Martha’s Vineyard: ‘Birthplace of the Man from Nowhere’s Presidency’
canadafreepress.com
By Judi McLeod
Friday, August 16, 2013
Like a homing pigeon, President Barack Obama always returns to Martha’s Vineyard.
There since Saturday, Obama vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard in 2009, 2010 and 2011, missing only last summer when he was running for re-election.
But is it really the lure of the ocean or wanting to get in golfing and family time that keeps bringing him back?
It now turns out that ‘The Presidency of the Man from Nowhere’ both began and continues in Martha’s Vineyard, where uncrowned ‘Queen Behind the Oval office’ Valerie Jarrett is a longtime summer resident.
Senior Obama advisor and Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, Jarrett, who receives full-time Secret Service Protection, has 24-7 access to Obama White House living quarters, making the Martha’s Vineyard getaways for the two all the more curious.
Madam Jarrett claims huge influence in her power-behind-the-presidency position. “When billionaire investor Warren Buffett showed up for a private lunch with the president last July, the table was set for three.” (New York Times, Sept. 1, 2012). “If Carl Rove was known as George W. Bush’s political brain, Ms. Jarrett is Mr. Obama’s spine.”
“She is is also his gatekeeper.”
Jarrett’s Martha’s Vineyard oceanfront home, within walking distance of the East Chop Beach Club in an area of pricey Oak Bluff, is the Obamas’ perennial ‘Home Away from Home’ that draws Barack and Michelle back like moths to the proverbial flame. According to capecodonline.com, Jarrett owns the Seaview Ave. home.
Many people think Chicago when they think Jarrett. It was in Chicago where she was tagged “slum landlord”.
“Jarrett’s record before she went to Washington was spotty at best. After Mayor Daley made her commissioner of planning, she became embroiled in a massive screw-up in the city’s public housing revitalization plan, which cost Chicago millions of dollars in overruns. Daley fired her without explanation. (The Amateur)
“After she left city hall, Jarrett became CEO of Habitat Executive Services, where she earned $300,000 in salary and $550,000 in deferred compensation. She managed a federally subsidized housing complex that was seized by the government after inspectors found crime-infested slum conditions and widespread blight.”
Savvy Internet blogger Ulsterman was the first to notice when reading about Obama’s lunch with Jarrett yesterday that it was a bizarre Muhammad-going-to-the-mountain kind of situation: “Upon reading this report, I was first surprised, as I said, by the fact that Valerie Jarrett has a home in the super wealthy neighborhood of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. Second, I was struck by the fact that the President of the United States was traveling to see Jarrett, and not the other way around. It would appear even the pretense of Obama actually being in charge is being dropped away during his second term.”
Ulsterman being Ulsterman put his investigative skills to work and did a little more digging and came across “this rather interesting article from a 2009 edition of Martha’s Vineyard Magazine:
“On July 27, 2004, the morning that Barack Obama was to give his now-famous keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention in Boston, a Philadelphia Daily News headline read “Who the Heck Is This Guy?” Then came the 2,297 words, spoken over 17 minutes, that gave America the answer: He was an unheralded political phenomenon. But there were people on this Island who knew long before that speech what his potential was.
“Valerie Jarrett, Oak Bluffs seasonal resident, longtime Obama confidante, and now a senior advisor to the president, was one who knew. And she invited him to take a little time out from his Senate campaign (for which she was his finance chairman) and come down to Martha’s Vineyard after the Boston appearance. Two others who knew were Harvard law professors Charles Ogletree and Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr.
“And so it came to pass that the Obamas – Barack, Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha – came here for a brief vacation, and Obama was invited along to Edgartown’s Old Whaling Church, where Charles was staging his regular summer forum on race issues. Barack Who? was yet to be elected as a U.S. senator, and he was not on the program. But he dropped in, Charles says, “to meet a few people.” And Skip Gates introduced him as “my pick for President in 2012.”
“He was a little off in terms of how soon it would happen,” Charles says with a chuckle.
“Barack walked into the Old Whaling Church through the back door and the place was packed and folks went wild,” he says. “I expected [Obama] just to wave and thank people, but he gave a wonderful talk….He made quite a splash.” There was a reception in Obama’s honor the next day at Skip’s house in Oak Bluffs: “It was a remarkable gathering of Vineyard veterans who relished the idea that this guy was popular beyond measure,” Charles says.
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