By Edward McClelland | Wednesday, Nov 28, 2012
Mel Reynolds served in Congress from 1993-95 before resigning.
EXCERPT Mel Reynolds announced he will try to regain the Congressional seat he gave up in 1995, but he has a better chance of winning the Lotto than he does of getting back to Washington, D.C. If it hadn’t been for Reynolds’s lust for teenage flesh, Barack Obama might not be president today -- a sex scandal created the opening Barack Obama needed to get into politics.
Reynolds, then a second-term congressman was accused of having sex with a 16-year-old he’d met during his 1992 run for Congress. Reynolds had spotted the girl while driving around the district and pulled over to chat, even though he was supposed to be politicking and she was too young to vote. Soon after, she joined his campaign as volunteer and mistress. Two years later, the girl confessed to the affair to her next-door neighbor, who happened to be a Chicago police officer.
The state’s attorney set up a phone-sex sting. While sitting in a prosecutor’s office, the girl called Reynolds and told him she couldn’t make their tryst because she had to babysit. “What you gonna wear?” Reynolds prompted. “Well, my peach underwear, like you told me to. I was hoping we could do something really special but I see that’s not going to happen, I guess.” “I was definitely gonna f---,” Reynolds said. “Right in my office. I was gonna masturbate too.”
At the panting congressman’s urging, the girl spun a story of sex with a lesbian lover. When Reynolds asked if the other woman would be willing to do a threesome, the girl said no – but she knew a 15-year-old girl who might. A 15-year-old Catholic schoolgirl. “Did I win the Lotto?” Reynolds exclaimed.
There was no 15-year-old schoolgirl. But this declaration of a married congressman’s lust for teenagers turned into a catchphrase. Jay Leno joked about it on The Tonight Show. The case was so salacious it made headlines in Chicago for more than a year. Reynolds won re-election in his heavily Democratic district, but, by 1995, he was facing a trial that threatened to cost him his seat in Congress.
Reynolds protested that he was guilty only of phone sex and erotic fantasies, but, as his trial approached, State Sen. Alice Palmer announced she would run against Reynolds in the primary......this was Obama’s chance. He decided he wanted to run for the seat.
.....by the time Obama met Palmer, Mel Reynolds had been convicted, imprisoned, and resigned his seat in Congress. Palmer was no longer running in the March 1996 primary. She was running in a special election.... Palmer assured Obama she was all in. It was going to be Congress or bust. Obama won Palmer’s senate seat, and the rest is history -- history that began with a horny congressman.
Ward Room blogger Edward McClelland’s Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President will be available on Kindle for $9.99. Tracing Obama’s career in Chicago from his arrival as a community organizer to his election to the U.S. Senate, Young Mr. Obama tells the story of how a callow, presumptuous young man became a master politician, and of why only Chicago could have produced our first black president.
SOURCE http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Mel-Reynoldss-Horniness-Opened-Door-For-Obamas-Political-Career-181194681.html