Two intriguing articles which combined suggest that the ascension of Barack Hussein Obama to the leadership of the far left is the fruition of his long term plan to end run the established patronage based urban Democratic political structures. Ascension made possible by an alliance with the Academic left coveting the voting bloc he brings to the game.
Stanley Kurtz: While in his years as a Chicago organizer and attorney, Obama took care to maintain friendly ties to the Daley administration, in Obama’s campaign for state senate, he specifically avoided asking the mayor or the mayor’s closest allies for support. Obama’s plan was to make an end-run around Chicago’s governing Democratic political network, by building a coalition of left-leaning black churches and radical secular organizations like Acorn (perhaps with de facto help from liberal foundation money as well). This coalition would provide Obama with the flexibility to play out a political career some distance to the left of conventional Illinois democratic politics. And sure enough, Obama’s extremely liberal record in Illinois vindicated his strategy.
Thomas F. Roeser: The Democratic Party elders cannot…and will not…risk the certainty that there will be wholesale defections of blacks-the most predictably massive voting bloc ever to serve in any political party-if Obama is denied. Defections that would not just lose it the presidency (Democrats are inured to that possibility having lost it in 2004, 2000, 1988, 1984 and 1980), but would reduce the Democrats to a minority party in city after city by shrinking the black vote to a tiny margin. Consider what it would do to Chicago and Cook County: these areas would revert to a two-party status again, disastrous for politicians who don’t need the presidency ever to root their snouts in the patronage troughs. --- (h/t Dad29)
