Barack Obama -- Alice Palmer

Alice Palmer

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Alice Palmer

Communist

Obama's Political Mentor

In 1995, Alice Palmer represented the state's 13th District, and decided to run for the United States Congress. She hand-picked Barack Obama to run to replace her.

Palmer introduced her chosen successor to a few of the district's influential liberals at the home of two well-known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former members of the terrorist Weather Underground.

"I remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the Senate and running for Congress," says Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care. "(Palmer) identified (Obama) as her successor."

Ten years earlier, Palmer was an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front group, an affiliate of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front group.

Palmer participated in the World Peace Council's 1983 Prague Assembly, part of the Soviet launch of the nuclear-freeze movement. The only thing it would have frozen was the Soviet Union's military superiority.

In June 1986, while editor of the Black Press Review, she wrote an article for the Communist Party USA's newspaper, the People's Daily World, now the People's Weekly World. It detailed her experience attending the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how impressed she was by the Soviet system.

Palmer gushed at the "Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and better education" and spoke of the efficiency of the Soviets' most recent five-year plan, attributing its success to "central planning." She praised their "comprehensive affirmative action program, which they have stuck to religiously -- if I can use the word -- since 1917."

Palmer also marveled that all Russian citizens were guaranteed a job matching their training and skills, free education, affordable housing and free medical care. Because Soviet school curricula were established at the national level, she said, "there is no second-class 'track' system in the minority-nationality schools as there is in the inferior inner city schools in my hometown, Chicago, and elsewhere in the United States."

Well, Alice lost the congressional race to Jesse Jackson, Jr., and decided that she wanted to hang onto that hard-won state senate seat. Most of the community leaders tried to persuade Obama to withdraw and wait his turn. He was a newcomer after all.

Obama said no. He had every right to do so, but he decided to fight her for the nomination instead of stepping aside in deference to her.

Instead Obama performed his first real act of political jujitsu. He sent his aides to the courthouse to carefully examine all of Alice Palmer's signatures to see if enough could be disallowed to knock her off the ballot altogether. And indeed, some of Alice's signatures were fake. The aides also found enough other fake signatures on opponents' ballot initiatives to knock them off the ballot as well.

"They began the tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from the city's South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of Obama's four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot."

Obama ran unopposed in the primary.

By the time Barack Obama walked handily into his state senate seat, everyone there knew him as "the man who knocked off Alice Palmer." Quite a feat indeed for the newcomer, the young whippersnapper with the odd name.