March 5, 2008

Pork-Barrel Spending, Billjacking, and Strong-Arm Tactics: How Barack Obama Got Where He Is Today

“Obama and Me” is a long piece — well worth the full read — in the February 28 edition of the Dallas Observer by Todd Spivak, who, in 2000, “was a young, hungry reporter in Chicago with a young, hungry state legislator on my speed dial.”

“This,” Spivak writes, “is before Obama Girl, before the Secret Service detail, before he becomes a best-selling author. His book, Dreams From My Father, has been out of print for years. … This is before he becomes a U.S. senator, before Oprah starts stumping for him, before he positions himself to become the country’s first black president. He is just a rank-and-file state senator in Illinois…”

After describing a phone call from a “screaming” Obama, angry about a less-than-flattering piece Spivak had written about him for the Illinois Times, Spivak reaches back into Obama’s history — and how the “young, hungry state legislator” really rose to power.

Among the more salient points:

My view of Obama then wasn’t all that different from the image he projects now. He was smart, confident, charismatic and liberal. One thing I can say is, I never heard him launch into the preacher-man voice he now employs during speeches. He sounded vanilla, and activists in his mostly black district often chided him for it.

. . .

When asked about his legislative record, Obama rattles off several bills he sponsored as an Illinois lawmaker.

He expanded children’s health insurance, made the state Earned Income Tax Credit refundable for low-income families, required public bodies to tape closed-door meetings to make government more transparent and required police to videotape interrogations of homicide suspects.

. . .

It’s a lengthy record filled with core liberal issues. But what’s interesting, and almost never discussed, is that he built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.

Republicans controlled the Illinois General Assembly for six years of Obama’s seven-year tenure. Each session, Obama backed legislation that went nowhere; bill after bill died in committee. During those six years, Obama, too, would have had difficulty naming any legislative achievements.

Then, in 2002, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Republicans on the national and local levels led to a Democratic sweep of nearly every level of Illinois state government. For the first time in 26 years, Illinois Democrats controlled the governor’s office as well as both legislative chambers.

The white, race-baiting, hard-right Republican Illinois Senate Majority Leader James “Pate” Philip was replaced by Emil Jones Jr., a gravel-voiced, dark-skinned black senator known for chain-smoking cigarettes on the Senate floor.

Jones had served in the Illinois Legislature for three decades. He represented a district on the Chicago South Side not far from Obama’s. He became Obama’s kingmaker.

. . .

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.

“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” state Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

“I don’t consider it bill jacking,” Hendon told me. “But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the 1-yard line and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”

During his seventh and final year in the Illinois Senate, Obama’s stats soared. He sponsored a whopping 26 bills passed into law—including many he now cites in his presidential campaign when attacked as inexperienced. It was a stunning achievement that started him on the path of national politics, and he couldn’t have done it without Jones.

. . .

So how has Obama repaid Jones?

Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency, Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’ Senate district.

Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking his view on pork-barrel spending.

I’ll never forget what he said:

“Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

. . .

On the stump, Obama has frequently invoked his experiences as a community organizer on the Chicago South Side in the early 1990s…

But, as a state senator, Obama evaded leadership on a host of critical community issues, from historic preservation to the rapid demolition of nearby public-housing projects, according to many South Siders. …

. . .

In the presidential campaign, Obama has been criticized for a shady land deal and other past ties to Tony Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer and ubiquitous political donor who now faces federal charges of attempted extortion and money laundering. …

. . .

Though it didn’t make national news, Obama inflamed many residents in his old state Senate district last March when he endorsed controversial Chicago alderman Dorothy Tillman in a runoff election. …

. . .

He was just 35 when in 1996 he won his first bid for political office. Even many of his staunchest supporters, such as Black, still resent the strong-arm tactics Obama employed to win his seat in the Illinois Legislature. …

. . .

A week after my profile of Obama was published, I called some of my contacts in the Illinois Legislature. I ran through a list of black Chicago lawmakers who had worked with Obama and was surprised to learn that many resented him and had supported other candidates in the U.S. Senate election.

“Anybody but Obama,” the late state Representative Lovana Jones told me at the time.

State Representative Monique Davis, who attended the same church as Obama and co-sponsored several bills with him, also did not support his candidacy. She complained of feeling overshadowed by Obama.

“I was snubbed,” Davis told me. “I felt he was shutting me out of history.”

In a follow-up report published a couple weeks later, I wrote about these disgruntled black legislators and the central role Senate President Emil Jones played in Obama’s revived political life.

The morning after the story was posted online, I arrived early at my new offices. I hadn’t taken off my coat when the phone rang. It was Obama. …