Dr. Drew reports on young
Obama's ideological extremism
in Stanley Kurtz's Radical-In-Chief.
I've been thinking through my primary objectives in going public with my take on young Obama's Marxist socialist views. Here they are:
1. Fixing the Historical Record and Debunking Liberal Scholars: What totally ticks me off is the way people like historian James Kloppenberg seek to obscure the real Obama from the public’s consciousness. Accordingly, I'm proud to play a small role in debunking the myth that Obama was always a pragmatist/centerist – as Kloppenberg argues in Reading Obama. Since I witnessed young Obama’s extremist ideology face-to-face, I think it is important to report that scholars like Kloppenberg do not know what they are talking about when it comes to understanding young Obama’s ideology.
2. Stopping Obama from Voiding U.S. Constitution With Liberal Judicial Appointments: Given the upcoming 2012 election, I think a lot of people are interested in determining the extent to which Obama has lied about his Marxist socialist ideology in the past and the extent to which his long-standing ties to extremist ideology will impact us if he has another term as president. I’m particularly concerned about what Obama might do to harm our country by appointing Supreme Court justices who will not see the Constitution as a barrier to redistributing wealth or institutionalizing socialized medicine. Obama’s appointment of Van Jones to his White House staff shows Obama cannot be trusted to keep ideological extremists out of his administration. As a political scientist, I know that Obama’s ideology will be even more dangerous if he is given another four years in office.
3. Unrepentant Righteous Vindication: I’ve been saying that Obama was a Marxist socialist as a sophomore at Occidental College since 2008. Virtually all of the subsequent literature – from the left and the right – is consistent with my take on young Obama’s extremist ideology, including Remnick’s book, The Bridge. I'm still amazed that the mainstream media buried my report on young Obama's ideological extremism despite my experience as a former Williams College professor and as an award-winning political scientist. Since I taught with Roger Boesche while he was at Williams College, I’m still shocked I was never interviewed to report on the ideology of the person widely believed to be young Obama’s favorite college professor.
4. The Big Issue: The fundamental issue is what does Obama believe now? Obama has never explained how, if at all, he got out of his Marxist socialist perspective. I've explained my own conversion story. I would think that most voters would be eager to see more accountability from the president of the United States regarding his own background and intellectual history. I'm looking forward to the day that someone in the White House press room has the courage to ask: "Mr. President, have you ever argued in favor of Marx's revolutionary ideology?"
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist
The picture above is a montage of all the different Saturn Five launches. I like referring to the Saturn Five because it reminds me of the considerable challenge of launching your first grant proposal. All in all, I guess it is easy to distract me with a new website or technology. Nevertheless, I enjoy learning about these new bells and whistles and sharing the results with our clients and participants in our workshops. In this case, Thumbtack provides a free way of advertising your grant writing consulting services. I'll let you know if this takes off.
As you may know, I post at http://www.ephblog.com/ with a great deal of frequency. EphBlog is edited by a William College alumnus, Dick Swart '57 of Portland, OR. This steamy blog site has true blue liberal contributors, but has no official connection with Williams College. Nevertheless, I like to post there to remember the good things I liked about my first two years as a young assistant professor in the political science department at Williams College. It was a pleasure, for example, to teach in a classroom filled with some of the brightest young people in American in the late 1980s.
One of my debates at that site seems important enough to recycle in Anonymous Political Scientist. As a political scientist, I think a bright moon is associated with some dim prospects for Obama's second term. I'd like to explain why I think that way as briefly as possible.
First, it is silly to suggest - as one of the folk at Ephblog did - that Obama is doing okay right now simply because he out polls Congress. For better or worse, the ratings of Congress are almost always lower than the ratings of the President. See, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/behind-the-numbers/post/no-contest-president-vs-congress/2010/12/20/ABelgvF_blog.html The public’s strong desire to elect generic Republicans over generic Democrats shows how damaged the Democrat party brand is after two years of Obama’s incompetence. It is a much better measure of the problems facing Obama than his relative popularity compared to Congress.
Second, one of the most immediate pieces of evidence that Obama is in trouble with the voters is dramatic shift in the generic congressional numbers as reported by Rasmussen. According to Rasmussen Reports, Republicans have a nine-point lead over Democrats on the generic congressional ballot. I think this number is significant because Rasmussen Reports limits its results to likely voters. By their numbers, an impressive 46% of likely voters responded by saying they would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate. Only 37% of these likely voters said they would pick the Democrat. "The gap is three points larger than it has been for the past two weeks," said Rasmussen Reports.
I find more bad news for Obama in Rasmussen's report on the public's lack of confidence in Obama's skills relative to turning around the economy. See, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/march_2011/just_31_now_give_obama_positive_marks_for_the_economy
The positive ratings for Obama on the economy are now at the lowest level they have ever been at since Obama took office in January 2009. As a political scientist, I know the economy is the most important issue deciding presidential campaigns. That’s why I think that polling result is so significant…no matter where it comes from.
Personally, I think Obama made a huge political mistake when he took out time on television to announce his basketball picks instead of paying attention to the serious issues surrounding Japan and Libya. As far as I'm concerned, Obama’s decision to call massive public attention to his basketball picks is as politically tone deaf as his defense of the GZM during the height of the mid-term elections. All in all, it looks to me like voters are making up their minds and they are not pleased with the direction our country is going under Obama's leadership.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
As a political scientist, I'm sensitive to the way clothes impact a political or military or business leader's power and influence. David Brooks, for example, is now famous for predicting Barack Obama would make "a very good president" because of the crease in his trousers. Accordingly, I'm not surprised a similar lesson has been learned by doctors, nurses, surgeons, dentists, veterinarians, and other medical professionals.
Thankfully, the folks at Blue Sky Scrubs have developed some of the highest quality, impressive scrubs for their growing client base. I particularly admire their new lab coats. These lab coats have high quality piping in slate grey or white. What can I say? I have been a sucker for piping on jackets and coats ever since I became of fan of Patrick McGoohan's work in the iconic, The Prisoner, television series.
Blue Sky Scrubs also offers great looking nursing uniforms which will brighten the days of both the patients and the nurses who wear them. I'm working with a business coach who is helping me take my efforts to the next level. Ironically, he wants me to wear better clothes...a uniform, in a sense...which will look the same each time clients meet with me. If high quality clothing is important to my success - and President Obama's success - then I'm certain it will make a big difference in the most important show of all - the daily activities of a medical professional.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.
Jack Cashill voices the pain of those of us who are doing the journalistic work we once thought was the sole responsibility of CBS’s 60 Minutes. You can catch his appearance on CSPAN2 by clicking here. I identify with Cashill. In his newest book, he indicates it is not so easy to balance his efforts to save Western civilization with his concurrent responsibilities for bagging leaves in time for the city leaf collectors. In my case, I have sought to expose President Barack Obama’s intellectual roots as a revolutionary Marxist while addressing my nagging doubts about the necessity of rinsing dishes prior to racking them up in the dishwasher. If you understand that neither Cashill or me are kidding about our lives, then you will be thrilled by the tone and fresh insight in Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America's First Postmodern President.
As an eye witness to young Obama’s Marxist ideology, I was excited to see Cashill busting up the myths surrounding Obama and replacing them with a simpler, easier to believe story that is a much better fit with accessible, on-line evidence. Cashill’s results are politically significant because President Obama's charisma is dependent on the images Obama created about his early life in his first book, Dreams from My Father. Cashill’s new insights about the real Obama should be particularly relevant to the sort of swing voters who tell survey researchers that they do not care for Obama’s results even thought they still like Obama as a person. After reading Cashill’s book, I suspect these swing voters will be disappointed by the titanic gap between Obama’s all-American myth and the cold facts of his real life.
One of the coldest facts is that there are now nude photos on the Internet of a woman who looks exactly like Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. This news was so unpleasant to me that I was nervous about checking up on Cashill’s report by searching for these photos through Google. (To my relief, the samples I found are clear enough to show the girl’s face, but cropped tight enough that I did not feel I violated any laws.) Along with Cashill, I see these photos as evidence of a much larger pattern of unfortunate mistakes made by the young Ms. Dunham. These photos are politically significant because they offer a convenient segue into a larger discussion of an unwholesome side of the young Obama story - the odd, deviant, dysfunctional world of Frank Marshall Davis. Davis, as readers may know, was a member of the Communist party and also handy in the craft of producing pornographic literature and photography.
Cashill reframes the Obama story by pointing out that Frank Marshall Davis and his friend Paul Robeson were Stalinist Communists, a political label which is shocking to most Americans and yet useful to me in understanding the roots of the Marxist ideology and earnest revolutionary fervor I observed in the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College in 1980-1981.
Cashill adds to the sheer seediness of the world surrounding little Obama plenty of new evidence that infant Obama had no conscious contact with his birth father. This unpleasant reality is an abrupt challenge to Obama’s claim, in Dreams, that his father left him and his mother behind in Hawaii after two years of dutiful fatherhood. Here, Cashill leverages the outstanding reporting done by one of our nation’s most intelligent and charming citizen journalists - Michael Patrick Leahy. Leahy interviewed a few of Stanley Anne Dunham’s childhood friends and reported the results in his book, What Does Barack Obama Believe? Leahy’s research shows Anne Dunham took infant Obama with her to Seattle, Washington in the summer of 1961 and did not return with her baby to Hawaii until Obama, Sr. was long gone from the island. Leahy, in my view, has been doing the hard work I assumed New York Times reporters should have been doing including interviewing members of the extended Dunham family, sharing freely available information from the Internet, and combing over public records to determine the precise details of Barack Obama's birth and early childhood.
Even as somebody who met young Obama in the early 1980s, I'm was still startled by Cashill’s most controversial argument – the theory that Bill Ayers was the ghost author of Dreams from My Father. Cashill’s thesis was supported, of course, by the independent reporting of a liberal author, Christopher Andersen. Andersen unwisely confirmed Ayers’ participation in creating Dreams in an otherwise flattering book called Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage (2010). The weight of Cashill’s argument, however, rests on his careful textual analysis of the striking similarities between the language used in Dreams and the language used in Ayers’ own writing. Here, I’m most convinced by Cashill’s description of how Obama correctly applies nautical images to his life story. The accuracy of the nautical language in Dreams strikes me as much more consistent with Ayer’s experience as a merchant marine than with Obama’s experience as a community organizer.
I would like to add more details that support the idea that Ayers was a major player in drafting Dreams from My Father. The young Barack Obama I knew, for example, displayed absolutely no hostility to white people. He appeared to be culturally and emotionally white. The young Barack Obama I knew was not particularly close to the African-American students at Oxy either, but was - instead - deeply involved in the lives and political activities of the most radical foreign and Muslim students. The young Barack Obama I knew would have been excited to meet Bill Ayers, would have been comfortable with Ayers’ anti-American hostility, and would have been more than capable of persuading the jaded ex-terrorist that he was a sincere believer in the necessity of a socialist transformation of the U.S.
My only difference with Cashill is that I’m not impressed with the quality of Dreams from My Father.
This is true even after Cashill’s book single-handedly improved my taste as a consumer of contemporary literature. My reading of Dreams did not leave me with any useful paradigm shifts, any evidence of encyclopedic knowledge or any immediately relevant information. I think it is more accurate to assert that President Clinton’s book, My Life, articulates the insights and raw memory capacity of a true genius. In comparison to My Life, I found Dreams dull and boring - except for the parts tangentially related to my own intellectual development or linked to my nearly insignificant participation in what Obama reports were the pivotal, life-changing moments of his sophomore year at Occidental College.
Aside from this relatively minor disagreement regarding the quality of Dreams, I whole-heartedly agree with Cashill’s take on the challenge of confronting Obama’s charismatic power: The alarming sense that media elites greet one’s modest, factual, painfully obvious news tips with an astonishing lack of appropriate attention. I have come to believe there is something broken in American journalism. I would think a healthy, well-functioning democracy would include mainstream media outlets that would snap open the delightful fortune cookies Cashill has set out for them. For now, my confidence for winning our future rests in the outspoken courage of Jack Cashill, a writer who is willing to go to extreme lengths – short of leaving his home surrounded by leaves - to make sure that his fellow citizens learn the truth about President Obama.
John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist. He applies his skills as a grant writing consultant in the Southern Calfornia area. His website is at the following link: http://drdrewguaranteedgrants.com/about-us/
