|
|
|
Barack Obama's two years at Columbia University are less known to the American public than any other part of his life. The New York Times called them a "lost chapter" of the President's life. He refused to discuss those years during his presidential campaign, to release transcripts, or even to name friends. Scholar Stanley Kurtz has done an exhaustive and fascinating job of original research in hitherto unread archives to discover the facts about those years. He proves that the "evidence clearly indicates that the President of the United States is a Socialist." Obama's conversion to Socialism came on April 1, 1983 when, at age 21, he attended a "Socialist Scholars Conference" in the historic Great Hall of Manhattan's Cooper Union. Kurtz unravels the significance of those Columbia years and shows how they provided Obama with a road map for his career. After graduation, Obama learned the strategies and tacitcs of Saul Alinsky, the famous Chicago radical, where he learned how to build stealth into his profession as a community organizer. Kurtz showed how the Midwest Academy, a Socialist front group, was another hidden key to Obama's political career. In this book, we read the details of Obama's close working relationship with ACORN and SEIU Local 880. Kurtz shows how an important element of Obama's political strategy was his alliance with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. That's why Obama featured Wright's "audacity of hope" theme in his career-making keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and also made it the title of his second book. Obama's meteoric political rise depended at every turn on support and funding from Chicago's Socialist community. Kurtz explains how it was the strategy of stealth-Socialist community organizers to disguise their long-term goal to transform capitalist America into a massive welfare state. That's what Obama meant when he said he wanted to "fundamentally transform the United States" and when he told Joe the Plumber his goal was to "spread the wealth around." Despite Stanley Kurtz's scholarly approach, with 73 small-print pages of documentation, this is a very readable book. In fact, it's a book all Americans should read if they want to know how Obama's Socialist past and commitment explain the real meaning of his current policies and plans for our future. (New York, Threshold, Simon & Schuster, 2010, 485 pp., $27) |
The important morning session, devoted to community organizing, featured Frances Fox Piven. That 1983 conference transformed his life: it committed him not only to Socialism but to stealth-Socialism and a vocation as a community organizer. The message of Socialism fell on fertile soil because Obama's childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, had been a member of the Communist Party.
