Lynn Sweet

Now, the press stands for Barack Obama.

At the start of his first press conference since winning the presidential election, the press corps rose to their feet to greet him, a sight that brought a smile to his face. As his senior political adviser David Axelrod slumped against a wall on the side of the room, Obama stood on a small stage at a local Chicago Hilton, flanked by the economic advisers he had met with for the better part of the afternoon.

Obama wore a blue power tie and was at turns folksy, inquiring how Chicago Sun reporter Lynn Sweet hurt her arm (she said she shattered it running to hear his acceptance speech), talking about the difficulties of finding a hypo-allergenic shelter dog for his daughters, then calling himself a "mutt" and, oddly, saying he had only consulted living presidents since his victory because "I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Regan thing about doing any séances.  read more »

Here's the press filing center at Washington University in St. Louis where Joe Biden will debate Sarah Palin tonight.

Except for Lynn Sweet, chatting with a couple of the filmmakers who have been working on an Obama documentary since the beginning of the campaign, it's pretty much empty.

The bus line that is shipping reporters from the media tents outside the Pepsi Center to Invesco Field is getting awfully long, but it's moving fast. David Carr, who was right behind Lynn Sweet, and directly ahead of Newsweek's Andrew Romano, was on line for only about five minutes before he got onto the bus. Mr. Carr was smoking a Camel and thrilled that his new book, The Night of the Gun, would land at #11 on The New York Times' nonfiction best-seller list this Sunday. But, he added, it was only a matter of time before he was going to get kicked from the list once Labor Day hit and an avalanche of campaign books flood the market.  read more »

At some point in 1999, Barack Obama, then a young and virtually unknown Illinois state senator, was considering running for a seat in the House of Representatives representing Illinois’ First Congressional District—which includes parts of the South Side of Chicago and some southern suburbs—against longtime incumbent Bobby Rush.

So on a visit to Washington, D.C., he stopped in at the office of Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.  read more »