It makes altogether perfect sense for Barack Obama to make his first in-person campaign stop for Joe Biden in Philadelphia, PA. On at least three occasions, Philadelphia helped save Obama’s own political bacon.

The first time came in March 2008 after the racist, anti-American speeches of Obama’s wild-eyed pastor, Jeremiah Wright, first surfaced.  To neutralize the fallout Obama chose Philadelphia as the site for a speech, immodestly titled “A More Perfect Union.”

Obama began the speech by reminding those few registered voters who might somehow have forgotten, “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas.” This bogus story of his own upbringing seared into Obama’s “genetic makeup” the idea that “this nation is more than the sum of its parts -- that out of many, we are truly one.” The bottom line, said Obama: “I can no more disown Wright than I can disown the black community.”

The speech wowed Obama’s white liberal supporters and silenced his critics. The Philadelphia Inquirer summed up the speech in a one-word headline, “Brilliant.” The New York Times’ Janny Scott called it “hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, his legs a-tingle, celebrated it as “worthy of Lincoln” and “the best speech on race ever given in this country.” That was Obama’s gift in 2008: to make a thoroughly dishonest, ghostwritten speech defending a crazed racist pastor seem patriotic, even Lincolnesque.       

Obama’s promise to not disown his pastor lasted just forty days and forty nights. Unfortunately for Obama, Wright kept saying what he always had been saying. After a speech at the National Press Club in late April 2008, a reporter asked Wright whether he truly believed that the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Said Wright, “I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”      

Obama had been attending Wright’s church with some regularity for twenty years. Wright officiated at Obama’s marriage to Michelle. He baptized Obama’s children. Yet when faced with the fallout of the HIV quote, Obama claimed that he had never seen this side of Wright before.

“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met twenty years ago,” Obama said indignantly and dishonestly. Oh, no? In fact, just twenty years earlier an equally deranged Wright sermon moved Obama to become Christian, or something like it. That sermon, “The Audacity to Hope,” featured classic Wright gems like “white folks’ greed runs a world in need,” a line that Obama approvingly quoted in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. Ten years later, Obama would name his second book, more or less, after the sermon.    

For the Philadelphia speech to be the best ever given on race it would have helped a good deal if it were honest. It obviously wasn’t. As America quickly learned, Obama’s vow to not ditch his pastor was no more sincere than Biden’s claim he never touched Tara Reade. The LA Times headlined this new twist in the controversy with a neat little dollop of irony, “Obama angrily disowns pastor.”

On Election Day 2008, at a polling station in Philadelphia, two leather-jacketed thugs from the New Black Panther Party helped suppress the votes of anyone not likely to vote for Obama. One of the men, Philadelphia chapter leader King Samir Shabazz, carried a billy club. When approached by civil rights attorney Bartle Bull, Shabazz yelled at him, “Now, you will see what it means to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” So much for brotherly love.

In January 2009, with George W. Bush still in office, the Department of Justice filed a civil suit against Shabazz, two of his buddies, and the New Black Panther Party itself. One of those named was a Democratic Committee member and credentialed poll watcher. Bull submitted an affidavit in support of the suit. Career DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams called the open intimidation by the Panthers, “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” The law in question was the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In May 2009, however, Adams’s new, Obama-appointed bosses ordered him and his colleagues to abandon all action against the New Black Panther Party and two of the defendants. “For the first time in our lifetime the power of the administration of the United States was working against the Voting Right Act,” said Bull. “They were protecting the people who were abusing the law.”

In 2012, knowing they were all but immune from the law, Philadelphians came to Obama’s aid once again. “It's one thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to dominate a Democratic city like Philadelphia,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported much too casually, “but check out this head-spinning figure: In 59 voting divisions in the city, Mitt Romney received not one vote. Zero. Zilch.”

Obama outscored Romney by a combined 19,605 to zero votes cast in these 59 districts. Saddam Hussein never did that well. That said, not a single major media outlet followed up on the Philadelphia story.

They should have. According to Roper, Romney received 6 percent of the black vote nationwide. If those numbers held in Philadelphia -- and there is no reason to believe they would not have -- nearly 1,200 of these 19,605 Philadelphia voters would have voted for Romney.

If only 14 people voted in those districts, the odds would have favored Romney's receiving at least one vote. If 80 people had voted, Romney would have had a better than 99 percent chance of receiving at least one of those votes. With nearly 20,000 voters, the odds of Romney being completely shut out are beyond any reasonable calculation.

Based on his own past history and the reality of Joe Biden, Obama will lie his way through Philadelphia. He can hardly tell the truth about the senile old pedophile at the top of the ticket. As to the cheating and stealing, Obama will once again leave that to others.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is widely available. See also www.cashill.com

Image: Don Shall