Obabma a product of rugged Chicao politics

CHICAGO — Although Barack Obama has been running for president as a transformational agent of change, there is another side of his political personality — a crafty, tough, successful big-city pol.

And not just any big city, but the legendarily cutthroat Chicago, a national cliche for smash-mouth patronage-fueled urban politics. Here, Obama was able to court the Daley political machine without alienating Jesse Jackson's organization.

"I may be skinny, but I'm tough," Obama said frequently during his successful campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. The message was clear to the party activists who dominate the primaries: If he could make it in the rugged City of the Big Shoulders, he can make it anywhere.

"Politics ain't beanbag, as they say, and that's especially true here," Jay Stewart, executive director of the Chicago-based ethics watchdog group Better Government Association, said in an interview. "And the idea that Obama somehow isn't tough enough for the bruising of a presidential campaign is just laughable."

Moreover, "professionals who have grown up in a world of hard-edged, pragmatic, informal Chicago politics surround Obama" Jim Grossman, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago, told the Associated Press.

Indeed, few politicians have negotiated the treacherous terrain of Chicago politics more successfully than Obama.

In his campaign for president, Obama got the early backing of Hizzoner, Mayor Richard Daley, who abandoned his long-standing tradition of remaining neutral in such contests. And within three months of Daley's endorsement, Obama added the other titans of Chicago politics to his list of backers: the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his son, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., both harsh critics of the Daley machine.

Obama's top advisers include chief strategist David Alexrod, a onetime strategist for Daley; confidante Valerie Jarrett, who once served as Daley's deputy chief of staff; Patti Solis Doyle, a onetime Clinton aide who got her start in politics with Daley; and adviser William Daley, the mayor's brother, who chaired Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

"Ours is a blunt, brawling way," Axelrod boasted to reporters during the primaries. "People are up front about their self-interest."

But since nailing down his party's presidential nomination last month, Obama has downplayed his Chicago toughness, even as the national media have taken interest in the big-city pol and onetime community organizer and his relationship to the Daley machine:

— New York Times columnist David Brooks called him "Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who'd throw you under the truck for votes ... the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator."

— The conservative National Review magazine, retracing Obama's steps as a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s, suggested his early experience in the Windy City whetted his appetite for political power and that "in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land."

— The Boston Globe, in an in-depth article, examined Obama's longtime financial ties to developers and his advocacy of government subsidies for private low-income housing developments, even as such developments in the district he represented for eight years as a state senator deteriorated to the point of being uninhabitable.

At a recent news conference here, Obama bristled at the suggestion that his political career was typical of Chicago politics. Oddly enough, at the same news conference, he suggested that "the Chicago way," as Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass likes to say, may be good for the country as a whole.

"You will recall that for my entire political career here, I was not the endorsed candidate of any political organization here," Obama said. "My reputation in Springfield (as a state legislator) was as an independent. There is no doubt I had friends and continue to have friends who come out of the more traditional school of Chicago politics, but that's not what launched my political career and that's not what I've ever depended on to get elected, and I would challenge any Chicago reporter to dispute that basic fact."

And yet, he added, "I think one thing about Chicago is that people try to get stuff done for their constituents, and one of the things I'm going to try to do as president is help get stuff done for American people who are struggling with high gas prices and lack of health care and an inability to afford college."

Getting stuff done requires building diverse political coalitions and being pragmatic as well as idealistic, and Obama has done that, not only in his presidential campaign, but in his decades of community organizing as well.

"I don't think he would have ended up where he is if he hadn't come to Chicago," Jerry Kellman, who hired Obama as a community organizer in 1985, told U.S. News & World Report. "It's where he got an incredible education in real politics. His idealism became tempered with realism and practicality very quickly."

And bare knuckles, when required.

In 1996, for instance, he ran for the state Senate with the blessing of the incumbent, Alice Palmer, who was seeking election to Congress. When her congressional campaign faltered, Palmer tried to hold her state Senate seat, but Obama, experienced in voter registration drives, challenged her nominating petition and those of other rivals until Palmer stepped aside and the others were forced off the ballot.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune last spring, Obama said he was "just abiding by the rules" in that first campaign against Palmer. But his hometown newspaper suggested Obama's effort "clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career: the man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it."

"The whole episode showed that Obama was an extraordinarily ambitious young man willing to do whatever it took to advance not only his agenda of community empowerment but his own political career," author David Mendel wrote in "Obama: From Promise to Power."

Getting stuff done in this city often involves what Obama acknowledges are "the traditional problems of Chicago politics," what others, such as Stewart's Better Government Association, describe as outright corruption with no purpose other than "to further Mayor Daley's political might."

While "Obama is not a machine politician by any stretch of the imagination" and "he and Daley are not joined at the hip," Stewart said, "they certainly aren't two ships passing in the night either." Their relationship is complicated, one of "peaceful coexistence," Stewart added.

The Obama-Daley relationship is complicated. When Obama first entered Chicago politics, Daley had little interest in him. In 2000, when Obama ran against Rep. Bobby Rush for Congress, the Daley machine backed Rush. In 2004, when he ran successfully for the U.S. Senate, Obama did so again without the backing of the machine.

Still, after the 2004 Senate election, Obama and Daley achieved an uneasy detente. That almost ended in the summer of 2005 when Obama remarked to the Chicago Sun-Times that an investigation of alleged corruption at City Hall had given him "huge pause" about endorsing Daley for re-election.

An hour later, according to the Sun-Times account, Obama asked to clarify his remark, adding that while Daley was "obviously going through a rough patch right now," Chicago had "never looked better" and that talk of an endorsement was premature.

But a month after Daley endorsed him for president over Sen. Hillary Clinton in December 2006, Obama returned the favor, saying, "I don't think there's a city in America that has blossomed as much over the last couple of decades than Chicago — and a lot of that has to do with our mayor."

It was a setback for Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who had considered challenging Daley and who for months had complained of the "tangled web of corruption" at City Hill.

Scott Shepard's e-mail address is sshepard@coxnews.com