Free Republic

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...