Review
Obama a Lefty, Not a Reformer
The first serious negative biography of Senator Barack Obama casts the Democratic nominee as a fake reformer and a real liberal.
The Case Against Barack Obama by National Review's David Freddoso, blasts Obama for failing to take on the Chicago machine, for listening to "radical advisors," and for backing "doctrinaire liberal" causes from teachers unions to abortion rights.
It does not, however, compare him to Paris Hilton, or dwell at length on his religion or race - making the substance of The Case Against Barack Obama sound a bit unfamiliar amid a campaign cacophony of hyperbolic web ads, alleged race cards, and viral smears.
Freddoso says John McCain's campaign and Republicans at large are making the wrong case against the Illinois senator.
"I don't think you beat Obama by saying that he's Paris Hilton," said Freddoso, a reporter for the conservative magazine National Review, referring to McCain's latest advertising campaign. "The more important thing is really to look at is he who he says he is? Is he really this great reformer?"
Freddoso's book, released today by the conservative publishing house Regnery and provided exclusively to
Politico by the publisher, occupies a small island in the often-shrill sea of criticism of Obama. As a range of conservatives suggest that Obama is a closet radical, and as McCain's campaign aims to disqualify him from the White House on the grounds of his international fame, Freddoso makes a case that conservatives should look at the presumptive Democratic nominee's record.
His thesis: "It's not that Obama is a bad person. It's just that he's like all the rest of them. Not a reformer. Not a Messiah. Just like all the rest of them in Washington. And just like all the other liberals too."
Freddoso's is one of two new books harshly attacking Obama. The other, by Jerome Corsi, reportedly covers some of the same territory as the viral emails that have plagued the Democratic candidate, making much of his slender connections to Islam and his teenage drug use.
Freddoso opts largely for a fact-based critique, and writes that the viral and overt smears have allowed Obama to evade substantive criticism.
"Too many of those criticizing Obama have been content merely to slander him," he writes. False rumors about Obama's religion and ancestry have produced, Freddoso writes, "an intellectual laziness among the very people who should be carefully scrutinizing Obama."
His book comes with Republican popularity at a historic low, amid widespread disenchantment with Republican ideals of limited government and hawkish foreign policy. Many - including, apparently, McCain's strategists - doubt a Republican can win a policy face-off. But as the real campaign hones in on the character of the candidates, Freddoso's book attempts to build an alternate case against Obama. Freddoso's argument begins in Chicago....Though Obama's first political steps were in Hyde Park's reformist politics, Freddoso focuses on the smooth accommodation he made to the machine.... -- Politico, Ben Smith, August 4, 2008
Review
Here's Looking at You, Kid
If find yourself believing that "we are the ones we've been waiting for", or that "this is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow" or even, tout court, that "yes we can", the chances are that you are suffering from a severe case of Obamamania.
Tens of millions of Americans and an even larger number of Europeans have fallen victim to the syndrome, which involves a belief that a young black senator from Chicago can cure the world's ills, in part because of his race, in part because of his obvious intelligence and rhetorical skill; but in no part because of any record of achievement in the past. Fortunately, an inexpensive remedy is at hand.
It comes in the form of a new book by David Freddoso, The Case Against Barack Obama. Unlike the authors of some of the cruder attacks on Mr. Obama, Mr. Freddoso works for a well-respected organization, the online version of the National Review. Although it is a conservative publication and the author makes no secret of where his political sympathies lie, this is a well-researched, extensively footnoted work. It aims not so much to attack Mr. Obama as to puncture the belief that he is in some way an extraordinary, mould-breaking politician.
The Obama that emerges from its pages is not, Mr. Freddoso says, "a bad person. It's just that he's like all the rest of them. Not a reformer. Not a Messiah. Just like all the rest of them in Washington." And the author makes a fairly compelling case that this is so. The best part of the book concentrates on Mr. Obama's record in Chicago, his home town and the place from which he was elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, before moving to the United States Senate in 2004. The book lays out in detail how this period began in a way that should shock some of Mr. Obama's supporters: he won the Democratic nomination for his Illinois seat by getting a team of lawyers to throw all the other candidates off the ballot on various technicalities. One of those he threw off was a veteran black politician, a woman who helped him get started in politics in the first place.
If Mr. Obama really were the miracle-working, aisle-jumping, consensus-seeking new breed of politician his spin-doctors make him out to be, you would expect to see the evidence in these eight years. But there isn't very much. Instead, as Mr. Freddoso rather depressingly finds, Mr. Obama spent the whole period without any visible sign of rocking the Democratic boat.
He was a staunch backer of Richard Daley, who as mayor failed to stem the corruption that has made Chicago one of America's most notorious cities. Nor did he lift a finger against John Stroger and his son Todd....Cook County, where Chicago is located, has been extensively criticized for corrupt practices by a federally appointed judge....
Take a break from the hugs, hopium with a good read
If what you want from Sen. Barack Obama's historic Democratic convention speech on Thursday night is to give yourself up to profound emotion and to join others in common passion and release, then guzzle some hopium and enjoy. Or you can enrich the experience by reading The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate by David Freddoso. Freddoso's book, on the best-seller lists, is the anti hopium. It is the pin of reason to the Obama balloon.
From the Inside Flap
You Don't Know Barack Obama Until You Read This Book
Has any major candidate for president of the United States ever received less critical examination than Barack Obama? Who is this man, who was only elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004? How did someone with his meager record of accomplishment become the Democratic nominee for president? How did someone with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate and long-standing relationships with a former terrorist, a racist minister, and the corrupt operators of Chicago Machine politics end up as a supposed beacon of a newer, cleaner, bipartisan politics? Investigative reporter David Freddoso has the answers. Doing the legwork that the mainstream media has neglected, applying a critical eye while the media swoons before the Obama-messiah, and posing the hard questions that Obama needs to answer, Freddoso reveals a politician as calculating as any other, a far-left Democrat who goes beyond "abortion rights" to supporting de facto infanticide, whose "new politics" amount to Chicago-style hardball overlain with lofty rhetoric, and who, from his positions of power, has helped his patrons. In The Case Against Barack Obama, you'll learn:
* How Barack Obama opposed a bill banning infanticide-by-neglect--a stance too extreme even for Nancy Pelosi. (Freddoso has an exclusive interview with the nurse central to the case.)
* How Obama's friendship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was no accident, but a carefully thought-out personal and political decision * Why Obama thought his association with the Reverend Wright and the terrorist Bill Ayers wouldn't matter--an exposé of the insular radical chic of Chicago's Hyde Park politics
* What Obama really did for convicted developer Tony Rezko * Debunking the myth of Obama's "new" politics: the forgotten tale of how Obama won his first election by throwing all of his competitors off the ballot
* A story Obama would like to stay buried in Chicago: how he used his clout as a U.S. senator to save the corrupt Cook County Political Machine when reformers of both parties tried to challenge the entrenched political bosses * How Obama has repeatedly steered taxpayer money to campaign donors
Sober, fair, and thoroughly researched--and all the more powerful and provocative because of it--
The Case Against Barack Obama removes the halo from a man less qualified, and more radical, than the mainstream media has let you know.
About the Author
David Freddoso is an American political conservative commentator, journalist, and author, best known for writing three books critical of the Barack Obama administration as well as for his columns for the National Review Online and the Washington Examiner. The first book, The Case Against Barack Obama, reached the New York Times bestseller list as well as the Amazon.com official Top 20 list. Having worked in politics since 2002, his latest book is Spin Masters: How the Media Ignored the Real News and Helped Re-elect Barack Obama, which he published January 28, 2013. His writings have involved criticism of what he sees as left-liberal media bias in the American journalistic mainstream.
