UPDATE: Here is more on ACORN and their agenda, and more on Obama’s association with it. We will learn a lot more about ACORN this fall. If we don’t, we are in serios trouble.
Victor Davis Hanson points out a feature of Obama’s speeches; they are about one narrow view of US history. The American system was not built by protesters and “community organizers.”
When I was a boy, I saw movies about “Young Tom Edison” and Paul Erlich. There was a sense that business was not immoral. The Depression gave new energy to the criticisms of the “Muckrakers” of the early 20th century but movies like “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” showed the world of business to be dull but worthy of a man’s time and energy. Now, we have dishonest movies like “Wall Street”, produced by the weird Oliver Stone and starring the execrable Charlie Sheen, that declares all of American economic life to be corrupt and unworthy.
It is no surprise that we now have a presidential candidate who has the same attitude toward the American economy. His views mesh well with ACORN, the radical group for which he worked as an organizer. This history, by an obscure group but pretty well footnoted, will be the focus of intense interest this fall. This is the most leftist politician since FDR dropped Henry Wallace as Vice-President in 1944. Wallace would run for president against Harry Truman in 1948 with communist party assistance. He’s back as Barack Obama 60 years later.
Arthur Schlessinger’s essay on Henry Wallace in 2000 could have been written about Barack Obama. He called him “a Perplexing and Indomitably Naive Public Servant.”