Chicago backroom politics
One of the more telling political moments the other day occurred when Chris Matthews asked Texas State Senator Kirk Watson, a prominent Obama supporter, to name Obama’s legislative accomplishments. Watson was tongue-tied. Although I’ll be the first to admit to brain freeze when put on the spot with questions like that, one would think that someone going on the air to tout Obama as the next President of the United States would, in fact, have done his homework. As it happens, Obama actually has a lot of accomplishments from his years as a Chicago State Senator. As he likes to boast when challenged about the tabula rasa that is his legislative record, Obama will point to the fact that he sponsored bills in the Illinois Senate that increased children’s health insurance; that he increased government transparency by requiring that, if public meetings were held behind closed doors, they would have to tape record proceedings; that he required that the police videotape their interrogations of homicide suspects; etc.
What’s interesting isn’t his sponsorship of the bills — although it does speak to a liberal political sensibility on several issues with which I disagree — it’s the way in which he ended up sponsoring the bills. In a lengthy article, Todd Spivak, who started writing about Obama when Obama was a nobody who had just entered Illinois politics, goes back in time and explains how Obama’s name ended up on so much legislation (h/t The New Editor):
It’s a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what’s interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.
Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama’s seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years, Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative achievements.
Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every lever of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor’s office as well as both legislative chambers.
The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James “Pate” Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned African-American known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.
Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s kingmaker.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'”
“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”
“Barack Obama.”
Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.
“I don’t consider it bill jacking,” Hendon told me. “But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”
During his seventh and final year in the state Senate, Obama’s stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law — including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced.
It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics — and he couldn’t have done it without Jones.
Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.
Jones further helped raise Obama’s profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news headlines.
For instance. Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet supplement ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national attention and extensive local coverage.
I spoke to Jones earlier this week and he confirmed his conversation with Kelley, adding that he gave Obama the legislation because he believed in Obama’s ability to negotiate with Democrats and Republicans on divisive issues.
So how has Obama repaid Jones?
Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’s Senate district.
Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.
I’ll never forget what he said:
“Some call it pork; I call it steak.”
In other words, as many have long suspected, Obama is indeed nothing more than the product of the Chicago political machine. He’s smart, he’s photogenic, he’s manipulative, he’s a vicious political infighter, and he’s the product of someone else’s political vision and imagination.
On the same subject — Obama’s relentless drive to political prominence, morality be damned — IBD speaks about the significance of the Rezko trial and of Obama’s cozy relationship with Tony Rezko (h/t W”B”S):
Rezko was among Obama’s earliest supporters. In 1995, when Obama ran for a seat in the Illinois Senate, Rezko, through two of his companies, gave Obama $2,000. Obama won election in 1996 in a district that coincidentally included 11 of Rezko’s 30 low-income housing projects.
In 2003, when Obama said he’d run for the U.S. Senate, Rezko held a lavish fundraiser at his Wilmette, Ill., mansion. Rezko has raised a lot of money for Obama, who is returning $150,000 raised by Rezko and his associates and is giving $72,650 in Rezko contributions to charity.
Rezko is known by the Chicago press as a “fixer” who can make things happen for a price. Little is done out of the goodness of his heart. He’s on trial for bilking up to $6 million from the people of Illinois through kickbacks while working for the administration of current Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
[snip]
Rezko and Obama would do business yet again. In 2005, when Rezko was under federal investigation for influence peddling in Blagojevich’s administration, Obama and Rezko’s wife, Rita, bought adjacent pieces of property from a Chicago doctor.
The doctor sold one parcel to Obama for $1.65 million, $300,000 below the asking price, while Rezko’s wife paid full price, $625,000, for the adjacent vacant lot. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko’s wife $104,500 for a 10-foot-wide strip of her land, allegedly so that he could have a bigger yard.
The deal rendered the Rezko parcel too small to build on, thereby increasing the value of Obama’s property. What was Rezko expecting in return for this favor to Obama that made Rezko’s parcel almost worthless?
An interesting sidebar to the deal was that just weeks before, an Iraqi billionaire by the name of Nadhmi Auchi, who has a French conviction for corruption to his credit, had loaned Rezko $3.5 million through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services FA.
A 2004 Pentagon report obtained by the Washington Times identified Auchi as a global arms dealer and Iraqi billionaire “who, behind the facade of legitimate business, served as Saddam Hussein’s principle international financial manipulator and bag man.”
The report states that “significant and credible evidence has been developed that Nadhmi Auchi has engaged in unlawful activities” such as bribing “foreign governments and individuals prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom to turn opinion against the American-led mission to remove Saddam Hussein.” He also helped “arrange for significant theft from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program to smuggle weapons and dual-use technology into Iraq.”
Yet Auchi, despite his French conviction and other activities, was somehow able to get permission to come to Chicago in 2004. John Batchelor of Human Events says that in April 2004 Auchi met with Rezko, Gov. Blagojevich, State Senate President Emil Jones Jr. and reportedly then-state Sen. Obama, who’d just won the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination.
Funnily enough, reading all this, I keep thinking that it’s like a weirdly inverted version of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. I haven’t seen this Frank Capra classic in years but, if memory serves me correctly, the corrupt Sen. Joseph Harrison Paine (Claude Raines) uses political manipulation to get the young, tall, good-looking Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) to Washington as his fellow-Senator, believing that Smith is enough of a fool that he can be manipulated into serving Paine’s purposes — including being Paine’s unwitting fall guy when Paine’s corruption is exposed. Of course, Smith proves to be nobody’s fool, to have incredible integrity, and to have the grit to defend himself against the smear and to save American government.
Now, in modern days and the real world, Obama has the young, tall, good-looking part down pat, and he’s certainly nobody’s fool. All similarities to the picture, though, seem to stop there. As more and more emerges about Obama’s days in the Chicago political machine, the “incredible integrity” bit is beginning to look increasingly shabby. Rather than being Sen. Paine’s innocent victim, Obama looks remarkably like Sen. Paine’s willing co-conspirator.
