CNN's Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston have a report on Barack Obama's first race for public office, the 1996 Illinois State Senate where he had all four of his Democratic Primary opponents -- including the incumbent -- thrown off the ballot, leaving Obama to run unopposed.

According a source cited by National Review's Jim Geraghty, then-State Sen. Alice Palmer, the incumbent Obama had thrown off the ballot, had many of the signatures on her petition disqualified on technicalities -- names were printed instead of written in cursive.

There is nothing illegal in this, but in the previous election, Alice Palmer won the 1992 Democratic Primary race for the 13th District Illinois State Senate seat over opponent Charlie Calvin, 83%-17%, or 29,115 to 5,987.

In the 1992 general election, Palmer ran unopposed, receiving 69,989 votes.

It is indisputable that in his first race for public office Barack Obama had a sitting incumbent who won with 83% of the vote in the previous election thrown off the ballot for not having enough valid signatures on her election petition in the next cycle.

Prior to running for office, Obama helped to organize the registration of thousands of new voters -- only to turn around and clear the ballot of any opposition when he himself decided to be a candidate.

The hypocrisy of that is self-evident, but is multiplied by the fact that Obama now runs as a 'change candidate' who wants to reform the 'old type of politics.'

To the best of my knowledge, after the Chicago Tribune's original report on this story in April 2007, only the Wall Street Journal and now CNN have reported on it in the mainstream media.

As CNN's Griffin and Johnston note, Tribune columnist John Kass thinks "the national media are naive when it comes to Chicago politics ... [and] have bought into a narrative that Obama is strictly a reformer."

They quote Kass:

"It's not the tactics of 'let's all people come together and put your best ideas forward and the best ideas win,'" Kass said. "That's the spin; that's in the Kool-Aid. You can have some. Any flavor. But the real deal was, get rid of Alice Palmer.

"There are those who think that registering people to vote and getting them involved in politics and then using this tactic in terms of denying Alice Palmer the right to compete, that these things are inconsistent. And guess what? They are. They are inconsistent. But that's the politics he plays."

(Because Illinois election results for 1996 are unavailable online, I contacted the Illinois State Board of Elections, and one of the agency's election specialists sent me the election results quoted here.)