Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side

NYT ^ | May 11th, 12008 | JO BECKER and CHRISTOPHER DREW

[The_Republican]

In August 1999, Barack Obama strolled amid the floats and bands making their way down Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Billed as the largest African-American parade in the country, the summer rite was a draw over the years to boxing heroes like Muhammad Ali and jazz greats like Duke Ellington. It was also a must-stop for the city’s top politicians.

Back then, Mr. Obama, a state senator who was contemplating a run for Congress, was so little-known in the community’s black neighborhoods that it was hard to find more than a few dozen people to walk with him, recalled Al Kindle, one of his advisers at the time. Mr. Obama was trounced a year later in the Congressional race — branded as an aloof outsider more at home in the halls of Harvard than in the rough wards of Chicago politics.

But by 2006, Mr. Obama had remade his political fortunes. He was a freshman United States senator on the cusp of deciding to take on the formidable Hillary Rodham Clinton and embark on a long-shot White House run. When the parade wound its way through the South Side that summer, Mr. Obama was its grand marshal.

The secret of his transformation, which has brought him to the brink of claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, can be described as the politics of maximum unity.

He moved from his leftist Hyde Park base to more centrist circles; he forged early alliances with the good-government reform crowd only to be embraced later by the city’s all-powerful Democratic bosses; he railed against pork-barrel politics but engaged in it when needed; and he empathized with the views of his Palestinian friends before adroitly courting the city’s politically potent Jewish community.

[CivilWarguy]

The “politics of maximum unity” is better defined as: Obama lying to everyone.

[johniegrad]

You have to admit though that he ran a smart campaign by filling the early primaries with nothing but platitudes and fluff. He won some early contests and remained unknown. Hiliary only became competitive after people starting to learn something about him and, by that time, it was too late. Now, will that work in the general. I don’t think so.