VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 233
Although close friends and confidants had been talking up a run for national office since the
early 1990s, Barack Obama in 2003 was still an Illinois state senator running in the Democratic
primary for the U.S. Senate. This reporter, a longtime and former Chicago community and
political organizer, had worked with Obama in 1992’s highly successful Project VOTE Illinois
registration drive. After moving to Georgia in 2000, I managed to keep in touch with events at
home, and was well aware of Obama’s run for the US Senate. While researching a story on the
Democratic Leadership Council for the internet magazine Black Commentator in April and May
of 2003, I ran across the DLC’s “100 to Watch” list for 2003, in which Barack Obama was
prominently featured as one of the DLC’s favorite “rising stars.” This was ominous news
because the DLC was and still is the right wing’s Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party.
The DLC exists to guarantee that wealthy individuals and corporations who make large
campaign donations have more say in the Democratic Party than do flesh and blood Democratic
voters. The DLC achieves this by closely examining and questioning the records, the policy
stands and the persons of officeholders and candidates to ensure that they are safe and worthy
recipients of elite largesse. The DLC also supplies them with right-wing policy advisers
beholden to those same interests, and hooks up approved candidates with the big money donors.
Then as now, the DLC favors bigger military budgets and more imperial wars, wholesale
privatization of government functions including social security, and in so-called “free trade”
agreements like NAFTA which are actually investor rights agreements. Evidently, the giant
insurance companies, the airlines, oil companies, Wall Street, military contractors and others
had closely examined and vetted Barack Obama and found him pleasing. (Glenn Ford, “How
We Held Obama’s Feet to the Fire in 2003,” The Black Agenda Report)
OBAMA “THE WAR HO” –
“A LIAR OF THE FIRST ORDER” – “WE MUST REJECT HIM”
In a later article, Ford elaborated: ‘The Senator from Illinois masquerades as a “peace candidate”
- and then proposes the Americans invade Pakistan, the only Muslim nation that has The Bomb. ...
Obama wants to invade Pakistan, the most dangerous place in the world. Obama wants to add
almost one-hundred thousand new troops to the U.S. military.’ Ford went on to quote a recent
speech by Obama: ‘“My plan would maintain sufficient forces in the region to target al Qaeda
within Iraq,” Obama told the fat cats at the Woodrow Wilson Center. In other words, he is not about
to get out of Iraq. Barack Obama is a liar of the first order. Obama masks himself as a peace
candidate, but he is really a son of war. He carries the “White Man’s Burden,” proudly. He will
carry us into a suicidal conflict, with relish. We must reject him.’ (Glenn Ford, “Barack Obama
Ain’t Nothin’ But a War Ho’,” Black Agenda Report)^93
Glenn Ford proceeded to demolish the Obama mystique in a systematic refutation:
The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in
memory. That’s not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic
empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your
product and your target audience. From its Bloody Sunday 2007 proclamation that Obama was
the second coming of Joshua to its nationally televised kickoff at Abe Lincoln’s tomb to the
tens of millions of dollars in breathless free media coverage lavished on it by the establishment
media, the campaign’s deft manipulation of hopeful themes and emotionally potent symbols has
led many to impute their own cherished views to Obama, whether he endorses them or not. To
cite the most obvious example, the Obama campaign cynically bills itself as “the movement”,
