Most of the interview is pretty soft ball, with questions like "Who is Barack Obama?" Which has Obama answering jokingly about how his name is mispronounced. How people like to say: Yo-Mamma or Alabama. Then he goes on to say that his name means "One who's blessed" in Swahili.
Obama then goes on to talk about his father and mother and where they met and how he grew up in Hawaii and then onto his education. It's definitely an interview where most people have no idea who the hell he is and he knows it. Which is rather funny since he is --at the time-- a State Senator. Not only that but teaches constitutional law at the University of Chicago. The Democrats, however, did make Obama a household name after making him the keynote speaker at the Presidential Convention.
What I found most fascinating about the interview is when they ask Obama about the use of up holding, then President Bush's, political nominations --a thing that the Democratic Party complains about the GOP today and has for the last 5 years. One of the things he [Obama] was for in the way of tactics was using the filibuster. He [Obama] believed that the use of the filibuster was fine to use if he believed if the nomination was someone that would do harm to the nation or if the person --in Obama's words: Wasn't up to snuff. One of these nominations was one of President Bush's judicial nominations to the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, Miguel Estrada. Obama believed that Estrada was a good person to use the tactic on because a) he was young and Estrada would technically be on the bench for 30-40 years. And b) Estrada wasn't a good nomination and he didn't know much of what he stood for. Obama was also worried that Estrada would give wide access to Executive Branch, mostly in the form of Attorney General John Ashcroft, for spying on regular people and that Law enforcement wouldn't need a warrant to read people's e-mails.Which is funny because Obama has allowed the NSA just that. (The Democrats did achieve victory against Miguel Estrada, successfully blocking his nomination on the grounds that he was unqualified and extreme.)
Obama also goes on to talk abut education, and how that most people's complaints about the education system are in the form of how bad the Chicago Schools are. Oddly enough that concern didn't stop him from placing Arnie Duncan, then the head of the Chicago School District, the head of the nations school system.
Give the video a go, see how then Barack Obama idealism faces up with today's version on the man. See how the worm has turned from then to now.
