Obama's Chicago Years: Race Conscious Big Government

Stanley Kurtz has been doing some of the best writing on Barack Obama's fundamental leftism.

  

As the 2008 presidential election quickens, Obama's ties to the oppositional elements of America's subterranean outposts of the American left are becoming increasingly clear, from William Ayers to ACORN. 

Kurtz is on the assignment with his latest piece, "Barack Obama's Lost Years," which takes a look at Obama's history as an Illinois state senator:

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 theHerald, 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.

Kurtz then goes on to break down each area of Obama's state governmental experience, from his racial legislative record, to his relationship to liberals and radicals, and to his big government redistributionism.

The picture that Kurtz provides is one not just of a Chicago machine politician - in the classic style of Illinios power and patronism - but also one of a personalist postmodern update of earlier eras of Democratic Party racial recrimination and state-centrism.

This vision is a good preview of the future of American politics under a Barack Obama administration in Washington, D.C. 

Obama's Stealth Socialism

Peter Wehner, at the National Review, notes:

John McCain, while still the underdog, has a chance to pull out this election. He's gotten more aggressive in the last week or so and it is, I think, beginning to pay dividends.

McCain's most recent dividends come from Obama's missteps on the race controversy. But his deeper vulnerability is found in his stealthy socialist agenda. Investor's Business Daily makes the argument:

During his NAACP speech earlier this month, Sen. Obama repeated the term at least four times. "I've been working my entire adult life to help build an America where economic justice is being served," he said at the group's 99th annual convention in Cincinnati.

And as president, "we'll ensure that economic justice is served," he asserted. "That's what this election is about." Obama never spelled out the meaning of the term, but he didn't have to. His audience knew what he meant, judging from its thumping approval.

It's the rest of the public that remains in the dark, which is why we're launching this special educational series.

"Economic justice" simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It's a euphemism for socialism.

In the past, such rhetoric was just that — rhetoric. But Obama's positioning himself with alarming stealth to put that rhetoric into action on a scale not seen since the birth of the welfare state.

In his latest memoir he shares that he'd like to "recast" the welfare net that FDR and LBJ cast while rolling back what he derisively calls the "winner-take-all" market economy that Ronald Reagan reignited (with record gains in living standards for all).

Obama also talks about "restoring fairness to the economy," code for soaking the "rich" — a segment of society he fails to understand that includes mom-and-pop businesses filing individual tax returns.

It's clear from a close reading of his two books that he's a firm believer in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich at the expense of the poor.

Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old.

There's more at the link.

See also, Kyle-Anne Shiver, "Why I'm Thanking God for Obama."

Cartoon Credit: Michael Ramirez

Blogger and Sitemeter

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Dave Marron at The Thunder Run with a heads up on a possible denial-of-service lock-out attack on his blog. (Perhaps this was a replay of the Pro-Bama lock-out controversy in June.)



This apparently happened to a number of bloggers as well, and the outrage prompted The Yankee Confederate to post this provocative entry: "Obama's Netroots Supporters Continue 'Blog Burning'."



The whole controversy, both political and technological, generated responses from both left and right.



Then, late afternoon yesterday, I had trouble logging onto my own blog. I tried a couple of different computers, and keep getting an error message. A Google search sent me to a Blogger help group, where I found that websites with SiteMeter code were gettting blocked in Internet Explorer.



I removed the code and that fixed the problem.



Wired has a nice summary, "Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet Explorer":

A number of web sites that use SiteMeter tracking code to monitor the number of visitors to their site are reporting that the code is causing Internet Explorer browsers to crash when users visit their sites.



I haven't spent time testing a lot of sites, but the Gawker Media sites all seem to be affected. These include Gawker, Valleywag, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, among others.



The problem appears to be affecting IE 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0. Internet surfers using IE to access a site that has SiteMeter tracking it receive a message saying the site cannot be loaded and "operation aborted." The issue seems to have begun late afternoon Friday.



SiteMeter has not responded to a request for comment and so far has posted no announcement to its web site addressing the issue. But SiteMeter's blog has a few posts published earlier this week referencing its move to a new platform and changes to its tracking code.



A number of sites are reporting that once they remove the SiteMeter code, the problem disappears and their page loads fine in IE.

Captain Ed notes that the Hot Air blogs were affected, and he suggests having a backup browser available for Internet Explorer users facing trouble with website accessability.



For techies, see The Reference Frame, "Fix: IE7 with Sitemeter: Operation Aborted."

Obama Missteps in Race Allegations

This morning's New York Times suggests Barack Obama has hit the wrong tone in his allegations of racism against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain:

Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles, but this week a few of his words opened a racial door his campaign would prefer not to step through. When Senator John McCain’s camp replied by accusing him of playing the race card from the bottom of the deck, the Obama campaign seemed at least momentarily off balance.

The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates. So on Friday the Obama campaign, a carefully controlled lot on the best of days, reacted most cautiously as it sought to tamp down any sense that it was at war with Mr. McCain over who was the first to inject race into the contest. Mr. Obama made no mention of the issue, except for a brief reference in an interview with a local newspaper in Florida.

“I was in Union, Mo., which is 98 percent white, a rural conservative, and what I said was what I think everyone knows, which is that I don’t look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates,” he told The St. Petersburg Times. “There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this.”

The furor started on Thursday when Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, said, “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.” Mr. Davis was alluding to Mr. Obama’s remarks on Wednesday that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

As Mr. Obama carefully addressed the issue on Friday, his campaign’s formidable network of grass-roots activists, and the Web sites crafted to give them “talking points” to carry into battle against Republicans, remained uncharacteristically quiet on the matter, even though the issue dominated political blogs for a second straight day.

David Plouffe, the campaign manager, talked briefly, and not too eagerly, about it. And the campaign’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, blamed the Republicans for misconstruing Mr. Obama’s words as an attack, and quickly moved on.

The mainstream press is finally getting it.

It's the Democrats who have been obsessed with race this campaign, and now Obama's own allegations of racism have forced a system-wide backlash against the attacks.

The big question now is how long will the racial pull-back last?

Obama wants to use race to has advantage, just like the activist racial-recrimination base of the party. It's assumed that the guilt-mongering victim's mentality is gold for Democrats, as they can mine the presumed racial shame of white Americans for electoral and policy gain.

But the backlash is too risky, and whatever gains might be had in crass racial appeals aren't enough to justify turning this campaign into a referendum on racial tolerance.

The radical activists would love it, of course. See, "Obama Heckled on African American Policies."

Photo Credit: "Barack Obama addressed hecklers after he finished a speech in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Friday," New York Times.

Do Voters Tell Pollsters the Truth in Racial Surveys?

The question of the "Bradley effect" came up last January in controversies in public opinion surrounding Hillary Clinton's whopping comeback victory in the New Hampshire primary.

The workings of the Bradley effect were first suggested in the 1982 gubernatorial race in California, when black Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost a close challenge to George Deukmejian, after holding a strong lead in match-up surveys heading into election day. Since then, survey specialists have suggested that pollsters might be overestimating black candidate support in pre-election surveys in general.

John Judis offered an overview for this year at the New Republic:

Pollsters - along with nearly everyone else on earth - failed to predict the result of the New Hampshire Democratic primary. According to Real Clear Politics, they estimated that Barack Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton by an average of eight percent. She won by three, and eleven percent is an awful lot for pollsters to be wrong by - well beyond the margin of error. In the scramble to explain how this could have happened, several writers, including Andrew Sullivan and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, have suggested that the discrepancy might be the result of what is called the "Bradley effect."

Judis took particular issue with Andrew Kohut, who had looked at the New Hampshire controversy in, "Getting It Wrong."

All of this is a nice background review to the Wall Street Journal's weekend analysis, "When Voters Lie":

One of the toughest questions on any poll is whether people are telling the truth. It is a conundrum that looms front and center as voters look ahead to the first U.S. presidential contest that an African-American candidate has a chance to win. With polls showing overwhelming voter support for the idea of a black president, researchers and pollsters are trying to determine who really means it.

Peter Hart, a Democrat on a bipartisan team conducting the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, estimates that 10% of current Democrats and independents who say they support presumed Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama may not be giving a fully honest answer, at least based on their responses to broader questions about race. "This election is exceptionally tricky," he says.

While most political pollsters say they don't find large numbers of people lying on polls, they are taking extra precautions....

Pollsters look for the "Bradley Effect," the idea that some white voters are reluctant to say they support a white candidate over a black candidate. The phrase refers to California's 1982 gubernatorial election, when the late Tom Bradley, a black Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, led in exit polls against white Republican George Deukmejian. Mr. Bradley lost the election. The conclusion: some voters hid their true choice from pollsters. Skeptics say the issue was neither race nor honesty. One theory is that Mr. Deukmejian's supporters simply didn't want to participate in polls.

Sen. Obama leads Republican rival John McCain 47% to 41%, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey last month. Aides to Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain declined to discuss the details of the candidates' polling strategies. But the two camps no doubt take surveys with a grain of salt. "There certainly is a presumption that people self-censor to some degree," says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center in Washington.

In a recently released study, Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., found nearly 11% of people who have reported being polled said they have lied to pollsters about their views on politics and public affairs. "Why they're lying is probably as varied as individuals are varied," says Jerry Lindsley, director of the school's polling institute. "Halfway through a survey, they might all of a sudden get nervous about the kinds of questions they're being asked and start to lie or not be totally straightforward."

Questions about polling and race were raised during this year's presidential primaries. In New Hampshire, polls gave Sen. Obama as much as a 10-percentage-point advantage over Hillary Clinton the day before the primary. Sen. Clinton went on to win the state. Pollster Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, doesn't blame lying. Instead, he says, some voters who were poorer, less-educated and white may have had less favorable views of African-Americans and were less likely to take surveys. "When polls get it wrong, it's not because people lied, it's because the people who turned down the polls have different attitudes than the people who took the polls," he says.

Read the whole thing, as well as the sidebar analysis by June Kronholz, "How the Unconscious Affects the Truth."

Note, though, that recent political science research finds that white voters show little disinclination to vote for black candidates in congressional, and state and local elections.

That's not to say, however, that racial bias in voting is insignificant after all. The Washington Post reported in June that "3 in 10 Americans Admit to Race Bias." However, that same survey found that voters were more concerned about John McCain's advanced age than they were about Barack Obama's racial background.

I wrote a beefy analysis on racial prejudice during the Democratic primaries, "Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race."

I don't think racially "sensitive" voting will ever totally be eliminated, but a hegemonic Jim Crow structure of racist sentiment is a thing of the past. Indeed, while Barack Obama's election seems to have stimulated latent racist ideological and psychological elements (even though much of this is justified in terms of free speech exceptions), the strong possiblity of the Illinois Senator's election to the presidency in November seems to make a lot of these debates moot.

Related: "Obama Aide Concedes 'Dollar Bill' Remark Referred to His Race."

Obama's Economic Illiteracy

This video analysis of Barack Obama's economic planning, from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation, is essential viewing. It's about ten minutes long, but well worth your time:

Additional analysis on Obama's political economy is provided by Michael Boskin: "Obamanomics Is a Recipe for Recession."

Hat Tip: Vulcan's Hammer

Terror's Continuing Evil

The continuing evil of terrorism was on display last weekend with the bombings in Istanbul, Turkey, and Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad, India. The Jerusalem Post explains the implications, in "Why Terror Thrives":

Someone set out to kill a lot of people on Sunday night in Istanbul, Turkey - and did. Two bombs were exploded, 10 minutes apart, along a pedestrian mall in a residential neighborhood. The first explosion attracted a crowd; the second, which could be heard a mile away, was intended to kill those drawn to the site of the first attack. Some 17 people lost their lives and over 150 were wounded. Turkish president Abdullah Gul said the attack showed "the ruthlessness of terrorism." Indeed it did.

Terrorism, meaning the systematic use of force against civilians to demoralize, intimidate or subjugate countries or peoples, has been a scourge of humanity from time immemorial. The assault against an El Al plane at Munich Airport on February 10, 1970 was not the first instance of a civilian airliner being targeted. That appalling distinction goes to a Puerto Rican communist who hijacked a US airliner to Havana in 1961. Cuba gave him asylum.

It was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, however, that trailblazed attacks on airliners with its September 7, 1970 hijacking of three planes "to call special attention to the Palestinian problem." Sure enough, the Palestinian cause has since became synonymous with anti-civilian warfare, from the Munich Olympics' massacre in September 1972 to the Arab fratricide inside Gaza this weekend. And the slaughter of innocents is now part of the Islamists' struggle against "infidels." What the Palestinians began in the early 1970s is now paying "dividends."

This past weekend, for instance, Muslim attackers killed 49 Hindu civilians in western India, in 17 separate attacks. The modus operandi, as in Turkey, was a small explosion followed by more bombs set off to kill rescue service personnel and bystanders.

Yesterday, at least 25 Shi'ite pilgrims were killed and 52 wounded when female suicide bombers (presumably Sunni Arabs) attacked a religious procession in Baghdad.

Terrorism is now so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. And always, obscenely, the onslaughts are carried out "in the name of Allah."

TRAGICALLY, the international community has only itself to blame for making terrorism permissible as a tool of war - depending on who is blown up, and who is doing the blowing up.

This distinction was first articulated by the world's most coddled terrorist, Yasser Arafat, on November 13, 1974, when the PLO chief made his debut appearance at the UN General Assembly: "The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights," he asserted. "Whoever stands by a just cause and fights for liberation from invaders and colonialists cannot be called terrorist... The Palestinian people had to resort to armed struggle when they lost faith in the international community...." The family of nations responded with a standing ovation.

Although Arafat would make a number of tactical flip-flops on the use of violence against innocent civilians, he ultimately rejected gains he could have made at the negotiating table - at Camp David in 2000, for instance - in favor of unleashing the second intifada.

One can only fantasize about how much safer the world would be today had the UN, instead of legitimizing Arafat's terrorism, charged him with war crimes. Would disgruntled Muslims have established al-Qaida's global network - or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Al Shabaab in Somalia, or the Army of Muhammad in India - had the international community sent a different signal all those years ago? But not only did Arafat get a green light from the international community, the world has since helped nourish self-defeating Palestinian tendencies toward violence, intransigence and radicalism.

Seldom have the Palestinians been told to choose between violence and political accommodation. When the Quartet gave Hamas precisely that choice, the Palestinians stood their ground. Far from penalizing them, the world went wobbly - the most recent example of this being a UK parliamentary committee, headed by Labor MP Ann Clwyd, which wants to "dialogue" with Hamas and lift sanctions against Gaza's Islamo-fascist regime.

VIOLENCE may be endemic to mankind, yet the community of nations nevertheless managed to outlaw poison gas and criminalize genocide. Is it beyond people's capacity to, belatedly, define deliberate attacks against civilians as a crime against humanity? Wouldn't the world be a better place if terrorists found no sanctuary, no financial backing and no diplomatic cover - because, simply, no "reason" justified their actions?

See also, "Unending Terrorism."