Alice In Obamaland
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, August 21, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: One of the "lies" Barack Obama says are being told about him is quite true. It involves a staunch admirer of the Soviet Union and its communist society who helped launch Obama's political career.
Among the alleged lies mentioned in the Obama campaign's 40-page response to author Jerome Corsi's book "Obama Nation" is the claim that when Obama ran for state senator, "instead of stepping aside in deference to (state Sen. Alice) Palmer, Obama decided to fight her for the nomination."
The Obama campaign quotes a state representative who said Palmer "pulled her own plug."
But as ABC News senior correspondent Jake Tapper notes on his blog, it is Obama who is the truth-challenged one. "This is not a lie, this is true," Tapper says. "Palmer had decided to run for Congress, and Obama was tapped to run to replace her. When Palmer lost in the (U.S. House) primary, she wanted to stay as a state senator. Obama said no. He had every right to do so, but he decided to fight her for the nomination instead of stepping aside in deference to her."
According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama operatives flooded into the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners on Jan. 2, 1996, to begin the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of Palmer and three other lesser-known contenders for her Illinois state Senate seat. They kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
As the Tribune noted, "The man now running for president on a message of giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by leveling the playing field, but by clearing it."
In 1995, Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district's influential liberals at the home of two well-known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former members of the terrorist Weather Underground.
"I remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the Senate and running for Congress," says Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care. "(Palmer) identified (Obama) as her successor."
It was in 1995 that Palmer decided to pursue the opportunity of an open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives after Mel Reynolds of Illinois' 2nd District resigned due to allegations of sex with an underage campaign volunteer.
But Palmer hit a speed bump in November of that year when Jesse Jackson Jr. defeated her in a special election for Reynolds' empty seat.
Palmer then refiled to keep her state Senate seat and asked Obama to withdraw. Obama refused.
"I liked Alice Palmer a lot," Obama would say later. "I thought she was a good public servant. It (the process by which Obama got Palmer off the ballot) was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."
Who Alice Palmer is and what she believed is the real story here.
Ten years earlier she was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front group, an affiliate of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front group.
Palmer participated in the World Peace Council's 1983 Prague Assembly, part of the Soviet launch of the nuclear-freeze movement. The only thing it would have frozen was the Soviet Union's military superiority.
In June 1986, while editor of the Black Press Review, she wrote an article for the Communist Party USA's newspaper, the People's Daily World, now the People's Weekly World. It detailed her experience attending the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how impressed she was by the Soviet system.
Palmer gushed at the "Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and better education" and spoke of the efficiency of the Soviets' most recent five-year plan, attributing its success to "central planning." She praised their "comprehensive affirmative action program, which they have stuck to religiously — if I can use the word — since 1917."
Palmer also marveled that all Russian citizens were guaranteed a job matching their training and skills, free education, affordable housing and free medical care. Because Soviet school curricula were established at the national level, she said, "there is no second-class 'track' system in the minority-nationality schools as there is in the inferior inner city schools in my hometown, Chicago, and elsewhere in the United States."
Obama and Palmer both oppose school choice and vouchers and successful programs like the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. They prefer the central planning of education as dictated by the teachers unions and the commissars at the National Education Association.
When Obama won the Iowa caucuses, Frank Chapman, a member of the U.S. Peace Council Executive Committee, wrote a letter to the People's Weekly World celebrating the victory of Alice Palmer's former protege.
"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move," Chapman wrote. "It was a dialectical leap ushering in a new era of struggle. Marx once compared (the) revolutionary new era of struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface."
Before old-style Chicago politics as practiced by an ambitious Obama doomed their friendship, he thought Palmer was a good public servant, and Soviet admirer Palmer thought he was a worthy heir. Why? |
