“Obama funded Chicago’s hard-left.” That could have been the headline of an obvious and easy-to-do investigative article on Barack Obama’s background around the time he was thinking of announcing his presidential bid in 2007. The nation’s most liberal senator funds Chicago’s hard-left: a valid and illuminating point. The investigative trail created by Obama’s foundation work would have led any interested reporter to Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, the Midwest Academy, and much else, long before those ties became public. Of course, no such article ever appeared.
Instead, we find a hit piece in today’s Washington Post headlined “Gov. Perry wages war on Texas’s ivory tower” (the Internet headline is somewhat different). I’m not so much objecting to the Post report as I’m wondering where similar stories about Obama were in 2007, although I do think the Post piece is largely an effort to undercut Perry before his campaign gets underway. In any case, while liberal readers will be horrified, I suspect many Americans will be delighted by Perry’s “war” with the Ivory Tower.