Susana Martinez (Steve Terrell)

America is extremely well served by conservative-minded magazines, which are as eclectic as they are widely read. There's the waspish and irreverent Weekly Standard, the delightfully counter-counter-cultural New Criterion, the engaging and elegant Claremont Review of Books, the witty but hard-hitting Commentary, and there's the National Review, founded by William F. Buckley and now edited by Rich Lowry, which does excellent work serving as the conscience of the Republican Party and the unremitting scold of the Democrats. National Review recently  had a scoop far more impressive than anything the New York Times has revealed about News Corporation — and about a much more important issue — but which so far has not received a fraction of the coverage from America's liberal news media. 

Writing in National Review Online on  June 7, Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, revealed that he had found indisputable evidence that as late as in January 1996 Barack Obama formally joined the radical, leftist New Party, and that in the 2008 election the then Democratic candidate "deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party". Kurtz argues convincingly how Mitt Romney is therefore right to argue that Obama would ultimately love to ditch American capitalism   in favour of a European-style social democracy, or even something farther to the left than that.

When the accusation that Obama had been a member of the New Party — the political arm of the radical Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now (Acorn) — was made during the 2008 presidential election, the Obama campaign went on the record to denounce it as "a crackpot smear", stating categorically: "Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party." Yet now Kurtz has discovered brand new evidence at the Wisconsin Historical Society that shows that the Obama campaign lied. The minutes of the Illinois branch of Acorn for its meeting on January 11, 1996 categorically state that "Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He signed the New Party ‘Candidate Contract' and requested an endorsement from the New Party. He also joined the New Party."

This "contract" contained the promise to associate himself publicly with the New Party while in office, and from early 1997 the membership lists of the Chicago chapter of the New Party have Barack Obama down as a member, with January 11, 1996 as the date he joined. Yet in 2008, the Obama campaign stated that although the New Party did support him for state senator in the 1996 election, he never joined it "and never solicited the endorsement". These latest revelations completely explode that on-the-record statement.

Kurtz states how the New Party — which dissolved itself in the late 1990s after much factional feuding — "disdained mainstream Democrats, considering them tools of business, and promised instead to create a partnership between elected officials and local community organisations, with the aim of socialising America to an unprecedented degree". The party's published statement of principles called for "a peaceful revolution" in order to redistribute wealth in America to a degree that Kurtz reports was "substantially to the left of the Democratic Party".