Republicans complain that Obama has had a free ride with the Press. There is certainly some truth to that, but a story is a story and there is a story by Binyamin Appllebaum in Boston Globe that might be the most potentially damaging piece I have yet seen on Obama. You can see a short clip summarizing the story here. Mickey Kaus calls this Obama's Katrina.
CHICAGO - The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can't afford to live anywhere else.
But it's not safe to live here.
About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition...
As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.
But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable...
Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.
There are two obvious issues here: that Obama forcefully pushed for funding for a low income housing policy, but apparently didn't pay much attention when the policy began to fail; and two, that while the policy was a disaster for the low-income people it was designed to help, a lot of private developers made out like bandits and Obama reaped a lot of financial support from those same developers.
Now its fair to say that, if it were McCain at the center of this story instead of Obama, Democrats would be tearing their shirts and gnashing their teeth over the terrible injustice. Congressional committees would even as we speak be launching investigations. Likewise, Republican strategists have to be looking for ways to exploit the story.
On the other hand, it is not at all clear that Obama is really guilty of anything. When your policies benefit financially powerful people, they tend to support you for office. When those people are smelly, it can often rub off on you. That's common politics pretty much everywhere, and it's hardly different in Chicago.
As for the policy: using tax dollars to fund low-income housing was one of the ideas floated about in the 80's and 90's, after it became clear that the policies of the sixties and seventies had failed spectacularly. The theory was that private managers would have more incentive than government managers to make housing work for the occupants. That might have been true if the private managers depended on the good will of the occupants for their profit, as ordinarily happens in a free market. But the managers were paid by the government, and government can quickly become forgetful of its original purpose. Besides, it's Chicago, and milking the public teat without helping to feed the cow, well that's a time honored tradition.
If Obama were really the new kind of politician that many people think he was, he might have paid more attention and demanded that the developers at least maintain the housing they had been lucratively paid to develop. Instead, it looks like he acted pretty much like the bad old kind of politician, and didn't bite the hand that fed 'em.
But all that said, it's not clear that there is anything Obama could have done that would have made a difference. Over the last four decades various cities have tried everything to break the cycle of poverty among the poorest of their residents, and nothing works. If there was mischief going on behind the scenes in this affair, and if Obama was tainted by it, we ought to know. But at least he was trying to find a solution. Some critics of the private development idea think that only public funding can be honest, but public funding was drying up and besides, Chicago wards soak it up like a sponge and always seem to look dry. It will be interesting to see whether this story had legs.
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