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You're known by the friends you keep

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John Reiniers

A Mind of My Own

Published: December 6, 2009

The Economist recently noted, that among other things, the midterm 2010 elections "will also reveal more about this opaque President..." Barak Obama's lack of transparency wasn't preordained. During the campaign, the media simply elected not to report relevant facts about his circle of advisers, or his past. Let me explain why this is significant.

When our kids were starting grade school, the very first parental guidance we gave them involved their selection of friends at school: "You are known by the friends you keep." It didn't really mean anything at first. They were too young to understand. But we would keep repeating this when we would meet other students during volunteer work or after school. At times I would simply say the first several words of this old adage: "You are known by," and they would complete it verbatim.

It paid off.

One gets weary of political spin to everything, but examining a politician's past friends is, at the very least, a road map to their ideological platform. When their past achievements are very thin, knowing "the friends they keep" is critical to this analysis.

Consider Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S. When he ran against John Quincy Adams, Jackson - sort of like Sarah Palin - was thought to be a "barely educated bumpkin." He was the first president who didn't come from aristocratic lineage and is considered our first populist president. I mention Jackson because the media reported every negative tidbit about his past. They were brutal back then. Jackson's past as a legislator, his "bigamous" marriage, as well as his circle of supporters were well known to all. But his supporters thought he was in touch with the common man - so voters liked "old hickory." His life was an open book.

The same with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The exact opposite of Jackson. Repeatedly, the media reminded their readers that Roosevelt came from the wealthiest and oldest families in the U.S. He had private tutors and went to Harvard. He was a descendant of everyone in U.S. history who was of privilege. But unlike Obama, who apparently is an FDR wannabe, there was no opaqueness about FDR's background as an activist. At least we knew where FDR was coming from - more and bigger government.

Since the advent of his socialist circle of czar advisers, we now have a better measure of Obama. He seems to be a progressive in a European socialist way, but his czars appear to be authoritarian - not democratic - socialists. As manufacturing czar Ron Bloom put it, "We believe in the persuasion of power."

Let's look further back to the "friends he keeps." Obama's consigliore is his senior adviser, progressive liberal Valerie Jarrett, a virtual cerebral body part to both him and the first lady. Know her and you know the Obamas. Jarrett was to have been impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevitch's appointment to Obama's senatorial seat. She is the one who influenced Obama to appoint communist Van Jones as manufacturing czar.

The Jarrett family played a significant role in Obama's rise to power. Vernon Jarrett, her father-in-law, was a Chicago activist and left-wing journalist, who was the Chicago Tribune's first black journalist. I was a faithful subscriber when we lived there. His obituary noted that he "stoked the political embers in Chicago that led to the election of the city's first African-American mayor, Harold Washington." (Whom I remember as the quintessential amiable politician.) Washington was backed by a branch of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Chicago communist party. Washington studied at Roosevelt University, whose chairman of the Economics Department was Marxist economist Walter Weiskopf. Economist Rolf Weil recently lectured on "Roosevelt University's revolutionary Economics Department." The department theme was that socialist-based economics will be as successful as free-market economics. (Which is pretty close to what former DNC Chairman Howard Dean just said in an April speech in Paris.)

And guess who said Washington's election made him leave New York to work in Chicago as a community organizer? Right. Obama. The Progressive reports that "leftie" (then Congressman) Washington "studied the organizing techniques of Saul "Rules for Radicals" Alinsky ..." A template for Obama, the community organizer.

Now guess who worked as Deputy Corporation Counsel under Washington? Right again. Valerie Jarrett, who stayed on under her new boss - Richard Daley - when she recruited Michelle Obama.

And who is the second banana on the Obama team? David Axelrod, political consultant, another Chicago progressive - Obama's Karl Rove - who created the winning campaign strategy for Obama's presidential run. What is little known is that Axelrod made his political bones by helping African-Americans get elected. His first experience with this skill was working on Harold Washington's first campaign for mayor and then his reelection. (It was no mean feat overcoming Chicago's notorious racial prejudice.) So it made sense for Axelrod and Obama to team up for his run for the Illinois Senate.

The mainstream media ignored Obama's own words which he said after the nomination: "I am somebody who is no doubt progressive." They also ignored the editorial commentary of The Progressive, which as late as November 2009 observed about Obama - one of their own - "Obama knows not just the rough outlines of the left-labor-liberal progressive agenda, but the specifics ... He has ... over a quarter century ... campaigned for them." The media knew Obama had to be sold to the independent voter as a centrist agent of change - not a bomb-throwing socialist. During the campaign he conveniently embraced Paul Volcker and Warren Buffett as his advisers for political cover. These responsible icons were not in his circle of friends then, and are now ignored by the White House.

There you have it. Obama's political strategist Axelrod, and his family consigliore, Jarrett, came together with a socialist/communist alliance to elect Chicago's Harold Washington, stayed on with the Daley machine and then engineered a breakthrough among white liberal voters to win Obama the Illinois Senate seat.

The Chicago media knew all about Obama's socialist political roots; the traditional national media ignored them. The rest is history. The Chicago machine went national with Obama and his "left-labor-liberal progressive agenda."

John Reiniers, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill.

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