NewYorker: Making It: How Chicago shaped Obama

[babylonsister]

Making It
How Chicago shaped Obama.
by Ryan Lizza July 21, 2008


Barack Obama on the South Side during his first campaign, for the State Senate. An outsider in Chicago’s system, he was meticulous about constructing his own political identity and coalition. Photograph by Marc PoKempner.


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.

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.”

more...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lizza?printable=true

[hedgehog]

1. So Ms. Preckwinkle is disappointed because Obama didn't

do her any favors as he achieved higher office? Our candidate focused on representing the voters rather than joining the Old Boy network? Sounds like a recommendation to me.

[mucifer]

2. wow that was a really well writen not so flattering history of Obama in

Chicago. I'm glad I read it. It should be read all the way through to get a sense of history. Obama is a brilliant and shrewd politician. But, he sure has his faults. It is kinda creepy. That said I will still volunteer for his campaign.

[Doctor_J]

3. You have to remember that Big Media - all of it - is out to stop Obama

and the Dems from breaking up the galloping fascism that's now in place. The Times and Post will be indistinguishable from Fox News and WSJ within a few weeks, especially if Obama starts to pull away in the polls. They hate the idea of young working people having more say over how the country is run than old rich people.

[babylonsister]

5. Here's an interesting, alternate take on this article:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2008/07/13/the-perfect-metaphor-for-obama-s-ascent.aspx

The Perfect Metaphor for Obama's Ascent

snip//

A major theme of Ryan's piece is the self-conciousness with which Obama went about charting his own rise. The redistricting passage is telling in itself, but it's also a nice metaphor for the meticulous, near-mathematical precision of that years-long exercise.

Update: One of the questions that's inevitably come up in the handful of discussions I've had about Ryan's piece is whether we should feel much differently about this demystified Obama than we did about the previous version. I can understand why some people would--it's comforting to think that a politician could emerge on the national scene largely untainted by the grubbiness of politics. To the extent people felt that way about Obama, the increasingly filled-out picture of him could be tough to accept.

But, as someone says in Ryan's piece, it's hardly a shock that the guy who upended one of the most successful political franchises of all time is well-acquainted with the dark art of politics. The news in Ryan's piece isn't that Obama's a politician--or that shouldn't be the news, in any case. Ryan's achievement is to lay out the particular form of politics Obama has practiced--which was to master the game "as it's played" at every level he played it, and to use the rules of the game to advance his own goals.

It's not exactly a flattering or ennobling account, but I didn't find anything in there especially stomach-churning and certainly not disqualifying. If anything, it made me think Obama will actually be pretty effective at enacting his agenda should he end up in the White House.

--Noam Scheiber

[hedgehog]

6. WHy should we condemn someone for being ambitious and/or being

good at politics? Politics is just a tool, neither good nor bad. It's the ends that the tool is used for that are good or bad.

[babylonsister]

7. I'm not condemning anyone; if anything, I'm trying to justify

why this isn't a bad article. It was pretty insightful and had info I hadn't read before.
I did think when posting this this a.m. that people might react negatively to it, but we also need to keep our eyes open.

[hedgehog]

9. I was agreeing with the post but I guess I didn't make that clear.

Sorry.

[babylonsister]

11. Gotcha! nt

[starroute]

4. When I was a kid my father told me to look at the New Yorker's ads

... and to think about who the magazine's real audience was.

I'd grown up on the New Yorker, from the time when I was little enough to sit in the big armchair next to my father and he would explain the cartoons to me, to when I was 9 or 10 and becoming able to get the jokes on my own, to when I was 12 or 13 and started reading the articles. I encountered Hannah Arendt's coverage of the Eichmann trial there when I was 14 and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" when I was 15. I really valued that magazine.

But once my father told me to look at the ads, and I started realizing how many of them were for things like Rolls-Royces and Corning crystal and other beautiful objects that I would never in my life be able to afford, I had to agree with my father than its real audience was not me or anyone I knew.

I haven't read the New Yorker for many years, but I can't think that it's changed very much. It may publish Seymour Hersh's valuable investigative pieces -- but its real audience is still the people who buy the expensive cars and jewelry and knick-knacks, and their interests are not the same as mine.

[stuckinlodi]

8. Same Goes for Vanity Fair

I like the articles, but the advertizing and the columns about gossip, parties, etc. make it clear it is not meant for people like me.

[hedgehog]

10. I think Vanity Fair has 10 times the snark level of the New Yorker.

Plus, there has to be at least one disparaging comment on a Kennedy in each issue. Bonus points if it's something Gore Vidal said!