Here's another account of Obama for you.
In a campaign influenced by Walmart, instead of backing the pro-labor candidate, Obama backed a "Walmart tool."
There was little surprising about Obama's endorsement given his self-interested allegiances to the politically powerful City Hall regime of Chicago's Mayor Daley, with whom Obama shares the same big money campaign super-consultant (David Axlerod) and numerous big money sponsors.
For the first time Mayor Daley had vetoed an ordinance by his normally obedient City Council, a measure widely supported by citizens, community organizations, and labor unions in Chicago's black, Latino, and working-class wards, and he did not want the council to bring the measure up again. It was originally passed by the council under pressure from a remarkable grassroots campaign, and would have required giant retail corporations like Wal-Mart, Target, Lowes, and Home Depot to pay workers a modest minimum wage of ten dollars an hour by 2010.
Wal-Mart and Target announced that they were putting a number of "big box" retail developments on hold in Chicago, and launched a preemptive public relations strike, threatening to disinvest in the city unless a "favorable business climate" was restored. Daley made a special point of wrapping his veto in the flag of racial justice, claiming it was required to permit the flowering of economic development in the city's abandoned ghetto neighborhoods.
Pat Dowell, the recipient of significant support from the Service Employees' International Union (SEIU), was running against Tillman, and Dowell had strongly criticized Tillman for siding with Daley and Wal-Mart.
Obama needed the support of the powerful campaign finance magnet Daley, and endorsed Tillman, over labor-backed Dowell.
Obama's wife Michelle then received $51,200 in 2006 for attending a few board meetings of TreeHouse Foods, a giant firm that relied heavily on its close business relationship with Wal-Mart. The granting of high-pay/do-little board posts to the spouses of politicians is a longstanding tool of the "old," corporate-dominated politics that Senator Obama claims to reject. This is not like Clinton's placement on the board of Walmart as the result of an effort to address sex discrimination in Walmart's employment practices.
Mrs. Obama resigned from her position with TreeHouse in the summer of 2007, citing "increased demands on her time" in connection with her husband's presidential campaign.
It isn't surprising that she cut her politically damaging ties to a notoriously anti-labor company that her husband was attacking Clinton about in his speeches.
'Reprehensible Misrepresentation'
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"A Tasteless and Reprehensible Misrepresentation"
The central claim in the ad is that Obama was "weak on the war on gangs" when he voted in 2001 against a bill to make gang killers automatically eligible for the death penalty. The first thing to be said about the claim is that the author of that very bill says the ad is a "tasteless and reprehensible misrepresentation" of Obama's stand and "completely mischaracterizes" his position on criminals.
The bill's sponsor is Illinois state Rep. Susana Mendoza of Chicago, who vainly attempted to get it enacted in 2001 after being elected the previous year on the strength of her anti-gang activism. When we asked Mendoza for comment, she said the ad made her "sick to my stomach" and said Obama opposed her bill for respectable reasons:
Mendoza: The ad completely mischaracterizes Senator Obama's position against ruthless criminals and attempts to paint him as weak on crime, when I know that to be the furthest thing from the truth. If anyone should be upset about his not voting for HB1812, it should be me, as its sponsor. But, as I said before, I understood and respected then and continue to do so to this day, his reasons for not supporting that particular bill, none of which were because of a weak position towards criminals. ... I do not agree in any way whatsoever with the ad and that I find it to be a tasteless and reprehensible misrepresentation of the truth.
Mendoza, a Democrat, is supporting Obama for president.
The Facts
Mendoza's bill, HB 1812, would have made anyone found guilty of a murder committed "in furtherance of the activities of an organized gang" eligible for the death penalty. It passed with large majorities in each house, despite Obama's vote against it. Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, vetoed the bill Aug. 17, 2001. He said in his veto message that the bill was too broad, too vague and too likely to fall on minorities. He said that most gang killers were already eligible for the death penalty anyway:
Gov. Ryan, Aug. 17, 2001: Illinois has some of the toughest laws on the books to severely punish gang-related crimes. In fact, most gang-related murders would qualify for the imposition of the death penalty under the existing eligibility factors in our death penalty statue. Unfortunately, this still has not deterred gang members from killing.
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