Political experts left and right agree: the coming election will be
decided by America’s suburbanites. From Florida to Virginia on across
the country, in every battleground state, they are the key demographic.
All of which raises a question that has not been considered as yet, and
ought to be: is President Obama’s re-election in the suburbanites’
interest? The answer emphatically is no.
As many Americans do not know, in the eyes of the leftist
community organizers who trained Obama, suburbs are instruments of
bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with
the urban poor. Obama adopted this view early on, and he has never
wavered from this ideological commitment, as a review of his actions in
office goes to show.
President Obama’s plans for a second-term include an initiative to
systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the
cities. It’s a transformative idea, and deserves to be fully aired
before the election. But like a lot of his major progressive policy
innovations, Obama has advanced this one stealthily–mostly through
rule-making, appointment, and vague directives. Obama has worked on
this project in collaboration with Mike Kruglik, one of his original
community organizing mentors. Kruglik’s new group, Building One
America, advocates “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which
suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and
less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs. Kruglik’s group also favors a raft
of policies designed to coerce people out of their cars and force
suburbanites (with their tax money) back into densely packed cities.
Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to Kruglik’s
efforts. A federal program called the Sustainable Communities
Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the
country with “regional equity” and “smart growth” as goals. These are,
of course, code words. “Regional equity” means that, by their mere
existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities. It means,
“Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the
suburbanites to give to the urban poor. “Smart growth” means, “Quit
building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit
can shuttle you between your 800 square foot apartment in an urban tower
and your downtown job.” In all likelihood, these planning commissions
will issue “recommendations” which Obama would quickly turn into
requirements for further federal aid. In fact, his administration has
already used these tactics to impose federal education requirements on
reluctant states. Indeed, part of Obama’s assault on the suburbs is his
effort to undercut the autonomy of suburban school districts.
Suburbs are for sellouts: That is a large and overlooked theme of Obama’s famous memoir, Dreams from My Father.
Few have noticed the little digs at suburban “sprawl” throughout the
book, as when Obama decries a Waikiki jammed with “subdivisions marching
relentlessly into every fold of green hill.” Dreams actually
begins with the tale of an African American couple who’ve come to
question their move from city to suburb – the implication clearly being
that the city is the moral choice.
Early on in Dreams, Obama tells of how his mother and
Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetoro, were pulled apart by a proxy
version of the American dream. Lolo got a job with an American oil
company, bought a house in a better neighborhood, and started dining at
the company club. Obama’s mother, who had come to Indonesia in search
of Third World authenticity, wanted nothing to do with the “ugly
American” types who frequented this new world, and she taught her son to
disdain them as well. From Obama’s perspective, American-inspired
upward mobility had broken his new family in two.
Back in Hawaii after his Indonesian interlude, Obama came to see his
grandparents as strangers. The realization dawned as they drove him
along a sprawl-filled highway. Obama then threw in his lot with an
African-American mentor named Frank Marshall Davis, who lived in a
ramshackle pocket of the city called the “Waikiki Jungle” where his home
was a gathering place for young leftists and nonconformists. Rejecting
assimilation into America’s middle-class, Davis hit on socialist
politics and identification with the urban poor as the way to establish
his racial credentials.
Dreams from My Father describes Davis’s efforts to pass this
stance on to Obama. At Occidental, with Davis’s advice in mind, Obama
worried that he was too much like “suburban blacks, students who sit
with whites in the cafeteria and refuse to be defined by the color of
their skin.” This fear of becoming a middle-class suburban “sellout” is
the background to the famous passage of Dreams where Obama
explains why he started hanging out with “Marxist professors” and other
unconventional types. Recalling Davis’s admonition to reject the
standard path to success, “the American way and all that shit,” Obama
left Occidental’s suburban campus for Columbia University, “in the heart
of a true city.”
After leaving New York for Chicago, Obama met up with the Reverend
Jeremiah Wright. This relationship, too, reflected Obama’s ideological
disdain for the suburbs. Obama was distressed, for example, to learn
that one of Wright’s assistants planned to move to a suburb for her
son’s safety. After confronting Wright with concerns that his
congregation was “too upwardly mobile,” Obama was mollified to discover
the congregation’s official “Disavowal of the Pursuit of
Middleclassness.” The years with Rev. Wright helped Obama solidify the
solution to his identity crisis that Frank Marshall Davis had taught him
long before: reject the lure of the middle-class suburbia and identify
instead with the urban poor.
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