Barack Obama’s Ties to the Marxist Led New Party

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Obama’s Third-Party History

By Stanley Kurtz

June 7, 2012 4:00 A.M.

On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final
years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally
joined the New Party,

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7434
http://www.keywiki.org/index.php/New_Party

which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and
even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the
American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third
party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney
argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-
style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.

In late October 2008, when I wrote here

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226029/something-new-here/stanley-kurtz

at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New
Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot
smear.”

http://web.archive.org/web/20090730002941/http:/www.fightthesmears.com/articles/28/KurtzSmears.html

Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly
maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party,
the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this,

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226147/life-new-party/stanley-kurtz

but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN
at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that
Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract”
promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party
while in office.

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago
chapter read as follows:


Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative
District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions.
He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an
endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.


Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party
from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996,
indicated as the date he joined.

Knowing that Obama disguised his New Party membership helps make sense
of his questionable handling of the 2008 controversy over his ties to
ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6968
http://www.keywiki.org/index.php/Association_of_Community_Organizations_for_Reform_Now

During his third debate with John McCain, Obama said that the “only”
involvement he’d had with ACORN was to represent the group in a
lawsuit seeking to compel Illinois to implement the National Voter
Registration Act, or motor-voter law.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/debate-transcri.html
http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/debates/third-presidential-debate.html

The records of Illinois ACORN and its associated union clearly
contradict that assertion, as I show in my political biography of the
president, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of
American Socialism.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1439155089/

Why did Obama deny his ties to ACORN? The group was notorious in 2008
for thug tactics, fraudulent voter registrations, and its role in
popularizing risky subprime lending. Admitting that he had helped to
fund ACORN’s voter-registration efforts and train some of their
organizers would doubtless have been an embarrassment but not likely a
crippling blow to his campaign. So why not simply confess the tie and
make light of it? The problem for Obama was ACORN’s political arm, the
New Party.

The revelation in 2008 that Obama had joined an ACORN-controlled,
leftist third party could have been damaging indeed, and coming clean
about his broader work with ACORN might easily have exposed these New
Party ties. Because the work of ACORN and the New Party often
intersected with Obama’s other alliances, honesty about his ties to
either could have laid bare the entire network of his leftist
political partnerships.

Although Obama is ultimately responsible for deceiving the American
people in 2008 about his political background, he got help from his
old associates. Each of the two former political allies who helped him
to deny his New Party membership during campaign ’08 was in a position
to know better.

The Fight the Smears website quoted Carol Harwell,

http://keywiki.org/index.php/Carol_Harwell

who managed Obama’s 1996 campaign for the Illinois senate: “Barack did
not solicit or seek the New Party endorsement for state senator in
1995.” Drawing on her testimony, Fight the Smears conceded that the
New Party did support Obama in 1996 but denied that Obama had ever
joined, adding that “he was the only candidate on the ballot in his
race and never solicited the endorsement.”

We’ve seen that this is false. Obama formally requested New Party
endorsement, signed the candidate contract, and joined the party. Is
it conceivable that Obama’s own campaign manager could have been
unaware of this? The notion is implausible. And the documents make
Harwell’s assertion more remarkable still.

The New Party had a front group called Progressive Chicago, whose job
was to identify candidates that the New Party and its sympathizers
might support. Nearly four years before Obama was endorsed by the New
Party, both he and Harwell joined Progressive Chicago and began
signing public letters that regularly reported on the group’s
meetings.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511

By prominently taking part in Progressive Chicago activities, Obama
was effectively soliciting New Party support for his future political
career (as was Harwell, on Obama’s behalf). So Harwell’s testimony is
doubly false.

When the New Party controversy broke out, just about the only
mainstream journalist to cover it was Politico’s Ben Smith, whose
evident purpose was to dismiss it out of hand.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1008/The_dread_New_Party.html

He contacted Obama’s official spokesman Ben LaBolt, who claimed that
his candidate “was never a member” of the New Party. And New Party co-
founder and leader Joel Rogers

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2460
http://www.keywiki.org/index.php/Joel_Rogers

told Smith, “We didn’t really have members.” But a line in the New
Party’s official newsletter explicitly identified Obama as a party
member. Rogers dismissed that as mere reference to “the fact that the
party had endorsed him.”

This is nonsense. I exposed the falsity of Rogers’s absurd claim, and
Smith’s credulity in accepting it, in 2008

(here http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/172668/party-without-members/stanley-kurtz
and here http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/172672/bias-unmasked/stanley-kurtz
).

And in Radical-in-Chief I took on Rogers’s continuing attempts to
justify it. The recently uncovered New Party records reveal how
dramatically far from the truth Rogers’s statement has been all along.

In a memo dated January 29, 1996, Rogers, writing as head of the New
Party Interim Executive Council, addressed “standing concerns
regarding existing chapter development and activity, the need for
visibility as well as new members.” So less than three weeks after
Obama joined the New Party, Rogers was fretting about the need for new
members. How, then, could Rogers assert in 2008 that his party “didn’t
really have members”? Internal documents show that the entire
leadership of the New Party, both nationally and in Chicago, was
practically obsessed with signing up new members, from its founding
moments until it dissolved in the late 1990s.

In 2008, after I called Rogers out on his ridiculous claim that his
party had no members, he explained to Ben Smith that “we did have
regular supporters whom many called ‘members,’ but it just meant
contributing regularly, not getting voting rights or other formal
power in NP governance.” This is also flatly contradicted by the newly
uncovered records.

At just about the time Obama joined the New Party, the Chicago chapter
was embroiled in a bitter internal dispute. A party-membership list is
attached to a memo in which the leaders of one faction consider a
scheme to disqualify potential voting members from a competing
faction, on the grounds that those voters had not renewed their
memberships. The factional leaders worried that their opponents would
legitimately object to this tactic, since a mailing that called for
members to renew hadn’t been properly sent out. At any rate, the memo
clearly demonstrates that, contrary to Rogers’s explanation,
membership in the New Party entailed the right to vote on matters of
party governance. In fact, Obama’s own New Party endorsement, being
controversial, was thrown open to a members’ vote on the day he joined
the party.

Were Harwell and Rogers deliberately lying in order to protect Obama
and deceive the public? Readers can decide for themselves. Yet it is
clear that Obama, through his official spokesman, Ben LaBolt, and the
Fight the Smears website, was bent on deceiving the American public
about a matter whose truth he well knew.

The documents reveal that the New Party’s central aim was to move the
United States steadily closer to European social democracy, a goal
that Mitt Romney has also attributed to Obama. New Party leaders
disdained mainstream Democrats, considering them tools of business,
and promised instead to create a partnership between elected officials
and local community organizations, with the goal of socializing the
American economy to an unprecedented degree.

The party’s official “statement of principles,” which candidates
seeking endorsement from the Chicago chapter were asked to support,
called for a “peaceful revolution” and included redistributive
proposals substantially to the left of the Democratic party.

To get a sense of the ideology at play, consider that the meeting at
which Obama joined the party opened with the announcement of a
forthcoming event featuring the prominent socialist activist Frances
Fox Piven.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2505
http://www.keywiki.org/index.php/Frances_Fox_Piven

The Chicago New Party sponsored a luncheon with Michael Moore that
same year.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=899
http://www.keywiki.org/index.php/Michael_Moore

I have more to say on the New Party’s ideology and program, Obama’s
ties to the party, and the relevance of all this to the president’s
campaign for reelection. See the forthcoming [2012 June 25] issue of
National Review.

In the meantime, let us see whether a press that let candidate Obama
off the hook in 2008 — and that in 2012 is obsessed with the
president’s youthful love letters — will now refuse to report that
President Obama once joined a leftist third party, and that he hid
that truth from the American people in order to win the presidency.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/302031
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/302031/obamas-third-party-history-stanley-kurtz

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center.
A longer version of this article appears in the forthcoming 2012 June
25 issue of National Review.

Barack Obama’s Ties to the Marxist Led New Party and “Progressive
Chicago”
http://www.trevorloudon.com/2012/06/barack-obamas-ties-to-the-marxist-led-new-party-and-progressive-chicago/