Liars (19 page)

♠

Berrigan tried for decades to fight his way past the traumas he'd experienced in World War II, but he failed to realize that no amount of blood sprayed, draft cards burned, or criminal plots concocted can change basic human nature, including its violent elements. Being human means that our worst tendencies and instincts will recur, no matter how idiotic they might seem to the “enlightened.” As Rudyard Kipling wrote in
Gods of the Copybook Headings
after losing his son in World War I:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.

Human instinct, like that of dogs and sows, is impossible to change. No matter how many times we are burned, the fire still beckons for our hand once more. Most people understand these immutable ground rules of life.

Progressives do not.

We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

—BARACK OBAMA, 2008

Chicago, Illinois

July 1995

The future president of the United States stood in the living room of a domestic terrorist.

They were in Hyde Park, a Chicago neighborhood of tree-lined streets dotted with handsome old stone and brick houses. In this
highly segregated city,
Hyde Park stands out as a vibrant, racially diverse but monolithically leftist melting pot. There couldn't be a more fitting place for a future commander in chief to live, just mere blocks away from
former domestic terrorists, not to mention Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Hyde Park is home to the prestigious University of Chicago, but venture just a few blocks outside the neighborhood, and you'll find
yourself in the middle of Chicago's notorious South Side. The ivory tower of elitist academics looms over crippled communities riddled with drugs, gangs, and broken homes. The slums and Section 8 housing projects are home to some of the highest murder rates in the civilized world. The wreckage caused by decades of leftist rule ironically lies all around the progressive Hyde Park denizens, although they refuse to acknowledge it, let alone
take any responsibility for it.

“Barry, if I have one lesson for you,” Bill Ayers said, “it's this: if you really want to change things, you've got to drop the radical pose for the radical ends. You're a talented community organizer; politics is just community organizing on a larger scale. People project their hopes, dreams, and aspirations on you. They don't expect you to actually solve all of their problems, but they want you to say you'll try.”

Barack Obama, a thirty-four-year-old aspiring politician, listened intently. “What matters more than
what
you say,” Ayers continued, “is
how
you say it. You can play on fear, but ultimately you also have to give people the antidote, and that is hope. We lost a generation of progress because we didn't understand that simple rule.”

Obama grinned as he put out his cigarette, anticipating the arrival of his wife, Michelle, and Ayers's wife, Bernadine Dohrn, as well as many guests whom he would attempt to dazzle out of their money that night. The duo of Ayers and Dohrn was nothing if not dynamic. The two had spent almost eleven years on the run, fugitives from the law. In fact, Dohrn had achieved the distinction of making the
FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, all the more impressive considering that only nine women have ever been listed there.

What were they running from? Ayers, Dohrn, and their Weather Underground coconspirators had sought to spark a full-on Communist revolution in the 1960s and '70s, by destroying property and
killing those who got in the way. After the two grew tired of running and finally turned themselves in to authorities, only Dohrn faced charges, and they were minor.

Blessed with unexpected freedom, the two revolutionaries continued to
adhere to their beliefs, never expressing remorse for their crimes. Dohrn eventually landed at the prominent law firm Sidley Austin—the same firm where Barack would later meet Michelle—and she later served as a
professor of law at Northwestern University. Ayers reinvented himself as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, where he got to shape young minds on a daily basis, this time without explosives.

As they finished their conversation, Obama, ever the shrewd politician, asked one last question: “What do I tell people if they ask about our relationship?”

Ayers displayed his characteristic mischievous smirk. “Just tell them I was a guy in the neighborhood.” Then he turned and opened the front door to a stream of prospective Obama donors.

As it turned out, it was the opening of a door that would one day lead right to the White House.

♦

Looking back, as improbable as
it may seem, the same system that Obama would later claim was rigged had actually worked out quite well for him. A man who grew up in a fractured home had ended up attending the greatest academic institutions in the world and was now on the cusp of a meteoric rise in Illinois politics, an ideal place to cut one's teeth and build a progressive power base.

In the middle of it all were these radicals-turned-educators who had once led the Weathermen, an organization that was responsible for twenty-five bombings on American soil, including attacks at the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and New York Police Department headquarters. The group had
murdered at least seven people, including three police officers, and they
didn't seem to have a whole lot of sympathy. “In a revolution,” Ayers once told a Weathermen
colleague who'd become an FBI informant, “
some people have to die.”

And now this group of aging revolutionaries had found an ambitious young man with a zeal for politics and a strong progressive streak right in their own backyard.

He was the messenger they had been searching for.

There have been all kinds of wild attacks leveled against Barack Obama: that he's a Third World sympathizer, a secret Islamic Manchurian candidate, a devotee of Saul Alinsky (OK, maybe this one is true), an undocumented Kenyan illegal immigrant, an avowed socialist, and so on. I'm wary of conspiracy theories like these because they assume a certain amount of forethought and malice. We cannot look into Obama's heart and know what he truly feels.

But we can certainly judge him by his words and actions.

Obama
calls himself a progressive. He has spent his entire life proving his devotion to this cause; sacrificing Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress; lying to, alienating, and dividing millions of Americans; and endangering the nation by empowering its worst enemies to advance his agenda.

By background, association, words, and actions, President Obama's progressivism has pervaded almost every aspect of the man's life. His ability to seamlessly combine leftist ideology with community-organizing tactics designed to win over a nation demanding “change” in a time of crisis has helped to usher in a new wave of progressivism. In its short time, this wave has already eroded the limited government victories of the Reagan Revolution and of the moderates under Bill Clinton who'd seemingly accepted the new reality of smaller, more effective federal government. Obama has returned the Democratic
Party to the unapologetically liberal, government-expanding tradition of FDR and LBJ—and this wave may just be getting started.

Obama came from a progressive family in a progressive state. But unlike that of those who preceded him, elites such as the Roosevelts or even many of the leading leftist agitators of the '60s, Obama's broken background betrayed the fact that
he was destined for prominence. He was born with no silver spoon in his mouth, no bourgeois upbringing to rebel against. He was a living product of the civil rights movement of the '60s, the son of a black Kenyan man who left him and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, a white woman from Kansas who later married an Indonesian.

Young Barack's early years were spent in exotic locales—Honolulu with his mother and Jakarta with his stepfather's family. For long stretches during his childhood, Dunham left young Barack
to be taken care of by her parents.

A Norman Rockwell painting this was not.

The near-total absence of his biological father, combined with his mother's transience, could not have been easy on Barack. Yet Dunham proved to be a strong, if unconventional, influence. According to a profile by Tim Jones in Obama's hometown newspaper, the
Chicago Tribune
:

[
T
]
he parental traits that would mold him
[
Obama
]
—a contrarian worldview, an initial rejection of organized religion, a questioning nature—were already taking shape years earlier in the nomadic and sometimes tempestuous Dunham family, where the only child was a curious and precocious daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley—
after himself.

Politically, Dunham ran in leftist intellectual circles that questioned the capitalist system. Even as a student she was known to ask her teacher, “
What's wrong with communism?” The church her family
attended while she was growing up in Washington State was dubbed “
The Little Red Church on the Hill” because of its radical ties.

Obama later described his mother as a “lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps,
position-paper liberalism.” Dunham's political leanings are relevant here because Obama himself says they are. “The values she taught me,” he said, “continue to be my touchstone when it comes to
how I go about the world of politics.”

Obama's father seemed to share a similar ideology to that of Dunham. One white paper drafted by Obama Sr. indicates that he felt there was nothing theoretically wrong with a one hundred percent tax rate and that nationalizing industries and economic redistribution
were chief aims of government.

Young Obama's time in college further reflects the influences of those
with whom he spent his youth. As he later wrote about his college years:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my
[
college
]
friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. . . . At night in the dorms we discussed neocolonialism . . .
[
Franz
]
Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy . . . we were
resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints.

At Occidental College, Obama was known to hang out with the “kids most
concerned with issues of social justice.” John C. Drew, an Occidental classmate, has indicated that based on conversations with Obama during their college days, the future president was a “doctrinaire Marxist revolutionary, although perhaps—for the first time—considering conventional politics as
a more practical road to socialism.”