A turning point in Barack Obama's political career 5, 2001, at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., the political career of state Sen. Barack Obama received a huge lift. If not for that odd moment, he might not be where he is now, in the Oval Office, heading into a difficult reelection campaign in which his prospects nonetheless appear slightly more favorable week by week. What happened that day in the land of Lincoln was a matter of luck and chance. His future was pulled out of Old Abe's stovepipe hat. As with any successful politician, luck is often evident in the Obama biography, and we are seeing it again this year. He began his presidency with so many seemingly intractable problems that the most trenchant assessment of his dilemma came from the satirical Onion headline "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." Yet now, how lucky for him that the Republican candidates maul one another in their frenzy to replace him. How fortuitous that they keep veering further right, giving the president the opportunity to seize the middle and possibly win back the persuadable voters who will decide this election. All in keeping with a lucky streak that propelled him from obscurity into national prominence eight short years ago. That is when John Kerry, the Democratic Party's standard-bearer, asked him to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 national convention and when his most formidable opponents for the U.S. Senate were knocked out of the race, one after another, by troublesome reports involving their treatment of former wives. Luck is the residue of design, the baseball wise man Branch Rickey once said, and there is no doubt that Obama had a political design that made it possible for him to take advantage of the breaks that went his way that year, just as he did four years later when he outmaneuvered Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain on his way to the White House. And just as he did when it came to the least appreciated of his many lucky moments - that September day in Springfield. Here was Obama in the fall of 2001: He was 40 years old. Only a year earlier, he had been crushed in his attempt to snatch a Chicago-based U.S. House seat away from the Democratic incumbent, Bobby Rush. He was back in Springfield, frustrated, in his fifth year as a state senator trying to make his way in a chamber ruled by Republicans, unable to establish a legislative record that might lift him up and out of that downstate trap. In the wake of the 2000 Census, the Illinois legislature established a commission to redraw the state's 118 House and 59 Senate districts. With the House controlled by Democrats and the Senate by Republicans, the Legislative Redistricting Commission was divided, four from each party, and incapable of breaking a political deadlock as both sides realized that in politics, maps are destiny. The state Constitution provided an un­or­tho­dox solution: Have the secretary of state draw a name for a ninth commission member. Tie broken, problem resolved. The essential prop, a replica of Abraham Lincoln's iconic stovepipe hat, would lend gravitas to an otherwise bizarre situation.