The form carried a recommended reading list, including Rules for Radicals by the notorious hard-left community organizer and Obama mentor Saul Alinsky, and two Huffington Post articles by Zack Exley, “The New Organizers” and “Obama Field Organizers Plot a Miracle.” The first of those, published in October 2008, enthuses about “an insurgent generation of organizers” inside the Obama campaign that has, “almost without anyone noticing… built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people’s organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.”
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Exley operated the Web site www.gwbush.com, which was filled with lies about George W. Bush that were designed to kill his chance to become president. The site’s headline was “Just Say ‘No’ to a Former Cocaine User for President.”
Also included on the OFA internship recommended reading list were Stir It Up: Lessons from Community Organizing and Advocacy by the leftist activist Rinku Sen, and sections of Obama’s book Dreams from My Father dealing with his days as a community organizer in Chicago.
And what is the point of all this propaganda and community organizing? To elect more Democrats, of course. This internship program is geared toward the 2010 elections. The form begins with a nakedly partisan and propagandistic appeal: “Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda of change. OFA is launching a national internship program connecting students all over the country with our organization on the ground—working to make the change we fought so hard for in 2008 a reality in 2010 and beyond.”29
Obama is using the public school system to help ensure Democratic victories in 2010, 2012, and thereafter.
SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA THROUGH THE NEA
A few overzealous schoolteachers, nothing more? Such was the claim on the left. But there was no mistaking the post-American president’s insidious manipulation of the National Endowment for the Arts. On August 10, 2009, the White House Office of Public Engagement, the National Endowment for the Arts, and an ostensibly nonpartisan volunteer group called United We Serve hosted a conference call. According to Patrick Courrielche of Big Hollywood, who was invited to participate, “the call would include ‘a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”
What kind of positive change? What else but promoting the socialist agenda of the post-American president? “We were encouraged,” Courrielche explains, “to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these ‘focus areas’ as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign, and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues.”
In other words, the participants were encouraged to create art to further the Obama agenda. The ballot box wasn’t enough. The mainstream media wasn’t enough. The appeal to reason and proven success would fail the post-American president and his allies, and apparently they knew it—so they wanted to resort to more subtle means of persuasion. Courrielche warned of “the danger of the use of the art community as a tool of the state.”30 There was no attempt to hide the manipulative and politicized aspect of the “art” the conference call participants were being urged to produce: “Throughout the conversation,” recalled Courrielche, “we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to ‘shape the lives’ of those around us. The now famous Obama ‘Hope’ poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s ‘Yes We Can’ song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election.”31
The official story was that Michael Skolnik, the political director for hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons (why does a music-industry leader need a “political director”?), organized the call out of sheer public-spiritedness. However, John Nolte of Big Hollywood explained that “all evidence points to the fact that the conference call was a ruse, a front for a White House using Skolnik as a kind of beard in order to put an innocent spin on their abuse of the NEA and two non-partisan volunteer organizations (United We Serve—an initiative overseen by The Corporation for National and Community Service—a federal agency, and the White House’s Office of Public Engagement).” Nolte said that the goal of all this was “to motivate a group of hand-picked pro-Obama artists (grant recipients or those wanting grants) to push the President’s flagging agenda, especially health care—and to funnel this promotion through the ACORN-related Serve.gov website.”32
American taxpayers of all political persuasions subsidize the National Endowment for the Arts (and, of course, have no choice not to do so), supposedly so that art will be created that will enrich all citizens and American culture in general. Barack Obama was attempting to use it to further one political perspective. Yet when art becomes the handmaiden of politics, it is no longer art at all—it is propaganda. He was attempting to compel the NEA to start turning out a softer version of the socialist realism that put a confident, muscular face on Stalin’s tyranny.
The August 10 call was not the Obama administration’s only attempt to corral the art world into becoming propagandists for the regime. Culture critic Lee Rosenbaum, who blogs about the art world, reported on September 2, 2009, that Kalpen Modi, the associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, in an August 27 conference call “sought to rally the artworld troops behind President Obama’s call for Americans to engage in public service.” Rosenbaum, who noted that she “supported and (with reservations) still support the agenda of the new President,” saw the ominous implications of this for the integrity of the art world: “It’s a worthwhile objective, to be sure. But government exhortations for artists to join the United We Serve brigade makes me more than a little uneasy.… More government oversight will inevitably lead to more government interference and control.”33
ONE-PARTY STATE
And for the post-American president, more government interference and control meant Democrat Party interference and control. On November 5, 2009, John Berry, the director of the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees personnel appointments for the federal bureaucracy, issued a directive: “Beginning January 1, 2010, agencies must seek prior approval from OPM before they can appoint a current or recent political appointee to a competitive or non-political excepted service position at any level under the provisions of title 5, United States Code.”34 In plain English, this meant that former political appointees could not be appointed to civil service positions without special approval—and the memo directed that this provision was to be made retroactive going back five years. Pundit Mark Tapscott explained that this directive “effectively establishes a partisan political factor in hiring for career civil service positions in the federal bureaucracy.… In other words, if you worked for President Bush in the executive branch at any time during his second term in the White House, you may not be approved. The same applies if you worked for a Republican Member of Congress at any point during the past five years.”35
According to political blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com, it amounted to an attempt to “purge the federal government of Republican civil servants.… The memorandum goes on to apply this change to civil servants who were political appointees in the last five years, in effect freezing these employees out of other positions, denying them promotions, and forcing them out of their jobs.”36
For Erickson, there was more than a whiff of the one-party state to this Obama initiative: “This is what happens in third world kleptocracies and totalitarian regimes. This is scary stuff.”37
Even that was not all. Any decent socialist propaganda needs a socialist hero. And some were anxious to cast the post-American president himself in that role.
SOCI
ALIST HERO
Louis Farrakhan proclaimed Obama to be the messiah back in October 2008: “You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”38 It became a joke, particularly among Republicans and conservatives, to call Obama the Messiah in view of the extravagant praise—and extravagant hopes—that were attached to him during the campaign.
But there was also a serious cultic edge to some of the adulation.
The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman, provoked ridicule when he said in October 2009 that “Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.” He didn’t mean that Barack Obama is a literary titan who doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus while petty men like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy walk under his huge legs and peep about to find themselves dishonorable graves. But what he did mean, while no less fatuous, was also disquieting in its implications: for the first time, the United States of America had a president whose supporters talked about him in the same effusive and worshipful tones usually reserved for the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong Il.
What Landesman really meant was that since Obama was the most powerful man in the world and a writer as well, the president was the most politically powerful writer since Caesar. “This is the first president,” Landesman asserted, “that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.” Landesman is wrong about this in several ways: as Scott Johnson at the popular “Powerline” blog pointed out, Lincoln never actually wrote a book, and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon wrote books without employing ghostwriters. Johnson also mentions Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, whose Profiles in Courage was ghostwritten; “my guess,” Johnson concludes, “is that JFK and Obama share the attribute of authorship in roughly equal measure.”
Probably so. But that didn’t stop Landesman from exulting: “If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” Ludicrous? Yes. After all, the inevitable question was, “What has he done to deserve this?” Did Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope really merit being placed above Churchill’s The Second World War, The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, or even Theodore Roosevelt’s The Strenuous Life?
Landesman’s ridiculously exaggerated praise recalled the Soviet literary establishment’s hailing of Stalin’s turgid Marxism and Problems of Linguistics and Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR as “works of genius.” Every German home once had a copy of Mein Kampf, even if nobody in the house read it, and every Chinese citizen once knew that he better own a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book—if he knew what was good for him. Landesman has given Barack Obama the perfect companion to his spurious Nobel Prize: the fulsome and empty literary praise usually reserved for totalitarian autocrats of little or no actual literary accomplishment.
At a time when the Obama administration was relentlessly demonizing dissenting voices and manifesting a shaky (at best) commitment to the freedom of speech, it was hardly a reassuring message to send. It demonstrated once again this administration’s utter tone deafness and apparent indifference to genuine concerns about its commitment to core principles of the U.S. Constitution—witness Nancy Pelosi’s incredulous response of “Are you serious?” to a questioner who asked her about the constitutionality of nationalizing health care.
With free speech under attack everywhere—attacks that were sometimes abetted by the Obama administration—it was not the time to be inviting comparisons with history’s greatest oppressors. Even comparisons on the absurdity meter.
Writing in 1962, Ayn Rand foresaw the disaster the Obama administration was bringing upon the nation:
A “mixed economy” [socialism/capitalism] is a society in the process of committing suicide.
A nation cannot survive half-slave, half-free. Consider the condition of a nation in which every other social group becomes both the slave and the enslaved of every other group. Ask yourself how long such a condition can last and what its inevitable outcome will be.39
TWELVE
THE RED CZARS
ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA WARNED ABOUT THE ARROGATION OF POWER IN THE EXECUTIVE branch: “The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m president of the United States.”1
When he did become president, however, he did just the opposite. He took steps to centralize power in the executive branch that George W. Bush would never have dreamed of taking. Working at a furious pace, he appointed an unprecedented proliferation of officials—known popularly as “czars”—with a huge array of responsibilities over immense swaths of domestic and foreign policy. These appointments bypassed the legislative branch altogether, for while conventional Cabinet appointments required the approval and oversight of Congress, these czars were accountable to no one except Barack Hussein Obama.
The czars all have Cabinet counterparts, also—people who should be doing their jobs, and as far as the general public is concerned, are doing their jobs. Yet while Cabinet members are subject to confirmation hearings and public scrutiny, the czars perform many of their ostensible duties—out of the public eye and far away from any accountability.
Obama wasn’t the first president to appoint “czars” answerable only to himself. The media first used the term in connection with World War II–era Roosevelt administration officials overseeing various emergency programs, and revived it during the Nixon administration; it has been around ever since. But many of these earlier czars were performing special duties, without having responsibilities that overlapped with those of other officials. And none of his predecessors could match the post-American president in his proliferation of czars—Obama appointed thirty-two during his first months in office, and showed no sign of stopping.
It was an all-out assault on the American system of checks and balances, and a concentration of power in the executive branch unmatched by anything in American history.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House minority whip, pointed out in August 2009 that “by appointing a virtual army of ‘czars’—each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House—the president has made an end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions.… Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.”
Even Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), the dean of Democrats in the Senate, was upset. In February 2009 he wrote to Obama about several of the czars, saying: “I am concerned about the relationship between these new White House positions and their executive branch counterparts. Too often, I have seen these lines of authority and responsibility become tangled and blurred, sometimes purposely, to shield information and to obscure the decision-making process.” Like Cantor, he warned: “The rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances.”2
This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. Cantor declared that, by appointing so many czars, Obama has departed from constitutional mandates: “The Constitution mandates that the Senate confirm Cabinet-level department heads and other appointees in positions of authority. This gives Congress—elected by the people—the power to compel executive decision-makers to testify and be held accountable by someone other than the president. It also ensures that key appointees cannot claim executive privilege when subpoenaed to come
before Congress.”3
Likewise Byrd: “If the czars are working behind the scenes and the secretaries will be the mouthpieces of the administration, it calls into question who is actually making the policy decision. “Whoever is making the policy decisions needs to be accountable and available to Congress and the American public.”4 But by contrast, Cantor says, Congress has “not been able to vet” Obama’s czars, “and we have no idea what they’re doing.”5
The post-American president may have a very good reason for that: much of what they’re doing is not good, and several among them are committed socialists: red czars.
OBAMA’S HARD-LEFT INTERNATIONALIST SCIENCE CZAR
John P. Holdren, the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is Obama’s assistant to the president for Science and Technology, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and cochair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)—that is, the science czar. As he announced Holdren’s appointment, Obama, never a reliable friend of the freedom of speech, indulged in some bitterly ironic pieties: the post-American president said that “the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources—it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”6
Yet John P. Holdren was a relentlessly politicized ideologue—so much so that one could find more fervent true believers only in a Soviet Politburo meeting, or, more recently, staffing other positions in the Obama administration. Holdren was, not surprisingly, a true believer in global government and tight controls on free citizens. A longtime and deeply committed Leftist, he participated in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Joseph Rotblat, Barack Obama’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner, founded the Pugwash Conferences (named after the Nova Scotia site of the first conference) in the 1950s to enable Western and Soviet scientists to meet together. Rotblat himself was a nuclear scientist who had been part of the Manhattan Project, but who left the project and devoted himself to nuclear disarmament when it became clear that a post–World War II America would use nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the Soviet Union. The Pugwash Conferences Web site still contains a tribute to him.7
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