David Freddoso is a reporter at National Review Online and author of “The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate.” He spoke to The Post’s David Harsanyi about his book and the election.
Denver Post:Barack Obama claims to represent a new kind of politics, a reformer who transcends the divisive debates of the past. You argue that this narrative is a myth. Why have so many Americans bought it? Have the media dropped the ball? Or is the public, starved for new faces, uninterested in specifics?
Freddoso: Both of those things are going on. In the absence of real knowledge about the senator, people have come to believe whatever they want to believe — positive or negative. For most of this campaign, all the information we have had on Obama has come either from his own books, his own multimillion-dollar media campaign, or else from smear artists on the Internet who don’t care whether what they say is true.
Most of the reporters in the mainstream media don’t seem to care whether Obama’s claims are true, they just repeat them. You’ll rarely hear anyone bring up the $1 million earmark Obama gave his wife’s employer a year after she got a $200,000 annual pay raise, or the dozens of other such examples in his record.
DP: You go out of your way make the conservative case against Obama. When other authors make unsubstantiated claims or spread scurrilous rumors about Obama, are they only distracting us from the conversation we should be having about the candidate?
Freddoso: Yes. Not only is it morally wrong to slander him, but it also crowds out the truth — which is not so flattering to Senator Obama. It allows him to evade substantive criticism about his political and legislative record, which is a legitimate and necessary part of any election campaign.
There isn’t much truth floating around. Obama’s campaign counters negative false representations about him with his own false representations. That’s understandable, since politicians make a living by misrepresenting themselves. But the mainstream media should know better. They are supposed to be sorting out the truth claims, and instead they simply defend Obama.
DP: Involvement in the Chicago political machine would in all probability stop most people from seeking the presidency. How has Obama been able to avoid substantive questions about his relationship with not only Tony Rezko and Bill Ayers, but other unsavory characters like Emil Jones and Todd Stroger?
Freddoso: Again, it’s a simple case of national reporters who don’t bother to read up on Chicago politics or talk to people in that town. I had people beating down my door at the Evans-Novak Political Report in 2006, trying to get me to cover Stroger’s election, because it really looked like the reformers had a chance to defeat the machine. Conservatives and liberals came together for the common good, and Obama thwarted them.
DP: Many critics of Obama argue that he’s the farthest left-wing major candidate who has ever run for the presidency. Yet Obama has shown a propensity to run to the center harder than most. Which one is it? Do you believe that Obama is driven by ideology or is it something else?
Freddoso: Obama’s record shows that he is reflexively and rigidly liberal. This comes out in his documented opposition to gun rights (which he now obfuscates), his desire to raise taxes, and his promise of last July that he will sign a bill that re-legalizes partial-birth abortion as his first act as president. But like most politicians, he is also motivated by self-interest, even with respect to these proposals.
DP: In the past, Obama has been able to brandish his rhetorical gifts and personal story rather than constructing ideological and policy arguments. How has he fared so far this presidential race doing that?
Freddoso: The Saddleback Forum is probably the best indication so far. I thought that his performance was quite poor. Obama is great with a memorized and well-rehearsed speech and a teleprompter, but he’s not so good on his toes.
Obama is asked to give some substance to his self-definition as a bipartisan reformer, to provide one example, and he gives a fictional example. But what else can the man do? There’s nothing in his real record about being a bipartisan reformer — he only plays one on television.
Contact David Harsanyi at dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
