Picture this. It's Spring 2001 and a young state senator is walking in to a pretty

unremarkable government building in Springfield, Illinois. He's going in to what

the local Democrats call the inner sanctum. A fingerprint and code

protected room with a big printer and a bunch of computers with double monitors

and on them are detailed maps of the city of Chicago. The state senator had

lost a race for Congress the year before and he was about to make a political

decision that changed history. The voters on the south side of Chicago had

rejected him in that congressional race but what for his next race he could

choose his own voters. What if he could make his constituents wealthier, more

educated, more diverse by adding a different chunk of the city. That just

might help him become the kind of politician for whom the possibilities were

limitless. So with the help of some consultants and his state's redistricting

process he set out to do exactly that. Inside the inner sanctum, Illinois

Democrats are drawing the state's new districts. The young legislator sits

down in front of a terminal with a local Democrat named John Corrigan to draw

Barack Obama a new district. Corrigan who told me this story many years later in

2008 when I was covering the Obama campaign was in charge of drawing all of

Chicago's districts and he also happened to have volunteered for Obama in his

recent losing campaign. Obama's new gerrymandered state senate district gave

him access to some of the most important people in Chicago. David Axelrod became

one of his constituents. It gave him a new fundraising base. It helped set him on

the course to become a successful senate candidate and of course that set him

...