Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 31

Alexander Cockburn: The Last Stalinist, an Enemy of Freedom, and a low-level Anti-Semite. May He Not Rest in Peace

You know that when hosannas of praise rise up for a journalist who died, simply described in the New York Times obituary as a “left-wing writer,” that a great deal remains unsaid. The writer who passed away a few days ago is Alexander Cockburn, and the piece by Colin Moynihan says that he became known as an “unapologetic leftist, condemning what he saw as the outrages of the right but also castigating the American liberal establishment when he thought it as being timid.” He is described by a former colleague at the Village Voice as having “a remarkable mind.”

One could say his mind was remarkable, if one chooses to use that word to describe someone who once wrote that the Soviet Union in Leonid Brezhnev’s day was “the golden age of the Soviet working class,” and who regularly reprinted Soviet and Cuban disinformation from their intelligence agencies as unadulterated truths.

In many ways, Alex Cockburn was the true successor of Walter Duranty, a man who wrote to serve the enemies of the United States and to glorify what he saw as the great achievements of the Bolsheviks and their successors.

So let us turn now to what others have said about him. The Washington Post obituary writer refers to him as “an avowed liberal — even a radical,” which is like saying Pat Buchanan is just another conservative, even one possibly on the far Right. Ralph Nader, we learn, called Cockburn a man of the Left “who defined the frontiers of candid progressive ideas.” What one can learn is that Cockburn could be judged by the views of his admirers.

One of them is Justin Raimondo, the proprietor of Antiwar.com, the website that tried its best to forge a Red-Brown alliance of the Right and the far Left in the cause of opposition to “American imperialism and interventionism.” He reminds us, because he was Cockburn’s comrade in opposition to the NATO war against the Milosevic regime during the Clinton presidency, during which Cockburn shared the platform at rallies with Pat Buchanan. Raimondo thinks Cockburn was not of the Left, but was a populist anarcho-syndicalist, whatever that may be, and later, he thinks that Cockburn was having a “paleoconservative moment,” since he was “a paleo-radical who had had survived long enough to be considered a reactionary.”

Raimondo and his friends on the paleocon Right of course would be happy to have Cockburn as an ally, but to exonerate Cockburn of Stalinism simply ignores all the evidence of the many times Cockburn — like his father Claud, who served the NKVD during the Spanish Civil War as Stalin’s favorite toady journalist in Spain – lied on behalf on totalitarians.

What’s with Those ‘Socialist Summer Camps’ Anyway? Here’s the Truth

You all recall the following quote from Alvy Singer, Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall:

You, you, you’re like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y’know, strike-oriented kind of, Red Diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.

Allen’s co-writer Marshall Brickman once quipped that these camps were places in which you scored points if your father was going to jail for violating the Smith Act.

Woody’s character was talking to his girlfriend, whom he easily identified as a bona fide Red Diaper baby, and who went to “socialist summer camps.” So what were these camps all about, anyway?

The issue has gone viral since The Daily Caller ran a story yesterday about President Obama’s nominee for head of The Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erica Groshen, who evidently sent her own children to  Camp Kinderland sometime in the 1990s.

Sometimes some on the American Right like to make a fool of themselves, and this is one of those times. Her husband made the mistake in May 2011 of giving the gigantic sum of $20 to the Working People’s Party, an electoral spinoff of ACORN and company. But as for Ms. Groshen, as another story reveals, she has the backing of Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has stated for the record: “[Groshen is] a very, very good economist and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her,” and adding “no-one could be more Republican than I am.”

She also said that no BLS commissioner could by herself skew the agency’s research or products. The BLS is “a vast bureaucracy with one person at the helm. … It’s just very difficult to change that vast group of technocrats,” she said.

If Ms. Groshen is good enough for Furchtgott-Roth, she’s good enough for me. Sure, Ms. Groshen is undoubtedly a leftist of some sort, but whom do you expect Obama would appoint to the BLS post, Mel Leffler? Any president is entitled to appoint someone he wants, and she has the solid credentials for what is essentially a bureaucratic management position.

But because Americans for Limited Government wants her investigated because she sent her own kids to Commie camp, the camp’s prettifiers have gone all out making jokes about how nutty the right is to think anything but camping went on there.

Is Obama a Socialist? An Answer to Milos Forman

Just when I thought I had made a convincing argument that Obama was a politician whose outlook is akin to that of Europe’s left-wing social democrats and that the modern Democratic Party is the equivalent of Europe’s social-democratic parties, along comes director Milos Forman to argue the opposite in the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

Forman, most well-known in this country as the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, is a Czech émigré who lived in Czechoslovakia from 1932 until 1968, thereby gaining first-hand experience of both Nazi and communist totalitarianism’s opposition to freedom. He presents vivid anecdotes of what it was like to experience the jackboot of the secret police in his native land. He knows first-hand its horrors. Even TV interviews, he learned, had to be scripted, when one was interviewing a leader of the Communist Party or the state.

No one can gainsay Forman’s knowledge of totalitarian regimes. He speaks the truth. But then he performs an agile sleight of hand that goes like this: Totalitarianism of the communist fashion worked in a certain way. That was socialism. What took place in communist Czechoslovakia does not occur in the U.S. Our president is not the equivalent of any of the Czech communists he knew so well. Therefore, Obama is not a socialist.

Forman accuses conservatives — he names Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh — of calling Obama a socialist. He writes:

They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism.

In making that argument, Forman reveals his own confusion, and in effect says that to say Obama is a socialist is to say he is a Marxist-Leninist totalitarian. Of course Obama is NOT a communist. He is an elected leader of a politically democratic republic. He is constrained in policies he would like to implement by a Congress and a vigorous Republican opposition. Nevertheless, a strong case has been made — here at PJM and in other conservative journals of opinion and in various serious books — that Barack Obama favors and pursues policies that are indeed the equivalent of redistributionist socialist measures favored today, for example, by François Hollande and his new government in France.

What ‘Socialist’ Policies Will Do To America if Barack Obama has a Second Term

Writing in the New York Times last Sunday, the paper’s Paris bureau chief Steven Erlanger asked the question: “What’s a Socialist?” The question was undoubtedly raised because of the recent electoral victory in France of Francois Hollande, the country’s first socialist chief since 1988. His party also garnered a “whopping majority in Parliament.” Erlanger continued: “What does it mean to be a Socialist these days, anyway?”

A good question indeed, since so many conservatives have tried to make a case that Barack Obama is a socialist. Erlanger does not write anything to directly answer that question, but cites a conversation he had with the most well-known Parisian intellectual, writer Bernard-Henri Levy, whom he quotes as saying the following:

‘There are no more socialists — if they were honest they would change the name of the party,” he told me.  Socialism “evokes the nightmare of the Soviet Union, whose leaders named themselves socialists.” Today, he maintains, European socialists are essentially like American Democrats — there has been no ideological left in France that matters since the effective demise of the Communist Party, which was “the true ‘exception francaise.’” (emphasis added)

Levy, in making that comparison, has let the cat out of the bag. It may not call itself socialist, but the type of policies the Democratic Party advocates are in effect the same kind of statist positions favored by the socialist left in France.

Like Europe’s socialists, the American left-wing Democrats adopt the clarion call of “social justice,” which means the creation of redistributionist policies that “tax the rich” as the would-be answer to funding an ever-growing entitlement state.

Joschka Fischer, who moved from the far left in Germany to the reformist left-wing Green Party, calls the European model of socialism “a combination of democracy, rule of law, and the welfare state,” and he provides the sad example of the deeply flawed and sinking British National Health Service as an example of what he thinks should be adopted as a model elsewhere.

One could say, as my friend, historian Martin J. Sklar, has argued — especially in his book The United States as a Developing Country — that the United States has long been a country based on “The Mix,” in which our system combines elements of both capitalism and socialism. Sklar explains it this way:

The developmental equivalent … in the United States … consisted of an outlook that we may call The Mix — that is, the mix of the public and private sectors as seats of authority and initiative in shaping, planning, regulating, and containing development, or to put it in baldly ideological terms, the mix of socialism and capitalism.

Mitt Romney’s Big Problem — and Hence Ours

Mitt Romney has a big problem, and it is one that he shares with many conservatives and Republicans who seem to believe that given the horrendous nature of Obama’s policies, he has to do very little to win. Unfortunately, a Romney victory in November is anything but a sure thing.

The polls right now show a very close race. And as most observers have noted, the outcome will be decided by a few voters in the swing states that Romney must conquer if he is to overtake the president. The latest Real Clear Politics compendium of all the polls shows Obama with a 3.5% lead in the general election,  47.6% for Obama compared to 44.1% for Romney.

When you break the polls down to look at the data in the critical swing states and see which candidate has more of the crucial Electoral College votes — the only thing that really count — the RCP data give Obama at present 221 and Romney only 181, with 131 a toss-up. So if the election were held today, there is more chance that Obama would get the necessary 270 electoral college votes. The swing states that are presently in neither man’s column include Michigan, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. And Pennsylvania, that many thought would possibly now be a sure bet for Romney, is ranked as leaning to Obama.

Yes, Romney could, as undoubtedly his strategists are hoping, win some of those states with large enough Electoral College votes to come through at the end. Certainly Karl Rove, when he comments on Fox News and interprets Romney’s 3-2-1 strategy, is optimistic — and provides his spin on the polling data to show why he thinks Romney will win. So if you want to be an optimist and take Rove’s point of view, be my guest. But even if Rove is right — and I certainly hope that he is — I don’t think the outcome he foresees is certain unless there is a groundswell of enthusiasm for Romney.

On this score, my fear is that Romney is being too cautious. When it is time for him to show some independence, be specific on policy, and not just blast Obama, he is essentially weak. First, let’s take up foreign policy. In a major report, Eli Lake writes what is a very disparaging piece of journalism for those of us who hope Romney will show he can be a leader. We all know that Barack Obama has had an abysmal record in foreign policy, from the “Reset” with Russia, to the Middle East, and now, in particular, with the crisis in Syria. What does Romney propose to do if he were in the White House instead of Obama?

What Lake shows is that Romney prefers to ignore the issues and hammer relentlessly on one thing alone — the economy. He has no senior policy staffer who coordinates positions and talks regularly with the candidate, and only engages in rather meaningless conference calls. We all remember that Marco Rubio gave a brilliant foreign policy speech a few weeks ago at AEI, but Romney evidently cancelled a major foreign policy speech he was originally going to give in May or June. Most disconcerting is the report that Alex Wong, described by Lake as his main foreign and legal policy advisor, is  “a 32-year-old Harvard Law School graduate, [who] has no practical foreign-policy experience beyond a 2005 summer internship at the U.S. Mission to the U.N.”

In contrast, during the 2008 campaign, John McCain — although he is on top of the issues on foreign policy all on his own — “had Randy Scheunemann, a former national security adviser to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, performing this job during the 2008 race.”

On domestic policy, the situation is not much better. Thomas B. Edsall, one of the shrewdest political commentators,  accuses Romney of “playing it dangerously safe.” In previous campaigns, he writes, both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took positions that challenged their own sides, thereby showing independents that they were capable of taking a stand opposite to their own base when they believed it was wrong. He quotes Bush as denouncing House Republicans in 1999 for wanting to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit and accusing them of trying “to balance their budget on the backs of the poor.” And Clinton worked with Republicans to dismantle the welfare system, and at a major campaign stop standing next to Jesse Jackson, attacked the rapper and activist Sister Souljah for her out-and-out racism.

Politics- and not SCOTUS- will Determine Whether Obama Care Is Defeated. It’s up to Us!

Regardless of one’s view of the arguments made by Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority decision on Obama Care, and we have seen that conservative and libertarian writers and legal analysts are already split on their verdict on Roberts’ logic, on one matter we can agree. Speaking for the majority of the Court, Roberts stressed that the decision was not meant as either an endorsement of or comment on the nature of the policy and the arguments for universal health care made by the Obama Administration.

In effect, John Roberts was saying that acceptance of or rejection of Obama Care is to be left to politics and to the citizens. Its implementation and passage should not be the duty of the Supreme Court to decide. The Court interprets the law; the citizens through their representatives in the Senate and the House make the law. He has, in effect, thrown the ball back into our court.

The first impressions of the pundits were that the ruling was a victory for Barack Obama. Had the Court ruled the Act unconstitutional in its entirety, it would have been construed as a complete failure for Barack Obama, since it would have ruled against his signal piece of legislation on which he staked the reputation of his presidency. Hence the applause and congratulations heard in the ranks of the liberals and the Left. The President, they said, has been vindicated. The country will now move on to implement universal health care that will provide free and unlimited health coverage to all citizens, regardless of their income. For those who favor social-democracy or an increased welfare state that provides cradle to grave coverage for all needs, its Constitutionality was indeed seen as a major victory.

As time passes, however, and the realization of what Obama Care will cost and what it will do to the income, standard of living and actual ability to access health care when needed becomes clearer, its popularity will quickly begin to decline. Already, having justified its constitutionality by defining the Act as a tax, the voters will quickly learn that to finance the Affordable Care Act, it means a vast increase in taxes for the middle-class—including taxes for those that the President claimed would never be subject to increased taxes.

It will also become quite clear that what the Act does is introduce a new two-tier health system in our country—those who can afford it will gain access to doctors by paying into concierge service systems of doctors who opt out of Medicare and all health insurance, while those who cannot afford it will be subject to doctors in the system who are overworked and underpaid, and to government boards that dictate which health procedures they can have and which they cannot have. And, those who believe the poor will now get coverage since everyone is in the system, will also find out- as Darshak Sangavi argued in Slate, that over half the uninsured will still not get any health insurance coverage.

The most important point is that the latest polls- taken after the SCOTUS ruling- reveal that the public is even more against Obama Care than before it was deemed constitutional. The Newsweek-Daily Beast poll, conducted by Democratic Party stalwart Doug Schoen- no opponent of the Act- reveal that voters dislike Obama Care by a margin of 50-45! Nick Summers summed up the poll this way:

Overall, 50 percent of those polled said they disapprove of the court’s 5–4 decision, while 45 percent said they support it. Consistently, a majority of voters said that they oppose the individual mandate (53 percent); believe taxes will increase (52 percent); believe their personal health-care costs will increase (56 percent); and disapprove of Obama’s handling of health care in general (58 percent). Only 24 percent of those polled said that they believe the ruling will make the country better off.

The same poll also indicated that Obama maintains only a slim margin over Romney, and that 21 per cent of voters are open to changing their minds. That result in particular, when correlated with the poll’s finding about the electorate’s view of Obama Care, spells the kind of news that will give most Democrats serious pause for thought. And 59 per cent still believe that our country is heading in the wrong direction! Why, if this is the case, would these voters cast their ballot on Election Day once again for Barack Obama?

The Rasmussen poll, taken a few days before the SCOTUS ruling, produced similar results. Scott Rasmussen’s poll shows that 54 per cent of the public still want Obama Care repealed—the same percentage that objected to the Act after it passed in Congress. The poll reports: “Most voters have consistently expressed the view that the law will hurt the quality of care, drive up costs and increase the federal deficit. They also don’t like the government ordering people to buy health insurance and don’t think the Constitution permits that anyway.” This finding is similar, as we can see, to the attitudes stated to Schoen’s recipients of the poll questions. Rasmussen said, after assessing the numbers, that the “health care law is doomed regardless of what the court decides.”

So, while President Obama won a temporary victory, in the long run, he may well indeed have not only lost the war- but a second term as well. The vast sums of money that poured into the Romney campaign after the Court’s decision, and the growing anger of the electorate that turned against the Obama health care program from the start, is a good indication that an Obama second term is no longer a sure thing. No wonder that Obama wants the country to move on, and forget as quickly as possible about health care as an issue.

 

In New York City, the U.F.T. Betrays Al Shanker’s Legacy

Two days from now a primary election to pick the Democratic Party candidate for Congress in the 8th Brooklyn-Queens Congressional District in New York City will take place. The two men contending for the spot are New York City Councilman Charles Barron and New York State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries.

Both men are African-American, but their differences are profound. Jeffries is a moderate centrist who has gone against the grain of his own party by supporting school vouchers and educational reform. In contrast, Barron is a an ultra-leftist who chose opposition to Israel as the major focus of his candidacy and who is in no uncertain terms a black racist.

Last week the former KKK leader David Duke gave Barron his endorsement:

The possible election of [Barron], a dedicated anti-Zionist to the U.S. Congress, has thrown the Zionist-influenced media and the Zio-political establishment in a tizzy.

Duke acknowledged that he doesn’t agree with Barron on everything but stressed that “I certainly agree with Barron that Israel is the worst rogue terrorist state on Earth.”

Among Barron’s most notable statements are his praise of the late Moammar Qadaffi as a hero, inviting the Zimbabwean killer and dictator Robert Mugabe to City Hall in New York, and saying at a rally on behalf of reparations for slavery,

I want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this. It’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.

As for Israel, Barron has said that “the biggest terrorist in the world is the government of Israel.” In the New York City Council, he protested about sitting near a statue of Thomas Jefferson, who he said was “a slaveholder, a hypocrite and a racist.”

The opponents of Barron read like a Who’s Who of New York’s Democratic Party establishment. They include Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Governor Andrew Cuomo, Rep. Jerry Nadler, and others. These Democrats see a Barron victory as an embarrassment to their party and city, undermining the clout of their congressional delegation. They are terrified about the possibility that Barron will win the primary, and hence win a seat in Congress in a district that always votes Democratic.

The problem, however, is that New York City’s major trade unions, led by AFSCME, have endorsed Barron and are actively supporting him. DC-37 represents 25,000 Department of Education employees and backs Barron because of his opposition to charter schools, which the union opposes. Its executive director, the leftist unionist Lillian Roberts, stated that “city workers and their unions have had to fight major battles to protect rights that we fought hard to win as well as to preserve the vital safety-net services we provide to an ever-growing clientele,” which is clearly enough for her to support Barron despite his racism and extremism.

Obama’s Life and the Truth: David Maraniss Almost Regrets Telling the Real Story

Poor David Maraniss. The best-selling biographer of the just published Barack Obama: The Story is not only crying all the way to the bank, but also shedding crocodile tears that his new biography is giving the Right ammunition against the president. Yesterday, Maraniss told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien the following on Starting Point:

I’m not writing it as a fact-checker. I’m writing it as an historian. Other people for ideological reasons are pouncing on that part of what my book is, but in fact I’m trying to tell the truth.

A memoir is far different from rigorous factual biography. It’s not as though I’m trying to say, aha, I got you, at each point, I’m just trying to present the way I really found it, which in many cases was different from what he presented.

Let me pause to parse the above paragraph from the distinguished journalist and historian. Here is my translation of what Maraniss is actually saying:

My book has been taken up by Obama’s enemies just because I told the truth. Give the president a break. He was writing a memoir, and everyone knows a memoir is different from the truth, since Obama is the first post-modern president. His memoir was his truth — even though it wasn’t true, it was to him. I didn’t mean to show he lied — pardon me — unintentionally fabricated his own story. I only sought to show the truth was different than he said it was.

Get it now? If you don’t, Maraniss also said on the program that Obama sought to write it through the “prism of race.” He went on to note that the “right-wing” is “cherry-picking” negative things in the book, which “is almost why I didn’t want to write it.” As he went on, he got deeper into the problem:

He wrote it when he wasn’t running for president, and had no thought that people like me would come along and tell the real story.

So what is the real story? Fortunately, Buzzfeed has given us a good summary. The Maraniss bio, Ben Smith tells us, “is the first sustained challenge to Obama’s control over his own story, a firm and occasionally brutal debunking of Obama’s bestselling 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father.” And this is important because I and so many others can tell you about how many people voted for and supported Obama for president precisely because of what he related in his own memoir.

June 19th, 1953: Another Anniversary of the Execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Passes

Another year and June 19th has rolled around, marking the 59th anniversary of the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Decades ago, one could count on the legions of the American Left to come out for an annual event commemorating their execution, and renewing their pledges to prove the spy couple’s innocence. Undoubtedly, their two sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, will continue to wage their campaign depicting their parents’ spy activities as the work of well-meaning radicals who only wanted peace, and to deny that their parents had anything to do with atomic espionage.  As their younger son Robert told The New York Times, “Ethel was not a spy and Julius was ignorant of the atomic bomb project.” While acknowledging that he now believes his father was “not so innocent,” he argues that spying for the Soviets was “not such a bad thing,” and that the real condemnation should be of the United States government, which fabricated evidence, suborned perjury, manipulated the jury, and wrongfully executed two essentially innocent victims.

Now, two articles appear on the anniversary of their execution. The first is an eloquent, moving and powerful article originally appearing one year ago, and featured again today at Jewish Ideas Daily.  Written by the scholar and journalist Alex Joffe, the piece’s discussion of “Jews, Communism and Espionage” is must reading for anyone who wants to comprehend the significance of the recurring denial about the guilt of the Rosenbergs. Joffe writes:

Supporters of the Rosenbergs had always admitted their membership in the Communist party — touting this, however, as evidence not of their guilt but of their virtue: at a time when the “capitalist” nations had been doing nothing to oppose Hitler, the Rosenbergs were staunch anti-fascists as well as upholders of the higher ideals of equality and social justice embodied in the Communist revolution and the Soviet experiment. When pressed, supporters would concede that some, like Greenglass, may have been guilty of espionage, but not Julius and Ethel. Now, this pillar of the argument having been knocked out from under them, they have fallen back on the insistence that what the Rosenbergs did was good, just, and necessary, performed by two citizens of the world in support of a wartime ally. The real villain of the piece was not the Rosenbergs; it was the U.S. government.

Joffe’s remarks, as I have noted, are confirmed by the explanations regularly offered by the Meeropols. He acknowledges, as I have from the beginning of my work on this case, the misdeeds of the U.S. government and its prosecutorial counsels. But as Joffe writes,

to transform the fact of American misconduct into the focal point of the entire narrative is to engage in the same sort of subterfuge that the Rosenbergs’ defenders perfected in the 1950s with such striking success among liberals and intellectuals, turning on its head the widespread and well-founded alarm over internal subversion and discrediting the cause of anti-Communism itself.

No matter, the case will continue forever to be a “fetish of the American Left,” as Joffe so well puts it, “Exhibit A in its indictment of American evil.” And it is no accident — as the comrades always used to say — that the case is consistently invoked as an example to reveal that the same hysteria exists in our own day, and hence one should dismiss those who have any concern with domestic terrorism and Islamist extremism as current day practitioners of what used to be called “Cold War hysteria.”

And here is Joffe’s stunning conclusion to his article:

As compared with the phenomenon of Nazism, still vividly present in modern consciousness, the vast, blood-soaked, and no less openly anti-Semitic tyranny that was Soviet Communism has been largely erased from mind. When it comes to individuals like the Rosenbergs, whose service to that tyranny involved high crimes against their fellow American citizens, technical guilt may now be grudgingly acknowledged but, for the most part, moral guilt is not. To the contrary, the alleged nobility of their motives is held to trump the all too evident evil of their actions. To the extent that American Jews sympathize with such perversions of morality, they owe themselves, and their fellow Americans, a reckoning.

The second article, just made available on the internet, is one that I have written for World Affairs Quarterly, “A Tale of Two Trials:Soviet Propaganda at Home and Abroad.”  It is based on a talk I presented a year ago at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes” in Prague, the Czech Republic. I discuss the often ignored differences between a real show trial –  such as that staged by the Stalinist regime in Prague that occurred the same time as the Rosenberg trial — and the Rosenberg case in the United States.

Dinner with the Obamas at the Parker-Broderick Home

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our fund-raiser in chief, President Barack Obama, outdid himself on Thursday night. As we all learned from the much-derided Anna Wintour video, we were all invited to party with the president at her “good friend” Sarah Jessica Parker’s home in Manhattan, to the tune of $40,000 per person. This is the same Vogue editor who once chose to feature Assad of Syria’s wife as a feature story in her magazine — now removed from the website – and who recently announced her new designer canine products under the slogan “Bark For Obama.”

The dinner was followed by a concert from Mariah Carey at the Plaza Hotel for the honored guests. The first couple raked in a cool $4.5 million in one evening. But as reporter Peter Grier reported for DC Decoder, Mitt Romney without any celebrities or any glitz brought in $3.5 million that same night in Chicago, where he presented a speech on the state of the economy.

Back at the Parker-Matthew Broderick home, a guest might have spotted George Clooney, Eddie Murphy and Tom Hanks, but evidently there were many rich folk whom the average celebrity hound in attendance would find unrecognizable. For Parker, the real star was Michelle Obama, who she introduced first by saying: “It is a great, a rare, a very special and I’m assuming a singular treat to welcome you into our home – our radiant, our extraordinary first lady.” After that, she turned to Michelle’s husband, and referred to him as the “beloved current and future president of the United States.”

The event was in honor of the same president who has the nerve to tell the nation that his campaign is all about the suffering of the middle class: “still a lot of people hurting out there,” he recently said. Obama was guest of honor, as Grier wrote, “in front of a group of folks who mingle with the middle class only when it’s serving them dinner,” or perhaps when they reluctantly are signing an autograph. Grier noted a poster displayed at an entertainment website stating “While rubbing elbows with New York’s rich and famous Obama paused to remember the Americans suffering under his economy, how sweet.”