The arcane antics of the General Assembly that take place in the halls of the Capitol complex are providing fodder for political "attack dogs" who don't fully understand the way in which Illinois government operates.But too many of the partisan ideologues who are trying to find dirt on Obama from his days as a state senator from the Hyde Park neighborhood are doing little more than showing their overall ignorance when they try to make accusations that imply Obama is less the “visionary of change” he claims to be, and is really nothing more than a political hack.
THE LATEST OF these attacks comes from Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is trying to turn Obama’s recent release of his income tax returns into an issue against him.
When Obama posted copies of his tax returns for 2000-06 on his campaign web site, he said opponent Hillary R. Clinton was being negligent for not promptly making the same financial information available about herself.
Judicial Watch wants us to think that Obama is merely using the issue as a tax dodge, of sorts, to make people think he is being forthcoming about personal information – but is really covering up information of greater significance.
According to the group’s statement, they want access to Obama’s “records” for the eight years (actually, it was seven years, 10 ½ months) he served in the Illinois Senate.
“IT APPEARS THAT Obama never kept records of his time in the Illinois state legislature, or he discarded them,” group President Tom Fitton wrote in a recent newsletter. “Either way, he clearly intended to leave no paper trail.”
The problem with this accusation?
I honestly have no idea what Fitton is referring to when he says he wants Obama’s “records.”
Does he mean that he wants to know how Obama voted on the nearly 8,000 pieces of legislation that came before the Illinois Senate during his stint in Springfield? That information is available.
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN able to go through the Obama voting record and figure out that he was largely a reliable vote for the Illinois Senate’s Democratic caucus, which was the minority party for six of Obama’s eight years in the General Assembly. That means many of Obama’s votes were defense mechanisms to protect himself from future political charges being made against him.
Does Fitton want an attendance record? That is available too. We can easily find out how many times Obama didn’t bother to show up for an Illinois Senate session, or may have been present and missed a vote because he was in the men’s room at an inopportune moment.
All of this information can be found for every single member of the Illinois House and state Senate. In today’s age of computers, it is not difficult to weed through eight years worth of votes and other records in order to find embarrassing data that might have gone overlooked in the past – when people had to manually go through each page looking for specific information.
I once heard another group hint at this same issue, saying what they wanted to see was Obama’s daily schedule – a detailed accounting of every single person he met with, every hearing he attended, who did he bother to eat lunch with (and who paid?). In short, they expected to find a daily logbook along the lines of what is kept for presidents of the United States, and then eventually shipped off to the National Archives.
IT WOULD BE ridiculous to expect such detailed information to be kept for every single one of the tens of thousands of individuals who have served in the Illinois General Assembly. The records literally would take up the entire Stratton Building – that ugly 1950’s era structure located across the parking lot to the west of the Statehouse.
The simple fact is that your typical legislator (on days when the General Assembly is in session) shows up at the capitol, hangs around the House or Senate chambers or in his capitol complex office during down time, and spends the great deal of his time waiting.
Specifically, he’s waiting for the General Assembly’s leadership to figure out what direction the Legislature will go on any given issue. There’s a reason some legislators call themselves “mushrooms” – the joke is that they are kept in the dark by the leadership about everything.
When the Legislature is not in session, the legislators are back in their home districts (many of them have law practices or other business interests to tend to) trying to find ways to remain in the public eye so that future voters will not forget they exist.
KEEPING DETAILED RECORDS about this kind of trivia on individual legislators (the leadership is a different story) would be absurd. Obama himself once joked that information of this level was not maintained because no one was planning to someday build the “Barack Obama legislative library and museum.”
So by saying they want Obama’s “records,” they make a non-issue sound ominous. That also is the reason these critics never go any farther to say what they mean by “records.”
If we were to find out that what they want to know is whether Obama went himself to the Rathskellar (the cafeteria located in the capitol basement) or sent a page to get something for him to eat or drink, we would realize just how ridiculous the “records” charge truly is.
Another non-issue comes from the people who want to make “present” an issue.
SPECIFICALLY, THERE ARE people who are trying to lambast Obama for the roughly 130 times (out of 8,000 votes) that he voted “present” – instead of “yes” or “no” – on bills.
Some of those bills were related to abortion, and conservative critics are trying to create the image either of a politico who’s trying to cover up his “radical” support for abortion being legal or of a hypocritical pol who talks of supporting a woman’s right to abortion, but does not back up such a sentiment with his votes.
Obama himself has said his “present” votes were to avoid taking a stance on bills that consisted of conservative measures that were designed to make it more difficult for women to obtain abortions when desired. Some of those bills’ primary purpose was to put Democratic legislators on the record as favoring abortion – so they could then be singled out for attacks during re-election campaigns.
Perhaps the ideologues can go through the "records" and find out how many times legislators made the same corny St. Patrick's Day-related joke about Senator O'Bama? Illustration by Obama for America.IN SHORT, HE was trying to circumvent a future political assault on himself, although the reality of politics (and journalism, for that matter) is that people will always find something in your record that offends them.
It is ridiculous to try to imply that Obama’s “present” vote is anything more than the political equivalent of states other than Illinois that permit a person facing a criminal charge to plead “no contest” so as to allow them to say they never pleaded guilty to anything.
The difference is that someone who tries to imply that a “no contest” verdict is the same as a “guilty” verdict leaves them selves open to a lawsuit for slander or libel. A politico running for office has to take the abuse, even though a “present” vote is really such a non-issue that it may be even more trivial than the “records” issue.
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EDITOR’S NOTES: Barack Obama’s legislative records are an issue only to people who either don't have a clear (http://www.judicialwatch.org/jwnews/2008/03142008.pdf) understanding of the ways in which the Illinois General Assembly operates, or who perhaps own stock in landfills (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/obama-releases.html) and would love to generate the kind of waste paper that such extensive record-keeping would create.
The New York Times was able to find enough record keeping of Obama’s legislative acts (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us/politics/20obama.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin) to put together an account of what type of state senator he was.
When is a “present” vote a “no,” and nothing more than a “present?” (http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/02/06/obama_present_votes/index.html)
All of this political trivia over Illinois Statehouse procedure should be less important (http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/03/27/obama_s_economic_plan/index.html) than the economy in choosing the next president of the United States.
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