If the polls are to be believed - always a big “if” - it appears at this writing (10/16/08) that the American electorate is asleep at the wheel and about to drive the ship of state over a precipice never before approached and into ... who knows what? Barack Obama's carefully-occluded persona and record have allowed him to ride a superficially winning personality and effective speaking style to the very steps of the White House. Both the American and international media, having wet their collective pants over Obama, have assiduously suppressed the normal journalistic instinct to explore the murkier precincts of a candidate's curriculum vitae. The result is that many voters enthused by the candidacy of "The One" probably have a less than rounded view of what an Obama presidency, supported by Democratic super-majorities in Congress, would most likely auger.

Briefly stated, Barack Obama is the most radical candidate ever put forward by a major American political party. (And, no, William Jennings Bryan does not come close.) The Democratic Party has had a weakness in recent decades for candidates relatively far to the left: McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry. But these candidates were at least locatable somewhere on a continuum of leftist ideology that arguably could be connected to some recognizable and serious strain of American political thought, Obama is not. His is an internationalist and alien ideology that has no antecedent (although Gore and Kerry perhaps came closest) in American presidential politics.

Everyone who follows the news knows the endearing story of young Barack's abandonment by his father, his rearing by his white grandparents, his academic successes, his supposed eschewing of opportunities to join big law firms and cash in for the work of a "community organizer" in his adopted home of Chicago. But there are lacunae in this story through which one could drive a herd of unicorns or other mythical beasts: his youth in Indonesia, for starters. Journalists have made perfunctory inquiries, accepted superficial accounts, and declared the subject adequately researched and closed. The same applies to his undergraduate career at Columbia University. By all accounts, people who were there contemporaneously with Obama and studying in the same departments have no memory of him. He was a ghost. Where are all the college chums usually dug up by the press when a new figure enjoys a meteoric rise into the American consciousness?

During the last election, Bush and Kerry, contemporaries at Yale, had their academic records compared (Bush's was slightly better than Kerry's). But we have no record of Obama's performance at Columbia. Did he have good grades? How did he get into Harvard Law School? Was he an affirmative-action admission? When he was "president" of Harvard Law Review (When I was on law review, we had "editors," but I'm sure Harvard has a better purchase on how to do it.), surely he wrote something. His adoring fans would definitely be interested in reading his case note or article. I cannot find it.

Speaking of Obama's efforts as a writer, investigative reporter Jack Cashill has compared an essay on community organizing that Obama contributed to a collection by various authors in the early 1990s to his later memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” Using forensic software, Cashill concluded that the clunky essay could not be from the same author as the well-written “Dreams.” Comparing the latter to the prolific writings of Obama's friend and mentor Bill Ayers, however, Cashill saw that the style was very similar. In particular, Ayers' liberal use of nautical metaphors, which also appear with frequency in “Dreams,” reflects his brief post-college career as a merchant seaman. Although Barack spent part of his youth in Hawaii, he had no experience with the sea. Cashill speculates that Obama, having stalled out with his memoir, took the whole mess to Ayers to polish up for him. If so, this would put his allegedly distant acquaintance with Ayers in an entirely different light. Do not look for the mainstream media to follow up this provocative possibility.

Almost no notice has been taken of Obama's strange involvement in recent political developments in Kenya, home of his absconding father. In 2006, Obama visited the country on a "fact-finding" trip, which apparently turned into a political campaign on behalf of his cousin, Rolla Odinga. In the recent election, Odinga failed to get more votes than the incumbent, who is from a rival tribe, but by inciting mob violence in which about a thousand are said to have been killed, he gained the office of prime minister. Odinga's appeal to the Muslim minority in Kenya was founded on his promise to allow Sharia law in the country. It is reported that Obama maintained frequent contact with Odinga up to about the time of the New Hampshire primary and had assigned an aide as liaison to Odinga. I suppose no one is really interested in exploring what excellent new African adventures an Obama administration may portend. Certainly, the MSM is not.

There is nothing odd or surprising about Obama's popularity among Europeans. As mentioned above, his leftist ideology does not have an American pedigree, but descends from alien, mostly European, forbears. Obama would have absorbed by osmosis the ideologically toxic atmosphere of Columbia, from whence, after a pit-stop at Harvard law, he intentionally placed himself into Chicago's South Side political milieu, with its strong currents of black nationalism and influence of Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. This is an ideological stew with distinctly anti-American overtones. "Community organizing" is a euphemism for a form of leftist political activism based on the ideas of Saul Alinsky, the late socialist and social theorist. Barack, Michelle, Ayers, and their comrades are all Alinsky disciples. ACORN, the outfit that is finally being investigated by the FBI for fraudulently registering ineligible, dead, and non-existent voters all over the country, is the typical fruit of "community organizing." These are some of the people who, by demonstrations, filing of complaints, etc., (what Tom Wolfe memorably described as "mau-mauing the flak-catchers") bullied banks into making loans to borrowers who were not credit-worthy, thereby helping to precipitate the mess our credit markets are in today.

Given the true dangerousness of the world today and the disturbance in world markets, as well as the ginned-up, phony n but politically useful -- dangers like global warming, the scene could be set for a power grab on the order of that executed by FDR on the pretext of fighting the Great Depression. If so, it will likely be in the direction of placing the United States under greater control by world bodies dominated by anti-Western tin-pot dictators and outright lunatics. Speaking of which, Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations, within the most recent news cycle, waxed rhapsodic at the prospect of an Obama presidency. Need more be said?

David Sanders is a Northsider.