Artifact Nine: Obama’s Big Political Play

In the lead-up to The Choice 2012, FRONTLINE’s hotly anticipated dual biography of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, we’re publishing “The Artifacts of Character,” a series of rarely seen objects that elucidate key moments and experiences in the candidates’ lives. This week we’ll be publishing three artifacts for each candidate, on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Check back this afternoon for our next artifact from Romney.

In late 2000, Obama was recovering from a devastating loss to Rep. Bobby Rush, who won 61 percent of the vote in the primary to Obama’s 30 percent, and went on to retain his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But in the spring of 2001, Obama had an opportunity that would help to change the course of his political future.

The Illinois Democrats had won the right to redraw the state’s legislative districts. And they would do so, as the Republicans did in 1991, to maximize their political advantage.

“Partisan redistricting in America is the most corrupt process that’s still legal, right?” Ryan Lizza, a reporter for The New Yorker, told FRONTLINE in 2008. “Everyone does it, every party does it, and everyone knows it’s totally wrong and is the sort of cause of a lot of our political problems.”

In 2001, Illinois Democrats did their redistricting in an old 1950s office building known as the “inner sanctum,” Lizza said. “Outside, you’re protected by a fingerprint reader and a keypad. You walk through that door and you’re in a little room, and there’s another door with another fingerprint reader and another keypad, just to emphasize that this is a very secure place.”

The legislators got an opportunity to sit down with a Democratic staffer, John Corrigan, at a bank of computers loaded with demographic and mapping technology, Lizza recalled.

Rush, Lizza would later note, took the opportunity to redraw his district to exclude Obama’s home by just a few blocks, which would have forced him to relocate if he wanted to challenge Rush again.

But Obama by then had loftier aspirations. When he had his turn in the inner sanctum, he redrew his state senate district, number 13, according to the map shown here.

The old district, shown in turquoise on the map and outlined in bold blue, started in Obama’s home of Hyde Park, on Chicago’s South Side, and extended westward into poor black neighborhoods, where people lived in small bungalow homes.

The new district, outlined in bold red, retained Obama’s home in Hyde Park and his black supporters, but moved upwards along the lakefront into the so-called Gold Coast, where the wealthy of Chicago resided in upscale condos overlooking Lake Michigan.

The new district better reflected the coalition Obama wanted to build — one of African-Americans and progressive whites.

But it also presented a key moment in Obama’s early political life, Lizza wrote, for perhaps an even more significant reason: “It immediately gave him the two things he needed to run for the U.S. Senate in 2004: money and power.”