Senate Candidate Battles the Odds in Illinois : Politics: Carol Moseley Braun is black. She’s a woman. And she’s short of cash. But her run for office, born of the Thomas hearings, looks like a winner.

“You’ve never seen a senator look like me, right?”

When Carol Moseley Braun poses the question to the small church gathering in this Mississippi River town, she grins warmly. She knows the answer.

Nobody has ever seen a U.S. senator like Carol Braun. There have been women senators, although very few of them. There have been black senators, although only three of them, and only one since Reconstruction.

But there has never been a black female senator.

Carol Moseley Braun is black. She’s a woman. And she’s the favorite to win election from Illinois this November.

A year ago, she was merely Cook County’s recorder of deeds, an unknown. Then Braun watched Anita Hill testify that she had been sexually harassed by Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. She watched as senators belittled Hill’s charges and elevated Thomas to the nation’s highest court.

“I just said enough is enough,” Braun explained quietly while flying to a remote corner of Illinois. “These guys just don’t get it.”

Poorly financed--she raised just $500,000 for her primary campaign--she was discounted from the beginning. Her opponents were Alan Dixon, the incumbent senator who had never lost an election in 43 years in politics, and wealthy attorney Al Hofeld. Dixon spent more than $2 million and Hofeld $4 million.

She was a woman, she was black, and she had little money. She was doomed.

Fade to Madison Square Garden, New York City, July 13, 1992. The Democrats are showcasing their flock of women candidates for the U.S. Senate. There’s Lynn Yeakel of Pennsylvania. There’s Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California. There’s Jean Lloyd-Jones of Iowa.

And there, in the spotlight, is the woman whose startling victory signaled this surge of female nominees for the Senate.

“I believe that the dream of America lives when every girl or boy, no matter what race or color or condition, has the opportunity and the freedom to give their best to America,” said Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun.

Braun was born in Chicago, the daughter of Joseph and Edna Moseley. Her mother had been a hospital technician, her father a Chicago police officer. The family lived on the South Side, in a segregated, middle-class neighborhood, and the children were sent to parochial schools.

Carol was left largely responsible for her three younger siblings. Her mother had difficulty dealing with her fierce and abusive husband. Braun acknowledges that her father sometimes beat her.

“It’s not something pleasant to talk about,” she says.

She majored in political science at the University of Illinois and then got her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School.

Her political career started as a campaign worker for Harold Washington, the state representative who eventually would become Chicago’s first black mayor. She became an assistant U.S. attorney.

In 1979, she was elected as a state representative. Ultimately, she became assistant majority leader, Harold Washington’s floor leader in the Statehouse.

She was an eloquent spokeswoman for liberal social causes but “not what I would regard as a great legislative tactician,” said Sam Vinson, Republican minority leader during Braun’s Springfield tenure.

She returned to Chicago in 1988, when she was elected recorder of deeds. She lives there with her 14-year-old son, Matthew, in an expansive apartment near Lake Michigan in the South Shore neighborhood; her marriage to Michael Braun, a man she met in law school, ended in divorce in 1986.

She turns 45 on Aug. 16. Friends say she is a meticulous housekeeper, a gourmet cook, a woman who enjoys working with her hands and is not shy about “pulling on sweats and sneakers and refinishing a table,” said longtime friend Barbara Samuels.

She collects black memorabilia, hesitating in an antique store over an Aunt Jemima-style cookie jar before passing it up. She is a fan of all types of music. “She’ll turn on country and western and she actually knows the words,” Samuels said.

But this low-key lifestyle was turned upside down by her victory in the March 17 primary. Braun addressed the Democratic National Convention and the National Organization for Women’s annual meeting, and she has appeared on morning talk shows.

A year ago, she was unknown outside of Chicago. Now she is the subject of an upcoming Vogue magazine piece, and Essence magazine plans to put her on its cover this fall.

“I’ll be honest. I voted for you in March because you were a woman. I didn’t even know you were African-American,” an older black woman tells Braun at a small community meeting in Quincy.

“I hope you won’t hold that against me,” replies Braun, with a smile.

She need not worry about this voter. But political experts say there are plenty of others who will view her skin color as a reason to vote Republican.

While the Illinois Legislature and U.S. congressional delegation are controlled by Democrats, many party members defect rather than vote for blacks in high-profile races, veteran political analyst Don Rose said.

“If she loses 20% of the white Democratic vote, she loses the election,” Rose said.

“It’s a factor,” agreed political consultant David Axelrod, who worked for Hofeld. “I’d like to say that bias against minorities and women are a thing of the past in this state, but I think that’s unrealistic.”

Braun must also overcome a splintered Democratic Party. In the three-way primary, she won with just 38% of the vote.

“The biggest hurdle she had to overcome was to be nominated, and she’s done that,” said Jack van der Slik, director of the Illinois Legislative Studies Center at Sangamon State University. “The negative out of that is that about 62% of the Democratic voters did not prefer her. She’s got some work to do.”

Still, Axelrod gives her a good shot: “I think she’s in a very strong position. If you were betting, you’d bet on her.”

Braun’s opponent, Rich Williamson, 42, worked in the Reagan Administration and on President Bush’s 1988 campaign staff. But the Republican attorney is a political neophyte who had to be urged to enter the race.

Compared to the primary, Braun has a real bankroll. She has raised $2.17 million in the first half of this year, while Williamson has raised slightly more than $1 million, according to Federal Election Commission documents.

In early campaigning, Williamson has aired attack ads, painting Braun as an insider, a machine politician, liberal to the core.

Braun supports abortion rights and a national health care plan administered by individual states. She opposes capital punishment. She supports a personal income tax increase on the top 1% of wage-earners and $100-billion worth of cuts in defense spending--twice what Bush has called for.

She is, she says, liberal on social issues, conservative on economic ones.

But in her first year as a state representative, she voted with the Illinois Manufacturers’ Assn. just 12% of the time. In her final year, the Chamber of Commerce gave her a 40% rating on business issues.

She says Williamson’s description of her as an insider is laughable, noting that he once was President Reagan’s senior staff member in charge of intergovernmental affairs and served as senior adviser to the 1988 Bush campaign.

To date, her worst problems have come not from Williamson but from her own campaign. Four campaign workers, including her finance director and two longtime friends, have quit in recent weeks. Several others, including her press secretary, abandoned ship during the primary.

Those who quit say campaign manager Ksogie Matthews--a South African whose father and grandfather were active in the African National Congress and whose own campaign experience came with the Rev. Jesse Jackson--is smart but autocratic.

Matthews also has alienated some fund-raisers. Jane Danowitz, executive director of the Women’s Campaign Fund in Washington, D.C., says he hung up on her when she asked why Braun was dropping a scheduled appearance at the fund-raiser’s biggest event.

“I hasten to add that we’ve kissed and made up,” Danowitz said.

Matthews retains Braun’s full support, says spokesman David Eichenbaum.

“This is a campaign,” Eichenbaum said. “This happens all the time. People come and people go.”

Braun goes and goes. She is a tireless candidate, speaking eloquently 13 hours and 11 campaign appearances into a recent downstate swing.

Her campaign style is soft-spoken. She smiles frequently but makes her points forcefully. Her message is consistent before well-heeled white attorneys and small-town black day-care center operators: Washington is out of touch; this country needs change; she can help make it happen.

“To the extent that I can be a special voice for women, a special voice for minorities, I hope to do that,” she tells one radio reporter.

To one audience, she describes a childhood trip to the Jim Crow South. Her brother wanted to drink from a fountain marked “Colored Water.”

“He was waiting for a rainbow to come out,” said Braun. “Me, I have never been satisfied with colored water.”