Word: chicago
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great midcentury heyday of Chicago's Democratic machine, politics was open only to those with a sponsor--"We don't want nobody nobody sent," a ward boss famously said. By the time Obama got into the game in the 1990s, it was no longer an exclusive club. The centrally controlled party organization had splintered into a loose group of ward committees that operated like autonomous fiefs. Still, old practices died hard; the same virtues of loyalty and familiarity were rewarded by new bosses who expected political newcomers to pay their dues--and wait their turn...
...exception was Hyde Park, a small, integrated, partially gentrified neighborhood of professionals and University of Chicago professors, with a long tradition of independent politics. Obama moved there as a newly minted lawyer specializing in civil rights cases and lecturing at the university's law school. In 1996 he won his first political election to represent Hyde Park in the state senate, using legal challenges to keep rivals off the ballot. But after three years in the state capital of Springfield, he got restless and turned an eye to the seat for the First Congressional District of Illinois...
Obama argued that Rush had failed in leadership and vision. But his delivery was stiff and professorial--"more Harvard than Chicago," said an adviser who had watched Obama put a church audience to sleep. The problem was deeper than speaking style. Obama was a cultural outsider. Rush attacked his Ivy League education, using the E word for the first time. "He went to Harvard and became an educated fool," the Congressman told the Chicago Reader. "We're not impressed with these folks with these Eastern-élite degrees." Not growing up on the South Side raised other suspicions about Obama...
...campaign left him $60,000 in debt and unsure of his future. At 38, he was a state legislator in a party out of power, a black politician trounced in the black heartland, an outsider in the tribal world of Chicago politics. His long absences from home had angered his wife. "He was very dejected when it was over," said Mikva, "and thinking of how else he could use his talents." When a nonprofit group dangled a high-paying job, as director, Obama was so nervous--for fear that he might get it--that his hands were shaking...
...Obama was going to make his great leap forward, he would need the help of men like Emil Jones. A former sewer inspector in Chicago, Jones worked his way up the Democratic machine on the Far South Side to become Illinois's senate president in 2003, a pork-barreling, wheeling-and-dealing powerhouse. Early that year, he met privately with Obama at the statehouse. Obama had passed up various statewide races but now had found one to his liking: the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Peter Fitzgerald, a quirky maverick up for re-election in 2004. If Obama were...