Obama should have been vetted sooner

Ray Harbert, Las Vegas

Sunday, June 1, 2008 | 2:04 a.m.

It would seem that the powers that be, the liberal press and opportunistic politicians anointed Barack Obama much too soon. All you heard was that he was a great speechmaker, an advocate of change and a politician with extraordinary judgment. In their haste to anoint him, they never properly vetted him. Now the totality of the real Barack Obama is beginning to emerge.

There is an adage that one is known by the company he keeps. We are now beginning to know Obama by that company. The likes of his friend and financial mentor, Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a man who is under investigation in Chicago for political corruption and with a felony arrest warrant in Las Vegas. Obama has close personal ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose anti-American speeches from the pulpit have drawn national outrage.

Now one of Obama’s close sponsors and fundraisers, a Catholic priest, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, has mocked Hillary Clinton from a Chicago church pulpit.

Great speechmaking does not necessarily qualify one to be president. To be an advocate of change does not mean that a president can change what goes on in the political arena of Washington. Nor can he necessarily end the influence of the Washington lobbyists. To judge one by the company he keeps has a great deal of logic. Based on Obama’s selection of friends and colleagues, what will his Cabinet look like?

Obama’s claim to good judgment rests on a single speech, a speech in which he came out against President Bush’s war in Iraq. Where is the depth to Obama’s claim of good judgment?

All of the above speaks volumes for good and early vetting. In Obama’s case, that vetting is just beginning. Where was the national press early on? Now that the Democratic primaries are drawing to a conclusion and Obama is the apparent winner, it sounds like “too little, too late.”