Why Isn't Obama Pulling Away?

It Really Isn’t Hard To Figure Out Why
Jennifer Rubin - 08.03.2008 - 2:20 PM

Democrats remain flummoxed and liberal pundits fret: what’s the matter with Barack Obama? He is supposed to be winning. By a lot. Well, a Democrat is supposed to be winning, but this particular one is having his share of problems. Charles Krauthammer on Friday explained: More...

I think the sheen from earlier this year, where he was seen as a streaking meteor and he was the candidate of hope–I think it was Brit Hume who said he started the year by selling hope, but now he’s selling audacity. And I think there’s a sourness setting in. And you see it even in mainstream press when you get a Dana Milbank of “The Washington Post” write a brilliant article in which he says said that Obama started out as the presumptive Democratic nominee, and now he’s the “presumptuous” Democratic nominee. So there is a sort of a turn in the zeitgeist. Where the energy issue is hitting is in congress. The Democrats have made a huge mistake here, the stubbornness of Pelosi and Reid in not allowing a vote. The Democrats know it is a losing issue. It’s manna from heaven because Republicans were running uphill on all the economic issues, and they are clearly on the side of public opinion on this.

It is really three factors at play: Obama has gotten worse, John McCain’s campaign has gotten more aggressive in pointing out that Obama has gotten worse and Obama is no longer talking about the issues which were underpinning that huge advantage Democrats were thought to enjoy.

It’s the last point which has liberal supporters stumped. What happened to the laser-like focus on the economy? What happened to the non-stop message that John McCain is George W. Bush’s clone? These were lost in the audacity festival in Berlin and the aftermath of the trip (e.g. the soldier snub gaffe). But even before that, between the securing the nomination and the overseas trip, the major campaign storylines have been: Obama’s flip-flops, Wesley Clark slurring McCain, Hillary Clinton voters still upset, Obama’s repositioning (kind of) on Iraq, the success of the surge, and the faux seal and the arrogance meme.

Where was there anything positive for Obama or any moment in which he was leading the policy discussion? In any other year the candidate who ceded the debate so dramatically would be losing. It’s a measure of how tough a year it is for Republicans that Obama is still effectively tied.

So why not more focus by Obama on the economy? Well, first he thought he had to fix his commander-in-chief problem. That may have been a giant waste of time and simply distracted from the central problem Obama faces on domestic policy. Obama has a significant challenge there which I suspect he has to fix, and fix quickly. Most of his economic plan is a collection of tax increases for the “rich” and corporations and estates. Throw in some protectionism and it’s not a very credible message during a weak economy. So he can rail about the faltering economy and call it the Bush-McCain depression but until he has a more attractive, growth-oriented approach it may be hard to seize the high ground.

And when you’re not driving the message, others will. That’s in large part why the stories become all about “process” and his personal deficiencies. That polling lead he is supposed to have, I suspect, won’t appear until he can diffuse and shut down the myriad of harmful storylines now circulating. And to do that, he’ll need a clear and believable economic message. Come to think of it, McCain could use one too.

The Race Issue Isn't Going Away

By JUAN WILLIAMS
August 4, 2008

With polls showing the presidential contest between John McCain and Barack Obama getting closer, a question is now looming larger and larger. Is skin color going to be the deciding factor?More...

Just last week, Sen. Obama warned voters that Sen. McCain's campaign will exploit the race issue by telling voters that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." A few weeks earlier, he said they will attack his lack of experience but also added, "And did I mention he's black?"

The McCain campaign did not counter the first punch, but after last week's jab -- fearing that Mr. Obama was getting away with calling his candidate a racist -- campaign manager Rick Davis responded to the dollar-bill attack by saying, "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

Mr. Obama's campaign concedes it has no clear example of a Republican attack that expressly cites Mr. Obama's name or race. Yet in the last few days some Obama supporters were at it again, suggesting that a McCain ad attacking Mr. Obama as little more than a "celebrity," by featuring young white women such as Britney Spears, is an appeal to white anxiety about black men and white women.

The race issue is clearly not going away. And the key reason -- to be blunt -- is because there is no telling how many white voters are lying to pollsters when they say they plan to vote for a black man to be president. Still, it is possible to look elsewhere in the polling numbers to see where white voters acknowledge their racial feelings and get a truer measure of racism.

In a Wall Street Journal poll last month, 8% of white voters said outright that race is the most important factor when it comes to looking at these two candidates -- a three percentage point increase since Mr. Obama claimed the Democratic nomination. An added 15% of white voters admit the candidates' race is a factor for them. Race is even more important to black voters: 20% say it is the top factor influencing their view of the candidates, and another 14% admit it is among the key factors that will determine their vote. All this contributes to the idea that the presidential contest will boil down to black guy versus white guy.

Consider also a recent Washington Post poll. Thirty percent of all voters admitted to racial prejudice, and more than a half of white voters categorized Mr. Obama as "risky" (two-thirds judged Mr. McCain the "safe" choice). Yet about 90% of whites said they would be "comfortable" with a black president. And about a third of white voters acknowledged they would not be "entirely comfortable" with an African-American president. Why the contradictory responses? My guess is that some whites are not telling the truth about their racial attitudes.

A recent New York Times poll found that only 31% of white voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama. That compares to 83% of blacks with a favorable opinion. This is a huge, polarizing differential.

But polling can be tricky. In May, a Pew poll asked voters about Mr. Obama but did not give them the option of saying they are undecided. In that poll, whites split on the candidate, 45% saying they had a favorable opinion, 46% unfavorable. When white voters had the option of being undecided, as they did in the Times poll, 37% of whites said they had an unfavorable opinion of him, but 26% said they were undecided.

To win this campaign, Mr. Obama needs to assure undecided white voters that he shares their values and is worthy of their trust. To do that he has to minimize attention to different racial attitudes toward his candidacy as well as racially polarizing issues, and appeal to the common experiences that bind Americans regardless of color.

Mr. Obama has shown an unprecedented ability to cross the racial divide in American politics. He did particularly well in managing caucus states, such as Iowa, where highly energized supporters, especially idealistic young white supporters, minimized the impact of negative racial attitudes with passionate participation.

But the white Democratic caucus voters in Iowa, where there are relatively few racial issues, are decidedly more liberal than white voters nationally. In primary states from New Hampshire to Texas and California, Mr. Obama lost when one of two things happened. Either working-class white voters did not participate in polls, or some white voters lied and told pollsters they planned to vote for him before casting their votes for another candidate.

There are going to be more of those wobbly white voters in November. The size of the white vote in a general election race dwarfs the white vote in the Democratic primary. Based on the 2004 presidential contest, whites make up about 77% of voters and blacks 11%.

In the Democratic primaries there were states, especially in the South, where blacks made up nearly half of the electorate. But in the general election there are no states where blacks make up so large a percentage. Even in Southern states such as Georgia and North Carolina, where blacks made up about a quarter of the vote in the last presidential election, it will be an upset if Mr. Obama manages to win. Those states have a history of Republican dominance in presidential contests. Even an energized black vote is unlikely to make Mr. Obama a winner anywhere in the South, although some Democrats hold out hope for Virginia.

In 2004, John Kerry had a 46% favorable rating among white voters, barely better than Barack Obama's. But Mr. Kerry lost. Mr. Obama needs to do better with whites. But the white voters' view of him is still clearly unsettled.

Polls show white voters struggling to identify with him as a fellow American who, to quote Bill Clinton, is able to "feel your pain." When the New York Times poll asked whether Mr. Obama cares about "the needs and problems of people like yourself," 70% of whites answered "a lot" or "some." But 28% of whites said Mr. Obama cared about them "not much" or "not at all." Compare that with the 72% of black voters who said Mr. Obama cared about them "a lot." The same Times poll had Mr. Obama leading Mr. McCain by six percentage points, 45-39, but trailing by nine points among white voters, 37-46.

After Jesse Jackson's vicious comments about Mr. Obama, some political strategists suggested that a split with Mr. Jackson and his racially divisive politics could help Mr. Obama with white voters. But polls have yet to reveal this.

Could a Jackson-Obama split cause black voters to lose enthusiasm for him -- dividing their loyalties between the two most prominent black political voices of this era? Opinion surveys do not indicate this is likely. Polling done by Gallup just before Mr. Jackson's outburst indicated that 29% of black Americans chose Mr. Obama as the "individual or leader in the U.S. to speak for you on issues of race." Mr. Jackson came in third with only 4% support (behind Al Sharpton, who had 6%). Last year, a Pew poll focusing on racial attitudes found 76% of blacks judged Mr. Obama a "good influence," a full eight points higher than Mr. Jackson.

Jodie Allen, a senior editor at Pew, wrote recently that a poll Pew conducted last November showed clearly that "the black community is at least as traditional in its views as the larger American public." Blacks in the Pew poll were just as likely as whites to take a hard line opposing crime (as long as black neighborhoods are not unfairly targeted), to condemn the shocking number of children born out of wedlock and express disgust with the violence and misogyny in rap music.

Mr. Obama needs to hammer home these conservative social values to capture undecided white voters. He might lose Mr. Jackson's vote. But he won't lose many black votes, and he will win the undecided white votes he needs to become America's first African-American president.

Mr. Williams is a political analyst for National Public Radio and Fox News.

The Denver Group - Warning!

Someone has created a “spam” or spoof version of The Denver Group’s website, and people can easily end up there instead of the actual site. This is definitely being done to hamper their ability to fundraise (that’s bad), but it means they are making people genuinely nervous (and that’s good!

Please spread the word of the spoof, and put their proper URL everywhere:

http://thedenvergroup.blogspot.com/

Thanks!

URGENT ACTION - Please Fill out the Survey!

By SusanUnPCgravatarclose
Email: susanunpc@gmail.com
Site: http://noquarterusa.net/
August 1, 2008 at 9:26 AM

The more surveys we can turn in to the people who make the actual decisions on which platform issues will come before the delegate body in Denver, the more we can demonstrate the level of interest and passion in these issues.

We also promise that, once the math crunching is done, you’ll get to see how everyone voted on each measure (which you can read below).

In the meantime …

… if you haven’t voted, please do.

… if you haven’t e-mailed ALL of your friends and asked them to vote, please do it today. Thanks! More...

The Drafting Committee of the Democratic National Convention is meeting this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in Cleveland. This committee will draft the platform that the Platform Committee will debate and ratify at a meeting the following weekend.

Many people think the party platform is a document with no force, but it is actually binding on the party and the next DNC chair for four years. As Hillary supporters who believe the party needs to be reformed, it is absolutely critical that we use whatever opportunity we have to affect the platform.

The Obama Campaign invited voters to tell the Democratic Party what the Platform should be.

I Own My Vote responded by putting forward 10 possible platform planks that address the concerns of Hillary Clinton’s supporters and asking people who signed the I Own My Vote Pledge to vote on whether they agree or disagree with each plank. Each plank that receives a majority of the votes will be submitted to the DNC as part of the I Own My Vote Platform Suggestions.

It is imperative that we deliver the results to the Drafting Committee on Thursday afternoon before the committee meets. Hillary’s platform committee members are waiting for this platform.

It is our goal that over 1000 people will participate in our virtual platform meeting so we can show a real commitment to the positions we articulate. So please, sign the I Own My Vote pledge and visit the virtual platform committee now.

HERE ARE THE PLATFORM MEASURES YOU WILL BE ENDORSING. VOTE now, and then ponder the possibilities! We could actually change how the Democratic party operates its primaries!

Equal Rights Amendment

The Democratic Party apologizes to all women for removing the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment from John Kerry’s 2004 Democratic National Convention Platform.

The Equal Rights Amendment must be passed during the next congressional session.

VOTE.

Universal Healthcare

The Democratic Party will use all available means to create a system of universal healthcare under which 100% of the population will be covered by comprehensive health insurance.

The Democratic Party and its leaders will oppose any efforts to redefine the term “universal healthcare” to mean any policy that insures less than 100% of the population.

We believe that Senator Hillary Clinton’s health care plan is the most effective way to create a system of universal healthcare for all Americans.

The United States must mandate that all citizens have health insurance.

Vote

One Person One Vote

In our democratic system, every adult person is entitled to one vote.

The 2008 primaries illustrated that a caucus vote is worth more than a primary vote because each delegate elected by caucus represents less voters than each delegate elected by primary.

Caucuses allow party officials to exert undue influence and coercion over voters.

Caucuses are immune from federal oversight, while primaries are subject to federal election law.

Therefore, the Democratic Party will forbid caucuses in all future nominating processes and will require all states to conduct primaries to select their delegates to future national conventions.

VOTE.

Fair Reflection

The Democratic Party and Senator Obama apologize to the voters of Michigan for supporting a delegate selection plan that allotted pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention through a method that substituted the judgment of members of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee for the judgment of Michigan’s voters.
VOTE.

No Geographic Preference

No state is more important than any other state. No voter is more important than any other voter.

The Democratic Party has engaged in a practice that has given preference to some states over others.

In the future the Democratic National Committee will not give preference to any state in scheduling the primary elections.

So long as all states hold their primaries within a prescribed window of time, the Democratic Party will not penalize any state for scheduling its primary before or after any other, even if as a result all states schedule their primaries for the same day.

VOTE.

Discrimination

The Democratic Party will not tolerate discrimination based on race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or nation of origin.

The Democratic Party leadership, including the DNC executive committee, presidential and vice-presidential nominees, House and Senate leadership, and members of all committees within the Democratic National Committee, will from this point forward publicly defend candidates and officeholders who are attacked on any of these bases in the media.

VOTE.

Prevention of Unjust and Foolish Wars

The Democratic Party opposes all unjust and foolish wars.

The key to preventing unjust and foolish wars is an informed electorate with a vested interest in the nation’s military policies who will hold Congress accountable.

Relying on a volunteer military constituted of paid soldiers and contractors insulates the vast majority of Americans from the dangers and consequences of our nation’s military actions.

The Democratic Party opposes any disproportionate impact such military composition has on individuals, families, and communities based on race, economic status, economic opportunity, or educational level.

Barack Obama has inspired young people everywhere to support him. The Democratic Party believes that these young people are the key to stopping unjust and foolish wars.

Therefore, the Democratic Party supports the reinstatement of the draft as proposed by Congressman Charlie Rangel of New York.

VOTE.

A Fair, Open, and Legitimate Convention

It is in the best interests of Party unity that there be no question about the legitimacy of the electoral process.

The election of the Democratic nominees for the offices of president and vice president shall take place at the Democratic National Convention.

Party leaders shall not do anything to discourage or suppress the delegate vote at the Democratic National Convention.

In the event that any candidate receives more than 25% of the popular vote for president, his or her name shall be automatically entered into nomination for the office of president of the united states and the secretary of the convention shall take a roll call vote of all the delegates. In this eventuality, the party shall not nominate any candidate for president by aclimation.

VOTE.

LGBT Rights

All members of the Democratic Party, led by the nominee for President, will work together to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and to provide equal federal benefits to all married couples, with marriage defined by the state or country where the marriage was solemnized.

The Democratic Party will also use all means to ensure that the same benefits that exist for married couples exist for all civil unions.

Further, the Democratic Party and its elected officials will not fund or promote any educational material or organization that spreads a message of hate or discrimination against LGBT people.

VOTE.

Defense of Labor

The Justice Department has oversight of some labor unions such as the Teamsters because of a history of union leadership misusing union dues and pension funds.

The Democratic Party supports the working class and unionized labor.

Therefore, the Democratic Party supports continued Justice Department oversight of those labor unions to which such oversight currently applies.

GO HERE. It takes but five minutes!

ED O’REILLY on PUMA RADIO TONIGHT!

5pm PST, Sunday, August 3, 2008

To watch - Click on the BlogTalkRadio icon in the upper right hand corner!

Tonight, we will be bringing you a rather robust episode of “No We Won’t” !!
Please join Sheri, and our special guest, Darragh Murphy of PUMA PAC, as we welcome Ed O’Reilly, the next Junior Senator from the state of Massachusetts! (Will you be listening, Senator Kerry?) Simofish and SF PUMA will be here to discuss the Hillary nomination video, John West will discuss the 300 HRC delegates for nomination. Also, Darragh Murphy, Executive Director of PUMApac will be joining us. Please tune in for great show!

Obama says give Fla. and Mich. delegates full vote

2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now that Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination for president, he says convention delegates from Florida and Michigan should have full voting rights at the party's national convention.

The delegates were originally stripped because the two states violated party rules by holding primaries before Feb. 5. The delegates from each state were given half votes at contentious party meeting in May.

Obama's former Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had won both primaries. Obama, in a letter Sunday to the party's credentials committee, says "party unity" calls for the delegates to "participate fully alongside the delegates from the other states and territories."

Just an observation: When Hillary was campaigning to have the two states count in the primaries, Obama supporters accused her of opportunism and defended Obama's lack of enthusiasm (and coincidentally she would net more delegates from both states). They said the rules were the rules, MI and FL violated the rules, and should be punished accordingly. Now that Obama realized he needs these states (perhaps because he's not doing as well as he anticipated) the Obama supporters appear to be thrilled with his decision. They no longer speak of opportunism or care that MI and FL's delegates will be counted after breaking the rules...

And if Obama's truly interested in being fair, he'll return the Michigan delegates to Hillary taken away by the R&B Committee,and release the uncommitted Michigan delegates to vote their conscience.

Surveillance at the Democratic Convention - More Erosion of our Civil Liberties!

(You will want to read this if you are going to the convention)
Federal and state law enforcement officials will increase intelligence operations during the Democratic National Convention, overseeing an information war room that will be staffed around the clock with analysts ... Suspicious activity will be documented, reported to the Fusion task center and terrorism community.

A fusion center is a collaborative effort between not just state, local and federal law enforcement, but also, as in Colorado, involving the military, private sector companies and other non-law enforcement government agencies. It breaks down all the arm’s-length relationships by putting these people together in an environment where it’s unclear who is actually in charge and whose rules apply to the information that’s being collected and shared and distributed through these fusion centers. And particularly where the military and private entities were involved, it seems inappropriate to incorporate them into what is essentially a law enforcement function. And in fact, there are longstanding laws in place specifically to prevent military intervention in law enforcement activities.

Terrorism activity can include criminal and NONCRIMINAL activity. There are in one letter 65 behaviors identified, including taking videos. There have been instances where people have been stopped for taking video's, and instances of people being arrested for taking videos of police. What is even more disturbing is that information is collected on people and held indefinitely in databases, even if there is no wrongdoing. “This is something that's really growing,” says German. “There are very ambiguous lines of authority. " ...It's unclear who's in charge. It's unclear whose rules everyone in the fusion centers are playing by.” It's also unclear who can access the information.

One story that they highlight in their report happened in Los Angeles. The co-founder of the very first Los Angeles County Terrorism Early Warning Center contacted the US Northern Command after 9/11 and started a conspiracy to steal Military Intelligence records that later involved at least seven law enforcement officers and military reservists in this theft scheme, stealing military surveillance records apparently pertaining to southern California mosques. It’s unclear why the military has those records in the first place, but the fact that this group could operate for five years stealing these highly classified records - and were discovered completely by accident is the perfect storm of the issues ...

There is MUCH More information - It's a fascinating video. There are a couple of articles at the website as well. Click here to watch the video or read the articles!

Obama's Eloquence Fatigue

By George Will

WASHINGTON -- As the presidential candidates enter the three-month sprint to November, Barack Obama must be wondering: If that did not do it, what will? The antecedent of the pronoun "that" is his Berlin speech. The antecedent of the pronoun "it" is assuage anxieties about his understanding of the need to supplement soft power (diplomacy) with hard power (military force). More...

He spoke in Berlin at the bullet-scarred base -- it was in the crossfire 63 years ago as Russian troops neared Hitler's bunker about a mile away -- of an 1873 monument to German militarism. To be precise, the monument celebrates the Franco-Prussian War and lesser triumphs of the militarism that would help ruin the next century.

Anyway, at that monument Obama exhorted Germans -- does the candidate of "change" appreciate how much beneficent change made this exhortation necessary? -- to be more willing to wage war, in Afghanistan. He was right to do so.

But polls taken since his trip abroad do not indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this presidential campaign: Measured against his party's surging strength in every region and at every level, he is dramatically underperforming. Surely this fact is related to anxieties about his thin resume regarding national security matters, the thinnest of any major party nominee since Wendell Wilkie's in 1940. But the fact also might be related to fatigue from too much of Obama's eloquence, which is beginning to sound formulaic and perfunctory.

Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." John Kennedy said in Berlin, "Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free." That half-baked and badly written thought was either trivial because it was tautological (when one man is enslaved, not every man is free) or it was absurd (when one man is not free, no man is free). That absurdity is dangerous because it makes a grandiose mission seem imperative, as in President George W. Bush's second inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs -- someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, Obama should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy.

And no more locutions such as "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship." If they meant anything in Berlin, they meant that Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism is not, however, a political asset for American presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, one of whose urgent needs is to seem comfortable with America's vibrant and very un-European patriotism, which is grounded in a sense of virtuous exceptionalism.

Otherwise, "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship" are, strictly speaking, nonsense. Citizenship is defined by legal and loyalty attachments to a particular political entity with a distinctive regime and culture. Neither the world nor the globe is such an entity.

In Berlin, Obama neared self-parody with a rhetoric of Leave No Metaphor Behind. "Walls"? Down with them. "Bridges"? Build new ones between this and that. "A new dawn"? The Middle East deserves one. And Berlin was the wrong place to vow to "remake the world once again." Modern Berlin rose from rubble that was the result of the last attempt at remaking "the world."

Of course, from Obama, such tropes, although silly, are not menacing, any more than they were from Ronald Reagan, who was incorrigibly fond of perhaps the least conservative, and therefore the most absurd, proposition ever penned by a political philosopher, Thomas Paine's "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." No. We. Don't.

The world is a fact, and facts are indeed stubborn things. After eight years, if such there are, of an Obama presidency, if such there is, the world will look much as it does today -- if we are lucky.

Swift and sweeping changes are almost always calamitous consequences of calamities -- often of wars, sometimes of people determined to "remake the world." Wise voters -- polls might be telling us that there are more of them than Obama imagines -- hanker for candidates whose principal promise is that they will do their best to muddle through without breaking too much crockery.
georgewill@washpost.com

Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/obamas_place_in_the_annals_of.html at August 03, 2008 - 11:10:16 AM PDT

Barack Obama's Lost Years

by Stanley Kurtz
08/11/2008, Volume 013, Issue 45

The senator's tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal.More...

Barack Obama's neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has a longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from Chicago aldermen to state legislators to U.S. senators. Obama himself, as a state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for the Herald, under the title "Springfield Report," between 1996 and 2004. Read in isolation, Obama's columns from the state capital tell us little. Placed in the context of political and policy battles then raging in Illinois, however, the young legislator's dispatches powerfully illuminate his political beliefs. Even more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling Obama's early political and legislative activities in the pages not only of the Hyde Park Herald, but also of another South Side fixture, the Chicago Defender.

Obama moved to Chicago in order to place himself in what he understood to be the de facto "capital" of black America. For well over 100 years, the Chicago Defender has been the voice of that capital, and therefore a paper of national significance for African Americans. Early on in his political career, Obama complained of being slighted by major media, like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Yet extensive and continuous coverage in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald presents a remarkable resource for understanding who Obama is. Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama's early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the "lost years," the period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama's heretofore hidden world.

What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama's early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It's no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

THE CENTRALITY OF RACE

Any rounded treatment of Obama's early political career has got to give prominence to the issue of race. Obama has recently made efforts to preemptively blunt discussion of the race issue, warning that his critics will highlight the fact that he is African American. Yet the question of race plays so large a role in Obama's own thought and action that it is all but impossible to discuss his political trajectory without acknowledging the extent to which it engrosses him. Obama settled in Chicago with the declared intention of "organizing black folks." His first book is subtitled "A Story of Race and Inheritance," and his second book contains an important chapter on race. On his return to Chicago in 1991, Obama practiced civil rights law and for many years taught a seminar on racism and law at the University of Chicago. When he entered the Illinois senate, it was to represent the heavily (although not exclusively) minority 13th district on the South Side of Chicago. Indeed, race functions for Obama as a kind of master-category, pervading and organizing a wide array of issues that many Americans may not think of as racial at all. Understanding Obama's thinking on race, for example, is a prerequisite to grasping his views on spending and taxation. Thus, we have no alternative but to puzzle out the place of race in Obama's broader political outlook as well as in his legislative career.

When it comes to issues like affirmative action and set-asides, Obama is anything but the post-racial politician he's sometimes made out to be. Take set-asides. In 1998, Obama endorsed Democratic gubernatorial hopeful John Schmidt, stressing to the Defender Schmidt's past support for affirmative action and set-asides. Although Obama was generally pleased by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 acceptance of racial preferences at the University of Michigan, he underscored the danger that Republican-appointed justices might someday overturn the ruling. The day after the Michigan decision, Obama honored the passing of former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson Jr., eulogizing Jackson for creating model affirmative action and set-aside programs that spread across the nation.

In 2004, a U.S. District Court disallowed the ordinance under which Chicago required the use of at least 25 percent minority business enterprises and 5 percent women's business enterprises on city-funded projects. In the immediate aftermath of the ruling, Obama and Jesse Jackson were among the prominent voices calling for a black leadership summit to plot strategy for a restoration of Chicago's construction quotas. Obama and his allies succeeded in bringing back race-based contracting.

Prominent among those allies were two of Obama's earliest and strongest political supporters, Hyde Park aldermen Toni Preckwinkle and Leslie Hairston. These two are known as fierce advocates of set-asides and key orchestrators of demonstrations and public-relations campaigns against businesses that question race-based contracting. When, in 2001, construction work was planned for South Lake Shore Drive, a major artery that connects Hyde Park to the rest of Chicago, Preckwinkle and Hairston seized the occasion to call for an extraordinary 70 percent minority quota on contracts for the project. They even demanded that, for the sake of race-based hiring, normal contractor eligibility requirements be waived. Then when work on South Lake Shore Drive was not awarded to minority contractors, a group consisting of Preckwinkle, Hairston, two neighboring aldermen, and numerous activists staged a surprise raid on the construction site, shutting it down and forcing the contractor to hire more blacks. A raid on a second construction site collapsed when several blacks were found already at work on the project. (The aldermen said these African-American laborers had been hired at the last minute to stymie their protest.)

Biographical treatments of Obama tend to stress the tenuous nature of his black identity-his upbringing by whites, his elite education, his home in Chicago's highly integrated Hyde Park, personal tensions with black legislators, and questions about whether Obama is "black enough" to represent African Americans. These concerns over Obama's racial identity are overblown. On race-related issues Obama has stood shoulder to shoulder with Chicago's African-American politicians for years.

Occasionally, Obama has even gotten out in front of them. In 1999, for example, he made news by calling on the governor to appoint a minority to the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), a body that had previously attracted little notice among Chicago's blacks. In 2000, the Chicago Defender named Obama one of a number of "Vanguards for Change," citing him for "focusing on legislation in areas previously unexplored by the African-American community including his call that a person of color be appointed to the ICC." Obama did bring a somewhat different background and set of interests to the table. Yet the upshot was to expand the frontiers of race-based politics.

And the story doesn't end with Obama's support for set-asides. A Chicago Defender story of 1999 features a front-page picture of Obama beside the headline, "Obama: Illinois Black Caucus is broken." In the accompanying article, although Obama denies demanding that black legislators march in perfect lockstep, he expresses anger that black state senators have failed to unite for the purpose of placing a newly approved riverboat casino in a minority neighborhood. The failed casino vote, Obama argues, means that the black caucus "is broken and needs to unite for the common good of the African-American community." Obama continues, "The problem right now is that we don't have a unified agenda that's enforced back in the community and is clearly articulated. Everybody tends to be lone agents in these situations."

Speaking in reply to Obama was Mary E. Flowers, an African-American state senator who apparently broke black caucus discipline and voted to approve the casino's location in a nonminority area. Said Flowers: "The Black Caucus is from different tribes, different walks of life. I don't expect all of the whites to vote alike.  .  .  .  Why is it that all of us should walk alike, talk alike and vote alike?  .  .  .  I was chosen by my constituents to represent them, and that is what I try to do." Given Obama's supposedly post-racial politics, it is notable that he should be the one demanding enforcement of a black political agenda against "lone agents," while another black legislator appeals to Obama to leave her free to represent her constituents, black or white, as she sees fit.

Obama's fight to unify the black caucus on the casino vote was undertaken in partnership with state senator Donne Trotter. Yet nearly every biographical account of Obama lavishes attention on Trotter's claim that Obama was just a "white man in black face." The significance of that bit of campaign hype, offered while Trotter was running against Obama for Congress, has been exaggerated, perhaps because Trotter's epithet helps to defuse the notion that Obama himself practices race-based politics. Yet Obama does exactly that. His public legislative cooperation with Trotter, and with other black Illinois politicians, yields more insight into Obama's political plans than any electoral rhetoric or private intra-black-caucus backbiting. To the extent that Obama can be accused of having shaky "black credentials," that very accusation pushes him to practice race-conscious politics all the more energetically.

When the 2000 census revealed dramatic growth in Chicago's Hispanic and Asian populations alongside a decline in the number of African Americans, the Illinois black caucus was alarmed at the prospect that the number of blacks in the Illinois General Assembly might decline. At that point, Obama stepped to the forefront of the effort to preserve as many black seats as possible. The Defender quotes Obama as saying that, "while everyone agrees that the Hispanic population has grown, they cannot expand by taking African-American seats." As in the casino dispute, Obama stressed black unity, pushing a plan that would modestly increase the white, Hispanic, and Asian population in what would continue to be the same number of safe black districts. As Obama put it: "An incumbent African-American legislator with a 90 percent district may feel good about his reelection chances, but we as a community would probably be better off if we had two African-American legislators with 60 percent each."

Obama's intensely race-conscious approach may surprise Americans who know him primarily through his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 2004. When Obama so famously said, "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America-there's the United States of America," most Americans took him to be advocating a color-blind consciousness of the kind expressed in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that his children would one day be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Anyone who understood Obama's words that way should know that this is not the whole story. In an essay published in 1988 entitled "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City," Obama tried to make room for both "accommodation and militancy" in black political engagement. He wrote,

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and board-room negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.

However his views may have evolved in the ensuing 20 years, Obama surely knew that the King-like rhetoric of his keynote address would be taken by most Americans as a repudiation of the kind of race-based politics he and his closest allies have consistently practiced throughout his electoral career. It's difficult to gauge the extent to which Obama may have consciously permitted this misunderstanding to take hold, or the extent to which he still believes that the opposition between "integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy" is a false one. Neither alternative is particularly encouraging.

LIBERALS AND RADICALS

Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama has made a point of refusing the liberal label. While running for Congress against Bobby Rush in late 1999 and early 2000, however, Obama showed no such compunction. At a November 1999 candidate forum, the Hyde Park Herald reported that "there was little to distinguish" the candidates, who "struggled to differentiate themselves" ideologically. Acknowledged Obama, "[W]e're all on the liberal wing of the Democratic party." Indeed, the common political ideology of the candidates was a theme in Herald coverage throughout the race. Rush's background suggests what that ideology was: A Chicago icon and former Black Panther, Rush received a 90 percent rating in 2000, and a 100 percent rating in 1999, from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Both years the American Conservative Union rated him at zero percent.

So how exactly did these two liberal candidates "struggle to differentiate" themselves in debate? During a candidate forum, for example, when Rush bragged that since entering Congress, he hadn't voted to approve a single defense budget, Obama pounced, accusing Rush of having voted for the Star Wars missile defense system the previous year. Since that contest, Obama's liberalism hasn't exactly been a secret to the folks back home. In 2002, Obama himself could speak hopefully of plans "to move a progressive agenda" through the state legislature, and local observers commonly identified Obama as a "progressive." When it endorsed him for the U.S. Senate in 2004, the Chicago Defender proclaimed Obama "represents renewal of the liberal, humanitarian cause." The Defender went on to assure readers that Obama would support "progressive action" in Washington.

The most interesting characterization came from Obama himself, who laid out his U.S. Senate campaign strategy for the Defender in 2003: "[A]s you combine a strong African-American base with progressive white and Latino voters, I think it is a recipe for success in the primary and in the general election." Putting the point slightly differently, Obama added, "When you combine  .  .  .an energized African-American voter base and effective coalition-building with other progressive sectors of the population, we think we have a recipe for victory." Obama consciously constructed his election strategy on a foundation of leftist ideology and racial bloc voting.

The overwhelming majority of Obama's "Springfield Report" columns in the Hyde Park Herald deal with state or local issues. It's interesting, therefore, that one of the tiny handful of Obama columns explicitly dealing with national politics is a 2000 column pleading with readers to support Al Gore rather than Ralph Nader for president. Obama opens his column noting that he's heard many people complain that Al Gore and George Bush are beholden to the same "big money interests." In pressing his case for Gore-which hinges on Republican/Democrat differences on issues like Supreme Court appointments, abortion, affirmative action, the environment, and school vouchers-Obama makes a point of agreeing with some of Nader's criticisms of the major parties. Obama raises no objections to Nader's agenda and implicitly presents himself as someone who might support Nader, were it not for the danger of a wasted vote aiding the Republicans. It's also striking that so many of the policy considerations Obama counts as decisive are classic sixties-derived issues-precisely the sort of polarizing culture-war conflicts Obama nowadays claims to have transcended. In the end, Obama needn't have worried. Hyde Park voted 91 percent for Gore, 6 percent for Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.

Obama's strong liberalism is nowhere more evident than on the subject of crime. Throughout his Illinois State Senate career, crime was a top Obama concern. Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We've heard a good deal of late about Ayers's Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood." Yet several Obama-Ayers connections are known: Obama's 1995 political debut at the home of Ayers and his wife (and fellow former terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn, Obama's joint service with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a couple of appearances with Ayers on academic panels, and what the New York Times called Obama's "rave review" (not actually a full review, but a warm endorsement) of Ayers's book on juvenile justice, which Obama dubbed "a searing and timely account" in the Chicago Tribune.

For all the attention, the actual content of Ayers's 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, as well as the political context of Obama's interest in it, have so far passed unremarked. Obama supporters paint Ayers as having mellowed since his radical days, pointing to his wonkish interests. Yet Ayers's radicalism pervades his book on Chicago's juvenile court system. Founded in 1899 (long before juvenile murder rates shot off the charts), Chicago's juvenile court was the first in the world, intended to serve as "a kind and just parent" to offenders. Ayers's title, he explained in the book, is meant to "bristle with irony" as a commentary on an American "society out of control." Ayers expressed the same sentiment more bluntly in an interview published in the New York Times shortly after 9/11, when he not only dismissed the notion of the United States as a "just and fair and decent place," but said the claim "makes me want to puke." A Kind and Just Parent is a thoughtful, well-informed, and beautifully written book, which provides revealing and sometimes disturbing glimpses of life at a Chicago juvenile detention facility. The book also virtually defines the phrases "liberal guilt" and "soft on crime." Ayers agon-izes over a high school field trip years ago, on which he and other white students toured a juvenile court system largely populated by black boys. When recounting horrific crimes-and even his own mugging-Ayers focuses on the terrified insecurity of the perpetrators, rather than the harm they inflict. Testifying at the trial of a young felon he'd been tutoring, Ayers calls him "nervous, a little shy  .  .  .  eager to please." The prosecutor responds: "Would you call shooting someone eight times at close range 'eager to please?'" Actually, Ayers effectively does do this, opening his book with the claim that a young murderer had "slavishly followed the orders" of his gang leader, rather than acting of his own free will.

Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he'd like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper "structural problems of the system." Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the "normal" and the "deviant." The unfortunate result, says Ayers, is to leave the bulk of us feeling smugly superior to society's prisoners. Home detention, Ayers believes, might someday be able to replace the prison. Ayers also makes a point of comparing America's prison system to the mass-detention of a generation of young blacks under South African Apartheid. Ayers's tone may be different, but the echoes of Jeremiah Wright's anti-prison rants are plain.

Given his decision to recommend Ayers's book in the Tribune, it's fair to say that Obama is at least broadly sympathetic to this perspective. When Obama offers examples of ill-conceived legislation, he often points to building prisons: Instead of building another prison, why not expand health care entitlements? Biographer David Mendell cites Obama's irritation with fellow legislators who "grandstand" by passing tough-on-crime legislation, while letting bills designed to bring "structural change" languish. Debating Bobby Rush in 2000, Obama bragged that he had "consistently fought against the industrial prison complex." Obama's Hyde Park Herald column echoes these points.

The most intriguing thread linking Obama, Ayers, and crime, however, runs through Ayers's wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn founded the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University, and along with her associates there, she regularly and energetically opposes "get tough" crime laws. Ayers draws on his wife's wisdom in A Kind and Just Parent, and Dohrn, like her husband, publicly presents her work on juvenile justice not as a repudiation of her youthful radicalism, but as a continuation of it.

The Ayers-Dohrn-Obama nexus was jolted into action in late 1997 and early 1998, when a major juvenile justice reform bill was introduced in the Illinois General Assembly. Written by prosecutors and sponsored by a Republican ex-prosecutor, the bill was neither simplistic nor partisan. Well aware of evidence that sending juveniles to adult prisons can backfire and actually raise recidivism rates, sponsors met rehabilitation-minded critics halfway. The proposed bill was an early example of "blended sentencing," in which juveniles who have committed serious crimes are given both a juvenile sentence and a parallel adult sentence. So long as the offender keeps his nose clean, doesn't violate parole, and participates in community-based rehabilitation, he never has to serve his adult sentence. But if the offender violates the provisions of his juvenile sentence, the adult punishment kicks in. That gives young offenders a powerful incentive to do right, and puts toughness at the service of offering kids a second chance.

Blended sentencing is generally viewed as an innovative compromise. To those on the far left, however, blended sentencing is just another mean-spirited "get tough" crime measure in disguise. That's why, when the Illinois blended sentencing bill was introduced in 1997, both Obama and Bernardine Dohrn were cited by the Chicago Sun-Times as key local critics of the bill. Steven A. Drizin, an associate of Dohrn's center (who is thanked in Ayers's book) was a member of the study commission that helped produce the bill, yet remained an energetic critic, not only of blended sentencing, but of nearly every other prosecutor-favored provision in the bill.

Meanwhile, Obama worked closely with the Illinois Black Legislative Caucus to slow the bill's progress, expressing skepticism about the blended sentencing provisions. While one report speaks of Obama negotiating with Cook County state's attorney Richard Devine for a compromise, there is good reason to believe that Obama's actual aim was to scuttle the entire bill. We have this on the authority of someone who may very well be Michelle Obama herself. Michelle Obama organized a University of Chicago panel about Bill Ayers's crime book in November 1997, just as the battle over the juvenile justice bill was heating up. That panel featured appearances by some of the key figures discussed in Ayers's book, along with Obama himself, who was identified in the press release as "working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system." In effect, then, this public event was a joint Obama-Ayers effort to sink the juvenile justice bill-Obama's decision to plug Ayers's book in the Chicago Tribune the following month was part of the same political effort.

In January 1998, a front-page headline in the Defender touted Obama's claim that the juvenile justice bill might be on the verge of failure. Obama hoped that black caucus opposition to the sentencing provisions might be matched by concerns among some Republicans that the bill could force expensive jail construction (based on the prospect that the deterrent effect of blended sentencing might fail, thereby forcing more juveniles into adult prisons). Obama's hopes were wildly off-base. In the end, the juvenile justice bill passed overwhelmingly. Given his ambitions for higher office, Obama was no doubt reluctant to vote against the final bill. A last-minute, minor and uncontroversial adjustment to the blended-sentencing provisions by the governor appears to have provided enough political cover for the bill's sharpest critics including Obama to come around and support it.

Also in 1998, according to the Hill, a Washington newspaper, Obama was one of only three Illinois state senators to vote against a proposal making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang. A year later, on a vote mandating adult prosecution for aggravated discharge of a firearm in or near a school, Obama voted "present," and reiterated his opposition to adult trials for even serious juvenile offenders. In short, when it comes to the issue of crime, Obama is on the far left of the political spectrum and very much in synch with his active political allies Ayers and Dohrn.

Obama's signature crime legislation was his effort to combat alleged racial discrimination by the Illinois police. In 2003, the Defender said Obama had "made a career" out of his annual battle for a bill against racial profiling. For years, profiling legislation was bottled up by the Illinois senate's Republican leader. When senate control shifted to the Democrats in 2003, Obama's racial profiling bill finally passed-just in time to give his drive for the U.S. Senate nomination a major boost. At the time, Obama touted his profiling bill as "a model for the nation." It's also said that Obama showed a willingness to listen to police during the negotiations that led to the final bill. With the Democrats in control, however, the police had little choice but to work with Obama. As Obama himself made clear at the time, the police never abandoned their opposition to the bill.

Police doubts were entirely justified. Obama's bill is a deeply flawed example of precisely the sort of grievance-driven race-based politics that fuels legislation on affirmative action and minority set-asides. All of these "remedies" falsely leap from statistical evidence of racial disparities to claims of discrimination. In the case of racial profiling, disproportionate police stops of black or Hispanic motorists in no way prove discrimination.

In her path-breaking 2001 study, "The Myth of Racial Profiling," Heather Mac Donald assembled the evidence. It showed that racially disparate patterns of drug-interdiction stops in New Jersey, one of the first states supposedly proven to have practiced racial profiling, in fact reflected racial differences in the transport of drugs. Drug trafficking is not evenly spread across the population (as profiling activists improperly assume), and for the most part New Jersey police were simply going where the drugs were. Wrote Mac Donald, "When white club owners, along with Israelis and Russians, dominated the Ecstasy trade, that's whom the cops were arresting." When the big shipments shifted to minority neighborhoods, arrests followed. That's good crime intelligence, not racism. The reason virtually every major law-enforcement organization opposes racial-profiling legislation is that these bills invariably fail to provide benchmarks based on actual group-based variations in crime rates. Without such benchmarks, there is no basis for leaping from statistical disparities in traffic-stops to accusations of police racism.

Obama's February 16, 2000, Hyde Park Herald column was a textbook example of the racial-profiling fallacies Mac Donald exposed. Arguing for legislation to require the collection of traffic-stop data by race, Obama made the bogus leap from disproportionate traffic-stops and searches to accusations of racism using the same, baseline-free ACLU-supplied statistics Mac Donald critiqued. Obama then made a still greater leap: "Racial profiling may explain why incarceration rates are so high among young African Americans-law enforcement officials may be targeting blacks and other minorities as potential criminals and are using the Vehicle Code as a tool to stop and search them." The notion that the high black incarceration rates are due to racist traffic stops is utterly fanciful. (Mac Donald lays out the evidence not only in her profiling piece, but also in a second important study, published this year, "Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?") Obama's column takes a leaf right out of Jeremiah Wright's playbook, stoking the worst sort of race-based conspiracy theories.

Indeed, Obama's racial profiling crusade shows his political alliance with Wright, Pfleger, and Meeks in action. We know from Obama's 1988 "Why Organize?" essay that a long-term goal of his was to politically organize "liberationist" black churches:

Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership, and-most important-values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago.

We also know from a 1995 profile that Obama viewed his legislative role as an extension of his grass-roots organizing career. So it's unsurprising to see in the Hyde Park Herald of February 28, 2001, that Obama's "grass-roots lobbying effort" for racial profiling legislation is to feature not only the ACLU and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, but also appearances by Meeks and Pfleger. The Chicago Defender notes the additional presence of Reverend Michael Sykes, an associate pastor of Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. So Obama's drive for racial profiling legislation brought to fruition his long-time goal of politically organizing Chicago's most liberationist black churches. Of course Wright, Meeks, and Pfleger are known for their demagogic accusations of white racism. Obama's racial profiling bill fit squarely in that tradition. As with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, it's evident that the liberationist preachers were also his valued political allies.

Like other racial-profiling activists, Obama frequently cites New Jersey's experience as proof of his case. A little-noticed 2007 study by University of Chicago professor Paul Heaton sheds some fascinating light on the profiling crusade in that state. Heaton found that as a result of anti-profiling reforms, annual arrests of minorities for motor vehicle theft in New Jersey declined by 20-40 percent. Unfortunately, during the same period, motor vehicle theft increased in minority areas. Heaton concluded: "It appears that official and public scrutiny of profiling behavior by police can lead to substantial reductions in arrests of minorities, although this enforcement reduction may carry the unintended consequence of encouraging crime in minority areas." In other words, Heaton's work tends to corroborate Heather Mac Donald's analysis-not Barack Obama's. Disproportionate traffic stops are largely a response to disproportionate crime, while using simplistic statistics to falsely accuse police of racism yields more crime, not less.

A NEW WAR ON POVERTY

Important though it is to Obama, the crime issue runs a distant second to his deepest passion: social welfare legislation. "Big government liberal," "redistributionist"-call him what you like, Obama's fondest hope is to lead America into another war on poverty. Everything in his state-legislative career points in this direction, and Obama calls for a renewal of expensive national anti-poverty programs in his book The Audacity of Hope. True, Obama's promotion of government partnerships with private-sector housing contractors (like Antoin "Tony" Rezko) was supposed to open up novel, post-Great Society solutions to the problem of poverty. Yet, as a devastating Boston Globe report on Obama's Illinois housing policy recently showed, the results of Obama's new war on poverty are just as counterproductive as those of the old war on poverty. Neighborhoods supposedly renovated now lie deserted by the private developers who took Obama's government handouts and ran-quickly building or renovating housing units, but failing to maintain them.

Race and crime issues excepted, Obama's Illinois legislative career as covered in the newspapers essentially boils down to a list of spending measures. Many of Obama's proposed expenditures were tough to oppose. Because he was working under a Republican majority for the bulk of his time in the Illinois State Senate, Obama became a master of incrementalism. His pattern was to find the smallest, most appealing spending proposal possible, pass it, then build toward more spending on the same issue. An Obama bill exempting juvenile prisoners from paying for nonemergency medical or dental services isn't something you'd want to vote against. Obama's small, targeted spending measures tended to pass and to be followed by more: Obama called for a $30 million youth crime prevention package; Obama requested additional funds to expand the regulation of electrical utilities; Obama asked for $50 million over five years to overcome the "digital divide"; Obama proposed to fund anger management classes for children age 5-13; Obama ran for Congress promising to restore federal block grants to pre-Republican levels, and so on.

In a 2007 speech to Al Sharpton's National Action Network (NAN), Obama touted his Illinois legislative experience and challenged members of Sharpton's group to find a candidate with a better record of supporting the issues they cared about. (Incidentally, Sharpton named Jeremiah Wright's daughter Jeri Wright, publisher-editor of Wright's Trumpet Newsmagazine, to head NAN's new Chicago chapter in 2007. He named Wright's successor, Reverend Otis Moss III, its vice president.) Intrigued by Obama's challenge to Sharpton's group, Randolph Burnside, a professor of political science, and Kami Whitehurst, a doctoral candidate, both at the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, decided to put Obama's Illinois record to the test. The two scholars made a study of bills sponsored and cosponsored by Obama during his Illinois State Senate career.

Published in the Journal of Black Studies, the results are striking. Burnside and Whitehurst produced two bar graphs, one representing bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, arranged by subject, and a second displaying bills Obama joined as a cosponsor. In the chart depicting bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, the bar for "social welfare" legislation towers over every other category. In the chart of Obama's cosponsored bills, social welfare legislation continues to far exceed all other categories, although now crime-related bills are visibly present in second place, with regulation and tax bills close behind. According to Burnside and Whitehurst, other than social welfare and a bit of government regulation, "Obama devoted very little time to most policy areas."

This brings us to what is perhaps the most striking result of our tour through Obama's Springfield days. Conventional wisdom has it that John McCain holds a political advantage over Obama on war and foreign policy issues, while Obama is favored to handle the economy. Yet Obama's economic experience is largely limited to social welfare spending. Indeed, precisely because of his penchant for spending, Obama's fingerprints are all over Illinois's burgeoning fiscal crisis.

The Illinois state budget has been in an ever-widening crisis since 2001. In an April 2007 report, a committee of top Chicago business leaders warned that the state was "headed toward fiscal implosion." Illinois's unfunded pension debt is the highest in the nation, while Illinois is sixth in the nation in per capita tax-supported debt. Yet the Illinois General Assembly-now controlled by Obama's Democratic allies-churns out at will exactly the sort of spending programs Obama pushed for, with only partial success, under the Republicans. The result is a fast-growing gap between revenues and expenditures (unimpeded by the statutory requirement of a balanced budget), rising fears of fiscal meltdown, finger-pointing, and political gridlock.

A watershed moment in Illinois's fiscal decline came in 2002, when crashing receipts and Democratic reluctance to enact spending cuts forced Republican governor George Ryan to call a special legislative session. While Ryan railed at legislators for refusing to rein in an out-of-control budget, the Chicago Tribune spoke ominously of an "all-consuming state budget crisis." Unwilling to cut back on social welfare spending, Obama's chief partner and political mentor, senate Democratic leader Emil Jones, came up with the idea of borrowing against the proceeds of a windfall tobacco lawsuit settlement due to the state.

This idea sent the editorial pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune into a tizzy. Editorialists hammered cut-averse legislators for "chickening out," for making use of "tricked-up numbers," for a "cowardly abdication of responsibility," and for sacrificing the state's bond rating to "short-term political gains." As critics repeatedly pointed out, borrowing against a onetime tobacco settlement-instead of balancing the budget with regular revenues-would be a recipe for long-term fiscal disaster.

What was Obama doing while all this was going on? He was promoting the tobacco securitization plan in his Hyde Park Herald column, railing against the governor in the Defender for balancing the budget "on the back of the poor," and voting to override cuts in treasured programs like bilingual education. Actually, far from "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor," the governor had trimmed evenly across all the state's most expensive programs. In the end, Ryan did force a number of cuts, yet the resistance of Obama and his allies took a toll. When, just a year later, Democrats added control of the governorship and state senate to their existing control of the house, they revealed that the state deficit had reached $5 billion-far larger than most had feared. Since then it's been a swift downhill tumble toward fiscal implosion for Illinois. Now ruling, the Democrats have continued their profligate ways, pushing the state's budget woes to new heights.

Illinois's fate may foreshadow the nation's. Obama's small and carefully targeted spending bills were expressly designed to win passage by a Republican-controlled state senate. But if Obama takes the presidency with a Democratic Congress at his back, we'll likely see a grand-scale version of the fiscal mayhem Obama and his colleagues brought to Illinois.

Obama's overarching political program can be described as "incremental radicalism." On health care, for example, his long-term strategy in Illinois was no secret. He repeatedly proposed a state constitutional amendment mandating universal health care. Prior to the 2002 budget crisis, Obama's plan was to use the windfall tobacco settlement to finance the transition to the new system. That would have effectively hidden the huge cost of universal care from the taxpayer until it was too late. Yet Obama touted his many tiny expansions of government-funded health care as baby steps along the path to his goal. The same strategy will likely be practiced-if more subtly-on other issues. Obama takes baby-steps when he has to, but in a favorable legislative environment, Obama's redistributionist impulses will have free rein, and a budget-busting war on poverty (not to mention entitlement spending) will surely rise again.

Obama's vaunted reputation for bipartisanship is less than meets the eye. The Illinois legislature has long been home to a number of moderate Republicans, less fiscally conservative than their colleagues, many from districts where the parties are closely balanced. It was easy enough to get a few of these Republicans to sign onto small, carefully tailored spending bills directed toward particularly sympathetic recipients. The trouble with Obama's bipartisanship is that it was largely a one-way street. Overcoming initial opposition from Catholic groups, for instance, Obama cosponsored an incremental bill on abortion, requiring hospitals to inform rape victims of morning-after pills. Yet rejecting compromise with the other side, Obama voted against bills that would have curbed partial-birth abortions. In other words, Obama is bipartisan so long as that means asking Republicans to take incremental steps toward his own broader goals. When it comes to compromising with the other side, however, Obama says "take a hike." Obama voted against a bill that would have allowed people in possession of a court order protecting them from some specific individual to carry a concealed weapon in self-defense. The bill failed on a 29-27 vote. Bipartisanship for thee, but not for me: That's how Obama ended up with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate.

The real Obama? You see him in those charts. Fundamentally, he is a big-government redistributionist who wants above all to aid the poor, particularly the African-American poor. Obama is eager to do so both through race-specific programs and through broad-based social-welfare legislation. "Living wage" legislation may be economically counterproductive, and Obama-backed housing experiments may have ended disastrously, yet Obama is committed to large-scale government solutions to the problem of poverty. Obama's early campaigns are filled with declarations of his sense of mission-a mission rooted in his community organizing days and manifest in his early legislative battles. Recent political back flips notwithstanding, Barack Obama does have an ideological core, and it's no mystery at all to any faithful reader of the Chicago Defender or the Hyde Park Herald.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Obama backs away from McCain's debate challenge

Douglass K. Daniel

Democratic candidate Barack Obama on Saturday backed away from rival John McCain's challenge for a series of joint appearances, agreeing only to the standard three debates in the fall.More...

In May, when a McCain adviser proposed a series of pre-convention appearances at town hall meetings, Obama said, "I think that's a great idea." In summer stumping on the campaign trail, McCain has often noted that Obama had not followed through and joined him in any events.

Obama's reversal on town hall debates is part of a play-it-safe strategy he's adopted since claiming the nomination and grabbing a lead in national polls. Advisers to the Illinois senator, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss strategy, say Obama is reluctant to take chances or give McCain a high-profile stage now that Obama's the front-runner.

On Saturday, in a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said the short period between the last political convention and the first proposed debate made it likely that the commission-sponsored debates would be the only ones.

"We've committed to the three debates on the table," campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Saturday in an interview. "It's likely they will be the three appearances by the candidates this fall."

Asked by The Associated Press if that meant Obama would not agree to any other debates, Psaki said, "We're not saying that." She said the McCain campaign had rejected Obama's proposal for two joint town hall meetings.

McCain's campaign disparaged Obama for backing off. McCain has not yet formally agreed to the commission-sponsored debates, but the McCain campaign says he plans to.

"We understand it might be beneath a worldwide celebrity of Barack Obama's magnitude to appear at town hall meetings alongside John McCain and directly answer questions from the American people, but we hope he'll reconsider," spokesman Brian Rogers said.

The first debate planned by the commission is set for Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss., three weeks after the Republican National Convention concludes Sept. 4. The Democratic convention is scheduled for Aug. 25-28.

The other presidential debates are set for Oct. 7 and Oct. 15 and the vice presidential debate for Oct. 2.

A day after Obama clinched the Democratic nomination in early June, McCain challenged Obama to a series of 10 town hall meetings. The candidates' campaigns began negotiations, telling reporters that they agreed in spirit to joint appearances.

When the idea first came up from the McCain campaign that May, Obama was still battling Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Obama said then: "Obviously, we would have to think through the logistics on that, but ... if I have the opportunity to debate substantive issues before the voters with John McCain, that's something that I am going to welcome."

In June, Plouffe had suggested Obama-McCain meetings more along the lines of the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates. During Abraham Lincoln's Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858, the candidates met seven times across Illinois. One spoke for an hour, the other for an hour and a half, and the first was allowed a half-hour rebuttal.

Plouffe said Saturday that Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois will be Obama's representative in further discussions with the commission.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, established in 1987, sponsors and produces debates featuring the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the major parties. The nonprofit and nonpartisan organization has sponsored all the presidential debates since 1988.

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Associated Press writers Mike Glover in Orlando, Fla., and Ron Fournier in Washington contributed to this report.

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Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

This Sunday, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows the race still very close with Obama attracting 44% of the vote while McCain earns 43%. When "leaners" are included, it’s Obama 47% and McCain 46%.More...

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of voters have seen or heard news coverage of McCain’s ad including Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Just 22% believe the ad was racist. But, most say Obama’s comment about not looking like other Presidents on the dollar bill was racist.

The number of Americans who consider themselves to be Democrats fell two percentage points in July. Obama’s party still enjoys a big advantage over the GOP, but the gap between the parties is the smallest it has been since January.

While much has been made of McCain’s struggles with his party’s conservative base, 33% of the uncommitted voters are Democrats while only 19% are Republicans.

McCain is currently viewed favorably by 56% of voters, Obama by 54%. McCain earns positive reviews from 85% of Republicans while Obama does the same from 83% of Democrats. Among unaffiliated voters, 61% have a favorable opinion of McCain. For Obama, that number is 47% (see other recent demographic highlights).

Cindy McCain is viewed favorably by 50% of American voters, Michelle Obama by 46%. Other key stats of Election 2008 are updated daily at Obama-McCain: By the Numbers