Marathon Pundit: About Obama's state legislature "accomplishments"

Jim Geraghty in his National Review Online Campaign Spot blog comments on ABC News' Russell Goldman's fact-checking of Sarah Palin's ABC News acceptance speech in St. Paul.

Geraghty writes:

ABC News offers another argument, that in the state legislature, Obama helped pass "two contentious bills, one that studied racial profiling by police and another that ordered interrogations in potential death penalty cases to be recorded." It's tough to argue those bills were routine or unimportant, particularly if you’re ever arrested in Illinois. If you're not, those laws may never impact your lives.

But there is more to add to this discussion. Shortly after becoming State Senate President in 2003, Emil Jones, Jr. told Chicago radio talk show host that he was "Going to make me a US Senator."

From Todd Spivak's landmark February 28, 2008 article in the Houston Press:

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

"I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen," State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. "Barack didn't have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

"I don't consider it bill jacking," Hendon told me. "But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book."