Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 10:40:12 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Scientists to drill beneath oceans
http://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php/topic,8063.0.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

BAR: Cynthia McKinney Deserves Your Support, Obama Does Not

Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: BAR: Cynthia McKinney Deserves Your Support, Obama Does Not  (Read 1186 times)
0 Members and 83 Guests are viewing this topic.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« Reply #30 on: July 17, 2008, 04:26:25 pm »









“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.”

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.

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.


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.”
« Last Edit: July 17, 2008, 04:28:31 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
Pages: 1 2 [3] 4 5   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy