The 1997 speech that launched Obama
September 19, 2012 | 10:50 pm | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:04 am 160Comments
Like so many in the
liberal powerbase that served as a springboard for Obama, Marilyn Katz’s activist roots stretch back to her days as a Students for a Democratic
Society operative. Today, Katz is an influential political operative in
Chicago who has visited the White House 26 times since 2009.
Few doubt that Barack Obama's
stirring oration before the 2004 Democratic National Convention vaulted
him into the national limelight.
But another, less-heralded Obama address -- delivered on
Valentine's Day 1997 at First Chicago Bank -- was equally essential to
his later successes. Without it, it is doubtful that he would have ever
been in position to assume so prominent a role in 2004.
Obama was a newly elected Illinois state senator in 1997 when he
addressed an audience that included many of Chicago's most powerful
political insiders and activists, nonprofit executives, business movers
and shakers, and philanthropic funders.
The occasion was a meeting of the Futures Committee, an elite Chicago
civic leadership group created by the Local Initiatives Support Corp.,
or LISC, a liberal, nonprofit, low-income-housing activist group.
No authenticated text of Obama's speech -- which was billed beforehand by LISC in a promotional flier obtained by The Washington Examiner as "a local perspective on effective communities" -- is now known to exist.
But people interviewed by the Examiner who heard him speak say Obama laid out a powerful vision for a political
strategy that ultimately reshaped housing activism on the Left, first in Chicago and then nationwide, even as it paved the way for an
accommodation between the corrupt political machine of Mayor Richard M.
Daley and its long-standing nemesis, the city's coalition of white
liberal reformers and black community organizers.
Obama described a practical strategy for building on the
federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, contained in the 1986
Tax Reform Act, plus federal, state and local funds and programs, to
create new public-private development partnerships.
The LIHTC encouraged the partnerships needed to unite government
officials and progressive nonprofit activists behind the cause of
building thousands of new affordable-housing units, first on Chicago's
poor South Side and then, as the movement spread, to similar
neighborhoods across the nation.
Obama spoke at a time of great ferment on the Left in which federal
housing policies became a central focus for political activism.
He was drawing from the same well that had produced the Community
Reinvestment Act, relaxed federal standards for mortgage qualifications,
and creative financial packaging of subprime loans, but doing so in a
manner uniquely matched to conditions on the political ground of
Chicago.
Public-private partnerships for affordable-housing projects were not a
new idea to some of Obama's listeners, since philanthropic groups like
the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation had been promoting the
concept for several years.
Not coincidentally, it was a MacArthur vice president, Rebecca Riley,
who arranged for Obama to speak at the Valentine's Day gathering.
Obama's innovation was to expand the concept beyond simply building
affordable apartments and high-rises. It encompassed a cradle-to-grave
vision of providing for the material needs of the low-income families
residing in the new housing, including their schools, child care, job
training, medical coverage, clothing and food.
In turn, the residents would campaign and vote for the officials
advocating the partnerships, adding significantly to their political
power.
Left unstated was the underlying reality that politically connected
developers who built the housing would profit handsomely and could be
expected to gratefully give millions of dollars in campaign
contributions to politicians like Obama who made it all possible.
Chicago thus became the proving ground for Obama's vision, which,
according to LISC spokesman Joel Bookman, "really changed the direction
of community development in Chicago and ultimately nationally."
It was an irresistible combination of money, politics and idealism that
also offered endless opportunities for greed and tragic abuse of the
poor.
That made it an ideal tool for uniting the Daley machine with the reform
coalition that had elected Harold Washington as the city's first
African-American mayor in 1983. (Richard M. Daley, who reinvigorated the
machine and became mayor in 1989, was the son of the machine's founder,
Richard J. Daley, who died in 1976.)
The key to Obama's vision in Chicago, according to Marilyn Katz, was the
city's most famous radical: "Remember, this is the community of Saul
Alinsky. And most of the first housing groups were the Alinsky groups
who were still banging at the door."
Katz, an influential Chicago public relations executive and longtime
Obama friend and political operative, has visited the White House more
than two dozen times since 2009.
Like so many in the liberal power base that served as a springboard for
Obama, Katz had activist roots stretching back to her days as a Students
for a Democratic Society operative in Chicago.
A Futures Committee handout for the Valentine's Day meeting titled,
"Barack Obama's principles of community development," said the proposed
program had "to organize around production, not just consumption."
Such words were a clarion call to activists raised on a thousand
variations of the Marxist labor theory of value and capitalist
alienation.
"He really questioned the kind of surrogate
capitalist strategy that most of the nonprofit community-based
organizations had been pursuing," Katz told the Examiner.
"And he suggested that a real estate strategy for
redevelopment of communities was not enough and that you had to really
go into the quality-of-life issues, education, wealth building,
amenities that were the hallmarks of any community needs," she said.
Obama's vision "changed the direction and the nature of the 123 groups
that were working in the various communities in the city. It was a very
influential speech," she said.
The LISC vision speech was a critical turning point for Obama because
his position with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill &
Galland put him at ground zero with what Katz called "the tangential and
interlocking circles between the Left-liberal political community, the
urban redevelopment community, the legal community and politicos" who
controlled Chicago, then and to this day.
It was from that point that Obama cultivated the personal, professional
and political relationships that would serve him well all the way to the
White House.