Beneath the Smoke

The Anchoress links to this first rate insight into how Obama built his legislative record.

Illinois Senate Majority Leader Republican James “Pate” Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s ­kingmaker.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

A truly fascinating piece that describes how a powerful Chcago pol who was Illinois Senate Majority Leader simply substituted Obama's name for the original bill sponsors on twenty or more laws that now bear Obama's name and not the original sponsors. He's done nothing and he knows nothing, is increasingly heard in the land.