Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, from his article in October issue of Commentary:

Four years [after his 2004 DNC speech], Mr. Obama is the Democratic nominee, and even his occasional shrill attacks on his opponent seem to have chipped away little of the cornerstone of his own candidacy: the promise to bring us, all of us, together. Can he do that? Is he well-suited to raise the curtain on a new postpartisan, postideological era?

From his record in office, it would hardly seem so. Nonpartisanship does not just mean Democrats coaching Little League, lovely as that is, but cooperating with members of the other party in developing compromise solutions to national problems. The Senate has a particularly rich tradition of such bipartisanship, but Mr. Obama appears never to have participated in it. On the contrary: according to Congressional Quarterly, which measures how often each member votes in accordance with or at variance from the majority of his own party, Mr. Obama has compiled one of the most partisan of all voting records.

Last year, for example, the average Senator voted with his own party 84% of the time; Mr. Obama voted with his party 96% of the time. In the prior two years, his number was 95%, making him the fourth most partisan member of the Senate. […] Throughout his Senate career, according to Americans for Democratic Action, the dean of liberal advocacy groups, Mr. Obama voted “right” 90% of the time. Actually this is misleading, since ADA counts an absence as if it were a vote on the “wrong” side. If we discount his absences, Mr. Obama voted to ADA’s approval more than 98% of the time.

This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope and change, Mr. Obama himself believes in.[…]

[…]

Abandoned by his father when he was still too young to remember him and then sent at age 10 by his mother to live in Hawaii with her parents, who enrolled him in a prestigious prep school, Mr. Obama spent much of his teen years searching for his black identity. Late in his high-school career he found a mentor of sorts in Frank Marshall Davis, an older black poet. According to Herbert Romerstein, former minority chief investigator of the House Committee on Internal Security, FBI files reveal Davis to have been a member of the Communist Party not only in its public phase but also when it officially dissolved and went underground in the 1950s.

According to Mr. Obama, Davis told him that a white person “can’t know” a black person, and that the “real price of admission” to college was “leaving your race at the door.” Perhaps influenced by this, he reports that at college, “to avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

Despite Mr. Obama’s tone of self-mockery, the passage discloses the milieu in which he immersed himself. In this light, it is not surprising that, upon graduation, he decided on a career as a “community organizer,” even if it was none too clear to him what exactly that meant. As he confesses in his early memoir “Dreams from My Father” (1995):

When classmates . . . asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House. . . . Change in the Congress. . . . Change in the mood of the country. . . . Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. . . . I'll organize black folks.

Thanks to a grant from a left-wing foundation, he was hired by a small group of white protégés of Saul Alinsky, the original apostle of “community organizing.” Alinsky’s institutional base was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he called a “school for professional radicals” and whose goal he announced to be “revolution, not revelation.” As Mr. Obama himself would put it, there were “two roles that an organizer was supposed to play . . . getting the Stop sign [and] the educative function. At some point you have to link up winning that Stop sign . . . with the larger trends, larger movements.” In other words, “community organizer,” to Mr. Obama and his colleagues and mentors, was a euphemism for professional radical.

It was in the course of trying to mobilize churches for political protest that Mr. Obama met Jeremiah Wright. […] By Mr. Obama’s own testimony, the reason other ministers directed him to Mr. Wright was that Mr. Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ was steeped in politics.

Thus, Mr. Obama writes that Mr. Wright had “dabbl[ed] with liquor, Islam, and black nationalism” before returning to Christianity and studying, among other things, “the black liberation theologians.” Whoever and however many these theologians may have been, Mr. Wright invoked only one on the church’s Web site. “The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ,” in Wright’s words, was “based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone’s book, Black Power and Black Theology.”

What was that theology? Here are two tiny snippets of Cone’s thought: “Christianity and whiteness are opposites,” and “there will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness.” In addition to a cross superimposed on a map of Africa, the Web site declares: “We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.” It defines Trinity as, among other things, “a congregation committed to the historical education of African people in diaspora, a congregation committed to liberation.” […]

[…]

The first time Mr. Obama attended services at Trinity, Mr. Wright delivered a sermon (it was titled “The Audacity of Hope”) whose theme was: “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” Twenty years later, when it was revealed that Mr. Wright’s church had honored Louis Farrakhan, that Mr. Wright had traveled with Mr. Farrakhan to visit the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, and that in his sermons Mr. Wright had beseeched God to “damn America,” charged the U.S. government with inventing the AIDS virus in order to kill black people, and claimed that Israel and South Africa had colluded to invent an “ethnic bomb” to kill blacks and Arabs while leaving whites unharmed—when all this was revealed, Mr. Obama, under pressure from the Hillary Clinton campaign, declared himself “shocked” at Mr. Wright’s vitriol. But in truth not only was he aware of Mr. Wright’s views, they were what had drawn him to Trinity church in the first place.

Mr. Obama left Chicago after three years to attend Harvard Law School. As he would explain, “I had things to learn . . ., things that would help me bring about real change.” After graduating with honors in 1991, he returned to the Windy City to join the small law firm of Judson Miner, an activist who had been attorney to Mayor Harold Washington.

Within three years of his return, he also became deeply involved with Bill Ayers, a former leader of the so-called Weather Underground. This leftist terrorist group, akin to the German Baader-Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigades, specialized in bombing government buildings. Ayers later wrote boastfully that he had personally carried out an attack on the Pentagon. Ayers’s wife and closest collaborator was Bernardine Dohrn, whose views were so extreme that they seemed to cross a line from ultraleftism to Satanism. At a meeting of the Weather Underground, she hailed the murders then recently committed by Charles Manson’s demented followers. “Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach!” […]

The details of Mr. Obama’s association with Ayers remain somewhat shrouded because both Ayers and Dohrn have refused to discuss it, while Mr. Obama and his spokesmen have prevaricated about it.

[…]

Later, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, added: “Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school.” If this is true, Ayers’s children must be slow learners, since they are 31 and 28, while Mr. Obama’s are 9 and 6. But Mr. Obama’s own reply, though less bald-faced than Mr. Axelrod’s, was thoroughly disingenuous. Thanks to the meticulous investigations of the left-leaning blogger Steven Diamond (globallabor.blogspot.com), the story of Mr. Obama and Ayers’s collaboration has been seeping into the public record despite extraordinary efforts to seal it.

[…]

Mr. Obama’s turn to electoral politics signified no change in his basic ideological orientation. As his wife, Michelle, put it: “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” (“I take that observation as a compliment,” Mr. Obama said as late as 2005.)

Mr. Obama’s target was a legislative seat held by Alice Palmer, who had decided to make a run for the U.S. Congress. She introduced Mr. Obama in Democratic Party circles as her anointed successor. (After a later falling-out, the two would dispute whether her support had amounted to a formal endorsement or merely, as she claimed, “an informal nod.”) Like others among his mentors or patrons, Ms. Palmer, too, was a radical, a member of the executive body of the U.S. Peace Council, the least disguised of Soviet front organizations. She had made multiple pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, and in 1986 attended the 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, telling the party paper on her return that the Soviets “plan to provide people with higher wages and better education, health and transportation, while we in our country are hearing that cutbacks are necessary in all of these areas.” According to a later story in the same paper, Ms. Palmer visited Moscow again the following year to attend the World Congress of Women sponsored by another Soviet front organization.

In his campaign for the Illinois senate, Mr. Obama was endorsed by the New Party, a coalition of socialists, Communists and other leftists. According to the newsletter of the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, whose members were said to constitute 15 percent of the Chicago New Party, “Once approved, candidates must sign a contract with the NP [which] mandates that they must have a visible and active relationship with the NP.” Apparently, Mr. Obama signed such a pledge. After winning the primary (unopposed because his lawyers had succeeded in knocking all three opponents off the ballot), he appeared at a New Party membership meeting to voice his thanks.

Entering the national political scene eight years later, Mr. Obama did not, to be sure, appear as a radical, but he still bore the earmarks of the world in which he had been immersed for 20 years. He called himself “progressive,” a term of art favored by veterans of the hard New Left, like Tom Hayden, as well as by old-time Communists. Early this year his wife, Michelle, lacking his tact, would kindle controversy by saying that his success in the presidential primaries made her feel proud of her country for the first time. The comment, a faux pas that she was soon at pains to explain away, flowed logically from her view, expressed in her standard stump speech, that our country is a “downright mean” place, “guided by fear,” where the “life . . . that most people are living has gotten progressively worse.”

This year, Mr. Obama appeared before the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (whose official slogan is “no justice, no peace”) to seek its support. The candidate praised Mr. Sharpton as “a voice for the voiceless and . . . dispossessed. What National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up.” Given Mr. Sharpton’s long career of reckless racial demagogy, it might seem shocking that a mainstream candidate should be seeking his blessing, but in this, at least, Mr. Obama was not unique: all of the 2008 Democratic aspirants did so. He did, though, strive to separate himself from the pack:

If there is somebody who has been more on the forefront on behalf of the issues that you care about and has more concrete accomplishment on behalf of the things you're concerned about, then I am happy to see you endorse them. I am happy to see you support them. . . . But I am absolutely confident that you will not find that, because there is nobody who has stood fast on these issues more consistently each and every day, than I have. That is something that I know.

As it happened, Mr. Sharpton, a consummate wheeler-dealer, kept his options open for a while. But other radicals, soft and hard, rushed to embrace Mr. Obama, often waxing rapturous in their support. Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel enthused in The Nation that Mr. Obama’s was “a historic candidacy,” from which “new possibilities will be born.” Michael Lerner wrote in Tikkun that the “energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests [sic] in Obama’s campaign” was reminiscent of “the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation.” Most remarkably, Tom Hayden himself joined the chorus by breaking a New Left taboo against “red-baiting” and laying bare some of Hillary Clinton’s own far-left history—this, in retaliation for the Clinton campaign’s revelations about Mr. Obama’s radical background.

Even after declaring his candidacy, and despite a certain inevitable sidling rightward, Mr. Obama still reflected the presuppositions of a radical worldview. In one notable remark, he said of voters in economic distress that in their desperation they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Chastised for his condescension, he responded: “I said something that everybody knows is true.” This was elitism of a very specific kind—the mentality of the community organizer, according to which people in the grip of “false consciousness” need to be enlightened as to the true nature of their class interests, and to the nature of their true class enemies.

The same suppositions are again evident in Mr. Obama’s stances on international issues. Iraq, as he sees it, is only a symptom. “I don’t want to just end the war . . . I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” And what would that mindset be? In a 2002 speech that he frequently cites, he said the war resulted from

the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors . . . to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne . . . the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income . . . the arms merchants in our own country . . . feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

In this litany of global perfidy, the issues of Saddam Hussein’s murderous dictatorship, of American security, of the future of freedom, shrink to inconsequentiality next to the struggle of the oppressed against their American capitalist overlords.

[…]

Even the events of 9/11 could not shake Mr. Obama from the mindset that the enemy is always ourselves. The bombings, he wrote, reflected

the underlying struggle—between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together; and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

In this reading, the lessons to be learned from the actions of Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta are that we must accept multiculturalism at home and share our wealth abroad.

[…]

In sum, Mr. Obama comes to us from a background farther to the left than any presidential nominee since George McGovern, or perhaps ever. This makes him an extremely unlikely leader to bridge the divides of party, ideology or, for that matter, race. If he loses, it will be for that reason (though many will no doubt adduce different explanations, including of course white racism, to which every GOP victory since Nixon’s election in 1968 has been attributed).

And if he wins? Without a doubt, it will be a thrilling moment. But the enduring importance of that landmark event will depend on the subsequent effectiveness of his presidency. If his tenure—like that of, say, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter—should end by inviting scorn, then it may open as many wounds as it heals. On the other hand, it is not unimaginable that he may rise to the challenge of the office and govern from the center, as he will have to do to succeed. This, however, would truly involve reinventing himself, a task for which his intellectual and ideological background furnishes few materials.

What we are seeing, as I have at length tried to hammer home here, is the careful mainstreaming of the New Leftist as a viable leader of the free world, radicalism dressed in empty and evasive bromides and wrapped around charisma and cult of personality, made palatable to the masses by way of a project that included, among other things, a slow takeover of the Democratic party (and the label of “liberal” by way of a self-servingly described “progressive” ideology), thus insuring that life-long Democrats remain convinced that they aren’t changing their own principles; a long and carefully planned reworking of the education system through a linguistic takeover: denaturing the ground for meaning plays directly into the motivations of identity politics and sets the “logical” ground for a multiculturalist social engineering plan, in which meaning is relegated to those whose “authenticity” gives them the essential right to define and control their own group narrative; the breakdown of traditional religion, either by mockery or a re-imagining of religion as the realm of “social justice”; a takeover of the press by j-school grads who are taught that facts are secondary to the lessons to be drawn from the narrative of their framing, giving them power to become advocates rather than reporters. Couple this with hiring practices that yield a mainstream press that self-identifies as nearly 80% Democrat — with today’s Democrats being run by the repackaged new leftists who at one point spit on bourgeois liberalism — and you have an activist press that is in the process of trying actively to sway elections, believing not only that it is their duty to do so, but that it is likewise their “right” as “patriots” to save the benighted masses from themselves; and of course, the sound-bite culture of superficiality, made most evident in the attention lavished on “celebrity,” but most sinister in its effects on concepts: “diversity” has become a Crayola paradigm, with the supposedly post-racialists backing initiatives that insure that skin color is paramount to defining difference; “tolerance” has become “not giving offense,” a 180-degree change from how it is supposed to operate under a free speech paradigm, with the tolerant granting to those with whom they disagree the right to express unpopular opinions.

Obama is a construct of his own upbringing, a monument to a movement, the apotheosis of a project to undercut the foundation beliefs of the U.S. from the inside out.

And the field has at long last been prepared: with nearly 80% of Obama supporters believing that the Supreme Court is too worried about the Constitution to do the right thing, we have doubtless reached a point wherein classical liberal ideals have been so marginalized, and Enlightenment principles so degraded, that we are unable even to fight back from a legal perspective: after all, with a Living Constitution, law itself becomes arbitrary — and a 5-4 vote based around a willful refusal to appeal to original intent can change the course of governance.

At which point it is fair to say that, without some fundamental agreement as to where meaning rests, we are but a nation whose future rests with whim and will.

Not what the founders intended — but precisely the plan “progressives” had to thwart those intentions, down to the Alinsky/Gramsci finishing touches of “moderating” for public consumption the radicalism that is necessary for a remaking of the System.

The question then is, what to do about it…?

****
See also, Stanley Kurtz.

(h/t Terry H)