WASHINGTON – Barack Hussein Obama is a soaring political superstar right now – but he also sports one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate and has a shady land deal in his recent past.
Democratic activists are swooning over Obama as the party’s presidential alternative to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, but critics say voters still have a lot to learn about the first-term Illinois Democrat.
Largely overlooked in the hubbub over the Democrats’ election sweep last month was Obama’s backpedaling over a questionable land deal he struck in 2005 with a tainted political fund-raiser, Tony Rezko, who has since been indicted by the feds in an alleged pay-to-play scheme.
The seeds for the deal were planted in 2004, when Obama got a big-money book contract after winning his Senate seat. With the book cash, he bought a swanky Illinois mansion in June 2005 for $1.65 million – $300,000 below the asking price. On the same day that Obama closed on the home, Rezko paid $625,000 for the adjacent vacant lot.
Six months later, Obama expanded the size of his yard by buying a strip of Rezko’s land for only $105,000.
Obama insists the transaction was aboveboard, but he’s been contrite about the appearance of impropriety.
“It was a mistake to have been engaged with him [Rezko] at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe that he had done me a favor, Obama said in a statement distributed to Chicago reporters.
“For that reason, I consider this a mistake on my part, and I regret it.” In the Senate, Obama’s liberal voting record belies the centrist themes he strikes on the stump.
The liberal lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action gives Obama a 100 percent voting rating – 5 points to the left of Sen. Ted Kennedy, who gets 95 percent grade.
Obama backed a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported international funding for groups that provide abortion, and opposed reauthorization of the Patriot Act.
And a Congressional Quarterly review found Obama has a nearperfect partisan voting record, casting his lot with the Democratic Party line a 97 percent of the time – higher than Clinton and dead even with Sen. John Kerry (Mass.).
Obama will also have some explaining to do the second he decides to launch a White House bid – possibly as soon as two weeks – because he “unequivocally” vowed in 2004 and again earlier this year to complete his full Senate term, which expires in 2010.
As reporters and prospective voters peer deeper into Obama’s past, they’ll learn more about his professed youthful dalliances with cocaine and marijuana – and his heavy cigarette-smoking habit that continues today.
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10 things you might not know about Barack Obama:
1) Did a controversial land deal with an indicted political fund-raiser
2) Has one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate
3) Has repeatedly pledged to serve a full term – through 2010
4) Is a heavy cigarette smoker
5) His middle name is Hussein
6) He’s left-handed
7) Lived in Indonesia from ages 6 to 10
8) Graduated from Honolulu high school in 1979
9) Was a political-science major at Columbia
10) Was president of Harvard Law Review