My assorted thoughts on the New Yorker Obama piece

Beyond the controversial magazine cover, here are my musings on Ryan Lizza's New Yorker article on Barack Obama's rise.

This sentence about Obama's first State Senate run speaks for itself:

(Convicted felon Tony) Rezko was one of the people Obama consulted when he considered running to replace (Alice) Palmer, and Rezko eventually raised about ten per cent of Obama's funds for that first campaign.

Palmer of course was the first person Obama "threw under the bus."

Lizza devotes several paragraphs to the State Senate rivalry between Obama and Rickey "Hollywood" Hendon, a filmmaker. I've never met Obama, but I have met Hendon. When I was employed in catering sales at the old Bismarck Hotel, I worked with Hendon on the set-up particulars for a couple of his fundraising events there. Hendon is a lot of fun, he is almost certainly more fun than the wonkish Obama.

Hendon was close to Alice Palmer, and the two men didn't get along. And the still don't is my guess. I won't rehash Lizza's account of their run-ins, but he leaves out another point of contention--Obama is a South Sider, Hendon lives on the West Side of Chicago.

But Lizza missed an intregal component of Obama-Hendon feud.

Like any community, the African-American community of Chicago doesn't have one voice. When blacks first settled in Chicago, they put down roots on the city's South Side (not that they had a lot of choice in the matter). Blacks didn't live in large numbers on the West Side until after World War II. To this day the older community dominates Chicago's African-American political scene. Harold Washington (Chicago's first black mayor), Jesse Jackson, Eugene Sawyer (Chicago's second black mayor), Carol Moseley Braun, Roland Burris (Illinois' first statewide officeholder)...all South Siders. The city's major black social institutions and churches are located....you guessed it, on the South Side.

How would have Obama's life be different if he had accepted a community organizer's job on Chicago's West Side? Is America ready for a West Side president?

Lizza then moves on to Obama's "famous" 2002 anti-war speech he gave at Daley Plaza in Chicago's Loop. Maybe I had a busy week at work, maybe my daughter was sick, but I didn't hear about this speech until last year. I'm sure it had an effect on those liberal goo-goos who made up much of Obama's early support base (along with Tony Rezko) for his US Senate run two years later. But those people, considering who was on the Democratic primary ballot in 2004, would have backed him anyway.

Obama's since debunked claim that his Kansas grandfather met with soldiers who witnessed the horrors of the Treblinka and Aushwitz concentration camps at the end of World War II is mentioned, but not corrected, by Lizza. It was the Red Army who liberated those camps, US soldiers never got anywhere near those places.

The "man behind the curtain" for Obama in his last two years in the Illinois State Senate was machine pol Emil Jones, the president of that body.

Lizza writes:

In the State Senate, Jones did something even more important for Obama. He pushed him forward as the key sponsor of some of the Party's most important legislation, even though the move did not sit well with some colleagues (My note: Rickey Hendon was one of those senators) who had plugged away in the minority on bills that Obama now championed as part of the majority. "Because he had been in the minority, Barack didn't have a legislative record to run on, and there was a buildup of all these great ideas that the Republicans kept in the rules committee when they were in the majority," (Will) Burns said. "Jones basically gave Obama the space to do what Obama wanted to do. Emil made it clear to people that it would be good for them." Burns, who at that point was working for Jones, was assigned to keep an eye on Obama's floor votes, which, because he was a Senate candidate, would be under closer scrutiny. The Obama-Jones alliance worked. In one year, 2003, Obama passed much of the legislation, including bills on racial profiling, death-penalty reform, and expanded health insurance for children, that he highlighted in his Senate campaign.

Has Emil Jones considered running for president? He is after all, another powerful South Sider.

And finally...

Here's an excerpt from the survey Barack Obama completed for the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO) during his 1996 campaign for the State Senate.

Do you support state legislation:

to ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns: Yes.

Twelve years later Obama says he supports an individual right's to bear arms, including handguns. An Obama spokesman made the audacious claim that a staffer filled out the IVI-IPO form for the great one.

Lizza in the New Yorker reveals the identity of the staffer:

In another episode that has Obama's old friends feeling frustrated, Obama recently blamed his first campaign manager, Carol Anne Harwell, for reporting on a 1996 questionnaire that Obama favored a ban on handguns. According to her friends, Harwell was furious that the campaign made her Obama's scapegoat. "She got, as the saying goes, run over by a bus," Lois Friedberg-Dobry (an early Obama supporter) said.

Harwell should be angry. The IVI-IPO, despite its name, is about as independent as MoveOn.org. It may not be officially part of the Cook County Regular Democratic Organization, but it almost never endorses Republicans. The group is highly respected by the the Hyde Park intellectuals who made up an important part of Obama's early base. It's ludicrous to believe that Obama, without his knowledge, let Harwell complete the IVI-IPO survey.

He's just another Chicago politician.

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