`The Manchurian President': Chicago's Commie Liberal Puppet
The paranoid style of American politics is alive and well

By Chip Berlet

In These Times

September 8, 2010 

http://inthesetimes.com/article/6336/the_manchurian_president_chicagos_commie_liberal_puppet

America is in the midst of a 21st-century witch hunt. A
loose-knit network of right-wing ideological strategists,
Republican Party operatives and media demagogues generate
the odious smears. Their goal is to stymie the Obama
administration's policy initiatives, capture Congress in
November and unseat President Barack Obama in 2012. This
propagandizing echoes the scapegoating of liberals, union
and community organizers, peace activists, gay people, Jews
and people of color during the anti-communist witch-hunts of
the McCarthy era.

Anti-Obama rhetoric also mimics 1960s slurs dubbing Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr. a dupe of a communist conspiracy -
claims circulated by groups like the ultra-conservative John
Birch Society, the white supremacist "Citizens' Councils"
and the Ku Klux Klan. Billboards and flyers with this
revelation appeared across the South, and postcards were
distributed nationwide.

The underlying message is that liberals are either tools or
agents of the plot to build collectivism and global
governance. Such claims, once used to label President
Franklin D. Roosevelt a fascist, and have resurfaced against
Obama, who is tagged as Hitler and Stalin. Such sloganeering
is a classic trope that distorts a complex idea into a short
metaphor full of rich cultural or political baggage.

Into this guilt-by-association cesspool swims Aaron Klein,
who fancies himself a shark of an investigative journalist
but is really just another bottom-feeder. Klein, a senior
staff reporter for the hard-right conspiracist World Net
Daily, worked with Internet crank Brenda J. Elliott
(therealbarackobama.wordpress.com) to write the new book The
Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists,
Socialists and other Anti-American Extremists.

Similarly gawdy anti-Obama books include: Newt Gingrich's To
Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine,
Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama's
Radical Agenda and Brad O'Leary's The Audacity of Deceit:
Barack Obama's War on American Values. Slightly less
histrionic are: Jerome R. Corsi's The Obama Nation: Leftist
Politics and the Cult of Personality, and Floyd Brown and
Lee Troxler's Obama Unmasked: Did Slick Hollywood Handlers
Create the Perfect Candidate?

According to The Manchurian President, Obama was groomed for
office by a nest of socialists, communists and other
dangerous radicals based in Hyde Park, the South Side
neighborhood that includes the University of Chicago.

Klein writes, "[Brenda Elliot and I] began to realize the
scope of Obama's radical associates and mentors ... We
realized we were piecing together an intricate puzzle that
revealed a man with an agenda far more radical and dangerous
than he portrays - a politician backed by groups and
individuals who seek to drastically alter the U.S. system or
destroy it altogether."

The book identifies Marilyn Katz, a well-known anti-war
activist and public-relations consultant, as part of Obama's
Chicago cabal. The writers spend "a lot of time mapping" an
alleged subversive network of Obama operatives, Katz says.

The authors portray Obama "as some kind of robotic guy run
by a nest of vipers," says Katz. Obama "is a moderate
politically - a gatherer, not a splitter. He excels in
everything he does. They can't attack him directly based on
his race or his credentials," so they map out "`who-knows-
who?'"

Anti-Obama smears utilize guilt-by-association, innuendo and
hype. The Manchurian President also fingers labor organizer
and long-time leftist activist Carl Davidson as one of
Obama's co-conspirators. Davidson founded the Chicago
chapter of the New Party in the 1990s, which Klein and
Elliot call a "self-described ... `socialist democratic'
organization."

The text describing the New Party's "socialist democratic"
leaning cites a USA Today article, but the footnote trails
to a partisan blog - RedState.com, which proclaims USA Today
reported on November 16, 1992, that the New Party was "self-
described [as] `socialist democratic.'" USA Today actually
reported "the New Party [was] a self-described `social
democratic' organization based on the idea of local autonomy
and a combination of campaign work with non-electoral
cultural and educational activities."

The Manchurian President breathlessly reports that in "an
interview conducted by Aaron Klein ... Davidson strongly
suggests Obama was an actual member" of the New Party.
Davidson, however, says he told Klein that "Obama was never
seriously a member of the New Party, I never saw him sign a
membership form," and there is no record that he did. "It's
just a crock."

"We helped him out on his campaign for state senate in 1996,
and later he thanked us. That was it. The whole idea of
Obama as our Manchurian Candidate is ludicrous," says
Davidson.

A conspiracy that never dies

The political right has long built elaborate conspiracy
theories about leftist subversion.

In the early 1950s, John Beauty's The Iron Curtain Over
America blamed the international communist conspiracy on a
Jewish plot. After the Vietnam war, a story surfaced that
politicians and high-ranking military officials, in league
with the CIA, never really wanted victory. In other words,
the treacherous liberal elite stabbed our boys in the back.
Their goal: Create enough chaos and internal dissent within
the United States to impose martial law and round up
patriotic conservative Americans - and their guns. The hard-
right, anti-communist John Birch Society spread this
conspiracy theory across America - a narrative that endures
to this day in right-wing media.

Similar fictions featuring Obama resurfaced in early July,
reports sociologist Jerry Lembcke. "I was surprised it has
taken this long with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for
these right-wing storylines to bubble to the surface. Now we
are right back into this `who lost the war?' culture that
the nation experienced after the war in Vietnam."

Lembcke has been tracing the right-wing myth of liberal
treachery for more than a decade in a series of books. In
The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam,
Lembcke reported that stories about GIs being spit on as
they returned from service in Vietnam were fabricated to
explain that Vietnam had not been a military loss, but a
betrayal by liberal elites and radical anti-war activists.
In CNN's Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam's Last Great Myth,
Lembcke traced a yarn that the U.S. government had murdered
AWOL GI's hiding in North Vietnam. Lembcke's new book, Hanoi
Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal, explores the
scapegoating of Jane Fonda that emerged years after her 1972
visit to North Vietnam on an anti-war mission.

"The power of a political trope," he says, "works for and on
people who are unaware of where it comes from. Very few
Americans will connect these claims about Obama and
socialism to the old JBS [John Birch Society] betrayal
theory and right-wing conspiracism [about Vietnam]."

Populism, demonization and scapegoating combine to generate
witch hunts. In the '60s, New York Times reporter Cabell
Phillips noted that in the right-wing conspiracy storyline,
"liberalism is equated with socialism and socialism with
communism." Thus it was necessary to oppose "most welfare
legislation, [and] many programs for international
cooperation such as foreign aid. ... Such activities are
depicted as playing into the hands of the Communists, and
sometimes stemming from Communist subversion."

Hard times yield a hard right. Indeed, the Republicans
appear set to adopt the liberal treachery motif as a
campaign tool in the upcoming election.

Progressives must energetically defend Obama against
pathological smears and racist attacks - while we kick his
butt to live up to his campaign promises.

[Chip Berlet is a senior analyst at Political Research
Associates, at www.PublicEye.org.]

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