What informs Obama’s worldview?
This is a legitimate question of any president. Not only that, a full airing should be a prerequisite for earning the right to govern. The worldview that informs a nation’s leader will shape that nation and impact its role in the world.
This all broke down in the last presidential election in the U.S. Now, questions are surfacing about what we know of our president’s belief system. Dr. Paul Kengor raises some of them here.
The Reagan narrative is a wonderful conversion story.
That brings me to Selwyn Duke’s piece at American Thinker. Duke responded to an article I wrote for American Thinker, titled, “Obama’s Missing Link,” based on an interview I did with Dr. John Drew, a former Marxist who knew Barack Obama at Occidental College, and knew Obama as a fellow Marxist. Drew’s testimony is extremely compelling; it cannot be ignored by anyone trying to piece together Obama’s still-mysterious, elusive political past.
Of course, Drew’s account ultimately leads to the central question: How much does this matter now? Where does Obama currently stand ideologically? Is he still influenced by remnants of a Marxist worldview? If so, to what degree? Where, precisely, does he fall on that left-side of the political spectrum?
Most important, if Obama has changed, when and where and why and how did he change? And where’s the documented account of that change?
This is not a personal attack, it’s not racist or party-driven. It asks questions.
At the time of the Reagan centennial, with some odd comparisons more than contrasts with the current president (Reagan suddenly became more popular with big media, and the president), Reagan scholar Kengor notes this:
And yet, of all these contrasts, the single most telling is the lack of a conversion narrative for Obama, unlike Reagan. The young Reagan transformed from duped liberal, duped by communists, to the man who undermined the Evil Empire. Reagan did a “180,” a transformation he discussed at length, including in memoirs published two decades before his presidency.
Obama, however, has never left the left. More than that, if he really was on the Marxist-Leninist left, as John Drew describes, we have no accounting, from Obama or anyone, of a switch. In Obama’s memoirs — he’s already done two of them — we hear about him attending socialist conferences and “hanging out” with Marxist professors, but we never get any repudiation of those conferences, professors, or even a tiny, passing comment suggesting these were fanciful political musings from a misguided youth.
We have the Reagan conversion narrative. Where’s Obama’s? And could someone in the media, with access to Obama, please ask the question?
Jack Cashill is wondering about the same thing. He published here and there.
Going back, Occidental friend John Drew confirms seeing Obama at a party in Los Angeles in June 1981. “At that time,” says Drew, “the future president was a doctrinaire Marxist revolutionary, although perhaps — for the first time — considering conventional politics as a more practical road to socialism.”
In “Dreams,” Obama gives no account of the following summer…
For the record, [David] Remnick is the Princeton-educated, Washington Post-groomed, Pulitzer-Prize winning New Yorker editor. I am a “little-known conservative writer” who lives in Kansas City.
When I called in [to the Milt Rosenberg show], I…noted that I had originated the thesis that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write Dreams From My Father. The question I posed to Remnick was this: “Why did you ignore the six detailed pages Christopher Andersen spent confirming my thesis?”…
Rosenberg allowed me to establish in some detail how Andersen documented the Obamas’ financial struggles in the early 1990s. Andersen related how at the urging of Michelle, a “hopelessly blocked” Obama turned to “friend and neighbor” Bill Ayers to help him with his much-acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.
Andersen’s details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.” Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. Obama hoped to use a comparable style for his own family history. The problem was that although he had taped interviews with many of his relatives, he could not find it in himself to write the book…
The key sentence in Andersen’s account is the one that I quoted on air almost verbatim: “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.” Added Andersen, “Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book.”
Getting back to the main point…what did he believe about social constructs when he was elected president of the United States? And what worldview informs his practices on behalf of this nation today?
As Kengor said, we deserve to know.
