Back in the 1990s, I witnessed firsthand the ability of Barack Obama to make positive changes in the lives of ordinary people. He didn't do it in a way that drew attention to himself, he did it through intelligence and efficiency and a high level of competence. His tactics were unique in my experience with state government in Illinois, and made me take notice of his ability long before he appeared on the national stage.
In the late 1990s I was working at a transportation planning agency in Chicago as the principal communications liaison. I wrote and distributed press releases, distilled dense planning papers from "Planningese" into brief executive summaries in understandable English, and worked to promote public involvement in the planning process.
In those days, it was an uphill battle to get anyone interested in even our main, "exciting," important function—developing long-range transportation plans for the Chicago area. So in reaction, I kept trying to make the releases and policy papers ever more simplistic. But not long after, I began getting calls from this one state senator’s office. You guessed it—State Senator Barack Obama.
But it wasn’t just the fact that his office was the one state legislative office that called me most often-- by far-- for clarification or more information, that really impressed me. It was the fact that the people in his office were efficient, curious, highly professional, and interested on a level that was totally beyond anything I’d experienced in my contact with other state legislative offices.
They asked about my opinion, how the plans were arrived at, why elements of interest to their constituency were (or were not) included, the political dynamics of the planning process, and promising alternatives to conventional wisdom. It was mind-blowing. Sure, it was a lot of extra work for me, and outside the ordinary, but I was spellbound.
Soon, some representatives of state Sen. Barack Obama’s office began appearing at public meetings. This new element was of great concern to a lot of the people in the executive offices of my agency. They would ask me: "Why is HE here? What did you say to them? Did you know they were coming to this meeting?"
It was at the tail end of an era when Republicans had held the state governorship for a 24-year period. Convicted felon George Ryan was then governor of Illinois, a post he had graduated to (as many other Republicans had) from the office of Secretary of State. Frankly, most of the people in my agency were political hacks and Republican cronies, working there only because they had political connections with the Republican leadership in Springfield. Some of them had as much as eight or ten weeks of vacation, and they showed up the rest of the year for only a few hours a day—hours that were spent mostly dozing off in their offices while their secretaries screened calls.
For those of you not familiar with Illinois, take a look at a road atlas. You’ll find that Illinois has the second most Interstate highways in the country after California, a state with many more cars and three times the population. There are several Interstates—some with unique numbers-- that go only from Quincy to Champaign (I-72), only from Moline to Indianapolis (I-74), only from Peoria to Lincoln (I-155), only from tiny town to tiny town (I-180). On top of that, there is another layer of bureaucracy, the Illinois State Tollway System. The reason Illinois is overbuilt with highways is because Republican politicians were being funded by the highway construction companies the selected to build more roads. And while all this state money was being poured into building ever more highways (and a lot of that money coming back into the campaign coffers of Republicans) the Chicago Transit Authority was crumbling and woefully under-funded.
As a disaffected employee somewhat resentful that the agency had become a place to dump deadwood Republican cronies, I saw this scrutiny from Sen. Obama’s office as welcome and delightful. He became a hero for me.
In 2000, I resigned from the agency in disgust. After a Democrat was elected to the governor’s office in 2002, the agency was drastically cut through attrition and early retirement. And in 2006, the agency was merged with another agency for greater efficiency.
But way back in 1998, I realized from personal experience that Barack Obama was someone special. No one else in state government seemed to care that millions were being wasted in this agency, and their product was hurting the interests of the people. That’s why I immediately donated $50 to his Presidential Exploratory Committee last January, several hundred dollars since, and why I’ve volunteered my time to help him win the Democratic nomination.
P.S. This is my first attempt at writing a diary, so please excuse me if the formatting or style seems awkward.