Last week we documented Obama’s 1996 endorsement by the New Party: which raises the question: what is the New Party? It’s easy to allege that this group is closely tied to former communists, but digging in to the New Party and Obama’s involvement, a very dirty picture presents itself. In fact, it is abundantly apparent that Barack Obama not only knew what the New Party was when he sought its endorsement, but through his ties with ACORN, the radical left activist organization, Obama used his radical left connections to get elected to the Illinois State Senate.
Most of the New Party’s history has been lost in the digital age. It was established in 1992 and started to die out in 1998, well before Google and the modern web were established. But through lengthy searches of the Nexis archive and microfilm at the local university library, I’ve been able to piece this together.
The New Party was established in 1992 “by union activist Sandy Pope and University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers,” USA Today reported on November 16, 1992. The paper wrote that the new party was “self-described [as] ‘socialist democratic.’”
Throughout its creation and rise, the New Party sought to unite alienated leftists who had grown disgusted by Bill Clinton’s embrace of the center-left Democratic Leadership Council. The Wisconsin State Journal summed up where the Left was in February of 1992. “Angry Americans,” Jesse Waldman wrote, “particularly left-wing Democrats, are tired of choosing between the lesser of two evils when they go to the ballot now.” A July 4, 1996, column in the Los Angeles Times by Todd Gitlin, which championed the New Party as “both old-fashioned and elegant” proclaimed the New Party as a path to victory for leftists alienated by the Democrats and Republicans. Capturing the mood of the left in a May 31, 1998 article for the leftist magazine In These Times, Doug Ireland wrote, “As Bob Master of the Communication Workers of America — the point-man for the new labor ballot line — puts it: ‘The political perspective of labor and working people has no voice in state politics, especially since the Democratic Party has moved to the right.”
The seeds, however, had been sown all the way back in 1988. Quoting John Nichols in the March 22, 1998 issue of In These Times, “The roots of the New Party go back to the aftermath of Jesse Jackson’s run for president in 1988. At that time, Dan Cantor, who had served as labor coordinator for the Jackson campaign, and University of Wisconsin sociology professor Joel Rogers began talking about how to formulate an alternative between the increasingly indistinguishable Democratic-Republican monolith.”
It is no great leap to say, as a result, that Barack Obama’s rise to the Democratic nomination is the child of Jesse Jackson’s defeat.
Read on . . .
