Obama profile from May 2004. Still the same man he was then.

[illinoisprogressive]

Wow, that takes me back to the summer that I was first aware of the man who would be my State's senator. the Politico links to this article that was so fun to compare with today from the New Yorker in 2004. The article is so striking in its similarity to today. We in Illinois were just experiencing Obamamania and many of the remarks in the articles are the same you hear now in the rest of the country. Illinois is two years ahead of the country here.
However, I see two big things: one is that Senator Obama is still the same man he was 2 years ago and still acts the same.
The other is that after two years Illinois is still in Obamamania and it has not gone away. We still love and support our Jr. Senator. Knowing this and hearing the national pundits predicting his crash and burn because no one sustains this kind of excitement and support, well, two years on, it is still being sustained here.
I remember the Senator coming to speak in Rockford last summer and at an early morning Saturday event at the local college. It was sold out and people were so excited. This was before his book came out and before his name was brought up as a possible contender and draft movements sprung up. He was still just our senator.
The part I excerpted is talking about the difference in the state with chicago being our big city and southern Illinois being the deep south. it also references the man who is still respected and an icon here, The late great Paul Simon who died much to early. You mention Paul simon to someone from Illinois and you never hear a bad word and he is our Paul Wellstone.

from the article:
"Abner Mikva told me, “Barack is the most unique political talent I’ve run into in more than fifty years. I haven’t been this excited about a candidate since Adlai Stevenson first got me into politics.” As an illustration of Obama’s gifts, Mikva said, “I’ve seen him speak on Israel in front of a Jewish audience—a very, very tough crowd. And he was incredibly thoughtful, saying, basically, ‘There are a lot of people in that area, with lots of different interests and points of view, and they all have to be taken into consideration, and we can’t just rally around Sharon,’ and so on. And the crowd was just wowed. I’ve fluffed that question so many times myself—and I’m Jewish. Kerry fluffed it on ‘Meet the Press’ the other day. But Barack managed to make those people who disagreed with him feel comfortable with the disagreement.”

This is a regular theme with Obama: supporters who disagree with him. The two big Chicago daily papers both endorsed him enthusiastically in the primary, even though they disagreed with him on major issues—his opposition to the war in Iraq and, in the case of the Tribune, his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

This seems to be a pattern in Illinois. Paul Simon was the most respected political figure in the state for decades. He was a liberal Democrat who came from a conservative downstate region where his name remains political gold. The universal explanation for Simon’s near-universal popularity is “integrity,” and this spring I heard the word a lot from people discussing Obama. It refers to consistency and incorruptibility, but also to a refusal to resort to smear politics. The cultural and political distance between Chicago’s South Side and southern Illinois is vast—Cairo is closer to Little Rock than it is to Chicago, “and not just geographically,” as Obama likes to say. Voters in such disparate places will never agree on affirmative action, gun control, or many other issues that Obama has taken clear positions on. And yet, in a state with a population that is only fifteen per cent African-American, he needs to campaign hard downstate, far from his base, making his pitch on economic issues and personal appeal."

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact1?currentPage=1

[flpoljunkie]

1. Thanks for your perspective. Recommend the New Yorker article, as well.

[illinoisprogressive]

2. Thanks. that was nice of you. I guess being from Illinois I see some deja vu.

It is kinda fun to watch what is going on in the country and hearing the remarks. They are so much like here two years ago. And reading this article from May 2004 was like reading one that could have been written today and it's good to know our senator has not changed since hitting the big time. lol

[IndyOp]

3. This is *exactly* what I don't like...

"supporters who disagree with him..."

To be clear - I don't agree 100% or even 90% with the candidates I support, I don't expect to, nor do I expect anyone else to.

However - what I dislike about Obama's current campaign is the emphasis on "big, feel-good themes" without specific details. His publicist has specifically stated that he wants the campaign to be about Obama's autobiography - not get caught up in the particulars of policy. I don't like that.

I also don't like Obama's celebrity status -- people just LOVE him even though they don't know who he really is in terms of what he would do in the job he is applying for.

I am awaiting my copy of Gore's "Assault on Reason" - how we have lost our ability our disposition to reason carefully while making decisions in politics. It is all about feel-good phrasing, autobiographies people can identify with...

I am not at all ruling Obama out as a person I would support. I want him to run a different campaign -- one in which we know who he is policy-wise and one in which people who have significant disagreement with his policies will not be his supporters.

Adlai Stevenson campaigned on having clear policy positions, by the way. Eleanor Roosevelt supported him and argued that he would be much better than his opponent, whose campaign managers were trying to sell him to the public just like they would try to sell consumer goods - with feel good messages.