Now watch out because I’m going to talk about the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, state senator and candidate for US Senate, Barack Obama. I think maybe it’s time we all take responsibility and start behaving like adults, not blind, fawning adoring children. It is important to bring reality to this candidate and not idolize him. We have to be honest, fair, and objective. At least, that is my hope for the voters of the State of Illinois.
Barack Obama’s keynote speech was delivered (some would say) exceptionally well, and he had some good lines — particularly the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white, that was especially good. But in essence it was a Clinton redux, with the exception that he didn’t address concretes about the economy, which Clinton always delivers. It was a fairly good speech delivered like a good actor, that highlighted not his trials and tribulations — outside of having a funny name — but the trials and tribulations of his grandparents.
Obama’s speech was an echo of Clinton’s and Kennedy’s speeches about “one America,” challenging the Republican categorization of Democrats as un-patriotic, weak, and irresponsible; but where Clinton’s speech brought out specifics and focused economic policy– and Kennedy’s speech focused on the definition of love for one’s country, Obama’s speech rested on a sociological evaluation: there is no “conservative America” and “liberal America,” he said, but the “United States of America”; and yes, he said, we have some gay friends. Ultimately, he was saying, Democrats and Republicans represent different interests but the policies of this government are antithetical to what all Americans want. Nothing new, though, after listening to Gore, Carter, Clinton, and Kennedy.
My criticism on Obama recently incited much interest, and I have, to date, received many pieces of angry, denunciatory mail for my efforts; but for me that is just enough reason to focus even more of a critical eye on him. I have received even more kudos from my internet political pundits for doing a good job of covering and exposing another point of view, that which the media has overlooked or at other times, glossed over. A friend and colleague suggested I’d be shirking my duty as a political pundit in Illinois not to discuss him, and he’s right. Curiosity and research are in my nature, anyway, so I feel a little reality check could be useful to us all. We as citizens are not being served well by this blind devotion (Mark Brown has compared him to Lincoln; The Reader to Jesus Christ) to Obama, who should be scrutinized just like any politician.
Who is Barack Obama? Well for a long time he went by “Barry,” first of all. He is an intelligent University of Chicago professor, which is not to be sneezed at, and a lawyer who serves Hyde Park and the Gold Coast in Springfield (in the 2002 election, half of his votes came from three wards — those representing the Gold Coast, Hyde Park, and South Shore). This, along with the fact that he was born and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia — make his stump speech line about being “from the South Side of Chicago” not a lie, exactly, but a little misleading.
Both of his parents were academics — his father was the senior economist in Kenya’s Ministry of Finance — and he lived comfortably, attending elite private schools as a youth and then attending Columbia University in New York. After he received his B.A., he came to Chicago for a handful of years when he was a paid organizer. He then returned to the Ivy League at Harvard, where he served as editor of the Law Review. After that, he came back to Chicago and was one of the directors of Project VOTE, which totes itself as a non partisan organization with the goal of turning out and registering record numbers of new voters. He eventually secured a post at the University of Chicago. Soon he ran for the state senate when his political sponsor stepped down to run for a different office. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress against Bobby Rush in 2000.
OK. Is everybody OK? Still with me? Calm? Maybe this would be easier if you turned that framed picture of him around for a second.
Mr. Obama’s record in the state legislature is spotty and has raised certain questions about his supposed idealism.
http://www.vote-smart.org/npat.php?can_id=BS030017&PHPSESSID=a7090747d72cb8e1f5238fb867de2bb4
Most notoriously, he raised displeasure with portions of the gay and lesbian community when he co-sponsored Senate Bill 101 (SB101) — which added the phrase “sexual orientation” to a civil rights act — but failed to do much lobbying for it personally, and didn’t reach out to the black caucus for their support. Some said he was tippy-toeing around the issue to avoid confronting some powerful black church groups that opposed the change; this was while representing mainly Hyde Park and surrounding areas and the Gold Coast.
Later, there was the issue of a parity pay bill for Illinois homemakers, HB4176. This bill was the result of years of hard work by a large, low-income union, which had expended enormous resources pushing and lobbying the bill. The union had thrown rabid support behind Obama in the primaries, spending the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in manhours to get him the nomination. Many of these workers were women, many elderly, who spent weeks out in the freezing Chicago winters registering voters and attending rallies. When the bill reached Mr. Obama’s committee for a vote, he tried to transfer it to another committee to avoid having to cast a vote himself. Why? Perhaps he feared angering a rival union which was slightly smaller but had more political muscle.
Not exactly a profile in courage.
Then there is the behavior of his campaign during the primary, which could be considered by some as less than admirable.
Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times, an admirer of Obama, pointed out the needless and suspicious secrecy of his campaign, especially its fundraising arm. His chief media advisor, David Axelrod, was an advisor to the Clinton campaign who had railed against the politics of personal destruction in the 1990s. Axelrod was also once a columnist for the Tribune and an advisor to Mayor Daley.
Last month, the Tribune finally admitted that it was Axelrod and the Obama campaign that brought pressure on the press to demand the unsealing of M. Blair Hull divorce records, which had had their contents leaked to media outlets by the Obama campaign even earlier. The Obama campaign also helped orchestrate a demonstration by women’s groups demanding Hull’s withdrawal from the race. Coincidentally, this was the same weekend Obama’s first commercials hit the airwaves. Interestingly (or maybe not), the same exact thing happened to another of his rivals–Jack Ryan. Certainly gives one pause.
Then there was the DLC incident. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) is a centrist group of Democrats reviled by progressives, who feel it is “republicanizing” the party. Bill Clinton was a DLC Democrat and was integral in early in his political career in shaping its philosophy; Clinton was one of the first national DLC Democrats. African American Democratic leaders are especially likely to be hostile to the DLC — so much so that the Rev. Jesse Jackson once referred to it as the “Democratic Legacy of the Confederacy.” While jockeying for notoriety within the party, Obama made himself known to the DLC and allowed himself to be listed on their list of “100 To Watch”; when the on-line Black Commentator condemned the move and pointed out that his association with the DLC was utterly anathema to his progressive public face, Mr. Obama was recalcitrant and asked the DLC to remove his name from a DLC directory, a directory which he said “implies membership,” and is often used by lobbyists to see where to spread money.
In his response to the Black Commentator, Obama pointed out that he supports, in principle, a single-payer health care system, to be achieved incrementally: but how? I want to know how, specifically. He also said that although NAFTA is not perfect, it should be retained, but reformed: OK, but how? Tell me how.
Yet after the primaries, when Mr. Obama was selling himself downstate as a moderate, he repeatedly insisted his “signature legislation” — the eight to 10 pieces of legislation he highlighted in his campaign literature — he had passed with bi-partisan support. Yet of these 10 pieces of legislation, he passed eight between the time he set up his Senate Exploratory Committee in April of 2003 to his official announcement of candidacy in August; before that, he has no significant legislation passed under his name, especially when the state government was conrolled by a slim Republican majority.
To wit:
• Clean Air Act, passed February 2004
• KidCare Expansion, passed August 2003
• Ethics Bill (SB 702–Chief Sponsor Susan Garrett), passed June 2003
• Videotaped Interrogations, passed August 2003
• Earned Income Tax Credit, passed August 2003
• Country of Origin Labelling, passed in July 2003
• Tuition Limit Increase, enacted January 2004; passed previous summer.
Then there is the Death Penalty Moratorium (S233, HR1038), BTW an ACLU cause, a piece of legislation that by no means can be attributed to any one legislator; remember, the Governor gave this executive order in 2000.
The point is simply that Mr. Obama is no different from any Democratic politician, that I can see, in terms of record and policy — rather he is a talented speaker, certainly passionate, a handsome face, and a shrewd, even ruthless and slick politician with a great desire to win; but he has had trouble maintaining his ideals while serving Hyde Park and the Gold Coast in a relatively anonymous office. When he has to balance the entire state of Illinois, he may have even more trouble. Notice that I said “may”; why is it wrong to ask questions about this guy? Does anybody out there actually think he’s perfect?
http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=7592
Then there is the conspicuous vacuum on illegal aliens. The fact of the matter is, illegal immigration, especially illegal immigration from Mexico, is hurting Black Americans. If Democratic candidates ever getting around to speaking the truth, they will have to tell Black voters that illegal immigration is taking jobs away from Black Americans, cutting into resources available for welfare, and restructuring public schools and many urban areas. In short, the votes of Latinos are brought by the Democrats at the expense of Black America.
As the Democrat’s ”multicultural” candidate, Barack Obama has little to say about this multicultural issue. You can read his position papers and look at his website and find no recognition that illegal immigration from Mexico is hurting Black Americans. One has to wonder what kind of immigration policy Obama will vote for if he ever becomes a U. S. Senator. One has to wonder even more why Black Americans continue to vote Democratic, when the Democrats are not looking out for their interests.
The Obama campaign has been silent too long on the issue of illegal immigration and its impact on Black Americans in Illinois. Nor have other prominent Democrats like Mayor Daley of Chicago, or Jesse Jackson and his son spoken out about the impact of this issue. Black Americans like basketball player Michael Jordan, who gave $10,000, also contribute money to the Obama campaign without questioning Obama’s stand on illegal immigration.
The final and perhaps the most astounding point of interest is that Barack Obama voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act of 2000, HR 2175. Essentially, The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act states that any baby that has been born alive is to be legally considered a person. As such, she or he would automatically be granted full protection under the U.S. Constitution. “Allowing certain unwanted babies whose mothers were induced into labor early in the child’s development to be born, and then leaving those babies on a shelf in a hospital soiled utility room was a practice of infanticide,” said former Senator Patrick O’Malley (R-Palos Park).
The practice was revealed by a nurse who held for 45 minutes until his death one of those babies whose mother had been induced into early labor at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, a hospital in Senator O’Malley’s district at the time. Soon after O’Malley discovered the medical procedure was going on at Christ Hospital, he resigned from the hospital’s governing board and introduced legislation to stop the practice.
O’Malley said that Obama is a well-educated Harvard Law School graduate and has no excuse for not defending innocent persons such as babies who have just been born alive.
“Barack Obama is a constitutional lawyer,” O’Malley said today. “He is on the wrong side of Dred Scott on this one. The legislation I introduced would have protected infants who are born alive with a beating heart and breathing lungs. He was opposed to protecting those babies.”
Obama voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act in the state senate twice in committee and once on the senate floor. He also voted “present” in a subsequent floor vote, which had the effect of a “no” vote. Most recently the legislation was assigned to a committee Obama now chairs, Health and Human Services Committee, and Obama did not allow the legislation to be heard in his committee. While at the federal level similar legislation was passed into law in 2002 with the support of U.S. Senators Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, in the Illinois legislature, Obama opposed the same measure. This shocking revelation should clearly illustrate that Obama is no “moderate”. Voting against that bill is extreme, even for supporters of abortion in general.
But perhaps these arguments are not enough for you to back up my very reasonable point that Mr. Obama is, in fact, a human being who should be taken to task. So then you should ask yourselves: Why do you adore him so much, specifically? What is unique to his ideas that you don’t find anywhere else? And what did you know about him outside of his own campaign rhetoric — that’s called “spin” in somebody else’s campaign?
Am I saying Barack is a bad person? Absolutely not. The legislation he helped pass he should be credited with it. But nobody has given a valid reason why this guy should be compared to Lincoln. It is my nature to resist deification; this is just a man. People are already assuming this guy will be the first black president because he was able to pass a few pieces of legislation the summer before he ran for senate is ridiculous. Even Bill Clinton served as attorney general for one term and chief executive of a state for over a decade before he sought the nomination, and even then he faced remarkably tough competition from two men — Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown (backed by Jesse Jackson).
This guy is human. He has faults, and ultimately, is little more than a politician — I say that because I’m looking at his record; what he has actually done, as well as what he has proposed for the future. So go ahead; I’m willing to hear more arguments as to why this man is perfect and the greatest hope for America since Franklin Delano Roosevelt …except I’d like to hear about something other than his youth, attractiveness and good speaking voice. Affection is subjective and ultimately meaningless. Barack is a big boy, and I’m sure he is willing to be drawn into intellectual debates. Although now that he reduced the number of debates from 6 to 2 when Ryan exited and Keyes entered that race, that literally remains to be seen. But adoration is laziness, and laziness can never serve us as voters and citizens.
As responsible voters who care about Illinois, we must take a look at our candidates and who they really are and what they stand for, not the image or the campaign rhetoric.
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