Has anybody ever done a timeline on Obama's time in Chicago, and the whole community organizer thing? The latter especially bugs me, because that's one of those "everybody knows" things:

It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter registration drive.

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.

Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.

Ouch!

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

(A colleague recently reported having heard this narrative from a friend, citing the latter’s conversion at the hands of her eighteen year old. I observed that three short years ago the daughter was likely acting the same way about Britney Spears.)

Any adult who makes their political choices based upon a child's preferences has some issues going on there that I don't even want to think about.

We discussed it a week or so ago at riverdaughter's place. What we discovered was fairly vague (surprise) and left me with more questions than answers.

My question was who paid the bills and what was their purpose in doing so?

I'll see if I can find the thread, there was some good stuff there.

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Real ponies don't oink - Patrick McManus

Here's the link, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, bostonboomer has done a great job:

http://riverdaughter.wordpress.com/2008/...

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Real ponies don't oink - Patrick McManus

It's almost as if he has something against vacuous opportunists.

and it reminded me of something that I read on a comment section (somewhere-of course can't remember) the other day. I do know about this rezkowatch site-have checked it out before, but had never seen this particular page. I had this 'holy shit' reaction to the list of Chicago friends on it (gotta read the entire page). So, if this is something that everybody already knows about, just be gentle with me.....I am, after all, a dumber than dirt Clinton supporter.

http://rezkowatch.blogspot.com/2008/04/o...

This graf from the Reed article:

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.

David Axelrod was Daley's PR strategist. Ahem.

I don't know if it's my age--not that I'm old, mind you--but I'm been on the planet long enough to have gained an intuition about spotting BS. Obama reeks of it. Didn't like him from the beginning of the campaign when I began seeing more of him, more than his 2004 convention speech. Nice talk but where's the walk? Empty suit is what I initially discerned and with more exposure to him, my opinion plummets lower and lower.

Thanks for pointing this out, Vast Left. Props!

Speaking of Obama's rousing 2004 speech, interesting insights from Vanity Fair interviews of his friends and family by Todd Purdom:

Obama’s good friend Martin Nesbitt, a successful black businessman in Chicago, spent the day of the speech with him, traveling from appearance to appearance. “We were walking down the street in Boston, and this crowd was growing behind us, kind of like Tiger Woods at the Masters. And I turned to Barack and I said, ‘This is incredible. You’re like a rock star.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘If you think it’s bad today, wait till tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?,’ and he said, ‘My speech is pretty good.’?” It was an extraordinary display of self-confidence, and self-knowledge. “All of the rest of us are groping as to how to handle this, because we couldn’t ever imagine we’d be in this place we’re in,” Obama’s brother-in-law Craig Robinson told me. “I think the way my sister is processing it is day by day. I think the way that Barack is processing it is as just another step in his strategic plan.”

M'yeah.