This old quote sums it up.
(no link)
CHICAGO A NEWCOMER TO THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS HAS SEEN ENOUGH TO REACH SOMECONCLUSIONS ABOUT RESTORING VOTERS’ TRUST.
Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) - Saturday, August 3, 1996
Author: JOE FROLIK NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
EXCERPT
Before entering the race, Obama said, he spoke to about 30 elected officials in the district, which includes the integrated, middle class neighborhood around the University of Chicago as well as some of the city’s poorest precincts.
“Not one asked me where I stood on an issue,” he says, smiling.
“What they cared about was, `Who sent you? How much money you got?’
His answers were apparently good enough; the party backed his nomination.
How long is it going to take for the American people to wake up? My disgust with these clowns triples each and everyday and I am left wondering what in the hell is wrong with this country!!
Xactly !!!
“What they cared about was, `Who sent you? How much money you got?’
Former Federal Judge Abner Mikva tells a similar story:
One of the stories that is told about my start in politics is that on the way home from law school one night in 1948, I stopped by the ward headquarters in the ward where I lived. There was a street-front, and the name Timothy O'Sullivan, Ward Committeeman, was painted on the front window. I walked in and I said "I'd like to volunteer to work for Stevenson and Douglas." This quintessential Chicago ward committeeman took the cigar out of his mouth and glared at me and said, "Who sent you?" I said, "Nobody sent me." He put the cigar back in his mouth and he said, "We don't want nobody that nobody sent." This was the beginning of my political career in Chicago.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Mikva/mikva-con2.html
Cordially,