Judy Keen, USA TODAY
- Catherine Haskins is 36 and has never bothered to vote in a presidential election. She says that will change Nov. 4 when she votes for Barack Obama.
Until now, Haskins, a single mom and small business owner in Washington Park, one of this city’s poorest neighborhoods, never believed that any presidential candidate could make a difference in her life or the lives of her three sons.
In Obama, she says, she sees a politician who was raised by his own single mom and by his grandparents, a former community organizer who worked in Chicago neighborhoods much like her own. “He gets it. He’s lived it,” she says.
