Clinton Foundation Refuses to Reveal Donors but Sells List to Friends
by Matthew Vadum and Deborah Corey Barnes
02/05/2008
Since leaving the White House in 2001, Bill Clinton has used philanthropy to stay in the public eye. His star power attracts widespread public attention and major donor contributions to the William J. Clinton Foundation, which supports his presidential library and funds many worthy charities. Drawing the very wealthy and the politically ambitious into his orbit, like moths to a flame, Clinton hopes to promote public policies he considers vital for America and the world—and his own new career as a philanthropic rainmaker.
And should Sen. Hillary Clinton become President, she will further boost the prospects of the Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton’s “focus on humanitarian issues,” observes ABC News, “is in many ways the perfect balance to his wife’s political ambitions—and also repairs the damage done to his reputation by the Monica Lewinsky scandal during his presidency, helping to transform the former President’s legacy into one of an elder statesman dedicated to global issues” (“Bill Clinton’s Humanitarian Focus,” ABC News, Sept. 25, 2007).
Clinton is raising money to end poverty and create economic opportunity in poor countries. He wants to create awareness of threats to public health, whether from HIV/AIDS overseas or sugary soft drinks in local elementary schools. He has joined former Vice President Al Gore in the fight against global warming. Days after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Clinton and former President George H.W. Bush were everywhere on television, reassuring the world that philanthropy would provide relief.
Out of office, Clinton remains a faithful liberal who continues to believe in the blessings of government assistance. But he says he has discovered that personal philanthropy can also do wonders: “I felt obligated to do it because of the wonderful, improbable life I’d been given by the American people and because politics, which consumed so much of my life, is a ‘getting business.’ You have to get ... votes, over and over again,” Clinton writes in his 240-page book, Giving, which became a bestseller when it went on sale last September.
Unfortunately, Clinton’s idea of giving includes supporting advocacy organizations that promote more government spending. In his book, Clinton explains how lobbying campaigns can push lawmakers to increase government healthcare spending. He urges his readers to contact the group Families USA, whose executive director, Ron Pollack, coordinated lobbying by outside groups in support of the Clinton Administration’s failed healthcare proposals. If readers are aged 50 or over, Clinton urges them to join AARP.
He commends the work of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank headed by his former White House chief of staff, John Podesta, and notes that CAP created the “Better Healthcare Together” coalition, an unlikely alliance of labor unions and corporations that are eager to push employee healthcare costs onto the taxpayers.
While Clinton lauds private citizens for giving to their places of worship and local charities, he says it’s not enough. Big Government remains the solution: “Many of the problems that bedevil both rich and poor nations in the modern world cannot be adequately addressed without more enlightened government policies, more competent and honest public administration and more investment of tax dollars.”
Public interest in what Bill Clinton has to say is sustaining the market’s demand for his speeches. Touring the world giving talks and wagging his famous finger has made him a wealthy man. Clinton gets six-figure fees for his paid speaking engagements, earning him some $31 million from 2001 through 2005.
Where Does the Money Go?
The William J. Clinton Foundation states that its mission is “to strengthen the capacity of people throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence.” It focuses on four “critical areas”: “health security, economic empowerment, leadership development and citizen service, and racial, ethnic and religious reconciliation.” The foundation also runs the “Clinton Presidential Center” in Little Rock, Ark., which includes the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum and the Clinton School of Public Service.
The legal and financial relationships and responsibilities among these entities are complex. Like other presidential libraries, the Clinton Library is administered and funded by the National Archives. The Clinton School is a branch of the University of Arkansas. However, $165 million in privately-raised contributions funded construction costs for the Presidential Center—the library, museum, school and foundation offices—which was dedicated in November 2004.
Direct contributions are the source of almost all the foundation’s revenue, and they have risen rapidly each year. According to its Form 990 tax returns, the foundation took in a total of $49.5 million from 1998 to 2002. But in 2006 the yearly take was $135.8 million. As of Dec. 31, 2006, the total amount contributed to the foundation since 1998 was more than $367 million. Its net assets are $208.3 million.
Where does the money go? While the foundation paid the $165 million in construction costs for the library complex, it is now setting its sights on projects far beyond the Little Rock campus. The foundation reported $91.9 million in expenses in 2006 and $85.5 million of that was reported as spending on “program services” (with the remainder going to management and fundraising). In 2006, much of the foundation’s program consisted of grant-making, and most of that went to disaster relief. The foundation handed out $31.3 million in grants, of which $30.1 million went to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to help victims of the 2005 hurricane. Other grant recipients included ACORN, the radical poverty group that originated in Arkansas. It received $250,000 to help Katrina victims apply for the federal earned income tax credit. The City College of New York received $49,114 for a program on “ethnic reconciliation” and $192,200 went to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for an oral history project on the Clinton presidency.
However, the Clinton Foundation’s future projects are even more ambitious. The foundation has established a series of international “initiatives” intended to tackle a variety of world problems. These initiatives do not directly fund overseas programs. Instead, they team up (“partner”) needy non-profits and government agency officials around the world with wealthy donors looking for projects to assist. Perhaps even more importantly, the Clinton Foundation links up wealthy donors to one another. This is a rather novel concept of what a foundation is for: Grantors are incentivized to do good deeds because they get to bask in the approval of Bill Clinton.
The foundation-as-networker for the good and the great is a new institutional form. But with living tycoons such as Bill Gates’ assuming the role of philanthropist to solve global health problems and Clinton’s own Vice President dedicated to saving the planet’s environment, it is hardly conceivable that Bill Clinton would settle for less. Here are the principal Clinton Foundation initiatives:
l Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (CHAI) aims to increase the availability of AIDS care and treatment for the needy by “lowering the cost of treatment, providing strategic and targeted technical assistance where it is most needed.” The foundation’s first organized undertaking, CHAI serves as the model for the foundation’s signature style of linking donors to grantees. The initiative has successfully brokered price cuts by generic drug producers of AIDS drugs, organizing what is in effect a buying cooperative of more than 70 poor countries desperate to help those living with HIV/AIDS. CHAI’s management consultants are providing ill-equipped countries with the business strategies to create a more efficient healthcare market for HIV/AIDS treatment and education.
Ironically, the chairman of CHAI’s policy board is Ira Magaziner, who received poor notices in the 1990s when he was the organizer of Hillary Clinton’s healthcare task force.
l Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was incorporated in 2005 as a separate 501(c)(3) non-profit. A self-described “catalyst for action,” it hosts yearly Clinton Global Summits that bring together left-leaning thinkers and activists with wealthy businesspeople and politicians to meet and mingle and ruminate on the world’s problems. The summit’s goal is to have wealthy CGI attendees “partner” with the leaders of aid and development groups by making financial pledges to their programs. During its last three meetings (2005-07) CGI has announced 600 pledges of more than $10 billion.
l Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) created in 2006, it is yet another promoter of “partnerships” among heads of business, government and politics. CGI’s initial partner is the C40 Large Cities Climate Leadership Group, an association of city officials organized by London Mayor Ken Livingston (a.k.a. “Red Ken”). Representing some 40 of the world’s largest cities, the group is committed to making cities more environmentally friendly by securing various city commitments to adapt their traffic signals, water systems and waste dumps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Clinton’s program has persuaded five banks to provide $1 billion in financing for these projects.
l Alliance for a Healthier Generation fights childhood obesity. It’s a partnership between the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association—co-chaired by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
l Clinton Hunter Development Initiative (CHDI) to encourage “sustainable economic growth in Africa” is a Clinton Foundation partnership with the Hunter Foundation. CHDI has a 10-year operating budget of $100 million, pledged by Sir Tom Hunter, the richest man in Scotland.
l Urban Enterprise Initiative (UEI) helps inner-city small business owners and entrepreneurs. It claims to have provided 65,000 hours of technical assistance (worth more than $14 million) to New York City entrepreneurs.
l Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI) is the latest foundation partnership, created in 2007. Pledge money comes from three principal sources: Lundin for Africa, the philanthropic arm of Vancouver, Canada’s Lundin Group of Companies ($100 million); Mexican businessman Carlos Slim, the third-richest man in the world according to Forbes Magazine ($100 million); and Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra ($100 million). In a separate gift, Giustra gave the Clinton Foundation $31.3 million in 2006 through his Radcliffe Foundation.
Clinton Library Donations:
Secrecy or Disclosure?
Federal law does not require non-profit charities to disclose the identities of their contributors, and that applies to presidential foundations. Typically these foundations support the unique entity known as the presidential library. Presidential libraries have two parts: The library’s document collections are maintained by the National Archives and are open to all researchers of whatever political persuasion. But most tourists visit the library’s exhibition halls, conference center and museum store, which are administered by the presidential foundation. They invariably glorify their particular President. Costs are divided. The National Archives pays to maintain the collection of documents and library salaries, while donors, including corporations and foreign governments, may give unlimited amounts of money—even while a President is in office—to the presidential library foundation.
When it opened in 1997, the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library voluntarily disclosed the names of donors who gave more than $10,000. Only a few names were withheld at the request of individual donors. So when the drawing boards called for the Clinton Presidential Library to feature a wall naming its major donors, the move was applauded as an effort to bring greater transparency to the $165-million project.
The wall was never built. Last September, Clinton said his foundation doesn’t need to disclose its current and past donor identities, because, he said, “A lot of people gave me money with the understanding that they could give anonymously.”
But how anonymous is anonymous? ABCNews.com reported that a partial list of donors was sold to infoUSA, a direct marketing data company founded by major Clinton donor Vin Gupta. From June 2006 to May 2007, the company offered to sell a list of more than 38,000 Clinton presidential library donors to foundations and other non-profits. Perhaps it all depends on the meaning of the word “anonymous” (“Clinton Library Sells Secret Donor List,” Nov. 19, 2007). Under pressure, Clinton now promises to make public the names of all future donors to his foundation if his wife is elected to the White House.
Sheila Krumholz of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks the influence of money in politics, rejects this reasoning. “The fact that they’ve sold the list and then turned around and said that these names must be kept anonymous completely undercuts their argument,” she said. “The voters ought to have this information before the election, when it could still make a difference.… We really ought to find out who his donors are before the nomination is settled,” liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias wrote in an October 4 Los Angeles Times op-ed. “Because it’s presumed that big-dollar donors to the Clinton Foundation are gaining access to and some measure of influence with the foundation’s top dog, is it such a stretch to think that might extend to his White House-seeking wife as well?”
Asked to comment on the foundation’s policy at a presidential debate in September, Sen. Clinton punted. “Well, you’ll have to ask them,” she said, referring to Bill Clinton and his staff. In fact, the New York Times reported December 20 that the foundation’s first chief of staff, Karen Tramontano, has said Mrs. Clinton was deeply involved in deciding the foundation’s organization and scope of work: “She had a lot of ideas. All the papers that went to him went to her.”
Who’s on the donor list? Billionaires, Saudi royalty, Arab businessmen, the king of Morocco, the governments of Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei, and Taiwan, and lots of Hollywood celebrities have donated to the Clinton Foundation. In 2004, the New York Sun reported on 57 donors who appear to have each given $1 million or more. The big donors included Gupta, former Mattel Inc. Chairman Bill Rollnick, Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Robert L. Johnson (who is an outspoken supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s presidential candidacy), Hollywood director-producer Steven Spielberg and his actress wife Kate Capshaw, movie producer and Kerry 527 funder Stephen Bing, insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, Gateway, Inc. co-founder Ted Waitt, shopping center developers Bren and Melvin Simon, and the Soros Foundation, which is the European arm of George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Denise Rich, ex-wife of Marc Rich, the fugitive whom Clinton granted a pardon hours before leaving office, gave the foundation $450,000 (“Saudis, Arabs Funneled Millions to President Clinton’s Library,” New York Sun, Nov. 22, 2004).
The New York Times also revealed that in the closing years of the Clinton Administration at least 97 donors donated or pledged a total of $69 million for the library. Although some of the $1-million donors were longstanding friends of the Clintons, others were pushing the Clinton Administration for policy changes. Two donors pledged $1 million each while they or their companies were undergoing Justice Department probes (“In Charity and Politics, Clinton Donors Overlap,” New York Times, Dec. 20, 2007).
Ties to Hillary’s Campaign?
The William J. Clinton Foundation proclaims that it is nonpartisan and denies coordinating its activities with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But considering its extensive ties to Democratic Party fundraisers and placeholders, it’s hard to believe the foundation isn’t at the very least marketing the Clinton Foundation to Hillary-for-President supporters.
Legendary money-man Terry McAuliffe, a close personal friend of the Clintons, is on the Clinton Foundation’s board of directors and is one of its top fundraisers. McAuliffe, who used to head the Democratic National Committee (DNC), is also managing Sen. Clinton’s presidential campaign and is its chief fundraiser. Other major donors to the Clinton Foundation who are among Hillary Clinton’s top fundraisers include DNC Finance Director Philip Murphy and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs and a heavy-hitter in Democratic fundraising circles who was chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) from 2003 to 2005.
Then there’s Clinton Foundation CEO Bruce Lindsey, who was a senior advisor in the Clinton White House known for doggedly defending the President during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals. The foundation paid him a salary of $254,000 in 2006. In November, after critics suggested Clinton was suppressing presidential documents to protect his wife, Lindsey said the former President “has not blocked the release of a single document.” But the New York Sun reported December 19 that the National Archives, which administers presidential libraries, is withholding about 2,600 pages of records at Bill Clinton’s request.
Another Clinton Foundation board member is lawyer Cheryl Mills. She also happens to be general counsel for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and previously served as deputy White House counsel in the Clinton Administration.
Lastly, there is the well-connected Washington, D.C.-based fundraising and communications firm, O’Brien McConnell Pearson (OMP). It does work both for the foundation and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. OMP’s other clients include the League of Conservation Voters, Southern Poverty Law Center, America Votes, ACLU, NAACP, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), DNC and Friends of Harry Reid.
The Clinton Global Initiative is studded with partisans who are sure to gain influence should Hillary Clinton win the White House. While its press releases proclaim CGI’s Global Summit a “nonpartisan event with an emphasis on results,” its agenda is prepared by committed advocates who are veterans of Washington’s trench warfare over public policy.
CGI’s Energy Working Group is chaired by Brookings Institution scholar David Sandalow, a senior environmental official in the Clinton Administration who was also executive vice president at the World Wildlife Fund. The working group’s advisory board includes: Frances Beinecke, president of the NRDC; Clinton-era EPA Administrator Carol Browner (also on the board of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and John Podesta’s Center for American Progress); Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change; Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense; and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist heavily invested in ethanol and an outspoken backer of California’s failed Proposition 87, which would have imposed taxes on the state’s oil producers.
CGI’s other working groups are chaired by senior fellows at the Center for American Progress who previously served in the Clinton Administration. Gene Sperling chairs the education working group. He was Clinton’s national economic advisor and is the author of The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity. Gayle Smith chairs the working group on poverty alleviation. She served in the Clinton National Security Council and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Thomas Kalil chairs the global health group. He was deputy director of the White House National Economic Council.
The Clinton Global Summit
On Sept. 26, 2007, Bill Clinton opened the third annual Global Summit of his foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative. For three days, the summit’s 1,300 invited guests gathered at events in the Sheraton hotel, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York City to discuss the state of the world. They pledged themselves and their money to solve the world’s problems. Bill Clinton rounded up numerous attendees from the corporate world, including Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Duke Energy chairman Jim Rogers and now-deposed Starbucks CEO Jim Donald. Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian was there, as were NoVo Foundation Chairman Peter Buffett (Warren’s son), former Vice President Al Gore, UN climate change envoy Gro Harlem Brundtland, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rev. Jim Ball, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network and originator of the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie turned heads. Britain’s Tony Blair, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and 50 other current or former heads of state greeted one another. Media magnate Rupert Murdoch and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R.-Tenn.) also accepted Clinton’s invitation. Cost to attend the Summit: $15,000 per person.
A “major underwriter” for the summit was Rochester, N.Y., businessman Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of Paychex, the payroll processing corporation. An alternative-energy booster, Golisano supports electricity-producing wind farms and has started a company, Empire State Wind Energy LLC, to show New York municipalities how they can structure deals to extract more revenue from commercial wind development. Golisano fulfilled his CGI pledge “Commitment to Action” by promising $10 million to the Rochester Institute of Technology to create a sustainability institute.
Of course much of the talk at the summit was about global health, poverty, children and education. But global warming was a major topic on everyone’s lips. “I see New Orleans as a microcosm for the global problem,” said Brad Pitt. “If there’s anyone who understands the repercussions of climate change, it’s the people of the Gulf Coast.” Said philanthropist Ted Turner: “Outside of a nuclear exchange, global warming is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.”
Bill Clinton called for the rapid expansion of carbon markets to create price incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This position finds favor with anyone who can profit from it. For instance, summit participant Jim Rogers, chairman of Duke Energy, which generates electricity from “clean” coal and nuclear power, announced that his company’s “Commitment to Action” would consist of working to “overcome regulatory barriers that may discourage utility investment in energy efficiency today.” He called it the “Save a Watt” program. Environmental groups cynically suggested that might be a euphemism for lobbying politicians to let Duke Power raise its rates and win public subsidies for nuclear plant construction.
When we contacted CGI Director of Development Scott McDonald, he refused to explain what the requirements are for being a donor for the CGI Summit. “Whilst we do have levels of sponsorship, the ultimate outcome of a sponsor’s tailored engagement with CGI is the result of a dialogue,” he said in an e-mail.
In his book, Bill Clinton reports that the first CGI summit in 2005 led to more than $2.5 billion in pledges, while the second in 2006 secured pledges of more than $7 billion.
Bill Clinton and Giving
Many CGI pledges are definitely charitable and appear very worthwhile, notably those to the poorest countries in Africa. When these donors combine money with management expertise, they can make a difference, creating new markets that supply goods and services to meet a potential demand. Such philanthropy can produce long-term social progress and immediate help to the needy.
But CGI—and Bill Clinton’s notion of giving—also accentuates style over substance. By promoting social networking among the very wealthy, who are encouraged to find a project they want to help, the Clinton initiatives depend on the donor’s yearning for recognition, esteem and fame. That can lead to little more than high-class socializing and publicity seeking. It can also produce occasions for hidden but profitable deal-making and influence-buying.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Is Obama Rewriting his Resume?
Is Obama Rewriting his Resume?
By: fflambeau Saturday January 2, 2010 8:31 pm
Looking for some information on President Obama’s holiday stay in Hawaii, I came across a special section of the Honolulu Advertiser (it’s one of Hawaii’s two main newspapers-websites) devoted to the Obamas.
It’s clear that the Obama administration had a major hand in putting together the biographical section of this section called "Obama Ohana Comes Home 2009, Hawaii Vacation, December 24-January 3". Before I discuss the substance of the diary, let me register my own bewilderment that a newspaper would put out what appears to be little more than a campaign document for Obama. It’s that bad. Our newspapers really have devolved into public relations arms for various causes; they long ago gave up the vital function our Founding Fathers saw them as providing: ceaseless questioning and vigilance, a check on our government. Instead, reporters/newspapers today just seem to hand out propaganda by various people, no questions asked.
Back to the issue at hand. Please have a look at the following biographical information at the Honolulu Advertiser website–with information, as the Advertiser indicates, provided by the Obama team–and see if you can spot what’s missing:
…Barack’s father eventually returned to Kenya, and Barack grew up with his mother in Hawaii, and for a few years in Indonesia. Later, he moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.
College Years
Barak (sic.) earned his law degree from Harvard in 1991, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Soon after, he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law. Finally, his advocacy work led him to run for the Illinois State Senate, where he served for eight years. In 2004, he became the third African American since Reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
If you said "the community organizer" stuff is missing, you go to the head of the class. Note that instead of that, we get this: "he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law."
I happen to think that this missing element–the "community organizer"–was very important in the 2008 campaign but is no longer something Obama wants any attention to be paid to. The "community organizer" hat sort of set off Obama from all of the other Democratic candidates running for the presidency.
Hillary and John Edwards, after all, had far more distinguished and accomplished legal careers than Obama. Edwards was a very prominent trial lawyer, one of the best; Hillary had been a state AG and had spent several years with major law firms.
So it looks like the Obama campaign played up the community organizer thing only to set him off from others. For the real difficulty for Obama was not the general election campaign, but for such an unknown (with a very vague record especially on progressive issues) getting the nomination of his party which generally goes to a liberal in the party.
It also turns out according to University of Pennsylvania political scientist, Adolph Reed, Jr. that Obama as a "community organizer" was really only involved in conventional voter registration drives, not, for instance, in efforts to get better housing for minorities, not in job retraining efforts, not in anything related to uplifting the social and economic positions of the poor. Here’s Reed writing on this subject in The Progressive:
It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter registration drive.
That’s why the "community organizer" thing was always just floated and left out there by his team: ambiguity used again by those surrounding Obama.
What the "community organizer" thing also gave Obama was a certain cachet in liberal-progressive circles. With only a single vote against the Iraq war (and many others in favor of funding it in the Senate and with many others in favor of expanding defense department budgets), Obama had next to nothing to run on as a liberal or progressive. You could almost hear the Obama team invoking "community organizer" as a mantra: he’s not just another politician, he’s not just another lawyer wanting to get higher on the food chain, the man was a community organizer!
Well, now that "community organizer hat" seems to be in the process of being shed by Obama.
There are several likely reasons for this:
1) in Hawaii especially (and I lived there for 10 years) Blacks are not really popular at all (especially in the Asian communities) and their numbers are tiny (mostly confined to the military bases). "Community organizer" screams minority and especially Black American. That is being downplayed now especially in a state where racial harmony is very important and where mixed races are common and accepted.
2) Note the emergence in the biography of Obama as a "civil rights lawyer" even though he spent very little time as a lawyer and has never written a word on law anywhere. But I think that fits in with his much more conservative image now. Community organizer is the kind of title that allows GOP dinosaurs to label Obama a socialist so it has to go.
3) There’s no need for the "community organizer Obama" anymore since that image was essential to getting the Democratic nomination but now the guy is the President and he doesn’t have to worry about that. Indeed, if one looks at Obama’s career, it’s fairly obvious that he used a number of people (especially black ministers in Chicago) to advance his career but jettisoned them as soon as it became politically expedient to do so. In or around 2006, Obama was really pal’in around with Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs. After all, he made the opening speech at the Goldman Sachs-Rubin funded Hamilton Project in April, 2006, and called for free trade, more NAFTA type agreements and cuts in entitlements. He wasn’t interested in building homes for the homeless, in helping the poor, in education for the poverty stricken, in health care for those without it, Obama wanted to make links to those with money because that’s how you win elections in America today.
Here’s how investigative journalist Ken Silverstein described Obama way back in 2006 in a devastating article called "Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine". He ends that article with this:
On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a “player.” The lobbyist added: “What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?”
Lot’s of truth in that remark but there WAS value in a "starry-eyed idealist" because Obama needed to sell himself as that to get the Democratic nomination in 2008. The idealism, of course, was dropped as the votes were being counted.
4) Obama’s core identity, very close to Rockefeller Republicanism with its emphasis on favorable treatment to Wall St. and big banks and on an expanding American Empire (and bread and circuses for the masses) has nothing to do with true community organizing. Obama, a closet Rockefeller Republican, mounted a stealth campaign in 2008 and the "community organizer" (along with his single vote against the Iraq War) provided him with convenient cover. Now that the election is over, he can drop this identify and assume a more traditional, and dignified one, of civil rights lawyer (even though that’s false too). I mean look at Obama: does this guy, dressed up to the t’s, without any concern for the poor and minorities look to you like a community organizer?
No way. Stealth campaign. Frank Rich pegged Obama perfectly: "Obama punked us".
By: fflambeau Saturday January 2, 2010 8:31 pm
Looking for some information on President Obama’s holiday stay in Hawaii, I came across a special section of the Honolulu Advertiser (it’s one of Hawaii’s two main newspapers-websites) devoted to the Obamas.
It’s clear that the Obama administration had a major hand in putting together the biographical section of this section called "Obama Ohana Comes Home 2009, Hawaii Vacation, December 24-January 3". Before I discuss the substance of the diary, let me register my own bewilderment that a newspaper would put out what appears to be little more than a campaign document for Obama. It’s that bad. Our newspapers really have devolved into public relations arms for various causes; they long ago gave up the vital function our Founding Fathers saw them as providing: ceaseless questioning and vigilance, a check on our government. Instead, reporters/newspapers today just seem to hand out propaganda by various people, no questions asked.
Back to the issue at hand. Please have a look at the following biographical information at the Honolulu Advertiser website–with information, as the Advertiser indicates, provided by the Obama team–and see if you can spot what’s missing:
…Barack’s father eventually returned to Kenya, and Barack grew up with his mother in Hawaii, and for a few years in Indonesia. Later, he moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.
College Years
Barak (sic.) earned his law degree from Harvard in 1991, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Soon after, he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law. Finally, his advocacy work led him to run for the Illinois State Senate, where he served for eight years. In 2004, he became the third African American since Reconstruction to be elected to the U.S. Senate.
If you said "the community organizer" stuff is missing, you go to the head of the class. Note that instead of that, we get this: "he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law."
I happen to think that this missing element–the "community organizer"–was very important in the 2008 campaign but is no longer something Obama wants any attention to be paid to. The "community organizer" hat sort of set off Obama from all of the other Democratic candidates running for the presidency.
Hillary and John Edwards, after all, had far more distinguished and accomplished legal careers than Obama. Edwards was a very prominent trial lawyer, one of the best; Hillary had been a state AG and had spent several years with major law firms.
So it looks like the Obama campaign played up the community organizer thing only to set him off from others. For the real difficulty for Obama was not the general election campaign, but for such an unknown (with a very vague record especially on progressive issues) getting the nomination of his party which generally goes to a liberal in the party.
It also turns out according to University of Pennsylvania political scientist, Adolph Reed, Jr. that Obama as a "community organizer" was really only involved in conventional voter registration drives, not, for instance, in efforts to get better housing for minorities, not in job retraining efforts, not in anything related to uplifting the social and economic positions of the poor. Here’s Reed writing on this subject in The Progressive:
It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter registration drive.
That’s why the "community organizer" thing was always just floated and left out there by his team: ambiguity used again by those surrounding Obama.
What the "community organizer" thing also gave Obama was a certain cachet in liberal-progressive circles. With only a single vote against the Iraq war (and many others in favor of funding it in the Senate and with many others in favor of expanding defense department budgets), Obama had next to nothing to run on as a liberal or progressive. You could almost hear the Obama team invoking "community organizer" as a mantra: he’s not just another politician, he’s not just another lawyer wanting to get higher on the food chain, the man was a community organizer!
Well, now that "community organizer hat" seems to be in the process of being shed by Obama.
There are several likely reasons for this:
1) in Hawaii especially (and I lived there for 10 years) Blacks are not really popular at all (especially in the Asian communities) and their numbers are tiny (mostly confined to the military bases). "Community organizer" screams minority and especially Black American. That is being downplayed now especially in a state where racial harmony is very important and where mixed races are common and accepted.
2) Note the emergence in the biography of Obama as a "civil rights lawyer" even though he spent very little time as a lawyer and has never written a word on law anywhere. But I think that fits in with his much more conservative image now. Community organizer is the kind of title that allows GOP dinosaurs to label Obama a socialist so it has to go.
3) There’s no need for the "community organizer Obama" anymore since that image was essential to getting the Democratic nomination but now the guy is the President and he doesn’t have to worry about that. Indeed, if one looks at Obama’s career, it’s fairly obvious that he used a number of people (especially black ministers in Chicago) to advance his career but jettisoned them as soon as it became politically expedient to do so. In or around 2006, Obama was really pal’in around with Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs. After all, he made the opening speech at the Goldman Sachs-Rubin funded Hamilton Project in April, 2006, and called for free trade, more NAFTA type agreements and cuts in entitlements. He wasn’t interested in building homes for the homeless, in helping the poor, in education for the poverty stricken, in health care for those without it, Obama wanted to make links to those with money because that’s how you win elections in America today.
Here’s how investigative journalist Ken Silverstein described Obama way back in 2006 in a devastating article called "Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine". He ends that article with this:
On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a “player.” The lobbyist added: “What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?”
Lot’s of truth in that remark but there WAS value in a "starry-eyed idealist" because Obama needed to sell himself as that to get the Democratic nomination in 2008. The idealism, of course, was dropped as the votes were being counted.
4) Obama’s core identity, very close to Rockefeller Republicanism with its emphasis on favorable treatment to Wall St. and big banks and on an expanding American Empire (and bread and circuses for the masses) has nothing to do with true community organizing. Obama, a closet Rockefeller Republican, mounted a stealth campaign in 2008 and the "community organizer" (along with his single vote against the Iraq War) provided him with convenient cover. Now that the election is over, he can drop this identify and assume a more traditional, and dignified one, of civil rights lawyer (even though that’s false too). I mean look at Obama: does this guy, dressed up to the t’s, without any concern for the poor and minorities look to you like a community organizer?
No way. Stealth campaign. Frank Rich pegged Obama perfectly: "Obama punked us".
Electing President
I was not a big fan of McCain, but neither Obama. His resume seemed to be a bit too thin without much substance. Now finding some articles about his inflating resume after more than 1 year after the elecion, I wonder if the primary for Democrat was after all hate toward Hillary rather than Obama himself.
As many people know, Hillary was not the most likable person on the earth. I don't know about her personally at all. But, we sometimes can tell that the person is really trustworthy even from the frist impression.
Hillary was actually my kind of hero when I was in college. She inspired me and other young women to be strong and independent. There is nothing wrong with being a bitch.
But of course, after more than a decade of experiencing a real life, I realize that I was brain-washed by her campaign. Still though, she inspired me when she was fighting the losing primary until the end. The way she fight remained me of something I was inspired as a college student.
As to Obama, he is likable and seems to be an easy-going. For someone easy going but very ambitious, the job of the presidency seems to be a bit stretch if the president job is really high stressed and high pressured as reported in general. At least, people surrounding the president are definitely highly-pressured and highly-demanded.
In either ways, without knowing that his resume was inflated, his resume was already not enough at all for such the top job. It is like someone who barely have management experiences in corporate life applying for a CEO job. The presidency seems to be a lottery.
With more information available, I wish that we could have more sophisticated process of electing a president. By the time of presidential election, we have two multiple choices. I personally feel that it is the better of two evil choices.
As many people know, Hillary was not the most likable person on the earth. I don't know about her personally at all. But, we sometimes can tell that the person is really trustworthy even from the frist impression.
Hillary was actually my kind of hero when I was in college. She inspired me and other young women to be strong and independent. There is nothing wrong with being a bitch.
But of course, after more than a decade of experiencing a real life, I realize that I was brain-washed by her campaign. Still though, she inspired me when she was fighting the losing primary until the end. The way she fight remained me of something I was inspired as a college student.
As to Obama, he is likable and seems to be an easy-going. For someone easy going but very ambitious, the job of the presidency seems to be a bit stretch if the president job is really high stressed and high pressured as reported in general. At least, people surrounding the president are definitely highly-pressured and highly-demanded.
In either ways, without knowing that his resume was inflated, his resume was already not enough at all for such the top job. It is like someone who barely have management experiences in corporate life applying for a CEO job. The presidency seems to be a lottery.
With more information available, I wish that we could have more sophisticated process of electing a president. By the time of presidential election, we have two multiple choices. I personally feel that it is the better of two evil choices.
The audacity of resume-padding (or, why Obama makes things up)
The audacity of resume-padding (or, why Obama makes things up)
By ABRAHAM KATSMAN AND KORY BARDASH
A JPost.com exclusive blog
Obama, right, hugs McCain, at the Saddleback Forum in Lake Forrest, Calif. Saturday.
Photo: AP
SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region | World One of the knocks on Barack Obama is that his résumé is, so to speak, paper-thin. But that is not entirely accurate. Obama, in fact, has held some major job titles which are noteworthy all by themselves: United States Senator, Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Law Review President-each of these titles puts him in rarefied company. Tack on a few Illinois State Senate terms, and his resume actually appears solid. Yet, in spite of these prestigious positions, Obama has increasingly resorted to making claims of accomplishment that are so patently inflated that even his cheerleaders at CNN and the New York Times are taking notice. Why?
It seems that Obama recognizes that while his résumé titles are impressive, his actual accomplishments are weak. It's as if he were jockeying to be the next company CEO with little to show for his prior high-profile management positions. So, he does what anyone else does who has spent years coasting on charisma without doing any heavy work: he pads his résumé--stretching the truth here, stealing credit there, and creating the illusion of achievement during his lackadaisical, undistinguished tenure in previous jobs.
A few examples? Take Obama's first general election ad. We are told that Obama "passed laws" that "extended healthcare for wounded troops who'd been neglected," with a citation at the bottom to only one Senate bill: The 2008 Defense Authorization Bill, which passed the Senate by a 91-3 vote. Six Senators did not vote-including Obama. Nor is there evidence that he contributed to its passage in any material way. So, his claim to have "passed laws" amounts to citing a bill that was largely unopposed, that he didn't vote for, and whose passage he didn't impact. Even his hometown Chicago Tribune caught this false claim. It's classic résumé-padding--falsely taking credit for the work of others.
Or take one of Obama's standard lines: his claim of "twenty years of public service." As pundit Michael Medved has pointed out, the numbers don't add up. Shall we count? Three years in the US Senate (two of which he's spent running for President), plus seven years in the Illinois State Senate (a part-time gig, during which time he also served as a law professor) equals, at most, ten. Even if we generously throw in his three years as a "community organizer" (whatever that means, let's count it as public service), that still adds up to just thirteen.
Obama's other activities since 1985 have included Harvard Law School, writing two autobiographies (including several months writing in Bali), prestigious summer law firm jobs, three years as an associate at a Chicago law firm, and twelve years part-time on the University of Chicago Law School faculty. As Medved notes, it takes quite the ego to consider any of those stints "public service." Which of them is Obama including?
Obama made yet another inflated boast last month during his visit to Israel. At his press conference in Hamas rocket-bombarded Sderot, Obama talked up "his" efforts to protect Israel from Iran:
"Just this past week, we passed out of the US Senate Banking Committee - which is my committee - a bill to call for divestment from Iran as way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon." (Emphasis added.)
Nice try. But as even CNN noted, Obama is not even on that committee. That is one peculiar "mistake" to simply have made by accident. Again, his claiming credit for the work of others just looks like clumsy, transparent résumé embellishment.
Would someone with Obama's stellar list of job titles resort to making stuff up? He seems to think he has to. In spite of the many impressive positions he's held, he's done almost nothing with them. If he wants to claim specific, relevant accomplishments, his only resort is to stretching the truth.
Look at his record: he's now completed over half of a Senate term; yet, is there even one signature issue he has taken hold of, other than his own presidential run? Similarly, as the New York Times recently pointed out, Obama spent twelve years on the University of Chicago Law School faculty--singularly famous for its intellectual ferment and incubator of scholarship--and produced not even a single scholarly paper. He was President of Harvard Law Review, but wrote nothing himself. Even as a state legislator for seven years-or community organizer for three years, there is little that shows his imprint. OK, to be fair, he did write two books. About himself.
For all his glowing job titles, Obama has never gotten much done. Is it any wonder that his spokesmen respond with sweeping generalities when asked what Obama has actually accomplished relevant to the presidency?
Obama has held several serious positions from which a serious man could have made a serious impact. But Obama made none. He remains a man of proven charisma, but unproven skill--and not for lack of opportunity. He's treated his offices as if they were high school student council positions-fun to run for, fun to win, affirmations of popularity, heady recognition from superiors, good resume-builders for stepping up to the next position of power, and…well, that's about it-actual accomplishments are not expected; heavy lifting is never on the agenda.
Obama's record of accomplishment is thin not because of lack of opportunity, but in spite of it. For twenty years, Obama has walked the floors of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, but has left no footprints other than those from his runs for whatever office came next.
It's been said that some people want to be President so they can do something; and some want to be President so they can be something. Obama has accomplished nothing noteworthy despite the golden opportunities and positions he's had; why should we believe he'd be a different man in the White House?
No company would hire anyone with Obama's empty track record, pattern of underachievement and padded résumé to be CEO. Is America really ready to hire him as President?
By ABRAHAM KATSMAN AND KORY BARDASH
A JPost.com exclusive blog
Obama, right, hugs McCain, at the Saddleback Forum in Lake Forrest, Calif. Saturday.
Photo: AP
SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region | World One of the knocks on Barack Obama is that his résumé is, so to speak, paper-thin. But that is not entirely accurate. Obama, in fact, has held some major job titles which are noteworthy all by themselves: United States Senator, Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Law Review President-each of these titles puts him in rarefied company. Tack on a few Illinois State Senate terms, and his resume actually appears solid. Yet, in spite of these prestigious positions, Obama has increasingly resorted to making claims of accomplishment that are so patently inflated that even his cheerleaders at CNN and the New York Times are taking notice. Why?
It seems that Obama recognizes that while his résumé titles are impressive, his actual accomplishments are weak. It's as if he were jockeying to be the next company CEO with little to show for his prior high-profile management positions. So, he does what anyone else does who has spent years coasting on charisma without doing any heavy work: he pads his résumé--stretching the truth here, stealing credit there, and creating the illusion of achievement during his lackadaisical, undistinguished tenure in previous jobs.
A few examples? Take Obama's first general election ad. We are told that Obama "passed laws" that "extended healthcare for wounded troops who'd been neglected," with a citation at the bottom to only one Senate bill: The 2008 Defense Authorization Bill, which passed the Senate by a 91-3 vote. Six Senators did not vote-including Obama. Nor is there evidence that he contributed to its passage in any material way. So, his claim to have "passed laws" amounts to citing a bill that was largely unopposed, that he didn't vote for, and whose passage he didn't impact. Even his hometown Chicago Tribune caught this false claim. It's classic résumé-padding--falsely taking credit for the work of others.
Or take one of Obama's standard lines: his claim of "twenty years of public service." As pundit Michael Medved has pointed out, the numbers don't add up. Shall we count? Three years in the US Senate (two of which he's spent running for President), plus seven years in the Illinois State Senate (a part-time gig, during which time he also served as a law professor) equals, at most, ten. Even if we generously throw in his three years as a "community organizer" (whatever that means, let's count it as public service), that still adds up to just thirteen.
Obama's other activities since 1985 have included Harvard Law School, writing two autobiographies (including several months writing in Bali), prestigious summer law firm jobs, three years as an associate at a Chicago law firm, and twelve years part-time on the University of Chicago Law School faculty. As Medved notes, it takes quite the ego to consider any of those stints "public service." Which of them is Obama including?
Obama made yet another inflated boast last month during his visit to Israel. At his press conference in Hamas rocket-bombarded Sderot, Obama talked up "his" efforts to protect Israel from Iran:
"Just this past week, we passed out of the US Senate Banking Committee - which is my committee - a bill to call for divestment from Iran as way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon." (Emphasis added.)
Nice try. But as even CNN noted, Obama is not even on that committee. That is one peculiar "mistake" to simply have made by accident. Again, his claiming credit for the work of others just looks like clumsy, transparent résumé embellishment.
Would someone with Obama's stellar list of job titles resort to making stuff up? He seems to think he has to. In spite of the many impressive positions he's held, he's done almost nothing with them. If he wants to claim specific, relevant accomplishments, his only resort is to stretching the truth.
Look at his record: he's now completed over half of a Senate term; yet, is there even one signature issue he has taken hold of, other than his own presidential run? Similarly, as the New York Times recently pointed out, Obama spent twelve years on the University of Chicago Law School faculty--singularly famous for its intellectual ferment and incubator of scholarship--and produced not even a single scholarly paper. He was President of Harvard Law Review, but wrote nothing himself. Even as a state legislator for seven years-or community organizer for three years, there is little that shows his imprint. OK, to be fair, he did write two books. About himself.
For all his glowing job titles, Obama has never gotten much done. Is it any wonder that his spokesmen respond with sweeping generalities when asked what Obama has actually accomplished relevant to the presidency?
Obama has held several serious positions from which a serious man could have made a serious impact. But Obama made none. He remains a man of proven charisma, but unproven skill--and not for lack of opportunity. He's treated his offices as if they were high school student council positions-fun to run for, fun to win, affirmations of popularity, heady recognition from superiors, good resume-builders for stepping up to the next position of power, and…well, that's about it-actual accomplishments are not expected; heavy lifting is never on the agenda.
Obama's record of accomplishment is thin not because of lack of opportunity, but in spite of it. For twenty years, Obama has walked the floors of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, but has left no footprints other than those from his runs for whatever office came next.
It's been said that some people want to be President so they can do something; and some want to be President so they can be something. Obama has accomplished nothing noteworthy despite the golden opportunities and positions he's had; why should we believe he'd be a different man in the White House?
No company would hire anyone with Obama's empty track record, pattern of underachievement and padded résumé to be CEO. Is America really ready to hire him as President?
Co-Workers: Obama Inflated His Resume
Despite the inflated resume, I always thought that his resume was like a joke considering the job he was appealing for. But, now I found the followings from this site. A GOOD JOB!!!
Co-Workers: Obama Inflated His Resume
It has been noted by Charles Krauthammer and others that very few people have stepped forward to vouch for Barack Obama.
Indeed, there would seem to be an especially conspicuous absence of witnesses to the years after graduated from Columbia and before he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer.
Well, it turns out that one of his co-workers, Dan Armstrong, has in fact written about Mr. Obama during those days. And while he is an admitted fan of Obama’s, he claims that he has inflated his resume considerably.
Others who worked with Obama at Business International have subsequently chimed in.
First, Mr. Obama’s version as presented in from Dreams From My Father, pp 55-6:
CHAPTER SEVEN
… And so, in the months leading up to graduation, I wrote to every civil rights organization I could think of, to any black elected official in the country with a progressive agenda, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups. When no one wrote back, I wasn’t discouraged. I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans and maybe even save a little bit. I would need the money later, I told myself. Organizers didn’t make any money; their poverty was proof of their integrity.
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day…
Nevertheless, as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened. Auma called. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently…
[A] few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job…
We are supposed to believe that “something happened” and the rest is history.
Here, however, is a somewhat different perspective on Obama’s halcyon days as a “spy behind enemy lines,” from a site called Analyze This:
Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume
July 9th, 2005
[by Dan Armstrong]
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s. I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was particularly close to Barack – he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers – but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book.
Here’s Barack’s account:
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool.
First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.
Barack worked on one of the company’s reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack’s job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don’t send exactly what you ask for, and you can’t always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.
It’s also not true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.
… as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary; money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of the same – rewriting other people’s copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the idea that he had a secretary is laughable. Only the company president had a secretary. Barack never left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese financiers or German bond traders.
Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened…. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently. …[several pages on his suffering half-sister] …a few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job.
What Barack means here is that he got copy from a correspondent who didn’t understand interest rate swaps, and he was trying to make sense out of it.
All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.
Like I said, I’m a fan. His famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention moved me to tears. The Democrats – not to mention America – need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.
And yet I’m disappointed. Barack’s story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to embellish his role. I don’t buy it. Just as I can’t be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how dishonest he is, I can’t listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he’s willing to bend the facts to his purpose.
Once, when I applied for a marketing job at a big accounting firm, my then-supervisor called HR to say that I had exaggerated something on my resume. I didn’t agree, but I also didn’t get the job. But when Barack Obama invents facts in a book ranked No. 8 on the NY Times nonfiction list, it not only fails to be noticed but it helps elevate him into the national political pantheon.
As Mr. Armstrong suggests, if Obama would exaggerate about such things as this, what else has he exaggerated or made up out of whole cloth?
The comments to this post are also quite intriguing, such as:
Comment from Bill Millar
Time: October 30, 2007, 8:17 am
Cathy Lazere [another commentor] calls Barack self-assured? That’s putting a nice spin on it. I found him arrogant and condescending.
The thing is, I worked next to Barack nearly every day he was at Business International –- on many days angling for possession of the best Wang word processing terminal.
I had MANY discussions with Barack.
I can tell you this: even though I was an assistant editor (big doings at this “consulting firm”) and he was, well, he was doing something there, he certainly treated me like something less than an equal.
Funny thing… A journalism/political science major… Writing about finance… Pretending in his book to be an expert on interest rate swaps.
I remember trying to explain the nuance of these instruments to him in the cramped three Wang terminal space we called the bull pen. In contrast to his his liberal arts background, I had a degree in finance and Wall Street experience, so I knew what I was talking about.
But rather than learn from a City College kid, the Ivy Leaguer just sort of rolled his eyes. Condescendingly. I’ll never forget it. God forbid he leave the impression that a mere editor like myself knew more about something than did Barack.
He was like that…
But know what? I can forgive him for being immature–which is probably all that was at the time. Don’t we all believe we know everything at just around that age?
That said…he was a lot older when he wrote his book. Mature enough by this time to realize that his account of his time at Business International could be described as embellishment…
By the way, there should be no doubt as to Mr. Armstrong’s bona fides on this subject. Even the New York Times has cited him as an authority for an article on this period of Mr. Obama’s storied life.
Co-Workers: Obama Inflated His Resume
It has been noted by Charles Krauthammer and others that very few people have stepped forward to vouch for Barack Obama.
Indeed, there would seem to be an especially conspicuous absence of witnesses to the years after graduated from Columbia and before he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer.
Well, it turns out that one of his co-workers, Dan Armstrong, has in fact written about Mr. Obama during those days. And while he is an admitted fan of Obama’s, he claims that he has inflated his resume considerably.
Others who worked with Obama at Business International have subsequently chimed in.
First, Mr. Obama’s version as presented in from Dreams From My Father, pp 55-6:
CHAPTER SEVEN
… And so, in the months leading up to graduation, I wrote to every civil rights organization I could think of, to any black elected official in the country with a progressive agenda, to neighborhood councils and tenant rights groups. When no one wrote back, I wasn’t discouraged. I decided to find more conventional work for a year, to pay off my student loans and maybe even save a little bit. I would need the money later, I told myself. Organizers didn’t make any money; their poverty was proof of their integrity.
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day…
Nevertheless, as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened. Auma called. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently…
[A] few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job…
We are supposed to believe that “something happened” and the rest is history.
Here, however, is a somewhat different perspective on Obama’s halcyon days as a “spy behind enemy lines,” from a site called Analyze This:
Barack Obama Embellishes His Resume
July 9th, 2005
[by Dan Armstrong]
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s. I know because I sat down the hall from him, in the same department, and worked closely with his boss. I can’t say I was particularly close to Barack – he was reserved and distant towards all of his co-workers – but I was probably as close to him as anyone. I certainly know what he did there, and it bears only a loose resemblance to what he wrote in his book.
Here’s Barack’s account:
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool.
First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.
Barack worked on one of the company’s reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack’s job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don’t send exactly what you ask for, and you can’t always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.
It’s also not true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.
… as the months passed, I felt the idea of becoming an organizer slipping away from me. The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary; money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors—see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand—and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
If Barack was promoted, his new job responsibilities were more of the same – rewriting other people’s copy. As far as I know, he always had a small office, and the idea that he had a secretary is laughable. Only the company president had a secretary. Barack never left the office, never wore a tie, and had neither reason nor opportunity to interview Japanese financiers or German bond traders.
Then one day, as I sat down at my computer to write an article on interest-rate swaps, something unexpected happened…. I had never met this half sister; we had written only intermittently. …[several pages on his suffering half-sister] …a few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job.
What Barack means here is that he got copy from a correspondent who didn’t understand interest rate swaps, and he was trying to make sense out of it.
All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks. Luckily, an angel calls, awakens his conscience, and helps him choose instead to fight for the people.
Like I said, I’m a fan. His famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention moved me to tears. The Democrats – not to mention America – need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.
And yet I’m disappointed. Barack’s story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to embellish his role. I don’t buy it. Just as I can’t be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how dishonest he is, I can’t listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he’s willing to bend the facts to his purpose.
Once, when I applied for a marketing job at a big accounting firm, my then-supervisor called HR to say that I had exaggerated something on my resume. I didn’t agree, but I also didn’t get the job. But when Barack Obama invents facts in a book ranked No. 8 on the NY Times nonfiction list, it not only fails to be noticed but it helps elevate him into the national political pantheon.
As Mr. Armstrong suggests, if Obama would exaggerate about such things as this, what else has he exaggerated or made up out of whole cloth?
The comments to this post are also quite intriguing, such as:
Comment from Bill Millar
Time: October 30, 2007, 8:17 am
Cathy Lazere [another commentor] calls Barack self-assured? That’s putting a nice spin on it. I found him arrogant and condescending.
The thing is, I worked next to Barack nearly every day he was at Business International –- on many days angling for possession of the best Wang word processing terminal.
I had MANY discussions with Barack.
I can tell you this: even though I was an assistant editor (big doings at this “consulting firm”) and he was, well, he was doing something there, he certainly treated me like something less than an equal.
Funny thing… A journalism/political science major… Writing about finance… Pretending in his book to be an expert on interest rate swaps.
I remember trying to explain the nuance of these instruments to him in the cramped three Wang terminal space we called the bull pen. In contrast to his his liberal arts background, I had a degree in finance and Wall Street experience, so I knew what I was talking about.
But rather than learn from a City College kid, the Ivy Leaguer just sort of rolled his eyes. Condescendingly. I’ll never forget it. God forbid he leave the impression that a mere editor like myself knew more about something than did Barack.
He was like that…
But know what? I can forgive him for being immature–which is probably all that was at the time. Don’t we all believe we know everything at just around that age?
That said…he was a lot older when he wrote his book. Mature enough by this time to realize that his account of his time at Business International could be described as embellishment…
By the way, there should be no doubt as to Mr. Armstrong’s bona fides on this subject. Even the New York Times has cited him as an authority for an article on this period of Mr. Obama’s storied life.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Little People have to pay after all
U.S. House lawmakers may agree to pay for the nation’s health-care overhaul by adopting versions of Senate proposals to raise Medicare payroll taxes and tax health benefits for the first time, Democratic aides said.
House leaders may also discard a plan to impose a surtax on the wealthiest Americans, which has come under fire from some Senate Democrats, aides said.
Of course, any billionair or millionair friends among Senate Democrats? Or they themselves qualify in those subjected to the excercise tax? I think the both cases.
Should House members agree to drop their proposed surtax on high-income Americans, that would leave a funding gap. The measure, which would impose an additional 5.4 percent levy on people with incomes of at least $500,000 and couples earning more than $1 million, would raise $460.5 billion over 10 years.
To make up the lost revenue, negotiators are considering boosting the Medicare payroll tax increase beyond the 0.9 percent contained in the Senate legislation.
The Senate tax would apply to individuals earning at least $200,000 and joint filers earning at least $250,000. Negotiators are considering applying any expansion of the increase to a higher income group, the aides said.
House leaders may also discard a plan to impose a surtax on the wealthiest Americans, which has come under fire from some Senate Democrats, aides said.
Of course, any billionair or millionair friends among Senate Democrats? Or they themselves qualify in those subjected to the excercise tax? I think the both cases.
Should House members agree to drop their proposed surtax on high-income Americans, that would leave a funding gap. The measure, which would impose an additional 5.4 percent levy on people with incomes of at least $500,000 and couples earning more than $1 million, would raise $460.5 billion over 10 years.
To make up the lost revenue, negotiators are considering boosting the Medicare payroll tax increase beyond the 0.9 percent contained in the Senate legislation.
The Senate tax would apply to individuals earning at least $200,000 and joint filers earning at least $250,000. Negotiators are considering applying any expansion of the increase to a higher income group, the aides said.
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