Stanley Kurtz on Obama's class warfare election

From National Review's the Corner, here's an excerpt of Stanley Kurtz' post:

I’ve been struck by commentators on both the right and left treating Obama’s leftist campaign as a matter of strict necessity. For a couple of years, conventional wisdom has held that the weak economy left Obama little choice but to turn this into a base election. Then conventional wisdom was upended by the conventions. Bill Clinton’s dubious but effective attempts to exonerate Obama from economic blame could easily have been combined with a centrist campaign — and presidency. Obama’s class-warfare campaign was a choice, not a necessity. But to see that is to suggest that Obama is a leftist by conviction, and many have been reluctant to do that.

Remember when Obama told Diane Sawyer he’d rather be “a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president”? That was a swipe at Clinton, Obama’s lifelong model of what not to do. In that same interview, Obama explained that he didn’t want to go “small bore” just to avoid controversy and secure re-election. That’s what Clinton did, and that’s what Obama wants to avoid. The president is willing to take significant political risks for a shot at transforming America in a second term. Reelection flowing out of a class-warfare-based campaign would further that goal. Is it so hard to believe that Obama means it when he runs left? After all, he was the most liberal senator before he became president. So where’s the mystery? The real mystery is our refusal to see what’s staring us in the face.

Here’s where Obama’s political past is illuminating. Obama joined a leftist third party in 1996 precisely because he was dissatisfied with the direction of the Democrats under Bill Clinton. That’s why the New Party was created to begin with. I explained in the final chapter of Radical-in-Chief, two years before the fact, that Obama would run a class-warfare campaign in 2012 because his leftist community-organizing buddies see that as a strategic key to transforming the country. Again, as Crook himself correctly says, Obama could have done otherwise. The president’s strategy was a choice based on background and conviction.