all info copy/pasted from: here
"Obama, with the help of his cultlike followers whom I call "Obamites", has somehow positioned himself as "above the fray" of dirty politics, perhaps in conjunction with his "change, hope" feel-good platform.
His rise to power shows many interesting, even odd, turns of events that led him where he is today. In some cases, he himself acted to attain victory. In other cases, strange events occurred which do not seem to be directly linked to him, but the sheer coincidence is compelling: 2 campaigns were essentially won by late-breaking scandals from released court records.
In his one and only true test, in the 2000 US Representative primary, Obama lost by a huge margin.
This is a work in progress.
I. 1996 ILLINOIS STATE SENATE 13TH DIST. PRIMARY: Unopposed by challenging opponent’s petitions and having them forced off ballot.
Obama won the 1996 primary unopposed after knocking four opposing Democrats off the primary ticket by challenging their petitions, including the incumbent, Sen. Alice Palmer who had stepped down to run for Congress, informally endorsed Obama, lost, and re-entered the race for the 13th District seat.
A. Ruthless Technicalities.
“The day after New Year's 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. There they began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city's South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
But in that initial bid for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like Palmer.
A close examination of Obama's first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career: The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it.”
B. Alice Palmer, et al.
“Palmer served the district in the Illinois Senate for much of the 1990s. Decades earlier, she was working as a community organizer in the area when Obama was growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia. She risked her safe seat to run for Congress and touted Obama as a suitable successor, according to news accounts and interviews. But when Palmer got clobbered in that November 1995 special congressional race, her supporters asked Obama to fold his campaign so she could easily retain her state Senate seat.
Obama not only refused to step aside, he filed challenges that nullified Palmer's hastily gathered nominating petitions, forcing her to withdraw.
Another candidate he eliminated, long-shot contender Gha-is Askia, now says that Obama's petition challenges belied his image as a champion of the little guy and crusader for voter rights. "Why say you're for a new tomorrow, then do old-style Chicago politics to remove legitimate candidates?" Askia said. "He talks about honor and democracy, but what honor is there in getting rid of every other candidate so you can run scot-free? Why not let the people decide?"
In a recent interview, Obama granted that "there's a legitimate argument to be made that you shouldn't create barriers to people getting on the ballot."
But the unsparing legal tactics were justified, he said, by obvious flaws in his opponents' signature sheets. "To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up," Obama recalled.
"I gave some thought to … should people be on the ballot even if they didn't meet the requirements," he said. "My conclusion was that if you couldn't run a successful petition drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be."”
“Had Palmer survived the petition challenge, Obama would have faced the daunting task of taking on an incumbent senator. Palmer's elimination marked the first of several fortuitous political moments in Obama's electoral success: He won the 2004 primary and general elections for U.S. Senate after tough challengers imploded when their messy divorce files were unsealed.
And he defended his use of ballot maneuvers: "If you can win, you should win and get to work doing the people's business."” Source generally: Obama knows his way around a ballot, David Jackson and Ray Long, Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2007
II. 1996 ILLINOIS STATE SENATE 13TH DIST. GENERAL ELECTION: Unopposed
After forcing out his fellow Democrats in the primary, Obama was elected unopposed to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 representing the 13th District, comprising the university neighborhood of Hyde Park in south Chicago.
III. 2000 U.S. Representative Primary: Lost against Incumbent.
In Obama's first real test as a politician, he lost handily (by approximately 30% of the vote) to the incumbent and fellow African-American Bobby Rush.
Obama Adviser and former Congressman Abner J. Mikva was quoted as saying "“Bobby Rush had not been the most active member of Congress from Illinois, but there was no issue that made him particularly vulnerable,” Mr. Mikva said. “He hadn’t robbed a bank or beaten his grandmother or things like that. In that respect, I was concerned.” NY Times, September 9, 2007.
IV. 2004 U.S. SENATE PRIMARY: Unopposed due to “late-breaking” scandal resulting from divorce records being unsealed.
"In early polls leading up to the March 16, 2004, primary election, candidate Blair Hull enjoyed a substantial lead and widespread name recognition resulting from a well-financed advertisement effort." Then ironically scandal took out Blair Hull. Obama was once again unopposed in the primary.
A month before the primary elections a news story broke out regarding his divorce from his ex-wife. She had sought a restraining order against him during their divorce in 1998. Hull tried to keep the divorce records sealed, but pressure from journalists and his opposing candidates forced him to release them.
The papers claimed that his ex-wife alleged that during a physical fight between them he had threatened to kill her, this led to his arrest for battery, however no charges were ever filed. Source: The Rise and Fall of Blair Hull, William Voegeli, The Claremont Institute, March 19, 2004
Axelrod paved the way for Obama
There was a question that came up yesterday about Blair Hull’s difficulties here in Illinois, and what in the heck precipitated it? We all have our theories, right? What I’m looking for is some kind of documentation to attest to the facts in this; bearing in mind that Obama’s chief media advisor at the time was David Axelrod, who was an advisor to the Clinton campaign. Axelrod, in fact, railed against the politics of personal destruction in the 1990s, and was also once a columnist for the Tribune and an advisor to Mayor Daley. Lynn Sweet at the Sun Times shows us Obama’s 2008 Whitehouse team, and at the top of the list is:
David Axelrod, media strategist. Founder of Chicago-based AKP Media. Handled Obama’s 2004 Senate race. “A” client list: consults for Mayor Daley, Rep. Rahm Emanuel.
According to CBS Radio, he’s even more accomplished than that:
David Axelrod, Chicago-based Democratic Media Advisor/Strategist for U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and presidential campaign for Senator John Edwards.
It just seems to be too great of a coincidence that Obama, who wasn’t backed by the kind of money Ryan and Hull had, ended up benefiting from the misery of two men who appeared to have been set up; one a democrat, the other a republican. Still, if you look at it from one viewpoint, they both could have been considered his political rivals. I have often voiced deep concerns about George Soros’ candidates which include Hillary, Kerry and Obama. But it’s not like we haven’t been aware of setups for scandal before.
There was a campaign the gay activists were putting together in order to crucify republicans in sex scandals, and we saw evidence of that with list that David Corn obtained in Washington regarding the Foley incident.
The scale was tipped on purpose.
In this piece from 2004, when I was about a week-old as a blogger and was still on blogspot, I wasn’t familiar with citing work, and using the blockquotes, and hadn’t mastered blogging 101 yet. Here’s the passage that prompted the inquiry:
…..the Tribune finally admitted that it was Axelrod and the Obama campaign that brought pressure on the press to demand the unsealing of M. Blair Hull divorce records, which had had their contents leaked to media outlets by the Obama campaign even earlier. The Obama campaign also helped orchestrate a demonstration by women’s groups demanding Hull’s withdrawal from the race. Coincidentally, this was the same weekend Obama’s first commercials hit the airwaves. Interestingly (or maybe not), the same exact thing happened to another of his rivals–Jack Ryan. Certainly gives one pause.
Certainly does. It was WLS-Channel 7 TV and the Chicago Tribune that filed suit to open Hull’s sealed divorce records. To be fair, the Chicago Tribune exposed Jack Ryan’s past, too, so this was a case of bipartisan snooping. Brent Bozell at the Media Research Center is right, though; journalists don’t cover liberal political scandals in quite the same way as conservative ones.
There’s not a whole lot else to say about this except that we’re looking for validation and citing beyond this blog; from the Tribune itself or some other source, into the veracity of that claim. I don’t recall how I stumbled upon that, and I’m sure that a lot of bloggers can relate to surfing the web, and not saving something into favorites, and ending up somewhere, not being able to retrace your steps.
From the Chicago Tribune:
In the Democratic primary, Obama found himself the overwhelming beneficiary when the campaign of former securities trader Blair Hull crashed in the aftermath of Hull’s release of court files from a messy divorce. Though Obama has been a passive beneficiary of Ryan’s latest problems, the Democrat’s campaign worked aggressively behind the scenes to fuel controversy about Hull’s filings.
Zenpundit:
Memogate is an aberration you say ? Did not Clarence Page’s own Chicago Tribune and local Chicago newsman Chuck Goudie give unusually heavy coverage of the divorce records of Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan to the benefit of a previously invisible, underfunded, candidate with the slenderest of legistative records, named Barack Obama? Was it accidental or a coincidence that the two opponents with the financial resources to bury Mr. Obama in the primary or general elections were relentlessly hammered on ” scandals” by the Trib while the same paper ran multipage ” puff ” pieces on Saint Obama ? If we searched the email database and phone records of senior editors at the Tribune how many messages would we find from the staff of David Axelrod ? Who happened to slip Chuck Goudie an ( allegedly) anonymous letter detailing Mr. Ryan’s many year old attempt to bring the then Mrs. Jerri Ryan to a sex club ? Did these two men do anything to deserve having their careers destroyed by a local media that had placed themselves so obviously in Mr. Obama’s corner that no Illinois politician dared to step into Mr. Ryan’s shoes ?
If the rest of the mainstream media does not come out front and center with strong ethics policies mandating nonpartisanship ( outside of the op-ed. page) they will find the public regarding the CBS fiasco as merely the tip of a liberal iceberg.
V. 2004 U.S. SENATE GENERAL ELECTION: Scandal knocked out Republican candidate due to divorce records being unsealed.
The Republican nominee, Jack Ryan, withdrew due to a sex scandal on June 25, 2004, and other potential draftees (most notably former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka) declined to run. On August 8, 2004 – with 86 days to go before the general election – the Illinois Republican Party drafted Alan Keyes to run against Democrat Barack Obama for the U.S. Senate.
Ryan and actress Jeri Ryan divorced in 1999 in California, and the records of the divorce were sealed at their mutual request. Five years later, when Ryan's Senate campaign began, the Chicago Tribune newspaper and WLS-TV, the local ABC affiliate, sought to have the records released. Both Ryan and his wife agreed to make their divorce records public, but not make the custody records public, claiming that the custody records could be harmful to their son if released.
On June 22, 2004, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Schnider, a Democrat, agreed to release the custody files. The decision to release these files generated much controversy because it went against both parents' direct request and because it reversed the earlier decision to seal the papers in the best interest of the child. In those files, Jeri Ryan alleged that Jack Ryan had taken her to sex clubs in several cities, intending for them to have sex in public.
At the time of the release, Jeri Ryan, issued had a conciliatory statement, saying that she considered her ex-husband "a friend" and had "no doubt that he will make an excellent senator." She also said that "there was never any physical abuse in our marriage -- either to myself or to our son -- nor, to my knowledge, was he ever unfaithful to me."
The allegations were never proven, and in fact, Ryan was awarded additional custody rights at the end of the hearing, suggesting the allegations were not deemed reliable by the judge.
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