What the (Bleep) Just Happened? by Monica Crowley Page A

she said, “Barack stood up that day and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the world as it is ’ and ‘ the world as it should be .’” She continued, “All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do—that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be .” If only America would follow Barack through the back of the magical Marxist wardrobe. She had used the radicals’ phrase “fighting for the world as it should be” before, so her invocation of Alinsky at the convention should not have come as a surprise to anybody paying attention. Most Americans heard that phrase—“fighting for the world as it should be”—as a siren call to idealism, a summons to a noble mission of improving the nation and world. But what the Obamas meant by “fighting for the world as it should be” and what most Americans understood that to mean were two very different things. Their “world as it should be” was one built on “social and economic justice” in which the have-nots would seize power, money, and resources from the haves. The “two Americas” would be jammed into one in which the playing field was forcibly leveled.
    Although Obama was leading the kook parade, his chief political strategist, David Axelrod, had his own revolutionary street cred. Before he got to Obama, Axelrod was mentored by Chicago journalist and political activist Donald C. Rose, who was a member of the Communist Party front, the Alliance to End Repression. Axelrod met Rose while a student at the University of Chicago, and Rose took him under his wing. They worked together over the course of several years, with Rose and another communist-linked mentor, David Canter, showing Axelrod the ropes of community organizing and mobilization through the 1982 Chicago mayoral campaign of Harold Washington and the 1992 U.S. Senate race of Carol Moseley Braun. The group with whom they worked also helped to elect Obama to Braun’s Senate seat and ultimately to the presidency.
    Obama took the Alinsky techniques national beginning in 2004, playing the role of the “reasonable” liberal intellectual, even as he planned the ultimate redistributionist takeover. Alinsky’s dream—of destroying the existing capitalist system and replacing it with a redistributionist one—was about to be realized, beyond ol’ Saul’s wildest dreams. In fact, on August 31, 2008, the Boston Globe published a letter to the editor from Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinsky. He cheered Obama for having mobilized the masses at the Democratic National Convention “Saul Alinsky style.” “Obama learned his lesson well,” he wrote. “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully.”
    On Super Tuesday 2008, Obama proclaimed that the radicals’ dream was within reach: “This is it! We are the ones we’ve been waiting for! We are the change we seek!” Precisely. And ever since that day, Obama has carried around a makeup compact, and during quiet moments alone he pulls it out, peers down into its tiny mirror, and whispers, “We love you.”
    Obama never made a deep secret of his beliefs or intentions. He wrote extensively about his mission to bring “social and economic justice” to America in both of his books and spoke often about his redistributive beliefs. He voted that way too. He was so into redistribution that he even had a “tramp stamp” of Mao Zedong tattooed onto the small of his back. Oh wait: that was former White House communications director Anita Dunn. In 1995, the same year he published Dreams from My Father , Obama said this: “… working on issues of crime and education and employment and seeing that in some ways certain portions of the African American community are doing as bad if not worse, and recognizing that my fate remains tied up with their fates, that my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the