Senator Barack Obama won a seat in the Illinois State Senate in 1996. He faced no opposition in the primary after his campaign successfully challenged the petitions of his opponents, including Alice Palmer, who had held the seat. How the Democratic challengers for the seat eventually won by Obama were eliminated has been spun by Obama's current opponents for President as unethical. Yet that defamatory characterization is not warranted by the facts.

The Chicago Tribune dredged up the 1996 election recently in "Obama knows his way around a ballot", an article that is balanced as to the facts but presents alot of very negative opinions about what happened. The facts are there but you've got to read through a fair amount of anti-Obama dreck to get at them.

From the article (emphasis mine):

In the early 1990s, Chicago's 13th Legislative District was served in the Illinois Senate by Palmer, who was working as a community organizer in the area when Obama was growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia. She risked her safe seat to run for Congress and touted Obama as a suitable successor, according to news accounts and interviews.

But when she got clobbered in that November 1995 special congressional race, Palmer supporters asked Obama to fold his campaign so she could easily retain her state Senate seat.

Obama not only refused to step aside, he filed challenges that nullified Palmer's hastily gathered nominating petitions, forcing her to withdraw.

There's more...