Mickey Kaus recently wrote:
If (like me) you want to feel better about Barack Obama, try reading conservative Bradford Berenson’s Frontline comments on Obama’s performance at the Harvard Law Review.
Berenson was a conservative member of the Review, and his comments portrayed Obama as “an honest broker,” as someone who did “not let ideology or politics blind him to the enduring institutional interests of the Review.”
If (like me) you fear that this view of Obama is pollyanna-ish wishful thinking, try reading (or better yet, re-reading) Stanley Kurtz’s masterful portrayal of Obama’s years in the Illinois legislature, a tenure that, like the content of his service on the Woods Foundation and Chicago Annenberg Challenge, has been virtually ignored by the mainstream press. What a study of that tenure reveals, Kurtz writes, “is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign.”
In addition to his well-publicized 130 “present” votes, Obama:
- supported racial set asides and actual racial quotas;
- led an effort to restore racial quotas in construction after they had been outlawed by a 2004 federal court decision;
- “expressed[d] anger that black state senators have failed to unite for the purpose of placing a newly approved riverboat casino in a minority neighborhood.” One of those who failed to fall in line behind Obama was black state senator Mary Flowers, who objected to Obama’s position by stating:
the Black Caucus is from different tribes, different walks of life. I don’t expect all of the whites to vote alike. . . . Why is it that all of us should walk alike, talk alike and vote alike? . . . I was chosen by my constituents to represent them, and that is what I try to do.
As Kurtz observed, with considerable restraint:
Given Obama’s supposedly post-racial politics, it is notable that he should be the one demanding enforcement of a black political agenda against “lone agents,” while another black legislator appeals to Obama to leave her free to represent her constituents, black or white, as she sees fit.
- led the effort to preserve as many black seats as possible after the 2000 census revealed an increase in Hispanic and Asian population and a decrease in the black population, opposing any effort to expand Hispanic representatin “by taking African American seats”;
- consciously constructed his election strategies “on a foundation of leftist ideology and racial bloc voting” (as Obama put it, “an energized African-American voter base and effective coalition-building with other progressive sectors of the population”);
- wrote what the New York Times called a “rave review” of a book by William Ayers that, among other things, said “he’d like to see the prison system itself essentially demolished,” comparing the American prison system to South Africa’s mass detention of young blacks”;
- campaigned himself against “the industrial prison complex”;
- in 1998 “was one of only three Illinois state senators to vote against a proposal making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang”;
- in support of a bill against racial profiling, argued that statistical disparities in arrests were proof of racism and discrimination by the police.
Note that Kurtz’s summary here of Obama’s legislative record in Springfield omits his now-documented blocking of legislation that would have required doctors to provide medical treatment to babies who survived unsuccessful abortions, even though identical legislation had passed the U.S. Senate without opposition.
Kurtz’s conclusion:
The real Obama? You see him in those charts. Fundamentally, he is a big-government redistributionist who wants above all to aid the poor, particularly the African-American poor. Obama is eager to do so both through race-specific programs and through broad-based social-welfare legislation. “Living wage” legislation may be economically counterproductive, and Obama-backed housing experiments may have ended disastrously, yet Obama is committed to large-scale government solutions to the problem of poverty. Obama’s early campaigns are filled with declarations of his sense of mission-a mission rooted in his community organizing days and manifest in his early legislative battles. Recent political back flips notwithstanding, Barack Obama does have an ideological core, and it’s no mystery at all to any faithful reader of the Chicago Defender or the Hyde Park Herald.
On second thought, if (like Mickey Kaus) “you want to feel better about Barack Obama,” then by all means don’t read Kurtz’s article, or his article that appeared this morning listing a whole host of new ties between ACORN and the leftist New Party (essentially ACORN’s political arm for a while).
