From Chicago’s South Side to the Senate: The political education of Obama.

From Muckety news:

The magnet that drew a 23-year-old idealist named Barack Obama to Chicago was Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African-American mayor.

As a young man, Obama idolized the politician who had vanquished the Chicago machine and two of its most powerful players, then-Mayor Jane Byrne and future-mayor Richard M. Daley, after they split the white vote in a three-way race in 1983. The young Obama wrote the new mayor asking for a job, but heard nothing back, so he signed on as a community organizer on Chicago’s South side, arriving in his beat-up blue Honda in June, 1985. (Washington died of a heart attack in office, several months after winning re-election, in November 1987.)

As a newcomer, Obama aligned himself with the reformers. He put down roots in Hyde Park, an integrated neighborhood with a history of electing independent-minded politicians that was home to the late Washington, as well as to Carol Moseley Braun, Jesse Jackson Jr. and the University of Chicago.

More than two decades later, Obama-the-presidential-aspirant had come to have a far more nuanced and pragmatic view of Chicago’s political establishment. In 2007, he endorsed then-Mayor Daley, son of the late party boss of the same name, who returned the favor when Obama declared for the Democratic presidential nomination. By then, Obama had mastered the skill of mixing an idealist’s message with a politician’s tactical approach to alliances.