ONE FOR ALL & ALL FOR ONE. Reading the 1995 Chicago Reader piece on Obama that’s been tagged several times on this site already, this passage jumped out at me:

In 1992 Obama took time off to direct Project Vote, the most successful grass-roots voter-registration campaign in recent city history. Credited with helping elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the U.S. Senate, the registration drive, aimed primarily at African-Americans, added an estimated 125,000 voters to the voter rolls–even more than were registered during Harold Washington’s mayoral campaigns.

I’ve always wondered how it came to be that two out of three of the African-Americans elected to the Senate since reconstruction came from the same state, and why that state was Illinois, of all places. This passage suggests an answer: Barack Obama‘s organizing work. Impressive.

–Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.