Obviously, the presidential race will generate the lion’s share of political attention this year, but the race for Illinois’ Senate seat will be as captivating as any campaign in the nation.
Democrat Barack Obama came from behind in the final month before yesterday’s primary to crush his six rivals, winning the primary with a surprising 54%. His closest challenger, Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes, was a distant second with 23%.
Obama is the kind of candidate to get excited about. The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson profiled the candidate last week, calling him a “bright hope for Illinois.”
Seven years ago Obama was elected to the state Senate from a district in Chicago’s South Side. In Springfield, he developed a reputation as an impassioned progressive who was able to get support on both sides of the aisle. One of his bills created a state earned-income tax credit that has brought more than $100 million to Illinois’s working-poor families. Another, conceived in the wake of revelations about innocent men the state had wrongly executed, mandated the videotaping of police interrogations of suspects in capital crimes. There followed “tortuous negotiations with state’s attorneys and death-penalty abolitionists,” Obama recalls, but in the end the bill passed unanimously.
In October 2002, Obama made an eloquent case against the impending war in Iraq at a rally in downtown Chicago. Declaring repeatedly that “I don’t oppose all wars,” he distinguished what he termed “a dumb war, a rash war” from a string of just and necessary wars in which the United States had engaged. He is surely the progressives’ darling in the field, drawing enthusiastic support from white Lake Shore liberals as well as the African American community. But he’s also won the endorsements of virtually all the state’s major papers, many of which — such as Chicago’s Tribune and Sun-Times — note their disagreement with him on the war but hail him as a brilliant public servant nonetheless. Should Obama win, says Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Evanston, who backs his candidacy, he’d “march right onto the national stage and the international stage.”
While practicing law in the early 1990s, Obama wrote “Dreams From My Father,” a memoir and meditation of genuine literary merit that depicts his understandable quest for his identity — a quest that immersed him in the world of Chicago’s poor and that took him to a Kenyan village in search of a father he never knew. It’s a story of worlds colliding, fusing and redividing, of a life devoted to re-creating in a grittier world the idealism and sense of community of the early civil rights movement, which provided the backdrop for his parents’ marriage.
To get a sense of the epic campaign Illinois observers are expecting, consider that today the Chicago Tribune described the fight between Obama and Republican multimillionaire Jack Ryan as the “Senate race of a generation.”
This race promises to be an uncommon gift waged by uncommon candidates. Obama and Ryan are two men with compelling life stories and bold agendas to match. They are winners today not because they were anointed by party bosses, they are winners because they successfully appealed directly to voters.
If before Tuesday their status as party outliers made them vulnerable, they awaken Wednesday as two men who owe almost nothing to this state’s professional pols.
Obama and Ryan are young men in a hurry. They exude smarts, likability and energy. Those attributes distinguish them — individually and together — from the mummified party plodders who so often wind up near the top of political tickets. Obama and Ryan are the perfect adrenal antidotes for bored voters who think that only the most alluring of emotional toxins — apathy — makes election season endurable.
Not in Illinois. Not in 2004. This promises to be a titanic struggle, not just of two forceful candidates, but of rival policy positions as well.
Because Obama is an African-American candidate — and if elected, will be the Senate’s only black member — the campaign will inevitably focus attention on race. While that may be expected, it’s also a shame.
Obama is an exceptional individual and is well-qualified to serve in the Senate. While his race is certainly important to him, to lazily label Obama the “black candidate” is to ignore a man with a remarkable record, background, and life experiences.
I suspect some, if not most, profiles of Obama will emphasize the color of his skin. But those articles will be missing the point of Obama’s appeal if they mention his race without also noting that Obama is a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, was editor of the law review at Harvard Law School, and has spent most of his adult life providing a voice for those most politicians conveniently ignore.
This is a campaign that will capture well-deserved attention this year. Some cycles feature heavyweight battles that fizzle out over time, but I have a hunch this one’s not going to disappoint.