A Screaming Obamanation

Barack Obama is, in my view, basically a 1960s-style left-winger with a good speech. The fact that someone like him could be on the verge of winning the presidential nomination of one of our major parties says a lot about the state of American culture. He's a product of Chicago's Daley Machine, which in the 1990s gave us the ethically-challenged U. S. Sen. Carol Measly Brain.

As the piece below notes, almost all of Obama's accomplishments in the Illinois legislature came during a single year. He lost the 2000 Democratic primary for the U. S. House by 30-plus percentage points, and he won the 2004 U. S. Senate race largely because of the shortcomings of his opponents. What several of his fellow Chicago legislators think of him is also noteworthy.

From AgainstObama:

It’s not quite eight in the morning and Barack Obama is on the phone screaming at me. He liked the story I wrote about him a couple weeks ago, but not this garbage.

Months earlier, a reporter friend told me she overheard Obama call me an a**hole at a political fund-raiser. Now here he is blasting me from hundreds of miles away for a story that just went online but hasn’t yet hit local newsstands.

It’s the first time I ever heard him yell, and I’m trembling as I set down the phone. I sit frozen at my desk for several minutes, stunned.

This is before Obama Girl, before the secret service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book Dreams From My Father has been out of print for years.

I often see Obama smoking cigarettes on brisk Chicago mornings in front of his condominium high-rise along Lake Michigan, or getting his hair buzzed at the corner barbershop on 53rd and Harper in his Hyde Park neighborhood.

This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country’s first black president.

My view of Obama then wasn’t all that different from the image he projects now. He was smart, confident, charismatic and liberal. One thing I can say is, I never heard him launch into the preacher-man voice he now employs during speeches. He sounded vanilla, and activists in his mostly black district often chided him for it.

Chris Matthews, the MSNBC political pundit, recently grilled Texas state Senator Kirk Watson for supporting Obama despite knowing nothing about the candidate’s legislative record.

“Can you name any - can you name anything he’s accomplished?” Matthews pressed.

“No,” Watson, whose district includes Austin, finally admitted. “I’m not gonna be able to do that.”

“Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” Matthews said.

Hillary Clinton recalled the incident with a chuckle during last Thursday’s debate at the University of Texas.

When asked about his legislative record, Obama...Read more>>>