NYTimes hit piece on Obama

[dude1394]

You knew I was kidding, didn't you?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/us...Q3MmCFZGlqwSMg

Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side
Marc PoKempner

By JO BECKER and CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: May 11, 2008

In August 1999, Barack Obama strolled amid the floats and bands making their way down Martin Luther King Drive on Chicago’s South Side. Billed as the largest African-American parade in the country, the summer rite was a draw over the years to boxing heroes like Muhammad Ali and jazz greats like Duke Ellington. It was also a must-stop for the city’s top politicians.

This is part of a series of articles about the life and careers of contenders for the 2008 Republican and Democratic presidential nominations.

Back then, Mr. Obama, a state senator who was contemplating a run for Congress, was so little-known in the community’s black neighborhoods that it was hard to find more than a few dozen people to walk with him, recalled Al Kindle, one of his advisers at the time. Mr. Obama was trounced a year later in the Congressional race — branded as an aloof outsider more at home in the halls of Harvard than in the rough wards of Chicago politics.

But by 2006, Mr. Obama had remade his political fortunes. He was a freshman United States senator on the cusp of deciding to take on the formidable Hillary Rodham Clinton and embark on a long-shot White House run. When the parade wound its way through the South Side that summer, Mr. Obama was its grand marshal.

The secret of his transformation, which has brought him to the brink of claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, can be described as the politics of maximum unity.
.....

much more Obama advertisement at the link.