Deteriorating Living Conditions You Can Believe In
Posted on June 27th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Remember Clinton’s debate line about Obama’s ties to “slumlord” Tony Rezko? Since Rezko was mostly known for the corruption charges against him at the time, this line of attack didn’t really register with a lot of people and the use of the word slumlord was supposed to be seen as another example of some nefarious speaking in “code” about race. It refers, of couse, to Rezko’s past as a private developer who took government subsidies and loans to manage low-income housing developments, which fell into disrepair and which he then abandoned for greener pastures.
This Globe story about Obama’s support for subsidies to failed housing developers (who were also campaign contributors), including Rezko, is grist for Nader’s mill and could embarrass Obama with some very bad publicity. This concluding passage says it all:
Jamie Kalven, a longtime Chicago housing activist, put it this way: “I hope there is not much predictive value in his history and in his involvement with that [development] community.”
A lot of progressive, civil libertarian and conservative admirers of Obama hope that there is not much predictive value in Obama’s record on many of the policies they support.
Update: It seems that I beat Mickey Kaus to the anti-Obama punch, but he appropriately makes up in rhetoric (”Obama’s Katrina”) what he lacked in timing.
Filed under: politics
2 Responses to “Deteriorating Living Conditions You Can Believe In”
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Hard to see much of a story here. Inner city housing development has always been difficult, private or publically managed. It would appear that the failures here aren’t on the development side, but on the maintenance and management side, where there isn’t enough budgeted to keep things going. Hard to lay much blame on Obama for that. At least he tried to do something, but obviously he doesn’t have the power to increase maintenance budgets.
There are two problems for Obama here. First, it reminds voters of his associations with the genuinely sleazy Rezko, and it shows that his relationship with Rezko was more enduring than was the case with other local area pols. Second, it has the potential to create horrible visual associations if anyone is inclined to make an ad against Obama with footage of these derelict developments. The message that can be used against him is that he used taxpayers’ money to pay his friends to do a lousy job. That cuts out a lot of the circumstances and oversimplifies things, but that’s the nature of these kinds of embarrassments. There may be a good explanation and Obama may be able to account for his role in all of this, but if his opponent wanted to latch on to this it would be damaging.