Barack Obama Flashback Quote of the Day

Harper's Magazine, November 2006:

 

Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington machine

In July, on a typically oppressive summer day in Washington, D.C., roughly a thousand college students from across the country gathered at a Marriott hotel with plans to change the world. Despite being sponsored by the Center for American Progress, a moderate think tank founded by one of Bill Clinton’s former chiefs of staff, John Podesta, the student group—called Campus Progress—leans decidedly farther to the left. At booths outside the main auditorium, young activists handed out pamphlets opposing nuclear power, high pay for CEOs, excessive profits for oil companies, harsh prison sentences for drug users, and Israeli militarism in Gaza and the West Bank.

At one session, Adrienne Maree Brown of The Ruckus Society—a protest group whose capacious mission is to promote “the voices and visions of youth, women, people of color, indigenous people and immigrants, poor and working class people, lesbian, gay, bisexual, gender queer, and transgendered people”—urged students to “break the fucking rules.” Even the consummate insider Podesta told attendees, with unintended ambiguity, “We need more of you hanging from trees.”

Around noon, conference participants began filing into the auditorium; activists staffing the literature booths abandoned their posts to take seats inside as well. The crowd, and the excitement, building in the hall was due entirely to the imminent arrival of the keynote speaker: Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

 

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=msIpvb8OrhY (See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9SjqkWEqrTk)

 

Having ascended to political fame through a stirring and widely lauded speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama, the U.S. Senate’s only African-American member, is now considered to be the party’s most promising young leader—especially among those who, like the student organizers present, are seeking to reinvigorate its progressive wing....

The senator was running a bit late; but when he finally glided into the auditorium, escorted by an assortment of aides, he was greeted by a tremendous swell of applause as he took to the stage. Dressed in a brown jacket and red tie, Obama approached the podium, flanked by two giant screens enlarging his image, and began a softly spoken but compelling speech that recalled his own days, after his graduation in 1983 from Columbia University, as a community organizer in poor neighborhoods of Chicago.

 

“You’ll have boundless opportunities

when you graduate,”

 

he told the students...

 

Actual quote from the video is "You've got boundless opportunities in front of you..." - not exactly as noted in Harper's.

 

That was THEN. (In July 2006, the national UNEMPLOYMENT RATE was 4.7%)

THIS is now.

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Podesta's remark -- "We need more of you hanging from trees" -- is about as revealing a sentence as any Leftie has ever uttered. For most of us, one of the epochal events in the history of the world was the day homo sapiens first came down from the trees, and, unlike his primate relatives, stopped swinging from branches and flinging feces at his fellows. But Podesta -- who ironically calls himself "progressive" -- would apparently have us all regress to our tree-dwelling days. And a lot of Lefties are all too willing to accomodate him. The protesters who will be out on the streets of Chicago tomorrow are nearly as primitive as the original tree-dwellers -- and so are most of the OWSers. And much of the Left's so-called rhetoric these days isn't much more than the flinging of verbal feces. Obama's campaign slogan is -- laughably -- FORWARD! But his henchman Podesta is a much more serious (and honest) guy; his slogan -- and it should be Obama's, too -- is: BACK TO THE TREES!