"... the most successful voter registration effort in Chicago's history."

[lamp_shade]

Three paragrphs from The Nation August 13th 2008 (Christopher Hayes). We all know Chris. He's a frequent (and favorite) Olberman guest.

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Four years after Jackson's second run, a voter-registration organization called Project Vote recruited Barack Obama, just out of Harvard Law School, to spearhead another massive registration drive in Illinois. Founded in 1982 by liberal attorney Sandy Newman, Project Vote was conceived as a way to fight back against Reagan-era policies by registering the victims of those policies to vote as they stood in line at social service agencies. The project quickly grew in scale, registering poor and minority voters wherever they could be found. When Newman called Obama in 1992, Obama had just signed a contract for his first book and was hesitant about missing the deadline for his manuscript. "I didn't make any bones about the fact that this was sixty-hour-a-week work and we paid a pittance," recalls Newman. But Obama was sold.

When Obama arrived, black voter registration and turnout in Chicago were at their lowest points since record-keeping began. Over the course of a few months, Obama recruited staff and volunteers from black churches and community groups and helped train 700 deputy registrars. He put together a fundraising committee chaired by white politicos and black business leaders, and saturated black radio with ads declaring, "It's a power thing." Project Vote fliered black neighborhoods and sent volunteers door-to-door in high-rise housing projects; minority franchise owners of McDonald's restaurants allowed people to register voters on-site and donated paid radio time to the campaign. Other businesses, labor unions and foundations also kicked in funding.

Overall, the drive added an estimated 150,000 voters and, though nonpartisan, helped elect Carol Moseley Braun as the first black woman ever to serve in the US Senate. By the time the campaign was over, voter registrations in the nineteen predominantly black wards outnumbered those in the nineteen that were predominantly white, a first in Chicago history. Statewide, black registration went up 11 percent. It was, says Newman, "the most successful voter-registration effort in Chicago history."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080901/hayes

[Captain Hilts]

1. I sure wish they'd voted in 2000 and 2004. nt