THE OBAMA CHRONICLES….Michael Ledeen is worried about Barack Obama:
I have nothing against hanging out with Marxist radicals. Some of my best friends are still Marxist radicals. I learn from them, even though I don’t agree with them very often. But what’s alarming about Obama is that he seems to have predominantly radical friends.
….And that pattern of behavior seems to me…to be a harbinger of the ideological nature of an Obama presidency….I fear that one of the catastrophes of an Obama Administration would be a high density of intellectual radicals, and not just on domestic policy, not just an increase in self-destructive political correctness in the schools and the media (the stifling of dissent in talk radio, etc. etc.), but also in foreign policy, where, as Andy tells us, Obama is a fan of dangerous characters like Odinga.
Remember way back in….oh….February? The conservative conventional wisdom at the time regarding Obama was remarkably sanguine. Sure, sure, he was a liberal, but he was thoughtful, cautious, nonradical, and always seemed willing to take the other guy’s side into account. If this really did turn out to be a Democratic year — well, we could do a lot worse than Barack Obama.
Now, a change of heart was always in the cards. Once the campaign really heated up we’d hear about his likely Supreme Court nominations, his liberal voting record, his elite Ivy League background, etc. etc. That’s all in a day’s work. But it’s not what happened. The conservative intelligentsia may not be quite willing to baldly support the “Obama is a secret Muslim” trope — that’s a little too….common — but a significant chunk of them really, truly seem to believe that Obama is a Manchurian candidate of some kind. That he’s a genuine 60s-vintage radical leftist hiding behind a carefully constructed, smooth-tongued exterior. And much like the John Birch Society conspiracy theorists of the same era, their best evidence of this is the very fact that he’s thoughtful, cautious, nonradical, and always seems willing to take the other guy’s side into account. Just look at his advisors — or should I say, “advisors”? His economic team is headed by Austan Goolsbee, Jason Furman, and these guys. His foreign policy team? Susan Rice, Tony Lake, and these guys. Domestic policy? David Cutler, Jason Grumet, and these guys. Of course, this is all a front for the rubes, deliberately designed to piss off guys like David Sirota and lull guys like David Broder into narcotic acquiescence. It’s very, very clever.
But not quite clever enough. Despite a full quarter century of carefully hiding his radical views from the public while he ascended the political ladder, he screwed up. He palled around with Bill Ayers. He spent 20 years in an America-hating black nationalist church. He supported an Islamofascist opposition leader in Kenya. He approved grants to a guy who promoted Maoism in American schools.
Those seem like odd mistakes for a savvy guy like Obama to make if he was otherwise so good at hiding his inner radicalism, don’t they? And yet, a lot of conservatives really seem to believe this stuff. Obama is a crypto-Marxist. A crypto-black nationalist. A crypto-appeaser. Everything you think you know about him is just a mask, the public side of a very careful, very deliberate, 25-year act. And nobody gets it except for us. Isn’t that always the way?
Next stop: Arkham Asylum. Or, more likely, membership in the same loony bin groups that thought Bill Clinton was dealing blow out of Mena when he was governor of Arkansas. I wonder which crazy billionaire is going to bankroll the Obama Chronicles when January 20th rolls around?
