Summary: The remarkable ascent of Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama
begins with his career as a “community
organizer” for far-left causes in Chicago,
an experience that served as a launching
pad for his political career. Along with way,
Obama acquired some unsavory friends
including sleazy political fundraiser Tony
Rezko and unrepentant Pentagon bomber
William Ayers. Obama promises to carry his
activist spirit into national politics, but does
he also carry the smell of Chicago politics
into the national arena?
CONTENTS
June 2008
Barack Obama
Page 1
Philanthropy Notes
Page 12
“What Obama is proposing goes far beyond
the boundaries of traditional community
service volunteers. Obama wants to bring
the spirit and tactics of community organizing
into the political system, and there is no
road map out there for how to do it.” —John
K. Wilson, Barack Obama, The Improbable
Quest (2008)
The Chicago winter of 1996-1997 was
a bad one, especially for residents of
the Englewood apartment building at
7000-10 South Sangamon. The 31-unit building
had been rehabilitated with a $653,500
loan from the city of Chicago’s low-income
housing fund, another $654,000 in bank fi -
nancing, and $1.9 million in tax credits. The
general partner on the project was Rezmar
Corporation, run by Antoin (“Tony”) Rezko
and Daniel Mahru. But the tenants shivered
for over fi ve weeks without heat because
Rezko and Mahru claimed they lacked the
cash to turn the heat back on again.
Rezko was a successful real estate investor
who owned fast-food restaurants in
Chicago’s inner-city neighborhoods. But he
branched out into politics in the early 1980s
when he met Jabir Herbert Muhammad,
the former manager of retired heavyweight
champion Muhammad Ali and son of Nation
of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad.
Jabir Muhammad asked Rezko to donate to
mayoral candidate Harold Washington, an
African-American challenging Chicago’s
white establishment. After Washington was
elected mayor, Rezko, an Arab Christian who
emigrated from Syria to Chicago in 1971, became
increasingly involved in causes linking
his business interests to the political clout of
Chicago’s black community. For several years
he was even chairman of the Muhammad A
Foundation, an Islamic charity founded in
1975 that in 1985 changed its name from
the Elijah Muhammad Foundation when
the champ lent it his name. Rezko was also
the actual owner of fast-food franchises that
Jabir Mohammed told city offi cials were his.
According to the Chicago Tribune (March
16, 2005), in the late 1990s Jabir Mohammed
was the front man who allowed Rezko
to secure city contracts using Chicago’s
minority set-aside program.
Harold Washington died in 1987 and in
1989, the year Richard M. Daley was elected
to the fi rst of six (so far) terms as mayor of
Chicago, Rezko and Mahru formed Rezmar
Corp., promising to build more low-income
housing in Chicago. Rezmar became the
Daley administration’s favored low-income
housing developer. Rezko’s timing was good:
During these years many neighborhoods on
the South Side were undergoing gentrifi cation,
and the prospect of rising real estate
values attracted a fl ock of developers with
wallets open to make whatever campaign
contributions might be necessary in order
to get business done.
The South Sangamon building was one of
30 low-income projects—containing a total
of 1,025 apartments—that Rezko took on
between 1989 and 1998. In all, Rezmar Corp.
collected more than $100 million by arranging
“public-private partnerships” with the
city, the state and federal governments, and
in bank loans to rehab South Side buildings
intended as low-income housing. Neither
Rezko nor his partner had any construction
experience when they created Rezmar, but
they became experts at working Chicago’s
political system to acquire taxpayer subsidies
for their redevelopment schemes.
Rezko and Mahru also managed the
buildings. Not surprisingly, every one of the
projects ran into fi nancial diffi culties within
six years, according to a Chicago Sun-Times
investigation, and more than half went into
foreclosure. Chicago sued Rezmar on at least
a dozen occasions. “Their buildings were
falling apart,” a former city offi cial told the
Sun-Times. “They just didn’t pay attention
to the condition of these buildings.”
To arrange project fi nancing Rezko frequently
relied on a small Chicago law fi rm,
Davis Miner Branhill & Galland, whose top
partner, Allison S. Davis, was a Rezko associate
and Daley administration insider.
Davis’s name recently surfaced in
Rezko’s trial for money-laundering, fraud,
bribery, and extortion. Witnesses say he was
the go-between in one of the alleged crimes:
an attempted pay-to-play shakedown of
Chicago businessman Tom Rosenberg whose
fi rm managed $1 billion for the Illinois Teachers
Retirement Association, a $40 billion
pension fund. In early 2004 Davis allegedly
approached Rezko about how to secure an
additional $220 million pension allocation
for Rosenberg’s asset management fi rm and
was told that Rosenberg needed to pay Rezko
a $2 million kick-back or raise $1.5 million
for the re-election campaign of Illinois Governor
Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat. At press
time, the trial, which ended on May 5, had
gone to the jury for deliberation. Rezko did
not testify and made no defense, his lawyers
arguing that the prosecution failed to meet
its burden of proof.
Ensnared in Chicago Politics
The sleazy tale of Tony Rezko —corrupt
businessman and political fundraiser— is
hardly unique in Chicago. What makes the
story noteworthy is that it touches Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama
who has promised to move America away
from politics as usual. Obama now admits
that becoming involved with Rezko when
he purchased a new home in January 2005
following his election to the U.S. Senate the
previous November was a “bone-headed
mistake.” The terms of that involvement
have received widespread publicity: Senatorelect
Obama and Rezko toured the property
together when it was already known that
Rezko was under criminal investigation.
Obama and his wife Michelle subsequently
paid the seller $1.65 million for their new
home, $300,000 below the asking price. On
the same day Mrs. Rita Rezko paid the same
seller the asking price of $625,000 for the
adjoining 9,000-square-foot lot. In January
2006, Mrs. Rezko sold a 10 foot-by-150 foot
strip of the lot to the Obamas for $104,500,
and in December she sold the remainder of
the property to her husband’s lawyer for
$575,000.
Obama’s previous connections with
Rezko have received less attention, but they
will invite further scrutiny during the election
season and as Rezko’s legal troubles
play out. During that bad
winter 11 years ago when
Rezmar couldn’t afford
to turn on its tenants’
heat, Obama was a thirdyear
associate at Allison
Davis’s law fi rm, which
represented Rezmar. A
standard Rezmar practice
was to team up with
nonprofi t groups that were
clients of the Davis fi rm
to secure government and
private funding for lowincome
housing projects.
The groups included the
Chicago Urban League,
the Woodlawn Preservation
and Investment Corp.
(WPIC), and the Fund for
Community Redevelopment
and Revitalization.
According to the fi rm
and the Obama campaign,
Obama had little association
with Rezmar, generating
only fi ve billable
hours of work related to
Rezko’s business. (The Sun-
Times says none of the billing
records have been supplied to the media.)
However, Obama’s acquaintance with
Rezko goes back even further. He has said that
in the early 1990s, while he was a top student
at Harvard Law School, Rezko offered him a
job—that he did not accept. He admits that
the two men stayed in touch following his
work for Davis, that the Obamas and Rezkos
have had dinners together, and that Rezko
hosted a big 2003 fundraiser at his home when
Obama ran for the Democratic nomination for
the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Republican
Senator Peter Fitzgerald. According to the
Sun-Times (June 18, 2007), Rezko and his
associates have donated at least $168,000 to
Obama’s campaigns, three times more than
what Obama has acknowledged.
Sun-Times research also found that 11
Rezko buildings were located in Obama’s
district during the years when he was an Illinois
state senator (1997-2004). Would the
residents of these apartment buildings have
voted to elect the idealistic young Obama to
the state senate had they known of his ties
to their negligent landlord?
As a young activist in the mid-1980s,
Obama worked with community and church
groups to clean up public housing on Chicago’s
South Side. Protests and demonstrations
could accomplish only so much, so he
switched careers from community organizing
to elective politics. Obama explained his
vision of the agitator-politician to a reporter
this way:
“What if a politician were to see
his job as that of an organizer, as
part teacher and part advocate, one
who does not sell voters short but
who educates them about the real
choices before them? As an elected
public offi cial, for instance, I could
bring church and community leaders
together easier than I could as a
community organizer or lawyer…
We must form grass-roots structures
that would hold me and other elected
offi cials more accountable for their
actions.”
Those words must
ring hollow to the
Rezko tenants.
Obama’s staff says
he was unaware of
Rezmar Corp.’s failings,
which they say
would more appropriately
be handled
by a local alderman.
The irony here is that
Obama understood
that grassroots organizers
could not
succeed unless they
had political allies
in power. And it’s
apparently why he
sought the fundraising
help of a
man identifi ed as a
“slumlord” by his
rival for the Democratic
presidential
nomination, Senator
Hillary Clinton.
The South Sangamon
building finally
had its heat turned on
in February 1997 after the city of Chicago
sued, eventually collecting a $100 fi ne from
Rezmar. At about the same time—January
14, 1997, according to public records—state
senator-elect Obama received a $1,000 campaign
donation from Rezmar.
Community Organizing: From Saul Alinsky
to Martin Luther King
Between his graduation from Columbia
University in 1983 and his admission to
Harvard Law School in 1988, Obama moved
to Chicago where he became a community
organizer. He returned to Chicago with his
law degree in 1991 and resumed advocacy
work as a civil rights lawyer and constitutional
law teacher. A look at those few short
years prior to his election to the Illinois state
senate in 1997 and to the U.S. Senate in 2004
reveals the seeds of his thinking on grassroots
activism and political advocacy.
In 1985 veteran Chicago organizer Jerry
Kellman hired Obama to run the Developing
Communities Project. He paid his earnest
new pupil a salary of $13,000 and assigned
him to the Roseland and West Pullman areas
on the South Side. Here’s how a reporter
from U.S. News & World Report—with
unconscious irony, it seems—described
Kellman’s idea of “self-help”:
“Obama’s assignment was to teach
the poor to rely on themselves in a
very aggressive way—to get what
they wanted from city hall, their
landlords and others in power by
clarifying their needs and banding
together to take action. It’s the kind
of self-help that he preaches today as
a presidential candidate.”
The better term is probably “agitation,”
which in the community organizer’s sense
means making someone angry enough about
the condition of his life that he agrees to take
action to change it.
Mike Kruglik, formerly one of Obama’s
fellow organizers, hailed Obama for his
persuasive powers:
“He was a natural, the undisputed
master of agitation, who could engage
a room full of recruiting targets in a
rapid-fi re Socratic dialogue, nudging
them to admit that they were not
living up to their own standards…
With probing, sometimes personal
questions, he would pinpoint the
source of pain in their lives, tearing
down their egos just enough before
dangling a carrot of hope that they
could make things better.” (New
Republic, March 19, 2007).
Agitation is what Chicago-born Saul Alinsky
(1909-1972), the father of community
organizing, called “rubbing raw the sores
of discontent.” In his classic book Rules for
Radicals, Alinsky prescribed the tactics and
defi ned the goals of community organizing.
Among his “rules”: “Keep the pressure on.
Never let up” and “Pick the target, freeze it,
personalize it, and polarize it.”
“I attended one of Saul Alinsky’s
schools,” Kellman told Foundation Watch
recently, “and most of his principles are still
being used in those schools today.”
Obama’s Radical Roots
But for someone who urges Americans
to transcend their ideological, racial, and
cultural differences, Obama certainly carries
a lot of baggage. National Journal concluded
in 2007 that Obama was the most liberal
member of the U.S. Senate with a voting
record to the left of Hillary Clinton, John
Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and self-described
socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont. For
many years, Obama has surrounded himself
with extreme, polarizing fi gures. Obama’s
is “as openly radical a background as any
signifi cant American political fi gure has
ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as
Martin Luther King Jr.,” Ben Wallace-Wells
wrote in a Rolling Stone magazine profi le of
Obama last year.
Left-wing funders are drawn to the
campaign. Philanthropist George Soros is
praying for an Obama victory in November
“I think Obama has the charisma and the
vision to radically reorient America in the
world…I think that he has shown himself
to be a really unusual person,” Soros said.
(New York Review of Books, May 15, 2008)
The political action committee of the abortion
rights group NARAL endorsed Obama
over his female opponent in the race for the
Democratic presidential nomination, and
is sure to spend several million dollars on
his behalf.
Jodie Evans, a co-founder of Code Pink,
a far-left anti-war women’s group, is a socalled
bundler who has collected at least
$50,000 for the Obama campaign. (Human
Events, April 14, 2008) Evans has visited
Venezuela and met with Hugo Chavez to
show her support for his socialist regime.
Code Pink has been in the news for harassing
wounded U.S. soldiers at Walter Reed Army
Medical Center and military recruiters as
part of what it calls its “counter-recruitment”
program. (For more on Evans’s group, see
“Code Pink: The Women’s Anti-War Movement,”
by John J. Tierney, Organization
Trends, December 2006.)
Obama’s most prominent emissary to
the public, his wife Michelle, is refreshingly
honest about the couple’s political beliefs.
On the campaign trail, Mrs. Obama spoke of
the virtues of the coercive redistribution of
wealth: “The truth is, in order to get things
like universal health care and [a] revamped
education system then someone is going
to have to give up a piece of their pie so
someone else can have more.” (Charlotte
Observer, April 8, 2008)
Mrs. Obama made headlines in February
when during a speech in Wisconsin she put
her ambivalence about America on public
display, noting that as an adult she has never
been proud of her country: “For the fi rst time
in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my
country and not just because Barack has done
well but because I think people are hungry
for change and I have been desperate to see
our country moving in that direction and
just not feeling so alone in my frustration
and disappointment.” (ABC News, February
18, 2008)
At times on the trail, Mrs. Obama’s anger
towards her own country has come through as
she’s lectured Americans on how they don’t
live up to her standards. She implied that if
voters ultimately reject her husband’s bid for
the White House, there must be something
wrong with them: “What Barack and I talked
about when we decided [that he should run
for the presidency] was that we were going
to do this authentically and that this was as
much a test for us about the country and the
[political] process as it was the other way
around.” (“All Things Considered,” NPR,
July 9, 2007)
Here are a few other examples of Mrs.
Obama’s attitude toward the United States:
*America is “just downright mean”
and “guided by fear.” (The New
Yorker, March 10, 2008)
*“Sometimes it’s easier to hold on to
your own stereotypes and misconceptions,
it makes you feel justifi ed in
your ignorance. That’s America. So
the challenge for us is, are we ready
for change?” (speech at University
of South Carolina, January 2008,
available at http://www.breitbart.
tv/?p=68384&comments=1)
*“I don’t think there is a person of
color in this country that doesn’t
struggle with what it means to be
a part of your race versus what the
majority thinks is right.” (CNN,
February 1, 2008)
*“We are living in a time when we
are suffering from a deep empathy
defi cit.” (speech to National Congress
of Black Women, September
30, 2007)
*“Before we can work on the problems,
we have to fi x our souls. Our
souls are broken in this nation.” (New
York Times, February 25, 2008
National Journal identifi ed prominent
radicals on the Obama presidential campaign’s
black advisory council. (“Obama’s
Inner Circle,” March 31, 2008).
One is Cornel West, an African-American
studies professor at Princeton University
who denounces his native land as racist and
patriarchal. He has described himself as a
“progressive socialist,” and has written that
“Marxist thought is an indispensable tradition
for freedom fi ghters.” He visited Venezuela
in 2006 and praised the government of leftist
strongman Hugo Chavez. “We in the United
States have so many lies about President
Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution.”
West said he visited in 2006 “to see the
democratic awakening taking place.” Chavez
has allowed terrorist groups Hezbollah and
Hamas to open offi ces in Caracas, and recent
evidence suggests he has also been backing
communist rebels trying to overthrow
the democratically elected government of
Colombia. (See “The American Friends of
Hugo Chavez: Dial 1-800-4-TYRANT,”
by Ana Maria Ortiz and Matthew Vadum,
Organization Trends, March 2008.)
Another campaign advisor is Charles
Ogletree, a Harvard Law School professor
who taught Obama and his wife when they
were law students. Ogletree argues the U.S.
government should pay reparations to the
living descendants of slaves.
Obama’s presidential campaign was
embarrassed recently when a foreign policy
advisor, Robert Malley, had to resign after it
was revealed that he had been meeting with
the terrorist group Hamas, which has called
for attacks on the United States. The resignation
came after Hamas political adviser
Ahmed Yousef said in April that his group
supports Obama’s foreign policy ideas and
hopes he wins the presidency. Obama’s position
on Hamas mirrors U.S. policy. He has
said that Hamas is a terrorist group and that
the U.S. should not enter into talks with it
unless it renounces violence and recognizes
Israel’s right to exist.
Another advisor is Cass Sunstein, a
professor at University of Chicago Law
School who will join the faculty of Harvard
Law School this fall. In his 2004 book The
Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfi nished
Revolution and Why We Need It More than
Ever, Sunstein argues that rights are discretionary
grants from the government to the
citizen. Not quite as far to the left is Harvard
Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who
also serves as a campaign policy and legal
advisor. The liberal constitutional law expert
argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in
2000 on behalf of Al Gore in Bush v. Gore,
the Florida vote-counting lawsuit.
Obama’s fondness for radical ideas seems
to begin during his childhood. In Dreams
from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,
he wrote about the admiration
he felt for the ideals of his Kenyan father, a
Harvard-educated economics professor: “My
father’s voice had nevertheless remained
untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or
withholding approval. You do not work hard
enough, Barry. You must help in your people’
struggle. Wake up, black man!”
And what were those ideals? Marxist
and anti-Western ideals, according to an
academic paper written by his father. In
the article credited to “Barak H. Obama”
the economist argued for collective land
ownership and confi scation of private land,
along with Mugabe-style nationalization of
“European” and “Asian” owned businesses
in order to be handed over to “indigenous”
blacks. The senior Obama wrote: “The
question is how are we going to remove
the disparities in our country, such as the
concentration of economic power in Asian
and European hands, while not destroying
what has already been achieved and at the
same time assimilating these groups to
build one country.” (“Problems Facing Our
Socialism,” East Africa Journal, July 1965,
is available at http://www.politico.com/
static/PPM41_eastafrica.html) Aides to
Obama refused to comment on the article,
The Politico reported April 15.
Obama also appears to have been infl uenced
by his boyhood mentor, poet-activist
Frank Marshall Davis, an apologist for the
Soviet Union and member of the Communist
Party USA. Obama refers to him simply
as “Frank” in Dreams From My Father. In
Dreams, Obama describes “Frank” as “pushing
eighty” and as a poet of “some mod
notoriety once” who visited his family in
Hawaii and who was “a contemporary of
Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during
his years in Chicago.”
How do we know “Frank” refers to
Frank Marshall Davis? In a 2007 speech at
the dedication of a Communist Party (CP)
archive, fellow traveler and historian Gerald
Horne, a professor at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, clarifi ed the relationship
between Obama and Davis:
In any case, deploring these convictions
in Hawaii was an African-
American poet and journalist by the
name of Frank Marshall Davis, who
was certainly in the orbit of the CP – if
not a member – and who was born in
Kansas and spent a good deal of his
adult life in Chicago, before decamping
to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion
of his good friend Paul Robeson.
Eventually, he befriended another
family – a Euro-American family –
that had migrated to Honolulu from
Kansas and a young woman from
this family eventually had a child
with a young student from Kenya
East Africa who goes by the name
of Barack Obama, who retracing the
steps of Davis eventually decamped
to Chicago. In his best selling memoir
‘Dreams of my Father’, the author
speaks warmly of an older black poet,
he identifi es simply as “Frank” as
being a decisive infl uence in helping
him to fi nd his present identity as an
African-American…
Horne predicted that:
At some point in the future, a teacher
will add to her syllabus Barack’s
memoir and instruct her students to
read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’
equally affecting memoir, Living
the Blues, and when that day comes,
I’m sure a future student will not only
examine critically the Frankenstein
monsters that US imperialism created
in order to subdue Communist parties
but will also be moved to come to
this historic and wonderful archive
in order to gain insight on what has
befallen this complex and intriguing
planet on which we reside. (Political
Affairs magazine, a Marxist journal,
republished the speech as “Rethinking
the History and Future of the
Communist Party.” It is available
at http://www.politicalaffairs.net/
article/articleview/5047/1/32/.)
Radical Chicago Friends
Obama’s radicalism seems to have
manifested itself in his Chicago connections
as well.
The Los Angeles Times has reported
(April 10, 2008) that Obama has been a
“friend and frequent dinner companion” of
Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American and
former Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) spokesman. Khalidi is the Edward
Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia
University. Said, who died in 2003, was a
fi erce critic of Israel and a close associate of
the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Khalidi
held a fundraiser for Obama’s ill-fated congressional
bid in 2000, and is a co-founder
of the Arab American Action Network, a
group that provides social services to Arab-
Americans in the Chicago area.
At one point Obama served on the board
of the liberal Chicago-based Joyce Foundation,
a charity that makes grants to a variety
of groups, including environmentalists and
gun control advocates. But the funding for
young Obama’s organizing job came from
the Woods Fund of Chicago, a relatively
small (2006 assets: $72 million), little-known
foundation. Its founder, Frank Woods, was
a prominent telecommunications executive
who donated money to civil rights groups
in the 1950s. The charity began moving to
the left politically in the 1990s, and today
focuses on community organizing, arts and
culture, and public policy.
The Woods Fund was thrust into the
national spotlight in April when during a
live televised candidates’ debate moderator
George Stephanopoulos asked Obama
about his association with a current board
member, education professor William Ayers.
Ayers is an unrepentant homegrown terrorist
who used to belong to the Weathermen,
a violent 1960s radical group. Ayers once
summed up the group’s philosophy: “Kill
all the rich people. Break up their cars and
apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill
your parents.”
Although Obama’s chief strategist, David
Axelrod, told The Politico’s Ben Smith in
February that Obama and Ayers are “certainly
friendly, they know each other,” the
candidate tried to distance himself from Ayers
during the debate. (Axelrod and Obama
met on one of Obama’s voter-registration
drives on Chicago’s South Side.) Obama
said he was just a child when Ayers, a selfdescribed
revolutionary communist, bombed
U.S. landmarks and that he had little contact
with “a guy that lives in my neighborhood…
who I know and who I have not received
some offi cial endorsement from. He’s
somebody I exchange ideas from [sic] on a
regular basis. And the notion that somehow
as a consequence of me knowing somebody
who engaged in detestable acts 40 years
ago when I was eight years old, somehow
refl ects on me and my values, doesn’t make
much sense…”
But evidence suggests Obama’s connection
to Ayers goes back to at least 1995, and
that he must have known what Ayers, who
has said claims that America is “a just and
fair and decent place” make him “want to
puke,” stood for.
It was 1995 when Ayers and his wife
Bernardine Dohrn, a law professor and
fellow former Weathermen member, held
a fundraising event for state senate candidate
Obama in their home. Dohrn gained
some notoriety when, upon learning of the
murder of actress Sharon Tate in 1969, she
commented: “Dig it! First they killed those
pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room
with them. They even shoved a fork into the
victim’s stomach! Wild!” One attendee at
the Ayers-Dohrn soiree that helped launch
Obama’s career in electoral politics said the
couple was “introducing [Obama] to the
Hyde Park community as the best thing since
sliced bread.” Ayers himself donated $200 to
Obama’s state senate reelection campaign in
2001. (The Politico, February 22, 2008)
Obama served with Ayers on the Woods
board between 1999 and 2002. During that
time, the Fund approved two grants totaling
$75,000 to Khalidi’s Arab American Action
Network ($40,000 in 2001 and $35,000 in
2002, according to its tax returns). The Fund’s
website states that its philanthropy is based
on the axiom that there are “structural barriers
to job opportunities, job retention and
job advancement” that harm the working
poor. In 2005 it made $3.4 million in grants
to such groups as the Midwest Academy
(training for community organizers), Tides
Foundation (community organizing), Center
for Community Change (organizing),
American Friends Service Committee, and
the Association of Community Organizations
for Reform Now (or ACORN, discussed
below), and the Proteus Fund (organizing for
world peace), among others. These groups
engage in left-wing policy advocacy and
social activism.
It is hard to believe that the two activists
exchanged no ideas about political goals and
tactics during their board tenure. (Ayers still
serves on the board.) The two also appeared
on academic panels together. One panel dealt
with juvenile justice issues, and at that time
Obama said Ayers’s book on the topic was
“a searing and timely account.” Both also
worked to reform Chicago’s education system.
(New York Times, May 11, 2008)
In his online curriculum vitae, Ayers
describes himself as “Co-Founder and Co-
Chair” of the 1995-2000 project known as
the Chicago School Reform Collaborative
(the Annenberg Challenge). Obama was the
Annenberg Challenge’s fi rst chairman, and
he served on the “Leadership Council” of the
Chicago Public Schools Education Fund, the
Challenge’s successor organization. Obama
served on this council alongside Ayers’s fa-
ther, Thomas, and his brother, John, in 2001
and 2002, according to the Fund’s annual
reports. Obama and John Ayers also served
on the council in 2003 and 2004, according
to the Fund’s annual reports. (Thomas Ayers,
who died in 2007, had been CEO of Commonwealth
Edison.)
In a 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, and in
subsequent press interviews, William Ayers
said he had no regrets about bombing New
York City police headquarters, the Capitol,
and the Pentagon in the 1970s. “I don’t regret
setting bombs,” Ayers said of his terrorism in
a New York Times interview that happened
to be published September 11, 2001. “I feel
we didn’t do enough.” When asked if he
would do it all again, he said, “I don’t want
to discount the possibility.”
Decades after Ayers bombed the Pentagon
in May 1972, he giggled about the
experience in his memoir. In a 2001 Wall
Street Journal column about a book signing
event for Ayers’s memoir, John Tabin noted:
“In his book, he writes: ‘It turns out that we
blew up a bathroom and, quite by accident,
water plunged below and knocked out their
computers for a time, disrupting the air war
[in Vietnam] and sending me into deepening
shades of delight.’” Added Tabin: “In
those four little words, ‘disrupting the air
war,’ there is the dark prospect of American
soldiers in jeopardy.”
And who might one of those soldiers
in jeopardy at the time have been? While
Ayers interfered with America’s war effort
and cheered for a North Vietnamese victory
over the United States, John McCain,
whose A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft was
shot down over Hanoi in October 1967, was
held in captivity by the North Vietnamese
and tortured regularly. Now the Republican
Party’s presumptive presidential candidate
in 2008, he was released by the Communist
government in March 1973.
As McCain languished in the Hanoi
Hilton, Obama’s friends Ayers and Dohrn
spent the 1970s waging war against the
United States and fl eeing justice. They surrendered
in 1980 but a legal technicality led
to all charges against them being dropped.
Ayers gloated: “Guilty as sin, free as a bird,
America is a great country.”
And what a forgiving country it is! After
they retired from their distinguished careers
in terrorism, the couple was welcomed with
open arms by the academy. Ayers is now
Distinguished Professor of Education at
the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC),
and Dohrn is professor at Northwestern
University School of Law and director of
that school’s Children and Family Justice
Center.
Organizing Strategies
The Woods Fund, with its focus on community
organizing and local activism, was
an ideal fi t for Obama. The group posts on
its website guidelines that describe its “Integrated
Approach to Community Organizing
and Public Policy.” The idea is to show
professional organizers how to direct local
grassroots people to understand that their
goal must be “system change,” not solving
parochial neighborhood problems. Organizers
must learn to steer neighborhood groups
toward more politicized and ideological ends
and away from merely local controversies and
personal disputes. Successful organizing, the
guidelines state, “builds power for effective
action in the public arena.”
Kellman argues that the Woods strategy
of linking community organizing to public
policy is perhaps better described as “Naderite”
rather than following the Alinsky model.
It’s the strategy used by the New York Public
Interest Research Group, Obama’s second
employer out of college.
Here’s what Kellman told Foundation
Watch about models of community organizing
in a recent interview:
“Obama and I have come to disagree
with the Alinsky model, in its key
emphasis on self-interest. ‘See the
world as it is,’ Alinsky used to say, ‘not
as you would like it to be.’ Obama,
I think, turns that on its head. He’s
saying, ‘We can make the world as
it is into the world as we would like
it to be.’”
Kellman points out that Alinsky, an atheist,
disagreed with the views of Martin Luther
King, Jr. and found his approach to organizing
undisciplined because it ignored self-interest
for the sake of (what was for King, at least)
a higher, religious vision of a better world
for us all.
“What really inspired me was the civil
rights movement,” Obama has said. “And
if you asked me who my role model was at
that time, it would probably be Bob Moses,
the famous [SNCC-Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee] organizer…” (New
Republic, March 19, 2007). During “Freedom
Summer” in 1964, Moses famously
led groups of civil rights activists to travel
to Mississippi where they organized blacks
to brave white hostility by registering to
vote. It’s notable that Obama does not cite
the example of King here, possibly because
he knew the comparison might smack of
arrogance.
By contrast, here is his friend Kellman’s
comment on Obama’s true vision for community
organizing—and for himself. Kellman
told Obama biographer David Mendell
that he believes Obama is indeed the most
likely heir to King’s legacy, both as an advocate
and moral voice for black Americans.
Kellman thinks Obama saw this role for
himself years ago but has necessarily been
circumspect about it: “If you look at the King
analogy and you look at Barack, Barack has
become the expectation of his people, and
in that sense he is similar to King…And
obviously, that can cause someone to kind
of lose perspective.”
Especially if he’s politically ambitious
and in a hurry. The Sun-Times notes that every
three years since 1995 Obama has aspired to
a more powerful political position. He built
his entire state legislative record (26 bills
passed in a single year) in 2002, the last of
his seven years in the Illinois state legislature.
Not coincidentally, it was the fi rst year since
1976 that both houses in the legislature had
a Democratic majority.
From Little ACORNs…
Let’s look at ACORN, another nonprofi
t organization important throughout
Obama’s career. The radical activist group
was founded in 1970. Unlike most of the
New Left groups that have fallen away as
their members age and acquire children and
tenure, ACORN activists have kept the spirit
of leftism alive.
ACORN is the nation’s largest community
organization of low- and moderate-income
persons, with 350,000 “member families,”
organized into 800 neighborhood chapters
and 104 cities, according to its website.
Founder Wade Rathke also heads the New
Orleans-based Local 100 of the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU),
which donates over $2 million to ACORN
annually, a signifi cant part of the ACORN
network’s $37 million budget. ACORN is
actually several organizations, including the
ACORN Institute (training), the Living Wage
Resource Center, the Wal-Mart Alliance for
Reform Now (WARN), and the ACORN
Housing Corp.
In 1992, Obama took time off from his
new job at Davis Miner to direct ACORN’s
voter mobilization arm, Project Vote, a hugely
successful voter registration campaign that
helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley
Braun into the U.S. Senate by adding an
estimated 125,000 voters to the rolls. Project
Vote is an ostensibly independent 501(c)(3)
that claims to conduct “non-partisan” voter
registration drives, counsels potential voters
on their rights, and litigates on behalf of the
poor and “disenfranchised.”
Its greatest legislative accomplishment is
the National Voter Registration Act of 1993,
commonly known as Motor Voter. But in his
book Stealing Elections (2004), Wall Street
Journal columnist John Fund argues that the
law leads to voter fraud:
“Perhaps no piece of legislation in
the last generation better captures
the ‘incentivizing’ of fraud… than
the 1993 National Voter Registration
Act…Examiners were under orders
not to ask anyone for identifi cation or
proof of citizenship. States also had
to permit mail-in voter registrations,
which allowed anyone to register
without any personal contact with a
registrar or election offi cial. Finally,
states were limited in pruning ‘dead
wood’ – people who had died, moved
or been convicted of crimes – from
their rolls. … Since its implementation,
Motor Voter has worked in one
sense: it has fueled an explosion of
phantom voters.”
In 1995, Obama sued on behalf of
ACORN for the implementation of Motor
Voter laws in Illinois and won. That secured
Obama an invitation to train ACORN staff.
Obama later returned the favor when, as
a member of the Woods Fund board, he
approved frequent grants to ACORN. In a
2007 address to its leaders (who subsequently
endorsed his presidential bid), Obama pr
ACORN’s mission:
“I come out of a grassroots organizing
background. That’s what I did for
three and a half years before I went to
law school. That’s the reason I moved
to Chicago—to organize. So this is
something that I know personally, the
work you do, the importance of it. I’ve
been fi ghting alongside of ACORN
on issues you care about my entire
career. Even before I was an elected
offi cial, when I ran Project Vote in
Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in
the middle of it, and we appreciate
your work.”
ACORN’s practical effectiveness may
be partly due to its PAL programs. PALs are
Precinct Action Leaders who are recruited
from local neighborhoods and trained to build
neighborhood networks. Each volunteer
participant in PAL creates and services a
list of about 100 family, friends, and others
in the local community. The PALs make
sure everyone is registered, informed, and
ready to vote.
Despite Obama’s work for Project Vote,
polls show that clear majorities of black and
Hispanics back voter ID laws. And so does
the U.S. Supreme Court, which on April 28
ruled 6-3 that states can require voters to
show identity cards
Send a Kid to Camp (Obama)
Foundation Watch asked Jerry Kellman
if ACORN has assisted the Obama
presidential campaign in any way. He replied
that its 501(c)(3) status prevents ACORN
from helping as an organization but that
“lots of grassroots members” are assisting.
Hmm. Indeed, it is illegal for a tax-exempt
charitable organization to assist a political
campaign. But given Obama’s friendly relations
with ACORN, one can only speculate
about its role.
Two new programs sponsored by the
Obama campaign are also mobilizing the
grassroots. There is no indication that these
programs have or seek tax-exempt status.
However, they will give young adults and
college students supporting Obama an
unpaid opportunity to learn fi rsthand the
fundamentals of community organizing,
Obama-style.
According to the sketchy information
available on one project, “Camp Obama”
offers activism training for campaign volunteers,
teaching them methods Obama himself
used as a community organizer. “We want
you to stop thinking about Barack Obama
and be Barack Obama,” says Jocelyn Woodards
about the intensive two-day training
course.
A second program, the Obama Organizing
Fellows, will train participants in “fi eld
organizing, messaging and other activities”
and teach them to “organize in a community,
working in conjunction with grassroots leaders
and campaign staff.” Fellows must devote
30 hours per week to the program which runs
from June to the end of the summer. Kellman
has said that the Obama campaign uses
elements of both types of organizing—the
practical and aggressive Alinsky method and
the visionary “movement” style. However,
he compares the Obama campaign—in its
“positive energy”— to the civil rights
movement.
It’s worthwhile to note that the Obama
campaign has stolen a page from Howard
Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign by taking
Internet strategy to the next level. The
campaign not only raises large sums online
from many individual donors but it is collecting
contact information on Obama website
visitors, which could be used in Novembe
for a veritable “children’s crusade” of young
Obama supporters.
ACORN’s active involvement in the
Obama campaign is likely to be signifi cant.
ACORN’s “non-partisan” Project Vote has
announced its plans to register hundreds of
thousands of voters before the November
election. That should concern all Americans
given the record of highly-publicized voter
fraud allegations lodged against ACORN
in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida
(2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado
(2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington
state (2007).
ACORN is currently involved in the
fi ght in Congress over how to deal with the
increasing number of home foreclosures.
In recent weeks Republicans have balked
at Democratic plans to include activist
groups in government programs to provide
mortgage counseling. Senator Bob Casey
(D-Pennsylvania) denounced Republicans
attacks on a Democratic bill to provide $200
million to counsel homeowners threatened by
foreclosure, noting that the bill would help
fund ACORN and the Hispanic advocacy
group La Raza. Casey may want ACORN’s
help in bringing foreclosure relief, but its
critics have looked at the group’s record and
decided ACORN is a bad risk. (For more on
ACORN, see “Voter Turnout or Voter Fraud?
Interest Groups Push for Election Reform,”
by Jonathan Bechtle, Organization Trends,
April 2006.)
Reverend Jeremiah Wright
Obama biographer David Mendell believes
community organizer Jerry Kellman
was the fi rst signifi cant infl uence on Obama’s
thinking about the connection between politics
and community. But he says the second
key infl uence was Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the
founder of Trinity United Church of Christ.
Until their recent public break, Wright and
Obama were close. Wright, whose words
inspired the title of Obama’s book, The
Audacity of Hope, offi ciated at Obama’s
wedding and baptized his children.
In the spring, Wright became a household
name throughout the nation as the media began
to draw attention to the preacher’s fi ery
sermons and speeches blaming America for
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and accusing the
U.S. government of inventing the HIV virus
“as a means of genocide against people of
color.” In one well-publicized 2003 sermon,
Wright urged his parishioners to condemn
the United States. “No, no, no, God damn
America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent
people. God damn America for treating
our citizens as less than human. God damn
America for as long as she acts like she is
God and she is supreme,” he said. And under
Wright’s leadership, on July 22, 2007,
the church newsletter reprinted a terrorist
political manifesto by Hamas offi cial Mousa
Abu Marzook.
The church’s website puts Wright’s
thinking in context: “The vision statement
of Trinity United Church of Christ is based
upon the systematized liberation theology
that started in 1969 with the publication of
Dr. James Cone’s book, Black Power and
Black Theology.”
Black liberation theologians like Cone
explicitly state a preference for Marxism as
a way for the black church to understand the
problems and needs of its members. Marxism
argues that modern society is based on
class distinctions and that an oppressor class
creates economic and social structures that
suppress its victims. Black liberation theology
identifi es the oppressor with whites
and the victims as black. Here’s a clarifying
quote from Cone: “The Christian faith does
not possess in its nature the means for analyzing
the structure of capitalism. Marxism
as a tool of social analysis can disclose the
gap between appearance and reality, and
thereby help Christians to see how things
really are.”
But social analysis is not enough. The
mission of liberation theology is social
change.
A critic of liberation theology, the black
intellectual Anthony Bradley of the Acton
Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty,
has written, “Black Liberation Theology,
originally intended to help the black community,
may have actually hurt many blacks
by promoting racial tension, victimology,
and Marxism which ultimately leads to more
oppression. As the failed ‘War on Poverty’
has exposed, the best way to keep the blacks
perpetually enslaved to government as
‘daddy’ is to preach victimology, Marxism,
and seduce blacks into thinking that upward
mobility is someone else’s responsibility in
a free society.”
Obama now says he disagrees with his
former pastor, did not hear his most infl ammatory
sermons, and is surprised by his
most recent remarks at the National Press
Club on April 28. Whatever the extent of
that disagreement, the record shows that in
2002, Obama’s last year on the board of the
Woods Fund, it made $6,000 in grants to
Trinity United Church of Christ.
A Tragedy in the Making
In The Promised Land (1995), his remarkable
study of the great black migration
to Chicago, writer Nicholas Lemann noted
the important roles urban renewal and the
interstate highway system played in reshaping
the physical landscape of the city. But he
wrote that it was the University of Chicago,
especially its school of sociology, that transformed
the expectations of Chicago’s citizens.
As an undergraduate sociology student
at the University, Saul Alinsky absorbed the
teachings of the “Chicago school” of sociology.
It taught that individual pathologies like
delinquency and crime are the result of “root
causes” solvable by progressive communitybased
social action.
Among the most debilitating notions conceived
by the activists and academics in the
University’s Hyde Park neighborhood was
the idea that poverty is a political condition.
The solution they proposed was “empowerment,”
the idea that political activism can
overcome poverty and bring about economic
betterment. Alinsky’s work in organizing
community activists to “empower” poor
people by protesting social conditions in their
neighborhoods was the consequence of this
theory. Lemann agreed that empowerment
was a wonderful-sounding idea. Too bad it
didn’t work. He writes:
“The history of the Woodlawn Organization
[an Alinsky protest project]
proved otherwise: no matter how well
organized, a community without employed
people cannot stabilize…Both
politically and in terms of reducing
crime or poverty, community action
was a failure.”
Lemann judges the 1960s War on Poverty
a failure, not least because it relied on
unelected community organizers and made
enemies of local elected offi cials. “It also
failed because its main tool, community
action, assumes a non-existent link between
political power and individual economic
improvement.”
This non-existent link seems to pervade
the policies and political outlook of Obama.
Instead of proposing self-sustaining local
programs to regenerate communities, Obama
embraced the empowerment phantom of
“community politics.” The idea that community
activists should mobilize neighborhoods
and direct programs funded by federal tax
dollars is implicit in his entire career.
Perhaps Obama came to believe that activist
politics and federal programs can solve
social problems because he saw how he was
able to use his own natural skills and evident
charisma to political advantage. After all,
when Obama says he is willing to negotiate
directly with rogue nations like North Korea
and Iran, it may be because he believes Kim
Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will
be as susceptible to his persuasive speech
and stage presence, his radiant smile, as the
American public has been. For a confi dent
man who has experienced an amazing political
career it’s not hard to imagine that you
can bring “unity” to the world as easily as
to the Democrats.
This misdirection of energies is characteristic
of Obama’s career to this point. It is a
tragic error that will doom his hopes should
he be elected president.
Elias Crim is a freelance writer in Chicago,
Illinois. Matthew Vadum is Editor of Foundation
Watch.
Capital
