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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That echoed Obama's reasons for having voted against the bill. According to the transcript of the May 15 debate, Obama noted that a murderer already was eligible for death if the crime was found to be committed in "a cold, premeditated and calculated" manner and that "should be more than sufficient" to cover a gang killing. And he said he objected to the bill because it was likely to target minorities:
Obama, May 15, 2001: [What] I'm concerned about is that we use this term "gang activity" as a mechanism to target particular neighborhoods, particular individuals for, admittedly, heinous crimes that I think need to be punished to the fullest extent of the law irrespective of where they happen and irrespective of the particular criminal body that they're working with.
The debate over the Mendoza bill arose after Gov. Ryan had suspended all executions in January 2000 because 13 death-row inmates were found to have been wrongly convicted in the previous 23 years. That total later rose to 17, giving Illinois the distinction of having the highest rate of overturned capital convictions of all 38 states with the death penalty, according to Ryan's successor, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich.
A False Implication
The ad suggests that Obama ignored an editorial cry for passage of the death-penalty bill, but that is not true. The ad's graphics cite a Nov. 23, 2001, Sun-Times editorial, which indeed demanded action on gang violence, as the ad says. But the newspaper didn't call for passage of the death-penalty bill. What the editorial actually urged was a local enforcement effort against gangs something like the federal government's "unrelenting, multipronged attack" against terrorism following the events of September 11, 2001, just weeks earlier. The newspaper mentioned "the questioning of thousands of people and the thorough scouring of bank records" but did not call for any new legislation.
Furthermore, Obama's vote took place on May 15, months before the Nov. 23 editorial appeared. In fact, the bill was dead by the time the editorial was published. Mendoza's efforts to override Ryan's veto had failed, and the records of the Legislature show the "veto stands" as of Nov. 15. So the ad's suggestion that Obama ignored an editorial outcry is wrong.
Death Penalty for Terrorists
The ad questions whether Obama "can be trusted in the war on terror." In fact, he has supported the death penalty for terrorists. In 2003, after a commission appointed by Ryan had made numerous recommendations for changes in the way the death penalty was administered, the Legislature adopted many of them, such as allowing judges to rule out a death sentence for someone convicted solely on the testimony of a jailhouse informant, accomplice or single witness, and allowing the state Supreme Court to overturn a death sentence that was "fundamentally unjust." But the new law, Public Act 93-0605, also retained most of the existing factors that made murderers automatically eligible for capital punishment, including terrorism. Specifically, the law says that the death penalty may apply if "the murder was committed by the defendant in connection with or as a result of the offense of terrorism." Obama, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, was among 10 Senate sponsors of the bill and also was among 57 state senators who voted for the bill April 3, 2003. (There was only one vote against it.)
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