Election '08: The mainstream media have finally gotten around to revealing Barack Obama's early mentor. But they've downplayed the mystery man's communist background.
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IBD Series: The Audacity Of Socialism
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As noted in the July 29 curtain-raiser to this series, the seeds of Obama's far-left ideology were planted in his formative years as a teenager growing up in Hawaii — and they were far more radical than any biography or media profile has portrayed.
Poet-journalist Davis speaks in Hawaii in this undated photo.
A careful reading of Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that his childhood mentor up to the age of 18 — a man he refers to only as "Frank" — was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his "subversive," "un-American activities."
In a belated story on the relationship, the Associated Press describes Davis as "left-leaning."
In fact, Davis was a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, according to the 1953 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities of the Territory of Hawaii, which labeled him "a bitter opponent of capitalism." The report was introduced as evidence in the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee hearings probing the "Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States."
"Davis scholars dismiss the idea that he was anti-American," the AP reports. But one of them, ex-University of Hawaii professor Kathryn Takara, acknowledges in a Ph.D. paper on Davis (not quoted by AP) that he'd been fingered as "a Communist."
Davis wrote militant poems as a black writer in Chicago, including one in which he hails the Soviet revolution: "Smash on, victory-eating Red Army." He also attacked traditional Christianity, titling one inflammatory screed, "Christ is a Dixie N*****."
As Obama was preparing to head off to college, he sat at Davis' feet in his Waikiki bungalow for bitter nightly bull sessions. Davis plied his impressionable guest with liberal shots of whiskey and advice, including: Never trust the white establishment.
"They'll train you so good," he said, "you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh**."
In the eyes of white America, Davis warned Obama: "You may be a well-trained, well-paid n*****, but you're a n***** just the same." He also nurtured anti-white hatred in his young mulatto subject, telling him, "Black people have a reason to hate."
AP conveniently glossed over these quotes.
How much influence did Comrade Davis have on Obama? The Democrat White House hopeful refuses to talk about the relationship now. In the book, he only shares that he was "intrigued by old Frank, with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge."
However, Obama followed in Davis' footsteps after college, working as a "community organizer" for the same socialist network in Chicago. He even considered a career in journalism like Davis.
Obama attended socialist conferences, and took a shine to other black Marxist revolutionists. Not long after Davis died in 1987, Obama came under the spell of another black nationalist-socialist, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who, like Davis, wore a dashiki and became a father figure.
If the relationship with Davis was as blase as the Associated Press makes it sound, why is Obama mum about it? And why did he try to hide Davis' identity in his first memoir, published in 1995?
"With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures," he wrote in the preface, "the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of privacy." But there was no need to protect Davis' privacy. He had long been dead.
More likely, the cryptic references to his communist mentor were — and still are — designed to protect Obama's background from the scrutiny it deserves.
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=302827467707515
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