VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 223Organization. “We certainly thought those were his positions,” said David Igasaki, the group’s
chairman, who noted Mr. Obama had also interviewed with the group. “We understand that
people change their views. But it sort of bothers me that he doesn’t acknowledge that. He tries
to say that was never his view.”’ (Jo Becker and Christopher Drew, “Pragmatic Politics, Forged
on the South Side,” New York Times, May 11, 2008.)
Obama was able to impress allies and observers with his matchless flexibility and ductility when
it came to compromise; this was all the easier for him because in the final analysis he had no
principles at all.
His willingness to negotiate — the interrogation law ended up with a host of exceptions —
gained him a reputation as a pragmatist who could sell compromise as a victory to all sides, said
Peter Baroni, then the legal counsel to the Republican caucus. “He took what came into the fray
as a very leftist bill, a very leftist proposal, a very non-law-enforcement bill,” Mr. Baroni said,
“and he appeased law enforcement and brought everyone around to support it.” (Jo Becker and
Christopher Drew, “Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side,” New York Times, May 11,
2008.)
Obama has demonstrably always instinctively tended to the pro-austerity position demanded by
the financiers and bankers who own him and who have fostered his career. This approach is clearly
evident in Obama’s claims about his sponsorship of welfare to work programs, in which he claims
that he reduced the welfare rolls by 80% — meaning that many needy persons were simply
jettisoned by the system to preserve loot needed by the Combine and its clients. In his early years,
Obama would answer the pleas of his constituents for some practical benefit with a browbeating,
pedantic lecture on the tightness of the budget and the need for budget austerity. Now, Obama
became more cunning. He now preferred to co-opt demands for significant material improvements
in the life of the black community by delivering patronage payments to those who made themselves
spokespersons for such demands. Compared to real broad-based reform, the expense of this
approach for the system was trifling. An example of this is Obama’s transfer of something like a
quarter of a million dollars of public funds to the renegade priest Father Pfleger, who could be
counted on to suppress demands that might call into question the domination of Chicago by
parasitical financiers.
Before his loss to Mr. Rush, Mr. Obama’s typical response for requests for state money would
be a lecture, recalled Dan Shomon, a former Obama aide. “He would say something like: ‘You
know what, you’re not going to get your money, and you know why? Let me explain the state
budget,’” Mr. Shomon said. “Then he’d give a 20-minute treatise on how the Republicans
wouldn’t raise taxes, so there wasn’t any money to do what they wanted to do.” Now, Mr.
Obama more eagerly met the demands for spending earmarks for churches and community
groups in his district, said State Senator Donne E. Trotter, then the ranking Democrat on the
Senate Appropriations Committee. “I know this firsthand, because the community groups in his
district stopped coming to me,” Mr. Trotter said. Typical of Mr. Obama’s earmarks was a
$100,000 grant for a youth center at a Catholic church run by the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a
controversial priest who was one of the few South Side clergymen to back Mr. Obama against
Mr. Rush. Father Pfleger has long worked with South Side political leaders to reduce crime and
improve the community. But he has drawn fire from some quarters for defending the Nation of
Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and inviting him to speak at his church. Father Pfleger, who did
not return calls for comment, is one of the religious leaders whose “faith testimonials” Mr.
Obama has posted on his presidential campaign Web site. David Axelrod, the chief strategist for