The Radical, Exposed

by Robert P. Heslin, for Touchdowns.com

Commentator Hugh Hewitt has a fascinating interview with journalist Stanley Kurtz, who has written an important new book on Barack Obama and his socialist roots, Radical-in-Chief. Key take-away points from their conversation are offered to the reader here.

• Between 1983 and 1985 when he lived in New York City, Barack Obama attended numerous Socialist Scholars Conferences, where he formed friendships and political alliances that continue to this day. Among the most important of these was with James Cone, the theological mentor of Jeremiah Wright.

• At the very least we can safely say that Obama is intimately familiar with the socialist universe of community organizers.

• There is a kind of institutional spillway that leads from the kind of socialist conferences Obama attended, on to community organizing, and finally to the political arena.

• Community organizers are overwhelmingly socialist in their politics. Because the United States is a center-right country, they must conceal their ideas. They must advance their cause by stealth.

• Secrecy and deception are constants through Obama’s political career.

• Obama's two books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope, are notable as much for what they conceal as for what they reveal.

• After the Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers controversies in the 2008 presidential primaries, the mainstream media built a protective wall around Obama, to prevent more information about his radical past from coming out.

• The chief purpose of David Remnick's biography of Obama – "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama"  – is to let out the toxic details of his past in as slow a trickle as possible, and thus limit the damage to Obama's reputation.

• Many of Obama's supporters would turn away from him if they knew how truly radical he was.

• According to Remnick, Barack Obama favors black reparations "in theory" if not in practice – though that would hardly reassure most American voters. It's hard to overstate the damage such a policy would do to the country if it were ever seriously pursued.

• From the start of his political career in Chicago, Barack Obama has proven himself to be a devoted Alinskyite. Saul Alinsky's book "Rules for Radicals" is infamous now for such teachings as: "pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it."

• Obama has taken this to heart. Witness his recent appeal to Latino voters leading up to the 2010 elections:

Well, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to see how well we do in this election. And I think a lot of it is going to depend on whether we still have some support not only from Democrats, but also Republicans. But they’re going to be paying attention to this election. And if Latinos sit out the election instead of saying we’re going to punish our enemies, and we’re going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder.

We’ve got to have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can go, come for the ride, but they’ve got to sit in back.

• President Obama's long term strategy is to bring about a realignment in American politics based on social class. Such a change is the raison d'être for the Alinsky model of social activism (which is also championed by Hillary Clinton): personalizing, objectifying and angering groups of Americans – turning them against each other. Obama is following this formula. Who is he personalizing/objectifying? Insurance companies. Wall Street fat cats. Doctors. Who is he trying to rouse to anger? His Democrat base.

• While Obama refrains from using the word "enemy" to describe countries and organizations hostile to the United States, he's perfectly comfortable with the term when the subject is domestic political opponents.
  

• Obama treats American corporations as enemies. This despite the fact that big business gave more money to Obama than to McCain in 2008.

• Obama's intent is to drive corporate interests out of the Democrat party, into the arms of Republicans. Why? To ignite a populist movement on the left and permanently shift American political culture leftward. Obama and the Democrats are targeting several "have-not" groups in service of this goal:

  • Blacks

  • Latinos

  • Economic populists

  • Unions, including public-sector unions (who are so prosperous now perhaps they shouldn't be called "have-nots").
    
    

• What you end up with is corporate interests in the Republican party and a broad coalition of have-nots in the Democrat party. Presto! America is now divided by class.
  
  
• Obama and his allies believe that as time passes, the have-nots will coalesce and build themselves politically into a socialist juggernaut.
  
  
• Starting with his career as a state senator in Illinois, Obama has demonstrated a willingness to act with strategic patience. That willingness is also on display in his push for health reform.
  
  
• Obama had initially planned to move even more cautiously than he has so far in his attack on private medicine. That changed when he saw the size of his Democrat majorities in the House and Senate in 2008. He became more aggressive.
  
  
• The long term strategy: pass as many entitlements into law as you can, get as many people hooked on them as possible, sell it to the public as compassionate government, and dare the other side to undo it.
  
  
• It is critically important for Republicans to act quickly once they get power and repeal these new laws – before they lead to the further corruption and infantilization of the American people.
  
  
• Some people speculate that in the time leading up to the subprime mortgage crisis, ACORN was following a Cloward-Piven strategy.
  
  
• The Cloward-Piven strategy was devised by Richard Cloward and Frances Piven in the 1960s. In it, activists overwhelm local welfare systems with an avalanche of applications so that the systems collapse. The desired outcome is for the federal government to step in and become the sole means of support for welfare recipients.
  
  
• While author Stanley Kurtz doesn't believe that to be true in the particular case of ACORN and mortgage lenders, he does believe that community organizers have incorporated Cloward-Piven into their playbooks. Activists have concluded that excessive pressure can be intentionally brought to bear on financial and social-welfare institutions, resulting in emergencies that can be exploited to further socialist goals.
  
  
• When the public comes to understand this, it will only add to the wave of political rejection headed Obama's way. And that rejection will be all the more emphatic because Obama campaigned in 2008 as a post-partisan healer and unifier. In fact he is neither. As Rush Limbaugh says, "He came to divide."
  
  
• Radical-In-Chief is a work of scholarship, copiously footnoted and documented.