David Freddoso - The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Medias Favorite Candidate

THE RHETORIC VS. THE REALITY

B arack Obama is a mere man. Even worse, he is a politician.

Obama claims to be a new kind of politician- -a candidate who will rise above petty partisan divides and bring us a new era of "change."

That is his rhetoric, anyway.

Here is what he really is: A shrewd, Machine-aligned politician from Chicago- -the kind who "won't make no waves and won't back no losers." A left-liberal politician in the mold of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Walter Mondale. A charismatic, smooth-talking politician whose words make people faint.

Our press normally fixes a critical eye on ambitious politicians who promise us the world. That eye just seems to well up with tears whenever it falls upon the junior senator from Illinois.

As the least experienced politician in at least one hundred years to obtain a major party nomination for President of the United States, Obama appears to be escaping the appropriate examination that any man (or woman) who covets the Oval Office deserves. Too many of those criticizing Obama have been content merely to slander him- -to claim falsely that he refuses to salute the U.S. flag or was sworn into office on a Koran, or that he was really born in a foreign country. Such spurious criticisms have given rise to an intellectual laziness among the very people who should be carefully scrutinizing Obama.

That is why this book needed to be written.

It took only a couple of years covering Washington and Congressional politics for me to learn a sad, simple fact: A disappointingly small number of those who run for office from either party are true reformers. The ones who are reformers usually lose.

Obama has crafted himself an image as one of those rare reformers who succeeds. This is what prompted me to begin work on this book. As it became clear that he was going to win the Democratic nomination for president, it seemed irresponsible to stand by as so many were offering admiration, piety, even worship to- -of all things- -a politician. Because the idea of Barack Obama as a reformer is a great lie.

Obama has not pursued true reform in any of the offices he has held. He has silently and at times vocally cooperated with Chicago's Democratic Machine to preserve one of the most overtly corrupt political systems in the nation. He maintains his silence now, even though he has the political capital to do something about the problem, because his political allies in Illinois are the problem. These are the allies who drafted and gave him popular, must-pass bills to herd through the state legislature; the allies who openly take credit for making him a senator; the allies who control Chicago's political money. In Washington, his commitment to reform has been no greater- -not even this year, as he runs for office promising "change" and "hope."

Obama's ethnic pedigree understandably attracts much interest and fascination. But it is far less interesting than his unusual political pedigree. He is the product of a marriage between two of the least attractive parts of Democratic politics- -the hard-core radicalism of the 1960s era and Chicago's Machine politics. Obama plays hardball and knows when to look the other way. But he also surrounds himself with political, social, and spiritual mentors who are so far to the left that many push the envelope on ideological respectability. The interesting result of this mix is that Obama can engineer a high-minded drive to register thousands of voters in Chicago's black wards, only to turn around and throw all of his opponents off the ballot on a technicality, so that those voters have no choice but to elect him. This is precisely how he first won his state Senate seat in 1996.

It also means that despite his capacity for such political savvy, Obama was still so attracted to the startling radicalism of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that he continued to attend the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Oprah Winfrey, recognizing the problems with Wright that Obama has since experienced, had much earlier abandoned the same congregation in part out of concern for her public image.

Barack Obama is a candidate for the presidency of the United States. It is appropriate to consider his character, his record, his background, and his proposals. It is not appropriate for anyone who takes his role as a citizen seriously to weep at Obama's message of "hope" and "change,"

Barack Obama has demonstrated great skill in fundraising and in delivering speeches that have been carefully written, parsed, and tested in advance to achieve maximum emotional impact.

Whether in victory or defeat, Barack Obama's supporters will be the last ones to understand that he is just another politician. He is not and never will be worthy of such adulation.

Barack Obama is an impressive man- -he would never have gotten this far if he weren't. But he is not the force for "Change" or "Unity" that many nave individuals believe he is. He is simply another liberal Democratic politician who will divide America along the same lines as it has been divided for decades.

As a policy-maker, Obama has very bad ideas that would hurt America- -they are the same ideas that have been floating around Washington for years, though in some cases more extreme. The same ideas espoused by Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, or any of Obama's other liberal ideological soulmates on Capitol Hill.

On abortion, he stands to the left of even these liberals- -once you understand his position, you see that he is to the left of almost everyone in America. His understanding of foreign policy is unsurprisingly thin for someone who was still a member of the Illinois Senate as recently as November 2004.

Obama's irregular land deal with a felon later convicted of corrupting public officials deserves more than a superficial examination of whether the transaction itself was corrupt. We ought to ask why in the world Obama had a seventeen-year friendship with a figure whose livelihood depended on sapping the taxpayer for subsidies and corrupting public officials- -officials like Barack Obama. What did Obama ever do to help Rezko? Quite a bit, as we shall see.

When those close to him become stained by scandal, Obama suddenly shows a level of cognitive dissonance unworthy of the obviously intelligent, reflective author of Dreams from My Father : "This isn't the Tony Rezko I knew..."

Obama speaks of the days when his family was making $240,000 per year as if he had been suffering poverty. Meanwhile, he argues that the wealthy need to pay more in taxes, and in March he voted to raise yours if your taxable income is greater than $32,500 per year. That is a very different measure of wealth.