Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=303953050138122
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, August 18, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Election '08: Barack Obama's fierce attack on Jerome Corsi's best-selling book, "The Obama Nation," has backfired. He has been forced to confirm things he'd hoped would stay buried.
Read More: Election 2008
Obama, for example, for the first time has acknowledged that the mysterious "Frank" in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," is in fact Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis, who during the height of the Cold War was investigated by both the FBI and Congress as a pawn of Moscow.
As we've noted, the late Davis was Obama's early mentor with whom he shared whiskey and rage while growing up in Hawaii. The militant black poet influenced the young Obama's decision to become a pro-labor community organizer and agitator in his hometown of Chicago.
Corsi writes about Davis in his critical new book, "The Obama Nation," which has hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. In an unusual 40-page rebuttal posted on his campaign Web site, Obama tries to smear the entire book as a "series of lies."
Only, Corsi's book is basically a critique of Obama's own first book, "Dreams From My Father," written in 1995. It finds hole after hole in the narrative. Dates don't add up. Stories don't square with reality. Identities of central characters like Davis are hidden from view.
In his angrily worded report, Obama attempts to play down the influence Corsi says Davis had on him. But he doesn't dispute anything the book documents about Davis' un-American activities with the Soviets.
Instead, Obama takes issue with Corsi claiming Davis' angry poems provided "a voice for Obama's black rage." He calls it a "lie."
In fact, Obama's own words appear to support the claim. On Page 171 of "Dreams," Obama flies into a fit over chronic black poverty in Chicago's South Side, blaming whites who took flight to the crime-free suburbs and took jobs with them. He's overcome by the same black rage Davis radiated in his Waikiki bungalow years earlier.
Obama took to heart Davis' advice to "keep your eyes open" to signs of institutional racism. He became race-conscious like never before. He admits he never "let it go," even when he could see that overt racism was a thing of the past.
But that wasn't even the point Corsi was making in his section on Davis, which he subtitled "Obama's Communist Mentor." The issue of black rage was a side point. The main point is Davis' communist influence, something voters have a right to know more about.
Obama in his rebuttal leaves that point completely unaddressed. He doesn't want to go there — for obvious reasons.
Obama's rapid response to Corsi's alleged "swift-boating" backfires again in the same report when he defends his wife, Michelle, against the charge that she was influenced by another black Marxist revolutionist, Stokely Carmichael, in formulating her Princeton thesis on black separatism.
Again, Obama calls it a "lie." But turning to Page 139 of his memoir, "Dreams," we find that he himself was inspired by Carmichael, a civil rights leader turned militant black nationalist. Changing his name to Kwame Toure, Carmichael wrote a book on "Black Power" that propounds an explicitly socialist, Pan-African vision.
While living in New York, Obama says he was in "search of some inspiration" one day and "went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of SNCC and Black Power fame, speak at Columbia." He clearly knew the background of the source for his inspiration that day.
"At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature and arguing with each other about Trotsky's place in history," he wrote, describing the scene. "Inside, Toure was proposing a program to establish economic ties between Africa and Harlem that would circumvent white capitalist imperialism."
Obama, who has family in Kenya, is proposing his own bailout of Africa.
Obama wants to run from this radical past, but his first memoir — written long before he had serious White House aspirations — is a peek into his soul. "Dreams" has become more of a nightmare, and he may just come to regret ever writing it.
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