Obama and
the ‘Left,’ by Thomas Sowell
The Washington Times
Tuesday October 28, 2008
Reprinted with permission
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Although Sen. Barack Obama has been allied with a succession of far left individuals over the years, that is only half the story. There are, after all, some honest and decent people on the left. But these have not been the ones that Mr. Obama has been allied with – allied, not merely “associated” with.
ACORN is not just an organization on the left. In addition to the voter frauds that ACORN has been involved in over the years, it is an organization with a history of thuggery, including going to bankers’ homes to harass them and their families, in order to force banks to lend to people with low credit ratings.
Nor was Barack Obama’s relationship with ACORN just a matter of once being their attorney long ago. More recently, he has directed hundreds of thousands of dollars their way. Money talks – and what it says is more important than a politician’s rhetoric in an election year.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pflegger are not just people with left-wing opinions. They are reckless demagogues preaching hatred of the lowest sort – and both are recipients of money from Mr. Obama.
Bill Ayers is not just “an education professor” who has some left-wing views. He is a confessed and unrepentant terrorist, who more recently has put his message of resentment into the schools – an effort using money from a foundation Mr. Obama headed.
Nor has the help all been one way. During the last debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, Mr. McCain mentioned that Mr. Obama’s political campaign began in Bill Ayers’ home. Mr. Obama immediately denied it and Mr. McCain had no real follow-up.
It was not this year’s political campaign that Mr. Obama began in Bill Ayers’ home but an earlier campaign for the Illinois state legislature. Barack Obama can match Bill Clinton in slickness at parsing words to evade accusations.
That is one way to get to the White House. But slickness and words won’t help a president deal with either domestic economic crises or the looming dangers of a nuclear Iran. People who think talking points on this or that problem constitute “the real issues” that we should be talking about, instead of Mr. Obama’s track record, ignore a very fundamental fact about representative government.
Representative government exists, in the first place, because we the voters cannot possibly have all the information necessary to make rational decisions on all the things the government does. We cannot rule through polls or referendums. We must trust someone to represent us, especially as president of the United States.
Once we recognize this basic fact of representative government, the question of how trust-worthy a candidate is becomes a more urgent question than any of the so-called “real issues.”
A candidate who spends two decades promoting polarization and then runs as a healer and uniter, rather than a divider, forfeits all trust by that fact alone.
If Ronald Reagan had attempted to run for president of the United States as a liberal, the media would have been all over him. His support for Barry Goldwater would have been in the headlines and in editorial denunciations across the country. No way would he have been able to get away with using soothing words to suggest he and Goldwater were like ships that passed in the night.
If Barack Obama had run as what he has always been, rather than as what he has never been, then we could simply cast our votes based on whether we agree with what he has always stood for.
Some people take solace from the fact Mr. Obama has verbally shifted position on some issues, like drilling for oil or gun control, since this is supposed to show he is “pragmatic” rather than ideological. But political zigzags show no such moderation as some seem to assume. V.I. Lenin zigzagged and so did Adolf Hitler. Zigzags may show no more than that someone is playing the public for fools.
Some people who see the fraud in what Mr. Obama says are amazed that others do not. But Mr. Obama knows what con men have long known. Their job is not convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. He does that very well.
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