Obama's ballot history startling, hypocritical
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.