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Pick A President On Record

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By ADON TAFT, Life to the Fullest

Hernando Today

Published: August 11, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama definitely is patriotic and not a Muslim, no matter what you may have heard or read. However, there may be reason to question whether his background makes him the man who can lead the country to economic security or to racial and political harmony.
Nothing the Chicago politician ever has said or done, officially or privately, would be described as anti-American by anyone but possibly a right-wing extremist. Critical occasionally but not anti-American.
While both Obama's biological father and stepfather nominally were Muslims, the senator never has followed in their religious footsteps, perhaps because neither Barack Obama, Sr., a Kenyan, nor Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian, insisted he or themselves observed most tenets of Islam, the faith of the majority of their countrymen. Each drank heavily, ate pork, wed white women and was a womanizer (in addition to Islam's approved multi-wife marriages).
Both men had economic and political left leanings nurtured in American universities (University of Hawaii, Harvard), at one time worked for oil companies (Shell and Mobil) and held government positions in their homelands where they were involved with socialist/communist revolutionary forces.
Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, a Kansas girl from Methodist and Baptist stock, was described by him, in his autobiographical book, "Dreams from My Father," as a secular humanist, a "position-paper liberal." Most of her adult life was spent in pursuing education and working in agencies of a number of governments and for non-profit organizations, especially the Ford Foundation.
His own religious experience has centered in Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, notable now to people across the nation as the place where Dr. Jeremiah Wright ministered for nearly four decades. It was during a service there when the congregation sang a spiritual entitled "Thank You, Jesus" that Obama recalls he first came to understand that they were talking about their relationship to God, "thanking Him in advance for all that they dared to hope for in me! Oh, I thank You, Jesus, for not letting go of me when I let go of You," the presumptive Democrat nominee for president wrote in "Dreams from My Father." "Oh, yes, Jesus, I thank you."
It was from one of Wright's sermons, labeled "The Audacity of Hope," that Obama adopted the title of his most recent best seller. In that message his pastor followed a theme of "when white folks' greed runs a world in need."
That view of whites as oppressors is one of the issues that have nagged at Obama most of his life. He refers to it at least 18 times in "Dreams from My Father." It still is in the forefront amidst charges and countercharges over who is playing the race card in the presidential campaign.
From his childhood, his white mother taught him that blacks in the United States were oppressed but great in spite of it. She taught him "to be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burden that only we were strong enough to bear." (It was his father's parents who objected to the marriage of a black man to a white woman, not his mother's parents who raised Barack during many of his formative years.)
While growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama sought out a controversial expatriate from Chicago, Frank Davis, whose protest poetry, along with the biography of Malcolm X, stirred him and confirmed that "black people have a reason to hate. That's just how it is…You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained."
The resulting struggle with a feeling that, as a black living in a white world where "they have all the power," he was helpless and hopeless led Obama to a period of heavy drinking, smoking pot and "blowing" cocaine during high school and his early years at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He confesses in "Dreams from My Father," that he deliberately chose "politically active black students as friends, Marxist professors and punk-rock performance poets, discussed neocolonialism-- especially Frantz Fanon's 'The Communist Manifesto of Neocolonialism,' Eurocentrism and patriarchy."
It also was there that a black friend named Regina voiced the view, since repeated by others, that, "You always think everything's about you." That perceived arrogance and an economic/government outlook steeped in African tradition, socialist-tinged educational influence and personal employment history are other troubling issues when considering Obama as a presidential candidate.
Later, while a student at Columbia University, Obama reports that he broke up with his white girl friend of at least a year because "she couldn't understand black anger." He realized "our two worlds were as far apart as Kenya is from Germany (where his sister was studying) and I knew that if we stayed together, I'd eventually live in hers…Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider."
It was during his period in New York, Obama wrote, that he "began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America's race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal war." He also attended socialist conferences at Cooper Union and African cultural fairs in Harlem and Brooklyn.
Obama then began to proclaim a "need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan (whose admirers did not include Obama) and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots." That's when he decided, "That's what I'll do; I'll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change."
So he left the only private enterprise job he's ever had, with a business consulting firm in Manhattan, where he said he "felt like a spy," to become a community organizer in Chicago.
Those experiences, along with the influence of the Kenyan and Indonesian cultures, his employment record of only that one short stint in the private enterprise sector, his voting record in both the Illinois state legislature and the U.S. Senate, and the policies he has proclaimed in his campaign have led some, such as the writers at the Investor's Business Daily, to describe his views as "stealth socialism."
Visiting family in Kenya, Obama was impressed – somewhat favorably – with the concept of communal ownership of property (advocated by his father for the Nairobi government along with confiscation of European and Asian owned enterprises), a sort of family welfare system akin to tax the rich to give handouts to those who are jobless (whether or not by choice) and government cronyism.
When coupled with Obama's history with community organizing under the tutelage of Saul Alinsky-trained Gerald Kellman and the backing of the Woods Fund (whose board included former Weatherman William Ayers), critics see a connection to Obama's proposals for government "investments" in things such as universal health care, free college tuition, universal 401(k)s in which the government would match contributions from low and moderate-income families, free child care and universal pre-schools, calling his labeling of them as "economic justice" just a "euphemism for socialism."
His voting record indicates a partisan support of such measures with little evidence of reaching across party or racial lines.
Some are wary of an Obama presidency that might pick federal judges, particularly those on the Supreme Court, who share the Harvard law school graduate's view that law is "a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power – and that too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. "
Writing in "The Audacity of Hope," the man who for 10 years taught Constitutional law at the University of Chicago laments that in its original form the Constitution "provided no protection to those outside the constitutional circle – the Native Americans whose treaties proved worthless before the court of the conquerors, or the black man Dred Scott, who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man a leave a slave."
He therefore rejects the original intent interpretation held by those like Justice Antonin Scalia while he endorses the view of those like Justice Stephen Breyer who hold that the Constitution "is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world." After all, Obama contends, the one impulse shared "by all the Founders" was "a rejection of all forms of absolute authority … implicit … was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course…"
So when you make your choice for president, pick the man whose view of the world, economic ideas, social policies and personal experience best resemble your picture of the leader of our country and the western world. In deciding whether Sen. Obama fits that role, you can safely judge that neither his patriotism nor religious faith should be questioned.
There still may be plenty of room left to wonder about the basis for his proposals for adjusting the economy, his ability to reach across racial or political lines or his view of the Constitution with all its ramifications.

Adon Taft, retired, was a reporter for The Miami Herald for 43 years. During the 37 years he was the religion editor, he won numerous awards including the Supple Memorial Award, the top prize in the field of the reporting of religion news.

Adon Taft lives in Brooksville.

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