Finally! Does this explain infamous meeting in Bill Ayers’ living room?: Missing link at confab where Obama was said to have launched political career.

Posted on June 22, 2012 at 2:19 AM EST

By Aaron Klein
Is the socialist-oriented New Party the missing link at the center of the now infamous 1995 meeting that was said to have launched President Obama’s political career in Weatherman founder Bill Ayers living room?
It was at that meeting that New Party member Alice Palmer announced she wanted Obama as her successor as state senator since she was stepping down to run for Congress.
Now WND has found that in the July 1996 edition of the New Party’s newsletter, the New Party news, the controversial party announced “the Illinois New Party capped off a month-long house party drive in Chicago.”
Further review of New Party literature from 1995 and 1996 finds that so-called house parties were regularly utilized by the New Party to introduce candidates to leading party activists as well as to raise money and recruit new members.
It is known that single-payer activist Quentin Young, who advised Obama on healthcare when the politician was a state senator, was present at the parlor meeting at the Ayers’ residence.
WND reported last week that Young was listed by the New Party as an early party founder and builder.
“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” Young was quoted as saying. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”
Chicago-based blogger Maria Warren was also present. She wrote that she remembered watching Obama give a “standard, innocuous little talk” in the Ayers’ home.
“They were launching him,” Warren wrote, “introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”
It would make sense that the New Party sponsored the get together in Ayers’ living room for Palmer’s announcement.
Palmer was the New Party’s signed candidate for office. The New Party, which had partnered closely with ACORN, was mobilizing support for Palmer among its constituents and the larger Chicago progressive community.
New Party founder and Marxist activist Carl Davidson recalled screening Palmer and signing her up to the party.
Wrote Davidson:
In the next two elections in the city … the New Party has taken a slightly different approach. It organized a citywide candidates forum and invited a number of progressive candidates. Of those responding, two were of special interest, Alice Palmer and Willie Delgado …Both Palmer and Delgado attended the [New Party] forum and were thoroughly questioned by 70 or so New Party members. At the close, both publicly signed a “contract” with the New Party… Two weeks later, the New Party formally endorsed them and is now mobilizing support.
How was the New Party mobilizing the stated support for Palmer at the time, an effort that Palmer wanted transferred to Obama?
Earlier this week, WND reported the New Party had such a close relationship with ACORN that at one point the two shared an office address, fax lines and email addresses.
ACORN led the New Party’s mobilization and voter drive efforts. In progressive circles at the time, the New Party was considered the de facto political wing of ACORN, a group with which Obama long maintained a close relationship.
Ayers and Dohrn, meanwhile, traveled in the same political circles as New Party leaders, making it even more likely the duo could have hosted a New Party house meeting. The duo were key supporters of Palmer.
In 1994 Dohrn and Bill Ayers were listed on a “Membership, Subscription and Mailing List” for the Chicago Committees of Correspondence, which was co-chaired by New Party founder Davidson.
WND found that Chicago activists Joe Iosbaker and Stephanie Weiner were also listed as New Party leaders.
Iosbaker is a University of Illinois-Chicago office worker and a union steward for his SEIU local. His home was raided by the FBI in September 2012 reportedly as part of a terror probe investigating material support for jihadist groups.
Together with other activists raided in the same probe, Iosobaker and Weiner are founders of the so-called Committee to Stop FBI Repression, which protested the FBI raids.
Another founder of the Committee whose home was part of the same raid is Hatem Abudayyeh, the executive director of the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN.
WND was first to report that Obama, while serving as a paid director of the far-left nonprofit Chicago Woods Fund, provided two grants to the AAAN. Obama served at the Woods Fund alongside Ayers.
AAAN was founded by a longtime Obama associate, Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi’s wife, Mona, is president of the Arab American Action Network.
The New Party, meanwhile, is coming under increased scrutiny after new information emerged further indicating President Obama was a member of the party in the 1990s.
The New Party was a 1990s party that sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda.
In 2008, Obama’s campaign denied the president was ever a member amid reports, including from WND, citing the New Party’s own literature listing Obama as a member.
Information uncovered in recent weeks, including Obama’s signed contract with the New Party, further establishes the president’s membership with the controversial organization.
Socialist goals
The New Party, established in 1992, took advantage of what was known as electoral “fusion,” which enabled candidates to run on two tickets simultaneously, attracting voters from both parties. But the New Party disbanded in 1998, one year after fusion was halted by the Supreme Court.
The socialist-oriented goals of the New Party were enumerated on its old website.
Among the New Party’s stated objectives were “full employment, a shorter work week and a guaranteed minimum income for all adults; a universal ‘social wage’ to include such basic benefits as health care, child care, vacation time and lifelong access to education and training; a systematic phase-in of comparable worth; and like programs to ensure gender equity.”
The New Party stated it also sought “the democratization of our banking and financial system – including popular election of those charged with public stewardship of our banking system, worker-owner control over their pension assets [and] community-controlled alternative financial institutions.”
Many of the New Party’s founding members were Democratic Socialists of America leaders and members of Committees of Correspondence, a breakaway of the Communist Party USA.
Last month, WND reported on a 1996 print advertisement in a local Chicago newspaper that shows Obama was the speaker at an event sponsored and presented by the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA.
WND first reported on the event in 2010.
Obama listed as New Party member
In 2009, WND reported on newspaper evidence from the New Party’s own literature listing several new members of the New Party, including Obama.
Earlier this month, Kurtz, writing at National Review Online, reported Obama signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.
In 2008, Obama’s Fight the Smears campaign website quoted Carol Harwell, who managed Obama’s 1996 campaign for the Illinois Senate, as stating: “Barack did not solicit or seek the New Party endorsement for state senator in 1995.”
Fight the Smears conceded the New Party did support Obama in 1996 but denied that Obama had ever joined.
With research by Brenda J. Elliott