THE LOST RACE. One commonly articulated concern about Sen. Barack Obama's nascent presidential bid is that he has never faced a tough race for office before. That's not quite true. In 2000, as the rest of America was focused on the contest between Bush and Gore, Obama lost a bid to unseat former Black Panther Bobby Rush, the then eight-year incumbent representing Chicago's South Side. Today, Salon revisits that race and looks at what kind of an impact it had on Obama's political development, digging up the Chicago Reader writer who covered the race, Edward McClelland, and tasking him with going back through his old notes. The result is one of the first less than glowing articles about Obama in a respectable publication, which concludes that Obama only began to soar as a politician once he stopped trying to compete on African-American cultural turf and embraced his multi-ethnic, multi-racial identity publicly. More importantly, the shellacking he took in the failed bid against Rush transformed him from an awkward, arrogant, young man in a hurry (anyone who's been to an Ivy League school knows the exactly the type) into someone who would master the art of building legislative bridges and getting his agenda turned into law, as well as the politician we know today. Totally worth a read.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
