On Jan. 21, 2007, as he was leaving Soldier Field after the Chicago Bears had clinched a spot in the Super Bowl, the junior senator from Illinois called a friend in Baltimore, Rep. Elijah Cummings.
“Elijah, I need you to help me out,” Barack Obama said.
“To do what?” Cummings asked.
“I want you to run my campaign.”
“Campaign for what?” the congressman asked.
“The campaign for the presidency,” Obama replied.
“Campaign for the presidency of what?” Cummings continued.
“Of the United States,” the senator said.
“And I asked him one question: I said, ‘Can you win?’ ” Cummings said, recounting this oft-told tale in some detail to The Examiner.
“He said, ‘I will win.’ Period. That was enough for me. It was that brief. I signed up then and there. I knew that our country needed to change.”
Next Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, as the roll call of the states runs through the alphabet, the 57-year-old congressman from Baltimore, co-chairing the state delegation with Gov. Martin O’Malley, will announce Maryland’s votes, fulfilling a childhood dream.
“I used to watch the conventions as a little kid, and I always wanted to be one of the ones that announced the votes,” Cummings said.
“I’m glad I was born when I was born,” experiencing not only the civil rights changes, but also the first African-American who has a real chance to be president.
Next Wednesday, Obama will be half way to the finish line after one of the hardest fought primary seasons in recent memory. Yet the hardest part of the campaign may lie ahead, Cummings knows, and if he is successful, Obama faces an even more difficult task: governing.
‘On a path to greatness’
Cummings signed on to chair Obama’s Maryland campaign when the black politicians of the nation were split between the young African American senator and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a split that lasted “almost to the end,” Cummings recalled.
“I am good friends of both [Hillary] and President Clinton,” the congressman said. He recalled how in the depths of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he had invited Bill Clinton to his church, New Psalmist Baptist Church in West Baltimore, where the beleaguered president was embraced and uplifted.
“There are certain loyalties that had been built up,” Cummings said. “It was hard for people to imagine someone named Barack Obama could rise to the level of the presidency. People did not want to waste their support or upset the political establishment. I can understand why people would have been reluctant.”
Cummings was not reluctant, seeing in Obama a man who had been called for a mission. “In the black church, there’s a term. They say ‘Your steps are ordered.’ It talks about being predestined.”
In Obama’s short political career — far shorter than Cummings’ own quarter century — he saw “how doors are being opened for him.
Clearly he was on a path to greatness. No doubt about it.”
Those doors opened for Obama in his 2004 race for U.S. Senate, as he faced a weak opponent in the general election, Alan Keyes, a former Senate candidate in Maryland. Early on, Cummings, then chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, helped open financial doors for Obama with a major fundraiser organized by the caucus.
He already was high on Obama, calling him “absolutely brilliant.”
Last October, when many still thought that the primary race would be over by Super Tuesday, Obama’s co-chairs, Cummings and Attorney General Doug Gansler, met privately with the Illinois senator before a major rally at Prince George’s Community College.
Cummings talked to Obama about his belief that the candidate’s “steps were ordered.”
“I do believe my steps are ordered, but I’ve got to get on the path,” replied Obama, according to Cummings.
The path was not always smooth. In the early days of the campaign, “he was unseen, unnoticed, unappreciated, un-applauded and unsung, and he went against the most powerful political couple in this country, if not the world,” Cummings said. “The thing that disturbed more than anything else is the discounting of his life. He’s not just an empty suit,” but a lawyer, a scholar, a community organizer.
A candidate who inspires
Known as an inspiring speaker himself, Cummings said he was drawn to Obama because “what this nation needs is someone who not only has a plan, but has a plan that can inspire people to do better.”
As a surrogate campaigner for Obama this year, Cummings traveled “on his own dime” multiple times to North and South Carolina — where his parents were once sharecroppers — West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Speaking to voters, he laid out three points.
“We can do better as a nation,” Cummings recounted. “We can do better in education, health care, criminal justice. We can do better in spending our money,” and Obama “could help us get there.”
Secondly, with innovation, “we can bring jobs back to America. The greatest threat to our national security is not Osama bin Laden, but the failure to educate all of our kids.”
And finally, “we needed somebody who in and of himself represents the audacity of hope,” Cummings said. “There were older people who told me that they came to support Barack Obama because of their children.”
He got to see that inspiration firsthand Feb. 11 at two raucous Maryland rallies with Obama. “I had never seen anything like that in my life,” said Cummings, who fired up the crowd of 12,000 at the 1st Mariner Arena.
Earlier at the University of Maryland’s Comcast Center in College Park, with 17,000 on hand, Cummings was impressed that it was a majority white audience. Talking to students there, he realized that “they had a different experience of race than what I did. They grew up in a much more diverse society than what I did” in Baltimore.
“One of the reasons that Barack Obama is doing so well is because society is changing,” Cummings said.
Taking care of business
Cummings is among the most liberal members of Congress, and the only member of the Maryland delegation in the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“His voting record is very liberal, usually the most liberal in the [Maryland] delegation,” says the Almanac of American Politics, analyzing ratings by interest groups and its own tallies.
“He’s pretty much your liberal-spending Democrat, spending money you don’t have,” said dentist Mike Hargadon, Cummings’ Republican opponent this year. Cummings was unopposed in 2006.
His approach is “pretty far left,” said Tony Salazar, a Howard County lawyer who was Cummings’ GOP challenger in 2004, getting just 25 percent of the vote. Salazar notes that over half of Cummings’ campaign contributions come from political action committees, with unions and trial lawyers at the top of the list.
Salazar sees Cummings as unfocused on policy issues other than civil rights. “He’s got his hand in a lot of pots,” he said.
But former Republican congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley has been impressed with how he’s performed as the new chairman of the House subcommittee on the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation, a post Cummings was not anxious to accept last year.
“He’s learned more about this industry faster than any person I’ve ever known,” Bentley, former chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, told an industry conference last week. “The maritime industry is very fortunate to have this man.”
As a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Cummings has taken a prominent role investigating the use of steroids in professional sports and in sharply questioning executives of the mortgage industry on the foreclosure crisis.
“I’m a huge fan of his,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who represents Southern Maryland. “He is what a representative ought to be. He is someone who cares and cares deeply about the substance of policies, and he pursues politics for policy reasons, not for power reasons.”
“He’s living up to the legacy of his predecessors, particularly Parren Mitchell, who was a giant,” Hoyer said. Mitchell was the first African-American from Maryland elected to Congress and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He died last year.
The man Cummings succeeded, Kweisi Mfume, agrees: “He really listens to people, and he listens to them in genuine way.”
While sponsoring and passing legislation is important, “most of all you have to take care of the people you represent,” said Mfume, who resigned the seat to become president of the NAACP.
Mfume and Cummings both campaigned as surrogates for Obama in several states. “If he’s with you on a cause, then he’s with you,” Mfume said of Cummings.
Cummings is “very close to Obama,” Hoyer said. “I think if Obama is elected he may play a role in the administration,” though “he plays an important role now in the Congress.”
Cummings said he’s given little thought about what might happen Jan. 20 if Obama becomes president. Asked about whom he might appoint in the new administration, according to Cummings, Obama told the House Democratic caucus in July, “I’m not even talking about that. I’m taking this one day at a time.”
So is Cummings: “I’m so concerned about making sure he wins.”
Still, can a black man get elected president?
“There are some people who are not going to vote for a person of color,” Cummings said. “They’re just not going to do it.
“But you know what? There are a whole lot of people who will. And I think the people who will far outnumber the people who would not. And I think they’re growing every day. More and more, our society is becoming diverse.”
Half of congressional districts represented by members of the black caucus are majority white, Cummings pointed out. He does “very well” in the Howard County part of his district, where “only 15 percent are people of color,” he noted.
“America has said we don’t want to continue to living the way we’ve been living. We don’t want to continue with one group on one side of the street and one group on the other — talking about each other and not talking to each other.
“Because of Hillary and Barack, I’m dancing with the angels. No matter what happens now, the political landscape of this country will be forever changed. I’m glad I’ve had the chance to see this before I die, because I never dreamed that I would.”
The Cummings file
Name: Rep. Elijah Cummings
Age: 57 (born Jan. 18, 1951 in Baltimore, one of six children, to Ruth and Robert Cummings, former South Carolina sharecroppers
Education: Baltimore City College High School, 1969; B.S., Howard University (Phi Beta Kappa) 1973; J.D., University of Maryland School of Law, 1976.
Career: Lawyer in private practice; member of the Maryland House of Delegates, 1983-1996; first African-American to serve as speaker pro tempore; elected to represent the 7th Congressional District in a special election April 16, 1996 after Rep. Kweisi Mfume resigned.
District: Much of Baltimore City, western Baltimore County, most of Howard County.
Committees: Transportation and Infrastructure, chairs subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation; senior member of Oversight and Government Reform Committee; new member of Armed Services Committee.
Next week’s profile: Everett Alvarez, the honorary chair of Maryland’s Republican delegates who will announce the votes at the GOP convention.
