Carol Moseley Braun Crushed in Chicago Mayoral Election

From [HERE] Call it the O Factor. But Mr. Obama’s tacit endorsement of Mr. Emanuel was only one front in the storm that buried Ms. Braun. Once a national political superstar as the first black woman elected to the United States Senate, Ms. Braun finished in fourth place in the Chicago mayoral race with 9 percent of the vote. Her campaign was besieged by a lack of money, internal strife, voter indifference — more than half the city’s electorate stayed home — and by the missteps of a candidate who clearly had been out of politics for too long. The rust showed when she initially refused to release her tax returns.

The shellacking of Ms. Braun has sent Chicago’s black political empowerment movement reeling.

“There’s going to be a lot of second-guessing after this,” said Hermene Hartman, the black publisher of N’Digo magazine, who broke ranks with a coalition of black leaders to endorse Mr. Emanuel. “Did we pick the right consensus candidate? I don’t think so.”

Even among the coalition of black business, community and religious leaders that eventually anointed Ms. Braun after a long and messy process, support for her was always fragile, Ms. Hartman said.

“The community was just too splintered,” she said. “Everybody was talking one thing and doing another. Everybody was with Rahm but talking Carol. You knew damn well they weren’t going to raise any money for Carol.”

In the end, the chairman of the coalition, Alderman Walter Burnett, did not even support Ms. Braun. Instead he decided not to endorse anyone after his political mentor, the Illinois secretary of state, Jesse White, endorsed Mr. Emanuel. Ms. Braun did not win a single black ward — or any ward.

There were signs of trouble early when Ms. Braun’s campaign hired Victor Reyes, a former top aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Mike Noonan, a former campaign operative for Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. The move outraged South Side grassroots organizers.

Even with the two experienced political operatives on board, Ms. Braun’s campaign was uninspired and plagued by mis-steps. Perhaps the biggest was her accusation that another black candidate, Patricia Van Pelt Watkins, had used crack cocaine. Ms. Watkins said she had once had a cocaine addiction but had been clean for 30 years.

Ms. Braun eventually apologized for the comment, but by then she had been exposed as an out-of-touch elitist in the eyes of many black voters, said Salim Muwakkil, an editor and writer for In These Times magazine and a talk-show host on the radio station WVON, which caters to a largely black audience.

“Drug problems, and overcoming them, are part of the life story of too many black people,” Mr. Muwakkil said. “That remark upset a lot of people. The class divisions in the black community are real.”

But lack of money was at the top of the list of what went wrong.

The Braun campaign could never afford a serious media blitz. Despite promises of hefty campaign contributions, some of the city’s black business leaders kept their hands in their pockets. Among the few exceptions were Elzie Higginbottom, a real estate developer, and John Rogers Jr., founder of Ariel Investments, whom Ms. Braun, on election night, called “the bravest businessman in the city of Chicago,” for supporting her and standing up to “extreme pressure.”

She managed to raise roughly $550,000. Mr. Emanuel raised about $800,000 from donors with Southern Californian addresses alone and amassed a total of nearly $12 million.