Chicago Daily Observer

Obama has two new ads up, both highlighting McCain advisers who have been employed as lobbyists.

If having a staffer who has worked as a lobbyist makes you “on the take,” I wonder what it means when you take more money from companies like Fannie and Freddie than anybody except Chris Dodd. More than, say, 352 other lawmakers, going back to 1989.

Seems like time for a response ad. “When the highly-paid CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac felt reformers closing in, they needed a defender. They knew where to send their money. The Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd… and Barack Obama. They gave Obama more than $126,000, in less than four years. While Fannie and Freddie was running aground, Dodd, Obama, and Congress looked elsewhere. Ask yourself who can really bring change to Washington, and keep our financial system from running aground.”

Just to review, the public cannot get access to paperwork related grants distributed by then-state-legislator Obama (records from 1997 to 2000 aren’t available); his state legislative office records (which he says may have been thrown out); he refuses to release a specific list of law clients, instead giving a list of all of his firm’s clients, numbering several hundred each year; he won’t release his application to the state bar (where critics wonder if he lied in responding to questions about parking tickets and past drug use); he’s never released any legal or billing records to verify that he only did a few hours of work for a nonprofit tied to convicted donor Rezko; and he’s never released any medical records, just a one-page letter from his doctor.

hicago papers, radio, and television haven’t been hagiographic in their coverage of local-rising-star-turned-Democratic-nominee Barack Obama. They dug deep into Obama’s real-estate dealings with developer/felon Tony Rezko, and provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of Rezko’s trial.

But if one were to assemble a list of the revelations that have most damaged Obama’s efforts to win the presidency, two at or near the top would be the video of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright; and Obama’s long, working relationship with William Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and founder of the radical Weathermen domestic terror group, which planted bombs in public buildings.

In their Michelle Obama piece, which is titled, “The War over Michelle,” Time’s Nancy Gibbs and Jay Newton-Small note that conservatives and some others “hear ‘whining’ from a woman preaching a ‘Gospel of Misery,’ about everything from her student loans to the high cost of piano lessons,” and other “deteriorating conditions.”

They point out: “They are probably right that most Americans have a happier impression of the past 40 years. But the skies have darkened in the past year … Those who hear Michelle in person often talk about feeling that they are seeing for the first time a political figure who understands what their lives are really about.”

A thought somewhat related to the Rezko stuff… My friend Cam noted a few weeks ago that while Americans have seen liberal presidential candidates before, we haven’t seen a big-city machine politician like Barack Obama at the top of the ticket in a long time.

John Kerry lived in Boston, but played little role in local politics; he had a brief stint as a lieutenant governor and then went to the Senate. Al Gore, too, was a creature of the Senate and the dual-edged sword that is the vice presidency. And no offense to Bill Clinton, but Little Rock and the incestuous Arkansas political culture isn’t the same as the big-city hardball of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore… Dukakis, Mondale, Carter… most of these guys came up in state legislatures or spent long stretches of their pre-presidential-campaign career in state or ... Read More...