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A Streetwise Veteran Schooled Young Obama
By JANNY SCOTT
New York Times

The rise of Barack Obama includes one glaring episode of political miscalculation. Even friends told Mr. Obama it was a bad idea when he decided in 1999 to challenge an incumbent congressman and former Black Panther, Bobby L. Rush, whose stronghold on the South Side of Chicago was overwhelmingly black, Democratic and working class.

Mr. Obama was a 38-year-old state senator and University of Chicago lecturer, unknown in much of Mr. Rush’s Congressional district. He lived in its most rarefied neighborhood, Hyde Park. He was taking on a local legend, a former alderman and four-term incumbent who had given voters no obvious reason to displace him…

Mr. Rush won the primary with 62 percent of the vote; Mr. Obama had less than 30 percent…Obama learned from that experience. Mr. Mikva recalls telling him about advice once given to John F. Kennedy by Cardinal Richard Cushing: “The cardinal said to him, ‘Jack, you have to learn to speak more Irish and less Harvard.’ I think I recounted that anecdote to Barack. Clearly, he learned how to speak more Chicago and less Harvard in subsequent campaigning.”

In March 2004, Mr. Obama won the Democratic primary for the United States Senate with nearly 67 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.

Today, Mr. Rush, a practicing Baptist minister in his eighth term in Congress who is backing Mr. Obama’s presidential candidacy, still seems to be ruminating about the Obama phenomenon with grievance and wonder. Mr. Obama’s ambition has found its audience, he said. In a Congressional race, your neighbors “hold you to a different standard…”

Mr. Rush has an explanation for Mr. Obama’s emergence after the dark days of 2000 as a political star four years later. He vanquished a field of multimillionaires, some more experienced and better known, and benefited from fortuitous domestic scandals that sidelined two opponents and left him facing a Republican widely seen as unable to win.

“I would characterize the Senate race as being a race where Obama was, let’s say, blessed and highly favored,” Mr. Rush said, chuckling. “That’s not routine. There’s something else going on.”

What was he suggesting?

“I think that Obama, his election to the Senate, was divinely ordered,” Mr. Rush said, all other explanations failing. “I’m a preacher and a pastor; I know that that was God’s plan. Obama has certain qualities that — I think he is being used for some purpose. I really believe that.”