President Barack Obama’s past has come up several times in
the national debate. Is this a legitimate issue?
The disreputable pasts of other presidents have been noticed
in other campaigns. President Bill Clinton, some people recall, had a “bimbo”
problem. President John Kennedy had serious health problems, and he also
wandered from his marriage vows. President Nixon may not have been a crook, but
his politics was not always straight and narrow.
Mr. Obama’s past has been examined since he has been in
office. It turns out the book that introduced him to the American public,
“Dreams of My Father,” was not, as many people supposed at the time it was
issued, a strictly factual production. There are huge chunks of Mr. Obama’s
past that are only fleetingly touched upon in his supposed autobiography. Many
of the incidents in the book, it appears on close examination, are fictional;
some of the characters in the book are “composites.”
We assume, as a matter of course, that all people are
influenced by their friends and acquaintances, which is why your mother warned
you when you were a wayward teenager, “You are judged by the company you keep.”
She didn’t want you running around with the street thugs of your misspent
youth. “People will talk,’ she warned.
Some of the people who talk about presidents are journalists
and commentators.
Among the past friends and acquaintances of Mr. Obama is
Bill Ayres, a flag stomping former terrorist who, reminded of his own bomb
throwing past, expressed regret that that he and his former comrades in the Weather Underground of the silly seventies
were not more energetic. Mr. Ayres was quoted in a New York Times interview on the occasion of the publication of his
memoir, ''Fugitive Days'', as
saying, "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do
enough", and, asked if he would do it all over again -- "I don't want
to discount the possibility.”
Mr. Obama claimed
that his acquaintance with Mr. Ayres was fleeting and unimportant, a characterization some question. Their
putatively historically “accurate” autobiographies are both larded with fictitious
characters and episodes. Mr. Obama recovered politically from his momentary
alliance with Mr. Ayres -- the publisher of “Prairie Fire,” a communist
manifesto
-- who also recovered from his disreputable past. Presently, Mr. Ayres is a celebrated
pedagogue, a follower of Paulo Frere, author of “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed," a book that had a certain revolutionary
cachet in the post Woodstock era and was thought by some to have ushered in
decades of educational destruction.
Mr. Obama, whose
political career was launched from Mr. Ayres’ living room, obviously was not
judged by the company he kept with Mr. Ayres. Mr. Obama’s much longer and more
emotionally involved connection with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a black
power preacher who claimed that the U.S. government “invented the HIV virus as
a means of genocide against people of color,” apparently left no permanent
marks on his reputation. Such associations obviously did not harm Mr. Obama’s
presidential prospects. Both the title of Mr. Obama’s less literary opus, “The
Audacity of Hope,” and his keynote address to the Democratic National
Convention were inspired by Mr. Wright’s racialist effusions.
Not only past
associations but commanding ideas bounce harmlessly off Mr. Obama’s politician-made-of-steel
chest.
The thesis of a
new documentary by Dinesh D’Souza, “2016 Obama’s America,” is that Mr. Obama is
wedded to an overmastering idea: “He simply subscribes to an ideology that
thinks it would be good for America to have a diminished economy and a
diminished role in the world. In other words, Obama is all about what he
perceives as global justice. And global justice to him means a redistribution
of wealth and power away from America and towards the rest of the world. That’s
his ideology.”
Mr. Obama’s favorable
presidential fortune may be the best proof that mom’s warning – you will be
judged by the company you keep – is simply an ancient relic of hallowed times past.
The dust of ages has long since settled over both Mr. Ayres and Mr. Wright. But
polls showing that some of the fizz has gone out of Mr. Obama’s bottle and Mr.
D’Souza’s film, the #2 largest grossing documentary of all time, suggests Mr. Obama may be vulnerable.
Comments
To most of the MSM, plainly not. But a Republican's past is clearly a matter of grave concern, except when there is evidence of clear competency and achievement, such as the fact that Romney graduated from Harvard Law and Business School simultaneously. Obama is touted as brilliant, Romney not so much. But by the single measure of Degrees earned (and simultaneously at that), Romney certainly appears the more accomplished man.
Now lets move on to Joe Biden. He was widely acclaimed by the Media as BRILLIANT foreign policy "expert" for his years of service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Yet very recently he himself dismissed that "expertise" as non-existant. Sarah Palin however was fair game for a public proctology exam by the same news outlets that crowned Joe Biden as an expert.
Why is the media so hell bent to eviscerate its own credibility?