Divining Barack Obama's Core Beliefs from Wife Michelle's Written Speeches

Jacqueline Kennedy, so far as I know, never made a controversial public statement while she was First Lady, or while JFK was campaigning for the office. If JFK had been a stealth candidate, there would have been no way to estimate his true views by his wife's comments.

Barack Obama's core beliefs are, by comparison to JFK's, secret. His message bodyguards are attempting to make his true views off-limits even to speculation. Themes of unity and change are to supplant any untidy specifics of agenda and implementation.

Recalcitrant analysts are therefore left to extrapolate Obama's views from the views of those with whom he has chosen to keep company: Jeremiah Wright Jr., Al Sharpton, Bernie Sanders, Paul Simon and, of course, Michelle Robinson Obama.

Here is Ronald Kessler's recent effort at doing so.


The Real Barack Obama
by Ronald Kessler

Michelle Obama’s comment that, for the first time in her adult life, she feels proud of America helps crystallize who Barack Obama is.

To be sure, the wife of a candidate is perfectly free to have views that are distinct from her husband’s. But on a matter that is so fundamental to one’s being as love of country, it is difficult to imagine that Michelle Obama would publicly twice make such a statement suggesting disdain for America unless she felt it comported with her husband’s views.

Equally important, her statement aligns perfectly with the hate-America views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s minister, friend, and sounding board for more than two decades. On the Sunday following 9/11, Wright characterized the terrorist attacks as a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later, Wright suggested that the attacks were retribution for America’s racism.

“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01,” Wright wrote in his church magazine Trumpet. “White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”

Wright has been a key supporter of Louis Farrakhan, and in December, honored the Nation of Islam leader for lifetime achievement, saying he “truly epitomize[s] greatness.” Farrakhan has repeatedly made hate-filled statements targeting Jews, whites, America, and homosexuals.

Those who think two of the closest people to Obama could publicly make anti-America statements unless Obama himself felt that way, are fooling themselves. To date, Obama has proven himself to be nothing more than a great orator, rendering the statements of those around him even more important in illuminating his true character and agenda.

During his Senate career, he skipped 17 percent of the votes and sponsored only one bill that became law. That bill was to promote “relief, security, and democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Bereft of official accomplishments, Obama has distinguished himself mainly by being against measures that protect American security, such as finishing the mission in Iraq. If we were to leave Iraq quickly, as Obama vows he would do, it would become a launch pad for al-Qaida attacks on the U.S.

Obama avoided voting on extending the Protect America Act, thus putting America at risk when immediate interception of terrorist communications is required. Last August, Obama voted against a measure that would have allowed the U.S. to continue to monitor overseas conversations of terrorists like Osama bin Laden without first obtaining a warrant. If his radical vote had prevailed, bin Laden would have been given the same rights as Americans.

To this day, Obama has not distanced himself from most of Rev. Wright’s comments.

In a statement supposedly issued to address the matter, Obama ignored the point that his minister and friend had spoken adoringly of Farrakhan and that Wright’s church was behind the award to the Nation of Islam leader. Instead, as outlined in a Jan. 17 Newsmax article, he disingenuously claimed he thought the magazine bestowed the award on Farrakhan for his efforts to rehabilitate ex-prisoners.

Neither Wright’s encomiums about Farrakhan nor the Trumpet article mentions ex-prisoners.

Similarly, after John McCain’s wife Cindy responded to Michelle Obama’s remarks by telling a Wisconsin rally, “I have, and always will be, proud of my country,” Barack Obama told a radio interviewer that his wife did not say what people think she said. He then proceeded to rewrite her comments, claiming that she had meant she was encouraged by the “large numbers of people” who have gotten involved in the political process. Michelle Obama then made a similar revision of her remarks.

In her speech in Milwaukee, Michelle Obama said flatly, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

And what has been wrong with America up to now? That it gave Michelle the opportunity to attend Princeton and Harvard Law School? That it gave Barack Obama the chance to attend Harvard and Harvard Law School and become a U.S. senator making more than $1 million a year from book royalties?

Was it that America stopped Nazi Germany from continuing to murder millions of Jews? That America has provided Africa and other countries with $15 billion to combat the spread of AIDS/HIV and that another $30 billion is on the way? That 46 percent of all Americans classified by the Census Bureau as poor own their own homes, 76 percent of them have air conditioning, and 75 percent of them have at least one car? Or that America allows us to express our views freely without fear of being put in jail, as is the case in Russia?

A lawyer, Michelle Obama is perfectly capable of expressing herself precisely. In fact, she spoke from a written speech.

Those who do not want to believe she meant what she said — and that Barack Obama could not be so close to Rev. Wright if he did not himself believe in much of what he has said — are in denial.

The real Barack Obama is starting to emerge, and for those of us who are grateful to America for everything it represents, it is not a pretty sight.

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.

Now, Michelle Obama is Proud of America

John F. Kennedy was blessed, most agree, with the perfect political wife - Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. To the best of my knowledge, she never embarrassed or disadvantaged him.

Barack Obama, too, is blessed with a "keeper." Michelle Obama grew up in a stable two-parent family, went to Princeton as an undergraduate, then Harvard Law School, then returned to her native Chicago for a richly compensated legal career. She is, by all accounts, a devoted mother to their two daughters.

"Michelle Obama has achieved enormous professional success, political influence and personal acclaim in America," writes conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. "Ivy League-educated, she's been lauded by Essence magazine as one of the 25 World's Most Inspiring Women; by Vanity Fair as one of the 10 World's Best-Dressed Women; and named one of "The Harvard 100" most influential alumni. She has had an amazingly blessed life. But you wouldn't know it from her campaign rhetoric and her griping about her and her husband's student loans."

Although Mrs. Obama communicates for a living, she has brought discredit on her husband this week by an appalling gaffe.

In Wisconsin, Mrs. Obama told supporters Monday that "people in this country are ready for change, and hungry for a different kind of politics and let me tell you something, for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."

"America hasn't been good to her?" asks blogger Jim Geraghty in The Campaign Spot. "What, opportunities to go to Princeton, Harvard Law, working for top-shelf law firms and hospitals, sitting on the board of directors for a major Wal-Mart supplier — that's not enough?"

"If American ingenuity, a robust constitutional republic and the fall of communism don't do it for you, hon, then how about American heroism and sacrifice?" writes Malkin. "How about every Memorial Day? Every Veterans Day? Every Independence Day? Every Medal of Honor ceremony? Has she never attended a welcome home ceremony for the troops?"

"Michelle Obama is 44 years old," writes Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz. " She has been an adult since 1982. Can it really be there has not been a moment during that time when she felt proud of her country?

"Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War; how about only things that have made liberals proud — all the accomplishments of inclusion? How about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court? Or Carol Moseley Braun’s election to the Senate in 1998? How about the merely humanitarian, like this country’s startling generosity to the victims of the tsunami? I’m sure commenters can think of hundreds more landmarks of this sort. Didn’t she even get a twinge from, say, the Olympics?"

"The narcissistic, self centered, arrogant insult delivered by Michelle Obama," writes Liberal blogger and Clinton supporter Taylor Marsh, " is a slap at the American spirit that runs throughout this country, regardless of political party, race, gender, creed, religion, you name it. "

"I am a proud American first," she writes, "a liberal second. But Michelle Obama will never speak for me."

Malkin who, like Obama, is a woman of color and working mother of two, cited Michael Kinsley to the effect that a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. "In this case, it's what happens when an elite Democratic politician's wife says what a significant portion of the party's base really believes to be the truth: America is more a source of shame than pride."

But "even Dennis Kucinich would probably have no problem finding something to be proud of in the past two decades," blogger Mickey Kaus writes in Kausfiles. "If Michelle Obama's default position is set to 'Aggrieved,' it also suggests something personal, no?"

It's personal for John and Cindy McCain.

"I'm proud of my country," Cindy McCain, wife of the Arizona senator, told supporters Tuesday as she introduced her husband at a rally. "I don't know if you heard those words earlier. I'm very proud of my country."

"I have never lived a day, in good times or bad, that I haven't been proud of the privilege" of being an American, the senator said in his victory speech Tuesday night.