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The Friends of O
(page 2 of 4)
RELATED STORIES Making Peace Network Ties |
If Obama quickly made friends among white liberals and African American businesspeople, he also hooked into Hyde Park's anchoring institution, the University of Chicago. Even without the law school connection, the link was inevitable. As Rogers puts it, "The vast majority of Barack's supporters from [Hyde Park] are either graduates or parents of the Lab Schools," the top-tier private elementary and high school associated with the university. Rogers and Jarrett graduated from the school. It happens that another Lab Schools parent who supports Obama is Mayor Richard M. Daley, whose eldest daughter, Nora, was a student there.
Obama had been courted by the university even before his law degree was in hand. Michael McConnell, a noted conservative law professor then at the U. of C., submitted an article to the Harvard Law Review while Obama was its president. He did such a fine job of editing that McConnell wanted to bring him to the university, says Geoffrey Stone, who was dean of the law school at the time. "We would make him a law and government fellow, he could work on his book [published in 1995 as Dreams from My Father], anything else he wanted to do," Stone says. "I met him here in my office; he was extremely impressive." Stone adds wryly, "My secretary and I agreed that one of these days he would be governor of Illinois." (McConnell is now a federal appellate judge in Utah; he declined to comment.)
Obama ended up teaching law part-time at the university—a role that led to a recent flap over whether he deserved the title "law professor," as some of his campaign materials have asserted. The former law school dean Douglas Baird says Obama was a "senior lecturer," a title which at the U. of C. is "a big, big deal. That meant he could pick up the phone and call any dean in the country and say, 'I want to join your faculty,' and they [would] say yes."
Not long after Obama joined the faculty, Mikva had retired from the bench and was also teaching at the law school. He, Baird, Stone, and another prominent law professor, Cass R. Sunstein, often met with Obama in the Quadrangle Club, the faculty club at 1155 East 57th Street. Reflecting on the school's influence on Obama, Sunstein recently wrote, "The University of Chicago Law School is by far the most conservative of the great American law schools. [Obama] is strongly committed to helping the disadvantaged, but his University of Chicago background shows; he appreciates the virtues and power of free markets." During an interview in April with the University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, Sunstein elaborated: "On the mortgage and credit market crises, he has been against Hillary Clinton's freeze [on interest rates] and he's been in favor of increased disclosure to make the market work. So if we could compare Clinton and Obama on some issues, you'll notice that he is more libertarian and more disclosure focused, where she is somewhat more mandate focused."
The university pioneered a discipline of "law and economics" that, broadly speaking, favors incentives over mandates, the market over regulations. "That was certainly abuzz during the time Obama was at the law school [from 1992 to 2004]," says the U. of C. economist Austan Goolsbee. When Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, his campaign needed an economics adviser. "They called all these people from Harvard—no one would give them the time of day," Goolsbee recalls. So they turned to him, and Goolsbee remains a senior adviser. "If you look at his platform, at his advisers, at his temperament, the guy's got a healthy respect for markets," says Goolsbee. "It's in the ethos of the [University of Chicago], which is something different from saying he is laissez-faire. He is a Democrat who thinks you can harness market mechanisms to achieve Democratic objectives."
Obama's critics say that he is in fact a conventional protectionist who campaigns against free-trade treaties such as NAFTA. Goolsbee set off a small commotion in February when he allegedly told a Canadian consular official that Obama's recent anti-NAFTA rhetoric was just politics and not a sign that he opposed the agreement. Goolsbee does not comment now on that incident but insists that Obama is sympathetic to free-market approaches to public policy.
Douglas Baird puts a slightly different spin on Obama's economic approach. "It isn't so much that [Obama] is market oriented as he is keenly aware of the fact that we live in a world of limited resources," Baird says. "That kind of outlook might strike some as being more market oriented."
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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.