A bit about Obama’s background

Note: I know someone who can beat Obama. How do I know? Because this person already has.

His name is Bobby Rush. He beat BHO in a primary election for US Congress in 2000.

He has a great deal to do with how well BHO is doing now. How? Read on.

So many have touted HRC’s “experience” as one of her supposed virtues. But her political rise has been, in some sense, easy.

“Easy”??? Yes. Sure, as First Lady for Bill Clinton, both in Little Rock and later in Washington D. C., she kept a hectic schedule, got a ton of criticism (much of it unfair) and had her personal life splashed all over the world.

But, when it came to elective office: she was recruited by the New York Democrats to run for Senator. She faced no serious challenge either in the primary or in the general election, and she enjoyed huge name recognition and fund raising advantages. In short, the skids were greased for her; she didn’t have to work for the election.

So, it is probably no surprise the she grossly underestimated how hard this Democratic Primary would be:

She ended up having no “plan B” if the race were to continue after Super Tuesday.

To watch the almost comical digression of her campaign’s expectations, read this.

What about Obama?

Up to now, Obama has badly outcampaigned her in almost every possible way. One big reason: he knew that it would be hard from the very start and he prepared accordingly.

Contrary to what many of his detractors think, he isn’t some empty suit who just had this handed to him on a platter. He is working from, that’s right, painful experience.

A bit of background reading Ryan Lizza’s New Republic Article.

New York Times article about Obama’s first political election loss.

USA Today article about this loss

NPR Article about his loss.

Obama’s unlikely journey to where he is today started with his answering an ad in the New York Times; the ad was for a young African American to come to Chicago to work as a community organizer. It turns out that the group doing the organizing was lead by white people and they wanted an African American to lend the group some “credibility”, so to speak. As Lizzy’s article (TNR) says

A year after graduating from Columbia, Obama spotted an intriguing help-wanted ad in The New York Times. The Calumet Community Religious Conference (ccrc), a group that aimed to convert the black churches of Chicago’s South Side into agents of social change, was looking for a community organizer to run the group’s inner-city arm, the Developing Communities Project (DCP). Obama soon arranged to meet in New York with the organizer heading up the job search.

Obama had spent the previous year on a fruitless quest. He worked briefly for a Ralph Nader outfit in Harlem teaching college kids about recycling and then on a losing assemblyman’s race in Brooklyn. But he longed for an experience that connected him to the civil rights era. “In the sit-ins, the marches, the jailhouse songs,” he wrote in Dreams, “I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned.” Obama wanted to join the club.

“What really inspired me,” Obama told me during one of several conversations about his work as an organizer, “was the civil rights movement. And if you asked me who my role model was at that time, it would probably be Bob Moses, the famous sncc [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] organizer. … Those were the folks I was really inspired by–the John Lewises, the Bob Moseses, the Fannie Lou Hamers, the Ella Bakers.”

It was during these 4 years when he picked up valuable skills. He also found his spiritual home:

[...]This adulation is a far cry from how Obama was received by Wright when they first met in the mid-’80s, during Obama’s initial round of one-on-ones. Like Smalls, Wright was unimpressed. “They were going to bring all different denominations together to have this grassroots movement,” explained Wright, a white-haired man with a goatee and a booming voice. “I looked at him and I said, Do you know what Joseph’s brother said when they saw him coming across the field?’” Obama said he didn’t. “I said, Behold the dreamer! You’re dreaming if you think you are going to do that.’”

From Wright and others, Obama learned that part of his problem as an organizer was that he was trying to build a confederation of churches but wasn’t showing up in the pews on Sunday. When pastors asked him the inevitable questions about his own spiritual life, Obama would duck them uncomfortably. A Reverend Philips put the problem to him squarely when he learned that Obama didn’t attend services. “It might help your mission if you had a church home,” he told Obama. “It doesn’t matter where, really. What you’re asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophesy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you’re getting yours from.”

After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright’s church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for “Buppies”–black urban professionals–and didn’t have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”–included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.’” [...]

He was to spend 4 years in Chicago, then go to Harvard for Law School, and then return to Chicago.

In 1988, Obama left Chicago for Harvard Law, where his greatest political victory was getting himself elected president of the law review. He did it by convincing a crucial swing bloc of conservatives that their self-interests would be protected by electing him. He built that trust during the same kind of long listening sessions he had made use of in the depressed neighborhoods of Chicago. “He didn’t get to be president of Harvard Law Review because he was first in his class,” said Richard Epstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School, where Obama later taught. “He got it because people on the other side believed he would give them a fair shake.”

Even at Harvard, Obama kept a foot in the world of organizing. He spent eight days in Los Angeles taking a national training course taught by the IAF, a station of the cross for Alinsky acolytes. And, after he returned to Chicago in 1991, he served on the boards of both the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation, which also gives grants to Alinsky-style groups, and continued to teach organizing workshops.

Then after more organizing work and law practice, he was persuaded to run for the State Senate in 1995. There he engaged in some rather bare knuckle politics:

Obama initially planned to inherit the seat of a much-admired incumbent named Alice Palmer, a fixture in South Side activist circles since the ’60s. Palmer had opted to run for Congress, clearing the way for Obama to replace her, but, when she lost the primary, she decided she wanted to keep her old Senate seat, after all.

Obama was faced with a decision: step aside and wait his turn or do everything he could to take down a popular incumbent. In one meeting, an old guard of black political leaders tried to force Obama to abandon the race, but he wouldn’t budge. Instead of deferring to Palmer’s seniority, Obama challenged the very legitimacy of her petitions to get on the ballot, dispatching aides to the Chicago Board of Elections to scour Palmer’s filing papers, and, while they were at it, every other candidate’s, signature by signature. Many were fake. Obama won the challenge and cleared not just Palmer but all his potential rivals from the field.

It was a brash maneuver that caught the attention of the Illinois political establishment. “His introduction to the political community was that he knocked off Alice,” said Ron Davis, a longtime Obama political hand who filed the challenge against Palmer and still cackles with glee over their victory. “The [current] president of the state Senate, Emil Jones, pushed very hard to save Alice, but we beat his staff. So they heard about Barack before he came down there to Springfield: Who was this guy who came in and knocked Alice off the ballot?’”

Obama played the game very well

Speaking of what he learned as an organizer, Obama himself told me, “I think that oftentimes ordinary citizens are taught that decisions are made based on the public interest or grand principles, when, in fact, what really moves things is money and votes and power.”

After beating Palmer, Obama brought some of his old organizing lessons to Springfield. His successful career there owed much to a relationship he built with Emil Jones, the South Side machine pol whom Obama later described as his “political godfather.” Jones was an improbable mentor for Obama: In the mid-’80s, Obama’s group had organized protests against Jones when it wanted more help with funding for its projects. In Dreams, Obama portrayed Jones as an “old ward heeler” jockeying for position on a stage with the mayor. And Obama and Jones tangled over Alice Palmer, whom Jones had tried to rescue. Yet despite that history, or perhaps because of it, Obama sought out Jones in the legislature and let him know he was eager to work with him. Jones’s mentoring frayed Obama’s relationships with some other black colleagues–”petty jealousies,” Jones told me–but it paved the way for all of Obama’s legislative achievements.

Then, in 1999, came his first attempt to win a seat in the U. S. Congress.

Mr. Obama was a 38-year-old state senator and University of Chicago lecturer, unknown in much of Mr. Rush’s Congressional district. He lived in its most rarefied neighborhood, Hyde Park. He was taking on a local legend, a former alderman and four-term incumbent who had given voters no obvious reason to displace him.

Mr. Rush’s name recognition started off at 90 percent, Mr. Obama’s at 11. Then Mr. Rush’s son was murdered, leading Mr. Obama to put his campaign on hold. Later, while vacationing in Hawaii with his family, he missed a high-profile vote in the Legislature and was pilloried. (One Chicago Tribune editorial began, “What a bunch of gutless sheep.”) Then President Clinton endorsed Mr. Rush.

“Campaigns are always, ‘What’s the narrative of the race?’ ” said Eric Adelstein, a media consultant in Chicago who worked on the Rush campaign. “In a sense, it was ‘the Black Panther against the professor.’ That’s not a knock on Obama; but to run from Hyde Park, this little bastion of academia, this white community in the black South Side — it just seemed odd that he would make that choice as a kind of stepping out.”

The episode revealed a lot about Senator Obama — now running for president, against the odds again and with a relatively slim résumé. It showed his impatience with the frustrations of his state Senate job; his outsize confidence; his fund-raising powers; his broad appeal; and his willingness to be what Abner J. Mikva, a former congressman and supporter, calls “a very apt student of his own mistakes.”

The race did not go well for Obama but some future trends emerged:

Mr. Obama was seen as an intellectual, “not from us, not from the ’hood,” said Jerry Morrison, a consultant on the Rush campaign. Asked recently about that line of attack, Mr. Rush minimized it as “chest beating, signifying.”

The implication was not exactly that Mr. Obama was “not black enough,” as some blacks have suggested more recently; his credentials were suspect. “It was much more a function of class, not race,” Mr. Adelstein said. “Nobody said he’s ‘not black enough.’ They said he’s a professor, a Harvard elite who lives in Hyde Park.”

Not everything went badly. Mr. Obama proved unusually good at raising money. He raised more than $500,000 — less than Mr. Rush but impressive for a newcomer — tapping connections at the University of Chicago, Harvard Law School, law firms where he had worked, and a network of successful, black, Chicago-based entrepreneurs who have played an important role in subsequent campaigns.

He was also catching on among whites in the district thanks to Thomas J. Dart, then a popular state representative who is now Cook County sheriff.

But President Clinton’s endorsement of Mr. Rush, an early supporter of Mr. Clinton, dealt a final blow. According to Mr. Adelstein, Mr. Clinton — after a personal request from Mr. Rush — overrode his own policy of not endorsing candidates in primaries.

Mr. Rush won the primary with 61.02 percent of the vote; Mr. Obama had just over 30 percent. Mr. Obama was favored by whites but lost among blacks, Mr. Lester said. Looking back, some say the magnitude of the loss reflected Mr. Obama’s failure to connect with black, working-class voters.

He learned some important lessons, which ended up carrying him to win the 2004 Democratic Senate Primary (after starting out in fourth place!), the Senate seat (when the Republicans imploded because of a sex scandal and ended up running Alan Keyes as a backup) and to where he is today:

He and others say Mr. Obama learned from that experience. Mr. Mikva recalls telling him about advice once given to John F. Kennedy by Cardinal Richard Cushing: “The cardinal said to him, ‘Jack, you have to learn to speak more Irish and less Harvard.’ I think I recounted that anecdote to Barack. Clearly, he learned how to speak more Chicago and less Harvard in subsequent campaigning.”

Mr. Shomon said, “There was a gradual progression of Barack Obama from thoughtful, earnest policy wonk/civil rights lawyer/constitutional law expert to Barack Obama the politician, the inspirer, the speaker.” Denny Jacobs, a friend of Mr. Obama and a former state senator, agreed. “He stumbled on the fact that instead of running on all the issues, quote unquote, that hope is the real key,” he said. “Not only the black community but less privileged people are looking for that hope. You don’t have to talk about health care, you have to talk about ‘the promise’ of health care. Hope is a pretty inclusive word. I think he is very good at selling that.”

In March 2004, Mr. Obama won the Democratic primary for the United States Senate with nearly 53 percent of the vote, racking up huge totals in wards he had lost to Mr. Rush in 2000. (Mr. Rush, still stung by Mr. Obama’s challenge to him, endorsed a white candidate in the race, Blair Hull, a former securities trader.) Mr. Obama won the general election with the biggest margin ever in an Illinois Senate race.

So the long and short of it: Obama has been tested; he went against the odds thrice and came up short once. The lessons he learned are paying big dividends for him at the moment.