by Michael Daly

Created on: November 05, 2008   Last Updated: November 09, 2008

Character matters. It is a fact often lost amid the waves of a political campaign, and it is usually not for the better that character becomes lost. The 2008 Presidential race came to a contest between a US Senator with a poor record of legitimate accomplishment and an overweening sense of entitlement and gall on one side, and a veteran US Senator whose character was shaped by the brutality of an infamous prison run by an imperial predator state that had launched war on its neighbors at the behest of a much larger expansionist state ruled by an evil ideology formed and driven by the character failings of its most rutless practitioners. The battle between Barack Obama and John McCain was one of character and was a contest where Obama pulled a masquerade of character to hide an intolerant bullying drive.

Barack Obama was a Senator unable to list or defend any serious record fo accomplishments because there was nothing upon which he could hang his credetials. So he ran on character, portraying himself as a nonpartisan uniter of people, a character that was aided by sycophantic media coverage but which has never stood up to objective scruitiny. Obama's political career started with his involvement with slum lords in South Chicago. One, Tony Rezko, helped finance Obama's fledgling political campaign and Obama, while practicing law, worked with Rezko, a fact pointed out by Hillary Clinton early in 2008 on CNN.

South Chicago became, as the Boston Globe put it on June 27, 2008, "A grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy." What Obama wound up doing was to help slumlords impoverish the south side of Chicago and ride the support of people such as Tony Rezko responsible for the damage wrought to higher political power. Far from recognizing the havoc he was helping bring about, Obama camaigned for policies identical to what he'd help do in Chicago, vowing in June 2007 to "create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund," which would require siphoning off monies from the now-bankrupt government lending entities Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (it says something about Obama's character that he chose as key economic advisor Rahm Emanual, whose own economic illiteracy matches Obama's and who was a key figure in the collapse of Mac and Mae as chairman of Freddie Mac when it was looting itself into oblivion).

Obama's character is also an issue in seeing how he treats people such as former General Colin Powell, whom Obama insulted as a "yes man in the early Bush administration" in TIME

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