This piece on Huffington Post may be the beginning of the end for Obama as the left recognizes that they bought a pig in a poke. He has no core values. At last, they seem to recognize this.
Stanley Kurtz, however, sees core values but they aren’t the ones Obama is talking about.
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. Take set-asides. In 1998, Obama endorsed Democratic gubernatorial hopeful John Schmidt, stressing to the Defender Schmidt’s past support for affirmative action and set-asides.
Obama wrote a column for the Hyde-Park Herald for years while serving in the Illinois legislature. Those columns are the source for Kurtz’s analysis of his convictions.
The overwhelming majority of Obama’s “Springfield Report” columns in the Hyde Park Herald deal with state or local issues. It’s interesting, therefore, that one of the tiny handful of Obama columns explicitly dealing with national politics is a 2000 column pleading with readers to support Al Gore rather than Ralph Nader for president. Obama opens his column noting that he’s heard many people complain that Al Gore and George Bush are beholden to the same “big money interests.”
He was flirting with Ralph Nader’s candidacy in 2000 but urged a vote for Gore to avoid splititng the vote between the two leftist candidates.
Obama’s strong liberalism is nowhere more evident than on the subject of crime. Throughout his Illinois State Senate career, crime was a top Obama concern. Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We’ve heard a good deal of late about Ayers’s Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”
Still, they together fought attempts to toughen juvenile justice handling of violent crime.
Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he’d like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper “structural problems of the system.” Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the “normal” and the “deviant.”
Foucault has even proposed that mental illness is a “social construct” and his views are at the heart of much of the opposition to treatment of schizophrenia.
The Ayers-Dohrn-Obama nexus was jolted into action in late 1997 and early 1998, when a major juvenile justice reform bill was introduced in the Illinois General Assembly. Written by prosecutors and sponsored by a Republican ex-prosecutor, the bill was neither simplistic nor partisan. Well aware of evidence that sending juveniles to adult prisons can backfire and actually raise recidivism rates, sponsors met rehabilitation-minded critics halfway. The proposed bill was an early example of “blended sentencing,” in which juveniles who have committed serious crimes are given both a juvenile sentence and a parallel adult sentence. So long as the offender keeps his nose clean, doesn’t violate parole, and participates in community-based rehabilitation, he never has to serve his adult sentence.
The bill ended up passing overwhelmingly and Obama, typically, jumped aboard the train just as it was leaving the station and voted for a slightly amended version. His votes and his expressed opinions in the local paper provide a picture of his real views and they are hard left. These views are firmly held but the only thing more important to Obama than his principles is his ambition. That’s why they have been concealed.
Tags: Obama
Thanks for the heads up. Haven’t had time to fill up my private jet for a trip over to PuffHo.