Mel Reynolds, who announced Wednesday he will try to regain the Congressional seat he gave up in 1995, has a better chance of winning the Lotto than he does of getting back to Washington, D.C.
But don’t be so hard on the man. If it hadn’t been for Reynolds’s lust for teenage flesh, Barack Obama might not be president today.
That’s right -- a sex scandal created the opening Barack Obama needed to get into politics.
Reynolds, then a second-term congressman from the South Side, was accused of having sex with a 16-year-old he’d met during his 1992 run for Congress. Reynolds had spotted the girl while driving around the district and pulled over to chat, even though he was supposed to be politicking and she was too young to vote. Soon after, she joined his campaign as volunteer and mistress. Two years later, the girl confessed to the affair to her next-door neighbor, who happened to be a Chicago police officer.
The state’s attorney set up a phone-sex sting. While sitting in a prosecutor’s office, the girl called Reynolds and told him she couldn’t make their tryst because she had to babysit.
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