Tracking down Barack Obama’s hidden political convictions and dragging them into the light of day is a task requiring the patience of a detective. We haven’t got access to the personal journals Obama kept for years; until some recent cracks in the wall of silence, his former friends and colleagues have been savvy enough to keep quiet; and there is no such thing as a time machine. So clues must be patiently gathered and pieced together, one by one. While the Socialist Scholars Conferences discussed in this chapter provide a tremendously revealing window into the president’s hidden past, Obama’s energetic and long-standing efforts to shroud his New York years have succeeded in keeping his movements and beliefs during this period difficult to follow.
Yet there are important indicators of what Obama was reading and thinking during this time of intellectual ferment. When juxtaposed with the Socialist Scholars Conferences, these clues will point us in the right direction. Obama was vastly more knowledgeable about the socialist roots of his new profession than he has ever dared let on. Evidence also suggests that Obama was learning not only about socialist community organizing in New York, but about the determination of many organizers to hide their socialist beliefs.
The restless reading of Obama’s New York years shaped him profoundly. In Chicago, Obama worked directly with the very best stealth-socialist organizers in the country, some of them the very same people he’d studied and read about years before. That broader picture—as well as the clear evidence that Obama was a socialist during his early college years at Occidental—is what makes the initial clues examined in this chapter so important.
Even our necessarily limited reconstruction of Obama’s socialist adventures in New York will suffice to expose the artful dodging Obama engaged in during campaign ’08. When it comes to his early knowledge of community organizing and its socialist roots, Obama has long “played dumb.” That facade of ignorance cannot survive an investigation of Obama’s New York years.
Barack Obama’s name appears on a large list of names and addresses, in a folder labeled “Socialist Scholars Conference,” in the Records of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).1 Analysis of this list and associated materials strongly suggests that Obama pre-registered for the Second Annual Socialist Scholars Conference held on April 19–21, 1984, at the Boro of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, in New York. Recall at the start that Obama himself acknowledges attending “socialist conferences” during his time in New York.2 Obama’s use of the plural means that he likely attended at least two, and perhaps all three of the Socialist Scholars Conferences held in New York between 1983 and 1985.
The list with Obama’s name and address is clearly a mailing list, since the names are arranged by zip code, and names without usable addresses have been crossed off the list by hand. The folder containing the mailing list is filled with material that has obviously been used to prepare a program for the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference—lists of conference speakers from that year, charts of individual panels, and 1984 conference programs as well. There appears to be no material from after 1984 in the folder. A single program for the 1983 conference is present, however, probably as a reference for the 1984 planners.
Subtracting duplicate names, the list totals about one thousand. Since attendance at the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference was close to fifteen hundred, it seems unlikely that this list simply contains the names of attendees from the 1983 event.3 We know from material in this folder, and from other parts of the DSA records, that several different conference programs were prepared in 1984.4 Some, presumably worked up early, had registration forms attached and no appended speakers list. Others had an addendum with information on added panels, while still others, presumably prepared at a late stage, had a full alphabetical list of speakers attached and a more complete list of panels. All of this suggests that the material containing Obama’s name was a list of people who had pre-registered for the 1984 conference. These pre-registrants were going to get a mailing of the final, or near-final, conference program, with a full alphabetical list of speakers appended. Material used to produce this program was contained in the folder, along with the mailing list.
Another indicator that the list with Obama’s name on it contains attendees of the 1984 conference is that thirty-six people on the list were also speakers at the 1984 conference. Some of these speakers appear to have been late additions to the list of panelists, suggesting that when certain prominent people pre-registered, conference organizers recruited them to participate on a panel.
Obama’s address is listed as 339 E. Ninety-fourth Street, #6A, New York, NY 10028. This is an apartment Obama is known to have occupied during much of his time at Columbia.5 The conference, however, took place in April of 1984, almost a year after Obama’s graduation. One account says that Obama moved out of his college apartment at some point, but doesn’t say when.6 In 2008, the Obama campaign released a list of five residences he occupied in New York, adding that Obama himself had forgotten many details of his movements.7 A New York Times article on Obama’s New York years indicates that the New York phone book continued to list the East Ninety-fourth Street apartment as Obama’s address, even after he graduated.8 Obama may also have pre-registered for the 1984 conference early on, before any possible move. In short, despite some ambiguity about Obama’s famously mysterious movements in New York, documentary evidence, as well as his own testimony in Dreams from My Father, strongly suggests that Obama attended the Second Annual Socialist Scholars Conference, held in April 1984 in New York.
Obama’s attendance at New York’s mid-eighties Socialist Scholars Conferences coincided with a high point in DSA’s minority recruitment efforts. Almost as soon as it was formed out of the merger of two smaller groups in 1981–82, DSA started looking to draw in African-American recruits. The rise of the Harold Washington movement in Chicago in 1983 surely added urgency to these efforts. In January of 1982, DSA’s board floated the idea of minority quotas on leading committees.9 A few months later, DSA head Michael Harrington met with the circle of black liberation theologians around James Cone (Jeremiah Wright’s theological mentor) and recruited Cornel West (see Chapter Two).
The first DSA national convention, held October 14–16, 1983 (six months after the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference), took several steps to enlarge minority participation. Prior to the convention, DSA leadership sent out letters calling on members to elect particular individuals—including Cornel West—as delegates.10 The convention then voted to allocate 25 percent of National Executive Committee seats to minorities—three for men and three for women.11 (DSA had a pre-existing male-female quota system.) The overall effect of these changes was to shift DSA to the left, since minority activists tended to come from more militant backgrounds than Harrington’s traditional allies.12 For example, at the 1983 convention, DSA overcame objections from the more democratic and anti-Soviet sections of the leadership and voted to support the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and other Central American revolutionary movements as well.13
The issue of minority recruitment raises some obvious questions. Did Obama ever join the Democratic Socialists of America? Short of this, was he perhaps involved in DSA activities, over and above the Socialist Scholars Conferences? I don’t know the answer to these questions. Given the importance of minority recruitment to DSA between 1983 and 1985, it’s hard to believe that Obama would not have been aggressively urged—in person at the Socialist Scholars Conferences—to join the DSA. It also seems perfectly possible that Obama might have attended various events sponsored by DSA. New York DSA also sponsored “socialist schools” with classes on a wide variety of political topics, and Obama could have attended such a school.14 I have no evidence, however, for any Obama involvement with DSA over and above his attendance at Socialist Scholars Conferences.
Before we plunge into an investigation of Obama’s probable doings at the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference, one more background condition requires discussion. Just as the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference took place in the shadow of Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign, Jesse Jackson’s first presidential campaign was very much on the minds of conference participants in 1984. As early as May of 1983, just after Harold Washington’s mayoral victory, Jackson broached the idea of a presidential campaign modeled on the Washington phenomenon.15 In Jackson’s words, it was time for America’s blacks to “rene- gotiate our relationship with the Democratic Party.”16 Jackson figured that by combining a charismatic campaign with a massive minority registration drive, he could force the Democrats left. Even without his capturing the nomination, the eventual nominee would presumably have to placate Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, or risk defeat at Reagan’s hands.
The 1984 Jackson campaign was a seemingly perfect example of the synergy between grassroots organizing, minority coalition-building, and national politics that DSA now hoped to orchestrate. Certainly, many DSAers saw it that way. Manning Marable, the most influential African-American in the organization, viewed Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition as “a new stage of American politics,” a de facto leftist “party-in-a-party.”17 Paulette Pierce, a prominent member of DSA’s African-American Commission, said that Jackson was “acting out the avowed electoral strategy of DSA,” working within the Democrats “to bring together a new progressive majority which could transform the Party.”18
Even the militant “sectarian” left, usually averse to participation in the two-party system, made an exception in Jackson’s case. The near-unanimous conclusion of hyper-radical groups, from the Communist Party to the Communist Workers Party, was that participation in the Jackson campaign would energize their efforts at grassroots organizing.19 “Although Jackson is not a socialist,” said one Chicago radical, “his campaign has contributed to the development of demands outside the usual spectrum set by bourgeois politics.”20 Or, as another hard-leftist put it, Jackson “isn’t a socialist, but he questions the divinity of capitalism.”21
Above all, Jackson’s foreign policy views thrilled just about every hard-left faction. It was tough to construe Jackson’s statements as anything other than outright support for Central America’s Marxist revolutionaries. “Our foreign policy in Central America is wrong,” said Jackson, adding, “We are standing on the wrong side of history.”22 Jackson called on the Reagan administration to withdraw its opposition to the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua: “Successful revolutions in Central America need not threaten U.S. national security.”23 Jackson urged U.S. recognition of Cuba and questioned open-ended U.S. support for Israel. He also called for a 20 percent military spending cut.24
The “Marxist-Leninist” (i.e., not democratic socialist) American Guardian endorsed the Jackson campaign, highlighting its synergy with grassroots organizing efforts. The Guardian hoped that Jackson might raise his movement’s expectations so high that, once dashed, the Rainbow Coalition would abandon the Democrats and energize an independent quasi-socialist movement of the left.25 This is exactly what the DSA’s “right wing” feared. Harrington and his closest allies were determined to work within the Democratic Party. They were supportive of the newfound synergy between community organizing, minority empowerment, and electoral politics, yet wanted to confine it to the local level. In presidential politics, they worried, openly moving too left, too fast would only split the Democrats and hand the country to Reagan for another four years.26
That anti-Jackson stance infuriated black leaders like academic Paulette Pierce, who had cast their lot with the DSA.27 How could DSA recruit minorities, asked Pierce, if it couldn’t choose Jesse Jackson over a moderate Cold Warrior like Walter Mondale? Many—probably most—rank-and-file white DSAers agreed.28
So leading up to the April 19–21, 1984, Socialist Scholars Conference, the American left was divided over the Jackson campaign. The vast majority of black socialists, however, stood with Jackson, seeing in him the embodiment of a new grassroots electoral strategy designed to realign (or break) America’s two-party system. By April, the Jackson campaign had faltered on the candidate’s infamous reference to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York as “Hymietown,” followed by Jackson’s unconvincing denials and his implications that Jews were trying to discredit him.29 For the left, however, despite genuine dismay at the Hymietown controversy, Jackson’s magic sparkled throughout. Where was Obama in all this? Chances are he stood with Jackson politically. In any case, we have reason to believe that Obama stood near Jesse Jackson, literally, just three weeks before the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference. In Dreams from my Father, Obama tells of walking through Harlem to hear a speech Jesse Jackson delivered on 125th Street.30 This reference is probably to the massive March 31 rally Jackson held on 125th Street in Harlem at the height of his 1984 campaign.31
The theme of the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference was “The Encounter with America.” Programs featured drawings of a burly-looking Uncle Sam and Karl Marx standing side by side and rolling up their sleeves, as if they were about to take on a bunch of evil-doers (presumably corporate types) in a fight.32 I’m going to concentrate on only one panel at this conference, but will also mention some of the other talks Obama likely encountered.
Obama would have had plenty of opportunities to hear panel talks in 1984 echoing themes introduced at the Cooper Union Conference the year before: grassroots organizing, minority coalition-building, and black-church radicalism. Cornel West presented at two panels in 1984, and we probably have reworked versions of both talks in articles West published in the months following the conference.33 Obama could also have attended a panel called The Hole in the Electorate, which featured Frances Fox Piven and DSA head Michael Harrington, among others, commenting on Piven’s strategy for using minority voter registration to provoke a class-based realignment of the parties. Suffice it to say that all the themes he encountered at the 1983 Cooper Union Conference would have been driven home again in 1984. There is, however, one 1984 conference panel worth discussing in depth, both because Obama would almost certainly have attended it, and because it would have provided a personal introduction of sorts to the father of black liberation theology, James Cone.
Sometime around August–September 1983, DSA issued a pamphlet geared toward recruiting minorities. The pamphlet, featuring a large cover photo of Martin Luther King, Jr., was titled “Reflections on the Legacy,” and argued that toward the end of his life, King experienced a political conversion to democratic socialism. The pamphlet featured an essay, “From Reformer to Revolutionary,” by King historian David Garrow, with an introduction by Paulette Pierce, a sociology professor and DSA leader who identifies herself in the pamphlet as “a black member of the Democratic Socialists of America.”34 The 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference included a panel on “Dr. King and Democratic Socialism,” featuring Garrow, King historian John Ansbro, and James Cone, the founder of black liberation theology and theological mentor to both Cornel West and Jeremiah Wright.35 Garrow’s recruiting pamphlet would have been readily available at the panel and at the conference literature tables. The panel itself surely would have focused on Garrow’s claims about King’s socialist conversion.
In Dreams from My Father, Obama roots his decision to become a community organizer in his desire to carry forward the civil rights crusade of the sixties. Images of struggle from that era, says Obama, “became a form of prayer for me.”36 We also know that by the time Obama arrived in Chicago for his first organizing job, he had already accumulated substantial personal knowledge of the history of King and his movement.37 So it’s tough to imagine Obama passing up a panel called Dr. King and Democratic Socialism—or failing to read the associated pamphlet.
Paulette Pierce was a key figure in efforts to bring DSA around to formal support of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. Pierce’s 1983 introduction to Garrow’s essay is an extraordinary document. Highlighting King’s alleged late-life transformation “from a reformer into a revolutionary,” Pierce stresses King’s eventual abandonment of his belief in America. At first, says Pierce, King may have had an “abiding faith in America” and in “the fundamental justness of American institutions.”38 Yet by the end, Pierce notes, King came to believe that “‘America is much, much sicker than I realized.’”39 This recognition prompted King to argue that “‘The whole structure of American life must be changed.’”40 According to Pierce, King became convinced that “private ownership and control of the means of production contradicted his Christian beliefs.”41 By the end of his life, claims Pierce, King was “clearly on his way to openly embracing a democratic socialist position.”42
Garrow’s historical essay is remarkable for its focus, not only on King’s alleged socialism, but on his attempts at community organizing … in Chicago. Garrow recounts the story of King’s failed efforts during the Chicago Freedom Movement, begun in late 1965. Despite six months of effort, King’s attempts to organize Chicago’s poor black citizens into “enduring self-directed groups” collapsed.43
King’s organizing failure in Chicago, says Garrow, turned him against capitalism and transformed him from a reformer into a “revolutionary.” Garrow quotes the later King actually opposing integration of a sort: “Let us not think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the Negro into all existing values of American society.”44 According to Garrow, by the end of his life, King had come to believe that the economic structure and system of values that sustained American capitalism would have to go.
Garrow’s stress on community organizing in this essay is no fluke. In June of 1985, Garrow was invited to address a DSA National Executive Committee meeting. There Garrow highlighted the importance of King’s largely unsung local organizing efforts in the South. According to Garrow, media focus on spectacular demonstrations notwithstanding, grassroots organizing was the true key to King’s success.45 Garrow’s work suggests that when Obama speaks of community organizing as a kind of modern successor to King’s civil rights movement, he has some historical basis for the claim. Garrow’s DSA pamphlet also suggests that when Obama links his own struggle for change to the legacy of Dr. King, he may have socialism in mind—even if most Americans do not hear it that way.
Did Martin Luther King, Jr., really become a democratic socialist toward the end of his life? King does seem to have turned leftward in his later years. Whether he went so far as to privately embrace socialism is less clear. In any case, for our purposes, whether King converted to socialism toward the end of his life is less important than the fact that many in Obama’s world believe that King did.
How did panelist James Cone respond to Garrow’s notion of a late-life socialist conversion by Dr. King? Cone was likely sympathetic to the idea of a radical left turn, yet noncommittal on the specific question of King’s socialism. That, at least, is Cone’s position in his published work, where he appears a bit uncomfortable with the controversy, given accusations of communist or socialist connections made by King’s opponents at the height of the civil rights struggle.46
The deeper problem is that, while Cone is deeply sympathetic to Marxism, he worries that when it comes to race, even Marxists might not be radical enough. We saw in Chapter Two that Cone published a pamphlet through DSA called “The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other?”47 That pamphlet included a commentary by DSA head Michael Harrington. In his pamphlet, Cone expresses strong sympathy for Marxism, without openly or explicitly signing on as a socialist. It’s a safe bet that, at the King panel, Cone’s DSA pamphlet would have been touted alongside of Garrow’s. It also seems very likely that Obama would have read both pamphlets (and would have done so even if he had missed the panel itself).
In his DSA pamphlet, Cone challenges Marxists from the point of view of black liberation theology. Marxists, Cone says, “have to be open to … asking whether fascism is inherent in the very nature and structure of western civilization.”48 Despite his doubts about Western civilization (of which Marxist theory is a part), Cone agrees that black churchpeople need to be open to the need for a “total reconstruction of society along the lines of Democratic Socialism.”49 Capitalism, agrees Cone, is “a system which offers no hope for the masses of blacks.”50
Again, given Obama’s voracious reading habits during his New York period (“I had tons of books. I read everything.”),51 and given his curiosity about all things black—and socialist—it’s hard to believe that he would have overlooked Cone’s pamphlet. Obama almost certainly knew about Cone through panel appearances by Cornel West, and by Cone himself, at the Socialist Scholars Conferences. So when Obama learned that Jeremiah Wright was a leading follower of James Cone’s black liberation theology, he would have understood exactly what Wright was talking about. In fact, Obama would almost certainly have recounted for Wright his experiences with James Cone and Cornel West at the Socialist Scholars Conferences. In short, Obama would have understood Wright’s radicalism, as Wright would have grasped Obama’s. Surely, then, the socialist-friendly attitudes of Cone, West, and their circle would have provided an immediate foundation for a bond between Obama and Wright. None of the other black preachers Obama encountered could have boasted of a comparable relation- ship to Cone, West, or the socialist-friendly Black Theology Project. Here, then, is a powerful explanation for Obama’s choice of Wright as his pastor.
In June of 1984, two months after the Second Annual Socialist Scholars Conference, Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson visited Fidel Castro’s Cuba at the same time a delegation from the Black Theology Project (BTP) was in the country. The BTP delegation included James Cone and Jeremiah Wright.52 Although Cornel West was unable to attend, a paper he wrote for the occasion was read in his absence.53 It was almost as though a panel from the Socialist Scholars Conference had reconvened in Havana, with Reverend Wright as an added attraction. The occasion of BTP’s visit was an ecumenical theological seminar and memorial celebration in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.54
At one point in his Cuban visit, Jesse Jackson ended a speech at the University of Havana by leading the crowd in chants of “Long live President Castro! Long live Martin Luther King! Long live Che Guevara!” In the pages of the liberal New Republic, Glen C. Loury, then a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, condemned Jackson’s “clear suggestion that Martin Luther King’s movement and Che Guevara’s movement are on the same moral and political plane.” Added Loury: “Such cavalier use of King’s moral legacy will only squander it.”55 Loury doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that Jackson’s equation of King and Che might have been a well-thought-out comparison, rather than a careless attempt to please his hosts. The more we learn about the Jackson-BTP adventure in Cuba, the more deliberate Jackson’s chants appear to be.
For the most part, the American press ignored Jackson’s troubling cheerleading, as well as the presence of the BTP delegation alongside him during much of his visit. It wasn’t until President Reagan addressed a Hispanic audience and reminded them of Jackson’s chants that any attention was paid to the disturbing aspects of Jackson’s trip. Then, in a November 2, 1984, Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Diego A. Abich revealed at least a part of the story behind the Jackson-BTP adventure in Cuba.56
According to Abich, the Cuban government took extraordinary steps to make certain that Jackson’s visit coincided with that of the BTP delegation. BTP’s ecumenical hosts in Cuba were not the conservative religious traditionalists so disfavored by Castro, but instead a Marxist theological group controlled by the Cuban government. In fact the seminars held by BTP’s “ecumenical” hosts took place in facilities controlled by Cuba’s intelligence agency, DGI. (DGI, Abich adds, worked under the direction of the Soviet KGB.) Along with initial soundings among Cone’s circle at Union Theological Seminary in the early months of 1984, says Abich, a Cuban “evangelical” operative approached Jeremiah Wright about organizing a Martin Luther King memorial conference, while Wright was on a March 1984 visit to the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Abich then explains how Castro turned the joint Jackson-BTP visit into a major event, milking it for propaganda worldwide, while counting on BTP to sow political discontent in America. Although Abich speaks of “Mr. Castro’s manipulation of Rev. Jackson and other black religious leaders,” manipulation was not the issue.
A study of the Black Theology Project’s records of this trip makes it clear that these visiting American theologians had every intention of assisting the Cuban Revolution. Far from being manipulated, BTP was eager to help Castro, and eager to stoke discontent with America’s social system. A copy of Abich’s op-ed piece can be found in BTP’s files, so the organization clearly knew it stood accused of allowing itself to be manipulated by Castro.57 Yet a BTP delegation returned to Cuba in 1986, this time led by Reverend Wright.58 Obviously, if BTP had felt deceived or manipulated by their Cuban hosts after reading Abich’s account, they would never have returned.
The October 1984 Bulletin of the Black Theology Project carries an extended account of the joint Jackson-BTP Cuba trip, written by noted black liberation theologian Gayraud Wilmore.59 Wilmore’s account was republished in Jeremiah Wright’s church newsletter, “Trinity Trumpet,” along with pictures of Wright and Jackson together in Havana.60 Wilmore makes it clear that BTP’s delegation was delighted to encounter Marxist clerics who equated religious liberation with the success of the Cuban Revolution. The BTP delegation was also perfectly aware of the fact that many of the ecumenical scholar-clerics who hosted them were also “activists” in the Cuban Communist Party. The BTP delegation was present at a service memorializing Dr. King when Jesse Jackson entered the church alongside President Castro himself. This was the first time in twenty-five years that Castro had crossed the threshold of an evangelical church, and according to Wilmore, “the excitement was almost more than either visitors or hosts could bear.”61 The sight of Fidel Castro and Jesse Jackson standing side by side in a Cuban evangelical church was a liberation theologian’s dream come true.
According to Wilmore, in his remarks at this service, Jackson asked Cubans to “hold on” and patiently wait for “deliverance from the animosity and blockade of the Reagan administration.” “By the power of a liberating God and the determination of all fair-minded and progressive Americans,” added Jackson, there was reason to hope for relief.62 Wilmore then praises Jackson for having “had the audacity to link his political fortunes with a radical theological perspective within the U.S. Black Church that calls for serious dialogue between Christians and Marxists and solidarity in struggle with the people of Cuba and Central America.”63 Wilmore concludes: “Blacks in the United States need the example of the effective abolition of racism and poverty that Cuba represents.”64
In short, rather than having been manipulated by Cuban intelligence and the Cuban Communist Party, the Black Theology Project was positively eager to do everything in its power to assist the Cuban Revolution, seeing in Cuban socialism a model for America in general, and American blacks in particular.
Two years later, in July of 1986, BTP returned to Cuba, with Reverend Wright leading a delegation to the Second Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Theological Meeting. According to an article in Granma (the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party), “Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a close associate of U.S. political and religious leader Jesse Jackson, spoke on behalf of the people of the United States, and especially the black population.”65 Wright, Granma continues, “denounced” racial discrimination in the United States and explained the role of the black Church in American history.66 There followed an address by Brazilian liberation theologian Frei Betto, who defended Marxism as the key to proper Christian theology.
Records of the Black Theology Project indicate that Reverend Wright was a board member during this 1986 trip.67 A speakers biography posted on the Internet in conjunction with an appearance by Wright at a 2003 Corinthian Baptist Church event lists him as a member of the BTP board of directors from 1975 through 1995.68 The Black Theology Project and its parent organization Theology in the Americas (TIA) appear to have been only minimally active after the mid-eighties. Yet BTP-TIA records indicate that Wright took charge of TIA sometime around the late eighties.69
Obama had connected with Wright by 1987, just a year after Wright’s second trip to Cuba. Wright had no compunctions about headlining Wilmore’s long and obviously radical account of BTP’s Cuba venture—with pictures—in Trinity Trumpet. Is it conceivable, then, that Wright could have failed to regale Obama himself with tales of these trips—particularly after learning of Obama’s encounter with James Cone and Cornel West at those Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York? Given that Wright took over leadership of Theology in the Americas in the late eighties, and continued to serve on the Black Theology Project board through 1995, is it conceivable that Obama would never have heard of Wright’s involvement in these organizations? In November of 2009, a video surfaced of Wright addressing the sixtieth anniversary gala for the Marxist journal Monthly Review.70 In that address, Wright stresses the importance of his links to the Black Theology Project—and his ties to Cuba. Considering how free Wright is with this information—indeed how positively proud he is of his trips to Cuba—it is easy to imagine how eagerly Wright would have recounted the tale of it all to Obama.
Does this “likelihood” reach the level of “beyond a reasonable doubt”? I think it does. Ultimately, of course, that is for the reader to decide. But don’t decide just yet. Wait for Chapter Eight.
Barack Obama’s own statements about his New York years are consistent with the notion that he was a socialist at the time. If these were the only bits of evidence available, it would be a mistake to make too much of Obama’s few remarks on this mysterious period in his life. Yet juxtaposing Obama’s account of his time in New York with his attendance at Socialist Scholars Conferences reveals a pattern. There is also clear evidence that Obama was a “pure Marxist socialist” during his time at Occidental College (see below). While Obama’s college socialism could be dismissed as a passing phase, the evidence from his post-college years in New York suggests continuity of belief.
After graduation, Obama worked for Business International Corporation, a company that produced research reports on global business conditions for overseas companies. His goal was to pay off student loans and save up money for the low-wage organizer jobs to come. In his sympathetic biography, Obama: From Promise to Power, published during the runup to the 2008 campaign, Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell quotes Obama explaining that this job gave him an education in “the coldness of capitalism.”71 In Dreams from My Father, Obama says the job made him feel “like a spy behind enemy lines.”72 The author of these remarks might easily be taken for an enemy of capitalism. When Obama writes, in Dreams, of “the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined,” it could be interpreted as just a passing remark.73 On the other hand, Obama’s observation echoes widespread Marxist views of race in America (see Chapter Two).
When Obama’s mother and half-sister visited him in the summer after his first year at Columbia, he pressed them repeatedly with lectures on “the politics of the dispossessed,” even turning on his anthropologist mother:
I instructed my mother on the various ways that foreign donors and international development organizations like the one she was working for bred dependence in the Third World.74
Obama’s imperious lectures alarmed his half-sister, Maya, who started wondering if her half-brother’s ideological intensity would turn him into “one of those freaks you see on the streets around here.”75 Most readers will concentrate on Obama’s struggle to mature and reconcile with his family. Knowledgeable leftists, however, will identify Obama’s swipe at his mother as a reference to the “dependency theory” popular among Marxist students of the Third World at the time.
Dependency theory holds that modern multinational corporations and development agencies are little more than updated versions of the looting and plundering colonialists of old. The idea that international businesses are in any way improving conditions in the Third World is anathema to dependency theorists. On the contrary, dependency theory explains the social and economic problems of Third World nations as products of capitalist exploitation. Internal social and cultural factors in these nations don’t really matter, the theory goes. What counts are the evils of international capitalism.76 Obama’s lecture would certainly have been a swipe at his liberal anthropologist mother, who had spent a lifetime trying to trace the cultural roots of economic behavior in Indonesia. Reverend Wright’s many sermons on Africa, I should add, could easily be summarized as variations on the themes of dependency theory.
For approximately three months, from about late February through late May of 1985, Barack Obama worked as an organizer for the New York branch of Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group (NY- PIRG).77 This was his first true job as a community organizer, and his last position before decamping to Chicago. What made Obama accept a job with NYPIRG? He had dreamed of organizing since 1983, of course. Yet there is more to the matter than that.
NYPIRG was a bona fide part of the grassroots movement Obama hoped to join. There are powerful connections between Ralph Nader’s PIRGs and groups like DSA, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s voter registration organization, Human SERVE, and the network of “Citizen Action” groups managed by Chicago’s Midwest Academy.78 Much of this is described in what is generally agreed to be the best account of the community organizing movement of the late seventies, Harry Boyte’s 1980 book, The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement.79
According to Boyte, Ralph Nader’s shift from strictly legislative tactics toward citizen organizing in the seventies was a major catalyst of the “new populism” (i.e., the late-seventies national upsurge in community organizing).80 In fact, it was the Brooklyn office of NYPIRG in 1976 that began one of the first campaigns to pressure banks into loosening credit standards for mortgages in high-risk neighborhoods (i.e., “subprime lending”).81 According to Boyte, for the first decade of his consumer crusade, Nader concentrated on righting corporate wrongs and kept his conventionally liberal political views to himself. Over time, however, Nader became convinced that it wasn’t enough to fight isolated corporate abuses. Ultimately, says Boyte, a radicalized Nader decided that the very “structure of power and the distribution of wealth in America” would need to be transformed.
So in the late seventies, a more ideological Nader began to collaborate with other radical community organizations. For public purposes, however, Nader’s PIRGs continued to soft-pedal leftist ideology and kept their focus on concrete issues alone (e.g., environmental laws and various forms of corporate regulation). As Boyte puts it: “Nader seemingly had a clear understanding of the enormity of the corporate enemy’s power. It appears in retrospect that his specificity about issues was always partly tactical.”82 Here Boyte spots a stealth leftism in Nader’s tactics. To summarize Boyte’s account, Nader wants to radically transform America’s capitalist system. Yet Nader prefers to avoid openly leftist rhetoric, focusing attention instead on concrete reforms that might someday, quietly and gradually, add up to a major transformation of society.
Is it fair to saddle a young Obama with this sort of motive for organizing with NYPIRG? Yes, it is. That’s because Obama had almost certainly read Boyte’s work. There’s even a chance that Boyte’s writings brought Obama to NYPIRG in the first place. So it’s of interest that Boyte, a first-rank theorist of community organizing, was for years a leader in America’s major socialist organizations. Boyte is perhaps the most important advocate of “stealth socialism” in community organizing, and in politics generally. Boyte wouldn’t describe himself this way, but his opponents (within socialism) call him a stealth socialist—with justice, in my view.
An in-depth 2008 investigative article for the environmental magazine Plenty quotes a student who worked with Obama at CCNY saying: “He read widely, and would hold forth about different theories and models of organizing.”83 The same point is made in more detail by Eileen Hershenov, who hired and supervised Obama for NYPIRG. Says Hershenov: “I have a distinct memory of having several conversations with Barack during that short period about different models of organizing. A number of books were appearing by former organizers with groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and we talked about the pros and cons of these organizing strategies.”84 Harry Boyte worked as a community organizer for the SCLC.
What books by former community organizers were appearing around 1985? Robert Fisher’s Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America—still probably the best, and best-known, history of community organizing—appeared in 1984.85 Community Is Possible: Repairing America’s Roots, Harry Boyte’s followup to The Backyard Revolution, also appeared in 1984.86 Juxtaposing Boyte’s two books with Fisher’s would have put Obama in an excellent position to “hold forth about different theories and models of organizing.”87 The overall argument of Fisher’s book is that organizers need to be more open about their radical politics. Boyte represents the opposite view. Although Boyte doesn’t overtly say that it’s best for organizers to hide their socialism, his work includes sympathetic descriptions of things like Nader’s “tactical” focus on concrete issues—despite the radical turn in Nader’s own beliefs. Obama had reason to know that, despite the tactical silence of Boyte’s own books, Boyte himself was a socialist. So the clash between Fisher’s case for organizer openness and Boyte’s argument for discretion would surely have made an impression on Obama.
Precisely because Boyte and Fisher were authoritative commentators on community organizing in the mid-eighties, their work has much to teach us about Obama’s profession. In Let the People Decide, Fisher immediately lets the socialist cat out of the bag. Fisher opens the book with the story of his early organizer days in Cambridgeport, a mixed student and working-class Boston suburb sandwiched between Harvard and MIT. In the early seventies, Fisher organized for the Cambridgeport Homeowners and Tenants Association (CHTA), which followed the classic tactics of Saul Alinsky. “Unlike new left radicals of the early 1960’s,” says Fisher, “the organizers in CHTA consciously downplayed their radical sentiments and rarely sought to clarify their ideology… . In fact, we consciously sought to get beyond the barrier that radical ideology and rhetoric seemed to foster between activists and workers in the 1960’s.”88 Unfortunately for these organizers, their stealth tactics failed. Cambridgeport’s working-class citizens avoided the group, and CHTA remained an overwhelmingly student-run enterprise. (No doubt Cambridgeport’s residents were familiar with the leftist politics of activist students, even without being told.)
Facing failure, one faction of CHTA organizers decided that the root of their problem was Alinskyite stealth: “They emphasized that a militant, avowedly socialist ideology—a clearly stated view of how the capitalist system works and why working people needed to join together to oppose it—was lacking. CHTA needed a clear and correct ‘line’ to offer working people; then residents would get involved and devote more time and energy to building a multi-racial working-class organization.”89 This, Fisher says, was the argument of the communist faction of organizers. (The word “communist” is Fisher’s.) The communists were opposed by democratic-socialist organizers, who agreed to be more ideologically honest, yet objected to the communists’ authoritarian insistence on imposing a single “correct” ideological line on CHTA’s members.90
In the end, this split between Marxist-Leninist and democratic-socialist community organizers effectively killed CHTA. Oddly, however, Fisher takes the fiasco as a lesson that organizers need to be more open about their politics. In fact, community organizing developed in precisely the opposite direction. The communists soon discovered that dictating a “correct” ideological line to American workers only drives them away. By the late seventies and eighties, communism was on the decline among organizers and democratic socialism was the more common position. Given widespread American antipathy to socialism, however, the pressures on organizers to keep their political views quiet were immense. Increasingly, in the world of organizing, Boyte’s stealth solution came to dominate.
Saul Alinsky, the founder of modern community organizing, had al- ready built stealth into the profession.91 Alinksy told organizers to downplay their own ideologies and instead use the public’s concrete grievances to stoke change. Boyte defended this approach, but also went further. His innovation was to propose applying Alinskyite stealth, not merely to community organizing, but to socialism itself.
Over time, Boyte seems to have decided that even Michael Harrington’s non-revolutionary form of socialism would be rejected by the vast majority of Americans. So Boyte formed a “communitarian caucus” within Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The communitarians wanted to use the language and ethos of traditional American communities—including religious language—to promote a “populist” version of socialism. Portraying heartless corporations as enemies of traditional communities, thought Boyte, was the only way to build a quasi-socialist mass movement in the United States. Socialists could quietly help direct such a movement, Boyte believed, but openly highlighting socialist ideology would only drive converts away.
In effect, Boyte was calling on DSA to drop its public professions of socialism and start referring to itself as “communitarian” instead. That was too much for DSA to accept. Without at least some level of public socialist affirmation, most DSAers worried that socialism itself would eventually disappear. Boyte’s opponents also argued that secret socialism would not remain secret forever: “We can call ourselves ‘communitarians,’ but the word will get out. Better to be out of the closet; humble, yet proud.”92
If Boyte failed to convince DSA to package itself as “communitarian” rather than socialist, Boyte’s stealthy ways certainly became the dominant mode within community organizing itself. In fact, Boyte was a close associate of the leaders of the Midwest Academy, arguably the most important de facto socialist “front group” in American organizing, and a group with close ties to Barack and Michelle Obama.
The Third Annual Socialist Scholars Conference, held in New York on April 4, 5, and 6, 1985, included a panel called, “The New Populism: Left Potential, Right Danger.” The panel was sponsored by the journal Social Policy, the intellectual center of American community organizing. Boyte spoke at this session.
We know that in the spring of 1985, Obama was poring over books on community organizing, grappling especially with work by a former organizer for the SCLC. This is surely Boyte, and it seems very likely that Obama would have availed himself of an opportunity to see Boyte at the April 1985 Socialist Scholars Conference. Whether Martin Luther King, Jr., became a late-life convert to socialism is debatable. Boyte, however, had organized for Dr. King, had written the definitive book on contemporary community organizing, and was himself a socialist. How could Obama resist?
S. M. Miller, a professor of sociology and economics at Boston University, was another member of the New Populism panel, and we can find a piece by Miller that clearly came from a panel where he criticized Boyte.93 Quite possibly, Obama himself heard Miller deliver this criticism directly to Boyte in 1985:
The left agenda is more profound and more disturbing than it is usually wise to tell those whom radical activists wish to help organize, at least at the beginning. This situation leads organizers not infrequently to be in the situation of keeping back, if not disguising, some of their ultimate objectives… . This raises issues of manipulation… . Such organizers are not fully representing themselves to others.94
Obama spent years in the company of some of the top stealth organizers in the country. Is he perhaps practicing their stealth techniques in his current stint as Organizer-in-Chief of the United States of America?
To review, we can reliably place Obama at the 1983 Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference, and at least one other such conference—on Obama’s own testimony in Dreams from My Father. Documentary evidence strongly suggests that Obama attended the 1984 Socialist Scholars Conference, and Obama’s interest in theories of community organizing would have given him a strong incentive to attend the 1985 Socialist Scholars Conference as well. We can’t be certain of which panels Obama attended at these various conclaves, although it is possible to make informed guesses. While any single reconstruction of Obama’s movements at these conferences may be mistaken, the larger pattern is clear. Obama’s attendance at various Socialist Scholars Conferences between 1983 and 1985 would have given him an in-depth introduction to the socialist background of community organizing, and would have connected him to socialist-friendly sectors of the black church, ultimately leading him to Jeremiah Wright. We also know from testimony by Obama’s colleagues at NYPIRG that he had read widely on competing theories of community organizing, which itself would have taught him much about the socialist background of his chosen profession.
None of this is consistent with the image of Obama as naive about community organizing until well after he moved to Chicago. In March of 2007, New Republic reporter Ryan Lizza published a long and thoughtful article on Obama’s organizing career.95 Although Lizza had engaged Obama in “several conversations about his work as an organizer,” here is how Lizza began the piece: “In 1985, Barack Obama traveled halfway across the country to take a job that he didn’t fully understand. But, while he knew little about his new vocation—community organizer—it still had a romantic ring, at least to his 24-year-old ears.” Compare Lizza’s account—completely consistent with Obama’s depiction of himself in Dreams—with the recollections of Obama’s NY- PIRG colleague: “He read widely, and would hold forth about different theories and models of organizing.” Obama’s attempt to obfuscate his knowledge of organizing’s socialist underpinnings is at the root of the discrepancy between Lizza’s account and the testimony of Obama’s colleague.
During the 2008 campaign, Time magazine asked Obama about his references in Dreams to “socialist conferences” and radical thinkers like Franz Fanon. According to Time, Obama replied that “this was in the Reagan years and he was also reading works by conservative giants like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. He browsed among the ideologues but never bought in, he said. ‘I was always suspicious of dogma and the excesses of the left and the right.’”96 So this is Obama’s stance on the matter of the Socialist Scholars Conferences. He sampled ideologies of the left and the right, but finally rejected both. Obama’s answer is both evasive and adept. Ultimately, the effectiveness of his dodge depends upon public ignorance of community organizing, socialism, and the connections between them.
The most popular annual convention for conservative activists is called CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference, pronounced C-Pack). Imagine a presidential candidate who attended CPAC conferences throughout his youth, then spent years as an activist in various conservative organizations, before finally becoming a politician with the most conservative voting record in the United States Senate. (Obama had the most liberal Senate record.)97 Instead of campaigning openly as a conservative (like, say, Ronald Reagan), he claims to be a pragmatist who rejects ideologies of the left and right. Questioned by the press about his youthful conference attendance, he denies being a conservative and insists that during those same years he had also made a point of reading Karl Marx and Michael Harrington. This would not be a persuasive reply.
Many intellectually active conservatives read leftist thinkers. It’s certainly a good idea to know something about a wide variety of political views, and Obama deserves credit for studying conservatives as well as Marxists. Yet that does nothing to negate the significance of Obama’s lifetime pursuit of a political vocation and strategy outlined at those early Socialist Scholars Conferences. Given the powerful evidence that Obama was a committed socialist during his pre–New York years at Occidental, not to mention his presence at two—and quite possibly three—socialist conclaves, the notion that Obama was simply a curious outsider “browsing” at these conferences is strained past the breaking point. The obvious problems with Obama’s reply can be suppressed because Americans have no idea what community organizing is, or how it connects to those Socialist Scholars Conferences—and because the socialism of so many of Obama’s organizing colleagues has been intentionally hidden from view. My job is to lift the veil.
Although New York’s Socialist Scholars Conferences provided Obama with his calling, they were not by a long shot the future president’s first encounter with socialism. Obama’s childhood mentor, the prominent poet and journalist Frank Marhsall Davis, had once been a member of the Communist Party. While some darkly hinted in 2008 that Davis may have secretly brought Obama into the party, that is exceedingly unlikely. Davis’s one-time party membership was an endless source of trouble. He did all he could to keep it a secret. On the other hand, Davis remained boldly and proudly radical till the end. The issue of party membership aside, he stayed sympathetic to socialism and would surely have communicated this to Obama. It’s evident from Obama’s memoir that he took Davis’s warnings about “selling out” in college to heart. That’s what propelled Obama into Occidental College’s socialist circles.98
In February of 2010, an acquaintance from Obama’s Occidental College years, John C. Drew, let it be publicly known that he had encountered Obama on a couple of occasions around 1980 and 1981, at which time, according to Drew, the future president was a “pure Marxist socialist.” Drew himself had been a revolutionary Marxist while at Occidental, but in 1980 was back visiting his girlfriend (who was still a student at Occidental) after having spent some time away at graduate school. In the early eighties, Drew still accepted Marx’s analysis of society, yet had increasingly come to see the Marxist vision of a violent, class-based revolution as an unrealistic hope. According to Drew, Obama energetically argued against this deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, insisting that a true socialist revolution in the United States was well worth hoping and fighting for. After their debate, Drew concluded that Obama had a “hard Marxist-Leninist point of view.”99
Today, Drew is a Republican, which for some might bring his testimony into question. Yet in April of 2010, two months after Drew’s revelation, David Remnick’s rich, useful, and friendly biography of Obama added considerably to our knowledge of the president’s socialist convictions and alliances during his time at Occidental.
In Obama’s sophomore year, Remnick reports, he shared an apartment with a Pakistani student named Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Along with Chandoo, Obama was close to another Pakistani student named Wahid Hamid. Remnick explains that Chandoo and Hamid, among others, helped “ignite” Obama politically. Chandoo was “a socialist, a Marxist,” and freely admits today that these were his beliefs at the time. Hamid reluctantly confesses to having been a socialist, while trying to distinguish socialism from strict Marxism. Hamid also describes Obama as sharing the political convictions of their leftist circle.100
Remnick makes an effort to soften the impact of these revelations: “To slap an ideological tag on Chandoo and Hamid, let alone Obama, is not only unfair, it also credits them with thinking far more programmatically than they did.”101 In Drew’s account, however, Obama at this time was very programmatic indeed—boldly and thoughtfully defending the classic hard-Marxist revolutionary line against Drew’s critique. Drew’s account is very specific—and based on his recollections of an extended ideological debate with Obama. In contrast, Remnick’s attempts to mitigate the impact of his own revelations are fuzzier and less convincing.
According to Remnick, during the 2008 presidential campaign and afterward, “Hamid and Chandoo were wary of talking to the press, lest they say something that could be used against themselves or, worse, against Obama.”102 This is a significant admission. I’ve suggested that Obama’s relative silence about his New York years, as well as his reluctance to name friends from this time, stemmed from a desire to hide his socialist past. Remnick’s revelations about the silence of Chandoo and Hamid confirm this. Even after he left Occidental, Obama stayed in touch with his South Asian friends. Do they know more about Obama’s socialism in New York than they were prepared to say—even to a friendly source like Remnick? The willingness of Chandoo and Hamid to open up to Remnick about their own and Obama’s socialism appears to be a post-election effort to disclose potentially explo- sive information to a sympathetic source in the least damaging manner possible—lest it come out later, uncontrolled.
Obama’s beguiling account of his Occidental years in Dreams highlights what might be called his public debut—a speech he delivered to a campus anti-apartheid rally in early 1981.103 It’s apparent from Remnick’s report that this rally was organized by Obama and his Marxist friends.104 Remnick notes the central role of Occidental’s Democratic Socialist Alliance in planning the anti-apartheid action.105 He also explains that Obama occasionally attended meetings of the handful of groups involved in planning the demonstration, including meetings of the Democratic Socialist Alliance.106 Although Remnick makes every effort to downplay the significance of all this, the plain meaning of what he reveals is that Obama was active in Occidental’s Democratic Socialist Alliance—helping to plan its actions, periodically attending meetings, and serving as a close ally of its top leaders.
It’s apparent, then, that Obama’s presence at New York’s Socialist Scholars Conferences several years later was not mere intellectual grazing, but instead the logical extension of his socialist convictions and activities at Occidental. During the 2008 campaign, Obama mocked John McCain’s attacks with a clever quip: “By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”107 This was an effective jab, but also, I think, a way of attempting to deflect potentially damaging revelations to come.
Although John Drew’s account of Obama’s college Marxism attracted some notice on the Web, the story never really took off. No doubt this was because Obama had already confessed to making friends with Marxist professors at Occidental, and because the whole episode could be dismissed as a passing enthusiasm of youth. For the same reason, Remnick’s controlled revelations two months later had little noticeable impact. Yet Obama’s discovery of his organizer vocation at the Cooper Union Socialist Scholars Conference of 1983 suggests that Obama’s clearly established socialist interlude at Occidental in 1980–81 was more significant than it might at first appear. From Obama’s tutelage under Frank Marshall Davis, to his revolutionary Marxism at Occidental College, to his life-shaping experience at New York’s Socialist Scholars Conferences, and beyond, there is a powerful thread of ideological continuity. It is socialism in one form or another that unites the various phases of Obama’s political life.
Accounts of Obama’s college socialism from Drew and Remnick also expose Obama’s characteristic tactic of defusing potentially damaging revelations with partial and misleading confessions. Obama’s confession in Dreams that he made friends with Marxist professors at Occidental “to avoid being mistaken for a sellout” has caused him some grief over the years, but not nearly as much harm as the full truth would have done. We now know that Obama wasn’t just “hanging out” with Marxist professors. He was fully and enthusiastically on their side.
What about Obama’s socialist father? I’ve put off discussion of Barack Obama Senior’s socialism, partly because it has already been treated in depth by Obama’s critics and admirers, but also because it’s difficult to say exactly how much Obama knew about his father’s beliefs, and when he found out.108 In 1965, Obama Sr, published an article in the East Africa Journal entitled “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” The article was a leftist critique of the economic policy favored by Obama Sr.’s own political sponsor. “Problems Facing Our Socialism” called for land redistribution, progressive taxation, regulation, and a decreased privatization in Obama’s native Kenya. Given that this article was published just four years after Barack Jr.’s birth, and considering that Obama’s parents habitually discussed politics and international development with their friends at the University of Hawaii, it seems certain that Obama’s mother would have known of her husband’s socialist views. The question is: What did she tell her son, and when?
By his own account, Obama deeply idealized his absent father, packing into his image “all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.”109 In his mind’s ear, Obama often heard his father’s stern and righteous injunction: “You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”110 If young Obama knew that socialism was central to his father’s conception of the black man’s struggle—as it in fact was—he would surely have felt drawn to aid in the socialist struggle.
Obama did know that his father was a figure in the government of Kenya,111 so his curiosity about his father’s political views would likely have been strong. It was at Occidental that Obama stopped using his casual, boyish, and Americanized nickname “Barry” and adopted his given name “Barack” instead. Caroline Boss, in Remnick’s words, “a friend of Obama’s and one of the main leftist political leaders at Occidental,” explains this shift to “Barack” as a way of connecting to his father.112 Could it be that in college, an increasingly socialist Obama discovered that, across continents and oceans, a shared ideology might bind him more deeply to the father he never knew?
It’s clear by now that a powerful cord of ideological continuity stretches from Obama’s early experiences with the ex-Communist (but still strongly socialist) Frank Marshall Davis, through his time as a socialist at Occidental College, to his life-changing attendance at Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York. During his late youth and early adulthood, Obama was a socialist. The future president was ushered into this ideology by early mentors, college friends, and his own intellectual explorations as an adult. Having fully entered the socialist world, the question remains: Did Obama ever leave it?