Kurtz: Obama was a member of the New Party

Stanley Kurtz has dug up positive proof that Barack Obama formally joined the New Party in 1996 and lied about it in 2008:

On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.

In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.

Minutes of the meeting on January 11, 1996, of the New Party’s Chicago chapter read as follows:

Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.

Consistent with this, a roster of the Chicago chapter of the New Party from early 1997 lists Obama as a member, with January 11, 1996, indicated as the date he joined.

Dr. Kurtz concludes:

I have more to say on the New Party’s ideology and program, Obama’s ties to the party, and the relevance of all this to the president’s campaign for reelection. See the forthcoming issue of National Review.

In the meantime, let us see whether a press that let candidate Obama off the hook in 2008 — and that in 2012 is obsessed with the president’s youthful love letters  — will now refuse to report that President Obama once joined a leftist third party, and that he hid that truth from the American people in order to win the presidency.

Any bets on that? I think, were they somehow dragged toward acknowledging the story at all, the liberal media would dismiss Obama's New Party membership and his denials as irrelevant.

Do read the whole thing. The Obama smear machine's sleazy attempt to marginalize Kurtz, a painstaking and principled scholar, by absurdly labeling him a "crackpot," still rankles. The real crackpots are those who, even now, want to remake America into Europe. It's hard not to notice that things aren't going so well over there:

Andrew Stuttaford: Unraveling:

RAE is taking crisis initiatives throughout next week to avert the collapse of the natural gas and electricity system,” the regulator’s chief Nikos Vasilakos told Reuters.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: The Week that Europe Stopped Pretending:

Switzerland is threatening capital controls to repel bank flight from Euroland. The Swiss two-year note has fallen to -0.32pc, not that it seems to make any difference.

Denmark’s central bank said it was battening down the hatches for a "splintering" of EMU. It has cut interest rates twice in a matter or days and pledged to do whatever it takes to stop euros flooding into the country. Contingency plans are on the lips of officials in every capital in Europe, and beyond.

On a single day, the European Commission said monetary union was in danger of "disintegration" and the European Central Bank said it was "unsustainable" as constructed. Their plaintive cries may have fallen on deaf ears in Berlin, but they were heard all too clearly by investors across the world. 

Et cetera.

CNN: 'Spanic,' 'Grexit' and Europe's flying money:

Will the future of the eurozone be decided at thousands of ATMs across the continent? That may be a stretch, but Spaniards and Greeks are withdrawing billions of euros from their bank accounts and sending them somewhere "safer."

And they're getting some encouragement, too.

Deutsche Bank, for example, is soliciting the money of Spaniards nervous about the solvency of banks at home. Such nervousness is understandable, as the Spanish government struggles to inject liquidity into the country's fourth-largest bank -- Bankia -- and other financial institutions weighed down by bad property loans.

Stuttaford explains what can happen when the dominoes start to fall. See Argentina, 2001:

The corralito limited cash withdrawals from individual bank accounts to the equivalent of $250 a week (the dollar value would soon fall sharply). And the response to it should worry those now running the PIIGS. Argentinians took to the streets and reduced the country’s political order to chaos. Depending on how you define the term, Argentina had five presidents in less than a month, but none could change the inevitable. The country defaulted on its debt, the peg was scrapped, the peso tanked, and the corralito was replaced by the corralón, the centerpiece of an even tougher regime. Depositors were allowed to withdraw a little more money than before, but only in heavily depreciated pesos. Term deposits were frozen, and transfers of money out of the country heavily restricted. Not so long after, dollar deposits were switched into pesos, and the ruin of Argentine savers, many of whom lost their jobs as the economy crashed, was complete.

Mark Steyn puts it all together:

In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: They’ve wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars’ worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.

That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn.

Something for nothing can't last forever. Bubbles must burst. But there's no room in Obama's world view for that reality, and recent history hasn't taught him anything. He's the same committed statist he was in 1996. So yes, the vetting by Stanley Kurtz and others is very relevant indeed. Obama has pledged to finish what he started, and for once, I believe him.

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