Liars (20 page)

After transferring to Columbia University, Obama says, he attended “
socialist conferences.” Author Stanley Kurtz places him at the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference that celebrated the
centenary of Karl Marx's death. Delivering the opening remarks at that conference was City University of New York professor Frances Fox Piven, a famed leftist sociologist and advocate of the Cloward-Piven strategy to crater the American economy and replace it with a socialist system.

Activists, slam poets, artists, ivory tower professors, amateur philosophers, social justice advocates—these were the people Obama had known for years. These were the people he felt most comfortable around. He loved the to-and-fro of debate in college seminars. He loved the adrenaline that came from knocking on doors, urging complete strangers to vote for causes. He was a proud activist.

In 1992, Obama directed Project Vote's Chicago voter-registration drive, helping to elect the socialist-linked
Carol Mosely Braun to the U.S. Senate. While at Columbia, he published an editorial in the
Columbia Sundial
in favor of disarmament, with the
goal of a nuclear-free world. This position would later reappear in 2009, when, as president, Obama vowed that “the United States will take concrete steps towards
a world without nuclear weapons.”

Obama's community organizing in Chicago further reflected, and also likely reinforced,
his progressive principles. “Community organizing” was what socialists had done for decades in an effort to hide their true socialist beliefs behind a facade of “populism.” The idea was to push the country toward socialism gradually, under the guise of pragmatic “
problem-solving.”

Three of Obama's mentors studied at the Industrial Areas Foundation, an organization founded by Saul Alinsky that advocates a
variety of leftist policies. Alinsky himself sought a socialist “future where the means of production will be owned by all the people instead of just
a comparative handful.” To achieve this end, he developed organizing strategies and tactics (most notably in his book
Rules for Radicals
) that provided the foundational playbook for
Obama's political rise.

While it may have been self-serving, what Alinsky's own son wrote of Obama in a 2008
Boston Globe
editorial is telling:

Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change. . . .
Obama learned his lesson well.

Obama would continue to support these causes as a civil rights attorney when he practiced at Miner Barnhill & Galland, representing, among others,
community organizers such as ACORN.

The friends and advisors Obama has surrounded himself with shared a similar progressive vision to his own. Consider, for example,
that the man who had the greatest influence on Obama's faith, baptizing the future president and officiating at his wedding ceremony, was
Reverend Jeremiah Wright. You'll recall that Wright yelled things like “God damn America,” blamed 9/11 on American foreign policy, and accused whites of being
endemically racist. But Wright also provided Obama with a first-class education in black liberation theology, a school of thought that added a religious tinge to
the progressivism Obama had imbibed.

Obama would later speak of the need for fellow progressives to understand and internalize faith, both as a political imperative and because the values provided by faith would help
make a progressive vision a reality.

Another close Obama friend was Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi is an acolyte of Arabist and anti-Israel professor Edward Said,
whose famous book
Orientalism
paints the West as the racist, imperialist,
colonialist oppressor of the Islamic world. Israel is cast in this progressive dialectic as the “powerful” or “victimizer,” against the “powerless” or “victim” Arabs. The small, formerly socialist Jewish nation surrounded by bloodthirsty enemies had morphed from David to Goliath
in the Left's historical reading.

Khalidi has been an Obama ally since the 1990s, hosting him for social functions and organizing a fund-raiser during
Obama's unsuccessful 2000 congressional bid. It also happens that Khalidi is a close friend of Ayers. He, like Ayers and Obama, lived in Hyde Park while teaching at the University of Chicago
during the 1990s.

Why so much attention to Obama's friends? Simple. “Show me your friends, and I'll show you your future” is not just a popular saying, it's a fact. We've seen the president's friends . . . and now we're starting to see our own future.

Obama's background and associations were a toxic brew of progressivism that made him an easy political target, not just for conservatives but also for moderate Democrats who rejected the excesses of the 1960s leftists. Obama knew this, which is why—like most shrewd progressives who aspired to the highest elected office in the land, from Wilson to FDR to LBJ—Obama hid his more radical views under the cloak of “liberalism.”

Obama's public rhetoric on many issues appears to be moderate and within the liberal mainstream. It is the kernels of progressivism embedded within his words and the broader narrative he crafts that reflect a symmetry between his life's work and associations and the beliefs to which he adheres. This tactical calculation is consistent with what he learned as a community organizer.

Here's how this works in practice. While a nonpolitician progressive (such as influential historian Howard Zinn, for example) will say that America's experiment has been immoral, Obama will rephrase that to say that the mistreatment of Native Americans and our original sin of slavery indicate that we have not always lived up to our values and that
we must still be better.

Obama may not overtly attack the rich, but he will argue that they ought to pay their “fair share” and that at some point
people have earned “enough.”

He will not exhibit blatant hostility toward private business, but he will admit that he sides with labor and that regulations can help strengthen the economy
while protecting the environment.

He will not claim that America is a racist nation, but he will say that there are issues of race that still have not been overcome and that minorities continue to have
legitimate grievances.

He will not explicitly say that his framework is dialectical—that is,
based on the Marxian vision of looking at the world through a prism of competing races, classes, and sexes, such as the oppressors versus the oppressed, the victimizer versus the victim—but he will admit to standing with the “powerless.”

In Obama's book
The Audacity of Hope
, almost every argument is presented as follows:
Conservatives believe X. Liberals believe Y. While both sides have legitimate concerns, and we should respect conservatives for their beliefs, I stand with liberals.

While Obama is quick to praise the free market, such praise is almost always followed with a “but.” During a 2005 address, he said that “our greatness as a nation has depended . . . on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that
we're all in it together.”

“But.” There's that word, when there really shouldn't be one.
I love our constitution, but . . .

As he would later argue during a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the spot at which Teddy Roosevelt had delivered his famous “New Nationalism” address a century earlier, “We simply cannot return to this brand of ‘you're on your own' economics if we're serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country.”

Noting that Roosevelt's critics had called him a “socialist” and “even a communist” for his views, Obama said that “we are a richer nation and a strong democracy” for having fought for progressive goals such as “an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women . . . insurance for the unemployed . . . political reform and
a progressive income tax.” Progressivism trumps the caricature of free market economics.

While Obama purports to believe in individualism, he also argues that America can only be strong when it acts collectively. During his heralded keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention,
he said that “alongside our famous individualism . . . is that fundamental belief [that] I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper,
that makes this country work.” In Obama's thinking, the nation is one big family with all of the responsibilities that entails. What he does not make explicit, however, is that this belief revolves around government coercion rather than voluntary action. Families look out for one another because they want to. Taxes, on the other hand, are involuntary.

Obama delivered a commencement address in 2005 at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine, arguing that “our individual salvation depends on
collective salvation.” For him, government is seen as a positive force that provides opportunity, rather than as the impediment to liberty that it really is. Government plays the central role in wealth creation, while labor unions play a central role in making sure that such wealth is distributed “fairly.” And remember that inequality of outcomes is the great progressive scourge. Obama has called it “the defining challenge of our time,” one that can only be solved, of course,
by government intervention.

Obama is clear in
The Audacity of Hope
about his progressive view of the Constitution. After acknowledging the merits of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's originalism, he wrote: “I have to side with Justice Breyer's view of the Constitution—that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of
an ever-changing world.” This constitutional philosophy is consistent with the idea touched on earlier about Obama's Dewey-like “pragmatism” and is directly reflected in his appointments of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Several other themes come to the forefront throughout Obama's addresses: an emphasis on “shared prosperity” and the struggle for “social justice”; a belief in “global citizenship” and the idea that all nations, not just America, are “exceptional”; an acknowledgment of
America's past sins across the world and a belief that to rectify them requires apology, multilateralism, diplomacy, and treating even our mortal enemies with “mutual respect.”

Most critical of all for Obama is the power of “change.” Claremont-McKenna Professor Charles Kesler wrote that the president “believes that change is almost always synonymous with improvement, that history has a direction and destination, that it's crucial to be on the right side of history . . . and that it's the leader's job to discern which is the right side and to lead his people to that promised land of
social equality and social justice.”

Kesler continued:

Obama says, “Yes, we can” to slaves, abolitionists, immigrants, western pioneers, suffragettes, the space program, healing this nation, and repairing the world—and that's in one speech. . . . “Yes, we can” takes the place in his thought that “all men are created equal” held in Lincoln's thought. Insofar as it is America's national creed, it affirms that America is what we make it at any given time: America stands for the ability to change,
openness to change, the willingness to constantly remake ourselves. . . . The country's saving principle, then, is openness to change.

But Obama's obsession with change reflects a belief that America's fundamental principles of individual liberty, limited government, and peace through strength are rotten to the core. As a result, progress in his view can only be achieved by minimizing or, ideally, eliminating these principles from the American mind-set.

And that is exactly what Obama would seek to do as president.

One political figure is mentioned more than any living Democrat in Obama's autobiography:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in many respects, Obama's domestic policy has paralleled that of the great progressive leader, beginning with his approach to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

In Obama's first inaugural address, the newly minted president called for, what else, action. He declared:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action, bold and swift. And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We'll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and
run our factories.

Note the progressive implication here that jobs come from government rather than from private enterprise. Also note that everything the president advocates is about “we,” that is, the collective, under the aegis of the state.

The president continued: “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford,
a retirement that is dignified.”

Once in office, President Obama moved swiftly so as not to let this crisis go to waste. His first task was to address the financial sector, a
place where George W. Bush had set the tone and where, like Herbert Hoover, Bush deserves scorn for abandoning “free market principles to
save the free market system.”