Top Obama adviser's link to communism

President Obama and David Axelrod, with paper in hand

David Axelrod, President Obama's former longtime senior strategist, has been caught minimizing his father's participation with the Communist Party USA.

Further, there is evidence Axelrod himself was mentored early on by communist activists.

In his book "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics," released two weeks ago, Axelrod makes light of the communist affiliation of his father, Ukrainian immigrant Joseph Axelrod.

Axelrod implies the affiliation was a "youthful act of defiance."

Axelrod writes: "In keeping with his bohemian lifestyle, when Dad registered to vote at the height of the depression, he listed his party affiliation as 'communist.' Years later, when a friend used my dad as a reference for a promotion in the military, Dad's youthful act of defiance came up."

He continued: "They figured if I had really been a member of the Communist Party, I would have registered as a Republican to throw everyone off the scent," Dad told me, recounting the drama. And of course they were right. Dad wasn't much of a joiner, unless you count baseball teams."

However, blogger Charles C. Johnson of GotNews.com obtained and posted a document that lists Joseph Axelrod as an official member of the Communist Party for the 1936 general election.

Axelrod's parents, Joseph and Myril Bennett, had affiliations with other communist-leaning groups.

In the 1940s, his mother wrote for the left-leaning New York daily PM, which was run by numerous activists from the Communist Party USA. Politico previously described her father as a Russian immigrant and her mother as the child of immigrants.

Axelrod himself was a central figure in the rise of Obama to national prominence, advising him in his two presidential elections and in the direction of the White House.

Axelrod took credit for the "change" theme that characterized Obama's 2008 election. Some have noted the import of the "change" theme in Marxist ideology.

Mentored by communist?

Did leftist, communist-affiliated activism influence Axlerod himself?

WND previously reported a purported communist activist claimed he served as political mentor to Axelrod.

Don Rose, founder of the pro-communist Hyde Park Voices and member in the 1960s of a purported Communist Party front, the Alliance to End Repression, boasted of his relationship with Axelrod.

“Your dad and I ‘mentored’ and helped educate [Axelrod] politically,” Rose writes, “which is perhaps why you may recall seeing him hanging around the house.”

Rose was writing to Marc Canter, the son of the late David S. Canter, who was co-founder of the Voices newspaper and was named as a communist in the late 1960s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

“I later wrote a reference letter for him (Axelrod) that helped him win an internship at the Tribune, which was the next step in his journalism career,” admitted Rose, referring to an internship Axelrod landed at the Chicago Tribune in 1977.

The newspaper later hired Axelrod full time. At the age of 27, he became the youngest Tribune writer when he served as the City Hall bureau chief and a political columnist for the publication.

Rose’s correspondence with Marc Canter came in response to blog reports claiming Axelrod worked for Rose’s Hyde Park Voices, when it actually was a similar sounding newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, that employed Axelrod for a short period of time.

The correspondence was later posted on Marc Canter’s personal blog.

Axelrod, meanwhile, worked again with Rose and Canter when he was hired in 1987 to aid in the successful reelection campaign of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. Washington himself was supported by a coalition of communist and socialist groups.

Canter, a key Chicago political fixer, was reportedly instrumental in convincing Washington to first run as Chicago’s mayor in 1981.

Rose and Axelrod then worked together again, running the 1992 senatorial campaign of Carol Moseley Braun, whose election was notoriously aided by a massive voter registration drive led by Obama himself at Chicago’s Project Vote.

Rose was later an organizing member of Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq, the group that invited Obama to speak at its Oct. 2, 2002, antiwar rally in Chicago – an address that was said to propel Obama to national attention.

That rally was also organized by Marxist Carl Davidson and extremist activists Marilyn Katz and Bettylu Saltzman.

Davidson is a notorious far-left activist and former radical national leader in the anti-Vietnam movement. He served as national secretary for the infamous Students for a Democratic Society anti-war group, from which Ayers’ Weathermen later splintered.

Davidson was a founder of the New Party, a controversial 1990s political 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.

WND previously reported newspaper evidence indicating Obama was a New Party member.

With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott.