The company Obama has kept

Rod Dreher: The company Obama has kept
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, May 11, 2008

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher @dallasnews.com.

Forty years ago this month, Paris exploded in left-wing student riots that led to a nationwide general strike. The revolutionary fervor of France's soixante-huitards ('68ers) spread widely, including to American campuses. If you're wondering when the Good '60s of peace, love and civil rights gave way to the Bad '60s of anarchy and violence, May 1968 is as good a historical pivot point as any.John McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton at the time. Barack Obama was 6 years old. Yet the restless spirit of '68 haunts this year's presidential campaign, especially the White House bid of Mr. Obama, who, having pretty much missed the '60s – "Civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by," he told The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan last year – was supposed to take us beyond those divisive traumas.

It's not working out that way. His former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is an unreconstructed '60s radical, a fire-breathing disciple of James Cone's period-piece black liberation theology. Mr. Obama wrote in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, about his attraction to the leftist pastor's church as a vehicle for social change. If black nationalism would uplift the race, he wrote, "then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence."

That's a remarkable admission of a racialized "ends justify the means" morality. It helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to stick with a crackpot like Dr. Wright. It also might explain why an up-and-coming Barack Obama found nothing particularly wrong with rubbing political elbows with Bill Ayers, the Chicago university professor and onetime fugitive member of the revolutionary, communist Weather Underground.

Mr. Ayers, an unrepentant '60s domestic terrorist, is an academician in good standing and an active member of Chicago's progressive community. It is unremarkable that a rising star in Chicago Democratic politics would collaborate with Mr. Ayers, which tells us something about the soixante-huitard generation.

They may have failed at revolution, but they succeeded in changing the culture. (A famous soixante-huitard slogan: "Live without limits, and enjoy without restraint.") They did so in large part by, to use the Marxist Antonio Gramsci's phrase, "marching through the institutions." Pulpits. Professorships. Publishing and media. And in some cases, politics.

It's not "guilt by association" to inquire to what extent Mr. Obama – whose moral and political conscience was shaped by his education at elite universities, his street activism and his tutelage at Dr. Wright's knee – shares the views and assumptions of the soixante-huitards. In terms of style, he's plainly not one of them. But his deeply liberal voting record marks him as at least a fellow traveler. Besides, as Rolling Stone magazine put it last year in a sympathetic profile, Mr. Obama's is "as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from."

This may be of no matter to the left, but Mr. Obama is not running for mayor of Berkeley, president of Harvard or prime minister of The New York Times.

But if the '60s radicals went too far, they had ample cause to protest – especially against the war in Vietnam, which the U.S. government had been lying about and would continue to lie about. The radicals weren't all wrong about American power. Know why the terrorist team of Ayers & Dohrn never went to jail? The FBI broke so many laws trying to catch them that putting them on trial would have been futile.

"By any means necessary" was not just an ethic of the far left (ask Ollie North). Nor is it a thing of the past, as the Bush administration and its allies have so amply demonstrated in relentless pursuit of the president's prerogatives. If it's fair to judge Mr. Obama by the ideological company he keeps, Mr. McCain deserves the same. Meaning well is not exculpatory.

That said, Mr. Obama's radical baggage is more politically damaging because it deflates the hope many voters invested in him. He was once the man to deliver American politics from the storm and stress of the '60s generation – "Goodbye to all that," as The Atlantic headlined Mr. Sullivan's much-read pre-primary encomium to Mr. Obama's transformational potential.

Not yet, alas. Against his own conscience, the ambitious but insecure young Mr. Obama compromised with the malevolent spirit of '68 for the sake of worldly gain. For the consequences are not proving to be as little as he expected.

Said the Devil to Faust: "In the end, you are exactly – what you are." Yes.