Right slams Obama as 'shady Chicago socialist'

Tellurian

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Sun Feb-17-08 11:10 PM
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Right slams Obama as 'shady Chicago socialist'

Republicans are out to crush Barack by painting him as a leftwinger with dubious support

Leading Republicans believe they can trounce Barack Obama in the presidential election by tarring him as a shady Chicago socialist. They are increasingly confident that his campaign could collapse by the time their attack machine has finished with him.

Grover Norquist, an influential conservative tax reform lobbyist, said: “Barack Obama has been able to create his own image and introduce himself to voters, but the swing voters in a general election are not paying attention yet. He is open to being defined as a leftwing, corrupt Chicago politician.”

Norquist’s comments will be music to the ears of Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Democratic rival, who believes Obama has not been sufficiently “vetted” for the White House. She has been unable to attack him too vociferously without risking a backlash from Democratic primary voters, but Republicans may salvage her campaign by doing the job for her.

Obama has the voting record of a “hard-left” socialist, according to Norquist, from his time in the Illinois state legislature to the US Senate. He was recently judged by the nonpartisan National Journal to have the most liberal voting record in 2007 of any senator.
Underdog Obama outpaces Hillary

The senator for Illinois may be headed for victory in the Democratic presidential race if he widens support among women...“It will be easy to portray him as even harder-left than Hillary,” said Norquist. “Hillary could lose the election, but Obama could collapse. People already know Hillary and she is not popular, but the disadvantage for Obama is that Republicans can teach people who don’t know him who he is.”

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and Republican guru, recently described Obama as the “most leftwing candidate to run since George McGovern” – a reference to the anti-Vietnam-war Democrat who lost 49 states out of 50 to Richard Nixon in the 1972 election. Norquist believes Obama’s questionable Chicago connections will stir things further.

The city has a reputation for corruption from the days when Al Capone and his mob ran the town in the 1920s. Obama is tainted by his long association with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a Chicago property developer who is scheduled to go on trial for extorting kickbacks in return for political favours on March 3, the day before the Ohio and Texas primaries.

Obama bought his family home in Chicago for $1.65m, $300,000 less than the asking price, on the day that Rezko’s wife Rita bought an adjoining lot at the full price of $650,000. Obama later paid her $105,000 for a sixth of her yard in order to expand his garden.

The seller insisted on both plots being sold together, which suggests that Rezko did Obama an enormous favour even if the deal was not illegal. The seller has so far evaded press inquiries, but he is regarded as a potential “ticking timebomb” should he decide to go public.

Clinton briefly raised the question of Rezko, whom she described as a “slum landlord”, in a televised debate with Obama in California, but was silenced when a 1990s picture emerged of her with Rezko and President Bill Clinton. Obama has returned around $85,000 in campaign contributions from Rezko.

“Hillary put the issue into the bloodstream, but it didn’t get focused on,” said Norquist. He believes that well financed “527” attack groups – named after their tax-exempt status – will mercilessly pursue Obama over his ties to Rezko. It was a conservative “527” group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who did grave damage to John Kerry’s reputation as a war hero in the 2004 White House race.

Mark McKinnon, a top adviser to John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said last week he would resign in the event of a contest against Obama as he did not want to participate in tearing him down.

But other members of McCain’s team have already gone for the jugular. A testy exchange last year between the two senators over the Iraq troop surge led a senior aide to take aim at Obama’s former drug use by claiming he “wouldn’t know the difference between an RPG and a bong ”.

Obama could run into further difficulties over his relationship with William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois and former member of the Weather Underground, a leftwing terrorist group that planted bombs in the Capitol and the Pentagon in the 1970s.

Ayers told The New York Times on the day of the September 11 attacks: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” It emerged last week that Ayers served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund, an antipoverty group, from 1999 to 2002, and donated $200 towards his Illinois state Senate campaign in 2001.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3382313.ece

...Republicans already smell Blood in the water..the brief exchange between McCain and Obama was the signal. Obama with the "deer in the headlights" look... seen physically folding under the crushing weight of a brief no nonsense exchange with John McCain ... Obama will collapse under the weight of a full on Right Wing attack..he is no match for what is yet to be unleased on his shaded past...

I'm not interested in 'Rolling the Dice' and losing because of on an untested, unvetted candidate for our next Democratic president..

Right slams Obama as 'shady Chicago socialist'

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