[Rhodes22-list] Political - Reading Assignment for Ed

[Brad Haslett]

Ed,

Here's some interesting reading.  I'll send the link to the NYT's and attach
the Weekly Standard article (the more informative of the two).  What I found
interesting about the Standard article was the requirement in Chicago for
25% minority participation in city construction projects and 70% on one
particular project.  I probably told you the story about us going to work
for three black "contractors" from Indianapolis when we first landed on the
MS Coast.  They owned a pickup truck, three cellphones, and a clipboard, and
knew absolutely nothing about construction.  They were very forthright with
us, "we're the only black 'contractor' on the coast, we're getting all the
juicy ROE's (right of entry)".  We worked for them for two weeks (since we
owned equipment and knew what we were doing) but discovered they had fled
town (for good) when we pressed them for payment.  That was not an uncommon
experience in the first few weeks after Katrina and was what encouraged us
to pursue no further public work and do only private projects.

Brad

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/us/politics/03affirmative.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1217768990-2g13xxT6nmafXBY6ayueFw

--------------------

[image: The Weekly Standard]



  Barack Obama's Lost Years
The senator's tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an
old-fashioned, big government, race-conscious liberal.
by Stanley Kurtz
08/11/2008, Volume 013, Issue 45


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*.
     (c) Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights
Reserved.