Senator Obama's Lack of integrity

This is an awesome article and well researched article by baseball crank.

From Baseball crank:

POLITICS: The Integrity Gap, Part II of III: Sen. Barack Obama

In Part I of this series on the “Integrity Gap” between the two national tickets, I looked at Governor Sarah Palin’s record of integrity in public office – her battles against corruption and wasteful spending, even by the powers controlling her own party in her home state of Alaska – even when she was putting her career at risk. As I explained, integrity is not just about honesty – it’s also about one of the crucial presidential character traits, toughness. Palin has proven that she doesn’t back down no matter who she has to take on.

In Part II, I will look at Senator Barack Obama, who is easily contrasted to Palin because they have careers of similar length in both local and statewide office, in states controlled largely by their own party. I have previously explained here why Obama lacks every kind of experience that we usually rely upon to test the character of potential presidents and teach them the lessons they will need to govern, and I’ve explained here why the flurry of flip-flops at the outset of his general election campaign raises questions specifically about his toughness, his principles and his convictions. During the recent financial crisis we got a taste of Obama’s leadership style in crisis: do nothing and hope he can shift the blame to somebody else.

Nearly all of Obama’s appeal requires his supporters to take on faith that he will do things he has never done. But on the question of whether Obama will ever take a meaningful stand against corruption or waste in his own party or stand up to vested interests and ideological extremists on his own side, we have a certain answer: he has bypassed too many opportunities to do so already. To the contrary, Obama is so thoroughly marinated in extremism and corruption that it would be nearly impossibe to extricate himself and still have a meaningful identity left.

Given the length of this post – at over 21,000 words, it runs more than twice the length of Part I and 33% longer than my entire five-part series on Mitt Romney from the primaries – it was necessary to break the body of the post into six separate volumes that follow this introduction:

Obama’s Rootless Ambition looks at the influences that shaped Obama before he ran for office.

Obama and the Extremists looks at his relationships with left-wing radicals and how they were an integral part of his rise in politics.

Obama and ACORN looks at his intimate relationship with a network of community organizers with a pervasive record of voter fraud and deep involvement in the subprime housing crisis.

Obama and the Machine looks at Obama’s long, deep and multifacted partnership with machine politicians in Chicago and Springfield.

Obama and the Favor Factory looks at Obama’s routine practice of trading favors with his political benefactors.

Obama, “New Politics” and Principles looks at the illusory nature of Obama’s “new politics,” his absence of a record of fighting tough battles on principle, and wraps up and concludes the series.

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: Rootless Ambition

Chapter two of seven.

II. Barack Obama: The Greasy Pole

Note on sources: You can follow the links here, as I’ve linked to sources for nearly all the factual assertions, and mark additional sources with an asterisk *. Where appropriate I’ve indicated sources whose credibility I was uncertain of, but have generally tried to avoid citing much in the way of rumor. Fairly late in the game in assembling this post, I picked up David Freddoso’s book The Case Against Barack Obama, which examines a lot of these same issues in more depth and with copious footnotes. I’m indebted to Freddoso’s book for pointing me to additional sources in a handful of places, and for stories I’d missed like the Stroger saga, although in most cases I’ve cited additional web-based sources besides the book. I’d recommend the book and I refer the reader where possible to stories Freddoso has written up at more length.

Barack Obama talks a good game about being a reformer, a good government, “new politics” guy. But somehow his priorities never extended to actually doing anything that would rock the boat in Chicago politics or get in the way of his climb up the greasy pole of the Chicago machine. Instead, his rise has depended on the exchange of favors with crooked patrons and extremist friends and on the forebearance of the machine.

You will often hear Obama’s defenders argue that his ties to this or that extremist or corrupt figure is an isolated aberration, an example of “guilt by association”; that the various favors he dispensed with public money and private charitable foundation funds are nothing unusual in politics. But when you look at Obama’s record and biography taken together, what you see is that the favors, the extremists and the machine ties are all inextricably intertwined, and that far from being isolated incidents, Obama’s modus operandi of mutual back-scratching with radicals and crooks extends to nearly every aspect of his life and career – his family, his faith, his home, his jobs and education, his significant election victories and legislative “accomplishments,” his closest advisors and most important mentors, the money and organization that made up his campaigns.

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A. Rootless Ambition

“He’s always wanted to be President,” Valerie Jarrett, who has been a family friend for years, ever since she hired Michelle Obama to work in Mayor Daley’s office, says [of Obama]….”He didn’t always admit it, but oh, absolutely. The first time he said it to me, he said, ‘I just think I have some special qualities and wouldn’t it be a shame to waste them.’ I think it was during the early part of his U.S. senatorial campaign. He said, ‘You know, I just think I have something.’”

-The New Yorker

Michelle’s brother… recounted one of the first times [in the early 1990s] Michelle brought Barack to a party…When Craig asked about his career plans, Barack replied, “I think I’d like to teach at some point in time, and maybe even run for public office.” Craig assumed Barack wanted to run for a post like city alderman, but Barack let him know that his sights were set higher. “He said no, at some point he’d like to run for the U.S. Senate,” Craig recalled. “And then he said, ‘Possibly even run for president at some point.’

--Liza Mundy, “Michelle: A Biography”

(1) The Man From Nowhere

In Part I, I noted that Sarah Palin’s integrity finds its foundation in her apolitical roots, her background, upbringing and family life as far outside of politics in general and national politics in particular as you can get. But with Barack Obama, the opposite is true: Obama really has no roots outside of politics and his political worldview, apparently few close friends outside of politics, no real hometown, and unlike John McCain (who was raised as a Navy brat) no real continuity as he moved from place to place. He had an itinerant upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia and a nomadic college career in Los Angeles and New York, and wrote – affectingly – in his 1995 memoir about his search for identity. “That whole first year seemed like one long lie,” he wrote of his freshman year at Occidental College.

Obama’s mother, Stanley Anne Dunham, after her short-lived marriages to Obama’s father (a Harvard-trained Kenyan student of economics) and stepfather (an Indonesian student), worked as an anthropologist in Indonesia, even leaving Barack behind in Hawaii as a teen to return to Indonesia, while he attended an elite private school, and was raised by his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham; it was Stanley who had served in World War II. Obama’s birth father Barack Obama Sr., with whom he had little contact, was a product of Kenyan socialism, albeit something of a skeptic of the Kenyan socialist project. * His stepfather, Lolo Soetero, who seems to have been a fairly lax Muslim, had apparently been sponsored to the U.S. on a student visa issued by the Sukarno regime, and had it revoked in 1967 when the regime fell (Sukarno was a quasi-Marxist leader somewhat typical of the Third World in the 1960s – he once received the “Lenin Prize” from the Soviet Union – but was deposed in 1967 and replaced by right-wing dictator Suharto), and when Obama was living in Indonesia, his stepfather worked for a U.S. oil company. Additional information from verifiable, non-crackpot sources about the political and social worldview of Obama’s mother and stepfather is hard to come by; the Chicago Tribune’s profile of her is probably the best we will get, while things like Spengler’s inflammatory Asia Times profile (which I rely on here only for his educated speculation about Soetero’s visa) rest on a lot of speculation with uncertain basis in fact. Indeed, liberal blogger Jeralyn Merritt has argued that even Obama’s knowledge of his own family history seems to depend heavily on what his campaign staff tells him.

One thing we do know is that while various efforts have been made to read a lot into Obama’s brushes with Islam growing up, especially his years in Indonesia, Obama himself had no real religious faith; he attended both Muslim and Catholic schools in his youth, apparently with disinterest in the religious instruction he was provided, but by his own admission had fallen away from faith of all kind by the time he encountered Rev. Jeremiah Wright. As Obama wrote of his youthful experience with religion, “my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detatchment as well.” Like something bitter people cling to, one might say.

As a teen, “Obama felt like an outsider even in Hawaii’s racially diverse community, because the African American population in the Islands was, and remains, miniscule, creating in Obama a feeling of isolation.” And there were other symptoms of how he was, at that point in time, still something of a lost soul:

“I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years,” he wrote. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though.”…In the book, Sen Obama recalls that he had “been headed” to the status of “junkie” or “pothead”, which he describes as “the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man”. He recalls smoking “reefer” in the backs of his friends’ vans, dorm rooms and “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school”.

Amusingly, some friends from those days suggest that Obama may have exaggerated his drug use and alienation for effect: “He was known as a partier, as a guy looking for a good time, but not much more”. But almost any account of Obama’s early years finds him a young man not really sure where he belongs, and along the way he was imbibing some other unhealthy intellectual influences as well. Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father, his first memoir, about a major influence from his teen years, a man named Frank:

A careful reading of Obama’s first memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” reveals that his childhood mentor up to the age of 18 – a man he refers to only as “Frank” – was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his “subversive,” “un-American activities.”

The Obama campaign has confirmed this:

[T]he Obama campaign’s attack on [Jerome] Corsi’s book … acknowledges on pages 9 and 10 of its report that the mysterious “Frank” in Obama’s 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, is in fact the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member Frank Marshall Davis.

Davis would hang out and smoke pot with Obama’s grandfather and wrote a sexual autobiography that included he and his wife seducing a 13-year-old girl he refers to, creepily enough, as “Anne”. You can click the links for some sampling of Davis’ racist and Marxist words of …er, wisdom. More: * * *

Now, you can’t hold a man responsible for the family he was born into, or for his grandfather’s friends. Certainly it’s impressive by any measure how far Obama has come from where he started – part of his point in writing about his cocaine use, like George W. Bush’s drinking, is to show the road he chose to stop taking. But the best you can say about Obama’s roots and where they place him is that he arrived as a college student in Los Angeles and later Manhattan without the sort of support network and firm grounding that most Americans take for granted. Even after he started moving up the ladder of academia and community organizing, Obama remained an outsider wherever he went. For a decade between 1979 and 1989, he lived in four large, liberal cities, a single young man thousands of miles from his family with no faith and no real ties to the communities he lived in. At Columbia, for example, he lived with wealthy, drug-using Pakistanis * and barely anyone remembers him. * * As Charles Krauthammer has noted, Obama’s campaign has been decidedly short on personal testimonials from old friends.

Which raises the issue of what rushed in to fill the vaccum in Obama’s life in the years between 1979 and 1989. It wasn’t religion, it wasn’t family, it wasn’t community and it wasn’t even money – it was political activism.

(2) The Activist

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

-Quoted in David Mendell’s Obama: From Promise to Power, p. 148-149

Given that Barack Obama doesn’t have much in the way of accomplishments or biography – see the timeline of his career here – the tales told about him at the Democratic Convention focused heavily on his first real decision as an adult, to walk away from more lucrative job opportunities in the private sector to become a “community organizer” in Chicago for less money, followed by the same decision to forego life as a big-firm lawyer to work at a plaintiffs’ firm doing civil rights work after law school. Certainly the basics of this story speak well of Obama’s interest in things other than money, but the truth is more complicated, and reflects as much as anything the fact that Obama’s early career was driven by his political ambitions – the same ambitions that would lead him over and over again in his brief career to make accomodations with so many unsavory people and projects.

As you can see from the line about the New Rochelle train, Obama never wanted a job in the private sector. As even the New York Times notes of Obama’s time after graduating college, “In his memoir, he says he had decided to become a community organizer but could not persuade anyone to hire him. So he found ‘more conventional work for a year’ to pay off his student loans.”

Obama got into the community organizing field in New York with NYPIRG (Obama in 2004: “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well”), and as Megan McArdle has explained, the PIRGs are basically Ponzi schemes financed by exploiting their own workers; it doesn’t necessarily say good things that Obama was successful in this line of work. While this did indeed entail financial sacrifice compared to the private sector, as Jim Geraghty notes, Obama’s salary as a community organizer, while hardly princely, wasn’t even all that bad for a guy in his 20s with no dependents, no mortgage, and no real obligations:

[T]he man who hired Obama, Jerry Kellman, [is quoted] as saying that the $12,000 was Obama’s “training salary” for the first few months. “After three or four months, he was up to 20,000, and after three years he was probably making $35,000 or so.”In 1985, the year Obama began as a community organizer, that $20,000 would be the equivalent of $39,431.04 in 2007. His salary when he left Chicago[] to attend Harvard [L]aw School in 1988 would be the equivalent of $63,093.21 in 2007.

As it turns out, “[t]he Chicago-based Woods Fund provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to hire Obama. In turn, Obama would later serve on the Woods board” from 1993 to 2002; it was one of the boards Obama served on that brought him in contact with Bill Ayers, who was also on the Woods board. (In fact, in one of his community organizing roles, Obama served as Director of the Developing Communities Project from 1985 to 1988, part of a coalition of groups headed by Ayers at the time).

Obama, who did not even graduate with honors from Columbia, was nonetheless able to parlay his community organizing experience into the leg up he needed to get into Harvard Law School, with letters of recommendation from a left-wing Northwestern University professor and from Percy Sutton, a former Manhattan Borough President and 1977 contender for the Democratic nomination for New York City Mayor (Sutton has claimed in a TV interview that he did so at the insistence of “Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to radical Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal”):

“I was introduced to him by a friend who was raising money for him and the friends name was Dr. Khalid al Mansour from Texas. He is the principle adviser to one of the world’s richest men. He told me about Obama. He wrote to me about him and his introduction was ‘there is a young man that has applied to Harvard and I know that you have a few friends left there becasue you used to go up there to speak, would you please write a letter in support of him?’…I wrote a letter in support of him to my friends at Harvard saying to them I thought there was a genius that was going to be available and I sure hoped they would treat him kindly.”

(Via here, and read here about the Sutton family spokesman’s vague efforts to retract the interview *). Sutton, of course, was a respected mainstream political figure; less clear is how tightly the radical al-Mansour’s other connections were plugged in at Harvard as of 1989 – Prince al-Waleed would later become a great benfactor of Harvard (he’s the namesake of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard, established by a $20 million gift in 2005), and Saudi money was a longstanding fundraising priority of the Law School, which in 1991 established its Islamic Legal Studies Program, bolstered by the “King Fahd Chair for Islamic Shariah Studies [which] began with a $5 million dollar donation by the Saudi royal family in 1993.”

In any event, by the time Obama left Chicago for law school, he had his sights set firmly on political office:

In their conversations, he described politics–and winning political office–as the most important step toward achieving change. And, instead of seeing Harold Washington as buffeted by forces beyond his control, he now aspired to be Washington. “He was fascinated by Mayor Washington,” says Kruglik. “Harold Washington inspired him to think about becoming a politician.” Kruglik says that Obama wanted to follow in the mayor’s footsteps: Washington had gone to law school, later becoming a state senator, then a congressman, and finally Chicago’s mayor. “He told me that he was thinking of running for mayor some day, ” Kruglik says.

During law school, Obama “spent eight days in Los Angeles taking a national training course taught by [left-wing theorist Saul] Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.” * (More on Alinsky and Obama’s community organizer days here, and on the Alinsky’s explicit advocacy of dissembling and moral relativism here). He spent his first summer after law school at a large law firm in Chicago, but Obama told the senior partner who hired him that he wasn’t interested in coming back to work full time because “he wanted to go into politics.” Instead, he went to work for a firm that got him directly involved in Chicago’s power politics:

Obama was part of a team of lawyers representing black voters and aldermen that forced Chicago to redraw ward boundaries that the City Council drew up after the 1990 census. They said the boundaries were discriminatory.After an appeals court ruled the map violated the federal Voting Rights Act, attorneys for both sides drew up a new set of ward boundaries.

Of course, even if it wasn’t his primary motivator, Obama was going to need money to do the things he wanted to do. And that’s where a stroke of outrageous good fortune came in: after the New York Times wrote up his election to head the Harvard Law Review in March 1990, a literary agent called him out of the blue and offered to get him a book deal. (You have to have some knowledge of the book business to know how bizarre it is for any non-famous person to get solicited to write a book with no manuscript, let alone a 28-year-old law student with no prior publications). Obama got a six figure book deal with a major publisher but was unable to complete the book. Undeterred, his agent landed him a second book deal with a $40,000 advance, and at some point he switched from the planned book on race relations to a memoir. Despite being given an office to work from at the University of Chicago, he still didn’t finish the thing until he took time off to go back to Indonesia and write, finally having Dreams From My Father published in time to launch his run for office in 1995; it somehow got reviewed by both the New York Times and the Boston Globe.

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POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: The Extremists

Chapter three of seven.

B. The Extremists

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our setereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce [a former girlfriend] or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

-Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, describing his choice of friends as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles, which he attended for two years. He also wrote about “socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union” after transferring to Columbia, and “went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Black Power fame, speak at Columbia.” Carmichael, of course, was a famous Sixties radical, a subject that apparently interested Obama as early as his college years.

If Obama was going to pursue his dreams of political activism, he wasn’t going to follow the route of Sarah Palin and Joe Biden in relying on his roots to his home town, nor did he have John McCain’s advantage of a famous war record. He was going to need a political base that would accept an outsider, and needed to bring something to the table. And this is how he built one. The groundwork for Obama’s entree into Chicago politics was laid through networking in the very same radical chic circles he described in the passage above. There’s not adequate space here to revisit in full the left-wing radicalism of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Fr. Michael Pfleger, the New Party, Alice Palmer, Rashid Khalidi, Khalid al-Mansour, and others in Obama’s circle, but the thumbnail sketches and links below should clue you in to the common theme – Obama carefully cultivated an image as a friend of Sixties radicals, race-baiters, Marxists and worse. Maybe this was due to the same romantic impulse of his college years and maybe it was craven political opportunism, but the record shows how firmly he ingratiated himself with these people, with the result that he gets endorsements to this day from avowed Communists. * Even as a presidential candidate, Obama is willing to lend his appearance and good name to the operations of wholly disreputable far-left figures like Al Sharpton. *

Yet while Obama was adept at showing one face to the hard left, he and the organizations he worked with were also acutely aware of the need to present a more respectable face to the broader community, as the Woods Fund noted in a report on its grant to ACORN (more on which below):

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public’s eye. The Woods Fund’s claim to be “nonideological,” it says, has “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”

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(1) Rev. Wright, Fr. Pfleger & Racialism

The most notorious of Obama’s associations is his spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the United Church of Christ. You can find samplings of why Rev. Wright’s race-baiting, his crackpot anti-American conspiracy theories and his all-purpose loathing of this country have caused Obama so much justifiable grief at the following links * * * * *. Obama has written movingly of the impact that Wright’s preaching had of shaking him from his agnosticism and leading him to Jesus, and I have no way of evaluating the sincerity of any of that, or for that matter criticizing the strange ways that men are brought to the Lord. But the overtly political nature of Wright’s preaching was evident from the very beginning, starting when “”[a]s a young biracial man building a black identity, Obama found Wright’s Afrocentrism appealing. The first time he visited the church, in 1985, he saw a ‘Free South Africa’ sign on the lawn.” As he sat through years of Wright’s fiery sermons, Obama could easily, at any time, have chosen to move on to a less divisive church (Protestants have no particular religious obligation to stay with any one preacher or congregation), but as the liberal magazine Salon explains, Obama had obvious political motives for coming to and staying with Rev. Wright:

[J]oining a black mega-church was also a quick way for a young man on the move on the South Side of Chicago to address some gaps in his resume.In any American town, it’s not uncommon for anyone launching a business enterprise that depends on name recognition and personal contacts to join the Lion’s Club or the Rotary and one of the biggest churches on Main Street. In “Audacity of Hope,” Obama is talking about networking when he describes what brought him to Wright’s church in 1987.

He was a community organizer then, and one of the black ministers with whom he was consulting suggested that the work would go more smoothly if he joined a congregation. “It might help your mission,” said the pastor, “if you had a church home … It doesn’t matter where, really.” The pastor was talking about Obama’s community organizing mission, but he was also giving him good advice about politics.

When Obama picked a “church home,” he chose one that helped him with another weak spot in his biography. Before Obama joined Trinity United, Rev. Wright warned Obama that the church was viewed as “too radical … Our emphasis on African history, on scholarship…” But Obama joined anyway. With that act, he had become significantly blacker — and more like local voters. Part of the cultural divide between the half-Kenyan Hawaiian and his Chicago neighbors, most of them products of the Deep South’s black diaspora, was bridged.

Obama’s political motivations for sidling up to Wright are evident in a 1988 essay by Obama touting the need to organize black churches:

Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership, and-most important-values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago.

* * Indeed, far from being repelled by Wright’s Manichean view of race relations, Obama himself sometimes took the posture of enforcer of strict racial solidarity in Chicago:

A Chicago Defender story of 1999 features a front-page picture of Obama beside the headline, “Obama: Illinois Black Caucus is broken.” In the accompanying article, although Obama denies demanding that black legislators march in perfect lockstep, he expresses anger that black state senators have failed to unite for the purpose of placing a newly approved riverboat casino in a minority neighborhood. The failed casino vote, Obama argues, means that the black caucus “is broken and needs to unite for the common good of the African-American community.” Obama continues, “The problem right now is that we don’t have a unified agenda that’s enforced back in the community and is clearly articulated. Everybody tends to be lone agents in these situations.”

+++

When the 2000 census revealed dramatic growth in Chicago’s Hispanic and Asian populations alongside a decline in the number of African Americans, the Illinois black caucus was alarmed at the prospect that the number of blacks in the Illinois General Assembly might decline. At that point, Obama stepped to the forefront of the effort to preserve as many black seats as possible. The Defender quotes Obama as saying that, “while everyone agrees that the Hispanic population has grown, they cannot expand by taking African-American seats.” As in the casino dispute, Obama stressed black unity, pushing a plan that would modestly increase the white, Hispanic, and Asian population in what would continue to be the same number of safe black districts. As Obama put it: “An incumbent African-American legislator with a 90 percent district may feel good about his reelection chances, but we as a community would probably be better off if we had two African-American legislators with 60 percent each.”

(UPDATE: Via Ed Morrissey, Stanley Kurtz and others look at how the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, under Obama’s direction, spread funding around to “Afrocentric” educational programs that espoused many of Wright’s racial ideas).

Obama has also come under fire for his ties to the Catholic priest Fr. Michael Pfleger, due to Fr. Pfleger’s own racially incendiary remarks (more: * * *) from the pulpit of Rev. Wright’s church. Fr. Pfleger, too, has a long rap sheet of extremism:

[H]e has welcomed the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan to preach in his church; he has hired prostitutes to worship there; he has been arrested for defacing billboards; and he once urged the crowd at an anti-gun rally to hunt down a gun store owner ‘like a rat’ and ‘snuff’ him.

Obama’s alliance with Fr. Pfleger, “a longtime Obama friend,” is similarly decades-long in duration and political in nature. Pfleger supported Obama in his primary battle with Bobby Rush in 2000. Among the many causes on which they worked together was a joint appearance in 2000 to protest the payday loan industry.

(2) Ayers & Dohrn and Alice Palmer

The hot issue of the moment is Obama’s relationship with unrepentant terrorist and unreconstructed left-wing radical Bill Ayers and his wife and fellow Weather Underground terrorist Bernadine Dorhn, an alumna of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. I’ve discussed the nature of Ayers’ and Dohrn’s radicalism, Obama’s ties to them, and the implausibility of Obama’s claim to not have known who they were here, here, here, here, and here. (To add another example of Ayers’ and Dohrn’s decades-long national media press clipping file: Dohrn was profiled in the New York Times in 1993 *). Leaving aside for now the debate on exactly when and where Obama and his wife first met Ayers and Dohrn – among the evidence that he’d known him since the 1980s is the relationship I mentioned above between the organizations Obama and Ayers were running at the time – the short summary, from Stanley Kurtz:

From 1995 to 1999, [Obama] led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

To briefly summarize, CAC was largely Ayers’ brainchild; Ayers’ anti-American, left-wing beliefs haven’t changed a whit since the Weather Underground days, and he now espouses the view that his radical left-wing ideas should be passed on to children through political indoctrination posing as education; and Obama, who headed the CAC’s process for disbursing funds and who could not possibly have been unaware of Ayers’ views on education, nonetheless funneled millions of dollars to educational projects under Ayers’ direction in 1995. The core of the Ayers issue is not friendship but money, and Obama’s judgment that a left-wing terrorist was an appropriate person to entrust with the education of children.

And that same year, 1995, Obama had what was essentially his coming-out party as a first-time candidate for public office – the State Senate seat to which he’d be elected the following year – at Ayers’ and Dohrn’s home, as his predecessor, Alice Palmer, announced that she was passing the torch to Obama:

“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.”Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.

+++

Dr. Young and another guest, Maria Warren, described it similarly: as an introduction to Hyde Park liberals of the handpicked successor to Palmer, a well-regarded figure on the left.”When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,” Warren wrote on her blog in 2005. “They were launching him – introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”

* Obama’s alliance with Ayers didn’t end when he got into office, either. In 1997, Ayers’ book on juvenile justice, which like everything else about Ayers was bursting with radical left-wing sentiments, got ‘a rave review in The Chicago Tribune by Mr. Obama, who called it ‘a searing and timely account.’” What did that book say, and how closely did Obama embrace Ayers’ theories?

Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he’d like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper “structural problems of the system.” Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the “normal” and the “deviant.” The unfortunate result, says Ayers, is to leave the bulk of us feeling smugly superior to society’s prisoners. Home detention, Ayers believes, might someday be able to replace the prison. Ayers also makes a point of comparing America’s prison system to the mass-detention of a generation of young blacks under South African Apartheid. Ayers’s tone may be different, but the echoes of Jeremiah Wright’s anti-prison rants are plain.Given his decision to recommend Ayers’s book in the Tribune, it’s fair to say that Obama is at least broadly sympathetic to this perspective. When Obama offers examples of ill-conceived legislation, he often points to building prisons: Instead of building another prison, why not expand health care entitlements? Biographer David Mendell cites Obama’s irritation with fellow legislators who “grandstand” by passing tough-on-crime legislation, while letting bills designed to bring “structural change” languish. Debating Bobby Rush in 2000, Obama bragged that he had “consistently fought against the industrial prison complex.” Obama’s Hyde Park Herald column echoes these points.

And Ayers repaid the compliment in the book:

Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), “former mayor” Eugene Sawyer, “poets” Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and “writer” Barack Obama.In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales.

Here are Ayers and Dohrn on national TV in 1998, reiterating how completely unrepentant they were and are:

In fact, Obama went on to collaborate closely with Ayers in 1997-98 on a joint push for “reform” of the juvenile justice system, including appearing on a panel with Ayers hosted by Michelle Obama at the University of Chicago, where Obama was then teaching and Michelle working. Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s campaign in 2001, and Obama appeared on another panel with Ayers at a conference Dohrn spoke at as late as 2002.

More on Obama, Ayers, Dohrn and Ayers’ and Dohrn’s radicalism: * * * * And here’s Obama’s original effort to downplay the relationship.

At the meeting at Ayers & Dohrn’s house, Obama was introduced by the woman who was then vacating the seat, Alice Palmer. * Obviously the blessing of the incumbent is a thing of great usefulness – what convinced Palmer that Obama was an ideological comrade? Consider who Alice Palmer is, and what that says as well about the district Obama was courting:

Ten years earlier she was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front group, an affiliate of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front group.Palmer participated in the World Peace Council’s 1983 Prague Assembly, part of the Soviet launch of the nuclear-freeze movement….

In June 1986, while editor of the Black Press Review, she wrote an article for the Communist Party USA’s newspaper, the People’s Daily World, now the People’s Weekly World. It detailed her experience attending the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how impressed she was by the Soviet system.

Palmer gushed at the “Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and better education” and spoke of the efficiency of the Soviets’ most recent five-year plan, attributing its success to “central planning.”…

(3) Rashid Khalidi, AAAN, and Ali Abunimah

Obama also had a longstanding relationship with Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi, among other Palestinian activists going back to a class Obama took with Edward Said at Columbia. Khalidi has acted as an adviser and spokesman for the PLO, which of course was long on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations for obvious reasons: “From 1976 to 1982, Mr. Khalidi was a director in Beirut of the official Palestinian press agency, WAFA. Later he served on the PLO ‘guidance committee’ at the Madrid peace conference.” * (Khalidi denies that the PLO ever formally employed him). Khalidi was, typically enough, “practically the best friend of Bill Ayers. Bill Ayers features Khalidi in some of his books about how to politicize the teaching for students….Bill Ayers publish[ed] Rashid Khalidi’s essay in [his] book of collected essays”.

Khalidi’s wife headed the Arab American Action Network, which received grants from the Woods Fund during Obama’s and Khalidi’s tenure on the Woods Fund’s board, including $40,000 in 2001 and $70,000 in 2002. (More on AAAN, its vice president Ali Abunimah and his website Electronic Intifada, which frequently refer to Israel as an “apartheid” state, here: * * * * * * * * * *) And he, too, repaid the favor: “Khalidi, a former spokesman for Yasser Arafat, held a fundraiser for Obama in 2000 during his unsuccessful bid for Congress.” For his part, Obama spoke warmly in 2003 about many meals shared at Khalidi’s house.

The LA Times presents Khalidi as a “moderate” by Palestinian standards:

He is seen as a moderate in Palestinian circles, having decried suicide bombings against civilians as a “war crime” and criticized the conduct of Hamas and other Palestinian leaders. Still, many of Khalidi’s opinions are troubling to pro-Israel activists, such as his defense of Palestinians’ right to resist Israeli occupation and his critique of U.S. policy as biased toward Israel.

This would be more encouraging if not for the long history of dissembling for Western audiences practiced by the PLO and its spokespeople.

Khalidi is hardly Obama’s only tie to people and groups who take a hardline pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli view. More recently at his side was his presidential campaign’s former senior foreign policy adviser Samantha Power. (Note the video here). Another is Obama military adviser Merrill “Tony” McPeak. * This is how we end up with Palestinians in Gaza phone-banking for Obama * and kind words for Obama from Hamas * and Jesse Jackson last week telling a foreign audience “that, although ‘Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades’ remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House”. And MyDD.com quotes Abunimah having this to say about Obama’s own efforts to cater to Palestinian anti-Israel sympathies in Chicago:

I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator — when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time. I remember personally introducing him onstage in 1999, when we had a major community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. And that’s just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation.

* Certainly despite Obama’s assurances today, his courage in standing up for Israel has never proven to be much of an obstacle to cozying up to those who mean it ill.

(4) The New Party

Obama wasn’t content to give radicals, terrorists and racists his money, his name and his seat in a pew; he also went and joined the New Party, a far-left outfit that served as an umbrella coalition of Marxists and others too far to the left for the Democratic Party. * * Under the laws in effect at the time – changed by a 1997 Supreme Court decision – it was possible for candidates in Illinois to run on two party lines, and Obama sought out and received the New Party line endorsement – in fact, to do so, he had to follow New Party policy requiring all NP-endorsed candidates to sign a contract supporting the party’s agenda. Obama was undoubtedly viewed and touted by the New Party as a member, and sought to leverage that membership to appeal to the NP base: “Barack Obama, victor in the 13th State Senate District, encouraged NPers to join in his task forces on Voter Education and Voter Registration.” * As discussed below, the NP connection also cemented his relationship with ACORN.

The far Left didn’t forget Obama’s NP days after the party essentially faded from the scene; in 2000, the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America wrote warmly of him:

Barak Obama is serving only his second term in the Illinois State Senate so he might be fairly charged with ambition, but the same might have be said of Bobby Rush when he ran against Congressman Charles Hayes. Obama also has put in time at the grass roots, working for five years as a community organizer in Harlem and in Chicago. When Obama participated in a 1996 UofC YDS Townhall Meeting on Economic Insecurity, much of what he had to say was well within the mainstream of European social democracy.

+++

What does Obama really believe about all these people? Is the real Obama the deeds of yesterday, or the more soothing words of today, when he distances himself from so many of his old friends?

I don’t actually pretend to know whether Barack Obama shares the beliefs of Bill Ayers; I only know that he was content to send millions of dollars Ayers’ way to “educate” the children of Chicago and give a glowing review to Ayers’ book. I don’t actually pretend to know whether Barack Obama shares the beliefs of Rev. Wright; I only know that he was content to sit in Wright’s pews for two decades, bring his young daughters to have their heads filled with Wright’s ravings, donate to Wright’s church, declare Wright to be his spiritual mentor and name his best-selling book after one of Wright’s incendiary sermons. I don’t actually pretend to know whether Barack Obama shares the beliefs of the New Party; I only know that he was content to put his name on their party line and sign a contract to support their platform. (For that matter, I don’t even pretend to know for certain whether Barack Obama shares the sex education agenda of Planned Parenthood; I only know that he was content to push their agenda through the State Senate and never object to statutory language extending sex education all the way down to kindergarteners).

In short: maybe Obama isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool radical left-wing culture warrior; maybe he was just too afraid to stop lending his moral and financial support to such people and stop currying their favor. Either way, he never stood against them in any way. And the pattern of his relationship with the extremists would be repeated.

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POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: ACORN

Chapter four of seven.

C. ACORN

The left-wing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a national umbrella group of, well, community organizers, sits at the intersection of Obama’s ties to extremists and his ties to machine politics. ACORN is indisputably Sixties-style “New Left” in its orientation, pursuing what Sol Stern describes as an agenda of “undisguised authoritarian socialism.” The group has both money and foot soldiers, as it “uses banking regulations to pressure financial institutions into massive ‘donations’ that it uses to finance supposedly non-partisan voter turn-out drives.” See here for a more thorough description of the mischief ACORN plays in forcing banks to make subprime loans. And:

In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group… as “oppositional outlaws.” Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists…the only truly radical community organization.”

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ACORN’s rap sheet for voter fraud alone is extensive. This is “an organization that has a “decade long history of voter fraud, embezzlement and misuses of taxpayer funds” that Consumer Rights League Chief Public Advocate, James Terry testified about last month to the House Judiciary.” For example: flagrantly fraudulent voter registrations in Nevada; “5,000 ACORN registrants in St. Louis were sent letters by election officials asking the recipient to contact them. Fewer than 40 responded”; “In Kansas City, 15,000 ACORN registrations have been questioned and in November, 4 ACORN employees were indicted for fraud. Additionally ACORN officials have been indicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and there are on-going investigations in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.” * * * * * * * * * * * *

Obama could not be more closely tied to ACORN if he was an oak tree:

Meeting last November with the leaders of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) – the nationwide network of left-wing community groups that taps government money for a host of causes – Obama declared: “I’ve been fighting alongside Acorn on issues you care about my entire career,” including representing Acorn in a court case in Illinois. Acorn members apparently reciprocated by working hard to turn out voters for Obama’s Illinois campaigns, according to a 2003 piece in the magazine Social Policy by a Chicago-area Acorn organizer. After the candidate’s November appearance, Acorn’s affiliated political action committee endorsed Obama for president.

*

* What he now admits to is having been their lawyer: “the Obama campaign has sought to distance the Senator from the radical organization, claiming Obama merely represented ACORN in a lawsuit enforcing the Illinois ‘Motor Voter’ law.” * *

A sampling of Obama’s ties to ACORN, and specifically to the aspect of ACORN – its voter registration drives – that are at the heart of its criminal activity:

Obama trained ACORN activists. A 1995 Chicago Reader article on Obama stated “Obama continues his work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons.” Obama also ran Project Vote, known for widespread voter fraud, which Time magazine called “a non-partisan arm” of ACORN.

+++

During the Democrat primary, the Obama campaign paid Citizen Services Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, more than $800,000.

A payment that Obama’s campaign somehow managed to misreport to the FEC. * Obama’s “Fight the Smears” website likewise falsely denied his role in training ACORN activists until confronted by evidence contradicting his denials. *

Project Vote was, in fact, an important part of the groundwork for getting Obama ingratiated with Chicago Democrats barely a year after leaving law school:

In 1992 Obama took time off to direct Project Vote, the most successful grass-roots voter- registration campaign in recent city history. Credited with helping elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the U.S. Senate, the registration drive, aimed primarily at African-Americans, added an estimated 125,000 voters to the voter rolls

Conveniently enough, it appears that at one point, ACORN, Project Vote, and the New Party all listed as headquarters the same address in Brooklyn. Obama is, of course, ACORN’s favorite politician:

[ACORN] Founder Toni Foulkes enthusiastically backed Obama’s U.S. Senate run in 2004, declaring: “ACORN is active in experimenting with methods of increasing voter participation in our low and moderate income communities to virtually every election. But in some elections we get to have our cake and eat it too: work on nonpartisan voter registration and GOTV, which also turns out to benefit the candidate we hold dear [Obama].”

By Foulkes’ own admission, ACORN’s ties to Obama run straight through Obama’s career in Illinois:

Foulkes claims that Acorn specifically sought out Obama’s representation in the motor voter case, remembering Obama from the days when he worked with [former Chicago ACORN leader] Talbot. And while many reports speak of Obama’s post-law school role organizing “Project VOTE” in 1992, Foulkes makes it clear that this project was undertaken in direct partnership with Acorn. Foulkes then stresses Obama’s yearly service as a key figure in Acorn’s leadership-training seminars.At least a few news reports have briefly mentioned Obama’s role in training Acorn’s leaders, but none that I know of have said what Foulkes reports next: that Obama’s long service with Acorn led many members to serve as the volunteer shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns – his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000… With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago Acorn leaders, by the time of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and Acorn were “old friends,” says Foulkes.

Of course, Foulkes’ article has since disappeared from the web.

And like Ayers – and sometimes through Ayers – ACORN was a recipient of money from Obama’s tenure as a director of the charitable Woods Fund:

Chicago ACORN Received Grants Of $45,000 (2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002), And $40,000 (2002) From The Woods Fund.

* * These are not discrete stories. They are all one story.« Close It

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: The Machine

Chapter five of seven.

D. The Machine

Chicago politics, of course, have been famously corrupt and totally dominated by the Democratic machine since beyond living memory. (In Illinois at the state level, corruption is endemic and bipartisan: “four of the last nine governors have been indicted on charges of corruption, and three were convicted”). This is the city where top aides to Mayor Daley were convicted in May 2006 of federal felonies for rigging hiring in city jobs. It’s a city where an alderman who pleaded guilty in August to a “general practice” of shaking down real estate developers was caught on tape saying “Most aldermen, most politicians are hos.”. (A Rezko-linked alderman, in fact, who is the daughter of a Rezko-linked housing developer once represented by Obama’s law firm * * – small world, indeed). It’s not an uncommon sentiment (several aldermen found it necessary to hold a press conference stating that they were not, in fact, hos).

The Chicago machine is nothing if not an equal opportunity honeypot; machine corruption and its close cousin, racial/ethnic politics, has endured over decades as different ethnic and racial groups have taken their turns running the city, all the while doling out favors within their wards. The current machine is topped by Mayor Daley, two decades in office and the son of the city’s most notorious mayor; at the state level, it envelops Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich.

To all appearances, Barack Obama’s home neighborhood of Hyde Park – affluent, academic, ethnically diverse – should be a natural base for that rare breed in Chicago, the real reformer, with the independence to not only stand aloof from the politics of the greased palm and the dead voter, but actually make that politics more difficult:

The neighborhood invariably elects a goo-goo alderman who pulls killjoy stunts like, you know, asking to see what’s in the mayor’s budget before voting on it. The most famous, Leon Despres, who just turned 100, once spent five days at Trotsky’s place in Mexico City.

Of course, as noted above, Obama’s original district also extended to what Salon calls “the weary black neighborhoods to the west, with threadbare street corners that might hold a liquor store, or a chicken shack. (It did not include Trinity United.).” (Todd Spivak, who covered Obama in 2000, says Obama’s district “spanned a large swath of the city’s poor, black, crime-ridden South Side”)

Certainly Obama frequently postured as a political reformer in Illinois (“My reputation in Springfield was as an independent”), as well as in the U.S. Senate. Was that posture any more, or any less, genuine than his posture as a friend of left-wing radicals? I don’t know the answer to that either; I only know that Obama, with his sights set beyond Hyde Park, made sure never to get in the machine’s way. “Jay Stewart, the executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, notes that, while Mr. Obama supported ethics reforms as a state senator, he has “‘been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state, including at this point, mostly Democratic.’” The Chicago Sun-Times isn’t fooled either:

Obama friend Tony Rezko was convicted of corrupting state government, but Obama was never implicated and has returned contributions Rezko made to his Senate campaign. Obama did run as an independent Democrat but worked closely with state Senate President Emil Jones, an old-school organization Democrat. Obama runs for president with the full blessing of Mayor Daley.

As we shall see, this is not the half of it.

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(1) It’s Good To Have Friends

Obama’s first run for public office was at age 34 in 1996, when Alice Palmer announced she was leaving her State Senate seat to run for Congress. As noted above, Palmer was one of Obama’s many far-left allies. As it turned out, Palmer lost her bid for Congress (to Jesse Jackson Jr, now Obama’s national campaign co-chair) and tried to come back and reclaim her job, but Obama stayed in the race. Unlike Sarah Palin’s three hotly contested races against incumbents, however, Obama and his allies were able to use the legal machinery of the city avoid a contested campaign:

According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama operatives flooded into the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners on Jan. 2, 1996, to begin the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of Palmer and three other lesser-known contenders for her Illinois state Senate seat. They kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama’s Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.

The Trib account attributes his success to the fact that “when he filed his challenge[] the city of Chicago had ‘just completed a massive, routine purge of unqualified names that eliminated 15,871 people from the 13th District rolls.’” and his “competitors had ‘relied on early 1995 polling sheets to verify the signatures.’” * Obama himself faced no such challenge.

See, here is where we have to take a step back and look at the realities of how corrupt urban political machines operate…because this sort of outrageous good fortune does not, in machine-controlled cities, ordinarily fall into the lap of candidates who present any threat to the machine. Obama’s opponents all just happened to get shoved off the ballot, leaving him standing unopposed? (Freddoso, at p. 5 & 246 and n. 17, cites 1994 & 1995 press accounts in the Tribune and the Sun-Times indicating that Mayor Daley was worried about Palmer running against him for Mayor, and thus his interests were served by her defeat).

This would not the last time things like this just happened to Obama’s opponents, while Obama himself slid by on the greased skids. It would certainly seem as if Barack Obama has important friends who want him in high places.

There’s also Obama’s 2004 run for the U.S. Senate, a race in which he was generally regarded as something of a longshot (as you may recall – Freddoso cites polls showing this at p. 47 – a little more than three weeks before the March 16, 2004 primary, Obama was in a second-place tie with 17% of the vote). The favorite was Blair Hull, a multi-millionaire who spent $29 million on his campaign (Hull was the subject of a sympathetic Atlantic profile in January 2004 by liberal writer Joshua Green comparing him to Jon Corzine and not even mentioning Obama). But Hull’s campaign unraveled when the Chicago Tribune pressured Hull to release his divorce records, showing a record of menacing his ex-wife including the filing of an order of protection. Now, the Trib was just doing its job as a newspaper – but how did the Trib find out where to look? After all, unsealing divorce records isn’t routine – John Kerry was running for president that year and successfully resisted calls to unseal his divorce papers, without facing much pressure from the big news organizations to do so.

Well, we can make an educated guess and then some: Obama campaign chief David Axelrod had previously interviewed to work for Hull, and Freddoso notes (p. 47-48) that in the process he’d learned about some of Hull’s marital history, although he protests to this day he didn’t tell anybody. As the NY Times notes, “[t]he Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.” Axelrod himself is a former Tribune reporter. It’s good to have friends, isn’t it?

Winning the nomination for what was then a Republican-held seat meant Obama would be expected to face off against Jack Ryan, a wealthy and charismatic former investment banker and subject of a famously glowing “is he too good to be true” November 2003 profile by George Will. But Ryan’s campaign, too, imploded when the Tribune persuaded a California judge to unseal Ryan’s divorce records, revealing his actress wife’s testimony about him pressing her to attend sex clubs. (The sympathetic judge was a Gray Davis-appointed Democrat). Again, it was nice for Obama that he had friends, and he was instead able to face off against Alan Keyes in a walkover election. (One cannot miss the irony here of Obama today complaining loudly about any discussion of his own past after using sex scandals to KO his prior opponents).

Of course, speaking of powerful and sinister friends, the fact that Obama had those well-financed opponents at one time enabled him to use a loophole in the campaign finance laws to accept $60,000 in contributions in that campaign from left-wing billionaire George Soros and his family:

Obama … is different from most Democrats because of his willingness to embrace the controversial Soros. Shortly after Soros equated the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Obama joined him for a New York fund-raiser June 7.The event, held at Soros’ home, boosted Obama’s campaign at a time he was still facing a challenge from Republican Jack Ryan….

+++

Little has been made of his connection to Soros, although it is quite unique. Not only did George Soros donate to Obama’s campaign, but four other family members – Jennifer, sons Jonathan and Robert and wife Susan – did as well.Because of a special provision campaign finance laws, the Soroses were able to give a collective $60,000 to Obama during his primary challenge.

* Then there’s the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the smoking gun of Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers – documents detailing Obama’s and Ayers’ role in the CAC were held at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but Stanley Kurtz faced a lengthy and frustrating stonewall before he was finally able to get a look at them. * (Kurtz also faced intimidation when he took to local radio in Chicago to talk about his research *). Because the one thing Obama’s friends in Chicago don’t want is a close look at his record.

(2) Mr. Jones and Me

You have undoubtedly already heard plenty about Obama’s ties to Wright and Ayers and to Tony Rezko, who I discuss below. But probably the single most important relationship in Obama’s rise, and the one that tells us the most about Obama, is with Emil Jones. As The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza notes, when he arrived in Springfield in 1997, “Obama sought out Jones in the legislature and let him know he was eager to work with him” despite having portrayed Jones in Obama’s first book as an “old ward heeler.” Jones’ background before he was a State Senator? “His career included 30 years on the city payroll, 20 with the Sewer Department, where he retired as an inspector in 1993. He denied wrongdoing when in 1997 the city released federal subpoenas in a ghost-payrolling investigation that included requests for records regarding his employment. He was never charged.” The Chicago Tribune calls Jones “a transparent, old-school advocate of governance as the management of spoils” and notes that in 2002, “after Jones helped engineer the delivery of $4.5 million in taxpayer-funded grants to the City Colleges of Chicago, it was revealed that $300,000 of that money made its way to a firm run by his relatives.”

Obama accomplished little during his first six years as a State Senator, as a backbench member of the minority party:

Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama’s seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years, Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative ­achievements.

Jones became the State Senate President when the Democrats took the majority in 2003, and basically created most of Obama’s legislative record by adding Obama’s name on other people’s bills. As Jones once said (apparently at Obama’s instigation), “I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator”:

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.

+++

Jones further helped raise Obama’s profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news headlines.

(See also Freddoso pp. 27-33. Taking credit for other people’s legislative work is a pattern Obama has continued in Washington). What did Jones get out of the relationship?

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, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.

I’ll never forget what he said:

“Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

Even the New York Times noticed Obama’s patronage of Jones:

Mr. Obama secured several million dollars for a project at Chicago State University. Emil Jones Jr., the president of the Illinois State Senate and an early and powerful political benefactor of Mr. Obama’s, has been a dogged champion of Chicago State, and one of Senator Obama’s closest friends.

Freddoso notes at p. 32 & n. 24-25 (citing Obama’s own website and this report) that Obama requested $11 million in earmarks for Chicago State, that Chicago State has named a building after Jones and his wife, and that since 2001, Jones has received about $55,000 in contributions from Chicago State’s trustees, foundation directors and administrators.

What kind of patron is Emil Jones? Freddoso, again, notes (citations at at pp. 28-29 & nn. 5-10 of his book), a variety of questionable projects in which Jones got jobs and funding for his wife, son and stepson:

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last July that his son, Emil Jones III, does not have a college degree, but obtained an unadvertised $57,000 job with the Illinois Department of Commerce. The hire was made shortly after Senator Jones agreed to back Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s (D.) budget plan. The younger Jones is expected to succeed his father in his senate seat.Jones’s stepson, John Sterling, owns a technology firm called Synch-Solutions, which received a contract for $700,000 of work for the state budget office in 2007. In that same year, the Chicago Sun-Times found that the company had “a $3.5 million contract from the Chicago Aviation Department, a $1.2 million contract from the cash-strapped Chicago Transit Authority and another $1.2 million from the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority . . . [and] a separate $3 million subcontract through Chicago’s public schools.”

In 2005, Governor Blagojevich rescinded the requirement that the director of mental health at the state’s Department of Human Services be a medical doctor. This allowed Jones’s wife, Lorrie, to take the position, with a salary of $186,000 – an $80,000 raise over her previous salary.

* While Jones’ backing of Obama’s legislative resume focused on 2003, Freddoso, among others, cites Obama biographer David Mendell to say that on the Illinois ethics reform bill that passed the State Senate in 1998 by a 52-4 vote, “former Rep. Abner Mikva convinced Jones to let Obama handle the legislation. Sen. Dick Klemm (D.) was removed as chief cosponsor and replaced by Obama on May 22, 1998 – the very day the bill passed.” * * * But Obama can take all the credit he wants for that one, when you consider how it led to the final payback for Emil Jones:

Before championing a big legislative pay increase, Illinois Senate President Emil Jones provided himself with tens of thousands of dollars in interest-free loans from his campaign fund.Under Illinois’ relatively loose campaign-finance laws, there’s nothing illegal about politicians dipping into their campaign funds that way. But it’s highly unusual.

Since 1989, the South Side Democrat has taken out $120,528 in personal loans from his political fund and repaid $96,900 of that amount — leaving nearly $25,000 unaccounted for.

Just last year, Jones withdrew $5,800 from his fund in 20 separate loans of $200 or $300 each between July and December.

In October alone, he had eight disbursements of $300 apiece over a 23-day period.

Last week, Jones sparked criticism when he proclaimed, “I need a pay raise.” That was in support of a pending 12 percent legislative pay raise set to take effect unless legislators took steps to block it. Jones stands to see his salary rise from $91,824 to $102,547.

A government watchdog group questioned whether Jones is using his campaign for personal expenses rather than political ones, under a loophole in a 1998 law that was supposed to ban the personal use of campaign funds.

“It absolutely looks like a slush fund,” says Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. “He is living under a whole set of rules that no one else in the public is.”

Jones’ camp declined repeated requests from the Chicago Sun-Times for comment on how he has spent the money from his interest-free loans. A top aide would say only that some of the money was spent on gasoline. Campaign records don’t appear to show what the loans were for. Nor is there anything in the public record stating the terms of the loans.

As chairman of his political fund, Jones decides the loan terms — and whether the loans ever need to be repaid.

“It’s the kind of open-ended float you would not get if you went to a commercial bank and asked for a loan,” says Kent Redfield, a University of Illinois at Springfield political scientist who studied Jones’ records for Canary’s group. “It’s ‘other people’s money.’ [Campaign contributors] don’t give you money to help you out with your lifestyle. They give you money to help you out with your campaign. If you rely on your fund to augment your lifestyle, that’s a conflict of interest.”

* It gets worse: not only was Jones, under the Obama “ethics” bill, able to borrow money from his campaign contributions, he is allowed to keep half a million dollars of it as a golden parachute following his retirement, which was announced in August:

Part of the price for that victory was leaving a major loophole in the law. While new legislators were barred from using campaign money for personal use, those already in office could keep using the campaign money they already had for anything they wanted – Cadillacs, college tuition, whatever.For instance, Senate President Emil Jones – who helped Obama reach the U.S. Senate – could walk away with as much as $578,000 when he retires next year. He can use that for political purposes or simply spend it as personal income, as long as he pays taxes on it.

* Typically enough, Jones is bequeathing his State Senate seat to his 30-year-old son, who will replace him on the ballot.

You want an illustration of the influence Obama could have exerted for reform if he’d wanted to? Jones spent months bottling up ethics reform legislation in the State Senate, reform with more teeth than the flaccid bill passed by Obama:

Designed as a response to the “pay-to-play politics” that have flourished under Gov. Blagojevich, the plan would bar firms with more than $50,000 in state contracts from donating to the officeholder in charge of the deals.But the governor entirely rewrote the plan, stripping out that language and putting it in an executive order. In its place, he inserted provisions into the original legislation to deal with how lawmakers award themselves pay raises and to bar the practice by some state officeholders of holding outside, non-elected government jobs.

+++

On Wednesday, the Illinois House rejected Blagojevich’s rewrite, 110-3. Under the state Constitution, the Senate has “15 calendar days” to follow suit, or the plan as originally written will die.

As late as mid-September 2008, Obama was resisting calls to lift a finger to help the real reform bill pass. Finally, after media pressure that crested while Obama was behind McCain in the national polls, he made the call – and the retiring Jones immediately complied: “‘I plan to call the Senate back into session to deal with the issue of ethics only at the request of my friend Barack Obama,’ Jones said in a statement…”Just think of what Obama might have accomplished in Illinois if he’d made more calls like that.

(3) Married To The Machine

When Obama married Michelle Robinson in 1991, he was literally marrying into the city’s Democratic machine:

[H]er father, Frasier Robinson, spent some time as a maintenance worker for Chicago’s Department of Water Management.However, he was a good deal more than the labourer that many seem to imagine.

Indeed, according to family friends, Michelle’s father was a volunteer organiser for the city’s Democratic Party, a by-word for machine politics in America, and his loyalty was rewarded with a well-paid engineering job at Chicago’s water plant. Even before overtime, he earned $42,686 – 25 per cent more than High School teachers at the time.

Shortly before the Obamas were married, Michelle went and got a job at the heart of the Chicago machine:

In 1991, she wrote to Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Jarrett…offered her a job in the mayor’s office. But before Michelle would accept, she asked that Jarrett have dinner with her and Barack.Barack was worried, according to his biographer, David Mendell, that Michelle might be too straightforward and outspoken to survive in a political setting. He fretted, too, that if she was going to enter the realm of Chicago politics, she needed a mentor, someone to look out for her.

“My fiance wants to know who is going to be looking out for me and making sure that I thrive,” Jarrett recalled Michelle saying. After the meal, Jarrett told the Chicago Tribune, she asked, “Well, did I pass the test?” Barack smiled and said she did.

When Michelle was hired by the Daley administration, she was an assistant to the mayor, making about $60,000 a year. But Jarrett was promoted to head the Department of Planning and Development, and took Michelle with her. Michelle’s new job was “economic development coordinator,” which city records describe as “developing strategies and negotiating business agreements to promote and stimulate economic growth within the City of Chicago.”

From Mayor Daley’s office, with the connection to the very well-connected Jarrett firmly established, Michelle went on to head the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit community organization, from 1993 until 1996, and served on its board until 2001; Barack Obama was a founding member of the board of Public Allies in 1992 *, and would go on to send them taxpayer money:

Senator Obama has trained several classes of Allies in community organizing, spoken at Public Allies Chicago events, and helped Senator Durbin secure an appropriation from the Department of Justice that successfully helped us better recruit and retain young men of color for our Chicago program and learn practices we are applying nationally.

This wasn’t the only intersection between the power of Obama and his friends to secure funding and Michelle’s career:

The Chicago-based Muntu Dance Theatre received a $4.5 million grant to help pay for a $10 million cultural center.Obama’s mentor in Springfield, state Sen. Emil Jones (D-Chicago), sponsored the grant. And at the time $2.25 million of the grant was disbursed, Obama’s wife, Michelle, sat on the non-profit dance group’s board.

Obama said in the interview that at the time of the award in 2003 his wife wasn’t a board member, though tax returns of the charity indicate she sat on the board in 2002 and 2003.

(See also Freddoso p. 31). Notably, the theater’s website now lists Emil Jones as “Honorary Campaign Chair” of the “Campaign for the Muntu Performing Arts Center.”

In 1996, when Barack Obama was elected to the State Senate, his wife moved to a job at the University of Chicago. In 2002, she moved over from the University to its Hospital, where she “developed the University’s first office of community service” and “quickly built up programs for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity and minority contracting.” Then in 2004, Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate; shortly thereafter, Michelle was given a promotion and a pay raise that more than doubled her salary “from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005.” Her new duties would include “all programs and initiatives that involve the relationship between the Hospitals and the community…[and] management of the Hospitals’ business diversity program.” In short, she had yet again a perfect job for deciding who would and would not find favor in the community and local business with a powerful institution – and one that itself sought favor with her influential husband. In 2006, Obama tried to return the favor, requesting a $1 million earmark for his wife’s employer to build a new pavillion (the earmark did not ultimately get passed).

(4) I’m Barack Obama, and I Approve This Machine

There are a number of ways for an honest politician to get in the way of a crooked machine, or of waste or fraud in the government. She can resign in protest, as Sarah Palin did in Alaska. He can hold hearings smoking out members of his own party, as John McCain has done in the Senate. She can back candidates in primary battles against the establishment, as Palin has also done in Alaska. He can bring national attention to self-interested wastes of taxpayer money, as McCain has also done in the Senate. You will look high and low in his record for Obama doing any of these things.

In fact, Obama has repeatedly either sat out opportunities to support reform in Chicago or affirmatively supported the machine. By January 2007, the Justice Department and the Chicago press had laid bare the corruption of the administration of Michelle’s old boss Mayor Daley, including the May 2006 convictions of Robert Sorich, Timothy McCarthy, two of Mayor Daley’s most senior aides, and two sanitation officials for what the New York Times described at the time as running “City Hall’s legendary patronage machine” :

Prosecutors said Mr. Sorich and Mr. McCarthy had concocted “blessed lists” of preselected winners for certain jobs and promotions based on political work or union sponsorship. The scheme involved sham interviews, falsified ratings forms and the destruction of files to cover it up, they said.

* * * (See also Freddoso, pp. 20-26, discussing the broader pattern of bribery, shakedowns, corruption in city employment and contracting, you name it). Yet Daley, preparing for his 2007 re-election bid, had one voice spinning furiously to direct attention away from the rampant corruption: the man Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet calls “Mayor Daley’s key adviser” – David Axelrod, better known now nationally as the guiding strategist and campaign manager for Obama’s presidential campaign. (The NY Times: “‘David Axelrod’s mostly been visible in Chicago in the last decade as Daley’s public relations strategist and the guy who goes on television to defend Daley from charges of corruption,’ Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who is now chairman of the political science department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.”) Freddoso (p. 23 & n. 72) cites a 2005 Philadelphia Inquirer article in which Axelrod declared, a la Mario Cuomo denying the existence of the Mafia, that “The so-called ‘machine’ doesn’t exist anymore.”

As Freddoso recounts (p. 26), while Daley’s position remained strong, he faced two black opponents in the 2007 primary, so an endorsement from the popular Obama would help remove any remaining obstacles to re-election. * Moreover, as NPR noted at the time, before those weaker challengers stepped up, there had been “talk that the corruption issue would lead to some big-name Democrat challenging him this year (Congressmen Jesse Jackson Jr. and/or Luis Gutierrez had been mentioned)” – and Jackson, as we know, is a key Obama ally. But unlike Sean Parnell’s Palin-backed challenge to Don Young in Alaska, Obama apparently didn’t persuade Jackson to run, and may not even have tried. Instead, Obama endorsed Daley, and Daley endorsed Obama for president. One hand washes the other.

Notably, Obama’s one serious intra-party battle in Chicago, his primary challenge to Congressman Bobby Rush in 2000, followed on the heels of Rush challenging Mayor Daley in the primary in 1999 *. David Ignatius of the Washington Post says that Obama was “[p]rodded by the Daley machine” into that race.

The second egregious example cited by Freddoso (here and at pp. 6-19) is the Stroger machine. I’ll let the Huffington Post explain:

In 2006, the Cook County Board President, John Stroger, faced near-daily chronicling of the incompetence, scandal, and patronage under his administration. These revelations included not only the typical employment of family members and friends, but more disturbingly what one Chicago newspaper referred to as a “catalogue of horrors” at a County hospital and what another uncovered at the Juvenile Detention Center where staff encouraged fights among the youth in “the gladiator room”. Although normally untouchable, challenging Stroger was a formidable reform candidate, Forrest Claypool, who had been endorsed by every major paper in Chicago. This ‘machine versus reform’ race provided Obama with a seemingly tailored opportunity to demonstrate his new brand of politics and yet, although Claypool was a senior advisor to him during his Senate race, Obama chose not antagonize the machine and remained silent throughout the campaign, even after Stroger suffered a debilitating stroke a week before the election. Following Stroger’s victory (52% to 48%), local committeemen selected Stroger’s son, Todd, to replace him on the general election ballot, and despite general voter outrage over this cynical act of nepotism, Obama immediately embraced Todd Stroger, calling him a “a good progressive Democrat” who will “lead us into a new era of Cook County government.” To no one’s surprise, since winning the general election, Todd Stroger has hired a plethora of family members and friends, while slashing essential positions and services, including nurses and law enforcement officials, and proposing massive tax increases. When asked about the situation at the County under Todd Stroger, Obama said he was not following it, something he apparently has the luxury to ignore.

* * (See Obama’s letter supporting Todd Stroger here). Remember Todd Stroger next time someone asks you what Obama’s definition of “progressive” is. And note once again the contrast between Obama’s embrace of Todd Stroger and Palin’s endorsement of a primary challenger to Lisa Murkowski. Why did Obama sit out the primary and back Todd Stroger in the general? Maybe because Obama doesn’t like to rock the boat with powerful machines (How powerful are the Strogers in Chicago? Cook County Hospital is now named John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital) Maybe because Obama’s close friends were also Stroger’s – besides Stroger’s alliance with Mayor Daley, Tony “Rezko had served as John Stroger’s finance chairman and raised $150,000 for him (Stroger put Rezko’s wife on the county payroll).” Or maybe because the Strogers are black and Forrest Claypool is white. No matter how you slice it, Obama put his stamp of approval on Stroger control of Cook County.

But wait! The hits keep on coming. The Tribune again:

In the 2006 Democratic primary… Obama endorsed first-time candidate Alexi Giannoulias for state treasurer despite reports about loans Giannoulias’ family-owned Broadway Bank made to crime figures. Records show Giannoulias and his family had given more than $10,000 to Obama’s campaign, which banked at Broadway.

Giannoulias spoke for Obama at the 2008 Convention. Bad decision? It is rumored that Tony Rezko is now talking to the feds about Giannoulias and his family (Ed Morrissey collects those reports and more background on Giannoulias here).

Freddoso also notes, at p. 19-20, Obama’s 2007 endorsement of Dorothy Tillman, a corrupt, race-baiting Alderman who once brandished a gun at a city council meeting – the Chicago Tribune noted that when Obama endorsed her, Tillman “was then under fire for her stewardship of the scandal-plagued Harold Washington Cultural Center, where contracts benefited members of her family” – what mattered was that she had endorsed Obama in 2004. *

Then there’s Obama’s 2004 endorsement of his poker buddy State Senator Larry Walsh, a guy Obama liked so much he put thousands of Obama volunteers to work campaigning for Walsh. Walsh is now a lobbyist, and Obama has requested $6 million in earmarks for his client. And now, Walsh is under FBI investigation. (As it happens, Walsh was also tied to a Rezko construction project).

Freddoso cites this Ryan Lizza piece quoting an Obama ally:

[Obama] recognizes that Daley is a powerful man and to have him as an ally is important. While he was a state senator here and moving around in Chicago, he made sure to minimize the direct confrontational approach to people of influence and policymakers and civic leaders.

Barack Obama take on the people who run the machine? Not a chance. He’d have to stop endorsing them first.

(5) Rezko and Friends

Yet another of Obama’s closest and earliest political supporters is Tony Rezko, who was convicted in June in federal court in Chicago of corrupting the government of Illinois.

[In 1999, E.J.] Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked: a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reelection. “They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest,” Obama told Dionne. It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself….[Tony] Rezko’s rise in Illinois was intertwined with Obama’s….he had tried to recruit Obama to work for him. Chicago had been at the forefront of an urban policy to lure developers into low-income neighborhoods with tax credits, and Rezko was an early beneficiary of the program. Miner’s law firm was eager to do the legal work on the tax-credit deals, which seemed consistent with the firm’s over-all civil-rights mission. A residual benefit was that the new developers became major donors to aldermen, state senators, and other South Side politicians who represented the poor neighborhoods in which Rezko and others operated. “Our relationship deepened when I started my first political campaign for the State Senate,” Obama said earlier this year, in an interview with Chicago reporters.

Rezko was one of the people Obama consulted when he considered running to replace Palmer, and Rezko eventually raised about ten per cent of Obama’s funds for that first campaign. As a state senator, Obama became an advocate of the tax-credit program. “That’s an example of a smart policy,” he told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin in 1997….Obama and Rezko’s friendship grew stronger. They dined together regularly and even, on at least one occasion, retreated to Rezko’s vacation home, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

-The New Yorker

Following the M.O. he explained to Dionne, Barack Obama went out of his way to do favors for Rezko, writing to federal and state officials to get Rezko a lucrative contract to build senior citizen housing:

The deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama’s former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama’s state Senate district.Obama’s letters, written nearly nine years ago, for the first time show the Democratic presidential hopeful did a political favor for Rezko – a longtime friend, campaign fund-raiser and client of the law firm where Obama worked – who was indicted last fall on federal charges that accuse him of demanding kickbacks from companies seeking state business under Gov. Blagojevich.

The letters appear to contradict a statement last December from Obama, who told the Chicago Tribune that, in all the years he’s known Rezko, “I’ve never done any favors for him.”

Among the direct benefits to Obama in return, from his alliance with Rezko? Well, Rezko was in the business of demanding state jobs for people he favored, sending Gov. Blagojevich (who was identified in the indictment of Rezko as “Public Official A” under Rezko’s corrupt influence) a list of 39 people he wanted jobs given to – including “two people who appear to have Obama links and a third who’s now an Obama presidential campaign staffer.” A very valuable thing to have in politics, a man who will arrange jobs for your campaign staff between campaigns.

Obama also got significant campaign contributions from Rezko: “Over the years, Rezko, Mahru, their wives and businesses have given more than $50,000 to Obama’s campaign funds, records show. And Rezko has helped raise millions more.” Rezko’s corruption also extended into Iraq; federal prosecutors have argued that Rezko paid a $1.5 million bribe to get a contract in Iraq, which naturally involved yet another kickback donation to Obama. (Rezko’s corrupt Iraq connections included still seedier and more ominous figures including a Saddam-linked billionaire, although efforts to tie the Iraqi connections to Obama have been speculative at best). To say nothing of a $10,000 contribution in 2004 funded by a recipient of a $250,000 kickback from a corrupt Rezko deal, from a donor whose son was then awarded an internship in Obama’s U.S. Senate office.

Rezko, in fact, himself offered Obama a job straight out of law school in 1991:

He once told the Chicago Tribune that he had briefly considered becoming a developer of affordable housing. But after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, he turned down a job with Tony Rezko’s development company, Rezmar, choosing instead to work at the civil rights law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, then led by Allison Davis.

Rezko went on to be Obama’s original, founding and most significant fundraiser:

When Obama opened his campaign for state Senate in 1995, Rezko’s companies gave Obama $2,000 on the first day of fund-raising. Save for a $500 contribution from another lawyer, Obama didn’t raise another penny for six weeks. Rezko had essentially seeded the start of Obama’s political career.

Rezko’s projects were not so beneficial to the not-so-well-connected citizens who lived in them, and his predations victimized Obama’s own constituents who were left to live in decrepit housing – and other close Obama allies were similarly involved in developing substandard housing projects:

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign and a member of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.Allison Davis, a major fund-raiser for Obama’s US Senate campaign and a former lead partner at Obama’s former law firm. Davis, a developer, was involved in the creation of Grove Parc and has used government subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,500 units in Chicago, including a North Side building cited by city inspectors last year after chronic plumbing failures resulted in raw sewage spilling into several apartments.

…Rezko’s company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama’s district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers – including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko – collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations.

Butler and Davis did not respond to messages. Rezko is in prison; his lawyer did not respond to inquiries.

+++

Over the next nine years [1989-98], Rezmar used more than $87 million in government grants, loans, and tax credits to renovate about 1,000 apartments in 30 Chicago buildings. Companies run by the partners also managed many of the buildings, collecting government rent subsidies.Rezmar collected millions in development fees but fell behind on mortgage payments almost immediately. On its first project, the city government agreed to reduce the company’s monthly payments from almost $3,000 to less than $500.

By the time Obama entered the state Senate in 1997, the buildings were beginning to deteriorate. In January 1997, the city sued Rezmar for failing to provide adequate heat in a South Side building in the middle of an unusually cold winter. It was one of more than two dozen housing-complaint suits filed by the city against Rezmar for violations at its properties.

People who lived in some of the Rezmar buildings say trash was not picked up and maintenance problems were ignored. Roofs leaked, windows whistled, insects moved in.

Where was Obama?

Eleven of Rezmar’s buildings were located in the district represented by Obama, containing 258 apartments. The building without heat in January 1997, the month Obama entered the state Senate, was in his district. So was Jones’s building with rats in the walls and Frizzell’s building that lacked insulation. And a redistricting after the 2000 Census added another 350 Rezmar apartments to the area represented by Obama.But Obama has contended that he knew nothing about any problems in Rezmar’s buildings.

After Rezko’s assistance in Obama’s home purchase became a campaign issue, at a time when the developer was awaiting trial in an unrelated bribery case, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that the deterioration of Rezmar’s buildings never came to his attention. He said he would have distanced himself from Rezko if he had known.

Other local politicians say they knew of the problems.

* Doug Ross has a great photo essay on Obama’s blind eye towards Rezko’s abuses. You can read the Obama campaign’s decidedly lawyerly responses here (Sample: “Senator Obama did follow up on constituency complaints about housing as matter of routine. Further questions about their condition should be addressed to the CHA [Chicago Housing Authority]. It is our understanding that, according to CHA, the buildings owned by Rezmar were maintained in good condition and good standing.” Because, you know, the Chicago government is always diligent and trustworthy where guys like Rezko are concerned.)

Obama, while on the board of the charitable Woods Fund, steered $1 million to Davis. He was, of course, not just a low-income housing developer but also the boss who had given Obama a job out of law school:

Obama began serving on the Woods Fund board in 1993, the same year he was hired as an associate lawyer with Davis’ small Chicago law firm, Davis Miner Barnhill. Obama kept working there until he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

The grant to Davis is intertwined with Obama’s effort to steer taxpayer money to Rezko:

As a developer, Davis’ partners have included Tony Rezko, the now-indicted political fund-raiser who has been among Obama’s biggest political supporters.A few months after Davis left the law firm, Obama won his first political office — a seat in the Illinois Senate. His campaign contributors included Rezko and Davis.

Two years later, Obama wrote to city and state officials, urging them to give money to New Kenwood LLC, a company that Davis and Rezko formed to build an apartment building for low-income seniors at 48th and Cottage Grove.

Davis and Rezko were building that project in 2000 when Davis approached the Woods Fund, seeking its investment in future projects.

Consider what Obama got out of working for Davis’ firm. In 2007, during the primaries, Obama cracked at John Edwards’ expense that his preference for making change rather than money was “why I didn’t become a trial lawyer.” But of course Obama was, technically, employed by a trial-lawyer firm, and participated in class action filings against big corporations. But in so many ways, the job seems to have been little more than a sinecure for an aspiring politician – hence the time off to run a voter-registration drive to help a Democrat get elected to the US Senate, hence the time off to go to Indonesia to finish his book, hence keeping him on the part-time payroll while in the State Senate, hence Obama’s secrecy about what particular clients he represented.

As for Rezko, he too was no ordinary donor or bundler for Obama; it was Rezko whose help was necessary to help Obama buy his home, the place where his wife sleeps and his children play with their toys:

Two years ago, Obama bought a mansion on the South Side, in the Kenwood neighborhood, from a doctor. On the same day, Rezko’s wife, Rita Rezko, bought the vacant lot next door from the same seller. The doctor had listed the properties for sale together. He sold the house to Obama for $300,000 below the asking price. The doctor got his asking price on the lot from Rezko’s wife.Last year, Rita Rezko sold a strip of that vacant lot to Obama for $104,500 — a deal Obama later apologized for, acknowledging that people might think he got a favor from Rezko. Obama called the episode “boneheaded” and a “mistake.”

* In fact, the adjacent property fairly clearly was not of any independent use to Rezko. Basically, Rezko’s wife’s purchase of the lot had no purpose other than to subsidize Obama’s mansion. A payoff that hits, literally, close to home for Obama.

Patrick Fitzgerald’s prosecutorial net has been closing of late around Rezko and his corrupt circle. Gov. Blagojevich has admitted that he’s been interviewed multiple times by federal investigators. (Naturally, Obama endorsed Blagojevich’s re-election in 2006). Rezko is now talking to federal prosecutors, and federal investigators apparently now think they have enough to indict Gov. Blagojevich himself. * “[F]ederal agents are preparing charges of tax fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice against the governor… involving alleged trading of jobs for five-figure campaign donations” and Blagojevich’s wife receiving “$200,000 in real estate commissions – some on deals done with the convicted Tony Rezko [that] allegedly coincided with the award of state contracts by her husband’s administration” Even some Illinois Democrats have had talk of impeaching Blagojevich. *

As Rudy Giuliani put it, if Obama never found any corruption to battle in Chicago or in the Illinois statehouse, it’s because “he’s just not observant.”

« Close It

POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: The Favor Factory

Chapter six of seven.

E. The Favor Factory

With the expansion of federal intervention in the economy that will inevitably follow the current financial crisis – ranging from the $700 billion financial industry bailout to the $25 billion auto industry bailout to the federal government investing billions directly in major banks – there will be even more opportunities than usual for the next Administration to use federal dollars to reward friends and cronies instead of serving the taxpayers. Indeed, House Democrats tried in the bailout package to earmark proceeds to go to Obama’s old friends at ACORN, and succeeded in subsidizing ACORN in the housing bill that passed in July. It’s important that the next White House be resistant to opening the favor factory for business.

Senator Obama now claims that he will be a good steward of federal taxpayer money – such a good steward, in fact, that he’ll be able to cut spending enough to offset every dollar of his many hundreds of billions of dollars of planned new spending programs. But his record throughout his career shows him to be a man who has always been quite liberal in every sense of the word in using public money and private charitable money to reward his friends, and who is wholly disinclined to saying “no.” Obama knows how the favor factory works, and he isn’t shy about using it.

Read More »

(1) Pork and Earmarks

As I noted in Part I of this series, one of the major controversies of the last several years in American politics has been pork barrel spending, and specifically “earmarks” – legislative directions that money be routed to particular projects. Earmarks are not an enormous part of the budget – in the last debate, Obama dismissed $18 billion as being basically chump change – but they contribute to governmental bloat, and more problematically the reasons why politicians like directing money to benefit particular people often get them in ethical or legal trouble.

As I also discussed in Part I, on the most notorious pork project in recent years, Obama voted against Tom Coburn’s effort to strip funding from the “Bridge to Nowhere” and send it to victims of Hurricane Katrina, presumably out of fear that such a vote would bring down retaliation on his own pork barrel. That said, Obama does deserve some credit on one corner of Coburn’s Porkbusters campaign: when Coburn needed a Democratic sponsor in 2006, Obama stepped up and co-sponsored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, a/k/a the Coburn-Obama bill, capping off the Porkbusters crusade for earmark transparency by creating an internet database of federal spending requests; as I wrote at the time:

H. Res. 1000 and the Coburn-Obama bills don’t cut a dime by themselves, but anybody who knows Washington can tell you that changing the procedures is half the battle; by providing increased public and media oversight over earmarks and pork-barrel spending – as well as simply a better mechanism for Members to see what they are voting on and at whose behest – the rule and the bill together provide a first step towards getting the pork problem under at least the beginnings of control.

While the indefatigable Coburn carried the laboring oar on the bill – as he did in the battle against the Bridge to Nowhere – Obama certainly deserves some credit for co-sponsoring it, a move that was not entirely popular in the Senate or within his own caucus. Of course, the main opposition at the time was Old Bull GOP Senators like Ted Stevens and Trent Lott, not exactly Obama’s best buddies. In any event, Obama’s record on the spending itself is nonetheless poor.

For his Senate career, Obama has requested nearly $1 billion in earmarked spending all by himself, “$931.3-million… nearly a million dollars for every [working] day that Obama’s been in the United States Senate.” Obama repeatedly voted against Coburn’s initiatives to rein in pork and earmarks, including an effort to re-route bike path funding to bridge safety after the bridge collapse in Minnesota. Looking at the watchdog groups that follow this stuff (these are conservative groups, but they don’t hesitate to take on Republicans who go astray on these issues), Citizens Against Government Waste gave Obama a lifetime rating of 22 out of 100, and the Club for Growth rated him a 33 out of 100 for 2007. And the earmarking was already a habit from his State Senate days, as “Obama doled out more than $3.6 million in state grants in just the last half of his state legislative career, records show…Records from 1997 to 2000 weren’t available.” Another report states that “Obama awarded about $6 million for everything from literacy programs and park improvements to drill team uniforms and jazz appreciation events.”

When you turn to specific cases, Obama’s record doesn’t get prettier:

+In 2001, Obama was desperate for cash after maxing out his credit cards to cover debts from his unsuccessful run for Congress. Enter the kind of donor who seems to come out of the woodwork whenever Obama needs help:

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.

Yes, that’s right: taxpayer money for ping-pong tournaments. All for the greater good of retiring Obama’s campaign debts. How critical was the money from Blackwell to Obama’s financial well-being?

Obama’s tax returns show that he made no money from his law practice in 2000, the year of his unsuccessful run for a congressional seat. But that changed in 2001, when Obama reported $98,158 income for providing legal services. Of that, $80,000 was from Blackwell’s company.

+Obama rewarded Fr. Pfleger with a $225,000.00 earmark for programs at Pfleger’s church when Obama was a State Senator, and “Pfleger gave Obama’s campaign $1,500 between 1995 and 2001, including $200 in April 2001, about three months after Obama announced $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs.”

+Obama managed $200,000 for “a venture capital fund linked to the Rev. Jesse Jackson” and his Rainbow/PUSH organization.

+“Englewood got $100,000 for its botanical garden even though it was outside of his state Senate district. Obama needed votes from the neighborhood when he ran for Congress – but after he lost, he reneged on a promise to complete the project. Nothing but a plywood gazebo and a field of weeds sits on the garden plot now.”

+In one case, Obama basically bought off an organization founded by a guy who had run against him three years earlier:

In 2001…Obama steered $75,000 to a South Side charity called FORUM Inc., which promised to help churches and community groups get wired to the Internet. Records show five FORUM employees, including one who had declared bankruptcy, had donated $1,000 apiece to Obama’s state Senate campaign.As the grant dollars were being disbursed to FORUM, the Illinois attorney general filed a civil lawsuit accusing the charity’s founder of engaging in an unrelated kickback scheme. Just days after the suit was filed, Obama quietly returned the $5,000 in donations.

+Even some of the more reputable-sounding earmarks have something in them for Obama’s friends:

His campaign’s list said the senator had secured $1.3 million of an $8 million request in 2006 for a high-explosive technology program for the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The list said the program was overseen by General Dynamics.One of Mr. Obama’s top supporters, James S. Crown, serves on the board of General Dynamics, a military contractor. Mr. Crown is a member of Mr. Obama’s national finance committee.

Mr. Obama also secured $750,000 of a $3 million request for renovation of a space center named for Mr. Crown’s grandfather, Henry Crown, at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

And there’s more

Senator Obama’s ties to the Crowns run deeper than one corporate earmark. Paula and Lester Crown are also both directors of the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, an organization for which Senator Obama has requested a total of $7 million in earmarks since 2006. The first was a request for $4 million in 2006 to fund the Children’s Memorial Medical Center’s Electronic Medical Record Project, and the second was a request for $3 million in 2008 to build an intensive care unit. All told, one third of the directors at CMH, including the Crowns, have donated $95,124 to Barack Obama’s senate campaign, and $119,137 to his presidential campaign. These include Director Vicki Heyman, who along with her husband is a prominent Democratic fundraiser and bundler for the Obama campaign. In total, bundlers on the CMH board and their relatives, the Crowns included, have raised and pledged a total of at least $1.15 million for Obama for America. To top it all off, James Crown and his wife Paula are both bundlers for the presidential campaign, and are members of his National Finance Committee. James Crown was also on Barack Obama’s 2004 campaign finance committee, and is currently co-chair of his Illinois finance committee.

+As McCain has noted, Obama in 2008 managed to snag more than $3 million in federal dollars for a projector for a planetarium in Chicago, after requesting $300,000 for the same project in 2006. How’d they get his attention? “The Chairman and two of the Vice Chairman of the Adler Planetarium Board of Trustees raised a total of almost $250,000 for Sen. Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. The Adler Planetarium was probably pleasantly surprised when they found that their earmark increased by $2.7 million dollars, in other words, by a factor of ten.” *

+“As a state senator, Democrat Barack Obama awarded $75,000 in government grants to a Chicago social service organization led by a rabbi who is also his wife’s cousin, records show.”

(2) Spending

In contrast to the tough and unpopular line-item veto decisions made by Sarah Palin even in good budgetary times in Alaska, Obama’s spending record in Illinois shows a man incapable of saying “no” to domestic spending, even stealing a famous 1999 line from George W. Bush (I noted this previously here):

In a 2007 speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN), Obama touted his Illinois legislative experience and challenged members of Sharpton’s group to find a candidate with a better record of supporting the issues they cared about. …Intrigued by Obama’s challenge to Sharpton’s group, Randolph Burnside, a professor of political science, and Kami Whitehurst, a doctoral candidate, both at the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, decided to put Obama’s Illinois record to the test. The two scholars made a study of bills sponsored and cosponsored by Obama during his Illinois State Senate career.Published in the Journal of Black Studies, the results are striking. Burnside and Whitehurst produced two bar graphs, one representing bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, arranged by subject, and a second displaying bills Obama joined as a cosponsor. In the chart depicting bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, the bar for “social welfare” legislation towers over every other category. In the chart of Obama’s cosponsored bills, social welfare legislation continues to far exceed all other categories, although now crime-related bills are visibly present in second place, with regulation and tax bills close behind. According to Burnside and Whitehurst, other than social welfare and a bit of government regulation, “Obama devoted very little time to most policy areas.”

This brings us to what is perhaps the most striking result of our tour through Obama’s Springfield days. Conventional wisdom has it that John McCain holds a political advantage over Obama on war and foreign policy issues, while Obama is favored to handle the economy. Yet Obama’s economic experience is largely limited to social welfare spending. Indeed, precisely because of his penchant for spending, Obama’s fingerprints are all over Illinois’s burgeoning fiscal crisis.

The Illinois state budget has been in an ever-widening crisis since 2001. In an April 2007 report, a committee of top Chicago business leaders warned that the state was “headed toward fiscal implosion.” Illinois’s unfunded pension debt is the highest in the nation, while Illinois is sixth in the nation in per capita tax-supported debt. Yet the Illinois General Assembly-now controlled by Obama’s Democratic allies-churns out at will exactly the sort of spending programs Obama pushed for, with only partial success, under the Republicans. The result is a fast-growing gap between revenues and expenditures (unimpeded by the statutory requirement of a balanced budget), rising fears of fiscal meltdown, finger-pointing, and political gridlock.

A watershed moment in Illinois’s fiscal decline came in 2002, when crashing receipts and Democratic reluctance to enact spending cuts forced Republican governor George Ryan to call a special legislative session. While Ryan railed at legislators for refusing to rein in an out-of-control budget, the Chicago Tribune spoke ominously of an “all-consuming state budget crisis.” Unwilling to cut back on social welfare spending, Obama’s chief partner and political mentor, senate Democratic leader Emil Jones, came up with the idea of borrowing against the proceeds of a windfall tobacco lawsuit settlement due to the state.

This idea sent the editorial pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune into a tizzy. Editorialists hammered cut-averse legislators for “chickening out,” for making use of “tricked-up numbers,” for a “cowardly abdication of responsibility,” and for sacrificing the state’s bond rating to “short-term political gains.” As critics repeatedly pointed out, borrowing against a onetime tobacco settlement-instead of balancing the budget with regular revenues-would be a recipe for long-term fiscal disaster.

What was Obama doing while all this was going on? He was promoting the tobacco securitization plan in his Hyde Park Herald column, railing against the governor in the Defender for balancing the budget “on the back of the poor,” and voting to override cuts in treasured programs like bilingual education. Actually, far from “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor,” the governor had trimmed evenly across all the state’s most expensive programs. In the end, Ryan did force a number of cuts, yet the resistance of Obama and his allies took a toll. When, just a year later, Democrats added control of the governorship and state senate to their existing control of the house, they revealed that the state deficit had reached $5 billion-far larger than most had feared. Since then it’s been a swift downhill tumble toward fiscal implosion for Illinois.

Obama hasn’t been better in Washington – to pick one egregious example, he voted for the appalling farm bill. Obama remains a major supporter of the ethanol boondoggle (see Freddoso pp. 92-93) – the issue on which every major presidential candidate but John McCain has kowtowed in order to compete in the Iowa caucus – and perhaps not coincidentally, Obama is very closely tied to the ethanol industry, and “briefly provoked a controversy by flying at subsidized rates on corporate airplanes, including twice on jets owned by Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation’s largest ethanol producer and is based in his home state.” (Now it turns out that even his vaunted “95%” tax cut plan consists largely not of tax cuts but of disguised social welfare spending, by cutting checks to people who currently pay no taxes.)

(3) Housing

You are probably familiar by now with Obama’s role in joining with Senate Democrats to resist needed reforms of the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the role that played in the current housing crisis, as well as Obama’s status as the largest annual recipient of Fannie/Freddie campaign cash, his tabbing of one Fannie CEO to head his veep vetting process and another’s role (if you believe him) as an Obama economic advisor. *

Some may view this as somehow an odd coincidence, that Obama was so especially popular with these enterprises. But if you have read this far, you’ve undoubtedly noticed how many of Obama’s shady associations and grubby favors have involved housing interests. Obama’s in this all the way. For example, Obama’s old friends at ACORN likewise have their hands in the subprime debacle:

ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC) was beyond knee-deep in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failures which have riveted our economy. Promoting an ACORN housing development in Texas on its website in 2006, ACORN boasted “in addition to providing access to AHP grants, ACORN’s lending partners provide low cost, easier to qualify for mortgage loans.”

* Or consider this April 1995 Chicago Sun-Times description of ACORN’s pitch to home buyers at a time when Obama was pushing his foundations to expand funding for ACORN: “You’ve got only a couple thousand bucks in the bank. Your job pays you dog-food wages. Your credit history has been bent, stapled, and mutilated. You declared bankruptcy in 1989. Don’t despair: You can still buy a house.” The Stanley Kurtz article has much more on ACORN’s specific efforts to influence Fannie and Freddie to loosen credit standards for subprime housing loans, including this:

This sweeping debasement of credit standards was touted by Fannie Mae’s chairman, chief executive officer, and now prominent Obama adviser James A. Johnson. This is also the period [1993-95] when Fannie Mae ramped up its pilot programs and local partnerships with ACORN, all of which became precedents and models for the pattern of risky subprime mortgages at the root of today’s crisis. During these years, Obama’s Chicago ACORN ally, Madeline Talbott, was at the forefront of participation in those pilot programs, and her activities were consistently supported by Obama through both foundation funding and personal leadership training for her top organizers.Finally, in June of 1995, President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and Secretary Cisneros announced the administration’s comprehensive new strategy for raising home-ownership in America to an all-time high. Representatives from ACORN were guests of honor at the ceremony.

And of course, Obama in private practice participated in litigation against a major national bank to force them to extend more loans to minorities (I have no doubt that the borrowers he represented were not prime borrowers or the bank would have been much happier for their business). *

(4) Cycles of Money

As should be clear from the discussion of his ties to radicals, Obama has also benefitted from the support of those to whom he directed private funds entrusted to him. During his time on the Woods Fund board, he spread cash around to many community organizations, and lo and behold:

Dozens of the board members and officials from these organizations in turn would donate money, in many instances up to the legal limit, for Obama’s Senate and Presidential races between 2004 and 2008.For example the Woods Fund between 1999 and 2002 granted $60,000 to BPPPI. Board member and executives donated at least $16,950 to Obama’s political campaigns. The Woods Fund granted the Center of Neighborhood Technology $150,000 between 1999 and 2002. Obama received over $24,000 in campaign donations from its officials. And in turn Obama made sure to seek earmarks on their behalf once he reached the U.S. Senate.

(5) Racial Favoritism

Obama in Chicago was likewise a strong proponent of using strict race-based quotas and set-asides to steer government contracting along racial lines, a practice that catered to the narrowest and most provincial interests of his constituents:

In 2004, a U.S. District Court disallowed the ordinance under which Chicago required the use of at least 25 percent minority business enterprises and 5 percent women’s business enterprises on city-funded projects. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Obama and Jesse Jackson were among the prominent voices calling for a black leadership summit to plot strategy for a restoration of Chicago’s construction quotas. Obama and his allies succeeded in bringing back race-based contracting.

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POLITICS: Obama and the Integrity Gap: “New Politics,” Principled Positions, and Conclusion

Chapter seven of seven.

F. “New Politics” In Old Wineskin

Obama’s supporters like to shift the conversation away from his record at all costs and focus on his campaign. One of the principal themes of that campaign has been his commitment to “a ‘new politics for a new time’ shorn of partisanship and division,” exemplified by a higher standard of integrity in campaigning, what John Dickerson of Slate called “a national seminar for 16 months on changing politics and shedding the old insider way of doing things.” Frankly, I pity anyone who was ever foolish enough to believe in that, but at any rate, even if you leave aside the traditional “who lied more and said meaner things about who,” you can see that Obama’s campaign has repeatedly broken the very promises that underpinned the “new politics” theme:

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+Obama pledged during the primaries not to pay “street money” to get out the vote in places like Philadelphia, but will be paying it for the general election.

+Obama claims not to take money from lobbyists, but he’s basically playing word games:

[H]e takes money from lobbyists’ spouses and holds fundraisers at the offices of law firms that lobby Congress. He won’t touch money from PACs or lobbyists representing big oil and drug companies, but he happily accepts huge amounts of money from executives at those companies and many others. In fact, he’s relying on two oil company executives to raise $50,000 apiece for his campaign.Obama may like voters to think he’d cross the street rather than deal with a lobbyist, but nine of his campaign staffers are former lobbyists, and some of his informal advisers are current lobbyists.

Slate has a long list of the many exceptions to Obama’s porous “no lobbyist” policies. * *

+Obama broke his pledge to McCain to stay within the public financing system. *

+Obama pledged to oppose spending by independent “527″ groups on his behalf, but reversed course as such groups have been ramping up to support him.

+Obama abandoned his pledge not to run negative ads.

+Obama promised in 2004 to serve out his full Senate term without running for president in 2008. *

+Jake Tapper has noted that Obama’s recent push to talk about McCain’s involvement in the “Keating Five” scandal in the 1980s contradicts Obama’s assertion earlier in the campaign that the Keating Five story was “not germane to the presidency.” (This, while calling in Keating Five member John Glenn to stump for Obama in Ohio).

Obama has also been in hot water lately for doing nothing to prevent potentially illegal campaign donations, including possibly from foreign sources. Now, I’m not much of a starry-eyed idealist about this sort of thing, so I won’t pretend for your benefit to be scandalized by Obama acting exactly like a conventional politician on a bunch of political-process issues. But once again, Obama’s repeated abandonment of his prior promises on these sorts of issues reminds us yet again how malleable Obama is when it comes to any principle that stands in the way of his political self-interest.

G. Barack Obama, Man of Principle?

(1) Keep Left to Avoid The Traffic

As John McCain has now noted multiple times in their debates with no response from Senator Obama, Obama has never bucked his own party or its major interest groups in any significant way on any significant issue. Now, I’m a great believer in taking principled stands and having a coherent philosophy; the mere fact of being ideologically consistent is not necessarily in and of itself a character flaw. In fact, in a politician who is willing to take difficult stands on principle it can be positive proof of integrity.

But in Obama’s case, his unwillingness to confront his own party and supporters on the issues raises two questions about his character. The first is that his career has insulated him from ever having to take a tough position and hold it under fire; until the current general election, he has never faced a contested election against a Republican or faced any real push-back from the Right (previously the only candidate to test him from his right was Hillary Clinton…think about that one a while). We have little enough evidence that Obama’s positions are, or are not, deeply held convictions he would hold to at any political peril – like so much about him, they are untested. What we do know is that Obama’s flurry of flip-flops this summer, most notoriously his craven capitulation on the FISA bill he had pledged to draw a line in the sand on, combined with his continuing effort in the debates to recast himself as a tax-cutter, spending-cutter and foreign policy hawk and his outright obfuscation of his position on the Born-Alive Infant Protection bill in Illinois, suggests that Obama’s not actually all that willing to openly defend controversial positions.

Second, it is positively contradictory for Obama’s supporters to argue that (1) his extensive ties to left-wing radicals were some sort of disingenuous camoflauge, and at the same time that (2) his rigidly left-wing voting record in public office is the mark of sincere high principle. Maybe Obama has a hardline left-wing record and far-left friends because that’s who he really is, and maybe he has both because that’s who he wanted to be to his constituents – but it’s not plausible to separate the two.

(2) Iraqophobia

In the absence of any battles against his own side or even any principled risks taken for his own side, most odes to Obama’s judgment, character and principles begin and end with his opposition to the Iraq War – his 2002 war speech and his 2007-08 primary campaign as the sole principled anti-war candidate:

In a September 26, 2007, debate at Dartmouth College, Obama congratulated himself for “telling the truth to the American people even when it’s tough, which I did in 2002, standing up against this war at a time where it was very unpopular. And I was risking my political career, because I was in the middle of a U.S. Senate race.”

A theme he repeated at Saddleback in August. Again, the reality is different:

Obama’s best shot at the [2004] Democratic [Senate] nomination involved consolidating a coalition of lakefront liberals and African Americans. “He knew, and I knew, that the liberal progressives were key in any Democratic primary,” says Dan Shomon, Obama’s then-campaign manager…though it may have been unpopular to oppose the war in Washington, that was not the case among liberals in Chicago–among the first cities to pass an antiwar resolution. (Obama also had an interest in pleasing Saltzman [the organizer of the 2002 rally]. The spunky grandmother was an important local ally who has since raised more than $50,000 for his campaign.)Nor was opposing the war likely to threaten Obama in a general election. Illinois is a reliably blue state, carried easily by Al Gore and John Kerry. The state’s only Democratic senator at the time, Dick Durbin (as well as eight of Illinois’s nine Democrats in the House), ultimately opposed the Iraq resolution. Moreover, Obama was a long-shot U.S. Senate candidate likely to lose and remain in his liberal Hyde Park State Senate district, probably among the nation’s least pro-war enclaves.

Obama’s biographer recounts the same details. The Nation quoted Obama in 2003 underlining why the African-American constituents that formed the core of his base were not inclined to support the war:

In the African-American community — which is paid scant attention by national media — anecdotal evidence and polling suggest there is heightened concern about the administration’s credibility and the wisdom of this war. According to a new Gallup Poll, 68 percent of African-Americans now oppose the war.”Blacks are not willing to feel obliged to support the president’s agenda,” explains Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama. “They are much more likely to feel that (Bush) is engaging in disruptive policies at home and using the war as a means of shielding himself from criticism on his domestic agenda.”

And his 2002 speech pandered to that view, even pressing some decidedly anti-Semitic notes. Of course, after giving that one speech, Obama basically disappeared from the war debate without a trace; if you were listing the nation’s loudest voices against the war in 2002 and 2003, you’d run through thousands of names before you reached Obama. From 2004 through the fall of 2006, Obama was essentially grudgingly in support of finishing the job in Iraq, and refused even to say flatly that he’d have voted against the war, telling the Chicago Tribune in July 2004, “[t]here’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.” * As he pivoted to the general election in 2004, before Ryan flamed out, Obama denied that he’d ever called for withdrawal from Iraq. Only in January 2007, after the Democrats proved they could win Congressional elections with anti-war candidates and just weeks before launching his primary campaign, did Obama come out as a full-throated anti-warrior. In short, his Iraq position may never have encompassed a complete flip-flop, but it has surely tacked repeatedly with the political winds, and provides us no evidence of any particular principle or integrity on Obama’s part.

H. Who Obama Isn’t

Less than a month from the general election, we can say who Barack Obama isn’t, but we still don’t really know who he is. To be sure, Obama is to all appearances affable, a good speechmaker and a good family man, but when we look beyond talk to what the man has done, we find an awful lot not to like in such a short and parochial career.

Three times now in the debates, John McCain has challenged Obama to name an example of standing up to the vested interests on his own side or the leadership of his own party. Three times, Obama has failed to respond. Those of us who have studied his career know that that’s because there is nothing he can say (the best David Axelrod could come up with was a Russ Feingold bill that passed the Senate 96-2). We can’t know what Obama truly believes, and we haven’t seen what it would take to get him to stand his ground under fire. We only know that time and again he’s taken the path of least resistance with people who really needed someone to say “no” to them, and reaped the rewards of their favor.

A President Obama would be faced with many challenges and crises and tests, not a one of which he has ever passed. He would have the ability to appoint scores of people to federal executive, judicial and administrative agency jobs – what kind of people would he appoint to positions of responsibility? He would have control over vast quantities of federal spending – how would he spend it, how would he restrain spending, who would his spending and regulatory decisions benefit? Would he stand up to sleaze, to powerful vested interests that support his party, to ideological extremists? Can he be trusted to operate these vast powers when we know that a compliant Democratic Congress led by the likes of Charlie Rangel and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers and Chris Dodd will have no motivation to provide meaningful oversight? Everything in his record tells us that he cannot. Obama supporters who tell you otherwise are simply wishcasting their own desires and ignoring his actual record. Because Barack Obama has no record of integrity. Only words, and people who badly want to believe them.

In Part III: McCain’s battles; Biden’s long tradition of existence in the Senate.

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October 12, 2008

POLITICS: Beldar on the Branchflower Report

I’ll have more detail on this later in the week after I’ve finished with the big Obama post. In the meantime, here’s Beldar, who has actually followed this story from the outset and has read the whole thing.

Posted by Baseball Crank at 10:09 AM | Politics 2008 | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

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POLITICS: Obama Rumor Mill

If you go out on the web you will find with Barack Obama, as with any national political figure, a broad spectrum of charges ranging from the indisputably true to the undeniably crackpot, and plenty in between. Here’s two of the hot recent ones that fall in the gray area, as well as one example of how the mainstream media can follow up on stuff like this.

This essay by Jack Cashill argues somewhat convincingly that Dreams of My Father had the assistance of a ghostwriter, and more speculatively that the ghostwriter was Bill Ayers. I don’t know a lot about Cashill but the essay is basically in the category of “plausible but unproven speculation.” On the upside, Cashill doesn’t make any really uncheckable assertions of fact other than his linguistic analyses (which could presumably be rechecked by MSM sources), so you can apply your own judgment.

Then we have this report sourced out of the Daily Mail in London suggesting an extramarital affair by Obama. (H/T Ace, who applies the Andrew Sullivan standard). Aside from Clinton and Gary Hart, we’ve had rumors of this kind in the past with Kerry, McCain (aside from the known affairs on his first wife, that is), George H.W. Bush, Palin and John Edwards, and only the Edwards one panned out. I don’t put much stock in this or think the media should report it without investigating and getting the facts right. But I would hope they do seriously investigate stuff like this even when it’s about Obama.

Then we have this September 29 report from Ken Timmerman of Newsmax about Obama’s lack of financial controls and resulting receipt of large numbers of shady and quite likely illegal campaign contributions, including from foreign sources. Newsmax is not the most credible of sources – I generally don’t cite their work unless it can be corroborated – but Timmerman, too, made clear what his sources were (FEC records) and you had to wonder why no major media outlets had tried the same thing. Shamed by Newsmax, which the IHT version of this credits, the New York Times ran basically the same investigation and seems to have come to basically the same conclusion, albeit without bringing themselves to address the more problematic foreign-donor angle. But it’s a key example of the major media lacking the initiative to do basic due diligence on Obama until a fringe-y right-wing source delivers them a completed story on a platter.

October 10, 2008

POLITICS: Not The ACORN He Knew

I’ll cover this in more detail in a few days in Part II of my series on the Integrity Gap between the two tickets, but as the evidence mounts* of the involvement of the left-wing community organizer group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in extensive voter fraud across multiple states, Barack Obama has tried to minimize his involvement with ACORN and the critical role it played in his rise in the world of the Chicago political machine.

Obama’s “Fight the Smears” campaign website denies any ties to ACORN other than his representation of the group in a 1995 lawsuit:

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.

Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

As the Cleveland Leader points out, this is flatly contradicted by an article written by ACORN head Toni Foulkes, which was conveniently removed from the internet (a common practice in the drive to scrub all evidence of Obama’s career prior to 2004) after it was quoted by Stanley Kurtz of the National Review and other sources, while the rest of the articles on the same site remain up:

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Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.”

This stuff has been out there in plain sight, yet still Obama denies it:

As recently as March 2008, the Los Angeles Times also made reference to Barack Obama’s involvement with ACORN:

“At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff.” (LA Times, March 2, 2008)

It was also reported contemporaneously by the left-wing Chicago press:

A 1995 Chicago Reader article on Obama stated “Obama continues his work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons.”

During the 2008 Democrat primary, the Obama campaign paid Citizen Services Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, more than $800,000, a payment that Obama’s campaign somehow managed to misreport to the FEC

As of yet, we can only speculate about why Obama is lying about his involvement with ACORN, what other aspects of that relationship he has failed to disclose, and what other things have been conveniently “disappeared” from his Chicago past.

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