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The Friends of O
(page 4 of 4)
RELATED STORIES Making Peace Network Ties |
Obama won his state senate seat, joining a Democratic minority in the body at the time, but soon grew bored with the slow pace of Springfield. He decided to challenge U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in 2000. The reaction was cool. Minow recalls, "I know a lot of successful black businesspeople; I've done legal work for a lot of them. I called every single one I know, asked them for a contribution for Barack [against Rush]. I raised exactly zero dollars because they all said the same thing to me—quote, Let him wait his turn."
Toni Preckwinkle, the Fourth Ward alderman and longtime champion of the IVIs, backed Obama in the contest, in part as a turnabout because Rush had supported her opponents in the 1999 aldermanic elections. Preckwinkle is something of a Chicago archetype—the liberal reformer who is also a tough political infighter. She says she warned Obama that he was going to have a terrible time of it. "He got beat badly, partly because he wasn't a very good candidate, and partly because the weekend before the election, President Clinton did radio spots for Bobby."
Both Minow and Mikva argue that Obama was lucky to lose that congressional race. "He found out a lot about himself," says Mikva. "He just assumed that he had some natural affinity with black voters. [But] you earn votes. . . . The first time I heard him speak in a black church in that campaign, he sounded like a law professor."
The loss didn't temper Obama's ambition. One day in 2003, Minow recalls, Obama scheduled a lunch with Minow and announced that he wanted to be a U.S. senator. "I said, 'Are you nuts?' He said, 'No, I've thought it through.'" For months, the campaign looked like a long shot, at best. Minow says that later that same year, when he attended the public announcement of Obama's declaration of candidacy for the U.S. Senate, "there were, I think, only a few other white people there."
Stone recalls that not long after, he and Obama were "standing around the shrimp bowl" at a fundraiser for the Clinton Foundation. "I said, 'I don't get it: You lost to Rush, you've got a very strong field [of Senate candidates in the Democratic primary]; hang it up and become a full-time law professor and make something of yourself.' He said, 'I appreciate that but I really believe I have been given an opportunity.' I thought, 'What a waste.'"
Alan M. Dobry, a former Democratic committeeman of the Fifth Ward who had helped Obama knock Palmer off the ballot, observes that Obama brought an advantage to that 2004 race. He "has a lot of well-connected friends and some of them are quite affluent," Dobry says. "When he was a state senator, he used to be able to have benefits on the Near North Side, where he could go and raise a lot of money." At the same time, South Side black politicians, including state representatives Mary Flowers and Monique Davis, and the late Cook County Board president John H. Stroger, pointedly endorsed a white candidate, Daniel Hynes, now the state comptroller. Not incidentally, Hynes, son of the powerful political strategist Thomas Hynes, was backed by Mayor Daley's brothers John and Bill.
Upon winning the primary, Obama joined hands with the Daley organization to win the general election. Obama and Daley's alliances developed when Daley endorsed Obama for president and Obama endorsed Daley for mayor. Dobry says that maneuver alienated many IVIs. "I feel he essentially double-crossed us on the matter of being a liberal and went over to the Daley gang."
Will Burns, who has worked for Obama and for Obama's political godfather, Illinois senate president Emil Jones Jr., of the South Side, scoffs at the charge. "The Machine supported Paul Douglas for years and no one called him a sellout," Burns says. A Hyde Park intellectual and U.S. senator from 1949 to 1963, Douglas was one of the strongest liberal voices of the last century—and he was close to the former mayor Richard J. Daley.
Other sources say that Obama's error was not so much in embracing Richard M. Daley as in neglecting to go back to Hyde Park to explain his position and mend his fences. His detractors regard him as sometimes distant, even supercilious—a complaint that came up in the Bobby Rush race and that has resurfaced in the presidential campaign. "Barack tends to be somewhat aloof," Dobry says, "but that's been my experience with people from Harvard."
In any case, Obama's departure for Washington in 2004 opened a vacancy in his state senate seat. His successor would be named by the Democratic committeemen in the district. Obama told them that he wanted Will Burns in the job. In a stinging rebuke that attracted little public attention, the committeemen instead selected Kwame Raoul, who remains in the job. "Barack is not a committeeman," Burns says. "It was not his decision to make." Anyway, he says, "in politics and comedy, it's all about timing." Burns is now the Democratic nominee for a state representative's seat.
* * *
The Obama campaign has long maintained that he decided to run for president in December 2006 during an annual vacation with his family in Hawaii. Actually, sources say, Obama's staff believed as early as the summer of 2006 that he would run in 2008.
Some of his early mentors, however, didn't know yet, and in September 2006 Obama spoke at the popular political steak fry hosted every year by Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. The C-Span cameras stayed with Obama as he mingled with the crowd. "I watched it and saw a 21st-century Jack Kennedy," says Minow.
He and Mikva soon met with Obama to urge a White House run in 2008. "Ab and I both have three daughters and they all turned out very well," Minow remembers saying. "If you're going to run for president and be away from home a lot, you're better off doing it when your kids are small rather than when they are teenagers. That's when they really need a father." Obama's daughters, Malia and Sasha, were then eight and five years old.
Minow also told Obama, who at the time was 45, "Jack Kennedy told me when he was 39 he was going to run for president." (Kennedy made up his mind in 1956 after falling just short of winning the vice presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.)
By the end of the year, Obama was calling Democratic operatives and fundraisers in Chicago, laying the groundwork of support for a run for the presidency.
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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.