An O-Bot

Since before O-Botting was cool.

Or nefarious.

Or whatever term the Supreme Bloviet is hanging around our necks this week.

Yes, this is a for-real "Thank You" note sent to me by then-State Senator Barack Obama me for my support in his ultimately-failed Democratic primary challenge for Illinois' 1st Congressional district. I'm pretty sure I have a "Rock with Barack" stub for the "Young Voter's Reception" thing I also dropped a little coin to attend.

The world as it was then, courtesy of the Chicago Reader, March 7, 2000:

...
Obama's detractors rap him because he didn't grow up on the south side. He points out that he's spent most of his adult life there, his wife is from South Shore, and he's raising his daughter as a south-sider. His enemies also say he's too white and too bright. Part of it--although they won't say it publicly--is that he grew up with a white mother. Part of it is his demeanor. His lanky, Lincoln-esque body is usually stiff and upright, and he speaks in a stentorian baritone that sounds like a TV newscaster's (Lester Holt's, to be specific). But the main reason is that he's associated himself with Harvard and the University of Chicago, two strongholds of white power.

"Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community," says Donne Trotter, who detests Obama. "You just have to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It's these individuals in Hyde Park, who don't always have the best interests of the community in mind."

Lu Palmer, a radio talk show host and chairman of the Black Independent Political Organization, dismisses Obama as arrogant and compares him to Mel Reynolds, who went from a Rhodes Scholarship to Congress to prison.

"When Obama first hit town, my recollection is that he came here running some voter registration drive," Palmer said. "He came to our office and tried to get us involved, and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn't like his arrogance, his air." Palmer had another run-in with Obama in 1996, when he tried to dissuade the young politician from running to replace state senator Alice Palmer (not a relation). Palmer was resigning to seek Reynolds's old congressional seat, which was won by Jesse Jackson Jr. "I said, 'Man, you sound like Mel Reynolds,'" Palmer said. "There are similarities. If you get hung into these elite institutions, and if you so impress white folks at these elite institutions, and if they name you head of these elite institutions, the Harvard Law Review, that makes one suspect."

Obama says that when "Congressman Rush and his allies" rip him for going to Harvard and teaching at the U. of C., they're sending a signal to black kids that "if you're well educated, somehow you're not keeping it real." He refuses to be ashamed of his education. In January he held a fund-raiser for black educators at Honeysuckle's, a nightclub on 87th Street. It attracted people who don't believe the Ivy League is poison. "I'm glad he went to Harvard," said Lula Ford, who used to be principal of Beethoven Elementary School in the Robert Taylor Homes. "I want all children to go to Harvard, especially from the south side of Chicago."
...

A lot has changed since then.

For one thing, I no long have the scratch to write checks to candidates like this -- ironic that I was never without more work that I could handle during the Bush Administration, but that since being laid off ten days after Barack Obama was sworn in I have not had steady employment, or any gig that paid more than 1/10th of what I was making back during the Dark Days of Dubya.

For another, this...