in Chicago to enroll black voters ahead of the November elections. It was
estimated that about 400,000 African Americans in the state were eligible to vote
but still unregistered, the majority in and around Chicago.
The pay was abysmal, but the job appealed to Barack’s core beliefs. In 1983,
a similar voter-registration drive in Chicago had helped propel Harold
Washington into office. In 1992, the stakes again felt high: Another African
American candidate, Carol Moseley Braun, had surprised everyone by narrowly
winning the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate race and was locked in
what would become a tight race in the general election. Bill Clinton, meanwhile,
would be running against George H. W. Bush for president. It was no time for
minority voters to be sitting out.
To say that Barack threw himself into the job would be an understatement.
The goal of Project VOTE! was to sign up new Illinois voters at a staggering pace
of ten thousand per week. The work was similar to what he’d done as a grassroots
organizer: Over the course of the spring and summer, he and his staff had
tromped through plenty of church basements, gone house to house to talk with
unregistered voters. He networked regularly with community leaders and made
his pitch countless times to wealthy donors, helping to fund the production of
radio ads and informational brochures that could be handed out in black
neighborhoods and public-housing projects. The organization’s message was
unwavering and clear, and a straight reflection of what I knew Barack felt in his
heart: There was power in voting. If you wanted change, you couldn’t stay home
on Election Day.
In the evenings, Barack came home to our place on Euclid Avenue and
often flopped on the couch, reeking of the cigarettes he still smoked when he was
out of my sight. He appeared tired but never depleted. He kept careful track of
the registration tallies: They were averaging an impressive seven thousand a week
in midsummer but were still falling short of the goal. He strategized about how to
get the message across, how to wrangle more volunteers and find pockets of
people who remained unfound. He seemed to view the challenges as a Rubik’s
Cube–like puzzle that could be solved if only he could swivel the right blocks in
the right order. The hardest people to reach, he told me, were the younger folks,
the eighteen- to thirty-year-olds who seemed to have no faith in government at
all.
I, meanwhile, was fully steeped in government. I’d spent a year now
working with Valerie in the mayor’s office, acting as a liaison to several of the