Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (15 page)

Political expediency, alas, required that the candidate’s wife step down when the issue reared its head after Obama’s Wal-Mart-bashing during the presidential campaign cycle. True to form, Mrs. Obama turned the decision into an ostentatious display of self-sacrifice. “As my campaign commitments continue to ramp up, it is becoming more difficult for me to provide the type of focus I would like on my professional responsibilities,” said Chicago’s Joan of Arc in a resignation statement eight days after her husband declared his boycott of the stores stocked with food items processed and distributed by her TreeHouse colleagues. “My priorities, particularly at this important time, are ensuring that our young daughters feel a sense of comfort and normalcy in this process, and that I can support my husband in his presidential campaign to bring much needed change to this country.”
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Quick, get her a Purple Heart.

Instead of acknowledging her husband’s rank hypocrisy, Mrs. Obama turned it into another moment of hero worship: “Barack is gonna say what needs to be said, and it’s not going to, you know, necessarily matter. . . what I’m doing if it’s not the right thing. He’s going to do what’s right for... the country. He’s going to speak out. And he’s going to, you know, implement his views as he sees fit.... I see no conflict in that.”

The see-no-conflict Obamas also saw no dissonance in the campaign’s loud drumbeat for executive compensation reform. Obama made it a signature issue in the U.S. Senate and milked populist sentiment for limiting CEO pay as a Democratic presidential campaign. In February 2009, he took a grand stand to take “the air out of golden parachutes” and announced pay caps on company executives who received federal bailout funds
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(just a first step toward nationwide pay caps for all corporate heads, as advocated by top House Democrat Barney Frank) .
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Yet, while the CEO of Wal-Mart received $8.7 million in total compensation in 2005, the CEO of TreeHouse—a company dwarfed in size by Wal-Mart—received $26 million in total compensation in the same year. What is the definition of “excessive compensation”? It all depends on who’s supplying the butter for your bread—and putting the pickles on the side plate.

THE OBAMAS AND THE AYERS: VERY FRIENDLY NEIGHBORS

Cronies come in all colors: White, black . . . and pinko, too. In 1997, Mrs. Obama launched the “University of Chicago Community Service Center” for “service learning, volunteerism and civic engagement.” Her position of Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University of Chicago Community Service Center had not existed until it was created shortly after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in his first campaign for Illinois State Senate. The project provides training for the next generation of left-wing community organizers and “social justice activists.” Investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz summed up the racket:

In short, just after Barack Obama effectively secured a seat in the State Senate, the University of Chicago invented a new job, for which it hired Michelle Obama. In that job, Michelle would be able to channel University of Chicago students into the radical anti-American groups that she and her husband worked with, and whose ideology has received far too little scrutiny....

So we see here an unusual arrangement between the University of Chicago and its new teacher/State Senator. The Senator’s wife provides political cover for the university with the community, in return for which the university provides a previously non-existent and prestigious position to the Senator’s wife, which allows her to funnel students into hard-left political groups that sometimes provide campaign workers to the Senator. At any rate, that’s how it looks.
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It was during her first year overseeing the program that Mrs. Obama arranged an eyebrow-raising panel on juvenile justice. The featured speakers? Barack Obama, newly elected Illinois State Senator and lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, appeared with friend, neighbor, and unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. From the November 1997 university press release touting this grievance-mongering, crime-excusing event:

The juvenile justice system was founded by Chicago reformer Jane Addams, who advocated the establishment of a separate court system for children which would act like a “kind and just parent” for children in crisis.

One hundred years later, the system is “overcrowded, underfunded, over-centralized and racist,” Ayers said.

Michelle Obama, Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University of Chicago Community Service Center, hopes bringing issues like this to campus will open a dialogue between members of the University community and the broader community.

“We know that issues like juvenile justice impact each of us who live in the city of Chicago. This panel gives community members and students a chance to hear about the juvenile justice system not only on a theoretical level, but from the people who have experienced it.”
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A month after Ayers graced Mrs. Obama’s summit with his radical presence, Mr. Obama wrote a glowing book review of Ayers’s book about the juvenile court system,
A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court
. Mr. Obama called it “[a] searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”
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Not coincidentally, Ayers name-dropped his Hyde Park pal Barack Obama on page 82 of the book, along with Nation of Islam racial demagogue Louis Farrakhan—their own militant Neighborhood Watch captain:

Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives a block from our home and adds, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of a “safe neighborhood watch”: the Fruit of Islam, his security force, has an eye on things twenty-four-hours a day. I pass Farrakhan’s mansion, offer a cheery wave to the Fruit, get a formal nod in response, and turn north two blocks across 47th Street, into the lap of urban blight.
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In another noteworthy Chicago coincidence, Ayers’s Weather Underground terrorist partner and wife Bernardine Dohrn was hired in 1984 by the same white-shoe law firm, Sidley Austin, that later recruited Michelle Obama. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy reported:

Ayers’s father, Tom Ayers, a prominent Chicago businessman, was also deeply involved in the [education] reform effort. Interestingly, in 1988, while Obama and Ayers toiled on the same education agenda, Bernadine Dohrn worked as an intern at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin—even though she could not be admitted to the bar due to her contempt conviction for refusing to cooperate in a terrorist investigation. How could that happen? It turns out that Sidley was the longtime outside counsel for Tom Ayers’s company, Commonwealth Edison. That is, Ayers’s father had pull at the firm and successfully pressed for the hiring of his daughter-in-law.
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Like Mrs. Obama’s father, Ayers’s father was a cog in the Daley political machine. Mrs. Obama and the elder Ayers’s Commonwealth Edison shared another common bond: David Axelrod. Just as Mrs. Obama had relied on Axelrod’s signature re-branding skills to sell an unpalatable program to Chicago’s poor, Commonwealth Edison hired Axelrod’s same public relations firm, ASK Public Strategies, to repackage a huge utility rate hike.
Newsweek
magazine reported that the company “took a creative lobbying approach, concocting a new outfit that seemed devoted to the public interest: Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, or CORE.” This front group ran fear-mongering ads warning of a “California-style energy crisis” if the utility rate increase wasn’t approved. Axelrod failed to disclose that the ads were funded by Commonwealth Edison. Transparency for thee, but not for Team Obama.

Now, hum with me to the tune of that famous Sesame Street ditty:

Oh, these are cronies in Michelle and Barry’s neighborhood. They’re the people that they met (and did business with, and socialized with, and traded favors with) each day
. . .

CHAPTER 3

VETTING THE VEEP

THE MYTH OF “AVERAGE JOE” BIDEN

M
ore than 30,000 people gathered in front of the Illinois Statehouse in Springfield in August 2008 to see Barack

Obama announce his new running mate. Obama introduced his partner as an insider’s outsider, a “working class kid from Scranton and Wilmington” who “has always been a friend to the underdog.” Obama praised his choice for the vice presidency as a “unique public servant who is at home in a bar in Cedar Rapids and the corridors of the Capitol; in the VFW hall in Concord, and at the center of an international crisis.” Above all, Obama said, “Joe Biden is that rare mix—for decades, he has brought change to Washington, but Washington hasn’t changed him.”

Biden was only too eager to claim the mantle of Working Class Hero in his acceptance speech. “Ladies and gentlemen, your kitchen table is like mine,” he said. “You sit there at night after you put the kids to bed and you talk, you talk about what you need. You talk about how much you are worried about being able to pay the bills.” Your kitchen table, however, is probably not like the one in the Biden family’s $3 million, custom-made, lakefront home—built and paid for with generous help from wealthy banking executives and developers. As for worrying about paying the bills, Biden might imagine that he feels your pain, but he’s a struggling Average Joe only in his own mind.

Non-delusional observers in Wilmington and Washington regard Biden’s “Ordinary Man” mythology as a joke. Even the
New York Times
was forced to conclude: “A review of his finances found that when it comes to some of his largest expenses, like the purchase and upkeep of his home and his use of Amtrak trains to get around, he has benefited from resources and relationships not available to average Americans.”
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Like the Naked Emperor of Hope and Change in the Oval Office, the Court Jester of Reform in the vice president’s office has no clothes. Lunch bucket Joe, ridin’ the train to work, rubbin’ elbows with the unwashed masses, stayin’ true to his hard-scrabble upbringin’, pinchin’ pennies, and keepin’ it real in D.C.? Guffaw. Biden’s “just folks” image is one of Capitol Hill’s most farcical false narratives.

His hometown newspaper, the
Wilmington News Journal
, snickered at a typical example of the Delaware senior senator’s bluster on the campaign trail. Brandishing his blue-collar credentials during the vice presidential debate in October, Biden exclaimed: “Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington and go to Katie’s Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time and you ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years.”
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Just a few tiny problems with Average Joe’s folksy anecdote, the
News Journal
pointed out.

Katie’s Restaurant in Wilmington’s Little Italy “closed in the 1980s”—and it wasn’t on Union Street.
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Home Depot Joe spending “a lot of time” shopping for garden tools and barbecue grill accessories? Not likely.
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Biden’s supporters brushed off the bogus brag as an innocent error. But this small gaffe epitomized Biden the blowhard.
News Journal
readers—the small-town folks Joe Biden claims to represent—tore into their dissembling senator:

Joe Biden reminded us that “the Past [is] Prologue” and then went on to prove it by again resorting to the type of bizarre, completely made up, life experience tale that got him into trouble 20 years ago.... The past truly is prologue. [Twenty] years ago Biden lied about his academic record and assumed (with conviction and sincerity) the life story of a British Politician (Neil Kinnock).

He tells these tales with such wonderful conviction and sincerity—but they are all lies—he just makes things up and seems to really believe what he makes up. That seems borderline delusional to me.