Durbin’s Long Shot Pays Off

• By Erin P. Billings
• Roll Call Staff
• June 5, 2008, Midnight

More than a year and a half ago, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) gambled on a long shot, a really long shot: that his newly elected, junior home-state colleague, Sen. Barack Obama, had the makings of a president. He took the risk against what was then the party establishment’s view that another prominent Senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), would easily secure the Democratic nod for the White House in 2008.