Jack Cashill:
Jonathan Turley, the holder of the prestigious Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at George Washington University and an outspoken liberal, has said of our president, “Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be.”
How a man who launched his campaign for president comparing himself to Honest Abe Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, now finds himself hunkered down in Washington being compared to Tricky Dick Nixon is a story that needs explaining.
The DNA of it can be found in Obama’s first public controversy, one that shows just how early in his political career Obama adopted lying as strategy. At the time, late 1999, State Senator Obama found himself challenging two black candidates for Congress, each of whom favored gun control as conspicuously as he did.
One was the former Black Panther Bobby Rush, whose seat in the US House of Representatives Obama coveted; the other a fellow state senator, Donne Trotter. His opponents sensed the same vulnerability that Jesse Jackson would exploit years later, namely Obama’s felt lack of authenticity as a black man. “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” said Rush during the campaign. “Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it.”
Trotter was rougher still. “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community,” he said. “You have only to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It’s these individuals in Hyde Park, who don’t always have the best interest of the community in mind.”
Shortly after Christmas in 1999, Obama missed a critical vote on the Safe Neighborhoods Act, a gun control measure in the Illinois State Senate. Rush and Trotter promptly let the voting public know that Obama had abandoned Chicago in its hour of need.
The front-page headline of the January 5, 2000, edition of the Hyde Park Herald, a community newspaper, captured the spirit of the brouhaha: “Obama Misses Gun Law Vote, Draws Criticism from Rivals.” What made the missed vote so awkward for Obama was that while Governor George Ryan desperately tried to find him, he was doing some holoholo time in the Aloha State.
His opponents seized the opportunity to show how very un-black such a sojourn was. Trotter, for one, described Obama’s absence as “irresponsible” and a “dereliction.” Rush’s campaign spokeswoman meanwhile pointed out that while some public officials were trying to get guns off the streets of Chicago, “other public officials are on a beach in Hawaii.”
When contacted by the Herald, Obama swore that he intended to be in Springfield for the special session, but his “18-month old daughter had a bad cold,” and he “determined it was too difficult to make a nine-hour flight.” Said the Herald in something of an understatement, “Rush didn’t buy Obama’s explanation.”
