FROM IBD
HEAD: Alice In Obamaland
Among the alleged lies mentioned in the Obama campaign's 40-page response
to
author Jerome Corsi's book "Obama Nation" is the claim that when Obama ran
for state senator, "instead of stepping aside in deference to (state Sen.
Alice) Palmer, Obama decided to fight her for the nomination."
The Obama campaign quotes a state representative who said Palmer "pulled
her
own plug."
But as ABC News senior correspondent Jake Tapper notes on his blog, it is
Obama who is the truth-challenged one. "This is not a lie, this is true,"
Tapper says. "Palmer had decided to run for Congress, and Obama was tapped
to run to replace her. When Palmer lost in the (U.S. House) primary, she
wanted to stay as a state senator. Obama said no. He had every right to do
so, but he decided to fight her for the nomination instead of stepping
aside
in deference to her."
According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama operatives flooded into the
Chicago
Board of Election Commissioners on Jan. 2, 1996, to begin the tedious
process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions
of
Palmer and three other lesser-known contenders for her Illinois state
Senate
seat. They kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's
Democratic
primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
As the Tribune noted, "The man now running for president on a message of
giving a voice to the voiceless first entered public office not by
leveling
the playing field, but by clearing it."
In 1995, Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of
the district's influential liberals at the home of two well-known figures
on
the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former members of the
terrorist Weather Underground.
"I remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers'
house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the Senate and
running for Congress," says Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician
and
advocate for single-payer health care. "(Palmer) identified (Obama) as her
successor."
It was in 1995 that Palmer decided to pursue the op****tunity of an open
seat
in the U.S. House of Representatives after Mel Reynolds of Illinois' 2nd
District resigned due to allegations of *** with an underage campaign
volunteer.
But Palmer hit a speed bump in November of that year when Jesse Jackson
Jr.
defeated her in a special election for Reynolds' empty seat.
Palmer then refiled to keep her state Senate seat and asked Obama to
withdraw. Obama refused.
"I liked Alice Palmer a lot," Obama would say later. "I thought she was a
good public servant. It (the process by which Obama got Palmer off the
ballot) was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely
differently."
Who Alice Palmer is and what she believed is the real story here.
Ten years earlier she was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace
Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front group, an affiliate
of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front group.
Palmer participated in the World Peace Council's 1983 Prague Assembly,
part
of the Soviet launch of the nuclear-freeze movement. The only thing it
would
have frozen was the Soviet Union's military superiority.
In June 1986, while editor of the Black Press Review, she wrote an article
for the Communist Party USA's newspaper, the People's Daily World, now the
People's Weekly World. It detailed her experience attending the 27th
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how impressed she
was by the Soviet system.
Palmer gushed at the "Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and
better education" and spoke of the efficiency of the Soviets' most recent
five-year plan, attributing its success to "central planning." She praised
their "comprehensive affirmative action program, which they have stuck to
religiously - if I can use the word - since 1917."
Palmer also marveled that all Russian citizens were guaranteed a job
matching their training and skills, free education, affordable housing and
free medical care. Because Soviet school curricula were established at the
national level, she said, "there is no second-class 'track' system in the
minority-nationality schools as there is in the inferior inner city
schools
in my hometown, Chicago, and elsewhere in the United States."
Obama and Palmer both oppose school choice and vouchers and successful
programs like the D.C. Op****tunity Scholar****ps. They prefer the central
planning of education as dictated by the teachers unions and the
commissars
at the National Education Association.
When Obama won the Iowa caucuses, Frank Chapman, a member of the U.S.
Peace
Council Executive Committee, wrote a letter to the People's Weekly World
celebrating the victory of Alice Palmer's former protégé.
"Obama's victory was more than a progressive move," Chapman wrote. "It was
a
dialectical leap ushering in a new era of struggle. Marx once compared
(the)
revolutionary new era of struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes
burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement
on
the surface."
Before old-style Chicago politics as practiced by an ambitious Obama
doomed
their friend****p, he thought Palmer was a good public servant, and Soviet
admirer Palmer thought he was a worthy heir. Why?
************
Not a bad question, one that can best be answered: No matter why,
Br-a-a-a-a-a-ck, the Magic Mulatto just ain't a right fit to be President;
the boy just ain't got the fundamentals. At his core, he's just another
grasping Chi-town pol. Just ask Tony Rezko.
Dionysus
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