Well, I’m finally done. No more quotes: the last parts of the book didn’t surprise me. Freddoso deals with Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright, his view that “partial-birth abortion” ought to be considered a fundamental human right, and lays out the basic facts about Antoin Rezko. All well worth reading, even if not so quotable.
The Case Against Barack Obama will not convince you that Obama is the antichrist. It does not try to. Freddoso very careful avoids any such fearmongering. What he does do, however, is clearly demonstrate that Obama’s taglines of “Hope” and “Change we can believe in” are lies. Or at least that his political history doesn’t suggest that he’ll be any different from any other moneygrubbing, backscratching politician. From earmarking to voting “Present” on controversial issues (a staggering 130 times), Obama is no Mr. Smith. We have no reason to believe that Washington will be any better in 4 – 8 years, and I’m willing to wager that health care, unemployment, and poverty won’t have improved either.
Anyway, I recommend the book to all my fellow HPNers. If you want to borrow it, let me know. It’s an easy read, and I’m happy to make it the first entry in the communal HPN library. (See, Davey? I know how to share!)
An interesting aspect of [Obama's] career in the state Senate was his habit of voting “present” on controversial legislation instead of voting “yea” or “nay.” He did this about 130 times over his eight-year career there, which other Illinois senators say is unusually high. As Nathan Gonzales of the Rothenberg Political Report noted, “We aren’t talking about a ‘present’ vote on whether to name a state office building after a deceased state official, but rather about votes that reflect an officeholder’s core values.”
Unlike in the United States Congress, bills in Illinois have a fixed numerical threshold for passage—in other words, a “present” vote is equivalent to a “no” vote for all practical purposes. But for rhetorical purposes, a “present” vote is different in that critics and journalists must discuss it differently. For example, Barack Obama did not vote against a bill to prevent pornographic book and video stores and strip clubs from setting up within 1,000 feet of schools and churches—he just voted “present.” Obama voted “present” on an almost-unanimously passed bill to prosecute students as adults if they fire guns on school grounds. He voted “present” on the partial-birth abortion ban and other contentious issues…
– David Freddoso, The Case Against Barack Obama, p 116.
I’m starting to wonder just how active Obama will be as President. The Obama that Freddoso depicts seems more likely to cling to power as long as he possibly can (a la FDR and Clinton) than to actually try and change the country to his own ideology. Obviously, power-hungry men have the ability to hurt a lot of people in their path (again thinking of FDR and Clinton). But for whatever reason (and perhaps foolishly), it only excites me.
And no, Davey, this is not political theology. It’s all an exercise in storytelling and storyreading. So there.
Ezra Klein, associate editor of The American Prospect, is a talented liberal writer. He probably got too caught up in the moment when he wrote:
Obama’s finest speeches … enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair … Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
Martin Snapp of the Bay Area Contra Costa Times, after comparing Obama to Moses, King David, and Luke Skywalker all in the same column (and no, none of it is in jest), gets to the really good part. He writes that the candidate’s followers “love him because he’s taught them to love themselves.” He then explains why Obama is unlike every other politician:
Clinton’s supporters think she would be the best president. Ditto for McCain’s. But the Obamaphiles want something more: They believe the country is going down the tubes, and they consider it their patriotic duty to lay aside all the old differences that have divided us for the past 40 years and work together for the common good.
– David Freddoso, The Case Against Barack Obama, pp. 62-63.
This is only a sampling of the quotes Freddoso includes in his chapter, “Obamessiah.” Believe it or not, the other quotes are even more astounding.
Judges 2:11-15 (ESV):
And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals. And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Whenever they marched out, the hand of the Lord was against them for harm, as the Lord had warned, and as the Lord had sworn to them. And they were in terrible distress.
I would fear, if it were not for the next verse (Judges 2:16): “Then the Lord raised up judges, who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them.”
The question that burns on my mind is, Who will be such men in these times?
Ronald Davis was a paid consultant for Obama, who called him the “guru of petitions.” Davis’s job on January 2, 1996 was to look at each of the nearly 1,600 signatures that stat senator Alice Palmer’s campaign had collected in order [to] place her on the ballot for re-election. Davis was supposed to find a way to challenge and disqualify as many signatures as possible. The goal was to throw her off the ballot.
Palmer, the long-time South Side activist and state senator since 1991, had gathered 1,580 signatures, more than twice the 757 required to get on the ballot. But Davis and his team, over a few days, disqualified hundreds of them, one at a time. Obama says he was uneasy with this hardball tactic. In the end, however, he would say of the five-year incumbent Palmer: “If you couldn’t run a successful petition drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be.”
With that justification, he approved the project, and he checked up on its progress nightly. One by one, Obama’s “petitions guru” disqualified Palmer’s signatures for one reason or another. According to one local newspaper at the time: “Some of the problems include printing registered voters name [sic] instead of writing, a female voter got married after she registered to vote and signed her maiden name, registered voters signed the petitions but don’t live in the 13th district.”
Soon enough, Davis and his crew had brought Palmer below 757 valid signatures.
They had thrown an incumbent state senator off the ballot.
– David Freddoso, The Case Against Barack Obama, pp. 2-3.
Prior to this year, Obama has run in just one seriously contested election—for Congress, in 2000. He lost in a landslide. His victories, right up until his foray into the presidential primaries, have come almost effortlessly, owing largely to incredible good luck and the fact that his opponents’ faults were much greater than his own. This makes him an unknown quantity, even now as he runs for president.
– David Freddoso, The Case Against Barack Obama, p. xiii.
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