EXECUTIVE EXPERIENCE

"We don't want nobody that nobody sent"
-Chicago saying

One of the biggest knocks against Senator Obama as president is his clear lack of experience and readiness for the job. He's demonstrated the problem with this several times on the campaign trail with little-reported gaffes and stumbles over basic facts of government and foreign policy such as demanding things be done that have already long been in place. This lack of experience to a certain degree is always true for every presidential candidate except an incumbent: nobody is truly ready to be president until they've been on the job a while. Yet for some candidates, the lack is greater and more troubling.

The two major candidates for the US Presidency are both Senators, legislators. This is a very different job from the executive branch, which is what the president is. Think of it as someone who works on tires all day in an auto shop wanting to run the tire franchise, to be in charge of the paperwork, hiring and firing, dealing with other businesses and the government, and so on. You can be great with tires but it takes training and experience to be ready to step into an executive position. That training comes from smaller, less important jobs, moving up until you've proved you are ready. Senator McCain has had some smaller experience as an executive when he held command rank in the United States Air Force, his military service being something Senator McCain is proud of and well known for.

Senator Obama, too, has had some smaller executive experience, yet he seems remarkably reluctant to bring it up or even allow others to. The first experience he had as an executive was as head of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) in 1995, and the second was eight years as director of the Joyce Foundation (1994-2002). Why are these two efforts being ignored by the Obama campaign? In short: because the voters wouldn't much care for what he did and who he did it with.

The CAC has been an area of particular interest by Stanley Kurtz who has managed to obtain records and public paperwork from libraries in Chicago despite attempts to prevent his access. When Stanley Kurtz went on the air at a Chicago Radio Show to talk about this, the Obama Campaign sent out an email telling his supporters to call the show and demand that Kurtz be silenced, not let on, and to generally hush the entire affair.

Why? Well those papers show several things including the fact that not only did Barack Obama get his job as director of the CAC by recommendation of unrepentant domestic terrorists and former Weatherman Bill Ayers, but that they sat on several committees and worked together in the process. It also shows that the CAC didn't accomplish any of its goals with the $110,000,000 it was granted, but did manage to donate huge sums of this money to various hard left and radical organizations and pet projects.

What about the Joyce Foundation? Well this is a more significant time period of executive experience. In it Senator Obama was in charge of not just a one-time grant, but a billion dollar tax-exempt organization. Ostensibly the Joyce Foundation is dedicated to "Environmental and economic development issues in the Great Lakes area, as well as campaign finance reform" according to the website. How those two issues are related is not exactly clear, but that's what the organization is set up to accomplish. The Joyce Foundation was, for example, heavily involved in the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finanace Reform debacle, something that the Pew Charitable Trusts leadership later admitted was a successful falsehood, making politicians believe that there was a huge ground roots movement looking for finance reform when there was no such thing.

At the Joyce Foundation, then-State Senator Obama shifted its focus a bit. Here's David Hardy from Pajamas Media:

During Obama’s tenure, the Joyce Foundation board planned and implemented a program targeting the Supreme Court. The work began five years into Obama’s directorship, when the Foundation had experience in turning its millions into anti-gun “grassroots” organizations, but none at converting cash into legal scholarship.

The plan’s objective was bold: the judicial obliteration of the Second Amendment.

Well, that's pretty strong stuff, what were they doing that leads Mr Hardy to this conclusion?

Joyce’s directors found a vulnerable point. When judges cannot rely upon past decisions, they sometimes turn to law review articles. Law reviews are [ostensibly] impartial, and famed for meticulous cite-checking. They are also produced on a shoestring. Authors of articles receive no compensation; editors are law students who work for a tiny stipend.

OK so the plan was to establish a precedent for judges to rely on through legal review articles, to create a paper trail that later judges could use.

Bogus solicited only articles hostile to the individual right view of the Second Amendment, offering authors $5,000 each. But word leaked out, and Prof. Randy Barnett of Boston University volunteered to write in defense of the individual right to arms. Bogus refused to allow him to write for the review, later explaining that “sometimes a more balanced debate is best served by an unbalanced symposium.”

Yes, that makes sense, balance is best served by... not having any. Up is down, left is right, Bert is Ernie, as Professor Goldstein says on Protein Wisdom on occasion. So how was the Joyce Foundation involved?

In 1999, midway through Obama’s tenure, the Joyce board voted to grant the Chicago-Kent Law Review $84,000, a staggering sum by law review standards. The Review promptly published an issue in which all articles attacked the individual right view of the Second Amendment.

In a breach of law review custom, Chicago-Kent let an “outsider” serve as editor; he was Carl Bogus, a faculty member of a different law school. Bogus had a unique distinction: he had been a director of Handgun Control Inc. (today’s Brady Campaign), and was on the advisory board of the Joyce-funded Violence Policy Center.
...
Prof. James Lindgren, a former Chicago-Kent faculty member, remembers that when Barnett sought an explanation he “was given conflicting reasons, but the opposition of the Joyce Foundation was one that surfaced at some time.” Joyce had bought a veto power over the review’s content.

Now whether you consider this an attempt "to destroy the second amendment" or not, the Joyce Foundation under Barack Obama's leadership clearly was attempting to create a legal atmosphere in which the right to keep and bear arms is limited from what the founding fathers intended and wrote to a much lower status. To do so, they rejected and fought against any effort for balance or any opposing opinions, as an exchange of emails between Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) and Carl Bogus reveals.

Like Senator Obama's original position before the Supreme Court decided otherwise, the Joyce Foundation tried to push the legal interpretation that the second amendment was not an individual right, but a general right as exercised not by citizens but organizations such as the military and police. That this utterly violates the clear intent and writings of the founding fathers was irrelevant: when you start from the position of what you think ought to be done rather than what the constitution demands, you disregard what it meant and was intended to be used for.

Have you heard of his work in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge? If you've been reading this blog and others on the right, probably, but not otherwise. Have you heard of his work at the Joyce Foundation? This is the kind of thing you'd expect a candidate to bring up, brag about, put on his resume. Neither of these are on the Obama official website on his background page. There's a lying (and I do not use that word lightly) ad claiming that one of the few politicians in Washington who cried foul about the lending laws and structures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is somehow to blame for their problems, but nothing about these experiences.

Senator Obama is attacked for his lack of experience, but refuses to bring up these examples of executive experience and proof he's had some in the past. Why? Because the work he did and the achievments of those organizations. He knows that the general public wouldn't particuarly embrace what he was trying to do with the Joyce Foundation and what he didn't achieve with the CAC. He demonstrated how he wants to govern as president: far left, opposing what the bulk of the country desires and is interested in, and wasting gigantic sums of money without accomplishing his goals. In other words, he's a pretty standard dinosaur Democrat, he's Jimmy Carter II. And he doesn't want anyone knowing that until he's in office.

Does Obama have executive experience? Yes. Not enough to be president, and not the kind he wants you to know about. But he has some.

Senator Obama, Experience, Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Joyce Foundation