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.
Was Obama's Political Mentor A Soviet "Agent
Of
Influence"
New Zeal blog draws our attention to
Alice Palmer, a Chicago based
academic, activist and former friend, employer and political ally of
Barack Obama.
In the mid 1990s Alice Palmer, then an Illinois
State Senator, employed Obama has her chief of staff, when she attempted
an ill-fated run for the US Congress.
Later Palmer introduced Obama
as designated successor to her Illinois State Senate seat, in the living
room of former Weather Underground terrorists
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn,
while DSA member, former communist and long time Obama friend Quentin
Young looked on.
The Palmer/Obama relationship soured after
Obama refused to step down when Palmer decided she wanted her State
Senate seat back, after her Congressional bid failed.
Obama went
on to win the seat unopposed, after he knocked Palmer and his other
rivals off the ballot, by challenging the legitimacy of their nominating
signatures.
Alice Palmer was the first rung of Obama's ladder to
power.
It has long been known that Alice Palmer was a communist
front activist, as were many in Obama's orbit.
More seriously
however-new evidence shows that Alice Palmer had high level connections
behind the "Iron Curtain" and may have been a Soviet "agent of
influence" -- that is, a conduit of Soviet propaganda and policy, to the
US and the "third world".
Jerome Corsi
says Alice Palmer, the avowed communist who helped launch Barack
Obama’s career, continues to haunt Obama even today.
In 2008,
Palmer showed up at the Democratic National Convention in Denver as a
Hillary Clinton supporter, still resentful toward Obama for knocking her
and three other candidates off the ballot for an Illinois state Senate
seat some 13 years earlier by challenging voter signatures.
"The
Democratic primary, what I witnessed, was one of the most appalling,
disgusting things I’ve ever seen in my entire life," Hollywood-based
digital photographer Michele Thomas told WND in a joint interview with
Hollywood film producer Bettina Viviano.
Thomas began as a
volunteer for the 2008 Clinton campaign then launched a petition drive
when she learned the Democratic National Committee was not going to
allow delegates to cast their votes for Clinton at the convention.
"I just felt like the entire process was being eviscerated and rules
were being changed all along to ensure that no matter what, Barack Obama
was the nominee," Thomas said.
"And I felt compelled to take a
stand to have the process in which we decide who our candidates are that
we vote for be upheld," she said. "And that the peoples’ votes are held
up from the ballot box to the convention where the delegates bring those
votes forward."
Thomas said she received death threats as she
gathered the 300 signed and notarized petitions required by Democratic
National Convention rules to prompt a count of votes for Hillary Clinton
on the first ballot.
Knowing how Obama had defeated Palmer in his
first election campaign in 1996, Thomas required the delegates who
signed the petition to notarize their signatures on two copies. One copy
was sent to a Post Office box and the other brought to the convention in
Denver.
Thomas said she did it "so there was no way the DNC or
the Obama campaign, his lawyers, could knock my signatures off this
petition."
Thomas took three months off work to conduct the
petition drive, foregoing considerable income.
She explained why
she did it and why she is speaking out about it now.
"I’m a
little scared right now, there’s no doubt about it," she admitted, "but
at some point in your life, if you are fortunate enough, you are faced
with the decision of doing something bigger than yourself."
The
charges of Thomas, Viviano and others connected to the 2008 campaign are
now being investigated by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold
Case Posse, which is probing Obama’s eligibility for Arizona’s 2012
ballot.
In 1995, Obama saw his opening to run for elected office
when Palmer decided to give up her state Senate seat and run for
Congress in a special election.
In 1986, as editor of the Black
Press Review, Palmer was the only African-American to cover the 27th
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow.
She went out of her way to make Obama her handpicked successor.
To get Obama’s state Senate race off to a good start, Palmer arranged a
function to be held for a few influential liberals in the district at
the Hyde Park home of Weather Underground founders Bill Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn.
It’s not likely Palmer would have selected
Obama to be her successor in the Illinois Legislature or have introduced
him to the Hyde Park political community at the Ayers-Dohrn home unless
she saw an affinity between Ayers and Dorhn’s radical SDS Weather
Underground history, her own history of openly professed communism and
Obama.
After Palmer stepped aside for Obama to take her seat, she
suffered an unexpected electoral defeat in the November 1995 Democratic
Party primary. She came in a distant third, behind Jesse Jackson and
Emil Jones Jr., a power-wielder who would become Obama’s mentor after
Obama was elected to fill Palmer’s seat.
After losing the special
congressional election, Palmer reversed her decision and decided she
wanted her Illinois Senate seat back.
Palmer supporters asked
Obama to step aside, but he refused and decided to challenge Palmer’s
eligibility for the ballot using what the Chicago Tribune described as
the "bare-knuckle arts of Chicago electoral politics."
Obama
hired a fellow Harvard Law School alumnus to challenge the legitimacy of
the signatures Palmer received on petitions to qualify for the ballot.
Once he set on the strategy, Obama kept challenging petitions, until
he succeeded in getting all four of his Democratic primary rivals forced
off the ballot, enabling him to run unchallenged.
Viviano
described Obama’s strategy in defeating Palmer in 1995 as a betrayal.
"Alice Palmer was his mentor who had asked Bill Ayers to throw that
coming-out party for Obama," she explained.
Thomas said she met
Palmer in person at the 2008 convention in Denver.
"I actually
had my petitions in my backpack," Thomas remembered. "I walked right up
to her and I said, ‘Alice Palmer, you have no idea how you have affected
my life and what I’ve just done.’"
Thomas explained to Palmer how
she designed her petition to make sure Obama could not get lawyers to
disqualify her signatures.
"I had every single one of these
petitions notarized because I know what happened to you," Thomas told
Palmer upon meeting her in Denver. "I have them in my backpack right
now. Do you want to see them?"
Palmer said yes.
"She
started going through them, and she got tears in her eyes when she saw
that they were notarized," Thomas recalled. "She said, ‘Oh my God, This
is what I should have done, this is what I should have done."
Thomas told Palmer that the only reason she got her signatures
individually notarized was to prevent the Democratic National Committee
or the Obama campaign from throwing out her signatures to disqualify the
petition.
"This was all because of what [Obama] did to all of his
challengers," Viviano stressed. "It just was outrageous to disqualify
these people that way. This is how moral and ethical our so-called
president is. His own mentor, who went out of her way to support him in
his career -- he turned around with a knife and put it in her back and
had her challenged off the ballot in a way that was so amoral and
unethical, and she became a Hillary supporter."
Thomas remembered
that Palmer pulled her aside at the Denver presidential nominating
convention and told Thomas that she wanted to tell her a story.
Palmer explained to Thomas that after Obama’s lawyers disqualified her
signatures in 1996, she spent the next few months walking door-to-door
making sure her signatures were valid.
"She said every single one
of them was correct, and they should have not been knocked off," Thomas
said.
Thomas recalled that Palmer wanted to have dinner with her
that night. But the person who introduced her to Palmer later called and
said that the dinner was off because Palmer had been threatened.
Viviano shared Thomas’ outrage.
"America doesn’t do scared like
that," she insisted. "This is a First Amendment country, freedom of
speech and now, all of a sudden, there are people cowering in the corner
that are afraid to tell the truth about things.
"This is like
living under Chavez or Castro," she said. "It’s ridiculous."
