That’s when she selected fellow Chicago activist Barack Obama – 13 years away from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee – to fill her seat in

‘Ahead-of-the Curve’ Liberal Handpicked Obama as Her Successor
Friday, August 01, 2008
By Fred Lucas, Staff Writer


Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)
(CNSNews.com) – While working as editor of the Black Press Review in 1986, Alice Palmer traveled to the Soviet Union to report on the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. According to the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, she had nothing but praise for what she saw.

“We Americans can be misled by the major media,” Palmer was quoted as saying in the June 19, 1986 issue of the People’s Daily World, currently called the People’s Weekly World.

“We’re being told the Soviets are striving to achieve a comparatively low standard of living with ours, but actually they have reached a basic stability in meeting their needs and are now planning to double their production,” she added.

Within five years of her Soviet trip, Palmer was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the Illinois Senate. She was elected to another term in 1992 and served until 1995 when she decided to run in a special election for Congress.

That’s when she selected fellow Chicago activist Barack Obama – 13 years away from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee – to fill her seat in the state Legislature.

In the now famous meeting at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, one-time members of the Weather Underground domestic terror group, she introduced Obama as her successor to some of her supporters in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

She and Obama eventually had a falling out, and Palmer ended up endorsing his chief rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the Democratic presidential nomination this year.[Been telling you Hillary and Bill were Communist, hand picked and supported]

“Alice came in as an independent. She came in through the progressive movement, the (former Chicago mayor) Harold Washington coalition, and she remained loyal to that progressive base throughout her political career,” state Sen. Rickey Hendon, a Chicago Democrat, told CNSNews.com.

“She was a citizen of the world,[sound familiar.. we just heard it in Germany!] and she brought back a vast knowledge because of her travels,” said Hendon, who was in the same freshman class as Palmer in the state Legislature.

“She would always come back with progressive ideas to benefit the people of Illinois. Global warming – she was talking about it before the rest of us, back when both of us were elected as Democratic Ward Committeemen in 1989,” he said.

After her journey to the Soviet Union, the People’s Daily World quoted Palmer as saying that the Soviets talk about increasing productivity just as the Reagan administration has, “but the Soviets do not link these issues with ruining the living standards of human beings.”

“The Soviets are carrying out a policy to resolve inequalities between nationalities, inequalities that they say were inherited from capitalist and czarist rule,” Palmer told the paper. “They have a comprehensive affirmative action program, which they have stuck to religiously – if I can use that word – since 1917.”

Describing Palmer as “a regular die-hard American,” Hendon said people should not read too much into her praise of the former Soviet Union. [HA!! don't bet your bottom dollar on it]

“Alice was a progressive and the type of person who felt like you had to talk to everybody around the world regardless of their political persuasion, and I agree with her for the most part,” he said. “Just because someone is from a different culture or a different political persuasion, to say we won’t talk with him is ridiculous.”

Legislative record

Palmer, a mother of four who turned 69 last month, was a conventional liberal in the state Legislature, according to published reports, and even took a firm stance against a criminal street gang in Chicago when many black Democratic leaders would not.

She grew up in Indiana and attended college in Illinois, earning her doctorate at Northwestern University. After that, she remained at Northwestern to serve for five years as the associate dean of African American Student Affairs, according to her biography on TheHistoryMakers.com, a Web site on African American history.

Palmer, who cites Frederick Douglass’ statement, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. Never has. Never will,” as her favorite quote, became a political activist in get-out-the-vote drives before working in non-profit education programs.

She went on to work for the University of Chicago after her term in office before taking a seat on the board of trustees for the State University Retirement System, which she currently holds.

Palmer did not respond to an interview request or written questions submitted to her via e-mail through the State University Retirement System.

When state Sen. Richard Newhouse retired in 1990, the local party named Palmer to be his successor for the 13th District in Chicago.

“I don’t remember her having any kind of imprint on any particularly legislation. I don’t have much memory of her having any signature bills or anything like that,” said state Senate Majority Whip John Cullerton, a Chicago Democrat.

Despite having a thin record of legislative accomplishment, Palmer was a prominent figure in Chicago politics, as in 1994 when several Democrats urged her to challenge Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in the city’s Democratic primary. It’s an urging she resisted.

“One person I personally like is Alice Palmer,” Alderman John O. Steele told the Chicago Sun-Times that year. Rev. Al Sampson, president of the Metropolitan Area Council of Black Churches, told the paper, “Leadership is committed to running a black candidate” in the Feb. 28 Democratic primary.

Looking back on that, Hendon said, “Some people talked about that. I think she would have made a great mayor, but I don’t think that was serious conversation back then.”

Though liberal, [read Communist]Palmer had respect across the aisle, said Illinois state Sen. J. Bradley Burzynski, a Sycamore Republican.

“I remember her as a reasoned voice and well thought of and well spoken,” Burzynski told CNSNews.com.

He didn’t see a lot of radicalism from Palmer but said ‘extremely liberal” politics are typical of the Hyde Park area in Chicago where Palmer and Obama served, and Ayers and Dohrn live.

“When I served in the Senate with her, Republicans were in control, so those kinds of agendas were not part of our dialogue,” Burzynski said.

“It (Hyde Park) is an extremely liberal part of Chicago from my perspective. I look at the perspective I have of Sen. Obama in the Senate. Certainly, I would consider him to be very liberal. So that does speak to the politics of that very area I suppose,” Burzynski added.

During her first year in the state Senate in August 1991, Palmer joined three other female legislators to sponsor the “comparable worth” bill, the Chicago Tribune reported. The legislation required equal pay for state jobs with equal education requirements.

In February 1992, Palmer announced to the black newspaper, The Chicago Citizen that she was on her way to Canada to get a closer look at the country’s government-run health care system.

“I plan to go to Canada to learn first hand about the system and to look for ways we can adapt and improve it to meet Illinois and American needs,” Palmer stated to The Citizen that year.

“Health care reform is of major concern of all Americans. I support the implementation of universal health care legislation, based on the Canadian system, which provides health care services to all citizens,” Palmer added.

“She supported universal health care,” Hendon said. “That may have been something she saw in another country. She did travel the world.

“There were things she would see in another country doing better than us, or in a different way that’s effective. Why not bring it home to our citizens? So she was way ahead of the curve on universal health care and climate change,” Hendon said.

In May 1992, Palmer and state Rep. Monique Davis sponsored a joint Senate-House resolution urging the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the Rodney King incident. King was a black man beaten by Los Angeles police officers.

“All of us were outraged by the decision, and we felt that we needed to go on record and challenge the U.S. Justice Department to pursue whether Rodney King's civil rights were violated, with as much enthusiasm as they are following what happened with the White truck driver,” Palmer stated in the publication Chicago Weekend.

In 1993, the NAACP and Operation Push, as well as several black aldermen in the city were calling for the parole of Larry Hoover, leader of the 20,000-member Gangster Disciple street gang from his 150-year sentence for murder.

In what might have been an unconventional position for a liberal Chicago politician, Palmer was among just four area lawmakers to oppose the parole, which was supported by the criminal gang that was obtaining immense political clout in the city, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Palmer had a 100 percent voting record with the Illinois AFL-CIO in 1995 and a lifetime 97 percent record.

She was a champion for worker’s compensation benefits, the right of workers to sue their employer when they’re injured on the job; she also promoted public school teachers unions as well as faculty unions for public universities, according to Illinois AFL-CIO spokeswoman Beth Spencer.

Palmer was recognized in 1995 as the Legislator of the Year by the decidedly liberal group Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO), according to the group’s chairman David K. Igasaki.

“We’re concerned about government ethics and reformed, election reform, and civil liberties in criminal justice,” Igasaki told Cybercast News Service. “We are opposed to capital punishment. We were supportive of the gay rights bill that was up and controversial around that time (1995) in Illinois. We’re pro abortion rights, we favor progressive taxes.”

Rift with Obama

When U.S. Rep. Mel Reynolds resigned after a sex scandal in 1995, Palmer sought the nomination of the Democratic Party to fill his vacant seat. That’s when she introduced Obama to her friends as the heir to her seat.

However, Palmer came up short in her effort to defeat Jesse Jackson Jr. After losing the Democratic primary, she decided she wanted to remain in the state senate. But when Obama didn’t graciously step aside, she challenged him in the primary. After gathering signatures to get on the ballot, Obama’s campaign challenged the legitimacy of not only Palmer’s signatures but those of three other Democrats in the primary.

Obama [He would cut anyone's throat to get ahead]was successful in the challenge, getting Palmer and other lesser known Democrats disqualified, and running unopposed in the primary.

Palmer told the Chicago Tribune last year that she did not endorse Obama for the seat, and in their private conversations, the option was open for her to return to the state senate. While Obama said Palmer had “designated” him to run for the seat, Palmer said, “I don’t like the word ‘endorsement,” she told the Tribune. “An ‘informal nod’ is how to characterize it.”

Thus, Obama was elected to the vacant seat in the state legislature, and in less than a decade was elected to the U.S. Senate, and is now the presumed presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.

Obama told the Tribune last year, “I liked Alice Palmer a lot. I thought she was a good public servant. It was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely different.”

Evidently so does Palmer, enough so that she endorsed New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for president and made appearances with her during the Illinois Democratic primary.

But most in the state party sided with Obama over the ballot dispute, state Sen. Cullerton said.

“She tapped Obama to run and he went out and got petitions and the like, and she, after losing the primary, she flipped, changed her mind,” Cullerton said. “I don’t think she had a lot of sympathy from Democrats, having chosen her successor, have him go out and work hard to get on the ballot and then all of a sudden she changes her mind and wants her spot back.”