Stanley Kurtz on Obama’s “lost years”
Reviewing the forty-plus columns that Barack Obama wrote for the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender between 1995, when he entered politics, and 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, Stanley Kurtz provides a revealing and disturbing glimpse into the formative opinions and associations of the presumptive Democratic candidate for President.
Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama’s early political career–the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004–can fairly be called the “lost years,” the period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama’s heretofore hidden world.
What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama’s early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It’s no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.
Read the whole eye-opening column in The Weekly Standard here.
There is your real Barack Obama. This is a good article. It makes you want to read some of these articles he published in the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald. No man can get to where his is without a paper trail. His is just a little harder to find.
“What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign.”
There’s the key passage right there. The media portrays Obama the way they want to see him, not as he actually is.
Why aren’t there more calls for him to face McMcain one-on-one? Why isn’t there more media reporting on Obama’s incredible misstatements on a wide range of topics? (Many of these are catalogued on Power Line.) Why don’t interviewers challenge him on his current statements that are completely at odds with his long-held positions in the past?
Obama is nothing but megalomania – nothing.
Scott
Chicago City Alderman Arenda Troutman is guilty of bribery (see: “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arenda_Troutman).
She was finance director for John Edwards campaign and represented a district in South Chicago. Does Mr. Kurtz’ research suggest any connections between Troutman and Obama?
Obama may be “least eager” to talk about these years…but even the years he HAS talked or written about are filled with unknowns, misstatements, diversion tactics, and rationalizations.
So the written word, back BEFORE he was a “professional politician” is the closest thing we get to seeing the heart and soul of the guy…
and it ain’t a pretty picture!
Total BS. Kurtz wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit him in the rear end.