Chapter V: Obama's Toughest Critics on the Left

Obama’s toughest critic on the Left, the late

Robert Fitch, charged that Obama’s most 

trusted aide, Valerie Jarrett, made a fortune

as a real estate developer. Fitch, a radical 

leftist and freelance journalist who 

specialized in urban politics and economics,

said Obama surrounded himself with people

 who got rich on Chicago’s $1.6 billion 

neighborhood demolition program known 

officially as the Plan for Transformation.

Chapter V: Obama's Toughest Critics on the Left 
From the Washington Examiner

Barack Obama's carefully constructed image as a civil rights lawyer who wanted to heal the black community was greeted with skepticism by some Chicago activists.

"I never drank the Kool-Aid about Barack Obama," veteran Chicago black activist Eddie Read told The Washington Examiner. Read is president of the Black Independent Political Organization, one of Chicago's largest black community groups.

Read -- who describes himself as a "black nationalist" -- said Chicago streets are filled with genuine "street gangsters" and phonies known as "studio gangsters." The latter are impersonators who make money acting in studio-produced rap videos.

The same dichotomy is found among Chicago's street activists, Read said. "So what you get from me is I'm still up in the air on whether or not my brother Obama was a real

Chapter IV: For the Slumlord's Defense, Barack Obama, Esq.

via Getty Images and ap A security company

owned by now-jailed political fundraiser 

Tony Rezko sought help from Obama

and then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich in an effort

to gain a lucrative contract in Iraq, 

according to a report published in 2007.

Chapter IV: For the Slumlord's Defense, Barack Obama, Esq.
From the Washington Examiner

Writing in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams from My Father," Obama said he became "a civil rights lawyer" because "to lend meaning to a community's suffering and take part in its healing -- that required something more."

There was indeed "something more" to Obama's legal career, but it wasn't civil rights litigation at the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, where he was employed for a decade.

"He spent about half his time working with Bill Miceli and my former partner, Allison Davis, and that team," senior partner Judson Miner told The Washington Examiner. Most of the entries on Obama's client list for the firm from that period were in real estate, construction and finance.

Miceli and Davis were the partners in charge of the firm's housing and real estate practices. Davis would later leave

Chapter III: The 1997 Speech That Launched Obama

Like so many in the liberal powerbase 

that served as a springboard for Obama, 

Marilyn Katz’s activist roots stretch back to

her days as a Students for a Democratic

Society operative. Today, Katz is an

influential political operative in Chicago

who has visited the White House

26 times since 2009.

CHAPTER III: The 1997 Speech That Launched Obama
From the Washington Examiner

Few doubt that Barack Obama's stirring oration before the 2004 Democratic National Convention vaulted him into the national limelight.

But another, less-heralded Obama address -- delivered on Valentine's Day 1997 at First Chicago Bank -- was equally essential to his later successes. Without it, it is doubtful that he would have ever been in position to assume so prominent a role in 2004.

Obama was a newly elected Illinois state senator in 1997 when he addressed an audience that included many of Chicago's most powerful political insiders and activists, nonprofit executives, business movers and shakers, and philanthropic funders.

Chapter II: The myth of the rock star professor

CHAPTER II: The Myth of the Rock Star Professor

Obama with his grandparents, Stanley and 

Madelyn Dunham, on a park bench in New 

York City, when Obama was a student at 

Columbia University. (Associated Press)

Time magazine gushed in 2008 about Barack Obama's 12-year tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, saying, "Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students."

That may have been true during his first two years, when he ranked first among the law school's 40 instructors, with students giving him a rating of 9.7 out of a possible 10.

But law student evaluations made available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his popularity then fell steadily.

CHAPTER I: Obama's Childhood of Privilege, Not Hardship

CHAPTER I: A Childhood of Privilege, Not Hardship
From the Washington Examiner

Obama and his bride Michelle Robinson,

a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, on

their wedding day, Oct. 3, 1992, in Chicago.

(Associated Press)

First lady Michelle Obama told the Democratic National Convention that "Barack and I were both raised by families who didn't have much in the way of money or material possessions."

It is a claim the president has repeated in his books, on the speech-making circuit and in countless media interviews. By his account, he grew up in a broken home with a single mom, struggled for years as a child in an impoverished Third World country and then was raised by his grandparents in difficult circumstances.

The facts aren't nearly so clear-cut.

Introduction: The Obama You Don't Know

President Barack Obama

INTRODUCTION: The Obama We Don't Know
From the Washington Examiner

Few if any of his predecessors took the oath of office with higher public hopes for his success than President Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.

Millions of Americans hailed his election as an end to partisanship, a renewal of the spirit of compromise and a reinvigoration of the nation's highest ideals at home and abroad.

Above all, as America's first black chief executive, Obama symbolized the healing of long-festering wounds that were the terrible national legacy of slavery, the Reconstruction Era and Jim Crow. We would be, finally, one nation.

Chapter IX: The Arab American Network Behind Obama

Ray Hanania, a Chicago-based Arab-American

journalist and activist, described the network 

in a 2007 interview with Chicago magazine as

"a small cluster of activists." Chief among them

was Obama mentor Tony Rezko, above. Stuart

Levine, right, Rezko's former partner and the

government's star witness in the Rezko trial, 

testified that Obama met Nadhmi Auchi at a 

private Rezko reception held at Chicago's

Four Seasons hotel.

Chapter IX: The Arab American Network Behind Obama

President Obama's controversial relationships with radical figures like Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi have been well-publicized in recent years.

Prior to his academic career in the United States, Khalidi worked for Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization when it was classified by the State Department as a terrorist group.

Less well-known is a cluster of Chicago businessmen who formed an Arab-American network at the heart of Obama's political apparatus. Ray Hanania, a Chicago-based Arab-American journalist and activist, described the network in a 2007 interview with Chicago magazine as "a small cluster of activists" in the business