Radicalism In Soothing Tones

One of Obama's greatest strengths, it seems to me, is his ability make the radical sound perfectly reasonable to the uninformed. Joshua Muravchik, writing at the WSJ, thinks likewise. Mr. Muravchik examines the actions and ideology of The One, finding a man immersed in radicalism.

This from Joshua Muravchik writing at the WSJ:

. . . Throughout his Senate career, according to Americans for Democratic Action, the dean of liberal advocacy groups, Mr. Obama voted "right" 90% of the time. Actually this is misleading, since ADA counts an absence as if it were a vote on the "wrong" side. If we discount his absences, Mr. Obama voted to ADA's approval more than 98% of the time.

This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope and change, Mr. Obama himself believes in. His voting record is one indication. Another is his intellectual evolution.

Abandoned by his father when he was still too young to remember him and then sent at age 10 by his mother to live in Hawaii with her parents, who enrolled him in a prestigious prep school, Mr. Obama spent much of his teen years searching for his black identity. Late in his high-school career he found a mentor of sorts in Frank Marshall Davis, an older black poet. According to Herbert Romerstein, former minority chief investigator of the House Committee on Internal Security, FBI files reveal Davis to have been a member of the Communist Party not only in its public phase but also when it officially dissolved and went underground in the 1950s.

According to Mr. Obama, Davis told him that a white person "can't know" a black person, and that the "real price of admission" to college was "leaving your race at the door." Perhaps influenced by this, he reports that at college, "to avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

. . . Thanks to a grant from a left-wing foundation, he was hired by a small group of white protégés of Saul Alinsky, the original apostle of "community organizing." Alinsky's institutional base was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he called a "school for professional radicals" and whose goal he announced to be "revolution, not revelation." As Mr. Obama himself would put it, there were "two roles that an organizer was supposed to play . . . getting the Stop sign [and] the educative function. At some point you have to link up winning that Stop sign . . . with the larger trends, larger movements." In other words, "community organizer," to Mr. Obama and his colleagues and mentors, was a euphemism for professional radical.

. . . Mr. Obama's turn to electoral politics signified no change in his basic ideological orientation. As his wife, Michelle, put it: "Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change." ("I take that observation as a compliment," Mr. Obama said as late as 2005.)

. . . In his campaign for the Illinois senate, Mr. Obama was endorsed by the New Party, a coalition of socialists, Communists and other leftists. According to the newsletter of the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, whose members were said to constitute 15 percent of the Chicago New Party, "Once approved, candidates must sign a contract with the NP [which] mandates that they must have a visible and active relationship with the NP." Apparently, Mr. Obama signed such a pledge. After winning the primary (unopposed because his lawyers had succeeded in knocking all three opponents off the ballot), he appeared at a New Party membership meeting to voice his thanks.

Entering the national political scene eight years later, Mr. Obama did not, to be sure, appear as a radical, but he still bore the earmarks of the world in which he had been immersed for 20 years. He called himself "progressive," a term of art favored by veterans of the hard New Left, like Tom Hayden, as well as by old-time Communists. Early this year his wife, Michelle, lacking his tact, would kindle controversy by saying that his success in the presidential primaries made her feel proud of her country for the first time. The comment, a faux pas that she was soon at pains to explain away, flowed logically from her view, expressed in her standard stump speech, that our country is a "downright mean" place, "guided by fear," where the "life . . . that most people are living has gotten progressively worse."

. . . [Other] radicals, soft and hard, rushed to embrace Mr. Obama, often waxing rapturous in their support. Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel enthused in The Nation that Mr. Obama's was "a historic candidacy," from which "new possibilities will be born." Michael Lerner wrote in Tikkun that the "energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests [sic] in Obama's campaign" was reminiscent of "the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation." Most remarkably, Tom Hayden himself joined the chorus by breaking a New Left taboo against "red-baiting" and laying bare some of Hillary Clinton's own far-left history—this, in retaliation for the Clinton campaign's revelations about Mr. Obama's radical background.

Even after declaring his candidacy, and despite a certain inevitable sidling rightward, Mr. Obama still reflected the presuppositions of a radical worldview. In one notable remark, he said of voters in economic distress that in their desperation they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Chastised for his condescension, he responded: "I said something that everybody knows is true." This was elitism of a very specific kind—the mentality of the community organizer, according to which people in the grip of "false consciousness" need to be enlightened as to the true nature of their class interests, and to the nature of their true class enemies.

The same suppositions are again evident in Mr. Obama's stances on international issues. Iraq, as he sees it, is only a symptom. "I don't want to just end the war . . . I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place." And what would that mindset be? In a 2002 speech that he frequently cites, he said the war resulted from

the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors . . . to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne . . . the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income . . . the arms merchants in our own country . . . feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

In this litany of global perfidy, the issues of Saddam Hussein's murderous dictatorship, of American security, of the future of freedom, shrink to inconsequentiality next to the struggle of the oppressed against their American capitalist overlords.

When it comes to Iran, Mr. Obama has acknowledged that the regime presents a problem. But his actions—he opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization—as well as his rhetoric imply that the greater danger emanates from George W. Bush (who is allegedly seeking "any justification to extend the Iraq war or to attack Iran"). Likewise on defeating terrorism, where he rejects the America-centric focus that Bush has given to the issue; instead, in the words of his aides, Obama's main goal is to "restore . . . our moral standing"—that is, to put an end to our aggressive ways.

Even the events of 9/11 could not shake Mr. Obama from the mindset that the enemy is always ourselves. The bombings, he wrote, reflected

the underlying struggle—between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together; and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

In this reading, the lessons to be learned from the actions of Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta are that we must accept multiculturalism at home and share our wealth abroad.

Read the entire article. There is much in there about Bill Ayers, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and Rev. Wright. I have pointed out many times before, using much the same reasoning as this author, that Obama sees the worlds problems and solutions through the naive and distorted lens of Karl Marx.

By this paradigm, he divides the world up into victim groups, America the victimizer, and economic concerns as the panacea for all ills. For example, in the wake of 9-11, Obama identified the primary cause of Islamic violence as "a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair." We know that is not true – the typical terrorist is just as likely if not moreso to be educated and middle class. Then there was his comment that the "bitter" folk of our nation, those who take principled stands on their religion and Constitutional rights, only do so because they lack economic opportunity. Obama has expressed a similar view of Iran, positing that between his dynamic personality and just the right economic incentives, the mad mullahs can be divested of their religious principles that now drive their world-wide mayhem and murder. Indeed, he even held out WTO membership as the economic key to defusing the mad mullahs, not realizing that Iran had rejected WTO membership in 2006. They value their religion and their revolution far more than they care about the Iranian economy. For all of his intelligence, it would seem that Obama views the world through a naïve and distorted prism that, in the current circumstance, would prove not merely ineffectual, but highly dangerous.

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Michelle Obama Quotes Saul Alinsky During Her Convention Speech

I missed this, but Gateway Pundit didn't. Michelle Obama, in her speech last night, borrowed some of her phrasing from the famous / infamous Marxist organizer Saul Alinsky. I knew that her speech sounded the socialist utopian themes that her husband has been advocating throughout this election, but I did not realize she had gone so far as to quote Alinsky.

This from Gateway Pundit:

Michelle Obama quotes lines some radical Far Left book in her DNC Convention speech.

What to make of Michelle Obama's use the terms, “The world as it is” and “The world as it should be?” From whence do they originate? Try Chapter 2 of Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. In last night's speech, Michelle Obama said something that peeked my curiousity. She said:

"Barack stood up that day," talking about a visit to Chicago neighborhoods, "and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about “The world as it is” and “The world as it should be..." And, "All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do – that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be." . . .

We really are at a crossroads in this country. Ever since FDR, socialists and marxists, far too often aided by the right, have been moving ever more towards the consolidation of power, the institution of large scale socialism and the institutionalization of identity politics. This once fringe element of the Democratic party is now its dominant force. With the nomination of Obama and the chance for a veto proof majority in the Senate, they are but a step away from realizing their goals of taking full control of the levers of power in America.

In all fairness, Marxism and socialism played a positive role at their inception. Women got the vote, the ills of the industrial revolution were blunted, and a minimum social safety net was put in place, all at a time when Marxism was in its infancy in the West, pushing these things. But Marxism is utopian and the palative it offered has long since changed to a poison for Western society. The changes it promises are fundamentally opposed to the millenia old traditions of Western Civilization and the centuries old traditions in the U.S. that have brought us to be the dominant power in the world.

We rose to that position of dominance on the bases of capitalism, freedom and individualism. Those on the Marxist left have been warring on these concepts as evil for decades, promising instead a utopian world with cradle to the crave socialism, the destruction of our existing societal structures, and their replacement by new structures based on the marxist vision of social equality. They would replace the melting pot with the multicultural. They would limit capitalism and freedom not on the margins to keep a level playing field, but at the center to insure "fairness." They would use the police powers of the state to enforce their vision of society - and there are far too many indications that they would use those same police powers to punish those who disagree.

In this context, for Michelle Obama to use her time at the DNC convention to dust off the phrasing of Saul Alinsky is not necessarily surprising, but it is very telling about how much of a radical change Obama represents. Saul Alinsky was a 1940's era marxist who quite literally wrote the book - Rules For Radicals - on how to effect the radical, left wing change we see going on within America. His philosophy and methods have been embraced by many on the left, most notably Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama is advocating the institution of cradle to grave socialism in America and explictly followed in Alinsky's footsteps as a "community organizer." Hillary Clinton actually did her thesis at college on Alinsky, her populist rhetoric has sounded many of Alinsky's themes, and her first job offer after college was from Mr. Alinsky. Both have adopted Alinsky's tactics.

Update: I see some comments to this post at other cites claiming that Alinsky was not a marxist and the communists of the time hated him. The first is wrong. Alinsky was a dedicated Marxist. The latter is correct, however. Marxist radicals of Alinsky's era denounced Alinsky, but that was because of Alinsky's tactics, not his end goals. This from a 1972 interview of Alinsky in Playboy discussing why Alinsky always sought limited goals and incremental progress towards a Marxist utopia rather than a total and immediate revoultion such as occurred in Rusia and China:

PLAYBOY: Spokesmen for the New Left contend that this process of accommodation renders piecemeal reforms meaningless, and that the overthrow and replacement of the system itself is the only means of ensuring meaningful social progress. How would you answer them?

ALINSKY: That kind of rhetoric explains why there's nothing left of the New Left. It would be great if the whole system would just disappear overnight, but it won't, and the kids on the New Left sure as hell aren't going to overthrow it. Shit, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin couldn't organize a successful luncheon, much less a revolution. I can sympathize with the impatience and pessimism of a lot of kids, but they've got to remember that real revolution is a long, hard process. Radicals in the United States don't have the strength to confront a local police force in armed struggle, much less the Army, Navy and Air Force; it's just idiocy for the Panthers to talk about all power growing from the barrel of a gun when the other side has all the guns.

America isn't Russia in 1917 or China in 1946, and any violent head-on collision with the power structure will only ensure the mass suicide of the left and the probable triumph of domestic fascism. So you're not going to get instant nirvana -- or any nirvana, for that matter -- and you've got to ask yourself, "Short of that, what the hell can I do?" The only answer is to build up local power bases that can merge into a national power movement that will ultimately realize your goals. That takes time and hard work and all the tedium connected with hard work, which turns off a lot of today's rhetorical radicals. But it's the only alternative to the continuation of the present system. . . .

Read the entire article.

Dianne Alden has an excellent essay on Saul Alinsky and how the fringe left has embraced his methods and ridden them to power. It is a few years old, but if you are unfamiliar with Mr. Alinsky, it is well worth a read. Suffice it to say, the only thing Ms. Obama could have done to be more open about the agenda of she and her husband is to have worked in the phrase, 'from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.'

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Obama (Re)Education Summer Camps & Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals

No-Quarter is reporting that Obama is sponsoring "summer camps" for his supporters that appear to be part indoctrination, part training in the Saul Alinsky strategy. Here is the e-mail being sent to Obama supporters:

Dear ___________,

You have an opportunity to play a major role in this nationwide movement for change.

Dedicated volunteers like you have brought us this far. But to execute our strategy for the general election, we need supporters to step into one of the most important roles of our campaign.

If you’re ready to take the next step, you are invited to attend a two-day Camp Obama training session near you.


Learn more about this special opportunity and apply to attend Camp Obama right now:

Camp Obama trainings offer a unique, in-depth look at the strategies and techniques that have driven this campaign.

These two-day sessions, to be held August 15th - 16th, are led by experienced Obama campaign staffers and other professional organizers who are eager to empower dedicated supporters like you.

After completing a camp session, attendees will be asked to fill essential volunteer positions in battleground states — these are demanding roles, but they are a vital part of our election strategy.

Supporters with experience in community organizing or political campaigns are strongly encouraged to apply. But the only requirement is that you support Barack and be ready to turn your enthusiasm and energy into action.

Here are some of the skills you’ll learn at Camp Obama:
• Tactics that will help you creatively and effectively organize voters
• Tips to increase the visibility of the campaign in your area
• Keys to mobilizing other volunteers to join our movement

Apply now for a Camp Obama training near you:

We’re excited to invite our most dedicated supporters to get involved with the campaign in this crucial role.

Thank you for everything you’re doing to build this movement,

Obama for America

Simon at Power & Control has a fascinating post on the tactics of Saul Alinsky that the Obama campaign is using and the countering tactics of John McCain:

So let us have a look at Alinsky's handbook Rules For Radicals. Just so we can see the train coming and get off the tracks. Here is a list of the rules.

RULE 1:"Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have." Power is derived from 2 main sources - money and people. "Have-Nots" must build power from flesh and blood. (These are two things of which there is a plentiful supply. Government and corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)

That would explain a lot of the current campaign's dynamics. Obama is running on the idea that a lot of people fear being called racists. If that fear is not there then his campaign has no power. McCain has neutered that whole line of attack. It may play well among the latte liberals (Tom Wolfe called them the radical chic) but it will not play well against the original anti-slavery party (Abe Lincoln was a Republican).

RULE 2: "Never go outside the expertise of your people." It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don't address the "real" issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)

This would explain Obama's One note campaign: "I'm Black. Vote for me or we will brand you a racist." All his other policy positions are amendable (see flip-flop, Obama). Obama might not know math, science, economics, or any number of other things. He does know race and so does his base. . . .

Read the whole post. It is very good reading. On a related note, you will find the results of Mr. Obama's community organizing told in pictorial fashion at Doug Ross's Journal.

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