Interview with Paul Kinger on David Axelrod's political connections and communist influences

Hey, this is Carl Kozlowski with... Hey, Carl. Hey, how are you? With The Cause Effect. And I'm going to be talking right now with Paul Kinger. And by way of introduction to everybody out there, Paul is a professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader, Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, and Dupes, How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. His next book is a profile of Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis, scheduled for release later this year. And we're going to be talking with him about his really interesting current cover story in the American Spectator. Actually, it was the March cover story, but people can still find it online, I'm sure, at spectator.org. And it's called Obama's Red Handler, Meet David Axelrod. And just by way of explanation, because this is the first show I'm doing of The Cause Effect, I've got sort of a Bill Maher kind of a show, as people are hearing. But we're going to have sometimes people that are very conservative talking, and sometimes people from the complete opposite end of the spectrum. So just letting people know that, you know, if you... But I think we'll find people that are interesting, and just keep your mind open and absorb what they have to say. And it might open your way of thinking one direction or the other, depending on the guest of the week. So first off, I just want to say thanks, Mr. Kanger, for being part of this. And by way of explanation to people, David Axelrod, is somebody that a lot of people have seen if they're into politics. He's sort of the sleepy-eyed looking guy with a little kind of walrus mustache. I'm not even trying to be mean. I'm trying to be kind of cutesy about him. He's sort of endearing, you know, since it looks like a sad sack, and talks about, you know, he's a big advisor to Obama, and a very powerful guy who's basically... I always thought that he was like Obama's right-hand man, speaking as a spokesman for Obama. But judging from your article, it sounds like, he might be sort of like what people said about Dick Cheney with President Bush. He's sort of actually, in a way, in a lot of ways, sort of a string-puller. Is that an accurate assessment? No, I think it is. I mean, he's... David Axelrod is the chief strategist who carved out the Obama hope and change message. So, I mean, you know, you couldn't have a more significant impact. I mean, he was... He was the shaper of the message. He was the composer of the theme. I mean, every... The very essence of Obama and Obamaism can be credited to Axelrod. I mean, he took this... This senator from Illinois, this young senator from Illinois in 2007, Axelrod was based in Chicago. He's from New York originally, but he went to college at the University of Chicago and then stayed in Chicago, cut his teeth there, started writing for the Hyde Park Herald, and then eventually the Chicago paper, the Sun-Times. And from there, he went into political consulting, Paul Simon, others, national campaigns, presidential campaigns, and he latched on to Obama. And he saw in Obama this marvel of unique historical significance who, as... As Axelrod said, to get someone like Obama elected president would be a really special thing for me, for my life, for history. And he went out and he did it, and he's been sort of quiet, at least people would think, but he's not. He's working behind the scenes for the past few years. But he's now, right now, back in Chicago, tasked with, once again, getting Obama elected president. Yeah, so it's interesting because your article is very expansive about this guy's life. And the thing is, okay, what you're trying to get across is, early on in the story, is about the influences that had an effect on Axelrod because basically any politician, any human being that's worth anything in this world, you're shaped by either, family or other outside influences and mentors. And you paint a picture of Axelrod as growing up the son of a, in a liberal Jewish household, kind of secondarily Jewish, culturally Jewish in New York. And, but then his mom, in particular, had ties to an early controversial publication called PM. And I thought it was kind of strange, like if you could elaborate about that, but also you point out that you went looking through tons of microfiche trying to find any, any contributions from her and there's nothing there. Is that something odd, do you think? I mean, if you could explain PM and her, regardless of this, but is there anything worth wondering? Well, gee, why is there no record of her? And does that parallel some of the mysterious holes? And I'm not going birther necessarily, but there are holes in Obama's past where we're not allowed to see his school records. We're not allowed to, you know, he never wrote a damn thing for the Harvard Law Review despite being in charge of it. So, I mean, just wondering, is there any parallels there that, you think that people are trying to hide something from her or that she overstated her accomplishments? Well, it's a good question. And it could just be one of those things where, I mean, basically PM operated out of New York, a daily from 1940 to 1948. And Axelrod's mom, this was basically her first job in journalism, not just right out of college, but when she was in college at NYU, majoring in journalism. And at that point, her name was Meryl Bennett. Her maiden name is Meryl Bennett. She married Joseph Axelrod later. But I'll tell you, I couldn't find, I couldn't find a single article. And I did notice, Carl, that a lot of articles didn't carry a byline, a tagline, an author's name. So it could be that, you know, she's kind of a junior writer, low-level staff. Maybe she's writing these things and she doesn't get a byline. And I was able to sort of glean from different research that she covered education. But I mean, I couldn't even confirm that. And it's an important question because PM was an excellent illustration of some of the babbles that you get among the American left. And what happened was PM was run by progressive liberals. And these were true progressives who were not communists. They were pro-communists cloaked as progressives. And the magazine had been penetrated by American communists and American Stalinists, some of whom were calling themselves progressives and liberals. And this had been going on for a long, long time. And the communists on the paper were trying to get the paper to tow a pro-Stalin line. And so PM is just being ripped apart at the seams by these duplicitous, conniving communists that are getting in there and using the liberals and using this liberal paper. And so the question that I really wanted to find out was, where was Meryl Bennett? Was she one of the genuine liberals? Was she possibly one of the communists, the pro-Stalin folks? Was she a liberal being used by the Stalinists? Was she a smart liberal who knew who the bad guys were? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I couldn't find any of that. So I could tell you that generally she was on the left, but I wish I knew more, and I wasn't able to figure that out. She's still alive, by the way. She is? She is still alive. Wow. She lives in a nursing home in Massachusetts, I believe, near Boston. Huh. Interesting. Yeah. Well, so, but then more importantly, to Axelrod's development, and this starts looping into, where this goes with Obama. This whole thing is a fascinating story, so bear with us, folks, and you'll be hearing some things that are just like, whoa, what's going on here? Some of Axelrod's mentors were two guys named Don Rose and David Cantor, and they were much more directly connected. You make it clear that you're not saying that Axelrod's a communist, necessarily. Nobody's alleging that here on the show or otherwise, but... Sure. ...he's a communist. However, these guys that influenced him happen to be, and I gotta say, you know, my best friend in the world is a guy who's a diehard liberal, and he has had a lot of influence on me in some aspects of life. I still am a free-thinking person that, I'm a Ron Paul fan, basically, so I'm just saying that we're not saying that Axelrod bought everything he was told, necessarily. Right. But what sort of influence did these guys have on him? And it was an interesting thing that they came across him and helped kick his career going. Yeah. What? And all it takes for a liberal is to be influenced or reared or even mentored by a communist, and then suddenly you can't talk about the mentor, right? Yeah. I mean, that's the end of it. Whereas if you get a conservative who had any association whatsoever with people from the extreme right, you know, the New York Times and Liberal Public, they're not going to hesitate to talk about that, and you're finished. Yeah, that's something I was going to deal with later in the story, or in the interview, but let's hit that now, I guess. I mean, because you're saying that the mainstream press is afraid to touch that stuff. So is it that they're afraid of it, or is it that they're fine with it, and they're giving the big pat on the back? It's a complicated question. I mean, the main reason is that they don't want their guys to be tainted with this stuff. With Obama, in the case of Frank Marshall Davis, who is an actual, literal, card-carrying member of Communist Party USA. Frank Marshall Davis was Obama's mentor in Obama's campaign. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. throughout the nineteen seventy throughout obama's adolescent and uh... frank marshall davis is communist party card numbers four seven five four four uh... i have a six hundred page fbi file i know that the second out of the subject of my next book but uh... actual rod his two mentors don rose and david canter uh... don rose is on the far left i i can't say that that he was ever a communist remember the communist party but david cancer uh... he comes from the family of that and and in fact of david canter spotter harry jacob canter was actually ran for governor of massachusetts on the communist party ticket uh... you he was actually secretary of the boston communist party ed ed ed ed harry and the sunday but remember david mentor uh... it harry get gets recruited to the soviet union where he basically works translating uh... works of what uh... but i had uh... from russian and english ed ed ed but but but david is raised by harry and then david become the mentor debate but act a lot and ed ed ed but david and on roll even even if they're not reading debate but act roll roll up from the gospel court in the carl bar uh... they clearly influence them on political consulting uh... even our working with african-american canada they had a habit but very very somewhere commonality but the district had had a lot of had very similar commonality there. So, you know, clearly there were influences here to some degree. And you can't even ask these questions to people like Axelrod, you know, where, you know, Axelrod, you know, David, you know, these guys were communists. Do they have any influence on you? You even ask that question, and liberals start accusing you of McCarthyism, of trying to smear them. And, you know, what I'm saying is, let's just have an honest conversation. If Axelrod comes out and acknowledges that these guys were indeed mentors who had these radical associations, and then he says, but look, you know, we had some conversations about communism, and I'm no communist, and I reject it, then he'd basically be clean of it. You know, he would at least have addressed it. But the way this stuff works with these liberal Democrats is they don't even... They don't even have to address it. It gets raised by conservatives like me, and then it just gets ignored by liberal biographers and press people, and they never, ever have to account for it. And you see it again and again. In my book, The Crusader, which you talked about earlier, Carl, The Crusader, Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, I talk about... I present a document from Ted Kennedy that... To KGB. To KGB document on a Ted Kennedy secret offer to the Soviets in May 1983. May 14th, 1983. It's completely legitimate. No one's ever denied that it's not true. Kennedy went to his grave never having to account for that. What was his offer that he made to them? Do you know? It was... Yeah. In fact, the entire document I published in both Russian and English, the English translation. Wow. And the offer described Ronald Reagan as the... As the third threat to peace, especially in U.S.-Soviet relations. And it was set in the context of Reagan's reelection. You know, basically, we gotta defeat Reagan. And Kennedy then offers to the Soviets how to help the Soviets to present their message of peace directly to the American public, to go around Ronald Reagan and his alleged smokescreen of propaganda. Kennedy offers to go to Moscow, meet with the Soviets. I know this all sounds like a big deal. I know this all sounds conspiratorial, but it's all true. Offers to go there and meet with the Soviets. Offers to bring Yuri Andropov and the Soviet leadership to the United States, where they would talk to the American media. Kennedy would even help arrange interviews with media friends. The letter mentions Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters by name. It's all in there. It's completely true. Wow. The Kennedy staff didn't say that it wasn't true. They argued with the interpretation of it, but they didn't disavow the document. They know it's true. And I reported that first in 2006. That's when the crusader came out. I reported it again in dupes in 2010. And Kennedy never had the answer for it. Never. He went to his grave protected on this. If you had anybody from the right. Who? Any conservative. who would make a similar offer to some far-right regime against a sitting Democratic president. And by the way, we have this from the Matrokin archives. Kennedy made the same kind of offer against Jimmy Carter in March of 1980. So Carter and Reagan were both the greatest threat to world peace. Yeah, exactly. Despite the fact they're completely different parties and philosophies. Yeah, and the commonality here in both situations is that Kennedy was the frontrunner in the Democratic primary to dislodge Jimmy Carter as the incumbent in 1980. Oh, well. And in 1984, they thought he was going to challenge Reagan. He ended up not. But both of these are made of... So Kennedy did this to his own political... Wow, that's so dirty. And I tried to tell liberals, look, this guy did this to one of your own. And by the way, Jimmy Carter knows about this. Jimmy Carter knows that this happened. But it's... If you're a liberal, you can get away with this stuff. And then they turn to people like me, and they say, you sound like Joe McCarthy talking about all this communist conspiracy. And that's the end of it. And they don't take me seriously. And they write it all off as right-wing conspiracy. And here I am writing these 600-page books, 250,000 words, with all these footnotes and documentation, and carefully laying out all of this stuff and being as scholarly as I can. And saying, okay, well, it says this, but it doesn't say that. And be careful here. This guy is not a communist. This guy maybe is. This guy was a party member. This guy wasn't. This person was once here and is now there. I'm making all these nuanced distinctions. Being careful, trying to be fair. And then in the end, what happens? They just ignore the entire thing. So then you mentioned one other thing that I wanted to ask about. What was it about... People like Axelrod and... Cantor and Rose... That draws them to pursue candidates of the African-American background? Yeah, they... It just happened to be that... It started with, in the case of Rose and Cantor, their interest in the mayoral campaign of Harold Washington in Chicago. Yeah, the first black mayor. Who became Chicago's first black mayor. Uh-huh. And they were involved in that. And then after that, other... Other African-American candidates. And they sort of had a specialty in that area. And David Axelrod picked that up. He's represented a number of prominent African-American politicians throughout the country. With Obama being the coup de grace. Okay. So then, with regard to... Let's see, I'm just jumping ahead in the article here. You were saying that he also became tight with... Axelrod became like this. Legendary... Like, at one point, he wound up at the Chicago Tribune. Partly due to recommendations from Cantor and Rose. He moved up from this little neighborhood paper to getting at the Trib. And then he moved into political consulting. And he racked up an astounding 80% victory rate, winning 33 of 42 campaigns. And so, what was his secret to success for being such a remarkable success? Well, he's very shrewd. He's good at what he does. He's very good at coming up with a message for a politician. A theme, building a campaign around it. Some people also consider him ruthless. I would say one thing that's very clear is that, as many people say, he sort of falls in love with his candidates. I mean, he really likes the people that he signs on with. And on the other hand, to the contrary, he really despises their opponents. Yeah, I've heard that. And he is clearly... He's very partisan. Maybe even more partisan than ideological, although he's clearly a leftist. But, I mean, basically, if you're a Republican, you've got two horns protruding out of your head. And that's all there is to it. So, you know, he... I expect whoever the Republican nominee is, the Republican nominee will be this year, he's going to go after him full force. If it would have been Rick Santorum, he would have portrayed Santorum as a conservative caveman who wants to ban birth control. Sure. And if it's going to be Romney, which it apparently is, look out, this is going to be a class warfare campaign, unlike any that you've ever seen. Really? Huh. Well, one thing that I thought was interesting also in the article, a little side part, is, actually to me, the most shocking, that the... Basically, that he got involved with... His firm was working with, like, front groups, and basically was messing with the electricity rates in Illinois. The ComEd, the big electricity company, they wanted to raise their prices in Illinois without looking like the bad guy to people. Yeah, that's right. So, I don't know if you can explain that easily to people, what Axelrod did, because to me, it's just like, wow. You know, here he and his ilk are claiming they're on the side of the people. They're on the side, because only a liberal could be on the side of the people. And then what they did was downright, shockingly scummy, I think, about whether to do with electricity rates that sucked it to everybody, made them suffer more higher prices. Yeah, well, he has this group called ASK Strategies. Uh-huh. And the A is for Axelrod, the S and the K are for two of his partners. And what they do there, the focus of ASK, is not so much political candidates, but organizations and corporate clients. And they master the use of front groups. And that's very ironic, because Axelrod's mentors, as communists, master the use of front groups. Yeah. They would take a group and call it Committed Liberals for the American Way, right? Committed Liberals for Peace. And in fact, it would be totally staffed by literal members of Communist Party USA. But what they did, it's a notorious example, they took the company ComEd, and, you know, ComEd sought ASK's advice, ASK advised ComEd, and ComEd was about electricity in Illinois. They wanted to charge higher electricity prices to people in the state of Illinois. So what's the best way to do that? Well, ASK advised ComEd to form a group called CORE, and CORE was Consumers Organized for Reliable Electricity, which in turn described itself as, quote, a coalition of individuals, businesses, and organizations, unquote. And this group, CORE, then ran ads, which was written by ASK, direly warning about blackouts throughout the entire state of Illinois if electricity rates weren't high. And in fact, as Bloomberg News caught this, they reported this, they broke the story. ComEd later acknowledged that ComEd itself had bankrolled this entire $15 million PR effort. Yeah, and then later on, when it was time for Barack Obama to run for president, ComEd, the employees of ComEd and his parent Exelon, contributed $181,711 to his presidential bid, more than workers at any other company in the state. So he pulls this crap and then turns around and milks the employees for contributions to his candidate du jour. Well, so then another thing, okay, so he gets involved with Barack, meets him over the years at all these different things where Barack is the golden boy, and then suddenly, I've always been fascinated with the 2002 Barack Obama speech. He was the first guy to buzz. 2004 is when we put him on the map, where people are like, oh, this guy's a genius. Look out for him in 2008 at the convention. But in 2002, I always said, you know, he got a lot of credit for taking an anti-war stand on Iraq before it happened. But at the same time, it was in such a small venue that I didn't really think it was that ballsy a move at all. But if you can comment on that speech and its ramifications for the Axelrod-Obama relationship. And by the way, I've got to be off in two minutes. Oh, shoot. Okay, okay, got it. Yeah, well, it was October 2002. Obama spoke at Federal Plaza in Chicago. And the target here was George Bush and his policy in Iraq. And they put together a group called Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq. And this was made up of old SDS types, old Vietnam war protesters. And Obama spoke there. And Obama consulted Axelrod beforehand on how to talk, what to say. And Axelrod shrewdly advised him, you know, give the speech, appeal to the liberal Chicago base, but be careful not to alienate moderates and a wider base of voters. And so Obama did that. And, you know, there's a line in there where he warned about this, an occupation of undetermined length with undetermined costs and undetermined consequences. Which is a good line. And to some degree happened. And, you know, liberals have sort of grabbed onto that line and, you know, showed that as an example of Obama's sort of early wisdom on foreign policy. Well, I think that if I can get away with one more question within a second, but I just want to say on that, the reason why I didn't think it took much guts for him to do that was that at the time he was just a state senator. He had no vote on the war. He had no say in anything that was going to be happening. So it's like, ooh, that's really gutsy to come out and be against something that you're not even going to be voting on anyway. You know, but... It's part of a larger Senate bid and run for national office. Yeah, absolutely. Sure. But I guess if I may, the last thing I want to ask is, you're talking about how Axelrod helped create the Obama team and message of the hope and change and all that stuff, you know, and that they basically intentionally kept it vague and just, you know, with these positive platitudes that didn't really say anything. And Obama was even chewed out by Tom Daschle, Senate Majority Leader, during his incredibly brief time in the Senate. He voted over 100 times or maybe 150 times present, meaning he didn't even have the guts to take a stand on a zillion different issues. And he said to Daschle, I don't want to have a paper trail for when I run for higher office. And Daschle was just like taking a back of this guy's arrogance for saying something like that that early. So I guess this is the last going out of it. I guess this is the last going out thing, and then people can find the article at thespectator.org. What do you have to say about that whole keep things vague and shiny happy, don't look at the message behind the man kind of thing? Yeah, I mean, they do some of that. I mean, they like to blur the distinctions on things that could really hurt Obama and show him to be ideologically to the far left. But at the same time, any time you say something like that, you see this stuff like Republican war on women, the Catholic Church wanting to, as the bad guy in this contraception mandate, when it's really Obama and his mandate that's forcing the Catholic Church to react, kind of attacking the Supreme Court. I see all of this as sort of classic Saul Alinsky, Axelrod, pick your enemy, define it, demonize it, focus on it. And that's when you see this. Yeah. That's when you really see Obama's true colors. And that's where he's going after that hard liberal base. And so I see the markings of Axelrod in any of those campaign slogans, mantras, tactics. Okay. All right. Well, thanks. And we appreciate your time. And hopefully we'll talk to you about when the book comes out about Frank Marshall Davis. I think that should be some entertaining reading there, man. That guy's a piece of work. And so— Glad to be happy, Carl. Pardon me? Okay, great. I'd be happy to do that. Absolutely. Well, thanks a lot. And thanks for listening, folks. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye.