What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?
The assertion that Barack Obama is a socialist became a hallmark of
the 2008 presidential campaign. His opponent, John McCain, used Obama’s
own extemporaneous words to an Ohio plumber as Exhibit A: “When you
spread the wealth around,” Obama had said, “it’s good for everybody.”
That, McCain insisted, sounded “a lot like socialism,” as did Obama’s
proposals to raise taxes on the wealthy and high earners for the
explicit purpose of taking better care of the lower and middle classes
with that redistributed money.
Republicans believed they had hit a rhetorical mother lode with this
line of argument in 2008, but their efforts to make hay of Obama’s
putative socialism proved unedifying, if not outright comic. The
National Committee of the Republican Party even formally considered a
resolution on whether the Democratic party should change its name to
“the Democratic Socialist Party” of the United States. The stunt was
shelved infavor of compromise language lamenting the Democrats’ “march
toward socialism.”
Fourteen months into his presidency, in March 2010, Obama succeeded
in muscling through Congress a partial government takeover of the
national health-care system. That legislative accomplishment followed
Obama’s decision a year earlier, without congressional approval, to
nationalize two of the country’s Big Three automobile companies. In the
intervening months, he had also imposed specific wage ceilings on
employees at banks that had taken federal bailout money—the first such
federal wage controls since an ill-fated experiment by Richard Nixon in
1971.
Obama also made the federal government the direct provider of
student loans, and did so by putting that significant change in American
policy inside the larger health-care bill. In a September 2009 press
conference, Obama suggested that a publicly funded health-care system
might help “avoid. . .some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private
companies by profits and excessive administrative costs”—thus mistaking
the act of making money, the foundational cornerstone of capitalism
itself, with the generation of unnecessary expenses.
Given his conduct and rhetoric as president, we have every reason to
reopen the question from 2008 and ask, quite simply,
What kind of
socialist is Barack Obama?
Read More: Commentary Magazine
President Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times
before saying yes, because he got cold feet about the possible
political harm to himself if the mission failed. Instead of listening
to advisors from the U.S. military, Defense, or even State, Obama was
acting on the advice of White House politico and close friend Valerie
Jarrett. Valerie Jarrett?
This account comes from Richard Miniter's upcoming book Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors who Decide for Him.
Miniter has written a half-dozen books on the war on terror. He is
relying on an unnamed source within the U.S. military Joint Special
Operations Command who was directly involved in the operation and
planning of the Osama bin Laden kill mission.
Is the story credible? According to Edward Klein, a reporter once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett. Obama answered, "Yep. Absolutely."
Edward Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine
for many years, describes Jarrett as "ground zero in the Obama
operation, the first couple's friend and consigliere." Klein -- who
claims he used a minimum of two sources for each assertion in his book
on the Obama presidency, The Amateur -- writes in detail about
Jarrett opposing the raid on bin Laden. She told Obama not to take the
political risk. Klein thought Obama ignored Jarrett's advice. Miniter
tells us he listened to her, three times telling Special Operations not
to take the risk to go after bin Laden.
We need to understand the role Valerie Jarrett plays in Obama's private and political life.
"If
it wasn't for Valerie Jarrett, there'd be no Barack Obama to complain
about," starts Klein's chapter on Jarrett. He quotes Michelle Obama on
Jarrett's influence over her husband: "She knows the buttons, the soft
spots, the history, the context."
Read More: The American Thinker
The Obama campaign apparently didn't look backwards into history when
selecting its new campaign slogan, "Forward" — a word with a long and
rich association with European Marxism.
Many Communist and radical
publications and entities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries had
the name "Forward!" or its foreign cognates. Wikipedia has an entire
section called "Forward (generic name of socialist publications)."
"The
name Forward carries a special meaning in socialist political
terminology. It has been frequently used as a name for socialist,
communist and other left-wing newspapers and publications," the online
encyclopedia explains.
The slogan "Forward!" reflected the
conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements
reflected the march of history, which would move forward past capitalism
and into socialism and communism.
