Barack Obama's New Politics Doesn't Trickle Down to Endorsed Candidate Bill Foster

Political endorsements are a double-edged sword. While they can be used to promote a candidate, particularly when the endorser is a popular figure like Barack Obama, they can also come back to bite the endorser when the endorsee reveals faults that suddenly make him or her a political liability.

Take Obama's recent endorsement of CD-14 Dem candidate Bill Foster. As soon as we heard the ad, we knew it was a harbinger of things to come this election season, as every local Illinois Dem pol will be begging for Obama to do an ad or show up at an event. Bill Foster was no exception, and the unusual timing of this Saturday's special election to fill the remainder of former Speaker Denny Hstert's term gave the Foster camp a nice opening, which was to say, essentially, 'if you like Barack Obama's message of change, you can cast a vote for that kind of change right now, by voting for Bill Foster.'

A good message, but there's a problem...

Foster's GOP opponent, Jim Oberweis, was reportedly successful in having Foster's latest ad, in which Foster wrongfully claims that Oberweis wants to eliminate employer-paid healthcare, pulled from Chicago-area media. As reported at the state GOP website, weareillinois.org, "A false and misleading attack ad produced by union allies of Bill Foster was taken off the air and replaced by a different version after television stations were shown that its major claim was false. WMAQ/NBC-5 was the first TV station to replace the ad, and others are expected to follow."

The GOP website also posted this statement from the Oberweis campaign: "It's more than a touch ironic that just one day after Bill Foster's campaign released its much-touted television advertisement featuring Barack Obama, the so-called master of the 'New Politics,' Bill Foster's 'Old Politics' union allies are being forced to take off the air a false slash-and-burn attack advertisement that libels Jim Oberweis," said Oberweis for Congress spokesman Bill Pascoe.

Given that everyone expects Obama to be handing out endorsements left and right in Illinois, whether or not he is the Dem presidential candidate, he better be darn careful about vetting those whom he endorses. We think the Foster debacle reflects pretty poorly on Obama, who has campaigned on his 'new politics' message, and when you have a message like that, you can't afford too many more instances of backing candidates with dirt in their past, or who become an embarrassment in the course of the campaign.

For his part, Obama will have to fend off local Dems like Terry Link who probably think they are owed all the help Obama can spare to boost their local campaigns, in thanks for their past contributions and support. But, if the Lake GOP has anything to say about it, Link is one candidate that Obama will have to think long and hard about associating with during this campaign, lest the petition fraud scandal and other questionable issues related to Link rub off on Obama as the endorser.