Why I can’t vote for Obama, #2
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008Not only will he likely raise our taxes, but I don’t trust him to use our tax money wisely.
Surprise, surprise: he’s no saint. On the contrary, his record shows he buys political contributions in exchange for fat political favors.
The above Boston Globe piece, published in June, paints the picture. Obama collected hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars from housing developers in Chicago . . .
Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including [Valerie] Jarrett, [Allison] Davis, and [Antoin "Tony"] Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.
He then funneled low-income housing development projects to these individuals.
They took the money, built the housing, and then skipped out:
The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.
But it’s not safe to live here.
About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.
Look past what Obama says to what he does and you discover a cynical opportunist.
He grabs campaign contributions.
He doles out sweet deals to his buddies. Including family members btw.
And he could care less about whether the programs he supports actually help the people they’re supposed to help.
McCain’s far from perfect. But whatever his flaws, he strikes me as a fundamentally decent man who really does have principles — and sticks to them.
I just don’t get the same read from Obama. He’s mastered a kind of idealist rhetoric, clearly. But what that seems to have done is to make the man a kind of vessel into which people project their political ideals. This makes him extremely electable but also highly unpredictable.
Even committed leftists should be worried, IMO. In last night’s debate, for instance, he made sure to hit the anti-war hotbutton that won him the Dem nomination — criticizing the Iraq war. but he also claimed he supports military intervention in a number of circumstances. He says he wants to hunt bin Laden down and kill him, for pete’s sake.
Pretty bloodthirsty words for the Peace Now candidate, dontcha think?
So how to read this?
Has he jettisoned his dovish principles in order to appeal to on-the-fence voters who he’d lose if he didn’t claim to hate al Quaeda?
Or is he really more hawkish than he pretended to be in the early days of the campaign, when he tacked left of Hillary on foreign policy?
Must be one of the above. But either way, he’s once again revealed as an opportunist, isn’t he?
And we have no way of knowing which Obama will show up after the election — do we?