The Obama of ‘Dreams’

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By David Ignatius

Thursday, January 17, 2008; Page A23 

The promise of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was that it would transcend the old racial and ideological categories of American politics. Obama was sometimes described as “post-racial” or “the Tiger Woods of politics” — someone who defied the usual dividing lines and, in that sense, could be a healer and a uniter.

The past week has illustrated that race is still a campaign issue. The flap about what the Clintons meant in their comments about Martin Luther King Jr. or an Obama ”fairy tale” on Iraq is overdone, but the deeper question of Obama’s racial identity is not. He is the first African American with a chance to win the presidency, and many blacks — after initially holding him at a distance — are now treating him as a symbol of racial pride and identity. Amid this heightened sensitivity, the jostling that’s normal in a political campaign is taken as a sign of disrespect.Fortunately, we have Obama to help disentangle the racial threads. I don’t mean the candidate we see on the stump — it’s too late in the campaign for that — but the one who wrote the book. Obama’s first memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” is one of the best political autobiographies I’ve read, and it deserves to be a modern classic on the subject of the moment — race and identity.Much of Obama’s book is about his own search to understand his life as a mixed-race child of an African father and a white Kansan mother. He describes his early teenage struggles in “trying to raise myself to be a black man in America,” shooting pool in the red-light district of Honolulu or learning to trash-talk on the basketball court. “I was living out a caricature of black male adolescence, itself a caricature of swaggering American manhood,” he writes.The book is cited these days because of Obama’s frank discussion of his use of drugs in the years when he was dealing with the absence of his father and his uncertain identity: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: The final, fatal role of the young, would-be black man.” He was spared, he writes, in part because of a sense of guilt: “Slipped it into your baby food,” his mother told him.The book is so honest, and so funny and self-aware, that you come away thinking that Obama is that rare politician who genuinely understands who he is. You can’t help but worry that once the packagers are done with him, this voice will be blunted. Certainly, by the time he wrote his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama was more into speech-giving mode.Obama makes clear in “Dreams From My Father” that he brings another valuable gift to politics, in addition to his African American heritage. That’s his identity as what sociologists call a “third-culture kid,” whose formative years were spent living overseas. Journalist Lee Aitken, who studied the phenomenon when she was editing a special feature for expatriate families called “At Home Abroad” in the International Herald Tribune, says that Obama exemplifies many of these third-culture traits.Third-culture kids learn how to make their way in unfamiliar surroundings. The late Ruth Hill Useem, a former Michigan State sociologist who studied them for decades, explained: “They adapt, they find niches, they take risks, they fail and pick themselves up again. . . . Their camouflaged exteriors and understated ways of presenting themselves hide their rich inner lives.” In surveys, more than 80 percent said they could relate to anyone, regardless of race or nationality.It’s this voice of a seeker and adapter that you discover in Obama’s writings. Describing the years when he was still trying to find himself, “like a salmon swimming blindly upstream toward the site of his own conception,” he says he searched for an identity as a civil rights activist and organizer. “Because this community I imagined was still in the making, built on the promise that the larger American community, black, white and brown, could somehow redefine itself — I believed that it might, over time, admit the uniqueness of my own life.”This is the voice I wish I’d heard when the Clinton and Obama camps were trading attack points and “gotcha” lines about race and gender. Clinton has a story to tell about her struggle for identity, just as Obama does. But these candidates are so hunkered down, and their sound bites so pre-chewed, that we begin to lose sight of what makes them trailblazers. What’s new gets swallowed up by what’s old.On race, I want to listen to Obama — not his handlers and spin doctors. His journey is inspiring, if he doesn’t get lost on the campaign trail.

Obama’s Varied Record

By CHRISTOPHER WILLS – 1 hour ago

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — By some measures, Barack Obama has a thin record. He’s a Senate newcomer who has never worked in the White House, governed a state or run a business.

Democratic presidential rival Hillary Rodham Clinton points to his resume as evidence that Obama is not ready for the White House. “He was a part-time state senator for a few years, and then he came to the Senate and immediately started running for president,” she says dismissively.

Obama’s accomplishments are more substantial and varied than Clinton suggests. And he has a longer record in elected office than she does, as a second-term New York senator.

Obama was a community organizer and led a voter-registration effort in Chicago that added tens of thousands of people to the rolls. He was a civil rights attorney and taught at one of the nation’s premier universities. He helped pass complicated measures in the Illinois legislature on the death penalty, racial profiling, health care and more. In Washington, he has worked with Republicans on nuclear proliferation, government waste and global warming, amassing a record that speaks to a fast start while lacking the heft of years of service.

The Illinois Democrat likes to quote something Bill Clinton once said: “The truth is, you can have the right kind of experience and the wrong kind of experience. Mine is rooted in the real lives of real people, and it will bring real results if we have the courage to change.”

After college, Obama moved to Chicago for a low-paying job as a community organizer. He worked with poor families on the South Side to get improvements in public housing, particularly the removal of asbestos.

“Nobody else running for president has jumped off the career track for three or four years to help people,” said Jerry Kellman, who first hired Obama as a community organizer.

Obama also fought for student summer jobs and a program to keep at-risk children from dropping out of school. More importantly, say those who worked with Obama, he showed people how to organize and confront powerful interests.

“He had to train residents to stand up for their own rights,” said former organizer Loretta Augustine-Herron, who was part of Obama’s Developing Communities Project.

Obama left that job to get a law degree. Afterward, he returned to Chicago and ran Project VOTE. The organization recruited hundreds of registrars to sign up new voters, particularly within the city’s black population. Registration jumped nearly 15 points between the 1992 primary and the general election.

The registration wave was credited with making Carol Moseley Braun the first black female senator and helping Bill Clinton carry Illinois in his first presidential race. It also got insiders talking about Obama as a political candidate.

Obama then spent several years focusing on the law, both as an attorney at a small firm specializing in civil rights and as a lecturer on constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

As an attorney, he was on the team that successfully sued the state of Illinois for failing to implement a federal voter-registration law. Obama also worked on case of a whistle-blower who lost her job after exposing waste and corruption in a medical research project. The whistle-blower ended up with a $5 million settlement.

Obama was elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, when Democrats were in the minority. He proposed hundreds of new laws, including universal health care, tougher gun control and expanded welfare, but saw most of them spiked by Republican leadership.

He did have some successes, though — particularly in passing legislation sharply restricting the gifts that Illinois politicians could accept from lobbyists. Illinois has notoriously weak government ethics laws, and the Gift Ban Act was the first major new restriction since the Watergate era.

Obama also helped set up Illinois’ “KidCare” program that provided health care to children in families that did not qualify for Medicaid.

John Bouman, president of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, said Obama’s work helped make the program more consumer-friendly. He also said Obama was often willing to give up credit for the legislation if that helped win Republican support.

“It tells you something that as a relatively junior member in the minority party, he was an important negotiator,” Bouman said.

When Democrats gained a majority in the Senate, Obama’s political mentor, Senate President Emil Jones, gave him high-profile assignments, including two contentious issues involving police — videotaped interrogations and racial profiling.

Police weren’t happy about recording their interrogations of murder suspects or having to study racial bias in traffic stops. Initially, they opposed both pieces of legislation.

But Obama made clear that something was going to pass with or without their support. Ultimately, police groups endorsed both bills and they won unanimous approval in the Senate.

Obama was generally regarded as an effective and practical, although decidedly liberal, state lawmaker. One of his Republican colleagues was so wowed that he has appeared in an Obama campaign ad, but others aren’t impressed by his legislative record.

“I would say it was run of the mill, honestly,” said Sen. Christine Radogno, R-Lemont, who entered the legislature at the same time Obama did.

Obama was a part-time state senator in that he served in the Illinois legislature at the same time he practiced law. He became a state lawmaker in 1997, four years ahead of Hillary Clinton’s entrance into elected office, as U.S. senator.

When Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate, he said he wished to get things done rather than grab headlines, and cited Hillary Clinton as the sort of workhorse he wanted to be.

He teamed with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., to study the dangers of nuclear proliferation and pass legislation meant to keep nuclear material from falling into the hands of terrorists.

Obama also joined with Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., after Hurricane Katrina to improve oversight of federal spending.

And he shared billing with a Republican presidential hopeful when he joined Arizona Sen. John McCain in sponsoring legislation that called for sharp, mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The effort failed.

Obama Calls a Truce

http://embeds.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/01/14/obama-declares-truce/

Obama’s Record In Illinois

Appropos of the Clinton camp’s attempts to paint Obama as a “talker” and not a “doer” — check out this interesting New York Times chart from July 2007 showing the bills sponsored by Barack Obama in the Illinois Senate. Thought I’d share it. It shows that Obama sponsored more than 800 bills which included:

• 233 Health Care
• 125 Poverty and Public Assistance
• 112 Crime
• 97 Economy, Business and Finance
• 62 Education
• 60 Civil and Human Rights
• 35 Infrastructure and Public Works
• 21 Ethics
• 21 Administration
• 20 Environment
• 15 Gun Control
• 15 Symbolic Resolutions and Memorial Lights
• 6 Military and Veterans Affairs
• 1 Immigration
  • 823 TOTAL BILLS

Obama unveils $75 billion economic stimulus plan

Associated Press

LAS VEGAS — Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama unveiled a $75 billion economic stimulus package today that his campaign said would put an immediate $250 in the hands of workers and seniors, stem the foreclosure crisis and cover state budget shortfalls.The plan, which expands on his campaign platform, outlines tax relief well ahead of a decision on who will secure the Democratic nomination or which candidate will win the general election in November.”Obama believes we cannot wait until he becomes president to give workers the tax relief they need,” according to a policy paper sent to The Associated Press.Obama, the senator from Illinois, called on the government to make available a $250 tax credit to 150 million workers in an offset of the payroll tax on the first $8,100 of earnings. He urged a further $250 tax credit per worker if employment declines three months in a row.He would also bump up Social Security payments to seniors who would not benefit from the credit with a one-time $250 payment, with another $250 if employment declines three months straight.The relief would cost $45 billion, plus another $45 billion if the economy weakened.Obama also pledged $10 billion to increase pre-foreclosure counseling and help “responsible homeowners” refinance their mortgages or sell their homes.The plan also calls for $10 billion for states and local governments that have seen revenue shortfalls as a result of the housing crisis, caused by falling property values and sales tax declines.In addition, Obama called for $10 billion to lengthen the period of eligibility for those receiving unemployment insurance, while loosening the criteria to become eligible to include many part-time and nontraditional workers.