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Welcome to the website for John K. Wilson’s new book, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest (Paradigm Publishers, October 2007).
Barack Obama is quickly becoming America’s most popular politician, and his run for the presidency has brought huge crowds at home and an unprecedented wave of international attention as well. Much more than a biography, this book is a political tour of Obama’s legislative experience as well as his ideas about race, religion, and politics. Political writer John K. Wilson, author of four previous books including a study of Newt Gingrich, explores the reaction Obama has received from the left, the right, and the media.
To contact the author, please click here.
Submitted by JohnKWilson on Thu, 08/28/2008 - 11:22am.
Note: I'm the author of the book, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest(watch my live call-in Sun. Sept. 7 at noon ET on C-SPAN2), but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.
National Review writer Stanley Kurtz put himself into the headlines
earlier this month by pushing the guilt-by-association link between
Bill Ayers and Barack Obama because they both worked on the Chicago
Annenberg Challenge to improve public schools. When Kurtz went to look
at the Annenberg files at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
librarians temporarily blocked access out of concerns about whether
they had the proper permission to open them to the public. UIC quickly
changed their dumb decision, and this week Kurtz went to read the
Annenberg papers.
Previously, Kurtz had speculated that "access to the CAC records promises to provide a treasure trove of documentary evidence."
And what did he find? Absolutely nothing.
Kurtz's
grand conclusion: Ayers and Obama went to the same meetings! And this
brilliant attack by Kurtz: Obama is "comfortable working with people"
on the left. Well, that's no surprise, since he's also comfortable
working with people on the far right.
But although Kurtz smears failed for lack of even a sliver of any
evidence, he and the far right have come up with another line of attack.
Today, Rush Limbaugh claimed Kurtz was a victim of repression by the
Obama campaign. Why? Because Obama's campaign sent out an email urging
people to call into Milt Rosenberg's radio show
where Kurtz appeared last night. Limbaugh claimed, "Obama does not want
people to know how close he is to Bill Ayers." According to Limbaugh,
asking people to call into a radio show to criticize Kurtz's lies was a
"brutal sleaze and smear tactic."
Unlike Limbaugh, I listened to Kurtz on Rosenberg's show. More than
half the show was devoted to Kurtz's laughable attacks on Obama (in one
case, Kurtz started reading from an innocuous book on global justice
that he admitted Obama probably never read, but which he linked to
Obama because Obama knows the man who runs the foundation that produced
the book). There were a couple of people just reading from the Obama
campaign email, but plenty of anti-Obama people had the chance to call
and were apparently given preferential treatment to get on the air
(Rosenberg even called back notorious Obama critic Steve Diamond
because his line was bad). So Limbaugh was lying about an "effort made
to clog up the phone lines."
Amazingly, Kurtz and Rosenberg played the same victimization card as
Limbaugh. During the show, Kurtz accused the Obama campaign of
"stifling reasonable debate and free inquiry" by sending out an email
encouraging people to call in to the show and express themselves. He
claimed, "this is an effort to silence me illegitimately." And you
agreed: "It sure has that ring to my ears."
Well, I got the email, and it says nothing about stifling debate. Here's what the email says:
In the next few hours, we have a crucial opportunity to fight one of
the most cynical and offensive smears ever launched against Barack.
Tonight, WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz
a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears. He's
currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00
p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and
University of Illinois professor William Ayers.
Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are
legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the
standards of political discourse.
Call into the "Extension 720" show with Milt Rosenberg at (312) 591-7200
(Show airs from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. tonight)
Then report back on your call at http://my.barackobama.com/...
Kurtz has been using his absurd TV appearances in an awkward and
dishonest attempt to play the terrorism card. His current ploy is to
embellish the relationship between Barack and Ayers.
Just last night on Fox News, Kurtz drastically exaggerated
Barack's connection with Ayers by claiming Ayers had recruited Barack
to the board of the Annenberg Challenge. That is completely false and
has been disproved in numerous press accounts.
It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy
character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive
ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer
sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies.
Kurtz is scheduled to appear from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. in the Chicago market.
Calling will only take a minute, and it will make a huge difference
if we nip this smear in the bud. Confront Kurtz tonight before this
goes any further:
The campaign also offered this advice:
Tips for making your call:
Be honest, but be civil.
Be persistent. It may take a few attempts to get through to the show. Just keep trying. Your call is important.
Use the talking points above to help you speak confidently and concisely.
Everything in the Obama email was correct, and it never urged
censorship (or even rudeness) of any kind. By contrast, Kurtz has been
guilt of numerous inaccurate smears.
According to Kurtz,
"just after Barack Obama effectively secured a seat in the State
Senate, the University of Chicago invented a new job, for which it
hired Michelle Obama. In that job, Michelle would be able to channel
University of Chicago students into the radical anti-American groups
that she and her husband worked with, and whose ideology has received
far too little scrutiny. Some of these organizations, even if
unofficially, provided campaign workers for Barack Obama on election
day."
This is total nonsense. It's noteworthy that Kurtz doesn't actually
mention the names of any of these "radical anti-American groups." Does
he know what these groups were that the Community Service Center was
involved with? Or is he just making things up? I challenge Kurtz to
identify the groups Michelle "channeled" students into, and which of
these are "radical anti-American." Kurtz likes to smear every liberal
group as "deeply radical and anti-American," which is an indication of
anti-intellectual propensities.
Kurtz also likes to speculate about bizarre conspiracy theories: "So
we see here an unusual arrangement between the University of Chicago
and its new teacher/State Senator. The Senator’s wife provides
political cover for the university with the community, in return for
which the university provides a previously non-existent and prestigious
position to the Senator’s wife, which allows her to funnel students
into hard-left political groups that sometimes provide campaign workers
to the Senator."
This kind of crackpot idea is both insane and loathsome. The
"prestigious" position that Michelle Obama took was a relatively
low-level administrative post with few resources. I know because I
interviewed her at the time for a campus newspaper. The Community
Services program was politically bland, not "hard-left" unless you're
an extreme right-winger who thinks every group that helps people is
vaguely communist.
The Ayers smear by Kurtz is part of a larger right-wing smear
movement, such as the advertisement claiming that "Barack Obama is
friends with Ayers, defending him as quote 'respectable' and
'mainstream.'"
This is false. Obama is not friends with Ayers. The proof offered is
Axelrod calling them "friendly," which is not the same as friends.
Obama is friendly to lots of people. Also, Obama never defended Ayers
as "respectable" and "mainstream." His campaign posted a newspaper
article which said that (and it's true).
But rather than admit that they're engaged in a low-life smear
campaign without any proof, the far right has decided to claim that
criticism of their actions is a form of repression. It's a sign of how
low the conservative movement in America has sunk, where they refuse to
engage in an honest debate of ideas.
Crossposted at DailyKos.
Submitted by JohnKWilson on Tue, 08/26/2008 - 5:27pm.
Note: I'm the author of the book, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest (watch my live call-in Sun. Sept. 7 at noon ET on C-SPAN2), but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.
Yesterday, I posted a diary here on Rick MacArthur's false attacks against Barack Obama. I didn't have time to focus on another one of MacArthur's lies:
"if you believe that Obama is going to get us out of Iraq, think again.
The people I talk to, the people who know the foreign policy entourage
around Obama, particularly Anthony Lake, Samantha Power, these are the
conventional Wilsonian liberal interventionists who more or less
favored invading Iraq to begin with, or at least they kept their mouths
shut, or they might have preferred to do it with more UN cooperation,
more European help, and so on and so forth."
Here
is the response I got from Samantha Power: "the charge is ridiculous. i
opposed the war in iraq and spoke out in radio and television. i
consistently and loudly favored withdrawal. i have spoken out about the
need to incorporate the welfare of iraqis into withdrawl plans. since
rick is a person who has spoken out forcefully against the falsehoods
of the bush administration, it is disappointing that he himself proves
so indifferent to facts." This 2004 Time article confirms that Power opposed the war in Iraq.
I didn't contact Anthony Lake, but at least one report indicates that he opposed the war in Iraq.
It's true that Power and Lake (and Obama) are not isolationists. And
that's a good thing. One of the dangers of any president is to fight
the previous war and blunder because of it (that's McCain's problem
with the Vietnam War he wants to win in Iraq). The selection of Joe
Biden, who supported the war in Iraq, raised questions in the minds of
some progressives about Obama's commitment to end the war in Iraq. It's
all nonsense. Obama is willing to listen to people who, like Biden,
have interesting ideas but are sometimes wrong. However, it's
ultimately Obama's judgment that matters, and his judgment has been
sound.
Crossposted at DailyKos.
Submitted by JohnKWilson on Mon, 08/25/2008 - 5:04pm.
Note: I'm the author of the book, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest (watch my live call-in Sun. Sept. 7 at noon ET on C-SPAN2), but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.
John (Rick) MacArthur was on Democracy Now Monday, talking about his forthcoming book, You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America (Melville House Publishing).
Along the way, he smeared Barack Obama, repeating many of the false
Republican talking points about Chicago and Obama’s background.
MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, reflects a disturbing
trend on the left to destroy a pragmatic progressive like Obama rather
than try to contribute to political change in this country.
According
to MacArthur, our political system is unfair because "not everyone
could get slated by the Cook County Democratic machine the way Barack
Obama was on several occasions when he was an Illinois politician."
This is absolutely false. Obama was never "slated" by the Democratic
machine. When Obama ran for US Senate in the 2004 primary, he beat Dan
Hynes, the candidate of the Democratic machine and the son of a
powerful Cook County politician.
I certainly believe that there's a Daley machine in Chicago. But
it's not an all-powerful.entity, particularly not in state politics and
especially not in the independent area of Hyde Park which Obama
represented. To claim that Daley ordered Alice Palmer in 1995 to
endorse a little-known lawyer like Obama with no Daley connection goes
beyond any possible logic. Ironically, right-winger David Freddoso has
an even more insane conspiracy theory, blaming Obama for conspiring
with Daley to destroy Palmer supposedly because Daley saw her as a
threat to run against him for Mayor. So which conspiracy theory is it?
Did Mayor Daley conspire with Palmer to anoint Obama her successor, or
conspire with Obama to get rid of Palmer? Of course, neither theory is
even remotely plausible. The obvious reality is this: Palmer decided to
run for Congress and picked Obama as an excellent candidate to endorse
for her job. She did badly in her run for Congress, and decided at the
last minute to try to keep her Senate seat, but Obama didn't want to
give up his big chance for a political life, and so he challenged her
flawed petitions. That's it, end of story, no conspiracy here at all.
Yet MacArthur claims, Obama "is sponsored by the political
organization that epitomizes one-party rule in this country, the Cook
County Democratic machine run by Richard Daley." Obama has never been
"sponsored" by Daley. After Obama won the 2004 primary, Daley endorsed
Obama, but it’s hardly surprising that a mayor would support a hometown
candidate, and it was totally inconsequential for Obama.
Nor is it true that Daley "doesn’t allow people to run just because
they feel like it." Daley is corrupt, but he doesn’t actually have the
power to prevent people from running for public office, and he is
mostly indifferent about candidates for the state legislature.
But MacArthur treats Daley like he’s some kind of all-powerful god
in Chicago. According to MacArthur, "Barack Obama never took a position
on the big box minimum wage bill, because that’s not something that
would have pleased his political sponsor, who is Mayor Daley." Of
course, Obama never took a position on it because it was a city issue,
not something for a US Senator to decide. Obama might have felt
(correctly) that it was a dubious idea anyway. Increasing the national
minimum wage is far more important than creating a separate minimum
wage for a few big box stores that can avoid it by relocating in the
suburbs.
The Democracy Now conversation then turned to another distorted line of attack against Obama:
AMY GOODMAN: The names of the largest contributors to the Obama campaign, the corporations that are most funding him?
RICK MacARTHUR: Well, you’re looking at Lehman Brothers and
Citigroup, which is Bob Rubin’s—where Bob Rubin works. Goldman Sachs is
his number one banking contributor, if you put all the bundlers
together.
This is a totally false picture of the campaign financing system. No
corporations give money to candidates. Instead, individuals who work at
these corporations give money. MacArthur even complains that the people
giving money to Clinton or Obama often came from the same top
companies, although he never explains why it matters.
And even MacArthur admitted in an op-ed
that Obama has raised money from people who may be hurt by his policies
for more tax fairness: "So far, Obama has outraised John McCain among
employees of hedge funds $822,000 to $348,000 — this although John
McCain wants to leave the capital-gains rate at 15 percent and opposes
treating hedge-fund partner income as personal income."
It's rather amusing that John R. MacArthur, who is president of
Harper's magazine because he convinced his grandfather's incredibly
rich foundation to save the magazine in 1980, should be so suspicious
of wealthy people giving money. MacArthur claims that "Obama spends so
much time courting the rich," but the truth is that Obama's grassroots
approach to fundraising has freed him somewhat, compared to past
candidates, from the need to court the wealthy. No president has ever
enacted such a massive tax cut for the poor and massive tax increase on
the rich as Obama has proposed, but MacArthur considers it "just a few
raindrops on a scorched earth of class bias."
MacArthur also condemns Obama for taking money from corporate
lawyers even while he refuses donations from lobbyists, calling it "a
difference without a distinction." Actually, there’s a very important
distinction: lobbyists are registered, which allows them to be
excluded. Exactly how does MacArthur propose for Obama to identify
"corporate lawyers" so that he can refuse their money? The ban on
lobbyist money is mostly symbolic, but it is an important symbol.
Perhaps the worst lie MacArthur told in the interview about Obama is
this: "he’s also getting a lot of money from News Corporation. I mean,
Rupert Murdoch hedges his bets very carefully, and he was very careful
to split it down the middle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama."
Once again, MacArthur is completely wrong. Rupert Murdoch has hosted
a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, and twice donated her money
personally. According to opensecrets.org, Murdoch has never given any
money to Obama. Is that MacArthur’s notion of "split it down the
middle"?
Murdoch also gave a $2300 donation to McCain in June. Is MacArthur stupid enough to imagine that Rupert Murdoch is
breaking the law and ordering some of his employees to donate money to
Barack Obama, the candidate Murdoch is opposing? Does MacArthur
actually think that Obama would support Murdoch’s stands because a few
executives at News Corporation are giving Obama a minuscule proportion
of his total fundraising?
Why does the left have a death wish for progressive politics? Why
are Rick MacArthur and Amy Goodman repeating a series of right-wing
lies and smears about Barack Obama? I confess that I don’t understand
why the Goodman and MacArthur feel the need to viciously attack the
most progressive candidate of a major political party in American
history. But if they’re going to criticize Obama (and nobody is above
critique), they should at least try to avoid repeating the worst
right-wing lies about him.
I’d be happy to debate MacArthur about Obama on Democracy Now or any
other show. We need to have an honest debate about progressive
politics, not conservative attacks wrapped in the cloak of leftists.
Crossposted on DailyKos.
Submitted by JohnKWilson on Fri, 08/22/2008 - 9:22am.
With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy (no, wait, he should be apologizing to all of us for that lame redneck schtick):
If you can't count how many homes you have, you might be a rich guy.
If you think it takes $5 million a year to be rich, you might be a rich guy.
If you think some people "are poor if they’re billionaires," you might be a rich guy.
If you have a fireplace next to the outdoor spa in one of your mansions, you might be a rich guy.
If your plan to cut taxes on the wealthy would save your family $373,429 a year, you might be a rich guy.
If you dumped your first wife to have an affair with a wealthy heiress, you might be(come) a rich guy.
If you fly around with a lobbyist on corporate jets while doing favors for her client, you might be a rich guy.
If you wear $520 loafers, you might be a rich guy.
If your annual expenses for servants are five times the median income per person in America, you might be a rich guy.
If you refer to your 6-acre Sedona lakeside estate, worth more than one million dollars and complete with a large home, a guest house, and the house next door, as a "cabin," you might be a rich guy.
If you think that no American would pick lettuce for less than $50 an hour, you might be a rich guy.
If you fly around on your wife's corporate jet for free, you might be a rich guy.
If you think that big corporations need $200 billion in tax giveaways, you might be a rich guy.
If you think inheritance taxes on multi-millionaires need to be cut by 67%, you might be a rich guy.
If you think being given a vice president's job at your father-in-law's beer company is an accomplishment, you might be a rich guy.
If you and your wife are worth well over $100 million, you might be a rich guy.
If you think selling junk on eBay is how Americans can avoid poverty, you might be a rich guy.
If you think it's normal to take a free trip to Charles Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat
and get $112,000 in campaign donations in exchange for meeting with
federal regulators on Keating's behalf, you might be a rich guy.
Crossposted at DailyKos.
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