Redstate

Posted at 5:20pm on Mar. 2, 2008 Hollowness We Can Believe In

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

I'll be the first to tell anyone that Barack Obama is a highly intelligent, highly talented individual who is a very good campaigner. He also appears to be a nice guy--as politicians go--who is comfortable in his own skin. It's hard to dislike someone like that.

None of that, however, should serve as any kind of camouflage for the fact that he has one of the thinnest and least substantive records of any Presidential candidate in a long time. And yes, George W. Bush brought a bigger resume to the White House.

Your Honor, I call David Ignatius to the stand:

What I hear from politicians who have worked with Obama, both in Illinois state politics and here in Washington, gives me pause. They describe someone with an extraordinary ability to work across racial lines but not someone who has earned any profiles in courage for standing up to special interests or divisive party activists. Indeed, the trait people remember best about Obama, in addition to his intellect, is his ambition.

Obama worked on some bipartisan issues, such as a state version of the earned-income tax credit, after he was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. But he also gained a reputation for skipping tough votes. The most famous example was a key gun control vote that he missed in December 1999 because he was vacationing in Hawaii. The Chicago Tribune blasted him and several other vote-skippers as "gutless." One Chicago pol says that "the myth developed that when there was a tough vote, he was gone."

Obama's brash self-confidence led him into his only big political blunder. Prodded by the Daley machine, he challenged Bobby Rush, an incumbent Democratic congressman and former Black Panther, in 2000. Rush pounded Obama by more than 2 to 1 in the primary. "He was blinded by his ambition," Rush told the New York Times last year.

Obama has been running for president almost since he arrived in the U.S. Senate in 2005, so his Senate colleagues say it's hard to evaluate his record. But what stands out in his brief Senate career is his liberal voting record, not a history of fighting across party lines to get legislation passed. He wasn't part of the 2005 Gang of 14 bipartisan coalition that sought to break the logjam on judicial nominations, but neither were Clinton or other prominent Democrats. He did support the bipartisan effort to get an immigration bill last year, winning a plaudit from McCain. But he didn't work closely with the White House, as did Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Ignatius, of course, is no tool of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. And all he is discussing are the facts that are and should be available to anyone with any interest whatsoever in looking at Obama's record, both as an Illinois state legislator and as a U.S. Senator.

Obama likes to glide past this inconvenient truth by claiming that his critics simply want him to stay in Washington so that they can "boil the hope out of him." It's a nice line but it really shouldn't cover up matters. The fact is that Obama's record of accomplishment is inversely proportional to the intensity of his political ambitions.

Your Honor, I call Todd Spivak to the stand.

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