...And a Few Reasons Obama Might Not Be Such a GOOD President

Maybe this blog is right about Obama. Maybe, just maybe, he is not merely a vacuous welfare state politician who craves attention. Maybe he is a committed ideological communist.

The very word communist evokes snickers from leftists. They think it is an exaggerated concept, something blown all out proportion by McCarthyist right-wingers who use the word to smear Democrats and progressives. But there are still real communists in this world. As few communists as there are left in America, Obama has managed to associate with a surprising number of them.

Here is a picture of Obama when he was a part-time lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Greg Ransom explains the picture:

What Obama is teaching here is from the play book of radical pressure politics developed by Saul Alinsky. The record suggests that Barack Obama had so internalized the "ends justify the means" logic of Alinsky radicalism that Obama was comfortable with the power politics of even physical intimidation. And this is the sort of stuff Obama was teaching in the classrooms of the U. of Chicago Law School.

[At the top it says "POWER ANALYSIS". The next line reads "RELATIONSHIPS BUILT ON SELF INTEREST". The link between "CORP" and "MAYOR" is "$". That's how Obama sees the world -- regardless of whatever words his speech writers might put in his mouth this campaign season.]

Many Americans would not find Obama's Power Analysis controversial at all, so widespread is anti-business bias today. His argument does originate with Marx; it implies that we need noble government knights in shining armor like Obama to regulate the greedy corporations that corrupt mayors with their $. (McCain would agree entirely with Obama, which is why he is so dangerous and why I will NOT vote for McCain. It's either Obama or abstain.)

As a young man Obama followed the radical Saul Alinsky:

"As Obama was preparing to graduate from Columbia he wasn't sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Finally, in 1983, he decided to follow in the footsteps of one of his heroes, radical leftist and communist fellow traveler, Saul Alinsky. He concluded, "That's what I'll do… I'll organize black folks at the grass roots… for change."

...

So who is Saul Alinsky?

According to Wikipedia, "Alinsky was a critic of a passive and ineffective mainstream liberalism. In Rules for Radicals, he argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within to achieve other ends of social justice."

In Rules for Radicals Alinsky writes, "There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution."

This is where Senator Barack Obama's campaign about "Change" comes from. He is not talking about positive change but rather the change outlined by his mentor Saul Alinsky. Revolutionary change. Socialist change.

Could Obama's lack of substance be a conscious, Machiavellian -- or should we say Alinskyan -- deception? Are Obama's flip-flops his way of doing whatever is necessary to gain power? Who is the real Obama?

And don't forget this:

His mild-mannered style has thrown off even some angry black radicals, who want him to speak out more forcefully about the legacy of U.S. racism and economic inequality.

One is Princeton professor Cornel West, a militant black and self-described socialist. Reportedly, West was reluctant to join the refined Obama's presidential campaign until Obama took him aside and explained to him that he had to walk a rhetorical tightrope to reassure whites. West is now solidly on board his campaign as an adviser.

If this is true, then Obama is hiding his radicalism in order to gain power.

From that same article:

Cone says [Obama] wants to see a "new system" in America "in which people have the distribution of wealth."

If this is true, then Obama has plans for America that he is not sharing with us.

And then there is his wife Michelle's disturbing ideas:

...Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your division. That you come out of your isolation. That you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual; uninvolved, uninformed.

Some of her ideas are laudable, but none of this comes within the proper role of government. The state has a legal monopoly on the use of force, and force is how the state gets things done. It is a violation of individual rights for the state to force people to shed their cynicism, come out their isolation, move out of their comfort zones, etc. In a free country the state does not "require you to work."

I'm not sure what to make of all this. Is Obama a Peter Keating type or a stealth socialist? Or some combination of the two?

As I wrote in my last post, Obama has no mandate, so if he has hidden radical plans, he will have a hard time getting them done. Maybe he is counting on help from the MSM and the Democrats in Congress to foist radical change on un unsuspecting American public. Whatever, we should take comfort that it's hard to effect sweeping, radical change in the American system of government.

Obama is to some extent only doing what the rest of the Democrat Party has done since the ascension of the New Left and the debacle of the McGovern candidacy in 1972: appearing moderate to get elected. Political reality forced both Carter and Clinton to govern moderately. If the political reality changes because of the deterioration of the American sense of life and the "dumbing down" of America, then we could be in for some nasty surprises in the coming years.

I offer these thoughts for our consideration as we struggle to figure out how to vote in November.