Obama's first election!

Obama wins because he got all of his opponents removed from ballot!

"After I interviewed Obama voters on Election Day for my documentary, I had a pretty low opinion of what most of them had picked up from the media coverage of the campaign, but this poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace," said Ziegler.

......83% failed to correctly answer that Obama had won his first election by getting all of his opponents removed from the ballot, and 88% did not correctly associate Obama with his statement that his energy policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry. Most (56%) were also not able to correctly answer that Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground.
Nearly three quarters (72%) of Obama voters did not correctly identify Biden as the candidate who had to quit a previous campaign for President because he was found to have plagiarized a speech, and nearly half (47%) did not know that Biden was the one who predicted Obama would be tested by a generated international crisis during his first six months as President.

link: http://www.zogby.com/news/2008/11/18/zogby-poll-almost-no-obama-voters-ace-election-test/

Obama has spent his entire political career trying to win the next step up.
Every three years, he has aspired to a more powerful political position.

He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for
political office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as
Black, still resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his
seat in the Illinois Legislature.

Obama hired fellow Harvard Law alum and election law expert Thomas
Johnson to challenge the nominating petitions of four other candidates,
including the popular incumbent, Alice Palmer, a liberal activist who
had held the seat for several years, according to an April 2007 Chicago
Tribune report.

Obama found enough flaws in the petition sheets -- to appear on the
ballot, candidates needed 757 signatures from registered voters living
within the district -- to knock off all the other Democratic
contenders. He won the seat unopposed.

"A close examination of Obama's first campaign clouds the image he
has cultivated throughout his political career," wrote Tribune
political reporters David Jackson and Ray Long.

link http://www.houstonpress.com/2008-02-28/news/barack-obama-screamed-at-me/4/

Democrats don’t like it when you say that Barack Obama won his first election in 1996 by throwing all of his opponents off the ballot on technicalities.

By clearing out the incumbent and the others in his first Democratic primary for state Senate, Mr. Obama did something that was neither illegal nor even uncommon. But Mr. Obama claims to represent something different from old-style politics — especially old-style Chicago politics. And the senator is embarrassed enough by what he did that he misrepresents it in the prologue of his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope.”

In that book, Mr. Obama paints a portrait of himself as a genuine reformer and change agent, just as he has in this presidential campaign. He attributes his 1996 victory to his message of hope, and his exhortations that Chicagoans drop their justifiable cynicism about politics.

link http://attackmachine.com/blog/2008/08/20/how-did-obama-win-his-first-election/

Interesting that major bean is defending people running for office illegally...if there are problems with their candidacy then they shouldn't be running. I guess that some conservatives are so used to bending or circumventing the rules that they are surprised when someone says that's not right.

If his tactics were so honorable, then why does he misrepresent it in his book, “The Audacity of Hope”? Where there is smoke.......