http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmM2NDQ3ZWQ1YWM0Y2QyZTUxMDdkY...OTJlNGE
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Obama's Political Origins [Lisa Schiffren]
Until I came across this article by Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in
Media, which I regard as factual -- with all that that implies -- the
questions about Obama's background that should have come naturally
never quite rose to the surface of my mind. Barack Obama is the new
man, of course. His mixed race is a symbol of that. Just like Tiger
Woods -- as we have read, endlessly. What's to wonder about?
But maybe it's not so simple. Obama and I are roughly the same age. I
grew up in liberal circles in New York City -- a place to which people
who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for
generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates
throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the
product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the
offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish,
but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black
father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was
neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always
through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist
Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white
woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably
a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton
Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania
Professor Lani Guinier -- also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper
baby.)
I don't know how Barak Obama's parents met. But the Kincaid article
referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama's family,
later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black
Communist intellectual. And, according to what Obama wrote in his
first autobiography, the man in question -- Frank Marshall Davis --
appears to have been Barack's own mentor, and even a father figure. Of
course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it's an open
question what it means practically to have been politically mentored
by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer.
Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream
liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how
Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate
student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them
that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of
racism -- let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage
only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large
group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the
Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally
explosive matter at arm's distance.
It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir
up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as
the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be
discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights
revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't
buy the commie line -- and showed more faith in the possibilities of
democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display
in Moscow.
Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's
background, now that his chances of being president have increased so
much.
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