Obama and the New Party: Guilt by vague and unsubstantiated association

Another day at The Corner

Over at The Corner, Peter Kirsinow revisits the claim that Obama was a member of the “socialist” New Party during his run for the Illinois State Senate. Kirsinow’s point rests on the following false claim of equivalence:

Within days of McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin the mainstream press was all over her purported membership in the Alaskan Independence Party — universally described as a fringe party.

The Alaskan Independence Party is no more fringe or radical than the New Party, the tenets of which are plainly redistributionist. Indeed, the New Party appears to have been an adjunct of the Democratic Socialists of America. In fact, a DSA newsletter refers to a speech given by Obama at the Young Democratic Socialists Conference.

I suppose it’s not worth reminding Kirsinow that while the mainstream media were “all over” the claim that Sarah Palin was a member of the AIP, it took about fifteen minutes for that same media to discover that Sarah Palin was not actually a member of the AIP. On the other hand, her husband’s relationship to the party from has never been in question, since he was actually a member — though not, apparently, an active participant — from 1995-2002, during which time his wife was the mayor of Wasilla. I suppose it’s also not worth mentioning that Sarah Palin’s friends in the AIP — many of whose members truly believe that Alaska should not be a part of the United States — actively supported her campaign for mayor while burying their guns in their front yards in preparation for . . . something or other.

The “evidence” for Obama’s membership in the New Party, by contrast, rests on the testimony of a defunct website and a pair of ambiguously-written 12-year-old articles from a magazine with single-digit readership. Beyond that, the insistence that the New Party represented some sort of burrowing, Trotskyite faction of the revolutionary left is, well, insane. Unless, of course, one equates revolutionary socialism with living wage campaigns, voter registration drives, or calls for greater vigilance on anti-trust laws, or any of the other issues that animated the various urban-based party organizations. Which I suppose, given the innate deficiencies of the folks promoting this story, is probably the case.

In any event, the New Party allegations — like the Ayers story — have been around for months now. Several bloggers dropped this turd on the sidewalk in May; the usual suspects recently rediscovered discovered the pile and, after shoving some candles into it, have decided that it’s a heap of birthday cake.

Kirsinow insinuates that the media won’t touch the Obama/New Party story because they fear being tagged as racists. More likely, they haven’t touched it because it isn’t actually a story.