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".