Obama Played by Chicago Rules

By David Freddoso

Wall Street Journal

August 20, 2008; Page A19

http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121918996082755013.html





Democrats don't like it when you say that Barack Obama won
his first election in 1996 by throwing all of his opponents off the ballot on
technicalities.





By clearing out the incumbent and the others in his first
Democratic primary for state Senate, Mr. Obama did something that was neither
illegal nor even uncommon. But Mr. Obama claims to represent something
different from old-style politics -- especially old-style Chicago politics. And
the senator is embarrassed enough by what he did that he misrepresents it in
the prologue of his political memoir, "The Audacity of Hope."





In that book, Mr. Obama paints a portrait of himself as a
genuine reformer and change agent, just as he has in this presidential
campaign. He attributes his 1996 victory to his message of hope, and his
exhortations that Chicagoans drop their justifiable cynicism about politics.





When voters complained of all the broken promises
politicians had made in the past, Mr. Obama writes that he "would usually
smile and nod, and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was --
and always had been -- another tradition to politics, a tradition based on the
simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us
together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people
believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve
every problem, but we can get something meaningful done."





Mr. Obama writes that even if the voters were not impressed
by this speech, "enough of them appreciated my earnestness and youthful
swagger that I made it to the Illinois legislature."





In real life, it did not matter what Mr. Obama said on the
stump or whether South Side voters were impressed. What mattered was that,
beginning on Jan. 2, 1996, his campaigners began challenging thousands of
petition signatures the other candidates in the race had submitted in order to
appear on the ballot. Thus would Mr. Obama win his state Senate seat, months
before a single vote was cast.





According to the Chicago Tribune, Mr. Obama's petition
challengers reported to him nightly on their progress as they disqualified his
opponents' signatures on various technical grounds -- all legitimate from the
perspective of law. One local newspaper, Chicago Weekend, reported that
"[s]ome of the problems include printing registered voters name [sic]
instead of writing, a female voter got married after she registered to vote and
signed her maiden name, registered voters signed the petitions but don't live
in the 13th district."





One of the candidates would speculate that his
signature-gatherers, working at a per-signature pay rate, may have cheated him
by signing many of the petitions themselves, making them easy to disqualify.





In the end, Mr. Obama disqualified all four opponents --
including the incumbent state senator, Alice Palmer, and three minor
candidates. Ms. Palmer, a former ally of Mr. Obama, had gathered 1,580
signatures, more than twice the 757 required to appear on the ballot. A minor,
perennial candidate had gathered 1,899 signatures, suggesting the Obama team
invested much time working even against him.





The act of throwing an incumbent off the ballot in such a
fashion does not fit neatly into the narrative of a public-spirited reformer
who seeks to make people less cynical about politics.





But Mr. Obama's offenses against the idea of a "new
politics" are many, and go well beyond hardball election tactics. It is
telling that, when asked at the Saddleback Forum last weekend to name an
instance in which he had worked against his own party or his own political
interests, he didn't have a good answer. He claimed to have worked with his
current opponent, John McCain, on ethics reform. In fact, no such thing
happened. The two men had agreed to work together, for all of one day, in
February 2006, and then promptly had a well-documented falling-out. They even
exchanged angry letters over this incident.





The most dramatic examples of Mr. Obama's commitment to
old-style politics are his repeated endorsements of Chicago's machine
politicians, which came in opposition to what people of all ideological stripes
viewed as the common good.





In the 2006 election, reformers from both parties attempted
to end the corruption in Chicago's Cook County government. They probably would
have succeeded, too, had Mr. Obama taken their side. Liberals and conservatives
came together and nearly ousted Cook County Board President John Stroger, the
machine boss whom court papers credibly accuse of illegally using the county
payroll to maintain his own standing army of political cronies, contributors
and campaigners.





The since-deceased Stroger's self-serving mismanagement of
county government is still the subject of federal investigations and
arbitration claims. Stroger was known for trying repeatedly to raise taxes to
fund his political machine, even as basic government services were neglected in
favor of high-paying county jobs for his political soldiers.





When liberals and conservatives worked together to clean up
Cook County's government, they were displaying precisely the postpartisan
interest in the common good that Mr. Obama extols today. And Mr. Obama, by
working against them, helped keep Chicago politics dirty. He refused to endorse
the progressive reformer, Forrest Claypool, who came within seven points of
defeating Stroger in the primary.





After the primary, when Stroger's son Todd replaced him on
the ballot under controversial circumstances, a good-government Republican
named Tony Peraica attracted the same kind of bipartisan support from reformers
in the November election. But Mr. Obama endorsed the young heir to the machine,
calling him -- to the absolute horror of Chicago liberals -- a "good,
progressive Democrat."





Mayor Richard M. Daley -- who would receive Mr. Obama's
endorsement in 2007 shortly after several of his top aides and appointees had
received prison sentences for their corrupt operation of Chicago's city
government -- was invested in the Stroger machine's survival. So was every
alderman and county commissioner who uses the county payroll to support
political hangers-on. So was Mr. Obama's friend and donor, Tony Rezko, who is
now in federal prison awaiting sentencing after being convicted in June of 16
felony corruption charges. Rezko had served as John Stroger's finance chairman
and raised $150,000 for him (Stroger put Rezko's wife on the county payroll).





Mr. Obama has never stood up against Chicago's corruption
problem because his donors and allies are Chicago's corruption problem.





Mr. Obama is not the reformer he now claims to be. The real
man is the one they know in Chicago -- the one who won his first election by
depriving voters of a choice.



Sheridan Folger

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