I reported on Obama longer than anyone else. Here's what I learned.
This new guy named Barack Obama was speaking forcefully, delivering one of his first speeches as an Illinois lawmaker with such eloquence that I turned up the volume on the squawk box that carried his voice from the Senate floor to my press room office one floor below.
“Who’s that?” I asked the statehouse pundit who happened to be sitting on our dusty orange couch.
“Barack Obama? Sounds like some kinda black militant,” he said, and went back to gnawing on his soggy cigar.
The year was 1997, and the Illinois Capitol was a place where newcomers got their labels shortly after arrival. After politely asking a man in the office to stop calling me “baby,” I was the man hater. An intern with Mexican parents was “that Chicano chick.” Obama was the latest black radical, based first on his name and then on his interest in criminal justice.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-obama-and-me-20170121-story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
