Legal Commentary

Indiana: Former Obama Supporter Stumps for Hillary

By Jeralyn

Alice Palmer is campaigning for Hillary Clinton today in Indiana:

Joining Chelsea Clinton and other women leaders to campaign for Hillary Clinton today is Alice Palmer, the former state senator who picked Obama to be her successor back in the mid-90s. When she tried to reclaim her spot, though, Obama got her booted from the ballot.

Her story is an interesting one, since it shows how Obama plays hardball.

Fresh from his work as a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.

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.

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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.

Bottom line: How did he win his first Senate seat? By challenging his opponents' right to be on the ballot and succeeding, so he could run unopposed.

As to Alice Palmer:

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.

"I liked Alice Palmer a lot. I thought she was a good public servant," Obama said. "It was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."

He took four candidates off the ballot with his challenges:

"He wondered if we should knock everybody off the ballot. How would that look?" said Ronald Davis, the paid Obama campaign consultant whom Obama referred to as his "guru of petitions."

In the end, Davis filed objections to all four of Obama's Democratic rivals at the candidate's behest.

How he later justified it:

he defended his use of ballot maneuvers: "If you can win, you should win and get to work doing the people's business."

This is a unity candidate and candidate for a new kind of politics in Washington?

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 26, 2008 (boomark / email).