Unfortunately, while Kurtz’ points will resonate with those of us who vote with an eye toward more than simply “fashion” or “symbolism,” they will likely be brushed aside by those raised on a nannystate grown increasingly legitimized by both parties.
From “Something New Here,” NRO (which, given its importance, I’ll quote at length):
During his first campaign for the Illinois state senate in 1995-96, Barack Obama was a member of, and was endorsed by, the far-left New Party. Obama’s New Party ties give the lie to his claim to be a post-partisan, post-ideological pragmatist. Particularly in Chicago, the New Party functioned as the electoral arm of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). So despite repeated attempts to distance himself from ACORN, Obama’s New Party ties raise disturbing questions about his links to those proudly militant leftists. The media’s near-total silence on this critical element of Obama’s past is deeply irresponsible.
SOCIALIST?
While a small group of bloggers have productively explored Obama’s New Party ties, discussion has often turned on the New Party’s alleged socialism. Was the New Party actually established by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? Was the New Party’s platform effectively socialist in content? Although these debates are both interesting and important, we needn’t resolve them to conclude that the New Party was far to the left of the American mainstream. Whether formally socialist or not, the New Party and its ACORN backers favored policies of economic redistribution. As Obama would say, they wanted to spread the wealth around. Bracketing the socialism question and simply taking the New Party on its own terms is sufficient to raise serious questions about Obama’s political commitments  questions that cry out for attention from a responsible press.[…] the New Party was a mid-1990s effort to build a “progressive†coalition to the left of the Democratic party, uniting left-leaning baby boomers with minorities, relatively militant unionists, and “idealistic†young people.
PARTY WITHIN A PARTY
In contrast to Ralph Nader’s recent third-party campaigns, the New Party’s strategy was to work through “fusion.†Fusion parties were popular in the 19th century. Although these small parties had a separate line on the ballot, they often endorsed one of the major-party candidates. That meant these third parties didn’t have to act as “spoilers†in close elections. Yet by constituting themselves as separate entities and offering their endorsement as bait, fusion parties tended to push the major parties further to the right or the left. We see remnants of the old fusion-party pattern in New York State, where separate Liberal and Conservative parties sometimes shift elections by endorsing one or another major party candidate.As the New Party’s founders put it, they were looking for a cross between the “party within the party†strategy favored by leftist Democrats and the “plague on both your houses†stance later adopted by the Naderites. That means Obama’s New Party ties place him on the far left end of the Democratic party, arguably with one foot outside and to the left of the party itself.
This analysis, you’ll recognize, is perfectly in keeping with the analysis I’ve been offering about the New Left’s strategy, after its “outsider” 1972 drubbing, to recreate itself in a way that was more palatable to the masses, targeting specific demographics and, when necessary, affecting a bland, vague pseudo-populism and convenient centrism to put at ease those left-leaning Americans who were nevertheless wary of radicals and those with socialist tendencies and ideas.
The New Party’s formulation, then, is just one snapshot in time of what I’ve described as a decades long strategy on the part of the New Left to fuse with the Democratic Party, take over the “liberal” mantle, and then move the party decidedly left, so that “Democrats” are now being ruled by the “progressives” who once despised the “bourgeois liberalism” that many Democrats still believe, erroneously (and not in those terms, of course), is part and parcel of being a Democrat.
They stick to party out of habit, ignoring how they have had their identities stolen by the very radicals whom they at one point very pointedly rebuked.
Kurtz continues:
Does this make Obama “socialist?†Maybe so, but according to [Micah] Sifry [a former Nation writer who has written extensively on the New Party] the vague “New Party†name was chosen precisely to avoid such ideological pigeonholing. Maybe that vagueness was designed to avoid exposing the party as the socialist sympathizer it was. Or maybe the name was a way of avoiding complex internal struggles between competing ideological factions, some socialist and some not. (The answer is “both of the above,†I tend to think.) In any case, the New Party was clearly far to the left of mainstream Democrats, and according to Sifry, the party explicitly thought of itself as made up of committed “progressives,†rather than conventional “liberals.†That is entirely consistent with a famous 1995 profile of Obama by Hank De Zutter, which portrays him as closely tied to ACORN, and holding a world-view well “beyond†his mother’s conventional liberalism.
Here again, the Alinsky preferred method of (metaphorically speaking) cutting one’s freak hair and trading in ponchos for pinstripes — and hiding the ideologically fraught term “socialist” with the more pleasing, proactive sounding “progressivist,” the end being “social justice” rather than “the redistribution of wealth” as mandated by the state.
Which is why Obama’s recent slip up was so telling — and why “progressives,” following Alinsky yet again, launched a full-scale attack on Joe the Plumber rather than address the issues he raised when he noted that Obama’s idea about “spreading the wealth around” sounded rather like socialism.
Kurtz:
To get a sense of where the New Party stood politically, consider some of its early supporters: Barbara Dudley of Greenpeace; Steve Cobble, political director of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coaltion; prominent academics like Frances Fox Piven, coauthor of the “Cloward-Piven strategy†and a leader of the drive for the “motor-voter†legislation Obama later defended in court on behalf of ACORN; economist Juliet Schor; black historian Manning Marable; historian Howard Zinn; linguist Noam Chomsky; Todd Gitlin; and writers like Gloria Steinem and Barbara Ehrenreich. Socialist? Readers can draw their own conclusions. At one point, Sifry does describe the party’s goals as “social democratic.†In any case, the New Party clearly stands substantially to the left of the mainstream Democratic party.
ACORN CONNECTION
Unquestionably, ACORN was one of the most important forces behind the creation of the New Party. According to Sifry: “Wade Rathke, ACORN’s lead national organizer, was in on the founding discussions that led to the New Party, and the group’s political director, Zach Polett, also came to play a big role in guiding New Party field organizing for the party [in Chicago and Little Rock].†In fact, Sifry portrays ACORN’s leading role in the New Party as the result of a conscious decision by the organization to move into electoral politics in a more substantial way than they had been able to solely through their political action committee. In addition to Rathke and Polett, a key early supporter of the New Party was Obama’s closest ACORN contact, Madeline Talbott.While ACORN played an important founding role for the New Party nationally, ACORN was clearly the main force behind the New Party chapter in Chicago. In general, New Party chapters built around an ACORN nucleus were the most disciplined and successful party outposts. Nationally, the New Party’s biggest wins were in Chicago, very much including Obama’s victory in his 1996 run for the Illinois state senate. Chicago’s New Party was actually formed around two core elements, ACORN and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 880. Yet, as Sifry notes, SEIU 880 was itself an ACORN offshoot.
Together ACORN and SEIU 880 were the dominant forces in Chicago’s New Party. True, there was also participation by open socialists, but these were not a majority of New Party organizers. You can certainly argue, as libertarian blogger Trevor Louden has, that whether openly or not, the New Party in Chicago and beyond was effectively socialist. It’s a powerful argument and worthy of consideration. After all, according to Rutgers University political scientist Heidi J. Swarts, ACORN’s leaders see themselves as “a solitary vanguard of principled leftists.†So a party outpost built around ACORN would be a party built around “principled vanguard leftists.†Sounds pretty socialist to me. Yet, as I’ve emphasized, we needn’t resolve the “socialism†question to conclude that the New Party, and particularly its Chicago branch, was far to the left of the Democratic party, and largely under the control of ACORN.
[…]
As so often with ACORN, technically separate organizations are often relatively meaningless designations for different branches of ACORN itself. And in Chicago, the New Party was very much an ACORN-dominated operation. Ted Thomas was a city alderman, de facto ACORN leader, and New Party chair all at once. So Obama’s ties to the New Party represent yet another important, and still unacknowledged, link between Obama and ACORN.
We already know that Obama’s ties to ACORN’s Madeline Talbott ran deep. Less known is that Obama’s links to Chicago ACORN/New Party leader Ted Thomas were also strong. Thomas was one of a handful of aldermen who stood with Obama in his unsuccessful 2000 race for Congress against Bobby Rush. Obama is also had long-standing ties to SEIU Local 880, an ACORN union spin-off and a bulwark of Chicago’s New Party. In his 2004 race for the Democratic Senate nomination, SEIU Local 880 strongly endorsed Obama, citing his long history of support for the group.
[…]
So the fact that Obama received the New Party’s endorsement in his first run for office in 1995-96 cannot be dismissed as insignificant. On the contrary, Obama’s ties to the New Party, and the New Party’s backers at ACORN (often the very same people), are long-standing, substantial, and reveal a great deal about his personal political allegiances. Because it was a fusion party, the New Party did not require that all the candidates it endorsed be members. Yet the New Party’s endorsements were carefully targeted. There was no attempt to endorse candidates in every race, or even to set up nationwide chapters. Carefully selected races in carefully targeted cities were seized upon  and only when the candidate fit the profile of a decidedly left-leaning progressive Democrat. In this way, the New Party set out to form a hard-left “party within a party†among the Democrats.More than this, we now have substantial evidence that Obama himself was in fact a New Party member. We even have a photograph of Obama appearing with other successful New Party candidates. Clearly, then, it is more than fair to identify Obama with the hard-left stance of the New Party and its ACORN backers. In her recent study of ACORN and the Gamaliel Foundation, the two groups of community organizers to which Obama was closest, Heidi Swarts describes their core ideology as “redistributionist.†Joe the Plumber take note. Whether formally socialist or not, Obama ties with ACORN and its New Party political arm show that spreading your wealth around has long been his ultimate goal.
All this means that Barack Obama is far from the post-partisan, post-ideological pragmatist he pretends to be. On the contrary, Obama’s ideological home is substantially to the left of the Democratic-party mainstream, so far to the left that he has one foot planted outside the party itself. And since the New Party Chicago was essentially an electoral arm of ACORN, Obama’s New Party tie, is yet another example of his deep links to the far-left militant organizers of that group. Obama’s account of his limited ties to ACORN in the third debate was clearly not truthful. Likewise, his earlier denials of ties to ACORN have fallen apart.
At what point will the press force Obama to own up to the full extent of his ties to ACORN? At what point will the press demand a full accounting of Obama’s ties to the New Party? At what point will the depth of Obama’s redistributionist economic stance be acknowledged? Barack Obama is hiding the truth about his political past, and the press is playing along.
[my emphases]
At this point, the press is all-in for Obama, so the answer to Kurtz’ question is, of course, never. In fact, the second leg of the cover-up will come when the media, realizing they’ve been duped by charisma, heady leftism, and residual BDS, will double down and try frantically and by whatever means it can to spin away its complicity by hiding or downplaying Obama’s associations — which, far from “smearing” him by association, continue to show that, taken in the aggregate, they have consistently defined, refined, and solidified Obama’s “progressivism,” a far-leftism that has for years been angling for mainstream cover by taking over the Democratic party, and is now just weeks away from finishing the job the New Left began in the 60s: overthrowing classical liberalism from within.
Reading Kurtz, I was heartened to see many of my arguments rehearsed back at me. But at the same time, I was sickened that, no matter how many times the curtain is momentarily pulled back and the schematic revealed, at least half of the US electorate prefers to see whatever flickering phantoms are being projected on the surface once the fabric resettles.
There IS a cumulative effect on all the negatives from Obama’s past. Let’s just hope they’ve built up enough to help us on November 4.
semanticleo showing up and calling Jeff “delusional” in 5…4…3…2…
Great read Mr. Kurtz. The New Party seems equivalent of Canada’s New Democratic Party. Socialist, left of center but very close to the Canadian liberal party, in actuality. Especially if they get within sniffing distance of government. While I wouldn’t despair if the NDP took over here (because they govern like liberals), I wouldn’t rejoice either. But if that’s the case why not just run as a social democrat? My question then, is it only his socialism, being anethema to American voters, that is causing Obama to run this stealth campaign or is he truly even farther to the left than Canada’s social democrats?
BTW, what about the Ericksonian hypnosis thing?
This is sooooooooooooooooooooooo racist.
And a distraction.
Not to mention completely unhelpful to Michelle’s tots.
Hey you can’t talk about Michelle’s … oh you said TOTS! Oh alright then.
My question — and it’s something I’m going to write about at some point — is, what the hell happens if Obama wins and makes a hash of it all. Then, will the media continue to cover Obama’s ass?
What if Bill Ayers becomes a regular White House visitor? What if his administration is awash in ACORN types? What if the American public (and I mean, other than those of us who are ranting and raving against him right now) start to demand answers?
Then, will the media start to do its job and “look into” these things? Or will they play up the “fallout from 8 years of Bushco” meme that the Obama folks will inevitably push?
Because if people start demanding answers, and it turns out those answers were being provided all along by the NRs and Powerlines and Protein Wisdoms of the world, then the mainstream media will lose whatever credibility they now have left.
That’s what’s really scary to me about an Obama presidency. If the media foist this jackass onto us, and he turns out to be every bit of the disaster we expect him to be, then the media will have every reason to cover up his mistakes or blame them on innocent others — and no reason to be truthful.
The coverup, in short, will be worse than the lie.
Love the tater tots.
If Obama is elected, his first act as president will be to create the new cabinet position: Secretary of ACORN. He will then win 90% of the vote in re-election.
What can we do to get this message out to the general public?
I’ve been arguing for almost a year now that O! is a socialist and as such should be shunned. I’ve convinced a couple of people, but know several who don’t believe me and won’t read what I link to. (That could be because I’m a dick, but the truth is the truth…)
Be calm, people. Very little of that will ever happen.
Barack Obama is a poseur who does not know what he is doing. The world knows that.
It is traditional for the assholes of the world to test a new President. In this case, Obama has already signaled his fecklessness, ignorance, incompetence, and doctrinaire ideology. The result is that every tinpot imperialist, wild-eyed splodeydope, or simply reckless opportunist from Moscow to Mozambique, from Mexico to Mumbai, is (even as we speak and write) polishing up his strategy, and champing at the bit for the inauguration to be over. We can endlessly debate the “root causes” for the 9/11 attacks, but the proximate cause was Bush’s announcements at the beginning of his term that he intended to be President Log. Based on their experience with Americans under Clinton, and those assurances from W, Osama and al Qaeda decided the time was ripe to strike.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar opportunists waiting in the wings. President Obama and his incompetent goons are going to be so busy putting out fires internationally that he won’t have a minute to deal with his (undoubtedly anti-American) domestic agenda, not even counting the fact that he’ll have nothing to put the fires out with but urine and spittle.
It’ll be fun for the Press, of course. Mcgruder might even keep his job, what with the flood of pictures of dead and kidnapped Americans, bombed-out embassies, and expostulating photogenic “Leaders of the People”. The rest of us will be a bit less happy about it, but be comforted. There’ll be nobody less comfortable than Barack Hussein “Carter2” Obama.
Regards,
Ric
What can we do to get this message out to the general public?
It would actually be incredibly easy to get the message out, but for some reason no one else wants to do it, preferring instead to wait for McCain to do something.
If you want to get a message out, prepare a difficult question for BHO, and then go to one of his public appearances and try to ask him the question. If enough people tried, one or two would actually get to ask the question. Then, his response can be uploaded to Youtube, and if it’s “good” enough it might get linked by Drudge and seen by millions.
It would be like Joe the Plumber, but a much better, more prosecutorial-style question.
Write those at my name’s link and other major bloggers and ask them why they aren’t helping push this idea.
Ric – Yes but he still really wants to be president. I’m not so sure how much McCain “wants” this job any more (or any other totally sane or unnarcissistic human being for that matter).
Kurtz has found the smoking gun. And it has the far left and O!s prints all over it…
Expect only Fox to cover this; that is, unless O! seems waaaaaaaaay up an dunbeatable, and the press has pangs of conscience…But, I’m not holding my breath!
Closer to the truth is your characterization of what the press’ response will ultimately be…
They will do their best to try and portray the entire US electorate as moving en-mass, ideologically speaking, into line with the far left viewpoint. And, as long as they restrict their examples to many of our metropolitan, public educated, youth, they will have plenty of witnesses for the defense…
I mean, who cares what all of those bitter, clingy, Bible-thumping, shotgun-pumping, outhouse dumping, sibling-humping, non-ivy leaguer, RUBES! in fly-over country believe anyway…
Who can understand the constitution anyway, I mean, I can’t understand my cellphone contract or mortgage already!!!
Let’s hope that MTV has a rock-the-compact series coming up soon…
This should be required reading…
Good piece there, Bob. Thomas sees the evisceration of the Constitution, and he’s right. It’s become the instrument to advance consolidation of power, the very thing it was meant to avoid.
ducktrapper makes a great point. (actually a few great points). Why indeed would Senator Obama’s campagin not simply admit its East of Eden or left of liberal bona fides? There are probably a few good reasons, some intuitive and some not so much.
First, if he ran as a Michael Klonsky Maoist, or a William Ayers “small c” communist, he couldn’t get elected President of anything other than the Walter Duranty fan club…or perhaps the New York Times, …but I repeat myself.
However, the Frank Marshall Davis mentoring presents a different problem. The Communist Party USA devotee filtered his agitprop through a lens of racial antagonism. So too, does the Marxist inspired James Cone and his delirious progeny, Jeremiah Wright.
To “come clean” as a sentry in the class and racial warfare fronts, would be simply too heavy a burden to overcome and not even terminal Bush Derangement Syndrome would carry the sword past the first primary for national office.
When one ventures beyond the traditional liberalism of a Joe Lieberman and into the center point of leftism of Hillary Clinton and slalom past the nefarious secret meetings and myriad Logan Act violations of John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter…when one gets to the deep end of the pool, where Michael Moore, William Ayers, Ted Rall recess… we can clearly recognize the lurking treason and sedition sediment and film floating to the top.
Senator Obama must try to divorce himself from the flotsam and jetsam of radical extremism. If has spent a lifetime swimming in it, the entrenched media must float around him like remora and pick him clean of any residue.
That can take care of the “lighter side” of the ledger…the entrenched media sit on their hands and raise them only to shout “smear” and “guilt by association”. Being incurious and lacking ethical standards is a swell resume for the Duranty Drones of today.
But the Farrakhan/Cone “pulpit-tude” is often harder for us to get our arms around. Is it black nationalism or separatism or class resentment or theological improv theater? Is Marxism the point, or beside the point?
The race card always sits at the top of the deck, ready to be thrown with hair-trigger reflex…but stripping away the pretextual nonsense of EVERYTHING being ALL about race…why hide THIS association?
Perhaps this quote from James Cone, the architect of Liberation Theology might give us a clue.
“Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.”
“Destroy whitey, spread the wealth” is a tough platform to run on in Des Moines.
If the underpinnings of my church “every Sunday, 11:00 am” was based on such inspiration, I might want to keep it out of plain view until at least November 5th.
I don’t think that the entrenched media is going to wake up on November 5th with buyer’s remorse on their left, lefter, leftist menu. I think they have been in it to win it all along. So they play the game of Blind Man’s Bluff with the facts and omit as much as they can, gloss over the rest and pretty much run interference for the takeover of the Democratic Party by the deep end of the cesspool. They are swimming in it up to their lying little lips.
Senator Obama then will have a honeymoon suite readied in the Indoctrination Inn. A state controlled media, a state controled poliburo and soon coming to a courthouse near you…a state controlled judiciary and because of “fairness”, nobody around to dissent. Not even God, apparently.
>>and champing at the bit for the inauguration to be over.
this i agree with. there were pics, now lost in the memoryhole, of gaza strip palis watchingn the 2004 returns. with loaded aks in their laps, aching for the ululululus and shooting in the air, of course. i was very gratified that we disappointed them so much. oh, and the libs too
Puck,
If O! wins (and I’m less confident he will of late), Watch O!’s first moves. They’ll indicate the Chicago crowd’s real intentions for our country.
I think O’ll want to push through his key structural changes as soon as possible, just in case he’s washed out of office after 18-months via impeachment, or sent out to pasture by the voters in 2012.
There will be some urgency to his approach, I expect. And folks in a hurry can get in a wreck.
#12 ducktrapper:
Look for the person who will do the job because he ought to do it, no the person wh wants to do it.
If I can draw on fiction – Frodo didn’t want to take the ring to Mt. Doom, and Sam didn’t want to follow him. But both thought they ought to do this. Not for themselves, but so that something good would come of it.
And not ‘good’ because they knew what ‘good’ other people should be made to acknowledge, but ‘good’ so that other people could find their own way. No Dark Lords, no Queen Terrible and Bright. Just people making their own choices.
The Best and Brightest can’t stand that, you know.
Oh, forget you and your make believe shit.
Wish it were make believe, but facts are facts.
#10. Ric, and like I haven’t been busy enough the past few years…
Mikey – Well exactly. I hope that McCain is a dutiful sort. I think he really doesn’t have the appetite for this fight, however. He doesn’t appear to want to go for the throat. I believe he also knows how devisive this campaign is and could be in the long run and I think he wants to start the healing during the battle and that’s dangerous. First kill the opponent and then bandage his supporters’ boo boos John!
Is anyone else sick of “How to Defeat Barack Obama” spamming the same line to every goddamned blog, whining about how no one’s following his GENIUS advice? Wouldn’t his time be better served following his own goddamned advice?
#23. President Bush has the same problem. It is his greatest failure, and in the end, his saving grace.
Well anyone want to see video of a ref tackling a scrambling QB?
http://www.rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/Welcome-to-the-SEC-Stephen-Garcia-Signed-your?urn=ncaaf,115984
I always have problems linking on here. You have to take the WWW out of that for it to work.
Happy Tuesday, comrades.
I am practiciung for the coming “Land of O!”.
So this morning I took half of my miserable breakfast to South Norwalk and gave it away to one of the poor “helpless” people who would rather smoke crack than work for a living.
Then I took a quick jaunt to the mid-west and spit on Joe (the licenseless) Plumber’s lawn.
And as of right now, I am searching for my tin of “Oxford Brown” shoe polish, in the hope that when that lying pig Rush Limbaugh is forced off the airwaves, I could maybe take his job.
So now I’m off to work so that O! can give my money away on payday. But before I leave for work, I must bow three times in the direction of Chicago.
This “brave new world” is going to be fun, let me tell you!
I am so anxious for the day O! is inaugurated and I can quit working altogether. I just hope my “poor little me at the mercy of rich pigs” stipend includes many liters of sake.
Heaven is just around the corner!
The smartest thing to do in a recession is to raise taxes. Seriously that is just genius!!!11!!!
Untrue, Pink: The smartest thing is to dump new credit from the Bernake helicopter in order to unfreeze credit markets wrecked by too much credit. That shit is supergenius.
Wait. Or is it bailing out criminals and calling it reforming capitalism?
Either way I think it includes the treasury sec’y on his knees before Pelosi. And I keed not.