Rezko Primer IV. Letters of Support for projects Rezko was involved

ArchPundit January 23, 2008 2 Comments

In relation to a partnership between Rezmar Properties and some non-profits:

As a state senator, Barack Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting his political patron Tony Rezko’s successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens.

The deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama’s former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama’s state Senate district.

Obama’s letters, written nearly nine years ago, for the first time show the Democratic presidential hopeful did a political favor for Rezko — a longtime friend, campaign fund-raiser and client of the law firm where Obama worked — who was indicted last fall on federal charges that accuse him of demanding kickbacks from companies seeking state business under Gov. Blagojevich.

The letters appear to contradict a statement last December from Obama, who told the Chicago Tribune that, in all the years he’s known Rezko, “I’ve never done any favors for him.”

On Tuesday, Bill Burton, press secretary for Obama’s presidential campaign, said the letters Obama wrote in support of the development weren’t intended as a favor to Rezko or Davis.

“This wasn’t done as a favor for anyone,” Burton said in a written statement. “It was done in the interests of the people in the community who have benefited from the project.

“I don’t know that anyone specifically asked him to write this letter nine years ago,” the statement said. “There was a consensus in the community about the positive impact the project would make and Obama supported it because it was going to help people in his district. . . . They had a wellness clinic and adult day-care services, as well as a series of social services for residents. It’s a successful project. It’s meant a lot to the community, and he’s proud to have supported it.”

The development, called the Cottage View Terrace apartments, opened five years ago at 4801 S. Cottage Grove, providing 97 apartments for low-income senior citizens.

Asked about the Obama letters, Rezko’s attorney, Joseph Duffy, said Tuesday, “Mr. Rezko never spoke with, nor sought a letter from, Senator Obama in connection with that project.”

Davis couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday.

Further down the article:

While Obama served in the Illinois Senate, he continued to work for the law firm, which Davis left in 1997 to become a developer.

Davis soon went into business with Rezko, creating a company called New Kenwood LLC to build the seven-story apartment building for senior citizens on a vacant stretch of land once occupied by a gas station at 48th and Cottage Grove. The city of Chicago owned the land — nearly two acres tainted by lead, benzene and other toxic chemicals.

Davis is a member of the Chicago Plan Commission. He was originally appointed to the commission in 1991 by his friend, Mayor Daley. Davis, like Rezko, has been a prolific campaign fund-raiser for politicians including Daley and Obama.

Soon after they incorporated New Kenwood in 1998, Davis and Rezko got letters of support from elected officials — Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) and state Rep. Lou Jones (D-Chicago), whose districts included the proposed project.

Firm paid city $1 for land

New Kenwood LLC also got letters of support from Obama, who represented a nearby Senate district.”I am writing in support of the New Kenwood LLC’s proposal to build a ninety-seven unit apartment building at 48th and Cottage Grove for senior citizens,” Obama wrote in separate letters, each dated Oct. 28, 1998, to city and state housing officials. “This project will provide much needed housing for Fourth Ward citizens.”

At the time he wrote the letters, Obama was also a lawyer with Miner Barnhill & Galland, the law firm Davis formerly headed. Among the firm’s clients were several companies owned by Davis and Rezko. The firm did not represent New Kenwood.

Davis and Rezko hired Daley & George, the law firm of the mayor’s brother Michael, to help them get $3.1 million from bonds issued by the city of Chicago.

Rezko and Davis paid the city $1 for the land and spent more than $100,000 to clean it up, including the removal of an underground storage tank. Some tainted land was left behind, but state environmental officials approved construction after Rezko and Davis agreed to cover the polluted areas with parking lots, sidewalks or three feet of dirt, records show.

The $14.6 million Cottage View Terrace was funded entirely by city, state and federal taxpayers.

The project included $855,000 in development fees for New Kenwood. Records don’t show how Davis and Rezko split the money. Davis owned 51 percent of New Kenwood, Rezko 49 percent, according to the records.

Letters of support are hardly uncommon and wouldn’t be considered so much a favor, as a part of the job–it’s common for any grant to seek out letters of support from stakeholders in the community.

More interesting is a Chicago Tribune article on the pork Obama did secure for his Senate District in Illinois:

But some of the larger grants Obama sponsored were tied to political allies and show how difficult it is even for politicians advocating reform to avoid the appearance of favoritism as they dole out taxpayer funds. Several non-profit directors, for instance, gave money to Obama’s campaigns soon after their allotments were awarded.

“My philosophy was that, if money was being distributed, then it would be inappropriate for me to not get my share for my district,” Obama, now one of the U.S. Senate Democrats’ leaders on ethics reform, said in an interview. “Did I think it was the best way to prioritize government spending? No.”

The Tribune analyzed 119 grants in which Obama steered more than $6 million for Chicago projects between late 1999 and late 2002, the heart of his Statehouse career and the center of a state government frenzy in which Obama said the pork-barrel process was “wide open.”

Typical of his grants was the $5,000 Obama delivered to the South Shore Public Library for chess equipment, books and knitting supplies, or the $5,000 to help the Sir Miles Davis Academy plaster and paint walls and repair windows.

But other grants reflected politics. In 2001, for example, Obama steered $75,000 to a South Side charity called FORUM Inc., which promised to help churches and community groups get wired to the Internet. Records show five FORUM employees, including one who had declared bankruptcy, had donated $1,000 apiece to Obama’s state Senate campaign.

As the grant dollars were being disbursed to FORUM, the Illinois attorney general filed a civil lawsuit accusing the charity’s founder of engaging in an unrelated kickback scheme. Just days after the suit was filed, Obama quietly returned the $5,000 in donations. “I didn’t want to be associated with money that potentially might have been tainted,” he said.

FORUM founder Yesse Yehudah, who unsuccessfully ran for state Senate against Obama in 1998, denied wrongdoing and, without admitting guilt, settled the attorney general’s lawsuit by paying $10,000 to a charity. He declined to comment.

Obama was not accused of wrongdoing, and he said none of his state grants came about as a quid pro quo.

“It happens that there were major supporters in my district who had been supporters before they got member initiatives,” Obama said, noting that some of his contributors had been his allies for years.

One of those long-time supporters was Rev. Michael Pfleger, the politically active leader of St. Sabina Church. He gave Obama’s campaign $1,500 between 1995 and 2001, including $200 in April 2001, about three months after Obama announced $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs.

By Illinois standards, that’s a pretty clean bill of health for Member Inititiatives.

Rezko Primer III. Legal work on projects Rezko was involved

ArchPundit January 23, 2008 8 Comments

Updated 3/17/2008 after Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times interviewed him at length.

Central to Hillary Clinton’s charge that Obama was representing and taking donations from a slumlords in Rezko and Allison Davis.

Davis was a name partner in the law firm Obama worked for and eventually left the firm to work with Rezko on development deals. The reason Rezko was involved in the deals at all is that he partnered with three non-profits in Chicago to build affordable housing:

Obama said he joined the firm now known as Miner, Barnhill & Galland, which specializes in affordable housing partnerships, in January 1993. He said he was a full-time associate until he entered the state legislature in January 1997, when he went on “of counsel” status, occasionally working on matters for the law firm.

During his time with the law firm, he said his five hours of Rezko-related work consisted of “basically filing incorporation papers” and similar tasks for not-for-profit groups that partnered with Rezmar.

Asked if he had intervened on behalf of Rezko or Rezmar with any government entity, Obama replied, “Never. No.”

In a statement released Monday, the law firm said there were four instances in which it represented the interests of not-for-profit groups in ventures where Rezmar had a partial interest: Central Woodlawn Limited Partnership II, Woodlawn Partners Limited Partnership, KRMB Limited Partnership and Woodlawn Drexel Limited Partnership.

The law firm said Obama’s role was limited to “conducting due diligence under the supervision of more senior attorneys, assisting in documentation of loans, grants and tax credit investments in which the ventures had an interest and providing general legal assistance in land acquisition.

“The firm also assisted the Rezmar Corp. in its acquisition of a general partner interest in an Illinois limited partnership, but Obama had no involvement in the transaction,” the law firm said.

The firm’s senior partner, Judson Miner, said thenon-profits had been clients of the firm before Obama came aboard. “In these transactions, Barack was a young associate doing the kind of work young associates are assigned to do,” Miner said. He said Obama “was always as ethical and reliable as anyone.”

Sun Times April 24, 2007

More from the previous day:

Rezko became Obama’s political patron. Obama got his first campaign contributions on July 31, 1995: $300 from a Loop lawyer, a $5,000 loan from a car dealer, and $2,000 from two food companies owned by Rezko.

Around that time, Rezmar began developing low-income apartments in partnerships with the Chicago Urban League and two other not-for-profit community groups, both founded and run by Bishop Arthur Brazier, pastor of the Apostolic Church of God and a powerful ally of the mayor — the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corp., known as WPIC, and the Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization.

All three community groups were clients of the Davis law firm. Davis himself was treasurer of WPIC when it went into business with Rezmar.

Why go into business with Rezmar? “We thought they were successful,” Davis said, noting that little development was taking place in Woodlawn.

At the time, Rezmar had been in business for six years and had become one of City Hall’s favored developers of low-income housing, managing 600 apartments in 15 buildings it rehabbed with government funding. Teaming now with community development groups, Rezmar rehabbed another 15 buildings, with 400 apartments, between 1995 and 1998. Each deal involved a mix of public and private financing — loans from the city or state, federal low-income-housing tax credits and bank loans.

By the time Rezmar started working with those community groups, at least two of its earlier buildings were falling into disrepair — including the Englewood apartment building at 7000 S. Sangamon where the tenants were without heat for five weeks.

The tenants there had no heat from Dec. 27, 1996, until at least Feb. 3, 1997, when the city of Chicago sued to turn the heat on. The case was settled later that month with a $100 fine.

It was during that time that the area’s new state senator, Barack Obama, got a $1,000 campaign donation from Rezmar. The date: Jan. 14, 1997.

Obama works on Rezmar deals

Obama spent the next eight years serving in the Illinois Senate and continued to work for the Davis law firm.Through its partnerships, Rezmar remained a client of the firm, according to ethics statements Obama filed while a state senator.

Davis said he didn’t remember Obama working on the Rezmar projects.

“I don’t recall Barack having any involvement in real estate transactions,” Davis said. “Barack was a litigator. His area of focus was litigation, class-action suits.”

But Obama did legal work on real estate deals while at Davis’ firm, according to biographical information he submitted to the Sun-Times in 1998. Obama specialized “in civil rights litigation, real estate financing, acquisition, construction and/or redevelopment of low-and moderate income housing,” according to his “biographical sketch.”

And he did legal work on Rezko’s deals, according to an e-mail his presidential campaign staff sent the Sun-Times on Feb. 16, in response to earlier inquiries. The staff didn’t specify which Rezmar projects Obama worked on, or his role. But it drew a distinction between working for Rezko and working on projects involving his company.

“Senator Obama did not directly represent Mr. Rezko or his firms. He did represent on a very limited basis ventures in which Mr. Rezko’s entities participated along with others,” according to the e-mail from Obama’s staff.

The Tribune searched multiple records to determine where Obama had done work on behalf of the entities involved:

Law firm partner Judson Miner said that, over several years, Obama did a total of five to seven hours of billable work on Rezmar-linked projects. He mainly filed incorporation papers for the non-profit groups under the supervision of more senior attorneys, Miner said.

At the Tribune’s request, Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans produced a list of all 260 civil and criminal cases in which the firm filed appearances, and the Tribune separately examined 1990s lawsuits that Rezmar Corp. listed in applications for government grants. The paper also examined files from the Illinois Housing Development Authority and the city housing department, as well as the hundreds of clients Obama listed in the unusually frank ethics disclosure reports he filed as a state senator from December 1995 through April 2004.

Those and other records disclosed five instances in which Obama did legal work for ventures that included Rezmar Corp. The case of City of Chicago vs. Central Woodlawn Limited Partnership is one example.

In 1992, that community group partnered with Rezmar Corp. to rehab the former slum apartment building at 6107-6115 S. Ellis Ave. As work was ongoing, city officials sued the developers, alleging 16 serious code violations at the property, including a dangerously dilapidated porch.

Obama and a co-counsel filed appearances in February 1994, but the court records show they appeared on behalf of Central Woodlawn, Rezko’s non-profit partner, not Rezko or his company.

A separate attorney, Wayne Muldrow, represented Rezmar in the case. Muldrow, who had no connection to Obama’s firm, could not be immediately reached for comment Tuesday.

In September 1994, Central Woodlawn was ordered to arrange for an inspection. Two months later a city inspection found “full compliance” with the building code and the case was dismissed.

By the point that the degree of the problems had begun to be realized in 1997, Obama had gone to ‘of counsel status’ after winning a seat in the Illinois State Senate:

The Sun-Times reported that Rezko donated to Obama at the same time residents were without heat at one of the troubled properties operated by Rezko’s firm, Rezmar Corp. The firm received taxpayer help to rehab 30 buildings, including 11 in Obama’s state legislative district on the South Side.

Obama said in the interview Monday that he was unaware of the scope of properties owned by Rezmar or the problems surrounding them. He said none of the affected residents personally sought his help and that aides at his state Senate district office did not recall any inquiries. Still, he said it was “possible” that during his tenure in the legislature that a constituent may have written or called his office “saying, ‘We’re in a building, and we’re unhappy with the service here.'”

Such problems, he said, would normally be brought to the attention of an alderman or the city’s Housing Department. “Had I known that there were buildings that were in deteriorating or poor condition, that certainly would have given me pause. But I didn’t” know, Obama said.

Obama said he joined the firm now known as Miner, Barnhill & Galland, which specializes in affordable housing partnerships, in January 1993. He said he was a full-time associate until he entered the state legislature in January 1997, when he went on “of counsel” status, occasionally working on matters for the law firm.

Sun Times April 24, 2007

Sun Times list of projects worked on by Obama’s law firm which included Rezmar

Sun-Times interview:

I was practicing law for the next four years and . . . our paths would cross at times because they were doing development work. And my firm, which was mostly a litigation firm, had a small transactional practice that represented not for profits that were doing affordable housing work. And that’s where I wound up doing five hours worth or six hours worth of legal work on a partnership, a joint venture between the – I forget what the name of it was – but it was a community development group based in Woodlawn that Arthur Brazier had started and Rezmar. So we were representing the not for profit.

But at that time, I wasn’t particularly close with Tony, although I was familiar with him and I would see him on occasion.

 Tribune:

Fast-forward a little bit, I did not have a lot of interactions with Tony at that point. I was working as an associate at a law firm. There may have been interactions with my law firm and some of the development partners of Rezmar because they would often partner with not-for-profits and we had a small transactional practice in the law firm that specialized in representing not-for-profits—you know, church-based organizations that were doing community development.

I don’t recall exactly how many times at that point I had met Tony Rezko, but I don’t think at that point I would have considered him a friend. He was an acquaintance.

The Weird Experience Argument

ArchPundit January 16, 2008 No Comments

Let’s stipulate that experience already lost in the Presidential race with the three with the most experience out of the race in Dodd, Biden, and Richardson.

Slate and AP make important points about the idea that Hillary has the experience:

Edwards served a single term in the Senate. Obama served eight years in the Illinois state Senate and is halfway through his first term in the U.S. Senate. Clinton is about to begin her eighth year in the U.S. Senate. Going by years spent as an elective official, Obama’s 11 years exceeds Clinton’s seven, which in turn exceeds Edwards’ six. But it’s a silly calculus. They all come out about the same, even when you factor in Clinton’s youthful work on the House judiciary committee’s impeachment inquiry, her membership on the board of the Legal Services Corp., her chairmanship of the Arkansas Educational Standards committee, her crafting of an unsuccessful national health-care bill, and her sharing Bill Clinton’s bed most nights while he was Arkansas governor and president of the United States.

============

But a Dec. 26 New York Times story revealed that during her husband’s two terms in office, Hillary Clinton did not hold a security clearance, did not attend meetings of the National Security Council, and was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. During trips to Bosnia and Kosovo, she “acted as a spokeswoman for American interests rather than as a negotiator.” On military affairs, most of her experience derives not from her White House years but from serving on the Senate armed services committee.

If you notice, Obama actually has more experience running organizations–one of the reasons the COO quote was incredibly stupid.  He’s making the right argument in the sense that the Power of the President is to persuade, but in an incredibly dumb and awkward way.

From the AP 

Obama’s accomplishments are more substantial and varied than Clinton suggests. And he has a longer record in elected office than she does, as a second-term New York senator.

Obama was a community organizer and led a voter-registration effort in Chicago that added tens of thousands of people to the rolls. He was a civil rights attorney and taught at one of the nation’s premier universities. He helped pass complicated measures in the Illinois legislature on the death penalty, racial profiling, health care and more. In Washington, he has worked with Republicans on nuclear proliferation, government waste and global warming, amassing a record that speaks to a fast start while lacking the heft of years of service.

The Illinois Democrat likes to quote something Bill Clinton once said: “The truth is, you can have the right kind of experience and the wrong kind of experience. Mine is rooted in the real lives of real people, and it will bring real results if we have the courage to change.”

After college, Obama moved to Chicago for a low-paying job as a community organizer. He worked with poor families on the South Side to get improvements in public housing, particularly the removal of asbestos.

“Nobody else running for president has jumped off the career track for three or four years to help people,” said Jerry Kellman, who first hired Obama as a community organizer.

Obama also fought for student summer jobs and a program to keep at-risk children from dropping out of school. More importantly, say those who worked with Obama, he showed people how to organize and confront powerful interests.

Working with the kinds of coalitions to put together community organization and voter registration drives is at least as good as running a panel on education reform.

Coming Soon from Hillary Attack Web Site: The Obama Chronicles

ArchPundit January 15, 2008 1 Comment

Remember the Clinton chronicles and the list of those who mysteriously died with ties to the Clinton and the bullshit right wing smears to claim Vince Foster was murdered. It was essentially a hit job and a particularly bad one by Clinton enemies stemming from the Arkansas Project.

Now if your candidate had undergone that kind of smear, would you unleash it on another Democrat? Apparently those at Hillaryis44.com think it’s fine….

Imagine if another candidate was referenced in a suicide note. The crowd from Chicago would have demanded a special prosecutor by now.

Obama named in a suicide note:

On the day he disappeared, Norman Hsu, the disgraced fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, sent letters to friends that recipients viewed as a suicide note, people familiar with the letter have said.

In his letter, Hsu apologized for any embarrassment he had caused recipients of his largesse. In the last four years, he has generated donations of more than $1 million for Democratic politicians across the country.

Hsu’s undoing began two weeks ago with articles raising questions about his fundraising activities in the Wall Street Journal and about a criminal case in his past in The Times. In his letter, said a person familiar with its contents who asked to remain anonymous, Hsu contended that those articles were planted “by a politician who pledged ‘hope and change’ ” — an apparent reference to Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“This is a sad and baseless allegation,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said. “We had no knowledge of his past criminal behavior, fugitive status or a potential straw-donor scheme until reading it in the newspaper.”

Notice how the L.A. Times calls Hsu a “disgraced fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign” downplaying Hsu’s ties to Obama – even as it appears Obama is the one apparently named in the suicide note. Hsu was not called a fundraiser for the Innocence Project, even though he was a fundraiser for them and sent them the suicide note. No Hsu is tied instead to Hillary Clinton.

The rambling bizarre mention of the Innocence Project is the hardest to understand.  The Innocence Project is a stellar organization that includes people on its board like John Grisham and Janet Reno.

So by this standard if Tony Rezko was to attempt suicide, if he mentioned the Clintons, they’d be mysteriously implicated?

Talk about your freak shows. I haven’t seen anything this bizarre outside of Free Republic.

The Real Problem With Bob Johnson:

ArchPundit January 15, 2008 No Comments

Errr…he’s a right wing hack:

Robert L. Johnson came to the Bush administration’s attention when it needed him most. The cause of the White House’s duress was an annoyingly munificent collection of millionaires, headed by Bill Gates Sr., who had banded together to oppose President Bush’s plan to abolish the estate tax. In newspaper ads and press conferences, they held forth on the obligation of the wealthy to give back to society. So effectively did they seize the moral high ground that even the most fervent opponents of the estate tax resigned themselves to it. “$(I$)t is looking increasingly doubtful,” reported The Wall Street Journal a week later, “that large estates will escape federal taxation altogether.”

Evidently this didn’t sit well with Johnson, the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET), whose family stood to gain millions if Bush succeeded. Johnson is not a man with a deep sense of social obligation. Not long ago, when an interviewer prodded him for his views on philanthropy, Johnson scoffed, “$(B$)eing a very wealthy person is not something that I wake up in the morning and say, ‘Gee, I got all this money. How do I give it away?'” There is, however, an important exception to this every-man-for-himself ethos: society’s duty to aid extremely wealthy African Americans. This social obligation Johnson takes very seriously.

So Johnson did what he often does when his interests are at stake: He played the race card. Johnson gathered a collection of black business leaders and demanded an end to the estate tax. Taking out newspaper ads of their own, Johnson’s group attacked the tax for draining wealth from the black community. Unlike “very wealthy white Americans” who supported the tax, he declared, “We as African Americans have come to our wealth on a different path, a different road than they have.” Gates and his friends, Johnson implied, were not really promoting the common good; they were trying to keep the black man down. All of a sudden, it was not so clear who held the moral high ground. Estate tax repeal had become a civil rights issue.

=======================

Fortunately for Johnson, and even more fortunately for his heirs, estate tax repeal subsequently passed into law. But Johnson’s campaign to abolish the estate tax was more than just a way to save a few million bucks. It was the beginning of a political partnership between the CEO of BET and the president of the United States, one that has now turned its attention to an even grander cause: the privatization of Social Security. On May 2, Bush appointed Johnson to his commission charged with transforming the popular program. Once again, Johnson has racialized a long-standing conservative crusade. We must turn Social Security into a system with individual investment accounts, he argues, because the existing program unfairly shortchanges blacks. Social Security overhaul is Bush’s most radical–and most politically perilous–aspiration. That the administration has entrusted Johnson with this task, despite his lack of expertise (and, indeed, his lack of any history of public interest in the issue), is a measure of the ideological reliability with which it now regards him. Johnson, according to one analyst, “is trying to position himself as Bush’s go-to guy in the African American community.” And it looks like he’s succeeding.

One issue that continues to baffle me is that while Obama uses poor language to say Social Security is in crisis-it’s not, it has issues at best, he has a clear plan that is quite progressive to deal with it–a plan that solves the problem beyond any reasonable estimation from the actuaries.

However, Clinton wants to turn over the decision to a pane of villagers in DC–people who think there is a crisis and wanted to buy into Bush’s privatization scheme.  There’s a clearly better answer here–and one more transparent and Hillary Clinton doesn’t have it.

Illinois NOW, the Essence of Hypocrisy

ArchPundit January 14, 2008 3 Comments

How cute, Clinton’s campaign keeps up on the present votes including the most hypocritical pile of shit in a campaign:

Illinois Now on Obama’s Present Votes On Choice:

During Sen. Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign, the Illinois NOW PAC did not recommend the endorsement of Obama for U.S. Senate because he refused to stand up for a woman’s right to choose and repeatedly voted ‘present’ on important legislation.As a State Senator, Barack Obama voted ‘present’ on seven abortion bills, including a ban on ‘partial birth abortion,’ two parental notification laws and three ‘born alive’ bills. In each case, the right vote was clear, but Sen. Obama chose political cover over standing and fighting for his convictions. “When we needed someone to take a stand, Sen. Obama took a pass,” said Grabenhofer. “He wasn’t there for us then and we don’t expect him to be now.”

Yet, Lisa Madigan did the same thing. What did Illinois Now do about her refusal to take a stand?

Yep, they endorsed her:

Who else voted Present?Lisa Madigan on at least one vote:

ENDORSED BY IL NOW PAC

Statewide

Rod Blagojevich D-Governor

Alexi Giannoulias D-Treasurer

Dan Hynes D-State Comptroller

Lisa Madigan – Attorney General

Since Barack is a White Sox Fan

ArchPundit January 10, 2008 4 Comments

He may not understand the concept of “Throw it back!”

Oops…

ArchPundit January 10, 2008 4 Comments

Clyburn in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, said he was rethinking his neutral stance in his state’s presidential primary out of disappointment at comments by Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton that he saw as diminishing the historic role of civil rights activists.

Mr. Clyburn, a veteran of the civil rights movement and a power in state Democratic politics, put himself on the sidelines more than a year ago to help secure an early primary for South Carolina, saying he wanted to encourage all candidates to take part. But he said recent remarks by the Clintons that he saw as distorting civil rights history could change his mind.

“We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics,” said Mr. Clyburn, who was shaped by his searing experiences as a youth in the segregated South and his own activism in those days. “It is one thing to run a campaign and be respectful of everyone’s motives and actions, and it is something else to denigrate those. That bothered me a great deal.”

I haven’t been listening to black talk radio–has the Clinton line been getting much play?