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When Kurtz began reporting on Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, he steadfastly refused to apply the “socialist” tag to the candidate, but subsequent research, and the radical slant of the president’s policies, have driven him to insist that the word is, rightly defined— in accord with European “democratic socialist” precepts—accurate. Importantly: it’s neither slanderous to say that Labor Party Prime Minister Tony Blair pursued socialistic goals nor pejorative to assert, with Kurtz: “Evidence clearly indicates that the president of the United States is a socialist” (p. 15).
By the time he arrived at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Barack Obama was, according to an acquaintance, John C. Drew (himself a “revolutionary Marxist” in those days) a socialist with a “‘hard Marxist-Leninist point of view’” (p. 88). Moving to New York to attend Columbia University, Obama experienced what Kurtz believes is a “transformational moment” while attending the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference in 1983—one of the two or three such conferences he attended during his brief residence in New York. Major socialist spokesmen such as Michael Harrington (who wrote The Other America, the treatise that had inspired the Democrats’ “War on Poverty” in the 1960s) presided over such events, and many of them urged their followers to advance the cause through “community organizing.”
The celebrated success of Mayor Harold Washington in Chicago (a major influence on young Obama) had recently illustrated how black and Hispanic voters, activated by a voter-registration campaign and aligned with affluent progressive whites, could orchestrate social change. “The buzz in the socialist world in April of 1983 was that blacks would be the leaders of a new socialist-friendly American political movement—a reincarnation of the sixties civil rights struggle, uniting all the races, but this time pushing beyond traditional civil rights toward egalitarian ‘economic rights’” (p. 43).
Importantly, at these conferences Obama encountered theoreticians such as Peter Dreier, who espoused the position of Andre Gorz (a French Marxist) calling for “transitional reforms” to slowly move capitalism in socialist directions. Dreier called for “a ‘revolution of rising entitlements’ that cannot be abandoned without undermining the legitimacy of the capitalist class’” (p. 47). A steady expansion of government spending will, in time he said, drive the country to the edge of “fiscal collapse. At that point, a public accustomed to its entitlements will presumably turn on its capitalist masters when they propose cutbacks to restore fiscal balance” (p. 47). Significantly: “twenty-five years later, Peter Dreier would serve as an advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign” (p. 49).
Inspired to become a community organizer, Obama briefly worked for a Ralph Nader group in New York before moving to Chicago to implement the strategies of Saul Alinsky in South Chicago. Here he was weekly mentored by one of the founders of an organization that sought to radicalize the city’s Mexicans and work effectively “with local Catholic churches. This was a continuation and development of Alinsky’s own church-based organizing techniques” (p. 101). Obama tried to duplicate such strategies in the city’s black congregations, which led to his alliance with Jeremiah Wright. He further met and was trained by Dr. John L. McKnight, a professor at Northwestern University who later recommended him for admission to Harvard Law School. “McKnight is an expert in both health policy and community organizing” (p. 124) who helped make the Community Reinvestment Act a tool with which to pressure banks to “make high-risk ‘subprime’ loans to low-credit customers” (p. 125). An open admirer of Sweden’s democratic socialism, McKnight “helped turn Obama into a prominent advocate of single-payer health care” (p. 126), a cause he espoused while in the Illinois State Senate.
Obama’s Chicago success was significantly boosted by the Midwest Academy, an Alinskyite training institute founded by ‘60s radicals to train community organizers that quickly garnered clout in the Democrat Party. Voluminous archival materials in the Chicago Historical Society reveal the Midwest Academy as “a window onto the inner workings of a modern-day socialist front group. With the assistance of the archives, it is possible to identify numerous links between the Midwest Academy and both Barack and Michelle Obama” (p. 146). Here the Obamas encountered Rahm Emanuel, Lane Evans, Jan Schakowsky, the brothers John and Bill Ayers, and other influential Chicago notables.
Here too they imbibed the ideas of Harry Boyte, “a longtime community organizer” who helped shape “the Academy’s concept of a stealthy brand of incremental socialism rooted in community organizing” (p. 153) by urging his acolytes to disguise their real agenda with words such as populist, progressive, or communitarian. “In 2008, Harry Boyte was an advisor to the Obama presidential campaign” (p. 171). He and another scholar wrote an Obama-approved policy paper that proposed linking his campaign with “grassroots movement building—very much a continuation of the Midwest Academy’s political strategy” (p. 171).
President Obama’s Chicago connections with ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) further illustrate his radicalism. Kurtz devotes 70 pages to detailing Obama’s “broad, deep, longstanding, and intimate” (p. 192) ties to ACORN, which until its recent restructuring “was the largest and most influential community organization in the United States” (p. 191).
ACORN especially sought to use the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 to force banks to grant loans to lower lending standards for the poor and minority applicants. By persuading powerful politicians—e.g. Henry Gonzales, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, and Bill Clinton—to pass laws mandating such policies, especially in regards Fannie Mae and Freddy Mack, ACORN clearly helped precipitate the financial crash of 2008.
Though the president has tried to deny his close links with ACORN, documents in the Wisconsin Historical Society prove the contrary. Indeed, “it seems fair to say that Barack Obama knowingly lied about his ties to ACORN during the 2008 campaign” (p. 258), illustrating “a systematic and deep-lying pattern of deception about his radical political past” (p. 259).
Obama’s ties to ACORN were strengthened by his positions in several foundations that provided both money and connections basic to his political career. Here he worked closely with Bill Ayers, the notorious ‘60s terrorist. For nearly a decade Obama and Ayers “were longstanding political partners” working together at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund, “two leftist Chicago foundations” (p. 261). Obama publicly praised Ayers’s writings and funneled major financial support to the projects of him and his radical allies.
Obama also established lasting ties with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Afro-centric pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, which he attended (he claimed in 2004) “on a virtually weekly basis” (p. 323). President Obama, of course, has disavowed close connections with both Ayers and Wright, but the documentary record, closely examined, reveals their role in his Chicago years.
Now that he’s president, Obama seems committed, Kurtz argues, to moving America leftward. Still following Saul Alinsky’s agenda, he conceals his real beliefs and objectives, posing as a pragmatist interested only in solving pressing problems. But his administrative appointments, his support for the stimulus bill, his taking control of General Motors and Chrysler, his nationalizing the student loan program, and his commitment to health care reform reveal his real agenda. He is enacting the “stealth socialism” that he “studied and absorbed as a community organizer in Chicago.” It is “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” (p. viii).
Gerard Reed is a retired professor of history and philosophy, most recently Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. He is the author of three books--The Liberating Law; C.S. Lewis and the Bright Shadow of Holiness; C.S. Lewis Explores Vice & Virtue--as well as a variety of articles and book reviews.
