"Forward" beat out other re-election campaign slogans that did not test well with the focus groups, such as "Obama 2012 --Hey, It Could Have Been Worse," "Obama 2012 -- My President Went On Vacation and All I Got Was This Lousy $5 TRILLION in New Debt," or "Obama 2012 -- My Dog Ate My Homework, So I Ate My Dog." It was quite a struggle for them to come up with something that would truly capture the essence of the message they were trying to convey, and "Forward" seemed to fit the bill. Nice, clean and simple, giving the impression of something positive without the nuisance of actually getting into specifics. Without doubt, Obama wants to stay away from specifics; hence, no catchy promises of "Recovery Summer" or "Shovel Ready Jobs."
The Obama campaign team is certainly bright; otherwise they would never have beaten the Hillary machine in 2008. It is therefore all the more curious that they would choose "Forward" as their slogan, since in a political context that word has a long history of association with Marxism, communism and socialism. Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin of the Soviet Union, and Chairman Mao of Communist China, both heavily incorporated the "Forward" theme into their propaganda. Between the three of them, these brutal dictators were responsible for somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 million deaths (this is the same Mao that Obama's communications director, Anita Dunn, once claimed was her favorite political philosopher). This theme appears repeatedly in communist literature and, in fact, the name of Stalin's newspaper was "Forward."
With other politicians, such a choice for a campaign slogan might be written off as the result of really poor research, a political faux pas, embarrassing to be sure, but without a deeper meaning. In Obama's case, however, one can't help but wonder if this was a deliberate attempt to use this slogan as one that most Americans would find innocuous, but those identifying with socialist, communist and Marxist ideology (does the name "Occupy Wall Street" ring a bell?) would see as a clarion call to action, and as proof that Obama is on their side.
Any time a Republican or conservative mentions these Marxist leanings from Obama's past, they are immediately excoriated and dismissed by the media; the very same media that virtually ignored Obama's past as they help guide him to victory in the 2008 election. We don't even have to guess of infer whether such claims are true though. We can simply go straight to the horse's mouth, since Obama told us himself in his own writings.
In his book "Dreams From My Father", Barack Obama describes his life at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he aligned himself with Marxists and radical racial separatists, among others. Wrote Obama, "There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs ...It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names." He then went on to write that "To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."
It is not all that surprising that Obama would gravitate towards these people that so loathed America and the majority of Caucasians that comprised its citizenry, because the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Obama's father, Barack Sr., was a self-avowed and deeply committed socialist. His mother and the subsequent men she brought into her life embraced the ideology. Obama wrote in his book of communist poet and family friend, Frank Marshall Davis, calling him a "decisive influence" in his life. Obama would later launch his political career in the home of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, a couple of 1960's anti-war radicals and leaders of the Weather Underground, a domestic terrorist group responsible for the bombing of numerous government buildings, including the Pentagon. Even today, Bill Ayers proudly defends his violent radicalism. This is the same couple who, ironically enough, was featured in a New York Times article on the morning of the 9/11 attacks, in which they bragged of their radicalism and their love for explosives.
Obama would not only attend, but be married in and have his daughters baptized in, the church of the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright, a man who preaches even today hatred of America from the pulpit of his church. This is the same man that gleefully declared in the days following the 9/11 attacks that America had gotten what it deserved, and that her "chickens [had] come home to roost." When the controversy broke, Obama refused to criticize or distance himself from Wright, stating that he could "no more disown him than I can disown the black community." Of course, that was before it became a huge political liability. Once that happened, Obama fled from Wright like he was running from a crazy ex-girlfriend (or, in Obama's case, a composite of a bunch of different girls he knew).
The bottom line is that while most liberal Democrats buy into the ideology of socialist redistribution and government control to some extent, our president has been thoroughly marinated in a big vat of Marxist juices. Oh, he knows he can't come right out and say it in front of the American people, but it's there nonetheless. That is why he uses code words and phrases like "redistribution of wealth", and "social justice" and "making the rich pay their fair share." That is why he demands an even more progressive and punishing graduated income tax than we have today, which is exactly what his ideological heroes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called for in The Communist Manifesto. That's why he calls free market capitalism, the engine that has given Americans an unprecedented level of prosperity, a system that is "chaotic and unforgiving", and why he has referred to private enterprise as "the enemy." It's also why every signature piece of legislation (ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, the stimulus bill, etc.) was geared to stripping capital out of the private markets and giving it over to government control to be divvied out to the politically favored. Obama has used the tax and regulatory codes as the mechanism through which he achieves the takeover of private industry by government while still maintaining a façade of capitalism.
All of this has led to Obama's new campaign slogan, "Forward," a word drenched in Marxist ideology and a call for the uprising of an army of class warriors which he will use to divide Americans into hostile groups which can be pitted against one another just long enough for him to be re-elected, after which he will not care one whit what happens to them. He will have achieved his goal, and he will have four more years in which he can enact his socialist utopian dream of an America completely ruled in every facet by government. Four more years of ignoring the Constitution while knowing he will never have to answer to the voters again. "Forward" into the abyss of a fallen republic.
Louis DeBroux is a Taylorsville resident, married, with eight children. He is chairman of the Bartow County Republican Party. He owns Gatekeeper data backup and recovery. He can be emailed at led@gatekeeperbackup.com.