Barack Obama: No Experience?

The GOP loves to keep tossing around the word “community organizer” in reference to Obama’s work experience, as though that is the only thing he’s ever done, and as though that is not a respectful job.  Here is Barack Obama’s resume.

Some highlights:

Education:

Columbia University
B.A. Political Science with specialization in international relations
Thesis topic: Soviet nuclear disarmament

Graduate
Harvard Law School
J.D. magna cum laude 1988-1991

President, Harvard Law Review

Community Organizing:

 
1984-1985 Community Organizer for New York Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), promoting personal, community, and government reform at City College in Harlem.

1985-1988 Director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland on Chicago’s South Side. While director grew the DCP staff from 1 to 13 and their budget from $70,000 to $400,000.

1992 Led Chicago’s Project Vote! push. This effort resulted in a record number of voter registrations, over 600,000 in Chicago

In 1992 Obama took time off to direct Project Vote, the most successful grass-roots voter-registration campaign in recent city history. Credited with helping elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the U.S. Senate, the registration drive, aimed primarily at African-Americans, added an estimated 125,000 voters to the voter rolls–even more than were registered during Harold Washington’s mayoral campaigns. “It’s a power thing,” said the brochures and radio commercials.

Teaching

1993-2004 Visiting Law and Government Fellow, then Senior Lecturer, in Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Taught courses on the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law, on voting rights, and on racism and law. Helped develop a casebook on voting rights.

Law Practice

1993-2002 Worked as an associate attorney with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland. Represented non-profits and private individuals in urban development projects, voting rights cases, and wrongful firings. Filed major suit that forced the state of Illinois to enforce the Motor Voter Law and successfully argued a wrongful firing case before the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Illinois State Senate: 1996-2004

Chairman, Health and Human Services Committee

Spearheaded a successful bipartisan effort in Illinois to pass the broadest ethics-reform legislation by any state in 25 years, and also gained bipartisan support for his successful bills reforming death penalty interrogations and ending racial profiling by police. Worked with the Republican-led effort to reform welfare

Also sponsored successful bills expanding tax credits and child-care subsidies for low-income working families, protecting overtime pay for workers, expanding health care for children, and providing job skills training for juveniles

Member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs

Member, Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

Member, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

Member, Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
Shares responsibility for the bipartisan Coburn-Obama Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, requiring full online disclosure of all entities receiving federal funds, and the bipartisan Lugar-Obama Cooperative Proliferation Detection, Interdiction Assistance, and Conventional Threat Reduction Act of 2006, deepening non-proliferation work with WMD and including surface-to-air missiles, land mines, and other weapons that may be used by terrorists

Oh, and he ran a pretty good primary campaign where he defeated the Clinton dynasty and became the first African-American to get the nomination of his party for President of the United States.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.