Illinois Senate Update

In this post last week, I asked why the press and bloggers aren’t talking about Illinois’ Senate race more — Illinois is a state where a Democratic gain (Peter Fitzgerald’s seat) seems rather likely. In any event, The Washington Post has a profile of the leading Democratic contender, Barack Obama:

His father disappeared from his life when Obama was 2; his mother raised him in Hawaii and Indonesia. Obama went to college at Columbia, then moved to Chicago for five years of community organizing in a fusion of civil rights crusading and Saul Alinsky house-to-house plodding. He then went to Harvard Law School, where he became the first black president of the Law Review; returned to Chicago to run a program that registered 100,000 voters in the ’92 elections, entered a civil rights law firm and became a senior lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago. (If elected, Obama would be the second liberal Hyde Park academic to represent Illinois in the Senate; New Deal economist Paul Douglas was the first.)

Seven years ago Obama was elected to the state Senate from a district in Chicago’s South Side.

Not bad. I’m saving my money for the general election, but if you’re inclined to contribute, here’s the place.

AB