Obama played hardball in first Chicago campaign
(CNN) — When the Democratic National Committee meets Saturday on the thorny issue of seating the Florida and Michigan delegations at its August convention, party officials will have to fashion a solution that satisfies supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton and presidential nominee front-runner Sen. Barack Obama.
It may take a Solomon-like decision to appease both candidates.
Clinton has argued the primary results of two of the nation’s largest states should count because otherwise millions of voters are being disenfranchised. Obama has said he is willing to work out some compromise.
But he is insistent the primary results are invalid since the two states failed to follow party rules and the rules are the rules.
The DNC has not seated the Florida and Michigan delegates because the two states violated party edicts in holding their primaries early.
Although neither candidate campaigned in the two states, Clinton won about 50 percent of the Florida vote, compared to 33 percent for Obama. She won 55 percent of the vote in Michigan, where Obama’s name was not on the ballot.
In his first race for office, seeking a state Senate seat on Chicago’s gritty South Side in 1996, Obama effectively used election rules to eliminate his Democratic competition.
As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of new voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.
The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.
That was Chicago politics, said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? Kass said. It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race he made sure voters had just one choice.
Obama’s challenge was perfectly legal, said Jay Stewart, with the Chicago’s Better Government Association. While records of the challenges are no longer on file for review with the election board, Stewart said Obama is not the only politician to resort to petition challenges to eliminate the competition.
He came from Chicago politics, Stewart said. Politics ain’t beanbag as they say in Chicago. You play with your elbows up and you’re pretty tough and ruthless when you have to be. Sen. Obama felt that’s what was necessary at the time, that’s what he did. Does it fit in with the rhetoric now? Perhaps not.
The Obama campaign called this report a hit job. They insisted CNN talk to a state representative who supports Obama, because, according to an Obama spokesman, she would be objective. But when we called her she said she can’t recall details of petition challenges, who engineered them for the Obama campaign or why all the candidates were challenged.
But Will Burns does. Now running himself for a seat in the Illinois legislature, Burns was a young Obama volunteer during the presidential candidate’s first race.
Burns was one of the contingents of volunteers and lawyers who had the tedious task of going over each and every petition submitted by the other candidates, including those of Alice Palmer.
The rules are there for a reason, Burns told CNN.
He said challenging petitions is a smart way to avoid having to run a full-blown expensive race.
One of the first things you do whenever you’re in the middle of a primary race, especially in primaries in Chicago, because if you don’t have signatures to get on the ballot, you save yourself a lot of time and effort from having to raise money and have a full blown campaign effort against an incumbent, Burns said.
