Post-American Presidency (38 page)

And so it happened in September 2009 that videos began to surface of children in public schools being made to sing songs of fulsome praise for… Barack Hussein Obama. It smacked of Stalinism and Goebbels-style indoctrination, and was a stunning indictment of how dangerously politicized the public education system had become.

Perhaps worst of all was that Obama had no rebuke for this cultish adulation. He had nothing to say about it at all. He could have and should have reminded these students and teachers about the dangers of such idolization and the merits of republican government with its orderly transitions from leader to leader.

It was yet another missed opportunity for Barack Hussein Obama.

The first public school Obama-worship to be revealed came from an elementary school in New Jersey. Children sang to their dear leader with as much ardor as any child in Pyongyang ever sang to Kim Jong Il:

That was bad enough, but the rest was positively messianic. It had become commonplace for Obama’s critics to deride the adulation of his followers by referring to him as “the Messiah,” but this song cast Obama more or less overtly as the savior, borrowing lyrics from “Jesus Loves the Little Children”:

Another song children sang at the same school went this way: “Hello, Mr. President we honor you today! / For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say ‘hooray!’”
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Accomplishments? What accomplishments?

The New Jersey school’s Obama-adulation was no isolated incident. At Giffen Elementary School in Albany, New York, fifth
and sixth graders sang a “Barack Obama Rap” accompanied by Obama’s recorded voice talking about himself in speeches. The students sang:

These were not the only public schools indoctrinating their children in Obama-worship just months after he was elected.

The Left refuses to recognize the need for objectivity among men—particularly men of different views and opinions. It’s good that people in this great nation have varying opinions, provided we respect each other’s rights. But the Left is incapable of this. It wasn’t very long ago that a photo of George W. Bush was not allowed in many private schools. It would have been too “controversial.” But teaching classrooms of prepubescent children to sing songs praising Barack Obama? No problem!

Schools have no right playing politics with our children. It’s a terrible infringement of rights. And Obama’s cult of personality in public schools is nothing short of ominous.

RECRUITING FOR OBAMA IN THE SCHOOLS

Barack Obama is using our public school system to recruit for his next campaign. In January 2010 I broke the story that Organizing for America (OFA), formerly Obama For America, is recruiting in our high schools to “build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda.”

An eleventh-grade teacher in a government class in a public high school, Perry Local in Massillon, Ohio, passed out a propaganda recruiting paper—headed with Obama’s distinctive “O” logo—asking students to sign up as interns for Organizing for America.

The form carried a recommended reading list, including
Rules for Radicals
by the notorious hard-left community organizer and Obama mentor Saul Alinsky, and two
Huffington Post
articles by Zack Exley, “The New Organizers” and “Obama Field Organizers Plot a Miracle.” The first of those, published in October 2008, enthuses about “an insurgent generation of organizers” inside the Obama campaign that has, “almost without anyone noticing… built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people’s organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.”

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Exley operated the Web site
www.gwbush.com
, which was filled with lies about George W. Bush that were designed to kill his chance to become president. The site’s headline was “Just Say ‘No’ to a Former Cocaine User for President.”

Also included on the OFA internship recommended reading list were
Stir It Up: Lessons from Community Organizing and Advocacy
by the leftist activist Rinku Sen, and sections of Obama’s book
Dreams from My Father
dealing with his days as a community organizer in Chicago.

And what is the point of all this propaganda and community organizing? To elect more Democrats, of course. This internship program is geared toward the 2010 elections. The form begins with a nakedly partisan and propagandistic appeal: “Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda of change. OFA is launching a national internship program connecting students all over the country with our organization on the ground—working to make the change we fought so hard for in 2008 a reality in 2010 and beyond.”
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Obama is using the public school system to help ensure Democratic victories in 2010, 2012, and thereafter.

SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA THROUGH THE NEA

A few overzealous schoolteachers, nothing more? Such was the claim on the left. But there was no mistaking the post-American president’s insidious manipulation of the National Endowment for the Arts. On August 10, 2009, the White House Office of Public Engagement, the National Endowment for the Arts, and an ostensibly nonpartisan volunteer group called United We Serve hosted a conference call. According to Patrick Courrielche of Big Hollywood, who was invited to participate, “the call would include ‘a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

What kind of positive change? What else but promoting the socialist agenda of the post-American president? “We were encouraged,” Courrielche explains, “to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these ‘focus areas’ as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign,
and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues.”

In other words, the participants were encouraged to create art to further the Obama agenda. The ballot box wasn’t enough. The mainstream media wasn’t enough. The appeal to reason and proven success would fail the post-American president and his allies, and apparently they knew it—so they wanted to resort to more subtle means of persuasion. Courrielche warned of “the danger of the use of the art community as a tool of the state.”
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There was no attempt to hide the manipulative and politicized aspect of the “art” the conference call participants were being urged to produce: “Throughout the conversation,” recalled Courrielche, “we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to ‘shape the lives’ of those around us. The now famous Obama ‘Hope’ poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s ‘Yes We Can’ song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election.”
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The official story was that Michael Skolnik, the political director for hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons (why does a music-industry leader need a “political director”?), organized the call out of sheer public-spiritedness. However, John Nolte of Big Hollywood explained that “all evidence points to the fact that the conference call was a ruse, a front for a White House using Skolnik as a kind of beard in order to put an innocent spin on their abuse of the NEA and two non-partisan volunteer organizations (United We Serve—an initiative overseen by The Corporation for National and Community Service—a federal agency, and the White House’s Office of Public Engagement).” Nolte said that the goal of all this was “to motivate a group of hand-picked pro-Obama artists (grant recipients or those wanting grants) to push the President’s flagging agenda, especially health care—and to funnel this promotion through the ACORN-related Serve.gov website.”
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American taxpayers of all political persuasions subsidize the National Endowment for the Arts (and, of course, have no choice not to do so), supposedly so that art will be created that will enrich all citizens and American culture in general. Barack Obama was attempting to use it to further one political perspective. Yet when art becomes the handmaiden of politics, it is no longer art at all—it is propaganda. He was attempting to compel the NEA to start turning out a softer version of the socialist realism that put a confident, muscular face on Stalin’s tyranny.

The August 10 call was not the Obama administration’s only attempt to corral the art world into becoming propagandists for the regime. Culture critic Lee Rosenbaum, who blogs about the art world, reported on September 2, 2009, that Kalpen Modi, the associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, in an August 27 conference call “sought to rally the artworld troops behind President Obama’s call for Americans to engage in public service.” Rosenbaum, who noted that she “supported and (with reservations) still support the agenda of the new President,” saw the ominous implications of this for the integrity of the art world: “It’s a worthwhile objective, to be sure. But government exhortations for artists to join the United We Serve brigade makes me more than a little uneasy.… More government oversight will inevitably lead to more government interference and control.”
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ONE-PARTY STATE

And for the post-American president, more government interference and control meant Democrat Party interference and control. On November 5, 2009, John Berry, the director of the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees personnel appointments for the federal bureaucracy, issued a directive: “Beginning
January 1, 2010, agencies must seek prior approval from OPM before they can appoint a current or recent political appointee to a competitive or non-political excepted service position at any level under the provisions of title 5, United States Code.”
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In plain English, this meant that former political appointees could not be appointed to civil service positions without special approval—and the memo directed that this provision was to be made retroactive going back five years. Pundit Mark Tapscott explained that this directive “effectively establishes a partisan political factor in hiring for career civil service positions in the federal bureaucracy.… In other words, if you worked for President Bush in the executive branch at any time during his second term in the White House, you may not be approved. The same applies if you worked for a Republican Member of Congress at any point during the past five years.”
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According to political blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com, it amounted to an attempt to “purge the federal government of Republican civil servants.… The memorandum goes on to apply this change to civil servants who were political appointees in the last five years, in effect freezing these employees out of other positions, denying them promotions, and forcing them out of their jobs.”
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For Erickson, there was more than a whiff of the one-party state to this Obama initiative: “This is what happens in third world kleptocracies and totalitarian regimes. This is scary stuff.”
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Even that was not all. Any decent socialist propaganda needs a socialist hero. And some were anxious to cast the post-American president himself in that role.

SOCIALIST HERO

Louis Farrakhan proclaimed Obama to be the messiah back in October 2008: “You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring
about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”
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It became a joke, particularly among Republicans and conservatives, to call Obama the Messiah in view of the extravagant praise—and extravagant hopes—that were attached to him during the campaign.

But there was also a serious cultic edge to some of the adulation.

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman, provoked ridicule when he said in October 2009 that “Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.” He didn’t mean that Barack Obama is a literary titan who doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus while petty men like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy walk under his huge legs and peep about to find themselves dishonorable graves. But what he did mean, while no less fatuous, was also disquieting in its implications: for the first time, the United States of America had a president whose supporters talked about him in the same effusive and worshipful tones usually reserved for the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong Il.