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Defining Barack Obama
Daya Gamage – US National Correspondent Asian Tribune
Part One: Liberalism and Conservatism in U.S. Politics
Washington, D.C. 13 September (Asiantribune.com): To the Third World developing nations beyond the shores of the United States the impact of liberal and conservative politics in U.S. society and their reverberation in the developing world is somewhat complicated.
Barak Obama is the junior United States Senator from the State of Illinois. He is the first African American to be a major party’s nominee for the President of the United States.
The series of articles the Asian Tribune is about to start on presidential candidate of the U.S. Democratic Party the junior U.S. senator from Illinois Barack Obama cannot be completed unless a review is done what conservative and liberal politics mean to the United States, and what impact those politics have on the Third World developing nations.
This is a series we totally confine to define Barack Obama. The Democratic Party candidate for the November 4 presidential election has neither been adequately scrutinized nor ‘defined’. He was elected to the U.S. Senate for the first time in November 2004, and before that eight years in the Illinois State Assembly while being a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago and constitutional law professor in an Ivy League university.
In presenting this series the objective of Asian Tribune is to inform the Third World developing nations what is in store for them if and when an Obama presidency is inaugurated on January 20 next year.
The Third World developing nations, especially in the Asian Region, cannot escape the impact of decisions taken by Washington. The United States footprints and fingerprints are all over the Asian Region. Those decisions are reflected in foreign policy, foreign economic assistance, military assistance, humanitarian relief etc. Washington’s influence is always seen in international organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, United Nations, WTO, UN Commission on Human Rights etc. on which the Third World developing nations heavily depend for their existence.
The background, the character, the mind-set, political behavior, political shade, the beliefs in early years of the life and their extension in later years, the pronouncements etc, of the person who occupies the White House have far-reaching impact on domestic and overseas policies the U.S. administration takes on the areas we noted above. Above all, the persons with whom the occupant of the White House associated with in his early years and recent times, the impact the policy advisers exercise on him in shaping his policies, beliefs and settling his mind-set are most significant.
The Asian Tribune did extensive research and a study using those yard sticks and criteria in an attempt to define the Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama. This is not an easy task to define the probable White House occupant. The main objective, as mentioned above, is to alert the developing nations in the Asian Region and their vast expatriate community domiciled in the United States what an Obama Administration would look like or, if you put it in another way, to identify the kernel of his administration.
The Asian Tribune conveniently skipped defining the Republican Party presidential candidate the 26-year Washington veteran Senator John McCain as his administration can be considered an extension of the ‘neo-conservative’ Bush Administration with minor changes in the style. Senator McCain has had agreed 90% of Bush administration policies clearly reflected in his senate votes and has been a Washington insider throughout the Bush presidency working very closely with the Republican caucuses of the Senate and the House in support of Bush-Chaney ‘neo—conservative’ policies.
The Asian Tribune series starts here with the presentation of what conservative and liberal policies mean to the United States. Once that is done the reader is in a comfortable position to visualize where Barack Obama stands and what policy planks he would adopt in his administration and their impact on the developing nations in the Asian Region. Since Republican presidential candidate John McCain stands diametrically opposed to ‘Obama Policy Platform’ one may not find it difficult to ascertain the ‘Policy Platform’ of McCain.
Review of liberal and conservative strains in U.S. political scene is a prelude to ‘Defining Barack Obama’.
Defining Conservatism and Liberalism
The word 'liberal' comes from the Latin word 'liber' which means 'free'. The word 'conservative' comes from the Latin word 'servare' which means 'to preserve'. Liberals thus consider individual liberty as important, whereas conservatives consider tradition as important.
Liberalism arose out of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason. John Locke laid the foundation with his Second Treatise of Government (1689) in which he introduced concepts like rule of law, property rights and freedom of speech. The missing brick was individual liberty, which John Stuart Mill provided in his On Liberty (1859). The case for individual liberty is made based on rational and logical arguments.
Conservatism arose as a reaction to liberalism. The ideas of the Enlightenment inspired the French Revolution (1789). A year later, Edmund Burke argued in Reflections on the Revolution in France that tradition is a better source of wisdom than reason. Society is so complex that it is impossible to conjure a perfect society merely by our reason. It is better to rely on tradition, which is accumulated social experience, so goes the conservative concept.
The intellectual divide of tradition vs. reason translates into a practical divide of culture vs. politics. The late U.S. Senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed it up best when he said, "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics that determines the success or failure of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change culture, and help save a society from itself."
Ralph Waldo Emerson on The Philosophy of Liberalism said, "The basic difference was between the party of the past and the party of the future, between the party of memory and the party of hope. It is still true that the American liberal believes that society can and should be improved, and that the way to improve it is to apply human intelligence to social and economic problems. The conservative, on the other hand, opposes efforts at purposeful change -- especially when they threaten the existing distribution of power and wealth -- because he believes that things are about as good as they can be reasonably expected to be, and that any change is more likely than not to be for the worse."
The term liberalism in the United States today most often refers to Modern liberalism, a political current that reached its high-water marks with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. It is a form of social liberalism, combining support for government social programs, progressive taxation, and moderate Keynesianism with a broad concept of rights.
Demographics of Liberals in U.S.
Liberalism remains most popular among those in academia and liberals commonly tend to be highly educated and relatively affluent. According to recent surveys, between 19 and 26 percent of the American electorate self-identify as liberal, versus moderate or conservative. A 2004 study by the US-based Pew Research Center identified 19 percent of Americans as liberal. According to the study, liberals were the most affluent and educated ideological demographic. Of those who identified as liberal, 49 percent were college graduates and 41 percent had household incomes exceeding $75,000, compared to 27 and 28 percent at the national average, respectively. Liberalism also remains the dominant political ideology in academia, with 72% of full-time faculty identifying as liberal in a 2004 Pew Research study. The social sciences and humanities were most liberal, whereas, business and engineering departments were the most conservative. In the 2000, 2004 and 2006 elections, the vast majority of liberals voted in favor of the Democratic Party.
Some positions associated with liberalism in the United States
- individual freedom
- unalienable human and natural rights
- freedom of speech and the press
- separation of church and state
- equality of opportunity for all regardless of race, age, religion, income, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity
- freedom of information; the right to know what the government is doing
- the rule of law; the equal protection of the law
- higher concern for the environment and worker rights than market forces
- the value to society of working people
- social security, universal health care, and the provision of support to poor workers & families
- progressive taxation
- reluctance to use military force in a rash and hasty manner
- woman's right to choose to have an abortion
- proclivity toward supporting "home" issues versus foreign
- proclivity toward supporting federal power (central) versus state (devolved) power
- proclivity toward supporting public education versus private
- right of citizens to have legally recognized marriages/unions regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity
Barack Obama; born August 4, 1961 is the junior United States Senator from the State of Illinois. He is the first African American to be a major party’s nominee for the President of the United States.
The ethnic composition in the United States according to the 2008 census, the percentage of African Americans is 13%. Non-Hispanic Whites 68%, Hispanics 13.5% and Asians 5.5%.
A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama worked as a community organizer and practiced as a civil rights attorney before serving in the Illinois State Senate from 1997 to 2004. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003. After a primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic Party Convention in July 2004. He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote.
As a member of the Democratic minority in the previous 109th Congress, he helped create legislation to control conventional weapons and to promote greater public accountability in the use of federal funds. He also made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During the current 110th Congress, he helped create legislation regarding lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel. After announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama emphasized withdrawing American troops from Iraq, energy independence, decreasing the influence of lobbyists, and promoting universal health care as top national priorities.
A standard method that political scientists use for gauging ideology is to compare the annual ratings by the Americans for Democratic Actions (ADA) with the ratings by the American Conservative Union (ACU). Based on his years in Congress (i.e. 2005, 2006, and 2007), Senator Obama has a lifetime average conservative rating of 7.67% from the ACU, and a lifetime average liberal rating of 90% from the ADA.
The prestigious and widely accepted National Journal rated Barack Obama as the most liberal lawmaker in the United States Congress.
(Part Two: Barack Obama’s Communist mentor in his teen years)
- Asian Tribune -
http://www.asiantribune.com/?q=node/13283Defining Barack Obama: Part Two – Communist Mentor in his Teen Years
Daya Gamage – US National Correspondent Asian Tribune
Washington, D.C. 17 September (Asiantribune.com): The most popular saying is that ‘one is judged by the company one keeps’, but let us put this ‘association’ part in a much broader perspective.
Barack Obama
Right-wing and/or conservative commentators in the United States often reiterate that the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama “has a huge guilty association problem of his own making and that it has been ignored by the electorate.â€
The Online encyclopedia Wikipedia defines “guilt by association†as “n association fallacy is an inductive formal fallacy of the type hasty generalization or red herring which asserts that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another, merely by an irrelevant association.â€
A key word in that definition is “irrelevant.â€
In this Part Two installment of presenting facts about Senator Obama’s Communist Mentor in his Teen Years, endeavor is not to denounce or be critical of his association with people since his birth to date but to enlighten the readers that there was a greater possibility of his developed beliefs and mind-set in his formative years because of those associations may have had an impact in shaping his thinking and actions during his time in the U.S. Senate and as a candidate for U.S. presidency from a major political party.
This analysis does not project his associations “irrelevant†but endeavors to make those associations and, due to those associations, the mind-set Obama has conditioned “relevant†to define his candidacy for the greater benefit of the Asian Region and millions of Asian expatriates domiciled in the United States. After all, the nations in the Asian Region need to know what is in stock for them if Mr. Obama becomes the next president of the United States on January 20 next year.
Most recently this writer asked a prominent Sri Lankan Buddhist prelate in Sacramento, California Most Venerable Madawala Seelawimala, a professor at the University of California, Davis, if a person was exposed to certain beliefs in his formative years whether those beliefs form part of his character in later years to which the erudite monk replied that not all but most beliefs would influence to stay within the person and facilitate to create a mind-set.
Did Barack Obama’s close association with a communist activist in his formative years affect his thinking as growing adult and later years? The readers may find answers to this in later installments in this series.
In February this year, one of the latest revelations about Senator Obama was published by Cliff Kincaid, an investigative journalist with Accuracy in Media a watchdog group.
Kincaid’s article, “Obama’s Communist Mentor†described the close relationship that Barack Obama developed with Frank Marshall Davis while Obama lived in Hawaii from 1971-1979.
Davis was a member of the Communist Party of the United States and has had given Obama advice on career choices. In Obama’s first book Dreams From My Father, he writes about “Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self.â€
Trevor Loudon, a New Zealand-based libertarian activist, researcher and blogger, noted evidence that “Frank†was Frank Marshall Davis in a posting as far back as March of 2007.
Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor to the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, described Davis as having influenced Obama’s sense of identity and career moves. According to Horne, Obama retraced the steps of Davis by eventually moving to Chicago.
Davis was a known communist. The 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a member of the US Communist Party. Further, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations.
The Asian Tribune used the title Defining Barack Obama because the American electorate has the right to know who their candidates are and that the main stream media has not helped to define Mr. Obama, who came to national prominence since his ‘keynote address’ at the 2004 Democratic Party Convention which nominated Senator John Kerry, in failing to present hitherto unknown facts to define this candidate in proper perspective. On the other hand, as an Online Daily which values the rapport between the United States and the Asian Region it is to the advantage of the nations in the Asian Region to have a proper understanding of a candidate who is likely to occupy the White House from January 20 for four years or may be for eight.
Frank Marshall Davis, according to Cliff Kincaid, was not a “journalist†in any real sense of the term. He was a propagandist and racial agitator for the Communist Party of the United States.
In his books, Obama admits attending “socialist conferences†and coming into contact with Marxist literature. But he ridiculed the charge of being a “hard-core academic Marxist,†which was made by his 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes.
Nevertheless, Davis Mandel in his book Obama: From Promise to Power describes Obama as “left-leaning.â€
In the summer/fall 2003 issue of African American Review, James A. Miller of George Washington University reviews a book by John Edgar Tidwell, a professor at the University of Kansas, about Frank Marshall Davis’ career, and notes, “In Davis’ case, his political commitments led him to join the American Communist Party during the middle of World War Two even though he never publicly admitted his Party membership.†According to Cliff Kincaid, who first disclosed Barack Obama’s rapport with Davis, Tidwell is an expert on the life and writings of Davis.
The question posed by Kincaid was ‘Is it possible that Obama did not know who Davis was when he wrote his book, Dreams From My Father, first published in 1995?’
The answer lies here:
Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, talked about it during a speech in March 2007 at a reception of the Communist Party USA archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University. The remarks are posted online under the headline, “Rethinking the History and the Future of the Communist Party.â€
Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 “at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson,†came into contact with Barack Obama and his family and became young man’s mentor, influencing Obama’s sense of identity and career moves. Robeson, a member of the Communist Party was a well known black poet and actor who fell out of grace with all U.S. administrations and their intelligence agencies.
As Horne described it, Davis “befriended†a “Euro-American family†that had “migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name Barack Obama, who retracted the steps of Davis eventually, decamped to Chicago.â€
Cliff Kincaid reveals “It was in Chicago that Obama became a ‘community organizer’ and came into contact with more far-left political forces, including Democratic Socialists of America, which maintains close ties to European socialist groups and parties through the Socialist International (SI), and two former members of the Students for Democratic Society (SDS), William Ayers and Carl Davidson.â€
The SDS laid siege to college campuses across the United States in the 1960s, mostly in order to protest the Vietnam War, and spawned the terrorist Weather Underground organization. Ayers was a member of the terrorist group and turned himself in to authorities in 1981. He is now a college professor and served with Obama on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a charitable organization focused on welfare reform and affordable housing. Davidson is now a figure in the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an offshoot of the CPUSA, and helped organize the 2002 rally where Obama came out against the Iraq War.
Mr. Ayers was a founder of the Weather Underground; he and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, were indicted in 1970 on conspiracy charges that were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct.
Both hosted Mr. Obama at their Chicago home in 1995 when Mr. Obama was running for office, though that was not considered a vital moment in his political career.
In April, Senator Obama said Mr. Ayers was “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis†and called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old.â€
Dr. Kathryn Takara, a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa confirms Davis is the “Frank†in Obama’s book and describes Davis brought “an acute sense of race relations and class struggle throughout America and the world†and that he openly discussed subjects such as American imperialism, colonialism and exploitation. She described him as a “socialist realist†who attacked the work of the (US) House Un-American Activities Committee.
In a statement issued on 15 July 2008 the Communist Party of USA made this comment:
“A broad multiclass, multiracial movement is converging around Obama’s “Hope, change and unity†campaign because they see in it the thrilling opportunity to end 30 years of ultra-right rule and move our nation forward with a broadly progressive agenda.
“The struggle to defeat the ultra-right and turn our country on a positive path will not end with Obama’s election. But that step will shift the ground for successful struggles going forward.
â€One thing is clear. None of the people’s struggles — from peace to universal health care to an economy that puts Main Street before Wall Street — will advance if McCain wins in November.â€
The Republican candidate for U.S. president John McCain has been identified as a ‘war monger’ who will give no allowance to terrorism. Republican Party which is based on conservative ideology often put human rights and civil liberties in the back burner when dealing with terrorism. It was McCain’s political party when in majority in the House and Senate suspended Habeas Corpus to help Bush administration deal with ‘enemy combatants’.
In contrast, Democratic Party to which Barack Obama belongs has throughout its political existence considered human rights, individual liberties and strict rule of law as main policy planks of the ideology the party is guided, liberalism. This liberalism has a touch of socialism, equal opportunity and rights of minorities.
Asian Tribune, in presenting this series Defining Barack Obama, endeavors to use these yard sticks to introduce this undefined U.S. presidential candidate to the Asian Region and to the millions of Asian expatriates living in the United States to help them understand what shape an Obama Administration will take vis-Ã -vis the Asian Region.
Next: Obama’s International Socialist Connections
Asian Tribune
http://www.asiantribune.com/?q=node/13283

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I did not say that I admire any communist regime. The appeal I see in the word 'communism' today comes from the disgust I feel for the word 'capitalism' after reading extensively about the greed on Wall Street and the racism and religion-based violence/wars around the world. There are certain aspects of both communism and capitalism that I like, and some of each that I despise.
Right now, it's time for this country to take a few steps to the left.
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http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/october/meet_the_new_health_.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQTBYQlQ7yM
Right now, it's time for this country to take a few steps to the left.
Are you a socialist ?
Are you a socialist ?
She most certainly will speak for herself, but as of some time probably later today, your country takes its first big step towards socialism with passage of this bail-out/buy-in bill at the frantic urging of our republican president and his republican appointee, Paulson.
<>about the greed on Wall Street <>
You forgot to mention the role our massive federal government had in the current mess. sigh :-(
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<>and his republican appointee, Paulson.
American Patriot
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