Young Barack Obama: 'Politics matters'

by Mark Silva

A newly rediscovered 1993 interview with President Barack Obama shows that the young Democrat in Chicago had a budding interest in elective office and an awareness of the media's importance in achieving political goals.

"The recently discovered, unaired interview is part of a new documentary on Obama's early career in Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer and led a voter-registration project,'' our friend John McCormick, now of Bloomberg News, writes of the rediscovered early Obama interview."In it, he alluded to his future electoral aspirations.''

"If you end up being fortunate enough to have the opportunity to serve, it's because you've got a track record of service in the community'', Obama, then a 32-year-old lawyer, said in the interview. "Right now, I'm still building up that track record.''

Within two years, he was running for the state Senate.

In a media age like this, you really have to reach out to young people and show that registration was hip, was popular, was trendy, Obama, who turns 48 today, said in the 1993 interview. 'Politics does matter,'' he said.' It can make the difference in terms of a benefits check. It can make the difference in terms of school funding. Citizens can't just remove themselves from that process. They actually have to engage themselves and not just leave it to the professionals.''
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Stuart A. Goldman, the documentary's executive producer, provided Bloomberg with a copy of the interview, a "neat, compact'' set of seven questions with the younger Obama. Little Dizzy Home Video, a division of Los Angeles-based Waterstar Corp., plans an Aug. 11 release of the 55-minute narrative, Becoming Barack: Evolution of a Leader.

The documentary will draw heavily on the lost interview conducted by an aspiring film producer, Zeke Gonzalez.

Obama was a newlywed, two years out of Harvard Law School. He was working at a small firm, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago and writing his memoir, Dreams from My Father, notes McCormick, who covered presidential Obama's campaign as a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune before moving on to Bloomberg..

McCormick writes for Bloomberg:

"The interview was done after Obama led an effort called Project Vote that helped register 150,000 new black voters in Chicago. It was recorded in October 1993 at the Chicago law office of Obama's former boss, Judd Miner, and reveals the future president's appreciation of techniques that would later help him win the White House.

" Goldman, 56, said finding the footage was a chance discovery that he instantly knew had the potential to become the centerpiece of his film about Obama's life in Chicago. Gonzalez, the original interviewer, recorded the video as part of an effort in the early 1990s to capture conversations with Chicago's black leaders, Goldman said. Gonzalez, 21 at the time, interviewed Obama for 12 minutes before the tape ran out.

"Goldman said he learned of Gonzalez's video a few days after the November election while attending the American Film Market, an annual film festival. He really didn't have a vision for what to do with these interviews, said Goldman, who quickly cut a deal with Gonzalez for the footage and started to look for financing for his project.

"The documentary takes a close look at Project Vote. Like so many of the important events in Obama's life, his timing was essential. Obama was in the middle of writing Dreams when he was asked to lead the voter-registration drive. He initially declined. In the interview, Obama said he changed his mind a few weeks later because of the Democratic nomination of Carol Moseley Braun for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois that he would later hold.

" At that point, I realized that this presented an opportunity in Illinois to enfranchise and engage a lot of African-American voters that previously had not been involved,'' he said. 'Our task was simple. It was to get disenfranchised communities, minority communities, low-income communities, to turn out to vote.''

"The black turnout in November 1992 altered Chicago's electoral landscape and boosted the campaigns of both Bill Clinton and Braun, who became the first African-American woman elected to the Senate. The video makes extensive use of Obama's voice and storytelling, frequently injecting sound from the audio version of his best-selling memoir.

"Besides the 1993 interview, the video includes some of the earliest known recorded interviews with the now-president, including a 1986 news story by Chicago station WMAQ-TV that highlights an early organizing victory by Obama. One friend in the documentary recalls how Obama was generally calm and composed as a community organizer. She said she could tell when he was frustrated because he would have a two-cigarette moment, smoking one after another.''