From S. Side nobody to White House

In October of 2003, just nine months before Barack Obama would become a national sensation with his speech at the Democratic National Convention and just five months before he would win the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, the Chicago Tribune took a poll.

The poll found that only 9 percent of Democratic voters in Illinois favored Obama for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald.

Nine lousy percent.

By January, the picture had changed only slightly. Obama was up to 14 percent.

It's easily forgotten today, but when the history books are written, here's a point that should be considered:

Before Barack Obama was somebody, he was pretty much nobody.

By that I mean, practically right up until the moment that his star ascended, Obama was an unknown even in his home base of Chicago, familiar mainly within his own Hyde Park community and to a coterie of political insiders beyond it.

Although by then he was in his second full term in the state Senate, he wasn't a major force in local politics or the Legislature. He wasn't the guy you had to have on your side to get elected. He wasn't the person to whom the media turned for an opinion when there was a matter of local urgency. If he'd gotten in a tussle with his local alderman, he would have been considered the underdog. The thrashing that he'd received in 2000 when he tried to bounce U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush out of Congress was not regarded as a fluke. If he'd challenged Rush again in 2004, he would have likely tasted more of the same.

Obama's ascension was so stunningly rapid in 2004 that he became a national figure even before he'd cemented his position as a local one. The convention speech put him on the radar as a potential presidential candidate even though it would be several more months before he was actually elected to the U.S. Senate.

And yet, among most of those who did know him, there was always a sense that Barack Obama, even in his period of relative obscurity, would surely be somebody. His political talent excited the insiders. They saw his potential. They knew he could go national.

This created the type of background buzz that when his television commercials finally hit during that primary and melded with newspaper endorsements, Obama's popularity spread virally.

The guy polling 9 percent ended up winning that seven-way primary with 53 percent of the vote, and the buzz hasn't stopped since.