McCain’s Challenge

Obama then choreographed a drive to demand a new MET office. (The point, remember, was not for him to make the demands but for the leaders to do it for themselves.) They set up a meeting with MET officials, and then Obama drilled the leaders on what they should say. He took them around Roseland looking for a possible site for the new office. They found a shutdown department store at Michigan Avenue and 110th Street, and located the building’s owners. “He did all the legwork for us and brought it back to us,” Lloyd told me, “and we went downtown to the offices of the store and negotiated.” In a climactic meeting at Our Lady of the Gardens – Obama had, once again, carefully rehearsed the leaders on what they should say – MET officials agreed to open the new office. Obama had an accomplishment to point to. “Our kids were able to go there, sign up, and get their summer jobs,” Lloyd told me. “It was fantastic to me, I just felt like – oh, it meant so much to us.” They were thrilled beyond words when Harold Washington himself came to the ribbon-cutting for the new office.

BATTLE OVER ASBESTOS The other Obama accomplishment most people mention is the asbestos cleanup at Altgeld. One day someone – it’s not clear who – noticed that some rather specialized work seemed to be going on at the management office in the center of the complex. Everyone knows Obama wrote a memoir, Dreams from My Father, covering his time in Chicago. What fewer know is that during his years as an organizer Obama was also working hard on fiction writing. “He wrote stories about the people he was working with,” Mike Kruglik told me, “fiction that was beautiful, beautifully crafted, fantastically evocative about what it was like to be in that community, including how bleak the landscape was, how threadbare some of the institutions were, what it looked like and felt like.” I asked Kruglik if he had read the stories. “Yeah,” he answered. “[Obama] gave them to me. They were about what a pastor was doing with his church.” Kruglik says he can’t remember much beyond that – this was years ago – but given the prominent role that Obama’s pastors and his church have played in the campaign, there would probably be a great deal of interest in the stories today. But you won’t get them from Kruglik, who says he gave the stories back to Obama without making any copies.

About the Author

Michael Knox Beran

Michael Knox Beran, a lawyer and writer, is the author of WASPs: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy.

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Obama then choreographed a drive to demand a new MET office. (The point, remember, was not for him to make the demands but for the leaders to do it for themselves.) They set up a meeting with MET officials, and then Obama drilled the leaders on what they should say. He took them around Roseland looking for a possible site for the new office. They found a shutdown department store at Michigan Avenue and 110th Street, and located the building’s owners. “He did all the legwork for us and brought it back to us,” Lloyd told me, “and we went downtown to the offices of the store and negotiated.” In a climactic meeting at Our Lady of the Gardens – Obama had, once again, carefully rehearsed the leaders on what they should say – MET officials agreed to open the new office. Obama had an accomplishment to point to. “Our kids were able to go there, sign up, and get their summer jobs,” Lloyd told me. “It was fantastic to me, I just felt like – oh, it meant so much to us.” They were thrilled beyond words when Harold Washington himself came to the ribbon-cutting for the new office.

BATTLE OVER ASBESTOS The other Obama accomplishment most people mention is the asbestos cleanup at Altgeld. One day someone – it’s not clear who – noticed that some rather specialized work seemed to be going on at the management office in the center of the complex. Everyone knows Obama wrote a memoir, Dreams from My Father, covering his time in Chicago. What fewer know is that during his years as an organizer Obama was also working hard on fiction writing. “He wrote stories about the people he was working with,” Mike Kruglik told me, “fiction that was beautiful, beautifully crafted, fantastically evocative about what it was like to be in that community, including how bleak the landscape was, how threadbare some of the institutions were, what it looked like and felt like.” I asked Kruglik if he had read the stories. “Yeah,” he answered. “[Obama] gave them to me. They were about what a pastor was doing with his church.” Kruglik says he can’t remember much beyond that – this was years ago – but given the prominent role that Obama’s pastors and his church have played in the campaign, there would probably be a great deal of interest in the stories today. But you won’t get them from Kruglik, who says he gave the stories back to Obama without making any copies.