Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Naturally, these formal meetings involved additional encounters and exchanges, especially given that Obama and Ayers were friends, colleagues, and neighbors, and given that Ayers and Dohrn sponsored Obama politically with their own money and home.

  Not surprisingly, then, Ayers and Obama were intimately familiar with one another's work. In fact, Obama gave a glowing endorsement for his friend's book A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court that was published in the Chicago Tribune. In the December 21, 1997, issue of the Tribune, the state senator was featured in a section called “Mark My Words,” which quoted local figures on what they were reading. Obama praised Ayers's book, calling A Kind and Just Parent “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”65 (See page 462.)

  Obama's defenders would dismiss the endorsement by saying that it related to Ayers's educational work rather than political work. In fact, Ayers's educational work is political, and is radical. And this particular Ayers book is quite political, including very controversial sections regarding the American prison system and American foreign policy.

  Of course, why would that surprise anyone?

  No Big Deal

  During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Obama-Ayers connection raised eyebrows, from those of debate moderators like George Stephanopoulos, to Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton, to Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

  Conservatives believed that Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers was a legitimate statement on Obama's judgment and his far-left political views. The relationship, they said, suggested not that Obama shared Ayers's fondness for bombs but reflected Obama's radicalism on issues from abortion to “spreading the wealth.” After all, reputable, nonpartisan sources like National Journal ranked Obama the most liberal member of the most liberal U.S. Senate in history.66

  It was not only conservatives who raised the Ayers issue. Senator Hillary Clinton brought it up during the Democratic primary. She did so in a clever way, saying that Republicans would be raising it, and thus Obama should be prepared with a good explanation for the association.

  Clinton had understandable reasons for bringing up Ayers. As a native of the Chicago area and a child of the ’60s herself, she knew about Ayers and Dohrn. Hillary Rodham had been a liberal in the 1960s—but not a radical; she had never advocated violence. Moreover, as a senator from New York, she noted to Obama that Ayers's comments about not regretting his past bombings were “deeply hurtful to people in New York.”67 Her point was spot-on.

  By this point conservatives had been investigating Obama's Ayers association for months. Television and radio host Sean Hannity, for example, had been calling attention to this underexplored issue since early 2007. Finally the mainstream media could no longer ignore it entirely. A fair liberal journalist, George Stephanopoulos, directly asked Obama during a Democratic debate, “Can you explain that relationship [with Ayers] for the voters and explain to Democrats why it won't be a problem?” Many on the Left viciously criticized Stephanopoulos for asking this question.68

  After Obama won the Democratic nomination against Senator Clinton, the New York Times did a story, signaling to other mainstream media sources that it was permissible to follow suit. Like Hillary Clinton before him, John McCain raised the subject in presidential debates. McCain was rightly unsettled, as he had been brutally tortured and permanently crippled by the very Vietcong soldiers that Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd, Klonsky, Hayden, Fonda, and all the SDSers and Weathermen had hailed as heroes to be emulated. Why wouldn't he want answers on Obama and Ayers?

  In the end, though, it did not matter. On November 4, 2008, the majority of the American public showed that they did not care enough about Obama's personal and political relationship with Bill Ayers to hold it against him at the ballot box. He was handily elected president of the United States.

  And with the election over, a triumphant Bill Ayers, ever the bad boy, seemed to relish in his unwillingness to repent or pay a price for his past. Defiantly, almost snidely, he spoke to the nation in an interview with ABC's Good Morning America, where he asserted: “I've been quoted again and again as saying, ’I don't regret it,’ and saying, ’I don't think we did enough.’ And I don't think we did enough.”69

  A “Communist”? Who Cares …

  Most relevant to the focus of this book is the fact that while Bill Ayers was derided throughout the campaign as an “unrepentant terrorist”—a phrase employed especially by Sean Hannity—his past as a communist got far less attention. Although Ayers professed communism at far greater length than he did terrorism, that part of the equation seemed to have no impact at all.

  Once again, Cliff Kincaid and Herb Romerstein and crew were there to shed light on that aspect of Ayers, much as they had with Frank Marshall Davis. They again presented a volume of research and printed and posted materials. They again held a press conference—this time at the National Press Club, on March 12, 2009. But again they were ridiculed, mocked, or ignored.

  The dominant media culture in America, which, sadly, serves as educator-in-chief to millions of citizens, even in this incredibly diverse new media age, continued to be unconcerned with Communism. That was the case even when the contemporary Communist Party was the issue.

  In 2008 current Communists were quite open in their support of Obama's presidential bid. In an article titled “Communist Party Backs Obama,” Cliff Kincaid quoted Joelle Fishman, chair of CPUSA's Political Action Commission, and CPUSA member, and blogger, Alan Maki.70 In a truly shocking display, Maki, who maintained a blog called “Communist Manifesto,” announced a “Frank Marshall Davis roundtable for change” on no less than the official Obama ’08 website. There, Maki explained his enthusiasm: “Reading Barack Obama's book I learned about his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. Of course, as we all know [emphasis added], Frank Marshall Davis was a communist and … understood through his thorough studies of the situation that socialism provided the only workable alternative to capitalism.” Maki thanked Obama for bringing Davis to his attention: “Now I can say that Frank Marshall Davis is in many ways my mentor, too.”71

  Non-Communist liberals did not want this kind of information to get circulated to the wider public, and especially to the moderates and Reagan Democrats that Obama needed to win the election. Every story on Davis, or whiff of a CPUSA endorsement, or photo of a Che Guevara poster at an Obama campaign office, was political dynamite that had to be snuffed out.72

  When the People's Weekly World, the modern official newspaper of CPUSA, wrote an editorial endorsing Obama's “transformative candidacy,” calling it a “thrilling opportunity to end 30 years of ultra-right rule and move the nation forward with a progressive movement,” it was left solely to far-right websites to post the piece.73 Other Marxist sources gave speeches and wrote editorials hailing what they hoped would be the start of a new era, celebrating Obama's planned “change,” and insisting that at long last their “time has come.”74

  Likewise telling, and ever-present here, was the bogeyman of anti- Communism: Cliff Kincaid rightly noted that not even conventional conservative news outlets would touch the Frank Marshall Davis story. Kincaid's group tried to run paid ads on the Davis-Obama connection on conservative websites, which fled from them as “too controversial.”75 No doubt that is because of the backlash that would crash upon those sources; the howls of “McCarthyism” would again resound.

  An Unchanging Theme

  For many non-Communist liberals, it seems, there is always a reason to provide cover for Communists. At the opening of the CPUSA archives at NYU-Tamiment, the liberals had their reasons: to expose the alleged malevolent doings of anti-Communists’ past. At the gatherings hosted by Cliff Kincaid and Herb Romerstein, where the targets were Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn, the liberals had their reasons: to protect the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee.

  Either way, it is always the anti-Communists who emerg
e as the liberals’ bad guys. This has been a consistent, indeed unchanging, theme for nearly a century. Even while mocking, manipulating, and trashing non-Communist liberals, Communists—Stalinists and Leninists and Maoists, followers of Che and Fidel and Trotsky, supporters of Katyn and the Hungarian massacre—have happily observed many of those same liberals attacking their critics, and unwittingly doing their bidding.

  There is truly nothing new under the sun.

  23

  2008: A “PROGRESSIVE” VICTORY

  The Marxist radicals of the 1960s had fought to “disrupt” and “incapacitate” the American “empire.” They aimed to “seize power and build the new society.” But they had lost the fight; America had won. Then, just when it seemed they had been defeated for good, with their dreams crumbled like the Berlin Wall razed by Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and millions of freedom-starved Eastern Europeans, those Marxist radicals found inspiration and direction in the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. They suddenly had new life.

  Whether Obama knew it or not, he was the man on whom they projected their ideals and vision for America and the world—a vision that had long ago been exposed as false utopianism. They felt they could graft their program upon his. He was the first Democrat whose politics approached theirs.

  Hillary Clinton had not been far enough to the left for them. Bill Clinton had been too conservative for them, as had Jimmy Carter, who, in their view, was a “born-again” buffoon. And going back further still, the Democratic presidents of their day, LBJ and JFK, had been “sellouts” they despised, especially for opposing such heroes as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Fidel Castro in Cuba.

  It was Barack Obama alone; he was nearer them and their dreams.

  Progressives for Obama

  Most notable among these radicals were those who reunited in a group called Progressives for Obama. Whereas Bill Ayers was thrust into the national spotlight by conservative commentators like Sean Hannity, Progressives for Obama flew under the radar, largely unnoticed even by the Right.

  Spearheading Progressives for Obama was the man who had spearheaded SDS: Tom Hayden. Hayden was one of the four “initiators” of Progressives for Obama, along with author Barbara Ehrenreich, activist Bill Fletcher Jr., and actor Danny Glover.1 Hayden's lead role was appropriate, since the list of Progressives for Obama read like a Who's Who of the 1960s SDS crowd. Among the group's ninety-four formal “signers” were Mark Rudd, Carl Davidson, Thorne Dreyer, Richard Flacks, John McAuliff, and Jay Schaffner—all names that appear throughout the index of the transcripts from Congress's December 1969 investigation of SDS—plus former SDS education secretary Bob Pardun and Paul Buhle, a professor who had recently sought to revive SDS.2 Another signer was former SDS president Todd Gitlin, who now was a prominent professor at Columbia University. Still other SDSers, some of whom became Weathermen, were not formal signers for Progressives for Obama but signed online petitions backing Obama's candidacy, including Howard Machtinger, Jeff Jones, and Steve Tappis.3

  Progressives for Obama also included high-profile names such as Daniel Ellsberg, best known for publishing the Pentagon Papers, and Tom Hayden's former wife, Jane Fonda. The endorsement of Fonda, Vietcong cover girl, prompted Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm to opine, “There goes his [Obama's] crossover vote.”4

  That crossover vote would be more crucial than ever in the 2008 election. Which way would the independent/moderate voter lean? That was the milliondollar question the morning of November 4, 2008. The verdict arrived, and as it turned out, Obama had nothing to worry about: this huge group of swing voters went for Obama over John McCain by eight points, 52 to 44 percent, and thereby decided the election (since McCain got 90 percent of the Republican vote and Obama got 89 percent of Democrats).5 These crossover voters, unaffected by any of the outrageous Obama associations and endorsements, won the day for the Democrat.

  Hayden's Thinking

  Among the Progressives for Obama, the testimony of leader Tom Hayden is worth considering carefully. It is telling.

  After his early life establishing SDS, meeting with the Vietcong, wishing “Good fortune!” and “Victory!” to North Vietnamese colonels who killed American soldiers, and vigorously protesting the American system, Hayden went into politics, professional activism, and education. Like Mark Rudd, like Bill Ayers, like Bernardine Dohrn, like Michael Klonsky, Hayden came to view a quick “revolution” of the system as too daunting, if not impossible. He has become much more patient, instead advocating a “progressive” evolution of slower, measured change.

  Hayden now advances the “progressive” cause within the Democratic Party establishment. Of course, he once helped blow up the Democratic Party's national convention in 1968. No matter: the party has warmly accepted him. Hayden believes that the masses, including traditional Democrats, and some independents and crossover voters, might support his causes and candidates, whom he endorses more subtly.

  Hayden was ecstatic over Obama's presidential campaign. He looked to assist wherever he could, with a rush of enthusiasm not seen since his days undermining America in Vietnam. Not one to tinker around, Hayden got to work on a formal organization, as he had done with SDS. The man who drafted SDS's pivotal Port Huron statement began drafting mission statements for Progressives for Obama.

  During the 2008 campaign Hayden was moved to verse over the emergence of Obama. In one piece, “Obama and the Open and Unexpected Future,” written for CommonDreams.org, which describes itself as a website for “Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community,” Hayden mused:

  I didn't see him coming. When I read of the young state senator with a background in community organizing who wanted to be president, I was at least sentient enough to be interested. When I read Dreams of My Father [sic], I was taken aback by its depth. This young man apparently gave his first public speech, against South African apartheid, at an Occidental College rally organized by Students for Economic Democracy, the student branch of the Campaign for Economic Democracy which I chaired in 1979–82. The buds of curiosity quickened.6

  Hayden saw in Obama a long-awaited vehicle for “economic democracy,” an instrument to channel an equal distribution of wealth—“economic justice,” or “redistributive change,” as Obama himself once put it.7 Hayden said that, “win or lose, the Obama movement will shape progressive politics … for a generation to come.” He also expressed his hope that the progressive movement “might transform” Obama as well. Each could reinforce and shape the other.

  Hayden wrote this in June 2008. When Obama was elected in November, the former SDS leader was beside himself with joy, surely shocked that the American electorate had finally voted for a candidate that he saw as his kind of president. Those traditional Democrats who had shaken their heads in disgust at what Hayden and friends did at their party's convention in Chicago in 1968, at what they did during the Days of Rage the next year, at what they did at Columbia during the student strike, and on and on, had at long last—in the view of Hayden and friends—done the right thing.

  Hayden became particularly vocal in his praise for Obama once the election was over. During the election, the goal was to organize, raise money, but not speak too loudly, out of fear of driving away the moderates and traditional Democrat moms and pops who had worked in the mines and the mills, who owned guns, who prayed rosaries and filled churches—who might perceive the young Obama as “another Jack Kennedy.” With the presidency now secured, Hayden opened up (just as Bill Ayers waited to speak out until after Obama had been elected). Joined by his former comrades at the take-no-prisoners website of Progressives for Obama, he now regularly sounds off against Obama's critics—those opposing “single payer” or the “public option” in “healthcare reform,” or government “management” of General Motors—with the subtlety of a howitzer.

  With the presidency won, Hayden and his allies are free to express themselves, to demonize health-insurance comp
anies, the financial-services industry, AIG, the Big Three automakers, or whatever other capitalist “reptile” (Lenin's term) stands in the way of President Obama's desire for “reform” and mandate for “change.”

  The Good Professors

  In switching his goal from revolution to evolution, Tom Hayden embraced not only politics but also higher education. Like many of his SDS brethren, he now teaches college students. He has been a professor at Pitzer College and, coincidentally, at Obama's Occidental College.

  Education is now the common refuge of the ’60s radical Left, which searches always for a new generation of disciples. Among the Progressives for Obama, no other field appears in their bios as prominently as teaching.

  That is the case for Mark Rudd, who today teaches at a college in New Mexico. When he is not behind his regular lectern, Rudd travels the country speaking at universities, where the tenured radicals of the ’60s welcome him with open arms to inspire their students. He specializes in teaching social activism.

  Along with Ayers and Dohrn, Rudd serves on the board of Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), which he and others envisage as a “new SDS,” and which he longs to resurrect with his talks in college classrooms. The group was founded in Chicago in August 2006, and includes board members ranging from Jeff Jones to Barbara Ehrenreich. Its chair is Columbia University professor Manning Marable.8