VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 219In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama wrote: “Less than halfway into the campaign,
I knew in my bones that I was going to lose. Each morning from that point forward I awoke
with a vague sense of dread, realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking
hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan.” Billboards in the district
read: “I’m sticking with Bobby.” A few black elected officials endorsed Mr. Obama but most
fell in line behind the incumbent. Ministers closed ranks. The Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of
the St. Sabina Catholic Church, said other ministers and congregation members called to
complain when he endorsed Mr. Obama.’ (Janny Scott, “In 2000, a Streetwise Veteran
Schooled a Bold Young Obama,” New York Times, September 9, 2007)
Pfleger is the renegade priest whose hate-filled and sexist mockery of Senator Clinton became a
scandal at the end of the primary season; Pfleger, we see, is a close friend of Obama and has been
for a long time. If Pfleger had wanted to follow the black community, he would have gone with
Rush. Instead, he went with Obama, the darling of the elite law firms, the foundations, and the
University of Chicago. Pfleger renders much more to the foundations than he renders unto God, or
even to his crackpot race theories.
CONGRESSMAN BOBBY RUSH: OBAMA AN “EDUCATED FOOL”
When the vote came in, Obama had 30.36 percent, and Representative Rush had 61.02 per cent.
In 2000, just as in 2008, a deciding factor in the voting was Obama’s pedantic and condescending
professorial elitism and holier-than-thou demeanor, which gave the clear impression that he was
concerned about oligarchical opinion, and not about the wishes of the constituencies in the
congressional district he was asking to represent. This is a trait which, one thinks, will be with
Obama as long as he lives.
Mr. Obama’s Ivy League education and his white liberal-establishment connections also
became an issue. Mr. Rush told The Chicago Reader, “He went to Harvard and became an
educated fool. We’re not impressed with these folks with these Eastern elite degrees.” Mr. Rush
and his supporters faulted him for having missed experiences that more directly defined the
previous generation of black people. “Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests
and thinks he knows all about it,” Mr. Rush told The Reader. Mr. Obama was seen as an
intellectual, “not from us, not from the ‘hood,” said Jerry Morrison, a consultant on the Rush
campaign. Asked recently about that line of attack, Mr. Rush minimized it as “chest beating,
signifying.” The implication was not exactly that Mr. Obama was “not black enough,” as some
blacks have suggested more recently; his credentials were suspect. “It was much more a
function of class, not race,” Mr. Adelstein said. “Nobody said he’s ‘not black enough.’ They
said he’s a professor, a Harvard elite who lives in Hyde Park.” (Janny Scott, “In 2000, a
Streetwise Veteran Schooled a Bold Young Obama,” New York Times, September 9, 2007)
In the 2000 contest, class was trump, along with the uneasy perception that Obama talked a good
game in many fields in which he had never actually accomplished anything whatsoever.
Characteristically, Obama’s strong suit was fund-raising. Given the extent of Obama’s backing
from top elitist law firms and financial interests, this is hardly a surprise. Obama was a pluto-
candidate in 2000, and remains one to the present day. But, as the Obama machine discovered in
places like Ohio and Pennsylvania in the spring of 2008, even outspending an opponent by three to
one, four to one or even five to one will not produce victory if the candidate is viewed as an
arrogant oligarchical elitist. In 2000,