Illinois Leader
6 July 2004
OPINION -- With the June 25 announcement by conservative Republican Jack Ryan that he was dropping out of the U.S. Senate race for Illinois, the seat falls to Democrat candidate Barack Obama virtually by default.
But who is Barack Obama? Is the charming, handsome, articulate 42-year-old state senator who dominated a field of six in the March 16 Democrat primary with 53 percent of the vote, the herald of a “new kind of politics” or merely a new voice calling for the same old, racist, urban welfare politics the Democrat Party has promoted for forty years?
On June 4, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert pitched for Obama.
“In a political era saturated with cynicism and deceit, Mr. Obama is asking voters to believe him when he talks about the values and verities that so many politicians have lied about for so long. He's asking, in effect, for a leap of political faith.”
Herbert crafted two cover stories, as to why voters should support Obama: 1. He is a left-of-center candidate whose message transcends partisanship; and 2. He is black. (Actually, Obama is biracial; one can only call him “African-American” by reading his white mother out of his genetic code.)
Forget number one. Herbert wants Illinoisans to elect Barack Obama to the Senate, because Herbert has defined him as black.
Imagine how Herbert and millions of other black and white “liberals” would react, if a white columnist called on voters to elect a political candidate, merely because the latter was white (or was defined as white).
Herbert tells us that Obama is a “left of center” pol who believes in "a set of core values that bind us together as Americans." Herbert writes that Obama’s “partisans describe [him] as a dream candidate, the point man for a new kind of politics designed to piece together a coalition reminiscent of the one blasted apart by the bullet that killed Robert Kennedy in 1968.”
“Core values” talk -- logic and morality be damned -- always seems to lead to the demand that black and Hispanic Americans (and Hispanic non-citizens!) be privileged under the law, and white Americans be disenfranchised. And in fact, Obama is a rabid supporter of affirmative action and other racially biased policies, though Herbert did not see fit to divulge those facts. Indeed, Herbert provided no credible or substantive information about Obama’s politics.
Obama , who currently represents Illinois' 13th Senate District, on the largely black South Side of Chicago, is also an ardent supporter of abortion, and a lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago. But has he ever read the Constitution? The Supreme Court’s decisions deeming abortion a “fundamental right” and in favor of affirmative action were, constitutionally speaking, some of the worst in the history of the Court.
According to another fawning, if brief, profile in The Economist, “He has worked hard to reach across racial lines, but his core support comes from blacks and white urban progressives, and he has pinned his primary hopes largely on the Chicago area.” The anonymous Economist editorialist also indulged in some cheap race-baiting: "Are Illinois voters ready for this? In a city with deep Irish roots, a local commentator suggests that he might do better as O'Bama."
Had the writer at The Economist bothered to check his facts, he would have known that Chicago today has twice as many blacks as Irish. Apparently, he only knows Chicago from 1930s' 20th Century-Fox movies about Mrs. O'Leary's cow .
The media coverage of Obama that I have seen, has been an endless series of puff pieces, many of which employ the same fork-tongued rhetoric: ‘He transcends race (but support him, because he’s black).’ Such uncritical campaign propaganda from the press should not surprise students of the media - Obama and the people “covering” him are overwhelmingly leftists. Alleged journalists see helping Obama win as a matter of political honor.
But are Illinois voters ready for Obama's race politics?
Affirmative Action: America has already suffered for almost 40 years under a system in which incompetents are accepted to college and graduate and professional school, hired to responsible jobs, and given government contracts, due solely to their race, ethnicity, or sex, while qualified people suffer egregious discrimination, based solely on their race, ethnicity, or sex. Obama would maintain such vicious programs in perpetuity.
The unrealistic attitude of many black supporters of affirmative action was succinctly expressed by Obama’s wife, Michelle, as recounted in yet another valentine, by New Yorker writer William Finnegan. “Michelle’s father was a city worker, her grandfather a handyman. ‘They were bright, articulate, well-read men,’ she says. ‘If they’d been white, they would have been the heads of banks.’”
People have lived under the racist regime of affirmative action for so long, that they may fail to see the connection between it and contemporary racialist policies which are in fact direct outgrowths of it. Affirmative action has for over thirty years been defended by, among other rationalizations, the theory of “disparate impact.” According to “disparate impact,” any category in which a “preferred minority” (or women) does less well than white men, is automatically a case of racial discrimination. No evidence is required of those charging discrimination. Not only are claimants released from the onus of proving their case, but in recent years, a paranoid conspiracy theory has been joined to disparate impact theory, in order to foist pernicious race hoaxes on the public, such as the fiction of “racial profiling.”
Law Enforcement: Obama drafted successful legislation ensuring that all interrogations in death penalty cases are videotaped; “passed model legislation designed to curb the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement”; and “has been a leader in reforming the juvenile justice system to keep more young people in school and out of prison, and has fought to increase penalties for domestic violence.” (Quotes are from Obama’s official Web site.)
The videotaping requirement Obama got passed is part of a national movement to have all police interrogations videotaped. The movement gathered steam in late 2002, as part of the ultimately successful campaign to get the convictions of the five New York men who in 1989 as teenagers had admitted to assaulting, sexually abusing, and leaving for dead Tricia Meili, whom whites had known for years as “the Central Park Jogger” thrown out. (Blacks knew Meili’s name, because black media had constantly publicized it from the start.)
According to the Supreme Court, police are legally permitted to use deceit, in order to trick suspects into confessing to crimes, but some members of the public, particularly among blacks, oppose such tactics. And while some supporters of videotaping all interrogations have claimed that the practice is necessitated by the history of Chicago police coercing confessions, those same advocates believe that there is no such thing as a true, voluntary confession, at least not by minority suspects. (Advocates' ultimate goal is to get ALL confessions, at least all by minority suspects, thrown out of court.) Those who support the videotaping of interrogations hope that juries will be so disgusted by detectives’ use of deceit, that they will acquit the guilty, or that detectives will be so handcuffed by public race-baiting, as to be rendered impotent.
The Illinois legislation against so-called racial profiling requires that all local police departments record the race of anyone police stop for questioning. The legislation's rationale is that if “too many” blacks are stopped, the police are guilty of racial profiling. “Too many” is virtually always framed by race advocates as being more than the black (or black and Hispanic) proportion of the local population.
But in Illinois, as in the rest of the nation, disproportionate numbers of minority group members are violent criminals. “Anti-profiling” legislation leads to “de-policing” , whereby in order to have the "right numbers" and to avoid charges of racism, police ignore violent crimes committed right in front of their noses by minority criminals, while arresting whites for the pettiest of offenses. Another consequence of “anti-profiling” agitation is police departments’ doctoring of crime statistics, in order to compensate on paper for what police may not do on the street.
Obama’s “reform” of the juvenile justice system is designed to protect violent, young, black (and, to a lesser degree Hispanic) felons from having to pay for their crimes. But why would someone who is so lax with violent, young felons be so draconian with men convicted of domestic violence? For one thing, such legislating -- like his support for unlimited abortion rights -- burnishes Obama’s feminist credentials with white, female progressives. For another, such legislation primarily targets white men. “Domestic violence” is largely about locking up unruly and violent white husbands. (Violent wives get a pass.)
Seventy-seven percent of white children are born to married parents, while only 31 percent of black children are. And so, such legislation is tailored to harm white men. Note too that “domestic violence” law tends to get treated de facto as an adjunct of family law, in which constitutional protections are routinely violated. And so, Obama, a lecturer on constitutional law, wants to fabricate ever broader, new legal protections for black and Hispanic criminals, while doing away with legal protections for heterosexual, white, married men.
To me, Barack Obama comes off like Bill Clinton, a former professor of constitutional law who also apparently never read the document. Like Clinton, Obama also is a man of great charm. That charm and a historical decline, such that policy proposals that once would have been publicly denounced as racist nonsense are now taken seriously, makes Obama so much more dangerous, than if he were simply a crudely vicious racist like Gus Savage.
No wonder so many liberal journalists seem to fantasize about Obama eventually being elected the nation’s second “African-American” president.
(Postscript April 15, 2010: I have read statements claiming that other writers, who first wrote about “Obama” years after I had published this article and others like it, had been the first to refute the notion that “Obama” was a “post-racial” politician. Hopefully, this will put such claims to rest.)
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