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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 3 of 4

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The idealist had learned that politics sometimes meant playing rough.

A record on civil rights

As a freshman Democrat in a Republican-led legislature, Obama sought as a mentor Senate minority leader Emil Jones Jr., a former Chicago sewer inspector and product of the Cook County political machine. Jones assigned Obama to a high-profile role in a bipartisan overhaul of Illinois's notoriously loose campaign-finance laws. It was unglamorous work that risked upsetting powerful lawmakers. The rules were so lax that some legislators had spent campaign funds on new cars, additions to their homes, and school tuition for their children.

Obama had wanted caps on campaign contributions but came to realize that would never pass, recalls Mike Lawrence, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, which had worked with Obama, Senator Dillard, and two other lawmakers on the overhaul. Obama helped iron out a deal, approved in 1998, that barred the personal use of campaign funds, toughened disclosure laws, and banned many gifts from lobbyists.

"He impressed me as someone who had beliefs but also understood that when you're trying to get something done,... you have to be prepared to compromise," Mr. Lawrence recalls.

When Democrats took over the legislature in 2002, civil rights bills that had been bottled up for years gained new momentum. Obama sponsored a bill requiring law-enforcement officials in Illinois to record the race of motorists for a study of racial profiling. He also pushed through legislation requiring police to videotape interrogations of murder suspects.

The measures involved thorny legal issues and a delicate balancing of interests. But police and civil liberties groups – often at loggerheads – say they came away feeling their voices had been heard.

Laimutis Nargelenas, deputy director of the Illinois Association of Police Chiefs, recalls that other lawmakers had pressed for amendments that the police saw as unworkable, such as a requirement that videotaping begin the moment of arrest or that police officers ask motorists their race rather than guess.

Obama "was always willing to sit down and always wanted to hear, what were the unintended consequences," Mr. Nargelenas recalls. "Some other legislators would get a bill, put it through, and we'd say, 'Wow, these people don't have a clue how this would affect us.' "

Mary Dixon, legislative director for the ACLU of Illinois, a proponent of the bills, says Obama "helped law enforcement feel less attacked by the concept,… by repeating that, 'We know that the majority of law enforcement is doing a good job out there under difficult circumstances.' "

Still, Illinois Republicans say few of their number were as enthusiastic about him as Dillard, who appeared in the Obama ad.

"It is absolutely not typical," says GOP state Sen. Christine Radogno, who was elected the same year as Obama and is now the deputy minority leader. "I would challenge people to call every [Illinois] Republican who worked with Obama and find one other person that has that view."

The profiling and interrogation bills were an outgrowth of a broader effort, led by the governor, to reform the criminal-justice system in the wake of wrongful death-row convictions, she says. And while Obama has defended his "present" votes as a common practice to protest flawed bills, Senator Radogno says he overused them, sometimes as political cover on contentious issues. "If a bill has a fatal flaw," she says, "you ought to vote no and explain it."

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