7While Michelle was at Princeton, a watershed event had occurred in Chicago: Harold Washington was elected mayor in 1983, the city's first black mayor. It was a tremendous victory for the African American community, practically and psychologically, as the newcomer Barack Obama would later hear from his barber. Which is not to say that racial peace broke out in the city. During his first term, Washington became engaged in a long-running battle with the white-majority council that got so nasty that once, the mayor threatened to punch out his chief antagonist, council leader Ed Vrdolyak, telling him he would get a mouthful of something he didn't want. On another occasion Vrdolyak taunted a Washington supporter, Walter "Slim" Coleman, so badly from the council floor that Coleman leaped over the rails and was about to attack Vrdolyak but was restrained by several bailiffs.But Washington's tenure, according to Judson Miner, a white attorney who worked for Washington as corporation counsel, carried a basic lesson: It became clear to people that "an African American could run Chicago and it wouldn't fall apart." Running for his second term, Washington did better among whites; while he did not get a great many more white votes, fewer whites voted against him. Washington's death from a heart attack at his desk in 1987 was a tremendous blow, but his tenure changed racial dynamics in the city.

This wasn't clear at first. Barack told me that after Washington's death, he felt disillusioned by the splintering of the progressive biracial coalition that had supported the mayor, who was replaced by an undistinguished councilman picked by the old machine. "I was, like many people, impressed by the degree to which he could mobilize the community and push for change. I was frustrated by the inability to build an organization that could sustain all that excitement and deliver [results]." At that point, Obama says, "I was somewhat disdainful of politics. I was much more interested in mobilizing people to hold politicians accountable."That attitude helps explain what Barack decided to do after he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991. He was offered many jobs and could have gone to work anywhere.

Abner Mikva, a former U.S. congressman who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, called to offer him a clerkship, and when Obama turned him down, Mikva jokingly says he assumed Barack was an "uppity black" who would only clerk for a black judge. Michelle was also surprised that he was uninterested in clerking, even for a U.

S. Supreme Court justice. She said Barack had gone to law school because he realized, working as a community organizer, that to bring about change he needed to better understand how laws are created."You've got to have a grasp of the law, so he goes to law school, he goes to law school for more than just being a lawyer," Michelle told me. "Even though he was head of the law review he didn't become a Supreme Court clerk, which is the natural progression. Never did it cross his mind. Here I am, knowing the power of his position: 'You're not going to clerk for them? You're kidding me!' He's like, 'No, that's not why I went to law school. If you're going to make change, you're not going to do it as a Supreme Court clerk.

' It was change, it was always change. It was always this notion, how do you help move this country."Instead, Obama took a job at Judson Miner's civil rights law firm, though he first spent six months on a voter registration drive, Project Vote, targeting low-income African Americans. It was an effort strikingly reminiscent of what Michelle's father, Fraser Robinson, the genial precinct captain, had done, walking the streets of South Side exhorting folks to go out on election day and vote Democratic. The drive was so successful that it helped Bill Clinton win in Illinois and assisted Carol Moseley Braun in becoming the first black woman electe.