In Illinois, big changes expected of Obama

ByABC News
September 23, 2008, 10:46 PM

CHICAGO -- Catherine Haskins is 36 and has never bothered to vote in a presidential election. She says that will change Nov. 4 when she votes for Barack Obama.

Until now, Haskins, a single mom and small business owner in Washington Park, one of this city's poorest neighborhoods, never believed that any presidential candidate could make a difference in her life or the lives of her three sons.

In Obama, she says, she sees a politician who was raised by his own single mom and by his grandparents, a former community organizer who worked in Chicago neighborhoods much like her own. "He gets it. He's lived it," she says.

Illinois, which sent Obama to the U.S. Senate in 2004 with 70% of the vote, could help elect the USA's first African-American president. That prospect has prompted some people here to set aside cynical attitudes about politicians, says Haskins, owner of a car wash and detailing business. "I just know that he's going to make things better for people like me," she says.

Paul Green, a political science professor at Chicago's Roosevelt University, worries that people in Washington Park expect more from Obama than he can deliver even from the Oval Office.

The community's problems are "the same old story: jobs, education, drugs," he says. "Change is not going to be done by a president. It's not going to be done by waving a wand."

People invested the same expectations in Harold Washington, a Democrat, when he became Chicago's first black mayor in 1983, Green says, and "nothing changed."

Retiree Marilyn Nash, 61, says she understands why people think Obama can improve lives here, but she isn't sure he can fulfill those hopes. "Our problems are deep and old," she says. "We need better-paying jobs, better housing, real stuff. Politicians, even Barack, mostly give us words. That's not enough."

Obama lives in a big brick home a few dozen blocks away across the park for which the neighborhood is named from Washington Park. His Hyde Park neighborhood is integrated and solidly middle class, home to the University of Chicago.