Barack Obama’s years in Chicago between his graduation from law school in 1991 and his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004 contain many mysteries. Deepening ties to ACORN and the Midwest Academy during this period, as well as the story of his foundation work with Chicago’s left, are part of what Obama’s been hiding. Obama’s twelve years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, from 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, and his eight years in the Illinois state senate, from 1997 through 2004, are poorly understood as well. Obama appears to have worked to eliminate any paper trail from his State Senate days. During campaign 2008, Obama also declined to be interviewed for a New York Times story on his law school career.1 The main point of that story was that Obama had hidden his legal and political views from his University of Chicago colleagues. Keeping his convictions out of sight is something Obama does well.
An attempt to penetrate the mystery of Obama’s years in the Illinois state legislature reveals further connections with Chicago’s socialist world. Obama’s career as a state senator, moreover, shows him utilizing the patient incrementalism of an Alinskyite organizer on behalf of his long-term radical goals.
Yet, if the full extent of Obama’s radicalism has been kept under wraps, it should nonetheless have been obvious in 2008 that Obama was far from the post-racial, post-ideological, post-partisan politician presented to the country by the mainstream press and the Obama campaign alike. Obama’s public record in the Illinois state legislature reveals him to be profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Seen in the light of his state legislative career, moreover, the president’s associations with radical figures like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and Reverend James Meeks clearly emerge as intentional political partnerships, rather than peculiar instances of personal misjudgment. The socialism question aside, the press averted its eyes in 2008 from even the most obvious contradictions in Obama’s carefully tended personal myth.
Let’s begin with Obama’s twelve years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. That New York Times story on Obama’s law faculty days portrays him as an “enigmatic” figure. According to the Times, the future president often left his fellow faculty members “guessing about his precise views.”2 The University of Chicago has a strong tradition of intellectual give and take, centered on a system of workshops attended by faculty and interested students. Having spent much of my own time at the University of Chicago organizing and participating in these workshops, I can confirm that the byplay is intense. Had Obama showed up at a workshop, he would have been pressed to justify his views in detail—in a way that would have required him to bring his most fundamental beliefs to the surface. It’s of interest, then, that Obama largely avoided the law school’s workshops, leaving all but his immediate friends on the faculty mystified about his views.
Obama frequently taught the work of Lani Guinier, whose controversial writings on ways to reconfigure the electoral system to increase the number of minority officeholders forced President Clinton to withdraw her nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993. Obama’s conservative-libertarian law school colleague, Richard Epstein, believes that Obama learned from Guinier’s example “not to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically.”3 In fact, despite twelve years of teaching at Chicago’s law school, Obama published not a single academic article. David Franklin, a former Obama student who teaches law school today, believes that Obama agreed with Guinier’s proposals.4 Yet Obama carefully avoided saying so at the time. It seems likely that something beyond mere professorial reserve explains this silence.
Biographer David Remnick describes a moment when the normally cautious Obama “let his guard down” in class and told his students what he actually thought about the issue of reparations for slavery:
He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable. You could tell that he thought he had let the cat out of the bag and felt uncomfortable. To agree with reparations in theory means we go past apology and say we can actually change the dynamics of the country.5
Remnick tells this story to make the point that Obama is a moderate pragmatist, like his law school colleague and friend Cass Sunstein, who is also reluctant to get “too far ahead of the electorate.”6 But is it fair to describe someone who favors slave reparations, in principle—and likely agrees with the radical ideas that forced the withdrawal of Lani Guinier’s nomination—as a moderate? The fact that Obama is politically astute enough not to push these ideas prematurely is cold comfort for someone concerned about the president’s inner convictions and long-term intentions. After all, the implication of this “pragmatism” is that the moment Obama thinks one of his radical ideas is politically feasible, he’ll put it forward, in one form or another.
President Obama has scrupulously avoided justifying his health-care reform plans on the grounds of racial injustice. Yet in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that “a plan for universal health-care coverage would do more to eliminate health disparities between whites and minorities than any-race specific programs we might design.”7 Obama then adds: “An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race- specific, programs isn’t just good policy, it’s also good politics.”8 It’s not that Obama opposes preferential treatment by race. On the contrary, he heartily approves of such preferences. Yet Obama recognizes that, as president, he’ll get far better political results with race-neutral programs than with preferential treatment. So putting together Obama’s writings with what we’ve learned about his views on reparations, it seems likely that the president thinks of universal health-care reform as, in part, a race-neutral and roundabout way of making up for a history of racial injustice.
I’m not arguing that President Obama’s health-care crusade is nothing but a roundabout form of reparations. On the contrary, I think what attracts the president to socialism is the way it combines demands for racial redress with a universal program of wealth redistribution. When push comes to shove, I’d say it’s actually the universal character of socialist ideology that most appeals to Obama. Nonetheless, the radicalism exemplified by Obama’s “merely” theoretical approval of slave reparations tells us something about the ideology behind his support for universal health care. Knowing that, but for purely practical barriers, Obama would willingly redistribute massive amounts of wealth to make up for slavery, we see that the president favors not only redistribution but class-based guilt, in principle. That puts him well down the road to socialism.
Although Obama did everything in his power to hide his radical views from his conservative-libertarian colleagues at Chicago’s law school, he was on close and friendly terms with a few liberal professors like Cass Sunstein and Elena Kagan—both of whom have received major appointments from the president.9 Reports agree as well that Obama was on very good terms with his students. Left-leaning law students in particular flocked to Obama’s classes.10 That is why the largely student-initiated endorsement of Obama by the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in his first run for legislative office is so revealing.
Because back issues of Chicago DSA’s newsletter, New Ground, are available online, it has long been known that Obama was endorsed by this socialist group during his first campaign for office in 1995–96.11 The full significance of this endorsement has not been appreciated, however. Naturally, it would be unfair to take every endorsement of a liberal-leaning candidate by some socialist group as evidence of that candidate’s socialism. As I’ve argued throughout this book, socialists groups often ally with and support liberal factions within the Democratic Party. That does not automatically make these liberal groups socialist.
On the other hand, Obama’s endorsement by the Chicago DSA in 1996 is of a different order. Out of the many Chicago-area Democrats running for office in the primary or general elections in 1996, Chicago’s DSA endorsed only four: Danny Davis (for the U.S. House of Representatives), William “Willie” Delgado (for the Illinois House of Representatives), Patricia Martin (for judge of the Cook County Judicial Circuit), and Barack Obama (for Illinois Senate).12 Obviously, this tiny list was part of a selective effort to back a few Democratic candidates considered friendly to socialist ideas. It’s also highly significant that in 1996, the New Party, controlled by ACORN and the SEIU, but also supported by a significant contingent from DSA, endorsed these same four candidates—and only one additional candidate not on the DSA list.13 In short, during his first run for legislative office, Obama was one of a small and select group of candidates endorsed by Chi- cago’s openly socialist DSA, and by the de facto socialist New Party as well.
The New Party knew Obama chiefly through his years of cooperation with ACORN. Chicago DSA knew Obama through organizer circles, but especially through the very large and active Young Democratic Socialist chapter at the University of Chicago. The minutes of the January 20, 1996, meeting of the Chicago DSA Executive Committee indicate that Katie Romich, representing the University of Chicago DSA, was present and took the initiative to recommend Obama for endorsement. Romich also announced that Obama would speak at an upcoming forum sponsored by the University of Chicago DSA.14 So while Obama may have been a mystery to the law school’s conservative-libertarian professors, his students—to whom everyone agrees he was quite close—felt sufficiently confident of Obama’s political convictions to recommend him for endorsement by Chicago’s premiere socialist group.
Obama’s appearance at the student-sponsored DSA “Economic Security Forum” at the University of Chicago on February 25, 1996, was revealing in a couple of respects. Obama made his usual rhetorical bow to conservatives as well as liberals, presenting himself as someone who would combine the best of both worlds. Yet by American standards, Obama’s actual proposals were decidedly radical, and immediately recognized by his socialist supporters as an attempt to import a European-style welfare state to America.15 Four years later, in 2000, when Obama tried unsuccessfully to win Bobby Rush’s seat in Congress, Chicago’s DSA remained technically neutral. DSA’s description of the two candidates in its newsletter, however, clearly tilts toward Obama. According to New Ground, Bobby Rush “hasn’t always been the ideal Congressman from a left perspective … When Obama participated in a 1996 [University of Chicago Young DSA] Townhall Meeting on Economic Insecurity, much of what he had to say was well within the mainstream of European social democracy.”16
Why did Obama take the risk of appearing at this socialist-sponsored forum in 1996, given his caution about exposing his radical political views? The answer may be that he was forced into the open by a bitter electoral battle. Only three days before the DSA Executive Committee meeting at which he was recommended for endorsement by his student supporters, Obama’s main challenger, Alice Palmer, withdrew from contention.17 Palmer herself held the seat Obama was running for, and had personally anointed him as her successor. After her loss in a special election for Congress, however, Palmer decided to fight Obama for the seat she had earlier promised to vacate. Obama challenged the validity of the signatures on Palmer’s nominating petitions and was able to knock her off the ballot.18 Yet he probably agreed to appear at the Young Democratic Socialist forum before he knew for sure that Palmer would withdraw.
Palmer’s entry into the race with Obama had split Hyde Park’s left. Palmer herself was a hard Marxist. Not only had she co-chaired the Midwest Academy’s International Affairs Committee with longtime Obama colleague Ken Rolling, but for several years, Palmer edited an opinion magazine called New Deliberations that was obviously socialist in character (sample article title: “Socialism Is the Only Way Forward”).19 Obama critic David Freddoso has already reported Palmer’s attendance in 1986 at the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, followed by her praise of the USSR and criticism of the United States in the communist People’s Daily World.20 Palmer’s papers are filled with similar material—an engraved invitation to the first anniversary celebration of the Marxist revolution in Grenada, for example.21 It is, of course, both disturbing and revealing that Palmer had originally hand-picked Obama as her successor after lengthy consultations with the future president.22
In this Hyde Park/South Side district, support from the hard-left would be critical to an electoral victory. Chicago’s socialists were already extremely well-disposed to Alice Palmer, so once she decided to challenge Obama, he knew he would have to fight for DSA’s endorsement. Bringing his radical views more out into the open than usual to please his student supporters and garner the DSA nod would have been worth it for Obama at this critical juncture. Obama was fortunate that the University of Chicago Young Democratic Socialists were at a high point of size and influence in 1996, with a large and growing number of “cadre” (politically reliable members willing to commit significant time and effort to the group).23 The DSA Executive Committee, on the other hand, was short on cadre at the time, and in a poor position to contradict its youth branch, had it been so inclined.24 The importance of a DSA endorsement, and Obama’s likelihood of taking it away from Palmer through his student supporters, probably explains this rare bit of socialist openness on the part of a usually hyper-cautious Obama.
Coverage of Obama’s State Senate career in two local papers provides an essential resource for reconstructing this important phase of the president’s life. Obama’s neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has long opened its pages to local and state elected officials. As a state senator, Obama wrote more than forty columns for the Herald under the title “Springfield Report,” between 1996 and 2004. Even more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling Obama’s activities in the pages not only of the Hyde Park Herald, but also of another South Side fixture, the Chicago Defender. For more than one hundred years, the Defender has been an influential voice of Chicago’s black community. I’ll draw extensively in this chapter on material from both of these papers, in combination with Obama’s own columns in the Herald.
To a remarkable degree, Obama shared Jeremiah Wright’s anti-assimilationist views on the topic of race. That is surprising to Americans first introduced to Obama through his powerful keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. There he famously said: “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”25 That sounds like an expression of faith in a color-blind consciousness of the kind expressed in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his children would one day be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
In fact, while Obama clearly recognizes the political benefits of race-neutral programs, he is by no means opposed to race-based politics. On the contrary, during his years in the Illinois State Senate, race-based policies were an Obama specialty. Political necessity may have forced Obama to downplay that approach during his presidency. Yet it’s worth noting that during his years as a state senator, Obama strongly supported race preferences, set-asides, and other race-based measures.26
Obama once tangled with another state senator, Mary E. Flowers, when she broke with her black colleagues to support the placement of a riverboat casino in a non-minority neighborhood. Responding to Obama’s criticisms, Flowers said: “The Black Caucus is from dif- ferent tribes, different walks of life. I don’t expect all of the whites to vote alike… . Why is it that all of us should walk alike, talk alike, and vote alike? … I was chosen by my constituents to represent them, and that is what I try to do.”27 Given Obama’s supposedly post-racial politics, it’s notable that he should have been the one demanding enforcement of a black political agenda against an independent legislator like Flowers. This little history lesson serves as a reminder that we cannot depend on Obama’s soaring rhetoric to convey the truth of his inner convictions.
Well into the Obama administration, when a major question for debate has been whether the president is a socialist, it may be tough to remember how successfully candidate Obama was able to shed the liberal label in 2008.28 I’ve argued throughout this book that Alinskyite organizers consciously disguise their socialist views by presenting themselves as pragmatic problem solvers. That is exactly what Obama did in 2008. Certainly, the mainstream press and a substantial segment of the electorate bought this characterization, although it plainly contradicted Senator Obama’s voting record—the most liberal in the U.S. Senate at the time.
Local press coverage of Obama’s Illinois State Senate days provides abundant additional evidence of the future president’s longstanding liberalism. Although Obama rejected the liberal label in 2008, when he unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2000 he freely characterized himself and his opponents as “all on the liberal wing of the Democratic party.”29 Obama lost that race to incumbent congressman Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther who received a 90 percent rating in 2000 and a 100 percent rating in 1999 from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Both years the American Conservative Union rated Rush at zero percent.30 The Hyde Park Herald noted that there was “little to distinguish” Obama from Rush ideologically.31 We’ve seen that the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America remained neutral in that 2000 race, while describing Rush as a disappointment to the left and informally tilting to Obama. Given Rush’s 100 percent liberal voting record in 1999, Chicago’s DSA obviously had high standards for leftism. Obama met those standards.
To see just how leftist both Bobby Rush and Obama were in 2000, consider a moment from one of their debates. When Rush bragged that, since entering Congress, he hadn’t voted to approve a single defense budget, Obama pounced, accusing Rush of having voted for the Star Wars missile defense system the previous year.32 In 2002 and 2004, the Chicago Defender praised Obama, sometimes calling him “progressive,” sometimes a genuine “liberal.”33 Combine all this with Obama’s U.S. Senate voting record and its clear that his refusal of the liberal label during campaign 2008 was patent nonsense.
One of the most interesting characterizations of his views comes from Obama himself, who laid out his U.S. Senate campaign strategy for the Defender in 2003: “As you combine a strong African-American base with progressive white and Latino voters, I think it is a recipe for success in the primary and in the general election.”34 Obama consciously constructed his electoral strategy on a foundation of leftist ideology and racial block voting.
While the great majority of Obama’s columns in the Hyde Park Herald deal with state and local issues, it’s interesting that one of his few nationally focused columns is a plea for readers to support Al Gore, rather than Ralph Nader, in the 2000 presidential election.35 Obama opens his column by noting how many people he’s heard complaining that both George Bush and Al Gore are beholden to the same “big money interests.” While Obama makes a point of agreeing with some of Nader’s criticism of the major parties, he rests his case for Gore on differences between Republicans and Democrats on issues like Supreme Court appointments, abortion, affirmative action, the environment, and school vouchers. Far from criticizing Nader’s agenda, Obama implicitly presents himself as someone who could gladly support Nader, were it not for the danger of wasting a vote. It’s interesting that so many of the policy differences Obama points to as reasons for favoring Democrats are classic sixties-style issues—just the kind of polarizing culture-war conflicts Obama claimed to have transcended during the 2008 campaign. In the end, Hyde Park voted 91 percent for Gore, 6 percent for Bush, and 3 percent for Nader.36 In an election that divided the country down the middle, this provides some sense of just how left-leaning Obama’s home district was.
Obama’s leftist views are nowhere more evident than on the subject of crime, a central concern of his during his years in the Illinois legislature. While crime has declined as an issue on the national scene, Obama’s treatment of the topic provides a clear sense of his political leanings. The crime issue also brought Obama into an active alliance with Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and other elements of his radical network. So Obama’s approach to crime is well worth exploring in depth.
Knowing that Illinois was headed for a major reform of its juvenile crime laws, Bill Ayers dropped his usual focus on education and, in 1997, published A Kind and Just Parent, a blistering critique of the Illinois juvenile justice system.37 Ayers was following the lead of his wife and former Weatherman leader, Bernardine Dohrn, who had founded and directed the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University.38 In 1996 and perhaps earlier, Dohrn was gearing up for a major public battle on juvenile sentencing reform. Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama were very arguably the three most powerful voices in Illinois opposed to the modest strengthening of the state’s juvenile justice laws debated and finally passed in 1997–98. All signs point to the fact that Obama was actively working with Ayers and Dohrn during this period. It also seems likely that Obama understood perfectly well that the views of this famously radical couple on both crime and American society were virtually unchanged from their Weatherman days.
Steven A. Drizin, an associate of Dohrn’s Northwestern center (who is also thanked in Ayers’s book), was a member of the study commission that produced the proposed reform of the Illinois juvenile justice system in 1997.39 (Despite being on the commission that produced the reform proposal, Drizin was an energetic critic of just about every prosecutor-favored provision in the bill.) So Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama knew the juvenile justice bill was in the offing a year or more ahead of time.
Certainly, it’s conceivable that Ayers and Dohrn discussed the juvenile justice issue with Obama when they helped launch his ca- reer in 1995 at a campaign event in their home. In fact, the focus of Ayers and Dohrn on the upcoming juvenile justice debate may go a long way toward explaining their special interest in Hyde Park’s State Senate seat. Recall that Obama was also serving as board chair of the Ayers-founded Chicago Annenberg Challenge from 1995 through 1999, and working directly with Ayers there. On top of that, just as Obama became vice chair of the Woods Fund board in 1996, that foundation began supporting Dohrn and the work of her juvenile justice center at Northwestern. Dohrn was even featured in the Woods Fund annual report of 1996 as a model grantee. So in 1996, Dohrn’s colleague, Steve Drizin, was fighting the emerging juvenile justice reform within the state study commission, Ayers was finishing his book on the topic, and Obama was funneling foundation money to Dohrn’s center in preparation for a legislative battle in which he, Ayers, and Dohrn would be the key voices against the new juvenile crime bill.
Shortly after its appearance in 1997, Obama gave Ayers’s juvenile crime book what the New York Times called a “rare review” (not actually a full review but a warm endorsement) in the Chicago Tribune, calling it “a searing and timely account.”40 While Ayers’s views have remained constant since the sixties, his rhetoric now varies greatly, depending on context. Eager to influence the public debate on juvenile crime, Ayers kept his language in A Kind and Just Parent relatively tame—even if the substance of his views was as radical as ever. The title itself, as Ayers explains in the book, is meant to “bristle with irony” as a comment on an American “society out of control.”41 In other words, Ayers’s views in A Kind and Just Parent are identical to his notorious comments to a New York Times interviewer in 2001 that the notion of the United States as a “just and fair and decent place … makes me want to puke.”42 Yet in his 1997 book, Ayers expressed his hatred of the United States only indirectly, through irony. Of course, a sensitive reader like Obama would have easily picked up on Ayers’s radicalism, rhetorical subtleties notwithstanding.
A Kind and Just Parent is a thoughtful and beautifully written book, which provides revealing and sometimes disturbing glimpses of life at a Chicago juvenile detention facility. The book also virtually defines the phrases “liberal guilt” and “soft on crime.” While recounting horrific crimes—and even his own mugging—Ayers focuses on the terrified insecurity of the perpetrators, rather than harm to the victims.43 Testifying at the trial of a young felon he’d been tutoring, Ayers calls him “nervous, a little shy … eager to please.” The prosecutor responds: “Would you call shooting someone eight times at close range ‘eager to please’?”44 Actually, Ayers effectively does do this, opening his book with the claim that a young murderer had “slavishly followed the orders” of his gang leader, rather than acting of his own free will.45
Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. More than that, he’d like to see the effective abolition of the prison system itself. Drawing on the radical French philosopher Michel Foucault, Ayers argues that prisons impose conformity and obedience on society, falsely causing us to distinguish between “normal” and “deviant” behavior. Ayers wants prisons replaced by a form of home detention.46 He also pointedly compares America’s juvenile justice system to the mass detention of a generation of young blacks under South African apartheid.47
It’s obvious that A Kind and Just Parent uses high-toned academic theories to convey the very same points Ayers himself made more bluntly in his Weatherman days—for example, that America’s prison system is a racist plot to clear the streets of the kids most likely to make a socialist revolution. We saw in Chapter Seven that Dohrn has made such points fairly openly as recently as 2009. Obama could hardly have missed the radical substance of the book he praised so highly in 1997, even if Ayers’s rhetoric was toned down a bit for purposes of public debate.
Obama was certainly sympathetic to Ayers’s radical take on Amer- ica’s prison system. Obama once bragged that he had consistently fought against the “industrial-prison complex,” a favorite phrase of people like Jeremiah Wright, who see America’s criminal justice system as secretly driven by capitalist greed.48
Although the bill Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn fought so hard to sink in 1997–98 was written by prosecutors and sponsored by a Republican ex-prosecutor, it was neither simplistic nor partisan. Aware of evidence that sending juveniles to adult prison can backfire and raise recidivism rates, the bill’s supporters met rehabilitation-minded critics halfway. The bill was an early example of “blended sentencing,” in which juveniles who have committed serious crimes are given both adult and juvenile sentences. As long as the offender doesn’t violate parole and takes part in rehabilitation programs, he never serves the adult sentence. But should the offender violate the conditions of his juvenile sentence, the adult punishment kicks in. That gives young offenders a powerful incentive to do right, putting toughness in the service of offering kids a second chance.
Most people think of blended sentencing as an innovative compromise.49 To those on the far left, however, blended sentencing is nothing but mean-spirited punishment in a friendly guise.50 So when the Illinois blended-sentencing bill was introduced in 1997, both Obama and Bernardine Dohrn were cited by the Chicago Sun-Times as the key public voices against the bill.51 (Recall that Obama was funding Dohrn’s work through the Woods Fund at the time.)
Meanwhile, Obama worked with the Illinois black legislative caucus to slow the bill’s progress, specifically challenging the blended-sentencing provisions.52 While one report has Obama negotiating with the bill’s proponents for a compromise, Obama’s actual aim seems to have been to scuttle the entire bill.53 We have this on the authority of someone who may be Michelle Obama herself. Michelle Obama organized a University of Chicago panel about Bill Ayers’s crime book in November 1997, just as the battle over the juvenile justice bill was heating up. That panel featured Barack himself, who was identified in the press release as “working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.”54 So this event was very much a joint Obama-Ayers effort to sink the juvenile justice bill. Obama’s plug of Ayers’s book in the Chicago Tribune the following month was part of the same effort. Obviously, Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn were active political partners.
In January 1998, a front-page headline in the Defender broadcast Obama’s claim that the juvenile justice bill might be on the verge of failure.55 Obama hoped that opposition to the bill’s sentencing provisions by the black caucus would combine with Republican worries that the bill could force expensive jail construction (on the theory that the deterrent effect of blended sentencing would fail, thereby forcing more juveniles into adult prisons). Obama’s hopes were wildly off-base. The juvenile justice bill passed overwhelmingly. Given his ambitions for higher office, Obama was no doubt reluctant to vote against the final bill. A last-minute and largely cosmetic adjustment to the blended- sentencing provisions by the governor appears to have provided sufficient political cover for the bill’s harshest critics, including Obama, to come around and support it.56
Also in 1998, according to The Hill, a Washington newspaper, Obama was one of only three Illinois state senators to vote against a proposal making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or bail to have contact with a street gang. A year later, on a vote mandating adult prosecution for aggravated discharge of a firearm in or near a school, Obama voted “present,” and reiterated his opposition to adult trials for even serious juvenile offenders.57 In short, when it comes to the issue of crime, Obama is on the far left of the political spectrum, and very much in synch with his political allies Ayers and Dohrn.
In his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, published while he was still serving on the Woods Fund board with Obama, Ayers tells the story of a glittering party thrown by a Chicago foundation in honor of his book on juvenile crime.58 With so many wealthy and powerful civic leaders in attendance, Ayers joked about the event privately with friends, calling it the Ruling Class Party. When one of the juvenile ex-offenders Ayers points to as a model heard Ayers talking this way, the young man asked what “ruling class” meant. Ayers then offered his young follower an impromptu lecture on Marxism, explaining that a revolution would someday sweep away ruling-class types like the ones who were throwing this party for Ayers himself. The young man, worried that he might be betraying Marxism, asked Ayers if he should keep building up his small business—the key to his turn away from crime. “Absolutely,” answered Ayers. Just make sure to be on the side of the revolution when it comes.
This little anecdote nicely illustrates some things we should already know. At the very time he was working with Obama, Ayers was still an enthusiastically revolutionary “small c communist,” who had not at all abandoned his revolutionary hopes. Ayers had merely reduced the intensity of his rhetoric, accepting the support of Chicago’s elite, while reverting to his old radical talk privately with friends. Was Obama one of these friends? Probably. Obama worked directly with Ayers at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and on the juvenile crime bill. David Remnick, who blithely accepts Ayers’s bogus assurances that he was actually cool to Obama, reports that Michelle Obama was a dinner guest at the Ayers’s home in the mid-nineties.59 At the An- nenberg project, Obama worked not only with Ayers, but with the ex-Weatherman’s inner circle of supporters for years. How could Obama have failed to know who Ayers was and what he still believed?
The other interesting thing about this anecdote is that it shows how even Bill Ayers—the hardest of hard-core socialists—was willing to accept and even encourage private enterprise under certain conditions. Ayers still looked forward to a violent revolution, yet even for this one-time revolutionary, the road to socialism now required gradual subversion of the capitalist system from within.
Obama’s ties to University of Chicago professor Rashid Khalidi are part of a broader web of connections between Obama, Ayers, and Chicago’s leftist foundations. Although Khalidi denies having been a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1970s, the evidence that he was is very strong.60 To make sense of the ties between this prominent Palestinian activist and Obama’s radical world, keep in mind that Obama was a frequent dinner guest in the Khalidi home.61 At the same time, Bill Ayers was a friend to both Rashid Khalidi and his wife, Mona.62
Laying out the connections between this trio chronologically is revealing. In 1995, Ayers helped select Obama as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, then launched Obama’s political career at his home, with his close friend Khalidi present.63 From 1996 to 1998, Obama funded Ayers’s wife and fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn through the Woods Fund and worked with both Ayers and Dohrn in the fight against the juvenile crime bill. In 1999, Obama brought Ayers onto the board of the Woods Fund. In 2000, the Khalidis hosted a fundraiser for Obama’s congressional run against Bobby Rush.64 Soon after, Obama and Ayers began channeling Woods Fund money to the Arab American Action Network, a group founded by Rashid and Mona Khalidi (and viewed by some as harshly anti-Israeli).65 So Obama’s move to bring Ayers onto the Woods Fund board created two likely votes on this tiny seven-member board in support of Khalidi’s projects, thereby helping to consolidate Obama’s political support, via Khalidi. Once again, Ayers had served as a lynchpin of Obama’s political fortunes.
Obama’s signature crime legislation was his effort to combat alleged racial discrimination by the Chicago police. In 2003, the Defender said Obama had “made a career” out of his annual battle for a bill against “racial profiling.”66 For years, Illinois Republicans had bottled up Obama’s profiling bills.67 When State Senate control passed to the Democrats in 2003, the bill finally passed—just in time to boost Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign. Obama touted his anti-profiling bill as a “model for the nation.”68 Unfortunately, there’s a defect in the model.
Obama is often commended for carefully consulting with the police during the negotiations that led to the final racial-profiling bill. With the Democrats in control, however, the police had little choice but to work with Obama. As Obama himself noted at the time, the police never abandoned their opposition to the bill.69 Police doubts were entirely justified. Obama’s bill is a deeply flawed exercise in precisely the sort of grievance-driven, race-based politics that fuels legislation on racial preferences and minority set-asides. All of these so-called remedies falsely leap from statistical evidence of racial disparities to claims of discrimination. In the case of racial profiling, disproportionate police stops of black or Hispanic motorists in no way prove discrimination.
Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald’s powerful work on supposed racial profiling by police has shown that drug-interdiction traffic stops track closely to the ethnic identity of those in charge of the drug trade in a given area.70 Sometimes that involves black or Hispanic minorities, and sometimes it doesn’t. The point is that police stops are based on good crime intelligence, not racism. Mac Donald rightly points out that without baseline information on the ethnic identities of those actually committing crimes, statistical disparities in traffic stops in no way prove police racism.
Unfortunately, Obama’s Hyde Park Herald column defending his work on racial profiling is an almost textbook example of the sort of bad statistical arguments Mac Donald debunks.71 Not only does Obama use baseline-free statistics, he makes still bolder and more questionable accusations against the police. According to Obama: “Racial profiling may explain why incarceration rates are so high among young African-Americans—law enforcement officials may be targeting blacks and other minorities as potential criminals and are using the Vehicle Code as a tool to stop and search them.” Obama’s claim that high black incarceration rates are due to racist traffic stops is utterly fanciful (Mac Donald’s research is clear on this issue as well).72 Obama’s column takes a leaf right out of Jeremiah Wright’s playbook (not to mention Ayers and Dohrn), stoking the worst sort of race-based conspiracy theories.
Indeed, Obama’s racial-profiling crusade shows his political alliance with Wright, Pfleger, and Meeks in action. Obama’s long-term political goal was to organize “liberationist” black churches. So it’s no surprise to see the Hyde Park Herald praising Obama in 2001 for organizing a “grassroots lobbying effort” on racial profiling featuring not only the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, but also appearances by Meeks and Pfleger.73 Jeremiah Wright’s church was represented in the effort by an associate pastor. So Obama’s drive for racial-profiling legislation brought to fruition his longstanding goal of organizing Chicago’s most liberationist black churches for political purposes. Wright, Meeks, and Pfleger are known for their demagogic denunciations of white racism.74 Obama’s racial-profiling bill fit squarely in that tradition. Obama played the legislative “good cop,” while the preachers no doubt spoke more abrasively. When you see Obama’s writings on racial profiling, however, it’s evident that there’s little real difference between his position and the more harshly expressed views of his liberationist allies.
Important though it was to State Senator Obama, the crime issue ran a distant second to his real passion: social welfare legislation. Obama was very much a redistributionist during his years in the Illinois legislature, where his fondest hope was to help lead America into another massive war on poverty. Obama openly calls for a massive renewal of expensive anti-poverty programs in his book The Audacity of Hope.75 So it makes sense that, with the exception of his secondary interest in race and crime, Obama’s state legislative career essentially boils down to a series of spending measures.
Obama was a master of incrementalism. His method was to find the smallest, most appealing spending proposal possible, pass it, then build toward still more spending on the same issue. It would have been tough, for example, to vote against an Obama bill exempting juvenile prisoners from paying for medical services.76 Obama’s long-term plan, of course, was to keep expanding health-care entitlements in incremental steps, until no one but the government was in charge.
In a 2007 speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN), Obama challenged the group to find a candidate with a better record of supporting the issues they cared about. Intrigued by Obama’s challenge, Randolph Burnside, a professor of political science, and Kami Whitehurst, a doctoral candidate, both at Southern Illinois University—Carbondale, decided to put Obama’s Illinois record to the test. The scholars studied bills sponsored and cosponsored by Obama during his eight years in the Illinois State Senate.
The revealing results of this study were published in the Journal of Black Studies in 2007.77 Burnside and Whitehurst created two bar graphs, one charting bills for which Obama was the main sponsor, arranged by subject, and a second chart displaying bills Obama joined as a cosponsor.78 In the graph of bills of which Obama was the main sponsor, the bar for “social welfare” legislation towers over every other category. In the graph of Obama’s co-sponsored bills, social welfare legislation again far exceeds every other category, although crime bills are now visibly present in second place, with tax and regulation bills close behind. According to Burnside and Whitehurst, other than social welfare and a sprinkling of government regulation, “Obama devoted very little time to most policy areas.”79
Given this record on spending, it’s no surprise that the president’s fingerprints are all over Illinois’s ever-growing fiscal crisis. The Illinois state budget had been in a widening crisis since 2001. By 2007, an influential committee of top Chicago business leaders warned that Illinois was swiftly “headed toward fiscal implosion.”80 Things have only gotten worse since then.
A watershed moment in Illinois’s fiscal decline came in 2002, when crashing receipts and Democratic reluctance to enact spending cuts forced Republican governor George Ryan to call a special legisla- tive session. While Ryan railed at legislators for refusing to rein in an out-of-control budget, the Chicago Tribune spoke ominously of an “all-consuming state budget crisis.”81 Unwilling to cut back on social welfare spending, Obama’s partner and political mentor, Senate Democratic leader Emil Jones, proposed borrowing against a windfall tobacco settlement due to the state.82
That idea sent the editorial pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune into a tizzy.83 The papers hammered cut-averse legislators for “chickening out,” for making use of “tricked up numbers,” for a “cowardly abdication of responsibility,” and for sacrificing the state’s bond rating to “short-term political gains.” Critics repeatedly pointed out that borrowing against a one-time tobacco settlement— instead of balancing the budget with regular revenues—would be a recipe for long-term fiscal disaster.84
What was Obama’s position while all this was going on? In his Hyde Park Herald column, Obama actually promoted the tobacco securitization plan and railed against Governor Ryan for “balancing the budget on the back of the poor.”85 Obama also voted to override the governor’s cuts in programs like bilingual education. Yet far from “balancing the budget on the back of the poor,” Governor Ryan had actually trimmed evenly across all of Illinois’s most expensive programs.86 While the governor did manage to force a number of cuts, the relentless opposition of Obama and his Democratic colleagues had its effect. When Democrats added control of the governorship and State Senate to their existing control of the House a year later, it emerged that the state’s deficit was $5 billion, far larger than anyone had realized.87 Since Obama’s Democratic allies took full control of the state, it’s been a swift downhill tumble toward fiscal implosion for Illinois.
On the national level, we’re experiencing a grand-scale version of what happened to Illinois as Democrats took control of that state. Obama’s small and carefully targeted spending bills of the nineties were expressly designed to win passage by a Republican-led State Senate. With a Democratic Congress at his back, on the other hand, President Obama can now go to town on spending. What looked like Obama’s legislative moderation in Illinois was really never anything other than an incremental strategy for achieving his far more ambitious long-term spending plans.
A good term for Obama’s legislative strategy in Illinois might be “incremental radicalism.” On health care, at least, Obama’s long-term plans for Illinois were no secret. Working with his socialist colleague, activist Quentin Young, Obama repeatedly proposed a state constitutional amendment mandating universal health care.88 Obama openly favored a “single-payer” system at the time.89 Before the 2002 budget crisis hit, Obama planned to use the windfall tobacco settlement to finance his statewide health-care plan. That would have effectively hidden the enormous cost of the new health-care system from the taxpayer until it was too late to scale the changes back. The same sort of fiscal trickery has been essential to the president’s national health-care-reform plan.
While he openly touted single-payer as the long-term answer in Illinois, Obama simultaneously proposed an ever-expanding range of baby steps as a way of gradually reaching his ultimate goal.90 As president, Obama has moved in giant leaps on health care, while simultaneously denying that single-payer is his true goal. It’s tough to take this denial seriously, given the president’s open support of single-payer in Illinois.
Obama’s incremental radicalism no doubt shapes his approach to a broad range of other issues. The president moves gradually toward what are in fact radical goals, usually denying what those long-term plans really are. This strategy is a direct application of Alinskyite gradualism and stealth to the legislative realm.
Obama’s vaunted reputation for bipartisanship, based on his Illinois State Senate record, was always less than meets the eye. There has always been a group of centrist Republicans, less fiscally conservative than their colleagues, in the Illinois legislature. Many are from districts where the parties are closely balanced. It was easy enough for Obama to get a few of these Republicans to sign on to modest spending bills, carefully targeted toward the most sympathetic recipients. The problem with Obama’s bipartisanship is that it was largely a one-way street. Overcoming initial opposition from Catholic groups, for example, Obama sponsored a typically incremental abortion bill requiring hospitals to inform rape victims of available morning-after pills.91 Yet Obama rejected compromise on the same issue when he voted against a bill that would have curbed partial-birth abortions.92 So Obama is bipartisan only when that means asking Republicans to take tiny steps toward his own long-term goals. When it comes to moving a bit in the other direction, Obama shows Republicans the door. Obama voted against a bill that would have allowed people with a court order protecting them from the approach of a specific individual to carry a concealed weapon for self-defense.93 Bipartisanship for thee, but not for me. That’s how Obama ended up with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate.
What looked to some in 2008 like bipartisanship was really just Obama’s “good cop” routine. The sort of grassroots coalitions Obama favored consciously made use of a good cop/bad cop strategy. Policy experts worked courteously and cooperatively with all sides, while quietly encouraging the Alinskyite intimidation tactics of their community-organizer allies. Community-organizer good cops are not pragmatic centrists. They’re ideological radicals in moderate guise. Obama’s incremental radicalism depends on this good-cop veneer. Yet his post-partisan pragmatism was never sincere. The signs were there in 2008 for anyone who cared to look. Unfortunately, few did.