Originally posted by LLoyd45
He was unaware of their lobbyist activities and their ignorance of the tax codes..How could that possibly be? Doesn't his vetting committee do background checks and report back to Obama? I guess his experience as a community organizer is showing through with all the delegating of responsibility going on.

It doesn't seem to trouble Obama that 2/3's of the American people oppose his Stimulus package though does it?

Originally posted by Iamonlyhuman
Whaaat? Surely you know that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation, has been the U.S.'s central bank for the last 60? years, and is NOT funding this (the IMF is funding the debt). The Fed doesn't do anything but print paper money.

RYAN LIZZA: Yeah. You know, he got very lucky. He almost left politics after he lost that race in 2000 to Bobby Rush. But everything after that turns his way. The Democrats in Illinois were—won the right to redistrict the state, and like all Democrats in Illinois, Obama was deeply involved with the redrawing of his own district. In fact, one day in the spring of 2001, he sat down at a computer with sophisticated mapping software and began the process of redrawing his own district.

And his district changed in fundamental ways after that. He used to represent just an area in the south of Chicago that went east to west. His district changed; it now pointed north—it was a north-to-south district—and it included a huge chunk of downtown Chicago, including the famous Loop, which is the big business district; the Gold Coast; all—almost all of the Chicago Lakefront. He represented now all the museums, all the finest shopping areas of downtown Chicago, as well as his original Hyde Park base. So it was a very, very different district. It became whiter. It became wealthier. It became more white-collar. It became more Jewish. And it had one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago. And the folks that lived and worked in that district now would be the important donors for his US Senate campaign that started—that he started to run for in 2002. So it was a big dramatic change, and that redistricting really was a huge turning point in Obama’s political career.

The other thing that it did, besides the fact that his constituents now were so much different, the overall goal of redistricting in Illinois was to take back the State Senate for the Democrats. They gerrymandered the state, and they accomplished that in 2002. So, after 2002, Barack Obama, who had been a state senator since January of 1997 in the minority, where he couldn’t get much done, he’s now a state senator in the majority. And that allowed him to do—to actually get some things passed and get all of the issues—and get all of the things passed that he would then use as a platform for his 2004 Senate campaign. So that redistricting was incredibly important to his political career. I think you could make an argument that without that red