The number did not shock me at all. I saw Bob Beckel make a $10,000 bet on the outcome of the 2012 presidential election with Eric Bolling on The Five just a few days ago. I think it is silly for the ABC pundits to think this is an issue. After all, a tinier bet would have been ridiculous and a much larger bet would have been clearly inappropriate.

To put this issue in context, I should add that Forbes reported that Diane Sawyer made $12 million in 2005. We do not hear the pundits at ABC bringing up that little bit of irony, do we?

I don’t think Bachmann did much to restore her front runner status in Iowa. I think she should have left Herman Cain in his political grave. Sad. Sad. Sad.

As a bit of nostalgia, I remember listening to Gingrich’s GOPAC audio tapes too. I was a young political science professor at Williams College in MA in 1988 who was recruited to run for the state assembly to pin down a guy who might have been a strong Dukakis volunteer in Iowa. I remember listening to those GOPAC tapes. I guess that Rick Santorum brought them up because he is trying to make Newt Gingrich look too old to be president. Rick Santorum was once one of our most precocious citizen politicians rapidly rising from beating a Democrat congressman at age 32 to being a U.S. senator at age 36. Unfortunately, Santorum’s defeat in PA was a big failure. Santorum lost, with 41% of the vote to Casey’s 59% – the largest margin of defeat ever for an incumbent Republican Senator in Pennsylvania.

All in all, I think Gingrich won because he survived that intensive attack on his infidelity. By the end, I was feeling sorry for him even though he made a big mistake. Gingrich is going through a trial by fire and surviving as a stronger candidate according to the recent primary voter polls. Clearly, you do not become president by making yourself into the best candidate. It is much easier to make your opponents the worst candidates.

I expect that the voters will see this as, in part, fitting punishment for the seemingly repentant Gingrich and a necessary ritual for him to endure on his path to the White House and the overthrow of the Marxist socialist Obama regime.

That is the question I was faced with in 2008. I had met the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College, and I knew that his commitment to socialism was deep, genuine and long-standing.  See, http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/meeting_young_obama.html

I had been a leader of the Marxist students at Occidental College myself starting in 1976 when I founded the precursor of the Democrat Socialist Alliance on campus.  The young Obama I knew was a Marxist socialist who would have been quite comfortable with Communist party members like his Hawaii mentor Frank Marshall Davis, retired domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, or active socialist politicians like Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer.

The Obama I knew was nothing like the life-long, pragmatic centrist that he was pretending to be in the 2008 presidential campaign. When I talked politics with the young Obama, he expressed a profound commitment to bringing about a socialist economic system in the U.S. – completely divorced from the profit motive – which would occur, in his lifetime, through a potentially violent, Communist-style revolution.  In this context, I saw my report on young Obama as a key piece of evidence suggesting a profound continuity in his belief system. See, http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/obamas_missing_link_1.html

Although I was surprised by Barack Obama’s insistence on his mainstream ideological credentials, I was shocked that my attempts to spread the news about young Obama’s Marxism failed to gain any media traction during the 2008 presidential campaign with reporters, activists, or campaign staffs. 

Once I saw the significance of my face-to-face observations on the young Obama, I went out of my way to get my story on record with the Orange County Register.  I tried to contact, among others, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, the folks behind the Swift Boat ads, and the McCain campaign.

I thought I would get a phone call back from Fox News – someone, somewhere – and I still do not understand why no one seemed to catch on to the urgency of the situation.  I understand I did not have audio tape of young Obama. I did not have any photos or home movies.  Nevertheless, I was extremely active in the leftist politics and counter cultural milieu of Occidental College in the 1970s. 

As a younger man, I had earned a Ph.D. in political science from Cornell which, I would think, gave me some credibility in measuring young Obama’s ideological convictions. I quickly saw other people who had known the young Obama were featured in various news articles.  It seemed to me I should have been just another interview for any journalist, producer or campaign consultant interested in checking out my story and testing it against the facts.

In frustration, I was also posting what I knew on The Caucus Blog site at the New York Times.  My expectation was someone from the Times would call me and follow-up on the leads I was sending out.  Here is a sample of what I was doing in October 2008 to get the word out about Obama’s Marxist ideology.  See, http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/debate-expectations-talking-up-the-town-hall/?scp=20&sq=Marxist%20occidental%20obama&st=cse

I even thought of scheduling my own press conference on the campus of Occidental College through their campus Republican club. Internally, I was conflicted by the urgency of what I knew and the sense it was best for the story to break out in a manner supportive of the McCain campaign. 

What shocked me about my experience in the summer of 2008 is that I thought my background as a Williams College political science professor, as a small business owner, and as a visible presence in the Orange County community would allow my message to immediately go to the very top of the McCain campaign.  I thought my story would be welcomed by Fox News. 

Since then, things have slowly gotten better.  My story on the young Marxist Obama has appeared in Michael Savage’s Trickle-Up Poverty, Paul Kengor’s Dupes, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief and Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama.

Nevertheless, I think there is something broken in our media and campaign system. I do not think most independents or conservatives understand, or fully appreciate, the tremendous advantages the left derives from having the mainstream media serve as the fully paid, completely sympathetic, Dan Rather-level opposition research team of the Democrat party. It is a system that methodically ignores damaging information about flawed candidates like Sen. John Edwards and Rep. Anthony Weiner while routinely elevating minor errors among Republicans to the status of Watergate investigations. 

If Republicans are going to win in 2012, I think they need to make some changes so that they are friendlier to the whistle-blowers bringing them bad news about the Obama administration. Personally, I would like to see Republicans create new ways to collect negative news stories on liberals by 1) including web pages requesting opposition research from leakers, 2) establishing guidelines for leakers that help them give campaign decision makers the confidence to pursue appropriate leads, and 3) instituting feedback mechanisms so leakers have some minimal assurance that they have been heard by top campaign managers and that their information has been discarded for technical or strategic reasons and not simply because it was overlooked by a careless staff member.

I think recognition of this problem should be the first step in taking systematic action to prevent flawed Democrat candidates from winning office. In the meantime, I predict we will see more examples of media failure as the left dominates the muckraking journalism profession while the right seems too dependent on a small handful of seemingly obscure, over-worked journalists and – as my case illustrates – unconnected and often baffled citizen activists.

 I met Obama in December of 1980, a couple of days after Christmas, in Portola Valley — a small town near Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.  I was a 23 year old second-year graduate student in Cornell’s Government Department, and had flown to California to visit a 21 year old girlfriend, Caroline Boss.  Boss was a senior at Occidental College, where she had taken a class in the fall of 1980 with political theorist Roger Boesche.  She met and befriended Obama in that class.

 I had been an angry Marxist revolutionary during my undergraduate career at Occidental College.  During my hyperactive sophomore year, in the fall of 1976, I founded the Marxist-Socialist group on campus and named it the Political Awareness Fellowship.   As I recall, I developed this innocuous sounding name because there were so few students on campus as radical as I, and I was fearful of turning off moderate students who might be willing to learn more about Marxist theory.   

 On my watch, our group grew to a dozen student activists and managed to attract crowds of 80 or more to our events.  The most successful of these was a campaign to raise awareness of the plight of homosexuals who were beaten by Los Angeles City police officers along the Hollywood strip.  I promoted this event with a large banner in the Occidental College quad reading: Anita Byrant: Hitler in Drag?  During my junior year, I left Occidental College with the mission to study Marxist economics at England’s University of Sussex in the fall of 1977.

By the time I returned to Occidental in the fall of 1978 for my senior year, the Political Awareness Fellowship had morphed into something much bigger, an organization with strong leadership, its own office space and a new name.  The group’s president was Gary Chapman, an older student who had served as a Green Beret in Viet Nam.  Chapman was a colorful figure who shared stories from his military career including how he was required to take apart and reassemble his rifle in the dark.  Under Chapman’s leadership, the group had changed its name to the Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA).  As I recall, he told me “the old name wasn’t letting people know what we stood for.”  I agreed.  The DSA met weekly and brought in speakers about once a month.  Events were advertised by big signs in the campus quad.  During my time at Occidental, the group searched for ways to embarrass the administration, help students to see the evil of the U.S. capitalist system, and mobilize people in preparation for the coming revolution.

 In the spring of 1979, Chapman and I joined forces with other students on campus to found an anti-apartheid coalition, called The Student Committee Against Apartheid, which included the leadership of the DSA as well as several other groups. Although the coalition included liberals as well as radicals, I think it is fair to say the most significant intellectual and organizational leadership came from students in the DSA.  One of the ironies of our effort is that the white students took the lead in organizing these protests while African-American students seemed strangely passive and uninvolved in fighting the South African regime. 

My romance with Boss began in the spring of 1979.  Boss had joined the DSA and participated in the anti-apartheid events I helped organize that year.  Like me, she was a committed Marxist, preparing for the approaching revolution.  That year, I completed my senior honors thesis on Marxist economics.  Boss and I danced together after I accepted my Occidental degree in June of 1979 wearing the red armband that signified my solidarity with my Marxist brethren around the world and my commitment to the anti-apartheid movement.

 My relationship with Boss continued through the summer of 1979 and the academic year 1979-1980.  She spent the summer of 1980 with me at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.  When Boss returned to Occidental in the fall of 1980 for her senior year, she enrolled in Professor Roger Boesche’s European Political Thought class. It was there that she met Barack Obama who was starting his sophomore year. 

 When I first saw Obama, I remember I was standing on the porch of Boss’s parents’ impressive home as a sleek, expensive luxury car pulled up the driveway.  Two young men emerged from the vehicle.  They were well-dressed and looked like they were born to wealth and privilege.  I was a little surprised to learn they were Boss’s friends from Occidental College until she articulated the underlying political connection.  “They’re on our side,” she said.

 The taller of the two was Obama, then only 19, who towered over his five-foot-five companion, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo – a wealthy, 21 year old Pakistani student.  Chandoo had a full dark black, neatly trimmed moustache, and was dressed in expensive clothes.  Nevertheless, Obama was the more handsome of the two.  At six foot two, Obama carried himself with the dignity and poise of a model.  The diminutive Chandoo, in contrast, came across as more of a practical, businessman type.  Obama displayed a visible deference to Chandoo when they were standing together at the vehicle.

 Chandoo was vaguely familiar to me as a participant in the earlier anti-apartheid rallies on the Occidental College campus.  In David Remnick’s book, The Bridge, Chandoo’s bona fides as a committed Marxist were well-known to those close to him.  Chandoo’s girlfriend at the time, Margot Mifflin, told Remnick that “[I]n college, Hasan was a socialist, a Marxist, which is funny since he is from a wealthy family.” (See, Remnick, David, The Bridge, Alfred A, Knopf, 2010, page 104.)  Young Obama, on the other hand, was completely new to me.

  “This is Barack Obama,” Boss said.

 Since I was not much taller than Chandoo, I remember I looked up at Obama as we shook hands.  I was completely mystified by the pronunciation of his name. He did not put up a fight over it, however.

  “You can call me Barry,” Obama said.

 During the introduction, Boss and Chandoo were eager to let me know that Obama was a graduate of the prestigious Punahou Academy, an elite prep school in Honolulu.  I vividly remember that Chandoo was intensely proud of Obama’s ties to Punahou.  This prestige, however, was wasted on me.  I had never heard of the school and did not have a clue about what it meant to be one of its graduates.  Obama seemed embarrassed by the fuss.  Boss, I remember, wanted to make sure I understood that young Obama was not merely an attractive socialite dabbling in Marxist theory.  “You’ve worked with us,” she observed. “You’ve been at our DSA meetings. You’ve been active in the anti-apartheid movement.”

After a while, all six of us — the four students and Boss’ adoptive parents — drove in two cars to a local restaurant.  The owner knew Boss’s father.  The food was delicious, the setting spectacularly “California casual,” with tall redwood trees all around.  At the restaurant, we six continued our talk. Chandoo was quiet, less forceful, and deferential to Obama.  Obama was polite to Boss’s parents, calm, and distinguished in his manner.  Mr. Boss disapproved of his daughter’s radical perspective and could barely disguise his contempt for me.

 Despite the recent election of Ronald Reagan, the focus of our discussion was on El Salvador and Latin America. I remember I was especially angry about what was happening in El Salvador, particularly the recent rape and murder of four American nuns and a laywoman. We also discussed the recent assassination of John Lennon in New York City.  After lunch, the entourage returned to the Boss’s home in Portola Valley.  Mr. Boss, a gruff Swiss-born businessman, was an aficionado of luxury cars who took pride in his successes in the greeting card and display case businesses.

 “That’s an impressive car. Which one of you is the owner?” he asked.

 “It’s mine,” said Chandoo, graciously adding: “Would you like to see it?”

 While Chandoo and Mr. Boss gave Chandoo’s luxury car a once over, the rest of us engaged in small talk until Chandoo returned.  Chandoo beamed smugly, having impressed Boss’s father with his expensive car.  Inside the house, Mrs. Boss prepared snacks for everyone.  All four of the students lit up after-dinner cigarettes in the dining room of the Boss’s home. Caroline Boss sat at the head of the table to my left.  Obama sat directly across from me.  Chandoo sat on the other side of the table on Obama’s left.  Naturally, our conversation gravitated towards the coming revolution. I expected that my undergraduate friends would be interested in hearing my latest take on contemporary Marxist thought. I was in for quite a bit of a shock.

My graduate studies that fall had tempered my earlier Marxism with a more realistic perspective.  I thought a revolution was not in the cards anymore. There was no inevitability, in my mind, to 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 seemed like a childhood fantasy.  The future, I now thought, would belong to nations with mixed economic systems — like those in Europe — where there was government planning of the economy combined with a greater effort to produce a more equitable distribution of wealth.  It made more sense to me to focus on elections rather than on preparing for a coming revolution.

Boss and Obama, however, had a starkly different view. They believed that the economic stresses of the Carter years meant revolution was still imminent. The election of Reagan was simply a minor set-back in terms of the coming revolution.  As I recall, Obama repeatedly used the phrase “When the revolution comes….”  In my mind, I remember thinking that Obama was blindly sticking to the simple Marxist theory that had characterized my own views while I was an undergraduate at Occidental College.  “There’s going to be a revolution,” Obama said, “we need to be organized and grow the movement.”  In Obama’s view, our role must be to educate others so that we might usher in more quickly this inevitable revolution. 

I know this may be implausible to some readers, but I distinctly remember Obama surprising me by bringing up Frantz Fanon and colonialism.  He impressed me with his knowledge of these two topics, topics which were not among my strong points — or of overwhelming concern to me.  Boss and Obama seemed to think their ideological purity was a persuasive argument in predicting that a coming revolution would end capitalism.  While I felt I was doing them a favor by providing them with the latest research, I saw I was in danger of being cast as a reactionary who did not grasp the nuances of international Marxist theory.

Chandoo let Boss and Obama take the crux of the argument to me.  Chandoo, in fact, seemed chagrined by the level of disagreement in the group.  I cannot remember him making any significant comments during this discussion.

Drawing on the history of Western Europe, I responded it was unrealistic to think the working class would ever overthrow the capitalist system.  As I recall, Obama reacted negatively to my critique, saying: “That’s crazy!” 

Since Boss and Obama had injected theory into our debate, I reacted by going historical.  As best I can recreate the argument, I responded by critiquing their perspective with the fresh insight I had gained from my recent reading of Barrington Moore’s book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966). Moore had argued that a Russian or Chinese style revolution — leading to communism — was only possible in an agrarian society with a weak or non-existent middle-class or bourgeoisie.

 Since I was a Marxist myself at the time, and had studied variations in Marxist theory, I can state that everything I heard Obama argue that evening was consistent with Marxist philosophy, including the ideas that class struggle was leading to an inevitable revolution and that an elite group of revolutionaries was needed to lead the effort.  If he had not been a true Marxist-Leninist, I would have noticed and remembered.  I can still, with some degree of ideological precision, identify which students at Occidental College were radicals and which ones were not.  I can do the same thing for the Occidental College professors at that time.

 By the time the debate came to an end, Obama — although not Boss — was making peace, agreeing with the facts I had laid out, and demonstrating an apparent agreement with my more realistic perspective.  I have a vivid memory of Obama surrendering to my argument including signaling to the somewhat bewildered Chandoo — through his voice and body language — that the argument had concluded and had been decided in my favor.  Around 9 p.m., Chandoo and Obama left for another appointment, either in Palo Alto or San Francisco.  In retrospect, Obama had proved to me that he was indeed, as Boss had promised, “on our side.”

 Long before I realized Obama had grown into a spectacular political career, I have treasured this particular memory as an early example of my own intellectual growth and an early sign of my modest promise as a teacher.  At the time, I had the impression that I might have been one of the first to directly challenge Obama’s Marxist-Leninist mind-set and to introduce him to a more practical view that saw politics, rather than revolution, as the preferred route to socialism.  Had I really persuaded him, or was he just making nice to smooth things over with a new friend?  I’d like to think it was the former.

Whatever progress I made with Obama that evening, the price of our debate was a greater ideological wedge between me and Boss and a further decline in our rocky relationship.  Our relationship would officially end in February and then flicker out completely by June 1981 — much to the satisfaction of Boss’s father.

I remember that Obama was friendly to me on at least three other occasions over the next several months.  For example, Boss and I visited the apartment he shared with Chandoo.  I spoke with him again on campus in the student union.  I saw him on campus in The Cooler — the school’s coffee and sandwich shop.  I also spoke with him at large party in June 1981.  I certainly considered him a friend, a confidant and a political ally in the larger struggle against poverty and oppressive social systems. 

Whatever impact our encounter might have had on him, I know something about what Barack Obama believed in 1980.  At that time, the future president was a doctrinaire Marxist revolutionary, although perhaps — for the first time — considering conventional politics as a more practical road to socialism.  Knowing this, I think I have a responsibility to place on the public record my account of this incident from our president’s past.

As an eye witness to young Obama’s Marxist ideology, I was excited to see Cashill busting up the myths surrounding Obama and replacing them with a simpler, easier to believe story that is a much better fit with accessible, on-line evidence.  After reading Cashill’s book, I suspect swing voters will be disappointed by the titanic gap between Obama’s all-American myth and the cold facts of his real life. 

One of the coldest facts is that Cashill gives us insight into the unwholesome side of the young Obama story – the odd, deviant, dysfunctional world of Frank Marshall Davis.  Davis, as readers may know, was a member of the Communist party and also handy in the craft of producing pornographic literature and photography.  Cashill reframes the Obama story by pointing out that Frank Marshall Davis and his friend Paul Robeson were Stalinist Communists, a political label which is shocking to most Americans and yet useful to me in understanding the roots of the Marxist ideology and earnest revolutionary fervor I observed in the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College in 1980-1981.

Even as somebody who met young Obama in the early 1980s, I’m was still startled by Cashill’s most controversial argument – the theory that Bill Ayers was the ghost author of Dreams from My Father.  Cashill’s thesis was supported, of course, by the independent reporting of a liberal author, Christopher Andersen.  Andersen unwisely confirmed Ayers’ participation in creating Dreams in an otherwise flattering book called Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage (2010).  The weight of Cashill’s argument, however, rests on his careful textual analysis of the striking similarities between the language used in Dreams and the language used in Ayers’ own writing.  Here, I’m most convinced by Cashill’s description of how Obama correctly applies nautical images to his life story.  The accuracy of the nautical language in Dreams strikes me as much more consistent with Ayer’s experience as a merchant marine than with Obama’s experience as a community organizer.

I would like to add more details that support the idea that Ayers was a major player in drafting Dreams from My Father.  The young Barack Obama I knew, for example, displayed absolutely no hostility to white people.  He appeared to be culturally and emotionally white.  The young Barack Obama I knew was not particularly close to the African-American students at Oxy either, but was – instead – deeply involved in the lives and political activities of the most radical foreign and Muslim students.  The young Barack Obama I knew would have been excited to meet Bill Ayers, would have been comfortable with Ayers’ anti-American hostility, and would have been more than capable of persuading the jaded ex-terrorist that he was a sincere believer in the necessity of a socialist transformation of the U.S.

My only difference with Cashill is that I’m not impressed with the quality of Dreams from My Father.

This is true even after Cashill’s book single-handedly improved my taste as a consumer of contemporary literature.   My reading of Dreams did not leave me with any useful paradigm shifts, any evidence of encyclopedic knowledge or any immediately relevant information.  I think it is more accurate to assert that President Clinton’s book, My Life, articulates the insights and raw memory capacity of a true genius.   In comparison to My Life, I found Dreams dull and boring – except for the parts tangentially related to my own intellectual development or linked to my nearly insignificant participation in what Obama reports were the pivotal, life-changing moments of his sophomore year at Occidental College.   

Aside from this relatively minor disagreement regarding the quality of Dreams, I whole-heartedly agree with Cashill’s take on the challenge of confronting Obama’s charismatic power: The alarming sense that media elites greet one’s modest, factual, painfully obvious news tips with an astonishing lack of appropriate attention.  I have come to believe there is something broken in American journalism.  I would think a healthy, well-functioning democracy would include mainstream media outlets that would snap open the delightful fortune cookies Cashill has set out for them.  For now, my confidence for winning our future rests in the outspoken courage of Jack Cashill, a writer who is willing to go to extreme lengths – short of leaving his home surrounded by leaves – to make sure that his fellow citizens learn the truth about President Obama.

Compassionate fellow that he is, President Clinton graciously served as the keynote speaker for the Neighborhoods U.S.A. luncheon on May 28, 2010.  This was my first time seeing President Clinton face to face and I was curious to hear what he had to say. 

As far as I could tell, President Clinton’s primary message was that those of us working at the neighborhood level were the most important people on Earth and that his experience at the national level had taught him that it was a more cruel world than what we were used to seeing or observing. 

President Clinton argued that neighborhoods were a healthy and wonderful thing because citizens were forced to get to know each other as individuals.  He pointed out that – at the national level – it was easy for his political enemies to create an inaccurate and unfair characterization of him and others. 

For example, he shared the comments of one of his assistant who was with him in Washington who claimed, in relation to press accounts regarding President Clinton that “They keep writing about someone I am unfamiliar with.”

As someone who has occasionally been in the public eye myself, I know President Clinton is telling the truth that the media does tend to portray people in a manner that best sells newspapers or keeps you holding on through the commercial instead of the manner that might satisfy your own ego’s needs.  In my case, for example, I was never on the front page of a major newspaper for anything good or inspiring that I’ve done. 

At the federal level, President Clinton pointed out there are special problems “…because…it’s easy when you’re a long way away and there’s a lot of people in between that have various interests in…turning you into…a cartoon, instead of a human being.  It’s easy to perform reverse plastic surgery on you.  Particularly when it’s tough.”

Since I was attending the luncheon on business, I had to keep my mouth shut at the event.  Nevertheless, it was clear to me that President Clinton has a real nature which leaks out once in a while, a real nature which is immoral, ruthless, and prone to lie.  Unfortunately for him, that’s the part of his character which really captures the public’s attention and the media is more than happy to fill their appetite for more stories of President Clinton gone wrong.  Based on the comments he was making even as this latest scandal broke, I think it is safe to say that he really is a manipulative liar…concerned only for himself and his political party.

Nevertheless, from the point of view of the U.S. political cycle and the risks we face in Iran, I’m thinking that now is probably a good time for Israel to “pull the trigger.”  Among Republicans, I’m pretty sure they will be cheered by the Israeli strike and pleased to see that force is used to put down the Iranians who obviously wish us ill.  In fact, a large majority of us – conservatives and independents – would applaud this action.  For example, a recent Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll of 900 registered voters on April 6-7, 2010 shows 61% support in response to the question worded: “Do you support or oppose the United States taking military action to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons?” 

Among prominent Democrats, however, I think we can safely predict that “pulling the trigger” will not be a popular option.  As far as I can tell, liberal Democrats are always against war and it does not matter who the bad guys are or what kind of weapons they have on the launch pad.  Ironically, even foreign wars have a way of dividing us up along partisan lines.  Given this context, the natural question would be when is the right time to “pull the trigger?”  For example, from the standpoint of U.S. politics, is the time to pull the trigger now, just prior to November, after November, or in the Spring (or later) of 2011?

If Israel pulled the trigger now, I think it is safe to say that this action would energize Republicans and independents, while – at the same time – it would stoke a heated debate about whether or not Israel did the right thing.  Such a debate, in my view, would assist Republicans in contrasting themselves with the Democrats who would be busy attacking Israel for making a pre-emptive strike.  Consequently, the debate would provide Republicans with a nationalized public issue that broke in their favor.

Ironically, if Israel waited to “pull the trigger” just prior to November, then it would create a temporary rally-around-the-flag effect for President Obama that might impact the mid-term elections.  Obama’s popularity would rise temporarily as he took normal actions to insure that the conflict between Iran and Israel did not escalate into World War III.  Right now, we have a lot of military strength in Afghanistan, right near Iran, so it would be difficult for Russia or China to do much to defend Iran – if that was their objective.  If Israel attacks just prior to the November elections, then it would strengthen the military image of Obama, and – perhaps – give him an excuse — if he wishes to temporarily gain support by demonstrating a modest level of allied defense for Israel’s actions.  I do not see how Obama could do anything to harm Israel under this timing scenario without making things worse for his Democrat party.

If Israel pulls the trigger right after November, then Obama will have almost total freedom – electorally speaking – to do whatever he wants included issuing a strong attack on Israel and potentially supporting sanctions against Israel as part of a larger effort to distract people from the poor U.S. economy.  This would be the best option for Obama because he would build his ties to his base, long before he needed to pretend to be a centrist again in time for the 2012 Presidential election.  From the point of view of Israel, this looks like the worst time to pull the trigger to me.

If Israel attacks in the Spring of 2011, the issue will not have too much of a partisan electoral impact within the U.S.  Israel would be facing a less conservative Congress, and would still be in the doghouse with President Obama.  This analysis would be particularly poignant if, as Defense Secretary Gates suggests, Iran could expedite matters and have a nuke by the Spring of 2011.  So, my conclusion is that the sooner Israel pulls the trigger, the better it will be for her in ending an existential threat from Iran and for assisting her true and loyal friends in the United States. 

Doug Ross floated a blog post reputing to be the comments of a highly ranked University of Chicago law school professor which – in my mind, at least – sounds like a plausible reaction from a real, tenured college professor, someone who probably went into this line of work back when it was a mark of high intelligence and gifted insight, and not simply the expression of affirmative action window-dressing or compliance with politically correct liberal dogma.  According to the report in Ross’s blog, http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2010/03/to-be-lawyer-or-not-to-be.html, his correspondent shared that:

I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about “Barry.” Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn’t even considered.  A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The Board told him he didn’t have to be a member of the faculty, but they needed to give him a temporary position. He was never a professor and was hardly an adjunct.

The next passage, however, really caught my attention.  Off and on, I’ve been an adjunct professor myself.  In general, I thought that the schools would be honored to have someone with my business sense and experience on their roster.  It didn’t hurt my business either to show ties to an academic institution.  Nevertheless, they would be ticked off when I skipped out on staff meetings.  As the anonymous source indicates, this practice is quite disturbing to the “real” law school professors:

The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool.  According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building.  He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement).

I know that this is a typical issue because I thought it was unfair for me to attend faculty meetings as an adjunct when I was earning a fraction of what the real professors were earning.  Even worse, as a consultant, I lost time I could bill my clients attending these dull and generally useless meetings.  The real professors, however, saw their time in faculty meetings as a welcome break in their routine and an opportunity to pick some fellowship and a free lunch charged to the department.  Nevertheless, as much as I understand that Obama was too important to attend faculty meetings, I also think his claim that he was a law school professor is likely to offend those of us who truly compete for that honor through research, publication, and lonely scholarship.  His comments remind me of all the people who seem to think that just because they finished their course work and earned their M.A. degree that they are the equivalent of earning a Ph.D.  Those of us who have gone on and earned our Ph.D.’s, however, the completion of coursework seems to be a minor accomplishment compared to conducting your own original research and grappling, on a day-to-day basis, with the truth and the awesome creativity of producing new, reliable, and insightful knowledge. 

The Doug Ross blog post is a telling reminder that President Obama was never a professor.  He was never even close to being a professor. In the real world, professors publish articles, compete for tenure, conduct original research, win grants, and speak at national and international conferences.  In their view, the time they spend teaching classes, creating exams and grading papers – the majority of Obama’s work as a Senior Lecturer – has virtually no value.   Obama, sadly, sought the prestige of being a real law school professor…but never learned what it really took to compete among the most exclusive academic elite. 

Wallis, however, really frightened me with his suggestion that one could wrap yourself in the Christian faith to promote cold, anti-capitalist propaganda.  “Beck says Christians should leave their social justice churches,” remarked Wallis, “so I say Christians should leave Glenn Beck…what he has said attacks the very heart of our Christian faith, and Christians should no longer watch his show.”

“When your political philosophy is to consistently favor the rich over the poor,” said Wallis, “you don’t want to hear about economic justice.”

I’m glad Glenn Beck is calling attention to something I have found annoying about the Christian churches (mostly Southern Baptist) which I have attended over the years – a certain tendency to swap socially accepted ideas that the rich harm the poor for contemporary social science perspectives that trace poverty to easily understood individual or family-level variables like child labor, lack of schooling, drug and alcohol use, teen pregnancy, failure to save and invest, inappropriate single-parenting and so on. 

I was flabbergasted back in 2005 when my Southern Baptist church signed on to the famous ONE Campaign which had the goal of changing government policies to save lives in Africa.  The group included a broad coalition of religious and political leaders such as Live 8′s Bob Geldof, U2′s Bono, Jars of Clay, Kanye West, Rick Warren and Pat Robertson.  This eclectic group endorsed policies which – from the perspective of a political scientist – would lead to a measurable worsening of poverty including: 1) Doubling financial aid sent to the world’s poorest countries, 2) Debt cancellation for the poorest nations and 3) Reform of trade laws so poor nations are not shut out of global markets.

As a political scientist, I found this whole “social justice” theme – generally soak the rich, in disguise – appalling and destructive to genuinely valuable efforts to end global poverty. 

In my view, for example, I think efforts to abolish child labor and enforce compulsory schooling in America and Europe have been infinitely more successful in ending poverty and promoting economic development/modernization, than any scheme of redistribution which would have caused poor parents to avoid cutting loose from their dependence on child labor as a form of social security, disability insurance and cheap agricultural/sweatshop labor.  In some countries, our contemporary view that the parents should support their children is turned upside down so much that poor parents routinely seek to profit from their offspring by selling them into sexual slavery or work camp environments. 

Hopefully, the efforts of folks like Glenn Beck will assist in getting out the word that the activists pursuing “social justice” often have limited and unrealistic understandings of the simple, controllable things that cause global poverty – things that could be fixed with condoms and child labor laws – instead socialist schemes that redistribute the wealth.  Otherwise, we are likely to see another generation of religious, “social justice” pioneers miss the causal factors of poverty that are right in front of their very eyes – parents and government too calloused to see that they create and maintain their own poverty through the abuse and mistreatment of their most vulnerable fellow citizens – their children.

Last week, I was interviewed by Ronald Kessler, Washington D.C. Bureau Chief for Newsmax.  He a New York Times best-selling author of 18 non-fiction books.  One of his most famous books is The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI.  Kessler is widely credited with having presented the first credible evidence that Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate source dubbed “Deep Throat” was FBI official W. Mark Felt.

I’m profoundly honored that Kessler took the time to double check my story and thought it was credible enough to run as a story. Apparently, I’m not the only one who had conversations with Barack Obama on ”…how they would reform the world.” http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/29/local/me-oxy29

My major point is that I’m glad the national media is looking into Obama’s deep roots in Marxist socialist thought. I think it was highly unusual for a sophomore to be so totally committed to Marxism as was the young Barack Obama.  To me, it is evidence that he was a “red diaper baby,” a young person who was raised in an environment sympathetic to Marxist thought. 

All in all, I think the more the public learns about the young Barack Obama, the more they will be convinced that Obama is not the centrist he appeared to be during the 2008 campaign. At the very least, President Obama needs to come clean with the American people and explain how, if at all, his Marxist socialist ideas have changed over time.

Next on my agenda is to call attention to the socialist views of Obama’s favorite Occidental College professor, Roger Boesche. I knew of Boesche when I was an undergraduate at Occidental College and got to know him better when he was a visiting professor in the political science department at Williams College in MA.  I was an assistant professor of political science at Williams between 1986 and 1989. 

Boesche was an advocate of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice. In my view, the more pundits and journalists understand about Rawls’ ideas, the better they will be able to understand Obama’s sincere socialist perspective. In particular, they will better understand why Obama was able to win the trust of Bill Ayers and Alice Palmer when he was a novice politician in Chicago, IL.

Ironically, Roger Boesche and President Obama are still close. Here is a link which describes Professor Boesche’s 2009 visit to the Oval Office.  See, http://www.oxy.edu/x8880.xml  Boesche is a supporter of ObamaCare and believed Obama had the unique skills needed to implement it.  As for me, I’m grateful my description of Obama’s ardent Marxist perspective in the fall of 1980 is now part of the public record.