Steve Sailer’s Obama coverage has been brilliant, nuanced, detailed, ahead of the curve, sympathetic at times, and superior in every way to the dueling talking points served up by the mainstream media. His latest essay considers Barack Obama’s recent troubles, the Rezko connection in Chicago, and Obama’s early years as a community organizer. Community organizing followed the graft-seeking program of radical Jewish activist Saul Alinsky–incidentally the subject of a young Hillary Rodham’s senior thesis at Wellesley. What really motivates Obama:
By his own account, Obama’s only accomplishment was mau-mauing the black bureaucrats at the Chicago Housing Authority into removing some asbestos from public housing; a worthy task, but a solution to a problem that ranks comically low on any list of troubles besetting black slum dwellers.
In summary, Obama came to the Chicago to do good, but ended up doing well.
It’s the story of his life. Obama takes jobs ostensibly to help blacks-community organizer, discrimination lawyer, politician-but they mostly just help fuel his amazing ascent to the White House. The fundamental flaw in Obama’s career is that each job is to help poor blacks get more goodies out of the government, but government handouts undermine black moral fiber, leaving the community worse off than before the Great Society.
Sadly, as a half-white preppie from paradise, Obama has never felt “black enough” to effectively challenge the leftist orthodoxy in which a Jeremiah Wright is considered by other blacks to be part of the black mainstream.
If Obama had wanted to improve tangibly the lives of Chicago inner city blacks, but didn’t care about attaining power and fame for himself, he could have become, say, a high school teacher, perhaps at Providence-St. Mel, the famous all-black Catholic school on the West Side that’s renown for straightening out young fellows. With his charisma, he could have been a great teacher and role model.
But he chose a different path, one of overweening personal ambition.
Obama’s not a saint. He’s shown little genius or moral courage in the realm of public policy. He’s never bucked his own party. He’s not going to make all our racial troubles go away if he’s elected. He won’t easily sort out the economy’s troubles, nor the War in Iraq. He quite effectively speaks in generalities that allow him to be “all things to all people.” Once upon a time, all politicians used to do this well. Only recently, in the dumbed down age of talking points and “focus groups,” are we overawed when this skill set is put into action.
Across the span of his adulthood, Obama has positioned himself well to look like a great humanitarian, even though every step has really been an investment in political skill, political constituency building, and furthering his own personal ambition. The various steps he has taken are about as “idealistic” as a College Republican’s unpaid internship with the Department of Commerce. Of course, and this is obvious from his books and his tone, Obama is a sensitive and intelligent man. He clearly has concerns with his identity, whether he’s acting well, whether he’s living up to some higher ideal. When in doubt, when he’s feeling drained by the inherent cynicism of political life, he returns to the well of Saul Alinsky’s Sixties radicalism and the pissed off black identity politics of his wife and Reverent Jeremiah Wright for inspiration. This is as close as we can get to a “real Obama.” Needless to say, this is not a pretty picture, and it’s a far cry from the anodyne talk of racial healing that he has been able to peddle as a result of the media’s willful blindness.
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I agree. Too bad the African American voting bloc is blinded by skin color. They have abandoned the real ‘hope’ for all minorities. I often ask myself how could a group of ‘folks’ be so blinded? Then I remember history and the ‘others’ who produce a common enemy with their rhetoric, watch the unthinking flock to them, and turn their message of ‘hope and change’ to.. destroy at all costs..because it is the ‘enemy’.
It is sad to watch. It also angers a thinking person because so many lies are so apparent..from Rezko to the authorship or sponsoring of bills in the Illinois State Legislature..to actually attending the sermons of a ‘friend’ but denying the friendship and influence on national tv for approval from ‘white men’ (polling note).
The worst is our children influenced by the thousands by a man with no conscience.
Rev. Wright puts the lie to Obama’s claim to be a uniter, someone who transcends race. It is going to hurt him badly, and as I wrote today, I think his only hope is to get Oprah to do a sympathetic interview with the good Reverend.
Barak Obama is half American and half African, he’s not African-American, so the American black community isn’t represented with his nomination, better luck next time. Why not Rice or Powell, blacks with roots in the American black community that goes back to the 1600s (blacks). Barak is a community organizer with a spotty record in a state senate and 143 days in the Senate before he began to run for the presidency. He can’t hardly find a politician in Washington D.C. who has less qualifications than himself to be president. The media didn’t vet him but protected Barak Obama from a proper investigation on his personal life and relationships. The press is in his pocket and failed America in it’s primary job of giving us the news.
He’s not even half “African”, he’s 40% Arab, and maybe 10% Afro-whatever. Oh yeah then there’s the 50% white, and why is it that no one calls him an UNCLE TOM?