Pat Dollard | Young Americans

The Swamp:

by Frank James ( Not the dead one )

Noting that politicians are the ultimate resume-padders is something of a dog-bites-man story. No surprise there, really.

That said, it’s still always good to get some of the details surrounding Sen. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s “contributions” to legislation they’ve both taken credit for during the campaign.

The Washington Post reported today, for instance, on how Obama finagled his way into the spotlight during last the 2006 and 2007 immigration deliberations in the Senate.

After weeks of arduous negotiations, on April 6, 2006, a bipartisan group of senators burst out of the “President’s Room,” just off the Senate chamber, with a deal on new immigration policy.
As the half-dozen senators — including John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) — headed to announce their plan, they met Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who made a request common when Capitol Hill news conferences are in the offing: “Hey, guys, can I come along?” And when Obama went before the microphones, he was generous with his list of senators to congratulate — a list that included himself.

“I want to cite Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback, Mel Martinez, Ken Salazar, myself, Dick Durbin, Joe Lieberman . . . who’ve actually had to wake up early to try to hammer this stuff out,” he said.

To Senate staff members, who had been arriving for 7 a.m. negotiating sessions for weeks, it was a galling moment. Those morning sessions had attracted just three to four senators a side, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) recalled, each deeply involved in the issue. Obama was not one of them. But in a presidential contest involving three sitting senators, embellishment of legislative records may be an inevitability, Specter said with a shrug.

Unlike governors, business leaders or vice presidents, senators — the last to win the presidency was John F. Kennedy in 1960 — are not executives. They cannot be held to account for the state of their states, their companies or their administrations. What they do have is the mark they leave on the nation’s laws — and in Obama’s brief three-year tenure, as well as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s seven-year hitch, those marks are far from indelible.

“It’s not an unusual matter for senators to take a little extra credit,” Specter said

That 2006 immigration-reform effort failed but led the Senate to take another, well publicized crack at a comprehensive-immigration reform bill in Spring of 2007.

Once again, Obama appeared on the scene:

… In 2007, after the first comprehensive immigration bill had died, the senators were back at it, and again, Obama was notably absent, staffers and senators said. At one meeting, three key negotiators recalled, he entered late and raised a number of questions about the bill’s employment verification system. Kennedy and Specter both rebuked him, saying that the issue had already been resolved and that he was coming late to the discussion. Kennedy dressed him down, according to witnesses, and Obama left shortly thereafter.
“Senator Obama came in late, brought up issues that had been hashed and rehashed,” Specter recalled. “He didn’t stay long.”

As the Post story notes, Clinton also has taken a lot of credit for legislation, particularly on the state children’s healthcare insurance program, or SCHIP.

Her claims to have created the program when she was first lady have been met with some scoffing by a few Senate colleagues.

During months of SCHIP negotiations in 1997, her name rarely surfaced in news accounts. Clinton never testified before Congress or held a news conference on the bill. When Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), the lead GOP negotiator of the children’s health bill, heard reports that Clinton was depicting herself as SCHIP’s main advocate, “I had to blink a few times,” he said. Hatch said he doesn’t recall a single conversation with Clinton about SCHIP, even a mention of her name. “If she was involved, I didn’t know about it,” he said.
“You know how she says, ‘I started SCHIP’? Well, so did I,” joked Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), one of the Democrats who pushed the bill across the finish line along with Kennedy. Both have endorsed Obama.

Some Clinton insiders also are uncomfortable with some of her assertions. “I don’t really like the way she talks about her role in SCHIP,” conceded one former Clinton administration official, who supports the first lady’s candidacy, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to express his views candidly. “She doesn’t say it right. What she should say is ‘I was the driving force in the administration.’ That’s pretty big, and it’s all true.”

Of course, the ability to let others do the heavy lifting on legislation, then claim credit isn’t limited to Democrats. The Post story doesn’t mention how Sen. John McCain, who has won the Republican presidential nomination, didn’t endear himself with some Senate colleagues during the immigration debate.

Last year, the Post reported about a dust-up between McCain and fellow Republican, Sen. John Cornyn, after McCain popped up in the 2007 immigration negotiations.

Since January, McCain has missed half of the Senate’s scheduled votes — 87 — including all 45 votes held since first-quarter fundraising reports were released April 15 that showed McCain trailing all of the leading candidates in both parties. His absence from backroom negotiations over the immigration bill sparked a heated exchange last week with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who accused him of “parachuting in” at the last minute.
“[Expletive] you,” McCain replied, according to several people who witnessed the exchange.

McCain might’ve been a little touchy about this since, the year before, he had been up to his ears in negotiating the previous failed immigration-reform attempt.

That effort became an anchor he had to drag in his race for the nomination, one that still hurts him with the Republican base. Last year, however, was a different story. He wasn’t as involved.

Returning to Obama, the details surrounding his involvement, or lack of it, in the immigration negotiations, will resonate with those who’ve read Todd Spivak’s account about Obama’s Springfield, Ill. years.

Spivak covered Obama for small newspapers before the senator became a household name. He wrote a piece based on his reporting on Obama over the years. In the article, Spivak describes how Obama’s path to the U.S. Senate seat was cleared by State Senate President Emil Jones who took legislation sponsored by other lawmakers and gave them to Obama in an apparent effort to help Obama fill out his resume for the run for the U.S. Senate.

Jones appointed Obama sponsor of virtually every high-profile piece of legislation, angering many rank-and-file state legislators who had more seniority than Obama and had spent years championing the bills.
“I took all the beatings and insults and endured all the racist comments over the years from nasty Republican committee chairmen,” State Senator Rickey Hendon, the original sponsor of landmark racial profiling and videotaped confession legislation yanked away by Jones and given to Obama, complained to me at the time. “Barack didn’t have to endure any of it, yet, in the end, he got all the credit.

“I don’t consider it bill jacking,” Hendon told me. “But no one wants to carry the ball 99 yards all the way to the one-yard line, and then give it to the halfback who gets all the credit and the stats in the record book.”

That holds true whether the goal line is in Springfield or Washington.