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| 1995 |
When he gets the chance to run for the state senate in a district that included Hyde Park, the home of the university and some of the poorest ghettos on the South Side, he jumps at it.A longtime, widely-revered matron of the civil rights movement named Alice Palmer, a board member of the US Peace Council, identified by the FBI as a front organization of the Communist Party USA, had held the seat for a number of years, but she announced that she wanted to run for Congress. So, Obama seized the opportunity and proclaimed his intention to run for Alice’s open seat.
Nine years before Palmer hand-picked Obama as her successor, her organization, The Black Press Institute, contributed an article, “An Afro-American Journalist on the USSR,” to the Communist Party USA newspaper the People’s Daily World.
The article tells how Palmer attended the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and came away favorably impressed by the Soviet system.
Well, Alice lost the congressional race and decided that she wanted to hang onto that hard-won state senate seat. Most of the community leaders tried to persuade Obama to withdraw and wait his turn; he was a newcomer after all.
Instead Obama performed his first real act of political jujitsu. He sent his aides to the courthouse to carefully examine all of Alice Palmer’s signatures to see if enough could be disallowed to knock her off the ballot altogether. And indeed, some of Alice’s signatures were fake. The aides also found enough other fake signatures on opponents’ ballot initiatives to knock them off the ballot as well.
“They began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city’s South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.”
Obama ran unopposed in the primary.
By the time Barack Obama walked handily into his state senate seat, everyone there knew him as “the man who knocked off Alice Palmer.” Quite a feat indeed for the newcomer, the young whippersnapper with the odd name.
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| 1995 |
As part of Obama’s first run for office, he releases his memoir/fable, “Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” in which he acknowledges that he used cocaine as a high school student but rejected heroin. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though,” he wrote.On “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” (12/5/2006) Obama was asked by Leno about taking drugs. Said Leno, “Remember, Senator, you are under oath. Did you inhale?” Replied Obama, “That was the point.” In his book, Obama excuses his drug use as “reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy; teenage boys are frequently confused.”
Even more incriminating than the fact that Obama inhaled and admits to “maybe a little blow,” Obama is a cigarette smoker, actually, a chain smoker.
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| 1995 |
As part of her transition out of power, Alice Palmer introduced her successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of left-wing terrorists, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn — long-time friends of the Obamas.As noted by David Horowitz:
On the morning of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times including many who would never be able to read the paper again, I opened its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera. The article was headlined in an irony that could not have been more poignant, “No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives.” The couple pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the 1960s’ Weather Underground, America’s first terrorist cult. One of their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.
While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement. These two domestic terrorists have written and spoken at length about their pasts — their bombings and robberies — and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.
William (Bill) Ayers went underground with several comrades after their co-conspirators’ bomb accidentally exploded on March 6, 1970, destroying a Greenwich Village townhouse and killing three members of the Weather Underground (Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton, who was Ayers’ girlfriend at the time). He and his colleagues invented identities and traveled continuously. They avoided the police and FBI, while bombing high-profile government buildings including; the United States Capitol, The Pentagon, and the Harry S. Truman Building housing the State Department. Living underground, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised two children, Zayd and Malik, (Muslim names) before turning themselves in in 1981, when most charges were dropped because of what Ayers described as “extreme governmental misconduct” during the long search for the fugitives.
The earliest known contact between Obama and Ayers was when the couple hosted a “meet and greet” for Obama at Ayers house in Hyde Park -– an upper middle class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, where Obama now lives as a neighbor of Louis Farrakhan.
“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”
A Chicago-based blogger named Maria Warren — whose writing suggested she was to the left of Obama — recalled watching the candidate give a “standard, innocuous little talk” in 1995, in the Ayers’ living room when Obama was running for the state Senate.
“They were launching him,” Warren wrote, “introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”
Ayers and Dohrn are simply the most visible of the far left supporters who propelled Barack Obama’s early political career. The woman who touted Obama at the Ayers meeting, Alice Palmer, was herself a far left activist who was into community organizing like Obama.
Wondering whether the three may have crossed paths is not speculation. It is a fact that they have. Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama have appeared together at a number of gatherings and academic events.
In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled “Should a child ever be called a ’super predator?’” to debate “the merits of the juvenile justice system.”
In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, participated together at a conference entitled “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?” sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Ayers and Obama were two of the six members of the “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis” panel.
“I know they are friends,” said Dr. Young of Obama and Ayers.
Ayers is the Board Chairman of the nonprofit Woods Fund of Chicago and Obama is a former Board member. Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund’s website.
The Woods Fund focused on welfare reform, affordable housing, the quality of public schools, race and class disparities in the juvenile justice system, and tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty. The Fund supported the concept of an expanding welfare state allocating ever-increasing amounts of money to the public school system, and the redistribution of wealth via taxes.
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1996
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Obama is elected to the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat.
During his run, Obama receives the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for the Illinois state senate seat.
Later, the Chicago DSA newsletter reported that Obama, as a state senator, showed up to eulogize Saul Mendelson, one of the “champions” of “Chicago’s democratic left” and a long-time socialist activist.
Obama is/was an associate of the Chicago branch of the DSA.
A close examination of Obama’s first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career. The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it.
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| 1996 |
Barack Obama, the uniter across party lines, across religions, across racial divides, wasn’t always Mr. Sunshine. He had a different view 12 years ago, when his campaign was more localized.He was 34 years old: a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School — bastions of power and wealth. He was the beneficiary of the best education America had to offer. What were his feelings at age 34? Resentment, hyper-partisan, and accusatory towards whites, Republicans and the so-called Christian right.
As Barack Obama prepared to run for the state Senate he spoke up shortly after the Million Man March lead by Louis Farrakhan — or as Barack Obama honorifically recently titled him, Minister Farrakhan, he said:
“These are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a ‘lock ‘em up, take no prisoners’ mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.”
“The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it’s always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.”
Barack Obama has commented on the value of words to inspire, to bring about change. What kind of change was he talking about in his mid 30’s when most of us had already given up the rebellion we flirted with, and the resentments that beset us, in college?
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| 1997 |
Obama stopped working full-time for Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard once he took office in 1997. He remained associated with the firm until he was elected to the U.S. Senate nearly eight years later.
In some instances, Illinois state Sen. Obama took action that could have benefited some of his firm’s clients. In 1998, for instance, he used state Senate stationery to urge that state and city officials provide tax subsidies to help a partnership consisting of Davis and Rezko develop low-income housing, the Chicago Sun-Times reported last year.In 2001, Obama was coauthor of a law that created a tax credit for people who donate land, buildings or construction material to help develop low-income housing.
Illinois state Rep. Jack D. Franks, a Democrat, lauded the bill, which garnered near-unanimous support. But Franks said that while the measure helped Obama’s low-income constituents, it raises questions because his law firm’s clients could have benefited from it.
“Someone else should have carried this legislation,” said Franks, who has endorsed Obama’s Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“I can’t fault him for the idea. But he is wearing two hats. He is a legislator, and he is serving as a private attorney whose client interests benefited here. This goes to the judgment issue.”
Obama strategist Axelrod scoffed at the notion that Obama should have avoided such legislation.
He said that the beneficiaries were nonprofit corporations and people in need of low-cost housing.
“The shortage of affordable housing is a major public-policy concern of his and of the state,” Axelrod said.
“His view of public policy is that you should use the tools of government to deal with some of the crying social needs that we have.”
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| 1997 |
Obama introduces “Islamic Community Day” bill — Synopsis of Bill as introduced: Declares November 1, 1997 to be South Shore Islamic Community Center Day. |
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1996
2001
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His political history in Illinois shows that Obama has proven himself to be a nearly perfect Progressive-Democrat.
While in the Illinois State Senate, Obama is named Chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee. His distinguished works include passing bill to assist children and adults who cannot afford health insurance; increasing funding for AIDS prevention and care; a law requiring police to videotape interrogations for crimes punishable by the death penalty; a law requiring insurance companies to cover routine mammograms; legislation to curb racial profiling.
Obama opposed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act four times in Illinois. The Born Alive bill would have prohibited a baby from being born alive but left to die according to the mother’s wishes. Obama opposed this bill not once, twice, or three times, but four times.
Obama took almost $90,000 in bundled contributions from the Council for a Livable World. The council is a well-known anti-defense organization.
Obama puts rigid ideology before what’s best for the people of Illinois, and presumably he would do that as President as well. He has on several occasions made public his opposition to the NAFTA trade agreement and his belief that it must be negotiated. All the while thanks to NAFTA, Illinois exports $1.3 billion in agricultural goods to Canada.
Obama was the only member of the Illinois State Senate to vote against a bill that prohibited early release for sexual predators.
Obama voted to make a criminal out of a homeowner who was forced to use a gun in his own defense in his own home.
Obama refused to vote for a bill in the Illinois State Senate that would have increased penalties for drug traffickers.
Obama voted against making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang.
Obama voted against a bill that would have delivered the death penalty to gang members who murder first responders.
Obama’s record on anti-gang legislation is simple; because gang members are more often people of color, they shouldn’t be singled out for increased attention or special penalties by the law.
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1999
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Three years later, in September 1999, Obama was already preparing his first national campaign. He ran for U.S. Congress against veteran incumbent Bobby Rush, a former co-founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Rush painted the largely unknown freshman lawmaker as an out-of-touch elitist, and won the 2000 primary by more than 30 percentage points.
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| 2001 |
As an Illinois state senator in 2001, Mr. Obama accepted a $200 contribution from his friend William Ayers. The relationship is described above. (see: 1995) |
| 2001 |
The directors of the Woods Fund, including Obama and Ayers, provided a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN. The co-founder of the AAAN, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, was a director of the official PLO press agency WAFA in Beirut from 1976 to 1982, while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labeled by the State Department as a terror group. He also has held a fundraiser for Obama.
Khalidi’s wife, Mona, serves as president. The Fund provided a second grant to the AAAN for $35,000 in 2002.
The $40,000 grant from Obama’s Woods Fund to the AAAN constituted about a fifth of the Arab group’s reported grants for 2001, according to tax filings obtained by WND. The $35,000 Woods Fund grant in 2002 also constituted about one-fifth of AAAN’s reported grants for that year.
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| 2001 |
Obama sponsors Illinois Senate Bill 750 creating the “Halal Food Act,” providing for inspections by the Department of Agriculture to ensure that all food labeled Halal is prepared according to Islamic law.This act plays into Islamization. Here’s how it works and why Halal food plays a role.
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| 2001 |
As an Illinois state senator, Obama opposed a bill to define as a “person” a fully born baby who survived an abortion.In 2001, three bills were proposed to help babies who survived induced labor abortions. One, like the federal Born Alive Infants bill, simply said a living “homo sapiens” wholly emerged from his mother should be treated as a “‘person,’ ‘human being,’ ‘child’ and ‘individual.’”
On all three bills, Obama voted “present,” effectively the same as a “no.” Defining “a pre-viable fetus” that survived an abortion as a “person” or “child,” he argued, “would essentially bar abortions, because the Equal Protection Clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an anti-abortion statute.”
In 2002, Obama voted “no” on the bill.
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| 2001 |
After his unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2000, Obama faced serious financial pressure: numerous debts, limited cash and a law practice he had neglected for a year. Help arrived in early 2001 from a significant new legal client — a longtime political supporter.Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell Jr. paid Obama an $8,000-a-month retainer to give legal advice to his growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange. It allowed Obama to supplement his $58,000 part-time state Senate salary for over a year with regular payments from Blackwell’s firm that eventually totaled $112,000.
A few months after receiving his final payment from EKI, Obama sent a request on state Senate letterhead urging Illinois officials to provide a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin.
Killerspin specializes in table tennis, running tournaments nationwide and selling its own line of equipment and apparel and DVD recordings of the competitions. With support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, the company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its tournaments.
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| 2002 |
In October, Obama gives a speech at an antiwar rally in Chicago opposing the invasion of Iraq, saying, “I am not opposed to all wars. I am opposed to dumb wars.” |
| 2003 |
Obama, who has no military service record, has shown via his political history in Illinois, that he is a nearly perfect Progressive-Democrat.While in the Illinois State Senate, Obama is named Chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee. His distinguished works include passing bill to assist children and adults who cannot afford health insurance; increasing funding for AIDS prevention and care; a law requiring police to videotape interrogations for crimes punishable by the death penalty; a law requiring insurance companies to cover routine mammograms; legislation to curb racial profiling.
Obama supports homosexual marriage, racial preferences, banning all guns, flag-burning, socialized medicine and the absolute right to abortion, including partial-birth abortions. He voted against requiring medical care for aborted fetuses who survive.
Obama is anti-war, voted against the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, against privatizing Social Security and opposes the death penalty, three strikes laws and school vouchers. He has no military service record. He strongly supports the decriminalization of marijuana.
Obama opposed the Defense of Marriage Act; would work to repeal it in the U.S. Senate; would not vote for any legislation that would restrict the ability of gays and lesbians to marry.
Obama opposed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act four times in Illinois. A similar bill passed the U.S. Senate 98-0. The Born Alive bill would have prohibited a baby from being born alive but left to die according to the mother’s wishes.
Obama opposed this bill not once, twice, or three times, but four times.
Obama took almost $90,000 in bundled contributions from the Council for a Livable World. The council is a well-known anti-defense organization.
Obama puts rigid ideology before what’s best for the people of Illinois, and presumably he would do that as President as well. He has on several occasions made public his opposition to the NAFTA trade agreement and his belief that it must be negotiated. All the while thanks to NAFTA, Illinois exports $1.3 billion in agricultural goods to Canada.
Obama refused to vote for a bill in the Illinois State Senate that would have increased penalties for drug traffickers.
Obama voted against a bill that would have delivered the death penalty to gang members who murder first responders.
Obama was the only member of the Illinois State Senate to vote against a bill that prohibited early release for sexual predators.
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| 2003 |
Controversial votes when Obama was a state senator were avoided by voting “present” or claiming later that he erred by pressing the wrong button and didn’t really mean to take that position.Seen in the context of the “Great Game” the left plays with the American people in trying to mask their liberalism for fear of rejection by the voter, Obama, it turns out, is a master of “post partisan problem solving” -– hiding his liberalism under an avalanche of platitudes and feel-good bromides that have his supporters swooning and the media eating out of his hand.
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| 2003 |
In late 2002, Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor, became Illinois Senate Majority Leader, Emil Jones.When Obama was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to Jones, the former Chicago sewers inspector, who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.
“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones.
Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”
According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.
The exchange also sealed an intimate personal and political relationship that is likely to attract intense scrutiny amid the furor over Obama’s links to some of Chicago’s most controversial political and religious power brokers. Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”
At one point during Obama’s 2003 Senate campaign, Jones set out to woo two African-American politicians miffed by Obama’s presumption and ambition. One of them, Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, a state senator, had scoffed that Obama was so ambitious he would run for “king of the world” if the position were vacant. When Jones secured the two men’s support, Obama asked his mentor how he had pulled it off. “I made them an offer,” Jones said in mock-mafioso style. “And you don’t want to know.”
Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s kingmaker.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”
“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”
“Barack Obama.”
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation, yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.
“I don’t consider it bill jacking,” Hendon told me. “But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”
During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama’s stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.
It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics — and he couldn’t have done it without Jones.
Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.
Jones further helped raise Obama’s profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news headlines.
For instance. Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet supplement Ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national attention and extensive local coverage.
Jones gave Obama the legislation because he believed in Obama’s ability to negotiate with Democrats and Republicans on divisive issues.
So how has Obama repaid Jones?
Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’s Senate district.
Shortly after Jones became Senate president, he was asked his view on pork-barrel spending. He said: “Some call it pork; I call it steak.”
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| 2003 |
In January 2003, Obama announced his bid for the U.S. Senate, where he cruised to victory thanks to the self-destruction of his top opponents in both the primary and general elections.Obama joined a crowded field of seven candidates vying to fill an open Senate seat being vacated by retiring two-term incumbent Peter Fitzgerald. For months, he polled in the middle-of-the-pack behind frontrunner and former securities trader Blair Hull, who spent $30 million of his own fortune on the primary.
But Hull’s campaign imploded just weeks before the election when his divorce files were unsealed, revealing an ex-wife’s charges of verbal and physical abuse.
Obama unleashed a barrage of television ads just before the election, when the other candidates had largely depleted their war chests. He won the nomination with 53 percent of the vote.
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| 2003 |
An e-mail message made public on March 11, 2008, in the fraud trial of Antoin Rezko, a businessman and political contributor, brought attention to Obama’s role in discussions involving a state health planning board that Mr. Rezko is accused of improperly influencing.The message indicated that Obama, and other top Illinois politicians, consulted in 2003 on legislation to keep the board, which approved the construction of health facilities, from expiring under sunset provisions in state law.
The vaguely worded message also seemed to raise the possibility that Mr. Obama, who at the time was chairman of the Illinois Senate’s health committee, had been involved in recommending candidates for the board.
Mr. Rezko is accused of using his influence in state government to stack the board with associates, including some who made political contributions to Mr. Obama and other top Illinois politicians, and of seeking a bribe on a hospital project.
Mr. Rezko is accused of using his influence in state government to stack the board with associates, including some who made political contributions to Mr. Obama and other top Illinois politicians, and of seeking a bribe on a hospital project.
Mr. Pickering said he and Mr. Wilhelm had “worked closely” over six months with several state legislators to extend the life of the health facilities board. He then listed Democratic and Republican leaders in the state House and Senate, including Mr. Obama.
Mr. Pickering’s message went on to suggest four candidates to serve on the board, stating that “our attached recommendations reflect that involvement” with the political leaders.
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| 2003 |
In the general election for the U. S. Senate, Obama squared off against another multimillionaire: Jack Ryan, who later dropped out of the race after a judge ordered his divorce files unsealed. The documents revealed that Ryan’s ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan, a former Miss Illinois best known for her role as Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, accused him of trying to coerce her to perform sex acts in public.Obama spent several weeks facing no opponent as the Illinois Republican Party exhausted a laundry list of replacement candidates that included former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka. The GOP ended up recruiting two-time failed presidential hopeful Alan Keyes from Maryland to fill the slot.
Keyes’s strategy to use bombastic rhetoric to attract headlines turned off most voters. Most memorably, he said Jesus would not vote for Obama and that homosexuals, including Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, participated in “selfish hedonism.”
In the end, Obama won more than 70 percent of the vote in the most lopsided Senate election in Illinois history and became the fifth African-American to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.
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| 2004 |
Obama has spent his entire political career trying to win the next step up. Every three years, he has aspired to a more powerful political position.”He’s been given a pass,” says Harold Lucas, a community organizer in Chicago. “His career has been such a meteoric rise that he has not had the time to set a record.”
Three years later, he’d be trying to win the most powerful political position in the world.
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| 2004 |
On July 27th, Obama delivers his now-famous speech before the Democratic National Convention. (transcript) |
| 2004 |
On the day after his speech at the Democratic convention catapulted him into the national spotlight, Barack Obama told a group of reporters in Boston that the United States had an “absolute obligation” to remain in Iraq long enough to make it a success.”The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster,” he said at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, according to an audiotape of the session. “It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died. . . . It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.”
Did he believe what he said that day? It’s sure different than what he now says in Spring 2008.
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| 2008 |
He sure has an ability to “get things done.”If you consider that every bill he passed as a State Senator was passed his last year in office by a Democrat-controlled legislature. Also, some of the more high profile accomplishments he cites now like the racial profiling/videotape confession legislation were bills where a lot of the legwork had been done by other Democrats in the legislature years prior when it was controlled by Republicans, but were given to Obama by his kingmaker, Senate president Emil Jones, Jr. in order for him to make the “close” (where he often did).
When asked about this by the Houston Press’ Todd Spivak, State Senator Rickey Hendon replied, “I don’t consider it bill jacking. … But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”
This isn’t to suggest that Obama’s achievements in the state senate are totally without merit, but instead to point out they weren’t all done by his leaping tall buildings in a single bound. He had a lot of help from Democrats. Consider this, too: if he wins, he will have a solid Democrat Congress to work with, so the only “reaching out” he’d have to do would be to the few moderate Republicans who have already proven themselves all too eager to vote with liberal Democrats.
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| 2008 |
March 24th — Obama doesn’t talk much about his views on crime and punishment — at least not in front of general audiences — and for good reason.While his Web site says he’s “a strong proponent of tougher measures to fight crime,” his record tells a different story.
As an Illinois state senator, for example, he acted more as a friend to criminals than to cops, legislating among other things:
• Curbs on what he called a “broken” death penalty system.
• A measure to expunge some criminal records and give job grants to ex-cons.
• Tougher handgun controls.
• A vote against making gang members eligible for the death penalty if they kill someone to help their gang.
• Opposition to a bill requiring juveniles to be prosecuted as adults for firing a gun at or near a school.
At the federal level, Obama would:
• Repeal “unfair” mandatory sentences for crack convictions.
• Provide drug counseling instead of jail time for some abusers.
• Rethink criminal penalties for pot.
• Ban profiling by federal law enforcement, even if it helps catch violent criminals including terrorists.
• Strengthen hate-crime laws and beef up civil rights enforcement against police chiefs who profile.
• Provide job training, drug rehab and counseling for ex-cons.
• “Re-enfranchise” felons denied the right to vote.
In addition, Obama, who once vowed to repeal the Patriot Act, still talks about reforming it. He also once proposed banning executions of inmates, arguing he was against capital punishment.
It’s not clear where Obama stands on the issue now, but he does think death row and the entire U.S. penal system are stacked against blacks. While so far only alluding to racism as the culprit, his mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright minces no words in blaming “racist white America.”
“The brothers are in prison” largely because of their skin color, he claims.
And a racist white majority put them there, he believes, by “structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.”
In Wright’s conspiracy, personal responsibility plays no role. This is the same adviser who told Obama that there are “more black men in prison than in college” — a statement that Obama parroted until he was told that it was false.
Unfortunately, Obama listens to his preacher and buys into his conspiracy theories. “In our criminal justice system, African-Americans and whites are arrested at very different rates,” Obama recently complained. “It has to do with how we pursue racial justice.”
He vows to pursue it with gusto, unleashing civil rights cops on police chiefs and district attorneys who dare to arrest and prosecute criminals who happen to be of color.
In last Tuesday’s speech explaining his ties to Wright, he reiterated his desire to do more to enforce civil rights laws.
He cites the Jena Six case as an example of racial injustice. But one of the thugs he defends as a victim of Louisiana racism recently was arrested again for assault. The 6-6 Bryant Purvis allegedly choked and slammed a classmate’s head on a table after helping five other blacks beat a white student within an inch of his life.
Would Obama go soft on such brutal crime in the name of racial equality? No justice, no peace? Obama for now speaks only in code, saying he’ll fix “a criminal justice system that’s broken.” But how exactly is it broken? And who would he appoint to help fix it?
Who will he pick as his attorney general? His top civil rights cop? Is his pal Rep. John Conyers on the short list? Rep. Keith Ellison?
What about federal judges? Will they be frustrated social workers who go easy on criminals to “reintegrate” them into society?
More important, what kind of justices does Obama have in mind to replace aging veterans on the high court, who decide the constitutionality of capital punishment cases?
We shudder to think.
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| 2008 |
March 26th — There’s no paper trail on Obama.The president of a prominent watchdog group said Wednesday that he believes Democratic presidential frontrunner Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) “intended to leave no paper trail” during his time in the Illinois Senate.
In a statement, Tom Fitton noted that his group, Judicial Watch, has sought access to Obama’s records as a state senator and questioned whether the presidential candidate has been forthcoming with regard to what happened to those documents.
However, he said that “nobody knows where they are, if they exist at all” and claimed that “Obama’s story keeps changing.”
It could mean that Obama tried to hide his work, hoping to keep political opponents from unearthing ammunition in future elections. It could also mean that he didn’t do that much actual work, which would match his wafer-thin record of accomplishments in three years as US Senator.
It’s the cost of running as a cipher, and of running on ambiguous concepts of hope and change. Having what little records that should exist come up missing doesn’t help build confidence in a candidate’s credibility, either.
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| 2008 |
March 30th — The president of the Illinois Senate is sitting in his statehouse office, talking in gravelly tones about political strategies and counter-strategies. Out of nowhere, the theme from “The Godfather” begins playing.It turns out to be the ringtone on his cell phone — an appropriate song for the man who amounts to Barack Obama’s political godfather.
Emil Jones Jr. helped Obama master the intricacies of the Legislature. When Democrats took control of the state Senate, Jones, though he risked offending colleagues who had toiled futilely on key issues under Republican rule, tapped Obama to take the lead on high-profile legislative initiatives that he now boasts about in his presidential campaign.
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama’s stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.
It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics — and he couldn’t have done it without Jones. Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.
And when Obama wanted a promotion to the U.S. Senate, Jones provided critical support that gave the little-known legislator legitimacy, keeping him from being instantly trampled by the front-runners.
“He’s been indispensable to Barack’s career. He wants to see a black president before he gets called home,” said fellow state Sen. Rickey Hendon, a Democrat.
So how has Obama repaid Jones? Last June (2007), to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’s Senate district.
Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending. I’ll never forget what he said: “Some call it pork; I call it steak.”
Background
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| 2008 |
March 31st — During his first run for elected office, Barack Obama played a greater role than his aides now acknowledge in crafting liberal stands on gun control, the death penalty and abortion — positions that appear at odds with the more moderate image he has projected during his presidential campaign.The evidence comes from an amended version of an Illinois voter group’s detailed questionnaire, filed under his name during his 1996 bid for a state Senate seat.
Late last year, in response to a Politico story about Obama’s answers to the original questionnaire, his aides said he “never saw or approved” the questionnaire.
They asserted the responses were filled out by a campaign aide who “unintentionally mischaracterized his position.”
But a Politico examination determined that Obama was actually interviewed about the issues on the questionnaire by the liberal Chicago nonprofit group that issued it. And it found that Obama — the day after sitting for the interview — filed an amended version of the questionnaire, which appears to contain Obama’s own handwritten notes added to one answer.
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Comment by Kurt | May 6, 2008 non-bold type comments added by makingitreal.
