• Mood: thoughtful
• Music: "Sherry Darling" by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

my respect for Senator Obama just went up a notch

A friend on a mailing list mentioned a past piece of legislation that Barack Obama passed during his days in the Illinois state legislature. I was curious to know more about it, and deyaniera unwittingly came to my rescue to posting a link.

And I now share it with you: A Charles Peters column from the Washington Post on Senator Obama's getting passed a bill that requires that all police interrogations be videotapes.

This impressed me -- both that he wanted the bill passed, when it didn't really do him any good politically (and could easily have garnered him an enemy or twelve), and that he did get it passed despite the huge difficulty. And he made his community better, which is something politicians are theoretically supposed to do and in practice almost never do.