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They say: ‘In every family there is saint … and several martyrs’. What about a nation?

Perhaps the most left-wing candidate for President, but the most left-wing Vice President was certainly Henry Wallace, who wanted (among other things) nationalized health care.

“In 1946, Wallace publicly broke with President Truman over the issue of opposing Stalin’s bid for domination of Europe. Two years later Wallace ran as the liberals’ antiwar candidate. He opposed the Berlin airlift and blamed the fall of Czechoslovakia to the Communists on the United States. His campaign attracted many academics and intellectuals who saw him, not Truman, as the true champion of New Deal liberalism.

But the real backbone of his Progressive Citizens of America was the American Communist party. Its chairman was a secret Communist; John Abt, its general counsel, was a Soviet spy who was part of the same Communist cell as Alger Hiss (Hiss himself worked for Wallace when he had been secretary of agriculture). The campaign’s platform committee was headed by another secret Communist, Lee Pressman. Every aspect of the official platform faithfully reflected the Stalinist party line. ”

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-herman121802.asp

Interesting that Obama, while constantly comparing himself to Kennedy, Roosevelt and Lincoln, doesn’t mention Wallace. Wallace would seem to be his true political ancestor. With the Progressive Citizens of America the predecessors of the current Progressive Wing of the Dem party; Kos and company, Ayers, Wright….

Imagine if FDR had kept Wallace as his Vice President for his second term. Instead of President Truman, we’d have had President Wallace. According to Wikipedia:

“Wallace had said that if he became President, he would appoint Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State and Harry Dexter White as Secretary of Treasury. Both Duggan and White were Communist sympathizers who are now known to have been Soviet spies.”

But the Progressives didn’t originate with Stalin. During the Civil War this faction was called the Copperheads. From Wikipedia:

“During the American Civil War (1861-1865), the Copperheads nominally favored the Union and strongly opposed the war, for which they blamed abolitionists, and they demanded immediate peace and resisted draft laws. They wanted Lincoln and the Republicans ousted from power, seeing the president as a tyrant who was destroying American republican values with his despotic and arbitrary actions.

Some Copperheads tried to persuade Union soldiers to desert. They talked of helping Confederate prisoners of war seize their camps and escape. They sometimes met with Confederate agents and took money. The Confederacy encouraged their activities whenever possible.”

Sound familiar? The more things change…..

So Obama is firmly in the tradition of the left wing of the Democrat Party. The faction that Hubert Humphrey and the Americans for Democratic Action forced out of the Democrat Party in 1947 for their communist connections. Sadly, over time, these Progressives have wormed their way back into the Democrat Party, and now constitute it’s radical base. If only Humphrey were still around to purge them from the Party again…..

I remember reading a criticism of Nietzsche that pointed out whatever the merits of Nietzsche’s thought, it must be admitted that his thought had attracted several generations of malignant jerks. Obama seems a like a decent person but I would like him more if Jane Fonda, Al Sharpton, Michael Moore, and, of course, Hamas liked him a little less.

After rambling on about the perils associated with the canonization of Obama, you focus at the end of the post on a few of the liabilities of the “next President’s” (scary scare quotes eh?) uber-liberal voting record from the point of view of a neoliberalism (see the Washington Consensus) and a neoconservatism (we all know about this America Uber Alles school of thought such that no citations are needed) that are carried aloft in a toxic cloud of rhetorical bloviation.

To wit: First, you claim that we would be heavily taxed and thus poorer. Obama is proposing to tax the “under taxed” wealthy and provide tax breaks to the middle and lower classes. Only the toffish pundit class and friends will be more heavily taxed. We could carry on in the manner of George II and borrow and spend, if you prefer. Your target of traditional liberalism has been supplanted, in part, by a “post-liberalism” as represented in the more centrist (read: more market friendly) policies of the DLC and Gidden’s Third Way in Britain. However, Hillary’s top down, command and control approach to governance—you WILL have health insurance or else, Sieg Heil! —is an atavism that Obama is trying to avoid with his advocacy of a post-partisan approach to the ills of Washington.

Further, it is a blatant falsehood to claim that taxes make (all) of us poorer–many don’t. Given the concept of vertical equity (treat unequals unequally), those who have the ability to pay remit more only entails that those with more—not everyone–will, indeed, pay more. Presumably and if well administered (a Solarian—incommensurably alien–concept in the present Administration that seems determined to prove the neoliberal bromide that government can’t do anything well–be it New Orleans or Iraq or the FCC or the FTC or the FDA…ad infinitum) There are numerous examples that show that the multiplier effects of some taxes generate more wealth for all. (For example, in the current debate over a new GI Bill proponents cite a $7 to$1 return on the tax “investment” in the original post-World War II bill) Perhaps, it is the republican (small “r”) implications (the commonweal) that repulses the egoistic individualism inherent in such critiques that claim, “Screw you, it’s my money and the hell with the common good”.

Second, you claim that we will be less well protected from the scourges of non-resident evil by your new president’s administration. Well even the Baker Boys in their report to the resident Manichees urged them to jettison their neoliberal failure of a fundamentalist black and white world and to adopt a more realist foreign policy that employs dialogue, coordination with allies, the use of international organizations to pursue world peace and not the timocratic puffery of a wild bunch of Straussians who wouldn’t understand the nuances of Plato’s Seventh Letter if it were sky hooked to them from the heavens. I would characterize Obama’s foreign policy pronouncements as neither idealist (neoconservative) nor realist (e.g., a Kissinger-like Real Politik), but rather as a form of neo-pragmatist policy (though not Rorty’s version) in which one pursues ideals as far as one can practically do so. Such a pragmatic approach should make us more not less secure.

Saying that a more liberal candidate will make Americans poorer is like saying that a more liberal candidate will make Americans have fewer personal freedoms. If you don’t feel like going back to college and studying economic theory in more detail, you could at least compare a graph of per capita post-tax income to which presidents (and governors, if you want to really get down to it) were in power. If you thing liberalism results in poverty, you’ll be particularly surprised by FDR’s numbers. FDR, in case you weren’t aware, was perhaps the most economically liberal president we’ve ever had.