* 1996, Jan - Obama has his four competitor petitions invalidated; he emerges as the only candidate
* 2001 - Obama receives legal services contract with Illinois firm owned by Robert Blackwell, Jr. A few months later, Obama writes a letter on Illinois Senate letterhead in support of a tourism grant for a different Blackwell company. The next day, "Obama's U.S. Senate campaign received a $1,000 donation from Blackwell... In the presidential race he is credited on Obama's website with committing to raise $100,000 to $200,000 for Obama's campaign."
Obama reported $98,158 income for providing legal services; $80,000 was from Blackwell's firm."Illinois ethics disclosure forms are designed to reveal possible financial conflicts by lawmakers... Obama did not specify that EKI provided him with the bulk of the private-sector compensation he received... he attached a multi-page list of all the law firm's clients, which included EKI among hundreds."
* 2003 - Obama begins running for US Senate; the leading Democratic candidate will withdraw in 2004 due to a sex scandal that Obama's campaign urged the Chicago Tribune to report.
* 2004, Jun - Obama's Republican opponent withdraws due to sex scandal
* 2005 - Obama purchases land from neighbor and now-indicted political fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko
* 2007, Mar - Obama endorses controversial Chicago alderman Dorothy "The Hat" Tillman, who reportedly "[deployed] city resources to hire her family and reward campaign contributors."
* 2007, Apr - Controversy over Obama's MySpace page
* 2007, May - Obama's campaign releases its sophisticated Facebook application, only hours "after the company launched the developer platform." TechPresident argues that Facebook gave the Obama camp an advantage: "the other campaigns found out about Platform’s with the rest of us, on Friday, May 25" and reports that "Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, is working on the Obama campaign.
I went to the source page to find out what Obama has done with his life other than run for office.
Answer: Not much.
But then many of the candidates today fall into that unfortunate pattern. Once you subtract out military, community service, working on other people's campaigns, or being on a political staff of some sort, there is nothing left. They groom themselves (or are groomed by others) for a political life and never look back.
How are we that much different than the British, with their House of Lords?
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