'A Bright Hope in Illinois'
You'd think his name alone would keep him from winning: Barack Obama. Put an "Obama for Senate" bumper sticker on your car and the dyslexic or myopic might just try to punch you out. Yet, three days ago, in its last preelection poll before Tuesday's primary for the open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reported that Obama, a 42-year-old state senator, had opened a wide lead over the six other candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to succeed the departing Peter Fitzgerald. Obama was pulling down 33 percent support, while state Comptroller Daniel Hynes (an organization man) was second with 19 percent, and investment banker Blair Hull (who's spent at least $29 million of his own money on the race but whose campaign has been hurt by accounts of his very messy divorce) was in third with 16 percent. <snip>
In October 2002, Obama made an eloquent case against the impending war in Iraq at a rally in downtown Chicago. Declaring repeatedly that "I don't oppose all wars," he distinguished what he termed "a dumb war, a rash war" from a string of just and necessary wars in which the United States had engaged. He is surely the progressives' darling in the field, drawing enthusiastic support from white Lake Shore liberals as well as the African American community. But he's also won the endorsements of virtually all the state's major papers, many of which -- such as Chicago's Tribune and Sun-Times -- note their disagreement with him on the war but hail him as a brilliant public servant nonetheless. Should Obama win, says Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Evanston, who backs his candidacy, he'd "march right onto the national stage and the international stage." <snip>
While practicing law in the early 1990s, Obama wrote "Dreams From My Father," a memoir and meditation of genuine literary merit that depicts his understandable quest for his identity -- a quest that immersed him in the world of Chicago's poor and that took him to a Kenyan village in search of a father he never knew. It's a story of worlds colliding, fusing and redividing, of a life devoted to re-creating in a grittier world the idealism and sense of community of the early civil rights movement, which provided the backdrop for his parents' marriage. If by "American" we mean that which is most distinctive about us and our ideals, if we mean it to refer to our status as a nation of immigrants that could yet become the world's first great polyglot, miscegenistic meritocracy, then Barack Obama, if elected, would not only become the sole African American in the Senate: He would also be the most distinctly American of its members.
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Washington Post: 'A Bright Hope in Illinois'
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