Dueling Redbaiters
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 16:10:46 -0700 (PDT)
Dueling Redbaiters
By Ronald Radosh
The Weekly Standard | Monday, May 26, 2008
As the Democratic primaries near their end, supporters of both Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama have used a time-honored yet unexpected
device to attack each other: old-fashioned redbaiting.
At the Philadelphia presidential debate in April, George
Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with the Weather
Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, who with his comrades bombed several
government buildings in the 1970s. Obama protested that he knew Ayers
as a neighbor and professor of English (actually, he teaches
education) whose "detestable acts" when Obama was eight were no
reflection on "me and my values."
But as soon as it was her turn to speak, Obama's opponent piled on.
Ayers and Obama had served together on the board of the Wood
Foundation in "a paid directorship position," noted Clinton. It was
legitimate to raise questions about their relationship, she insisted,
since Ayers's bombings had resulted in people's deaths. This line of
attack may have been shortsighted on Clinton's part, considering that
her husband pardoned two imprisoned members of the Weather Underground
before leaving office, but the Clinton campaign didn't back off.
Before you could say Comrade, Clinton's close adviser Sidney
Blumenthal was emailing out blog posts, articles, and reports from a
wide array of conservative sources. Blumenthal's missives went to "an
influential list of opinion shapers--including journalists, former
Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and
think tankers," as the left-wing activist and professor Peter Dreier
reported on the Huffington Post (May 1).
This was shocking in its own way. Blumenthal, the very man who coined
the term "vast right-wing conspiracy," Dreier noted, by circulating
articles from the conservative media, was attempting to exploit "that
same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama."
Blumenthal sent out pieces from the ultra-conservative Accuracy in
Media (AIM)--"With Obama, It's the Communism, Stupid," "Obama and the
Fifth Column," "Is Barack Obama a Marxist Mole?"--as well as items
from more mainstream conservative publications, such as a Fred Siegel
cover story from National Review, Fred Barnes's "Republicans Root for
Obama" from THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and an older City Journal article by
Sol Stern reporting Bill Ayers's current role in developing a radical
curriculum for K-12 teachers ("Ayers's texts on the imperative of
social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the
syllabi of the nation's ed schools and teacher-training institutes").
Particularly grating to Obama supporters was Blumenthal's airing of
AIM's allegation that Obama had sought to hide the influence a
Communist mentor had on him as a young man. In his memoir, Dreams From
My Father, Obama mentions a certain "Frank," a black poet friend of
his white grandfather's who was a "contemporary of Richard Wright and
Langston Hughes" and had once had "some notoriety." Frank gave the
young Barack some "hard-earned knowledge" (such as that "black people
have a reason to hate. That's just how it is"). As Obama set off for
college, Frank told him that college was "an advanced degree in
compromise" and that he should not "start believing what they tell you
about equal opportunity and the American way."
It was easy for students of American communism to figure out that this
was Frank Marshall Davis, a Chicago writer and Communist activist who
moved to Hawaii in the late 1940s. That Davis sought to advise the
young Obama as he prepared to leave home hardly proves that Davis was
a major influence on Obama or that the young man accepted his
Communist views. Obama's withholding of Davis's full name, however,
does suggest that he worried it might cause him problems in his
political career--as if Davis were another difficult uncle like
Jeremiah Wright.
At one time, left/liberal people would have vigorously objected to all
this redbaiting. But Obama's supporters responded in kind. Hadn't
Clinton opened the door, as Bill Ayers's brother argued on the
Huffington Post (April 17), by engaging in "the most base version of
McCarthyism"? If Obama had left-wing connections in his youth, why not
bring forward Clinton's own hidden past? Let's see who the real
leftist is!
First to attack was New Left elder statesman Tom Hayden, who told
readers of the Nation magazine's website (April 22) that Clinton
herself had been as far left as one could get. And unlike Obama, she
did not have the excuse of being eight years old when the New Left
radicals were in their prime. Hayden revealed that Hillary "was in
Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations" and
that at Yale Law School in 1970 she chaired a meeting where students
voted to join a national strike against the Vietnam war. The same
year, during the trial of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for murder,
Clinton oversaw Yale law students who were following the proceedings
and looking for signs of government misconduct. Most significantly,
Hayden writes, Clinton went to work after law school for the San
Francisco law firm that defended the Panthers, led by Robert Treuhaft,
a former member of the Communist party.
Hayden, of course, sees these activities as "honorable" and asks a
simple question: "Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary
attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals
Hillary was associating with in those days?" Now she has become a
"guilt-by-association insinuator," who is "engaged in a toxic
transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and
accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right." Furious at
this betrayal, Hayden calls her "Lady Macbeth."
Hayden's sally was followed by one from Clinton's biographer Carl
Bernstein on the Huffington Post (May 2). What upset Bernstein was
that Clinton was evading the truth about her own past radical
activities and associations.
These began at Wellesley, Bernstein wrote, when "she exhibited an
academic fascination with the Left and radicalism." Later at Yale she
was associate editor of an alternative law review that depicted
"policemen as pigs and murderers." Yet, notes Bernstein, in her 2003
memoir, Clinton breathed not a word of her activity on behalf of the
Black Panthers, nor was she honest about why she went to work for the
Robert Treuhaft law firm. Treuhaft told Bernstein that Clinton came to
the firm because it was a "Movement law firm" and she was "in sympathy
with all the Left causes." Treuhaft commented that back then, "we
still weren't very far out of the McCarthy era." Bernstein adds, "And
might still not be, to judge from the 2008 presidential campaign."
It is just as silly, Bernstein concludes, to tie Obama to the Weather
Underground as it is to call Clinton a Stalinist. Yet Bernstein and
the others have inadvertently opened up two legitimate lines of
inquiry: What remains of their old radical ideals in both candidates'
present thinking, and how far is each willing to go in exploiting the
other's past? If scrutiny of these matters is fair game for them, it
can hardly be off limits for the press and the voting public.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ronald Radosh, Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New
York, is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
.
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