[Rhodes22-list] Political - Reading Assignment for Rockafeller Republicans?

[Tootle]

Brad,

Now how many Obama supporters will either read or understand?

Ed K
Greenville, SC, USA
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing." -Edmund Burke




Brad Haslett-2 wrote:
> 
> Ed,
> 
> Here's some interesting reading.  I'll send the link to the NYT's and
> attach
> the Weekly Standard article (the more informative of the two).  What I
> found
> interesting about the Standard article was the requirement in Chicago for
> 25% minority participation in city construction projects and 70% on one
> particular project.  I probably told you the story about us going to work
> for three black "contractors" from Indianapolis when we first landed on
> the
> MS Coast.  They owned a pickup truck, three cellphones, and a clipboard,
> and
> knew absolutely nothing about construction.  They were very forthright
> with
> us, "we're the only black 'contractor' on the coast, we're getting all the
> juicy ROE's (right of entry)".  We worked for them for two weeks (since we
> owned equipment and knew what we were doing) but discovered they had fled
> town (for good) when we pressed them for payment.  That was not an
> uncommon
> experience in the first few weeks after Katrina and was what encouraged us
> to pursue no further public work and do only private projects.
> 
> Brad
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/us/politics/03affirmative.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1217768990-2g13xxT6nmafXBY6ayueFw
> 
> --------------------
> 
> [image: The Weekly Standard]
> 
> 
> 
>   Barack Obama's Lost Years
> The senator's tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an
> old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal.
> by Stanley Kurtz
> 08/11/2008, Volume 013, Issue 45
> 
> 
> Barack Obama's neighborhood newspaper, the *Hyde Park Herald*, has a
> longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from
> Chicago aldermen to state legislators to U.S. senators. Obama himself, as
> a
> state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for the *Herald*, under the
> title
> "Springfield Report," between 1996 and 2004. Read in isolation, Obama's
> columns from the state capital tell us little. Placed in the context of
> political and policy battles then raging in Illinois, however, the young
> legislator's dispatches powerfully illuminate his political beliefs. Even
> more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling Obama's early
> political
> and legislative activities in the pages not only of the *Hyde Park
> Herald*,
> but also of another South Side fixture, the *Chicago Defender*.
> 
> Obama moved to Chicago in order to place himself in what he understood to
> be
> the de facto "capital" of black America. For well over 100 years, the
> *Chicago
> Defender* has been the voice of that capital, and therefore a paper of
> national significance for African Americans. Early on in his political
> career, Obama complained of being slighted by major media, like the
> *Chicago
> Tribune* and the *Chicago Sun-Times*. Yet extensive and continuous
> coverage
> in both the *Chicago Defender* and the *Hyde Park Herald* presents a
> remarkable resource for understanding who Obama is. Reportage in these two
> papers is particularly significant because Obama's early political
> career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate
> in
> 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the "lost
> years," the period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to
> his
> formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a
> community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, *Dreams
> from
> My Father*. The pages of the *Hyde Park Herald* and the *Chicago
> Defender*thus offer entrée into Obama's heretofore hidden world.
> 
> What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of
> the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning
> politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama
> campaign. As details of Obama's early political career emerge into the
> light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah
> Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and
> Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment
> and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other
> words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious,
> exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state
> budget
> deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift
> the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the
> day-culture-war
> issues included. It's no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield
> years
> in relative silence.
> 
> * THE CENTRALITY OF RACE*
> 
> Any rounded treatment of Obama's early political career has got to give
> prominence to the issue of race. Obama has recently made efforts to
> preemptively blunt discussion of the race issue, warning that his critics
> will highlight the fact that he is African American. Yet the question of
> race plays so large a role in Obama's own thought and action that it is
> all
> but impossible to discuss his political trajectory without acknowledging
> the
> extent to which it engrosses him. Obama settled in Chicago with the
> declared
> intention of "organizing black folks." His first book is subtitled "A
> Story
> of Race and Inheritance," and his second book contains an important
> chapter
> on race. On his return to Chicago in 1991, Obama practiced civil rights
> law
> and for many years taught a seminar on racism and law at the University of
> Chicago. When he entered the Illinois senate, it was to represent the
> heavily (although not exclusively) minority 13th district on the South
> Side
> of Chicago. Indeed, race functions for Obama as a kind of master-category,
> pervading and organizing a wide array of issues that many Americans may
> not
> think of as racial at all. Understanding Obama's thinking on race, for
> example, is a prerequisite to grasping his views on spending and taxation.
> Thus, we have no alternative but to puzzle out the place of race in
> Obama's
> broader political outlook as well as in his legislative career.
> 
> When it comes to issues like affirmative action and set-asides, Obama is
> anything but the post-racial politician he's sometimes made out to be.
> Take
> set-asides. In 1998, Obama endorsed Democratic gubernatorial hopeful John
> Schmidt, stressing to the *Defender* Schmidt's past support for
> affirmative
> action and set-asides. Although Obama was generally pleased by the U.S.
> Supreme Court's 2003 acceptance of racial preferences at the University of
> Michigan, he underscored the danger that Republican-appointed justices
> might
> someday overturn the ruling. The day after the Michigan decision, Obama
> honored the passing of former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson Jr.,
> eulogizing
> Jackson for creating model affirmative action and set-aside programs that
> spread across the nation.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Prominent among those allies were two of Obama's earliest and strongest
> political supporters, Hyde Park aldermen Toni Preckwinkle and Leslie
> Hairston. These two are known as fierce advocates of set-asides and key
> orchestrators of demonstrations and public-relations campaigns against
> businesses that question race-based contracting. When, in 2001,
> construction
> work was planned for South Lake Shore Drive, a major artery that connects
> Hyde Park to the rest of Chicago, Preckwinkle and Hairston seized the
> occasion to call for an extraordinary 70 percent minority quota on
> contracts
> for the project. They even demanded that, for the sake of race-based
> hiring,
> normal contractor eligibility requirements be waived. Then when work on
> South Lake Shore Drive was not awarded to minority contractors, a group
> consisting of Preckwinkle, Hairston, two neighboring aldermen, and
> numerous
> activists staged a surprise raid on the construction site, shutting it
> down
> and forcing the contractor to hire more blacks. A raid on a second
> construction site collapsed when several blacks were found already at work
> on the project. (The aldermen said these African-American laborers had
> been
> hired at the last minute to stymie their protest.)
> 
> Biographical treatments of Obama tend to stress the tenuous nature of his
> black identity-his upbringing by whites, his elite education, his home in
> Chicago's highly integrated Hyde Park, personal tensions with black
> legislators, and questions about whether Obama is "black enough" to
> represent African Americans. These concerns over Obama's racial identity
> are
> overblown. On race-related issues Obama has stood shoulder to shoulder
> with
> Chicago's African-American politicians for years.
> 
> Occasionally, Obama has even gotten out in front of them. In 1999, for
> example, he made news by calling on the governor to appoint a minority to
> the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), a body that had previously
> attracted
> little notice among Chicago's blacks. In 2000, the *Chicago Defender*
> named
> Obama one of a number of "Vanguards for Change," citing him for "focusing
> on
> legislation in areas previously unexplored by the African-American
> community
> including his call that a person of color be appointed to the ICC." Obama
> did bring a somewhat different background and set of interests to the
> table.
> Yet the upshot was to expand the frontiers of race-based politics.
> 
> And the story doesn't end with Obama's support for set-asides. 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."
> 
> Speaking in reply to Obama was Mary E. Flowers, an African-American state
> senator who apparently broke black caucus discipline and voted to approve
> the casino's location in a nonminority area. Said Flowers: "The Black
> Caucus
> is from different tribes, different walks of life. I don't expect all of
> the
> whites to vote alike.  .  .  .  Why is it that all of us should walk
> alike,
> talk alike and vote alike?  .  .  .  I was chosen by my constituents to
> represent them, and that is what I try to do." Given Obama's supposedly
> post-racial politics, it is notable that he should be the one demanding
> enforcement of a black political agenda against "lone agents," while
> another
> black legislator appeals to Obama to leave her free to represent her
> constituents, black or white, as she sees fit.
> 
> Obama's fight to unify the black caucus on the casino vote was undertaken
> in
> partnership with state senator Donne Trotter. Yet nearly every
> biographical
> account of Obama lavishes attention on Trotter's claim that Obama was just
> a
> "white man in black face." The significance of that bit of campaign hype,
> offered while Trotter was running against Obama for Congress, has been
> exaggerated, perhaps because Trotter's epithet helps to defuse the notion
> that Obama himself practices race-based politics. Yet Obama does exactly
> that. His public legislative cooperation with Trotter, and with other
> black
> Illinois politicians, yields more insight into Obama's political plans
> than
> any electoral rhetoric or private intra-black-caucus backbiting. To the
> extent that Obama can be accused of having shaky "black credentials," that
> very accusation pushes him to practice race-conscious politics all the
> more
> energetically.
> 
> 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."
> 
> Obama's intensely race-conscious approach may surprise Americans who know
> him primarily through his keynote address at the Democratic National
> Convention of 2004. When Obama so famously said, "There is not a Black
> America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America-there's
> the
> United States of America," most Americans took him to be advocating a
> color-blind consciousness of the kind expressed in Martin Luther King
> Jr.'s
> dream that his children would one day be judged, not by the color of their
> skin, but by the content of their character. Anyone who understood Obama's
> words that way should know that this is not the whole story. In an essay
> published in 1988 entitled "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the
> Inner
> City," Obama tried to make room for both "accommodation and militancy" in
> black political engagement. He wrote,
> 
>  The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward
> their
> lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to
> Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has
> raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and
> militancy, between sit-down strikes and board-room negotiations. The lines
> between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most
> successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these
> seemingly divergent approaches.
> 
>  However his views may have evolved in the ensuing 20 years, Obama surely
> knew that the King-like rhetoric of his keynote address would be taken by
> most Americans as a repudiation of the kind of race-based politics he and
> his closest allies have consistently practiced throughout his electoral
> career. It's difficult to gauge the extent to which Obama may have
> consciously permitted this misunderstanding to take hold, or the extent to
> which he still believes that the opposition between "integration and
> nationalism, between accommodation and militancy" is a false one. Neither
> alternative is particularly encouraging.
> 
> * LIBERALS AND RADICALS*
> 
> Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama has made a point of refusing the
> liberal
> label. While running for Congress against Bobby Rush in late 1999 and
> early
> 2000, however, Obama showed no such compunction. At a November 1999
> candidate forum, the *Hyde Park Herald* reported that "there was little to
> distinguish" the candidates, who "struggled to differentiate themselves"
> ideologically. Acknowledged Obama, "[W]e're all on the liberal wing of the
> Democratic party." Indeed, the common political ideology of the candidates
> was a theme in *Herald* coverage throughout the race. Rush's background
> suggests what that ideology was: A Chicago icon and former Black Panther,
> Rush received a 90 percent rating in 2000, and a 100 percent rating in
> 1999,
> from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Both years the American
> Conservative Union rated him at zero percent.
> 
> So how exactly did these two liberal candidates "struggle to
> differentiate"
> themselves in debate? During a candidate forum, for example, when Rush
> bragged that since entering Congress, he hadn't voted to approve a single
> defense budget, Obama pounced, accusing Rush of having voted for the Star
> Wars missile defense system the previous year. Since that contest, Obama's
> liberalism hasn't exactly been a secret to the folks back home. In 2002,
> Obama himself could speak hopefully of plans "to move a progressive
> agenda"
> through the state legislature, and local observers commonly identified
> Obama
> as a "progressive." When it endorsed him for the U.S. Senate in 2004,
> the *Chicago
> Defender* proclaimed Obama "represents renewal of the liberal,
> humanitarian
> cause." The *Defender* went on to assure readers that Obama would support
> "progressive action" in Washington.
> 
> The most interesting characterization came from Obama himself, who laid
> out
> his U.S. Senate campaign strategy for the *Defender* in 2003: "[A]s you
> combine a strong African-American base with progressive white and Latino
> voters, I think it is a recipe for success in the primary and in the
> general
> election." Putting the point slightly differently, Obama added, "When you
> combine  .  .  .an energized African-American voter base and effective
> coalition-building with other progressive sectors of the population, we
> think we have a recipe for victory." Obama consciously constructed his
> election strategy on a foundation of leftist ideology and racial bloc
> voting.
> 
> The overwhelming majority of Obama's "Springfield Report" columns in the
> *Hyde
> Park Herald* deal with state or local issues. It's interesting, therefore,
> that one of the tiny handful of Obama columns explicitly dealing with
> national politics is a 2000 column pleading with readers to support Al
> Gore
> rather than Ralph Nader for president. Obama opens his column noting that
> he's heard many people complain that Al Gore and George Bush are beholden
> to
> the same "big money interests." In pressing his case for Gore-which hinges
> on Republican/Democrat differences on issues like Supreme Court
> appointments, abortion, affirmative action, the environment, and school
> vouchers-Obama makes a point of agreeing with some of Nader's criticisms
> of
> the major parties. Obama raises no objections to Nader's agenda and
> implicitly presents himself as someone who might support Nader, were it
> not
> for the danger of a wasted vote aiding the Republicans. It's also striking
> that so many of the policy considerations Obama counts as decisive are
> classic sixties-derived issues-precisely the sort of polarizing
> culture-war
> conflicts Obama nowadays claims to have transcended. In the end, Obama
> needn't have worried. Hyde Park voted 91 percent for Gore, 6 percent for
> Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.
> 
> Obama's strong liberalism is nowhere more evident than on the subject of
> crime. Throughout his Illinois State Senate career, crime was a top Obama
> concern. Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most
> celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We've heard a good deal of
> late
> about Ayers's Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of
> repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with
> Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my
> neighborhood." Yet several Obama-Ayers connections are known: Obama's 1995
> political debut at the home of Ayers and his wife (and fellow former
> terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn, Obama's joint service with Ayers on the board
> of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a couple of appearances with Ayers on
> academic
> panels, and what the *New York Times* called Obama's "rave review" (not
> actually a full review, but a warm endorsement) of Ayers's book on
> juvenile
> justice, which Obama dubbed "a searing and timely account" in the *Chicago
> Tribune*.
> 
> For all the attention, the actual content of Ayers's 1997 book, *A Kind
> and
> Just Parent*, as well as the political context of Obama's interest in it,
> have so far passed unremarked. Obama supporters paint Ayers as having
> mellowed since his radical days, pointing to his wonkish interests. Yet
> Ayers's radicalism pervades his book on Chicago's juvenile court system.
> Founded in 1899 (long before juvenile murder rates shot off the charts),
> Chicago's juvenile court was the first in the world, intended to serve as
> "a
> kind and just parent" to offenders. Ayers's title, he explained in the
> book,
> is meant to "bristle with irony" as a commentary on an American "society
> out
> of control." Ayers expressed the same sentiment more bluntly in an
> interview
> published in the *New York Times* shortly after 9/11, when he not only
> dismissed the notion of the United States as a "just and fair and decent
> place," but said the claim "makes me want to puke." * A Kind and Just
> Parent
> * is a thoughtful, well-informed, and beautifully written book, which
> provides revealing and sometimes disturbing glimpses of life at a Chicago
> juvenile detention facility. The book also virtually defines the phrases
> "liberal guilt" and "soft on crime." Ayers agon-izes over a high school
> field trip years ago, on which he and other white students toured a
> juvenile
> court system largely populated by black boys. When recounting horrific
> crimes-and even his own mugging-Ayers focuses on the terrified insecurity
> of
> the perpetrators, rather than the harm they inflict. Testifying at the
> trial
> of a young felon he'd been tutoring, Ayers calls him "nervous, a little
> shy  .  .  .  eager to please." The prosecutor responds: "Would you call
> shooting someone eight times at close range 'eager to please?'" Actually,
> Ayers effectively does do this, opening his book with the claim that a
> young
> murderer had "slavishly followed the orders" of his gang leader, rather
> than
> acting of his own free will.
> 
> 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.
> 
> The most intriguing thread linking Obama, Ayers, and crime, however, runs
> through Ayers's wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn founded the Children and
> Family Justice Center at Northwestern University, and along with her
> associates there, she regularly and energetically opposes "get tough"
> crime
> laws. Ayers draws on his wife's wisdom in *A Kind and Just Parent*, and
> Dohrn, like her husband, publicly presents her work on juvenile justice
> not
> as a repudiation of her youthful radicalism, but as a continuation of it.
> 
> The Ayers-Dohrn-Obama nexus was jolted into action in late 1997 and early
> 1998, when a major juvenile justice reform bill was introduced in the
> Illinois General Assembly. Written by prosecutors and sponsored by a
> Republican ex-prosecutor, the bill was neither simplistic nor partisan.
> Well
> aware of evidence that sending juveniles to adult prisons can backfire and
> actually raise recidivism rates, sponsors met rehabilitation-minded
> critics
> halfway. The proposed bill was an early example of "blended sentencing,"
> in
> which juveniles who have committed serious crimes are given both a
> juvenile
> sentence and a parallel adult sentence. So long as the offender keeps his
> nose clean, doesn't violate parole, and participates in community-based
> rehabilitation, he never has to serve his adult sentence. But if the
> offender violates the provisions of his juvenile sentence, the adult
> punishment kicks in. That gives young offenders a powerful incentive to do
> right, and puts toughness at the service of offering kids a second chance.
> 
> Blended sentencing is generally viewed as an innovative compromise. To
> those
> on the far left, however, blended sentencing is just another mean-spirited
> "get tough" crime measure in disguise. That's why, when the Illinois
> blended
> sentencing bill was introduced in 1997, both Obama and Bernardine Dohrn
> were
> cited by the *Chicago Sun-Times* as key local critics of the bill. Steven
> A.
> Drizin, an associate of Dohrn's center (who is thanked in Ayers's book)
> was
> a member of the study commission that helped produce the bill, yet
> remained
> an energetic critic, not only of blended sentencing, but of nearly every
> other prosecutor-favored provision in the bill.
> 
> Meanwhile, Obama worked closely with the Illinois Black Legislative Caucus
> to slow the bill's progress, expressing skepticism about the blended
> sentencing provisions. While one report speaks of Obama negotiating with
> Cook County state's attorney Richard Devine for a compromise, there is
> good
> reason to believe that Obama's actual aim was to scuttle the entire bill.
> We
> have this on the authority of someone who may very well be Michelle Obama
> herself. Michelle Obama organized a University of Chicago panel about Bill
> Ayers's crime book in November 1997, just as the battle over the juvenile
> justice bill was heating up. That panel featured appearances by some of
> the
> key figures discussed in Ayers's book, along with Obama himself, who was
> identified in the press release as "working to block proposed legislation
> that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system." In
> effect,
> then, this public event was a joint Obama-Ayers effort to sink the
> juvenile
> justice bill-Obama's decision to plug Ayers's book in the *Chicago
> Tribune*the following month was part of the same political effort.
> 
> In January 1998, a front-page headline in the *Defender* touted Obama's
> claim that the juvenile justice bill might be on the verge of failure.
> Obama
> hoped that black caucus opposition to the sentencing provisions might be
> matched by concerns among some Republicans that the bill could force
> expensive jail construction (based on the prospect that the deterrent
> effect
> of blended sentencing might fail, thereby forcing more juveniles into
> adult
> prisons). Obama's hopes were wildly off-base. In the end, the juvenile
> justice bill passed overwhelmingly. Given his ambitions for higher office,
> Obama was no doubt reluctant to vote against the final bill. A
> last-minute,
> minor and uncontroversial adjustment to the blended-sentencing provisions
> by
> the governor appears to have provided enough political cover for the
> bill's
> sharpest critics including Obama to come around and support it.
> 
> Also in 1998, according to the *Hill*, a Washington newspaper, Obama was
> one
> of only three Illinois state senators to vote against a proposal making it
> a
> criminal offense for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with
> a
> street gang. A year later, on a vote mandating adult prosecution for
> aggravated discharge of a firearm in or near a school, Obama voted
> "present," and reiterated his opposition to adult trials for even serious
> juvenile offenders. In short, when it comes to the issue of crime, Obama
> is
> on the far left of the political spectrum and very much in synch with his
> active political allies Ayers and Dohrn.
> 
> Obama's signature crime legislation was his effort to combat alleged
> racial
> discrimination by the Illinois police. In 2003, the *Defender* said Obama
> had "made a career" out of his annual battle for a bill against racial
> profiling. For years, profiling legislation was bottled up by the Illinois
> senate's Republican leader. When senate control shifted to the Democrats
> in
> 2003, Obama's racial profiling bill finally passed-just in time to give
> his
> drive for the U.S. Senate nomination a major boost. At the time, Obama
> touted his profiling bill as "a model for the nation." It's also said that
> Obama showed a willingness to listen to police during the negotiations
> that
> led to the final bill. With the Democrats in control, however, the police
> had little choice but to work with Obama. As Obama himself made clear at
> the
> time, the police never abandoned their opposition to the bill.
> 
> Police doubts were entirely justified. Obama's bill is a deeply flawed
> example of precisely the sort of grievance-driven race-based politics that
> fuels legislation on affirmative action and minority set-asides. All of
> these "remedies" falsely leap from statistical evidence of racial
> disparities to claims of discrimination. In the case of racial profiling,
> disproportionate police stops of black or Hispanic motorists in no way
> prove
> discrimination.
> 
> In her path-breaking 2001 study, "The Myth of Racial Profiling," Heather
> Mac
> Donald assembled the evidence. It showed that racially disparate patterns
> of
> drug-interdiction stops in New Jersey, one of the first states supposedly
> proven to have practiced racial profiling, in fact reflected racial
> differences in the transport of drugs. Drug trafficking is not evenly
> spread
> across the population (as profiling activists improperly assume), and for
> the most part New Jersey police were simply going where the drugs were.
> Wrote Mac Donald, "When white club owners, along with Israelis and
> Russians,
> dominated the Ecstasy trade, that's whom the cops were arresting." When
> the
> big shipments shifted to minority neighborhoods, arrests followed. That's
> good crime intelligence, not racism. The reason virtually every major
> law-enforcement organization opposes racial-profiling legislation is that
> these bills invariably fail to provide benchmarks based on actual
> group-based variations in crime rates. Without such benchmarks, there is
> no
> basis for leaping from statistical disparities in traffic-stops to
> accusations of police racism.
> 
> Obama's February 16, 2000, *Hyde Park Herald* column was a textbook
> example
> of the racial-profiling fallacies Mac Donald exposed. Arguing for
> legislation to require* *the collection of traffic-stop data by race,
> Obama
> made the bogus leap from disproportionate traffic-stops and searches to
> accusations of racism using the same, baseline-free ACLU-supplied
> statistics
> Mac Donald critiqued. Obama then made a still greater leap: "Racial
> profiling may explain why incarceration rates are so high among young
> African Americans-law enforcement officials may be targeting blacks and
> other minorities as potential criminals and are using the Vehicle Code as
> a
> tool to stop and search them." The notion that the high black
> incarceration
> rates are due to racist traffic stops is utterly fanciful. (Mac Donald
> lays
> out the evidence not only in her profiling piece, but also in a second
> important study, published this year, "Is the Criminal-Justice System
> Racist?") Obama's column takes a leaf right out of Jeremiah Wright's
> playbook, stoking the worst sort of race-based conspiracy theories.
> 
> Indeed, Obama's racial profiling crusade shows his political alliance with
> Wright, Pfleger, and Meeks in action. We know from Obama's 1988 "Why
> Organize?" essay that a long-term goal of his was to politically organize
> "liberationist" black churches:
> 
>  Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the
> traditional
> 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.
> 
>  We also know from a 1995 profile that Obama viewed his legislative role
> as
> an extension of his grass-roots organizing career. So it's unsurprising to
> see in the *Hyde Park Herald* of February 28, 2001, that Obama's
> "grass-roots lobbying effort" for racial profiling legislation is to
> feature
> not only the ACLU and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education
> Fund,
> but also appearances by Meeks and Pfleger. The *Chicago Defender* notes
> the
> additional presence of Reverend Michael Sykes, an associate pastor of
> Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. So Obama's drive for racial
> profiling legislation brought to fruition his long-time goal of
> politically
> organizing Chicago's most liberationist black churches. Of course Wright,
> Meeks, and Pfleger are known for their demagogic accusations of white
> racism. Obama's racial profiling bill fit squarely in that tradition. As
> with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, it's evident that the liberationist
> preachers were also his valued political allies.
> 
> Like other racial-profiling activists, Obama frequently cites New Jersey's
> experience as proof of his case. A little-noticed 2007 study by University
> of Chicago professor Paul Heaton sheds some fascinating light on the
> profiling crusade in that state. Heaton found that as a result of
> anti-profiling reforms, annual arrests of minorities for motor vehicle
> theft
> in New Jersey declined by 20-40 percent. Unfortunately, during the same
> period, motor vehicle theft increased in minority areas. Heaton concluded:
> "It appears that official and public scrutiny of profiling behavior by
> police can lead to substantial reductions in arrests of minorities,
> although
> this enforcement reduction may carry the unintended consequence of
> encouraging crime in minority areas." In other words, Heaton's work tends
> to
> corroborate Heather Mac Donald's analysis-not Barack Obama's.
> Disproportionate traffic stops are largely a response to disproportionate
> crime, while using simplistic statistics to falsely accuse police of
> racism
> yields more crime, not less.
> 
> * A NEW WAR ON POVERTY *
> 
> Important though it is to Obama, the crime issue runs a distant second to
> his deepest passion: social welfare legislation. "Big government liberal,"
> "redistributionist"-call him what you like, Obama's fondest hope is to
> lead
> America into another war on poverty. Everything in his state-legislative
> career points in this direction, and Obama calls for a renewal of
> expensive
> national anti-poverty programs in his book *The Audacity of Hope*. True,
> Obama's promotion of government partnerships with private-sector housing
> contractors (like Antoin "Tony" Rezko) was supposed to open up novel,
> post-Great Society solutions to the problem of poverty. Yet, as a
> devastating *Boston Globe* report on Obama's Illinois housing policy
> recently showed, the results of Obama's new war on poverty are just as
> counterproductive as those of the old war on poverty. Neighborhoods
> supposedly renovated now lie deserted by the private developers who took
> Obama's government handouts and ran-quickly building or renovating housing
> units, but failing to maintain them.
> 
> Race and crime issues excepted, Obama's Illinois legislative career as
> covered in the newspapers essentially boils down to a list of spending
> measures. Many of Obama's proposed expenditures were tough to oppose.
> Because he was working under a Republican majority for the bulk of his
> time
> in the Illinois State Senate, Obama became a master of incrementalism. His
> pattern was to find the smallest, most appealing spending proposal
> possible,
> pass it, then build toward more spending on the same issue. An Obama bill
> exempting juvenile prisoners from paying for nonemergency medical or
> dental
> services isn't something you'd want to vote against. Obama's small,
> targeted
> spending measures tended to pass and to be followed by more: Obama called
> for a $30 million youth crime prevention package; Obama requested
> additional
> funds to expand the regulation of electrical utilities; Obama asked for
> $50
> million over five years to overcome the "digital divide"; Obama proposed
> to
> fund anger management classes for children age 5-13; Obama ran for
> Congress
> promising to restore federal block grants to pre-Republican levels, and so
> on.
> 
> 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. (Incidentally, Sharpton named Jeremiah Wright's
> daughter Jeri Wright, publisher-editor of Wright's *Trumpet Newsmagazine*,
> to head NAN's new Chicago chapter in 2007. He named Wright's successor,
> Reverend Otis Moss III, its vice president.) 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. Now ruling,
> the
> Democrats have continued their profligate ways, pushing the state's budget
> woes to new heights.
> 
> Illinois's fate may foreshadow the nation's. Obama's small and carefully
> targeted spending bills were expressly designed to win passage by a
> Republican-controlled state senate. But if Obama takes the presidency with
> a
> Democratic Congress at his back, we'll likely see a grand-scale version of
> the fiscal mayhem Obama and his colleagues brought to Illinois.
> 
> Obama's overarching political program can be described as "incremental
> radicalism." On health care, for example, his long-term strategy in
> Illinois
> was no secret. He repeatedly proposed a state constitutional amendment
> mandating universal health care. Prior to the 2002 budget crisis, Obama's
> plan was to use the windfall tobacco settlement to finance the transition
> to
> the new system. That would have effectively hidden the huge cost of
> universal care from the taxpayer until it was too late. Yet Obama touted
> his
> many tiny expansions of government-funded health care as baby steps along
> the path to his goal. The same strategy will likely be practiced-if more
> subtly-on other issues. Obama takes baby-steps when he has to, but in a
> favorable legislative environment, Obama's redistributionist impulses will
> have free rein, and a budget-busting war on poverty (not to mention
> entitlement spending) will surely rise again.
> 
> Obama's vaunted reputation for bipartisanship is less than meets the eye.
> The Illinois legislature has long been home to a number of moderate
> Republicans, less fiscally conservative than their colleagues, many from
> districts where the parties are closely balanced. It was easy enough to
> get
> a few of these Republicans to sign onto small, carefully tailored spending
> bills directed toward particularly sympathetic recipients. The trouble
> with
> Obama's bipartisanship is that it was largely a one-way street. Overcoming
> initial opposition from Catholic groups, for instance, Obama cosponsored
> an
> incremental bill on abortion, requiring hospitals to inform rape victims
> of
> morning-after pills. Yet rejecting compromise with the other side, Obama
> voted against bills that would have curbed partial-birth abortions. In
> other
> words, Obama is bipartisan so long as that means asking Republicans to
> take
> incremental steps toward his own broader goals. When it comes to
> compromising with the other side, however, Obama says "take a hike." Obama
> voted against a bill that would have allowed people in possession of a
> court
> order protecting them from some specific individual to carry a concealed
> weapon in self-defense. The bill failed on a 29-27 vote. Bipartisanship
> for
> thee, but not for me: That's how Obama ended up with the most liberal
> voting
> record in the U.S. Senate.
> 
> The real Obama? You see him in those charts. Fundamentally, he is a
> big-government redistributionist who wants above all to aid the poor,
> particularly the African-American poor. Obama is eager to do so both
> through
> race-specific programs and through broad-based social-welfare legislation.
> "Living wage" legislation may be economically counterproductive, and
> Obama-backed housing experiments may have ended disastrously, yet Obama is
> committed to large-scale government solutions to the problem of poverty.
> Obama's early campaigns are filled with declarations of his sense of
> mission-a mission rooted in his community organizing days and manifest in
> his early legislative battles. Recent political back flips
> notwithstanding,
> Barack Obama does have an ideological core, and it's no mystery at all to
> any faithful reader of the *Chicago Defender* or the *Hyde Park Herald*.
> * *
> 
> *Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center*.
>      (c) Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
> Reserved.
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