<p>Obama moved to Chicago in order to place himself in what he understood to be the de facto “capital” of black America. For well over 100 years, the Chicago Defender has been the voice of that capital, and therefore a paper of national significance for African Americans. Early on in his political career, Obama complained of being slighted by major media, like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Yet extensive and continuous coverage in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald presents a remarkable resource for understanding who Obama is. Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama’s early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the “lost years,” the
period Obama seems least eager to talk about.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>What they portray 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. As details of Obama’s early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It’s no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>Any rounded treatment of Obama’s early political career has got to give prominence to the issue of race. Obama has recently made efforts to preemptively blunt discussion of the race issue, warning that his critics will highlight the fact that he is African American. Yet the question of race plays so large a role in Obama’s own thought and action that it is all but impossible to discuss his political trajectory without acknowledging the extent to which it engrosses him.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>When it comes to issues like affirmative action and set-asides, Obama is anything but the post-racial politician he’s sometimes made out to be.</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>Obama’s intensely race-conscious approach may surprise Americans who know him primarily through his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 2004. When Obama so famously said, “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America-there’s the United States of America,” most Americans took him to be advocating a color-blind consciousness of the kind expressed in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that his children would one day be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Anyone who understood Obama’s words that way should know that this is not the whole story. In an essay published in 1988 entitled “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” Obama tried to make room for both “accommodation and militancy” in black political engagement. He wrote</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama has made a point of refusing the liberal label. While running for Congress against Bobby Rush in late 1999 and early 2000, however, Obama showed no such compunction</p>
<p>…</p>
<p>The most interesting characterization came from Obama himself, who laid out his U.S. Senate campaign strategy for the Defender in 2003: “[A]s you combine a strong African-American base with progressive white and Latino voters, I think it is a recipe for success in the primary and in the general election.” Putting the point slightly differently, Obama added, “When you combine . . .an energized African-American voter base and effective coalition-building with other progressive sectors of the population, we think we have a recipe for victory.” Obama consciously constructed his election strategy on a foundation of leftist ideology and racial bloc voting.</p>
<p>[Barack</a> Obama’s Lost Years](<a href=“http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/386abhgm.asp?pg=1]Barack”>http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/386abhgm.asp?pg=1)</p>
I personally like THE ONE … perhaps I AM ignorant. Alas.</p>