the Rice Thresher

Issue date: 9/12/08 Section: Opinion

In April 2007, David Jackson and Ray Long wrote in the Chicago Tribune the history of Senator Barack Obama's 1996 campaign for the Illinois Senate. In an article titled "Barack Obama knows his way around a ballot," the Tribune challenged Obama's self-styled image as a different kind of politician. A decade earlier, the presidential candidate who just fought to restore full voting rights to his party's delegations from Michigan and Florida to the 2008 Democratic National Convention fought to eliminate the voting rights of his opponents in a 1996 Democratic primary for the Illinois Senate.

I want to offer a glimpse into Obama's 1996 Illinois Senate campaign because it exemplifies the audacity of his claim to have a monopoly on hope. Obama's politics are only new to the extent that Obama has the requisite amount of charisma and brilliance to sell a post-partisan reformist image he hasn't earned. I am not voting for Sen. John McCain - Google "Keating 5," and you'll see a counter-claim to his "Country First" slogans.

I'm just frustrated that so many of my friends support Obama because they think he's above politics, when the only campaign in which he put himself above politics was one in which he ran unopposed on a primary ballot for his own party. He ran a political campaign without politics because he ran a political campaign in which he was the only candidate on the ballot.

Jackson and Long wrote in the Tribune: "The day after New Year's 1996," operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Senator Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city's South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot."

Democratic contenders for the Illinois State Senate needed 757 signatures to get on their party's primary ballot. One of Obama's primary contenders, Marc Ewell, submitted 1,286 names. Obama and his legal team contested Ewell's signatures until they left him 86 short. Ewell responded with a federal lawsuit, but the judge's decision, noted the Tribune, "reveals how [Ewell] was tripped up by complexities in the election procedures." Obama was more fortunate; his legal team included the highly-renowned Thomas Johnson, who had worked on similar cases for an earlier mayor.

Another primary opponent, Gha-is Askia, presented 1,899 signatures. He was left 69 with signatures. The Obama team had invalidated 1,211 of them. When interviewed by the Tribune, Askia argued that this discredits Obama's current image, "Why say you're for a new tomorrow, then do old-style Chicago politics to remove legitimate candidates? He talks about honor and democracy, but what honor is there in getting rid of every other candidate so you can run scot-free? Why not let the people decide?"

The staff-writers for the Tribuneagreed: "The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it."

Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 invoked a similar theme in an article titled "Obama played hardball in his first Chicago campaign," which was published in May 2008 on CNN's Election Center Web site. When CNN sought a comment from Obama regarding the petition challenge, his staff directed them to a quote from the Tribune article in which the senator remarked, "To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up."

These rules, according to the CNN report, included invalidating signatures "if names were printed instead of signed in cursive writing. If signatures were good but the person gathering the signatures wasn't properly registered, those petitions were also thrown out." The ballots of Michigan and Florida in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary were supposed to be thrown out, too, according to Obama, and then later included - after he secured the nomination - because he did not want to penalize his party's primary voters on a technicality.

Obama is the candidate with a sunrise for a campaign image and "change you can believe in" as his mantra. Denying candidates in your own party the right to appear beside you on your own party's ballot because their supporters signed their names in print instead of cursive is a textbook definition of realpolitick. What of their hope? Change They Could Believe In? This from someone who deemed his own constituency unfit to elect him on the basis of his character or his policies?

Obama has since reflected on the primary race in the interview he granted to the Chicago Tribune - the same "Obama knows his way around a ballot box" to which CNN was directed.

Asked whether the district's primary voters were well-served by having only one candidate, Obama smiled and said: "I think they ended up with a very good state senator."

Jacob Nelson is a Baker College sophomore.

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