I have no problem with a Marxist seeking the U.S. presidency. In fact, I think the presence of a Marxist would add interesting and perhaps valuable new aspects to the national debate. To be sure, I wouldn’t vote for such a candidate, but I believe in democracy and freedom of choice.

I have a big problem, however, with a closet Marxist, someone who knows he has no chance to be elected if he honestly says what he thinks, so he lies in the manner of a charlatan in order to dupe the unwary, seize power, and only then reveal his true intentions. Imagine how black Americans would feel if a candidate waited to announce his KKK membership until after the election was over, and you’ll have some idea of my attitudes towards closet Marxists.

Writing in the New York Times, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol says Democrat presidential contender Barack Obama is an undeclared Marxist. Blogger Robert McCain said so some time ago.

Is Barack Obama a closet Marxist?

Marx wrote: “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

Obama said recently: “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Sounds eerily simliar, doesn’t it? Also sounds somewhat hypocritical. Kristol writes: “And it’s a particularly odd claim for Barack Obama to make. After all, in his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too, ‘worship an awesome God.’”

If we remember, though, that Obama’s pastor and mentor has repeatedly issue harsh anti-American rhetoric like “God damn America!” – from which Obama distanced himself only when called on the carpet during this election cycle – then perhaps it’s not so odd after all. If Obama is just using religion to leverage his political position, then perhaps he’s going Marx one better (much as Vladmir Putin seems to be doing these days with his close relationship to Alexei II, the Russian pope).

The difference between Marx and such an Obama, however, is that Marx was proud of his ideology and openly declared it. Obama would be playing a shell game. Some of his allies (among whom are counted the radical leftists from the Daily Kos) seem to approve of this secret game, urging him to pipe down . . . for now.

When confronted with predictable outrage over his Marxist statements, Obama responded: “I said something that everybody knows is true.” That sounds frighteningly Marxian as well. He believes he speaks a truth that nobody can disagree with. And we well know what the Marxists did in Russia and China with all those who actually dared to disagree, don’t we?

Obama also wants to take Americans’ guns away from them, something the Communists did in Russia so as to prevent resistance to dictatorship. He seems to believe that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was simply a result of the Founding Fathers’ bitterness.

Kristol dismantles Obama’s other claims:

Obama ascribes their anti-trade sentiment to economic frustration — as if there are no respectable arguments against more free-trade agreements. This is particularly cynical, since he himself has been making those arguments, exploiting and fanning this sentiment that he decries. Aren’t we then entitled to assume Obama’s opposition to Nafta and the Colombian trade pact is merely cynical pandering to frustrated Americans?

Then there’s what Obama calls “anti-immigrant sentiment.” Has Obama done anything to address it? It was John McCain, not Obama, who took political risks to try to resolve the issue of illegal immigration by putting his weight behind an attempt at immigration reform.

Furthermore, some concerns about unchecked and unmonitored illegal immigration are surely legitimate. Obama voted in 2006 (to take just one example) for the Secure Fence Act, which was intended to control the Mexican border through various means, including hundreds of miles of border fence. Was Obama then just accommodating bigotry?

As for small-town Americans’ alleged “antipathy to people who aren’t like them”: During what Obama considers the terrible Clinton-Bush years of economic frustration, by any measurement of public opinion polling or observed behavior, Americans have become far more tolerant and respectful of minorities who are not “like them.” Surely Obama knows this. Was he simply flattering his wealthy San Francisco donors by casting aspersions on the idiocy of small-town life?

It’s amazing that the Democrats can field such a vulnerable candidate when they have such a wonderful opportunity, given George Bush’s unpopularity, to seize the White House. It looks like the Democrats, in other words, are going to do that thing they do all over again. In other words, not simply lose the election, but go down in flames (just like the Daily Kos’s beloved Howard Dean). And even if they win, Obama would be a lame duck candidate, permanently undermined and under siege throughout his presidency.

Check out this list: Dwight Eisenhower. Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush. Now ask yourself: What do they all have in common?

All four were Republicans elected since World War II to two terms as president, and in their reelection each won a majority of the popular vote (the American president can take office without such a majority, since he is not popularly elected). In other words, four times in the last 70 years Americans have ratified a Republican president with a mandate.

In that time, how many Democrats have matched that feat?

Drumroll, please. The answer is . . .

Zero.

Conversely, the only Republicans to seek the presidency since World War II and never occupy the office were Barry Goldwater and Bob Dole. On the Democrat’s side, however, there’s an amazingly long list of disastrous candidates who sought the presidency without ever occupying the Oval Office and without achieving anything for their party: Adlai Stephenson, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Al Gore.

It seems that American support for Republicans is far wider and deeper than for Democrats where the presidency is concerned — either that or the Democrats are simply incompetent at choosing candidates.

Since World War II, the Democrats have elected four presidents: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Of those, only Clinton was elected twice, and Clinton never got a majority of the popular vote in either of his two elections — in fact, he became the only president of the era to face impeachment proceedings. What’s more, during his term in office the Republicans won back control of the lower house of the legislature for the first time in half a century. Clinton backed free trade strongly, balance the federal budget, abolished welfare and supported guns (he was photographed hunting). If one wanted to try, one could construct a pretty convincing argument that Clinton was one of the most effective Republican presidents of the the past century.

Kennedy is sometimes compared to Obama (JFK’s own daughter has done so). JFK became president in 1960 with 49.72% of the popular vote and a margin of only 112,825 votes out of 68.3 million cast (just 0.17%). JFK went on to preside over two of the lowest moments in American presidential history, the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam. He was shot and killed, as is well known, before he could try to seek a second term. Johnson might as well have been, as his regime was an even more dismal failure than Kennedy’s and his party didn’t even allow him to stand for a second election. Carter was defeated in his bid.

Every successful Democrat since JFK — 44 years and counting — has been a Southerner. Is northerner Obama capable of becoming the man to reverse the Democrat’s legacy of carnage?

If he’s a closet Marxist, I hope that the wheel of history will crush him more sensationally than any other Democrat to date.

NOTE: Most are aware that Marxists are quite infamous for their hypocrisy. Russia’s Marxists railed against the Tsarist oligarchy, then proceeded to create their own. Blogger Michelle Malkin reports that Obama is right in line with Marxim here as well, screeching about the evils of such corporate interests as the pharmaceutical lobby while, in fact, receiving more funding from them than any other candidate.