By Steve Rhodes

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the recent foreign policy fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is how Obama supporters have come to defend a position that even Obama himself does not hold. That is, namely, a commitment to meet with Kim Il-Jong, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Basher al-Assad, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his first year of presidency, with no pre-conditions, anytime, anywhere.
Rather than admit a mistake, or explain that he was answering the question’s core principle not the details of its formulation, Obama has muddied his position to disguise the fact that he has walked his answer back to the same position held not only by Hillary Clinton but every other Democrat running for president, except Dennis Kucinich, who alone has committed himself to calling rogue leaders on his cell phone.
Let’s review.
1. The day before the debate, Obama is asked if he would meet with Hugo Chavez.“Under certain conditions, I always believe in talking,” he told columnist Andres Oppenheimer.
Under certain conditions.

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Posted on August 3, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

The front page story in The New York Times this week probing the relationship between Barack Obama and Tony Rezko revealed a few new disturbing facts, though the article was short on explanation and analysis – and there is yet more to the story of Illinois’ favorite son and his dark patron.
Let’s take a look.
* * *
“Mr. Obama has portrayed Mr. Rezko as a one-time fund-raiser whom he had occasionally seen socially. But interviews with more than a dozen political and business associates suggest that the two men were closer than the senator has indicated,” the Times reports.
“Mr. Obama turned to Rezko for help at several important junctures. Records show that when Mr. Obama needed cash in the waning days of his losing 2000 Congressional campaign, Mr. Rezko rounded up thousands of dollars from business contacts. In 2003, Mr. Rezko helped Mr. Obama expand his fund-raising for the Senate primary by being host of a dinner in his Mediterranean-style home for 150 people, including some whose names have come up in the influence scandal.

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Posted on June 15, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

The Tribune completed its “Making of a Candidate” series this week with an examination of how Barack Obama and his political consultants decided to craft the Obama brand and fix his politics around it. So much for authenticity.
Let’s take a look.
*
“One evening in February 2005, in a four-hour meeting stoked by pepperoni pizza and grand ambition, Sen. Barack Obama and his senior advisers crafted a strategy to fit the Obama ‘brand,'” the Trib reports.
“Yet even in those early days [of the U.S. Senate term he had just won], Obama and his advisers were thinking ahead. Some called it the ‘2010-2012-2016’ plan: a potential bid for the governor or re-election to the Senate in 2010, followed by a bid for the White House as soon as 2012 or, if not, 2016.
“The way to get there, they decided, was by carefully building a record that matched the brand identity: Obama as unifier and consensus builder, an almost postpolitical leader.”

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Posted on June 13, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

The New York Times recently ran a Sunday magazine story about David Axelrod, the Chicago media manager for Richard M. Daley and Barack Obama, among others. Axelrod, who recently wrote a Tribune Op-Ed column defending patronage, is perhaps the chief man behind the Obama curtain. Let’s take a look.
*
“When you finish watching the [announcement] video, you don’t have a particularly good sense of Obama as a politician (you might be able to say that he’s for change), but there is an intimacy – you have been drowned in his life, and you feel as if you know him,” author Ben Wallace-Wells writes.
“Axelrod says that the way to cut through all the noise is to see campaigns as an author might, to understand that you need not just ideas but also a credible and authentic character, a distinct politics rooted in personality.”
COMMENT: Cult of personality is the new politics? Maybe getting serious about politics should be the new politics.
*
“When the first major profile of Axelrod appeared in Chicago magazine in 1987, three years after he left a high-profile job as the lead political reporter for the Chicago Tribune work as a political operative , the article (“Hatchet Man: The Rise of David Axelrod”) began by comparing him to an ‘exotic rodent.'”

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Posted on May 15, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

There has always been a disconnect between the rhetoric of the Obama campaign and its fundraising operation. Far from being a grass-roots effort on behalf of “the people,” Obama is in fact tapping the same wealthy donor base that he decries as “insiders” and “special interests” as Establishment presidential candidates past and present.
What’s worse is the campaign’s willful deception in, among other areas, its e-mail solicitations to the Net crowd in which the rhetoric of a citizens’ campaign is laid on thick, even as the Obama works hard to keep his top-dollar fundraisers secret and out of the press.
Now some hard data and quality reporting is in that illustrates the reality of Obama’s fundraising – and not just the fat cats behind it, but how the campaign has at once declared it won’t accept money from lobbyists even as it accepts money from lobbyists.

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Posted on April 24, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

The Sun-Times expands today on Barack Obama’s relationship with indicted political wheel Tony Rezko in the first of a two-part investigation, this part called “Obama and His Slumlord Patron.”
The paper reports that “new facts [have] come to light that paint Rezko as a landlord overseeing dilapidated housing in the middle of Obama’s former state Senate district,” and that “Obama did legal work on some Rezko deals.”
As the paper acknowledges, the scope of Obama’s work remains unknown. But his involvement at some level is unmistakable – as is the absence of evidence Obama ever spoke up for the low-income citizens in his district whose lives were made miserable by the crappy housing Rezko built for them, even as he was taking campaign contributions from Rezko. On that score, the campaign would only say – in a written statement – that “Senator Obama did follow up on constituency complaints about housing as a matter of routine.”

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Posted on April 23, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gave two very different speeches in Selma, Alabama, over the weekend at events commemmorating the Bloody Sunday march 42 years ago .
Obama’s speech was halting, filled with boilerplate (“I stand on the shoulders of giants;” “I am the fruits of your labor”) and uninspiring – unless you are one of his cultish worshippers who remind me of rock fans so blinded by adulation of their star that they’d wildly cheer a favorite song performed in farts and burps.
Believe it or not, I have no particular interest in who wins the Democratic presidential nomination. I am not supporting Hillary Clinton, nor am I intending to vote for her.
My interest is in merely evaluating the candidates and, especially, the media coverage they receive. And even Obama and his advisers admit the coverage they are getting is over-the-top. (Oh how I wish Obama was everything they say he is! How great would that be? But alas, that’s not what I see.)
And so it is again with Selma.

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Posted on March 5, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

The media playing field is tilted in Obama’s favor right now, so the David Geffen flap is spinning in his favor, but if the media would take its mind off the thrill of the tit-for-tat and actually examine what’s being said, a different picture emerges.
It all started with Geffen’s comments to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Let’s take a look.
Geffen: “I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? — can bring the country together.”
Comment: What’s all this about how polarizing Hillary is? Even Republicans in New York like her. Her Senate approval rating is a healthy 56 percent; she has a 58 percent rating nationally. Were the Clintons ever polarizing? Or was it the right-wing nutjobs manufacturing tales of murder and kidnapping, and lesser “scandals” lapped up by the media that never came to be?
Besides, right now David Geffen is the most polarizing person in the campaign.

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Posted on February 22, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

If Barack Obama isn’t careful, a narrative is going to develop – if it isn’t developing already – that he is an inflator of flattering claims about himself.
The Los Angeles Times published a story on Sunday calling into question Obama’s fictionalized version of events as a community organizer working in the Altgeld Gardens housing project 20 years ago.
Channel 2 Political Editor Mike Flannery followed up with a report also unkind to Obama’s claims – including Obama’s boast that he sacrificed a high-flying legal career to work for a meager $13,000 a year on the South Side. It turns out he was making $25,000 in the same job two years later, a fact Obama conveniently leaves out even as he continues to this day to tout his noble financial sacrifice. (I didn’t make more than $21,000 before my third newspaper job, so I’m not all that impressed.)

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Posted on February 21, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Let us now come forward and speak the truth. Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech on Saturday was ordinary, at best. Very ordinary.
Come on, now. Tell the truth.
I’ve seen a lot of speeches in my day; I’m a C-SPAN geek and I’ve particularly follow presidential campaigns closely since Carter-Ford. Let us now tell the truth:
Barack Obama gave a very ordinary speech, at best, one that would be instantly forgettable if not memorable only because of how ordinary it was.
Read it for yourself. Watch it for yourself. And tell yourself the truth.

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Posted on February 12, 2007