If there's one particularly absurd storyline about Obama's early political career, it's the claim getting a rival knocked off the ballot in his first state Senate race was a form of something called "hardball," a dastardly form of politics endemic to Chicago.
I don't mean to pick particularly on CNN, because the story has appeared all over the place for the last year and a half, but that's where I happened to see it last.
I covered New York politics for quite a while, where the ballot access rules are, as in Chicago, stringent. You can argue that they set up an unjust barrier, aimed to protect incumbents. But that's hardly relevant here: Obama was the challenger, Alice Palmer the incumbent. These challenges are utterly run-of-the-mill; with some exceptions, it's considered madness to let a rival who hasn't met the legal qualifications stay on the ballot.
It's also the case that anybody with the wherewithal to mount a large scale campaign and convince a lot of people to vote for her really should be able to gather, in the Obama-Palmer case, the signatures of 757 local Democrats. Candidates usually gather several times that number to be safe, a shadowy urban political activity involving feeding pizza to a bunch of volunteers.
In any case, Obama was hardly engaging in some horribly brutal form of politics specific to Chicago. His opponent had failed to meet a minimal legal qualification for running for the office. It would have been political malpractice for him to, essentially, give her a pass and say, "No, please, run anyway, it's on me."
To have let her on the ballot would have been the equivalent of, say, his giving John McCain some money.
There are other things they do in Chicago, New York and most everywhere else that should provoke moral scruples. But they mostly involve breaking the law, not insisting on it.
Facebook
Twitter