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The Friends of O
(page 1 of 4)
Inside the circle of Chicagoans who spotted Barack Obama's talent, helped guide his path—and made it hard for him to close the deal (even before the Reverend Wright eruptions)
by James L. Merriner
RELATED STORIES Making Peace Network Ties |
When Barack Obama ran in the Democratic primary for a South Side congressional seat in 2000, one of his opponents, Donne Trotter, raised a curious accusation. "You just have to look at his supporters," Trotter told the Chicago Reader that year. "Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It's these individuals in Hyde Park, who don't always have the best interests of the community in mind." The Reader also mentioned rumors that Obama was a creature of a cabal of white Hyde Park liberals—a group that created something called the Obama Project to groom the young Harvard-trained lawyer for high office.
If Trotter or anyone else was trying to plant the notion that Obama was only a figurehead or a mouthpiece for some self-serving liberal elites, the conspiracy charge did not seem to have a decisive impact. In the end, the incumbent congressman, Bobby Rush, won easily, with Trotter getting only 7 percent of the vote and Obama around 30 percent. Even so, as Obama has gone on to stunning electoral success since then, he has not entirely escaped echoes of the Obama Project accusation.
More than a score of people interviewed by Chicago who were close to Obama in the 1990s dismiss the idea that some kind of secretive group schemed to produce the man who is now a leading candidate to win the Democratic nomination for president. Indeed, several people who tried to recruit Obama when he got out of Harvard Law School in 1991 say that he returned to Chicago with a political career in mind—in other words, he was his own Obama Project.
Still, Trotter's premise touches some threads of truth. (Trotter, who has endorsed Obama for president, did not respond to requests for comment.) Obama made his home in Hyde Park, and the liberal, diverse South Side neighborhood serves in some ways as a metaphor for the man. On the one hand, Hyde Park has been the historical incubator of reform politics in Chicago. Early on, Obama found friends and powerful patrons there—some white, some black—with similar beliefs and the ability to boost his career. On the other hand, Hyde Park is the home of the University of Chicago, known as a center of conservative thought, where Obama taught in the law school and socialized. Though his policies clearly tilt toward those of the Hyde Park liberals, Obama supporters find strains of the U. of C. in his thinking, notably in an openness to free-market solutions.
Hyde Park piles on baggage, too. Obama continues to face sniping that he is an elitist, a loose and loaded term that nonetheless reflects a stereotype of that intellectually charged university neighborhood—and exactly the sort of charge that has made it hard for him to "close the deal," in the parlance of the presidential campaign. What's more, Obama has made enemies there as he has moved up the political ladder, and he has disappointed some old allies, particularly reformers, dismayed that he's a friend of the Daley administration (for more on Obama's relationship with Mayor Daley, see "Making Peace"). Indeed, with a few exceptions, Hyde Park has long been marginalized in Chicago politics; the idea that the neighborhood might produce the country's president is little short of remarkable.
Nonetheless, Hyde Park, seven miles southeast of the Loop, proved a warm and nurturing base for the ambitious young lawyer. The Obama Project may be a figment of someone's imagination, but it's clear that in Hyde Park and in similar liberal enclaves around Chicago, a great many people recognized Obama's talent and boosted his progress, believing fervently in his promise. "When I first met Barack, I believed he could be president," says Valerie B. Jarrett, a close friend since 1991, a former city official, and now an adviser to his campaign.
Barack Obama first came to Chicago in 1985, taking a job as a community organizer shortly after graduating from Columbia University in New York. He spent three years working for the Developing Communities Project in Roseland and West Pullman, but he grew frustrated at what he could accomplish and decided to become a lawyer, enrolling at Harvard. While still there, he started attracting significant Chicago mentors. None have been more important than Abner Mikva, a powerful figure in Chicago and national Democratic Party politics for 40 years. He has served as a congressman both from Hyde Park and the North Shore, as a federal judge, and as White House counsel to President Bill Clinton. In 1990, sitting on the U.S. court of appeals in Washington, D.C., Mikva heard from his law clerk that a young man had just been elected the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. "I was always looking for diversity among my clerks," Mikva says, so he tried to interview Obama for a clerkship, a coveted position, especially on that prestigious court. Obama turned him down. "I said jokingly, 'Oh, he's one of those uppity blacks who will only work for black judges,'" Mikva recalls. Mikva's clerk said no—Obama was headed back to Chicago to run for public office.
The previous year, Obama had been hired by the firm of Newton Minow, Mikva's childhood friend and fellow Democratic insider. Assistant counsel to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson and chairman of the FCC under President John F. Kennedy, Minow is senior counsel at the gold-plated Loop law firm now known as Sidley Austin. His daughter Martha taught Obama at Harvard Law. Obama came to Sidley Austin as a summer intern in 1989. Later the firm offered him a second internship, which would likely have been followed by a permanent job. "He said, 'I can't take the job,'" Minow recalls. "I said, 'Why?' He said, 'I'm going to go into some form of politics.'"
Obama had some other news for Minow as well. Michelle Robinson, a Sidley Austin attorney, had been assigned that first summer as Obama's mentor. "He said, 'I'd rather you sit down when I tell you this. . . . I'm taking Michelle with me.' I said, 'You no-good, worthless, rotten . . .' He said, 'Hold it: We're going to get married.' I said, 'That's different.'" Minow and his wife, Jo, remain friends with the Obamas, the couples sometimes attending concerts at Ravinia together.
Barack and Michelle were married in 1992 by the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. at Trinity United Church of Christ, 40 blocks south of Hyde Park in Washington Heights; Obama joined the church later that year. Snippets of Wright's percussive sermons and subsequent public statements have caused roiling trouble for Obama's presidential campaign, prompting the candidate to denounce his former pastor and deemphasize Wright's influence on his thinking. But, according to Obama, a 2007 book by the Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, Obama sometimes used Wright as a sounding board for his political aspirations. The pastor himself has traveled in political circles—for example, he advised Harold Washington. Back in Hyde Park, the newly wed Obamas bought a condo at 5450 South East View Park near Lake Shore Drive and Jackson Park. Barack liked to play pickup basketball games on nearby courts.
Michelle brought her own powerful neighborhood connections to the marriage. She grew up in South Shore, the nearby working-class enclave to the southeast of Hyde Park, with her close friend Santita Jackson, daughter of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Michelle went to Princeton University, where her brother, Craig Robinson, played basketball with Hyde Parker John W. Rogers Jr.
Rogers exemplifies a dimension of Hyde Park often overlooked in accounts of Obama's career—young African American entrepreneurs. Rogers founded the nation's first African American money-management and mutual fund, Ariel Capital Management, and he is chairman emeritus of the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs (ABLE), a group of black CEOs of Obama's generation. Rogers's former wife, Desiree Rogers, a longtime friend of Michelle Obama, is president of Peoples Gas. Valerie B. Jarrett, one of the closest advisers to both Obamas, is CEO of the residential real-estate giant The Habitat Company. John Rogers, Jarrett, and Allison S. Davis, a lawyer and developer, all grew up near a stretch of South Greenwood Avenue. Obama's close pal Martin Nesbitt, former chair of the Chicago Housing Authority, is president of PRG Parking Management. These and other figures have been crucial Obama supporters and, in many cases, fundraisers. "Many of us were able to introduce [Obama] in our workplaces," says Alan S. King, a lawyer who studied for the bar exam with Michelle. "That expanded his base of support, raised his profile, and enhanced his fundraising efforts."
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Reader Comments:
For those who think that Obama is our future, consider the fact he will not hold his hand over his heart when the pledge is recited. He will not wear an American Flag on his lapel.
This from his own books:
> >> From Dreams of My Father: 'I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.'
>
> >> From Dreams of My Father: 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race.'
>
> >> From Dreams of My Father: 'There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.'
>
> >> From Dreams of My Father: 'It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.'
>
> >> From Dreams of My Father: 'I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I had packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.'
>
> >> And here's the clincher: (grab on to something when you read this:)
> >> From Audacity of Hope: 'I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.'
>
> >> _____________________________________
Is anyone paying attention out there?
Does that mean if elected President he would be partisan with the Muslims? The Blacks? Race discrimination was not a preferred ethic, but neither is reverse discrimination. It's hardly a solution to equality.
And it's in PRINT !
It continues to disappoint me that people, like Anonymous (how appropriate, considering the nature of his/her comments), take quotes out of context - or to just make up lies. I live in Oregon, where the Japanese were herded into concentration - er "relocation" - camps during World War II (even as the German bunds in the midwest collected secrets and sent money to Nazi Germnany - and it still shakes my faith in some Americans that they would want us to do something so perverse and antithetical to what our nation stands for to Muslims that live here now. That is the context for Senator Obama's comment on "stand with the Muslims".
So yes, some of us are reading and listening - and we really wish folls like anonymous would crawl back under their rock and die.
http://thinkonthesethings.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/barack-obama-refused-to-say-the-pledge-of-allegiance-youve-been-played-for-a-daggone-fool/
It was not the pledge you are referring to, it was the national anthem. Do your own thinking next time, don't just believe everything you get in an email. Check out the great site above for the TRUTH, though I assume you're not truly interested in it.
I won't even address the out of context quotes, unless you want me to take some of HRC's quotes (both RFK Assassination references anyone?).
But I thought Obama's campaign was being run by radicals and terrorists.
Ah! Anonymous 1 and the silly neo-con smears, which have been so often debunked.
1. Every time he says the pledge his hand is over his heart. Sometimes when he sings or listens to the national anthem it's not. Just as sometimes Preisdent Bush's and Dick Cheney's is not.
2. He does wear a flag pin. Does McCain? Does Hillary? Happy now?
And as for the rest of of your lies:
3. From Dreams of My Father : "I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race." THIS DOES NOT APPEAR IN ANY OF HIS BOOKS. Perhaps if you learned to read, you might know that.
This quote is the words of an unfavorable review by the a book reviewer, Steve Sailer, not Obama. You have the personal opinion of a conservative author and falsely presents it as a confession by Obama. Lie!
4. "From Dreams of My Father: "There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father" [pgs. 141-142]: Now he was trying to pull urban blacks and suburban whites together around a plan to save manufacturing jobs in metropolitan Chicago. He needed somebody to work with him, he said. Somebody black. ...
He offered to start me off at ten thousand dollars the first year, with a two-thousand-dollar travel allowance to buy a car; the salary would go up if things worked out. After he was gone, I took the long way home, along the East River promenade, and tried to figure out what to make of the man. He was smart, I decided. He seemed committed to his work. Still, there was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white - he'd said himself that that was a problem."
This edited quote makes it appear as if Obama is left with an unfavorable opinion of someone based on race. The full quote shows that Obama's mention of Marty Kaufman's race is made only after Kaufman raises it as a potential problem in light of his consideration to hire Obama for a job on a community organizing drive.
Obama took the job. "Kaufman" is actually a pseudonym. Obama told Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet that the man's real name was Gerald Kellman, who was Obama's boss at his first job in Chicago as a community organizer at the Calumet Community Religious Conference. Obama worked for him for three years before going on to law school. Kellman has said of Obama: "One of the remarkable things is how well he listens to people who are opposed to him."
5. "From Dreams of My Father: "I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father" [pg. xv]: When people who don't know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I 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), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose - the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife's six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it's on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down...well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I'm trying to hide from myself."
On its own, the quote can be interpreted as Obama rejecting his white heritage and, by extension, the entire white population. But, in full context, the statement is part of Obama's assessment of "black or white" individuals' first impressions of him as a person of mixed race.
6. "From Dreams of My Father: "I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father" [pg. 220]: Yes, I'd seen weakness in other men - Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew - Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq - fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own - my father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!
You have cut out important words, changing the quote's meaning. Gone is the notion that he "might love" white or brown men. Gone also is that Obama was speaking not of white or brown men generally, but specifically about "these men," his white, maternal grandfather Stanley Dunham and his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro. The doctored quote makes it appear as though Obama said he would never emulate any white or brown man, based on their race.
Gone as well is Obama's admission that his black friends sometimes "fell short of [the] lofty standards" of black role models like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
7. "From Dreams of My Father : ; "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."
Actual quote from "Dreams from My Father" [pg. 100-101]: 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 and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed necolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.
On its own, the quote makes Obama appear racially militant. Whereas, in full context, the quote illustrates Obama's confusion over his race and cultural heritage. This is emphasized in the preceding paragraph, where Obama describes himself as someone compensating for insecurity in his "racial credentials."
And your last, nastiest false assertion that he would "stand with the Muslims," HE NEVER SAID THAT. What he actually said is that he would stand with AMERICAN immigrants from Pakistan or Arab countries should they be faced with something like the forced detention of Japanese-American families in World War II:
Actual quote from "The Audacity of Hope" [pg. 261]: Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
He was saying the he would stand with AMERICANS, to ensure their consitutional rights were protected, in the face of misplaced hate from people like you. You and your fellow narrow-minded neocons need to stop spreading lies. It is this sort of hysteria, jingoism and misinformation that led to McCarthyism in the 50's. But this time, decent Americans will be too smart to fall for your hate and fear-mongering. You don't hold the patent on patriotism! And every time you tell these lies, patriotic Americans will stand up and tell the truth!!
MickFinn2001 wants people to die. That's the way Obama supporters normally respond toward anybody criticizing Obama. (See KOS)
Why would anybody want to post much information about themselves online with nutballs like that lurking about?
MickFinn2001 does not sound like a real name by the way. I'd wager that MickFinn2001 does not have a clue about Cook County government.
Peter Oslin
and what about his friend Jim Johnson? Hmmm....
Mr. "O" is same ol' chi town lib politics. Sad we live in a country that is swayed by 20 second sound bites and image consultants, "branding" experts.
Why is all of this being said? The one individual has taken a great deal of time to quote Obama correctly (from his book).
I'll vote for that guy to run our country.
Obamas relationship with the muslims is not just his entire name.. it is a Saudi prince who financed his education through an attorney for OPEC..it is NO wonder at all that Obama does NOT want to drill and says things like he will always stand for the muslims.. it is because he IS for the muslims! Even though islam has declared WAR on freedom and is spreading across the planet like cancer. Obamas "christian" church pastor brags that his masters degree is in ISLAM study rather than biblical scriptures. Obamas "christ" is a mean, cruel, hypocritical, black, vengeful "god" who wants to commit genocides across the world.. hmmm..just like ISLAM. ( see " black liberation theology " and look up NOI ) Obama has learned for the past twenty years or so ..to HATE his own country ....IF IF IF he is even an American citizen! He refuses to produce his birth certificate! No matter..as soon as he is found out whether now or AFTER he is elected ( there are that many stupid Americans willing to NOT look at the truth about this terrible man that WILL vote for him ) to not be an American citizen ..he will be impeached. If Joe Biden has anything to do with helping Obama decieve all of America.. Biden will go down with him, hopefully to jail..just like his own son had some man arrested immediately after he publically accused Obama of using cocaine illegally and having two homosexual trysts ..along with two strange execution styled murders of two young homosexuals near the same time from Obamas church in late 2007 when Obama was very worried about the truth.. as he is now. And he should be. Is this why Biden got the VP nod?????
My opinions only..but I can add two plus two and will accurately come up with the correct answer of four.
I am a Democrat and I will vote to remove all of our toip democrat leadeership soon as possible. They ALL make me sick to my stomach.