Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Re: The Corner's "Enthusiasm" for the Ayers Issue   [Andy McCarthy]

Ramesh (or anyone), can you make a case that Obama was a left-wing radical but no longer is?  When did that happen?  What radical positions that he once held has he moderated?

Maybe we're quibbling about the word "radical," as Jonah suggested before.  This is a confusing term.  To the Bush administration, for example, a "radical Muslim" is a terrorist — i.e., if you only subscribe to the ideology and want to impose shariah but you are not participating in violence, you can qualify as a "moderate."

I don't buy that connotation.  And I don't think it represents most people's understanding of "radical."  After all, no one I know who says Obama was a radical is suggesting he ever inclined toward violence.  (There was an extortionate streak in some of the community organizing activity, but that's not the kind of violence we're talking about.) 

If Obama was a radical, it was because of his extremist positions.  So I think it's a fair question:  If you accept the premise that he was a radical, how has he changed such that he should no longer be considered a radical?  Obviously, he is very smooth and he presents himself as a reasonable, moderate fellow.  But that doesn't affect substance.  (After all, he also poses as a uniter when his record is uninterrupted, hard-ball partisan.  The question has to be what he does, not what he says and how he packages himself.)  Have you seen some of this stuff he funded at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge?  His position on infanticide was a fringe position — as was the position he took on surveillance reform only a few months ago.  And his Global Poverty Act proposal is about as way out as it gets....

10/08 12:58 PMShare