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The Emperor Is Naked!
Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes tells the story of a vain monarch and his gullible followers who were hoodwinked by some clever con men masquerading as tailors. The swindlers “said they were weavers, and that they could weave the most beautiful material one could imagine. Not only were the colors and patterns unusually lovely, but the clothes sewn from the fabric had a remarkable characteristic: they were invisible to any person who was incompetent in his job, or who was simply grossly stupid.” As they set up their looms and pretended to work on this fabulous fabric, the emperor’s advisers – sent to investigate on the tailors’ progress – saw exactly what the two swindlers were fabricating: nothing. But, fearful of being found out to be stupid or unfit for their jobs, all the officials reported back to the emperor that they were delighted with the beautiful colors and lovely patterns. When the swindlers presented the emperor with his new suit of non-existent clothes, the emperor saw what all his advisers had seen – absolutely nothing – but, fearful to be discovered to be stupid or unfit to be emperor, he too played along, pretending to put on the new clothes and then primping in front of the mirror, pretending to admire his splendid outfit. “It’s magnificent! Delightful! Excellent!” Such comments were on everyone’s lips, as the emperor paraded through the streets of his capital city, wearing his non-existent new clothes. Word had spread among the emperor’s subjects of the supposedly magical properties of the cloth. Fearful of being called incompetent or stupid, everyone competed with one another to praise the emperor’s invisible outfit – everyone, except for one little boy who had the impetuousness (and honesty) of youth. “But he isn’t wearing anything at all,” cried the child. “Dear God, listen to the voice of innocence,” the father said, and each person in the crowd whispered to the other what the child had said. “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” everyone shouted at last. The story of the Emperor’s new clothes is a perfect metaphor for the presidential campaign of the Democrats’ candidate, U.S. Senator Barack Obama. Obama is an “empty suit” – a tyro, spouting all the tired old Democrat political clichés, a moron seriously lacking in the requisite experience or judgment, who’s unfit to be President of the United States. Yet the Democrats’ party faithful, their allies in the so-called “mainstream” news media, and a host of gullible Americans (including many college students and other newcomers to political elections) are seemingly enchanted by the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois, whose political rallies have taken on the atmosphere of evangelical camp meetings (crossed with Beatles concerts from the early 1960s, with “Obama-mania” taking the place of “Beatlemania,” complete with screaming fans on the verge of hysteria, or “Obasms”). Fearful of being considered un-cool, or even racist, by fellow left-liberals, many of the Senator’s own supporters are afraid to admit what Obama’s critics of all political orientations – left-liberal, centrist, conservative, or libertarian – recognize: that when it comes to qualifications for the nation’s highest political office, Obama – like the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s story – is totally in the raw, nude, bare-assed naked! As I frequently have observed over the past several months here, Obama is a fraud – or, more precisely, his campaign is fraudulent. It’s a campaign based almost entirely on bullshit: Obama’s claims to be a new kind of politician, his promises to bring “hope” to Americans and to bring “change” in public policies, and his chameleon-like efforts to disguise his far-left policies and to masquerade as a political centrist – all this, like his empty rhetoric itself, is nothing but bullshit.
Obama Lies Not Anomalies
Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, both his supporters and his critics have discussed the problem of identifying the “real” Obama. It’s a problem because the man has been fundamentally dishonest about himself. Indeed, for many years (probably for as long as he’s had his sights set on the nation’s highest political office) he has been engaged in a systematic effort to fabricate stories about himself – his family background, his early life, his college and law school years, and especially his years as a “community organizer” in Chicago – that are fictions (or, put another way, downright lies, or pure bullshit). If most Americans today fail to know the “real” Barack (Barry) Hussein Obama, Junior, it’s because his life – including even his full legal name – has been obscured by a veneer of bullshit that Obama has artfully created about himself. Obama’s lies and half-truths about himself began with his two autobiographies, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995, 2004) and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006). Although he identifies himself as black, or African-American, Obama really has a mixed racial heritage: his mother is white; his father is a black African, a Muslim (though by most accounts not a very religious man) whose family in Africa is a Muslim family of the predominantly Christian Luo tribe in Kenya. Obama’s first autobiography shows his youthful struggle to come to terms with his father – who abandoned Obama’s mother in Hawaii in order to study economics at Harvard and then went back to Kenya, where he remarried and held several government posts. (Obama’s father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was a polygamist, married to at least two women in addition to Barack Jr’s mother; he also was an alcoholic who died in an automobile crash in 1982. The first name Obama shares with his father, “Barack,” means blessed in Arabic.) Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, also remarried; her second husband – Barack Jr’s stepfather – was an Indonesian-born Muslim, whom she met while studying at the University of Hawaii (where she also had met Obama’s father). Obama spent three years growing up in Indonesia, after his mother moved there to be with her second husband. While in Indonesia, Obama did not attend a madrassa, or Islamic religious school; but (as he admits in his first autobiography) he did attend a government-run Indonesian public school and did receive Islamic instruction, including study of the Koran. He spent his formative years in Hawaii, living with his white Midwestern grandparents, who struggled to pay the tuition to send Barack Jr. (or “Barry,” as he was then known) to an elite private school, Punahou. The truth about Obama’s childhood and youth is ably documented by Jerome R. Corsi, in his book The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (New York: Threshold [Simon & Schuster], 2008). Corsi’s research exposes several of the lies or half-truths that are told by Obama (in his autobiographies) or Obama’s campaign (on its website) – including denials of his Muslim heritage as well as Obama’s false claims that his father came to the United States as part of an airlift of African students funded by the Kennedy family (which occurred over a year later) and that his parents met at the Selma, Alabama voting rights march (which occurred when Obama Jr. was five years old). Summing up Obama’s early life, Corsi observes: “A young man of mixed race identifies more with his African blood, rejecting his white mother and his African father, both of whom have abandoned him, as well as rejecting the white grandparents who have sacrificed economically to raise him, as he struggles to fit into an elite [Hawaiian] prep school, where radical anticolonial political philosophy, drugs, and an older socialist mentor help him find his identity as an African-American, in the heritage of his Muslim father” (p. 73). Indeed, as Corsi shows, Obama’s leftist politics emerged from the education he received from a series of far-left mentors, starting with a radical teacher at Punahou, then the Marxist professors he had as an undergraduate at Occidental College (a largely white, prestigious, private liberal-arts college in Los Angeles) and then as a transfer student at New York City’s Columbia University, and eventually the left-wing law professors at Harvard. As Obama himself concedes in his second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, he was a “pure product” of the 1960s – but went beyond his mother’s “pre-1967 liberalism” to embrace the views of the radical, post-1968 Far Left. Like Hillary Clinton, he was student of the ideas of Saul Alinsky, the radical leftist guru who defined community organization tactics for several generations of American leftists. Alinsky had died in 1972, a year after he wrote his classic book, Reveille for Radicals, and more than a decade before Obama, after graduating from Harvard Law School, moved to Chicago to become a community organizer. But it was in Chicago, when he fell under the tutelage of Jerry Kellman (a student of Alinsky’s methods), who helped teach Obama how “to convert the black churches of Chicago’s South Side into agents of social change” (p. 129). Obama’s central campaign theme, or mantra – “change” – in fact was Saul Alinsky’s credo. “`Change,’ for Alinsky, invoked radical socialism and meant the redistribution of wealth,” Corsi reports. “Obama means the same, but by hiding the reference he avoids having to be explicit about the radical goal behind the theme” (pp. 130-31). Obama’s campaign for the presidency reflects many other methodological teachings directly out of Alinsky’s playbook, Reveille for Radicals, including his use of ridicule and sarcasm. An insightful article in Investor’s Business Daily (I.B.D.) cites the way Obama belittled the 72-year-old John McCain for vowing to take on the “old boys network,” saying, “In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.” Other “Alinsky rules” that Obama’s campaign seems to be following include:
“Obama is following almost to the letter the blueprint for socialist revolution drafted by the father of community organizing,” the article concludes (“How Obama Applies Alinsky’s Rules,” I.B.D., Sept. 23). “When Obama tells audiences that his community organizing experience `taught me a lot about listening to people as opposed to coming in with a premeditated agenda,’ he is reciting pure Alinsky dogma,” Corsi also observes. “Listening, in the Alinsky lexicon, is just a tactic, but the tactic is powerful when listening is presented as genuine sympathy to understand the community’s needs as the community understands those needs. Obama listens because he has been taught the only way to intensify discontent is to use the language of the community itself. The view is intrinsically an elitist view; always, the organizer knows best. It is the community that must be led, even if the only way to lead appears passive, by listening first. Becoming a politician, Obama was not planning to stop being a community organizer” (The Obama Nation, p. 135). Like many leftist liberals (especially those with an academic background or career), Obama holds elitist views, which were famously exposed earlier this year when his comments at a private fund-raiser in San Francisco on April 6 were recorded and then publicized by the Clinton campaign. Describing small-town Pennsylvanians, Obama characterized them as “bitter” – as people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s ironic that Senator Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary campaign tried to use these comments to portray Obama as elitist, when she herself shares with Obama – and with virtually all other left-wing Democrats – elitist views grounded in their paternalistic theories of government. Left-liberals like Obama or Clinton do not trust Americans to be competent to govern themselves; they support bigger and bigger government – the paternalistic “nanny state” – that, in the name of “protecting” people (often from their own irresponsible actions), makes people ever more dependent on government. Obama’s policies, discussed below, perfectly illustrate this elitist, paternalistic philosophy of government. Obama’s pattern of telling lies or half-truths about himself extends to his efforts to disassociate himself from his controversial friends, including William Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Tony Rezko. Obama and his campaign continue to lie about his relationship with William Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground, the radical leftist terrorist organization that, among other things, bombed government buildings, banks, police departments, and military bases in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1980 Ayers, together with his fellow terrorist and spouse, Bernadine Dohrn, surrendered to police, but the terrorist charges were dropped because the FBI used illegal wiretaps to investigate them. (Dohrn, who now teaches law at Northwestern University and specializes in “juvenile justice reform,” pled guilty to two counts of aggravated assault, received a $1500 fine but no jail time.) “Obama was only eight years old when Ayers bombed buildings,” the Obama campaign continually notes whenever Ayers’ name is mentioned, usually adding that the Senator has denounced Ayers’ criminal acts. What neither Obama nor his campaign admit, however, are Obama’s close professional and personal ties to Ayers as well as Ayers’ own unrepentant views about violent Marxist revolution. Ayers, now a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology. Described as a “school reformer” by Tom Brokaw on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Ayers “is a school reformer in the same sense . . . as Joe Stalin was a agricultural reformer,” as Investor’s Business Daily noted in a recent editorial (“Obama’s Real Problem with Ayers,” Oct. 8). “An idea of what Ayers has in mind for America’s schools was provided in his own words not 40 years ago when Obama was eight but less than two years ago in November 2006 at the World Education Forum in Caracas hosted by dictator Hugo Chavez,” where, with Chavez at his side, Ayers voiced his support for “the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez . . . education is the motor-force of revolution . . . to overcome the failures of capitalist education.” As City Journal’s Sol Stern has pointed out, “Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children in the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive.” The radical anti-capitalist revolutionary Ayers “does not advise my campaign and will not be a part of my administration,” Obama recently has declared – thus conveniently ignoring questions about Obama’s close relationship with Ayers in the recent past as well as Ayers’ great influence in academic circles. These are questions that the “mainstream media” – 80% (or so) of whom are unabashedly biased in Obama’s favor – have failed to ask, leaving it to such publications as Investor’s Business Daily (an unabashed conservative, or free-market, newspaper) to investigate. The recent I.B.D. article notes that Ayers isn’t “just another nutty professor” but actually wields great influence in academic circles – elected just last month as vice-president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researches – and also “has Obama’s ear.” Obama, who at first tried to dismiss Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” actually launched his political career in Ayer’s and Dohrn’s Hyde Park living room in 1995. Obama served with Ayers on the Woods Fund Board for three years, beginning in 1999; more importantly, in 1995 Ayers selected Obama to serve as the first chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Chellenge, a $50 million grant program co-founded by Ayers to “reform” Chicago public schools. As Ayers’ chairman, Obama ran the fiscal arm that distributed grants to schools and raised matching funds; during his tenure, he gave substantial funds to one of Ayers’ own educational projects, designed to “improve learning environments” by helping make K-12 teachers “aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation” – left-wing code words for socialist revolution. Big Media, if it were truly doing its job rather than helping elect Obama by white-washing his record, might ask whether Obama’s secretary of education would be someone who follows Ayers’ radical leftist anti-capitalist teachings and would try to turn America’s schools into agents for socialist revolution, as Hugo Chavez has done with Venezuela’s. Obama also has been quite disingenuous about his ties to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was more than simply the pastor of the church Obama attended for twenty years; he was also Obama’s spiritual mentor, as the candidate himself admitted in an unguarded moment earlier in the campaign. Indeed, The Audacity of Hope, the title of Obama’s second book, was first used by Rev. Wright as the title of a sermon. What made the Rev. Wright so controversial wasn’t the pastor’s outrageous statements – the government causing AIDS in the black community, 9/11 happening because America’s “chickens [were] coming home to roost,” “God damn America,” and so on – but rather the radical left-wing Marxist “black-liberation theology” that was preached at Rev. Wright’s – and Obama’s – Trinity Church. Why did Obama decide to join this controversial church? Jerome Corsi asks. Quoting Obama’s own explanation, that his community organizing experience in Chicago forced him to realize he “had no community or shared traditions in which to ground my most deeply held beliefs” and that he was “drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change,” Corsi further asks, Did he simply choose the church because of “his pragmatic need as a community organizer to have a base from which to relate to the community,” as Alinsky had taught? (The Obama Nation, p. 185). Obama’s actions with regard to Wright – first condemning Wright but staying in Trinity, then later leaving the church when it had become a political liability – epitomize Obama’s strategy in dealing with inconvenient facts. “The problem Obama faces when he first denies anything about a controversy is that, later, when he has to admit he did know something he had earlier denied knowing, we can only conclude Obama’s first instinct was to lie, or at least misconstrue the truth so as to engage in a cover-up” (p. 197). Obama eventually “dumped” the church where he was baptized and married, and where his children were baptized, “simply because the national media exposure of the theology preached in the church proved a political embarrassment to Obama’s presidential campaign. . . . [B]y leaving Trinity Church only after the [Father] Pfleger episode added fuel to the fire, Obama displayed himself once again to be a typical politician whose decisions derive from political expediency” (pp. 206-207). Finally, Tony Rezko, a Chicago slumlord, helped to bankroll Obama in five election runs – in Obama’s successful 1996, 1998, and 2002 campaigns for the Illinois state senate, as well as his 2000 unsuccessful run for the U.S. House and his 2004 successful U.S. Senate campaign – and has been, in the words of Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund, Obama’s “friend of two decades and his master campaign fundraiser.” Obama will have a hard time explaining that he didn’t see Rezkno was “a master fixer in Illinois politics,” or that he didn’t know Rezko was involved “with money laundering, attempted extortion, fraud and aiding bribery in an alleged multimillion dollar scheme shaking down companies seeking state contracts,” Fund predicted – especially after a federal jury on June 4, 2008 found Rezko guilty on 16 of 24 counts of political influence peddling (The Obama Nation, pp. 153, 155). The problem, again, is that Big Media – acting as Obama’s cheerleaders and failing to do their job – simply have not challenged Obama on this issue, either. Rather than examining the shady financial deals that plague Obama’s past with Rezko, the media largely has chosen to ignore the issue altogether, preferring to superficially cover Obama’s campaign and its lofty rhetoric, with slogans like “Change We Can Believe In.” Obama’s campaign thus far has successfully covered up his shady past. How has it gotten away with it? Part of the answer, again, lies in the “mainstream” news media left-wing political bias, which disposes them to favor left-wing Democrats like Obama and thus to ignore his negatives. The rest can be explained in terms of the tactical success of the Obama campaign and its chief strategist, David Axelrod, whose strategy has been to win elections by promoting the personality of the candidate, not issues – in other words, a “cult of personality,” long on lofty themes but short on content. Jerome Corsi nicely describes “The Cult of Personality” in Chapter 8 of his book, showing how Axelrod’s strategy has created a tone of “secular messianism” surrounding Obama. (Indeed, as Corsi notes, a tongue-in-cheek Internet blog, the “Obama Messiah Blogspot” created by Christopher Blosser – a web designer and self-described political independent – opens with the question, “Is Barack Obama the Messiah?”) Even though it lacks originality – as Corsi also observes, Obama liberally borrows previously-used political language from former Axelrod clients like Deval Patrick (in his Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign) and even lines from the movies (such as “He is the One,” from the Matrix series) – the strategy seems to work, and to work quite well. Yet “behind the Axelrod-Obama `hope’ and `change’ rhetoric, we find the verbal mask has covered over the development of a liberal Democratic politician who, in truth, harbors radical views that are extreme even for most Democrats” (p. 301).
Not a “Uniter,” But a Divisive Racist
Throughout the campaign Obama has claimed to be a “uniter, not a divider,” someone who would bring Americans together rather than polarize them along partisan or racial lines. Yet, despite this disingenuous claim, both Obama’s rhetoric and his policies truly do divide Americans, by race as well as by socioeconomic class. His speeches and campaign ads are full of classic Democrat class-warfare political rhetoric; consider, for example, the tactic of attacking John McCain as “out of touch” with ordinary Americans by mentioning Cindy and John McCains’ “seven houses.” Or his constant reference to the “middle class” as if they’re the only real Americans. Similarly, Obama has played the “race card” throughout the campaign, while his campaign staff hypocritically accuse as “racist” anyone who has anything negative to say about Obama. In fact, as Obama’s life story so dramatically demonstrates, it’s he himself who is obsessed with the issue of race – and who himself is guilty of racism. His campaign is based on manipulation of black voters’ support because of racial identity politics and manipulation of white voters’ – especially white “liberal” voters’ – sense of guilt, as black political commentator Shelby Steele observed in an insightful op-ed this spring. “Barack Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s,” Steele noted. “Like these more irascible of his forebearers, Mr. Obama’s run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance.” The difference, he also noted, is what while Mssrs. Sharpton and Jackson were “challengers” who “intimidated whites,” Obama is a “bargainer”; he “flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.” (“The Obama Bargain,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2008.) As one pundit (I forget who) wittily remarked, the problem with Barack Obama’s skin isn’t its color but its thinness: Obama and his campaign managers are remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to virtually any important criticism of the candidate, and they are also remarkably quick to dismiss many criticisms as either racist or religiously-motivated bigotry. For example, when New Yorker magazine published a story refuting the false charges that Obama is Muslim, the magazine’s cover had a silly cartoon – obviously a satire – depicting Obama in full Muslim garb (reminiscent of an actual photo taken of him during his visit to Africa some years ago, a photo the Obama campaign has tried to suppress), along with his wife, Michelle, made up to look like a terrorist, standing in front of a White House fireplace with a portrait of Osama bin Laden above the mantel. The Obama campaign immediately assailed the New Yorker cover as an unfair attack on their candidate, when in fact the magazine was trying to marginalize what it perceived as bigoted conservative attacks on Mr. Obama. Obama’s thin skin again was revealed in his recent comments about Fox News. Although he’s leading in virtually all the major national polls, he was whining that he’d be two or three points even further ahead of McCain if it weren’t for the negative coverage he receives on Fox – virtually the only major national news outlet that’s not biased in his favor. Fox News’ coverage bothers Obama precisely because it’s so “fair and balanced,” as Fox’s motto aptly proclaims. As I noted above, it has been Obama himself who has continually injected issues of race – “playing the race card” – in this year’s campaign, both in his Democratic primary contest against Hillary Clinton and in the general election contest against John McCain. Consider, for example, Obama’s frequently-used line that he “doesn’t look like” the men on the “dollar bills.” (I think he meant not just George Washington on the $1 bill, but also Abraham Lincoln on the $5, Alexander Hamilton on the $10, Andrew Jackson on the $20, Ulysses S. Grant on the $50, and Benjamin Franklin on the $100.) He was obviously referring to his skin color, his darker complexion (unless, perhaps, he meant to refer to his Yoda-like ears) – in other words, his race. As Jerome Corsi shows in his book, Obama is a man obsessed with issues concerning race. Perhaps he perceives other people as racist because Obama himself is a racist: what psychoanalysts call “transference” (attributing to others one’s own psychological problems). Obama’s derogatory comments about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas confirm Obama’s racism. In his much-publicized interview with Pastor Rick Warren in August, Obama was asked which of the sitting U.S. Court justices he would not have nominated. Obama did not hesitate in answering “Clarence Thomas,” saying that aside from his “profound” disagreement with Justice Thomas’s interpretation of the Constitution, “I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker” at the time of his nomination. He added that he wouldn’t have appointed Antonin Scalia either, and perhaps not John Roberts, though he assured the audience that he thought they were smart enough for the job. As the Wall Street Journal editors noted, “By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General’s office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and sat for a year on the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s second most prominent court. Since his `elevation’ to the High Court in 1991, he has also shown himself to be a principled and scholarly jurist.”
To this nice succinct summary of Justice Thomas’s career, I’d add that – in my humble opinion – he’s the best justice on the Supreme Court today. His jurisprudence is the finest example of “originalism,” the leading theory of constitutional interpretation today; and although he has some blind spots when it comes to interpreting some of the rights provisions of the Constitution, Thomas is also the most libertarian justice on the Court. He has a much more profound understanding of the Constitution as a whole – approaching the kind of “contextual” approach to constitutional interpretation I have advocated – and understands better than any of his colleagues, including Justice Scalia, the clauses of the Constitution that limit federal governmental power. Indeed, Justice Thomas is the only one of the nine justices on the modern Court who truly understands the meaning of the Tenth Amendment (which Thomas Jefferson called the “foundation” of the Constitution), as I have argued in my 1996 Capital University Law Review article, “Justice Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court's Rediscovery of the Tenth Amendment.” To cite two specific examples, Thomas was on the right side (dissenting from the Court’s decision) in Gonzales v. Raich, the medical marijuana case in 2005 (while Scalia concurred with the majority); Thomas also dissented – with a superbly written dissenting opinion – from the Court’s infamous Kelo decision that same year (allowing government to seize private property by eminent domain for purposes of economic development). The Journal’s editors then contrasted Thomas’s sterling credentials with Obama’s mediocre record and drew the obvious conclusion about Obama’s negative opinion of Justice Thomas being determined by race: “Meanwhile, . . . Mr. Obama isn’t yet four years out of the Illinois state Senate, has never held a hearing of note of his U.S. Senate subcommittee, and had an unremarkable record as both a `community organizer’ and law school lecturer. Justice Thomas’s judicial credentials compare favorably to Mr. Obama’s Presidential resume by any measure. And when it comes to rising from difficult circumstances, Justice Thomas’s rural Georgian upbringing makes Mr. Obama’s story look like easy street.
“Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat’s answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn’t expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn’t merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court’s black conservative isn’t up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.”
(“Obama on Clarence Thomas,” Wall Street Journal Online, Aug. 18.) Let me be absolutely clear about this: It is racist (and wrong) to oppose Barack Obama because of his race. But it is equally racist (and wrong) to support Obama because of his race. Like every other American, Obama should be judged as an individual. He happens to be an individual who holds dangerously collectivist views.
No “Change” – Just Much, Much More of “the Same” Old Welfare State
The biggest fraudulent claim made by Obama is that he’d bring “change” to Washington. Following the GOP national convention, the Obama campaign settled on its principal theme, running ads claiming that a McCain presidency would be more of “THE SAME” as the past two terms of the George W. Bush administration. What that fraudulent claim obscures is the fact that an Obama presidency, in many key respects, also would continue many of the bad policies of the Bush administration. And more importantly, that an Obama presidency essentially would be “THE SAME” as the even worse administrations of Bush’s predecessors, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush (Bush the Elder), and – worst of all – Jimmy Carter. That’s because Obama and the Democrats offer nothing really new – just more of the same old tired, failed policies of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state, the very policies at the root of most of America’s problems today. “Barack Obama has always been a child of the Left. A community organizer, a civil rights lawyer, a strongly liberal state senator, and the single most liberal member of the Senate (according to the nonpartisan and respected National Journal), he is to the left of even Hillary [Clinton] on a host of issues.” So concluded Dick Morris, former political advisor to Bill Clinton, in his new book, Fleeced (co-authored with Eileen McGann) (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). Morris is correct: Notwithstanding his campaign’s efforts to camouflage him as a “centrist,” Obama in both his political outlook and his policies is far to the left side of the political spectrum, far outside the “mainstream” of American thought. As Morris notes, “If Barack Obama is elected, . . . [t]he legislative program he [and a Democratic Congress] will pass in 2009-2010 will be a lurch to the left equal to those of the Roosevelt and Johnson administrations” (Fleeced, p. 17). Morris is not exaggerating here; if anything, he’s underestimating the extent to which an Obama administration would vastly increase the size and scope of the national government, turning the United States even more into a socialist nation. Investor’s Business Daily has printed an excellent series of articles, aptly titled “The Audacity of Socialism,” revealing Obama’s leftist policies. In a recent installment (the 19th in the series), the paper gave several examples of what an Obama administration would mean in terms of domestic policy, together with price tags estimated by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. (See “If Bailout Plan Is Too Socialistic, Just Wait for Obama Leviathan,” I.B.D., October 1.) These include:
To these points, one might add that an Obama administration would return the United States to those bad old days when federal labor policy essentially was used to support the power of Big Labor. Labor unions endorse Obama because they know they’ll have a friend in the White House in his administration; for example, no doubt Obama would sign into law the misleadingly-named “Employee Free Choice Act” which would deprive workers of the right to vote by secret ballot and thus make it easier for labor unions to organize. No wonder the AFL-CIO plans to spend “an eye-popping” $200 million (as the liberal USA Today characterizes it) this election cycle to support Obama and Democrat candidates for Congress. As Michael Barone noted in a Sept. 28 column, the Democrats’ “card-check bill will promote unionization and do to much of the private sector what union contracts have done to the Detroit Three automakers.” Obama also would be, in the words of the National Rifle Association, “the most anti-gun president in American history.” He has a clear legislative record of opposing gun owners’ rights, including his votes (thankfully, on the losing side) in the Illinois legislature against legislation permitting law-abiding citizens to use firearms for self-defense in their own homes. And although he tried to backtrack after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case – as part of his effort this summer to appear a “centrist,” by affirming his support for hunting and sports uses of firearms – he previously supported the Washington, D. C. law banning firearms and making self-defense illegal even in persons’ homes. As the NRA pointed out in a recent ad, Obama also has voted to ban hundreds of rifles and shotguns commonly used for hunting, and he supported a 500% increase in federal taxes on guns and ammunition. His chief achievement (indeed, as far as I could discover in my research, his only achievement) in the U.S. Senate has been his sponsorship of Senate Bill 2433, the Global Poverty Act, which the Senator likes to characterize as requiring the president “to develop and implement a comprehensive policy to cut extreme global poverty in half by 2015 through aid, trade debt relief, and coordination with the international community, businesses and NGOs (non-governmental organizations).” (Incidentally, Obama’s support of using NGOs to spend federal taxpayer money apparently also extends to President Bush’s “faith-based initiative” programs, using private religious groups and charities, which Obama has pledged he would not only retain but expand!) This would put Obama’s schemes for income redistribution on the global scale, amounting to “a redistribution of income, not [just] from the U.S. haves to the U.S. have-nots, but from the U.S. haves to the world have-nots,” as Jerome Corsi characterizes it. “Evidently Obama’s `Audacity of Hope’ extends to giving the U.S. taxpayer the added burden of halving poverty worldwide. Forget about expanding productive business activity to the third world; Obama would end global poverty by largesse.” Finally, with regard to foreign policy, Obama says he would end the war in Iraq, but he has refused to guarantee a troop withdrawal by any certain date (although he has joined fellow Democrats in Congress in criticizing President Bush for similarly refusing to do so). He has suggested he’d intensify the war in Afghanistan, and like other Democrats in the White House (Bill Clinton’s wars in Somalia and Kosovo come to mind) has indicated his support for using the U.S. military for “humanitarian” interventions, even while he has criticized the aggressive neoconservative approach of the Bush administration. He also has shown his naïve understanding not only of Middle Eastern terrorists but also dangerous dictators around the world by saying he’d unconditionally negotiate with the leaders of Iran and North Korea. Summing up Obama’s foreign policy, Corsi notes it “appears predicated on a overconfidence that the power of his personality and his willingness to negotiate will somehow transform international politics to the point where we can pursue nuclear weapons disarmament, reduce our military, and withdraw from Iraq without adverse consequences, even for Israel. Obama talks as if he can transcend international politics-as-usual simply by employing some of the listening skills he learned in Saul Alinsky’s radical community-organizing methodology” (The Obama Nation, p. 278). Apparently, Obama is taking his own campaign’s “Messiah” hype a bit too seriously. The Obama campaign should modify its slogan from “Change you can believe in” to “Change you must believe in”: Only an irrational zealot, blinded by faith – and having absolutely no facts or rational arguments on which to ground a conclusion – would believe that such a left-wing Democrat politician would bring real change to Washington.
Hopelessly Lacking in Experience and Judgment
The chief constitutional responsibility of the President of the United States is to serve as the nation’s Chief Executive, to wield the executive power of the government of the United States. Yet Barack Obama has no executive experience at all. His supporters’ claim that his background as a “community organizer” on the streets of Chicago gives him executive experience is simply laughable. (Remember how, when Obama campaign staffers immediately criticized Republican vice-presidential Sarah Palin’s experience as mayor of a small town in Alaska, Palin responded with a real zinger in her Republican National Convention acceptance speech: “A small-town mayor is sort of like a `community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,” she declared, to thunderous applause – and deservedly so.) As a member of the U.S. Senate – a body that shares some executive powers with the President (principally the powers to confirm appointments and ratify treaties) – Senator Obama might be expected to have some familiarity with executive decision-making at the national level. However, Obama has been notably absent from most of the business of Congress in Washington during his nearly four years as a U.S. Senator, using the office not to represent the people of Illinois (as his duty under the Constitution entails) but rather as a platform from which he can campaign for the presidency. It’s telling that Obama’s campaign managers cited the campaign itself as his chief “executive” experience, for it blatantly reveals that Obama’s experience isn’t as someone truly charged with the executive functions of government but rather only someone who’s campaigning for an office that holds powers about which he’s totally unfamiliar. Again, the reason Governor Palin’s comment at the Republican convention was so devastating to Obama is that it’s so true! Obama’s experience as a “community organizer” in Chicago should be cause for concern for all thoughtful Americans. Not only was his work in Chicago totally different from the responsibilities that the President of the United States holds under the Constitution, but his experience in its totality – including the individuals and groups with which he associated – seriously calls into question Obama’s fitness to carry out the principal constitutional duty of the President, to see that the laws are faithfully executed. Simply put, Obama’s resume reveals a person who seeks to undermine, rather than uphold, the rule of law. His relationships with persons such as William Ayers and Tony Rezko obviously raises some alarm bells about Obama’s own lack of judgment as well as contempt for the law. Another disturbing item on Obama’s resume – and a key part of his work as a “community organizer” in Chicago – is his association with the sleazy group called the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an organization that Obama has worked with in the past (both as an attorney and as a trainer) and which (through its political arm) has endorsed Obama’s presidential campaign. ACORN in turn has stepped up its voter- registration efforts “to help elect a future benefactor,” as Investor’s Business Daily noted in a Sept. 29 editorial, pointing out that the Obama campaign has admitted to failing to report $800,000 in campaign payments to ACORN, disguised as payments to a front group called “Citizen Services Inc.” for “advance work.” In addition to ACORN’s efforts to expand housing opportunities for low-income Americans (an important part of the sordid story of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage meltdown), the group has become notorious for its work promoting vote fraud. ACORN has been implicated in voter fraud and bogus registration schemes in Missouri, Ohio, and at least 12 other states. (Indeed, ACORN has been engaged in nefarious practices in connection with its voter-registration drives for the past several general elections. This year, allegations of election fraud against ACORN have been made in several states, including Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. Here in Ohio, a RICO suit has been filed in state court, on behalf of two voters in Warren County, by the Buckeye Institute, the state’s free-market think tank (and its new litigation division, the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law). The lawsuit alleges that ACORN has engaged in a pattern of corrupt activity that amounts to organized crime. It seeks ACORN’s dissolution as a legal entity, the revocation of any licenses in Ohio, and an injunction against fraudulent voter registration and other illegal activities. The FBI also announced that it will investigate ACORN’s national headquarters for possible criminal violations.) What’s the significance of Obama’s ties with such an organization, or with such shady persons as William Ayers, the unrepentant former terrorist and Marxist educator; the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the black-liberation theology he preached at Trinity Church; and sleazy Chicago slumlord and political fund-raiser Tony Rezko? It’s what it tells – and it speaks volumes – about Obama’s lack of veracity as well as his poor judgment, particularly with regard to the individuals with whom he forms professional relationships. For a man who seeks to wield the awesome constitutional responsibility of President of the United States – including his sacred duty to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed” – it ought to disqualify him from office.
Obamanomics – An Obama-nation
Although polls show that American voters tend to trust Senator Obama and the Democrats more on issues relating to the economy – the “No. 1” issue, according to CNN, the Collectivist News Network – that trust is greatly misplaced. Only an idiot or a blindly partisan Democrat (which, of course, is redundant) really believes that Obama and the Democrats in Congress would be better for the American economy. In fact, Obama shares with other Demopublican/ Replicrat politicians (especially those of the Democrat variety) an abysmal ignorance of the basic principles of economics and of American free-market capitalism. That’s because Obama and the Democrats ultimately despise business, capitalism, free enterprise, and the market system; they really have blind faith in socialism, either the full-fledged Marxist variety (which far-left Democrats like Obama secretly hold as their ideal) or the half-assed socialism, the so-called “mixed economy” (more like the mixed-up economy), of the 20th-century American regulatory/ welfare state. An Obama administration, especially if coupled with continued Democrat control of Congress, would be simply disastrous for the American economy – and for Americans’ economic freedom. Moreover, the Obama campaign has been constantly hypocritical in its handling of economic issues, whining that Senator McCain is not specific in his positions while Senator Obama’s own “plans” either lack specificity, too, or else defy the laws of economics. (Consider, for example, the energy “plan” he offered this summer, as a solution to rising gasoline prices: Raising taxes on oil companies and giving American consumers a $1000 “rebate” – in other words, further limiting the supply while increasing the demand, which of course would only exacerbate the basic problem of too little supply relative to the high demand.) What are Obama’s plans for the economy? They can be summed up in three short phrases – massive increase in federal taxes, massive increase in redistribution of income, and massive increase in federal government regulation of business – all of which mean a massive exacerbation of the trend of the past century or so, moving away from the American free-market capitalist system and moving closer and closer to full-fledged socialism. An Obama presidency would, in manifold ways, help turn the United States (which is already semi-socialist) into a socialist country, with all the economic problems that attend socialism – stagnant, if not negative, economic growth, massive unemployment, inflation, regular power outages, etc. (European and Latin American nations are finally learning that socialism is a failure and are finally discovering the merits of capitalism, at least on utilitarian grounds. Ironically, just as Europe and most of the rest of the world are moving towards capitalism, the United States – the nation founded on the capitalist principles of individual rights, free markets, and limited government – seems poised to move in the opposite direction, backward, to the Old World paternalist systems (whether medieval feudalism or 19th-century socialism, it’s an anti-market, anti-capitalist social/economic system which the American Revolution was meant to reject.) Obama proposes massive tax increases on upper-income Americans – those he considers “the wealthy,” with household incomes above $100,000 a year. These are the most productive members of society, the people whose businesses create jobs and who already pay the bulk of federal income taxes. (The richest one percent of our population earns sixteen percent of our total national income but pays one-third of our federal income taxes. The richest ten percent earn one-third of the income but pay two-thirds of the taxes.) Obama would increase that injustice, by raising the top bracket of income taxation (on family income of $200,000 or more) to at least the 39.6 percent rate imposed during the Clinton presidency (up from the current 35 percent under the Bush tax cuts); he would impose Social Security (FICA) tax on all income, not just earnings under $102,000 as at present; and he would end the planned elimination of the federal estate, or “death,” tax (and, most likely, lower the threshold at which estates can be taxed, perhaps to as low as $1 million). Most ominously (in terms of its devastating impact on the prospects for future economic growth), Obama proposes to raise capital gains taxes – almost doubling them, from the current 15 percent to 28 percent – as well as to double the tax on dividends (from the current 15 percent to 30 percent). These proposed tax increases “would be crippling to our economy,” as former Clinton political advisor Dick Morris discusses in his new book, Fleeced (co-authored with Eileen McGann). Morris & McGann note also the disingenuousness of Obama’s economic plans, disguising as “tax cuts” what are really major tax increases coupled with a massive redistribution of income. As they note, the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2010, when all U.S. income tax payers will experience a big tax increase. Moreover, the alternative minimum tax (AMT) ensnare more and more Americans, as incomes rise but the threshold for the tax’s application remains the same. Obama is selling his tax increases as a “cut” by reducing these two theoretical taxes – renewing some of the Bush tax cuts on the middle class while reducing or eliminating entirely the AMT. But, as Morris & McGann observe, “inside this beautifully wrapped Christmas present of tax cuts – on taxes that have never been actually imposed – would be very real tax increases, likely the largest in American history” (p. 24). Obama also has proposed income-tax credits – up to $500 per person and $1000 per family – calling them “tax cuts”; but because they would apply even to people who pay no income taxes, his credits really amount to an income-redistribution scheme, using the federal income tax laws to take income from the Americans who earned it and redistributing it via direct payments (U.S. Treasury checks) to low-income people who did not. It’s not a new idea: George McGovern proposed a similar plan in the 1972 campaign, when it was called (somewhat more honestly) a “negative income tax,” but was regarded by the American people as too radical, too socialist, a scheme. The fact that Obama can blithely propose income-redistribution and make it popular by calling it either a “tax cut” or an “economic stimulus” plan shows how far down the road toward pure socialism the United States has traveled in the past thirty-five or so years. The result of Obama’s plans for increasing taxes and government spending will be to divide even more the people of the United States into two classes – “two Americas,” to use John Edwards’ phrase – “taxpayers and tax consumers,” as Morris & McGann conclude. By significantly increasing taxes on a small minority of the most productive Americans, while simultaneously “reducing or eliminating income taxes on large numbers of Americans” as well as “expanding benefits to the middle class,” Obama’s policies “would promote the most fundamental and dangerous polarization any democracy can ever face: the givers against the takers” (Fleeced, p. 40). Dick Morris, as a former political advisor to that wily politician, Bill “Slick Willy” Clinton, knows what he’s talking about here. Indeed, he even quotes Slick Willy as once telling him, “`Democrats and Republicans don’t disagree much on aid to the poor. But on middle-class entitlements, there is a big gap. Republicans oppose and fear middle-class entitlements because they know they can always cut aid to the poor. There is no constituency to defend them. But once the middle class gets a benefit, you’ll never be able to take it away.’”
Clinton was right about this, Morris adds – explaining why Obama’s economic policies are so dangerous: “It’s easy to cut food stamps, housing subsidies, or welfare benefits without provoking an electoral backlash. Few poor people vote, and most middle-class voters neither know nor care about what happens to these programs. But try to cut Social Security or Medicare, and all hell breaks loose. . . .
“In Western Europe, nations are struggling to cut their subsidies to middle-class families. In Germany, they’re trying to curb the lengthy guaranteed vacations workers take each summer. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to increase the thirty-five hour workweek. But middle-class voters are tenacious in clinging to their benefits – even if they rob their national economy of incentive, growth, entrepreneurial flexibility, and initiative. You can’t attack welfare spending in France, for example, because all citizens get a check regardless of their income and they all value it highly.”
He concludes, “So Obama’s strategy for expanding government is to cover the middle class. Promoting an American equivalent of European socialism, he wants to anchor the growth of government in largesse to people who vote – so that no one will ever be able to repeal it” (Fleeced, p. 42). The combination of Obama’s policies – his huge tax increases, coupled with the huge expansion of the welfare state – indeed would be “crippling to our economy,” as Morris concludes. The “malaise” years of the late 1970s, the years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency (with “stagflation,” a recession coupled with high inflation, and a real energy crisis, with gas and oil shortages, etc.) will seem like “the good old days” if Obama’s policies are implemented by a compliant Congress. (No wonder Jimmy Carter is so enthusiastic about Obama’s candidacy!) As Jerome Corsi argues (in explaining his thesis and the title of his book), “an Obama presidency would lead us into an `Obama Nation,’” an intentional play on words: “Obama’s radical leftist politics, driven by the cult of personality he has intentionally manufactured, would be an abomination in that the result of those policies would be to lead the United States in a costly and self-destructive direction, both at home and abroad.” In other words, if the American people are foolish enough to select Obama as their next president, we’ll get the political leader we deserve.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, October 16, 2008 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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