I wouldn’t necessarily hold this sort of thing against the president — after all, I’ve still got a bunch of Christic Institute stuff in the garage somewhere from my days as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley — but the emphasis of this hit piece does seem to be on the presumed intensity of the young Obama’s belief in the inevitability of a Leninist revolution in the United States. Still, I don’t find this guy’s recollection particularly damning, mainly because — wait for it — at the time Barack Obama was all of 19 years old.
Some may find it striking that Barry was so passionate about the cause even after the recent election of Ronald Reagan, but really, I heard lots of this sort of talk at Berkeley even in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I’m not surprised to see this sort of thing coming out of an Occidental student in the early ’80s.
[rolleyes]
Frankly, the fellow writing the piece seems to have had much better revolutionary credentials than BHO, which should make him a much more suspicious character — and yet today he’s writing for the American Thinker. Meh.
Reading that supposedly serious blather, “the old idea that the proletariat would rise up and overthrow the ruling classes. Now, the idea that we could entirely eliminate the profit motive from an advanced industrialized economy” – eliminate the “profit motive”??? As-if it were an abstraction that could somehow be un-entangled? What a useless jumbled mish-mash of faith and fantasy Marxism has proved to be, completely unrelated to the reality of how things work or what is in the make-up of people.