Views > March 11, 2008

Red-Boating Obama

By Joel Bleifuss

Sen. Barack Obama is many things to the right-wing noise machine: a crypto-Muslim, a drug-addled hoodlum, a snob who disdains flag lapel pins, and the husband of an avowed America-hater.

Should Obama get the nomination, we can expect Republicans—and their 527 Swift Boat surrogates—to move far beyond Sen. Hillary Clinton’s “kitchen-sink” pot shots (as Obama calls them) and deploy Web-based slurs in their propaganda. In February, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times of London let loose with an article headlined “Right slams Obama as ‘shady Chicago socialist.’ ”

Is Obama a socialist? We wish. Unfortunately, his economic program is uninspiringly centrist. (See David Moberg’s “Obamanomics.”) Nevertheless, it is true that Obama has been seen with pinkos.

In particular, Obama can be linked to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Democratic Party-oriented organization that is a member of the Socialist International (known as the Second International or SI), a global association of social democratic parties. SI-affiliates currently govern in the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy, among other outposts of social democratic radicalism.

On Feb. 25, 1996, Obama, who was then a candidate for the Illinois state Senate, spoke at a University of Chicago event titled “Employment and Survival in Urban America.” The event’s sponsors were the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, the University of Chicago DSA Youth Section and the university’s Young Democrats.

The conservative group Accuracy in Media (AIM), which has once again found a reason for existence, thinks it has connected the dots and uncovered a global conspiracy: “DSA describes itself as the largest socialist organization in the United States and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International. The Socialist International has what is called ‘consultative status’ with the United Nations. In other words, it works hand-in-glove with the world body.”

Conservative strategist Grover Norquist told the Sunday Times’ Sarah Baxter: “[Obama] is open to being defined as a left-wing, corrupt Chicago politician.”

Baxter further reports that “Obama could run into further difficulties” because, between 1999 and 2002, he served on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. Not only is Woods an anti-poverty organization, it is also where Bill Ayers serves as a board member. Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was at one time a member of the Weather Underground, and, in 2001, contributed $200 to Obama’s state Senate campaign. Baxter explains that the Weather Underground was a “left-wing terrorist group.” (Full disclosure: I serve on a board with Ayers, a fine fellow.)

But wait, there’s more!

While Obama was on the board, the foundation provided two grants to the Arab American Action Network, whose president at the time was Mona Khalidi, the wife of Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University professor (and occasional In These Times contributor) who is a critic of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank. You can read all about it in the story “Obama Worked with Terrorist” on WorldNetDaily.com, a right-wing website founded by Joseph Farah, the former editor of the Sacramento Union, the newspaper funded by Richard Mellon Scaife and other members of what Hillary Clinton in 1998 aptly termed “this vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Or you can wait until the fall, when it will all be coming to a television commercial near you.

Let the Red-boating begin!

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• Reader Comments

  Folks interested in reading about what Obama had to say at the University of Chicago form should go to:

  http://www.chicagodsa.org/ngarchive/ng45.html#anchor1078705

  be well,
  bob roman

  Posted by robertmroman on Mar 11, 2008 at 6:28 AM

  The mind of Norquist merely hints at what we can expect from the loathsome liturgy of right-wing rituals of empowerment. We look forward, Joel, to your keeping close tabs on the GOP mendacity machine as it exploits the telling ignorance of electors’ inattentiveness and reactionary tendencies. As I repeatedly inform the brighter lights of my children’s generation whom I occasionally have the good fortune to meet and engage, I’d thought, as a young mainstream journalist 40 years ago, that Nixon’s gang would be the worst ever I’d see in control of the presidency. However, the current cretins ( the word is derived form the Latin for christians) make Haldemann, Hoover, MItchell, Tricky and Doktor K seems innocuous by comparison. We socialists now have only Sen. Obama to look to for resurrection of the presidency as a viably democratic executor of what ought to be the people’s will, but would more correctly be termed, owing to contemporary stupefactions, the people’s swill. Thank you for the clever coinage. I’ll henceforth refer to Red-Boating, hoping others will understand its reference, which might be asking for far too much from far too many Americans at the moment. Will the Illinois Senator ever dare mention Mr. Debs? Dare he consult with Professor Zinn? Or will he shrink from labor’s defense as Tony Blair teaches at Yale, lamely dispelling William Buckley’s mantras?

  Posted by Bud Wizer on Mar 12, 2008 at 10:08 AM

  Britain an outpost of social democratic radicalism?

  That’s what we thought, too.  Eleven long years ago.

  Posted by Dolphin on Mar 16, 2008 at 7:58 AM

  Wait.  You’re saying that Barack Hussein O’Bama (Happy St Pat’s Day, Chicago), an African-American candidate for the presidency, can now be credibly connected to the Democratic Socialists of America (good organization, by the way, I’ve still got an expired membership card somewhere in my wallet), in addition to his association with Jeremiah Wright (with whose “radical” rhetoric I completely agree), and yet you seem to expect him to win the nomination and defeat John McCain in the general election?  You are either completely insane, or naively deluded, or suffer from a political death wish.  The Republicans, I can assure you, are salivating at the prospect of running McCain against him.

  Clinton is the only viable candidate for the office.

  Posted by Major Major on Mar 16, 2008 at 9:34 PM

  On second thought, maybe the Democrats don’t have a death wish after all.  Maybe they’d rather have the Republicans muck out their own stables.  But if that’s true, then it’s a dangerous game they’re playing, because whatever happens the Republicans will always blame the liberals for the catastrophic consequences the conservatives create, with the right wing extremists calling for a revolution from above (fascism and warfare) while the left wing extremists invoke the necessity of inciting a revolution from below (communism and civil war).

  Posted by Major Major on Mar 17, 2008 at 3:57 PM

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