Alexi Giannoulias returned to the South Suburbs to talk to voters about why this election is as important as any other. Alexi first talks about his work as Treasurer and his support for his Chief of Staff. He turns to his own race in part 2:
by Cal Skinner
You will remember that the day before Rod Blagojevich was arrested by the FBI, he let loose with this quote:
“I don't believe there's any cloud that hangs over me. I think there's nothing but sunshine hanging over me.”This morning on “Meet the Press” that cloud blew into sight...again.
The broadcast came on the heels of the Chicago Sun-Times publication of a front page article saying Reid had called Blagojevich offering advice on his U.S. Senate pick.“This is part of Blagojevich’s cloud. He’s making all this up. For anyone to suggest anything racial, is part of the Blagojevich spin.”What's our governor supposedly making up?
The contents of this Chicago Sun-Times article, which says Reid told Blagojevich he didn't want three black male politicians appointed to replace President-Elect Barack Obama (Senate President Emil Jones and Congressmen Danny Davis and Jesse Jackson, Jr.), but two while female politicians (Attorney General Lisa Madigan and former congressional candidate and now Illinois Veterans Affairs Director Tammy Duckworth) would be just fine.A pretty good article from this past January about the political environment that allows black politicians to move ahead in the system. This article from Salon.com says that if Sen. Obama had stayed in New York no one would have heard from him. He might have won an office but we may not have gone beyond for example, the New York State Assembly. I suppose a question to ask here is what would account for this? Why would Obama have never been heard from had he stayed in New York or also California or Hawaii?
Here's an excerpt. There is a lot about black history in Chicago. From Republican Oscar DePriest who was during the early 20th Century the only black man in Congress to William Dawson who operated a mostly black political machine until he was co-opted by the first Mayor Daley, or even some of the other black politicians of today including Harold Washington, Carol Moseley Braun or Sen. Obama himself...
For the hundreds of thousands of poor Southern blacks who made the trek north in the early 20th century, Chicago was literally known as the promised land. It promised prosperity, relative freedom -- and also, incredibly, political power. When the sharecroppers of Alabama and Mississippi passed around copies of the nation's biggest black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, in the 1920s and '30s, they read about a city with something unheard of in the rest of America: a black representative in the U.S. House. Oscar S. De Priest was a Republican, loyal to the party of Lincoln, and as the lone black man in Congress, he ended discrimination in the Civilian Conservation Corps, filed anti-lynching bills, and integrated the Senate Dining Room, over the physical objections of an Alabama senator.Consider this Illinoize's only black history month entry for this year!
De Priest was defeated in 1934, after the New Deal converted blacks to the Democratic faith, but his seat has remained in African-American hands ever since. It's currently held by Bobby Rush, a former minister of defense for the Black Panther Party.
When Barack Obama was 22 years old, just out of Columbia University, he took a $10,000-a-year job as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. It was a shrewd move for a young black man with an interest in politics. Had he stayed in New York, "you would never have heard of him," says Lou Ransom, the Defender's current executive editor. "He may have been a very good lawyer and maybe got elected to some office, but if he hadn't come to Chicago, he would not have had the kind of support to push him where he is now."
His home state of Hawaii is more diverse, the California of his early college days is more tolerant, New York is more sophisticated. But only in Illinois could Obama have become a senator and a presidential candidate. Going all the way back to Oscar De Priest (and in some ways to Abraham Lincoln), Illinois has led the nation in black political empowerment. It has elected two of the three black senators since Reconstruction -- Obama and Carol Moseley Braun. It's had a black attorney general, and its black secretary of state is setting a new standard for that office by not taking bribes (or at least not getting caught). The only other black candidate to win a presidential primary was Jesse Jackson, who came to Chicago from the South as a seminary student and stuck around to build his own political machine.
Ironically, Chicago became the political capital of black America because it was so racist. For most of the 20th century, it was the most segregated city in America. Blacks used to have a saying: "In the South, the white man doesn't care how close you get, as long as you don't get too high; in the North, he doesn't care how high you get, as long as you don't get too close." During the Great Migration, the refugees who rode up from Mississippi on the Illinois Central Railroad were crowded into the Black Belt, the South Side ghetto portrayed in Richard Wright's "Native Son." Because the black population was so concentrated, white politicians couldn't gerrymander it out of a congressional seat. One of De Priest's successors, William Dawson, was the most powerful black politician in America. He helped boot out the predecessor to Mayor Richard J. Daley, the current mayor's father, who bossed Chicago from 1955 to 1976. In return, Daley's machine rewarded Dawson with control of the entire South Side.
Sun Times columnist Carol Marin yesterday asked if Barack Obama was "out of the loop" when it came to his home state of Illinois? We asked voters in Illinois what they thought of Sen. Obama's job performance.
A whopping 73% of Illinois voters approve of the job Sen. Obama is doing representing Illinois in the U.S. Senate.
But it's not just the high approval number that's surprising, it is the intensity of Sen. Obama's support in Illinois that is impressive. 50.3% of Illinois voters 'strongly support' Sen. Obama's job performance while 22.7% 'somewhat support' his performance.
That means a majority of Illinois voter don't just approve...they STRONGLY approve.
50.3% Strongly Approve
22.7% Somewhat Approve
9.0% Somewhat Disapprove
7.7% Strongly Disapprove
10.3% Don't Know
We already knew that Democrats approved of him -- and 87% in Illinois approve of his performance as do 69% of Independents. But the shocker is that by a margin of 54.8% to 29.6% Illinois Republican voters support the job Sen. Obama is doing.
Most political figures would be thrilled to have a 54.8%-29.6% job approval statewide -- just ask Gov. Blagojevich. But Sen. Obama has those job approval numbers among his home state voters from the opposing party.
His numbers are hitting the stratosphere among some demographic groups such as an 83% job approval rating in the City of Chicago and 88% among African American voters. Read the crosstabs here.
At this point, there is just no weakness in Sen. Obama's home state job approval numbers. Democrats, Independents, Republicans, downstaters, collar county, young and old, white, Hispanic, and African American. It appears Sen. Obama's job performance is one of the few things upon which Illinois voters actually agree.
When you are a U.S. Senator, you can’t have outside income unless you write a book.
So, I guess it should not be much of a surprise that Barack Obama has let his Illinois law license lapse sometime this year.
But he didn’t decide to stop paying the licensing fee until this year, however, according to records readily available at the Attorney’s Registration and Disciplinary Commission.
And you may be surprised where I learned this information.
It was an email from Andy Martin, the only announced candidate for the Republican nomination to run against Dick Durbin for the U.S. Senate next year.
He included the tid-bit, almost as a throwaway at the bottom of a press release about having filed a formal complaint against Obama with
the Illinois Board of Admissions to the Bar, and Attorney and Attorney Registration Commission, asking for an investigation concerning whether Senator Barack Obama obtained bar admission based on false representations.The basis for his complaint are the 17 parking tickets Obama just paid from his college days.
Martin writes,Illinois agencies require that any outstanding parking tickets be paid prior to bar admission. It does not appear based on the available circumstantial evidence that Obama answered his bar admission questionnaire truthfully."V-e-r-y interesting," as they would say on Laugh-in.
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