My original post on Barack Obama’s ties to left-wing radicals elicited a postcard writing campaign (my first ever!) from Maine to Florida. Here’s what the many folks who signed the postcards said:
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“You wrote on your blog that Cliff Kincaid had failed to present evidence that Barack Obama was a communist. But Cliff never claimed to have such evidence. What he claimed to have was evidence that a communist named Frank Marshall Davis was a significant influence on Barack Obama. He also proved that Obama had concealed Davis’ identity in his book. Rather than write a silly entry on your blog, why doesn’t the Washington Examiner do a front-page story about the Davis-Obama relationship?”
True, Kincaid never claimed that Obama himself was a communist, which is why his relationship to Davis is less significant than his membership in a socialist group.
In his report, “Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection,” Kincaid writes:
“Dr. Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii, who knew and interviewed Davis and wrote a dissertation on his life and career, confirmed to me that the ‘Frank’ [in Obama’s book] is, in fact, Frank Marshall Davis.
“Takara confirmed that Davis was a significant influence over Obama during the three or four years that he attended the Punahou prep school. These would have been the years 1975-1979. She said Obama had been introduced to Davis by his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who considered Davis a ‘strong black male figure’ and thought he exerted a ‘positive’ influence over the young man in his high school years. ‘His grandfather was one of Frank’s closest friends,’ she said. ‘They played chess or cards together.”
Kincaid and Herb Romerstein did indeed document that Davis, a key member of a Moscow-sponsored communist cell in Hawaii, was good friends with Obama’s grandfather (who helped raise him) and hada close relationship with the young Obama as well.
However, I acknowledged this “significant relationship” in my original post:
“The voluminous information presented confirmed that Obama had indeed grown up in what researcher Max Friedman described as a ‘Marxist-rich environment,’ that his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a member of the Communist Party USA – a fact Obama took pains to conceal in his book, ‘Dreams From My Father,’ by referring to Davis by just his first name…”
But when Obama lived in Hawaii, he was still a teenager. It would have been almost impossible for him not to have a relationship with one of his grandfather’s best buddies, particularly so if Dunham had actively encouraged Davis to be a role model for his grandson, as Dr. Takara intimated. It is simply unfair to expect a 14-year-old boy (which Obama was in 1975) to distance himself from a family friend because of that friend’s politics or ideology.
Which is why I focused instead on Obama’s membership in Chicago’s New Party, a front group for the Democratic Socialists of America, which Australian Trevor Loudon calls “the most anti-American elements in the country.” Obama not only joined the New Party as an adult, but he had already started his political career by winning a seat in the Illinois legislature. His New Party membership shows that he considered the Democratic Party, whose nomination he now seeks, as too tame and centrist for his radical socialist views, a point later confirmed by his most-liberal-in-the-nation voting record and his continued association with former SDS members Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
Voluntarily associating with “the most anti-American elements in the country” seems to me to be a pretty strong indictment of the adult Obama’s worldview and choice of friends – and one he can’t blame on his grandfather.
