KOPEL: Full picture of Obama emerging

By Dave Kopel, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 26, 2008 at 5:55 p.m.

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Who is Barack Obama? Biographical pieces about Obama this week have included excellent investigative reports and shallow puffery. Yet even the best work on Obama has omitted an important part of the story.

Monday’s Washington Post featured a huge, excellent biographical piece, focusing on Obama’s early life, and his mother, Ann Dunham. The article describes Dunham’s intriguing combination of naivete and determination, her romance with the charming but dishonest and cold-hearted Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama Sr., and her complicated relationship with her own parents.

When Obama Jr. was 10, his mother sent him to live with his grandparents in Honolulu where he attended Punahoe, an excellent prep school.

Although the article doesn’t say so directly, it does show that the Obama campaign’s meme that Obama was raised with “Kansas values” is something of a stretch. He grew up mainly in Hawaii, along with several years in Indonesia. He was raised with Kansas values (since his grandparents and mother once lived in Kansas) in the same sense that I was “raised with Maryland values” — because my father lived in Maryland before he moved to Colorado.

In the left-leaning magazine The New Republic, John Judis pens “Creation Myth: What Barack Obama won’t tell you about his community organizing past.” On the South Side of Chicago, Obama followed Saul Alinsky’s theories of community organizing: appeal to the self-interest of the people being organized, and eschew charismatic leadership. Obama’s experience showed that the Alinsky principles could produce limited success, at best. Obama’s subsequent life in politics is (to his credit, I think, although Judis isn’t so sure) nearly the opposite of the Alinsky method.

The right-leaning National Review offers an all-Obama issue, including a pair of biographical pieces. David Freddoso, author of the new book The Case Against Barack Obama, details Obama’s participation in Chicago machine politics. There, Obama allied against bipartisan reformers, and supported the corrupt regime of Cook County Commissioner John Stoger and his son Todd.

Another article reviews Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father, and describes its almost unrelievedly bleak view of the United States and of racial relations.

Newsweek’s lengthy but shallow biography of Obama (Sept. 1 issue) might as well have been written by Obama’s press office. For example, one of young Obama’s “mentors” in Hawaii was Frank Marshall Davis. Newsweek describes Davis as “a leading black activist and writer” who was subject to a McCarthyite “denunciation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.”

The word “McCarthyite” is clever because it brings to mind the reckless and false charges made against some people by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. But McCarthy did not serve on the House Committee. And the substance of the House Committee’s charges were true: Davis participated in communist front organizations. Most significantly, Davis was a columnist for the Honolulu Record, the paper of the longshoremen’s union which was run by Harry Bridges, an outspoken communist.

Time magazine’s Obama biography this week frankly states that Davis joined the Communist Party, and admired the Soviet Union.

The biographical pieces in The Washington Post, Time and Newsweek all discuss Barack Hussein Obama Sr., describing him as an advocate of Kenyan national unity, and an opponent of tribalism. This is technically true, but only in the same sense that Josef Stalin urged people to think of themselves as workers for the Soviet Union, rather than as Ukrainians, Georgians and so on.

Last April, the weblog PrestoPundit found Barack H. Obama’s July 1965 article in the East Africa Journal, titled “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” (The blogger provided the article to Politico.com, where it is posted.) Obama Sr. claimed that the leaders of Africa were not socialist enough. What Kenya needed, he wrote, was the confiscation of privately owned land; he also urged the confiscation of businesses, including “small shops,” owned by nonblacks (immigrants from Asia and Europe).

Dreams From My Father doesn’t say so, but the conflict that destroyed Obama Sr.’s career in Kenya was apparently one in which the elder Obama allied with politician Oginga Odinga, who was communist and anti-Western, and who complained that the ruling government in Kenya was neither. (Archives available at Time.com detail Odinga’s political struggles.)

None of this means that Barack Obama Jr. shares his late father’s views. It does suggest that newspaper and magazine biographies that have discussed Obama Sr. have not provided a full picture.

Newsweek’s highly sanitized biography of Barack Obama is followed by a Jacob Weisberg essay claiming that Obama’s poor polling performance among older white voters stems from “a simple reason: the color of his skin.”

“Such prejudice usually comes coded in distortions about Obama,” Weisberg asserts. For example, “Some Jews assume that Obama is insufficiently supportive of Israel, the way they assume other black politicians to be.”

Of course, according to Weisberg’s thesis, the older Jews aren’t really worried about Israel; that’s just a code word for the Jews’ racial prejudice against black people.

The prejudiced Jews theory is reinforced by the claim that the Jews “assume other black politicians to be anti-Israel.” In fact, as any politically aware Jew knows, there are plenty of pro-Israel black politicians. Before becoming mayor of Denver, Wellington Webb was head of the local chapter of the America Israel Friendship League. (Disclosure: As an AIFL volunteer, I wrote press releases quoting him.)

Conversely, that some black politicians are anti-Israel is a fact, not an assumption. The most notorious example is former Georgia Democratic U.S. Rep. (and now Green Party presidential nominee) Cynthia McKinney. While not in league with the outrageous bigot McKinney, some black congresspeople who have generally been critics of Israel include U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters and former U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums, both D-Calif., and former U.S. Rep. Earl Hilliard, D-Ala.

But according to Weisberg, the racist older Jews just assume that Obama is anti-Israel because he has the same skin color as McKinney, whom the Jews “assume” to be anti-Israel.

A more plausible explanation is that some Jews worry about Obama and Israel because the people he has picked for his foreign policy team include many foreign policy establishment figures who have suggested that American foreign policy is too pro-Israel. As detailed in Ed Lasky’s article in the Jan. 16, 2008, issue of The American Thinker, these include: Zbigniew Brezinski, Anthony Lake, Susan Rice, Robert O. Malley and Scott Lasensky.

Pro-Israel Obama advocates might counter by pointing to vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has a strong record on Israel issues. Others might argue that Israel would be helped, in the long run, by American pressure to accommodate to Arab demands, since such accommodation would bring Israel peace and security. Reasonable people can differ on what policies are best, and in their predictions about what policies a President Obama would pursue.

What is not reasonable is for Time and Weisberg to claim that Americans, including Jews, who believe that American interests are best served by strongly supporting democratic Israel against its undemocratic enemies, and who are concerned by the contrary stance of so many Obama advisers, are not really sincere, but instead are acting out of racist antipathy to black people.

The national press has been paying extra attention to Colorado politics this week. Here’s some of the best coverage:

The Washington Post’s Peter Slevin (Aug. 25) examined the huge gap in Pueblo between the ground operations of the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign. Both McCain and Obama did poorly in the primary in Pueblo. But the Obama team has been working hard there ever since opening a Pueblo office in May, and Obama volunteers have been busy registering voters.

Meanwhile, McCain’s campaign in Pueblo consists of Silver Salazar, working out of his house, with almost no support from the state campaign — which has not even provided him with all the pro-McCain yard signs he needs. The article would have been more complete if the Post had noted that Silver Salazar is a cousin to Colorado’s Democratic senator Ken and U.S. representative John.

Roll Call is a twice-a-week newspaper whose main audience in Capitol Hill and the lobbyists who serve it. Many of its articles are available online for free, including an interesting piece (Aug. 25) by Tory Newmyer examining Denver-area donations to Obama and McCain, broken down by ZIP code.

Boulder’s two ZIP codes have been gold mines for Obama, whereas McCain has raised only a pittance from north Boulder, and done just a little better in south Boulder. Interestingly, one area where McCain has taken in nearly as much as Obama is LoDo. Other Denver neighborhoods don’t come close to the 26-to-1 Obama advantage in north Boulder, but Obama is winning the money races by at least 2-to-1, and sometimes much more.

The National Journal is a very influential, and very expensive, weekly magazine produced for Washington political and government professionals. You can’t buy it on the newsstand, and if you have to ask how much a subscription costs, you can’t afford it. In honor of the conventions this week and next week, National Journal has made itself available online for free.

Among the best items from the penultimate issue (which, unfortunately, is not free) is a chart showing the size of every post-convention “bounce” for major party candidates since 1968. The biggest bouncer was Bill Clinton (plus 16, 1992), and the smallest bounce was John Kerry’s (minus one, 2004). A big bounce often leads to victory, but not always, as demonstrated by Jimmy Carter (plus 10, 1980) and Walter Mondale (plus nine, 1984).

In that same issue, a Colorado map shows the county-by-county difference in the 2004 vote for winning U.S. Senate candidate Ken Salazar, and losing presidential candidate John Kerry. Salazar outperformed Kerry everywhere except Pitkin County (Aspen); Kerry was much weaker than Salazar in the eastern plains, and in southern Colorado. Improved performance in these areas may, therefore, be a key to an Obama victory his year.

My favorite NJ columnist is Jonathan Rauch, a pro-gay, anti-Bush libertarian/conservative. His Aug. 23 article contrasts the 2004 and 2008 Democratic platforms. The former offered extensive promises of strong U.S. leadership in war on terror; the latter barely mentions the topic. “Are We at War, Senator Obama?” asks Rauch.

Dave Kopel is research director at the Independence Institute, an attorney and author of 10 books. He can be reached at kopeld@RockyMountainNews.com.

• August 27, 2008

  6:21 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  shorwitt writes:

  What do you know about Alinsky beyond what's in Judis's piece?

• August 28, 2008

  10:06 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  recallrondellums writes:

  Oakland Residents - Recall Ron Dellums
  http://www.petitiononline.com/510911/...

• September 2, 2008

  2:28 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  gary writes:

  Obama....
  He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he
  rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he
  hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic
  surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way
  to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in
  Kenya . Only a small part of him is African Black from
  his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is
  exclusively.

  What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is
  'African-American,' the descendant of enslaved
  Africans brought to America chained in slave ships.
  He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead,
  his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading
  was the main Arab business in East Africa for
  centuries until the British ended it.

  Let that sink in: Obama is not the descendant of
  slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he
  makes the perfect Liberal Messiah.
  It's something Hillary doesn't understand - how some
  complete neophyte came out of the blue and stole the
  Dem nomination from her. Obamamania is beyond
  politics and reason. It is a true religious cult,
  whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe
  in Original Sin,..... transferring it.... from the evil of
  being human ...to the evil ....of being white.

  Nuff Said!

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