Squaring the Culture

Back in February, I posted a collection of observations about Barack Obama’s upbringing that established a radical influence at every major stage of his early life, right up through his early work as a community organizer with the Gamaliel Foundation. However, my observation at the time was that the radical connections went silent about that point.

A handful of articles that appeared over the last few weeks helped me fill in the gap between his earlier organizing activity and his current position as Senator from Illinois, and I’m presenting them here for your consideration.

The first was a discussion by Stanley Kurtz at the National Review that explained Obama’s early association with ACORN, the radical voter organizing group. Obama has been associated with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — ACORN — since the early 1990s, teaches their leadership training seminar every year on the subject of power, and began his legislative career in the Illinois State House by introducing measures that coincide with ACORN’s core issues, which are a high, state minimum wage (which they call “living wage”), expansion of the welfare rolls, and banking oversight to ensure favorable loans for poor neighborhoods. For this reason, it’s not surprising that Obama staffed his first campaign primarily from ACORN volunteers. Kurtz goes so far as to identify Obama in his early State House career as the “Senator from ACORN.”

A representative of ACORN, Toni Foulks, explains how the relationship got started in her article in the progressive journal, Social Policy:

…ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter… Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.

ACORN goes to great lengths to mask how radical an organization they are, because they receive federal funds for their “non-partisan” voter registration function. However, their own literature marks them as neo-Marxists, attempting to institute progressive social policies by any means necessary, including demonstrations and threats. They had their start in the 1960s as the National Welfare Rights Organization, a hard-left attempt to destroy capitalism and usher in socialism by increasing the size of the welfare rolls to unmanageable proportions. The organization succeeded in expanding welfare dramatically, but the result was only the enslavement of a larger number of people to the government dole and the destruction of the work ethic in large stretches of the black community. Having failed to produce revolution, the organization reformulated itself in its current form and set out to produce radical change by working inside the system, applying a systematic approach to their aims. Sol Stern, in a landmark article in the quarterly publication City Journal in 2003, explains ACORN’s roots and strategy at length. Says Stern:

ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism. “We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform,” whose prose Orwell would have derided as pure commissar-speak. “We will continue our fight . . . until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom . . . . We have nothing to show for the work of our hand, the tax of our labor”—claptrap that not only falsifies the relative comfort of the poor in America but that also is a classic example of chutzpah, given ACORN’s origins in a movement that undermined the work ethic of the poor. But never mind—ACORN claims that it “stands virtually alone in its dedication to organizing the poor and powerless.” It organizes them to push for ever more government control of the economy…

…and, of course, nothing in ACORN’s strategy even acknowledges, let alone addresses, the matters of individual responsibility that are the almost universal cause of poverty in America, such things as teenage pregnancy and crime. They focus instead on corporate irresponsibility, as they’re certain that all poverty is the result of oppression by capitalists.

Michelle Malkin has noted the number of times ACORN has been identified with voter fraud schemes, and how they manage to get their intensely partisan efforts funded as “non-partisan” voter drives. This is the organization Barack Obama defended in court, helped train, worked among, and called on to staff his first campaign.

A second article was an essay at Right Wing Nuthouse regarding Obama’s connection to the New Party, a Marxist coalition founded in 1992 to elect hard-left candidates by selecting candidates already on the ballot (usually Democrats) and running them as their own, third-party candidate. They would then add together the ballots from both parties — a tactic called “fusion” and legal in several states until around 1997. The New Party, which identified itself as an attempt to drag the Democratic party as far to the left as possible (a reaction to what they considered the too-centrist policies of President Clinton), had a committee approve a potential candidate’s platform and required candidates to sign a contract to maintain their association with the New Party. Obama apparently sought out the New Party as a tactic to obtain his State House seat in 1996, had his agenda approved by their committee, and signed their contract. Erick at Red State explained the New Party, its tactics, and its association with Obama at great length, after Publius, also at Red State, connected Obama to the New Party in an earlier post.

Erick and Kurtz go to great lengths to observe that these associations do not prove that Obama is, himself, a radical. I disagree with them wholeheartedly. Given the fact of his His radical upbringing, radical campus politics, and radical community organizing, his association with ACORN, the New Party, and other elements of the New Left clearly mark him as a radical with politics that satisfy those groups. These are as far left as organizations get in the United States, and Obama has his roots among them. His associations with the Reverend Wright. Father Phleger, and Trinity United Church of Christ, with radicals Ayers, Dohrn, and Khalidi, his wife’s association with radical points of view about race and American exceptionalism, and the near-universal favor all international radical organizations show toward Obama, make sense in the light of his unbroken connection with radicals from the moment he was born until he was nominated for the Senate.

Barack Obama is a hard leftist. I’m convinced. An Obama candidacy and presidency will be limited by what he can accomplish politically, and that means he will not be able to establish full socialism. However, I’m fairly well convinced that that’s what he’d establish if he did not have those limits. The American public should know that they’re being asked to elect the American equivalent of Hugo Chavez to occupy the White House.