Obama’s Early Years

Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. was elected President of the United States on November 4, 2008. Prior to that, he had served four years as a U.S. senator from Illinois (2005-2008) and eight years as an Illinois state senator (1996-2004).

Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, to a white mother from Kansas (Anna Dunham) and a black Muslim father from Kenya (Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.). The couple had met when they were students at the University of Hawaii. When they married, Anna was unaware that her new husband was still legally married to a woman in Kenya, whom he had wed in 1954, and with whom he had fathered four children.

In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama, Jr. describes his mother as “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” His father was a communist who had left his rural Luo-speaking village and his own Muslim father to become an “agnostic” and study economics abroad.

In his book Barack Obama: The Story, Washington Post reporter-editor David Maraniss explains that Obama’s parents were “married in name only.” Within a mere month after Obama’s birth, the baby and his mother had moved to Washington state, apart from the father. The father, for his part, left Hawaii in June 1962 and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he pursued graduate studies at Harvard University. Not long thereafter, he returned to Kenya with another white American woman, whom he married there in 1964. In January 1964 Anna Dunham filed for divorce.

In an early 1964 memo, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) official M.F. McKeon indicated that Harvard administrators were “planning on telling [Barack Obama, Sr.] that they will not give him any money, and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home.” Then, in May of that year, the director of Harvard’s international office told Obama precisely that. In a memo the following month, McKeon wrote that Harvard officials — who were “having difficulty with [Obama’s] financial arrangements and couldn’t seem to figure out how many wives he had” — had asked the INS to delay a request by Obama to extend his stay in the U.S., “until they decided what action they could take in order to get rid of him.” When the INS complied with Harvard’s wishes and denied Obama’s request, Obama returned to his native Kenya in July 1964 and never completed his Ph.D. He became a globe-traveling economist for the Kenyan government and would see his son only one more time, during a month-long visit in 1971.

In March 1965, Barack Obama Jr.’s mother married an Indonesian oil manager, a “non-practicing Muslim” named Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where the boy’s half-sister Maya was born. The family would reside there for four years. Obama attended school in Indonesia under the name Barry Soetoro; at that time, only Indonesian citizens were permitted to attend school in that country.

Muslim Upbringing as a Child

Obama and others have given much contradictory information regarding Obama’s religious upbringing. The most significant facts are provided below: Vis à vis Obama’s religious upbringing, Islam scholar Daniel Pipes reports the following:

“In Islam, religion passes from the father to the child. Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. [his Kenyan birth father] was a Muslim who named his boy Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Only Muslim children are named ‘Hussein’.… [Barack Obama’s] stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was also a Muslim. In fact, as Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: ‘My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.’ An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that ‘All the relatives of Barry’s [Barack’s] father were very devout Muslims.’”

* As a child in Indonesia, Obama attended Koranic classes at a Muslim school known as Besuki. At tha same time, he attended the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School.

* Obama’s good friend, the attorney and novelist Scott Turow, writes that Obama as a child spent “two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school.” School records show that when Obama attended Catholic school, he was enrolled as a Muslim.

* Journalist Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Obama’s childhood friends that “Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque.”

* Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune found that “Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers.”

* An Indonesian friend of Obama, Zulfin Adi, states that “[Obama] was Muslim. He went to the mosque. I remember him wearing a sarong [a garment associated with Muslims].”

The 1970s and CPUSA Member Frank Marshall Davis

In 1971, Obama was sent back to Hawaii to be raised largely by his white, middle-class, maternal grandparents, and to attend the prestigious Punahou Academy. For only one month of his life, also when he was ten, Obama was visited by his biological father.

During his years in Hawaii, Obama attended Sunday school at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, which, according to a 2009 statement by its pastor, “has always been, and to this day still is, involved in political activism.” In the 1970s, First Unitarian served as a sanctuary for draft dodgers and had close ties to the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), where Weatherman leader (and future Obama political alliy) Bill Ayers was a prominent figure.

Also in the Seventies, the Obama family became friendly with Frank Marshall Davis (1905-1987), a black writer and fellow Hawaiian resident. Davis wrote for the Honolulu Record (a Communist newspaper) and was a known member of the Soviet-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). He soon became the young Barack Obama’s mentor and advisor.

In Dreams From My Father, Obama writes about Davis but does not reveal the latter’s full name, identifying him only as “a poet named Frank” — a man with much “hard-earned knowledge” who had known “some modest notoriety once” but was now “pushing eighty.” (Obama later confirmed to biographer David Maraniss that “Frank” was indeed Frank Marshall Davis.)

Obama in his book recounts how, just prior to heading off to Occidental College (in California) in 1979, he spent some time with “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self.” Obama writes that “Frank” not only had told him that college was merely “an advanced degree in compromise,” but also had cautioned him not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh–.”

As of December 1980, Obama was a doctrinaire Marxist who had been active in the anti-apartheid movement and had attended meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America. He believed that a Communist revolution in the U.S. was imminent, and that the recent election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency was nothing more than a minor set-back to that revolution.

Use of Drugs and Alcohol in High School

In a February 16, 2001 interview, Obama made the following statements:

“I think I was a thug for a big part of my growing up.”

“[I] reacted by engaging in a lot of behavior that’s not untypical of a lot of black males across the country.”

“I didn’t take school that seriously.”

“I got into fights.”

“I drank and consumed substances that weren’t always legal.”

“Some of my behavior was self-destructive — I might drink a six-pack in an hour before going back to class.”

In his 2007 memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote: “I spent the last two years of high school in a daze…. I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically. I discovered that it didn’t make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl.” (To hear an audio recording of Obama reciting those words, click here.) Obama also wrote this about his high-school years: “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow [cocaine] when you could afford it.”

Seeking out Radicals at Occidental College

In his 2007 memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls the following about his days at Occidental:

“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 the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night,in the dorms,we discussed neocolonialism, [the socialist, anti-colonialist revolutionary] Franz Fanon,Eurocentrism,and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.”

John C. Drew’s Recollections of Obama as a Student at Occidental College

A 1979 graduate of Occidental College named John C. Drew describes himself as having been “part of that same progressive/international network of friends and activists” that Barack Obama belonged to during his days at Occidental. Drew cites an article in which Occidental College political theory professor Roger Boesche, who taught at least two of Obama’s political science courses, was quoted as saying that Obama, as a student, “…hung out with the young men and women who were most serious about issues of social justice.” Adds Drew:

“What’s missing from this story is that the ‘social justice’ young men and women were, in fact, simply left-wing socialists. They found a hero in Professor Boesche because he made complex texts easier to understand and because he encouraged them to fight even though they would be inevitably ground up in the gears of history. The outrage that Obama felt when he got a ‘B’ from Boesche was due to the idea that Obama felt he was held to a higher standard because he was a revolutionary who shared Boesche’s perspective. Obama felt he was held to a higher standard because he was one of the student[s] in greatest ideological agreement with what Professor Boesche was teaching at that time. “In one instance, Obama politely confronted his professor over lunch at a local sandwich shop called The Cooler. ‘He’d gotten a grade he was disappointed in,’ Boesche recalls. ‘I told him he was really smart, but he wasn’t working hard enough.’ Other students might have backed off at that point. But not Obama. He politely told Boesche he should have gotten a better grade. Even today, Obama recalls the demeaning mark. He told journalist David Mendell, author of a recent book called Obama, From Promise to Power, that he ‘was pissed’ about it because he thought he was being graded ‘on a different curve.’ Boesche still insists he gave him the grade he deserved. “Later, I taught with Boesche while he was a visiting professor in the political science department at Williams College. Boesche was still a socialist by 1989 and was still an ardent advocate of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Boesche was proud, in a paper he wrote, that he had gotten a message from Rawls basically confirming Rawls’ socialist perspective. All of this, of course, should just do more to confirm the reliability of my impression that the young Barack Obama was already an ardent socialist Marxist revolutionary when I met him in the fall of 1980. “Intellectually, we should gain a fresh and realistic perspective on the true nature (and depth) of Barack Obama’s ideology when we combine [Glenn] Beck’s understanding of social justice, with Boesche’s comments on Obama’s social justice friendships, and my comments that Obama was undoubtedly a Marxist revolutionary between 1980-1981.”

In February 2010, John C. Drew shared the following recollections he had of Obama:

“I met Barack Obama face-to-face later that same year in late December 1980. By then, I was in my second year of graduate school at Cornell. I was doing my first, official teaching. The young Ann Coulter was a student in Theodore J. Lowi’s Introduction to American Government course in 1980 and I was the teaching assistant responsible for guiding her small group discussion section. Back on the West Coast for Christmas break, I was visiting a girlfriend who was still attending Occidental College who introduced me to ‘Barry’ Obama and his housemate Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, a wealthy Pakistani student. “My most vivid memory of my time visiting with Obama was the way he strongly argued a rather simple-minded version of Marxist theory. I remember he was passionate about his point of view. As I remember, he was articulating the same Marxist theory taught by various professors at Occidental College. Based on my more detailed studies at Cornell, I remember I made a strong argument that his Marxist ideas were not in line with contemporary reality – particularly the practical experience of Western Europe. “I went on to become an assistant professor of political science at Williams College in MA, and won the William Anderson Award from the American Political Science Association for my doctoral dissertation…. “I think my experience with the young Barack Obama is useful evidence of why he was able to win the trust and support of Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Alice Palmer. In 1995, Alice Palmer represented the state of Illinois’ 13th District. After she decided to run for Congress she named Obama as her hand-picked successor. Palmer’s extremist ideology is evident in an article she wrote for the Communist Party USA’s newspaper, the People’s Daily World, now the People’s Weekly World, in June 1986. Amazingly, it detailed her experience at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union…. “My gut feeling is that Obama won the trust of folks like Alice Palmer because he never surrendered that uncompromising, Marxist socialist ideology I saw in him as a sophomore at Occidental College back in 1980. “My graduation photo helps me remember my days as a young revolutionary and the moments when – like Barack Obama – I sincerely believed a Marxist socialist revolution was coming to turn everything around and to create a new, fairer and more just world. Today, however, it pains me to write that I’m deeply ashamed of my radical views. With more maturity, I understand the true meaning of that red arm band. It is especially painful for me to look at it knowing that my time at Occidental College aligned with the brutal Khmer Rouge period (1975-1979) which covered the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge over Cambodia. “Nevertheless, I’m happy to revisit this unhappy chapter of my life if it helps others better understand the sincere commitment to Marxist revolutionary thought which animated me and the young President Obama.”

Columbia University

From Occidental, Obama transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he graduated in 1983 with a degree in political science. In 1982, Obama’s biological father — Barack Obama, Sr. — died in a car crash.

Socialist Scholars Conferences

In Dreams From My Father, Obama reveals that during his student years at Columbia he “went to socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Brooklyn.” Specifically, these were Socialist Scholars Conferences (SSC), which featured the elite of socialist academia as well as union activists, political revolutionaries, reformers, and opponents of “corporate greed.” According to the libertarian writer Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotskyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists.”

Daniel Pipes writes that “many pieces of evidence argue for Obama having been born and raised a Muslim” Specifically, says Pipes:

(1) Islam is a patrilineal religion: In Islam, the father passes his faith to the children; and when a Muslim male has children with a non-Muslim female, Islam considers the children Muslim. Obama’s grandfather and father having been Muslims – the extent of their piety matters not at all – means that, in Muslim eyes, Barack was born a Muslim. (2) Arabic forenames based on the H-S-N trilateral root: All such names (Husayn or Hussein, Hasan, Hassân, Hasanayn, Ahsan, Muhsin, and others) are exclusively bestowed on Muslim babies. (The same goes for names based on the H-M-D root.) Obama’s middle name, Hussein, explicitly proclaims him a born Muslim. (3) Registered as Muslim at SD Katolik Santo Fransiskus Asisi: Obama was registered at a Catholic school in Jakarta as “Barry Soetoro.” A surviving document correctly lists him as born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961; in addition, it lists him having Indonesian nationality and Muslim religion. (4) Registered as Muslim at SD Besuki: Although Besuki (also known as SDN 1 Menteng) is a public school, Obama curiously refers to it in Audacity (p. 154) as “the Muslim school” he attended in Jakarta. Its records have not survived but several journalists (Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times, David Maraniss of the Washington Post) have all confirmed that there too, he was registered as a Muslim. (5) Islamic class at SD Besuki: Obama mentions (Audacity, p. 154) that at Besuki, “the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.” Only Muslim students attended the weekly two-hour Koran class, Watson reports: two of his teachers, former Vice Principal Tine Hahiyari and third-grade teacher Effendi, said they remember clearly that at this school too, he was registered as a Muslim, which determined what class he attended during weekly religion lessons. “Muslim students were taught by a Muslim teacher, and Christian students were taught by a Christian teacher,” said Effendi. Andrew Higgins of the Washington Post quotes Rully Dasaad, a former classmate, saying that Obama horsed around in class and, during readings of the Koran, got “laughed at because of his funny pronunciation.” Maraniss learned that the class included not only studying “how to pray and how to read the Koran,” but also actually praying in the Friday communal service right on the school grounds. (6) Mosque attendance: Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s younger half-sister, said her father (namely, Barack’s stepfather) attended the mosque “for big communal events,” Barker found that “Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers.” Watson reports: The childhood friends say Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque. “We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque. But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played,” said Zulfin Adi, who describes himself as among Obama’s closest childhood friends. … Sometimes, when the muezzin sounded the call to prayer, Lolo and Barry would walk to the makeshift mosque together, Adi said. “His mother often went to the church, but Barry was Muslim. He went to the mosque,” Adi said. (7) Muslim clothing: Adi recalls about Obama, “I remember him wearing a sarong.” Likewise,Maraniss found not only that “His classmates recalled that Barry wore a sarong” but written exchanges indicating that he continued to wear this garment in the United States. This fact has religious implications because, in Indonesian culture, only Muslims wear sarongs. (8) Piety: Obama says that in Indonesia, he “didn’t practice [Islam],” an assertion that inadvertently acknowledges his Muslim identity by implying he was a non-observant Muslim. But several of those who knew him contradict this recollection. Rony Amir describes Obama as “previously quite religious in Islam.” A former teacher, Tine Hahiyary, quoted in the Kaltim Post, says the future president took part in advanced Islamic religious lessons: “I remember that he had studied mengaji.” In the context of Southeast Asian Islam, mengaji Quran means to recite the Koran in Arabic, a difficult task denoting advanced study. In summary, the record points to Obama having been born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and having lived for four years in a fully Muslim milieu under the auspices of his Muslim Indonesian stepfather. For these reasons, those who knew Obama in Indonesia considered him a Muslim.

Daniel Pipes has pointed out the significance of the manner in which Obama typically addresses Muslim audiences:

“When addressing Muslim audiences, Obama uses specifically Muslim phrases that recall his Muslim identity. He addressed audiences both in Cairo (in June 2009) and Jakarta (in Nov. 2010) with ‘as-salaamu alaykum,’ a greeting that he, who went to Koran class, knows is reserved for one Muslim addressing another.” Further, Pipes notes that “In Cairo, he [Obama] also deployed several other pious terms that signal to Muslims he is one of them: (a) ‘the Holy Koran’ (a term mentioned five times): an exact translation from the standard Arabic reference to the Islamic scripture, al-Qur’an al-Karim; (b) ‘the right path’: a translation of the Arabic as-sirat al-mustaqim, which Muslims ask God to guide them along each time they pray; (c) ‘I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed’: non-Muslims do not refer to Islam as revealed; (d) ‘the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed … joined in prayer’: this Koranic tale of a night journey establishes the leadership of Muhammad over all other holy figures, including Jesus; (e) ‘Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, peace be upon them’: a translation of the Arabic ‘alayhim as-salam, which pious Muslims say after mentioning the names of dead prophets other than Muhammad.”

Pipes offers also the following insight about Obama’s use of the phrase “Peace be upon them”: “Obama’s saying ‘Peace be upon them’ has other implications beyond being a purely Islamic turn of phrase never employed by Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians. First, it contradicts what a self-professed Christian believes because it implies that Jesus, like Moses and Muhammad, is dead; Christian theology holds him to have been resurrected, living, and the immortal Son of God. Second, including Muhammad in this blessing implies reverence for him, something as outlandish as a Jew talking about Jesus Christ. Third, a Christian would more naturally seek peace from Jesus rather than wish peace on him.”

In addition, Daniel Pipes observes that “Obama’s overblown and inaccurate description of Islam in the United States smacks of an Islamist mentality.” He elaborates:

“[Obama] drastically overestimates both the number and the role of Muslims in the United States, announcing in June 2009that ‘if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.’ (Hardly: according to one listing of Muslim populations, the United States, with about 2.5 million Muslims, ranks about 47thlargest.) Three days later, he gave a bloated estimate of ‘nearly 7 million American Muslims in our country today’ and bizarrely announced that ‘Islam has always been a part of America’s story. … since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.’ Obama also announced the dubious fact, in Apr. 2009, that many Americans ‘have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country.’ When ordering religious communities in the United States, Obama always gives first place to Christians but second place varies between Jews and Muslims, most notably in his Jan. 2009 inaugural speech: ‘The United States is a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers.’ Obama so wildly overestimates the Muslim role in American life that they suggest an Islamic supremacist mentality specific to someone coming from a Muslim background.”

Obama’s Views on the Cold War

In 1983, when he was a student at Columbia University, Obama wrote a lengthy article for the school magazine attributing U.S.–Soviet tensions mostly to America’s “war mentality” and the “twisted logic” of the Cold War. By Obama’s reckoning, President Reagan’s defense buildup served only to exacerbate the “silent spread of militarism” and reflected America’s “distorted national priorities” rather than a commitment to creating a “nuclear-free world.”

Community Organizing



Matthew Vadum and Jeremy Lott provide an excellent explanation of what a community organizer does. They write:

“What does a “community organizer” do? Good question. Ever since former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani mocked Senator Barack Obama at the Republican convention in September 2008, for the senator’s community organizing past, and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said that her previous experience as mayor was “sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,” [Obama’s] supporters have been furiously spinning this one. They’ve suggested a fanciful interpretation of “community organizer” that includes organizing church picnics and bake sales. Some have even had the cheek to suggest that Jesus Christ was a community organizer. “In that spirit, we suggest a better historical precedent: Lenin. Community organizing is leftist, anti-capitalist agitation. It’s about making people angry so they push for change, and the kind of change they seek is rarely good. Community organizers are essentially professional political activists who believe that something is terribly wrong with America and that they are the ones we’ve been waiting for to fix it.”

Dr. Thomas Sowell, the eminent Stanford University sociologist, offers this assessment of what community organizers do:

“For ‘community organizers’ … racial resentments are a stock in trade…. What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.”

Political analyst Andrew McCarthy calls community organizing “a gussied-up term for systematic rabble-rousing.” He adds:

“The quest for raw power is the gospel according to the seminal organizer, Saul Alinsky…. In Obama terminology, ‘hope’ is the possibility that power may be wrested from society’s ‘haves’ by infiltrating their political system. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is, organizers must target the very system they reject to acquire power—making themselves attractive to the great mass of society despite having ‘contemptuously rejected the values and the way of life of the middle class,’ as Alinsky put it. This is the formula for transformational ‘change’: the exploitation of power, once acquired, to redistribute wealth and elevate the left’s professionally aggrieved vanguard. “Though this quest for ‘social justice’ must tread through regular politics, it cannot be achieved by regular politics. That’s where the pitchforks come in. ‘Direct action’—as Mr. Obama’s longtime confederates at ACORN (the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) euphemistically put it—is the organizer’s signal tactic. Action, Alinsky taught, is the very point of organizing. ‘Direct action’ is barely disguised code for the occasional use, and the omnipresent threat, of mob mischief, unleashed against the law-abiding bourgeoisie. The organizer prospers by defining down our ethical boundaries—or, looked at the other way, by legitimizing extortion…. “In the short run, the goal of direct action is sheer extortion—i.e., to coerce capitulation in the controversy of the moment, be it a private business’s right to compensate employees or build production plants as it sees fit; a state’s sovereign power to defend itself by enforcing immigration laws; or Leviathan’s grab of one-sixth of the U.S. economy under the banner of ‘healthcare reform.’ Over the long haul, the goal is to demoralize civil society, to convince opponents that the ‘change’ in regular processes—particularly, reliance on the law—will be unavailing.”

Obama the Community Organizer: New York PIRG

Obama entered the work of community organizing in the spring of 1985, when he took a job with the New York branch of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG), the brainchild of Ralph Nader. According to his PIRG supervisor, Eileen Hershenov, Obama had already developed a solid grasp of the radical strategies that underlay community organizing – specifically, how the Left used the “community” umbrella to advance its radical agendas. Thus he was comfortable discussing everything from the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the godfather of community organizing, to the organizing strategies of socialist groups like the (defunct) Students for a Democratic Society.[2] As Hershenov would recall, in her discussions with Obama they “were thinking about how you engage the world: what works coming out of the sixties, what structures and models worked and what didn’t.”

The structures and models of the Left that worked, according to those in the organizational universe where Obama now found himself, were strategies of moderation in pursuit of radical goals, of working within the “system” in order to undermine it. These were tactics devised by European Marxists such as Andre Gorz, who advocated proposing “non-reformist reforms.” Such reforms were designed to change the very nature of the market system and to take the anti-capitalist struggle to a new level. As Gorz himself put it, these reforms, which he also called “anti-capitalist reforms,” can be “sudden, just as they can be gradual,” but they all share one common aim: they must be “strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within the [capitalist] system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints.” Whatever form the reforms took, in other words, the ultimate goal was to bring capitalism to its knees and to transform the system from within.

Obama the Community Organizer:The Developing Communities Project

Next, a small group of 20-odd churches in Chicago offered Obama a job helping residents of poor, predominantly black, Far South Side neighborhoods. Accepting that opportunity, Obama moved to Chicago and in June 1985 took a job with the Developing Communities Project (DCP), which was funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) and a number of Catholic churches in Chicago’s South Side. One of those churches was St. Sabina Church, headed by Father Michael Pfleger (who would become a devoted supporter of Obama’s political career).

The executive director of DCP was Jerry Kellman — a veteran Sixties protester and a Saul Alinksy-trained community organizer who aimed to use the “social justice” teachings of the radical Catholic left to spread left-wing politics into the churches. Together, Obama and Kellman targeted black churches in particular.

Obama worked with DCP for the next three years on initiatives that ranged from job training to school reform to hazardous-waste cleanup. Obama would later describe, in his book Dreams from My Father, what his duties were with DCP:

“The day after the rally, Marty [Jerry Kellman in Dreams] decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview. Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power. Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion.”

Obama’s expenses at DCP were signed and approved by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, a far-leftist who founded the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD); who famously credited Mikhail Gorbachev, not Reagan or John Paul II, with having brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union; and who called for a “consistent ethic of life,” in an effort to persuade anti-abortion Catholics to likewise embrace pacifism and wealth redistribution.

David Freddoso, author of the 2008 book The Case Against Barack Obama, summarizes Obama’s community-organizing efforts as follows:

“He pursued manifestly worthy goals; protecting people from asbestos in government housing projects is obviously a good thing and a responsibility of the government that built them. But [in every case except one] the proposed solution to every problem on the South Side was a distribution of government funds …”

Nor was Obama reluctant to use intimidation as a tactic. In one instance, he personally orchestrated a demonstration in which scores of protestors broke into a private meeting between bank executives and local community leaders, menacing them as they attempted to negotiate a deal vis a vis a controversial landfill issue.

A Community Organizing Project Involving Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, and the Brother of Bill Ayers

In 1987, when Obama was executive director of DCP, he asked Chicago mayor Harold Washington to support a community organizing project whose advisory board would include Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, the leftist Catholic priest Michael Pfleger, Illinois State Senator Emil Jones, and John Ayers (brother of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers).

In a May 4, 1987 letter to Mayor Washington, Obama wrote: “Developing Communities Project (DCP) has brought together churches, blocks clubs and civic organizations to address some of the most pressing issues of the Far South Side – unemployment and low educational achievement among our youth.” He added that after “discussions with a wide range of actors in the field of education, … we have drafted the enclosed proposal for a Career Education Network.” “We are not seeking any city funding for our program,” Obama continued. “[H]owever, we do seek your whole-hearted support and endorsement of our initiative. We should therefore respectfully ask that within the next three or four weeks you agree to meet briefly with a small delegation of DCP leaders and the attached list of advisory committee members to discuss our proposal and your possible support for it.”

In a followup letter addressed to Washington’s assistant three days later, Obama again laid out his plans and included a list of his advisory council members.

Trained in the Saul Alinsky Method

Three of Obama’s mentors in Chicago were trained at the Saul Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in the Windy City. (The Developing Communities Project itself was an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method.) Alinsky was known for having helped to establish the aggressive political tactics that characterized the 1960s, and which have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.

In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution” — a wholesale revolution whose ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent, moral confusion, and outright chaos to spark the social upheaval that Marx, Engels, and Lenin predicted — a revolution whose foot soldiers view the status quo as fatally flawed and wholly unworthy of salvation. Thus, the theory goes, the people will settle for nothing less than that status quo’s complete collapse — to be followed by the erection of an entirely new system upon its ruins. Toward that end, they will be apt to follow the lead of charismatic radical organizers who project an aura of confidence and vision, and who profess to clearly understand what types of societal “change” is needed.

But Alinsky’s brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As Richard Poe puts it, “Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.” Alinsky advised organizers and their disciples to quietly, subtly gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to introduce changes from that platform.

One of Obama’s early mentors in the Alinsky method, Mike Kruglik, would later say the following about Obama:

“He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.”

For several years, Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.

In 1990, eighteen years after Alinsky’s death, an essay penned by Obama was reprinted as a chapter in a book titled After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. Wrote Obama:

“Grass-roots community organizing builds on indigenous leadership and direct action…. The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W. E. B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.”

Author Andrew McCarthy makes the following observations about Obama’s words:

“Breathtaking!… Lawfulness and lawlessness, thuggishness and regular politics—we’re not to divine any moral or ethical differences. They are just different ‘approaches’ to empowerment. They only ‘seem’ to be ‘divergent.’ It may be important to maintain the veneer of respect for legal processes, but it is just as legitimate to stretch or break the rules whenever necessary to achieve the desired outcome—social justice being a higher form of legitimacy than society’s rule of law. Separatism, menacing, and civil disobedience: none of these is beyond the pale; they are simply choices on the hard power menu Obama ‘bridges’ with soft power (i.e., the system’s mundane legal and political processes).”

Obama and the Midwest Academy

As a young community organizer, Obama had close connections to the Midwest Academy, a radical training ground for activists of his political ilk. Probably the most influential community-organizing-related entity in America at that time, the Midwest Academy worked closely with the DSA and synthesized Saul Alinsky’s organizing techniques with the practical considerations of electoral politics. Emphasizing “class consciousness” and “movement history,” the Academy’s training programs exposed students to the efforts and achievements of veteran activists from earlier decades. Recurring “socialism sessions,” taught by Heather Booth, encompassed everything from Marx and Engels through Michael Harrington’s democratic socialism and the factional struggles of the Students for a Democratic Society, a radical organization that aspired to remake America’s government in a Marxist image. Knowing that many Americans would be unreceptive to straightforward, hard-left advocacy, the Midwest Academy in its formative years was careful not to explicitly articulate its socialist ideals in its organizing and training activities. The group’s inner circle was wholly committed to building a socialist mass movement, but stealthily rather than overtly. As Midwest Academy trainer Steve Max and the prominent socialist Harry Boyte agreed in a private correspondence: “Every social proposal that we make must be [deceptively] couched in terms of how it will strengthen capitalism.” This strategy of hiding its own socialist agendas below the proverbial radar, earned the Academy the designation “crypto-socialist organization” from Stanley Kurtz.

“Nearly every thread of Obama’s career runs directly or indirectly through the Midwest Academy,” says Kurtz, and, as such, it represents “the hidden key to Barack Obama’s political career.” The author elaborates:

“Obama’s organizing mentors had ties to [the Midwest Academy]; Obama’s early funding was indirectly controlled by it; evidence strongly suggests that Obama himself received training there; both Barack and Michelle Obama ran a project called ‘Public Allies’ that was effectively an extension of the Midwest Academy; Obama’s first run for public office was sponsored by Academy veteran Alice Palmer; and Obama worked closely at two foundations for years with yet another veteran organizer from the Midwest Academy, Ken Rolling. Perhaps more important, Barack Obama’s approach to politics is clearly inspired by that of the Midwest Academy.”

Obama and the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools

In the late 1980s, Obama and Thomas Ayers (father of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers) worked together on education issues in Chicago. In response to a Chicago summit exposing the poor quality of public education in the city, Chicago United — an organization founded by Thomas Ayers — formed a community advocacy coalition called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs. Thomas Ayers included Obama, who at the time was director and lead organizer of the Developing Communities Project, in this coalition.

Obama’s Tactics of Intimidation and Force

According to Stanly Kurtz‘s book Radical in Chief, Obama in 1988 was deeply involved in an organization called UNO that “favored civil disobedience and tactics that went to extremes.” That year, Obama helped to plan a demonstration where a mob of some 100 activists burst into a private boardroom where bank officials were discussing plans to develop a landfill with Waste Management Corporation. As former Justice Department official J. Christian Adams puts it, “Obama and his UNO gang delivered their message of opposition and intimidation_.”

Harvard Law School and Khalid al-Mansour

In 1988 Obama applied for admission to Harvard Law School. At the time, a Muslim attorney and black nationalist named Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour asked civil rights activist Percy Sutton to send a letter of recommendation to his (Sutton’s) friends at Harvard on Obama’s behalf.

Al-Mansour formerly had been a close personal adviser to Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, having helped them establish the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. He thereafter became an advisor to a number of Saudi billionaires known for funding the spread of Wahhabi extremism in America. Al-Mansour also showed himself to be a passionate hater of the United States, Israel, and white people generally.

With al-Mansour’s help, Obama in 1988 was accepted by Harvard Law School, where he became president of the Harvard Law Review — which never published any of Obama’s work. He graduated magna cum laude in 1991.

From April to November of 1992, Obama served as the Director of “Illinois Project Vote,” which registered approximately 150,000 mostly poor, mostly Democratic voters in Chicago’s Cook County before that year’s presidential election.

Also in 1992, Obama married Michelle Robinson (now Michelle Obama).

Obama Characterizes America As “Mean-Spirited” and Pledges “To Be Part of a Transformation of This Country”

In an interview published by the Daily Herald on March 3, 1990, Barck Obama said: “I feel good when I’m engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society, and those core issues to me are what’s happening to poor folks in this society…. There’s certainly racism here [at Harvard Law School]. There are certain burdens that are placed [on blacks], more emotionally at this point than concretely…. Hopefully, more and more people will begin to feel their story is somehow part of this larger story of how we’re going to reshape America in a way that is less mean-spirited and more generous. I mean, I really hope to be part of a transformation of this country.”

Obama Supports Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School

In 1991, a 30-year-old Barack Obama, who at the time was president of the Harvard Law Review and a well-known figure on the Harvard campus, spoke at a rally in support of Professor Derrick Bell. The godfather of Critical Race Theory, Bell was infamous for his anti-white views and his contention that America was an irredeemably racist country. At the rally in question, Obama encouraged his fellow students to “Open up your hearts and minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell,” whom he openly embraced during the proceedings. He also described Bell as someone who spoke “the truth.” For a video of a portion of Obama’s speech, click here.

1991: Obama’s Literary Agent Says Obama Was Born in Kenya

In May 2012, Breitbart News reported that it had obtained a 36-page promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which stated that Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.” The booklet, which was distributed to people in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama and 89 other authors represented by Acton & Dystel. Obama’s biography in the booklet reads as follows:

“Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.”

The booklet also included biographies of such notable authors as former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, sports legends Joe Montana and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and a number of Hollywood celebrities.

Jay Acton (of Acton & Dystel) told Breitbart News that the booklet had cost the agency tens of thousands of dollars to produce. He said that while “almost nobody” wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet were “probably” approached to approve the text as presented.

Obama Teaches about America’s “Institutional Racism”

Twelve times between 1992 and 2004, Obama taught “Current Issues in Racism and the Law” at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a part-time lecturer. The course summary, likely authored by Obama himself, told students they would examine “current problems in American race relations and the role the law has played in structuring the race debate”; how the legal system was affected by “the continued prevalence of racism in society”; “how the legal system has dealt with particular incidents of racism”; and “the comparative merits of litigation, legislation, and market solutions to the problems of institutional racism in American society.”

According to The New York Times, Obama taught only three subjects at the University of Chicago Law School: “race, rights and gender.” Adds the Times:

“His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. …His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law… “[In] one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. ‘Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?’ he asked in a mock-innocent voice. … “Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims, including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment, to gawkers. … ‘Are there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but racism from the past?’ Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994. “Liberals flocked to his classes[.] … After all, the professor was a progressive politician[.] …”

Karen McQuillan writes, in American Thinker, that Obama was a lecturer, and not a full professor, because he “did not have the qualifications to be a professor.” Adds McQuillan: “Obama never published a single law paper. He was hired by the University of Chicago when they learned he had been given a book contract on race and law directly after graduating from Harvard. There was no book – just the contract, which he later reneged on. This is not the normal level of accomplishment for a University of Chicago professor or even lecturer.”

Obama’s Introduction to ACORN and Project Vote

In the early to mid-1990s, Obama worked with ACORN, a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley‘s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). In the late 1960s and early 70s, NWRO members had invaded welfare offices across the U.S. — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law “entitled” them.

Obama also worked for Project Vote, ACORN’s voter-mobilization arm. Project Vote’s professed purpose was, and remains, to carry out “non-partisan” voter-registration drives; to counsel voters on their rights; and to litigate on behalf of the voting rights of the poor and the “disenfranchised.” Obama was the attorney for ACORN’s lead election-law cases, and he worked (unpaid) as a trainer at ACORN’s annual conferences, where he taught members of the organization the art of radical community organizing.

Litigator for Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C.

In 1993 Barack Obama took a job as a litigator of voting rights and employment cases with the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C. (a.k.a. Davis Miner). That same year, he also became a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.

In 1994 Obama worked for Davis Miner on a case titled Barnett v. Daley, where he was part of a legal team that challenged the racial makeup of Chicago’s voting districts. The Obama team sought to raise the number of black super-majority districts from 19 to 24. According to the judge in the case, Richard Posner, Obama and his fellow litigators held that “no black aldermanic candidate in Chicago has ever beaten a white in a ward that had a black majority of less than 62.6 percent, and it is emphatic that the ward in which the population is 55 percent black is not a black ward — is indeed a white ward, even though only 42 percent of its population is white.”

In a 1995 class action lawsuit known as Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Obama and his fellow Davis Miner attorneys represented the plaintiffs in charging that Citibank was making too few loans to black applicants. The suit demanded that the bank grant mortgages to an equal percentage of minority and non-minority mortgage applicants. Under pressure, Citibank settled the case three years later after agreeing to increase its lending to unqualified applicants. (These so-called “subprime” loans set the stage for the cataclysmic housing, banking, and economic crisis of 2008 — a crisis which the American public blamed largely on Republicans, and which therefore essentially sealed Obama’s presidential victory that year.)

Notwithstanding Obama’s support for the very policies that caused the housing crisis, he would speak about the crisis as though it were the result of forces unrelated to those policies. In August 2013, for instance, he said: “So the income of the top 1 percent nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 2007, but the typical family’s incomes barely budged. And towards the end of those three decades, a housing bubble, credit cards, a churning financial sector was keeping the economy artificially juiced up, so sometimes it papered over some of these long-term trends. But by the time I took office in 2009 as your president, we all know the [housing] bubble had burst. And it cost millions of Americans their jobs and their homes and their savings.”

Obama Depicts Opponents of Affirmative Action As Racists

In an October 28, 1994 NPR interview, Obama discussed American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray’s controversial new book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. He accused Murray of racism, and of caring too little about early childhood education prevention programs like Head Start. He claimed that: “[Murray is] interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it’s artfully packaged and can admit for exceptions like Colin Powell. It’s easy to see the basis for Mr. Murray’s calculations.”

Further, Obama attributed Americans’ overall opposition to affirmative action to a declining economy: “After watching their incomes stagnate or decline over the past decade, the majority of Americans are in an ugly mood and deeply resent any advantages, real or perceived, that minorities may enjoy.”

Obama also said it would be “just plain stupid” — and would indicate “a moral deficit” — to oppose making a taxpayer-funded “investment” in an expansion of government programs for children and low-income workers: “Real opportunity would mean quality prenatal care for all women and well-funded and innovative public schools for all children … a job at a living wage for everyone who was willing to work …”

More ACORN Connections

In 1995, Obama sued, on behalf of ACORN, for the implementation of the Motor Voter law in Illinois. Jim Edgar, the state’s Republican governor, opposed the law because he believed that allowing voters to register using only a postcard would breed widespread fraud.

ACORN would later invite Obama to help train its staff. Moreover, Obama eventually would sit on the Board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which gave a number of sizable grants to ACORN — including $45,000 in 2000, $75,000 in 2001, and $70,000 in 2002.

The Million Man March (1995)

Obama — along with such notables as Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright — helped organize the October 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC, which featured Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Said Obama in the immediate aftermath of the March:

“What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society…. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.”

Obama Smears “White Executives” in “the Suburbs”

In a 1995 interview, Obama made reference to a hypothetical “white executive living out in the suburbs, who doesn’t want to pay taxes to inner city children for them to go to school.”

Obama Endorses “Collective Salvation”

In the same 1995 interview, Obama said:

“I worked as a community organizer in Chicago. I was very active in low-income neighborhoods, working on issues of crime and education and employment, and seeing that in some ways, certain portions of the African American community are doing as bad if not worse, and recognizing that my fate remained tied up with their fates, that my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country. Unfortunately I think that recognition requires that we make sacrifices, and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring about a new day and a new age.

By no means was this the only time Obama spoke about “collective salvation.” In a 1998 radio interview he said: “… my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country. Um, unfortunately I think that recognition requires that we make sacrifices and this country has not always been willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring about a new day and a new age.”

In 2004, while promoting his book Dreams from My Father, Obama said: “My individual salvation depends on our collective salvation.”

In a Northwestern University commencement speech in June 2006, Obama said: “[W]hat I’ve found in my life is that my individual salvation depends on our collective salvation. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you’ll realize your true potential, that you’ll become full grown.”

Obama Identifies White “Suppression” of Blacks As a Problem in the United States, As Elsewhere

In the aforementioned 1995 interview, Obama said:

“… [T]he truth of the matter is that many of the problems that Africa faces, whether it’s poverty or political suppression or ethnic conflict is just as prominent there and can’t all be blamed on the effects of colonialism. What it can be blamed on is some of the common factors that affect Bosnia or Los Angeles or all kinds of places on this earth, and that is the tendency for one group to try to suppress another group in the interest of power or greed or resources or what have you.

Obama Scapegoats the “Top 5 Percent”

In a December 28, 1995 interview published in the Hyde Park Citizen newspaper, Obama explained his views on income inequality in the United States:

“In an environment of scarcity, where the cost of living is rising, folks begin to get angry and bitter and look for scapegoats. Historically, instead of looking at the top 5% of this country that controls all the wealth, we turn towards each other, and the Republicans have added to the fire.”

In that same interview, Obama said that his perspective on the “top 5%” had been shaped by his experiences abroad:

“It’s about power. My travels made me sensitive to the plight of those without power and the issues of class and inequalities as it relates to wealth and power. Anytime you have been overseas in these so-called third world countries, one thing you see is the vast disparity of wealth of those who are part of power structure and those outside of it.”

Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Obama’s Entry into Politics

In the mid-1990s, Obama developed a friendship with fellow Chicagoans Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, university professors who hosted a fundraiser at their home to introduce Obama to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois state senate in 1996. (This fundraiser was likely organized by the socialist New Party.) Ayers (who contributed money to Obama’s 1996 campaign) and Dohrn had been leaders of the 1960s domestic terrorist group Weatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society. The pair had participated personally in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. To this day, both have remained unrepentant about their former terrorist activities and their hatred of the United States.

There is compelling evidence suggesting that Ayers contributed heavily, if not entirely, to the writing of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

When questioned about his relationship with Ayers during an April 2008 Democratic primary debate, Obama responded:

“This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who is a professor of English in Chicago, who I know, and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He is not somebody who I exchange ideas from [with] on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow, as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense … [T]his kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, [that] somehow their ideas could be attributed to me, I think the American people are smarter than that. They’re not gonna suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn’t.”

Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Bill Ayers

But in reality, Obama’s ties to Ayers were deep and longstanding. In 1995, for instance, Obama was appointed as the first Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), a “school reform organization” founded by Ayers, who would later write, in his book _Teaching Toward Freedom, that his educational objective was to “teach against oppression” as embodied in “America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.”

When National Review Online writer Stanley Kurtz in 2008 asked the Obama presidential campaign about the nature of its candidate’s connection to Ayers and the CAC, the campaign issued a statement claiming that Ayers had not been involved in the “recruitment” of Obama to the CAC board in 1995. But when Kurtz reviewed the CAC archives at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois, he found that Ayers in fact had been one of five members of a working group that assembled the initial CAC board which hired Obama.

“Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit,” Kurtz wrote in September 2008. “No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.” According to Kurtz, the CAC archives show that Obama and Ayers worked as a team to advance the foundation’s agenda — with Obama responsible for fiscal matters while Ayers focused on shaping educational policy. The archived documents further reveal that Ayers served as an ex-officio member of the board that Obama chaired through CAC’s first year; that Ayers served with Obama on the CAC governance committee; and that Ayers worked with Obama to write CAC’s bylaws.

A September 2008 WorldNetDaily report offers still more details:

“Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Obama. Ayers also spoke for the Chicago School Reform Collaborative before Obama’s board, while Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the collaborative … According to the documents, the CAC granted money to far-leftist causes, such as the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which …has done work on behalf of Obama’s presidential campaign.”

WorldNetDaily reported further that “while Obama chaired the board of the CAC, more than $600,000 was granted to an organization founded by Ayers and run by Mike Klonsky, a former top communist activist. Klonsky was leader of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, which was effectively recognized by China as the all-but-official U.S. Maoist party.” Said Stanley Kurtz:

“Instead of funding schools directly, [the CAC] required schools to affiliate with ‘external partners,’ which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as ACORN.”

Kurtz has provided the following synopsis of the CAC/Ayers agendas:

“The CAC’s agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers’s educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland’s ghetto. “In works like ‘City Kids, City Teachers’ and ‘Teaching the Personal and the Political,’ Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? ‘I’m a radical, Leftist, small-c-communist,’ Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk’s, ‘Sixties Radicals,’ at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.”

Between 1995 and 1999, Obama and CAC distributed $110 million to a variety of leftist education enterprises for “experiments” in Chicago’s public schools.

Obama Speaks at an Event Sponsored by DSA

On February 25, 1996, Obama (who was then a candidate for the 13th Illinois Senate District) was a guest panelist at a “townhall meeting on economic insecurity,” sponsored and presented by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). His fellow panelists included William Julius Wilson (a longtime DSA activist from the Center for the Study of Urban Inequality); University of Chicago professor Michael Dawson; and DSA National Political Committee member Joseph Schwartz. In his remarks, Obama discussed how government could play a “constructive” role in improving society.

Obama Rejects Gun Rights

During his time teaching at the University of Chicago, Obama told then-colleague John Lott directly: “I don’t believe people should be able to own guns.”

As a candidate for the Illinois State Senate in 1996, Obama promised to support a ban on “the manufacture, sale & possession of handguns.”

In 1998 Obama supported a ban on the sale of all semi-automatic guns.

Years later, while running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama spoke in favor of federal legislation to block citizens nationwide from receiving concealed-carry permits. “National legislation will prevent other states’ flawed concealed-weapons laws from threatening the safety of Illinois residents,” he said.

That same year (2004), Obama spoke in favor of banning gun sales within five miles of a school or park, which would have effectively shut down almost all gun stores.

During his U.S. Senate tenure, Obama supported Washington, DC’s comprehensive gun ban, which prevented district residents from possessing handguns even in their own homes; required that long guns be kept locked and disassembled; and lacked a provision allowing the guns to be reassembled in the event of an emergency.

Obama Endorses Ayers’ Book

In December 1997 Obama wrote a blurb praising Ayers’ recently published book, _A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, calling it “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”

The Pro-Soviet Alice Palmer Paves Obama’s Path to Elected Office

A notable attendee at the aforementioned political gatherings which Ayers and Dohrn hosted on behalf of Obama (in the mid-1990s) was Democratic state senator Alice J. Palmer (of Illinois’ 13th District), who quickly developed a friendly relationship with Obama. Prior to her stint in politics, Palmer had worked for the Black Press Institute and was editor of the _Black Press Review. During the Cold War, she supported the Soviet Union and spoke out against the United States. In the 1980s she served as an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a Communist front group (and which was an affiliate of the World Peace Council, an international Soviet front). Palmer participated in the World Peace Council’s Prague assembly in 1983 — just as the USSR was launching its “nuclear freeze” movement, a scheme that would have frozen Soviet nuclear and military superiority in place.

State senator Palmer was instrumental in Obama’s entry into politics. In 1995 Palmer decided to pursue an opportunity to run for a higher office when Mel Reynolds, the congressman from Illinois’ 2nd District, resigned from the House of Representatives amid a sexual scandal involving him and an underage campaign volunteer. As Palmer prepared to leave the state senate, she hand-picked Obama as the person she most wanted to fill her newly vacated senate seat. Toward that end, she introduced Obama to party elders and donors as her preferred successor, and helped him gather the signatures required for getting his name placed on the ballot.

Obama Betrays Palmer

But in November 1995, Jesse Jackson, Jr. defeated Palmer in a special election for Reynolds’ empty congressional seat. At that point, Palmer filed to retain the Democratic nomination for the state senate seat she had encouraged Obama to pursue; that seat would be up for grabs in the November 1996 elections. She asked Obama to politely withdraw from the race and offered to help him find an alternative position elsewhere.

But Obama refused to withdraw, so Palmer resolved to run against him (and two other opponents who also had declared their candidacy) in the 1996 Democratic primary. To get her name placed on the ballot, Palmer hastily gathered more than the minimum number of signatures required. Obama promptly challenged the legitimacy of those signatures and charged Palmer with fraud. A subsequent investigation found that a number of the names on Palmer’s petition were invalid, thus she was knocked off the ballot. (Names could be eliminated from a candidate’s petition for a variety of reasons. For example, if a name was printed rather than written in cursive script, it was considered invalid. Or if the person collecting the signatures was not registered to perform that task, any signatures that he or she had collected likewise were nullified.)

Obama also successfully challenged the signatures gathered by his other two opponents, and both of them were disqualified as well. Consequently, Obama ran unopposed in the Democratic primary and won by default.

“I liked Alice Palmer a lot,” Obama would later reflect. “I thought she was a good public servant. It [the process by which Obama had gotten Palmer’s name removed from the ballot] was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently.”

Endorsement by the New Party

In 1995 Barack Obama sought the endorsement of the so-called New Party for his 1996 state senate run. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.

Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson‘s 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers (a sociology and law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), the New Party was a socialist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials — most often Democrats. The New Party’s short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new socialist third party.

Most New Party members hailed from the Democratic Socialists of America and ACORN. The party’s Chicago chapter also included a large contingent from the Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA members.

On April 7, 2010, Trevor Loudon of NewZealblogsopt reported:

Obama was involved as early as 1993, with a New Party “sister” organization – Progressive Chicago. This organization was formed by members of the New Party as a support group for “progressive” candidates. It’s main instigators included New Party members Madeline Talbott of Chicago ACORN and Dan Swinney, a Chicago labor unionist….Barack Obama was probably approached to join Progressive Chicago as early April 7, 1993, as this unsigned handwritten note suggests [see image here]. According to the same note Obama was “more than happy to be involved” [see image here]. By September 1993 Obama was one of 17 people listed as a signatory on all Progressive Chicago letters – as shown by the second page of this September 22 Progressive Chicago letter to Joe Gardner [see image here]…. It appears beyond doubt that Barack Obama was involved, more than two years before his Illinois State Senate run, with a New Party founded, “sister organization” – Progressive Chicago.”

In a 2010 interview, Carl Davidson, a Marxist activist who helped establish the New Party, recalled Obama’s involvement with the New Party: “A subcommittee met with [Obama] to interview him to see if his stand on the living wage and similar reforms was the same as ours. We determined that our views on these overlapped, and we could endorse his campaign in the Democratic Party.”

Not only did Obama seek the New Party’s endorsement in the mid-Nineties. By 1996, Obama himself had become a member of the New Party. When author Stanley Kurtz revealed this in late October 2008, the Obama campaign vehemently denied Kurtz’s claim, calling it a “crackpot smear.” But in June 2012, Kurtz proved conclusively that Obama had indeed been a member of the New Party. Wrote Kurtz:

“Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a ‘contract’ promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office. “Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows: “Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party ‘Candidate Contract’ and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party. “Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.”

Obama Calls for “Collective Action” to Combat the “Christian Right,” “Intolerance,” and “Narrow-Mindedness”

In a 1995 story in the Chicago Reader, Obama was quoted saying: “In America, we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”

Added Obama:

“The right wing talks about this but they keep appealing to that old individualistic bootstrap myth: get a job, get rich, and get out. Instead of investing in our neighborhoods, that’s what has always happened. Our goal must be to help people get a sense of building something larger…. People are hungry for community; they miss it. They are hungry for change…. “The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building … organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it’s always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility. “Now we have to take this same language—these same values that are encouraged within our families—of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other—and apply them to a larger society. Let’s talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values. Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.”

The Marxist Carl Davidson and Obama’s 1996 State Senate Run

Another key supporter of Obama’s 1996 state senate campaign was Carl Davidson, a Marxist who in the 1960s had been a national secretary of Students of a Democratic Society and a national leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement. In 1969 Davidson (along with Tom Hayden) helped launch the “Venceremos Brigades,” which covertly transported hundreds of young Americans to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane and interact with Havana’s communist revolutionary leadership. (The Brigades were organized by Fidel Castro‘s Cuban intelligence agency, which trained “brigadistas” in guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives.)

In 1988 Davidson founded Networking for Democracy (NFD), a program encouraging high-school students to engage in “mass action” aimed at “tearing down the old structures of race and class privilege” in the United States “and around the world.” In 1992 he became a leader of the newly formed Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and members of the Communist Party USA. In the mid-1990s Davidson was a major player in the Chicago branch of the aforementioned New Party.

Democratic Socialists of America Endorse Obama

Obama’s 1996 senate campaign also secured the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the United States and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. Obama’s affiliation with DSA was longstanding, as evidenced by his reference, in _Dreams From My Father, to the fact that during his student years at Columbia University he “went to socialist conferences at Cooper Union,” a privately funded college for the advancement of science and art. From the early 1980s until 2004, Cooper Union had served as the usual venue of the annual Socialist Scholars Conference. According to Trevor Loudon, guest speakers at these conferences included “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotsyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists.” London observes that “Obama speaks of ‘conferences’ plural, indicating [that] his attendance was not the result of accident or youthful curiosity.”

Obama won his 1996 race for the Illinois state senate in the 13th District, which mostly represented poor South Side blacks but also a few wealthy neighborhoods.

A Notable Obama Tie To Saul Alinsky

In 1998, Obama attended a performance of “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky,” a play which was being staged at the Terrapin Theater in Chicago. Following the performance, Obama took the stage and participated in a panel discussion about the show. Writer Andrew Breitbart described the play as follows:

“So, what’s in the play? It truly is a love song to Alinsky. In the first few minutes of the play, Alinsky plays Moses – yes, the Biblical Moses – talking to God. The play glorifies Alinsky stealing food from restaurants and organizing others to do the same, explaining, ‘I saw it as a practical use of social ecology: you had members of the intellectual community, the hope of the future, eating regularly for six months, staying alive till they could make their contributions to society.’ “In an introspective moment, Alinsky rips America: My country … ‘tis of whatthehell / And justice up a tree … How much can you sell / What’s in it for me. He grins about manipulating the Christian community to back his programs. He talks in glowing terms about engaging in Chicago politics with former Mayor Kelly. He rips the McCarthy committee, mocking, ‘Everyone was there, when you think back – Cotton Mather, Hester Prynn, Anne Hutchinson, Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson … Brandeis, Holmes … Gene Debs and the socialists … Huey Long … Imperial Wizards of all stripes … Father Coughlin and his money machine … Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd … and a kicking chorus of sterilized reactionaries singing O Come, All Ye Faithful …’ “And Alinsky talks about being the first occupier – shutting down the O’Hare Airport by occupying all the toilet stalls, using chewing gum to ‘tie up the city, stop all traffic, and the shopping, in the Loop, and let everyone at City Hall know attention must be paid, and maybe we should talk about it.’ As Alinsky says, ‘Students of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your juicy fruit.’ “The play finishes with Alinsky announcing he’d rather go to Hell than Heaven. Why? ‘More comfortable there. You see, all my life I’ve been with the Have-Nots: here you’re a Have-Not if you’re short of money, there you’re a Have-Not if you’re short of virtue. I’d be asking more questions, organizing them. They’re my kind of people – Hell would be Heaven for me.’ “That’s The Love Song of Saul Alinsky. It’s radical leftist stuff, and it revels in its radical leftism.”

Joining Obama on the discussion panel were the following individuals:

Quentin Young: Young is a longtime supporter of communist causes, and a friend of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. He is also a strong supporter of a single-payer, government-run healthcare system.

Heather Booth: This longtime radical activist co-founded the Midwest Academy.

Leon Despres: Despres knew Saul Alinsky for nearly half a century, and together they established the modern concept of “community organizing.” In 1937 Despres worked with secret Communist and Soviet spy Lee Pressman to support strikers at Republic Steel in Chicago. He also worked with another Communist Party front, the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee.

Also in 1937, Despres and his wife met with, and delivered a suitcase of “clothing” to, Leon Trotsky, who was then in Mexico City, hiding from Stalin’s assassins.Timuel Black: U.S. military intelligence believed that Black, who worked closely with the Socialist Party in the 1950s, was also a member of the Communist Party. In the early 1960s Black was a leader of the Hyde Park Community Peace Center, where he worked alongside former radical Trotskyist Sydney Lens and the Communist Quentin Young. Black served as a contributing editor to the Hyde Park/Kenwood Voices, a newspaper run by a Communist Party member. By 1970, Black was on the advisory council of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, a group controlled by the Communist Party. Black says he has been friends with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, “going back to 1968, since long before I knew Barack.”

Studs Terkel: Terkel was a sponsor of the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace in 1949, which was arranged by a Communist Party USA front organization.

Robert Lynch: Lynch was a leading member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a leader of the New American Movement.

To view a list of additional individuals who participated in the panel discussion following the Alinsky play, click here.

The Joyce Foundation

In 1994 Obama joined the 12-member board of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, which targets its philanthropy in large measure toward organizations dedicated to the agendas of radical environmentalism, “social justice,” prison reform, and increased government funding for social services, particularly for minorities. Obama would remain a board member for eight years, during which time the Joyce Foundation made grants to such groups as the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Children’s Defense Fund of Ohio, the Jane Addams Resource Corporation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Izaak Walton League of America, the Union of Concerned Scientists, SUSTAIN, the Tides Center, the Environmental Working Group, the World Resources Institute, the League of Women Voters Education Fund, the Democracy 21 Education Fund, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Brookings Institution, Alliance For Justice, the Council on Foundations, the Center for Community Change, the National Network of Grantmakers, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, the Nine to Five Working Women Education Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, Environmental Defense and the Urban Institute.

“I Actually Believe in Redistribution”

At an October 19, 1998 conference at Loyola University, Barack Obama said: “There has been a systematic … propaganda campaign against the possibility of government action and its efficacy. And I think some of it has been deserved…. The trick is, how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitate some redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.”

At other points during his address, Obama stated that the “working poor” on welfare constituted a political voting bloc that could be harnessed to the advantage of Democrats. Specifically, he said that:

“to the extent that we are doing research figuring out what kinds of government action would successfully make their [the working poor’s] lives better, we are then putting together a potential majority coalition to move those agendas forward”;

the “one good thing that comes out of [the welfare-reform bill of 1996] is that it essentially desegregates the welfare population,” merging urban blacks with “the working poor, which are the other people”; and

such a coalition becomes “one batch of folks … that is increasingly a majority population” whose policy needs would grow to encompass health care, job training, education, and a system where government would “provide effective child care.”

The Woods Fund of Chicago and Bill Ayers

Obama also had been a board member of the Woods Fund of Chicago since 1993. In 1999 he was joined on this board by Bill Ayers, who would serve alongside Obama until the latter left the Fund in December 2002. (In 2002 — while Obama was still on the board — the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was employed.)

Failed Congressional Campaign (2000)

In 2000, Obama ran against former Black Panther and incumbent congressman Bobby Rush in the Democratic Primary for the U.S. House of Representatives. Rush denounced Obama as an “elitist” who “wasn’t black enough,” and crushed him by nearly a two-to-one vote margin. Obama returned to the Illinois state senate for another four-year term.

Rashid Khalidi, Ali Abunimah, and the the Arab American Action Network

As noted earlier, during his state senate years Obama was a lecturer at the University of Chicago law school, where he became friendly with Rashid Khalidi, a professor in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Obama and his wife were regular dinner guests at Khalidi’s Hyde Park home. Khalidi and his wife Mona had founded in 1995 the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), noted for its contention that Arab Americans face widespread discrimination in the United States, and for its view that Israel’s creation in 1948 was a “catastrophe” for Arab people. In 2001 and again in 2002, the Woods Fund of Chicago, while Obama served on its board, made grants totaling $75,000 to AAAN.

In 2003 Obama would attend a farewell party in Khalidi’s honor when the latter was leaving Chicago to embark on a new position at Columbia University. At this event (which was also attended by William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn), Obama paid public tribute to Khalidi as someone whose insights had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases … It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.” Khalidi then returned the favor, telling the largely pro-Palestinian attendees that Obama deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat, stating, “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances.”

According to journalist John Batchelor, “AAAN vice-president Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada [a website that, like AAAN, refers to Israel’s creation as a “catastrophe”] has remembered Mr. Obama’s speaking in 1999 against ‘Israeli occupation’ at a charity event for a West Bank refugee camp; and Mr. Abunimah … has also recalled Mr. and Mrs. Obama at a fundraiser held for the then-Congressional candidate Obama in 2000 at Rashid and Mona Khalidi’s home, where Mr. Obama made convincing statements in support of the Palestinian cause.”

Obama Likens Aspects of America to Nazi Germany

In a January 18, 2001 radio interview, Obama said: “There’s a lot of change going on outside of the Court that judges have to essentially take judicial notice of. I mean you’ve got World War II, you’ve got the doctrines of Nazism that we are fighting against, that start looking uncomfortably similar to what’s going on, back here at home.”

Robert Blackwell and the Quid Pro Quo

Shortly after Obama’s unsuccessful run for Congress in 2000, he was deeply in debt, with little cash at his disposal (his annual part-time salary as a state senator was $58,000) and a stagnant law practice that he had largely neglected during a year of political campaigning.

In early 2001 a longtime political supporter, Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell, Jr., hired Obama to provide legal advice for his (Blackwell’s) growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange (EKI). In exchange for his services, Blackwell paid Obama an $8,000 retainer each month for roughly a 14-month period — a total of $118,000.

In return for these payments, Obama pressured the Illinois state tourism board to send a $50,000 grant to EKI. He also issued a formal written request for Illinois officials to furnish a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin, which sells equipment and apparel related to the sport of table tennis. The day after Obama wrote this letter, his U.S. Senate campaign received a $1,000 donation from Blackwell.

Killerspin would not receive the full $50,000 it was seeking that year, but only $20,000. With Obama’s help, however, the company eventually secured $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize the table tennis tournaments it sponsored. As blogger Ed Morrissey observes: “This looks like a rather obvious quid pro quo…. In exchange for $118,000 in salary, Blackwell received $320,000 in state taxpayer money and influence at the highest level of state politics.”

Obama’s presidential campaign website reported that Blackwell in 2008 committed to raise between $100,000 and $200,000 for Obama’s White House run that year.

Obama’s Response to 9/11

Eight days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Barack Obama issued the following statement, in which he: (a) asserted that the attacks had grown out of “a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair”; (b) exhorted Americans to be “unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent”; and (c) urged the U.S. “to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe.”

“Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we as a nation draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy. Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must reexamine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks. And we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction. “We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair. “We will have to make sure, despite our rage, that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad. We will have to be unwavering in opposing bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle Eastern descent. Finally, we will have to devote far more attention to the monumental task of raising the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe-children not just in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and within our own shores.”

Depicting America as a Racially and Economically Unjust Society

On January 21, 2002—Martin Luther King Day—then-Illinois state senator Obama delivered a racially charged speech at a Chicago church, stating that “Enron executives did to their employees” was akin to “what Bull Connor did to black folks.” (Enron was an energy company that went bankrupt after its massive engagement in accounting fraud came to light in 2001, and left 20,000 employees suddenly jobless. Bull Connor was Birmingham, Alabama’s Commissioner of Public Safety in the 1960s, and became famous for directing fire hoses and police attack dogs against anti-segregation demonstrators in his city.)

Lamenting the large number of African American males “caught up in the criminal-justice system,” Obama said: “It’s hard to imagine that the powerful in our society would tolerate the burgeoning prison industrial complex if they imagined that the black men and Latino men that are being imprisoned were something like their sons.”

Obama also charged that having the public “education system … funded by [local] property taxes” is “fundamentally unjust.” “So you have folks up in Winnetka [Illinois], pupils who are getting five times as much money per student as students in the South Side of Chicago,” he stated.

Obama’s MLK Day speech was also drenched in the rhetoric of class warfare. He said: “The philosophy of nonviolence only makes sense if the powerful can be made to recognize themselves in the powerless. It only makes sense if the powerless can be made to recognize themselves in the powerful…. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for nonviolence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They want to make sure folks don’t take their stuff.”**_

Iraq War

Obama was an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War ever since it was first discussed as a possible means of unseating Saddam Hussein from power. On October 2, 2002, Obama gave an antiwar speech alongside Jesse Jackson on the very day that President Bush and Congress agreed on a joint resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. It was with this speech that Obama first caught the attention of the American public.

Suggesting that the prospect of war was largely a Republican ploy to distract voters from domestic issues that were impacting minorities negatively, Obama said:

“Now, let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied U.N. resolutions, thwarted U.N. inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him…. “After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again. I don’t oppose all wars…. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne…. “But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

Also in his 2002 speech, Obama said that instead of using force to depose Saddam, America should “fight” for democratic reforms in the Middle East, for stronger international nuclear safeguards, and for energy independence:

“Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join – the battles against ignorance and intolerance, corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.”

The Chicago rally was staged by a group called Chicagoans Against the War. Some of the key organizers were Carl Davidson (the aforementioned Marxist antiwar activist and Obama supporter), BettyLu Saltzman (an officer of the New Israel Fund), and Marilyn Katz (a former Students for a Democratic Society radical in the Sixties).

In July 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. He used the speech to introduce himself to a national audience while impugning the Bush administration and the War in Iraq.

U.S. Senate Campaign (2004)

In 2004 Obama ran for one of Illinois’ two seats in the U.S. Senate. The _Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama’s campaign. More importantly, the Tribune persuaded a Democrat-appointed judge in California to open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s Republican opponent to the media. The resulting sex scandal, based on allegations in the divorce records by a Hollywood actress eager to prevent her ex-husband from getting custody of their children, prompted the Republican to resign from the race.

Human Events magazine provides the details:

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. But then the Chicago Tribune leaked the claim that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings. Those records were under seal, but as The New York Times noted: “The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.” Many people said Axelrod had “an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story.” Both Hull and his ex-wife opposed releasing their sealed divorce records, but they finally relented in response to the media’s hysteria — 18 days before the primary. Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce papers, explaining that his ex-wife “kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me.” After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull’s campaign collapsed with the chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

Obama then used similar techniques to win the general election, as Human Events again explains:

As luck would have it, Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan was tall, handsome, Catholic — and shared a name with one of Harrison Ford’s most popular onscreen characters! He went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early 40s, left investment banking to teach at an inner city school on the South Side of Chicago. Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of — again — 