imported post
For refutation, see:
http://www.obamapolitics.com/node/117
See also:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/28/how_chicago_shaped_obama_a_look
"Obama joins a law firm that is sort of defined by its opposition to the Daley political machine. So, in other words, he was making a sort of a political statement.
. . . .
And it’s about this time that he starts to sort of look around for an office to run for, and that happens in 1995. He gets his first chance to run for office. And do you want me to—Juan, do we have enough time to sort of tell that story of his first run?
JUAN GONZALEZ: I think it’s—yes, it is critical, in terms of being able to understand how he forms his political vision, yes.
RYAN LIZZA: Yeah. So, what happens, it’s very interesting. He—1995, which, if you think about it, is really not all that long ago, there’s a woman named Alice Palmer, and Alice Palmer is a longtime local community leader, an education expert, someone with a lot of ties to the African American leadership of Chicago. Her husband, a guy named Buzz Palmer, he had actually started a reform group in the notoriously racist Chicago Police Department, a sort of group to sort of—of African American police officers. So, the Palmers were a family who had a lot of ties to the black establishment in Chicago. They were longtime activists, older than Obama.
Alice Palmer decides to run for Congress, and she decides to leave her—excuse me, she decides to leave her State Senate seat. And Obama decides that he’s going to make a run for that State Senate seat, since Alice Palmer is leaving. He starts going around to all of the key Democratic political operators on the South Side of Chicago and lining up support, and eventually he gets the blessing of Alice Palmer herself, and she endorses him as the replacement for her State Senate seat. And she goes off and runs for Congress.
Now, what happens is, she loses her congressional race very badly. She loses the primary to Jesse Jackson, Jr., who holds the seat to this day. She garners only about ten percent of the vote. And she decides that—she has second thoughts, and she decides that now that she’s forced—she’s, you know, looking at being out of politics altogether, she decides she wants her State Senate seat back. And a group of her supporters tell Obama that he now needs to back down, because Alice Palmer, even after she’s endorsed Obama for the seat, she’s going to return and represent the South Side in the State Senate again.
So, Obama is faced with this incredible dilemma: does he back down, does he bow to the support—to Alice Palmer and her supporters or not? And this really split—this just divided the political community on the South Side of Chicago in half. Some of the people who had backed Obama decided to go back to Palmer. Some of Palmer’s old supporters decided to stick with Obama. And there was a lot of pressure on Barack Obama to back down.
And what happens is, Obama decides to stay in the race. And not only does he decide to stay in the race, but he sends some of his political operatives down to the Board of Elections in Chicago to look at the petitions that Alice Palmer used to get on the ballot. They realize they’re filled with irregularities. They challenge these signatures. And Barack Obama gets Alice Palmer and all of his other opponents kicked off the ballot, and he wins his first race unopposed. . . ."
