Kenyan Socialist President Once Again Betrays Secret Admiration for Capitalism

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By Ben Mathis-Lilley

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President Obama at Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover, Germany, on Monday.

Maja Hitij/Pool/Getty Images

The New York Times Magazine has published a long article derived from several interviews with President Obama about the U.S. economy and his handling thereof. It's a smart, clear overview of what has gone right economically during Obama's term and what might have gone better, and you're encouraged to read the whole thing. Specifically, though, I'd like to highlight one comment the president made to writer Andrew Ross Sorkin:

Often in our conversations, the president expressed a surprising degree of identification with America’s business leaders. “If I hadn’t gone into politics and public service,” Obama told me, “the challenges of creating a business and growing a business and making it work would probably be the thing that was most interesting to me.”
Now, it has been a well-known fact since the time of his 2008 campaign against John McCain that Hussein "Barack" Obama is a socialist who is trying to turn our country into the 1930s-era Soviet Union. (A Georgia Republican actually bragged in 2013 about being "the first Member of Congress to call [Obama] a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies.") Obama hates businesses and wants them to suffer, so it's strange that he would express an interest in starting one, right? It reminded me of another weird riff the president went on in a reflective recent interview, namely one that he did with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg about foreign policy. Said Obama while discussing the broader context of the war on terror:

“Right now, I don’t think that anybody can be feeling good about the situation in the Middle East,” he said. “You have countries that are failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people. You’ve got a violent, extremist ideology, or ideologies, that are turbocharged through social media. You’ve got countries that have very few civic traditions, so that as autocratic regimes start fraying, the only organizing principles are sectarian.”
He went on, “Contrast that with Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems—enormous poverty, corruption—but is filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast is pretty stark.”
Obama continued on this theme, contradicting his core Communist principles by speaking as if the incentives of capitalism can be among the building blocks of a just and humane society:

In Asia, as well as in Latin America and Africa, Obama says, he sees young people yearning for self-improvement, modernity, education, and material wealth.
“They are not thinking about how to kill Americans,” he says. “What they’re thinking about is How do I get a better education? How do I create something of value?
Truly, the more that our outgoing president talks about his legacy and his worldview at length, the more one gets the sense that he might not be a heavily indoctrinated Communist sleeper agent who was planted in the White House by Bill Ayers and the Black Panthers in order to destroy the American way of life.

Kenyan Socialist President Once Again Betrays Secret Admiration for Capitalism
 
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