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Submitted by JohnKWilson on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 10:02pm.
Tomorrow's New York Times (July 30) features a lengthy story by Jodi Kantor about Obama's time as a teacher at the University of Chicago Law School. Since I took a class from Obama in the mid-1990s on "Race, Racism, and the Law," I thought I could offer some insights into Obama, and what this article gets wrong. Although the article offers some interesting insights, it also distorts Obama's past and tries to attack Obama's candidacy by using his experiences at the University of Chicago as a way to confirm many of the false assertions made about Obama: that he's a politician who doesn't stand for anything, that he's an aloof elitist, that he only pretends to listen to opposing viewpoints.
The author even tries to smear Obama as someone who taught law school with an eye toward his own political ambitions:
Mr. Obama’s years at the law school are also another chapter — see United States Senate, c. 2006 — in which he seemed as intently focused on his own political rise as on the institution itself.
It's not even clear what this means, but it seems to suggest that Obama's careful, thoughtful approach as a teacher and colleague in the law school was all a guise he used to avoid taking positions which, presumably, he feared might be dug up a decade later by reporters investigating his presidential campaign. This notion is, of course, thoroughly insane. What the author should have concluded is that Obama's years at the University of Chicago Law School show without a doubt that Obama's careful, thoughtful approach to issues today is not a centrist political cop-out; instead, it's a fundamental intellectual approach that Obama followed long before he ever sought political office.
According to Kantor:
Now, watching the news, it is dawning on Mr. Obama’s former students that he was mining material for his political future even as he taught them.
This is a particularly odd comment, suggesting that Obama was simply using his students as a way to prepare for his political ambitions. In reality, Obama as teacher and Obama as politician was inspired in both roles by certain values and thinkers, and it's no surprise to see similarities.
There's a particularly offensive attempt to dismiss Obama as an affirmative-action hire given a job solely because of his race:
Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” The school had almost no black faculty members, a special embarrassment given its location on the South Side.
Let me assure you, it takes a lot more than that to embarrass most of the University of Chicago faculty. They have been thoroughly comfortable with the idea of an overwhelmingly white faculty teaching overwhelmingly white students about the law in an impoverished black neighborhood. Obama wasn't hired because he was black; he was hired because he was smart, and having been the president of the Harvard Law Review is a major qualification. It's routine for hiring to be made based on a personal connection, and Obama was given some office space with the hope that he would teach there in the future. I've taken classes with Michael McConnell, and although I disagree with his very conservative views, he's not somebody who goes around making cynical quota hires. The University of Chicago faculty hire whomever they want, and there is no real pressure to create diversity.
The New York Times article also tries to dismiss Obama's willingness to listen to other viewpoints as just an act:
The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it. “I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”
Epstein is someone who regards intellectual debate as a physical sport, and Obama's thoughtful personality is the exact opposite of Epstein. I think the problem was that too many of the faculty, including Epstein, never really listened to Obama, or many other people who didn't shout their views out.
There are plenty of ways that Obama was influenced by the University of Chicago faculty. One is understanding that laws with noble intentions can have unintended consequences. A second is the complicated view of rationality that more modern aspects of the Chicago School have embraced. Unlike the Milton Friedman origins of the Chicago School of Economics, which turned every datum into an argument for the unregulated free market, the newer version of the Chicago School emphasizes the role of irrationality and the place of government in addressing these flaws. Obama has been influenced by its liberal (Sunstein) and centrist (Goolsbee) proponents.
However, there are many other ways in which Obama recognized the limitations of the University of Chicago approaches. As someone who was out in the trenches, he never accepted the ivory tower theorizing as superior to the facts on the ground.
Indeed, Obama probably learned a great deal from recognizing the flaws of his colleagues rather than swallowing their ideas wholesale. Obama embodies the University of Chicago ethic of asking "What's your evidence?" far better than most Chicago professors.
According to Kantor,
he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage.
To the contrary, Obama greatly benefitted the law school by being someone who was engaged, with the real world. The problem was that his ivory tower colleagues weren't very interested in the world of politics.
Yet Kantor writes,
Because he never fully engaged, Mr. Obama “doesn’t have the slightest sense of where folks like me are coming from,” Mr. Epstein said. “He was a successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues."
I very much doubt this. Richard Epstein is an over-the-top libertarian, and his views are very consistently, and loudly, expressed at every opportunity. I think Obama, like me and everybody else, figured Epstein out very quickly. Personally, I enjoy Epstein and his machine-gun-mouth spewing out oddball ideas all the time. But Epstein is never really interested in finding out where other people are coming from, and certainly not interested in changing his mind about anything. He's exactly the kind of person Obama would tend to ignore, the ideologue with a passion only for hearing himself. Epstein was annoyed that Obama never played his intellectual mind games, and instead sought to make real changes in the political world.
The article is also insulting toward Obama's students, calling some of them "groupies" and declaring that "Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge."
Refuge? Maybe some liberals like the idea of a professor whose ideas weren't as crazy as the usual right-wingers, but the truth is that there were many progressives teaching at the law school when Obama was there, and most of the conservative professors were very tolerant of liberal thinkers, too. The appeal of Obama, more than any other professor, was his ability to listen to different points of views in a serious way, and yet still move students in the direction of understanding the law. That's precisely what makes Obama so powerful as a politician: He has the ability to listen to people who disagree with him, and yet still move people in a more progressive direction. That may be the most important skill Obama honed in his years at the University of Chicago.
I don't want to give the impression that this article is entirely negative. There are many positive aspects of Obama reported in the article.
Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall.
But overall, Kantor takes the overwhelmingly positive comments about Obama's years at Chicago and tries to twist them into a negative portrayal. Consider this quote:
In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.
Here the author of the article misinterprets Obama's self-deprecating humor as arrogance and "self-absorption," part of the "elitist" motif being used against Obama, and uses some anonymous "fans" to justify it. I find it hard to believe that multiple students brought up these jokes by Obama to attack him. Obviously, you can see why Obama has been forced to play down his sense of humor in the campaign, because the mainstream press simply can't understand a joke with this kind of subtlety.
The article hints at Obama's "budding political caution" as a reason why he didn't loudly proclaim his views in class, once again pushing the narrative of Obama as a typical politician unwilling to stand for anything. Kantor's article repeatedly tries to falsely smear Obama as indecisive and political:
When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime. “He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale
.
Really? Perhaps it was a case of Obama trying to be polite and listen to two faculty he disagreed with, or simply his willingness to hear about a novel proposal. But it's simply false to suggest that Obama never took a stand. To the contrary, in the Illinois Senate Obama did the opposite of what a pandering politician would be expected to do: He refused to accept the attack on individual rights in the name of going after gangs.
Obama voted against a proposal to criminalize contact with a gang for any convicts on probation or out on bail. And in 2001, Obama opposed making gang activity eligible for the death penalty: "There's a strong overlap between gang affiliation and young men of color.... I think it's problematic for them to be singled out as more likely to receive the death penalty for carrying out certain acts than are others who do the same thing." Defending the violation of rights of gang members hardly fits with the story of the wavering Obama being created in this article.
The New York Times article concludes with this dismissive comment:
So even some former students who are thrilled at Mr. Obama’s success wince when they hear him speaking like the politician he has so fully become. “When you hear him talking about issues, it’s at a level so much simpler than the one he’s capable of,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He was a lot more fun to listen to back then.”
This seems to be an attempt to attack Obama by dismissing him as just another elitist politician speaking down to the American people. During the campaign, Obama often spoke at a serious intellectual level. But whenever he did so, the media ignored him, or attacked him. It's because of the dumbed-down press coverage of issues that Obama has to simplify what he says. But if Obama wasn't running a University of Chicago law class at a higher intellectual level than what the general public hears from the press, he wouldn't be doing his job. Far from being a reason to condemn him, this should be the clearest evidence yet of Obama's skills as president. The current guy in the Oval Office turned out to reveal all of his intellectual abilities in his folksy campaigning style, and the result has been a disaster for the country.
We desperately need a president who's smarter than the average American. And we desperately need a media willing to report the truth about candidates without trying to spin the story against them in a way that badly distorts reality.
Crossposted at DailyKos and Huffington Post.
Submitted by JohnKWilson on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 10:25am.
Rasmussen Reports released a survey this morning finding that 49% of respondents believe that reporters will try to help Obama win.
That number is up from 44% a month ago. Only 14% believe that most reporters will try to help McCain win.
Perhaps most astonishingly, "45% say that most reporters would hide
information if it hurt the candidate they wanted to win" while only 30%
disagree. Republicans and independents are most likely to think this.
This poll reveals the power of the right-wing media in this country,
and the myth of liberal bias that is repeated over and over again.
Here’s
the fundamental problem: right-wing pundits declare that the media is
biased against conservatives. Mainstream media pundits generally agree
with them, since it makes it much more convenient for them to embrace
the pro-corporate viewpoint than to talk about the exclusion of
progressive voices. Last night, the CBS Evening News did a story repeating the "Obama getting too much coverage" nonsense.
It's no small irony that the accusation of liberal media bias is
believed precisely because the conservative media repeat the charge
endlessly and the public never hears the progressive viewpoint refuting
the charge. The myth of "liberal media bias" is itself evidence of
conservative media bias. If the media was actually so liberal and
biased, why would they allow this accusation to be heard so often
without the progressive view being heard?
Yesterday, Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources
played a similar game: invite right-winger David Frum to denounce
liberal media bias. Invite two centrist journalists to passively go
along with the theory, have no one to argue about the media bias for
McCain, and then Kurtz concludes with an attack on the media bias: "How
can that imbalance be fair?"
It’s true that Obama has been getting more coverage than McCain. And
that’s precisely what has hurt Obama: Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers,
"flip-flops" and all of the other nonsense stories that the media has
given oversaturated attention to, while ignoring the flaws of McCain.
I’m currently writing a lengthy article about the myth of media bias
for Obama, so I welcome any examples of this right-wing argument, as
well as any counter-examples.
Crossposted at DailyKos.
Submitted by JohnKWilson on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 2:22pm.
Dennis Byrne has a column today in Chicago Tribune
that is guilty of spouting the "baloney" he falsely accuses the Obama
campaign of offering. Byrne begins by claiming that Obama "promised
never" to reject public financing. This is utterly false, and I defy
Byrne to offer a single example of Obama stating that he would never
exceed the $84.1 million spending limits in the general election. Obama
did promise to "pursue" an agreement with McCain that included
restrictions on party spending where McCain has a clear advantage. But
Obama never made an unconditional promise to take public funding.
Byrne
give us more "baloney." Byrne claims that Obama’s campaign is
"disingenuous" for writing in a fundraising email, "we are at a
disadvantage." To prove his case, Byrne cites a news story that Obama
"probably will" raise more money than McCain. Perhaps Byrne ought to
learn more about tenses before he falsely accuses people of lying. The
Obama campaign email is correct that Obama began the general election
campaign at a disadvantage. According to OpenSecrets.org,
the Republican National Committee has more than $53.5 million cash on
hand, while the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has less than $4
million. Would Byrne be willing to admit that a $50 million deficit
might rationally be considered a "disadvantage" even if Obama manages
to raise more money in the future?
Byrne accuses Obama’s campaign of "shading the truth" because "it
implies that all the money comes from small contributions of $5, $10 or
$20." Unless Byrne can come up with a single example where Obama’s
campaign claimed that all of its money comes from $20 donations or
less, he’s "shading the truth" and owes Obama–and his readers–an
apology.
Byrne also engages in a particularly absurd kind of intellectual
fraud by claiming that it doesn’t matter if Obama refuses donations
from PACs and lobbyists because he takes money from "special
interests." Byrne then gives us a long list of industries where the
employees gave money to Obama. Everybody, including Byrne, works for an
industry of one kind or another that has an interest in legislation.
But an individual’s donation has nothing to do with the corporation and
cannot be called "corporate contributors" as Byrne does. I challenge
Byrne to identify a single donor to any campaign who would not qualify
as a member of a "special interest" according to Byrne’s definition. If
everyone is a "special interest," then the term is meaningless.
Finally, Byrne concludes his column by accurately reporting one fact
which contradicts every smear he’s been trying to deploy against the
Obama campaign. Byrne notes that in 2004, PACs provided one-tenth of
the DNC’s total fundraising. The fact that Obama rejected party funding
from PACs that were so important says a lot of his integrity,
particularly because Obama could have allowed this funding without
breaking the promise for his campaign. The fact that this is one of the
few accurate statements in the column says a lot about Byrne’s
integrity.
Crossposted at DailyKos.
Submitted by JohnKWilson on Sat, 07/05/2008 - 4:02pm.
An Associated Press news "analysis"this
weekend reveals a great deal about the right-wing attacks on the Obama
campaign and media’s complicity in spreading their falsehoods.
The articleby
Jennifer Loven begins, "Is Barack Obama close to being shadowed by
giant flip-flops and, worse, having the image stick with people all the
way to the voting booth?" If the press keeps falsely reporting Obama’s
policies as flip-flops when they’re not, he certainly does.
This image suggests some of kind of bad monster movie, where an
enormous pair of casual footwear haunts Obama everywhere. But the
reality is much worse than cheap sandals: Media coverage in the past
few weeks indicates that the press in 2008 may be even worse than in
2000 and 2004, when we "learned" that Al Gore invented the internet,
and John Kerry invented his military service in Vietnam.
Similar
falsehoods litter the AP article. According to Loven, Obama "now
supports broader authority for the government's eavesdropping program
and legal immunity for telecommunications companies that participated
in it..." This is false. Obama continues to oppose immunity. He
supported a compromise bill on eavesdropping even though he disliked
parts of it. That’s not a flip-flop; Obama has always been clear in his
willingness to make political compromises. Every senator votes for
bills that include provisions they oppose. The left is angry at Obama
and other Democrats for making compromises and breaking a promise to a
filibuster, but it’s not a flip-flop in Obama’s basic position.
Loven also claims about Obama, "The handgun control proponent
reacted to the Supreme Court overturning the District of Columbia's gun
ban by saying he favors both an individual's right to own a gun as well
as government's right to regulate ownership." Once again, this isn’t a
flip-flop. Obama has said for a while that the 2nd Amendment applies to
individuals, but that doesn’t prevent reasonable regulations.
Of course, like nearly all stories on Obama’s "flip-flops," Loven
omits the far more massive and proven flip-flops by John (I was against
the Bush tax cuts before I was for them) McCain. When it comes to
double standards, the media have no shame.
On July 3, the media reported another imaginary "flip-flop" after
Obama’s remark that he would "continue to refine my policy" on the
timetable for getting out of Iraq. Obama’s stand on Iraq has been
consistent for a long time: get out, but get out carefully. His policy
has not changed at all. Every policy consists of goals, plans, and
implementation. Obama’s goal (ending the war in Iraq by removing the
bulk of the troops) has never changed. His plan to do so (removing a
brigade or two every month, which would take approximately 16 months)
also has not changed. And he has consistently said, the exact time
would be determined by circumstances on the ground in Iraq.
As Loven admits, "Obama has always said his promise to end the war
would require consultations with military commanders and, possibly,
flexibility. This, in fact, is the only reasonable stance for a U.S.
commander in chief to take." It’s not the only reasonable stance, but
it is Obama’s stance. Yet after admitting that most of the accusations
of flip-flopping aren’t true, Loven concludes by declaring, "he's not
handling the shifts quietly enough — and maybe not forgivably either."
The AP certainly is not alone in its coverage of the Obama
"flip-flops." The media monster has already tried to put its scaly
tentacles around the Obama campaign by repeatedly lying about his stand on public financing.
George Stephanopoulos proclaimed this a "flip-flop" and added, "this is
a clear flip." (Loven repeats this lie by claiming that Obama broke
"earlier promises to accept it.") As I noted on FAIR’s Counterspin radio show, Obama never made any unconditional promise to take public funding.
When Obama’s "biggest flip-flop" (to quote Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post) isn’t a flip-flop at all, it shows how distorted the media views are.
While McCain desperately tries to tar Obama "a long series of
reversals," the media can either accurately report Obama’s positions,
or they can become the transcription agency for the Republican Party.
The only giant flip-flops here are in the overactive imagination of
Republicans desperately repeating an old line of attack, and the
subservient corporate media who are willing, once again, to repeat the
right-wing lies.
Crossposted at DailyKos.
Submitted by JohnKWilson on Tue, 06/24/2008 - 10:12am.
I’ve just listened to James Dobson's Focus on the Family radio program
denouncing Barack Obama. Dobson is a right-wing crackpot, advocating
all sorts of bizarre ideas about child-raising and the Bible that I
detail below. But Dobson is also a powerful political figure in the
Republican Party, someone whose incredible influence has been used on
behalf of corrupt figures like Jack Abramoff.
In his radio show, Dobson attacks
Obama for a June 28, 2006 speech in which Obama declared, "Even if we
did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every
non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity
would we teach in the schools? Would it be James Dobson's or Al
Sharpton's?"
Dobson’s host called Al Sharpton "a black racist" and Dobson said,
"Obviously, that is offensive to me," bizarrely complaining that he
himself was being accused of racist by the mere comparison with
Sharpton.
Dobson also attacked Obama for discussing Biblical passages that
defend slavery, ban eating shellfish, and urge stoning of a misbehaving
son. Obama noted about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, that it "a passage
that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department
would survive its application." According to Dobson, "He’s taking a
direct shot at the Defense Department." In reality, Obama was simply
pointing out that many Biblical ideas can be taken out of context and
wrongly applied to public policy.
Dobson accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and
dietary codes, that Dobson says no longer apply, to Jesus' teachings in
the New Testament. Dobson said, "I think he's deliberately distorting
the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview,
his own confused theology... He is dragging biblical understanding
through the gutter."
Of course, none of this is true. Obama was simply pointing out how
ridiculous Biblical literalism, and why it cannot be used the sole
basis of political decision-making..
Dobson also accused Obama making "a fruitcake interpretation of the
Constitution." Why? Obama made a statement in his 2006 speech about
how, in arguing for legislation, we shouldn’t invoke God’s will but
instead make an argument on principles that transcend a particular
faith. Dobson bizarre claims that this means "he’s trying to make the
case that it is anti-democratic to fight for moral principles." Dobson
claimed, "Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the
political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to
the lives of tiny babies? What he's trying to say here is unless
everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe."
According to Dobson, "we don’t have to go to the lowest common
denominator of morality, which he is suggesting."
This really is a "fruitcake interpretation" of Obama’s words. All
that Obama was saying is that in the political realm, we should make
arguments that appeal to reason and people of all faiths, rather than
simply invoking the Bible to prove our claims. It’s a perfectly
reasonable position to take. More importantly, it has absolutely
nothing to do with interpreting the Constitution, and Obama was in no
way talking about government restrictions how people argue about
politics.
Note, Dobson also condemned McCain in the broadcast for not
expressing support for the Arizona legislature’s efforts to put an
anti-gay resolution on the ballot. In the past Dobson has said that he
would not vote for McCain.
As a critique by Frederick Clarkson noted, Dobson has a shaky understanding of the Constitution.
Dobson has plenty of odd ideas, such as urging a father to educate his son about manhood by showing the kid his penis:
He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy
cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only
bigger.
In his best-selling 1970 book, Dare to Discipline, Dobson urged
beating children from the age of 18 months to 12 years old, using a
switch or a paddle, and called for hitting kids with "sufficient
magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely."
Dobson suggests that heterosexual marriage rates in Denmark, Norway,
and Sweden are falling due to the recognition of same-sex
relationships. According to Dobson,
"There is no issue today that is more significant to our culture than
the defense of the family. Not even the war on terror eclipses it."
Dobson believes
that because of bills prohibiting discrimination based on sexual
orientation, "every woman and little girl will have to fear that a
predator, bisexual, cross-dresser or even a homosexual or heterosexual
male might walk in and relieve himself in their presence."
At one event, Dobson appeared with a "policeman suspended from service for joining a violent abortion protest while on duty."
Dobson has also said, "Patrick Leahy is a God's people hater. I don't know if he hates God, but he hates God's people."
Some conservatives have dared to speak out openly about Dobson’s lunatic beliefs.
Gil Alexander-Moegerle, a former Focus on the Family, noted in his 1997 book James Dobson’s War on America:
James Dobson believes that he has been entirely sanctified, morally
perfected, that he does not and cannot sin. Now you know why he and
moralists like him make a life of condemning what he believes to be the
sins of others. He is perfect.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey declared:
The criteria of choice in just about every behavior you see in
Congress today is politics. Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo
thing come from? There’s not a conservative, Constitution-loving,
separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that
bill on the floor. That was pure, blatant pandering to James Dobson.
That’s all that was. It was silly, stupid, and irresponsible. Nobody
serious about the Constitution would do that. But the question was will
this energize our Christian conservative base for the next election.
Armey added:
To a large extent because Dobson and his gang of thugs are real
nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no
excuse for being stupid. There’s a high demagoguery coefficient to
issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn’t work unless it’s
dumb, shallowas water on a plate. These issues are easy for the
intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues
become bigger than life, largely because they’re easy. There ain’t no
thinking.
Yet Dobson’s political power continues. In 2007, Dobson led
25 evangelicals who called for the ouster of Rev. Richard Cizik from
the National Association of Evangelicals for opposing global warming,
accusing Cizik of "using the global warming controversy to shift the
emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time."
Dobson also has a connection to the disgraced Republican Jack Abramoff,
by following former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed's request in
2002 for Dobson to help Abramoff in opposing a casino license sought by
a competitor to Abramoff’s casino interests. Focus on the Family
compounded this evil by lying and claiming that "there is no
connection" between Dobson and Reed’s efforts for Abramoff. But three
days after Reed guaranteed to Abramoff that "Dr. Dobson would privately
urge Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton to oppose the Jena Choctaw
casino," Dobson wrote a letter to Norton doing exactly that. Focus on
the Family’s radio show also did a "special edition" radio broadcast
aired only in that state on behalf of Abramoff’s cause.
As a kid, Dobson recalls
that he tried to become a bully and targeted a boy he regarded as a
"sissy." When the boy beat up Dobson instead, Dobson decided to use
words rather than fists to launch a movement aimed at bullying children
and "sissies" on a much larger scale.
Dobson’s attacks on Obama reveal what Dobson truly is: a right-wing
nut with delusional interpretations of Bible who wields enormous
influence within the Republican Party.
Crossposed at DailyKos.
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