"A political machine, like the one that has dominated Chicago for most of the last 150 years, is a political party characterized by patronage jobs, favoritism, nepotism, precinct workers, and party loyalty."

"was not part of the Daley machine. It is true that the machine did not support Obama early in his career, when he was backed by liberal independents in Hyde Park, part of his state Senate district and home to the University of Chicago. But Obama acquired mentors like Emil Jones, the president of the Illinois state Senate and a major power broker. And he was careful not to offend the mayor. In 2005, an hour after he told the Chicago Sun-Times that the federal criminal investigations into Daley machine corruption give me huge pause, Obama called the Sun-Times to amend his remarks, saying that Chicago had never looked better. In the following year, Mayor Daley issued an unusual primary endorsement of Obama, and Bill Daley became a senior adviser to Obamas campaign. In the 2006 Chicago mayoral election, Obama, then U.S. senator and presidential candidate, endorsed Daley, who had been in power for 18 years, for reelection against two African American candidates for mayor, Dorothy Brown and William Walls. In 1991 Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Daley, hired Obamas then-fiance Michelle Robinson, met Obama, and introduced the couple to well-connected and wealthy Chicago Democrats. Later she became one of three senior advisers to President Obama. According to a 2008 report in Time, Michelle Obamas stint at the mayors office gave her, and her husband, access to Chicagos political class. Combined with her own Southside rootsshe went to high school with Santita Jackson, the Rev. Jesse Jacksons daughterMichelles job gave her husband entre into the best political machine in Illinois, augmenting her ties to Jacksons powerful civil rights group, Rainbow Push. After only 18 months, Michelle moved from the mayors office to lead the Chicago branch of a progressive nonprofit, Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program. Michelle became associate dean of students at the University of Chicago and was appointed to the board of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and six corporate boards. By 2007, at the age of 43, her university and corporate board salaries added up to half a million dollars a year. Educated at Harvard Law like Obama, whom she met when they both worked for the law firm Sidley Austin in Chicago, Michelle Obama herself was the daughter of a city employee, Fraser Robinson, a precinct captain for the Daley machine. According to Liza Mundys Michelle: A Biography: As a precinct captain, you could expect, in return for this political policing a city job. In fact, doing volunteer work was almost the only way you could get one Daley kept a file cabinet with a list of jobs in it and was said to know the names of everybody who held them. Michael Lind chronicles civilizational shifts and national trends, writing about American politics and culture with a deep understanding of history and appreciation for America's highest ideals. A third power base, after the nonprofit sector and the Daley machine, was the Black community, which in Chicago as elsewhere had its own organic intellectuals and leaders in the form of Black Protestant pastors, not foundation-designated reformers leading astroturf NGOs or individuals appointed to be racial spokespersons by The Atlantic or The New York Times. Obama sought credibility with that Democratic constituency by joining the congregation of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. After modifying Wrights phrase audacity to hope to become the title of his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic national convention and of his bestselling second book, Obama resigned from Wrights church and denounced his former mentor after Wrights inflammatory attacks on the U.S. became a liability for Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign. After the nonprofit-industrial complex, Chicago pols, and the overwhelmingly Democratic Black electorate, Obama brought Silicon Valley and Wall Street into his campaign and his new party. Donors in tech, finance, and Hollywood showered Obama with so much money that, in 2008, he abandoned the public campaign finance systemthe proud creation of earlier Democrats concerned about plutocracy in politicsin order to be able to raise campaign basing his campaign out of an initiative Obama launched there, through the early Illinois Senate campaigns in Hyde Park, and the national arena. From his base in the progressive technocratic foundation world, the young Obama ingratiated himself with the existing Daley electoral machine. It is often claimed that Barack Obama, an outsider in Chicago with a white American mother and a Kenyan father who was raised by his grandmother in Hawaii,"

"Some of them did fade away, like Tammany Hall in New York City."