The following is
definitely something to ponder before casting your vote if you have
not yet done so. This piece is the most comprehensive I have
read.
Obama's Strange Dependence
on Valerie
Jarrett
President
Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin
Laden three timesbefore
saying yes, because he got cold feet about the
possible political harm to himself if the mission
failed. Instead of listening to advisors
from the U.S. military, Defense, or even State,
Obama was acting on the advice of White House
politico and close friend Valerie Jarrett.
Valerie
Jarrett?
This account comes
from Richard Miniter's
upcoming book Leading
From Behind: The Reluctant President and the
Advisors who Decide for Him. Miniter has
written a half-dozen books on the war on
terror. He is relying on an unnamed source
within the U.S. military Joint Special Operations
Command who was directly involved in the operation
and planning of the Osama bin Laden kill
mission.
Is the story
credible? According to Edward Klein, a
reporter once asked Obama if he ran every decision
by Jarrett. Obama answered, "Yep.
Absolutely."
Edward Klein, former
foreign editor of Newsweek and
editor of the New
York Times Magazine for
many years, describes Jarrett as "ground zero in
the Obama operation, the first couple's friend and
consigliere." Klein -- who claims he used a
minimum of two sources for each assertion in his
book on the Obama presidency, The
Amateur --
writes in detail about Jarrett opposing the raid
on bin Laden. She told Obama not to take the
political risk. Klein thought Obama ignored
Jarrett's advice. Miniter tells us he
listened to her, three times telling Special
Operations not to take the risk to go after bin
Laden.
We need to understand
the role Valerie Jarrett plays in Obama's private
and political
life.
"If it wasn't for
Valerie Jarrett, there'd be no Barack Obama to
complain about," starts Klein's chapter on
Jarrett. He quotes Michelle Obama on
Jarrett's influence over her husband: "She knows
the buttons, the soft spots, the history, the
context."
No one outside Michelle
has the access or power over Obama's
decision-making like Jarrett does. Here's an
odd little fact that gives some insight into what
kind of president Obama is: Michelle, Michelle's
mother, and Valerie, and only a few others in
Washington, are allowed to call Barack by his
first name. After work, Jarrett joins Obama
at night in the Family Quarters, where she dines
often with the First Family. She goes on
vacation with
them.
Jarrett's title is the
weird mouthful "Assistant to the President for
Public Engagement and Intergovernmental
Affairs." She is the gatekeeper, but she is
also much more than that. She occupies Karl
Rove's and Hillary's old office and has an
all-access pass to meetings. She shows up at
the National Security Council, at meetings on the
economy and budget. She stays behind to
advise Obama on what to think and do. Obama
uses her as his left-wing conscience.
Klein's sources describe how at each pressing
issue, Obama turns to ask her, "What do you think
the right thing to do is?" As president, he
likes to have her next to him "as the voice of
authentic blackness in a White House that is
staffed largely by
whites."
A longtime friend told
Klein that Jarrett is the "eyes, ears and nose" of
the Obamas. She tells them whom to trust,
who is saying what, whom to see at home and
abroad. Michelle wants her there: "I told
her .... it would give me a sense of comfort to
know that (Barack) had somebody like her there by
his side." As Obama told the New
York Times, "Valerie is one of my oldest
friends. ... I trust her
completely."
To understand why Obama
relies so heavily on Jarrett, we must remember the
president's identity crisis as a black man, which
is the main subject of his memoir,Dreams from
My Father. Valerie Jarrett's adoption of
the Obamas as her friends and protégés in
Chicago's upper-crust black society was one of the
greatest things that ever happened to Obama.
Until becoming a community organizer, Obama tells
us he felt himself to be an inauthentic American
black. Nothing in his life helped him
understand or fit into the American black
community.
Within a few weeks of
Obama's birth, conceived out of wedlock as he was,
his mother moved away to a different college,
leaving Obama's African birth father behind in
Honolulu. There may have been a shotgun
wedding or not -- in the memoir, Obama says he is
not sure. The only time Barack set eyes on
his father was a brief visit when he was
ten. Our president lived with his white
mother, then with her and her Indonesian husband
in Indonesia from age six to ten. He was so
unhappy that he chose to leave his mother and live
with his white grandparents back in America.
Obama's America was the tolerant, wealthy American
world of Honolulu's top prep
school.
His only black
experience was his grandfather's creepy old
friend, Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying Communist and se
Valerie Jarrett reflects
Obama in many ways. Like himself,
Valerie looks more white than
black. Her mother had three white
grandparents, and her father was black. Like
Obama, she lived in the Muslim world for part of
her childhood, when her father practiced medicine
in Iran. Like Obama, she is a committed
leftist. But there are crucial
differences. Her father was not a drunk
Kenyan polygamist like Obama's, but a famous
pathologist and geneticist. Her mother was
not a leftist expatriate like Obama's, but a
distinguished psychologist. Valerie married
into Chicago's black elite, the top rung of
African-American society.. She went to
Stanford, got a law degree from Michigan, and
became Mayor Richard Daley's deputy chief of
staff, "the public black face" of his
administration.
When Valerie Jarrett
hired Michelle to work for Daley and befriended
her, the Obamas gained access to the exclusive
world of upper-class black Chicago politics.
Valerie knew everyone whom it was important to
know in black and Jewish money circles. She
gave Barack entrée and legitimacy. She
financed and promoted his ambitions for national
office.
Obama finally
belonged. Not that Jarrett's record in
Chicago was anything to be proud of. Jarrett
was known for her corruption and
incompetence. Daley finally had to fire her
after a scandal erupted over her role in misuse of
public funds in the city's substandard public
housing. She went on to become CEO of
Habitat Executive Services, pulling down $300,000
in salary and $550,000 in deferred
compensation. Again, she managed a housing
complex that was seized by government inspectors
for slum conditions. The scandal didn't
matter to Obama. The sordid corruption was
all part of Jarrett's Chicago success
story.
Every insider in Chicago
told Klein the same thing: Jarrett has no
qualifications to be the principal advisor to the
president of the United States. She doesn't
understand how Washington works, how relations
with Congress work, how the federal process
works. She doesn't understand how the
economy works, how the military works, how
national security works. But she understands
how Obama works.
The president turns to
Valerie Jarrett for definitive advice on all these
issues. She has given him terrible advice
over and over, and still he turns to her.
Her true job is to make
Obama feel proud of himself. When Obama
looks at Jarrett, he sees himself as whole and
good and real. He is no longer the fake
black, the fatherless kid flailing around in a
white world, tortured by the unfairness of it
all. She fills the emptiness at the core of
his identity. She admires and adores
him. Jarrett told New
Yorker editor
David Remnick that the president is "just too
talented to do what ordinary people do." And
the icing on the cake -- she shares his left-wing
politics that project unfairness out onto white
America.
Obama relies on Jarrett
to create the White House bubble he likes to live
in, where his narcissism is stroked and his desire
to do the big, left-wing thing is
encouraged. Jarrett is the doorman.
She runs access to the president. As Klein
puts it, she guards him from meeting with "critics
and complainers who might deflate his ego."
No one gets past Jarrett who has an incompatible
point of view.
Jarrett pushed
ObamaCare. At the beginning of Obama's
presidency, there was pressure on Obama to focus
on the economic crisis. Rahm Emanuel advised
a small, bipartisan health care reform with
popular items such as coverage for young adults --
to get it passed quickly and focus on the
country's money problems. Jarrett urged the
president to be true to his left-wing
agenda. She was all for having Reid-Pelosi
create the ObamaCare assault on the American
health system and ramming it through on a
one-party vote, using Chicago-style politics,
while Obama crossed the country doing what he does
best: make speeches. Obama liked Jarrett's
idea. Emanuel is now out of the White
House.
Jarrett pushed the
Solyndra fiasco. Jarrett promoted Solyndra
because one of her richest Chicago connections,
billionaire George Kaiser, a top Obama bundler,
had a 35% share in Solyndra. Kaiser visited
the White House sixteen
times..
Larry Summers, the
director of the president's National Economic
Council, warned Obama that the federal government
should not get involved in venture capital of any
sort. Summers understood that crony
capitalism sabotages economic growth. Huge
government funding distorts and destroys whatever
market segment it touches, replacing economic
decisions with political
ones.
A member of Obama's
finance committee warned the president that
Solyndra was going bankrupt. But it is Obama
and Valerie who see eye to eye, and they saw the
value to Obama of rewarding his political
cronies. It worked fine in Chicago.
Larry Summers is now out of the White
House.
Jarrett pushed Obama to
take on the Catholic Church over contraception,
arguing that it would appeal to single women (she
was right) and that religious freedom isn't
important (she was wrong). Bill Daley, who
had replaced Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff,
argued against Obama pushing contraception on the
Church and invited Archbishop Timothy Cardinal
Dolan of New York to meet with a displeased Obama,
who didn't appreciate hearing from the
Church. Daley is now out of the White
House.
Valerie Jarrett is the
most powerful woman in Washington. She has
guided the president's decisions on health care,
the budget, the stimulus, the deficit, foreign
affairs.
So when Jarrett told
Obama that the mission to kill bin Laden was too
politically risky, and to play it safe, it is
entirely plausible to believe that the president
listened to her. It is consistent with
everything we know about Obama's dependence on
her. According to Miniter's source in the
U.S. Military Joint Special Operations
Command, Obama listened to her for four
months, dithering and deciding no the first three
times the military told him that the time to get
bin Laden was now.
In The
Amateur, Klein reports that another worry won
out. Obama was even more scared of the
political fallout if voters learned he'd passed up
the chance to get bin Laden. What decided
him wasn't the national interest, but
politics. For once, the president disagreed
with Valerie
Jarrett.
