EXCERPTS FROM RADICAL IN THE WHITE HOUSE:
[What is Obama's strategy?]
I argue in the book that Obama isn’t in quite as hopeless a position as he may seem to be right now. Obama has adopted a high-risk strategy. His long-term goal is to polarize the parties along class lines, thereby driving the country substantially to the left. He’s taking big chances to get there, but there is a plausible long-term scenario for success. I go into this in some detail in the final chapter...[What is the Midwest Academy?]
I would call Obama, a “Midwest Academy socialist,” and one way to read the book is as a long explanation of exactly what Midwest Academy socialism is.[Who is Heather Booth?]
LOPEZ: What does the Midwest Academy have to do with the milestone health-care legislation the president signed this March?
KURTZ: The Midwest Academy virtually invented the “public option” idea, although in those days they wanted a public energy corporation to “compete” with private oil and gas companies (in the unspoken hope of driving them out of business). I believe that Obama’s support for a public option and his willingness to trade it away were both based on the Midwest Academy’s strategies of gradualism and “non-reformist reforms.” Even without the public option, the health-care bill as written is designed to drive the system toward single-payer over time. The president’s way of selling health-care reform, chiefly as a pragmatic fix rather than a matter of principle, also goes back to Alinskyite techniques as filtered through the Midwest Academy.
Midwest Academy founder Heather Booth began as a socialist feminist with an intense interest in abortion. Yet she ultimately downplayed that issue in an effort to assemble a populist anti-business coalition that united culturally conservative blue-collar workers with the descendants of the Sixties left. Midwest Academy strategy is to downplay cultural issues and foreign policy in order to avoid dividing a broad-based, economically focused, populist coalition of the Left. I think Obama follows this program. He’s a leftist on cultural issues, but he doesn’t want to emphasize it any more than he absolutely has to, because that will split his coalition on economic issues, which is what he really cares about.[The final chapter...]
The final chapter of the book shows how deeply Obama’s past still influences his present. More broadly, electing and reelecting a president is, in substantial measure, a matter of trust. Obama has misrepresented who he was and is, both during the 2008 election and since. In that sense, he has broken trust with the public. Only if the American people know the truth about their president’s political beliefs can they make an informed decision about his reelection. That is how democracy works. The mind of the president means a great deal. The health-care and financial-reform bills are largely unfinished projects. What they will become depends on how the massive regulatory apparatus of each is shaped by the administration. A number of Obama’s supporters still believe his claims of post-partisan pragmatism. Showing that this is not the true picture could have a very significant effect on whether the country decides to throw in its lot with Obama or his Republican opponent two years from now.[Liar-in-Chief]
LOPEZ: If there’s one thing you could drive home to Americans about the president, what would it be?
KURTZ: He hasn’t been telling us the truth about his political convictions.
LOPEZ: What does it mean for American history that we have a socialist as president right now?
KURTZ: The liberalizing changes of the Sixties have borne fruit in a new generation, yet they have been incomplete. The Democrats have moved left, but resistance to those changes has driven Republicans to the right. The government sector is so large now that the fundamental character of the American system is at stake. We will either move incrementally over the line toward European-style socialism, or pull substantially back. The battle will be fought out over the next two years, with the coming presidential election determining the winner. A Republican victory next week does not decide the question. It only sets up the larger battle Obama has been planning all along. We don’t yet know who will win.
Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
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