Is Obama the 'man his multi-million dollar media campaign portrays him as?’

Washington D.C., Aug 21, 2008 / 04:00 am

The recent exposure of Sen. Barack Obama’s false representation concerning his opposition to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act has focused attention upon the candidate and his positions which are well-documented in David Freddoso’s book, “The Case Against Barack Obama.”

Sen. Barack Obama had repeatedly claimed that his opposition to the Illinois version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA) was due to its lack of legal language that would protect the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion throughout the country.

The Illinois BAIPA bill was supported by nurse Jill Stanek, who discovered that infants who survived abortions in an Illinois hospital were being left to die of neglect in a utility closet.

Documents obtained by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) show that in 2003, as an Illinois state senator chairing the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services Committee, Obama voted to add such language to the state BAIPA bill shortly before voting to kill the bill in committee.

When challenged about the NRLC’s findings in a Christian Broadcasting Network interview on Saturday, Obama accused the organization of lying about his record.  However, his campaign later admitted that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee had misrepresented his record on this question.

In the past, Obama has accused pro-lifers of discouraging compromises that would reduce the number of partial birth abortions because, he claimed, the image of a partial birth abortion helps win converts to the pro-life cause.

According to political commentator Pat Buchanan’s August 12 column “A Catholic Case against Barack,” Sen. Obama supports the procedure of partial-birth abortion, in which the abortionist draws the baby’s body into, but not through, the birth canal and then stabs the baby’s skull with scissors. The baby’s brains are then vacuumed out so its corpse may be removed through the birth canal.

When the U.S. Congress was voting to ban the procedure, Buchanan claims, Obama’s wife Michelle was signing fundraising letters pledging that Barack would be “tireless” in keeping legal partial birth abortion, which she called a “legitimate medical procedure.”

When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban, Barack Obama accused the court of denying “equal rights for women.”

The candidate pledged in 2007 that as his first act as president he would sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which Buchanan says would “cancel every federal, state or local regulation or restriction on abortion. The National Organization for Women says it would abolish all restrictions on government funding of abortion.”

Recounting Obama’s opposition to BAIPA, Buchanan asks:

“How is it essential for the life or health of a woman that her baby, who somehow survived the horrible ordeal of abortion, be left to die or put to death? Yet, that is what Obama voted for, thrice, in the Illinois Senate.”

“Obama says he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act because he feared it might imperil Roe v. Wade,” Buchanan continues. “But if Roe v. Wade did allow infanticide or murder, which is what letting a tiny baby die of neglect or killing it outright amounts to, why would he not want that court decision reviewed and amended to outlaw infanticide?”

Buchanan also cites author David Freddoso, who in his book “The Case Against Barack Obama” says “I could find no instance in his entire career in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion."

Speaking in a Tuesday phone interview with Catholic News Agency, David Freddoso described his book as an attempt to start a conversation on the “middle ground” between the people who “are smearing him on the internet for supposedly being a secret Muslim or supposedly not saluting the flag,” and those who “think he’s the messiah.”

Saying he hopes to begin a discussion that is “neither obeisant nor defamatory” about Sen. Obama, Freddoso said his book is “A look at Sen. Obama’s political and adult life just to try and see if he is the man that his multi-million dollar media campaign portrays him as,” and to see if he is the “reformer and the flexible reasonable man that the mainstream media has accepted him as.”

“I think even a cursory examination of his career puts the lie to both these ideas,” Freddoso said, arguing Obama has never been a “true reformer” or an “agent of positive change” and the idea that Obama is a reformer is a “great lie.”

“His attempt to appear ideologically flexible and moderate is deceptive and untrue, and his judgment is very poor” in his choice of personal associations, Freddoso continued.

He called Obama a “rigid and doctrinaire liberal” on many issues, for Catholics in particular because of his support for partial-birth abortion.

Freddoso claimed the Freedom of Choice Act Obama pledged to support is one that “among other things, re-legalizes partial-birth abortion.”

“People tell pro-lifers a lot that when you bring this issue up, you’re being divisive, and yet here he is promising to open that can of worms as his first act of office,” he commented.

Freddoso credited the success of “The Case Against Barack Obama,” which is currently at #5 on the New York Times bestseller list, to a “hunger” for information about the candidate because they’re “not getting the real story.”

He cited people’s surprise at discovering Obama’s support for BAIPA, but also noted their surprise at learning of Obama’s hardball tactics in his first electoral victory, in which the aspirant to political office had all of his opponents thrown off the ballot in a legal challenge.