A trip back --and not a very long one

Plenty to say, and me at an utter loss.

I'll get to it later, but in the meantime, I've dug up what I put down a couple of days after Barack won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat on 16th March of 2004.

To be completely honest, I didn't think he had a chance to win, and in particular after getting his ass kicked, as I had predicted, when he challenged Bobby Rush for the latter's U.S. House seat four years before that.

I thought that the Senate nomination was a two-man fight between Machine-favored Dan Hynes and Blair Hull the rich guy from the North Shore whose embarrassing divorce records got unsealed in the latter days of the campaign, and I was planning to vote for Hynes --or against Hull, really-- until it looked like Barack could win the thing.

So anyway, here ya go. I called it "Election Recap: A Star Is Born" and sent it off to the host of a local sports-talk radio show with an interest in this sort of thing...

Mike--I wanted to get you some notes on the party primaries, which I don't imagine that you had a chance to digest with the trip out to Vegas on Tuesday as the polls were closing. The huge story here is that of Democratic senate candidate Barack Obama, who bulldozed his way to the nomination in surprising and sensational fashion.

Some numbers will put it into perspective, and let's start with a comparison of Obama's statewide vote tally as compared with the entire field that battled it out on the Republican side:

• Obama's total votes: 652,826
• GOP total votes for U.S. Senate nomination: 661,048

What it amounts to is a statewide vote total for all eight GOP candidates of only 8,222 more votes than Obama got. One could argue that the GOP turnout was kept down due to the electorate not being juiced up this time around, what with no presidential challenge --but the same is essentially true of the Democrats, given that Kerry came to Illinois with the necessary delegate count to ice the nomination and all major opposition within the party having dropped out of the race anyway.

In addition, the eight-way GOP demolition derby for the nomination to replace the retiring GOP Senator Peter Fitzgerald ought to have grabbed people's interest in the same way that the seven-way tilt on the other side had Democratic voters turning out. The fact that Tom Hynes, who got snuffed by Obama and finished a distant second with 23.7 percent of the Democratic vote, grabbed 59,138 more votes in a losing cause than GOP top man Jack Ryan lends further perspective and makes it plain that if the Republican Party intends to hold on to the Fitzgerald seat, it has a whole lot of work to do between now and November 2nd.

Let's look inside the Democratic vote and see just how and where Obama got it done, and let us begin in Chicago. In wards with high concentrations of Black voters, Obama destroyed the rest of the Democratic field. This isn't necessarily surprising, but it helps to remember that in a city of long-standing divisions along racial lines, Rich Daley is now winning re-election by capturing majorities in all 50 wards on the way to clobbering Black candidates --and this is in municipal elections in which wounds old and new have added immediacy.

It's also worth remembering that State Sen. Obama challenged Congressman Bobby Rush in the Democratic primary of 2000 in an attempt to wrest away the congressman's seat after Rush got battered by Daley in the 1999 mayoral election. Obama thought that he smelled blood in the water and that the voters would reject Cong. Rush, but he was rudely corrected by voters who stuck with Rush after he fought the good fight in taking it on the chin against Daley the previous spring. It's clear that Sen. Obama mended whatever fences were damaged in his losing effort (and indeed Cong. Rush joined Cong. Luis Gutierrez and Ald. Dick Mell in backing Blair Hull's candidacy over Obama's in this senate contest).

Not only did Obama enjoy a hammerlock on the Black vote in Chicago on Tuesday. A check of the city's ward map shows that most of Chicago was Obama country, and let's look at the vote totals in some selected North Side wards to see just how complete his domination was:

• Ward 43 (Lincoln Park): Obama 5,619 (71.6%), Hynes 1,140 (14.5%), Others 1,079 (13.8%)
• Ward 44 (Lake View): Obama 5,661 (70.8%), Hynes 1,104 (13.8%), Others 1232 (15.4%)
• Ward 48 (Edgewater): Obama 7,230 (76.5%), Hynes 676 (7.2%), Others 1,541 (16.3%)
• Ward 47 (Ed Kelly): Obama 6,604 (60.4%), Hynes 2,797 (25.6%), Others 1,533 (14.0%)
• Ward 33 (Dick Mell): Obama 2,657 (45.4%), Hynes 532 (9.1%), Others 2,667 (45.5%)
• Ward 50 (Bernie Stone): Obama 4,140 (54.1%), Hynes 1,131 (14.8%) Others 2,383 (31.1%)
• Ward 39 (Central northern border): Obama 3,085 (43.0%), Hynes 1,977 (27.6%), Others 2,109 (29.4%)
• Ward 45 (Northwestern border/Tom Lyons): Obama 3,351 (35.5%), Hynes 3,256 (34.5%), Others 2,840 (30.0%)
• Ward 41 (O'Hare): Obama 3,449 (35.5%), Hynes 3,282 (33.8%), Others 2,981 (30.7%)
• Ward 38 (Northwest/Cullerton): Obama 2,474 (36.2%), Hynes 2,019 (29.6%), Others 2,338 (34.2%)

The conclusions to be drawn are that Obama was a juggernaut along the Lakefront --no longer the "liberal" bastion of yore, at least south of Irving Park Road-- and he handled himself just fine in the "white ethnic" wards farther out from the lake.Also worth a look is his performance in the racially mixed 18th Ward on the far Southwest Side, which boasts a white alderman in the form of Thomas Murphy: Obama 10,888 (76.5%), Hynes 1,958 (13.8%), Others 1,381 (9.7%)

No less impressive --and perhaps even more so-- was Obama's performance in the collar counties:

• DuPage: Obama 35,770 (56.8%), Hynes 11,509 (18.3%), Others 15,681 (25.0%)
• Lake: Obama 29,636 (64.3%), Hynes 5,999 (13.0%), Others 10,469 (22.7%)
• Will: Obama 19,644 (49.5%), Hynes 9,528 (24.0%), Others 10,533 (26.5%)
• Kane: Obama 12,363 (56.2%), Hynes 3,749 (17.1%), Others 5,872 (26.7%)
• McHenry: Obama 8,297 (47.4%), Hynes 3,774 (21.6%), Others 5,418 (31.0%)
• DeKalb: Obama 2,996 (56.6%), Hynes 964 (18.2%), Others 1,329 (25.1%)

Impressive stuff, given that Democratic primary voters in the collar counties, whose numbers have been on the steady rise, had a clear "insider's choice" of state comptroller Dan Hynes --and roundly rejected him. What's clear is that Obama's support was broad, deep and across the board in Greater Chicago. In addition to winning Cook and the collar counties, Obama put up impressive wins in a handful of other Downstate counties:

• Kankakee: Obama 3,122 (47.2%), Hynes 1,809 (27.3%), Others 1,684 (25.5%)
• Champaign: Obama 7,350 (63.3%), Hynes 2,187 (18.8%), Others 2075 (17.9%)
• Sangamon (Springfield): Obama 5,546 (42.4%), Hynes 5,316 (40.7%), Others 2,209 (17.0%)
• McDonough (Macomb/WIU): Obama 966 (58.0%), Hynes 227 (13.6%), Others 472 (28.3%)
• Jackson (Carbondale/SIU & Paul Simon's hometown of Makanda): Obama 2,791 (42.6%), Hynes 2,298 (35.1%), Others 1,458 (22.3%)

This shows that Obama's appeal extends beyond the suburban ring to centers of government and education Downstate, and it's only good news for his general election prospects.