Posted on 01/11/2009 6:14:37 AM PST by COUNTrecount
"Ma priorité est de ramener les valeurs publiques ou collectives au centre du débat," said President-elect Barack Obama in an interview running in today's Le Monde newspaper.
Mr. Obama was not speaking in French; his words had been translated.
And in fact he hadn't uttered them in more than 12 years.
The French newspaper Le Monde on Saturday took the Obama team by surprise by publishing an interview with Barack and Michelle Obama from 1996 in which the two spoke at length about their marriage, only four years after they were wed, and two years before their oldest daughter Malia was born.
Many themes will not surprise those who know or follow the Obamas.
Sitting down to talk about their future the same year Obama eventually ended up running for state senate (and winning), his wife Michelle in the interview expresses reservations about whether a life in politics is what they want.
And while her husband is less uncertain of his calling, he wonders aloud about his ability to maintain a balance between private and public life. He also sounds out some notes about restoring civility in discourse to public life and the notion that we're all in this together, themes that have stayed with him throughout his career up through this week.
The interview, entitled "An Intimate Conversation with Michelle and Barack Obama," was conducted for a book about American marriages and was never published before today. The story was noticed in Le Monde by Tom McCarthy at the ABC News desk and translated from the French by Maeva Bambuck and Jean Fievet in ABC News' London bureau. (When assessing the precise accuracy of the quotes below, keep in mind they have now been translated from English to French to English.)
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.abcnews.com ...
Michelle had it right the first time. Obama is an “idiot,” to use her language. His campaign had to spend so much money because he had to travel to “all 57 states.”
She, the affirmative action Queen, is so sweet isn’t she? How could Obama resist her?
Being with her royal nastiness affirms him as authentically black.
Ping!
“It’s not every day that a girl from the South Side of Chicago meets someone who speaks Indonesian, who has traveled and has seen many fascinating things,” she says.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/07/11/politics/fromtheroad/entry4254480.shtml
Obama: “I don’t speak a foreign language. It’s embarrassing!”
Why would Obama be in the news in 1996? He was just a lowly community organizer still right?
Speaking of his mother's death just months before, Mr. Obama says, "she was only 53 years old. And when you have a small family, where every relative is very close to you…it was a difficult time for me. I have a sister on my mother’s side, she is half Indonesian like my mother’s second husband, and I also have brothers and sisters on the Kenyan side. They are very scattered, some live in Germany, others in Kenya, some here in the U.S."
She got half of that right. Both of them are idiots.
He has been on someone’s radar for a very long time.
http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2008/05/authors-against-obama.html
Chicago Sun-Times - Monday, February 12, 1996
Author: Salim Muwakkil
Barack Obama , the leading (and perhaps only) Democratic candidate seeking to succeed Sen. Alice Palmer in the state's 13th District, is one of the brightest political prospects . . . well, since Rhodes scholar Mel Reynolds.
That comparison is not intentionally invidious, just a reminder of how impressive credentials sometimes exempt political candidates from proper scrutiny. And although Obama ‘s credentials are quite impressive, his critics s insist that all isn't what it seems.
Adolph Reed Jr., a progressive Northwestern University professor of political science, condemns Obama as a politician with “impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics.” Robert T. Starks, another academic-activist who serves as chairman of the Task Force for Black Political Empowerment, says Obama is the tool of forces outside the black community.
(snip)
Wow,13 years ago they knew what we were getting!
Sure wish I knew who is running this show.
They have got their act together.
Shoot, go back even further. Who the heck had ever heard of Jimmy Carter?
Common denominator... Chicago!! (Hillary and Obama)
(no link)
CHICAGO A NEWCOMER TO THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS HAS SEEN ENOUGH TO REACH SOMECONCLUSIONS ABOUT RESTORING VOTERS’ TRUST.
Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) - Saturday, August 3, 1996
Author: JOE FROLIK NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
EXCERPT
Before entering the race, Obama said, he spoke to about 30 elected officials in the district, which includes the integrated, middle class neighborhood around the University of Chicago as well as some of the city's poorest precincts.
“Not one asked me where I stood on an issue,” he says, smiling.
“What they cared about was, `Who sent you? How much money you got?’
His answers were apparently good enough; the party backed his nomination. And given the district, Obama ‘s March primary win makes Nov. 5 simply a formality.
But despite the ease of his ascension, the nature of campaigning worries him. Sound bites sow distrust, he says: “They're dishonest about how complex some of the issues are. They're dishonest about the very real conflicts between groups that are going to have to be resolved through compromise.”
And then there's money. Chicagoans, he says, have grown especially jaded watching the Democrats raise cash for this month's national convention in Chicago.
“The convention's for sale, right,” Obama says.
“You got these $10,000-a-plate dinners and Golden Circles Clubs. I think when the average voter looks at that, they rightly feel they're locked out of the process. They can't attend a $10,000 breakfast and they know that those who can are going to get the kind of access they can't imagine.”
The Magi had no trouble finding a lowly manger. /s
Excellent link. He really is an exemplar of affirmative action accompanied by little in the way of actual accomplishment.
One thing that is of great interest is, it seems to me, the “law journal stuff.” Has anyone actually found anything in a copy of the Harvard Law Journal that he wrote? If so, what does it say? The poems from Oxy have been shown here and they are, to say the least, not very good or very memorable.
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