I dislike spin, obfuscation and misinformation. You undoubtedly mean well for your candidate, but
you are not helping him except perhaps among the least informed. And it disturbs me profoundly that there are others who may be going to their primaries on Tuesday with similarly held misconceptions, seduced by a good-looking guy with a smooth voice, great speech writers, fantastic spin-doctors, and no serious spousal baggage. Okay, he's better than that. But he's not JFK, RFK, or Martin Luther King (I'm expecting this specific endorsement comparison next from a surviving member of the King family, unless I've already overlooked it).
My other visceral reaction to what's been happening is deja vu. I remember the wave of emotionalism, hope and catharsis that swept a beatified Jimmy Carter into the White House after Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. And the wave of disillusionment that sent a Republican team (that included the progenitor of our current Decider, if you'll recall) right back in there after four short years. Perhaps we needed less of the many fine qualities we believed a man like Carter possessed and more of a bastard for the tough times?
To me, too many Obama supporters like you sound willing to have his qualifications and experience spoon-fed to them without a critical eyebrow being raised, witness your repeating the
800 bills claim without fully understanding it. Many don't realize that all it takes in a state legislature is a
signature to co-sponsor a colleague's bill, or to resurrect a failed idea from a previous year/session. Even your own "original" bills are researched, structured, and written by paid staff. If you divide his 800+ by eight years, it comes out to an average of about 100+ annually...which would be low-to-average for all (principal and co-) sponsored bills for a state senator in a small state with a part-time legislature,
which Illinois is NOT. A submission of anywhere from 5-35 pieces of principally sponsored legislation wouldn't be unheard of in that hypothetical state, the only example I can address from personal experience. In those conditions, less than twenty principally sponsored bills
annually is typical. My opinion:
Obama should have done better on his own quarter and gotten more passed with the time and resources he had. Officials who like to boast huge submission numbers while concealing the truth of failing to shepherd them adequately can find ways to massage and re-package the numbers; they don't have to be accountants.
(By the way, did you know that legislators who throw a lot of frivolous, feel-good, look-good, bandwagon or DOA or abandoned bills in the hopper end up costing their state taxpayers lots of money? To this extent, assembly leaders often impose moratoriums on certain popular types of folderol bills for this very reason, and refuse to allow them to be read into the record. The other thing that happens is that everyone wants a piece of what looks good to constituents, so the signing on of eager co-sponsors via amendment can sometimes actually impede or halt the bill's movement.)
You need to hear a few things in proper context. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) explains their classification system more succinctly than I can in my faster-but-folksy irritation mode:
http://www.ncsl.org/programs/press/2004/backgrounder_fullandpart.htmTo encapsulate, Illinois is a state with a year-round legislature that NCSL considers to be moderately heavy (80% of FT) in its job demands on members, who serve two-year terms and apparently also operate on a bi-annual hearing schedule (in Obama's case, the 90th-93rd assemblies).
An interesting footnote on the NCSL page referenced above is their chart of the typical size ranges of legislative staff across the nation; Illinois would fall in the mid-range, according to their assessment, of the 3.1 to 8.9 full-time paid staff. Five or six people would be
A LARGE full-time staff by anyone's standards, especially when you consider the ubiquitous flotillas of interns and volunteers. Large enough to have a designated chief of staff/custodian of his office records.
The lead item featured in your OP and presumably
the basis for your opinion that Clinton's record looks "thin" in comparison is a standard piece of
legislative wrap-up fluff, paid for by the politician (one
hopes, although there are ways of getting around that) and not the government, and appears to be one of the personal items that survived the presumed loss of his Illinois office records. Of course, they all do this, and any knowledgeable opponent could go back and data-mine all of the grit that sank to the bottom, or at least much of what they'd rather have buried in the archives. Admittedly, even the best politicians make mistakes, commit before they think, and get conscripted onto sinking ships. And better politicians and their staffs spend a large chunk of their time on constituent services; however, they need to produce tangible results on multiple playing fields simultaneously, not fluff.
The
2006 Legislative Scorecard you present is but
one rating published by
one children's advocacy organization. Legislators are "graded" by hundreds (if not
thousands at the Congressional level) of organizations in myriad areas. Clinton's 90% indicates that she voted in tandem with their agenda on nine out of the ten items scored as opposed to Obama's ten. More interestingly,
this particular organization singling out Obama and you're praising after the fact as being with them 100% is a faith-based non-profit program, a supporter of Bush and No Child Left Behind, and raises some of its funds by selling children's bibles, among other facts that are sinking into this unfortunate morass of misinformation you've posted. I'm sure you didn't realize this.
http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServerI have no idea what the
next unlabeled group of ten items represents to you; it looks like another, unrelated ten-item legislative agenda, this one included without references. Or perhaps it's tangentially connected to the link following it...too murky to even hazard a guess. So I can't comment on it otherwise; sorry if I'm missing something that should be obvious.
Your
roll call link connects to H.R. 4297, on vote #10 in the Senate. Your down-thread post #20 is riddled with factual errors. Many votes later than the early link you chose (on vote #188, in fact), a much-amended (and now renamed Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2006), conference-committee version was passed...
and both Obama and Clinton voted AGAINST IT the version passed and signed into law by Bush. I can't begin to speculate what you
thought was proven by the incorrect vote call you cited, or what you thought you read in the original 148 pages, etc. especially in light of the unattributed list referenced above. And I'm not going to waste another moment of my life investigating it.
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00118 If you really want to know the whole story of (zzzzzzz) what happened, look here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR04297:@@@S
Kate Michelman, who previously endorsed Edwards, is not specifically addressing his legislative record in the Huffington Post excerpt that you linked, making it less than relevant to your OP theme. So I'm not going to deal with her rebound endorsement.
Last, but certainly not least, is the link you provided to
Obama's actual legislative record in the 90th Session (his first) of the Illinois State Assembly, and the listed submission of 31 principally sponsored (i.e., of his primary sponsorship) bills, one senate resolution and one senate joint resolution is noted; this would be in perfect keeping with my earlier observations about the average annual legislation volume by a senator of a mid-sized state...except that we're talking about a larger state with a two-year session, twice as long to get that legislation passed. BUT WAIT...what happened to those bills?
Of the 33 pieces of legislation listed, only three bills and the senate resolution passed, all of them in 1997. See the rest marked "sine die?" These are bills that were inactive as of the final day of the term. Why? They were referred to the rules committee. Why were they referred to the rules committee? Because the legislator submitted them for consideration in some irregular fashion, or they were tabled, or they needed to be vetted and probably did not meet some other requirement.
The most common reason is missing a submission or other procedural deadline or benchmark; this is most likely in the case of those that have no "action taken" information other than referred to rules, although I did catch an example in his later record of a rules referral due to a procedural roadblock. The early flush may have incorporated a "legacy" bill or two, commonly passed along to freshman legislators.
Strangely, I cannot find any reference to any legislative actions brought to conclusion on Obama's part during 1998. That is truly bizarre, to the extent that I fear that I am misreading something. So if anyone can clarify this anomaly, please do, because I don't want to accuse him of getting nothing passed in 1998 if that's not true.
But that was Obama's first term as a state senator and only a poor choice of example. An admittedly fairer evaluation can be gleaned from his final and most "seasoned" term in the 93rd session, in which he introduced 113 pieces of legislation, 26 of which actually passed in that two-year period, the huge remainder again mostly going to the Rules Committee and languishing until the session ended. Anyone who cares to investigate how substantive any of these bills were, passed or not, will find interesting reading. Or the two other sessions in between. Be my guest. I am not going to laugh up my sleeve about them, although some deserve it.
http://www.ilga.gov/senate/SenatorBills.asp?GA=93&MemberID=747&Primary=TrueOn balance, Obama sponsored the failed SB0552 in the 93rd session,
which I think in his defense effectively debunks the myth that he had some kind of personal vested interest in keeping Illinois hospital billings of uninsured patients exorbitantly high. There's also at least one other dealing with hospital reform, a hospital "report card" act. Bravo.
Another curious footnote is an apparently perennial resolution he introduced in every session for a state constitutional amendment to mandate universal health care. In his final term, he also introduced bills to create what amounted to a task force to study the issue, another to create a health care commission, and again, the constitutional amendment. Two of the three (and I may have missed another-no way am I going to read that many fiscal notes) represented an estimated
$850,000 in what amounts to unfunded expenses for his state's budget, not to mention a lack of real plans for citizens (or government) to pay or find help paying for the universal health care, except to kindly
allow employers to pay a portion.
Obama's Illinois history is a mediocre to arguably poor record at best, certainly not a compelling reason to favor him over Senator Clinton, or his state experience specifically over her non-Congressional political experience. He's not the emperor, yet he's already donned those transparent clothes everyone is calling gorgeous. Look through them. And ProSense, if the information contained in your post is the summary of the reasons you believe Obama is impressive (with or without comparisons to anyone else), you are mistaken.
Barack Obama would make a great Vice President. However, I plan to vote for the masterful devil I know in the primary: a warty, sometimes highly unlikeable woman who has been deeply immersed in policy and political activism since Obama was in diapers, who partnered her husband through two non-consecutive terms as Arkansas governor, and who was able to continue working alongside him effectively while simultaneously living through a highly visible, humiliating, eight-year Republican assault on every aspect of herself, her spouse, her personal and professional lives. Who might not thank me for that depiction. That woman is tempered steel. We need steel to clean out the House (and the Senate, pun intended, apologies to none), not warm and fuzzy, moth-eaten, Camelot-cloaked dreams.
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