240 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographystate officials—donating to Rod Blagojevich’s successful 2002 campaign for governor of
Illinois, for instance, a total of $459,000 in loans, cash, and the use of his jet.
It turns out that Hull is that rare breed of candidate who will give an honest assessment of his
chances. “At the outset,” he told me, “I estimated there was about a ten percent probability” of
winning. But by the time he was six months into his campaign, Hull’s name recognition and
poll support had risen to the point where, he said, “it is clearly above that—and rising.” He
emphasized his continued willingness to bet millions of dollars that he can win. Hull is most
animated by those aspects of campaigning that can be quantified and formulated. “Politics is
very unpredictable,” he told me. “More so than blackjack.” When Elliott Close, a South
Carolina textile heir, ran for the Senate in 1996, his consultants thought it politically unwise for
him to drive a fancy foreign car. Close dutifully swapped it for a Cadillac. Not long afterward
he was ticketed for speeding, and a subsequent newspaper account emphasized his expensive
choice of automobile. Exasperated, Close bought a Buick and was said to carry the newspaper
clipping in his wallet for the remainder of the campaign. Other examples are not quite as
harmless. The Republican businessman Michael Huffington’s Senate campaign in California, in
1994, featured a get-tough-on-immigration platform unveiled in the final weeks of the
campaign. A few days after the announcement the Los Angeles Times reported that Huffington
employed an illegal alien as a nanny. Like Close, Huffington lost his election.
Nevertheless, there is compelling evidence that Illinois voters will accept a candidate who
draws on his own fortune to run for office. They have already elected one: Peter Fitzgerald, who
in 1998 spent $14 million of his personal fortune of $40 million to win the seat Hull wants. But
after Hull started campaigning, Fitzgerald announced that he would not seek re-election.
Spending part of a fortune to become a senator was one thing; going through the rest of it to
remain one, apparently, was another.
The central finding of the profile, perhaps suggesting what would come next, was this:
Self-financed candidates are usually facing media scrutiny for the first time. They are therefore
more susceptible to damaging revelations: a drunk-driving arrest, a history of domestic
violence, an illegal nanny. This reality can be daunting. (Joshua Green, “Blair Hull thinks he
has found the formula for how to buy a Senate seat A Gambling Man,” Atlantic Monthly,
February 2004)^97
As it turned out, the Obama machine could do better than a nanny. They would tar Hull with
domestic violence and threatening to kill his own wife.
HULL FALLS VICTIM TO AXELROD'S DIVORCE PAPERS GAMBIT
Blair Hull’s world began to get turned upside down when a group of Chicago media apparently
led by Axelrod’s network at the reactionary and neocon Chicago Tribune began demanding that the
sealed court papers regarding the divorce which had ended Blair Hull’s marriage be revealed to the
public. This procedure was highly irregular, since proceedings in Family Court are not
automatically open to the public, because of the interest of the minor children. But these mere
technicalities did not stop the Chicago Tribune, aided and prodded, as it was later learned, by the
Obama campaign and quite possibly by the anointed one himself. When the papers were finally
opened, they were an unmitigated disaster for poor Marson Blair Hull, including a physical beating
and a death threat. Things had reached such a level of intensity between Hull and his wife that she
had to ask for a special protective order to keep the allegedly violent husband away. Naturally,