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Posted on Sun, Jun. 26, 2005
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama draws parallels to Lincoln
Associated Press
CHICAGO - Sen. Barack Obama sees parallels between Abraham Lincoln's life and his own, but he says the nation's 16th president might not have envisioned a black man occupying the seat he now holds.
Obama, who occupies the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois that Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas in 1858, wrote about how Lincoln shaped his life in an upcoming special issue of Time magazine.
"In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat - in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles. He also reminded me of a larger, fundamental element of American life - the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams,"Obama wrote in a package dubbed 'Uncovering the Real Abe Lincoln,' on newsstands Monday....
Kathianne said:Hubris is setting in, can't say I'm surprised. He couches it by way of expanding the analogy, but it's clear what he means:
http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/news/local/11992619.htm
Kathianne said:Nah, I think it's his own personality, there is something there... At the same time, the DNC sees him as the 'Great Black Hope', who is one of their few bright lights.
Said1 said:I was kidding, I really know nothing about him.....other than a 5 minute clip.
Kathianne said:He's quite young, very educated and very bright. Very photogenic and has a great voice.
Kathianne said:Nah, I think it's his own personality, there is something there... At the same time, the DNC sees him as the 'Great Black Hope', who is one of their few bright lights.
He's quite young, very educated and very bright. Very photogenic and has a great voice.
Bonnie said:Hence the importance placed on his winning this past election. He is being groooomed............ I can see it now Hillary/Obama 08
Said1 said:I was going to say he reminded me of someone - then erased it!
Bonnie said:Ah go ahead say.....................
Yup, probably same vibes I'm getting. Great minds and all that!Said1 said:Seriously though, something about this guy caught my attention and I pay about as much attention to politics at your state level as you guys do our provincial politics. He's so "slick", that's what makes me automatically suspicous - not just of him, of anyone like that in general.
Said1 said:Seriously though, something about this guy caught my attention and I pay about as much attention to politics at your state level as you guys do our provincial politics. He's so "slick", that's what makes me automatically suspicous - not just of him, of anyone like that in general.
PEGGY NOONAN
Conceit of Government
Why are our politicians so full of themselves?
Wednesday, June 29, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
What's wrong with them? That's what I'm thinking more and more as I watch the news from Washington.
A few weeks ago it was the senators who announced the judicial compromise. There is nothing wrong with compromise and nothing wrong with announcements, but the senators who spoke referred to themselves with such flights of vanity and conceit--we're so brave, so farsighted, so high-minded--that it was embarrassing. They patted themselves on the back so hard they looked like a bevy of big breasted pigeons in a mass wing-flap. Little grey feathers and bits of corn came through my TV screen, and I had to sweep up when they were done.
This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he's a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better. "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat--in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles."
Oh. So that's what Lincoln's for. Actually Lincoln's life is a lot like Mr. Obama's. Lincoln came from a lean-to in the backwoods. His mother died when he was 9. The Lincolns had no money, no standing. Lincoln educated himself, reading law on his own, working as a field hand, a store clerk and a raft hand on the Mississippi. He also split some rails. He entered politics, knew more defeat than victory, and went on to lead the nation through its greatest trauma, the Civil War, and past its greatest sin, slavery.
Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family. He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton's first campaign for the presidency.
You see the similarities.
There is nothing wrong with Barack Obama's résumé, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it also is a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.
Mr. Obama said he keeps a photographic portrait of Lincoln on the wall of his office, and that "it asks me questions."
I'm sure it does. I'm sure it says, "Barack, why are you such an egomaniac?" Or perhaps, "Is it no longer possible in American politics to speak of another's greatness without suggesting your own?"
Even so sober an actor as Bill Frist has gotten into the act. This is the beginning of his Heritage Foundation speech yesterday:
You might have been wondering these last few months: Why would a doctor take on an issue like the judicial confirmation process? About 10 years ago, I set aside my medical career to run for the Senate. But I didn't set aside my compassion. I didn't set aside my character. And I sure as heck didn't set aside my principles. I got into politics for the same reason I got into medicine. I wanted to help people. And I wanted to heal. I just felt that, in politics, I could help and heal more than one patient at a time.
I admire Bill Frist, but can you imagine George Washington referring in public, or in private for that matter, to his many virtues? In normal America if you have a high character you don't wrestle people to the ground until they acknowledge it. You certainly don't announce it. If you are compassionate, you are compassionate; if others see it, fine. If you hold to principle it will become clear. You don't proclaim these things. You can't, for the same reason that to brag about your modesty is to undercut the truth of the claim.
And there are the Clintons. There are always the Clintons. The man for whom Barack Obama worked so hard in 1992 showed up with his wife this week to take center stage at Billy Graham's last crusade in New York. Billy Graham is a great man. He bears within him deep reservoirs of sweetness, and the reservoirs often overflow. It was embarrassing to see America's two most famous political grifters plop themselves in the first row dressed in telegenic silk and allow themselves to become the focus of sweet words they knew would come.
Why did they feel it right to inject a partisan political component into a spiritual event? Why take advantage of the good nature and generosity of an old hero? Why, after spending their entire adulthoods in public life, have they not developed or at least learned to imitate simple class?
How exactly does it work? How does legitimate self-confidence become wildly inflated self-regard? How does self respect become unblinking conceit? How exactly does one's character become destabilized in Washington?
The Supreme Court this week and last issued many rulings, and though they were on different issues the decisions themselves had at least one thing in common: They seemed to reflect a lack of basic human modesty on the part of many of the justices. Many are famously very old, and they have been together as a court for a very long time. One wonders if they have lost all understanding of how privileged they are to have lifetime sinecures of power and authority. Do they have any sense anymore of common human wisdom, of the normal human arrangements by which Americans live?
Maybe a lot of them aren't bothering to think. Maybe Ruth Bader Ginsburg is no longer in the habit of listening to arguments but only of watching William Rehnquist, and if he nods up and down she knows to vote "no," and if he shakes his head she knows to vote "yes." That might explain some of the lack of seriousness in the decisions. Local government can bulldoze Grandma's house because it's in the way of a future strip mall that will add more to the tax base? The Ten Commandments can appear on public land but not in a courthouse, but Moses, who received the Ten Commandments can appear in the frieze of the House but he'll be sandblasted off the Supreme Court? Or do I have that the other way around?
What are they doing? All this hair splitting, this dithering, this cutting and pasting--all this lack of serious and defining principle. All this vanity.
Perhaps Justice Ginsburg or Justice Stevens will retire soon and write a memoir: Like Jefferson I held to principle, and like Lincoln I often lacked air conditioning. But in my intellectual gifts I've always found myself to be more like Oliver Wendell Holmes . . .
What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water?
What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No. 1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them?
Obama, a Chicago Democrat who is just the fifth black senator in U.S. history, also raised questions about Lincoln's role in ending slavery.
"I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator," Obama said. "As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African-American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race. Anyone who actually reads the Emancipation Proclamation knows it was more a military document than a clarion call for justice."
And as for what Lincoln may have thought about Obama's election to the Senate in 2004?
"He may not have dreamed of that exact outcome. But I like to believe he would have appreciated the irony," Obama said.
Early life
Barack Obama was born at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii to Harvard University-educated economist Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a native of Kenya, and S. Ann Dunham, of Wichita, Kansas. Ms. Dunham is a distant descendant of Jefferson Davis,the first and only president of the Confederate States of America; she is also part Cherokee Indian [1].
At the time of Obama's birth, both his parents were students at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "Barack" means "blessed" in Swahili. It is derived from the Arabic verb baraka, "to bless." In Islam, "Barakah" is a common masculine name of the same origin. [2][3]
Of his years in Hawaii, Obama has written, "The irony is that my decision to work in politics, and to pursue such a career in a big Mainland city, in some sense grows out of my Hawaiian upbringing, and the ideal that Hawaii still represents in my mind."
When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced. His father eventually returned to Kenya, and he saw his son only once more before his death in 1982. Ann Obama married another East-West Center student from Indonesia. The family then moved to Jakarta,
where Obama's half-sister Maya was born (Obama has other half-siblings from his father's later marriages).
When Obama was ten he returned to Hawaii under the care of his grandparents,
and later his mother, for the better educational opportunities. He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, a prestigious academy that once taught the Hawaiian royal family. He graduated with honors.
College and career
Upon finishing high school, Obama studied for two years at Occidental College in California, before transferring to Columbia University.
There he majored in political science, with a specialization in international relations. Upon graduation, he moved to Chicago, where he took up community organizing in the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the city's South Side. It was during his time spent here that Obama officially converted to Christianity (from being formerly secular) and joined the United Church of Christ.
He left Chicago for three years to study law at Harvard University, where he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
He graduated Magna Cum Laude. While working one summer at a corporate law firm in 1989, Obama met Michelle Robinson, whom he married in 1992. Robinson is also a graduate of Harvard Law.
While in Chicago as a community organizer once again, Obama organized an aggressive voter registration effort that aided in the election of President Bill Clinton and Senator Carol Moseley Braun.
The campaign registered over 100,000 voters. Soon after, his talents earned him a position at a local civil rights law firm, and he became a lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, where he served as a professor until his election to the U.S. Senate.
Illinois General Assembly
In 1996, Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate from the south side neighborhood of Hyde Park, in Chicago. He served as chairman of the Public Health and Welfare Committee when the Democrats regained control of the chamber. The Chicago Tribune called him "one of the General Assembly's most impressive members."
Regarded as a staunch liberal during his tenure in the legislature, he helped to author a state Earned Income Tax Credit which provided benefits to the working poor. He also worked for legislation that would cover residents who could not afford health insurance. Speaking up for leading gay and lesbian advocacy groups, he successfully helped pass bills to increase funding for AIDS prevention and care programs.
In 2000, he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for Illinois' 1st Congressional district against incumbent Representative Bobby Rush. Rush received 61% of the vote, while Obama received 30%. [4]
After the loss, Obama rededicated his efforts to the state Senate. He authored one of the most progressive death penalty reform laws in the nation, under the guidance of former U.S. Senator Paul Simon. He also pushed through legislation that would force insurance companies to cover routine mammograms.
United States Senate campaign
Barack Obama joins his wife Michelle and U.S. Senator Richard Durbin
for a parade on July 4, 2004 in Wheaton, Illinois.In 2004, Obama decided to run for the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, who chose not to run for re-election. In the Democratic primary, he trailed business tycoon Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes. However, Hull was soon embroiled by allegations of domestic abuse. As Obama's name recognition rose, voters took a liking to the bright, charismatic senator.
He won decisively in the March primary, dispatching the other six candidates easily, and winning more than 50 percent of the vote. His primary political consultant and message strategist was David Alexrod, whose firm, AKP Message and Media, produced the campaign's television ads.
Entering the U.S. Senate campaign, Obama had become a national Democratic star. :alco: He squared off against former Goldman Sachs partner and teacher Jack Ryan, the winner of the Republican primary. Ryan trailed Obama in the polls, and Obama opened up a twenty point lead after the media reported that Ryan had assigned an aide to stalk Obama
In addition, during the campaign, a California court ruling opened custody files from Ryan's divorce from actress Jeri Ryan, in which she alleged that he had brought her without her knowledge to sex clubs, intending for her to have sex with him in public. The files, which were part of the custody proceedings regarding the Ryans' young son, were opened as a result of a lawsuit brought by the Chicago Tribune and WLS-TV, a local ABC affiliate. Ryan had insisted that there was nothing damaging in the files, and many Republican leaders openly questioned Ryan's integrity following the release. Ryan was forced to leave the race on June 25, 2004, leaving Obama without an opponent.
A campaign banner used by Obama supporters during his 2004 bid for the Senate. Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka had considered running as a Republican to replace Ryan, but ultimately opted not to, citing family and business considerations. After many more candidates turned down the Illinois GOP, Republican state Chairwoman Judy Baar Topinka announced two possible replacements: Alan Keyes, a former ambassador residing in Maryland, and Andrea Barthwell, a DEA official. After much deliberation, Keyes was chosen, and he officially accepted the nomination on August 8. He had gained much attention as a conservative firebrand in his unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 1996 and 2000. The nomination was widely viewed as a victory for the more conservative wing of the party, and a loss for the more moderate Topinka.
Keyes, a black conservative Republican, had an uphill battle, as Obama had high popularity across the state and Keyes had no ties to Illinois politics. During the time when he had no opponent, Obama campaigned across more conservative downstate areas that ordinarily served as the base for the Republican nominee. A Marylander, Keyes had established legal residency in Illinois with the nomination, the only requirement to run for office. The Chicago Tribune sarcastically greeted Keyes by editorializing: "Mr. Keyes may have noticed a large body of water as he flew into O'Hare. That is called Lake Michigan." [5]
Keyes's previous comments about U.S. Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton's run for Senate in New York, ("I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness to go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent people there, so I certainly wouldn't imitate it,") led many to call Keyes hypocritical. Keyes often rebutted this by pointing out that he was invited to run for the position in Illinois, whereas he claimed Clinton was not.
After a campaign in which Keyes called Obama's position on abortion "the slave-holder's position", accused gays and lesbians of being "selfish hedonists", and also claimed that Jesus would not vote for Obama, Obama won handily in the general election. Obama received 70% of the popular vote, to Keyes' 27%.
