommended Whitaker to Rezko, who had an unofficial role picking people for top state jobs in Blagojevich’s administration. During Rezko’s trial, workers in Blagojevich’s patronage office testified that if Rezko wanted somebody hired, it usually got done—quickly.

Rezko remains the most troubling common tie between the president and the disgraced former governor. Obama has repeatedly insisted that Rezko never sought anything except small favors here or there, such as an internship for the son of a business associate. Assuming that’s true, why did Rezko act like a crook with Blagojevich and not with Obama? One veteran political operative offered this explanation: “Rezko was, basically, forming political sleeper cells. He didn’t know which ones would be useful. He was right about Barack’s promise, not about his usefulness.”

And was Obama simply naïve about Rezko? “Maybe so,” says John Kupper,  who worked on Obama’s U.S. Senate and presidential campaigns. “But the fact is: He never asked Barack for anything in return.”

Blagojevich, however, was infuriated that he—and not Obama—was taking most of the political heat for Rezko. Recalls a fourth former Blagojevich aide: “A lot of Rod’s resentment was—‘How come I wear the jacket for Tony?’”

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After the 2002 elections, David Axelrod was drumming up business for the next election cycles. He had taken side work as a consultant to the Ontario Liberal Party, and in 2003 he also advised Mayor Daley, who cruised to his fifth term. Looking ahead to the 2004 political season, Axelrod wanted to be a part of something bigger. He worked briefly for John Edwards in his bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. But when that proved an awkward fit, Axelrod turned his full attention to Obama and the 2004 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. (At first he thought Obama was aiming too high, according to the Mendell biography, Obama: From Promise to Power. Mendell reports that Axelrod told Obama after his loss to Bobby Rush, “If I were you, I would wait until Daley retires and then look at a mayor’s race because then the demographics would be working in your favor.”)

Axelrod produced three 30-second biographical TV ads that introduced Obama to voters in the crowded primary’s closing weeks—by luck, just around the time records of a domestic dispute were damaging the image of the leading contender, the rich ex-trader Blair Hull. The commercials’ now famous mantra, “Yes, we can” galvanized voters across the state. “Ax basically created 90 seconds of ads that catapulted this guy into a national contender,” says Cauley.

Blagojevich never endorsed any of the Senate candidates, but it was a well-known secret that he was pulling for Hull, who had contributed $260,000, plus the use of his private jet, to Blagojevich’s first gubernatorial campaign. As far as Blagojevich was concerned, Obama was practically invisible. Cauley recalls: “Every time we were around Rod, he acted almost royalty-like—‘You’re down there, I’m up here; do you want to kiss the ring?’”

By then, Blagojevich had set his sights on higher office. “It wasn’t long after he got elected governor that he said, ‘Well, maybe I should go out to Iowa,’” recalls Giangreco. Several sources say Blagojevich had sketched out a plan, of sorts, to run for president in 2008. Mell explained it to me during a 2007 interview: “He would’ve been able to make a great case of this Kennedyesque, dynamic leader coming into the fifth-largest state and sweeping Republicans out of office after 26 years, then being this charismatic, idealistic governor cleaning up the state. Iowa’s right next door, and when he’s running for reelection, he sends all of his commercials out of the Quad Cities right past Des Moines. He would’ve been a known factor before he’d even start [campaigning in the Iowa caucuses]. That’s the way he envisioned it.”

Blagojevich told some of the people around him that he was basically a lock to be on John Kerry’s vice presidential short list in 2004—a notion that Whitney Smith, a spokeswoman for Senator Kerry, flatly refutes. Later, the governor felt doubly snubbed by Kerry’s campaign when he wasn’t even asked to speak at the Democratic convention in Boston, according to several Blagojevich associates. Kerry, of course, plucked Obama from obscurity to deliver the keynote speech.

Blagojevich watched the speech from the floor of the Fleet Center. At a backstage reception afterwards, Blagojevich could barely conceal his envy. According to a Democratic insider who asked to remain unnamed, Blagojevich told Obama, “Great speech, Barack.” Then he added, backhandedly, “But, remember, this is as good as it gets.” Obama shot back, “We’ll see.”

The budding rivalry between Blagojevich and Obama was one of the hidden story lines of the 2004 convention. As Giangreco explains it: “If this were a mathematical problem, and you were plotting it out on a chart and you could put a pin in the place where the axes where Rod’s descent hits Barack’s ascent, I would say it would be at the convention in Boston. That’s where Rod was done as a national figure, and for Barack, it was: The sky’s the limit.”

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This article appears in the June 2009 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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