Why is your headline in the present tense?

Palmer and Obama have been estranged since 1996, when she reneged on her promise not to run for reelection and then failed to obtain enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.

scumlord,
Sounds like Obama dumped Palmer...about 12 years ago. That's some pretty desperate digging there, sister. If nothing else, sound like Obama is tougher than you have been giving him credit for. Good job on that!

Gee, Obama made a legal challenge and got petitions discredited which were out of order for candidates who were unfortunate enough to pay $5 a signature for forged documents. Not pretty, indeed. But the fact that Palmer lost her challenge to Jesse Jackson was poor choices on her part, and she already knew Obama was not going to back down once he started his campaign. She should have made sure she had verifiable petitions. He did. How does this make him bad exactly?

"I hadn't publicly announced," he said. "But what I said was that once I announce, and I have started to raise money, and gather supporters, hire staff and opened up an office, signed a lease, then it's going to be very difficult for me to step down. And she gave me repeated assurances that she was in [the congressional race] to stay."

Obama "did say that to me," Palmer says now. "And I certainly did say that I wasn't going to run. There's no question about that."

She anoints him the successor to her senate seat and so she can run for congress and gives him her word she won't run for her senate seat... then she turns around and decides to go against her word after she loses her run. And Obama is supposed to just stop his campaign after investing all that money and resources and just let her run. Uh huh, ok... only a weak-assed idiot would just fold over for that.

"We looked at those petitions and found that none of them met the requirements of the law," Dobry said. "Alice's people, they'd done it in a great hurry. Almost all her petitions were signed a day or so before the deadline."

According to Davis, Palmer "had kids gathering the names. I remember two of her circulators, Pookie and Squirt."

Davis and others urged Obama to file legal challenges.

Such tactics are legal and frequently used in Chicago. Ballot challenges eliminated 67 of the 245 declared aldermanic candidates in Chicago before this past February's elections, an election board spokesman said.

...

Leafing through scrapbooks in his South Shore apartment, Askia, a perennially unsuccessful candidate, acknowledges that he paid Democratic Party precinct workers $5 a sheet for some of the petitions, and now suspects they used a classic Chicago ruse of passing the papers among themselves to forge the signatures. "They round-tabled me," Askia said.

I see, so its Obama's fault that the other candidates are forging signatures for their petitions. He's supposed to just sit back and let them break the law.

What a non-story.

Palmer was a mentor. The story is what it is.

You'd think she might recognize that Obama coming into politics through her seat was more consequential, and served a higher purpose in Democratic politics, than anything Ms. Palmer has ever done. She apparently feels otherwise, and puts the slight to her above the fact that we now stand on the brink of having a Presidential nominee she mentored, and the first African-American nominee in history to boot.

Apparently to her, all politics is personal. It's about who did you wrong. Kind of like Hillary and Bill, with their Nixonian enemies list. So she belongs with them, which is her right.

That's fine. I'm not saying Palmer should have been glad when she reneged, and Barack stayed put. But twelve years is long enough to get over it, given the good that ensued. A big yawn out to this nothing post.

Maybe Barack should campaign with Kathleen Willey.

Oops -- only the Clinton folks find the personal enemies to parade about. Time for them to go!

this is really scraping the bottom of the barrell for some dirt to throw on poor Obama.. whats the matter with these Clintonites?

obama's campaign calls hillary the 'master of a broken system' and spends millions to denegrate her plan for universal health coverage and then turns around and calls her the 'negative campaigner'--doesn't that bother any of you?

Us Hillary supporters aren't whining, just pointing out that it seems strange to me that he'd have the 'audacity' to run as a 'different kind of politicean' when he really isn't anything of the sort.

plus, he comes across arrogant and wimpy at the same time. yuck. very unpresidential.

I don't believe you read the article.