Stanley Kurtz’s new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, is an important work of scholarship—possibly the most important one on President Obama yet written.
The academic world will probably come late to that recognition. After all, Obama received overwhelming support from the professoriate in the 2008 election and even as the president’s popularity has faded in other quarters, he remains very popular in the academic world. A book that tags him “radical-in-chief” seems an unlikely candidate for a Bancroft Award, or for much of anything other than a dismissive huff from bien-pensant faculty members.
Kurtz’s book will survive the academic cold shoulder. He wrote it, he tells me, with academic historians very much in mind—some 50 or 60 years down the road. Those historians, whatever their political views, will have no choice if they set out to reexamine the presidency of Barack Obama but to build on Kurtz’s foundation. This is because Kurtz took the trouble over the last two years to do something that, astonishingly, neither professional historians or inquisitive journalists have bothered to do. He went into the archives.
His journey took him from the manuscript collections at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library to the Wisconsin Historical Society and some two dozen other depositories, perhaps most notably the Harold Washington Archives and the Richard J. Daley Library Special Collections. He also ended up in places where one might not imagine there would be much to be found on President Obama’s past, such as the Sophia Smith Collection, Women’s History Archives at Smith College.
I enjoyed an unusual vantage point on the making of this book. Kurtz and I have been friends since college (Haverford ’75). Both of us went on to become social anthropologists, consulted each other on our dissertations and books, and served as each other’s sounding boards as we each chose to leave behind our original vocations. Kurtz, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard and whose book on child-rearing in Western India, All the Mothers Are One, is a landmark of psychological anthropology, made a hard decision a decade ago to move to D.C. and reinvent himself as a “public intellectual.”
He was interested at first in the troubles roiling Western ideas of marriage, but his canvas gradually broadened. After 9/11, he took up the question of whether Title VI-funded university “area study” centers were playing fair with their taxpayer financing. He was drawn into national politics, and this culminated in summer 2008 when he became the first person to take serious note of candidate Obama’s long-standing relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.
Pursuing some clues that suggested that there was much more to the story than either Obama or Ayers had admitted, Kurtz sought and received permission to access a key archival collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before he could see the documents, however, the library inexplicably withdrew its permission. Then in response to public pressure, it changed course and allowed Kurtz in. The resulting fuss made national news—and provoked an effort by the Obama campaign in August 2008 to prevent Kurtz from speaking on the Milt Rosenberg radio program.
After that, Kurtz decided that the only way he could have a reasonable chance of following the threads of archival evidence would be to proceed as unobtrusively as possible. Over the next year and a half, he pored over manuscript collections, newspaper morgues, board minutes, official and unofficial correspondence, and the detritus of long-forgotten political campaigns. Of course, all of this is the ordinary grist for scholarly inquiry. Which raised the question: Why wasn’t Kurtz being jostled by other researchers? Why, in fact, was he the first and only researcher ever to examine many of the materials that were sitting there, publicly available, in dozens of archives?
Kurtz worried constantly that he would be scooped. Other people were working on books about Obama’s life before he became a presidential candidate, and some of them commanded resources he couldn’t match. New Yorker editor David Remnick, in particular, was due out with a major book. And when Remnick’s 586-page opus, The Bridge, arrived in April of this year, it was greeted as definitive. One reviewer called it “as exhaustive as a Boswellian recounting.” Yet Remnick had barely grazed the surface of the documents that Kurtz had been finding.
At this point, I don’t wish to weigh in on Kurtz’s thesis, which is that Obama became involved in the socialist movement in 1983 and chose his career as a community organizer accordingly. It is not a simple thing to argue and Kurtz is mindful of the gaps in evidence. The book has a slightly speculative thread woven through a vast amount of documentary evidence. It is possible to imagine that others could read the same evidence and come to different conclusions—which is to say that Radical-in-Chief passes a crucial test of genuine scholarship. It is a deeply documented account that acknowledges its own aporia and invites the reader to consider whether the facts bear any other plausible interpretations.
My point for this blog is simply that Stanley Kurtz’s book ought to be a scandal for higher education. Many of the sources he mined are in university archives and sat untouched by academic historians and scholarly researchers of any sort as the nation elected to the presidency a man who had disclosed next to nothing about his political past. The lack of curiosity among those paid to be curious; the intellectual negligence by those who pride themselves on being exemplars of critical thinking; and the complacency of researchers who couldn’t be bothered to trace an old-fashioned paper trail are breathtaking.
As I said in my last blog about the readiness of scholars to deride the Tea Party movement without troubling themselves to weigh the actual views of its participants, contemporary higher education suffers from surfeit of self-approbation. We could call it political correctness, but that term is stale and not exactly apt. What we have is not so much a willful desire to silence dissenting views as it is a casual assumption that dissenting views don’t matter and can be safely ignored.
44 Responses to On Finding Obama Where No One Thought to Look
marktropolis - October 25, 2010 at 8:03 pm
Maybe if he was capable of having his work published by an academic press, academe might take notice. But since he’s publishing this on the imprint of essentially a conservative vanity press (colleagues being Glenn Beck and Jerome Corsi) it’s not surprising academe wouldn’t notice.
So, Obama read some Marx. And he was (God forbid) a community organizer. What’s really stunning is that you actually believe any of this tripe. Oh, that’s right,you “don’t wish to weigh in on Kurtz’s thesis.” But you want to spend your ink defending his methods?
Perhaps Krurtz never ran into any other academics because there’s really not much to find there. But if you dig enough, and you make enough plausible assumptions, any one can find that Red under the bed. In case you didn’t hear, Dinesh D-Souza made this same argument a few weeks back. And he got trounced for it.
Now I understand why you’re the president of NAS.
dr_pdg - October 26, 2010 at 6:36 am
But that still begs the question- How could we possibly have elected a man when we know so little about his past?
Frankly, despite all the unanswered questions, I was counting on Hillary and Bill or the Glenn Beck & Co. to dig up anything on the guy and when they didn’t I figured he must be reasonably “clean”.
But clearly he is taking the USA in a direction that many of us find disturbing at best.
BR,
Dr. PDG, Jakarta
consejera - October 26, 2010 at 6:53 am
“He was drawn into national politics, and this culminated in summer 2008 when he became the first person to take serious note of candidate Obama’s long-standing relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.”
Serving on an Annenberg Challenge committee at the same time constitutes a “long-standing relationship?” I understand why Conservatives are scornful of the scorn and outright condescension they receive from the academy, but when one makes unsupportable statements like the one above, it’s deserved.
corwinamber - October 26, 2010 at 7:34 am
This piece is nonsense, but I suppose it serves a role in reminding us in higher education of the views of those who get their “news” and ideological updates from Fox News. I recommend re-reading Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” and looking for the parallels.
rufojr - October 26, 2010 at 8:14 am
Excellent article! Thank you for taking the time to acknowledge what so many of us have thought for a very long time.
@martropolis, you sound jealous if nothing else.
@dr PDG, EXACTLY!
@consejera, this is the problem with academy. They think they are above everyone else and if we don’t agree with you, then you label us conservatives and begin the name calling. You all think way too much of yourselves.
@corwinamber, no need to bring in Fox News everytime someone says something you don’t like. It’s really getting old. I will be sure to read Sinclair Lewis.
open2ideas - October 26, 2010 at 8:17 am
Isn’t it odd that we knew everything about George W’s academic life and we know what SC Justice Roberts wrote in High School, but no one bothered to look at the academic records of a candidate for the President of the United States…
This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, it’s the people’s right to know, it’s the responsibility of the press and the academic community to inform our debates. It seems a bit late to ask the questions now.
Has anyone ever read Obama’s applications or papers from Columbia (he miraculously transferred to Columbia from Occidental College with a 3.3 GPA) or Harvard? No, you haven’t, the President, as a candidate, had them sealed – curious move for a guy who ran on an open government platform.
The WSJ gave this some coverage during the campaign – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122108881386721289.html, but the campaign was very effective at ridiculing non-believers as ‘birthers’ or demonizing them as racists (hey, I thought only Republicans labeled people???).
If someone can point me to Obama’s complete academic, financial and medical records I’ll happily stand corrected.
However, if you simply find these facts awkward, and will respond defensively with ad hominem attacks – please spare me.
landrumkelly - October 26, 2010 at 8:30 am
This is a ridiculous piece. How does stuff like this get into the Chronicle in the first place?
Landrum Kelly, Jr.
Salisbury, North Carolina
newpseudo - October 26, 2010 at 8:41 am
Mr. Wood, you wrote, “It is not a simple thing to argue and Kurtz is mindful of the gaps in evidence.” You then go on to talk about Kurtz’s “speculative” thread. Are those statements another way of saying that Kurtz fabricated much of the book?
bizdean - October 26, 2010 at 8:49 am
”My point for this blog is …Many of the sources he mined are in university archives and sat untouched by academic historians.“ No it’s not. Your point for this blog is to cast a slur on a guy who’s trying to undo the horrible damage done by the Bush administration.
rightside - October 26, 2010 at 8:58 am
Let me see if I follow the ludicrous conclusions of this article and by extension the series of Tea Party friendly blogs from this author: Even though there are dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of professors in this country whose life’s work is dedicated to the study and/or practice of dissent and alternative viewpoints and lifestyles, somehow all of Academia is guilty of silencing dissent? So, for instance, even though there are Marxists, atheists, feminists, and queer theorists among this nation’s professors, not to mention Freidmanites, libertarians, Christians, and Mormons, somehow the Academy is guilty of enforcing a monolithic, dismissive attitude toward the Tea Parties? Absurd.
If Obama is a Socialist, it won’t be determined by something he said or did in 1980. It will be determined by what he does today, and tomorrow. So far, I’ve seen nothing from the President that would indicate that he’s anything other than a centrist Democrat. He’s a pragmatist, willing to make concessions. That is to say, he’s a politician. He may have been a radical (and who wasn’t in their teens or twenties?), but ultimately who cares? None of his current actions could be mistaken for radicalism, so just add Kurtz to the pile next to Dinesh D’Souza and all the rest of the myth-makers. Making such a statement is equivalent to calling the Pope a Nazi because he once was a member of the Hitler Youth. This kind of sensationalism, this immature reasoning, has no place in the academy or elsewhere, though it is sure to be lapped up by the devotees of the infotainment cult. I commend Mr. Kurtz on his ability to channel his energy into something more lucrative than genuine scholarship, though any respect for him will have to end there. As for the author of this blog post, have you considered the fact that, while the Tea Party may (rightly) be dismissed by the educated class, they receive non-stop coverage on every television and radio network? They are a nearly insignificant minority in terms of numbers, yet they dominate our information culture. When’s the last time serious scholarship received any such treatment? This is, at best, a well-meaning attempt to stand up for “the little guy” while not realizing that the little guy is actually the big bully. At worst, this is evidence that there’s no place Americans can hide from the incessant, destructive, fascistic propaganda.
flprof2 - October 26, 2010 at 9:00 am
Are we supposed to take this seriously?!
Wow, you are a friend of the author and you give his book a rave review….
My favorite part is: “It is not a simple thing to argue and Kurtz is mindful of the gaps in evidence. The book has a slightly speculative thread woven through a vast amount of documentary evidence.”
In otherwords everything you said before those comments can be ignored. Get serious!
quidditas - October 26, 2010 at 9:03 am
I agree that liberal academia’s radical chic retention of Ayers is inexplicable, but considering your focus on the failure of academics to “search the archives,” I find it weird that you would continue to hyperventilate about something ultimately insignificant in the continuing life of the nation when there is oh so much going on in the swamp on the Potomac right now.
Take for example, from today’s news, the Obama Administration’s refual of an FOIA request from BLOOMBERG NEWS, which is not exactly a left wing outfit:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/10/treasury-thumbs-nose-at-bloomberg-foia-request-on-citi-guarantees.html
Are you really going to try to tell me that obstructing the capitalist press in order to protect government-bailed Citibank executives is a socialist plot? And if it is a socialist plot, I would really like you to elaborate how that is so.
It seems to me that Obama IS a radical, but you radically mistake what kind of radical he is. Bill Ayers, meanwhile, is mere chicken droppings.
jhough1 - October 26, 2010 at 9:38 am
A strange decision to publish this. Personally I think it is clear that Obama is economically to the right of Richard Nixon and that the right call him a socialist for the same reason that Goldwaterites said that about Eisenhower and Nixon–to position right-center views as the far left. But is it news that very few academics do archive work on traditional political questions, and none on current candidates?
open2ideas - October 26, 2010 at 9:56 am
Folks – it would be great if we could stick to the point. Why has our fairly highly aggressive media (on both sides) not sought to dig up Obama’s academic or other records?
I notice that those that ordain themselves to defend Obama, have used mindless attacks, but can’t point to public sources of information. Why is that? Don’t we have the right to know and then decide for ourselves. What does the President gain by making his past a question mark. It’s way to easy to write this off as conspiracy-mongering – all I ask is for an open record – please show me.
profmomof1 - October 26, 2010 at 10:58 am
Wow, I’m amazed with the pure vitriol of readers who clearly have not even bothered to look at, much less read, the book in question or its evidence. Guess you don’t even have to look at evidence if it appears to contradict what you want to believe! And this is academcia?
rightside - October 26, 2010 at 11:30 am
Please define how a person who wrote a memoir (before he entered public life) about his past, including lengthy ruminations on radicalism, is someone who makes their past a “question mark”. And the same goes for Kurtz and the author of this post.
Perhaps nobody is wasting their time in the archives because
a) it’s irrelevant: You can see what the guy is doing now–real radicals, real Socialists, know for a fact that he is not one of them, and
b) the man wrote a memoir, for crying out loud, before he was in politics. Read it. He discusses how he entertained, then rejected, radical politics.
Or, you can line up next to the reprehensible Dinesh D’Souza and claim that he’s a Kenyan anti-colonialist because his Father (whom he met once) was one, or you can go spelunking in the archives to dig up something he said or did when he was twelve years old and pin that on the present administration. While you’re at it, you can call Bill Ayers a “terrorist” and fail to recognize what a different time and different set of circumstances groups like the Weathermen were facing as opposed to today. Basically, you can evaluate everything anachronistically, without context, and label people on the basis of it, as though human beings don’t change and evolve over time. We elected Barack Obama the adult, not the 18-year-old. I don’t care what he believed when he was in college. I care about what he believes today, and how that affects our country. Today, he looks more like one of the Chicago Boys than one of the Weathermen.
dank48 - October 26, 2010 at 11:36 am
Okay, if it’s not published by a respectable academic press, it can be ignored, right? What’s the corporate version of “ad hominem”? “Ad publisherem” will have to do, I guess.
What gets me–and I don’t hold a brief for or against President Obama–is, as Open2ideas points out, the mindlessness of attacks on this piece, which at least acknowledged its own and its subject’s weaknesses.
The “in other words” pseudoparaphrase technique of making a straw man isn’t original, but it’s reaching the level of an art form in the CHE commentary. Face it, professor: any idiot can do that sort of thing.
Especially piquant is the attempt to distract by protesting that academia is not guilty of what it hasn’t been charged with. No, there’s been no attempt to silence anyone. This ignores the real accusation of simple sloth, laziness, and inability to shake off one’s self-imposed digital shackles and actually visit archives and dig through documents. But of course that might lead to dusty fingers or, horrors, paper cuts. People would rather churn out opinion pieces disguised as books, or as book reviews, than do real research.
(This does, however, nicely supplement the earlier discussion about why college professors feel they get so little respect. Although I doubt that the professorial image is quite so tarnished as some think, it’s easier to get a handle on the problem than some people seem to suppose. Go to the restroom. Face the basin. Look straight ahead. There, in many, many cases, is the problem.)
marktropolis - October 26, 2010 at 2:57 pm
dank48, “What gets me–and I don’t hold a brief for or against President Obama–is, as Open2ideas points out, the mindlessness of attacks on this piece, which at least acknowledged its own and its subject’s weaknesses.”
What’s mindless is the fact that this book is really just a book-length version of the B.S. attacks aimed at the President since he got the nomination. Again, we have the “what about his birth certificate” screams. Or, the one that’s coming up (again) now, “what about his college record!” I’m not sure what else they want regarding the birth certificate business. It’s clear at this point they don’t really care about the truth, because they need this issue to continue raising questions about Obama’s legitimacy.
If you really think that the leadership of the democratic party would have supported Obama the way they did without fully vetting him, you more ignorant than you sound. Perhaps you’ve never heard of “opposition research.” If there were any legs to any of these stories, the GOP would have jumped on it. Instead, they allowed some talking heads on Fox and CNN to raise the issue. And then they can do the old plausible denial thing.
As for “if it’s not published by a respectable academic press, it can be ignored, right?” Wood’s objection above is that this book is being ignored by ACADEME, and ACADEME tends to pay attention to ACADEMIC journals. I don’t expect this piece to be ignored by all the Fox News minions who will trumpet the book’s findings without even reading it. “See, this proves it! Obama’s a fraud!”
dank48 - October 26, 2010 at 3:11 pm
God, I’m a slow learner.
My point was that criticizing a book, however polemical, ideological, or whatever it may be, because it’s not being published by what the critic considers the “right kind” of publisher is getting pretty damn particular.
Since when are scholars so blinkered? And, while it’s reasonably safe to say that Regnery, say, publishes relatively few books urging the overthrow of the United States and the establishment of a People’s Republic of North America, or that Grove puts out few Sunday School tracts, judging a book by its publisher is even dumber than judging it by its cover.
Full disclosure: I have on occasion read books published by Regnery, books positively or negatively mentioned on various television programs, and even books written by supposedly right-wing observers of the political scene. So far, I don’t notice much harm, but perhaps I’m not the one to say.
zeno6601 - October 26, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Ipse dixit:
Radical?
Obama yesterday:
“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s gonna be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”
Referring specifically to Republicans who are stressing border security and supporting strict immigration laws like Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration measure, Mr. Obama said: “Those aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values.”
This is not the language he used in his campaign, when he promised to be a uniter. But it is the language he used prior to the campaign.
Draw your own conclusions about his real politics. His approval rate is down to 37%, so I guess a lot of folks are deciding they got the bait and switch.
crunchycon - October 26, 2010 at 5:05 pm
And who would pay over a million $ in legal fees (so far) to keep his educational background and birth certificate sealed??????
Word is he attended Occidental on a Fulbright scholarship — which would mean he was a citizen of a DIFFERENT country than the USA. He traveled on his Indonesian passport in his 30s.
saluki87 - October 26, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Blind support from the radical left like that of Marktropolis, I suppose, is not surprising. However, you would expect more thoughtful responses in this forum. The author’s point that little was done to look into the past positions of Mr. Obama compared to those of other candidates is a good one. It seems very clear (at least to me). Draw your own conclusions from what Obama said, wrote, did, and whether or not how long ago it happened matters. That’s a separate issue.
It’s also very disturbing when academics, who are supposed to be supporters of free expression, simply shout down dissenting views.
crunchycon - October 26, 2010 at 5:07 pm
And no, I’m not a TEA partier — but I do wonder how Sarah Palin has been so thoroughly vetted, and EVERYthing has been reported in the MSM, but Obama was never properly vetted, and was allowed a “pass” to seal all his records. What republican could get away with that???
open2ideas - October 27, 2010 at 8:50 am
OK, after 24 hours, the best people have come up with is: A) read Obama’s autobiography (since when is autobiography ‘truth’); B) The Democratic Party must have vetted them (an assumption they can’t prove).
That’s really sad – my request remains the same – open Obama’s record so we can make our own conclusions. I don’t want anything more than we had for the prior 3 US presidents – is that too much to ask?
marktropolis - October 27, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Which records are you referring to open2ideas? If Wood’s post above has any worth, it’s his pointing out that Kurtz got to all the archives (and therefore uncovered the “real” Obama). So, what’s missing? What is it that Obama sealed?
If memory serves, there was a bit of a dust up a decade or so ago when Bush had his military records sealed. But I could be remembering incorrectly.
And crunchycon, rather than making *more* unsubstantiated claims, perhaps you might wish to uncover some actual evidence. Do you really think if any of that were true, the GOP would have just ignored it back in ’08? Then again, maybe you’re relying on Glenn Beck to do the research for you…
aliceh - October 27, 2010 at 2:31 pm
My goodness! As I read the comments I started to wonder whether the commenters and I had read the same article. After a read, I have to say the prediction of “dismissive huff” was spot on.
wisernow - October 27, 2010 at 10:04 pm
President Obama wears (wore?) Marx suits. That’s his only connection to Marx I know.
Barack was quiet and studious, focused on consensus and centrist needs when we were at Columbia. I haven’t seen any change in his interests since then.
This book is an blatent flit for cash by a man who has oddities he does not want known — so he fancies others have concealed manias as well. He worried about western marriage because his own cracked up. Then he got worried about misue of funds. Hmmm. Next he worried someone might steal a scoop conjured up in his head. Oooookay! Hypotheses are easily cooked when they have no basis or validity.
Kurtz’s next act? Oh ho hum . . . . but he does panhandle well.
open2ideas - October 28, 2010 at 7:46 am
marktropolis – Kurtz is praised for having digged into archives (where no one else did two years into Obama’s presidency), and got what he could, but much remains sealed. Several archives went out of their way to block access and the President’s legal team has actively worked to keep records sealed.
Again, if you or anyone else can provide links to Obama’s open academic record at Columbia or Harvard that would be much appreciated. Perhaps you have access to the records of the Annenberg Foundation – please share what you can.
As to your comment re: Bush, first off, as an educated person you can’t seriously be suggesting two wrongs make a right. I’d like to see open records from all our politicians regardless of party. Consistent healthy skepticism (something liberals promote – when convenient).
In addition, it’s hard to suggest that George W’s military record wasn’t scrutinized – it was in the news for weeks, maybe a month or more. It was publicly presented by mainstream media as a conspiracy and cover-up, George W was mocked and the conventional wisdom was that he didn’t fulfill his service. It appears that journalists (and academics for that matter) strangely don’t have the same zeal or appetite for investigating Obama – that is curious.
marktropolis - October 28, 2010 at 9:44 am
First off, Bush was mocked because he made a point of talking about how he’d served. And then it turns out that a) he didn’t really and b) he spent most of his “service” not being there.
Second, what is it that you’re after in his college record? Are you looking for that essay praising Marx? His secret alliance with ACORN? You want to know if he got a C on that American history exam? I guess his own confession that he spent a good chunk of his early college years smoking weed isn’t good enough for you? This just feels like such a fishing expedition – you’re all working extra hard to find that smoking gun. What is it that you could find that in some way would change your opinion of him?
I’m all for “open” records. I guess I’m trying to get a better understanding of what it is you are looking for – as it appears that really what you want to find is evidence to support your current conclusions.
And the Annenberg stuff is so played out it’s ridiculous. And all those records *were* opened up. And yes, Obama was on a large committee with a host of other people, one of whom was a guy who happened to have been a member of the Weather Underground. He was also a guy who happened to be (whether you agree with the assessment or not) a fairly well-respected scholar in education research (I believe at one point being nominated for an *elected* office within AERA). That body also included VPs and CEOs from Chicago-area companies like Ameritech, Chase Franklin Corp, the Chicago Tribune, to name a few. There were 20-something folks on that board, representing a variety of sectors of Chicago – including (God forbid) a progressive educator or two.
So, what you’re telling me is that the CEO of the Chicago Tribune was actually in league with Bill Ayers to overthrow the country. Yes? But I digress.
This all just sounds like the fishing expeditions that the right engaged in with Bill and Hilary. And many of those (after spending a few million bucks of both public and private money) came up empty. And don’t give me this innocent “it’s a matter of principle” garbage.
Again, what remains sealed? The Kurtz himself has dug through those archives (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212856075765367.html). The best he could come up with was still attempting to make the case that the entire Annenberg Challenge in Chicago was the brainchild of Ayers. And he alleges that the evidence is in the archives. I should note, that the piece linked above appeared in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal. So it appears that even the WSJ didn’t consider this hard news.
The long and short is that Kurtz has taken it as his mission to find ways to discredit Obama. And he’ll use whatever flimsy evidence he can find (and Wood, in his post above admits that it’s flimsy). And he’s taking you along for the ride.
open2ideas - October 28, 2010 at 10:56 am
marktropolis – you say you are for ‘open’ records, but rather than acknowledge the issue honestly, you question my motives (misdirection and ad hominem are fairly old debate techniques).
Fine, not unexpected – but let’s note that an open historical record is necessary for the operation of a democracy. Can Obama’s records be sealed on the basis of National Security or is it simply politically inconvenient to release them.
Here are two links for your reference, one from the left and one from the right, asking related questions -
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12705.html
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/obamas-years-at-columbia-are-a-mystery/85015/
Forget partisanship, the fundamental question remains – is there a right to know?
If our access to information was solely on the basis that we interpreted it one way (it sounds like your view would be your preference) – that wouldn’t be much of a democracy.
Here’s one more article –
http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20100907/AGENCY04/9070301/1018/DEPARTMENTS – Open government group gives Obama administration a mixed grade
marktropolis - October 28, 2010 at 11:17 am
As I said, I’m for open records. I’m not here to support anyone blocking access to anything. But your choice of links only confuses matters more. You’re first, from Politico (which is hardly a “left” news company, at the very best it’s mainstream, leaning right, but let’s not quibble on that), is a piece on a missing law review article that was – found! The last line in the piece actually gives you directions on where to find it. And it kind of made sense that Obama didn’t actively broadcast his authorship, since the piece in question was intended to be an ANONYMOUS piece, as is the tradition of those short pieces written by the editor. Which Politico points out.
Your second link – also somewhat dated – points to his years at Columbia, and again, if Wood is to be taken at his word, it sounds like Kurtz has uncovered all that. And the result is that Obama is… remind me again, a communist? Marxist? Socialist? I keep forgetting what we’re accusing him of now.
My point isn’t that there isn’t a right to know. Although I do think there may be some limits as it relates to individual’s personal lives (and yes, that includes public servants). My point is that you’ve got these guys like Kurtz and Corsi, (and others) and their agenda isn’t about shedding sunlight on some secret. Their agenda is finding little snippets of information that they can use to discredit a sitting president. And they’re going to connect the dots however they can. When you start with the proposition that Obama wasn’t born in this country, or is under some deep psychological hold from his late father to finish the Mau Mau revolution, or he went to a madrassa when he was in Indonesia, or whatever other hokum they start with, it’s really quite easy to connect him to folks like Bill Ayers. Or ACORN. Or the New Black Panthers. It’s all a little too similar to McCarthy’s techniques for finding all those reds under the bed. Or how they used to test to see if you were a witch (you know, dunk them in water – if they drown, they’re not a witch, if they don’t, you burn them at the stake).
In other words, it’s not about records per se. It’s about the presumption of guilt. After all, with a name like Obama, there’s got to be something wrong with him.
rightside - October 28, 2010 at 12:56 pm
So, even though Bill Ayers has changed enough to be a respected faculty member at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a leader in the field of education, we’re basing this entire discussion on the presupposition that he is still a member of the Weathermen? That he could, at any time, go off and plant another bomb at the Pentagon? Every word that Kurtz has published takes Ayers’ radicalism as a given. Why? Because, in the 60′s, he was a radical? Kurtz also chants the well-known chorus that Ayers hasn’t expressed regret for his past actions, which is patently false. If you actually want to hear him say so, you can watch his interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/14/exclusive_in_first_joint_broadcast_interview
So, here’s how we’re expected to frame this entire thing:
1. Ayers is as radical today as he was in the 70s.
(This is false)
2. Obama worked closely with Ayers on the CAC.
(This is unsubstantiated, but even if it were true, one is required to first believe in #1, which is false)
3. Because Obama worked with someone, he is guilty of all of the things that person has committed at any point in their life.
(This is ridiculous)
Beyond all of this, we’re required to operate under the fog of amnesia that treats 2010 as equivalent to 1970. I don’t agree with violence, but the climate for civil liberties in the United States in 1970 was drastically different than it is today. This is why someone like Bill Ayers the adult can be a professor in a respected university, when Bill Ayers the young man was bombing federal buildings. Because the world has changed. In 1969, policemen killed a leader of the Black Panthers, execution style. It’s partly because of people like Bill Ayers (the Weatherman) that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen today.
The ends certainly don’t justify the means, and I don’t agree with the Weathermen’s tactics. But, like most people, I definitely agree with their cause. There is nothing radical about believing that all people should be treated as equals, or about wanting to fight back against an unjust government that does not treat people as equals. This is quintessentially American–it’s how America started, how it has progressed, and what Tea Party adherents themselves get so riled up about.
Those were different times. I would trust Bill Ayers of today more than I would trust any of the leaders of the Tea Party. The problems he dealt with were real problems, not fictions created by a dumbed-down, sensationalist, propagandist “News” network.
marktropolis - October 28, 2010 at 3:06 pm
rightside – the piece you missed, and which is really the crux of Wood’s post above, is: Obama is hiding his past, which means he’s intentionally hiding information that could tell us who he really is. You know, since we have no idea who he is or what he politics are.
And, you know, we should really trust these guys Kurtz and Corsi, since their research bona fides are untouchable. And no one could ever accuse them of bias in their methods.
Besides, if Glenn Beck said it, then it must be true, ’cause he’s on Tee Vee!
getwell - October 29, 2010 at 12:33 pm
I wish we could discuss these polarizing issues in a more polite fashion…instead of verbal attacks and insults being hurled right and left.
Now now children, let’s all play nicely on the academic playground…no bullying allowed!
Tally of name-calling from comments:
From the right: Obama, Marx, Bill Ayers, socialist, radical left, radicalism, Nazi, Kenyan anti-colonialist, terrorist, Weathermen, Chicago Boys, ACORN, communist, Black Panthers
From the left: Kurtz, Glenn Beck, Jerome Corsi, Dinesh D-Souza, Fox News, George W Bush, Justice Roberts, Sarah Palin, Tea Party, conservative, right-wingers, nut jobs
Did I miss any names…or tag them in the wrong place? It was rather easy to determine which side one’s comments belonged based on the name-calling:)
12035470 - November 1, 2010 at 9:26 am
Hailing the Kurtz book as a seminal text for the ages and only later admitting you haven’t read it is the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty. As another Haverford grad (61) I’m appalled at Woods’ shoddy manipulations. I also (gasp) read Marx in my 20s, did some community organizing and believe solving social problems is our collective responsibility. This doesn’t make me a radical or a socialist — both in any case words with very elastic meanings. In this case they appear to be simply ignorant slurs.
ccchron - November 1, 2010 at 10:04 am
Most of the critical comments here are critical of this Chronicle article, or of what is reported about Kurtz’s working methods, not so much the book, which I don’t see anyone claiming to have read.
In that vein, I don’t understand the critical thrust of Wood’s piece, or of many of the comments defending it and Kurtz by comparing the scrutiny of Bush’s past with that of Obama’s. This is not the work of academics, as I understand it. The remains of Bush’s military record were indeed pursued, but by journalists. Remnick, who wrote the “definitive” book on Obama, is a mainstream nonfiction writer and journalist. The academic books I’ve seen on Obama are mainly interpretations of the meaning and significance of his rise, not would-be exposes of his past, which is implicitly taken to be not very important. When have academics written dirt-digging studies of major current figures? What could possibly be learned from reading his college papers? The main point of Wood’s article, that if academic historians had any credibility, Kurtz should have been accompanied by many of them in the reading rooms where he did his fishing, is a non-starter. They were doing other projects.
abcde1234 - November 1, 2010 at 10:05 am
To me, it’s pretty much indefensible that Bill Ayers is allowed to walk around outside of a prison, without a leg iron or subcutaneous GPS tracking device, let alone is in any way taken seriously on any topic not related to making crappy bombs.
That being said, I’ve not seen much evidence that Obama’s “relationship” with him was in any way serious or substantive. And, as many other posters have pointed out, I don’t see much radicalism in Obama’s legislative or executive actions (and thank goodness for that).
I do see, however, a commitment to overturning the truly radical wealth redistribution instituted by Reagan. Of course, Obama’s critics on the right, want to call this “socialism”, and fantasize that their fate under Obama would be in any way similar to their fate under a radical socialist. But of course the label sticks because there will be some redistributive effect of an even marginally successful Obama Presidency. It won’t be anything like real socialism, thank God, but it does hold out the possibility of a truly functional capitalist democracy, where the government intervenes to correct market failures, and the middle class is saved from extinction.
Or so I Hope.
But now you’ve got me curious, and I will indeed read Kurtz’s book. Just to see.
micah04 - November 1, 2010 at 11:51 am
I’d probably place myself within the current majority opinion on Obama, but I have to question the somewhat irrational obsession people have with having internet links to every record that has ever been in some way associated with a public figure.
Yes, running for public office will place your past more in the spotlight, and if you make the choice to become a “public figure,” you should be willing to be more open about your past than the average person; however, having said that, being a “public figure” does not make every record on you a “public record.” There are still protections in place for some records of Obama’s past…just like there are for many of your records.
As people mostly tied in some way to academia, we should be aware that legally we cannot release all – or even most – of the information we have on students without violating another right – that of the right to privacy. So I really hope for my records’ sakes (seeing as how I failed out of college twice before I became serious about my education) that people do have an incredibly hard time accessing records that are meant to be private.
It’s also interesting to consider the confirmation bias when looking at how we choose to accept and/or reject information. Forums are always full of it (“it” being confirmation bias, although I like the unintended pun), whether it is my baseball forum of fanatics, or the forum here that is supposedly a little less fanatical (although a dig through the Chronicle forum’s archives might make for a very revealing book. Cha-ching!)
nweinstein - November 1, 2010 at 11:59 am
I believe that “scholarship” should be more in the spotlight when discussing Stanley Kurtz’s new book. There was a hint of this concern when noting the type of publisher presenting Kurtz. The book’s cover art, with President Obama’s face in the middle of a red star, plays to exactly the kind of mindless sensationalism and marketing tactics scholarly conservative Presses need not resort to in order to gain readers. Far more serious is Kurtz’s reinvention of himself as a “public intellectual.” How does a social anthropologist specializing in child-rearing practices in India re-invent himself as a sophisticated political analyst? Apparently this transformation was achieved by spending two years in the archives. Kurtz and his friend and reviewer Wood might be shocked at how many liberal and conservative scholars researching Presidents spend more than double or triple that amount of time. And some of them begin archival research with a strong and credentialed foundation in American History and Political Science. It might have occurred to Kurtz that maybe one reason he wasn’t jostled by other researchers is that researchers with considerably more credentials and experience than himself had better subjects worthy of their time. All researchers can work with a slightly speculative thread woven through a vast amount of documentary evidence. But part of being a scholarly researcher, as opposed to a political pundit apparently parading as a scholar, involves extraordinary care in weighing what evidence is worth considering seriously and publishing.Scholarly Presses send manuscripts out to other scholars for feedback and fact-checking, a process Glenn Beck’s publisher needn’t trouble itself with. The type of “public intellectual” Kurtz became is knowingly revealed by the company he presently keeps on the Fox network, surrounded by the distinguished Doctor of Political Science, Rush Limbaugh. Peter Woods would be correct if he wrote that talking heads on Fox “are paid to be curious,” particularly curious about issues, real or imagined, supporting their already dogmatically held conclusions. Scholars, who are paid a minute fraction of what popular right-wing pundits earn, don’t need to be paid to be curious. And their curiosity doesn’t need to begin with what seems a fashionably lucrative agenda of the moment. Finally,the supposed “vast conspiracy of silence” from liberals that Kurtz is shouldering — laughing all the way to the bank? – is a tired tactic of the far Left and Right that needs retirement. Google Kurtz and his book today and note how many scores of links lead to the wholesale and uncritical endorsement of his thesis sure to boost book sales about true believers. Is this because of a grand public thirst for conservative scholarship? If Peter Woods really is interested in how courageous conservative thinkers can be unjustly silenced, he should examine how the American Enterprise Institute treated David Frum for his heretical research and conclusions.
marka - November 1, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Yikes! Here I’ve seen some of the better – and worse – posts ever in the Chronicle.
When I read the article, I thought the point was Kurtz had to dig hard to find anything about Obama, and most others didn’t seem very interested, despite others being very interested about comparable info on Bush, e.g. The article’s author explicitly states that this is not about whether one agrees – or doesn’t – with Kurtz or his thesis – but this apparent disparity.
nweinstein’s recent post seems indicative of those dismissive – somehow a social anthropologist is not qualified to study & report on a President – but historians & political ‘scientists’ are (on what basis is that canard presented?); such historians & ‘scientists’ have better subjects to study (what, pray tell, is more important for study by historians & ‘scientists’ than a President??); and then, in an abundance of gall, uses a whole passel of derogatory names to buttress his nonpartisan, academic ‘superior’ bearing???
Give me a break – please stop insulting my intelligence with the knee-jerk partisan name-calling, and address the topic at hand, rather than running around ranting about your enemies (them v. us).
nweinstein - November 2, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Let’s have social anthropologists teach courses on American Presidents – and political scientists teach social anthropology. Let’s give particular kudos to any researcher who has to dig hard – meaning two years or less in an archives. Let’s treat a pop publisher with a political agenda as identical with a juried scholarly publisher. Let’s pretend that a pundit is a scholar because his former colleague confirms he is one. Let’s pretend that acknowledging “gaps” and a “speculative thread” proves non-partisan scholarship. Best of all, let’s pretend that conservative ideologues are researchers with no axe to grind,. a breed wholly different than their liberal counterparts. The trouble is: some of us have dedicated our lives to scholarship that isn’t based on pretending. That links all scholars of any political, or no political, belief.
gloriawalker - November 13, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Will you ever be fair? What did you find on George Bush (father or son). If you did not read some of the books Mr. Obama (PRESIDENT OBAMA) read then you did not get an education. If you did not experience something or see a need for some change then YOU ARE NOT NORMAL. OH!!! MAYBE YOU ARE NOT AN AMERICAN.
trubluetier2 - November 15, 2010 at 10:34 am
Just a couple of questions: which “socialist movement” exactly did Obama become involved in? And if the revelations of this book are so vital and groundbreaking, why do you not use a single example to make your case?
It is understandable but pathetic to seal one’s records as a campaign strategy. The habit of the right is to slander people as unfit for public life on the basis of their having been exposed to too wide a range of ideas. This is incompatible with a free society, and educators of all political stripes should feel the threat.
m13905 - December 2, 2010 at 7:08 am
Obama a socialist – If only it were true!