Carol Moseley Braun, Democratic
candidate for U.S. Senate

By DONALD SEVENER

Carol Moseley Braun has brought her campaign for the U.S. Senate to a brand-new ray of hope shining in a squalid, desperate corner of Springfield. Surrounded by reporters and supporters, she stands in a soon-to-be-opened day care center in the John Hay Homes, one of the capital's more troubled and dangerous public housing projects. Braun listens intently as a John Hay resident explains how the day care center came about with federal funds and how it will employ residents of the housing project who will in turn enable others living there to go to school or to get jobs. "This makes all the sense in the world," Braun says. This is a modest investment by government to give people the ability to do for themselves. The whole idea is self-help."

As Braun marches out of the day care center for a walk through the Hay Homes, children follow, Pied Piper-style. "When I grow up," says 8-year-old LaFrances, "I want to be just like that famous woman —" she pauses, ponders, "— what's her name?"

There is hardly anyone who doesn't know the name of Carol Moseley Braun these days. For a decade she was an able, if not renowned, state representative. For the past three years she has occupied an invisible Cook County office, recorder of deeds. But Braun now enjoys vast fame: in Illinois as the woman who slew the invincible Alan J. Dixon, nationally as the candidate who could become the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

But for all her celebrity and star quality, Braun would bring to the Senate a perspective not commonly found there. "I'm an ordinary person," she says. "I'm not a millionairess. I'm not part of the 'In'-crowd. I can bring the concerns of people who know what it's like to have to balance a checkbook and pay the mortgage and go to the grocery store. And those are the voices that need to be heard in the Senate."

Her background and experience, her personality and political character, her progressive credentials and her moment in history all suggest that Carol Moseley Braun could become a significant force in the Senate. She would likely be something of a hybrid of the senatorial styles of Alan Dixon and Paul Simon. She would be no Dixon when it comes to raiding the pork barrel for Illinois, although her legislative experience and political savvy suggest she would bring home her share of the bacon. She would be more akin to Simon, certainly philosophically and in advocating a liberal agenda. Like Simon, she would be a national figure who would use her stature and forum to articulate issues of conscience. But unlike Simon, who is widely regarded as legislatively ineffective, Braun is a smart tactician who knows how to win votes and turn a cause into a law. Nobody would likely forget the name of Carol Moseley Braun.

Braun, 45, grew up in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago's south side. Today she lives in the south shore area of the city near Hyde Park with her 14-year-old son, Matthew. She was divorced from her husband, Michael Braun, six years ago.

Braun remembers her father as a community activist, and she often accompanied him to meetings where he pushed for school desegregation or other causes. "If anything, my parents gave me almost a romantic vision of what a democracy is and how it should work. And I think a lot of my public service career has been dictated by what I saw as my duty, my responsibility as a citizen. I mean, it sounds really corny and basic, but that is just where it comes from, a fundamental view about good citizenship."

Braun engaged in her own activism as a youth. Once while attending a program for exceptional students at an all-white high school she went into a restaurant in an all-white neighborhood. "I sat down at the counter, and the waitress walked all around me, serving other people, ignoring me," Braun told the Chicago Reader earlier this year. "I sat there for about an hour. Finally she gave me a cup of coffee. I put my quarter down and got up and left. I wouldn't drink their coffee, but I wasn't going to move until I was served."

Her civil rights activism led to a personal epiphany a few years later when she joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a march in Chicago's Gage Park. Whites taunted the marchers and threw rocks, one of which struck King. Braun was incensed and vowed that if another rock hit King, she would pick it up and throw it at the white mob. But then it dawned on her: King was preaching that you don't fight hate with hate. "He stood for turning hatred back on itself, not giving it the opportunity to take root. And by his moral authority and the example of his leadership, he really broke through and changed a generation."

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Braun was first drafted for elective office in 1977. By then she had graduated from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago law school and had worked for the U.S. attorney's office. She was elected state representative in 1978 and served in the legislature until 1988, when she became the first African-American woman elected to countywide office.

Braun recalls the first bill she passed in the General Assembly as a freshman lawmaker in 1979, a measure to give a cost-of-living increase to public aid recipients. "Nobody told me that for a big bill like that, you had to go to leadership and get them to sign off on it. So I went around and talked to 159 people, and I had a little folder prepared for each person I talked to with statistics showing how this bill would affect their district. I talked to Republicans and Democrats alike, and lo and behold, the bill passed." After the vote, Braun was approached by Rep. Webber Borchers, a right-wing Republican conservative from Decatur whom she had lobbied hard. "Webber hobbled over to my desk and said, 'Mizz Braun, I almost voted for your bill because, you know, you're the second nicest colored lady I've ever met.' I was second to a woman who had worked for his family for 30 years."

The story is revealing. "What has made Carol an effective legislator is her ability to make people's plight matter to other legislators," says Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, a Chicago Democrat. "Part of it is force of personality; part is her ability to articulate problems and grievances in a way that makes them accessible to others who don't experience them directly."

Indeed, many people cite her skill in working with disparate groups and interests as a hallmark of her legislative career. "She prides herself on being a bridge-builder," says another observer. "She is not an ideologue. She doesn't give just knee-jerk reactions."

Many describe Braun as pragmatic and independent. Although Braun became the leader of the legislative black caucus, Highland Park Democratic Rep. Grace Mary Stern says she "was not just somebody who automatically would take the position advanced by the black caucus. She came up not just through the black network but as a legislator in her own right. She was not simply a 'black' legislator." She ultimately became floor leader for the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, and she also served as an assistant majority leader to House Speaker Michael J. Madigan. "She has the ability to work with the organization, without being a part of it," says an admirer.

Says Braun: "The point is that everybody has an interest and a point of view, and the job is trying to understand other people's perspective and finding those things on which you can agree." Sometimes, she says, principles would get in the way of agreement, "but I really did try to build consensus wherever I could." She sponsored legislation that set up local councils to oversee Chicago schools, banned discrimination in housing and private clubs, and prohibited investment of state money in South Africa until apartheid was abolished.

Braun strides through the John Hay Homes, the Springfield housing project where apartment after apartment is boarded up, and some remain blackened from fires set during violence last spring after the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. Broken glass sometimes crunches beneath her feet as she walks to a food pantry and then to a pavilion where she gives a brief speech.

What, she is asked, can be done to improve housing projects like this? "We need to give people the opportunity to work," she replies. Braun's intelligence and thoughtfulness have apparently been so numbed by the demands of the campaign that much of what she says about issues comes out as vague generalities or platitudes.

What about crime? someone asks. "My brother is a homicide detective; when I hear a cop has been killed, that hits home. My father was in law enforcement. I was a federal prosecutor. Nobody is more committed to fighting crime than I am." She talks of using the "peace dividend" to pay for social programs (like the day care center), of tenant ownership of projects like John Hay, of government creating "an environment for job production" and mostly of her view that there is no need to raise taxes. "We need to use the money we have now better. We don't need higher taxes. People in the middle are squeezed now."

All candidates are allergic to taxes in an election year, but she is particularly sensitive because her Republican opponent, Rich Williamson, has savaged her in ads as a bigspending, high-taxing liberal.

In an interview, she defends herself, plausibly, saying state legislatures all over the country were forced to raise taxes after the Reagan Administration's severe budget cuts in social programs. Williamson was a Reagan aide promoting those policies. Braun: "We are dealing with an era in which the policies that my opponent pushed were taking money out of Illinois. And the state was left with fewer dollars for human services, for health care, for education, even for infrastructure development." And she calls Williamson's criticism "duplicitous" because in a book about Reagan's New Federalism that he wrote, she says he says that "the states should raise taxes to make up for the loss in federal funds." She adds, "Now he's going to turn around and say I'm a tax-and-spend Democrat. I'd say that is a bunch of phony."

Braun is convinced, as most economists are not, that economic growth will eventually erase the mountainous federal deficit. "The answer to deficit reduction," she says, "will lay in growth, getting this economy going, and once the economic engine heats up, that will provide us with the revenue to begin to pay off some of these bills."

Looking around the John Hay Homes, it doesn't appear the economic engine is going to overheat anytime soon. As she approaches the pavilion for her speech, rap music blares from a sophisticated sound system and nearby 10 young men race along an asphalt court playing basketball, shooting at hoops that have no nets. Maybe 30 people, a third of them reporters, pay attention to what Braun is saying. She says: "The challenge is real simple. We need to get back to basics and provide these babies," pointing to toddlers playing at her feet, "the same opportunities we had." Considering the poverty stretching out around her, this statement seems incongruous, even disingenuous.

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Later, in an interview, Braun discusses overhauling the welfare system. "You start," she says, "with the proposition that nobody wants to, or should have to, pay for somebody who is able to work and is too lazy to do so. That may sound like a real conservative statement, but I mean that." She says she would just as soon "scrap the whole thing, don't call it welfare anymore, call it a poverty subsidy or something like that." She calls the food stamp program an abomination because "people get these chits and it doesn't cover things like diapers, and what you wind up with is a black market in food stamps. That's not addressing the issue."

How would she fix that? "How do you fix that? I think, now this is kind of broad— I'm probably getting in trouble with this part because I haven't written out a paper on welfare and sat around with the policy people to work through this. But you start with job training and education and give people opportunities to work in the private sector and give people, as a last resort, public service kinds of employment opportunities. You provide day care and educational assistance so the kids can get taken care of.

"Workfare," she continues, "in and of itself is not bad. What's bad about workfare as we know it, is that it's kind of like a flat-earth approach. That means you go into a workfare program, but there's no job so you fall off."

At one time, Braun recalls, her secretary had to keep a separate phone log just to track all the calls she was getting urging, demanding, begging that she run for the U.S. Senate. "It was just nuts," says Braun. "It got to the point where it really did seem that it was the right thing to do, that I had a duty to respond."

The calls came after Sen. Dixon, a fixture in Illinois politics for more than a generation, became one of only two northern Democrats to vote to confirm Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice, touching off a tidal wave of feminist anger. In March, Braun did the impossible, upsetting Dixon and wealthy Chicago lawyer Al Hofeld to capture the Democratic Senate nomination.

"She is a very likeable, impressive person and in the right place at the right time," says former Sen. Adiai E. Stevenson III. "She has the opportunity to break black and female barriers in a way that makes everybody hopeful, makes people feel good."

Most observers agree that, if elected, Braun would be a very different senator than the glad-handing Dixon, who has a well-deserved reputation as a master at pork-barrel politics. Stevenson: "Even if she wanted to, history would not let her be a pork-barrel politician. She'll want to be deeply involved in the national issues." On the other hand, Stevenson observes, the Senate leadership "will want to involve her in the inner councils because she'll bring a dimension to their thinking and public advocacy that they wouldn't otherwise have." That insider role, plus her legislative experience and skill, would enable her to effectively represent parochial state interests, Stevenson says.

Many people say that Braun's senatorial style will more closely parallel Simon, who is more of a national figure than Dixon and has a reputation of being a powerful voice on matters of conscience, such as civil liberties. "Simon is a good guide to the kind of senator Carol would be," says Rep. Currie. "Dixon is the senator from Illinois; Simon is a senator of conscience. Carol would play a national role as the conscience of fairness and compassion. She did that well in Springfield."

She is more like Simon than Dixon in another respect: political philosophy. On certain bellwether votes where Dixon and Simon disagreed, Braun would have sided with Simon: for increased automobile fuel economy standards, for cutting SDI funding, against requiring notification of parents for teen abortions, against an amendment outlawing desecration of the American flag.

Both Illinois senators opposed congressional authorization of the Persian Gulf war, and interestingly, Braun agrees with their vote only in hindsight. "At the time that vote came, I was sufficiently incensed at the invasion of Kuwait that I think I possibly would have voted yes on that. I don't know, I wasn't there to listen to all the debate. Hindsight tells us, however, that it was ill-conceived, that it really was about oil, and that it probably made sense for us to wait and use other diplomatic tools to get Saddam out of Kuwait. At the time ... I think I was kind of swept along with the notion of getting this monster out of Kuwait and making Kuwait safe for democracy. As we now know, it wasn't anything like that."

Braun seeks to enter the Senate at a time when a record number of members of Congress have chosen to retire. One of the dropouts is Colorado U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth, a Democrat, who complained in an article written for The New York Times Magazine that congressional gridlock on important national issues, the relentless need to raise campaign funds and increasingly negative and bitter campaigns all contributed to his decision not to seek reelection. "I am leaving the Senate now because I have become frustrated with the posturing and paralysis of Congress," he wrote. "I even fear that the political process has made me a person I don't like."

Braun read Wirth's article. "Reading Tim Wirth, I got depressed, as anybody would. But there was a part in that article that really hit home. He said his son had asked him, 'Dad, has anybody asked you to do this [serve in the Senate]?' and he concluded, that no, there was nothing special about him being a United States senator. When I got to that part, I thought about myself and, if anything, it's just the opposite. There's an awful lot of people who have been locked out of the Senate, voiceless, who have not had a presence in that kind of policymaking body who I will represent in a unique way.

"I come from a working-class background. I'm an ordinary person. Working people need to have a voice; I think I can represent that. Women, minorities need to have a voice; I can represent that. Right there, I think I can bring something new to the Senate. I can open it up. As I read that article, a light bulb went off and I thought: Yeah, I really do have something special to offer."

Donald Sevener is a Springfield writer and frequent contributor to the magazine.

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