Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Rudd remains a stalwart for Communist Vietnam and Cuba, whose systems he still touts. He also touts Barack Obama, whose election he celebrates as a major “advance” and “opening.”9 Rudd did not like any of the Cold War Democrats of his era. He despised Kennedy and Johnson. He views Obama as much closer politically.

  Rudd appreciates that it was moderates and independents who made the difference in electing Obama. He noted the crucial importance of Obama's gaining those votes, and doing so by not openly conceding his far-left views:

  Obama is a very strategic thinker. He knew precisely what it would take to get elected and didn't blow it.… But he also knew that what he said had to basically play to the center to not be run over by the press, the Republicans, scare centrist and cross-over voters away. He made it.… And I agree with this strategy.… Any other strategy invites sure defeat. It would be stupid to do otherwise in this environment.10

  It seems fair to say that Rudd basically stated that Obama fooled—duped—“centrist” and “cross-over” voters. As he put it, Obama could not be candid about his true intentions in “this environment.” Rudd is exactly right.

  That environment is an America whose citizens, in poll after poll, year after year, have described themselves as “conservative” over “liberal” by a margin of roughly two to one, by approximately 40 percent to 20 percent. Remarkably, those numbers were unchanged even on November 4, 2008, when Obama—the antithesis of a conservative—easily won the presidential election. They held through the start of Obama's presidency and through the peak of his popularity. For instance, a major Gallup poll conducted from January to May 2009, at the height of “Obama mania,” found more self-described conservatives than liberals by a margin of 40 percent to 21 percent.11

  In other words, as Rudd and Hayden and friends recognize, the American political “environment” is a conservative country, not a liberal or socialist or far-left one. Thus, a political candidate as far to the left as Barack Obama, not to mention his advocates, can succeed only by pushing his agenda guardedly. Obama ran for president as a centrist, not as National Journal’s most liberal member of the Senate.12 It worked. As Rudd put it, Obama “didn't blow it.”

  Now, with Obama having secured victory, Rudd can, like Hayden, be less circumspect in how he “organizes.” He states: “Here's my mantra: ’Let's put this country on our shoulders and get to work.’”13

  In 2008 Mark Rudd, Tom Hayden, and many of their old comrades came back from the ’60s dead, from their past sojourns to Hanoi and Havana, from their work for and with Che, Fidel, the Vietcong, and even the KGB, to do their part for Obama in 2008. They must have been stunned by the result: victory.

  Other SDSers

  Another SDSer to reemerge from the shadows in connection to Obama was Michael Klonsky. Klonsky, recall, was the one whom Mark Rudd described as a Stalinist, too far to the Left even for Rudd and company.

  Klonsky had been raised a radical. In the 1960s he walked in lockstep with his far-left parents. Eventually, Klonsky, like Mao Tse-tung, bolted from the USSR and Stalin, but not from Communism. Klonsky became head of the New Communist Movement in the United States. He found CPUSA too reactionary for his tastes. The former SDS national secretary followed the Maoist path all the way to Red China, where he became one of the first Western visitors. In 1977 the Chinese Communist leadership hailed the young pioneer as representative of the “aspirations of the proletariat and working people.”14

  Klonsky, however, was reportedly disappointed with the booming freemarket reforms pursued in the 1980s by Mao's milder successor, Deng Xiaoping, prompting a permanent split with his Chinese friends.15 He went home to get a Ph.D. in education (University of South Florida) and began looking to the American classroom as the best platform for Marxist dogma. He landed in Chicago—on the same faculty as Bill Ayers.

  Like Ayers, Klonsky became a professor in the University of Illinois at Chicago's College of Education. Klonsky and Ayers have been described as joint “pioneers in small school development.” These “small school” projects were funded to the tune of almost $2 million in grants from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where Barack Obama was chairman of the board, and from the Joyce Foundation and Woods Fund, where Obama also served on the boards.16

  Klonsky and Ayers have been especially successful in packaging their ideas as furthering “social justice,” a handy cliché they use as a substitute for their socialism, even authoring books on the subject—published, naturally, through Columbia Teachers College.17 The language has worked brilliantly in enlisting gullible left-leaning Christians, especially at liberal Catholic and Protestant colleges.18

  Klonsky and Ayers have coauthored articles on education, including in sources like Phi Delta Kappan, a professional journal of education. In one of them, the two SDSers raved about Arne Duncan, longtime head of Chicago public schools, whom the pair described as “the brightest and most dedicated schools leader Chicago has had in memory.”1 Today, Arne Duncan is President Obama's secretary of education.

  As for Klonsky's work with and for Barack Obama, not only did Obama approve multimillion-grants to fund Klonsky's educational work in Chicago, especially his “social justice” educational work, but he even hosted a “social justice” blog for Klonsky at the official Obama ’08 campaign website.20

  Klonsky, too, was surely astounded that the American public in 2008 finally agreed with him on a presidential candidate. Forty years earlier, in 1968, he had said that the SDS motto was to “Vote in the Streets” rather than at the ballot box.

  Significantly, Klonsky, Rudd, Ayers, Dohrn, Hayden and the other’60s radicals have not suddenly supported the Democratic Party's presidential nominee because they have moved to the center. They retain basically the same core political philosophy. “My own support for Obama is not a reflection of a radically changed attitude toward the Democratic Party,” Klonsky told author Daniel J. Flynn.21 What has changed is not their ideology but their tactics.

  Klonsky remains on the far left. This time, in 2008, the Democratic Party moved toward him. He found a kindred soul in the party's nominee. He saw the Obama campaign as a “rallying point” for activists old and young alike.22

  Also there for Obama was Carl Davidson, another SDS stalwart—a national officer from the class of 1968—another longtime Castro enthusiast, and another who forty years earlier ecstatically watched the Democratic Party descend into national disgrace in Chicago. Now, in 2008, Davidson found a Chicagoan running on the Democratic ticket whom he, too, could at long last promote for president. He had helped organize the first public rally where Obama denounced the Iraq war, and now he became webmaster for Progressives for Obama.23

  Today, with Obama as president, Davidson blasts “the rightwing blogosphere” for its attempts to “cripple and take down Obama” and “the progressive left” through “more and more sham ‘connections,’ such as with me”—and with Van Jones. Van Jones was the avowed communist that President Obama had named as his so-called green-jobs czar, until conservatives like Glenn Beck exposed Jones's political extremism. (For this, Beck was smeared by the Left.) After pooh-poohing these “sham ‘connections’ to Obama,” Davidson instructed readers to “lend a hand” against the political Right by clicking the PayPal button at Progressives for Obama, which he conveniently made available via a hyperlink.24

  Another of the born-again SDS faithful stumping for Obama was Jeff Jones. Jones, who was Bernardine Dohrn's beau during the days of the four-finger fork salute in Flint, was one of the four Weathermen who signed the violent Marxist manifesto Prairie Fire, along with Ayers, Dohrn, and Celia Sojourn. After a life as a fugitive, taking credit for various bombings aimed at “pigs,”25 he had settled down for a life as a reporter and an environmental activist. Prior to Obama's meteoric rise, his name occasionally came up in connection with his Weather Underground days, as when his son published a memoir of their life on the run.26 Like Ayers, Jones, as recently as 2004, was quoted saying that he did not regret his
past: “To this day, we still, lots of us, including me, still think it was the right thing to do.”27

  Jones was not a signer of Progressives for Obama; no doubt, the group was smart enough to exclude the Prairie Fire authors from among its signers. Nonetheless, Jones was there for Obama—playing an especially active role after Obama entered the White House.

  In September 2009 the New York Post reported that Jones's consulting firm, the Apollo Alliance—Jones serves as director of the New York affiliate and a consultant to the national organization—helped write President Obama's budget-bursting $800 billion “stimulus” bill passed by Congress shortly into the Obama presidency.28 The Post described the Apollo Alliance as “a coalition of left-wing interest groups unified around the green-jobs concept.” Van Jones, the green-jobs czar himself, had helped build the alliance—which received taxpayer funding, according to the Post. As the New York Post reported—and the Apollo Alliance trumpeted on its own website—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid personally credited Apollo with helping to write the stimulus bill and getting it passed.29

  If this is accurate, it is an astonishing behind-the-scenes policy function played by one of the four central figures in the Weather Underground. For Jones, it would constitute a powerful role in crafting what to that point was the single biggest spending binge in the history of the United States—one that exploded President George W. Bush's record $400 billion budget deficit to an unsustainable $1.2 trillion.30

  Thus, it appears that a former domestic terrorist who was intimately involved with Dohrn and Ayers contributed to the first major policy development of the Obama presidency, and certainly one of the most costly. It shows that Obama's radical “associations” do seem to matter.

  “Education Is the Motor-Force of Revolution”

  Though so many SDSers have entered the ivory tower, they have not given up politics for education. Tom Hayden keeps organizing his comrades; Jeff Jones lobbies for green jobs; Carl Davidson puts together antiwar rallies; Mark Rudd calls for his fellow radicals to “put this country on our shoulders and get to work”; and Bill Ayers helps nurture the political careers of promising candidates like Barack Obama.

  Such political activism, again, undermines the claim that Obama's endorsement of Ayers's educational work was no big deal. In fact, Ayers's educational work is a handmaiden to his political work.

  That is true for all the comrades. They did not enter education to teach nonpolitical subjects like math. They went into education to inculcate the nation's youth into their worldview. They are John Dewey's disciples to an extreme degree.

  For many of them, including Ayers, there is little to no separation between their educational work and the Marxism they have long espoused. Consider the syllabus for a graduate course Ayers teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The course, CIE 576, is titled “Conceptions of Teaching and Schooling.” The good professor's syllabus begins with a reference to the Weather Underground's Prairie Fire. “A single spark can start a prairie fire—an ancient saying.”31

  Ayers has taken this vision global, to the kind of Marxist dictators who welcome his message. This is evident in his own account of his work for Venezuela's Miranda International Center. Ayers has sat on the board of this Venezuelan government think tank, which is a direct extension of Marxist leader Hugo Chavez and is, in the words of Investor's Business Daily, “focused on bringing Cuba-style education to Venezuelan school children.”32 Ayers's work in support of what he has praised as Chavez's “profound educational reforms” led him to make at least four pilgrimages to Venezuela during the time that he and Obama served together on the Woods Fund and Annenberg Challenge.33

  During one of those trips, in November 2006, Ayers addressed the World Education Forum in Caracas. During the speech he spoke of how Chavez and the Venezuelans “continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education.” He concluded his address with words of solidarity for Chavez and Venezuela's Marxist regime:

  Viva Presidente Chavez!

  Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!

  Hasta La Victoria Siempre!34

  Here Ayers showed that his ardor for revolution remains strong. In this case it is the “Bolivarian Revolution,” the name that Hugo Chavez himself has given to his destructive Marxist agenda. Ayers's final line, “Hasta La Victoria Siempre!” (Forever, until victory), paid homage to Che Guevara, who famously used the line in his last letter to Fidel Castro.35 Che, the animating spirit behind Ayers's Prairie Fire, remains a strong influence on Ayers decades later.

  The Bill Ayers–Hugo Chavez connection is about policy, politics, communism, and education, all of which, in Ayers's universe, are inextricably related. As Ayers put it in his World Education Forum speech: “Education is the motor-force of revolution.”

  Ayers and Chavez also share a strong affection for Barack Obama. In an extraordinary September 2009 statement at the United Nations, Chavez sniffed and said with a grin: “It doesn't smell of sulfur here anymore.” This was a swipe at former president George W. Bush, whom Chavez had denounced as “the devil” in UN remarks in 2006. There was freshness in the air this time, said Chavez. Now, the dictator said, “It smells of something else. It smells of hope.”36

  There is even a personal component to the Ayers-Chavez connection. Chesa Boudin is the adopted son of Ayers and Dohrn, whom the couple raised once the boy's biological parents, Weather Underground radicals David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, were jailed for the Brinks murder in 1981. Chesa Boudin now describes himself as a “foreign policy adviser to President Hugo Chavez.”37 He has picked up the mantle of his adoptive parents and his biological parents.

  Kathy Boudin herself has not put down that mantle. After she was sent to prison for her work in the Brinks murders, Boudin studied education, publishing articles in journals like the Harvard Educational Review. Her liberal friends fought for her parole. When it was delayed, they blamed not her past affinity for evil men like Mao and Che but, curiously, the current “evil” they perceived in the White House: George W. Bush.38 Despite Bush's presence in the world, Boudin was paroled in 2003.

  What path did she take once she was let out of prison? Higher education, of course. Having earned her doctorate in education from Columbia Teachers College, she has become adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work. As her bio states at the university's website, Boudin's work focuses on “Mother-child relationships,” “criminal justice,” “restorative justice,” “health care,” and “working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.”39

  Education Was the Motor-Force for Obama's Election

  By choosing education, the students of the ’60s chose smart. They knew where to instill the influence they needed to stoke the embers of political change.

  Those embers caught fire on November 4, 2008. Aside from moderates who went for Obama, it was America's youth, particularly the college crowd, who made Obama president. According to exit polls, those aged eighteen to twenty-nine, who made up nearly one in five voters—or about twenty-five million ballots—went for Obama by more than two to one: 66 to 32 percent.40

  This was an enormous cache of ballots, far surpassing Obama's overall popular advantage. Even wider was the margin in a related category: first-time voters. They went for Obama by 69 to 30 percent. A third related category, single (unmarried) voters, who accounted for one in three voters, went for Obama by 65 to 33 percent.

  Together, these categories capture the youth vote.

  Many of these people were instructed by their college professors to vote for Obama, or were at least influenced by the socialistic, humanistic milieu of the modern secular-left campus. To many of the “progressive” ideologues who teach in college, Obama represented what they had preached for decades. They celebrated his message of “hope” and “change” to their young and often impressionable students.

  The Chicago Coronation

  Imagine the joy the comrades must have felt as they watched their TV s
creens announce Barack Obama as the nation's president-elect late in the evening of November 4, 2008. Imagine the thoughts of those on-site in Chicago's Grant Park, where a victorious Barack Obama greeted legions of his devoted and delirious followers.

  The symbolism was too extraordinary for words—a powerful reminder that Cold War battles were still very much with us. Obama ascended the platform after a gracious John McCain, a Vietnam veteran whom the comrades had once grouped into a category of “fascist pigs,” conceded the election. The revolutionaries once proudly wore rings hammered out of the downed aircraft of McCain's imprisoned band of brothers, who were suffering unspeakable hell in places like the Hanoi Hilton. McCain's own aircraft had been shot down; one of the radicals may well have worn debris from his plane. The defeated Republican represented what they had always fought against.

  Obama, meanwhile, was the political godchild of those shadowy Marxists who had despised the likes of McCain and fought to defeat the forces of American “imperialism.” Now the comrades and thousands of other Obama devotees assembled on hallowed ground for the radicals: where the SDSers and the Weathermen some forty years earlier had rallied for the Democratic convention blow-up and the Days of Rage. It was a scene almost beyond belief.41