Obama Barack - Radical-in-chief : Barack Obama and the untold story of American socialism

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Copyright 2010 by Stanley Kurtz

Portions of Chapter Nine appeared in different form in The Weekly Standard Aug. 1118, 2008, and are 2008 The Weekly Standard.

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First Threshold Editions hardcover edition October 2010

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kurtz, Stanley.

Radical-in-chief : Barack Obama and the untold story of American socialism / Stanley Kurtz. 1st Threshold Editions hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Obama, BarackPolitical and social views. 2. United StatesPolitics and government2009 3. IllinoisPolitics and government1951 4. RadicalismUnited States. 5. Socialism United States. 6. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. 7. LegislatorsIllinoisBiography. 8. Political activistsIllinoisChicagoBiography. 9. Community organizationIllinois ChicagoHistory20th century. 10. Chicago (Ill.)Social conditions20th century. I. Title.

E908.3.K87 2010

973.932092dc22

[B] 2010032032

ISBN 978-1-4391-5508-0
ISBN 978-1-4391-7696-2 (ebook)

PREFACE
What on Earth Is a Community Organizer?

ONE
The Socialism Puzzle

TWO
A Conference for Marx

THREE
From New York to Havana

FOUR
Obamas Organizing: The Hidden Story

FIVE
The Midwest Academy

SIX
ACORN

SEVEN
Ayers and the Foundations

EIGHT
Jeremiah Wright

NINE
State Senate Years

TEN
The Obama Administration

Ever since Barack Obamas meteoric rise to the presidency began, Americans have been asking themselves that question. The answer, it turns out, solves the riddle of Obamas political convictions. Community organizing is a largely socialist profession. Particularly at the highest levels, Americas community organizers have adopted a deliberately stealthy posturehiding their socialism behind a populist front. These organizers strive to push America toward socialism in unobtrusive, incremental steps, calling themselves pragmatic problem-solvers all the while. Barack Obamas colleagues and mentors were some of the smartest and most influential stealth-socialist community organizers in the country. Their strategies of political realignment and social transformation guide the Obama administration to this day.

Although contemporary community organizers deliberately hide their socialism, with a bit of digging, their secrets can be revealed. In neglected archives and long-forgotten issues of obscure journals, the untold story of modern American socialism lives. As the revolutionary hopes of sixties radicals banged up against the hard reality of a popular Reagan presidency, Americas socialists turned to a combination of community organizing and local politics to move the country steadily leftward by degrees. These were the socialists who schooled Obama. Their story is his story.

The socialist community organizers who inspired and trained Obama openly embraced American democracy. Although they admired Marx, Lenin, and Maoalong with Obamas idol, Saul Alinskyin the medium term, at least, these organizers surrendered their revolutionary hopes and abandoned authoritarian ways. Some retained a soft spot for Third World Communist regimes in Cuba and Latin America. And surely the program favored by Obamas organizing mentors could be seen as a subtleand sometimes not so subtleassault on traditional American freedoms.

Yet this new stealth socialism, which Obama studied and absorbed as a community organizer in Chicago, became more sophisticated and transformed itself into the policies he is now enacting as president. Over the long term, Obamas plans are designed to ensnare the country in a new socialism, a stealth socialism that masquerades as a traditional American sense of fair play, a soft but pernicious socialism similar to that currently strangling the economies of Europe.

This is Barack Obamas secret. The president has systematically disguised the truth about his socialist convictions, sometimes by directly misrepresenting his past and sometimes by omitting or parceling out damaging information to disguise its real importance. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and ACORNall of Obamas well-known radical ties are entry points into the much larger and still unknown socialist world where Obamas career was nurtured. That is why the president has disguised and withheld the truth about these political partnerships.

The time has come to lift the veil and reveal the untold story of Americas Radical-in-Chief and his socialist political world.

Late on the afternoon of April 1, 1983, a twenty-one-year-old Barack Obama made his way into the historic Great Hall of Manhattans Cooper Union to attend a Socialist Scholars Conference. Within twenty-four hours, his life had transformed. There at that conference Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his adult life.

When Obama attended that first Socialist Scholars Conference, he was in his senior year at Columbia University, where hed transferred after two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Those Columbia years are more mysterious than any other portion of Obamas history. The New York Times calls them a lost chapter of the presidents life.

Its clear that Obamas New York interval was a time of solitude and isolation. In Obamas telling, when his mother and sister came to visit, they just made fun of me because I was so monklike. I had But what exactly was Obama reading during this interlude of personal isolation and internal growth? In what direction was his restless intellect pushing him? New Yorks annual Socialist Scholars Conferences have a great deal to do with the answer to that question, while also suggesting a reason for Obamas relative silence about his four-year sojourn in New York.

However isolated Obama may have been during his years at Columbia, politics served as at least a partial antidote to the solitude. Obama followed the campus anti-military movement closely, interviewing activists from two organizations, Arms Race Alternatives and Students Against Militarism, for an article he penned entitled, Breaking the War Mentality. Obama was concentrating on international issues, he clearly hoped to approach those questions from the standpoint of a more sweeping critique of American life.