Stuart Taylor tries to figure out whether Barack Obama is an ultra-liberal partisan or a moderate reformer. On the former side of the ledger, he reviews Obama’s associations with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn and finds:
I dwell on these much-debated associations not because I think that Obama sympathizes with what he has called Ayers’s “detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8” or identifies with Wright’s wild ravings. But I do think that Obama has understated (at best) his involvement with Wright and Ayers. And I wonder about the worldview of a man who was so comfortable with such far-left extremists and whose wife, Michelle, asserted earlier this year that America is “just downright mean” and “guided by fear” and that most Americans’ lives have “gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.”
Obama’s voting record as an Illinois and then U.S. senator is not extremist or radical. But it is not a bit bipartisan, either. He has hardly ever broken with his party, and he famously had the most liberal record of any senator in 2007 (although not in 2006 or 2005), according to National Journal‘s vote ratings.
This Obama has endorsed a long list of liberal restrictions on free enterprise that could end up hurting the people they are supposed to help, along with the rest of us: statist remedies for our broken educational system; encouraging unionization by substituting peer pressure and an undemocratic card-check process for secret ballots; raising the wages of women or lowering those of men who have dissimilar jobs that are declared by bureaucrats to be of comparable worth; renegotiating NAFTA; and more.
On the other side of the ledger, he finds Obama’s leadership style in leading the Harvard law review nearly twenty years ago, some minor divergences from party orthodoxy, his recent choice of advisors, and lots of campaign rhetoric.
The Ledger is not balanced. But that is not Taylor’s fault. There really is far more evidence to support the conclusion that Obama is an ultra-liberal partisan. Moreover, there is negative evidence: Obama never rattled the Chicago machine, and he fell in comfortably with Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich. So there is even less evidence for the “reformer” than for the “moderate.”
If this were a trial, you would say there is certainly a preponderance of the evidence in favor of the theory that Obama is an ultra-liberal partisan. And, of course, if elected he’ll have Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid egging him on, even if he might be tempted to moderate his views. It’s no wonder that Obama supporters have relied on hope that he won’t follow the course suggested by his brief Senate career.
