Books & Arts

Want to send this page or a link to a friend? Click on mail at the top of this window.

More Books and Arts

Posted August 17, 2008

'Obama Nation'

By JEROME R. CORSI

Published August 12, 2008

Preface

Who I Am and Why I Wrote This Book

In 2004, I coauthored Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, with Swift Boat veteran John O’Neill, a highly successful attorney in Houston, Texas, and a longtime friend I first met more than forty years ago, in college. In the 1960s, John O’Neill attended the U.S. Naval Academy while I was attending Case Western Reserve University and we competed in intercollegiate debate.

Unfit for Command was a critical analysis of John Kerry’s military service during the Vietnam War and his radical antiwar protest activities as a lead spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he returned from Vietnam. Any implication that this book is a “Swift Boat” book is not accurate in that John O’Neill and the other members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have had nothing to do with this book, its analysis and arguments, or my opposition to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

My intent in writing this book, as was the case in coauthoring Unfit for Command, is to fully document all arguments and contentions I make, extensively footnoting all references, so readers can determine for themselves the truth and validity of the factual claims. My fundamental opposition to Obama’s presidential candidacy involves public policy differences. While Obama’s three complete years in the Senate have given him remarkably little time on the national political stage, we still have enough information from his slim Senate record, as well as his years in the Illinois state legislature, to see a pattern of voting on the far left on a wide range of policy issues, including abortion, taxes, illegal immigration, international trade, and national security.

In this book, I intend to argue that an Obama presidency would lead us into an “Obama Nation.” The play on words is fully intended, because Obama’s radical leftist politics, driven by the cult of personality he has intentionally manufactured, would be an abomination in that the result of those policies would be to lead the United States in a costly and self-destructive direction, both at home and abroad. After an Obama presidency, we would be a militarily weakened and economically diminished nation. Instead of being more united, our internal conflicts could well become more sharpened and more abrasive from four years of Obama leadership.

Obama has so doggedly positioned himself on the extreme left that it is doubtful he can credibly move to the political center without alienating his Democratic Party supporters on that extreme left as well as his youthful base. This, in many ways, was the liability Senator George McGovern faced in running against President Richard Nixon in 1972. After McGovern won the nomination on a radical antiwar platform, Nixon was able to show the vast majority of center-right voters that McGovern’s policies spelled defeat in Vietnam, even though Nixon himself withdrew from the war less than two years later.

In the race against Barack Obama in the general election, the Republican Party will have a decided advantage because of the prolonged, acrimonious primary campaign Obama and Hillary Clinton waged against each other in 2008. The Republican Party now has hours of video ready to be played back to American voters in campaign advertisements, repeating Clinton’s and Obama’s abrasive comments about the other.

Obama first drew my attention in 2004, when he stepped onto the national political stage by addressing the Democratic National Convention that nominated Kerry for the presidency. My preliminary decision to write this book was made in 2005, immediately after Obama was sworn in to the U.S. Senate. Since he was a child, Obama has been making statements that he intended to be president, and in 2005 I suspected he would attempt to use the U.S. Senate as a stepping-stone for the presidency.

So I began researching Obama and following him in the Senate; I’d frequently sit in the Senate gallery to observe him on the Senate floor, and watched him on C-SPAN as he debated and voted on legislation. I finalized the decision to write this book in March 2008, as Hillary Clinton continued her presidential campaign despite delegate numbers that made it likely Obama would win the 2008 presidential nomination in the Democratic Party. I calculated that publishing the book before the Democratic National Convention would likely have an impact, even if Hillary beat the odds and ultimately won the nomination. Yet, I did not write the book to promote Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, nor did I publish it before the national nominating convention in the Democratic Party to assist her in getting the nomination on the convention floor. If Hillary Clinton were the nominee, I would oppose her too.

I have never been a registered member of the Republican or Democratic Party, unless voting in some particular state primary over the past forty years necessitated that result. The only political party I ever consciously joined is the Constitution Party, of which I am a registered member in the state of New Jersey, where I currently reside. Let me also clearly state that I am writing this book strictly to examine and oppose Barack Obama, not to support Senator John McCain or any other Republican Party or third-party candidate for the presidency.

While I intend to vote in 2008 for Chuck Baldwin, the presidential candidate of the Constitution Party, this book was begun before that party had chosen a 2008 presidential candidate and is not intended to be an argument for Chuck Baldwin. I also want to make clear the Constitution Party asked me to run as its presidential candidate in 2008, but I declined, preferring instead to remain with World Net Daily, where I am currently employed as a senior staff reporter.

Obama is running to be the nation’s first African-American president. Since the 1960s, I have been studying and writing about U.S. racial relations. In all my writings on that subject, I have been a strong opponent of any form of racial violence and a strong advocate for eliminating all forms of racial discrimination, inequality, and injustice.

In 2006, I supported Ken Blackwell in his campaign as the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio. Once again, my background studying racial relations was relevant, as Blackwell sought to be the first African-American governor of Ohio. Seeking to advance Blackwell’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, I coauthored with him a book titled Rebuilding America: A Prescription for Creating Strong Families, Building the Wealth of Working People, and Ending Welfare.

Many of my policy criticisms of Obama stem from arguments initially made with Ken Blackwell in writing Rebuilding America, especially the analysis of the importance of families in building middle-class wealth, reducing the incidence of teenage pregnancies, and alleviating poverty.

Blackwell, a conservative, had served in 2004 as Ohio’s secretary of state, and so presided over his state’s voting in the 2004 presidential election, which George W. Bush narrowly won over John Kerry. It was in Ohio that Bush secured the final electoral votes needed to be elected president in yet another historically close contest. I did not meet Blackwell or work with him in any capacity until 2005, months after the 2004 campaign was over.

My interest in U.S. racial politics dates back to my days as an undergraduate student in political science at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. As a political science student, I wrote papers published in law journals on legal assistance for the poor and on the Detroit race riots of 1967. The Hough Riots in Cleveland in 1966 led me to coauthor, with two Case Western Reserve professors, a book titled A Time To Burn? This was one of the first college textbooks on racial relations that used the race riots of the 1960s as a central focus of analysis. In 1966, I also studied Reverend Jesse Jackson’s efforts to bring “Operation Breadbasket,” begun by Reverend Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council, to Chicago.

In 1967, while completing my senior year at Case Western Reserve, I worked full-time in downtown Cleveland with Edward Howard & Co., one of the nation’s first public relations firms (it was established in 1925). I was an assistant to William Silverman, Jr., the vice president, who served as public relations manager for Seth Taft, the Republican Party candidate opposing Democrat Carl B. Stokes to be mayor of Cleveland.

My duties at Edward Howard & Co. during the Stokes-Taft race included bird-dogging Carl Stokes in the field by following him on his public appearances and reporting back the contents of his speeches and any relevant information regarding attendees, crowd size, and audience reaction. My work was fully disclosed to the Stokes campaign and I was welcomed at virtually every Carl Stokes campaign event I chose to attend. I observed Reverend King in Cleveland as he visited the city to aid in a voter registration drive and campaign for Stokes in 1967. On November 7, 1967, Stokes was elected the first African-American mayor of a major U.S. city.

On July 23, 1968, in my last summer in Cleveland before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, there was a gun battle between Ahmed Evans, an African-American militant, along with his armed followers, and the Cleveland police in Glenville, an inner-city neighborhood. The shooting went on for an hour and a half, leaving seven people dead and fifteen wounded. Fifteen of the casualties were policemen. For the next five days, a riot flared in Glenville and the surrounding East Side communities; the burning and looting were typical of 1960s race riots.

In my first year at Harvard University, where I was pursuing a Ph.D. in political science, I coauthored with Louis H. Masotti, Ph.D., a report titled “Shoot-Out in Cleveland. Black Militants and the Police: July 23, 1968.” The report, then widely known as the “Masotti Report,” was published as a staff report to the Eisenhower Commission, formally known as the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, as well as in two commercially published editions. I had studied under Masotti at Case Western Reserve both as a political science student and as a research associate at the Civil Violence Research Center, which Masotti headed.

As part of my studies at Harvard, I continued researching racial violence, student protests, and the antiwar movement as a research associate at the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University. One of my projects involved studying the wide range of civil rights and protest literature of that time. For example, at Harvard Square in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the Black Muslims frequently distributed such literature, including free copies of their newspaper. A subfocus of that study became the anti-Semitic diatribes the Black Muslim movement launched at Jews. I initially found the harsh feelings surprising; my assumption had been that oppressed African-Americans and Jews would be sympathetic to one another; the Jews have suffered centuries of their own oppression. While we found affinity between the intellectual views of Jews on the political left and the anger of African- American radicals, we also found antipathy in the black communities toward Jewish shop owners, who often became victims of burning and looting in urban race riots.

The Lemberg Center was where I conducted my first field studies of John Kerry and his participation with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I personally observed various race riots, student demonstrations, and antiwar protests, and examined the literature that was distributed at these events as explanation and political justification.

In 1980 and 1981, after the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, I was recruited as a political scientist by the U.S. Agency for International Development to assist the State Department on a psychiatrist-led team that had been organized to teach hostage survival skills to U.S. embassy employees and staff worldwide. For this work, I received a Top Secret security clearance. The project was led by psychiatrist David Hubbard, a noted expert on skyjacking. My work included extensive psychological research and training, with instruction from Dr. Hubbard. I analyzed prison interview transcripts and films of a variety of convicted felons, including bank robbers, rapists, and terrorists.

By 1982, I had left academia to pursue a career in financial services that continues to this day. After coauthoring Unfit for Command, I decided to devote the majority of my time to writing about politics. As a Senior Staff Reporter for World Net Daily, I investigate and write about a wide range of issues, including the economy, oil policy, trade agreements, foreign affairs, and domestic politics. One or more of my articles are published nearly every day.

Islam is part of this book, both in examining Obama’s background and in looking at policy areas including Islamic terrorism and our relations with Iran. I have been studying and writing about terrorism and Islamic extremism for over twenty-five years. This includes a game theoretic analysis of terrorism published by a noted journal at Yale University.

I have written or co-written two books on Iran: Atomic Iran and Showdown with Nuclear Iran. In the preface to Atomic Iran, I went on record supporting Islam as a genuine and important religion, with more than one billion believers throughout the world. I also acknowledged the proud three-thousand-year history of Iran, carefully distinguishing my opposition to the radical terrorists and clerics controlling the current Islamic Republic of Iran. I have opposed the United States’ or Israel’s going to war with Iran, arguing instead that we should support the millions of Iranian expatriates around the world and the thousands of brave freedom fighters within Iran who seek to bring true liberty to their country peacefully.

Finally, let me clearly state that this book has been written solely on my initiative. There has been no attempt made, nor will there be any attempt made, to communicate the shape or contents of this book with anyone in the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Constitution Party, or in any third party with a candidate running for the presidency.

In contrast to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama has not been vetted, not even by Democrats. Even today he is largely an unknown to all but a small handful of dogged political professionals and a concentrated core of political junkies who inhabit Internet blogs. Thus, in this book I have pursued Obama’s extensive connections with Islam and with radical racial politics, including those articulated by such extremists as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, in order to bring these issues from the shadows where Obama has tried to keep them hidden. For this same reason, I have pursued Obama’s extensive and continuing connections with Kenya, the homeland of his father, where Obama has continued to involve himself personally in advancing the goals of Raila Odinga, the radical socialist presidential contender who comes from Obama’s home tribe. Even for Obama, his past is prelude, in a political world where voters legitimately see character as an important predictor of policy.

Hence, I also document Obama’s emergence in Chicago politics through the Saul Alinsky school of radical community organizing. Alinsky used the battle cry of “Change” as a code word for a socialist redistribution of wealth. I have also examined Obama’s involvement in the slum landlord empire of Chicago political fixer Tony Rezko. I reported questions about Rezko’s use of a loan from Nadhmi Auchi, a Middle Eastern financial intermediary, to help Obama finance the purchase of his dream-home property in Chicago.

The nation went into 2008 with a struggling economy and a continuing war in the Middle East. Radical Islamic terrorist enemies continue to plot our demise, while growing numbers of largely Hispanic illegal immigrants, many of them still citizens of their home countries, including Mexico, live in our midst with no firm purpose or requirement to become American citizens. Meanwhile, urban African-American poverty has become generational and persistent, hardened by the continuance of an alarming rate of teenage pregnancies and abortions. These problems of racial disadvantage have not been diminished by more than four decades of well-intentioned but ineffective welfare-state programs that many would argue have actually been counterproductive. I will argue that the policies reflected in Obama’s legislative history or suggested in his presidential campaign are nothing more than a rerun of far-leftist solutions that have been tried many times but to no avail.

Obama’s life story, a subject Obama himself put on the agenda by writing an autobiography, is relevant only to the extent it illuminates public policy goals and objectives Obama is likely to pursue. In the final analysis, what I seek to prevent by writing this book is an Obama presidency that would represent nothing more than a repeat of the failed extremist politics that have characterized and plagued Democratic Party presidential politics since the late 1960s. With Obama, the leftist political correctness enforced by his campaign has even intervened to prevent anyone from using his middle name, which happens to be Hussein.

Put simply, the argument here is that Barack Obama is more of a Michael Dukakis, a George McGovern, a Jimmy Carter, or a John Kerry than he is a Franklin Delano Roosevelt or even a John F. Kennedy.

From THE OBAMA NATION: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. Copyright (c) 2008 by Jerome Corsi. Published by arrangement with Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 

Wehaitians.com, the scholarly journal of democracy and human rights

More from wehaitians.com

Main / Columns / Books And Arts / Miscellaneous