Obama’s Inexperience Tough to Ignore

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 8:56 AM

By: Ronald Kessler

A close look at Barack Obama’s career reveals it has been even more mediocre than generally recognized.

Before being elected to the Illinois state Senate, Obama worked as a community organizer and a lawyer in Chicago.

In his memoir, Obama says being a community organizer taught him how to motivate the powerless and work the government to help them. His chief example is an effort to remove asbestos from Altgeld Gardens, an all-black public housing project on Chicago’s South Side.

But those who were involved in the effort say Obama played a minor role in working the problem and never accomplished his goal. A pre-existing group at Altgeld Gardens and a local newspaper, the Chicago Reporter, were working on the problem before Obama came on the scene, yet Obama does not mention them in his book, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.”

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