Obama Campaign Complains About 'Hit Job' on His Effort to Disqualify Signatures

Thursday, May 29, 2008

BARACK OBAMA

Looks like this morning's item spurred CNN to look again at Obama's 1996 primary deck-clearing against Alice Palmer.

Obama's challenge was perfectly legal, said Jay Stewart, with the Chicago's Better Government Association. While records of the challenges are no longer on file for review with the election board, Stewart said Obama is not the only politician to resort to petition challenges to eliminate the competition.
"He came from Chicago politics," Stewart said. "Politics ain't beanbag as they say in Chicago. You play with your elbows up and you're pretty tough and ruthless when you have to be. Sen. Obama felt that's what was necessary at the time, that's what he did. Does it fit in with the rhetoric now? Perhaps not."
The Obama campaign called this report "a hit job." They insisted CNN talk to a state representative who supports Obama, because, according to an Obama spokesman, she would be objective. But when we called her she said she can't recall details of petition challenges, who engineered them for the Obama campaign or why all the candidates were challenged...
He said the Obama team challenged every single one of his petitions on what Askia called "technicalities."
If names were printed instead of signed in cursive writing, they were declared invalid. If signatures were good but the person gathering the signatures wasn't properly registered, then those petitions also were thrown out.

Also, Ed Morrissey, who I chat with Wednesdays on BlogTalkRadio, looks at the story and thinks it's a total non-issue. "Obama played hardball in Chicago … so?"

I find myself in the strange role of the mushy-headed liberal, or at least feeling a certain sense of injustice over the fact that hundreds of Chicagoans had their signatures on a nominating petition invalidated because they printed their names instead of signing them. Ed thinks if the letter of the law requires signatures to be cursive, that's that, and Obama simply made a shrewd move. I think, barring any other reason to think the printed name is not genuine, that's an awfully low bar . The aim of the law is allegedly to weed out inauthentic signatures, not to disqualify anyone whose first instinct is to not write in cursive.

And the rule seems rather obscure if hundreds of Chicago voters unknowingly violated it. (I'm much more worried about fraud in the form someone voting twice and invalidating my vote than in the form of signatures on a nominating petition.)

At the very least, Democrats' acceptance of this interpretation of the law obliterates vast swaths of their other rhetoric about "disenfranchisement", opposition to voter ID laws, "count every vote," etc.

05/29 03:36 PM Share