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Obama’s Boys of Summer
City Journal ^ | 06/29/2008 | Daniel J. Flynn

Posted on 06/30/2008 10:02:54 AM PDT by safetysign

A Who’s Who of 1968 radicals supports the candidate.

Backing a major-party candidate for president would have been anathema to Michael Klonsky 40 summers ago, when the organization he led, Students for a Democratic Society, urged young people to spurn elections. “By ’68, our line was ‘Vote in the Streets,’” Klonsky told me last spring. “We thought we had to fight with Eugene McCarthy and those people.” In August 1968, protesters clashed with police outside the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago—but far from being political innocents who took to the streets to protest Vietnam War hawks’ capture of the Democratic presidential nomination, many of them never supported antiwar candidates McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. “Those of us who have been in the streets for the past five days didn’t give a flying fuck whether McCarthy would win or lose,” SDS declared in posters around Chicago, “and now that he’s lost, still don’t.” On the eve of the general election of that year—in which less than 1 percentage point would separate the popular-vote totals of Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey—Klonsky’s SDS bluntly proclaimed: “The elections don’t mean shit.”

Klonsky, whose disgust for mainstream politics led him to launch a new, Maoist Communist Party in the 1970s, today supports Barack Obama so enthusiastically that until recently he was blogging on the Illinois senator’s campaign website. And boycotting this November’s election, Klonsky maintains, would be a “tragic mistake.” He notes that Barack Obama isn’t Hubert Humphrey, 2008 isn’t 1968, and the strong movement he served back then is “relatively weak” now. “My own support for Obama is not a reflection of a radically changed attitude toward the Democratic Party,” Klonsky recently explained to me. “Rather, it’s a recognition that the Obama campaign has become a rallying point for young activists and offers hope for rebuilding the civil rights and antiwar coalitions that have potential to become a real critical force in society.”

Michael Klonsky is hardly the only ’68 radical supporting Obama this year. In 1968, when Mark Rudd organized the student strike that shut down Columbia University, the SDS chapter that he chaired ridiculed Kennedy and McCarthy as “McKennedy,” claimed that “neither peace candidate offers an alternative to the war policies of Lyndon Johnson,” and suggested “sabotage” as an alternative to voting. Rudd succeeded Klonsky as national SDS leader, presiding over the organization’s metamorphosis into Weatherman and performing “a liaison function” for the plot to bomb a Fort Dix soldiers’ dance that instead killed three Weathermen, including two of Rudd’s Columbia SDS colleagues. Today, Rudd renounces bombs, embraces ballots—and supports Obama. “Probably the biggest difference between Columbia SDS people in 1968 and in 2008 is forty years,” Rudd explained in an e-mail. “Most of us have lived with compromise our whole lives. As kids we were raving idealists who thought that ‘The elections don’t mean shit’ was a slogan that meant something to somebody. It didn’t.”

Then there’s Carl Davidson, who was one of SDS’s three elected national officers in 1968, when the organization first urged young people to refrain from voting. His disillusionment with traditional politics became so pronounced that, in the post-sixties hangover that followed, Davidson joined Klonsky in rejecting traditional politics for fringe Marxist movements. More recently, he helped organize the 2002 rally in which Obama first spoke out against the Iraq War and now serves as the webmaster of Progressives for Obama. “The last thing we need is a simple repeat of 1968, which saw Nixon and the new Right as an outcome, as well as the defeat of [Humphrey],” Davidson contends. “One thing I’ve learned. Social change is not made by elections, but it certainly proceeds through them, not by ignoring them or chasing the illusion of end runs around them.”

Former SDS president Tom Hayden is also in the Obama camp. Hayden organized the made-for-TV protest outside the 1968 Chicago convention. But the catharsis of throwing debris at the Chicago police, the purer-than-thou sanctimony that tolerated no distinction between Lyndon Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, and the exhilaration of “voting in the streets” instead of in election booths combined to ensure liberal defeats. Hayden’s orchestrated anarchy proved more damaging to Humphrey’s presidential aspirations than any dirty trick Nixon’s henchmen could have dreamed up. Klonsky remembers Hayden plotting to spread nails on a highway; another SDS leader recalls Hayden encouraging activists to firebomb police cars. If the Democrats couldn’t run a convention, many Americans wondered, how could they run the country? “Did the radicalism of Chicago elect Richard Nixon?” Hayden asked, clearly pained, in his 1988 memoir. “Having struggled with that question for twenty years, I find there is no ‘neat’ answer.”

Now Hayden is one of the organizers of Progressives for Obama. “The difference is that back then the Democratic Party was directly carrying out the Vietnam War, which meant there was no anti-war critic to vote for after Kennedy was assassinated and McCarthy defeated by the establishment,” he offered in an e-mail last month. “Today the Republican Party is directly carrying out the war, which obviously will make a lot of people favor changing the presidency despite the uncertainty of what the Democratic candidate will do when in office.”

Progressives for Obama resembles a Who’s Who of SDS luminaries. In addition to Hayden, Rudd, and Davidson, the group includes Bob Pardun, SDS’s education secretary during the 1966–67 school year; Paul Buhle, a radical professor who has recently attempted to revive SDS; Mickey and Dick Flacks, red-diaper babies who helped craft 1962’s Port Huron Statement, a seminal New Left document; and SDS’s third president, Todd Gitlin. Age and experience have mellowed some of the SDSers in Obama’s camp. Gitlin, for instance, has evolved into a respected Ivy League professor and milquetoast liberal. But others still glory in a past that can only damage Obama’s future. The aging New Left still practices a therapeutic politics that places a higher value on feelings of personal liberation than on restrained pursuit of political aims.

Obama has already taken political hits for his connection to Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. In the sixties, Ayers advocated that young people kill their parents, and Dohrn praised the Charles Manson murders. Alongside their Weather Underground cohorts, the pair declared war on the United States and participated in a bombing campaign that hit the Capitol, the Pentagon, and numerous law enforcement agencies. The couple eventually reinvented themselves—first as academics, then as players in Chicago-area Democratic politics. Obama praised Ayers’s book in the Chicago Tribune, sat with him on a foundation’s board, and benefited from a fundraiser held at the couple’s home. Ayers spoke at events organized by Michelle Obama; Barack Obama spoke at events organized by Ayers.

With the public revelation of this unseemly relationship—between unrepentant terrorists and the man who now seeks to oversee America’s war on terror—and the impact it’s already had on voter attitudes, one would think that other sixties extremists might be more reserved in proclaiming their support for Obama, knowing the damage such associations can do to his candidacy. As for Obama, he’ll need to do some distancing of his own. He protested that he was only eight when Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd, and company embarked on their bombing campaign, and that’s reasonable enough. But he’ll need to go further.

Fortunately for him, the Left has a long history of cold-shouldering predecessors to perpetuate its ideology, cleanse it from past failures, and make it appear fresh. The New Left dissociated itself from the Old Left’s Russophilic dogmatism through the Port Huron Statement and other declarations of independence. Even the phrase “New Left” was adopted to divorce the Left from its history.

SDS’s history offers a template for eliminating the embarrassing past. Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and others founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) during the Progressive era, but by World War I the word “socialist” had fallen from favor. So, with the Left seeing labor unions as the agent of societal change, the ISS became the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). Then, by the end of the 1950s, theorists Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and Norman O. Brown scoffed at the idea of blue-collar workers—often violently hostile to the Left’s aims—as transformative agents, and the LID’s student arm, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), rechristened itself Students for a Democratic Society. Just as SDS killed SLID as the fifties became the sixties, Weatherman killed SDS as the sixties became the seventies: SDS’s spirit of “participatory democracy” could not peacefully coexist with the vanguardism of Weatherman. And now, completing the circle, the SDS alumni of “progressives” for Obama resurrect a term that would have been more familiar to their distant forebears in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. On the Left, everything old is eventually new again.

In 1968, the Left served as unwitting allies of Republicans, costing the Democrats the White House by rioting at their convention and withholding votes from Hubert Humphrey. In 2008, it is their vocal support that may cost Barack Obama the presidency. Obama can take a page from the early days of the New Left, which—initially, at least—refused to allow discredited radicals to discredit it. Either Obama publicly divorces himself from radical supporters whose association does more for them than it does for him, or he faces the prospect of Bill Ayers as his Willie Horton.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: obama; radicals; yobama
With this group of Americans backing Obama, how can he lose?
1 posted on 06/30/2008 10:02:54 AM PDT by safetysign
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To: safetysign

My mother always told me- you are known by the company you keep.


2 posted on 06/30/2008 10:06:49 AM PDT by 13Sisters76 ("It is amazing how many people mistake a certain hip snideness for sophistication. " Thos. Sowell)
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To: safetysign

Obama’s brown shirts. They will go after whoever they perceive as enemies of their movement. Probably starting with Rush and Murdoch.


3 posted on 06/30/2008 10:18:44 AM PDT by MovementConservative (John Roberts and Sam Alito.... Thank you GWB)
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To: safetysign

How does the Obama Campaign keep the Lunatic Left from exploding when he says such bald-faced lies?


4 posted on 06/30/2008 10:45:37 AM PDT by pabianice
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To: 13Sisters76
My mother always told me- you are known by the company you keep.

How right she is.


5 posted on 06/30/2008 1:39:37 PM PDT by rdb3 (Upward, onward, beyond...)
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To: All

CNS NEWS.com: "OBAMA's FOR EQUAL PAY, YET PAYS FEMALE STAFFERS LESS THAN MALES" by Fred Lucas (June 30, 2008)

AMERICAN THINKER.com - blog: "So Tell Us, Sen. Obama, 'Who Else Sent You?'" by Russ Vaughn (June 29, 2008)

CITY-JOURNAL.org: "OBAMA'S BOYS OF SUMMER A Who's Who of 1968 radicals supports the candidate." (June 29, 2008)

BOSTON.com: Chicago - "GRIM PROVING GROUND FOR OBAMA'S HOUSING POLICY" by Binyamin Appelbaum (June 27, 2008) (Note Very long article & includes video)

FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS.org: "EXCLUSIVE: OBAMA'S TERROR-FIGHTING FANTASIES: DEMOCRAT TYPIFIES THE 'SEPTEMBER 10' MENTALITY" by Joel Himelfarb (June 27, 2008)

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ONE PLACE.com - FOCUS ON THE FAMILY - Issues Update 2, June 2008: "Dr James Dobson responds to a speech made by Barack Obama..." (June 24, 2008)

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NEWSMAX.com: "OBAMA'S INFLUENCE IN THE HORN OF AFRICA" by Mignon Evans (June 24, 2008, 9:53 pm)

stepping back in time...CBS2Chicago.com: "OBAMA'S CRITICISM IRKS KENYAN GOVERNMENT Government Says Obama Is A Stooge For Political Opposition" (August 28, 2006, 7:00 pm US/Central) (Note: Photo Included.)

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NATIONAL REVIEW.com: "10 CONCERNS ABOUT BARACK OBAMA It's Policy." by William J. Bennett & Seth Leibsohn (June 24, 2008)

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REWARDS FOR JUSTICE.net: "WANTED USAMA BIN LADEN Up to $25 Million Reward"

POLITICO.com: "Muslims barred from picture at Obama event" by Ben Smith (Updated June 18, 2008, 3:07pm EST)

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Photo - Link

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FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE.com: "When Will The Big Media Investigate Obama's Communist Influences?" by Bill Steigerwald (June 9, 2008)

LittleGreenFootballs.com - blog: "“At the Official Obama Site: 'Jemaah Islamiyah For Obama'" (June 8, 2008, 1:09 pm PST)

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LittleGreenFootballs.com - blog: "AT THE OFFICIAL OBAMA SITES: 57 FLAVORS OF CRAZY" (June 8, 2008, 6:24 pm PST)

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LittleGreenFootballs.com - blog: "AT THE OFFICIAL OBAMA SITE: 'HOW THE JEWISH LOBBY WORKS'" (June 8, 2008, 9:08 am PST)

JIHAD WATCH.org: "Obama's Brilliant Career as Defender of Israel Lasts About One Day" (June 5, 2008)

FOX NEWS.com (AP): Chicago - "POLITICAL FUNDRAISER TONY REZKO FOUND GUILTY ON 16 COUNTS IN CORRUPTION TRIAL" (June 4, 2008)

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LittleGreenFootballs.com - blog: "Obama the Self-Proclaimed Messiah" (June 4, 2008, 8:41 am PST)

WorldNetDaily.com: "NATION OF ISLAM ACTIVISTS ON OBAMA CAMP PAYROLL Former insider worried by senator's connection to Louis Farrakhan, members of radical group" by Aaron Klein (June 3, 2008)

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RNC - VIDEO: "Democrats vs. Obama" (Added June 3, 2008)

POLICElink.com: Portland, Oregon - "OBAMA USES POLICE MEMORIAL FOR PORTA POTTIES" (May 30, 2008)

REAL CLEAR POLITICS: "OBAMA OBFUSCATES ON CHAVEZ & FARC" by Jack Kelly (May 27, 2008)

Link

VIDEO (RNC): "Obama and The Second Amendment" (Added May 16, 2008)

TOWNHALL.com: "PALESTINIANS PHONEBANK FOR OBAMA" -Column by Amanda Carpenter (May 13, 2008)

Video - Link

DANIEL PIPES.org (FOX NEWS - Hannity & Colmes - Video): "Terrorism Troubles [i.e. George Galloway enthuses for Barack Obama]" (June 6, 2008)

MEMRITV.org - VIDEO CLIP: "Title of Video: British MP George Galloway to Hamas TV: I Pray for the Safety of Barack Obama. Arab Puppet Presidents and Corrupt Kings Will Discover That the Ground Has Moved under their Feet in November" ("Clip #1785 Broadcast: May 2, 2008")

Link

DANIEL PIPES.org (FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE.com): "Barack Obama's Muslim Childhood" by Daniel Pipes (April 29, 2008)

JEFF HEAD.com: "THE AUDACITY OF TRUTH - BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA"

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A Shirt

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Link (mp3)

VIDEO - "Shocking Obama words: what he really thinks of white folks" (Added April 9, 2008)

VIDEO: "BARACK OBAMA: THE COMPANY HE KEEPS" -Hal Lindsey (Added March 22, 2008)

VIDEO: "OBAMA: WE ARE NO LONGER A CHRISTIAN NATION" (Added March 9, 2008)

VIDEO: "IN 52 SECS WHY BARACK OBAMA CANNOT WIN A GENERAL ELECTION" (Added February 16, 2008)

NY SUN.com - opinion: "THE KENYA CONNECTION" by Daniel Johnson (January 10, 2008)

AMERICAN THINKER.com - blog: "Barack Obama and Israel" by Ed Lasky (March 22, 2007)



6 posted on 06/30/2008 2:35:58 PM PDT by Cindy
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