How Did Barack Hussein Obama Get Here? Updated

Guy Benson writing for Townhall takes a look at how Obama ascended through the ranks as an obscure unaccomplished Illinois Legislator to the US Senate and a run for the Predidency. It seems he would be nowhere if his opponents hadn't collapsed under scandal.

Several questions still linger. How did Barack Obama rise from relative obscurity to his current level of prominence? How many Americans have heard of Alice Palmer, Blair Hull, or Jack Ryan? These names may hold no significance to the legions who now chant "yes we can," but they are names that Barack Obama should remember well. The mainstream press, which affords Obama nearly unanimous glowing coverage, has repeatedly failed to report a reality that doesn't quite fit the Obama-as-Messiah narrative. Namely, that this self-stylized agent of hope and change is a political opportunist extraordinaire. Barack Obama's dizzying ascendancy to political celebrity has been marked by less-than-inspirational bare-knuckle politics, an unremarkable legislative career, and a slew of lurid scandals that conveniently sunk formidable opponents.

Ken Blackwell takes a hard look at just how far to the left Barack is as the most liberal member of the Senate and commited socialist believer in ever higher taxes, increasing regulation of business, gay marriage, partial birth abortion etc., etc.
Update: George Neumayr at American Spectator has even more on Barack's "cotton candy" speechifying and policies of the past that ended in failure and division.

Senator Barack Obama rejects the "politics of the past" while borrowing from its phoniest chapters. His promised caravan toward a new Camelot, with Teddy Kennedy bringing up the rear, may generate feelings in Chris Matthews' leg and cause women to swoon, but over time it is likely to pall and bore.

Obama's speeches are like cotton candy, sweet but substanceless and dangerous to one's health if turned into a steady diet. Is he saying nothing? Unfortunately not. Glimpsed through the haze of his sophistical rhetoric is something, and it is tiresomely false, namely, the dogmatic assertion that "hope" and liberalism are synonymous.

His reliance on sentiment and rhetoric rather than reasoning to advance that assertion will not inspire a new politics of bipartisan unity but revive old and bitter resentments. Liberalism, after all, has no monopoly on hope, and the chapters of history to which Obama makes implicit reference -- the New Frontier and Great Society -- concluded in despair.