Berkeley on the Potomac?
1st December 2013
Paul Mirengoff connects the dots.
In 1996, when Obama went into electoral politics as a candidate for the Illinois state Senate, he did so as the hand-picked successor to Alice Palmer, an avowed socialist. (Palmer, however, decided to fight Obama for the seat after she lost a special election for Congress; Obama kept her off the ballot by successfully challenging her petition signatures). Palmer is the author of such articles as “Socialism Is the Only Way Forward.” And she attended the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1986.
Palmer would not have hand-picked Obama if she did not have good reason to believe that he shared her socialistic vision.
In 2000, when Obama ran for Congress against the prominent leftist incumbent Bobby Rush, the Democratic Socialists of America, though not endorsing either candidate, spoke of Obama in glowing terms while describing Rush as a disappointment to the left.
The Democratic Socialists of America would not have praised Obama if it did not have good reason to believe that he shared its socialistic vision.
Obama served in the U.S. Senate from 2005-2008. As Kurtz notes, one prominent index rated him the most liberal member of the Senate during that period — more liberal than even Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist.
Would Bill de Blasio have compiled a more leftist Senate voting record than Barack Obama did? It’s difficult to see how.