Obama in perspective

Give Barack Obama his due. He won a smashing victory in Iowa, then gave a stirring speech framed as a transformational moment in American history. Millions watching him speak Thursday night presumably saw a plausible president, quite possibly the next president.

Obama is still the presidential contender with a one-page resume. The Illinois state legislature and half of one term in the U.S. Senate is scant preparation to be president of the United States. In his brief Senate tenure, Obama has no legislative accomplishments, mainly because for most of that short time he's been running for president.

For a candidate aspiring to the toughest, most important job in the world, shouldn't experience count for something?

Foreign policy and national security are a president's top responsibilities, especially in time of war. Obama is devoid of experience in either field. His gaffes – threatening to invade Pakistan, offering prompt negotiations with anti-American despots – bespeak his amateur standing on matters vital to the safety and security of the American people.

Obama's inconsistency on Iraq is amply documented. He's been alternately for and against withholding funding for the troops, for and against setting timelines for withdrawal, and for and against a quick retreat from Iraq.

Whatever one's views on Iraq strategy and homefront support, these vacillations on a war in progress don't inspire confidence; in Obama's judgment, his grasp of Iraq realities and his constancy of purpose. Whatever this is, it isn't leadership.

All of this betrays Obama's lack of experience; a glaring deficiency that should be raising profound questions about his qualifications and fitness, at least now, for the presidency.

Then there's the disturbing disconnect between Obama's carefully crafted persona as a unifier and a supposed “trans-ideological” agent of change, and his actual record in office.

Obama is running, quite effectively, as both a change agent and an unconventional politician. That fits his campaign motif, a fresh-faced, idealistic outsider running against the Washington establishment voters so distrust. That, in turn, also suggests that Obama is a different kind of Democrat; one perhaps less reflexively partisan and divisive than, say, Hillary Clinton or John Edwards. Certainly that was an implicit message sent in his eloquent Iowa victory speech.

What's troubling, however, is that Obama's record doesn't match his reassuring persona.

The liberal Americans for Democratic Action rates Obama's voting record in the Senate at 97.5 percent, near perfection for liberal Democrats. The American Conservative Union, the ADA's ideological opposite, rates Obama's voting record at a rock-bottom 8 percent. Both ratings leave no doubt that Obama's actual votes mark him as a traditionally liberal Democrat, not a moderate.

Where in these votes is the evidence of trans-ideological change that Obama is selling so successfully on the campaign trail? Where in this record is the evidence that Obama is the unifier he claims to be?

On domestic, economic, foreign policy and national security issues, Obama's actual record is consistently liberal and consistently orthodox in Democratic Party terms. Obama typically talks like a centrist but votes like a liberal.

Obama's record also raises another disturbing matter – his penchant for ducking tough issues. In the Illinois Legislature, Obama compiled a record of voting “present” on controversial and politically explosive bills. However politically convenient, this isn't leadership. Obama's three years in the U.S. Senate are similarly devoid of any leadership examples on legislation of consequence.

This doesn't necessarily indict Obama's claimed leadership skills as fraudulent. It does demonstrate that those skills have not yet been in evidence in his legislative work. That's a curious, and worrying, fact.

Cataloguing the doubts about Obama isn't nitpicking or partisanship. It's the sort of scrutiny every presidential candidate should get. This is information that every voter deserves, and should want before making fateful decisions about this country's future.

Barack Obama is showing that he's a skilled campaigner with a deeply inspirational message. His appeals to hope, to change and to less divisive politics are proving compelling and popular, as arguably they should be. Obama is poised, possibly, to surpass Hillary Clinton as the odds-on favorite to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

Before that sale is made, however, voters should be looking closer and learning more about Barack Obama.

Here is a copy of the speech Obama made in Selma, Al. He lied about being conceived in Selma. His birth date does not match up with the Selma march date.

This speech needs to be printed as it will probably be pulled off the internet if he is the nominee.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/obamas_selma_speech_text_as_de.html

Go down about 15 paragraphs and get this:

“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”

This was an out and out lie as the dates don’t match.

For a candidate aspiring to the toughest, most important job in the world, shouldn't experience count for something?

That, regardless of what Martin Luther King once dreamed about, depends on the color of your skin.

Barak Obama's father, a Kenyan graduate student, left him when he was two years old to be raised by a white mother.

If his father had been a Norwegian graduate student named Olsen, would anybody in the U.S. be considering first term Illinois Senator Barry Olsen as remotely qualified to sit in the Oval Office?

Senator Barry Olson for President 2008

if Obama gets the nomination, any statement pointing out his lack of credentials will be termed racist hate-mongering.

Actually, it is quite easy to document the fact that Obama is, himself, a racist.

Obama would described his grandparents, the people who raised him, as "white folk."

From adolescence onward, Obama wanted a race to belong to, a team whose accomplishments would reflect well upon him. Of course, it was unthinkable in his liberal white family to take pride in the achievements of his mother’s race, so Obama gloried in being part of his absent father’s race.

From the age of ten onward, though, Obama desperately wants to be black: “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.” Honolulu’s paucity of African-Americans means he has to learn to be black from the media: “TV, movies, the radio; those were places to start. Pop culture was color-coded, after all, an arcade of images from which you could cop a walk, a talk, a step, a style.”

He cherishes every cause for complaint he can discern against white folks. He is constantly distressed at being half-white. Obama says he "ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."

When his grandmother wants a ride to work because the day before, while awaiting the bus, she was threatened by a black panhandler, he is outraged -- at his grandparents.

Later, when he moves to the South Side of Chicago in 1984, he eventually discovers that, like his grandmother, he’s sometimes scared of black males on the street, too.

In his first memoir, "Dreams," Obama included a description of black student life at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

"There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs," he wrote. "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."

He added: "To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."

Obama said he and other blacks were careful not to second-guess their own racial identity in front of whites.

"To admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred," he wrote.

In the period from high school in Hawaii, to Columbia University and then to the streets of Chicago as a community organizer, Obama is the classic angry young black man, describing his world thusly:

"We were always playing on the white man's court -- by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn't. The only thing you could choose was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage."

Obama’s once described the white race as “that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”

“That hate hadn't gone away,” he wrote, blaming “white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

During college, Obama disapproved of what he called other "half-breeds" who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.

The Obama File

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