The Race for Obama's Senate Seat.

• Author: Lydersen, Kari
• Position: Barack Obama

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Here's a centrist Democrat from Illinois, strong on labor but marred by the banking scandal, talking about hope. It's not Barack Obama, but a leading candidate to take the seat he once held in the U.S. Senate. The race reflects who the Democrats tend to be these days: not grassroots, insurgent progressives but establishment types tinged with corruption.

In the battle over a seat Republicans eye as a trophy, the Democrats have put up Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois's thirty-four-year-old state treasurer. Labor leaders and some of Chicago's top progressive Democrats tout Giannoulias as a man of the people. But that image took a beating this year as it became clear his family's bank had an especially bad record of making the kind of risky loans that brought on the economic crisis. And the bank made loans to some convicted white collar criminals and other unsavory characters, which hasn't helped him any.

In a race pundits are calling the nation's nastiest Senate contest, Giannoulias is running against Republican Mark Kirk, a suburban Chicago Congressman big on national security with a penchant for embellishing his resume, and a Green Party candidate, LeAlan Marvin Jones, who hails from Chicago's South Side public housing projects, where he gained prominence as a teen journalist.

An August 11 Rasmussen Reports poll had Giannoulias tied with Kirk at 40 percent each. Rasmussen Reports identifies Illinois as one of four "tossup" states with a Democratic Senate seat that could be won by a Republican. (The others are open seats in Colorado and Pennsylvania and Russ Feingold's seat in Wisconsin.)

At a luncheon for the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago on the longest day of the year, Giannoulias repeatedly invoked his "passion" for all things sustainable--especially his proposed national infrastructure fund. He showed off knowledge of the planning council's nuts and bolts work. And he pledged support for "re-reversing" the Chicago River, a controversial local issue involving sewage treatment and the Asian carp invasion, thus pleasing environmentalists and opposing the powerful shipping and riverboat tour industries. He jokingly hoped that Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who gets quite agitated over the river, was not in the room.

Kirk also spoke at the luncheon, but his snide jabs fell flat or elicited disapproving hisses from about a thousand civic leaders, staff, and donors gathered for the regional planning agency's fundraiser. He paused for emphasis in mentioning the "collapsing Greek economy." He stressed the word "adult" in calling for fiscal conservancy, seemingly a...