Repost: Obama’s ultra-leftist backers (Updated 2x)

The following article was originally posted April 28, 2008.

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In July 1996, the New York Times reported that Marilyn Katz, a former aide to Mayor Harold Washington and now a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)’s bid for the presidential nomination, “oversaw security for Students for a Democratic Society, a radical group at the eye of the Chicago protests” during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. “She was there.”

Katz is a loyal foot soldier in a notable effort by the city and the Democratic National Committee to counterspin 1968 so vigorously that it almost becomes a source of civic pride, the gist apparently being: Then we gave you broken heads; now we bring the Bulls and Jim Belushi. Chicago ‘96, the host committee, has assembled a cadre of ex-radicals like Katz who are eager to share good news. Mayor Daley has held a huggy “reconciliation” with the former Chicago Seven member Tom Hayden. Even the police are taking sensitivity classes. What about those grainy shots of students getting clubbed in Lincoln Park? Consider ‘em spun. “It’s time to replace that footage,” says Julie Thompson, a spokeswoman for Chicago ‘96. “Our story is now.”

Fast forward to October 2, 2002, when Barack Obama delivered his then little-noticed but now-famous speech at a Chicago antiwar rally. On the event’s fifth anniversary, activist Marilyn Katz, one of the rally’s organizers, and now a member of Sen. Obama’s national finance committee, posted the following on the blog of Chicagoans Against the War & Injustice (CAWI), which she had “put together”, relying upon “some of her old contacts she met organizing anti-war demonstrations for Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s.”

The rally in Chicago on October 2nd, 2002 was not organized by a politician or a recognized political force. Quite the contrary. It was organized by a loose group of friends—veterans of the women’s movement, the student movement, the civil rights movement, who alarmed by the prospect of what they considered an unwise and unfounded march to war and aware, yet seeing no one—from politicians to pundits to the press daring to speak out against a seemingly all-powerful republican juggernaut,—and fearing that if they did not speak out the war, the very room for disagreement with the White House on any issue would vanish, took it upon themselves to reclaim the public space for dissent.

Meeting in a living room in Chicago just ten days earlier, we chose to act agreeing that on October 2nd, 2002, we would assemble in Chicago’s Federal Plaza to stand against the war. With a gut feeling that other Americans also thought the invasion of Iraq was foolhardy, if not immoral and absurd, but with no assurance than anyone would come to a demonstration we agreed that “If we were five, we would be five.” “If we were without any elected officials, we would be an involved citizenry. But we would take a stand.”

But we were not alone. In fact nearly 3,000 people assembled in Federal Plaza on that day responding to the flurry of emails (a new organizing technology for us) that seemingly liberated people from their sense of isolation and offered them the opportunity of collective action – of community. Black, Latino, White, veterans of the peace and women’s movements, the 60s, high school and college youth, community activist—a mosaic of the City. Long time leaders like Jesse Jackson, Juan Andrade and Julie Hamos and a new voice…. not yet known to the crowd, to the media or to the nation…. the voice of State Senator Barack Obama.”

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