As an Illinois resident, I understandably fell under the spell of Barack Obama a lot sooner than the rest of the country.
I cast a vote for Barack Obama in the 2004 primary and I cast a vote for Barack Obama in the 2004 general election so even before my state and so many others hold their presidential primaries and caucuses today I will have already cast more votes for Barack Obama than most people.
It is from this vantage point that I look out on this year's Democratic primary and think just how familiar this all seems.
As Yogi Berra might say, "It's deja vu, all over again."
Michelle Obama has noticed this, too, when it comes to the criticisms.
http://www.youtube.com/...
(Check out the 5 min. mark.)
But for me the similarities go beyond that.
First of all, before the race even started Barack Obama entered with the sense that a victory was possible as Illinois had elected an African-American senator before having chosen Carol Moseley Braun for the Senate in 1992. While controversies during her term prevented her from being reelected, I think the same way that now Obama knows what is possible because of what Jesse Jackson has done in blazing a trail for African-American presidential candidates and what has been shown in the election and near-election of Deval Patrick and Harold Ford, Obama knew going into the Senate race what was possible because of the previous election of Carol Moseley Braun (as well as an African-American secretary of state who had won in all 102 Illinois counties in 2002).
There was also the Illinois political climate around the race in 2004 that is a lot like what the national political climate is here in 2008.
In 2002, Democrats had regained the governorship for the first time in 25 years in large part not because the citizens had big issues with Republican policies (in 1998 the state Republicans ran a pro-choice candidate while the Democrats ran a pro-life one) but because of Republican corruption that eventually resulted in ex-Gov. George Ryan being sent to prison. In that 2002 election, Democrats wound up sweeping every statewide office save one sending the Illinois Republican Party into total disarray. Kind of like what happened nationally in 2006.
Two years later in the 2004 U.S. Senate race, when the Republican incumbent decided he would not run again the tug of war between the moderate and conservative factions played out fantastically and embarrassingly as had been happening over the course of the last few years in the state with conservatives often purging moderates from their ranks in the primary and then the right-winger heading to crushing defeat in general election.
The stage was set favorably for a Democratic victory but there was a lot depending on what nominee was chosen.
It's a common myth that because Barack Obama won with 70 percent of the vote in Illinois in 2004 that landslide victory doesn't count because his opponent was Alan Keyes and so Obama has no experience when it comes to a difficult campaign or being vetted. This ignores the fact that there was another campaign on the ballot BEFORE the listing for the senate race.
Kerry carried Illinois in 2004 in large part because of the surplus of votes from Chicago and the rust belt cities along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. That lonely blue rectangle on the right part of the state is Champaign County containing the University of Illinois.
Yet Obama dominated the state because of the dozens of Bush-Obama counties all over picking up more than 600,000 votes than Kerry got. Here's a link where you can see the map.
Sure part of that had to do with Alan Keyes being batshit crazy and I won't get into all the developments that resulted in Keyes on the ticket and how that resulted from the GOP not knowing how to run against him, but if you're interested you can check them out here as well as a great roundup of the progression of the 2004 Senate race.
But what I am more interested in sharing in this diary is how Obama came to win the nomination in a 7-person primary and how he followed that to win this state in a landslide and why I think he can repeat a landslide victory in the presidential election.
Here are the vote totals for that race.
U.S. Senate (Dem)
11504 of 11745 Precincts (98%)
Barack Obama 640,707 53%
Dan Hynes 288,176 24%
Blair Hull 130,944 11%
Maria Pappas 73,485 6%
Gery Chico 52,105 4%
Nancy Skinner 15,651 1%
Joyce Washington 12,973 1%
Now who are these people? Let's just stick to the top 3.
Well, I think we all know who Barack Obama is. :)
Now Dan Hynes. Dan Hynes is a great man and a fantastic comptroller for this state who had he won I think would have done a decent job as senator for this state. But if his name wasn't Hynes you do have to wonder if he would be where he's at (I wonder who that sounds like?). You see, like just about everyone in Illinois politics that is not a millionaire, Dan Hynes comes to politics as part of the family business. It was this family that provided him the connections to get the Illinois Democratic machine backing. But when the machine met the Obama movement, the machine broke down and Hynes was defeated. Yet even though Obama defeated the machine, he still showed respect for Hynes and in return Hynes respected Obama's grace and the two men get along now and Hynes was even one of the leaders in the Draft Obama movement.
Blair Hull is another story. He was something of a vanity candidate. A multimillionaire he had no problem using his own money to fund his campaign. Now unlike someone like John Edwards who came in third but bowed out gracefully and campaigned with a great message, it was more Blair Hull's strategy to flood the airwaves with ads and pay the best consultants but in the end he lost in large part because the news media discovered some unseemly revelations in his divorce proceedings causing his campaign to implode.
That didn't stop him though from having unleashed a ton of negative mail pieces on things like the present votes, just one thing of many things collected by Hull supporters in the oppo research that wound up in the hands of Hillary Clinton's campaign for this campaign.
Despite claims to the contrary, Obama was absolutely absolutely vetted by the Chicago media and not given a free pass, although they did give his candidacy a little boost by exposing some rather unflattering revelations about the divorce proceedings of Blair Hull in the primary and later Jack Ryan in the general.
But I would argue the fallout of all that and Alan Keyes' candidacy turning off Democrats as well as his skin color making race not an issue is still not enough to explain why John Kerry got 54 percent and Barack Obama got 70 percent of the vote and 600,000 more votes.
How did he get there?
Well one thing was that his supporters came up with creative ways to support him like this song, perhaps the FIRST political song to be written about Barack Obama:
http://www.ilsenate.com/...
Barack Obama, oh yeah, say it again
He's solid as a rock, Barack Obama
If you believe like I believe that children are our future
You're ready to move forward
Instead of things being like they use to be . . .
Here's a segment with Obama questioning Howard Dean about the war in Iraq in August of 2003 as he appears as a guest on the "Beyond the Beltway" radio show that is based in Chicago.
http://www.youtube.com/...
Besides just his generally complimentary remarks he has for Howard Dean one thing that was interesting to me is he talks about "the hunger for plain-speaking Democrats." That was certainly true in Illinois and it worked for him here.
And look at Obama's message being "Yes we can" and talking about changing Washington back in 2004. That message resonates now just as it did then.
http://www.youtube.com/...
Obama was also extremely good at racking up newspaper editorial backing on his way to his run and incorporating historical figures into his candidacy. In his Senate race he not only talked up connection to beloved former Chicago mayor Harold Washington, but downstate, where I am, one thing that really resonated for me was the endorsement of a daughter of a fantastic Illinois senator from Southern Illinois who I admired and respected greatly.
Just like Caroline Kennedy advocated for Obama based on how she thought he had the potential to be a president like JFK, Sheila Simon advocated Barack Obama in a commercial talking about how she thought Obama had the potential to be a great senator like her father.
If you don't know who U.S. Sen. Paul Simon was, first of all, I feel sorry for you because this man lived and breathed public service and gosh he was just darn fun to look at with his classic bowtie and fun to listen to with his one-of-a-kind gravelly voice.
Here's a little clip to get acquainted with this Paul Simon if you'd like to know more:
http://www.youtube.com/...
Now I'll be honest. Though I think Obama is the cat's meow now, I really wasn't following the 2004 primary closely until toward the very end. I wasn't sure who to vote for. I knew I didn't want Hull, but I knew some people who were supporting Hynes and had seen their signs. I had heard about a pizza party on my college campus for Obama, but I hadn't gone to it because I found out about it too late.
Then I saw a commercial where Barack Obama appeared with Sheila Simon, the daughter of the recently passed away liberal Illinois icon who was even admired and respected by Republicans, Paul Simon.
The first election I ever voted in was in 1990 when my 3rd grade class cast votes in a mock election for our U.S. Senate and governor's races. While the governor's ballot was split 15-14 between Republican Jim Edgar and Democrat Neil Hartigan, in that classroom no student voted against Paul Simon. Perhaps I'll go into more on this in another diary another time, but suffice to say I liked him a lot and so did others.
So it was with these things that Obama won a 7-person primary fighting off both the state and Chicago Democratic machines as well as a self-funding candidate for whom money was no option to take more than 50 percent of the vote.
Then came the DNC convention. I think you know what happened there.
If you want to know if words and inspiration and media adulation translates into votes... consider what happened to Obama after that speech and what an amazing feat his success was.
You see Southern Illinois is closer to Memphis than it is Chicago. Central Illinois is a lot like Kansas. Yet somehow Obama won all over the state. Yet somehow Obama won 600,000 votes of people who voted against John Kerry. Three years after 9/11 and a year and a half after the start of the Iraq War, 600,000 more people voted for the war protester named Barack Obama than the veteran who voted for the war named John Kerry.
Given this,I can't help but think Obama can change the electoral map Or I should say I think he has the political skills and the message and the plans to make it happen IF he has us to help spread the word. So what do you say? I say...
YES WE CAN!