Washington Examiner Series: The Obama You Don't Know

[saveliberty]

Washington Examiner:

Introduction

 

The Obama you don't know

 

September 19, 2012 | 10:19 pm | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:06 am

14Comments

 

President Barack Obama

Few if any of his predecessors took the oath of office with higher public hopes for his success than President Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.

 

Millions of Americans hailed his election as an end to partisanship, a renewal of the spirit of compromise and a reinvigoration of the nation's highest ideals at home and abroad.

 

Above all, as America's first black chief executive, Obama symbolized the healing of long-festering wounds that were the terrible national legacy of slavery, the Reconstruction Era and Jim Crow. We would be, finally, one nation.

 

******

 

H/T Instapundit

[saveliberty]

Chapter I

 

A childhood of privilege, not hardship

 

September 20, 2012 | 12:13 am | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:05 am

6Comments

 

Obama and his bride Michelle Robinson, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, on their wedding day, Oct. 3, 1992, in Chicago. (Associated Press)

First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that "Barack and I were both raised by families who didn't have much in the way of money or material possessions."

 

It is a claim the president has repeated in his books, on the speech-making circuit and in countless media interviews. By his account, he grew up in a broken home with a single mom, struggled for years as a child in an impoverished Third World country and then was raised by his grandparents in difficult circumstances.

 

The facts aren't nearly so clear-cut.

Edited September 20, 2012 by saveliberty

[saveliberty]

Chapter II

 

The myth of the 'rock-star professor'

 

September 19, 2012 | 10:34 pm | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:04 am

3Comments

Obama with his grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, on a park bench in New York City, when Obama was a student at Columbia University. (Associated Press)

Time magazine gushed in 2008 about Barack Obama's 12-year tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, saying, "Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students."

 

That may have been true during his first two years, when he ranked first among the law school's 40 instructors, with students giving him a rating of 9.7 out of a possible 10.

 

But law student evaluations made available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his popularity then fell steadily.

Edited September 20, 2012 by saveliberty

[saveliberty]

Chapter III

 

The 1997 speech that launched Obama

 

September 19, 2012 | 10:50 pm | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:04 am

3Comments

 

Like so many in the liberal powerbase that served as a springboard for Obama, Marilyn Katz’s activist roots stretch back to her days as a Students for a Democratic Society operative. Today, Katz is an influential political operative in Chicago who has visited the White House 26 times since 2009.

Few doubt that Barack Obama's stirring oration before the 2004 Democratic National Convention vaulted him into the national limelight.

 

But another, less-heralded Obama address -- delivered on Valentine's Day 1997 at First Chicago Bank -- was equally essential to his later successes. Without it, it is doubtful that he would have ever been in position to assume so prominent a role in 2004.

 

Obama was a newly elected Illinois state senator in 1997 when he addressed an audience that included many of Chicago's most powerful political insiders and activists, nonprofit executives, business movers and shakers, and philanthropic funders.

Edited September 20, 2012 by saveliberty

[saveliberty]

Chapter IV

 

For the slumlord's defense, Barack Obama, Esq.

 

September 19, 2012 | 11:36 pm | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:03 am

4Comments

 

via Getty Images and ap A security company owned by now-jailed political fundraiser Tony Rezko sought help from Obama and then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich in an effort to gain a lucrative contract in Iraq, according to a report published in 2007.

Writing in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama said he became "a civil rights lawyer" because "to lend meaning to a community's suffering and take part in its healing -- that required something more."

 

There was indeed "something more" to Obama's legal career, but it wasn't civil rights litigation at the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, where he was employed for a decade.

 

"He spent about half his time working with Bill Miceli and my former partner, Allison Davis, and that team," senior partner Judson Miner told The Washington Examiner. Most of the entries on Obama's client list for the firm from that period were in real estate, construction and finance.

[saveliberty]

Chapter V

 

Obama's toughest critics on the Left

 

September 20, 2012 | 12:07 am | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:02 am

2Comments

 

Obama’s toughest critic on the Left, the late Robert Fitch, charged that Obama’s most trusted aide, Valerie Jarrett, made a fortune as a real estate developer. Fitch, a radical leftist and freelance journalist who specialized in urban politics and economics, said Obama surrounded himself with people who got rich on Chicago’s $1.6 billion neighborhood demolition program known officially as the Plan for Transformation.

Barack Obama's carefully constructed image as a civil rights lawyer who wanted to heal the black community was greeted with skepticism by some Chicago activists.

 

"I never drank the Kool-Aid about Barack Obama," veteran Chicago black activist Eddie Read told The Washington Examiner. Read is president of the Black Independent Political Organization, one of Chicago's largest black community groups.

 

Read -- who describes himself as a "black nationalist" -- said Chicago streets are filled with genuine "street gangsters" and phonies known as "studio gangsters." The latter are impersonators who make money acting in studio-produced rap videos.

[saveliberty]

Chapter VI

 

The poor people Obama left behind

 

September 19, 2012 | 11:51 pm | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:01 am

3Comments

 

A man moves furniture at the Altgeld Gardens housing project Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008, on Chicago's South Side. where Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., used to work as a community organizer. (AP Photo)

Four years after Barack Obama's historic election as president, little seems to have changed for the African-American communities on Chicago's South Side.

 

The lack of change -- or the sense that these neighborhoods are getting worse -- is eroding the president's standing among African-Americans in his hometown.

 

In 2011, Chicago suffered the third-highest black jobless rate among the nation's major metropolitan areas, at 19 percent, according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

[saveliberty]

Chapter VII

 

The myth of Obama as state Senate reformer

 

September 19, 2012 | 11:51 pm | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:01 am

1 Comment

 

Former Illinois state Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, a maverick Republican and reformer, said Obama never fought corruption, by Republicans or by Democrats: "He never wanted to upset the apple cart with the Chicago machine."

Shortly after Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, Prairie State Blue, a liberal blog, attributed his victory to the fact that Illinois' deeply entrenched government corruption had forced "political reformers" in the state legislature like Obama "to network outside the traditional political circles."

 

The claim illustrated Obama's success throughout his career at presenting himself as an outsider and reformer even as he became a skillful operator inside one of the nation's most corrupt political systems.

 

Earlier this year, a study by the Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs pointed to the convictions in recent years of four governors, two congressmen, a state treasurer, an attorney general and 11 state legislators.

[saveliberty]

Chapter VIII

 

Obama's state pension scheme

 

September 18, 2012 | 10:43 pm

2Comments

State Sen. Barack Obama and members of an Illinois lobbying group representing politically connected minority-owned businesses launched a campaign in 2000 to pressure state pension funds to help their friends and donors.

Obama and his cohorts targeted state officials in charge of pension funds for teachers, police and firemen, and regular government employees.

Much as the Rev. Jesse Jackson had been doing for years to Fortune 500 corporations, Obama and the Alliance of Business Leaders & Entrepreneurs, or ABLE, demanded that the officials set aside at least 15 percent of pension assets for management by minority-owned investment companies.

If their plan succeeded, the favored investment companies would add lucrative assets to their portfolios, which in turn would help push even more business their way.

[saveliberty]

Chapter IX

 

The Arab-American network behind Obama

 

September 19, 2012 | 11:54 pm | Modified: September 20, 2012 at 12:00 am

2Comments

 

Ray Hanania, a Chicago-based Arab-American journalist and activist, described the network in a 2007 interview with Chicago magazine as "a small cluster of activists." Chief among them was Obama mentor Tony Rezko, above. Stuart Levine, right, Rezko's former partner and the government's star witness in the Rezko trial, testified that Obama met Nadhmi Auchi at a private Rezko reception held at Chicago's Four Seasons hotel.

President Obama's controversial relationships with radical figures like Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi have been well-publicized in recent years.

 

Prior to his academic career in the United States, Khalidi worked for Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization when it was classified by the State Department as a terrorist group.

 

Less well-known is a cluster of Chicago businessmen who formed an Arab-American network at the heart of Obama's political apparatus. Ray Hanania, a Chicago-based Arab-American journalist and activist, described the network in a 2007 interview with Chicago magazine as "a small cluster of activists" in the business community who were politically involved.

[Draggingtree]

The Fallacy of Redistribution

 

The Fallacy of Redistribution

 

By Thomas Sowell - September 20, 2012

 

 

 

The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.

 

 

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example read more http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/09/20/the_fallacy_of_redistribution_115502.html

[clearvision]

Thanks @saveliberty!

[foxylady]

better late then never

[saveliberty]

I just found Chapter Ten today. @foxylady, it is better late than never!

 

Chapter X

 

Obama brings Chicago politics to Washington

 

September 19, 2012 | 11:54 pm

261Comments

Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus program included $499 billion in federal spending, most of which was channeled through state and local governments. Eight of the 10 states getting the most contracts were heavily Democratic, with highly unionized state and local government workforces, according to stimulus award data at recovery.gov.

Chicago has been called the home of "gangster government." How bad is it?

 

Consider the following facts about the city from which President Obama rose through the ranks of American public life, from community organizer and local lawyer to the Illinois state legislature to the U.S. Senate and finally the Oval Office:

 

» Chicago's 2.7 million residents make up only about 21 percent of the state of Illinois' population of nearly 13 million. Yet the city and its suburbs have accounted for 84 percent of the state's public corruption convictions in federal courts since 1976, according to a study released earlier this year by the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[Valin]

This does have to get out. This is where we come into the picture.

[Valin]

better late then never

 

[Valin]

As I was reading this a thought occurred to me...(yes a real live actual thought...and yes this should concern us all.) I've always said Barck Obama never did anything before running for President...I now admit I Was Wrong. My My My what a busy little bee he was...flitting here and there...doing this and that. Busy hands are happy hands.