Obama in Chicago
December 2nd, 2008 at 03:30pm Under Main Content
His record in the Illinois legislature and later in the US Senate contains absolutely nothing but a record of doing what is politically expedient. Palmer had opted to run for Congress, clearing the way for Obama to replace her, but, when she lost the primary, she decided she wanted to keep her old Senate seat, after all. Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
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. Obama had a media breakthrough in Edwardsville when he was endorsed by Evelyn Bowles, a popular retired state senator, and by Sheila Simon, daughter of the late U.S. Recktenwald thinks Obama probably will carry Carbondale, where Simon sits on the city council. In the Illinois Senate, he voted for gun control, including limiting handgun purchases to one a month, but no attempts at a ban that we are aware of. And he didn’t advocate a handgun ban when he was running for U.S.
The Senator injured his hip playing basketball a few weeks ago and finally had it looked at in an appointment this weekend at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He bought that town house sometime between 1997-2000 or so, since he lived there for a few years before trading up to the Obama Mansion with Rezko?s help in 2005, after he was in the United States Senate. And it looks like the payback was not given to the Giannoulias family until 2006, with Obama?s endorsement of Alexi Giannoulias for State Treasurer. Obama contributed nothing to such speculation, and many of his early statements regarding his intentions for his Senate term focused on the problem of Illinois’s declining job base. Yet few could doubt that the state that had produced Abraham Lincoln was now home to another figure able to exert a powerful healing force to the nation’s still-gaping racial wounds.
There was the Hired Truck scandal, in which his Transportation, Streets and Sanitation Depts, doled out $4-million worth of contracts to private truck drivers who did little more than campaign for the Machine on Election Day. And some city employees got nailed for running a heroin operation out of his Water Dept. In 2007 she scaled back her own professional work to attend to family and campaign obligations during Barack’s run for president. She took her turn as a speaker on the opening night of the 2008 Democratic convention, and her husband was elected president on 4 November 2008. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization.
Tags: Black Panther Bobby, Bobby Rush, Chicago Law School, Chicago Medical Center, Community Organizer, Handgun Ban, Handgun Purchases, Illinois Legislature, Illinois Senate, Obama, Playing Basketball, Recktenwald, S Endorsement, Senate Seat, Senate Term, State Senate Campaign, United States Senate, University Of Chicago Law, University Of Chicago Law School, Us Senate
By Bob Romano Add comment