[cobra bill]

David Freddoso's new book, The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate is a badly written hatchet job, full of errors and distortions and smears. The author, who works for the right-wing National Review and published his book with Regnery (which printed Unfit for Command, one of the Swiftboating attacks on John Kerry in 2004), simply fails to prove his key assertions, preferring to rely upon a bunch of false attacks, McCarthyist-style denunciations of Obama's associations, and extreme conservative attacks on abortion rights, all of it padded with lengthy digressions on topics unrelated to Obama and his record.

Freddoso's lies begin on the very first page of his book (repeated on the back cover) when he proclaims that Obama is "the least experienced politician in at least one hundred years to obtain a major party nomination for President...."(ix) Freddoso seems to be conveniently forgetting that George W. Bush in 2000 had served only six years as governor, far fewer years of experience as an elected public official than Obama's 12 years of experience (eight as state senator, four as US senator). Obama's experience in politics also exceeds that of Ronald Reagan (eight years as governor), Jimmy Carter (four years in state senate, four years as governor), Dwight Eisenhower (no political experience), Harry Truman (10 years as US senator, one year as vice president), Herbert Hoover (eight years as Secretary of Commerce), Woodrow Wilson (two years as governor), and William Howard Taft (four years as Secretary of War, two years as Solicitor General). Compared to 17 presidents in the past century, Obama has more political experience than eight of them, and less experience than eight of them (he's tied with Warren Harding).

Like any good conspiracy theorist, Freddoso is careful to condemn the conspiracy theories he doesn't believe in, hoping that doing so will make him seem reasonable by comparison. He writes, "Too many of those criticizing Obama have been content merely to slander him," listing some of the false rumors about Obama refusing to salute the American flag or being sworn into office on a Koran.(x) Yet throughout his book, Freddoso charges Obama with being a part of some secret liberal plot. A plot to help Daley by knocking Alice Palmer off the ballot. A plot to have "silently and at times vocally cooperated with Chicago's Democratic Machine."(x) A plot by Axelrod to let Blair Hull take the lead and then leak his damaging divorce data. A plot to help Rezko by passing legislation for affordable housing. A plot to spread socialism revealed by his associations with communists and Marxists, proven by the fact that he actually read award-winning books written by communists!

Freddoso uses a common trick of conspiracy theorists: deny that you're proposing a conspiracy theory, but add on "there is this set of facts" to support that exact conspiracy theory. And so Freddoso writes:

There's no evidence Obama's campaign was the force behind dragging down Blair Hull, but there is this set of facts:


*Axelrod knew about Hull's marital problems


*Axelrod's former employer, the Chicago Tribune, unearthed Hull's marital problems just weeks before the primary, and not until Hull had already sucked the wind out of Hynes's sails

*Obama benefited—immensely--from these revelations.(48)






All of this might lead a reasonable reader to conclude that Obama's campaign did secretly smear his opponent. Except that it's not true. Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell recounts in his book Obama: From Promise to Power that he was the first to report on the court order sealing Hull's divorce file, and he also reports on how it happened: "I met with a Hynes operative for lunch....I was handed a folder of opposition research on Hull. Among the papers was a copy of the outside sheet of the filing of one of Hull's two divorces in Illinois....The order contained only one salient fact: Hull's second wife, Brenda Sexton, had once been granted an order of protection against him."(212-3) It was the Hynes campaign, not the Obama campaign, that brought down Hull. It's hard to imagine that Freddoso could have overlooked this lengthy passage in Mendell's book about Obama, since Mendell is cited 39 times in Freddoso's book.


Even the cover of the book is an attempt to spread Freddoso's attacks. Beneath a glowering, dark-faced photo of Obama are photos of Obama dancing with his wife (they're black), smiling with Ted Kennedy (according to Freddoso, he's a communist KGB agent), his arm around Jeremiah Wright (they're black and racist), and next to Mayor Daley (they're corrupt).

In one of the many red-baiting sections of his book, Freddoso denounces Obama's predecessor Alice Palmer for covering the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1986 as a journalist, and expressing praise for some of the Soviet plans, along with criticism of Ronald Reagan. Because Obama was endorsed by Palmer as his successor (and attended a Palmer fundraiser at Bill Ayers' home), Obama is deemed guilty by association. But Freddoso also denounces Obama's campaign for successfully challenging Palmer's improper petitions when she made a late decision to enter the State Senate race after failing to gain traction in her run for Congress.

Freddoso offers a particularly hilarious claim that Chicago Mayor Richard "Daley considered Palmer a serious threat, a potential mayoral rival."(5) According to Freddoso, "By clearing the ballot, Obama had done more than just elbow his way into power without a real election--he had also erased any doubt of Daley's path to his next term."(5) This anecdote shows how little Freddoso understands about Chicago politics. It's laughable to imagine that Palmer, after she failed miserably in her race for Congress, could take on Daley. Indeed, the last thing Daley would have wanted is an appealing black politician like Obama winning an election in Chicago, since Obama was probably the only threat to Daley's permanent occupation of the mayoral position. Yet Freddoso compares Obama to Karl Rove and Machiavelli, imagining some kind of conspiracy where Obama was secretly doing Daley's bidding.(6)

Freddoso also promotes Obama's guilt by association with Chicago politics. Astonishingly, Freddoso devotes 14 pages of his book to the Stroger family's corruption in Cook County politics, and links it to Obama because Obama didn't endorse anybody in the primary and endorsed the Democrat over the Republican in the general election. Yet Freddoso admits, "He did not campaign for John Stroger or even endorse him...."(14)

One could make an analogy here: what if a Republican candidate for president had failed to speak out about the political corruption of a Republican office-holder? Indeed, that's exactly the case with John McCain. Except that McCain, unlike Obama, endorsed the incumbent George W. Bush in the 2004 primary and actively campaigned for him. And what McCain did was far worse: part of the job of a U.S. Senator is to monitor the activities of the executive branch, while no one imagines that the job of a U.S. Senator is to intervene in local county politics.