Garbage In, Garbage Out

Obama's current political troubles are the result of his misguided worldview, not GOP operatives
by:R.J. Moeller

As pundits and politicians scurry to explain, or explain away, the declining popularity and poll numbers for President Obama, the Democrat-dominated congress, and their Leftist policies intended to “re-make” America, many are missing the most obvious potential explanation. The ideas and pieces of legislation being suggested, from cap-and-trade to socialized medicine, are really bad ones and stem from a misguided worldview.

Perhaps it isn’t all the fault of Rush Limbaugh or evil insurance companies that Americans are voicing their disdain for the current Democratic leadership’s attempt to use an admittedly tumultuous and trying time for the nation to steam-roll every expansion of the federal government’s size, scope, and power that pops into their heads. Certainly there are contributing factors involved with the precipitous decline in the number of Americans who are in favor of the cost of the brand of change Obama promised. But the root cause for waning support may just be that the ideas and values our president and many currently in the highest reaches of power believe in are wrong and ineffective.

Let me be as clear as I can be: I do not reject Barack Obama the person. I do not question the fact that he believes he is doing what is best for this country. I do not believe he was born in Kenya. I do not believe he is a secret Muslim. He is by all accounts a loving father and good husband and provides an excellent role in this regard. God bless him for these and many other outstanding traits. My problem, and I believe his fundamental problem, is with the values and philosophies that shaped and influenced him prior to his becoming our Commander-in-Chief. My strong disagreement with him is at the level of values and convictions and world-view, not race or ethnicity.

Barack Obama and his administration are starting to suffer from the inevitable impact of years spent sitting at the feet of radical mentors who held distorted views of economics, politics, and morality.

To verify the truth of whether or not Barack Obama’s mentors and their ideas were indeed radical in nature, I turned not to the usual suspects for my information and proof. I don’t go to the pages of conservative magazines and Republican websites. Rather I sought out such self-avowed liberal sources as The New Republic Magazine, the New York Times, Barack Obama’s own published memoirs, and to the “bible” for all radical community organizers, Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals.

It was here I read for myself the very words of the very people that molded, shaped, influenced, and motivated the political worldview of our 44^th president. What I find is much more shocking and disturbing than some Sean Hannity diatribe, a Michael Steele scripted Republican National Committee press release, or a You Tube video forwarded by a wacky relative.

Barack Obama, the presidential candidate, was introduced to the nation as a community organizer from Chicago who represented a “new kind” of politician, one above the typical political fray. He presented himself as a consensus-builder, and talked frequently about reaching across the aisle to his Republican counterparts. He opined about a “common sense approach” and the need for our nation to move past “divisive” politics. The problem with his middle-of-the-road, even-Steven portrait of Obama, is that, in reality, it never existed.

How do we know that?

Let’s start with his Senate career. This 2-year period spent as a Senator, one in which he co-authored no more than a handful of meaningless bills, was by far the most “moderate” of his entire life. For such a term of moderation Barack Obama was rated the “most liberal" voting member of Congress. He stood to the Left of Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Joe Biden. During the 20 years before becoming the most liberal-voting Senator, he was known far and wide as a far-Left Chicago community organizer, one endowed with unusually effective rhetorical gifts.

So let’s turn next to his training as a community organizer. What is a community organizer?

It is at base a social agitator. At first I thought it might just be someone who organized block parties and helps to get out the vote? In fact, their primary goal according to Rules for Radicals, (and I quote) is to, “rub raw the wounds of discontent.” This is to be accomplished among primarily minority groups whose anger can be mobilized to bring about radical societal change. Saul Alinksy encourages tactics such as “overwhelming the system.” These tactics are designed to get the current system to collapse so a new collectivist, re-distributive form of social order can be erected in its place.

In other words, the community organizer’s political views, their "means" and "ends", are distinctly Marxist. (If you disagree, then you don’t know what Marxism is.) Their primary goal is to amass and centralize political power. Community organizers are left to decide what their own definitions of morality will be. This way, according to their dogma, anything standing in the way of doing what they have defined as the “right thing” becomes expendable. I’m not making this up. It’s in their literature, the very literature Obama embraced and taught classes on to new recruits during the 1980’s and 1990’s.

In one of the New Republic’s articles on the recent presidential campaign, journalist Ryan Lizza chronicled the ascendancy of Barack Obama. He takes us on the journey of a 24 year old agnostic who moved to Chicago after responding to an advertisement in the New York Times, to the United States Senator who would eventually become Commander-in-Chief. The details of that rise, of the people Obama worked for, and the things he believed in and taught others to believe in, are all at serious odds with the bi-partisan, non-radical, new type of politician President Obama insisted he was during the campaign.

For example, the organization that hired Obama after he graduated Columbia University was the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC). The men who ran it were primarily atheist and white males who realized that were being rejected by black pastors and community leaders because of their skin color and lack of religious faith. They hired Barack because he was black, well spoken, and believed in the radical ideology of Chicago’s own Saul Alinsky. Alinsky is ofen called the “father of community organizing” though he died in 1972. His influence lived on however, as he left behind him a number of organizations that trained future agitators under the guidance of his published magnum opus, Rules for Radicals.

Barack Obama was himself first turned away by the same Chicago pastors and leaders. Why? Because he was working for the same atheist white guys the group had previously rejected, and it was known that he was not a church-going man.

The turning point for Barack Obama’s career came when he was introduced to Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Hyde Park. He urged Obama to join his church in order to win over the confidence of the black community, which he did.It cannot be avoided that Barack Obama, the man who claims to be a moderate from the school of common sense, chose for his home church and pastor a mentor that a pro-Obama liberal magazine described like this:

Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity's guiding principles--what the church calls the "BlackValue System"--included a "Disavowal of the Pursuit of 'Middleclassness.'"

So who helped shape President Obama’s thinking? In addition to the self-avowed radicals who idolized the likes of Saul Alinsky, the next most important person was Jeremiah Wright. Wright taught his congregants that white people invented AIDS, America is an awful place that needs fundamental change, and that the purpose of the church body is to strive for the re-distribution of wealth. So what is the ideological formula that formed the political mindset of our 44^th President?

Leftist Social Agitation + Leftist Social Gospel + Corrupt Chicago Politics = Barack Obama.

The point here is this: the President and his policies are becoming increasingly unpopular because they are simply wrong. They are wrong because they emanate from ill-conceived, incorrect understandings of the world around us. They are based on a flawed view of economics, history, and Judeo-Christian inspired American ideals and values. Because his policies are based on wrong ideas, if he continues to follow this misguided course to re-shape America, they will fail and he will fail.

I consistently read men like Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman for a better understanding of economics. I turn to the likes of CS Lewis, GK Chesterton and Albert Mohler for matters of faith and worldview. The pastors of the churches I have attended in my life have undeniably impacted me in profound ways and have helped to shape the way I think about God. I am proud to be associated in any way with any of these men. Soaking up wisdom from others is an unavoidable reality of life and learning for all humans who begin that life knowing little of the world, of economics, of politics, etc.

Although I am not responsible for every word of every book or sermon these men have put out for public consumption, it has been impossible for me not to come away from the time I spend with them (or their thoughts) changed forever.

So who changed Obama? Who helped steer him in the direction he has now walked for decades as a public figure, first in Chicago and now in Washington? Could it be that the ideology and worldview Barack Obama was exposed to is what has led him, and now our country, to the point where handing over more than 1/6 of the American allegedly-free-market economy to the federal government is even on the table? Might more and more Americans be rejecting the president's plans not just because of a poor marketing strategy by the White House, but because more and more Americans are realizing that the radical community organizer persona that seemed trendy and hip last year was really just their "Obama goggles" talking?

Like any other loyal American I would rather have my President succeed than fail. So here’s my advice: You can still succeed, Mr. President, but only by radically changing course now. Become the moderate you ensured us you are. Prove to us that the distance you have attempted to put between you and your radical past is sincere.

Take the intellectual and ideological refuse you filled your head with for all those years out to the curb one last time and let history's garbageman place it upon the pile where it belongs.