OBAMANATION CHRONICLES

Cover of New Yorker Magazine (July 21, 2008):
Obama's aides were angered by the cartoon, which showed the presidential candidate and his wife, Michelle, in a "terrorist" fist-bumping gesture. The magazine said it was intended as a satire of right-wing rumours against Obama. However, immediately following the release of the article, the New Yorker's Washington correspondent was denied a press place on Barack Obama's tour of the Middle East and Europe after the magazine depicted the presidential candidate as a terrorist on its cover. The article's author, Ryan Lizza, would have expected to secure one of the 40 press places on Obama's tour but was told no space was available. (Source: Guardian (UK).)

The following is parts of a long 15-page article on Obama. Because of the cover of the New Yorker on 21 Jul 2008 that accompanied the article, the New Yorker reporter, Ryan Lizza, was denied a seat on the plane on Obama's visit to the Middle East and Iraq. The article was not complimentary -- and luckily not many COMMON FOLK read the words. The mainstream media ignored the words -- and the word was out that if you wrote an uncomplimentary article -- no matter how influential your magazine was -- you'd end up on the outs.

Making It -- How Chicago shaped Obama.

by Ryan Lizza July 21, 2008

One day in 1995, Barack Obama went to see his alderman, an influential politician named Toni Preckwinkle, on Chicago's South Side, where politics had been upended by scandal. Mel Reynolds, a local congressman, was facing charges of sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer. (He eventually resigned his seat.) The looming vacancy set off a fury of ambition and hustle; several politicians, including a state senator named Alice Palmer, an education expert of modest political skills, prepared to enter the congressional race. Palmer represented Hyde Park—Obama's neighborhood, a racially integrated, liberal sanctuary—and, if she ran for Congress, she would need a replacement in Springfield, the state capital. Obama at the time was a thirty-three-year-old lawyer, university lecturer, and aspiring office-seeker, and the Palmer seat was what he had in mind when he visited Alderman Preckwinkle.

"Barack came to me and said, 'If Alice decides she wants to run, I want to run for her State Senate seat,' " Preckwinkle told me. We were in her district office, above a bank on a street of check-cashing shops and vacant lots north of Hyde Park. Preckwinkle soon became an Obama loyalist, and she stuck with him in a State Senate campaign that strained or ruptured many friendships but was ultimately successful. Four years later, in 2000, she backed Obama in a doomed congressional campaign against a local icon, the former Black Panther Bobby Rush. And in 2004 Preckwinkle supported Obama during his improbable, successful run for the United States Senate. So it was startling to learn that Toni Preckwinkle had become disenchanted with Barack Obama.

Preckwinkle is a tall, commanding woman with a clipped gray Afro. She has represented her slice of the South Side for seventeen years and expresses no interest in higher office. On Chicago's City Council, she is often a dissenter against the wishes of Mayor Richard M. Daley. For anyone trying to understand Obama's breathtakingly rapid political ascent, Preckwinkle is an indispensable witness—a close observer, friend, and confidante during a period of Obama's life to which he rarely calls attention. (SEE Toni Reed Preckwinkle.)

Although many of Obama's recent supporters have been surprised by signs of political opportunism, Preckwinkle wasn't. "I think he was very strategic in his choice of friends and mentors," she told me. "I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman. I finally got elected. This is a job I love. And I'm perfectly happy with it. I'm not sure that's the way that he approached his public life—that he was going to try for a job and stay there for one period of time. In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have."

On issue after issue, Preckwinkle presented Obama as someone who thrived in the world of Chicago politics. She suggested that Obama joined Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ for political reasons. "It's a church that would provide you with lots of social connections and prominent parishioners," she said. "It's a good place for a politician to be a member." Preckwinkle was unsparing on the subject of the Chicago real-estate developer Antoin (Tony) Rezko, a friend of Obama's and one of his top fund-raisers, who was recently convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering: "Who you take money from is a reflection of your knowledge at the time and your principles." As we talked, it became increasingly clear that loyalty was the issue that drove Preckwinkle's current view of her onetime protégé. "I don't think you should forget who your friends are," she said.

(SITE NOTE: After Obama's election, the pieces seem to fit into place. But then one asks, did he attend Wright's United Trinity Church because of his CHRISTIAN BELIEFS -- or political beliefs as Preckwinkle asserts. In this New Yorker article, it states that Obama started working with churches in the community and changed from an agnostic to a practicing Christian. This has been a hotly contested argument with many fanatical conservatives claiming that Obama is a Muslim -- and state that the Rev Wright's "roots" are in the Nation of Islam. The claims are unfounded. However, his firebrand preaching style condemns the US for holding black people in an oppressed state -- preaching dissention and race hatred. The principles of the church view blacks in America as Africans in diaspora and espousing "black" empowerment (a reverse discrimination issue). (Source: Trinity United Church Website.) Obama joined the church in 1992 and was married in the church. This was before he entered politics in the state Senate in 1996. If Obama was attending the church for the past twenty years for political reasons and a feeling of his roots to Africa, then we can understand his attendance. If the church changed him from an agnostic to a "practicing Christian," we can understand his faith. If he holds to the stated "vision" of the United Trinity Church -- as espoused on their website -- in his beliefs, then one must have serious concerns for the fate of America.

Oprah Winfrey also used to attend the church, but left in the 1980s. For any spiritually minded, up-wardly mobile African-American living in Chicago in the mid-1980s, the Trinity United Church of Christ was—and still is—the place to be. That's what drew Oprah Winfrey, a recent Chicago transplant, to the church in 1984. She was eager to bond with the movers and shakers in her new hometown's black community. But she also admired Trinity United's ambitious outreach work with the poor, and she took pride in upholding her Southern grandmother's legacy of involvement with traditional African-American houses of worship. Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright's more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America's favorite daytime talk-show host. "Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost," said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey's personal sentiments. "She's always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn't be smart. She's been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright's anger-filled message didn't surprise her. But it just wasn't what she was looking for in a church." Oprah's decision to distance herself came as a surprise to Wright, who told Christianity Today in 2002 that when he would "run into her socially … she would say, 'Here's my pastor!' " (Source: Newsweek (May 2008).) (SEE Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, Jr..)

Others told me that Preckwinkle's grievances against Obama included specific complaints, such as his refusal to endorse a former aide and longtime friend, Will Burns, in a State Senate primary—a contest that Burns won anyway. There was also a more general belief that, after Obama won the 2004 United States Senate primary, he ignored his South Side base. Preckwinkle said, "My view is you have to bring your constituency along with you. Granted, you have to make some tough decisions. Granted, sometimes you have to make decisions that people won't understand or like. But it's your obligation to explain yourself and try to do your supporters the courtesy of treating them with respect." Ivory Mitchell, who for twenty years has been the chairman of the local ward organization in Obama's neighborhood—considered the most important Democratic organization on the South Side—was one of Obama's earliest backers. Today, he says, "All the work we did to help him get where he finally ended up, he didn't seem too appreciative." A year ago, Mitchell became a delegate for Hillary Clinton.

The same month Mitchell endorsed Clinton, the Obama campaign reached out to Preckwinkle, and eventually she signed on as an Obama delegate. I asked her if what she considered slights or betrayals were simply the necessary accommodations and maneuvering of a politician making a lightning transition from Hyde Park legislator to Presidential nominee. "Can you get where he is and maintain your personal integrity?" she said. "Is that the question?" She stared at me and grimaced. "I'm going to pass on that."

"WHO SENT YOU?"

Obama likes to discuss his unusual childhood—his abandonment by his father and his upbringing by a sometimes single mother and his grandparents in Indonesia and Hawaii—and the three years in the nineteen-eighties when he worked as a community organizer in Chicago, periods of his life chronicled at length in his first memoir, "Dreams from My Father." He occasionally refers to his time in the United States Senate, which he wrote about in his second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope." But his life in Chicago from 1991 until his victorious Senate campaign is a lacuna in his autobiography. It is also the period that formed him as a politician. Some Obama supporters professed shock when, recently, he abandoned a pledge to stay within the public campaign-finance system if the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, agreed to do the same. Preckwinkle's concern about Obama—that he is a pure political animal—suddenly became more widespread; commentators abruptly stopped using the words "callow" and "naïve."

(SITE NOTE: This move proved to be a smart move as he swiftly built up a $350 million war chest that allowed him to target key states with advertising and set up an impressive organization. Though McCain harped on his reneging on his promise, the liberal mainstream media called it an astute move. However, there remains the question as to how much of the donations were illegal. It was repeatedly pointed out that ANYONE could donate using false addresses -- and even his illegal alien half-aunt Zeituni donated to the fund. Democrats allege that much of the funds were from overseas -- but it has not been substantiated.)

Chicago is not Obama's home town, but it's where he chose to forge his identity. Several weeks ago, he moved many of the Democratic National Committee's operations from Washington to Chicago, making the city the unofficial capital of the Democratic Party; his campaign headquarters are in an office building in the Loop, Chicago's downtown business district. But Chicago, with its reputation as a center of vicious and corrupt politics, may also be the place that Obama needs to leave behind.

Simply moving there, as he did after graduating from Harvard Law School, was a bold decision. Chicago, where the late mayor Richard J. Daley and his son, the current mayor, have governed for forty out of the past fifty-three years, is not hospitable to political carpetbaggers. Abner Mikva, who was a congressman from Hyde Park and later the chief judge on the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court, was one of the first Chicago politicians to successfully challenge the Daley machine, and it took him years to overcome people's skepticism about his Wisconsin roots. Mikva, who is now eighty-two, tried to recruit Obama to work for him in Washington as a law clerk. Obama turned him down, replying that he was returning to Chicago to run for office. "I thought, Boy, does he got something to learn," Mikva told me recently. "You just don't come to Chicago and plant your flag."

(SITE NOTE: Abner Mikva spent ten years in the Illinois House of Representatives before serving in the U.S. Congress from 1969 to 1973 and 1975 to 1979. On May 29, 1979, Mikva was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Despite opposition from anti-gun control interests, Mikva was confirmed by a 58-31 vote of the United States Senate on September 25, 1979. He subsequently resigned his congressional seat (Porter succeeded Mikva after a special election.). Mikva served on the D.C. Circuit from 1979 until his retirement in 1994. (Source: Wikipedia.)

In 1990, Obama came to the attention of Abner Mikva, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who offered him a clerkship, but Obama turned it down. A Chicago lawyer, Mikva had been a liberal Congressman who opposed the Daley machine, fought with the National Rifle Association over gun control and against racial discrimination. Later, he served briefly as chief counsel to Bill Clinton in the White House. Mikva encouraged Obama in 2000 after he lost a primary and considered quitting politics. Four years later, when he was running for the Senate, Mikva "gave him more money than I've ever given anyone in my life." (Source: AJ Liebling Blog.))

I met Mikva at the Cliff Dwellers, a private dining club atop a downtown office building. As we looked out over Lake Michigan, he told me a story that has often been repeated by others to capture the essence of politics in the city. "When I first came to Chicago, Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas were running for governor and senator," he said. "I had heard about the closed Party, closed machine, but they sounded like such great candidates, so I stopped in to volunteer in the Eighth Ward Regular Democratic headquarters. I said, 'I'm here for Douglas and Stevenson.' The ward boss came in and pulled the cigar out of his mouth and said, 'Who sent you?' And I said, 'Nobody sent me.' He put the cigar back in his mouth and said, 'We don't want nobody nobody sent.' "

There was another tradition in Chicago politics, the so-called Independents, which grew up in opposition to Richard J. Daley—Boss Daley—whose reign lasted from 1955 to 1976. Anchored in Hyde Park and nurtured by the University of Chicago community, the Independents brought together African-Americans and white liberals in coalitions that became the city's main alternative to the Democratic machine. The Independents arose after the Second World War to challenge the closed patronage system that controlled the city, and became a serious political force in the mid-nineteen-fifties. Their numbers increased with a new wave of black activists energized by Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s Chicago organizing in 1966, and with white liberals outraged when antiwar protesters were beaten and teargassed by Chicago police during the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

Mayor Daley died in office in 1976, at the age of seventy-four. He was replaced by a reliable and ineffectual machine candidate, Michael Bilandic, whose appointment marked the beginning of twelve years of chaotic, balkanized politics, sometimes called the "inter-Daley period." David Axelrod, who has been Obama's chief strategist since 2002 and is the foremost political consultant in Chicago, was a witness to all of it, first as a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and later as the chief consultant to two mayors: Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor and a hero of the Independents, and the current Mayor Daley, whose last name still carries negative connotations in the precincts of Hyde Park. Axelrod, who is fifty-three, is by nature subdued. He wears a mustache that curls down the sides of his upper lip in a permanent expression of melancholy. We met in a Houlihan's, off the lobby of the building that houses the Obama campaign headquarters. (SEE David Axelrod.)

Axelrod recalled the election, in 1979, of Jane Byrne, Chicago's first female mayor, which he wrote about for the Tribune. Byrne's campaign, assisted by snowstorms that shut down the city and showcased Bilandic's incompetence, was the first successful insurgency in modern Chicago history. "It was a great reform campaign," Axelrod said. "I then chronicled, for the next four years, her systematic abrogation of every commitment she had made to reform. She became sort of a parody of a machine mayor." In office, Byrne aligned herself with City Council officials who were hostile to the city's black leadership, pandered to the voters of the most racist wards of the city, and purged African-Americans from key positions. On the South Side, there was a backlash; Washington, who had run a spirited campaign for mayor in 1977, was elected to Congress in 1980. In 1983, he was essentially drafted by a Hyde Park-based coalition desperate to unseat the disappointing Byrne. Washington won a three-way primary, with thirty-six per cent of the vote, and went on in the general election to defeat a white Republican who ran, briefly, on the implicitly racist slogan "Before it's too late." Washington's first term was dominated by warfare with a City Council controlled by white aldermen determined to stymie every proposal. But in 1986 he took control of the council and the following year was reëlected. Seven months after his victory, he collapsed at his desk, dead of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five. Axelrod saw much of this history from the inside, as Washington's strategist; Obama saw it from the perspective of an organizer who occasionally had brushes with the powerful at political events or meetings at City Hall. "He saw the jagged edges of Chicago politics and urban politics pretty close up," Axelrod said.

Obama spent three years in the city, from 1985, after he graduated from Columbia University, to the end of the Washington era. As a community organizer, he tried to turn a partnership of churches into a political force on the South Side. But the work accomplished very little.

"When I started organizing, I understood the idea of social change in a very abstract way," Obama told me last year. "It was to some extent informed by my years in Indonesia, seeing extreme poverty and disparities of wealth and understanding sort of in a dim way that life wasn't fair and government had something to do with it. I understood the role that issues like race played and took inspiration from the civil-rights movement and what the student sit-ins had accomplished and the freedom rides.

"But I didn't come out of a political family, didn't have a history of activism in my family. So I understood these things in the abstract. When I went to Chicago, it was the first time that I had the opportunity to test out my ideas. And for the most part I would say I wasn't wildly successful. The victories that we achieved were extraordinarily modest: you know, getting a job-training site set up or getting an after-school program for young people put in place."

CONSTRUCTING A NETWORK

In 1988, Obama left for Harvard Law School, returning to Chicago twice for summer stints at élite law firms, including, after his first year, Sidley Austin. (Sidley Austin is where he met Michelle Robinson, whom he married in 1992.) He returned to Chicago permanently when he graduated, in 1991. In a short period, he built a notable résumé and a network of connections. During the 1992 Presidential campaign, he ran a voter-registration drive that placed him at the center of the city's politics. That year, Illinois elected the first African-American woman to the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun, and Bill Clinton became the first Democratic Presidential candidate to carry Illinois since Lyndon Johnson, in 1964. Meanwhile, Obama practiced civil-rights law at a firm admired in the city's progressive circles, and became a popular lecturer in the law school at the University of Chicago. He was on the board of two liberal foundations that spread grant money around Chicago, and he settled in Hyde Park.

It was a neighborhood in transition when Obama arrived. The Hyde Park Herald serves as a sort of time capsule. It reported that crime was rising; a series of violent robberies was another reminder that Hyde Park existed as a middle-class island in a sea of high-crime urban poverty. New data showed that white enrollment was steeply declining at one local school. During the Martin Luther King, Jr., celebrations, the newspaper noted in passing that Jeremiah Wright was scheduled to give a speech at the University of Chicago. Considerable coverage was given to two institutions: the local food co-op, where Obama shopped every Saturday, and the Independent Voters of Illinois–Independent Precinct Organization, or I.V.I.-I.P.O., one of the neighborhood's most influential political groups. There was a new political force in Hyde Park as well. Real-estate developers were swooping in to rehabilitate low-income housing. On more than one occasion, the Hyde Park Herald reported on the rise in campaign donations from these developers to South Side politicians; in 1995, it ran a front-page article about Tony Rezko, who was then a very active new donor on the scene.

While it's true that nobody sent Obama in the sense that Abner Mikva meant it, one of Obama's underappreciated assets, as he looked for a political race in the early nineties, was the web of connections that he had established. "He understands how you network," Mikva said. "I remember our first few meetings. He would say, 'Do you know So-and-So?' And I'd say yes. 'How well do you know him? I'd really like to meet him.' I would set up some lunches."

The 1992 voter-registration drive, Project Vote, introduced him to much of the city's black leadership. "If you want to look at the means of ascent, if you will, look at Project Vote," Will Burns, the former Obama aide, said. In Chicago progressive circles, Burns, who is thirty-four, is described as an up-and-coming African-American legislator in the Obama tradition. Obama's refusal to endorse Burns in his primary earlier this year infuriated and mystified a number of Chicago Democrats, though Burns himself displays no bitterness and is now an adviser to the Obama campaign. (SITE NOTE: This aspect of Obama using people as stepping stones to further his career never was highlighted by the McCain campaign. They should have and perhaps the American people would have seen Obama in a different light. But now that Obama's in the highest office, he can feel secure. But is he? Paybacks are hell -- and it looks like he left quite a few stepped on toes along the way.)

At Project Vote, Burns said, Obama "was making connections at the grassroots level and was working with elected officials. That's when he first got a scan of the broader black political infrastructure." It was also the beginning of a dynamic that stood out in Obama's early career: his uneasy relationship with an older generation of black Chicago politicians. Project Vote "is where a lot of the divisional rivalries popped up," Burns said.

In this early foray into politics, Obama revealed the toughness and brashness that this year's long primary season brought into view. As Burns, who has a mischievous sense of humor and a gift for mimicry, recalled, "Black activists, community folks, felt that he didn't respect their role"—Burns imitated a self-righteous activist—"in the struggle and the movement. He didn't engage in obeisance to them. He wanted to get the job done. And Barack's cheap, too. If you can't do it and do it in a cost-effective manner, you're not going to work with him." Ivory Mitchell, the ward chairman in Obama's neighborhood, says of Obama that "he was typical of what most aspiring politicians are: self-centered—that 'I can do anything and I'm willing to do it overnight.' "

(SITE NOTE: Obama learned early in his political career that advertising costs money. If you have enough, you can win any campaign. Thus he became a master at this game. Fundraising from the elite -- while getting small amounts from the masses. Organizing the contributions so that he had a $650 million war chest. He got to be a master politician by ensuring he had the funding for a campaign -- and he saw to it himself. He looks for cost-effective results.

Radio Interview: Judge Abner Mikva Examines Obama's Leadership -- Excellent summarization of Obama's skill in selecting key personnel and operating a Presidential campaign

But there are accusations of Obama being CHEAP in the most derogatory of ways. He has used his Kenyan family to talk of his "roots" so it was interesting that his step-grandmother Sarah Onyango Obama -- who visited him in 2004 for his Senate swearing in -- did not tell Obama of her children in Boston who were being deported in 2004. Obama claimed ignorance of her presence. His half-aunt Zeituni was living in poverty in Boston and he did nothing to help. His half-uncle Omar couldn't pay the rent and had to disappear leaving his unpaid rent bill behind. But the point that may not be seen here is a true politician with shark teeth. He reveals himself here -- he praises everyone for helping and working TOGETHER -- inspiring his "YES, WE CAN" campaign -- but beneath his is simply working the crowd to get what he wants.)

During Project Vote, Obama also began to understand the larger world of Chicago's liberal fund-raisers. "He met people not just in the African-American community but in the progressive white community," David Axelrod said. "The folks who funded Project Vote were some of the key progressive leaders." Obama met Axelrod through one of Project Vote's supporters, Bettylu Saltzman, whose father, Philip M. Klutznick, was a Chicago shopping-mall tycoon, a part owner of the Bulls, and a former Commerce Secretary in the Carter Administration. Saltzman, a soft-spoken activist who worked for Senators Adlai E. Stevenson III and Paul Simon, took an immediate interest in Obama. "I honestly don't remember what it was about him, but I was absolutely blown away," Saltzman says. "I said to several people that this guy, who is now thirty years old, is someday going to be President. He will be our first black President."

(SITE NOTE: This is something no one can deny. Obama is eloquent and he has charisma. However, as I've said so many times before, it doesn't impress me any more -- especially after Bill Clinton, a speaker who you cannot help but like because of his speaking skills and charisma. He made a mess of the Oval Office and someday history will reveal how much damage he actually did to the country -- not simply from his sexual escapades. Obama is cut from his mold. Clinton was campaigning for Obama -- and none of his past indiscretions ever stuck to him.)

Obama's legal career helped bring him into Chicago's liberal reform community. In 1993, after he finished his work with Project Vote and was seeking to join a law firm, instead of returning to Sidley Austin he took a job at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a boutique civil-rights firm led by Harold Washington's former counsel, Judson Miner. Miner had perfect anti-Daley credentials, routinely filing lawsuits against the city, and was a founding member of the Chicago Council of Lawyers, which was to Chicago's legal élite what the Independents were to the Democratic machine.

Working at Davis, Miner enhanced Obama's profile. "When you go work for Judd Miner's law firm, that's another kind of political statement," Don Rose, a longtime Chicago political consultant, who ran Jane Byrne's campaign, told me. Will Burns said, "I think it might have been helpful with a certain group of people that Barack may have wanted to have at his back at the outset. So you get the support of the liberals and the progressives and the reformers, and then that gives you a base to then expand to pick up other folks. And then folks would be willing to give money to the bright, shiny new candidate." Joining Miner's firm, like living in Hyde Park, was a way of choosing sides in the city's long-running political battle between the machine and the Independents. Toni Preckwinkle explained Miner's legal work this way: "They've shown a remarkable willingness to take on the Democratic organization and the Democratic establishment in this city and win. Which is why I like them and a lot of people hate them."

If Project Vote and Miner's firm introduced Obama to the city's lakefront liberals and South Side politicians, it was his wife who helped connect him to Chicago's black élite. One of Michelle's best friends was Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita, who became the godmother of the Obamas' first child. Michelle had worked as an aide to the younger Daley—hired by Valerie Jarrett, who is now one of Obama's closest advisers. (Jarrett, an African-American, was born in Iran, where her father, a doctor, helped run a hospital; she and Obama formed a bond over their unusual biographies.) It was also through Michelle that Obama met Marty Nesbitt, a successful young black entrepreneur who happened to play basketball with Michelle's brother, Craig. (Nesbitt's wife, Anita Blanchard, an obstetrician, delivered the Obamas' two daughters.) Nesbitt became Obama's closest friend and a bridge to the city's African-American business class. (SEE CHICAGO BLACK ELITE AND POWER BROKERS: Michelle Obama; Craig Robinson; Valerie Jarret; Martin Nesbitt; Eric Whitaker; Penny Pritzker; John Rodgers; Jim Crown -- The Obama Team.)

Obama seems to have been meticulous about constructing a political identity for himself. He visited churches on the South Side, considered the politics and reputations of each one, and received advice from older pastors. Before deciding on Trinity United Church of Christ, he asked the Reverend Wright about critics who complained that the church was too "upwardly mobile," a place for buppies. Though he admired Judson Miner, he was similarly cautious about joining his law firm. Miner once told me that it took "a series of lunches" and hours of discussion before Obama made his decision. At the time, Obama was working on "Dreams from My Father."

(SITE NOTE: We can see how Obama was working steadily to establish his credentials. Just as Al Gore wrote his book on Global Warming long before he became Vice-President and ran for President. It would later lead to his receiving a Nobel Prize. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by Barack Obama. It was first published in 1995 after Obama was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, but before his political career began. As well as relating the story of Obama's life, the book includes a good deal of reflection on his own personal experiences with race and race relations in the United States. Obama's Dreams from My Father established his BLACK credentials -- credentials he would later use in representing the African-American community of the Hyde Park area.

However, the reality is that he's an archetypal example of an "oreo cookie" -- black on the outside, white on the inside. He was not raised as a black, never educated in black schools, never felt poverty in the projects, and never really associated with the black community until Chicago. He was never part of the black experience growing up -- and only became "black" when he came to Chicago. Before that he was Barry Durnham, Barry Soetoro, and Barry Obama. Even in his highschool years in Hawaii, he associated with the "white" parts of society -- graduating from Punahou, the "haole rich man's" school. In Chicage early on in his political career, blacks saw through him in his run for public office -- but as he moved to higher political offices representing a larger, more diverse constituency, the black issue became more subdued. It was a person choice -- and a political ploy -- to become "black." It paid off by passing himself off as an African-American -- in truth, something he's only been practicing for about 25 years.)

Debate over whether to call this son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan biracial, African-American, mixed-race, half-and-half, multiracial _ or, in Obama's own words, a "mutt" _ has reached a crescendo since Obama's election shattered assumptions about race. Obama has said, "I identify as African-American _ that's how I'm treated and that's how I'm viewed. I'm proud of it." In other words, the world gave Obama no choice but to be black, and he was happy to oblige.

But the world has changed since the young Obama found his place in it. Intermarriage and the decline of racism are dissolving ancient definitions. The candidate Obama, in achieving what many thought impossible, was treated differently from previous black generations. And many white and mixed-race people now view President-elect Obama as something other than black.

... "Let's not forget that he is not only the first African-American president, but the first biracial candidate. He was raised by a single white mother," a Fox News commentator said seven minutes after Obama was declared the winner. "We do not have our first black president," the author Christopher Hitchens said on the BBC program "Newsnight." "He is not black. He is as black as he is white." A Doonesbury comic strip that ran the day after the election showed several soldiers celebrating. "He's half-white, you know," says a white soldier. "You must be so proud," responds another. Pride is the center of racial identity, and some white people seem insulted by a perception that Obama is rejecting his white mother (even though her family was a centerpiece of his campaign image-making) or baffled by the notion that someone would choose to be black instead of half-white. ... (Source: Huffington Post.)

Although Black Americans are supporting Obama overwhelmingly, Obama has never promised anything to them. He distanced himself from the pain of the sons and daughters of former slaves, because he is not one of them. Ted Hayes says that Obama NEVER promised blacks anything. Blacks voted for Obama because they saw him as "black" -- but Obama owes American "blacks" nothing. Though 95 percent turned out to vote for him, Ted Hayes says to listen to his campaign rhetoric closely. He spoke to the Hispanics with promises, but made none to "blacks." Ted Hayes states he is NOT "black" -- though he is "African-American" by definition. He will fill the positions with black faces -- but be aware that it is being done for political reasons, not any deep-seated commitment to black America. (SITE NOTE: Ted Hayes, California activist, ran in 2008 as a Republican for the House of Representatives. He lost with 13 percent of the vote, but his voice was heard on the issues. A totemic figure in L.A., Mr. Hayes has long emphasized problem-solving and individual responsibility.)

(1). Ted Hayes voices objection of Obama being a "black"
-- though he is an "African-American".

(2). Ted Hayes says Obama owes "blacks" nothing
-- as he promised nothing to blacks.

(3). Obama will bring the end of America -- black & white are intertwined,
but Obama will cause the American dream to die.

Many have said that part of the appeal of "Dreams" is its honesty, pointing out that it was written at a time when Obama had no idea that he would run for office. In fact, Obama had been talking about a political career for years, musing about becoming mayor or governor. According to a recent biography of Obama by the Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, he even told his future brother-in-law, Craig Robinson, that he might run for President one day. (Robinson teased him, saying, "Yeah, yeah, okay, come over and meet my Aunt Gracie—and don't tell anybody that!") Obama was writing "Dreams" at the moment that he was preparing for a life in politics, and he launched his book and his first political campaign simultaneously, in the summer of 1995, when he saw his first chance of winning.

Many people who knew Obama then remember him for his cockiness. He had good reason to be self-assured. A number of his accomplishments had been accompanied by adoring press coverage. When he was named president of the Harvard Law Review, in 1990, he was profiled by, among others, the Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, and the Associated Press. Even then, the essential elements of Obama-mania were present: the fascination with his early life, the adulatory quotes from friends who thought that he would be President one day, and Obama's frank, though sometimes ostentatious, capacity for self-reflection. ("To some extent, I'm a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been made," he told the Boston Globe in 1990.)

His work for Project Vote was similarly applauded. In 1993, Crain's Chicago Business reported that Obama had "galvanized Chicago's political community, as no seasoned politico had before," and an alderman told Crain's, "Under Barack's leadership, we had the most successful, cost-effective and orderly voter registration drive I've ever been involved with." When "Dreams from My Father" was published, the reviews were overwhelmingly positive; Booklist included the memoir in a "guide to some of the best books of 1995."

Obama knew that Hyde Park, despite its reputation as the center of anti-machine progressives, was not exempt from other Chicago political traditions. During the first half of 1995, when he was preparing for his campaign for the State Senate, a big story in the neighborhood was a race for alderman marked by accusations of dirty tricks (endorsement flyers from a phony group of gay African-Americans were distributed the day before the election, apparently in an effort to stoke homophobia) and anti-Semitism (the campaign of one of the candidates was accused of being run by "Jewish overseers").

THE SOUTH SIDE CHOOSES

Obama's campaign began without much excitement. He had ties to so many of the city's élite factions that the local press described him as "a well-connected attorney." In August, the Chicago Sun-Times noted that Valerie Jarrett was hosting "a private autograph party" for Obama. His memoir was turning him into a figure of some acclaim. The same month, the Hyde Park Herald, which later called the book "a local indie hit," ran a flattering profile that highlighted a theme from "Dreams": how Chicago helped Obama end a long journey of self-discovery, a narrative that helped defuse any notion that Obama was a carpetbagger. "I came home in Chicago," he told the newspaper. "I began to see my identity and my individual struggles were one with the struggles that folks face in Chicago."

A month later, on September 19th, Obama invited some two hundred supporters to a lakefront Ramada Inn to announce his candidacy for the State Senate, and some of what he said sounded very much like the Obama of recent months. "Politicians are not held to highest esteem these days," he told the crowd. "They fall somewhere lower than lawyers. . . . I want to inspire a renewal of morality in politics. I will work as hard as I can, as long as I can, on your behalf." Alice Palmer introduced Obama, and an account in the Hyde Park Herald quoted more from her speech than from his; it was, after all, chiefly her endorsement that certified him as a plausible candidate. "In this room, Harold Washington announced for mayor," Palmer said. "Barack Obama carries on the tradition of independence in this district. . . . His candidacy is a passing of the torch."

Also in attendance that day were Toni Preckwinkle and Will Burns, who was then a recent University of Chicago graduate. (He went on to get a master's in social sciences; Obama helped persuade him to leave the university before he got a Ph.D., telling him, "You shouldn't be too academic.") Obama's talk of a "renewal of morality in politics," which previewed themes that emerged in this year's campaign, also tapped into a desire for generational change—similarly consistent with his current rhetoric. He was able to capture the imagination of some young African-Americans frustrated by their local leadership. Burns said, "You have to understand, it's 1995. It's the year after the Republicans have taken over control of Congress, and in Illinois all three branches of government were also controlled by the Republicans. So it was a really dark point. I was looking to be engaged in something that would mean something, that would actually get something done and that was beyond symbols. Around the same time that I started up with Barack, volunteering on his campaign, I had gone to some of the old community groups and nationalist organizations. I respected what they had done, but I didn't feel like that was really where I wanted to be."

However, the campaign was no insurgency. Obama abided by the local way of doing things. He had lined up support from Preckwinkle, his alderman, and Ivory Mitchell, the local ward chairman, and Palmer's endorsement brought with it two organizational assets: local operators and local activists. The operators helped Obama get on the ballot and handled the mechanics of his election. Two key operators were Alan Dobry and his wife, Lois Friedberg-Dobry, then in their late sixties and leaders of the Independent movement. "When you go to a political meeting, and you see a couple of guys or girls at the back of the room, and they aren't glad-handing or anything, those are the operators," Alan Dobry told me recently. There was a machinelike quality to the way the campaign unfolded. Palmer's endorsement was the only signal that the Dobrys needed to start the slow, detailed organizing necessary to win a State Senate seat for Obama, whom they had never met, though they lived in his neighborhood.

(SITE NOTE: We see that early on Obama had a genius for organizing -- finding the right people to do the work. He used others to get his work done -- but it was his selection of the key people that made him successful. But support doesn't last forever.

He has been criticized by Clinton for responses to a voters' group questionnaire during his first Illinois state Senate run in 1996. In the survey, his answers said he supported federal single-payer health care in principle and a ban on handguns. He opposed capital punishment and restrictions on abortion. Obama has said his then-campaign manager wrote the answers and they didn't reflect his beliefs then or now. Lois and Alan Dobry, board members of the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization, interviewed Obama when he submitted the questionnaire. It is inconceivable, they said, that he was unaware of the answers, which he defended. ``He was unequivocal,'' Alan Dobry said. (Source: BarackObama.com.))

Palmer's imprimatur was also helpful with a small group of Hyde Park activists, some of whom she asked to hold fund-raising coffees for Obama. At her suggestion, Sam and Martha Ackerman, who were leaders of Independent Voters of Illinois, hosted a coffee at their home. Unlike the Dobrys, they insisted on a meeting with Obama before backing him, and their support was important enough for him to spend an hour with them in their dining room, submitting to an interview. Their reaction to him was a common one. "I don't think he said he wanted to run for President, but he indicated that he was into public service for the long haul," Martha Ackerman told me. "I remember very clearly I said to Sam, 'If this guy is for real, he could be the first African-American President of the United States.' "

(SITE NOTE: He was impressing the right people. He was impressing the rich backers over lunch and young African-Americans disillusioned with local politicians. This is where he started refining his vision of "renewal of morality in politics." He was able to capture the imagination of some young African-Americans frustrated by their local leadership. This is where he started developing his vision of "change" that has captured the imagination of the youth voters.

But hard feelings still remain. Obama had learned how to play political hardball -- and had made an enemy. In the 2008 Presidential campaign, black activist Alice Palmer was campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Indiana. (Source: LA Times.))

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, another activist Hyde Park couple, also held an event for Obama. Forty years ago, Ayers and Dohrn were leaders of the Weathermen, the militant anti-war group that bombed the Pentagon and the United States Capitol. By the time Obama met Ayers, the former radical and onetime fugitive had been accepted into polite Chicago society and had been reborn as an education expert, eventually working as an informal adviser to Mayor Daley. (Those ties remain intact in the jumbled culture of Chicago politics. When Obama's association with Ayers first became a campaign issue, Daley, whose father, in 1968, sent his police force into the streets to combat Ayers's fellow-radicals, issued a statement praising Ayers as "a valued member of the Chicago community.")

Obama seemed sure enough that he would win the State Senate primary, to be held in March, 1996—in Chicago, winning the primary is tantamount to winning the seat—to take time, late that summer, for a brief book tour, which started in Hyde Park and carried him as far as California. In October, he was one of the thousands of African-Americans from Chicago who travelled to Washington for the Million Man March. (Obama criticized the march, telling a local alternative newspaper that it was a waste of energy.) When he returned home, he had more immediate problems. In December, 1995, the South Side coalition that he had cobbled together began to fall apart. Palmer's congressional campaign was eclipsed by her Democratic-primary opponents—Jesse Jackson, Jr., who had star power, and Emil Jones, a longtime leader in the State Senate. Several weeks before the primary, a group of her supporters—mostly older black activists, not unlike those Obama had tangled with when he was running Project Vote—realized that Palmer was destined for defeat and summoned him to a meeting. The Chicago Defender reported that Obama was asked "to step aside like other African Americans have done in other races for the sake of unity and to release Palmer from her commitment"—so that she could reclaim her State Senate seat. Obama left the meeting noncommittal.

Palmer was soundly defeated by Jackson—she got only ten per cent of the vote—and there were more insistent demands that Obama withdraw. He refused, which angered Palmer and her husband, Buzz. Buzz Palmer was a founder of the Afro-American Patrolman's League, a reform group within the Chicago police department, and the couple had many ties to the city's black leadership. Palmer, announcing that she had been drafted back into the State Senate race, went from being Obama's most important supporter to his chief challenger; the woman who had launched his political career now threatened to end it. "That's Chicago politics," Obama told a reporter—with a sigh, the account said. (SITE NOTE: Remember that in his Presidential campaign Obama Obama won the endorsement of the National Association of Police Officers (NAPO).

The South Side political community was forced to choose. The Ackermans went with Palmer, the Dobrys with Obama. Emil Jones announced his support for Palmer. Alderman Preckwinkle stayed with Obama. "I had given him my word I would support him," she told me. "Alice didn't forgive me, and she's never going to forgive me."

"These old nationalist guys start beating a drum—probably not the right metaphor—about how Barack should let this elder back in and how seniority's important," Burns said. "And they're writing essays in the Defender and N'Digo"—another local paper covering Chicago's black community. A comment in the Defender by Robert Starks, a professor of political science at Chicago's Northeastern Illinois University and one of Palmer's chief supporters, was typical: "If she doesn't run, that seat will go to a Daley supporter. We have asked her to reconsider not running because we don't think Obama can win. He hasn't been in town long enough. . . . Nobody knows who he is . . . We need someone with experience."

But, almost as fast as the threat to his campaign appeared, Obama stamped it out. The Dobrys were surprised that Palmer had so quickly gathered the signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot. They went to the Chicago board of elections and reviewed her petitions; as they suspected, they were filled with irregularities. One skill that the Independents had mastered in the years of fighting the first Mayor Daley was the machine's tactic of challenging ballot petitions, and the Dobrys were experts at this Chicago ritual. Publicly, Obama was conciliatory about the awkward political situation, telling the Hyde Park Herald that he understood that some people were upset about the "conflict between old loyalties and new enthusiasms." Privately, however, he unleashed his operators. With the help of the Dobrys, he was able to remove not just Palmer's name from the ballot but the name of every other opponent as well. "He ran unopposed, which is a good way to win," Mikva said, laughing at the recollection. And Palmer said last week, "Anyone who enters Chicago politics and can't take the rough and tumble shouldn't be there. Losing the seat was just that—not the end of the world."

Instead of arriving in Springfield as the consensus candidate of his district, Obama was regarded as a troublemaker. "He had created some enemies," Emil Jones, who in 2003 became president of the Illinois Senate, said. Burns described the fallout of the Obama-Palmer race this way: "It established a reputation that 'you're not going to punk me, you're not going to roll me over, you're not going to jam me.' I think it established him as a threat. You have his independence with Project Vote, you have his refusal to knuckle under during the Alice Palmer thing, and so now you have a series of data points that have some established leaders in the black community feeling disrespected. And so the stage is now set for the comeuppance during the congressional race. That was their payback."

(SITE NOTE: After Obama became the first black President-elect, the established leaders of the black community will never publicly voice their feeling of being disrespected from before. Past wrongs will be swallowed as it will be unthinkable to attack the first African-American president -- one of their own. The gain of having an African-American President will far outweigh any displeasure from past wrongs. Obama will be protected.)

ILLINOIS TURNS BLUE

In the political culture of 1996, two years after the ascendancy of the Gingrich Republicans, many Democrats ran as chastened and cautious politicians; among them was Bill Clinton, who turned his reëlection-campaign strategy over to Dick Morris (who had worked for Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, as well as Democrats) and the militantly centrist pollster Mark Penn (the Morris protégé who helped run Hillary Clinton's primary campaign). By then, Bill Clinton had abandoned his effort for universal health care and was about to sign into law a welfare-reform bill that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had denounced, saying, "For the first time since it was enacted in 1935, we are about to repeal a core provision of the Social Security Act." The bill was one of the most important factors in securing Clinton's reëlection. Had Obama not been running for office in one of the most liberal districts in Illinois, he would have drawn notice as a fairly bold Democrat. To judge by his public comments, he seemed both appalled and impressed by President Clinton's political skill. In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, published a few days after Clinton said that he would sign the welfare-reform bill, Obama talked about the Presidential campaign, saying that Bob Dole "seems to me to be a classic example of somebody who had no reason to run. You're seventy-three years old, you're already the third-most-powerful man in the country. So why? . . . And Bill Clinton? Well, his campaign's fascinating to a student of politics. It's disturbing to someone who cares about certain issues. But politically it seems to be working."

Soon, Obama began writing a regular column—"Springfield Report"—for the Hyde Park Herald. In the first one, on February 19, 1997, he wrote, "Last year, President Clinton signed a bill that, for the first time in 60 years, eliminates the federal guarantee of support for poor families and their children." The column was earnest and wonky. It betrayed no hint of liberal piety about the new law, but emphasized that there weren't enough entry-level jobs in Chicago to absorb all the welfare recipients who would soon be leaving the system.

In effect, while President Clinton and the national Democratic Party were drifting to the right, State Senator Obama pushed in the opposite direction. The new welfare law was one of the first issues that Obama faced as a legislator. "I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare," he said, choosing his words with care during debate on the Illinois Senate floor. "Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems. But I'm a strong believer in making lemonade out of lemons." Perhaps the law's most punitive aspect was that it cut off aid to poor legal immigrants, a provision that Clinton, in his 2004 memoir, called "particularly harsh" and "unjustifiable." The law that Obama helped pass in Illinois restored benefits to this group. (In a continuing effort to produce lemonade, Obama's first ad of the 2008 general-election campaign says that he "passed laws moving people from welfare to work.") Obama resisted the national rightward trend of the mid-nineties in other small ways. He sponsored an amendment to the state constitution that would have made health care a universal right in Illinois and helped pass an ethics bill that reformed Illinois's antiquated campaign-finance system.

In hindsight, little of his legislative record seems controversial. Some of the bills that he sponsored, statements that he made, and votes that he cast could be caricatured in a Presidential campaign. (In one 1997 column, he said, "I supported Governor Edgar's plan to raise the income tax," and in a 1999 debate, speaking of himself and his two opponents, he noted that "we're all on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.") But 2008 is not 1988, and Republican attacks on tax hikes and calling an opponent a liberal lack much of their formerly compelling electoral power.

Obama has benefitted from impeccable timing. As the national Party entered a period of ideological timidity, he was at the vanguard of a Democratic revival in Illinois that had begun in 1992, when Clinton and Braun won the state, and grew stronger when, four years later, Democrats took over the Illinois House of Representatives. It continued through 2002, when Democrats won the State Senate and the governor's office. By 2004, when Obama ran for the United States Senate, Illinois was a solidly blue state.

Not all of this was due to Democratic ingenuity; during this period the state Republican Party collapsed under the weight of corruption scandals. That is something of an Illinois tradition: four of the last nine governors have been indicted on charges of corruption, and three were convicted. As Saul Bellow once remarked, "Politics are politics, crime is crime, but in Chicago they occasionally overlap. The line between virtue and vice meanders madly—effective government on one side, connections on the other."

(SITE NOTE: But also notice how Obama -- under the guidance of David Axelrod in 2004 -- uses some questionable old-style politics methods to eliminate his competititon. The bare outlines of Obama's elections are pregnant with the implications that he has gained every office he has sought so far by underhanded and sordid means.

Obama's first election was described recently by Martin Fletcher, a foreign correspondent for NBC News, in the British newspaper The Times (not on NBC): "Mr Obama won a seat in the state senate in 1996 by the unorthodox means of having surrogates successfully challenge the hundreds of nomination signatures that candidates submit. His Democratic rivals, including Alice Palmer, the incumbent, were all disqualified." Obama's election to the U.S. Senate was even more curious, as described by Gerard Baker in the Irish Independent: "Two exquisitely timed divorces smoothed the way." (Source: Swamp Politics.)

Another Democratic candidate of the 2004 Senate race was Blair Hull. In 2004, Hull decided to seek the Democratic nomination for Illinois's open Senate seat, vacated by Peter Fitzgerald. Hull, who funded himself with $28 million, had a significant lead early on. month before the primary elections a news story broke regarding his divorce from his ex-wife. The controversy ended up destroying the Hull campaign. Then allegations surfaced that he had threatened to kill his wife during an argument, and that he was arrested for battery, although charges were never filed. Hull tried to keep the divorce records sealed, but pressure from journalists and his opposing candidates forced him to release them. The papers claimed that his ex-wife alleged that during a physical fight between them he had threatened to kill her. This led to his arrest for battery; however, no charges were ever filed. Nevertheless, the damage to Hull's campaign was done. The chief beneficiary of Hull's meltdown was a little-known state senator from Hyde Park, Barack Obama. (Source: Wikipedia.)

In the same campaign, lightning struck again. "His opponent, the engaging Jack Ryan, had run a campaign as a different sort of Republican. But a few months before the election, his divorce papers revealed that, while he might have been a different sort of Republican, he was from precisely the same stable of Obama political opponents. He had, it turned out, once tried to force his former wife to go with him to sex clubs in Paris." (Source: Swamp Politics.))

There were further changes under way in Chicago. Obama had won his first campaign by using old-fashioned Chicago machine tactics at a time when the notion of machine politics was increasingly anachronistic. As the political consultant Don Rose and his colleague James Andrews explain in a chapter for a book about the current Mayor Daley's first victory, the machine literally provided voters with access to food, health care, and a job. In most American cities, that model vanished after the Second World War; by then, the blue-collar base was leaving for the suburbs and reform movements were challenging machine politics. In Chicago, Rose and Andrews say, the elder Daley updated and preserved the system by creating a modern machine that combined "big labor and big capital, blue and white collars, and minorities"—a hybrid model that died with him.

Gradually, Chicago caught up with the rest of the country and media-driven politics eclipsed machine-driven politics. "It became increasingly difficult to get into homes and apartments to talk about candidates," Rose said. "High-rises were tough if not impossible to crack, and other parts of the city had become too dangerous to walk around in for hours at a time. And people didn't want to answer their doors. Thus the increasing dependence on TV, radio, direct mail, phone-banking, robocalls, et cetera—all things that cost a hell of a lot more money than patronage workers, who were themselves in decline, anyway, because of anti-patronage court rulings." Instead of a large army of ward heelers dragging people to the polls, candidates needed a small army of donors to pay for commercials. Money replaced bodies as the currency of Chicago politics. This new system became known as "pinstripe patronage," because the key to winning was not rewarding voters with jobs but rewarding donors with government contracts. E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, wrote about this transition in a 1999 column after Daley was reëlected. Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked: a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reëlection. "They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest," Obama told Dionne. It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself. Obama was learning that one of the greatest skills a politician can possess is candor about the dirty work it takes to get and stay elected.

At the time, Obama was growing closer to Tony Rezko, who eventually turned pinstripe patronage into an extremely lucrative way of life. Rezko's rise in Illinois was intertwined with Obama's. Like Abner Mikva and Judson Miner, he had tried to recruit Obama to work for him. Chicago had been at the forefront of an urban policy to lure developers into low-income neighborhoods with tax credits, and Rezko was an early beneficiary of the program. Miner's law firm was eager to do the legal work on the tax-credit deals, which seemed consistent with the firm's over-all civil-rights mission. A residual benefit was that the new developers became major donors to aldermen, state senators, and other South Side politicians who represented the poor neighborhoods in which Rezko and others operated. "Our relationship deepened when I started my first political campaign for the State Senate," Obama said earlier this year, in an interview with Chicago reporters.

Rezko was one of the people Obama consulted when he considered running to replace Palmer, and Rezko eventually raised about ten per cent of Obama's funds for that first campaign. As a state senator, Obama became an advocate of the tax-credit program. "That's an example of a smart policy," he told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in 1997. "The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace; but at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts." Obama and Rezko's friendship grew stronger. They dined together regularly and even, on at least one occasion, retreated to Rezko's vacation home, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

(SITE NOTE: The McCain campaign attempted to hammer home the association of Tony Rezko but it was like Obama was coated with teflon. Nothing stuck. The mainstream media didn't want to touch this story. In June 2008, GOP operatives tried to make political hay out of the federal conviction on 4 June 2008 of Chicago Democratic fundraiser Tony Rezko on 16 of 24 corruption charges. The Republicans were attempting to show that Rezko had close links to Obama although the probe was more closely connected to the administration of Illinois Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich. If Rezko became a centerpiece of the GOP campaign against Obama, it was expected that Democrats would resurrect John McCain's role as one of the infamous "Keating Five" US Senators. McCain was tarnished in the corruption and bribery investigation of failed Lincoln Savings and Loan chief Charles Keating in 1989. In the end, the McCain campaign only half-heartedly pursued the Rezko connection.

Barack Obama, the up-and-coming junior senator from Illinois, purchased his Georgian revival mansion on the South Side of Chicago, it set off alarms and suspicion of a shady deal. Why? In a real estate deal that is now called a "boneheaded move" by Obama, here is a timeline of what happened, leaning heavily on this thorough Q&A Obama did with the Chicago Sun-Times,

• In June 2005, Obama and now-indicted political fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko purchased adjoining parcels in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago. The parcels — one containing a house and the other undeveloped land — were owned by University of Chicago doctors Fredric Wondisford and Sally Radovick (husband and wife).
• Obama paid $1.65 million for his home ($300K less than the asking price of $1.95 million, but it was the Obama's third and "best offer") while Rezko paid $625,000 for the adjacent, undeveloped lot.
• Both closed on their properties on the same day.
• Obama wanted to increase the size of his side yard and in January 2006, Obama paid Rezko $104,500 for a strip of his land - about one-sixth of the parcel and costs one-sixth of the Rezko's original purchase price of $625,000.
• In 2006, Tony Rezko was indicted for fraud and was convicted in 2008.
• In 2007, Tony's wife, Rita, sold the remaining lot for $575,000.

So, how did the Obama's originally learn about this home?

According to My DD: Direct Democracy, in 2004, Barack's wife, Michelle, was on the board of the Commission of Chicago Landmarks and in this capacity, learned of a designated historical home in Kenwood that was for sale — the home and the adjacent land at 5046 South Greenwood. (…a Historical Georgian revival home built in 1910 with four fireplaces, glass-door bookcases fashioned from Honduran mahogany, and a 1,000-bottle wine cellar…)

At the time, the Obamas were living in a Hyde Park condo and wanted to upgrade to a bigger space. While the doctors wanted to sell the home and the lot together, the Obamas could not afford it. Barack then allegedly contacted Tony Rezko for advice on how to buy it since Rezko was also a real estate developer. Another headache over this home for Obama is whether he received a discount on a home loan. (Source: Zillow Blog.)) (SEE Barack Obama's mansion that has too many unanswered questions and the Tony Rezko.)

"WHATEVER YOUR NAME IS"

Obama's subtle understanding of the way the city's politics had changed—with fund-raising replacing organization as the key to victory—surely encouraged him in his next campaign. Almost as soon as he got to Springfield, he was planning another move. He was bored there—once, he appeared to doze off during a caucus meeting—and frustrated by the Republicans' total control over the legislature. He seemed to believe, according to colleagues at the time, that he was destined for better things than being trapped in one of America's more notoriously corrupt state capitals. Obama spent little time socializing with "the guys basically from Chicago," the veteran senator Emil Jones said. "He hung around a lot of the downstaters. They became good friends."

Obama's relations with some of his black colleagues from Chicago were dreadful from the beginning. On March 13, 1997, Obama introduced one of his first pieces of legislation, a modest bill to make a directory of community-college graduates available to local employers. There was a response from Rickey Hendon, a state senator from the West Side of Chicago who had been close to Alice Palmer. After Obama explained his bill, Hendon, who has dabbled in film and television work, earning him the nickname Hollywood, rose to ask a question, and the following exchange occurred:

HENDON: Senator, could you correctly pronounce your name for me? I'm having a little trouble with it.
OBAMA: Obama.
HENDON: Is that Irish?
OBAMA: It will be when I run countywide.
HENDON: That was a good joke, but this bill's still going to die. This directory, would that have those 1-800 sex line numbers in this directory?
OBAMA: I apologize. I wasn't paying Senator Hendon any attention.
HENDON: Well, clearly, as poorly as this legislation is drafted, you didn't pay it much attention either. My question was: Are the 1-800 sex line numbers going to be in this directory?
OBAMA: Not—not—basically this idea comes out of the South Side community colleges. I don't know what you're doing on the West Side community colleges. But we probably won't be including that in our directory for the students.
HENDON: . . . Let me just say this, and to the bill: I seem to remember a very lovely Senator by the name of Palmer—much easier to pronounce than Obama—and she always had cookies and nice things to say, and you don't have anything to give us around your desk. How do you expect to get votes? And—and you don't even wear nice perfume like Senator Palmer did. . . . I'm missing Senator Palmer because of these weak replacements with these tired bills that makes absolutely no sense. I . . . I definitely urge a No vote. Whatever your name is.

Although the exchange was part of a longstanding tradition of hazing new legislators, the tensions between Hendon and Obama were real. On another occasion, Obama voted—a parliamentary error, Obama says—to block funding for a child-welfare facility in Hendon's district. Hendon rose and criticized Obama for the vote. The two men became embroiled in a yelling match on the Senate floor that looked as if it might become physical; they were separated by Courtney Nottage, then the chief of staff for Emil Jones. Nottage led Obama off the floor to a room that legislators used to make telephone calls. "It looked like two men that were having a serious disagreement and they had walked up to one another really close," Nottage told me. "I didn't think anything good could come of that."

Hendon told me, "He's the one that got mad, because he said I embarrassed him on the Senate floor. That's when he came over to my desk." Before Nottage broke them up, Obama, who had learned to box from his Indonesian stepfather, supposedly told Hendon, "I'm going to kick your ass!" Hendon said, "He said something like that." He added that more details will appear in a book that he's written, entitled "Black Enough, White Enough: The Obama Dilemma."

(SITE NOTE: Rickey Hendon has been an Illinois State Senator since 1992. He currently serves as an Assistant Majority Leader, Co-Chairman of the Senate Executive Appointments Committee, Vice-Chairman of the Environment and Energy Committee and a member of the Labor and Commerce Committee and the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus. Hendon is a supporter of Obama for President according to his Wikipedia entry. However this 1997 incident shows a flaw in the cool exterior of Obama. What this shows is that the cool exterior of Obama can be breached by personal insult and ridicule. Can this happen as President? His campaign has shown a tendency to be petty by penalizing anyone who stands against him. If he allows his temper to explode in a crisis -- not simply swearing and cussing -- but losing one's composure, then you have lost the war. However, Abner Mikva stated that he has never seen Obama lose his temper -- though he has been angry, moody and had his ups and downs. This says lots about this doubt.)

Obama's friends were not surprised when, in 1999, he decided to challenge Bobby Rush, who has represented the South Side in Congress since 1992. Rush had run against Daley in the 1999 mayoral primary, and Obama interpreted Rush's defeat in that citywide race as a harbinger of his declining popularity in his congressional district.

The race against Rush was the turning point in Obama's political career. It started with a brilliant bit of oratory that alluded to Abner Mikva's story about the insularity of Chicago politics and sought to turn Obama's disadvantages into strengths. "Nobody sent me," Obama said at his campaign kickoff, on September 26, 1999. "I'm not part of some long-standing political organization. I have no fancy sponsors. I'm not even from Chicago. My name is Obama. Despite that fact, somebody sent me. . . . The men on the corner in Woodlawn drowning their sorrows in alcohol . . . the women working two jobs. . . . They're all telling me we can't wait." It was the best moment of his campaign.

(SITE NOTE: In his Presidential campaign, Obama used this same image of the outsider supported by the people who is fighting for the rights of the downtrodden...but now he was appealing to a broader audience of whites, hispanics AND blacks. Back in the Rush-Obama campaign, Rush portrayed Obama as basically an "oreo cookie" who knew nothing about being black.

Rush and Obama have the scars from their fractious 2000 House race. Rush beat Obama then and now carries the distinction as the only politician who has. Throughout that election, Rush showed a degree of animus for his Harvard-educated opponent, whom he regarded as an elite, ivory-tower outsider. “Barack is a person who read about the civil rights protests and thinks he knows all about it,” Rush told the Chicago Reader at the time. “I helped make that history, by blood, sweat and tears.”

When Obama ran for the Senate seat in 2004, Rush supported his Democratic primary opponent, Blair Hull, a wealthy white Chicago businessman. Rush supported Obama’s presidential run, but even now he dismisses talk of Obama’s victory as some kind of dawn of a post-racial age in America. “Well, I never bought into that,” Rush said. “And I absolutely reject it. To me that was nothing more than an election gimmick to try to assuage the feelings of white Americans. That’s really how I saw it.” (Source: Politico.) )

Obama was financially outmatched. Although he raised about six hundred thousand dollars, sustained television advertising in Chicago cost between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand dollars a week, according to Dan Shomon, Obama's campaign manager at the time. A series of unusual events defined the race. A few months before the election, Rush's twenty-nine-year-old son, Huey Rich, was shot and killed, which made the incumbent a figure of sympathy, and in the final weeks of the campaign Rush's father died. Obama made a serious misstep when, visiting his grandmother in Hawaii, he missed a crucial vote on gun-control legislation in Springfield. Even worse, on the day of the vote a column by Obama about how the gun bill was "sorely needed" appeared in the Hyde Park Herald, under the headline "IDEOLOGUES FRUSTRATE GUN LAW." Obama protested that his daughter was ill and unable to travel, and that he saw his grandmother, who lived alone, only once a year, but the press treated the trip as a tropical vacation.

(SITE NOTE: It seems rather ironic that the same situation presented itself for Obama in the Presidential campaign. Again his grandmother was in the center of attention -- but here she died one day before election day. Obama has continued his record of absences in the Senate -- but his anti-gun stance had earned him the enmity of the NRA. (Source: NRA v. Obama.))

Obama lost by thirty-one points—a humiliating defeat. On Election Night, at the Ramada Inn where he had begun his political career, he sounded dejected, hinting that he might leave politics. "I've got to make assessments about where we go from here," he said. "We need a new style of politics to deal with the issues that are important to the people. What's not clear to me is whether I should do that as an elected official or by influencing government in ways that actually improve people's lives." The defeat marked not so much the beginning of a new style of politics for Obama as the beginning of Obama's mastery of the old style of politics.

Obama had misread the political dynamics of Rush's unsuccessful mayoral campaign. "He thought he would get some help from Daley because Rush had run against Daley for mayor," Mikva said. "He thought that Daley might use the opportunity to get even. That's not the way the Daleys work. It's not the way the machine works. When Barack went in to see the Mayor, whom he knew slightly, Daley said what his old man used to say: 'Good luck!' "

Mayor Daley concurred. "Bobby Rush was very strong," he said. "When you lose a race, you can be strong in another avenue, and he was always strong in his congressional district. It was a learning experience when I lost to Harold Washington. The next day, I endorsed him." He added, "You learn from defeat. If you don't learn from defeat, then you go away as a sour politician—you think that people turned on you. Barack Obama understood that. The lesson from that campaign is you can't just run for any office saying you thought someone lost an election and you thought they were weak. He realized that and he rededicated himself."

THE INNER SANCTUM

Obama learned the exact nature of his appeal, as well as his handicaps. Unlike Obama's State Senate district, where the University of Chicago and the multicultural Hyde Park produced most of the votes, Rush's congressional district extended deep into black neighborhoods where Obama was unknown. His academic background was a burden, too. Will Burns explained, "Even though the University of Chicago is one of the largest employers on the South Side of Chicago, it is seen by some, particularly black nationalists, as a bastion of white political power, as a huge entity that doesn't take into account the interests of the community, that doesn't have a full democratic partnership with the community, and does what it wants to the community in maintaining clear boundaries about where black people are. It's seen as an expansive force, trying to expand into Bronzeville and into Woodlawn"—historically black neighborhoods adjacent to Hyde Park—"and put poor blacks out of the area. The University of Chicago is not a brand that helps you if you're trying to get votes on the South Side of Chicago."

Obama's fund-raising success and his professional networks were also viewed with suspicion. Chicago is still a city of villages, and Obama was adept at gliding back and forth between the South Side, where he campaigned for votes, and the wealthy Gold Coast, the lakefront neighborhood of high-rise condominiums and deluxe shopping, where he raised money. One day in Hyde Park, I mentioned the name Bettylu Saltzman (the Project Vote supporter and daughter of a Bulls owner) to Lois Friedberg-Dobry (the South Side operator). "I don't run in those circles," she said. Later, over lunch with Saltzman at a café in a gourmet supermarket on the Gold Coast, I mentioned the Dobrys and Obama's Independent Voters of Illinois friends, and she said, "You know, the North Side and the South Side of Chicago—it's like two different worlds."

A South Side operator named Al Kindle, a large man with a booming voice, was a field operator for Obama's race against Rush. He had helped elect Harold Washington, and he saw Obama's congressional campaign from the street level. We met one evening at Calypso Café, a Caribbean restaurant that Obama has said is his favorite place to eat in Hyde Park, and Kindle described some of the worst moments in the campaign. "The accusations were that Obama was sent here and owned by the Jews," Kindle said. "That he was here to steal the black vote and steal black land and that he was represented by the—as they were called—'the white man.' And that Obama wasn't black enough and didn't know the black experience, the black community. It was quite deafening in terms of how they went after Alderman Preckwinkle and myself. People would say, 'Oh, Kindle, man, we trust you, you being fooled. Obama's got you fooled.' And some people called me a traitor."

(SITE NOTE: There are still people who are saying these things today after he became President. This was the blacks rebuking Obama for not being "black" -- though technically he is "African-American." However, these "blacks" are actually Republican far-right conservatives. Though the nations blacks turned out 95 percent in favor of Obama in the Presidential elections later, the black voters of Chicago early on saw through Obama in 2000 for what he was -- an "oreo cookie" -- white on the inside and black on the outside -- without any real credentials for being a black man. He had not grown up in their black world. He pitted himself against a "pure-black" Rush, a former Black Panther and home-town boy, and lost. After the loss, Obama learned that the people he could win over were the "white voters.")

The loss taught Obama a great deal about the components of his natural coalition. According to Dan Shomon, the first poll that Obama conducted revealed that the demographic he could win over most easily was white voters. Obama, who hadn't shown any particular gift for oratory in the race, now learned to shed his stiff approach to campaigning—described by Preckwinkle as that of an "arrogant academic." Mikva told me, "The first time I heard him talk to a black church, he was very professorial, more so even than he was in the white community. There was no joking, no self-deprecation, no style. It didn't go over well at all."

(SITE NOTE: Somewhere along the way, he certainly became an eloquent speaker -- his stiffness became accepted as "cool under fire" and his self-deprecating humor seemed to have become better -- but as a means to deflect criticism. At the start of his Presidential campaign he used the black gospel style -- repetition and hammering of the same point with rising inflection -- but he stopped it after the campaign started in earnest. He only reverted to the black gospel style in his acceptance speech at the end of the campaign.)

But, as he had in his 1996 campaign, Obama had attracted a young and zealous corps of campaign workers. "I remember one of the candidates in the race used to talk about how crazed our volunteers were, because they were passionate, energized," Will Burns said. "You'd come by the office on Eighty-seventh Street and there'd be a bunch of guys with no teeth waiting to get their next Old Grand-dad and then these Shiraz-drinking, Nation-reading, T.N.R.-quoting young black folk. It was a random-ass mix. It was beautiful, though. When I see the crowds now, they're very reminiscent of what was happening then."

(SITE NOTE: This is the thing about Obama. He is able to excite his supporters and energize his campaign. Polls in the Presidential campaign showed the Obama supporters were always twice as "enthusiastic" as the Republicans. He possesses star power to rouse his supporters and staff.)

Emil Jones told me that, after 2000, Obama moved decisively away from being pigeonholed as an inner-city pol. During one debate with Rush, he noted that he and the other candidates were all "progressive, urban Democrats." Even though he lost, that primary taught him that he might be something more than that. "He learned that for Barack Obama it was not the type of district that he was well suited for," Jones said. "The type of campaign that he had to run to win that district is not Barack Obama. It was a predominantly African-American district. It was a district where you had to campaign solely on those issues. And Barack did not campaign that way, and so as a result he lost. Which was good." Meaning, it was good for Barack Obama.

(SITE NOTE: THIS IS IMPORTANT!!! This is something that Obama realizes that he can't walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk of the black community. He "looks" black -- but he was not poor black (an image he wants people to believe) -- and he never grew up black. His wife can bear the pedigree of growing up in a one-bedroom apartment (with the living room partitioned for another bedroom) on the Southside of Chicago -- but Obama came from a completely non-black background. He wrote his book "Dreams" to embellish this image of blackness -- but he just wasn't black enough. Early in his political career, the blacks saw through his facade and rebuked him. However, as he rose to higher office, he represented a much larger and diverse community. Michelle Obama, on the other hand, had the contacts that allowed Obama into the ranks of the black elite of Chicago -- and through his contacts into the rich funders of the Chicago wealthy. This is why he found it so easy to raise funds from the rich white society which he was a part of -- and the business class blacks that Michelle Obama came from. But let no one deny it that Obama is an exceptionally qualified and charismatic individual. He may have used contacts to get into the door, but he used his force of character, intelligence and eloquence to dazzle all who met him. In this Presidential campaign, it wasn't expected for him to be a street black. It only mattered that he represented the black race -- and this is why the African-American community voted almost in unison for Barack Obama. His base however is not black -- like Jesse Jackson on his bid for the Presidential nomination. It is much broader encompassing every nationality in America. He may have started as a local "black" politician, but he is now a "national" politician.)

One day in the spring of 2001, about a year after the loss to Rush, Obama walked into the Stratton Office Building, in Springfield, a shabby nineteen-fifties government workspace for state officials next to the regal state capitol. He went upstairs to a room that Democrats in Springfield called "the inner sanctum." Only about ten Democratic staffers had access; entry required an elaborate ritual—fingerprint scanners and codes punched into a keypad. The room was large, and unremarkable except for an enormous printer and an array of computers with big double monitors. On the screens that spring day were detailed maps of Chicago, and Obama and a Democratic consultant named John Corrigan sat in front of a terminal to draw Obama a new district. Corrigan was the Democrat in charge of drawing all Chicago districts, and he also happened to have volunteered for Obama in the campaign against Rush.

Obama's former district had been drawn by Republicans after the 1990 census. But, after 2000, Illinois Democrats won the right to redistrict the state. Partisan redistricting remains common in American politics, and, while it outrages a losing party, it has so far survived every legal challenge. In the new century, mapping technology has become so precise and the available demographic data so rich that politicians are able to choose the kinds of voter they want to represent, right down to individual homes. A close look at the post-2000 congressional map of Bobby Rush's district reveals that it tears through Hyde Park in a curious series of irregular turns. One of those lines bypasses Obama's address by two blocks. Rush, or someone looking out for his interests, had carved the upstart Obama out of Rush's congressional district.

In truth, Rush had little to worry about; Obama was already on a different political path. Like every other Democratic legislator who entered the inner sanctum, Obama began working on his "ideal map." Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama's Hyde Park base—he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park—then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama's map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city's economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama's new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.

(SITE NOTE: Obama knows personally the value of redefining political boundaries to one's advantage. Now you see why Obama wants the Census moved under the White House from the Commerce Department. It is to gerry-mander the entire US political landscape. It's politics, but something one would never expect from the Presidency. Besides this move may be constitutionally illegal.)

"It was a radical change," Corrigan said. The new district was a natural fit for the candidate that Obama was in the process of becoming. "He saw that when we were doing fund-raisers in the Rush campaign his appeal to, quite frankly, young white professionals was dramatic."

Obama's personal political concerns were not the only factor driving the process. During the previous round of remapping, in 1991, Republicans had created Chicago districts where African-Americans were the overwhelming majority, packing the greatest number of loyal Democrats into the fewest districts. A decade later, Democrats tried to spread the African-American vote among more districts. The idea was to create enough Democratic-leaning districts so that the Party could take control of the state legislature. That goal was fine with Obama; his new district offered promising, untapped constituencies for him as he considered his next political move. "The exposure he would get to some of the folks that were on boards of the museums and C.E.O.s of some of the companies that he would represent would certainly help him in the long run," Corrigan said.

(SITE NOTE: Obama was working the fundraising angle for higher office.)

In the end, Obama's North Side fund-raising base and his South Side political base were united in one district. He now represented Hyde Park operators like Lois Friedberg-Dobry as well as Gold Coast doyennes like Bettylu Saltzman, and his old South Side street operative Al Kindle as well as his future consultant David Axelrod. In an article in the Hyde Park Herald about how "partisan" and "undemocratic" Illinois redistricting had become, Obama was asked for his views. As usual, he was candid. "There is a conflict of interest built into the process," he said. "Incumbents drawing their own maps will inevitably try to advantage themselves."

The partisan redistricting of Illinois may have been the most important event in Obama's early political life. It immediately gave him the two things he needed to run for the Senate in 2004: money and power. He needed to have several times as much cash as he'd raised for his losing congressional race in 2000, and many of the state's top donors now lived or worked in his district. More important, the statewide gerrymandering made it likely that Obama's party would take over the State Senate in 2002, an event that would provide him with a platform from which to craft a legislative record in time for the campaign.

Obama's political activity from 2001 to 2004 reveals a man transformed. The loss to Rush drained him of much of the naïveté he once exuded. For instance, when Obama arrived in Springfield, in 1996, he was still enamored of the spirit of community organizing and determined to apply its principles as a legislator. In an interview with the Chicago Reader in 1995, he laid out this vision:

People are hungry for community; they miss it. They are hungry for change. What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer. We would come together to form concrete economic development strategies, take advantage of existing laws and structures, and create bridges and bonds within all sectors of the community. We must form grass-root structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions.

(SITE NOTE: THIS IS OBAMA IN 2008!!! GREAT VISIONS!!! However, there will be reality setting in once he settles into office. Just as Obama's idea of "community" never got off the ground, so will his 2008 vision during the Presidential campaign need to be revised. In fact, during his acceptance speech he was already alluding to some items having to be prioritized or delayed.

The bottom line is he promised the moon during the campaign. But the reality is that in a global recession and inheriting a trillion dollar debt, he simply can't afford the social programs he promised. Most observers think that he will keep his promise of no tax increase until 2010 -- and then like George Bush Sr. will levy taxes because of "extenuating circumstances." The taxation of the rich will not pay for his programs as the money is all in the middle class -- the folks he promised not to tax.)

Obama took at least one concrete step to turn this notion of the legislator as community organizer into a reality. In his first column in the Hyde Park Herald, the same one in which he addressed welfare, he announced that he was "organizing citizens' committees" to help him shape legislation. He asked his constituents to call his office if they wanted to participate. That kind of airy talk about changing politics gave way almost immediately to the realities of the job. I asked a longtime Obama friend what ever became of the committees. "They never really got off the ground," he said. By 2001, if there was any maxim from community organizing that Obama lived by, it was the Realpolitik commandment of Saul Alinsky, the founding practitioner of community organizing, to operate in "the world as it is and not as we would like it to be."

Alinsky's rules for radicals:

1 ) Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2 ) Never go outside the experience of your people. It may result in confusion, fear and retreat.
3 ) Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear and retreat.
4 ) Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules.
5 ) Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
6 ) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7 ) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8 ) Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9 ) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10 ) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11 ) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12 ) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13 ) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.

In electoral politics, operating in the world as it is means raising money. Obama expanded the reach of his fund-raising. Every network that he penetrated brought him access to another. Christie Hefner, Hugh Hefner's daughter, who runs Playboy Enterprises from the fifteenth floor of a lakefront building, explained how it worked. Hefner is a member of a group called Ladies Who Lunch—nineteen Chicago women, most of them wealthy, who see themselves as talent scouts and angel investors for up-and-coming liberal candidates and activists. They interview prospects over a meal, often in a private dining room at the Arts Club of Chicago. Obama's friend Bettylu Saltzman, a Ladies Who Lunch member, introduced Obama to the group when he was preparing his Senate run. Hefner, who declined to support Obama in 2000, was ready to help him when he came calling in 2002.

Not long ago, Hefner and I talked in her office; we were seated at a granite table strewn with copies of Playboy. "I was very proud to be able to introduce him during the Senate race to a lot of people who have turned out to be important and valuable to him, not just here but in New York and L.A.," Hefner explained. She mentioned Thomas Friedman, the Times columnist, and Norman Lear, the television producer. "I try and think about people who I think should know him."

(SITE NOTE: Obama learned this lesson of money politics in his 2000 campaign against Rush where he was outfunded -- and lost. Once you see this, you understand how a machiavellian politician like Obama would first promise the McCain camp that he would accept federal financing for his campaign -- lying the whole time -- and then at the last moment break his promise so that the McCain camp could never catch up. Obama built up a $650 million war chest that enabled him to target localities and focus his campaign. It is widely accepted that a lot of the campaign donations were from dubious sources -- and large amounts flowed in from overseas. However, the FEC will NOT audit the Obama campaign funding for reasons unknown.)

THE SPEECH

One insight into the transition that Obama was making during the short period between his painful loss to Bobby Rush and his Senate victory can be gained by comparing his reactions to the two major national-security crises of the time: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq war. For many Illinois state legislators, September 11th was not an event that required much response. The attacks occurred just before an important deadline in the redistricting process. John Corrigan, the Democratic consultant in charge of redistricting, told me that he spent September 12th talking to many legislators, Obama not among them. "It was like nothing had happened," he said. "Everybody came in and all they cared about was their districts. It wasn't any one particular legislator from any one particular community. I learned a lot about state government. Their job was not to respond to September 11th. They were more worried about making sure that they had a district that they could run in for reëlection." Obama's response to the event was published on September 19th in the Hyde Park Herald:

Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction.

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe—children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.

A year later, Obama agreed to speak at an antiwar rally in downtown Chicago, organized by Bettylu Saltzman and some friends, who, over Chinese food, had decided to stage the protest. Saltzman asked John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago—and, later, the co-author of the controversial book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy"—to speak, but he couldn't make it. "He was one of the main people we wanted, but he was speaking at the University of Wisconsin that day," Saltzman said. Then she called her rabbi and then Barack Obama. Michelle answered the phone and passed the message on to her husband, who was out of town.

Saltzman also called Marilyn Katz, who runs a Chicago public-relations firm and is close to Mayor Daley. Katz managed to get Jesse Jackson as a speaker, and handled many of the organizing details. Katz, a petite woman who was, improbably, the head of security for S.D.S. at the 1968 Democratic Convention, described what she felt the political mood was at the time of the rally. "Professors are being turned in on college campuses, Bush's ratings are eighty-seven per cent," she said. "Among my friends, there hasn't been an antiwar demonstration in twenty years. There's huge repression, Bush has got all this legislation. They're talking about lists, they're denying people entry into the country. . . . Bush's numbers were tremendously high, but we had no choice. Unless we wanted to live in a country that was fascist."

(SITE NOTE: Some criticize Obama for his political flip-flops. During his run for the Senate, Obama distanced himself from Mayor Daley because of accusations of bribery and corruption at the time. However, in his run for the Presidency, he stood side-by-side with Daley and praised him for his work in Chicago. (Source: Poligazette.) In Dec 2006, Mayor Daley decided to abandon his long-standing tradition of remaining neutral in Democratic primaries and endorse Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential race. (Source: Sun Times.) )

Despite the politics of Saltzman and Katz, Obama's now famous speech was notable for the absence of the traditional tropes of the antiwar left. In his biography of Obama, David Mendell, noting that Obama's speech occurred a few months before the official declaration of his U.S. Senate candidacy, suggests that the decision to publicly oppose the war in Iraq was a calculated political move intended to win favor with Saltzman. The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, "He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!"

The sensitive language of his September 11th statement was gone. Instead, Obama distanced himself from the pacifist activists who were surely present. "Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances," he told the crowd. He then went further, defending justifiable wars in almost glorious terms. "The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil. I don't oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's Army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow-troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain. I don't oppose all wars." It took some nerve to tweak the crowd in this way. After all, it was unlikely that many of the protesters knew who Obama was, and in a lengthy write-up of the event in the Chicago Tribune the following day he was not mentioned. Yet the speech reads as if it had been written for a much bigger audience.

During this period, Obama also became more of a strategist, someone increasingly comfortable discussing the finer points of polls, message, and fund-raising. According to his friends, Obama does not delegate campaign planning. Marty Nesbitt, his best friend, who became a familiar presence on the campaign trail this spring, flying in to play basketball with Obama on primary days, described the first meeting in which Obama pitched the idea of running for the U.S. Senate to his closest advisers and fund-raisers. This was in 2002, and things seemed to be going his way. The incumbent Republican, Peter Fitzgerald, was unpopular, and the race was attracting a large field of Democrats.

"He didn't start telling people he was interested in running for Senate until he figured out what the road map was," Nesbitt said. "He had a good sense of the odds, and he knew there were certain things that had to happen. . . . The first thing he said was, 'O.K., nobody with approval ratings like this has ever been reëlected, so it's not gonna be him, right?' And then he said there's a bunch of candidates who can potentially run, one of whom was Carol Moseley Braun. And he said, 'If she runs, I probably don't have a chance, because there's gonna be certain loyalty within the African-American community to her, even though she had some mistakes, and I'm probably not gonna get those African-American votes, which I need as my base if I'm gonna win. So if she runs, I don't run.'

"Then he just laid out an economic analysis. It becomes about money, because he knew that if people knew his story they would view him as a better candidate than anybody else he thought might be in the field. And so he said, 'Therefore, if you raise five million dollars, I have a fifty-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise seven million dollars, I have a seventy-per-cent chance of winning. If you raise ten million dollars, I guarantee victory."

That year, he gained his first high-level experience in a statewide campaign when he advised the victorious gubernatorial candidate Rod Blagojevich, another politician with a funny name and a message of reform. Rahm Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago and a friend of Obama's, told me that he, Obama, David Wilhelm, who was Blagojevich's campaign co-chair, and another Blagojevich aide were the top strategists of Blagojevich's victory. He and Obama "participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor," Emanuel said. "We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two." A spokesman for Blagojevich confirmed Emanuel's account, although David Wilhelm, who now works for Obama, said that Emanuel had overstated Obama's role. "There was an advisory council that was inclusive of Rahm and Barack but not limited to them," Wilhelm said, and he disputed the notion that Obama was "an architect or one of the principal strategists."

David Axelrod, the preëminent strategist in the state, declined to work for Blagojevich. "He had been my client and I had a very good relationship with him, but I didn't sign on to the governor's race," Axelrod said. "Obviously he won, but I had concerns about it. . . . I was concerned about whether he was ready for that. Not so much for the race but for governing. I was concerned about some of the folks—I was concerned about how the race was being approached." Axelrod's unease was warranted. Blagojevich and people close to him have been tied to a seemingly endless series of scandals. The trial of Tony Rezko revealed that Rezko used his influence in the Blagojevich administration to profit from companies seeking business with the state. There is speculation that Blagojevich will be the next governor to be indicted, and the Democratic Speaker of the Illinois House, Michael Madigan, has raised the issue of impeachment.

Part of Obama's political success is that he has been able to exploit relationships with important yet ethically dubious figures in Illinois while still maintaining his independence. In some ways, this is an Illinois tradition. When the liberal reformer Adlai Stevenson ran for governor, in 1948, one Democratic boss reportedly noted that he would "perfume the ticket." The earnest Lincoln scholar Paul Simon stood out in the Senate for his moral rectitude and his commitment to good government even as his state wallowed in scandal. "The political bosses knew they had to have what they used to call in business a loss leader—the showcasing," Don Rose, the Chicago political consultant, said. "The car that you sold for under its value for advertising purposes. While you had at the top of your ticket a shining star, under that it was like turning over a rock."

Obama has said little about the scandals in his home state. Besides the Rezko and Blagojevich cases, there have been indictments and convictions against the Daley administration concerning hiring and contracting practices. Getting close to the sullied political leadership in Illinois was probably an unavoidable cost of winning the U.S. Senate seat. Emil Jones told me that another of the lessons Obama learned after his 2000 loss was the importance of political sponsorship.

Jones and Obama have had a complicated history. As a community organizer, Obama led a protest against Jones, and in his memoir he unflatteringly describes him as an "old ward heeler." ("I guess he figured I was part of the establishment," Jones told me, objecting to the description. "He didn't know too much about politics and he was very idealistic.") Years later, Jones backed Palmer over Obama in the State Senate race. But their relationship changed dramatically after 2000. When Obama praised Jones as "my political godfather," Jones began using the theme music from "The Godfather" as his cell-phone ringtone.

I spoke to Jones in his office minutes after he left a meeting with the Governor, a close ally whom he has defended during the recent difficulties. Jones, who is seventy-two, is a former sewer inspector and insurance salesman; he speaks in a soft rumble and practices politics in a characteristically Chicago manner. He recently explained his support for a proposal to increase the salaries of legislators by saying, "I need a pay raise." In May, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Jones "provided himself with tens of thousands of dollars in interest-free loans from his campaign fund," which, the report noted, is not illegal in Illinois but is "highly unusual." A spokesman for Jones said that Jones "has always made it a practice to pay back the loans and continues to do so."

Being in the majority has proved hard for the Democrats. They were having trouble agreeing on a budget deal, and the newspapers were filled with those murmurs of impeachment. For Jones, discussing his long history with the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee—from target of the youthful Obama's anti-establishment organizing to political patron in Springfield—seemed a welcome relief, a reminder of happier times for Democrats in Illinois.

"When he ran that race against Bobby Rush, he had no one supporting him who had political influence over others and whom people respected, so he was out there as a lone wolf in that race," Jones said. That's why, in 2002, as Obama planned his next campaign, he sought out Jones. "We never discussed it, but he had to analyze that race and recognize he had no other powerful elected officials supporting him," Jones said. "And so he felt I could be very, very key if he was going to make the run for the U.S. Senate.

"In politics, you must know who is connected to whom," Jones continued. "The Mayor of Chicago and the father of Dan Hynes"—one of Obama's primary opponents—"when they were both state senators they shared an apartment together in Springfield, so there's a relationship between those two. And the Governor? One of his chief financial supporters in his first run was also in the race. I work with both the Mayor and the Governor, so, by my jumping in strong behind Barack Obama, they didn't want to alienate me and have me upset with them, so they stayed out of the race."

In the State Senate, Jones did something even more important for Obama. He pushed him forward as the key sponsor of some of the Party's most important legislation, even though the move did not sit well with some colleagues who had plugged away in the minority on bills that Obama now championed as part of the majority. "Because he had been in the minority, Barack didn't have a legislative record to run on, and there was a buildup of all these great ideas that the Republicans kept in the rules committee when they were in the majority," Burns said. "Jones basically gave Obama the space to do what Obama wanted to do. Emil made it clear to people that it would be good for them." Burns, who at that point was working for Jones, was assigned to keep an eye on Obama's floor votes, which, because he was a Senate candidate, would be under closer scrutiny. The Obama-Jones alliance worked. In one year, 2003, Obama passed much of the legislation, including bills on racial profiling, death-penalty reform, and expanded health insurance for children, that he highlighted in his Senate campaign.

ONE STEP AHEAD

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago's churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. "You have the power to make a United States senator," he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Obama's establishment inclinations have alienated some old friends. During the 2004 Senate primary, Obama sometimes reminded voters of his anti-machine credentials, but at the same time he shrewdly wrote to Mayor Daley's brother, William, who had backed one of Obama's primary opponents, asking for his support if he won the primary. As he outgrew the provincial politics of Hyde Park, he became closer to the Mayor, and this accommodation, as well as his unwillingness to condemn the corruption scandals ensnaring Daley and Blagojevich, both of whom he supported for reëlection, have some of his original supporters feeling alienated and angry. "I am not thrilled with Barack, simply because we elected him as an Independent, and he switched over to Daley," Alan Dobry said. Ivory Mitchell, speaking of Obama's Senate race, said, "When he won the primary out here and he went downtown, it appears as though Daley took over the campaign for him. . . . We were excluded." David Axelrod told me, in response, that some of the Independents on the South Side blame Daley for just about anything. "I think there's kind of this Wizard of Oz mystique," he said. "Daley had virtually no role in the Senate campaign."

Another transition from primary to general election is now under way for Obama, and it is causing him a similar set of problems, all of which stem from a realization among his supporters that superheroes don't become President; politicians do. Judging by the reaction to Obama's most recent decisions—his willingness to support legislation to modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, his rightward shift on interpreting the Second Amendment, his decision to "refine" his Iraq policies—some voters will be crushed by this realization and others will be relieved. In another episode that has Obama's old friends feeling frustrated, Obama recently blamed his first campaign manager, Carol Anne Harwell, for reporting on a 1996 questionnaire that Obama favored a ban on handguns. According to her friends, Harwell was furious that the campaign made her Obama's scapegoat. "She got, as the saying goes, run over by a bus," Lois Friedberg-Dobry said.

(SITE NOTE: The NRA still didn't believe him and called him the most anti-gun candidate. The Brady Committee anti-gun group endorsed Obama openly for President, while the NRA endorsed McCain. (Source: NRA v. Obama.) Neither do the gun owners of America. Since Obama was elected gun sales have skyrocketed. In addition, ammunition sales have kept the shelves empty as people stockpile the impending gun-control measures of Obama.)

Obama's rise has often appeared effortless. His offstage tactics—when he is engaged in the sometimes combative work of a politician—are rarely glimpsed by outsiders. Penny Pritzker, a friend and fund-raiser for Obama, remembers meeting with him at her office in 2006 to discuss his Presidential campaign. Pritzker, whose family, one of the wealthiest in Chicago, owns the Hyatt hotel chain, was as crucial to Obama's next campaign as Toni Preckwinkle's was to his first. "We were talking about whether he was ready to do this or not," Pritzker told me. She was blunt, telling Obama, "As I see it, the two things that you're going to need to address are your executive leadership skills, because your résumé doesn't have that in it, and the second would be your credentials in national security." Obama returned with an organizational chart indicating how the campaign would be structured—one of his great tactical advantages over the disorganized Clinton campaign—along with a list of advisers. Pritzker agreed to become his finance chair. Obama has frequently been one step ahead of his friends and the public in anticipating his own rise. Perhaps it is all those people he has met over the years who told him that he would be President one day. The Reverend Alvin Love, a South Side Baptist minister and a longtime Obama friend, said that Obama called him in December, 2006, seeking advice about whether to run for President. "My dad told me that you've got to strike while the iron is hot," Love recalls saying, and Obama replied, "The iron can't get any hotter."

Obama has always had a healthy understanding of the reaction he elicits in others, and he learned to use it to his advantage a very long time ago. Marty Nesbitt remembers Obama's utter calm the day he gave his celebrated speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston, which made him an international celebrity and a potential 2008 Presidential candidate. "We were walking down the street late in the afternoon," Nesbitt told me. "And this crowd was building behind us, like it was Tiger Woods at the Masters."

"Barack, man, you're like a rock star," Nesbitt said.

"Yeah, if you think it's bad today, wait until tomorrow," Obama replied.

"What do you mean?"

"My speech," Obama said, "is pretty good."

(SITE NOTE: Obama's good friend Martin Nesbitt, a successful black businessman in Chicago, spent the day of the speech with him, traveling from appearance to appearance. "We were walking down the street in Boston, and this crowd was growing behind us, kind of like Tiger Woods at the Masters. And I turned to Barack and I said, 'This is incredible. You're like a rock star.' And he looked at me and said, 'If you think it's bad today, wait till tomorrow.' And I said, 'What do you mean?,' and he said, 'My speech is pretty good.'?" It was an extraordinary display of self-confidence, and self-knowledge. "All of the rest of us are groping as to how to handle this, because we couldn't ever imagine we'd be in this place we're in," Obama's brother-in-law Craig Robinson told me. "I think the way my sister is processing it is day by day. I think the way that Barack is processing it is as just another step in his strategic plan." (Source: Vanity Fair (Mar 2008).))

(Source: New Yorker.)

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MAIN CHARACTERS IN SHAPING OBAMA'S POLITICAL CAREER

Toni Reed Preckwinkle

Toni Reed Preckwinkle (born March 17, 1947) is an alderman in the Chicago City Council representing Chicago's 4th ward in Cook County, Illinois, United States. Preckwinkle first sought office in 1983, but was defeated twice before securing election in 1991 and subsequently being re-elected four times. In addition to her elected role on the city council, Preckwinkle serves as the Democratic Committeeman of the 4th Ward of the city on the Cook County Central Committee. As 4th ward alderman, she has neighborhood, municipal and regional functions, and has an additional role in the development of the prospective Olympic Village and Olympic Stadium, which are planned in and around her ward as part of the Chicago 2016 Olympic bid.

She is a critic of current Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and ally of United States President-elect and 4th ward resident Barack Obama. She is an outspoken Chicago politician, whose actions and opinions are often noted in respected publications across the country such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and who has a reputation for being a progressive leader and for being publicly accountable. In her first four terms in office she emerged as the council's prominent defender of affordable housing. Among other issues she is known for her cost benefit analysis of the city's Olympic bid and for her sponsorship of living wage ordinances. She also has an interest in police brutality and excessive force. (Source: Wikipedia.)

In 1996, when Obama ran for the Illinois Senate seat of Alice Palmer, a "respected activist who had decided to run for Congress and anoint Obama as her successor", and her "congressional bid fell short, she decided she wanted to keep her seat and tried to get Obama to step aside," the Boston Globe reported October 10, 2007. "Not only did Obama refuse, his political associates - led by Chicago Alderwoman Toni Preckwinkle and her staff - challenged the validity of Palmer's signatures and the signatures of his other prospective opponents. Many were ruled fake, and in one fell swoop Obama knocked every rival out of the race." In 2000, Preckwinkle was among those who encouraged Obama to run for Congress. On November 1, 2007, Preckwinkle, as did all African-American members of the Chicago City Council, endorsed Obama's presidential run, about the time of the HPKCC report. (Source: Rezko Watch.)

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Reverend Wright

Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, Jr. (born September 22, 1941) is the former Pastor and now Pastor Emeritus of the Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), a megachurch in Chicago with around 8,500 members. In early 2008, Wright retired after 36 years as the Senior Pastor of his congregation and no longer has daily responsibilities at the church. Following retirement, Wright's beliefs and manner of preaching were scrutinized when short segments from his sermons were publicized in connection with the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Obama addressed the issues raised by the Wright controversy in his speech entitled "A More Perfect Union". To explain more fully his actual positions on these issues, Wright gave a speech before the NAACP on April 27, 2008, in which he stressed that he was not "divisive", but "descriptive", and that the black church experience, like black culture, was "different" but not "deficient".His wife is Ramah Reed Wright, and he has four daughters, Janet Marie Moore, Jeri Lynne Wright, Nikol D. Reed and Jamila Nandi Wright, and one son, Nathan D. Reed.

The Jeremiah Wright controversy gained national attention in March 2008 when ABC News, after reviewing dozens of Wright's sermons, excerpted parts which were subject to intense media scrutiny. Wright is the former pastor of Barack Obama. Obama denounced the statements in question, but after critics continued to press the issue of his relationship with Wright he gave a speech titled "A More Perfect Union", in which he sought to place Dr. Wright's comments in a historical and sociological context. In the speech, Obama again denounced Wright's remarks, but did not disown him as a person. The controversy began to fade, but was renewed in late April when Wright made a series of media appearances, including an interview on Bill Moyers Journal, a speech at the NAACP and a speech at the National Press Club. After the last of these, Obama spoke more forcefully against his former pastor, saying that he was "outraged" and "saddened" by his behavior, and in May he resigned his membership in the church. (Source: Wikipedia)

VIDEO Active X Required: ABC News Video of Rev Wright.

An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans. "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme." In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism. "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.

In a campaign appearance in Mar 2008, Sen. Obama said, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." He said Rev. Wright "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with," telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family. Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope." ABC News.))



In Mar 2008, Obama severed ties with Rev Wright. Obama said that he did not know the extent of Rev. Wright's controversial comments until recently. He confirmed that he was not in the church when Rev. Wright made the comments that were reported this week, a point he reiterated in another interview with CNN. "I didn't know about all these statements," he said. "I knew about one or two of these statements that had been made. One or two statements would not lead me to distance myself from either my church or my pastor...If I had thought that was the tenor or tone on an ongoing basis, then yes, I don't think it would have been reflective of my values." But Obama did say that in light of Rev. Wright's retirement, "I have no intention of leaving the church itself." (Source: ABC News.)

However, ABC News reversed itself when it was revealed that ABC News had taken its famous expose article by taking bits and pieces out of context. ABC News turned around 180 degrees and attempted to defend Rev Wright after the full text of his sermons were released showing that ABC News had sensationalized Wright's sermon. Rev Wright defended himself claiming he had been "used" by the press at the National Press Club in Apr 2008. (Source: Newsbusters and ABC.) (SITE NOTE: After seeing the 2001 sermon tape in its entirety, we are convinced that ABC conducted a classic case of "yellow journalism" by excerpting the most sensational parts OUT OF CONTEXT and editing it to appear that Rev Wright was preaching hatred against America and racism. Though his views are radical, it is also the view held by many black activists in the US.)

VIDEO: Active X Required: CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC & Fox News LIED about pastor Jeremiah Wright.
See 9/11 sermon in context

In the latter part of the Presidential campaign Obama distanced himself from Wright -- especially after it was disclosed the Rev. Wright had an affair with a white parishioner who came to him for marriage counseling and after it was disclosed the marriage ended in divorce. Elizabeth Payne, 37, told the Post that she and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, 67, had a sexual relationship this year and that she was fired from her job when the affair was made public. Payne had been working at Friendship-West Baptist Church as a secretary to the Rev. Frederick Haynes III, a longtime Wright protege. "I was involved with Rev. Wright, and that's why I lost my job and why my husband divorced me," Payne was quoted saying in Tuesday's newspaper. She said she has filed a wrongful-dismissal claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Source: Fox News (Sep 2008).) We noted that this scandal never made it into his Wikipedia entry -- but then neither did Jesse Jackson's scandalous sexual affairs as well.

However, Obama still lists his church as the Trinity United Church of Christ -- and proclaims that he is a practicing Christian there. While a US Senator, Obama and his wife decided that the family should remain in Hyde Park.

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David Axelrod

David Axelrod (born 1955) is an American political consultant based in Chicago, Illinois. He is best known as a top adviser to Barack Obama, first in Obama's 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate in Illinois and later as chief strategist for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Axelrod is the senior partner of AKP&D Message and Media and was a political writer for the Chicago Tribune. He operates ASK Public Strategies. He is also a supporter of Cook County Commissioner Forrest Claypool, who helped Axelrod found his firm (under the name Axelrod and Associates). Axelrod and Barack Obama's ties reach back more than a decade. Axelrod met Obama in 1992 when Obama so impressed Betty Lu Saltzmann, a woman from Chicago's "lakefront liberal crowd," during a black voter registration drive he ran that she then introduced the two. Obama also consulted Axelrod before he delivered his famed 2002 anti-war speech and asked him to read drafts of his book, The Audacity of Hope.


David Axelrod



Axelrod helped to craft the Obama campaign's main theme of "change." Axelrod is credited with implementing a strategy that encourages the participation of people, a lesson drawn partly from Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign as well as a personal goal of Barack Obama. Axelrod explained to Rolling Stone magazine, "When we started this race, Barack told us that he wanted the campaign to be a vehicle for involving people and giving them a stake in the kind of organizing he believed in." This includes drawing on "Web 2.0" technology and viral media to support a grassroots strategy. Obama's web platform allows supporters to blog, create their own personal page, and even phonebank from home. Axelrod's elaborate use of the Internet has helped Obama to organize under-30 voters and build over 475,000 donors in 2007, most of whom were Internet donors contributing less than $100 each. (Source: Wikipedia.))

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THE BLACK INNER CIRCLE

We can now see the team of Chicago black elite pulling together to groom Obama for greater things. Later powerful Jewish family members added their support and joined the group.

Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama: Michelle Obama, a formidable daughter of the South Side who is an alumna both of the Ivy League and Chicago's rough-and-tumble City Hall. She may not be in on all the conference calls or offer her own health plan in the style of former First Lady Hillary Clinton but no one else in the inner circle denies that she would be a driving force in any presidential campaign.

Apparently Michelle Robinson initially brushed off advances from Barack because they were working at same firm...and he was an intern and she higher up the law firm's foodchain as an associate. But love prevailed and they were married on October 18, 1992. Interestingly Barack and Michelle waited almost seven years before having children. Their first daughter name Malia Ann Obama was born in 1999 with Natasha (often called "sasha") following two years later in 2001. When asked about what made her fall in love with him she replied "for the same reason many other people respect him; his connection with people." Even though her husband is the center of attention, Michelle has zero concerns about fidelity in their marriage. She told Ebony magazine in March 2006, "I never worry about things I can't affect, and with fidelity . . . that is between Barack and me, and if somebody can come between us, we didn't have much to begin with." Michelle's impressive resume includes: Former associate dean at the University of Chicago; a member of six boards of directors including the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and Tree House Foods; and Vice President, Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals. In this position she was responsible for all programs and initiatives that involve the relationships between the hospitals and the community as well as management of the hospitals' business diversity program.

Michelle's professional relationships were helpful when her husband in 2004, then a state senator, ran for the United States Senate, where he faced a primary dominated by some of the Democratic Party's most powerful political families. In this 2004 race, Obama had the support of influential black business leaders, some of whom had closer ties to his wife than they did to him. According to Newsweek, a former boss of Michelle Obama's, a powerful black woman Valerie Jarrett, chair of the Chicago Stock Exchange, served as finance chair of Barack Obama's U.S. Senate campaign.



After Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate, Barack and Michelle choose to keep their children in Chicago, where Michelle continued her career as well. "We made a good decision to stay in Chicago so that has kept our family stable," Michelle Obama told the Chicago Tribune. Every Sunday the family attends services at the Trinity United Church of Christ. According to reports, Michelle has mastered being a mother, career woman and the wife of a politician. When Newsweek magazine trailed her in 2004, the reporter could not help but notice a to-do list for her two daughters Malia and Natasha that included time for "play." She is in bed most nights by 9:30 and rises each morning at 4:30 to run on a treadmill. This level of discipline and organization helps her manage her public and private pressures with poise. In New Yorker magazine Michelle noted that the life of a political wife is "hard and that's why Barack is such a grateful man." But there's more to it. "Barack didn't pledge riches" Michelle explains to Newsweek. "Only a life that would be interesting. On that promise he's delivered." (Source: Bio, Popmatters.)

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Craig Robinson

Craig Robinson: Michele Obama's brother. He grew up South Side of Chicago. Mom was a secretary, dad (who battled multiple sclerosis) worked for the city's water department. ... had a full ride to Univ. of Washington for hoops but his dad wanted him to go to Princeton, where he was a 6-6 forward good enough to be Ivy League Player of the Year twice and get drafted by the 76ers. ... played two years in England, got his Masters in business admin. in Chicago, went to work for some high-powered financial firms, but gave it all up to make ONE-TENTH the salary as an assistant at Northwestern.

Brown men's basketball coach Craig Robinson made an immediate impact on the Brown basketball team in just one year at the helm of the program, being named the Ivy League Men's Basketball Coach of the Year by Basketball U. A six-year assistant coach at Northwestern and a former two-time Ivy League Player of the Year, Robinson was named the 29th head coach in Brown University's 101-year basketball history on June 15, 2006. Robinson's Brown team went 19-10 this season - the win total was a school record - and finished 11-3 in the Ivy League. In his first season, the 46-year-old Robinson went 11-18, 6-8.



Before taking the Brown job, he spent six years as an assistant at Northwestern, serving as the chief recruiter for Bill Carmody. Robinson is a former Ivy League Coach of the Year and a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton. He apparently runs a variation of the PRINCETON OFFENSE made famous under longtime coach Pete Carril ... slow, low-scoring, lots of movement without the ball. Those famous backdoor cuts. ... but writers who covered Robinson said it wasn't REALLY the Princeton offense (Brown's scores seem to verify this). They say the Brownies could get very deliberate in the halfcourt, but Robinson gave his guards much more freedom than Carril did. We are told Robinson has an excellent reputation on the east coast and his name had been mentioned as a candidate for the vacant job at Providence. ... Kevin McNamara, a basketball writer for the Providence Journal, said OSU fans may be skeptical initially, "but Craig Robinson is a great guy. ... this is the steal of all steals.''

Robinson, who also has an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (1992), took a hiatus from coaching and went into private business in 1990. He was a Vice President for Continental Bank from 1990-92, Vice President for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter from 1992-99, and then Managing Director for Loop Capital Markets before he made his move to Northwestern. (NOTE: This was the period when he met Obama as a businessman -- not as a basketball coach.) A native of Chicago, Robinson has a 15-year-old son, Avery, and an 11-year-old daughter, Leslie. He and his wife, Kelly, reside in the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island. (Source: OregonLive.com and ESPN.)

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Valerie Jarrett

Valerie Jarrett: Chicago lawyer, businesswoman, and civic leader. She is a senior advisor to President-Elect Barack Obama and has been named as a co-chairman of the Obama-Biden Transition Project. Additionally, she is considered a leading candidate to replace Obama in the U.S. Senate. Jarrett is one of Senator Obama's longest serving advisors and "closest campaign aide[s] – an insider widely tipped for a top position in an Obama administration."

Jarrett got her start in Chicago politics in 1987 working for Mayor Harold Washington[6] as Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development. Jarrett continued to work in the mayor's office in the 1990s. She was Deputy Chief of Staff for Mayor Richard Daley, during which time (1991) she hired Michelle Robinson, then engaged to Barack Obama, away from a private law firm. Jarrett served Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development from 1992 through 1995; and was Chair of the Chicago Transit Board from 1995 to 2003. She is currently the CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate development and management company, which she joined in 1995. She was a Member of the Board of Chicago Stock Exchange (2000-2007, as Chairman, 2004-2007). She is also the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago Medical Center, Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago and a Trustee of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.[8][9] Ms. Jarrett serves on the board of directors of USG Corporation, a Chicago based building materials corporation. (Source: Wikipedia.)

She is the woman known as the other side of Barack Obama's brain. Jarrett, a 51-year-old business leader and single mother, just may be the most powerful woman in Chicago besides Oprah. And she's earned the complete confidence of Barack and Michelle Obama. (Source: Popmatters.) Jarrett is a member of African-American and Chicago royalty. But her story and her life begin in the Middle East, not the Midwest. She was born in 1956 in Shiraz, Iran, about 570 miles south of Tehran. Her parents moved to Shiraz, known for its poets, wine and flowers, as part of a program that sent American doctors and agricultural experts to developing countries to help jump-start their health and farming efforts. Her father was on the staff of the brand new Nemazee Hospital, where Jarrett was born. "Every memory from Iran is a very happy memory," (Source: Free Republic.)


Valerie Jarrett

She is currently the CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate development and management company, which she joined in 1995. She was a member of the board of Chicago Stock Exchange (2000-2007, as Chairman, 2004-2007). (SITE NOTE: The real estate holdings of Jarrett has earned her the name of "slum lord" because they have not been repaired and are barely habitable.)

She is also the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago Medical Center, Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago and a Trustee of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. Jarrett serves on the board of directors of USG Corporation, a Chicago based building materials corporation.

According to Judicial Watch, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago housing projects operated by real estate developers and Obama financial backers Antoin 'Tony' Rezko and Allison Davis. (Davis is also Obama's former boss.) Jarrett was a member of the Board of Directors for the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation along with several Davis and Rezko associates, as well as the Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization, an organization that worked with Rezko and Davis.

According to press reports, housing projects operated by Davis and Rezko have been substandard and beset with code violations. The Chicago Sun Times reported that one Rezko-managed housing project was "riddled with problems — including squalid living conditions…lack of heat, squatters and drug dealers."

As Chief Executive Officer of the Habitat Company Jarrett also managed a controversial housing project located in Obama's former state senate district called Grove Parc Plaza. According to the Boston Globe the housing complex was considered "uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage…In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale — a score so bad the buildings now face demolition." Ms. Jarrett refused to comment to the Globe on the conditions of the complex. (Source: Wikipedia.)

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Marty Nesbitt

Marty Nesbitt: Wife: Anita Blanchard, Obama family obstetrician. Obama has been close with Marty Nesbitt, a fellow Hyde Park resident and basketball companion, for years. Nesbitt, an entrepreneur, started a successful airport-parking company in Chicago. Marty Nesbitt, 44, founded an airport-parking operation called the Parking Spot (its biggest investor is the Pritzker family) and chairs the Chicago Housing Authority. He's also presidential campaign treasurer for U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, godfather to Mr. Nesbitt's youngest son. How he stays connected: Shuts off his BlackBerry at night to spend time with his four kids, ages 3 to 14, but often checks in at 2 a.m., when he wakes up for an hour. "My wife is an obstetrician, so her work over the years has interrupted my sleeping patterns.'' Books are a constant. "When I buy a book, I carry it everywhere until I finish.'' (Source: Highbeam.)

After serving as the finance chairman of Obama's unsuccessful 2000 congressional campaign, he's now the treasurer of Obama's presidential campaign. His fund-raising acumen paid off even before that: In 2002 Marty put Obama in touch with Illinois' astoundingly wealthy Pritzker family (worth $20 billion) to help with his Senate campaign. But it's not all business between the two; up until the hectic presidential campaign they still played basketball together, went out to dinner with their wives, and socialized within Hyde Park's clique of affluent African-Americans. Marty's wife also delivered both of the Obamas' children and Obama is the godfather to the Nesbitts' youngest son. (Source: Muckety: Marty Nesbitt Relationships, NY Times Magazine.)


On the tarmac at Midway Airport, after returning to Chicago, Obama pal Marty Nesbitt twirls a basketball while walking from the plane with Eric Whitaker, Valerie Jarrett and her daughter Laura. Nesbitt and Whitaker play basketball with Obama and were intending to hit the court with him later on Election Day. (photo by Lynn Sweet)

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Eric Whitaker

Eric Whitaker: A doctor who is frequently on the Obama campaign plane is the executive vice president for strategic affiliations and associate dean for community-based research at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where Michelle Obama worked before she took a leave for the campaign. Before that, Whitake was the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. Whitaker goes back the furthest with Obama, having met the idealistic community organizer during their student days at Harvard. They shared a drive to reverse troubling patterns in the African American community. A public health specialist, Whitaker founded "Project Brotherhood," a barbershop-based program aimed at improving the health of black men, and served as a senior physician at Chicago's Cook County Hospital, now known as John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital. (Source: Washington Post.)

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Penny Pritzker

Penny Pritzker: Billionaire real estate magnate Penny Pritzker –of Chicago's Pritzker family–is the Obama National Finance Director. Pritzker has long been an Obama financial backer. Speaking at a synagogue in Boca Raton, Fla., in May, Obama called Pritzker and Crown "dear friends" from "pretty prominent" Jewish families, and told the crowd: "One of the raps on me when I first ran for Congress in the African American community was, 'He's too close to the Jewish community.' You can look this up. 'All his friends are Jews. He's from Hyde Park; he's from the University of Chicago.' " (Source: Washington Post.)


Over at the Hyatt Hotel on east Wacker Drive. Obama Finance Chair Penny Pritzker and David Jacobson, deputy finance chair, handled fund-raising chores. (photo by Lynn Sweet)

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John Rodgers

John Rodgers: Ariel Investment founder John Rodgers is an Illinois Finance co-chair and longtime friend. Ariel Capital Management is the country's first black-owned investment firm.

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Jim Crown

Jim Crown: Industrial magnate Jim Crown– of Chicago's Crown family is an Illinois Finance co-chair. He is son of Chicago billionaire Lester Crown and another prominent member of the local Jewish community.

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