Your discussion of the vilification of Joe McCarthy is appropriate because that is where the story of Obama begins. The whipping the Communists took from McCarthy caused them to go underground but they did not give up. They immediately went to work and devised a long range plan, this one would be a much more deliberate and deceptive coup attempt with Stanley and Madeline Dunham, their daughter, black nationalists and Middle Eastern money barons. The objective would be to groom and propel a charismatic black guy into the Presidency to bring down the U.S. capitalist government.
Lenin had already started to export communism to the west, from Europe (France), even before his Bolsheviks stole the Russian Revolution. He increased this activity in 1919, but it paled in comparison to Joe Stalin's efforts.
As you point out, Stalin originally sold communism openly, but early in his tenure, the signs of failure of communist economic philosophy began to show, and informed resistance began to grow. McCarthy's exposure of more open communists in fact triggered the switch to covert infiltration sleeper agent tactics.
Overt communism was declared to be a past fad and now a myth. Nothing to see here, move along.
Of course, environmentalists popped up in the late 60's, but no one would re-brand communism now, would they? It didn't exist in the west.