Obama says he avoided city, state corruption
Clout and corruption scandals that have plagued Chicago and Illinois politics in recent years have not laid a glove on Barack Obama, he told reporters here Wednesday.
"You will recall that for my entire political career here, I was not the the endorsed candidate of any political organization here," the Democratic presidential hopeful said at the Westin Hotel downtown. "I didn't go around wielding a bunch of clout. My reputation in Springfield was as an independent. There is no doubt I had friends and continue to have friends who come out of the more traditional school of Chicago politics but that's not what launched my political career and that's not what I've ever depended on to get elected, and I would challenge any Chicago reporter to dispute that basic fact."
(AP)
Obama friend Tony Rezko was convicted of corrupting state government, but Obama was never implicated and has returned contributions Rezko made to his Senate campaign. Obama did run as an independent Democrat but worked closely with state Senate President Emil Jones, an old-school organization Democrat. Obama runs for president with the full blessing of Mayor Daley.
While disassociating himself from Chicago's Democratic organization, Obama Wednesday aligned himself with the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative bloc he usually rails against.
The court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that child rapists could not be executed because only crimes that killed people were eligible for the death penalty.
"I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8, years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances, the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our constitution," Obama said.
That puts Obama in league with the court's most conservative justices, whose rulings he often cites as reasons voters ought to put him in the White House. Obama suggests he would appoint judges who share his views of constitutional law.
Obama also showed his moderate streak on a bill before the Senate to approve the secret courts that hear Bush administration requests to eavesdrop on telephone calls. Obama said the compromises made on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) means he can live with it, even though some of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate want to filibuster the bill because it absolves the phone companies from liability for allowing the federal government to eavesdrop.
"It is a close call for me," Obama said. But the rewritten bill limits the president's power, he said. "The underlying program itself actually is important and useful to American security so long as it has these constraints on them. I thought it was important for me to go ahead and support this compromise."
Obama said he asked his major donors Tuesday to help retire his rival-turned-ally Hillary Clinton's debt.
"I'm not going to be individually contacting $15 donors," Obama said.
Obama is scheduled to campaign with Clinton in Unity, N.H., Friday and he denied Wednesday that he has a major rift with her husband.
On his decision to forgo public campaign financing, Obama had bragged that his donors who have given him contributions of less than $200 -- 90 percent of his donors -- allowed him to get the politics out of campaign finance, so that he did not have to accept public financing. He repeated the claim he has made repeatedly in the past few days that it was not a "flip-flop" for him to continue raising unlimited amounts of money from an unprecedented number of small donors over the internet instead of limiting himself to $85 million in public matching funds as he had indicated earlier he would.
"Public financing was one means of achieving that end -- I feel confident we have achieved it," Obama said.
Touring flooded areas of Illinois, Obama said he found 15 of the National Guard's 17 helicopters diverted to Iraq.
"Our military is strained to the breaking point," Obama said. "Our National Guard, as we saw in the Midwest flooding, can't function as effectively as it could. I was talking to National Guard representatives. Fifteen of their 17 helicopters in this region were overseas during the flooding."