Before Obama Was a Favorite Son

Real Clear Politics ^ | April 7th, 2008 | Timothy Stewart-Winter

[The_Republican]

In an unusual primary contest, issues of class, education, racial authenticity and "street smarts" were fused with tensions between the generation of Bobby Rush and Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., and younger blacks like Obama, a highly ambitious young state senator who had never known life before the civil rights era. The First District of Illinois had elected the first 20th-century black US congressman, Oscar DePriest, in 1929, has been represented by African Americans ever since, and was the nation's most overwhelmingly black congressional district in the 2000 census. Obama's political base was in the elite, interracial Hyde Park neighborhood, where he taught at the University of Chicago Law School. Rush looked vulnerable because he had just lost big in a mayoral primary to challenge incumbent Richard M. Daley (who had won a remarkable 45% of the black vote), though many perceived Obama's decision to run against a popular incumbent as audacious to the point of being foolhardy.

The race soon became seen as a contest between the Black Panther and the professor.

Rush's other primary opponent, Donne Trotter, from a well-connected South Side family, called Obama "the white man in blackface in our community." (Trotter polled a distant third on election day.)

For the second time in four years Obama was challenging a black incumbent with decades of experience and wide respect in South Side politics. Shortly before the primary, black progressive journalist Salim Muwakkil noted in the Chicago Tribune that Obama was "perhaps the least favorite son," observing that "his Harvard education and crisp elocution mark him as insufficiently 'black.' "

[The_Republican]

Klinton's Endorsement of Bobby Rush (Same Article)

Eight years ago, by contrast, Bill Clinton was perhaps the one national politician best positioned to swing black votes in the First District--and he endorsed Rush, campaigned for him in person, and recorded a 30-second radio spot on his behalf, helping assure Obama's defeat. (In doing so, he also repaid a debt to the first Illinois politician to have endorsed him in 1992.)