Barack Obama and Me

Houston Press ^ | February 28, 2008 | Todd Spivak

[bahblahbah]

It was the year 2000 and I was a young hungry reporter in Chicago covering a young hungry state legislator

--------------------------

It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn't yet hit local newsstands.

It's the first time I ever heard him yell, and I'm trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father has been out of print for years.

I often see Obama smoking cigarettes on brisk Chicago mornings in front of his condominium high-rise along Lake Michigan, or getting his hair buzzed at the corner barbershop on 53rd and Harper in his Hyde Park neighborhood.

This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country's first black president.

He is just a rank-and-file state senator in Illinois and I work for a string of small, scrappy newspapers there.

[bahblahbah]

This guy talks way too much about himself but it gets interesting at the end. Don't skip all the way there though.

[tx_eggman]

I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.

If a funny feeling ran up your leg you're ready for the big time ...

[rockrr]

He’s not gonna call you, Todd...

[maine-iac7]

This guy talks way too much about himself but it gets interesting at the end. Don't skip all the way there though.

You are right on both counts - I did plow all the way through, thinking all the while: "Where's my red editor's pen?"

The piece should have been self-edited to 50% of it's length and then the results cut 50% by his editor - THEN more people would read it...

[catroina54]

definitely NOT worth the read.
5 pages ?

[zipper]

Interesting. This article raises questions about who was responsible for both of Obama's political opponents' divorce records being exposed at critical times. Was it a mere coincidence? Was it political assassination? The writer offers no opinion.

Obama joined a crowded field of seven candidates vying to fill an open Senate seat being vacated by retiring two-term incumbent Peter Fitzgerald. For months, he polled in the middle-of-the-pack behind frontrunner and former securities trader Blair Hull, who spent $30 million of his own fortune on the primary.

But Hull's campaign imploded just weeks before the election when his divorce files were unsealed, revealing an ex-wife's charges of verbal and physical abuse.

Obama unleashed a barrage of television ads just before the election, when the other candidates had largely depleted their war chests. He won the nomination with 53 percent of the vote.

In the general election, Obama squared off against another multimillionaire: Jack Ryan, who later dropped out of the race after a judge ordered his divorce files unsealed. The documents revealed that Ryan's ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan, a former Miss Illinois best known for her role as Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, accused him of trying to coerce her to perform sex acts in public.

[SpringheelJack]

I can see why this guy had such a tough job getting hired at a newspaper: he doesn’t know what’s gold and what’s dross, and to make anything out of him an editor would need to work overtime.

Cutting out the chaff about himself, it seems the most important bits are on pages 2 and 4. According to him, the legislative accomplishments Obama trumpets were nearly all passed in a single year of his legislative career, after one of his bosses had decided to pump Obama into a candidate for major office. By the boss’s initiative, Obama co-opted bills that many of his more senior and accomplished colleagues had already did the grunt work on so he could get the credit for them. Other than when he had his puppetmaster, Obama was largely a legislative failure. His failures also all occurred when Republicans were the majority party in the legislature, which undercut his claims of being able to work productively across the aisle.

On page 4, there’s some stuff about Obama’s work to disqualify potential opponents. I think this is less important than the material on page 2, though in political terms it might be more damaging to his image.

[D-fendr]

This is a repost, but lots of very good history in it.

Should be required reading.

[Katya]

I saw that too...this is a great piece. It leaves a lot of unanswered questions...and you have to wonder “who” his real backers are. No way someone that unknown is able to coordinate that sort of campaign. Then again he prob made some powerful friends in law school and as editor of the review.