Burnt Orange Report

Barack Obama for U.S. Senate

By Byron LaMasters

This guy is amazing.

Barack Obama. No, not Osama. Or Iraq. He's a candidate for U.S. Senate in Illinois, and I've been impressed with him ever since I learned about him several months ago. He's a terrific candidate in a state that has shown that it has the ability to elect African-Americans to statewide office on a consistent basis. Obama is such a great candidate. He's an Illinois State Senator, a civil rights attorney and is squeaky clean ethically (in sometimes ethically challenged Illinois politics).

Learn more about him at his official website or check out what the Washington Post has to say:

Organization men are a staple of Illinois politics, of course, and investment bankers seem poised to take over the Senate in our plutocratic age. Obama, by contrast, is a candidate who all but defies categorization -- and who would certainly mark a radical departure for the stodgy Senate. If elected (and Illinois is a Democratic state becoming steadily more so), he would become the Senate's sole black member and just the third African American senator since Reconstruction, following Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke and fellow Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley Braun, who only narrowly lost her seat to Republican Fitzgerald in 1998 despite a string of scandals.

But that scarcely begins to describe the distinctiveness of Obama. His father was Kenyan, his mother a white girl from Kansas. The two met and married at the University of Hawaii in 1960 (when miscegenation was still a felony in more than half the states). His father disappeared from his life when Obama was 2; his mother raised him in Hawaii and Indonesia. Obama went to college at Columbia, then moved to Chicago for five years of community organizing in a fusion of civil rights crusading and Saul Alinsky house-to-house plodding. He then went to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the Law Review; returned to Chicago to run a program that registered 100,000 voters in the '92 elections, entered a civil rights law firm and became a senior lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago. (If elected, Obama would be the second liberal Hyde Park academic to represent Illinois in the Senate; New Deal economist Paul Douglas was the first.)

Seven years ago Obama was elected to the state Senate from a district in Chicago's South Side. In Springfield, he developed a reputation as an impassioned progressive who was able to get support on both sides of the aisle. One of his bills created a state earned-income tax credit that has brought more than $100 million to Illinois's working-poor families. Another, conceived in the wake of revelations about innocent men the state had wrongly executed, mandated the videotaping of police interrogations of suspects in capital crimes. There followed "tortuous negotiations with state's attorneys and death-penalty abolitionists," Obama recalls, but in the end the bill passed unanimously.

In October 2002, Obama made an eloquent case against the impending war in Iraq at a rally in downtown Chicago. Declaring repeatedly that "I don't oppose all wars," he distinguished what he termed "a dumb war, a rash war" from a string of just and necessary wars in which the United States had engaged. He is surely the progressives' darling in the field, drawing enthusiastic support from white Lake Shore liberals as well as the African American community. But he's also won the endorsements of virtually all the state's major papers, many of which -- such as Chicago's Tribune and Sun-Times -- note their disagreement with him on the war but hail him as a brilliant public servant nonetheless. Should Obama win, says Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Evanston, who backs his candidacy, he'd "march right onto the national stage and the international stage."

While practicing law in the early 1990s, Obama wrote "Dreams From My Father," a memoir and meditation of genuine literary merit that depicts his understandable quest for his identity -- a quest that immersed him in the world of Chicago's poor and that took him to a Kenyan village in search of a father he never knew. It's a story of worlds colliding, fusing and redividing, of a life devoted to re-creating in a grittier world the idealism and sense of community of the early civil rights movement, which provided the backdrop for his parents' marriage.

If by "American" we mean that which is most distinctive about us and our ideals, if we mean it to refer to our status as a nation of immigrants that could yet become the world's first great polyglot, miscegenistic meritocracy, then Barack Obama, if elected, would not only become the sole African American in the Senate: He would also be the most distinctly American of its members.

I'm sold. This guy leads 44% to 20% to 18% over Blair and Hynes in a recent Survey USA poll. Donate to his campaign. We have a opportunity to elect a progressive African-American Democrat to the U.S. Senate in Illinois, and Barack Obama is the perfect candidate. The election is next Tuesday, March 16th.

Posted by Byron LaMasters at March 12, 2004 12:25 AM | TrackBack