?????
Has as much charisma to a certain class of people, and his goals are about the same, BTW how come he ran away from his moselm father and white mother.
Remember he is also friend with JJ and the daley mob leader.
Nobody knows much about him. The daley connection is bad. It seems though that anyone who wanted to mmake gains in Chicago politics has go through Daley.
The party just shot itself in the foot in IL with Ryan, who was already down by 20 pts in the polls BEFORE his "scandal" and then the disaster from MD.
Why not?...... the rest of the freshman Senators did. Something wrong with that?
On Thursday, the new senators breakfast at the White House with the president and vice president. For lunch, Obama has a date with Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (R-Ill.), whose decision not to seek re-election opened up the seat for Obama.
His political positioning and rising star should be unsurprising because for much of his life Obama has been a "First Black," gaining attention most notably for being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. But in Chicago's well-established African American political community, which prefers its leaders homegrown, Obama has struggled against criticism from some blacks who mocked his Ivy League education, biracial heritage and African name, painting everything from his smooth speech patterns to the multiculti neighborhood where he lives as anything but "authentically" black.
The stinging loss in 2000 to a lackluster, unpolished and largely inarticulate Bobby Rush, who was successful in painting Obama as an over-educated, elitist outsider, led to a retooled image for Obama in this campaign. The revamping of Obama's image has made it difficult, if not impossible, for his presumptive African American political base to see him as anything but theirs.
He makes fun of his name ("My name is Obama, not 'Yo Mama'") but speaks little of the prominent, long-dead Kenyan father for whom he was named. Although the "African Committee to Elect Obama" in Illinois has held fundraisers for him, they are largely on the margins of Obama's campaign. He speaks little of a childhood spent in Indonesia and Hawaii and offers little about the white mother who raised him. He said recently that his mother, now deceased, recognized that "he was a black man in the United States and my experiences were going to be different than hers."
"My view has always been that I'm African American," he said recently. "African Americans by definition, we're a hybrid people."
Campaign commercials make reference to his historic appointment at the Harvard Law Review but his status as an alum of Columbia and Harvard, and as a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, are downplayed.
Played more prominently is Obama's early work as an organizer, registering 100,000 African American voters in Chicago in the early 1990s. He now touts his membership in one of the city's most popular black churches, Trinity United Church of Christ — something that clearly endears him to older, more traditional black voters. He has also leveraged political relationships with people like Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) and others who haven't always supported him in previous races. He has a lovely African American wife (let's face it, sisters wouldn't have it any other way) and two gorgeous daughters whose presence is prominent in campaign literature.
On paper, the strategy has worked. Through an already strong network of black professionals and liberal whites, Obama has built a campaign that appeals broadly to urban voters and those in predominantly white-collar counties and rural areas downstate. He has a healthy lead going into today's primary.
"He was always a part of us but somehow it seemed to be a secret before. White people are always looking for somebody black who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and can tell the Horatio Alger story," said Chicago political consultant Delmarie Cobb. "That doesn't play well in the black community because we've always done that."
"What makes him attractive to white people is that he's biracial. But he has never distanced himself from the black community, even when others tried to distance it from him," she said.
Oddly enough Rush, the former Black Panther, is still singing the "he's not one of us" song and is supporting Blair Hull, a white, independently wealthy trader. This time the baiting has fallen on deaf ears and it is now Rush who finds himself on the outs with black Chicagoans, who are suspect of his support for a rich, white man who has never held elective office.
Illinois Senate President Emil Jones, one of the most powerful black elected officials in the state, said at a recent prayer breakfast for Obama that politicians like Rush will eventually regret that they were "on the wrong side of history."
"Barack Obama is our son. All of the other candidates combined do not have his intellect," Jones said. "This is our son and our son deserves a chance."
Whether he realized it or not, Jones had invoked the most African of sayings in urging black Chicagoans to vote for Obama: I am because we are and because we are, I am.
I'm so tired of hearing about this Obama A-Hole that I could vomit.
Just because he gave a good speech at the Democratic Convention. Way over-rated and the idolatry, on the part of the Democrats ,is a bit excessive.
I would be very surprised indeed if Senator Osama were the only Freshman Senator invited to the breakfast.
Obama is the only openly liberal freshman Senator (the jury's still out with Salazar), so he'll get a lot of press. The Democrats spent $400 million on this election and Obama was pretty much all they got for it.
Well, not all Republicans can have sex with, and drown, women in a car, while drunk. They also cannot nail every woman EXCEPT their wives, as one prominent Rat was known to do. They also cannot make waitress sandwiches, either.
How nice that the Rat party is so pure.
He's a con man who dazzles white people because he's speaks such good English. But, he's still a Marxist.
Like Clinton, his act will grow old.
I'm just ashamed people can't see through this huckster.
Keep your enemies closer.