What Makes Obama Tick?

After hitting No. 2 on the New York Times’ best-seller list in early September, “Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream” author Dinesh D’Souza was asked why he was surprised at the success of both his book and the movie based on it: “2016: Obama’s America”. He said: “It shows a real hunger for information on Obama. There’s a sense [that] we haven’t got the full story on this guy.”

The official narrative is that President Barack Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law, the first African-American president, whose father is from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. As D’Souza takes great pains to point out, the official narrative hides an enormous amount of background from view. D’Souza exposes some of that background and then claims that Obama adopted his father’s “anti-colonialism” – the doctrine which Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara called “a world system, the last stage of capitalism [which] must be defeated in a world confrontation” – which maintains that the West, primarily America, got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries to obtain their mineral wealth. As D’Souza noted in Forbes magazine in September 2010:

From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation.

He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America.

In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet

As a result, Obama seeks “a smaller America, a poorer America, an America unable to exert its will, an America…in decline so that others might rise…America needs to be taken down a notch.”

There are at least two problems with D’Souza’s thesis: one, Obama never knew his father, and two, his actions as President have shown him as a promoter of larger, more invasive government controls over Americans at home while his foreign policy seeks to extend and expand American influence and empire abroad. In sum, his behavior seeks to extend the plantation of the American government to every living soul on the planet, not to reduce it. In other words, Obama may more properly be called an anti-capitalist totalitarian.

This is not to write off either of D’Souza’s projects as irrelevant or useless in understanding Obama. In his film “2016” D’Souza properly states that Obama’s “founding fathers” were far different from America’s founders, and explored briefly the background of some of them, including especially the influence on Obama of Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis.

The Washington Examiner filled in many of the blanks in Obama’s early years in a series entitled “The Obama You Don’t Know”:

Ann Dunham was just 18 years old when she gave birth to Obama. She was a freshman at the University of Hawaii. His Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was a few years older than Ann. They were married against family wishes…

He abandoned Obama Jr.’s mother when the boy was 1. In 1964, Dunham filed for a divorce that was not contested. Her parents helped to raise the young Obama.

Obama’s mother met her second husband, an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro, while working at the East-West Center in Hawaii. They married, and in 1967, the young Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro, traveled to Indonesia with his mother when the Indonesian government recalled his stepfather…

In 1971, his mother sent young Obama back to Hawaii, where his grandmother, Madelyn, known as Toots, would become one of the first female vice presidents of a Honolulu bank. His grandfather was in sales.

His grandfather was Stanley Armour Dunham, a furniture salesman who was also friendly with a hard-core Communist named Frank Marshall Davis. Dunham, called “Gramps” by Obama in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, introduced his grandson to Davis, who took him under his wing and began to indoctrinate him.

For the record, Davis wrote for the Honolulu Record, a communist newspaper, and was known by the FBI to be a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Much more is now known about Davis thanks to the recent publication of The Communist, by Paul Kengor.

By 1980 Obama was a doctrinaire Marxist who believed that a full-blown communist revolution in the United States was imminent, and that the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980 was simply a minor setback to that revolution.

That he retained his fervent anti-American, pro-communist mindset as a student at the radical Occidental College in California was confirmed by one of Obama’s classmates, John Drew. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College and the author of the just-published book, The Communist, interviewed Drew and wrote about it for the American Thinker in December 2010:

Drew: As far as I can tell, I’m the only person in Obama’s extended circle of friends who is willing to speak out and verify that he was a Marxist-Leninist in his sophomore year of college from 1980 to 1981.  I met him because I graduated from Occidental College in 1979, and I was back at Occidental visiting a girlfriend.

Kengor: Was Occidental known for radical-left politics?  Would that have been an attraction to Obama?

Drew: It was considered the Moscow of southern California when I was there. There were a lot of Marxist professors, many of whom I got to know pretty well…

What I know absolutely for sure — and this is where I really sought you out and I really wanted to be helpful in terms of the historic record — was to verify that Barack Obama was definitely a Marxist and that it was very unusual for a sophomore at Occidental to be as radical or as ideologically attuned as young Barack Obama was.

Kengor: You said that Obama was introduced to you at Occidental College as a Marxist?  Because you were one [a Marxist] at that point?

Drew: Yeah, that’s embarrassing for me, but I studied Marxist economics when I was at the University of Sussex in England.  I had a junior-year scholarship over there and I did my senior honors thesis on Marxist economics when I was at Occidental College.  And I also founded [the] Democratic Student Socialist Alliance…in 1976.

Kengor: John, now you had told me before, and I’m reading from my own book here, “Obama was already an ardent Marxist when I met him in the fall of 1980.”

Drew: Yeah, that’s exactly right.  Obama believed, at the time I met him — this was probably around Christmastime in 1980 — because, you know, I had flown out during Christmas break from Cornell, where I was doing my graduate work.

Young Obama was looking forward to an imminent social revolution — literally a movement where the working classes would overthrow the ruling class and institute a kind of socialist utopia in the United States.  I mean, that’s how extreme his views were his sophomore year of college.

Kengor: And you would know this because you were a comrade, so to speak.

Drew: Yeah, I was a comrade…I felt like I was doing Obama a favor by pointing out that the Marxist revolution that he [was] hoping for was really kind of a pipe dream, and that there was nothing in European history or the history of developed nations that would make that sort of fantasy — you know, [the] Frank Marshall Davis fantasy of revolution — come true…

Kengor: I know people are listening right now who want me to address this — and especially people who are Obama supporters. To be fair, I mean, look at where you were then and now where you are today.

S. Ann Dunham (Photo credit: East-West Center)

Drew: Well, yeah, now I’m a Ronald Reagan, churchgoing, Baptist conservative…

Kengor: But now, okay, so what about Obama?  Where do you think he is today?

Drew: I can definitely kick down some doors here intellectually by nailing down that he had a very consistent ideology, probably from the time that he was [in Hawaii] until he was there with Alice Palmer and Bill Ayers in Chicago.

I think his current behavior demonstrates that he does still have these ideological convictions. Whenever he talks about taxing the richest two percent, I think even though he knows that will harm the economy — to him, that redistribution of wealth is still extremely important.

Kengor: So it’s not that he’s right now trying to abolish all private property, but you’re saying he…still holds to certain tenets of a Marxist worldview?

Drew: Yeah, I think whenever he talks about people clinging to their guns and their religion due to economic stress, that’s just the standard Marxist argument. In fact, that’s the argument of alienation and class-consciousness that [Marxists believe that people] hold to, the superficial religious and cultural ideals of the capitalist culture.

[Marxists believe that people hold to that] instead of paying attention to the root economic changes, which are supposedly controlling their thoughts and their behavior. So he’s still using the Marxist mental architecture in the way he talks about things, and I really think he’s surrounded by people [who] share that mental architecture.

What makes these revelations helpful in understanding Obama is Drew’s own credibility. A recovering Marxist, John C. Drew, Ph.D., is an award-winning political scientist who is a writer for The American Thinker, Breitbart.com and David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine. Dr. Drew has taught at Cornell University, Hope International University, University of Oregon, and Williams College in Massachusetts

From Occidental, Obama transferred to Columbia University where he stayed active in revolutionary communist activities. Specifically, the attended Socialist Scholars Conferences with speakers that included, according to Trevor Louden, “members of the Communist Party USA and its offshoot, the Committees of Correspondence, as well as Maoists, Trotskyists, black radicals, gay activists and radical feminists.”

Upon graduation from Columbia, Obama moved to Chicago, taking a position with the Developing Communities Project which allowed him to refine his skills as a Saul Alinsky activist and trainer. In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution” – the objective of which is the gradual systematic acquisition of power in a particular power structure and then to push for radical changes to that structure from the inside. According to Alinsky, “The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties” and then introduce changes as part of the now-ruling apparatus.

In the early to mid-1990s, Obama worked with ACORN and its voter-mobilization arm, Project Vote, representing it in numerous election-law cases. During this period Obama developed a friendship with two more communist revolutionaries, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, both of whom were leaders in the 1960’s in the domestic terrorist group Weatherman, a spin-off of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They participated directly in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972.

Obama’s relationship with Ayers deepened over time which resulted in Ayers appointing Obama to chair his Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a radical organization dedicated to indoctrinating young people in “America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.”

So close is the relationship to this day that there is credible proof that Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father.

Naturally, Obama denies any such close relationship. In April, 2008, when the issue was raised, he said:

[Ayers] is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who is a professor of English in Chicago, who I know, and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He is not somebody who I exchange ideas from [with] on a regular basis.

And the notion that somehow, as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts forty years ago when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense…

[T]his kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, [that] somehow their ideas could be attributed to me, I think the American people are smarter than that.

They’re not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn’t.

Links to other radicals working from the inside to bring down the United States continued to grow in Obama’s network. One primary link goes back to 1947, 14 years before Obama was born. Frank Marshall Davis wrote a column for the communist paper, the Chicago Star, which was published on September 20^th. In it Davis wrote: “I’m so un-American right now that I want to see price controls clamped back on this minute, a new and stronger excess profits tax put into operation, and the whole [meat] packing industry nationalized.” Working with Davis in promoting the packing-house union was Vernon Jarrett who collaborated in the communist-controlled Citizen’s Committee to Aid Packing-House Workers.

Vernon Jarrett would later become father-in-law to Obama’s most intimate personal adviser in the White House, Valerie Jarrett.

But the links from efforts to unionize the packing-house industry reached all the way to the then-Soviet Union. Harry and David Canter lived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s while Harry was given the highly-regarded responsibility for translating Lenin’s writings. In the 1940s they returned to Chicago and began working closely with Davis. In the 1970s David Canter would become a mentor to another radical revolutionary, David Axelrod, Obama’s chief reelection strategist.

Another critical link has only partly been explored that ties Obama to the radical left: that to Obama’s “spiritual advisor,” Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC). Obama had been attending services there since 1988, and joined TUCC officially in 1992. Obama made clear his dependence upon Wright for enlightenment and direction:

What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.

That’s what mentors do: they help their students keep their focus on the “main thing.” For Wright the “main thing” is black liberation theology, channeling Marxist class warfare into hatred, division and ultimately, violence.

So vitriolic were Wright’s blasphemies against America that Obama offered Wright $150,000 not to preach until the November presidential election. According to Wright, Barack said: “I really wish you wouldn’t do any more public speaking until after the November election. It’s going to hurt the campaign if you do that.”

And so just how did Obama arrive at the White House? His journey into politics began with the help of another committed communist, Alice Palmer. Palmer was appointed to the Illinois state Senate in June 1991 to fill the remainder of a term for a senator who was retiring. She won election to the seat in 1992 and served until January 1997.

But in July 1995 Palmer announced that she would run for the U.S. House and would not seek reelection as a result. She named Obama as her successor who announced his campaign for her seat formally in September. Obama won in a walk in the November general election in 1996.

Since assuming office Obama has fulfilled his mandate to bring down the capitalist system. He has appointed communists and communist sympathizers as his “czars,” including the infamous Van Jones who was forced to resign because of his blatant communist background. Other czars with communist ties and sympathies included Carol Browner, Obama’s Energy and Environment Czar, John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar and Hannah Rosenthal, Obama’s Anti-Semitism Czar.

His audacious creation of more than 900 Executive Orders allowed the President not only to override and circumvent Congressional authority under the Constitution to create legislation, but also to take control of

• under EO 10990 all modes of transportation including highways and seaports
• under EO 10995 all communications media
• under EO 10997 all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals
• and numerous others including the most audacious one of all: EO 11051 which creates the Office of Emergency Planning and gives that office authorization to put all of his Executive Orders into effect any time there is a “time of increased international tensions [or] economic or financial cris[es].”

His signature piece of legislation, ObamaCare, illustrates Obama’s drive to move the economy away from market incentives and into government control. He seeks a single payer system, but, according to Jonah Goldberg, writing in Commentary magazine,

He is long on record saying he would prefer a single-payer system if he could design one from scratch. But since he has to work from within the confines of the existing system, he has given us ObamaCare instead—which, again, is now merely a “critical first step.”

It uses insurance companies as governmental entities, akin to utilities, to provide a now-mandatory government service. The insurance companies will make nominal government-decreed profits on top of government-decreed “fees” and “premiums” (rates set by government and enforced by the Internal Revenue Service).

On the night the House caved in and approved ObamaCare, Obama said:

This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system. But it moves us decisively in the right direction…

As momentous as this day is, it’s not the end of this journey.

And so, who is Obama after all? As Thomas Sowell summarized it,

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.

After reviewing the literature on Obama’s background, his mentors, advisors, cronies and czars, Mark Hendrickson concluded in Forbes magazine that Obama is

an interventionist, corporatist, statist, Big Government progressive, free-market-hating control freak who favors economic policies of a Marxist-Leninist flavor.