Barack Obama's Work

“In the eyes of many voters, Barack Obama has come of age in the short span of two years, miraculously fired in the crucible of this presidential campaign. The fact is, he has been practicing for a very long time, learning his lessons in relative anonymity,” writes Christi Parsons in the October 31 Chicago Tribune. Parsons covered the Illinois statehouse for the Tribune during Senator Obama’s tenure there; and reported on him on both Capitol Hill and for before his presidential campaign. Her current Tribune article (“In Statehouse, Obama quietly made own way”) discusses his hard work, his discretion, and his accomplishment. Months before, January 4, 2008, Charles Peters in the Washington Post wrote an article (“Judge Him by His Laws”) that identified some of Senator Obama’s work: Senator Obama, in the Illinois state senate, opposed coerced confessions as part of police investigations and proposed videoptaping of interrogations and, with stern opposition, got that into law; and he passed income tax credit legislation to help the working poor; and helped to establish the first ethics and campaign finance law in twenty-five years; and, later, in the national senate he coauthored a lobby reform law that specified the naming of fund bundlers.