"Late in the afternoon of 1983, Barack Obama made his way into the historic Great Hall of Manhattan's Cooper Union to attend a 'Socialist Scholars Conference.' Within twenty-four hours, his life had transformed. There at that conference Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his adult life."
So begins Stanley Kurtz's new monumental work, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.
The book is an in-depth reference work that documents the voluminous archival material on Obama's background, which Kurtz thoroughly examines in order to establish its authenticity and to separate fact from fiction. Scholarly in its approach, the Kurtz book does not lend itself to 5-second sound bites or to blazing headlines in the 'drive-by media.'
As a scholar and Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Kurtz's motive was not to make headlines or to provide red meat to the conservative media but to undertake a thorough investigation into the charges that Obama's past is rife with dubious and dangerous associations on the Leftwing fringe of American politics, and to trace how such associations have molded and shaped his career, political ideology, and policy initiatives.
In a book review published by Asia Times, the writer relates a first-hand experience with the 'Socialist Scholars Conference' that Obama attended as a college senior...
