VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 221“Hope for sale” might be the real motto of the Obama-Axelrod machine since 2000. For the sake
of historical accounting, we should point out that the rhetorical promise to deal with the despair of
the masses emerges as a distinct characteristic of the irrationalist totalitarian mass movements of the
1920s and 1930s in Europe.
After Obama had emerged victorious from a very peculiar U.S. Senate contest four years later,
Congressman Rush, who had been backing an opponent of Obama who was destroyed by piloted
scandals at just the right moment, commented bitterly that Barky had now become accustomed to
winning without a fight:
In March 2004, Mr. Obama won the Democratic primary for the United States Senate with
nearly 53 percent of the vote, racking up huge totals in wards he had lost to Mr. Rush in 2000.
(Mr. Rush, still stung by Mr. Obama’s challenge to him, endorsed a white candidate in the race,
Blair Hull, a former securities trader.) Mr. Obama won the general election with the biggest
margin ever in an Illinois Senate race. “For what he’s doing now, he didn’t need to march
against police brutality,” Mr. Rush said, invoking his own record. “He didn’t need to
demonstrate against poor meat in substandard grocery stores. He didn’t need that kind of stuff
because obviously his audience was at a different level.” (Janny Scott, “In 2000, a Streetwise
Veteran Schooled a Bold Young Obama,” New York Times, September 9, 2007)OBAMA NETWORKS WITH THE ELITE
After his defeat by Congressman Rush, Obama concentrated on building networks that would
assist him in the more grandiose projects that were now on his horizon. Having disregarded the
advice of his mentor Newton Minnow, Obama now assiduously cultivated this hoary patriarch:
Mr. Obama was comfortable attending performances of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with
city scions like Newton N. Minow, the father of Martha Minow. Mr. Minow, who had served in
the Kennedy administration and managed the white-shoe law firm of Sidley Austin when Mr.
Obama worked there after his first year of law school, began introducing him to Chicago’s
business titans. “He felt completely comfortable in Hyde Park,” said Martha Minow, his former
law professor and a mentor. “It’s a place where you don’t have to wear a label on your
forehead. You can go to a bookstore and there’s the homeless person and there’s the professor.”
(Jo Becker and Christopher Drew, “Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side,” New York
Times, May 11, 2008.)OBAMA LAUDS TERRORIST AYERS’ 1998 BOOK:
“A SEARING AND TIMELY ACCOUNT”
Obama also drew closer to the unreconstructed Weatherman terrorist bomber Bill Ayers, the son
of Thomas Ayers, the dean of the Chicago financier establishment. The cover story for this tandem
between Obama and Ayers was, incredibly enough, educational and juvenile justice reform, in
which Ayers now paraded himself as an expert:
The two men were involved in efforts to reform the city’s education system. They appeared
together on academic panels, including one organized by Michelle Obama to discuss the
juvenile justice system, an area of mutual concern. Mr. Ayers’s book on the subject won a rave
review in The Chicago Tribune by Mr. Obama, who called it “a searing and timely account.”
(Jo Becker and Christopher Drew, “Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side,” New York
Times, May 11, 2008.)