The High Achiever
Feb 29th, 2008 at 9:29 am by Susie
(Update: I misunderstood. DK did not ban for the link but for the way the writer described it. Sorry!)
Even though this story was already linked in Romensko, the well-known newspaper industry newsletter, people are apparently being banned if they try to post it at Daily Kos I’m not seeing it in many places. Well, here it is for those of you who haven’t seen it already.
Obama’s state legislative record isn’t really all that representative of anything other than a political arrangement. Politicians do this all the time (although not quite so blatantly, in such a high-profile race) because they rightly assume most reporters are too lazy to analyze the full history of each piece of legislation. (I wasn’t one of those reporters.)
But reporter Todd Spivak, who likes Obama and covered him from his early days, gives a more comprehensive perspective:
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 lever 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 African-American 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.
Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio program.
I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:
“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”
“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”
“Barack Obama.”
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 one-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 state 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.
Before Obama ran for U.S. Senate in 2004, he was virtually unknown even in his own state. Polls showed fewer than 20 percent of Illinois voters had ever heard of Barack Obama.
Jones further helped raise Obama’s profile by having him craft legislation addressing the day-to-day tragedies that dominated local news headlines.
For instance. Obama sponsored a bill banning the use of the diet supplement ephedra, which killed a Northwestern University football player, and another one preventing the use of pepper spray or pyrotechnics in nightclubs in the wake of the deaths of 21 people during a stampede at a Chicago nightclub. Both stories had received national attention and extensive local coverage.
I spoke to Jones earlier this week and he confirmed his conversation with Kelley, adding that he gave Obama the legislation because he believed in Obama’s ability to negotiate with Democrats and Republicans on divisive issues.
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’s 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.”
thanks for this piece. it’s informative and troubling.
However, I’m going to reserve further comment for now, because by days’ end yesterday it was more than clear that the charges about Obama’s call to the Canadian embassy regarding NAFTA were untrue. Since so many of the other charges against BO have, upon further scrutiny, turned out to be inaccurate I want to see what more comes out of this before I bang my head on the table.
A lot of sour grapes in the piece, but even if it’s entirely true I don’t find it all that troubling, at least as far as these things go. This is how politics works. I don’t think anybody reading this site, other than maybe Strudels & Shitguns, has any sort of quaint misconception that the dude running for president isn’t a politician and a very ambitious one at that. I find it a little hard to swallow that Obama was created from whole cloth by Emil Jones Jr, but who knows.
all i can add is that i remember when i live in chicago, about 2 blocks north of the edge of obama’s district, he always was on the right side of everything that came before the illinois legislature. better than my doofis rep. and his crusade to get all police interrogations videotaped was what really impressed me.
Here’s a linkg to a NYT summary of Obama’s state senate career. Kind of makes the article mentioned here read like a pretty feeble attempt by some minor league news reporter at his 15 minutes.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/07/29/us/politics/20070730_OBAMA_GRAPHIC.html
An experienced state house reporter always knows more than the big-city papers. They know the players, they know the backstory. And to assume a reporter is “minor league” because he didn’t pursue his career at a name-brand paper shows how little you know about journalism.
Your ASSumptions about what I do or do not know about journalism are amusing, but considerably off the mark. I will not list my credentials. I prefer not to, and in any case it is silly to get into that sort of thing in an anonymous commenting forum.
That said, this journalist struck me as decidedly minor league largely because of his writing style and grotesquely over blown self promotion. He spends a great deal of the article talking about himself , a common error of B or C list reporters. The sheer length of the article is also a clear sign that his reporting is sub par. Considering the amount of actual substantive information included, it should be no more than 1/4 of its current length, and that might even be too long. Writing that rambles on interminably is another obvious sign of a mediocre reporter.
He further exposes his weaknesses as a reporter by documenting a great deal of information that is purely his opinion or is second or third hand gossip. The overall content of the article that is sufficiently sourced to properly be included in a news piece (as opposed piece labeled as opinion), is pathetic.
If you know so much about journalism, why didn’t you know this is a typical style for an alternative weekly - which is where it appeared?
The article claims that Obama ” built his entire legislative record in Illinois in a single year.”
Yet when you look at the actual record (via the NYT link I posted above) that statements is shown to be at best the result of an incredibly lousy memory or at worst a bald faced lie. This untruth is the entire thesis of this thinly sourced article. Of course this begins to make more sense when you realize that most of it is not even about Obama, it is actually about the AUTHOR of the article himself. This guy is trying like hell to inflate his credentials. I don’t begrudge him that, but doing it by tearing someone else down based on this bold faced dishonesty - yeah that’s a problem.
It defies credibility that an “experienced state house reporter” remained totally unaware of Obama’s accomplishments prior to 2003. One example; Obama is credited by both Democrats and Republicans in the Illinois state legislature with being largely responsible for state Campaign Finance Reform passed in 1998. Newspapers at the time said it was : “the Most Sweeping Good-Government Legislation in Decades.” Obama would have NO difficulty mentioning that, along with the other bills he sponsored and helped shepard through the legislative process prior to 2003.