Campaign chief: We did `zero research' on `the One'

[Confederate Kahanist]

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=114728


Campaign chief: We did 'zero research' on 'the One'
Manager claims ignorance of his own candidate's past, including Rev. Wright

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Posted: November 01, 2009
8:57 pm Eastern


By Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDaily



David Plouffe

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe claims President Obama's campaign staff had done "zero research" on its candidate and was not aware of the inflammatory statements and views of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Plouffe, whose firm was hired to run Obama's presidential campaign, made the statement in a forthcoming book. While Plouffe and his staff may not have done their homework on Obama's radical associates, it may be hard for political insiders to believe some of Obama's other key advisers during the campaign were not aware of Wright's controversial views.

One of Obama's most senior advisers was closely associated with Wright while others traveled in the same Chicago circles as Obama. Also, a review of Wright's church literature and the vast amount of church material available to the public makes the possibility of Obama himself not knowing about Wright's controversial views seem implausible.

Plouffe recalled a Rolling Stone magazine item from February 2007 first disclosing some inflammatory quotes from Wright.

Plouffe wrote, "The incident should have prompted an immediate scouring of the Reverend Wright and all he has said over the years. … It's worth noting that our systemic failure to deal with this issue properly started the day before Obama's announcement. I still kick myself for how terribly we mishandled our internal Wright work."

Continued Plouffe: "We had done zero research on our own candidate beyond a small and incomplete package from the 2004 Senate race. ... We had ... failed to discuss the various options we might explore vis-à-vis Wright. We never raised with Obama the idea of leaving the church, or discussed with him any detail of how we would respond if inflammatory statements were to emerge. We were in denial."

Plouffe was not a Chicago political insider and may not have been familiar with Wright. In his book excerpts, featured online by Time magazine, Plouffe seemed to be referring to himself and his hired staff when discussing his being blindsided by the Wright controversy.

Obama advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, however, both key officials in Obama's presidential campaign, would likely have been familiar with the radical pastor.

WND previously revealed that Axelrod sat on the finance committee of a Chicago church that acts like a sister worship house to Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. Axelrod helped raise funds for Chicago's St. Sabina Catholic church, which was led by controversial pastor Michael Pfleger.

It was Pfleger who during the presidential campaign notoriously declared in a sermon that Hillary Clinton cried in public because she thought being white entitled her to the Democratic presidential nomination.

WND reported Pfleger was a regular guest lecturer at Wright's Trinity while Wright routinely delivered sermons at St. Sabina. Pfleger, like Wright, practices a brand of Christianity referred to as black liberation theology. Both Pfleger and Wright are closely associated with Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan, who has been hosted at both St. Sabina and Wright's Trinity.

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Separately, Valerie Jarrett, one of President Obama's closest advisers, traveled in some of the same radical political circles that Obama did.

Jarrett's father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was an associate of Frank Marshall Davis, the controversial labor movement activist who has been identified as an early influence on Obama. Vernon Jarrett worked at several communist-dominated organizations, including the Citizen's Committee to Aid Packing House Workers, whose own correspondence describes its communist influence. Many of its leaders were tied to the Communist Party.

A Washington Post obituary of Jarrett notes he "stoked the political embers in Chicago that led to the 1983 election of the city's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington."

In 1987, Valerie Jarrett got her start in politics, working for Washington as former deputy corporation counsel for finance and development. She was deputy chief of staff for Mayor Richard Daley, during which time she hired Michelle Robinson, then engaged to Obama.

Obama likely knew Wright's radical views

Obama attended Wright's church for nearly 20 years. It would have been highly unusual for Obama not to have known about Wright's controversial views or the openly radical politics of Trinity church.

Wright closely follows the ideology of James Cone, considered the founder of black liberation theology. Cone's main thesis is that true Christianity is specific to the black liberation experience and that traditional Christianity as commonly practiced in the U.S. is racist and against "true" Christianity.

Obama was interviewed multiple times for Trumpet, a magazine run by Wright and his daughter. The magazine evidenced close links between the pastor and the Nation of Islam, even featuring Obama on the cover alongside Farrakhan, as WND reported.

Obama has appeared on at least three Trumpet covers and last year gave an exclusive interview to the magazine. Obama's wife, Michelle, also talked with Trumpet in 2008.

The magazine is filled with Cone-style views on Christianity, noted Stanley Kurtz, a National Review Online contributor who reviewed two years of Trumpet editions.

The April 2007 Trumpet, for example, featured an article by black liberation theologian Obery M. Hendricks Jr., who attacks conservative Christians as "emulating those who killed Jesus, rather than following the practice of Jesus himself."

"Many good church-going folk have been deluded into behaving like modern-day Pharisees and Sadducees when they think they're really being good Christians," contends Hendricks, who writes in Trumpet that these believers have become "like the false prophets of Baal."

"George Bush and his unwitting prophets of Baal may well prove to be the foremost distorters of the true practice of Jesus' gospel of peace, liberation and love ever seen in modern times," writes Hendricks.

In an August 2007 issue of Trumpet reviewed by Kurtz, Wright argues Jesus is "African," and he attacks "white" Christianity as make-pretend: "How do I tell my children about the African Jesus who is not the guy they see in the picture of the blond-haired, blue-eyed guy in their Bible or the figment of white supremacists [sic] imagination that they see in Mel Gibson's movies?"

Authentic, liberation Christianity, wrote Wright, "is far more than the litmus test given by some gospel music singers and much more than the cosmetic facade of make-pretend white Christianity."

Wright denounced "colored preachers" who don't subscribe to black liberation theology as people who "hate themselves, who hate Black people, who desperately want to be white and who write and say stupid things in public to make 'Masa' feel safer."

Meanwhile, WND reviewed years of back issues of Obama's church newsletter while the politician attended the church, finding that aside from preaching black liberation theology, the publications were vehemently anti-Israel.

In the July 22, 2007, church newsletter, for example, Wright featured a reprinted article on his "pastors page" by Mousa Abu Marzook, identified in the publication as a "deputy of the political bureau of Hamas." In the article, Marzook defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared his terror group's official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America's Declaration of Independence.

A church newsletter from June 10, 2007 first discovered by the Sweetness & Light blog featured an open letter from a Palestinian activist that labels Israel an "apartheid" regime and claimed the Jewish state worked on an "ethnic bomb" manufactured to kill "blacks and Arabs."