Foreshadowed
by his roots and bottle-rocket-like rise, Barack Obama’s legacy is
one of betrayal and what might have been,… From the outset, he
courted and was courted by the pillars of counter-revolution, his
very blackness a cloak for his Manchurian mission.
by
Jon Jeter
Part
5 - The Mel Reynolds mold
The year
after Washington keeled over dead from a heart attack while working
at his desk on Thanksgiving Eve of 1987, a Harvard-educated black
Rhodes scholar named Mel Reynolds challenged a Washington ally, Gus
Savage, for Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District, which included a
swath of Chicago’s South Side lakefront. It would take Reynolds
three tries to finally unseat Savage but — as Frederick Harris
wrote in his 2014 book, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the
Rise and Decline of Black Politics — the city’s two major daily
newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times endorsed Reynolds, as
did conservative Washington Post columnist George Will. The main
business daily, Crain’s, did not endorse him, but went out of its
way to praise him for his tendency to “downplay race as a factor
in politics.”
Feted by
foundations, bankrolled by wealthy campaign contributors, and
championed widely by the media and the affluent Hyde Park
neighborhood that is home to the University of Chicago, Reynolds’
meteoric rise led one political rival to wonder aloud how an unknown
who’d never held public office could amass such campaign cash and
name-recognition: “White politicians have bought and paid for a
novice who wasn’t even a block captain, or community leader, or
even a member of a recognized church. There’s something wrong. His
whole staff comes from City Hall, which tells you they’re being
supplied to get rid of Gus Savage.”
Reynold’s
career would ultimately be derailed by a sex scandal involving a
teenage girl, but in his three years on Capitol Hill he amassed a
voting record that was solidly neoliberal, voting for the Clinton
Administration’s North American Free Trade Act and the omnibus
crime bill, both of which were catastrophic for Chicago’s working
class and communities of color.
The same
year that Reynolds won his Congressional seat, a young, 31-year-old
community organizer named Barack Obama approached Lu Palmer asking
for his support for a voter registration effort. As Palmer told the
story, he thought the Harvard-trained lawyer both arrogant and
unoriginal, and sent him on his way. But three years later, he would
encounter Obama again.
An old
ally in the Washington campaign, Alice Palmer (no relation) had
finished third in the special election to succeed the now-disgraced
Reynolds, and she wanted to return to Springfield. Palmer asked Obama
to withdraw his name from the state senate race out of respect for
the widely-respected Alice Palmer, but Obama refused. Palmer couldn’t
recall Obama’s exact words but something about the way he spoke
sounded oddly familiar. That’s when it clicked.
“Man,
you sound like Mel Reynolds!” Palmer told Obama.
Source,
links:
Comments
Post a Comment