Obama is proving that he's not the typical Chicago politician

BY STEVEN THOMMA McClatchy Newspapers

CHICAGO - Watching Barack Obama launch his presidential campaign, you'd never know he's from Chicago.

He staged the dramatic kickoff downstate in Springfield, far from his adopted hometown. He barely mentioned Chicago. And he didn't share the stage -- or the spotlight -- with any of the well-known Democratic politicians from Chicago. Not Gov. Rod Blagojevich, not Mayor Richard M. Daley. Not the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

His seeming slight of Chicago shouldn't be a surprise. For while Obama is from Chicago, he's not of it. At least not its politics.

The first-term Democratic senator didn't come up through the rough ranks of Chicago politics. He got his start as a neighborhood organizer who fought City Hall. He was just a bystander to the 1983-87 reign of the city's only African-American mayor, Harold Washington. He made his first unsuccessful run for Congress against an established black congressman, Bobby Rush. And he ran for the U.S. Senate against an Irish-American Democrat with deep roots in Chicago's political machine and broad support from the party establishment.

"He's an enigma," said Denny Jacobs, a former Democratic state senator from East Moline who served with Obama in the state Legislature.

"He's not the mayor's guy. He's not the aldermen's guy. He's not the county board chairman's guy. He's nobody's guy. Usually you're somebody's guy. In Chicago, that's a way of life."

It's not that Obama is at odds with Chicago politics. He's endorsed Daley for re-election, for example.

But being free of debts to Chicago's political establishments -- black or white -- gives him more freedom to seek the White House without being implicated in City Hall patronage investigations or having close ties to a controversial figure such as Jackson.

A native of Hawaii, Obama came to Chicago as a community organizer in 1985 -- nine years after the legendary machine politician Richard J. Daley, the current mayor's father, had died and two years after Washington became mayor.

Gradually known in the activist community, profiled in an alternative weekly newspaper, Obama was still far removed from the power centers of ward organizations or City Hall, where other young Chicago politicians sought their first steps up the ladder.

Eventually, he left to attend Harvard Law School, returning to Chicago to practice civil rights law and teach at the University of Chicago Law School.

That, too, set him apart in a city in which mayors and other politicians tend to get their degrees locally -- both Daleys went to DePaul University's law school and Washington went to Northwestern's -- and their real educations in ward politics.

While the University of Chicago is world renowned, with ties to 79 Nobel Prize winners and six currently on the faculty, it's hardly a hotbed of ward bosses.

"It's a conservative Democratic Party here," said Cynthia Canary, the executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. "They're not progressive Democrats. Pro-development, cautious fiscal approach, not activist on social issues."

They're also prone to federal ethics investigations. There's one now in City Hall.

"Had he come up through those ranks," Canary said, "I doubt he would be a standard-bearer on issues like ethics and accountability in government. His message would be different."