The Alderman and the Senator [Why DID Obama support a corrupt Chicago alderman?]

I was surprised, and horrified, to learn that Barack Obama endorsed Alderman Dorothy Tillman for re-election in Tuesday's runoff. For those of you who aren't local or who wisely avoid the open sewer of Chicago politics, Dorothy Tillman is the disastrously corrupt, incompetent, and even demented alderman of the south side's long-decrepit 3rd Ward...

I just can't understand is how he could throw in with Tillman, the one example I know of the kind of person white right-wingers imagine when they think of black politicians linking militant race rhetoric to city machine corruption.

From Obama and Me

Though it didn't make national news, Obama inflamed many residents in his old state Senate district last March when he endorsed controversial Chicago alderman Dorothy Tillman in a runoff election.
Flamboyant and unpredictable, Tillman is perhaps best known for once pulling a pistol from her purse and brandishing it around at a city council meeting. The ward she represented for 22 years, which included historic Bronzeville, comprised the city's largest concentration of vacant lots.
Just three months before Obama made his endorsement, the Lakefront Outlook community newspaper ran a three-part investigative series exposing flagrant cronyism and possible tax-law violations that centered on Tillman and her biggest pet project, a taxpayer-funded cultural center built across the street from her ward office that had been hemorrhaging money since its inception.
The series won a national George Polk Award, among the most coveted prizes in journalism. Not bad for a 12-page rag with a circulation of 12,000 and no Web site. (I had already left the Outlook and had nothing to do with the project.) In the end, Tillman lost the election despite Obama's endorsement, which critics said countered his calls for clean government. Obama told the Chicago Tribune that he had backed Tillman because she was an early supporter of his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.
Many speculate Obama only bothered to weigh in on a paltry city council election during his presidential campaign as a gesture to Chicago's powerful Mayor Richard M. Daley, a Tillman supporter. Even so, Obama should have remained neutral, says Timuel Black, a historian and City Colleges of Chicago professor emeritus who lived in Obama's state Senate district.
"That was not a wise decision," Black says. "It was poor judgment on his part. He was operating like a politician trying to win the next step up."

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