Obama Unbored by the Suburbs

The country is playing catch-up with Barack Obama, getting to know the charismatic U.S. senator from Illinois now that he is already considered the male to beat for the '08 Democratic presidential nomination. In a long profile (here on login-free The Seattle Times site) that ran on Sunday's front page, The New York Times officially introduced him to Northeast elite voters. Characterizing Obama as "modest and careful" in dealing with the media, reporter Jodi Kantor unearthed "a rare slip" during his early '90s tenure as president of Harvard's prestigious law review journal. "He told The Associated Press," notes Kantor, "'I'm not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.'"

It may be that Obama is now playing catch-up with the suburbs. On Martin Luther King Day, Obama pulled off a "minor coup," according to the Daily Southtown, when he traveled to Chicago's south suburbs to speak at St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, an African-American megachurch in Harvey. Harvey isn't the affluent consumer-culture haven the Times imagined when it coined the phrase "suburban populism" elsewhere in Sunday's paper. Harvey struggles with crime and poverty, and a mayor who has been the subject of several Southtown articles about town-hall corruption. Obama felt their pain while showing that the close-in burbs are on his national agenda. "Obama suggested the money sent to rebuild Iraq should be spent to rebuild towns such as Harvey," wrote Southtown reporter Guy Tridgell.

The trip to Harvey was unexpected both because St. Mark pastor Bishop William Jordan has supported Republican candidates in the past (though he backed Obama in his senatorial campaign), and because downtrodden Harvey didn't seem a large enough stage for a man ramping up to run for the White House. "If I recall Dr. King, he wasn't hanging out in Manhattan. Dr. King was not in Beverly Hills," Obama told the crowd at St. Mark. "Folks said, 'Why are you going to Harvey? Harvey has got a lot of problems.' I said, 'That's why I'm going to Harvey.'"