Barack Obama was, in fact, a member of the socialist New Party in the 1990s and sought its endorsement for the Illinois senate – contrary to the misrepresentations of Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, and in spite of the efforts of Politico’s Ben Smith to quash the story.
Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (2010), has released new “smoking gun” evidence at National Review Online. It is evidence that the mainstream media can no longer ignore–and Obama can no longer deny.
When the story of Obama’s association with the New Party first broke in 2008, Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt claimed that Obama had never been a member. (LaBolt likewise told the New York Times that Obama had “not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005”–a statement that carefully concealed the truth that Obama had spent time in Ayers’ home after he began serving in the Senate.) The Obama campaign took up the issue at its “Fight the Smears” website, smearing Kurtz and willfully distorting the truth about Barack Obama’s radical past:
Right-wing hatchet man and conspiracy theorist, Stanley Kurtz is pushing a new crackpot smear against Barack falsely claiming he was a member of something called the New Party.
But the truth is Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party. In all six primary campaigns of his career, Barack has has run as a Democrat. The New Party did support Barack once in 1996, but he was the only candidate on the ballot in his race and never solicited the endorsement.
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