In seeking to comprehend the presidential candidate’s fundamental mindset, Steve Diamond, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law with an interest in the rise of authoritarian tendencies in the global labor movement, became apprehensive about numerous persons who seem to have figured prominently in the senator’s dramatic ascent in Chicago politics. In a most intriguing commentary on Obama’s tangled relationship to these people — replete with higher education and K-12 connnections –Diamond states:

It is the connection of some of these people to authoritarian politics that has me particularly concerned … The people linked to Senator Obama grew to political maturity in the extreme wings of the late 60s student and antiwar movements. They adopted some of the worst forms of sectarian and authoritarian politics. They helped undermine the emergence of a healthy relationship between students and others in American society who were becoming interested in alternative views of social, political and economic organization …Today, however, many of these individuals continue to hold political views that hardened in that period. Many of them have joined up with other wings of the late 60s and 70s movements, in particular the pro-China maoist elements of that era [i.e., ground-up, community-focused revolutionaries, in contrast with top-down, Soviet-style ones] now playing a role in the labor movement and elsewhere.

The senator’s involvement with these militants needs to be much more extensively vetted and publicly discussed.