Obama and the Minister
By RONALD KESSLER
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120545277093135111.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama's longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor of Mr. Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, gave the sermon at the school's Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel in Washington on Jan. 15, 2006.

"We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he began. "Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."

Mr. Wright thundered on: "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

His voice rising, Mr. Wright said, "We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."

Concluding, Mr. Wright said: "We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . ."

Considering this view of America, it's not surprising that in December Mr. Wright's church gave an award to Louis Farrakhan for lifetime achievement. In the church magazine, Trumpet, Mr. Wright spoke glowingly of the Nation of Islam leader. "His depth on analysis [sic] when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye-opening," Mr. Wright said of Mr. Farrakhan. "He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest."

After Newsmax broke the story of the award to Farrakhan on Jan. 14, Mr. Obama issued a statement. However, Mr. Obama ignored the main point: that his minister and friend had spoken adoringly of Mr. Farrakhan, and that Mr. Wright's church was behind the award to the Nation of Islam leader.

Instead, Mr. Obama said, "I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree." Trumpet is owned and produced by Mr. Wright's church out of the church's offices, and Mr. Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor.

Meeting with Jewish leaders in Cleveland on Feb. 24, Mr. Obama described Mr. Wright as being like "an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don't agree with." He rarely mentions the points of disagreement.

Mr. Obama went on to explain Mr. Wright's anti-Zionist statements as being rooted in his anger over the Jewish state's support for South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. As with his previous claim that his church gave the award to Mr. Farrakhan because of his work with ex-offenders, Mr. Obama appears to have made that up.

Neither the presentation of the award nor the Trumpet article about the award mentions ex-offenders, and Mr. Wright's statements denouncing Israel have not been qualified in any way. Mr. Obama nonetheless told the Jewish leaders that the award to Mr. Farrakhan "showed a lack of sensitivity to the Jewish community." That is an understatement.

As for Mr. Wright's repeated comments blaming America for the 9/11 attacks because of what Mr. Wright calls its racist and violent policies, Mr. Obama has said it sounds as if the minister was trying to be "provocative."

Hearing Mr. Wright's venomous and paranoid denunciations of this country, the vast majority of Americans would walk out. Instead, Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle have presumably sat through numerous similar sermons by Mr. Wright.

Indeed, Mr. Obama has described Mr. Wright as his "sounding board" during the two decades he has known him. Mr. Obama has said he found religion through the minister in the 1980s. He joined the church in 1991 and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith.

The title of Mr. Obama's bestseller "The Audacity of Hope" comes from one of Wright's sermons. Mr. Wright is one of the first people Mr. Obama thanked after his election to the Senate in 2004. Mr. Obama consulted Mr. Wright before deciding to run for president. He prayed privately with Mr. Wright before announcing his candidacy last year.

Mr. Obama obviously would not choose to belong to Mr. Wright's church and seek his advice unless he agreed with at least some of his views. In light of Mr. Wright's perspective, Michelle Obama's comment that she feels proud of America for the first time in her adult life makes perfect sense.

Much as most of us would appreciate the symbolism of a black man ascending to the presidency, what we have in Barack Obama is a politician whose closeness to Mr. Wright underscores his radical record.

The media have largely ignored Mr. Obama's close association with Mr. Wright. This raises legitimate questions about Mr. Obama's fundamental beliefs about his country. Those questions deserve a clearer answer than Mr. Obama has provided so far.


The Two Obamas
Tom Veal
http://stromata.typepad.com/stromata_blog/2008/03/the-two-obamas.html

When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright came to the reluctant attention of the elite media (Mrs. Clinton’s flacks are still earning their keep, even if they have to work harder these days), my first thought was that there are probably a hundred conservative Congressmen whose ministers preach Loony Left sermons on a regular basis. What David Mamet terms “brain-dead liberalism” is the default political stance for contemporary Christian leaders. From what clerical acquaintances tell me, it’s no easier to be a Republican at a church conference than in Hollywood.

Upon closer examination, the Rev. Mr. Wright’s looniness appears to be more conscious and ingrained than the average Protestant clergyman’s. “God damn America”, sympathy for Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, declarations that America deserved 9/11 and dark hints that its government created the AIDS virus go a bit beyond what one ordinarily hears from the pulpits of the Religious Left. A sympathetic profile published last year in the Chicago Tribune emphasized how far Pastor Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is to the left of both a generally very leftish denomination and other black Protestant churches. The Wright ministry began with a political stance and shaped a theology around it. It metastasized into a lesson in why that is the wrong order of priorities. The political starting point, a call for full civil rights for black Americans, was admirable, but putting politics first led to a spurious distinction between “African” and “white” Christianity and eventually to the demonization of white America, “the U.S. of KKK A”.

That a leading Presidential candidate finds such a figure attractive ought to be a cause for worry. It would be a different matter if Pastor Wright were primarily a spiritual counselor. Many men who are wise, even saintly, in the affairs of God have talked foolishly about mundane politics. In the Orthodox Church, we have examples like St. John of Kronstadt, an inspiring preacher, organizer of charitable enterprises and member of the Black Hundred. But Fr. John was a secular naïf, to whom the Cross, the Holy Sacraments and a life of prayer were vastly more important than the City of Man. Jeremiah Wright is the opposite, so far as we can judge by appearances. (I make no judgement about what is in his heart and wish him nothing but the peace and mercy of Our Lord.)

If Barack Obama were a private citizen, or merely one percent of the United States Senate, his close association with Trinity UCC – praise for his “mentor” Pastor Wright, 20 years of active membership, sizeable donations – would be more a personal than a political matter. If he concurred in his church’s radically racist and anti-American ideology, his sentiments could do only minimal harm and would (rightly) be shielded from close scrutiny by our reluctance to pry into other people’s religious beliefs.

The President is on a different plane. One holding Pastor Wright’s views could do immense damage to the country. Am I convinced that Senator Obama sings “God damn America” in the shower? Certainly not. I wouldn’t rate the likelihood as high as 50 percent. On the other hand, it can’t help being significantly above zero, especially after we factor Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Michelle Obama and Tony Rezko into the equation. That friends and ideological soul mates describe the Senator as “most comfortable in the domain of policy and detail” is reassuring only to those who forget that policy wonks can be extremists, too.

Which is the real Obama? The transcender of racial divisions or the faithful acolyte of a radical hatemonger? How much of a chance can we take on getting the answer right?

Democrats and liberals decried George W. Bush’s “risky schemes” (tax cuts, Social Security reform, etc.), urge the “precautionary principle” as the only guide to environmental policy, and express fear that civil liberties will collapse if telecommunications companies can cooperate with government surveillance without a risk of liability. Men of such timid mien really ought to hesitate before gambling their nation on the hope that Barack Obama’s affinity with Pastor Wright is only accidental rather than elective.

The same question would arise if a Christian Reconstructionist were to become a leading Presidential candidate. Could someone who called R. J. Rushdoony or Gary North his mentor, worshiped with Reconstructionists, and gave money to the Chalcedon Foundation reassure us of his non-radicalism by the simple tactic of likening Reconstructionist opinions to those of an eccentric uncle and claiming not to be aware of the most outrageous ones? The fellow might indeed be an utter innocent, attracted solely by postmillennialism and theological explorations of the relation between the Old and New Testaments, with no desire to outlaw heresy or stone adulterers. Nonetheless, it would be elementary prudence, not “guilt by association”, not to make him the most powerful person on Earth.


The Gospel of Jeffrey
http://www.instapunk.com/archives/InstaPunkArchiveV2.php3?a=1298

With all the back and forth in the Democratic campaign over the past few days, people are losing their perspective and getting things wrong. Specifically, they're being swept up in the amount of ink being lavished on individual events and failing to see the difference between a grenade and a bunker-buster. Today, Glenn Reynolds (who also made an erroneous snap judgment of his own this morning) cited The Anchoress as a wise perspective on what's going on:


Both Democrat candidates have been playing victim cards in their turn, for months. Yesterday Geraldine Ferraro upped the ante by playing the gender and reverse-racism victim card.

These are not “racist” or “sexist” gambits being played by Wright or Steinem, but appeals to emotion, and appeals to emotion are too often used to gloss over a lack of substance, or so I have been told by my correspondents on the left, lo these many years, as they accuse the GOP of governing on “fear,” (because terrorism is not a real threat).

And while the victim card appeals to emotions, it tends to noisily set off rage in those who listen and perceive themselves as being identified as the “enemy.” So everyone gets emotional, everyone starts yelling, and no one is listening or making any sense...


Her point seems to be that we are at fault if we experience any kind of emotional response to the exchange of revelations between opposing campaigns. This time, The Anchoress is wrong.

So is the lede of the USA Today piece linked by HotAir.com.


WASHINGTON — The passion fueling the Democrats' history-making presidential campaign is putting two of the party's most important constituencies — women and African-Americans — on what could be a collision course.


What could be...? USA Today is wrong.

And Glenn Reynolds offered the following post, reproduced here word for word:


MARK PENN: Obama "really can't win the general." Yes he can.


Glenn Reynolds is wrong. However they surfaced -- which was inevitable despite The Anchoress's uncharacteristically irrelevant concern with how they surfaced -- the video excerpts from the sermons of Jeremiah Wright are the only significant revelation that occurred this week. (Ferraro's faux-pas will be as insignificant as she is in two weeks time.) They are also fatal to Obama's chances of winning the presidency. They are probably equally fatal to Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the presidency. It's up to the Democrat Party to figure out how to deal with the catastrophe, but catastrophe it is, and there are multiple reasons why.

Everyone has been bending over backwards to give Obama the benefit of every doubt, including all Democrats, the fawning MSM, and the many many conservatives who would also like to enter a post-racial era of politics. That's the prime reason for The Anchoress's rare lapse of good judgment. Citizens in the electorate who perceive, emotionally or intellectually, that they are conceived of as "the enemy" by a presidential candidate can't be accused of "not making any sense" if they suddenly become intensely skeptical of that candidate. They have every right -- an infinitely greater right, in fact, than any candidate for the highest office in the land has to an unlimited benefit of the doubt about the sincerity of his rhetoric. The candidate's prime mission is to convince voters that he (or she) is not serving some narrow slice of the electorate at the expense of all others. If he fails to do this, he has not earned the office. Period.

For a variety of reasons, we all know very little about Barack Obama. His life has been much like his campaign persona, featuring some point of contact for all people. If you're poor and black, he at least is black. If you're white and highly educated, he at least is highly educated. If you're a struggling single mother, he at least was raised by a single mother. If you're a Catholic or a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Baptist, he at least belongs to a nominally Christian church. If you're anybody who believes in the American Dream, he is at least, regardless of policy differences, a living embodiment of the American Dream. He has a finger in every pie. His speeches have been analogous. He wants things to be better. He wants less rancorous partisanship. He wants less conflict between America and the rest of the world. And he asserts his confidence, ever so believably, that all these utopian goals can be achieved because he is all of us, in one way or another.

But we don't know very much about him because the part of him to which any of us can relate is only a sliver. Hardly any of us had a white American college professor for a mother and a Kenyan muslim for a father. Hardly any of us spent large chunks of our youth living in non-European foreign countries. Hardly any of us went to the Harvard Law School. Hardly anyone in American history has been propelled to the summit of national politics with such frighteningly scant experience. He is the promising stranger who seems too good to be true. But he is a stranger, even to the 91 percent of genuine African-Americans who support him knowing that he shares none of their ancestry of slavery. And he is too good to be true.

The truth is, he is none of us. Which is absolutely fine for any individual citizen of the United States. But not for someone who aspires to be president of the United States. Ultimately, we all require some connection that goes beyond lofty phrases in speeches read off a teleprompter. The damage that will simmer and ultimately explode out of the Jeremiah Wright association is that Obama is a phony, no matter how he chooses to respond. Whether he defends his racist, anti-American pastor of 20 years or repudiates him with extreme prejudice. In his heart of hearts Obama understands nothing and no one, because he has never belonged anywhere or truly participated in anything. Which is why he has consistently gone overboard in trying to belong everywhere he's ever been. In the process, he has initiated a chain reaction that will do in his party, his rivals, the people he claims to want to serve, and himself.

He seems to present a forest of contradictions. His classmates at Harvard Law School, including his close associates at the Harvard Law Review, seem to remember him as a great guy, tolerant, friendly, and fair. Yet he chooses to be a member of a church that foments a continuous and deeply counter-productive racial rage. He forms a friendship with an over-privileged Vietnam-era radical terrorist whose knowledge of how to play "the system" is so advanced that he can cop a plea for bombing the U.S. Capitol and emerge from prison into a professorship without ever expressing a moment's remorse. Yet he marries a middle-class African-American woman who has had every conceivable advantage and who now, on the verge of becoming First Lady of the nation, publicly voices a churlish disrespect not only for her country but for white people. men generally, and even the husband who has opened up the golden path to power. He prospers politically through a murky relationship with a Chicago operator who has relationships with multiple dubious moneymen from the Wahabbi middle east that have benefited him politcally and personally. Yet he slams his female presidential rival for releasing a photo of him in muslim dress and objects to the speaking out loud of his own middle name.

Who is Barack Obama? There is only one thread of consistency in all these contradictions -- his distance from everyone in his life, save possibly the mother he chose to ignore in an autobiography focused on his distant, abandoning father. Barack Obama is whoever he happens to be around, whoever the emotionally strong people in his life choose to surround him with, whoever it serves him to be at the moment.

The argument is being made that Obama must hate America because he went to Jeremiah Wright's church, got married there, had his children baptized there, and contributed $20K to it in 2006. That's wrong, too. It's Michelle Obama who hates America, who believes the vile propaganda of yet anothe rich, phony, one-church Pope, who wanted to be married in a Farrakhan-esque cult denomination, and have her children baptized there. Obama was just reflecting her wishes because she was authentic African-American and he was merely determined to belong. She knows this. That's why she can barely conceal her contempt for him.

There is no Barack Obama. Everyone who meets him makes up their own version of him. He is an outstanding orator becaue he has learned to read the desire of those around him about who they want him to be and then to reflect and fulfill that desire. It has worked for him every step of the way until now. Be the ball? He is the words he says. When he says them. That's his whole identity, the wave of affirmation that flows back from the crowd when he has been a clear enough mirror.

He has been too many things to too many different people. But all those people expect to see what they're expecting to see every time, and it's no longer possible in the simultaneous pressures of a presidential campaign. Even he doesn't know how different he is from venue to venue and person to person. That's why he doesn't know how to recognize the urgency of repudiating Jeremiah Wright in absolute and unforgiving terms. There's a part of him that believes in the AIDS conspiracy, just as there's a part of him that believes in the fundamental decency of all the guilty liberals who admired and promoted him at the Harvard Business School.

All of this could possibly be overcome if he had any feel for the deep diversity of the American electorate. But he doesn't. From first to last, he's always been an outsider. He doesn't understand at all -- and neither does USA Today's eager young reporter -- that African-Americans have been on a deadly collision course with feminists since the mid-seventies. These two apparent and frequently avowed allies have been competing for the same finite pool of extra privileges all along, and because there are more women and more of the women are white, it is the feminists who have done more to slow the de-racialization of America than any other force. The feminists' anti-male propaganda has inevitably done far more damage to African-American males and their role in families than it has done to white men. The feminists' gradual achievement of female hegemony over child ownership, child-rearing, and abortion decisions has done more to destroy the black family and promote the epidemic of children born out of wedlock than any conspiracy Jeremiah Wright could ever dream up. The resistance -- in the virulent form of hip-hop hatred of women -- has made racism and sexism into the two supposedly allied causes that were destined to go finally and horribly to war with one another.

Regardless of how the campaign war turns out, both sides have been crippled. Obama cannot win because there is no one inside the gauzy, unreal image to battle through the contradictions to a mandate based on character rather than a mosaic of sliver identities. His white vote will shrivel as ordinary Americans discover they can't determine where his allegiance lies, unless it's to himself only. Women will sit on their hands because they've seen enough of the slick young operator who waltzes in at the last moment and swipes the opportunity from the deserving veteran female (and being half-white doesn't help him in this respect). But Hillary can't win, either, because of the one-drop rule. Even though Obama is not and never was an African-American, he has always been black enough to benefit from the superannuated slave culture that forgives every corruption and hypocrisy in those who have any claim on being black. If Hillary is the nominee, African-Americans will stay home in significant numbers. Unlike Jeremiah Wright, John McCain is the irascible uncle we'd go to for help in a pinch, not hide from because of the revolver he keeps in a cigar box.

At the end of the day, Reverend Wright is a self-fulfilling prophecy, the poison in the well. Like Moses, he can never accompany his chosen ones to the promised land When his people finally learn to stop following his like, they will find what they seek, as if by magic. But for now, the horse he groomed for them is scratched at the gate.

If you think we're wrong, you do not yet understand the power of YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2EVd9WDio0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdj5yye_G80

It will "never stop, never stop, never stop..."


Caveat Emptor
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2008/03/caveat-emptor.html

Andrew Sullivan is still fascinated by the Face, which holds him in such a spell that he can't believe anything bad about it. Describing his re-evaluation of Obama after the revelation of Jeremiah Wright's sermons, Sullivan writes:

A reader says that we cannot know what is in Obama's heart, and to a certain extent, that's true. ... I don't know how you can read Obama's writing or listen to any of his speeches and believe that Wright's ugliest messages are what Obama believes or has ever believed.

Mona Charen is less charitable. She believes that Barack Obama is one of the most skilfull con artists of all time. A man who hid the obvious in plain view by the simple expedient of appealing to his audiences' better natures. She wrote:

I am coming to believe that Barack Obama is one of the greatest con artists we've seen. His entire campaign has been about "coming together," a post-racial consensus, etc. Any mention of his middle name was immediately condemned as ignorant fear-mongering. He has played the role of racial unifier with great skill and finesse.

One of the more interesting Obama quotes was one he let fly before an audience at the Mississippi University for Women. "You all know the okey-dokey, when someone's trying to bamboozle you, when they're trying to hoodwink you?"

The subject of Obama's remark was Hillary Clinton's machinations. Hillary Clinton is one person who knows all about swindles. But to return to his question. No. Not everybody knows about the "okey-dokey". And often the more academically cloistered a person is; the less exposed to the cut and thrust of the streets one is, the less likely is one to know anything about being bamboozled and hoodwinked.

One of the problems with bringing up your son or daughter to be "too good" in a home in which violence is absent and consideration is uppermost is that they may get the mistaken idea that people out in the wild world always tell the truth and are always what they seem.

I've had the great good fortune to have met a large number of swindlers in my life. And here are my own rules of thumb for spotting them. First. They are always just a little too nice for comfort. Second. They have always have a story to tell. Whenever you deal with them something always "comes up". Third. They always suggest the possibility of getting a deal that is too good to be true.

A man who got took told me that "no swindler succeeds without the help of greed on your part. A man who is willing to pay fair price for something hardly ever gets fooled". This is some of the best advice I ever heard and it is mostly true.

Swindlers are hardly ever willing to admit to their lie, but when they are forced to it's a sight to behold. A long time ago, a few days after coming back from grad school I got a call from a friend who had entrusted $20,000 of his family's money to a labor lawyer in order to invest it. That sent my spider-sense tingling right off the bat because I knew what labor lawyers were like.

Anyway the labor lawyer promised my friend to invest the sum in high-yield securities but now the family had difficulty getting it back. And since I had some passing theoretical familiarity with finance, I agreed to talk to the lawyer. His office was in a place called the Diamond Building in one of the back streets of Quezon City. He had a couple of burly men in the front office and a secretary who was doing not very much but file her nails in a table in the reception area.

The lawyer had horned rimmed glasses and nice, open smile. He told me the $20,000 was locked up until maturity. So I kept at it. What type of security? With whom? What was the face value? The interest rate? But I kept a close eye on his face. He floundered around and he knew I could see him floundering around. So the moment finally came when he gave up on the okey-dokey.

His expression changed completely into some other face and then he snarled, "you ask too many questions. Be careful when you walk out nights." You really have to experience a moment like that to believe that such facial transformations can happen outside of the movies. I won't continue the story except to say that the next five minutes were truly interesting. The $20,000 were never recovered even though the crooked lawyer had what the British would call "a turn".

But it takes more than "a turn" to stop a real con-man. They keep going until they run into something as hard and slimy as themselves. Players live in a place where you don't want to go. Maybe the genius of the American political system is that it takes a brawler to get to the top. I think Hillary and Barack understand each other perfectly. Of Andrew Sullivan I have my doubts.


The Wit & Wisdom of Barack Obama
Some of it may sound familiar.
by Andrew Ferguson
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/887jicyo.asp

There's still room for whimsy at the New Yorker magazine, I don't care what you've heard. Just the other day two of the New Yorker's bloggers (now there's a phrase to send Harold Ross spinning) were chewing over the widely noted eloquence of Barack Obama. They were struck by "Obama's wonderful line," as one of them described it, to the effect that "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Obama uses it as one of his signature refrains. Some of his followers even turned it into a music video.

So one thing led to another, as it does on blogs, and before long the bloggers began wondering, as they do at the New Yorker, what the phrase would sound like in French.

"You couldn't say it in French," blogged one of the bloggers.

"Are you sure about the French?" the other blogger blogged back. "Mine isn't good enough to know if 'C'est nous qui nous avons attendu' or 'Ceux qui nous attendons, c'est nous' would sound French to a French ear, or if it just would sound stupid." Oui, blogged the first blogger. It would sound très stupid. "My ear/memory tells me that it would be too weird to say, since I think there's a we/us thing that doesn't work."

Eventually a French journalist was consulted. He ruled summarily that, translated into French, "the Barack Obama sentence [le sentence de la Barack Obama] sounds weird to me."

So there you have it: You can't really say "We are the ones we've been waiting for" in French. The matter was closed. The bloggers moved on. Good times indeed.

But wait. There was something tantalizingly incomplete about this brief discussion of whether the sentence sounds weird in French: What was missing was an acknowledgement of how weird the sentence sounds in English. What, after all, does "We are the ones we've been waiting for" mean, precisely? My hunch is that the sentence is one of those things that no one will admit to being confused by, like the movies of Godard or the tenor-sax solos of John Coltrane, lest your peers think you're a loser or a moron. Certainly Obama fans won't admit how obscure the sentence is--though several have claimed that it's lifted from a prophecy of the Tribal Elders of the Hopi Indians. Hopi prophecies are famously obscure.

But this is just wishful thinking. The origins of the phrase aren't nearly so glamorous or exotic. Two years ago, before Obama even said he wanted to be president, the left-wing-radical-feminist-lesbian novelist Alice Walker published a book of essays and called it We are the Ones We've Been Waiting For. Believe me: If the line had come from the Tribal Elders of the Hopi nation, Alice Walker would have been more than happy to say so. Instead she said it came from a poem published in 1980 by the left-wing-radical-feminist-bisexual poet June Jordan. Neither Walker nor Jordan has said what the sentence means. But Walker did offer this hint in the introduction to her book of essays: "We are the ones we've been waiting for because we are able to see what is happening with a much greater awareness than our parents or grandparents, our ancestors, could see."

That's a clue, anyway. The sentence may not have any positive content, Walker seems to be saying, but it does have an indirect meaning, an implication, as a kind of self-referential gesture for the people who claim it. When Obama's supporters say "We are the ones we've been waiting for," what they mean is that in the long roll call of history, from Aristotle and Heraclitus down through Augustine and Maimonides and Immanuel Kant and the fellows who wrote the Federalist Papers, we're number one! We're the smartest yet! Everybody--Mom, Dad, Gramps and Grandma, Great Grandpa and Great Grandma, maybe even the Tribal Elders--they've all been waiting for people as clued-in as us!

Is this what Obama means too? No one who's wandered through an Obama rally and heard the war whoops and seen the cheerful, vacant gazes would come away thinking, "These are the smartest people ever." I'm sorry, they just aren't. What is unmistakable is the creepy kind of solipsism and the air of self-congratulation that clings to his campaign. "There is something happening," he says in stump speeches. And what's happening? "Change is happening." How so? "The reason our campaign has been different is about what you, the people who love this country, can do to change it." And the way to change it is to join the campaign, which, once you join it, will change America. Because this is our moment. The time is now. Now is the time. Yes, we can. We bring change to the campaign because the campaign is about change. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Obama and his followers are perfecting postmodern reflexivity. It's a campaign that's about itself. The point of the campaign is the campaign.

They don't put it this way, of course, which just confirms a suspicion that's been creeping up on some of us for months: As a speech-giver, a man who has wowed the nation with the power of his language, Barack Obama is getting away with murder. Rhetorically, he is a master of le baloney.

It's not clear that Obama himself is even aware of this. His sincerity is self-evident and is one of the qualities that draw people to him, along with those eloquent hands, the grin, that voice as smooth and rich as molasses. His speeches are theatrical events, not intellectual excursions. On his website the videos of his most acclaimed speeches have proved much more popular than the transcripts. As a candidate he fits a public that prefers the sensation of words to the words themselves. His speeches are meant to be succumbed to rather than thought about.

But what if you do think about them?

The first thing you might notice is how familiar Obama's speeches sound on the page. He ran into trouble earlier in the year when he lifted a rhetorical trope from his friend Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts. ("Just words?" Patrick had said, before quoting famous lines from Thomas Jefferson, John Kennedy, and other big talkers.) The charge of plagiarism, made by Obama's opponents, was overheated, and also more complicated than the Clintonites probably realized. David Axelrod, Deval Patrick's campaign manager, came up with the "just words" refrain in 2006, as a way of rebutting charges that his candidate was all talk. Two years later, when Obama was hit with the same charge, he was lucky to have the same campaign manager. Axelrod dusted off the old locution and handed it to his new client. Obama was thus being accused of stealing lines that weren't his from a politician who took them from a ghostwriter who gave them to Obama. In the daisy-chain transactions between politicians and their consultants, there are no property rights.

Besides, the charge of filching betrays a misunderstanding of political speechmaking. Professional public speakers, whether politicians or stand-up comics, take stuff from each other, no matter who penned the words. The line between allusion and theft, between homage and plagiarism, is traditionally thin. When Abraham Lincoln spoke of government of the people, by the people, for the people, his listeners knew Daniel Webster's "Second Reply to Hayne," up to that time the most quoted piece of rhetoric in American history. In it Webster spoke of a government that was "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people." Webster's phrase was part of the public memory, every literate person was familiar with it, and no one would have thought to accuse Lincoln of trying to steal it.

Obama's case is slightly different. When he does filch--notwithstanding the "just words" affair--hardly anyone notices. He lives in an era when the public memory has shrunk to a length of days or weeks. Especially in American politics, policed by a posse of commentators and reporters who crave novelty above all, the past is a blank; every day is Groundhog Day, bringing shocking discoveries of things that have happened over and over again. No politician has benefited from this amnesia as much as Obama. He is credited with revelatory eloquence for using phrases that have been in circulation for years. "Politics is broken," he says in his stump speech, and his audience of starry-eyed college students swoons and the thirtysomething reporters jot excitedly in their notebooks. The rest of us are left to wonder if he's tipping his hat to Bill Bradley, who left the Senate in 1996 because, Bradley said, "politics is broken," or if he's stealing from George W. Bush, who announced in his own stump speech in 2000 that "politics is broken." Obama could be flattering us or snowing us.

Or perhaps he's just guilty of a lack of originality. On the page, deprived of his baritone, without the prop of his steely jaw, his speeches limp from one shopworn phrase to another. When he tells his audiences they need "a president who will tell you what you need to know, not what you want to hear," he might be quoting, gulp, Geraldine Ferraro, who as a vice presidential candidate in 1984 liked to tell audiences that "Leadership is not just telling people what they want to hear, it's telling them what they need to know." It's a timeless principle that can be found in dozens of pop business books, too--the kind read in his formative years by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who used it when he ran for governor in 2003.

Timelessness may be the key here: You begin to wonder, listening to Obama's rhetoric, whether anything has changed in 20 years. "This is a defining moment in our history," Obama likes to say; but that's what Elizabeth Dole said when her husband ran for president in 1996. (They're both wrong.) In 1992, Bill Clinton was complaining that "Washington" was a place "people came to just to score political points." Eight years later Bush was complaining that "Washington is obsessed with scoring political points, not solving problems." Now, in 2008, "Washington has become a place," Obama says, "where politicians spend too much time trying to score political points."

What's to be done about all this Washington point-scoring? Bob Dole's solution, 12 years ago, was to strongly favor "the things that lift this country up instead of dragging it down"; today Obama opposes "the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up." Because Howard Dean failed in his promise in 2004--"we're going to take this country back"--Obama revives the pledge, word for word, today. But like Gerald Ford, running against Jimmy Carter in 1976, he believes "we can disagree without being disagreeable."

Onward they plod, these old warhorse phrases, until Obama climbs to the climax of his stump speech. Head bowed, brow furrowed, eyes flashing, he announces that we "will choose unity over division [Jesse Jackson, 1992]. We will choose hope over fear [Bill Clinton and John Kerry, 2004]. And we will choose the future over the past [Al Gore, 1992]." In so doing, we will overcome our "moral deficit [Bush, 2000; Gore, 2000; Newt Gingrich,1994]" by "bringing people beyond the divisions of race and class [Clinton 1992]" because the "story of our country [Ross Perot, 1992]" or the "genius of our country [Bush 2000]" or the "wonder of our country [George H.W. Bush, 1988]" is, as Obama says in 2008, "ordinary people doing extraordinary things [Perot, Bush, Bush, and Ronald Reagan, 1984]."

Talk like this is the elevator music of politics, soothing and inoffensive and unavoidable. Obama has had the unbelievable luck to attract listeners who seem to think he's minted it fresh. Indeed, among his opponents, the most common criticism of Obama's speeches is not that they are hackneyed but that they are short on detail--details of policy in particular. This isn't completely true; a few proposals can always be picked out from the texts, like seeds from a clump of cotton. In nearly every speech I've read, Obama mentions withdrawing troops from Iraq, raising marginal tax rates on "all the wealthy people," dropping poor old people from the tax rolls, and giving every college student $4,000 a year in return for a pledge of community service. He always mentions eliminating tax subsidies that encourage U.S. companies to build plants overseas, while offering tax subsidies to companies that don't do that. How each of these would work as a practical policy is left to his audience's imagination--could you really have a federal program that gives money to every company that stays where it is?--but there's nothing new about that, either: People don't come to a rally to hear a candidate read a white paper from the Brookings Institution, unless they work at the Brookings Institution.

The truth is that Obama's speeches are full of engaging detail--just not policy detail. With his first book, the memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama proved he was a literary man of great skill, and he knows that the details that catch the attention are personal. So in his best speeches he offers quick, arresting portraits of individual Americans he has met in his travels. Taken together they help him execute a rhetorical pivot that only the greatest populist politicians--FDR in the 1930s, Reagan in 1980--have been able to pull off. You could call it optimistic despair. The overarching theme of Obama's speeches, and of his campaign, is that America is a fetid sewer whose most glorious days lie just ahead, thanks to the endless ranks of pathetic losers who make it a beacon of hope to all mankind.

Here's a partial list of the people that Obama has met lately. All of them are unhappy, and no wonder: Ashley, who grew up eating mustard sandwiches because her mother contracted cancer, lost her job, went bankrupt, and lost her health insurance; the "girl who goes to the crumbling school in Dillon"; "the mother who can't get Medicaid to cover all the needs of her sick child"; a New Hampshire woman who "hasn't been able to breathe since her nephew left for Iraq"; "the teacher who works another shift at Dunkin Donuts after school just to make ends meet"; a young woman in Cedar Rapids "who works the night shift after a full day of college and still can't afford health care for a sister who's ill"; "the Maytag worker who is now competing with his own teenager for a $7 an hour job at Wal-Mart." And beyond these dim, huddled figures lies the American landscape, unbearably bleak: "shuttered factories," "crumbling schools," "a planet in peril."

It's not exactly Walt Whitman. But Obama wants us to know that the picture he paints with his pointillist precision is comprehensive: He's leaving nothing out. He drives the point home when he concludes his litanies of despair by saying: "I have seen what America is." In this sense Obama truly is the unity candidate. There is no white America or black America, as he says; no blue states or red states, in his famous formulation, but only the United States of America. And what unites all these people--what unites us--is our shared status as victims.

Unfortunately, this raises the question of who the victimizer is. It's an uncomfortable question for a candidate who, having drawn such a depressing picture, wants to pivot toward the positive and upbeat and hopeful. Suddenly Obama's gift for the identifying detail leaves him. With unaccustomed vagueness he refers to "lobbyists" and "overpaid CEOs" but never names them. It's a world without human villains, improbably enough. Who are the agents of this despair? By whose hand has the country been brought so low? Whoever they are, they vanish in the fog of sentences like this: "We are up against decades of bitter partisanship that cause politicians to demonize their opponents instead of coming together to make college affordable or energy cleaner." So not even politicians in power are responsible; it's decades of bitter partisanship that has forced them into demonization, and the demonization has in turn prevented them from getting things done.

This is a murky place. Cause and effect are blurred. Bad things happen though nobody does them. Instead we face disembodied entities, ghostly apparitions. "Make no mistake about what we're up against," he will announce, with what sounds, for a moment, like clarity; but then he goes on to say what we're up against: "the belief that it's okay for lobbyists to dominate our government"; "the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington"; "forces that feed the habits that prevent us from being who we are"; "the idea that it's acceptable to do anything to win an election."

Some agents of despair these turn out to be! A belief, a way of thinking, an idea, forces that feed habits, and decades of partisanship. He won't even bring himself to blame Republicans.

Why does Obama choose to conjure up these disembodied spirits as the obstacles to "change"? There are a couple of explanations. One possibility is that he won't credit actual, nameable persons with holding these beliefs because no actual person does hold these beliefs. Imagine a candidate whose platform said: Vote for me and I'll guarantee that "our government is dominated by lobbyists." Who's on record saying that it's okay to do anything to win an election? And it's hard to find anyone who subscribes to the "conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington." Four of our last five presidents have been governors who never worked a day in Washington. And look where that got us.

But this is not the best explanation for why Obama won't specify his opponents. He is partisan enough to believe, and certainly many of his supporters believe, that some villainous figure--Karl Rove, I suppose--does believe these things. But if Obama named anybody, the cat would be out of the bag. It would at last be plain that his politics of unity, his politics of "addition not subtraction," is simply another way of recasting the old "politics of us versus them" that he says he disdains.

Leave aside the disembodied forces; forget the beliefs and ideas that no one really holds. Somebody somewhere has to be preventing Obama's kind of health care reform, and sending kids to underfunded schools, and shipping jobs overseas to increase profits, and standing in the way of medical research, and downplaying climate change out of skepticism or general orneriness. Put them all together and it's likely to come to a fairly high number of people: stockholders, employees, and managers of globalized companies; insurance claim adjusters, guys on oil rigs, hog farmers, pro-lifers, moms in SUVs, taxpayers who decline to float bonds for local schools, voters who pulled the lever for President Bush and are still kindly disposed toward him. People who make red states red and blue states purple. Lots and lots of people.

If Obama made this explicit, if in his speeches he dared to wrap bodies around those disembodied forces, if he began to trace effects back to the agents that cause them, then his campaign would suddenly appear to be what it is: a conventional alignment of political interests, trying to seize power from another conventional alignment of political interests--just one more version of a tussle that's gone on since the country's founding. His fans, it turns out, aren't the people they've been waiting for; they're just the same old people, like everybody else.

Of course, they're drawn to his campaign precisely because they refuse to believe that this is so. Maybe Obama refuses to believe it too. He seems to be a sincere man, as I say. But he's also a very smart one.


The peculiar theology of black liberation
By Spengler
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC18Aa01.html

Senator Barack Obama is not a Muslim, contrary to invidious rumors. But he belongs to a Christian church whose doctrine casts Jesus Christ as a "black messiah" and blacks as "the chosen people". At best, this is a radically different kind of Christianity than most Americans acknowledge; at worst it is an ethnocentric heresy.

What played out last week on America's television screens was a clash of two irreconcilable cultures, the posture of "black liberation theology" and the mainstream American understanding of Christianity. Obama, who presented himself as a unifying figure, now seems rather the living embodiment of the clash.

One of the strangest dialogues in American political history ensued on March 15 when Fox News interviewed Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, of Chicago's Trinity Church. Wright asserted the authority of the "black liberation" theologians James Cone and Dwight Hopkins:

Wright: How many of Cone's books have you read? How many of Cone's book have you read?

Sean Hannity: Reverend, Reverend?

(crosstalk)

Wright: How many books of Cone's have you head?

Hannity: I'm going to ask you this question ...

Wright: How many books of Dwight Hopkins have you read?

Hannity: You're very angry and defensive. I'm just trying to ask a question here.

Wright: You haven't answered - you haven't answered my question.

Hopkins is a full professor at the University of Chicago's Divinity School; Cone is now distinguished professor at New York's Union Theological Seminary. They promote a "black power" reading of Christianity, to which liberal academic establishment condescends.

Obama referred to this when he asserted in a March 14 statement, "I knew Reverend Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago." But the fact the liberal academy condescends to sponsor black liberation theology does not make it less peculiar to mainstream American Christians. Obama wants to talk about what Wright is, rather than what he says. But that way lies apolitical quicksand.

Since Christianity taught the concept of divine election to the Gentiles, every recalcitrant tribe in Christendom has rebelled against Christian universalism, insisting that it is the "Chosen People" of God - French, English, Russian, Germans and even (through the peculiar doctrine of Mormonism) certain Americans. America remains the only really Christian country in the industrial world, precisely because it transcends ethnicity. One finds ethnocentricity only in odd corners of its religious life; one of these is African-American.

During the black-power heyday of the late 1960s, after the murder of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, the mentors of Wright decided that blacks were the Chosen People. James Cone, the most prominent theologian in the "black liberation" school, teaches that Jesus Christ himself is black. As he explains:

Christ is black therefore not because of some cultural or psychological need of black people, but because and only because Christ really enters into our world where the poor were despised and the black are, disclosing that he is with them enduring humiliation and pain and transforming oppressed slaves into liberating servants.

Theologically, Cone's argument is as silly as the "Aryan Christianity" popular in Nazi Germany, which claimed that Jesus was not a Jew at all but an Aryan Galilean, and that the Aryan race was the "chosen people". Cone, Hopkins and Wright do not propose, of course, to put non-blacks in concentration camps or to conquer the world, but racially-based theology nonetheless is a greased chute to the nether regions.

Biblical theology teaches that even the most terrible events to befall Israel, such as the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, embody the workings of divine justice, even if humankind cannot see God's purpose. James Cone sees the matter very differently. Either God must do what we want him to do, or we must reject him, Cone maintains:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love. [1]

In the black liberation theology taught by Wright, Cone and Hopkins, Jesus Christ is not for all men, but only for the oppressed:

In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors ... Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation and against the white oppressors, or he is not [Cone].

In this respect black liberation theology is identical in content to all the ethnocentric heresies that preceded it. Christianity has no use for the nations, a "drop of the bucket" and "dust on the scales", in the words of Isaiah. It requires that individuals turn their back on their ethnicity to be reborn into Israel in the spirit. That is much easier for Americans than for the citizens of other nations, for Americans have no ethnicity. But the tribes of the world do not want to abandon their Gentile nature and as individuals join the New Israel. Instead they demand eternal life in their own Gentile flesh, that is, to be the "Chosen People".

That is the "biblical scholarship" to which Obama referred in his March 14 defense of Wright and his academic prominence. In his response to Hannity, Wright genuinely seemed to believe that the authority of Cone and Hopkins, who now hold important posts at liberal theological seminaries, was sufficient to make the issue go away. His faith in the white establishment is touching; he honestly cannot understand why the white reporters at Fox News are bothering him when the University of Chicago and the Union Theological Seminary have put their stamp of approval on black liberation theology.

Many things that the liberal academy has adopted, though, will horrify most Americans, and not only "black liberation theology" (Queer Studies comes to mind, among other things). It cannot be in Obama's best interests to appeal to the authority of Cone, whose unapologetic racism must be repugnant to the great majority of Americans, including the majority of black Americans, who for the most part belong to Christian churches that preach mainstream Christian doctrine. Christianity teaches unconditional love for a God whose love for humankind is absolute; it does not teach the repudiation of a God who does not destroy our enemies on the spot.

Whether Obama takes seriously the doctrines that Wright preaches is another matter. It is possible that Obama does not believe a word of what Wright, Cone and Hopkins teach. Perhaps he merely used the Trinity United Church of Christ as a political stepping-stone. African-American political life is centered around churches, and his election to the Illinois State Senate with the support of Chicago's black political machine required church membership. Trinity United happens to be Chicago's largest and most politically active black church.

Obama views Wright rather at arm's length: as the New York Times reported on April 30, 2007:

Reverend Wright is a child of the 60s, and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through," Mr Obama said. "He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.

Obama holds his own views close. But it seems unlikely that he would identify with the ideological fits of the black-power movement of the 1960s. Obama does not come to the matter with the perspective of an American black, but of the child of a left-wing anthropologist raised in the Third World, as I wrote elsewhere (Obama's women reveal his secret , Asia Times Online, February 26, 2008). It is possible that because of the Wright affair Obama will suffer for what he pretended to be, rather than for what he really is.

Note
1. See William R Jones, "Divine Racism: The Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology", in African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology, ed Cornel West and Eddie Glaube (Westminster John Knox Press).

Barack Obama and Me
It was the year 2000 and I was a young hungry reporter in Chicago covering a young hungry state legislator
By Todd Spivak 
http://www.houston-press.com/2008-02-28/news/barack-obama-screamed-at-me/full

It's not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an asshole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn't yet hit local newsstands.

It's the first time I ever heard him yell, and I'm trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father has been out of print for years.

I often see Obama smoking cigarettes on brisk Chicago mornings in front of his condominium high-rise along Lake Michigan, or getting his hair buzzed at the corner barbershop on 53rd and Harper in his Hyde Park neighborhood.

This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country's first black president.

He is just a rank-and-file state senator in Illinois and I work for a string of small, scrappy newspapers there.
_____________________

The other day, while stuck in traffic on Houston's Southwest Freeway, I was flipping through right-wing rants on AM radio. Dennis Praeger was railing against Michelle Obama for her clumsy comment on being proud of her country for the first time.

Praeger went on to call her husband a blank slate. There's no record to look at, he complained, unless you lived in Barack Obama's old state Senate district.

Well, I lived and worked in that district for three years — nearly half Obama's tenure in the Illinois Legislature. D-13, the district was called, and it spanned a large swath of the city's poor, black, crime-­ridden South Side.

It was 2000 and I was a young, hungry reporter at the Hyde Park Herald and Lakefront Outlook community newspapers earning $19,000 a year covering politics and crime.

I talked with Obama on a regular basis — a couple times a month, at least. I'd ask him about his campaign-finance reports, legislation he was sponsoring and various local issues. He wrote an occasional column published in our papers. It ran with a headshot that made him look about 14 years old.

Spinning through my old Rolodex, I see that I had two cell phone numbers for Obama. Both have since been ­disconnected.

I also had cell phone numbers for Jesse Jackson, his son Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., and David Axelrod, who now serves as Obama's senior presidential campaign adviser.

Axelrod, too, had begun his journalism career at the Hyde Park Herald before joining the Chicago Tribune as a political reporter then starting a political consulting firm. Another Hyde Park Herald alum was Seymour Hersh, the legendary investigative reporter who uncovered the My Lai massacre for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal for The New Yorker.

My view of Obama then wasn't all that different from the image he projects now. He was smart, confident, charismatic and liberal. One thing I can say is, I never heard him launch into the preacher-man voice he now employs during speeches. He sounded vanilla, and activists in his mostly black district often chided him for it.

I was 25 and had no problem interviewing big-wig politicians. But I always had to steel my nerves when calling Obama. His intelligence was intimidating, and my hands inevitably shook with sweat.

It was serendipity that I ever came to know Obama at all. Looking back, I think of it as a Forrest Gump moment: History was unfolding and I was at the center of it, clueless. It's a huge bummer to me that I never taped our interviews.

I moved to Chicago from the East Coast after a bad breakup. I had just one year of newspaper experience under my belt, working the courts beat for a small Vermont daily.

I picked Chicago because I had friends there. Plus, it was one of the few American cities left with two competing dailies, upping my chances of landing a gig.

I arrived determined to work for one of the big papers. I once spent an entire day dressed up in my only suit and tie — the one I wore to my brother's wedding, where I ripped a hole in the knee while dancing with my niece — and stood, résumé in hand, outside the newsroom at the dumpy old Chicago Sun-Times building.

Columnist Neil Steinberg was gracious enough to accept my folder and even gave me his home number to call later that night. Unimpressed by my clips, Steinberg said most new recruits graduated from top journalism schools such as Northwestern or Columbia — or their mommies or daddies worked at the paper or knew somebody who did.

His advice: To work in Chicago, you have to leave Chicago. Go prove yourself someplace else, kid.

I had a friend at one of the local journalism schools who let me tag along for a school-sponsored tour of the Chicago Tribune building. After the tour, page-two columnist John Kass told us about how he got picked up by the Tribune while in his early 20s after breaking a big story at a little South Side paper.

I spent three months sleeping on a friend's floor on the city's South Side. He was a broke grad student who had earned a mostly free ride at the University of Chicago, working toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature. His studio apartment in Hyde Park was tiny.

We joked that the only way I could stretch my legs at night was to open the oven in the kitchen. It was like the old blues lyric, "I got a gal she's long and tall, sleeps in the kitchen with her feet in the hall."

Obama, who then earned about $50,000 a year as a rookie state senator, lived in a small condo just two blocks away. I had never met or even seen his wife Michelle, though I'd heard she was employed at University of Chicago Hospitals. Their second daughter Natasha had not yet been born.

Every day, I walked past the Hyde Park Herald office, set upstairs from Obama's barbershop. The newspaper box out front said all I needed to know. It was dented, covered in graffiti and broken. The thing ate your two quarters and offered nothing in return.

I didn't want to work there. My aspirations were bigger than that.

Desperate, I finally swallowed my pride, climbed the steep, smelly staircase and submitted my shamefully thin résumé to the receptionist. To my dismay, the editor called later that afternoon with a job offer.
_____________________

Chris Matthews, the MSNBC political pundit, recently grilled Texas State Senator Kirk Watson for supporting Obama despite knowing nothing about the candidate's legislative record.

"Can you name any — can you name anything he's accomplished?" Matthews pressed.

"No," Watson, whose district includes Austin, finally admitted. "I'm not gonna be able to do that."

"Well, that's a problem, isn't it?" Matthews said.

Hillary Clinton recalled the incident with a chuckle during last Thursday's debate at the University of Texas.

When asked about his legislative record, Obama rattles off several bills he sponsored as an Illinois lawmaker.

He expanded children's health insurance; made the state Earned Income Tax Credit refundable for low-income families; required public bodies to tape closed-door meetings to make government more transparent; and required police to videotape interrogations of homicide suspects.

And the list goes on.

It's a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what's interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.

Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama's seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years, Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative ­achievements.

Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor's office as well as both legislative chambers.

The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James "Pate" Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama's. He became Obama's ­kingmaker.

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city's most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

"He said, 'Cliff, I'm gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'"

"Oh, you are? Who might that be?"

"Barack Obama."

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

"I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen," State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. "Barack didn't have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

"I don't consider it bill jacking," Hendon told me. "But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book."

During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama's stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.

It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics — and he couldn't have done it without Jones.

Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.

Jones further helped raise Obama's profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news ­headlines.

For instance. Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet supplement ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national attention and extensive local coverage.

I spoke to Jones earlier this week and he confirmed his conversation with Kelley, adding that he gave Obama the legislation because he believed in Obama's ability to negotiate with Democrats and Republicans on divisive issues.

So how has Obama repaid Jones?

Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones's Senate district.

Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.

I'll never forget what he said:

"Some call it pork; I call it steak."
_____________________

In Hyde Park, I eventually moved into a room a few blocks from the newspaper offices. For $150 a month, I lived in a former servant's quarters with a closet and a connecting bathroom set just off the kitchen in a dingy apartment occupied by several grad students. My eight-by-eight room fit a mattress on the floor and not much else.

During those rare moments when I wasn't working or hanging out with my new girlfriend, I sat on the apartment's crumbling back deck smoking cigarettes and drinking beer in cans with a very nice but drug-addicted homeless woman who crashed in a sleeping bag on the cement floor below. A couple years later, I wrote her obituary.

Hyde Park was the most racially integrated neighborhood in a city with a long, tortured history of segregation. Along 53rd Street, the neighborhood's main commercial corridor, chess players filled the parks, student activists chanted political slogans and women clad in bright colors and elaborate headwraps sang church hymns while strolling the sidewalks.

I would sometimes sit smoking on the fire escape outside my office and feel like I'd wandered into a Spike Lee film.

The communities surrounding Hyde Park were predominantly black and impoverished, marked by high crime, boarded-up storefronts and vacant lots. In some residential areas, banks and grocery stores were several miles away.

On the stump, Obama has frequently invoked his experiences as a community organizer on the Chicago South Side in the early 1990s, when he passed on six-figure salary offers at corporate law firms after graduating from Harvard Law School to direct a massive voter-registration drive.

But, as a state senator, Obama evaded leadership on a host of critical community issues, from historic preservation to the rapid demolition of nearby public-housing projects, according to many South Siders.

Harold Lucas, a veteran South Side community organizer who remembers when Obama was "just a big-eared kid fresh out of school," says he didn't finally decide to support Obama's presidential bid until he was actually inside the voting booth on Super Tuesday.

"I'm not happy about the quality of life in my community," says Lucas, who now heads a black-heritage tourism business in Chicago. "As a local elected official, he had a primary role in that."

In addition to Hyde Park, Obama also represented segments of several South Side neighborhoods home to the nation's richest African-American cultural history outside of Harlem.

Before World War II, the adjacent Bronzeville community was known as the "Black Metropolis," attracting African-American migrants seeking racial equality and economic opportunity from states to the south such as Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Storied jazz clubs such as Gerri's Palm Tavern regularly hosted Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker and many others. In the postwar era, blues legends Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King all regularly gigged in cramped juke joints such as the Checkerboard Lounge.

When the City of Chicago seized the 70-year-old Gerri's Palm Tavern by eminent domain in 2001, sparking citywide protests, Obama was silent. And he offered no public comments when the 30-year owner of the Checkerboard Lounge was forced to relocate a couple years later.

Even in Hyde Park, Obama declined to take a position on a years-long battle waged by hundreds of local community activists fighting against the city's plan to replace the historic limestone seawall along Lake Michigan — a popular spot to sunbathe and swim — with concrete steps.

It would be comparable to representing Barton Creek in Austin, and sidestepping any discussion about conservation.

Obama's aloofness on key community issues for years frustrated Lucas and many other South Siders. Now they believe he was just afraid of making political enemies or being pigeonholed as a black candidate. Lucas says he has since become an ardent Obama supporter.

"His campaign has built a momentum of somebody being born to the moment," Lucas says. "He truly gives the perception that he could possibly pull us all together around being American again. And the hope of that is worth the risk when you look at the other candidates. I mean, you can't get away from old school when you look at Hillary."

Lucas even believes Obama made the right choice by declining PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley's invitation to speak at this week's State of the Black Union 2008 conference in New Orleans.

"Obama can't bring those issues up if he wants to be elected," Lucas says. "And that's the travesty of the situation that we find ourselves in as African-Americans."

In the presidential campaign, Obama has been criticized for a shady land deal and other past ties to Tony Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer and ubiquitous political donor who now faces federal charges of attempted extortion and money laundering.

In a debate held last month before the South Carolina primary, Hillary Clinton charged that Obama had legally represented Rezko "in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago." The issue was turned back on her a few days later when an old picture of a smiling Clinton posing with Rezko surfaced on Drudge Report.

Though it didn't make national news, Obama inflamed many residents in his old state Senate district last March when he endorsed controversial Chicago alderman Dorothy Tillman in a runoff election.

Flamboyant and unpredictable, Tillman is perhaps best known for once pulling a pistol from her purse and brandishing it around at a city council meeting. The ward she represented for 22 years, which included historic Bronzeville, comprised the city's largest concentration of vacant lots.

Just three months before Obama made his endorsement, the Lakefront Outlook community newspaper ran a three-part investigative series exposing flagrant crony­ism and possible tax-law violations that centered on Tillman and her biggest pet project, a taxpayer-funded cultural center built across the street from her ward office that had been hemorrhaging money since its inception.

The series won a national George Polk Award, among the most coveted prizes in journalism. Not bad for a 12-page rag with a circulation of 12,000 and no Web site. I had already left the Outlook and had nothing to do with the project.

In the end, Tillman lost the election despite Obama's endorsement, which critics said countered his calls for clean government. Obama told the Chicago Tribune that he had backed Tillman because she was an early supporter of his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.

Many speculate Obama only bothered to weigh in on a paltry city council election during his presidential campaign as a gesture to Chicago's powerful Mayor Richard M. Daley, a Tillman supporter. Even so, Obama should have remained neutral, says Timuel Black, a historian and City Colleges of Chicago professor emeritus who lived in Obama's state Senate district.

"That was not a wise decision," Black says. "It was poor judgment on his part. He was operating like a politician trying to win the next step up."
_____________________

Obama has spent his entire political career trying to win the next step up. Every three years, he has aspired to a more powerful political position.

He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for political office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as Black, still resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his seat in the Illinois Legislature.

Obama hired fellow Harvard Law alum and election law expert Thomas Johnson to challenge the nominating petitions of four other candidates, including the popular incumbent, Alice Palmer, a liberal activist who had held the seat for several years, according to an April 2007 Chicago Tribune report.

Obama found enough flaws in the petition sheets — to appear on the ballot, candidates needed 757 signatures from registered voters living within the district — to knock off all the other Democratic contenders. He won the seat unopposed.

"A close examination of Obama's first campaign clouds the image he has cultivated throughout his political career," wrote Tribune political reporters David Jackson and Ray Long. "The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it."

Three years later, in September 1999, Obama was already preparing his first national campaign. He ran for U.S. Congress against veteran incumbent Bobby Rush, a former co-founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Rush painted the largely unknown freshman lawmaker as an out-of-touch elitist, and won the 2000 primary by more than 30 percentage points.

Three years later, in January 2003, Obama announced his bid for the U.S. Senate, where he cruised to victory thanks to the self-destruction of his top opponents in both the primary and general elections.

Obama joined a crowded field of seven candidates vying to fill an open Senate seat being vacated by retiring two-term incumbent Peter Fitzgerald. For months, he polled in the middle-of-the-pack behind frontrunner and former securities trader Blair Hull, who spent $30 million of his own fortune on the primary.

But Hull's campaign imploded just weeks before the election when his divorce files were unsealed, revealing an ex-wife's charges of verbal and physical abuse.

Obama unleashed a barrage of television ads just before the election, when the other candidates had largely depleted their war chests. He won the nomination with 53 percent of the vote.

In the general election, Obama squared off against another multimillionaire: Jack Ryan, who later dropped out of the race after a judge ordered his divorce files unsealed. The documents revealed that Ryan's ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan, a former Miss Illinois best known for her role as Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, accused him of trying to coerce her to perform sex acts in public.

Obama spent several weeks facing no opponent as the Illinois Republican Party exhausted a laundry list of replacement candidates that included former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka. The GOP ended up recruiting two-time failed presidential hopeful Alan Keyes from Maryland to fill the slot.

Keyes's strategy to use bombastic rhetoric to attract headlines turned off most voters. Most memorably, he said Jesus would not vote for Obama and that homosexuals, including Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, participated in "selfish ­hedonism."

In the end, Obama won more than 70 percent of the vote in the most lopsided Senate election in Illinois history and became the fifth African-American to win a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Three years later, in February 2007, Obama announced his bid for the White House in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln had made his famous House Divided speech.
_____________________

I moved to Springfield in early 2004 to work for the Illinois Times, where I covered Obama's U.S. Senate bid.

My first assignment was to profile Obama, who was largely unknown in central Illinois.

In fact, at that time just four years ago, Obama was still largely unknown even in his own community.

I followed Obama one wintry morning as he visited several black churches on Chicago's South Side urging people to vote for him in the upcoming primary. Congregants greeted him with lukewarm applause.

I noted in my article that one lady sitting in a pew beside me was noticeably impressed with the young man, and asked to borrow my pen. She wrote on her church pamphlet, "Obama, March 16," then underlined the date.

Over the years, most of my interviews with Obama were conducted by phone. So it felt good when he immediately recognized me and shouted my name from the end of a long, empty hallway inside the church after his speech.

After all, I admired the guy — and still do.

We shook hands and walked outside together. I asked some questions and snapped some pictures before a dark-blue Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows whisked him off to another congregation less than a mile away. I followed behind in my beat-up Oldsmobile.

My story ran on the cover of the Illinois Times. The more I thought about it, though, the more I thought it was fluff. Obama's own public-relations flack could have produced something comparable.

At the time, the Illinois media had fallen head-over-heels in love with Obama and his squeaky-clean image. "As pedigrees go, there is not a finer one among the Democratic candidates," the Chicago Tribune gushed in its endorsement.

All this predated TV pundit Chris Matthews's more recent comment that Obama's speeches send chills up his legs.

"He's been given a pass," says Harold Lucas, the community organizer in Chicago. "His career has been such a meteoric rise that he has not had the time to set a record."

A week after my profile of Obama was published, I called some of my contacts in the Illinois Legislature. I ran through a list of black Chicago lawmakers who had worked with Obama, and was surprised to learn that many resented him and had supported other candidates in the U.S. Senate election.

"Anybody but Obama," the late state Representative Lovana Jones told me at the time.

State Representative Monique Davis, who attended the same church as Obama and co-sponsored several bills with him, also did not support his candidacy. She complained of feeling overshadowed by Obama.

"I was snubbed," Davis told me. "I felt he was shutting me out of history."

In a follow-up report published a couple weeks later, I wrote about these disgruntled black legislators and the central role Senate President Emil Jones played in Obama's revived political life.

The morning after the story was posted online, I arrived early at my new offices. I hadn't taken my coat off when the phone rang. It was Obama.

The article began, "It can be painful to hear Ivy League-bred Barack Obama talk jive."

Obama told me he doesn't speak jive, that he doesn't say the words "homeboy" or "peeps."

It seemed so silly; I thought for sure he was joking. He wasn't.

He said the black legislators I cited in the story were off-base, and that they couldn't have gotten the bills passed without him.

I started to speak, and he shouted me down.

He said he liked the other story I wrote.

I asked if there was anything factually inaccurate about the latest story.

He repeated that his former colleagues couldn't have passed the bills without him.

He asked why I wrote this story, then cut me off when I started to answer.

He said he should have been given a chance to respond.

I told him I had requested an interview through his communications director.

He said I should have called his cell phone.

I reminded him that he had asked me months ago to stop calling his cell phone due to his busier schedule.

He said again that I should have called his cell phone.

Today I no longer have Obama's cell phone number. I submitted two formal requests to interview Obama for this story through his Web site, but have not heard back. I also e-mailed interview requests to three of his top staffers, but none responded.

Maybe he'll call the day after this story runs. I'll get to the office early just in case. And this time I'll have my recorder ready.


Mansion 'mistake' piles the pressure on Barack Obama
James Bone in New York and Dominic Kennedy in London
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3433485.ece

A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.

The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi, one of Britain’s wealthiest men, helped Mr Obama buy his mock Georgian mansion in Chicago.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama's bagman Antoin "Tony" Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

Three weeks later, Mr Obama bought a house on the city's South Side while Mr Rezko's wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.

Mr Obama says he never used Mrs Rezko's still-empty lot, which could only be accessed through his property. But he admits he paid his gardener to mow the lawn.

Mrs Rezko, whose husband was widely known to be under investigation at the time, went on to sell a 10-foot strip of her property to Mr Obama seven months later so he could enjoy a bigger garden.

Mr Obama now admits his involvement in this land deal was a “boneheaded mistake”.

Mrs Rezko’s purchase and sale of the land to Mr Obama raises many unanswered questions.

It is unclear how Mrs Rezko could have afforded the downpayment of $125,000 and a $500,000 mortgage for the original $625,000 purchase of the garden plot at 5050 South Greenwood Ave.

In a sworn statement a year later, Mrs Rezko said she got by on a salary of $37,000 and had $35,000 assets. Mr Rezko told a court he had "no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets, no unencumbered assets [and] is significantly in arrears on many of his obligations."

Mrs Rezko, whose husband goes on trial on unrelated corruption charges in Chicago on March 3, refused to answer questions about the case when she spoke by telephone to The Times.

Asked if she used money from her husband to buy the land next to Mr Obama's house, she said: "I can't answer these questions, I'm sorry."

Asked how long she and her husband had known Mr Auchi, she replied: "I will not be able to answer this question."

Mr Auchi's lawyer, asked whether the Fintrade Services loan was used to buy the land which became Mr Obama's garden, stated: "No, not as far as my client is aware."

Mr Auchi's links with Mr Rezko are a new political headache for Mr Obama, the charismatic Illinois senator vying to become America’s first African-American president.

Hillary Clinton has sought to make Mr Rezko, who has bankrolled Mr Obama's political career since his first run for the Illinois state senate in the mid-1990s, into an election issue by calling him a "slum landlord" in a televised debate. She has repeatedly suggested that Mr Obama has effectively not been "vetted" by media scrutiny and will not withstand "the Republican attack machine".

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr Obama, told The Times: “The bottom line is Obama does not recall ever meeting him [Mr Auchi].”

The house-and-garden deal raised questions about whether Mr Rezko, a property developer and fast-food restauranteur, made it possible for the Obamas to purchase a mansion they could otherwise not afford.

Mrs Rezko paid the asking price for the garden but the Obamas bought the house for $1.65 million, - $300,000 less than the asking price. The sellers deny they offered the Obamas a discount on the house because the garden had fetched full price from Mrs Rezko.

Mr Rezko has since been indicted for allegedly scheming to pressure companies seeking business with the state of Illinois for kickbacks and contributions to the governor Rod Blagojevich's campaign. He goes on trial on March 3.

A prosecution document filed last month alleged that a "political candidate" - identified by the Chicago Sun-Times as Mr Obama - received a $10,000 campaign contribution from what is said to be a $250,000 kickback in the corruption case. That means Mr Obama's name could figure in Mr Rezko's trial, although he is not accused of any wrongdoing.

Mr Obama insists he never used his office to do favours for Mr Rezko but admits that, as an Illinois state senator, he once wrote letters to housing officials urging them to provide money in support of a proposed apartment building for elderly people which Mr Rezko wanted to build.

Mr Obama has publicly sought to atone for his closeness to Mr Rezko, paying $150,000 to charity to distance himself from a man accused of political corruption.

The spotlight fell on Mr Rezko's ties to Mr Auchi last month when the Chicago businessman was thrown in jail for violating his bail terms by failing to declare a different $3.5 million loan from the British billionaire, made in April 2007. Prosecutors feared Mr Rezko, who travels widely in the Middle East, might flee to a country without an extradition treaty such as his birthplace of Syria.

Mr Auchi was convicted of corruption, given a suspended sentence and fined £1.4 million in France in 2003 for his part in the Elf affair, described as the biggest political and corporate scandal in post-war Europe. He, in a statement from his media lawyers, claims he is appealing against the sentence.

Mr Auchi founded his Luxembourg-based General Mediterranean Holding (GMH) in 1979, a year before he left Iraq. He says that he did business with his native country when it was considered a friend of the West but ceased to trade with the late Saddam Hussein's regime once sanctions were imposed after the invasion of Kuwait.

Mr Rezko has told a court that Mr Auchi is a "close friend." Mr Auchi's lawyer told The Times: "It is untrue that my client and Mr Rezko are 'close friends'. Mr Auchi first met Mr Rezko after the 2003 Iraq war and they have a business relationship."

Mr Rezko and Mr Auchi have been partners in a pizzeria business in the Mid-West and a major 62-acre land development in Riverside Park in Chicago.

According to court documents, Mr Rezko's lawyer said his client had "longstanding indebtedness" to Mr Auchi's GMH. By June 2007 he owed it $27.9 million.

Under a Loan Forgiveness Agreement described in court, Mr Auchi lent Mr Rezko $3.5 million in April 2005 and $11 million in September 2005, as well as the $3.5 million transferred in April 2007.

That agreement provided for the outstanding loans to be "forgiven" in return for a stake in the 62-acre Riverside Park development.

A posting last week on a GMH-owned website, middle-east-online.com, portrayed Mr Auchi as a Middle Eastern "Donald Trump" with a global business construction empire.

Mr Auchi visited the United States in 2004. Pictures show him meeting Emil Jones, the president of the Illinois state senate, an ally of Mr Obama, a former state senator.

Both Mr Auchi and Mr Obama say they have no memory of meeting each other. But, according to a source, the two may have had a brief encounter at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago where Mr Auchi’s visit was being honoured with a dinner attended by the Governor when Mr Obama, coincidentally in the hotel, dropped in.

An aide to Mr Obama said he did attend an event at the Four Seasons at which Mr Rezko was present but does not remember meeting Mr Auchi. "He shook a lot of hands and met a lot of people," the aide said. "We do not remember individual people."

Prosecutors say that, after Mr Auchi was unable to enter the United States in 2005, Mr Rezko approached the US State Department to get him a visa and apparently asked "certain Illinois government officials to do the same." Mr Obama denies he was approached. Mr Auchi's lawyer has emphasised to The Times that it would be entirely false to imply that money had been lent by GMH to Mr Rezko in return for Mr Rezko seeking to assist Mr Auchi to obtain a visa. The two men's relationship, the lawyer stressed, was a busines s one.

Mr Auchi's lawyer said the purpose of the Fintrade Services loan was to "assist the financial position" of a pizzeria company called AR Pizza, in which GMH held a shareholding. He said the loan had since been repaid in the form of a greater stake in the Chicago 62-acre land project.

AR Pizza has since become a defendant in a civil lawsuit by the Papa John's pizzeria chain, which alleges that it continued to operate a string of former Papa John's franchises under the name "Papa Tony's" without permission.

Mr Auchi's lawyer said: "My client played no part in the management and/or day to day running of AR Pizza, the GMH Group being an entirely passive investor in the company. Further, there was no need as a mimimum return on the investment was guaranteed. As to the court proceedings, my client is not a party to these. He denies any wrongdoing in relation to his involvement in AR Pizza."

Mr Rezko was also a major fundraiser for Governor Blagojevich. The governor's chief fundraiser Christopher Kelly, who also served as his gambling adviser, is fighting tax charges related to betting losses. The Associated Press reported that last month Mr Auchi's conglomerate also gave a loan to Mr Kelly secured on a Nevada land deal which the governor’s bagman was involved in.

Obama's Iraqi Oil for Food connection
By Andrew Walden
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/obamas_iraqi_oil_for_food_conn.html

Out on bail awaiting trial, dual US-Syrian citizen, Antoin ‘Tony' Rezko, was rousted out of bed by police pounding on the doors of his Chicago mansion the morning of Monday, January 28. According to the Associated Press:

"U.S. District Judge Amy J. St. Eve jailed Rezko...saying he had disobeyed her order to keep her posted on his financial status.  Among other things, he failed to tell her about a $3.5 million loan from London-based Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi -- a loan that was later forgiven in exchange for shares in a prime slice of Chicago real estate.  Rezko gave $700,000 of the money to his wife and used the rest to pay legal bills and funnel cash to various supporters."

Funds from Auchi's loan may have helped finance a complex series of transactions between Rezko and Democratic Presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama involving the 2005 purchase of Obama's Chicago mansion and Rezko's purchase of an adjoining landlocked parcel.

The Times of London reports:

"A company related to Mr. Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr. Obama's bagman Antoin ‘Tony' Rezko on May, 23 2005. Mr. Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

"Three weeks later, Mr. Obama bought a house on the city's South Side while Mr Rezko's wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.  Mr. Obama says he never used Mrs. Rezko's still-empty lot, which could only be accessed through his property. But he admits he paid his gardener to mow the lawn."

Rezko's relationship with Barack Obama goes back to at least 1990, when Obama's law firm did work relating to a Rezko housing development.  Rezko was a key early-money fund raiser in Obama's state Senate campaigns and his failed run at the US Congress.  In June 2005, when the mansion was purchased, Rezko was widely known to be under federal investigation.  Rezko also is a key fundraiser for Illinois Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich.

The sudden emergence of Auchi into this story indicates Rezko's deals may include a money trail leading back to dead Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.  Auchi's Saddam links trace back to a failed 1959 assassination attempt on the life of then-Iraqi-prime-minister Abdul Karim Qasim.

Auchi's General Mediterranean Holdings company was also the largest private shareholder in Banque Nationale de Paris which later merged with Paribas to become BNP Paribas.  At Saddam's insistence, billions of dollars of Oil for Food transactions passed through BNP from its 1995 inception until 2001. 

In January 2004, Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada published a list of 270 Oil for Food beneficiaries.  The list was translated and published on line by The Middle East Media Research Institute.  Hundreds of millions of dollars of Oil for Food money was illegally diverted to buy Saddam favor from the United Nations, possibly reaching as high as Secretary general Kofi Annan's son.  Also receiving million's from Saddam's slush fund were heads of state and their associates from Russia, France, China, and numerous Islamic countries.     

The Auchi-Obama links go beyond the mansion deal.  The Times of London February 1 reports uncovering, "state documents in Illinois recording that Fintrade Services, a Panamanian company, lent money to (an) Obama fundraiser in May 2005. Fintrade's directors include Ibtisam Auchi, the name of Mr. Auchi's wife." 

Auchi, a Chaldean Christian, was later pardoned by Qasim.  As Saddam's Baath party took power, Auchi prospered.  He went to work for the Iraqi Ministry of Oil in 1967.  He rose to be Oil Ministry Director of Planning and Development before leaving Iraq in 1979.  His brother was apparently killed by Saddam's regime as were family of many high-ranking Baathists.  But there are also claims that Auchi continued secretly working for Saddam's intelligence services, a kind of dual reality not uncommon in the twisted world of Saddam's upper echelons. 

What is certain is that Auchi prospered mightily collecting "commissions" on sale of weapons and other goods to Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s.  Living in the UK, he is now listed as Britain's 18th-richest man.  The Times of London reports, "On the 20th anniversary of his business in 1999, Mr. Auchi received a greeting card signed by 130 politicians, including (Prime Minister) Tony Blair, (Conservative Party leader) William Hague and (Liberal-Democratic Party leader) Charles Kennedy...."

In spite of his British connections and an earlier 2004 US visit, Auchi was denied entry into the US in 2005.  It is believed that he was attempting in 2005 to win a US visa with the help of Rezko several as-yet-unnamed Illinois political figures.  Among Auchi's many international awards is a 2005 election as an "Honorary Member in the International College of Surgeons in Chicago, Illinois."  Obama has denied trying to help Auchi.       

Auchi has played a role in BNP since the late 1970s.  When BNP was privatized by the French government in 1993, Auchi acquired stock in the banking giant through his Luxembourg-based company, General Mediterranean Holdings.  Auchi played a key role in BNP's 2000 merger with Paribas.  According to the New York Times, "As recently as 2001, General Mediterranean Holdings described itself in an annual report as one of largest single shareholders in BNP Paribas."  Saddam used Oil for Food fraud to channel millions of dollars to heads of state, activists, terrorists, and journalists--many of whom returned the favor by backing Saddam in 2003 when the US finally invaded.

In 2003 Auchi was convicted in France for receiving about $100 million in illegal commissions as part of a scandal involving the French oil giant Elf Aquitane.  The UK Guardian wrote:

"(Elf was) the biggest fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War.  Elf became a private bank for its executives who spent £200 million on political favours, mistresses, jewellery, fine art, villas and apartments." 

Auchi's General Mediterranean Holdings also has connections to the new Iraq-connections which lead right back to Tony Rezko.  Auchi's company helped finance a 250 megawatt power plant in the Kurdish town of Chamchamal, Iraq, teaming up with Rezko and Iraq's former Minister of Electricity, Aiham Alsamarrae.  Alsamarrae, a Chicago resident with dual US-Iraqi citizenship is accused of graft involving Iraq reconstruction projects-an embarrassing connection for the war critic Obama. 

Returning in 2003 to post-Saddam Iraq, Alsamarrae had been made Minister of Electricity under the occupation government of Paul Bremer.  Alsamarrae escaped in what he called "the Chicago way" from the Green Zone in December, 2006 after being held for four months in relation to a $2 billion Iraqi reconstruction corruption case.  He is now living in his Chicago mansion.

Writing in Human Events, March 3, 2008, John Batchelor reports on an Alsammarae-Obama-Rezko connection:

"...in April 2005, one month before Mr. Alsammarae left his post, his Ministry of Electricity signed a contract for $50 million with Companion Security to provide training to Iraqis to guard electrical plants by flying them to Illinois for classes.

"Companion Security was headed by a former Chicago policeman with a troubled history, Daniel T. Frawley, in partnership with Mr. Rezko and in association with Daniel Mahru, the lawyer for the original contract and Mr. Rezko's former business partner. In April 2006, Mr. Frawley entered negotiations with Governor Rod Blagojevich's staff to lease a military facility in Illinois to be a training camp. In August 2006, Mr. Frawley started negotiations with Mr. Obama's U.S. Senate staff to complete the contract....

"The timeline of Companion discussions in 2006 is important to note: April 2006 Frawley speaks to governor's office; August 2006 Frawley speaks to senator's office; October 2006 indictment of Rezko revealed; October 2006 Rezko arrested upon return from Syria; October 2006 Alsammarae convicted in Baghdad and makes his first escape attempt; December 2006 Alsammarae escapes from Baghdad. ...

"(In 2004) Mr. Auchi traveled by private aircraft to Midway Airport in Chicago and then to a fete at the Four Season Hotel, where he met with his business partner in Chicago real estate, Mr. Rezko, as well as with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Also present that night, according to a fresh report by James Bone and Dominic Kennedy of the London Times, was State Senator Barack Obama, who had recently won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat...."

Most politicians try to keep their financial backers out of trouble until after the election.  But Rezko, is already indicted by a federal grand jury.  And now his trial has begun in a Chicago federal court.

Rezko, along with Ali Ata and Abdelhamid Chaib, face federal grand jury charges presented in October 2006 by U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald.  The case revolves around allegations of fraud between 2000 and 2004 in the sale of 17 Papa Johns' Pizza parlors in Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee.  The case may begin with pizza but it could easily lead back to Europe, Syria, Iraq, and the UN Oil for Food program. 

Fitzgerald is the prosecutor who won perjury convictions against Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in March, 2007.  Chaib is an officer of several of Rezko's restaurant chains including Chicagoland Panda Express franchises.  Ata was appointed Executive Director of the Illinois Finance Authority by Governor Blagojevich.  Ata was also a former president of the Chicago Chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and had a financial interest in Rezko's restaurants.  Ata reportedly donated as much as $60,000 to Blagojevich and $5,000 to Obama.  Rezko reportedly raised as much as $500,000 for Blagojevich and at least $70,000 for Obama's various campaigns.  Obama has redirected as much as $150,000 in donations "bundled" by Rezko.   

Rezko has other unsavory financial ties.  Arab American Media Services reports:

"In 1997, Panda Express won the right to open a lucrative concession at O'Hare International Airport under the city's Minority Set-Aside program which directs large contracts to companies owned by Women, African Americans or Hispanics.  The city awarded a 10-year contract for O'Hare Airport to Crucial Inc. in 1999, which the city believed was owned by an African American, Jabir Herbert Muhammad, the son of the late Elijah Mohammad."

Elijah Mohammad led the Nation of Islam until his death in 1975.  Jabir Herbert Muhammad was sued in 1999 by boxer Muhammad Ali for unauthorized use of his name in connection with the so-called Muhammad Ali Foundation.  Rezko served as Executive Director of the Foundation.

Jay Stewart of the Better Government Assn. in Chicago told the LA Times:

"Everybody in this town knew that Tony Rezko was headed for trouble.  When he got indicted, there wasn't a single insider who was surprised.  It was viewed as a long time coming. . . . Why would you be having anything to do with Tony Rezko, particularly if you're planning to run for president?"

At a March 3 news conference in San Antonio, Texas, Chicago-based reporters peppered Obama with some of the questions the national news corps has avoided for over a year.  Obama claims he had already answered the questions in the Chicago media.  He said: "These requests, I think, could just go on forever.  At some point, what we need to try to do is respond to what's pertinent."

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote:

"Reporters, however, had a different idea of what was pertinent, and the questions about Rezko, NAFTA and other unpleasant subjects continued to come. An aide called out ‘last question,' and Obama made his move for the exit -- only for reporters to shout after him in protest. ‘C'mon, guys,' he pleaded. ‘I just answered, like, eight questions.'"

Obama has refused to sit down at length with the Chicago reporters who have worked this story for years.  But as Milbank pointed out, "The questioning...has only just begun."  With old-time Chicago corruption now going international-and Presidential--finding those answers is more urgent than ever.


Obama bagman is sent to jail over $3.5m payment by British tycoon
James Bone in New York, Dominic Kennedy in London
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3284825.ece

An undeclared $3.5 million (£1.8 million) payment from a corrupt Iraqi-British businessman has landed Barack Obama’s former fundraiser behind bars.

The payment, disclosed in court papers, is the first time that Mr Obama’s long-serving bagman Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a Syrian immigrant to the United States, has been linked to Nadhmi Auchi, the Iraqi-born billionaire who is one of Britain’s richest men. The relationship is a potential embarrassment for Mr Obama, who has made his opposition to the Iraq war a central plank of his campaign.

Court papers describe Mr Rezko as a close friend of Mr Auchi. The two are involved in a large Chicago land development together. But it is unclear how long the two men have known each other or whether they were linked before the 2003 Iraq war. Neither side would discuss their relationship.

The Times has, however, discovered state documents in Illinois recording that Fintrade Services, a Panamanian company, lent money to Mr Obama’s fundraiser in May 2005.

Fintrade’s directors include Ibtisam Auchi, the name of Mr Auchi’s wife. Mr Auchi’s spokespeople declined to respond to a question about whether he was linked to this business.

Mr Rezko, to be tried for corruption this month, had his bail revoked on Monday after he disobeyed a court’s instructions to keep it informed of changes to his finances. Prosecutors feared that he could try to flee abroad.

The property developer has been condemned by Hillary Clinton as a “slum landlord”.

According to prosecution documents Mr Rezko tried to persuade unnamed Illinois officials to help Mr Auchi to get a US visa after he was convicted of fraud in France. Mr Obama’s aides deny that he was approached.

Mr Rezko has been indicted for pressuring companies seeking state business for kickbacks and campaign contributions, although none for Mr Obama. He was granted bail in October 2006. He told a judge that he had no access to overseas money. But in April 2007 Mr Auchi’s business, General Mediterranean Holding (GMH), wired $3.5 million to Mr Rezko from a bank account in Beirut via a law firm.

The Chicago businessman has already been an embarrassment to Mr Obama’s campaign. The presidential challenger has tried to dampen criticism by paying $150,000 to charity to make up for donations from Mr Rezko. The Illinois senator has said that he made a “bone-headed mistake” to get involved in a property deal with Mr Rezko at a time when he was known to be under investigation.

Mr Auchi has attracted attention at Westminster because of his closeness to politicians and the Establishment. He says that his brother was executed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

His business partners in Britain have included Lord Steel of Aikwood, the former Liberal leader, and Keith Vaz, the Labour MP and Home Affairs Committee chairman.

On the 20th anniversary of his business in 1999, Mr Auchi received a greeting card signed by 130 politicians, including Tony Blair, William Hague and Charles Kennedy, who were then leaders of their respective parties.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP, went on to table parliamentary questions asking why the Blair Government appeared slow to respond to a French extradition request.

Mr Lamb said last night: “It’s a matter of public interest to understand why the payments were made. This deserves thorough investigation.”

Mr Auchi founded GMH in 1979, a year before he left Iraq. He says that he did business with his native country when it was considered a friend of the West but ceased to trade with Saddam’s regime once sanctions were imposed after the invasion of Kuwait.

US prosecution documents recall Mr Auchi’s suspended jail sentence and €2 million fine for corruption in France five years ago.

Defence lawyers said that Mr Auchi lent the $3.5 million for legal and family expenses. Most of the money had gone directly to law firms and there had been no attempt to flee. “While the Government attempts to besmirch Mr Auchi’s character,” they said, “he is one of Britain’s wealthiest men, has been a guest at the White House and met with two of the last three presidents, was Co-Chair of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is President of the

Anglo-Arab Organisation, and has received numerous awards and honorary positions from heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II, Pope John Paul II, and King Abdullah II of Jordan.”

Mr Auchi’s lawyers added: “Mr Auchi flatly and categorically denies any wrongdoing in relation to the matters that led to his conviction in France and he is pursuing an appeal against it.” Mr Auchi is also suing the oil company Elf in France for dragging him unwittingly into the scandal.


Rezko, Auchi and Obama
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2008/02/rezko-auchi-and-obama.html

In 2003, Nick Cohen at the Guardian wrote:

Allow me to introduce you to Nadhmi Auchi. He was charged in the 1950s with being an accomplice of Saddam Hussein, when the future tyrant was acquiring his taste for blood. He was investigated in the 1980s for his part in alleged bribes to the fabulously corrupt leaders of post-war Italy. In the 1990s, the Belgium Ambassador to Luxembourg claimed that Auchi's bank held money Saddam and Colonel Gadaffi had stolen from their luckless peoples. In 2002, officers from the Serious Fraud Squad raided the offices of one of Auchi's drug companies as part of an investigation of what is alleged to be the biggest swindle ever of the NHS. With allegations, albeit unproven, like these hanging over him, wouldn't you think that British MPs would have the sense to stay away?

Forget the British MPs. Tony Rezko didn't have the sense to stay away from Nadhmi Auchi. And now The Times reports that the "British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender."

The gist of the Times' story is that the Rezkos were broke at the time the Chicago property developer's wife bought a garden lot for full price just as Barack Obama was sold the house adjacent at a $300,000 discount. Obama later expanded his property by purchasing part of the garden lot from the Rezkos at $104,500 when it was appraised at $40,500.

Asked if she [Mrs Rezko] used money from her husband to buy the land next to Mr Obama's house, she said: "I can't answer these questions, I'm sorry."

Asked how long she and her husband had known Mr Auchi, she replied: "I will not be able to answer this question."

Mr Auchi's lawyer, asked whether the Fintrade Services loan was used to buy the land which became Mr Obama's garden, stated: "No, not as far as my client is aware."

Because both the Rezko garden and Obama house purchases were made on the same day the suggestion in the Times' story is that they were essentially one transaction and that Nadhmi Auchi anted up for Rezko. Bloomberg describes how the sale took place.

Rezko's wife, Rita, also an Obama donor, bought the adjoining plot in Hyde Park from the couple, Fredric Wondisford and Sally Radovick, for the $625,000 asking price, the same day that Obama bought the house for $300,000 less than the asking price. Antoin Rezko was under federal investigation at the time. ...

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama's campaign ... said Obama, 46, toured the property with Rezko for 15 to 30 minutes at some point before the purchase. Burton said Obama wanted Rezko's opinion of the property because Rezko was a real-estate developer in the area.... the sellers had "stipulated that the closing dates for the two properties were to be the same."

According to the Times, court records showed that Auchi virtually owned Rezko.

According to court documents, Mr Rezko's lawyer said his client had "longstanding indebtedness" to Mr Auchi's GMH. By June 2007 he owed it $27.9 million. Under a Loan Forgiveness Agreement described in court, Mr Auchi lent Mr Rezko $3.5 million in April 2005 and $11 million in September 2005, as well as the $3.5 million transferred in April 2007.

That agreement provided for the outstanding loans to be "forgiven" in return for a stake in the 62-acre Riverside Park development.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, loaned Tony Rezko $3.5 million on on May 23 2005 through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA. Three weeks later Rezko and Obama simultaneously bought the properties.

Both Mr Auchi and Mr Obama say they have no memory of meeting each other. But, according to a source, the two may have had a brief encounter at the Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago where Mr Auchi’s visit was being honoured with a dinner attended by the Governor when Mr Obama, coincidentally in the hotel, dropped in.

An aide to Mr Obama said he did attend an event at the Four Seasons at which Mr Rezko was present but does not remember meeting Mr Auchi. "He shook a lot of hands and met a lot of people," the aide said. "We do not remember individual people."

Prosecutors say that, after Mr Auchi was unable to enter the United States in 2005, Mr Rezko approached the US State Department to get him a visa and apparently asked "certain Illinois government officials to do the same." Mr Obama denies he was approached. Mr Auchi's lawyer has emphasised to The Times that it would be entirely false to imply that money had been lent by GMH to Mr Rezko in return for Mr Rezko seeking to assist Mr Auchi to obtain a visa. The two men's relationship, the lawyer stressed, was a business one.

Auchi was barred from entering the US in 2005 after having been convicted for fraud in France as an undesirable alien.

Cohen in his 2003 Guardian article described Auchi as "the thirteenth-richest man in Britain, and he has been able to collect British politicians the way other people collect stamps." Auchi was as gold-plated as they came. Wikipedia notes:

He was Vice-Chair of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University between 1996 and 2000. ... Nadhmi Auchi was honoured in 2003 by the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George with the honour and dignity of Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Francis I in recognition of his major contributions to inter-church and inter-faith dialogue. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II granted him his Coat of Arms in 2004. In the same year the President of the Republic of Lebanon, His Excellency General Emile Lahoud, awarded Mr Auchi with the First Grade of the Lebanese Order of Merit having already appointed him as a Commander of the National Order of the Cedar in 2000. He was also awarded the Ponitifical Order of St. Sylvester Pope and Martyr by John Paul II in 2004.

Whatever path took Auchi to Tony Rezko's doorstep must have been an interesting one indeed.