Denver — Tonight, Barack Obama will try to convince America that he is a moderate, ideologically reasonable candidate. If his July 2004 keynote at the Democratic National Convention is any indicator, he may bring up issues of personal responsibility, or discuss the fact that, as he has said in the past, “fatherhood does not end at conception” — an idea which actually contradicts his position on abortion.
Before you buy the idea that Obama is a centrist, it is worth your time to read a story about whose support Obama values, and whose support he is willing to repudiate in order to preserve a veneer of ideological purity.
You’ve probably never read
The Black Commentator. It’s a small, far-left publication with editorial offices in New Jersey. You may have noticed the paper in the fall of 2003 during the confirmation hearing of Janice Rogers Brown, a conservative black justice on California’s supreme court. That’s when
The Black Commentator created and distributed a
tasteless cartoon of Brown, wearing an exaggerated afro wig and huge lips, being greeted to the federal judiciary by President Bush, who accidentally calls her “Ms. Clarence.
To give you an idea of the tone and the slant of this publication, their lead editorial on January 23, 2003 was titled, “
Condoleezza Rice: The Devil’s Handmaiden.” The thesis of this piece: “
Condoleezza Rice is the purest expression of the race traitor. No polite description is possible.” The
Black Commentator, you might guess, is a fringe publication, a fever swamp of black radicalism. So you might be surprised to learn that its editors successfully engaged Barack Obama in a three-week correspondence when he was a candidate for the United States Senate and forced him to repudiate an endorsement by Democratic moderates.
In its June 5, 2003 issue, the
Commentator’s Bruce Dixon called out Obama for the fact that his name had appeared on the Democratic Leadership Council’s
list of 100 rising stars. (Dixon refers to the DLC as “the corporate money apparatus of the Democratic Party.”) In a lengthy and turgid piece, Dixon also pointed out that at the very same time Obama’s name showed up on the DLC list, the text of his 2002 speech against the Iraq War was abruptly removed from his campaign website without explanation.
Was Obama selling out? Was he a “summer soldier?” After all, a May 2003 Gallup poll had suggested that 79 percent of Americans still believed the Iraq War was going well.
On June 13, 2003, Obama responded to this criticism with a
letter in which he denied any direct contact between his office and the DLC. It was published in the
Commentator’s June 19 issue:
I don’t know who nominated me for the DLC list of 100 rising stars, nor did I expend any effort to be included on the list beyond filling out a three line questionnaire asking me to describe my current political office, my proudest accomplishment, and my cardinal rules of politics. Since my mother taught me not to reject a compliment when it’s offered, I didn’t object to the DLC’s inclusion of my name on their list. I certainly did not view such inclusion as an endorsement on my part of the DLC platform.
Obama put the speech back up on his website, and explained that it had been removed in the first place only because his staff was trying to keep it stocked with fresh material. (Perhaps there was not enough room in the Internet’s “tubes” for it?)
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