Biden has a history of using whatever power he has to destroy anyone in his way or he disagrees with and now he’s the f’n President
Actually Obama does. Did it three times while in Illinois to get people knocked off ballots. All successful. This is his playbook.
True for both
But I'm not convinced that Obama is smart enough to have cooked up those maneuvers he used in Illinois. He was still a newcomer from Hawaii with little political clout or cred. How can a lightweight outsider from Hawaii learn the cutthroat Illinois politics and win like that? He had some big brains figuring all that out. The story never got much publicity or traction. NPR, of all outlets, revealed how slimy he was (and is).
How Chicago Politics Shaped Obama
October 16, 2008
NPR / KNKXThe story of Obama's first election could be called: "The Political Execution of Alice Palmer." Palmer was a friend and early mentor to Obama when he was working as a grassroots organizer after law school. She was a longtime and popular state senator on Chicago's South Side. Then in 1996, Palmer decided to make a run for Congress.
Obama was the chosen successor for her seat in the state Senate, says Alan Dobry, a longtime political activist who lived in Palmer's district. Dobry says Palmer called Obama a "fine young man" when she talked about who would replace her. But Palmer lost in the primary for that congressional seat and decided that she wanted her old Senate seat after all. Her protege Obama would have to step aside. It was a test, a Darwinian dilemma. In order to fulfill his own ambitions, Obama would have to kill his friend's political career.
Obama stood his ground and went one step further. Using an aggressive procedural move, he challenged the signatures on Palmer's nominating petitions. And he even went beyond that: He challenged the petitions for all three of the opponents.
It's not unusual for politicians to muscle rivals off the ballot, especially in Chicago, says longtime Chicago Alderman Toni Preckwinkle. "My view is that you're not ready for prime time if you can't get your petitions in order and file them according to the requirements of the law," Preckwinkle says. "If you fail to do that, then it's your problem."
And there was a problem. It turned out all the opponents had faulty signatures. Back in that '96 race, Dobry was one of the people trying to verify signatures for Obama's campaign — and they found that Palmer's petitions were circulated by people named "Pookie." "We know what that means," Dobry says. "It means somebody got a bunch of kids from the local high school to circulate the petition, and they put down the name as Pookie."
The maneuver worked. Obama knocked all of his opponents off the ballot. He cleared the field and sailed on to an easy victory in the heavily Democratic district.
Obama arrived in Chicago as an outsider, a guy who was raised in Hawaii. The move against Palmer proved to Democratic Party insiders that just maybe he had what it took to survive in Chicago, says Laura Washington, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, who has covered politics for almost three decades. She says Chicago is a tough political town, where "folks fight to get ahead."
"If he wanted to win and be received as a tough cookie, he had to do what it took," Washington says. "I think that election is what made his peers sit up and take notice." Washington adds that Obama was a "nobody" until he beat Palmer.
"His peers, I think, secretly admired his ability to do that, even though some of them were supporters of Alice Palmer's," she says.