The President has correctly stated in his recent jobs plan booklet that this election is a "choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future," but he has been less than forthcoming about just what vision he has in mind.

Author Stanley Kurtz explores Obama's furtive second term agenda in his recent book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities.  Kurtz describes a decades-long plan for wealth redistribution that has been close to Obama's heart since his early community organizing days with the Gamaliel Foundation and the Woods Fund. ¹

Kurtz describes an organization called "Building One America" whose organizers, long-time Obama associates, have met with the President in the Oval Office.  Their goal is to "abolish America's suburbs" through "no-growth" boundaries that would force development back toward the cities, through "forced economic integration" and "government-planned living patterns," and through regional tax sharing schemes that would transfer suburban tax money to the cities: ²

Today the Obama administration has in place a series of little-known policies designed to undermine the suburbs by effectively merging them with the cities. 

The president, in short, has been laying the groundwork for a profound transformation of American society although the public has barely been told. ³

In the Kurtz telling, Obama's "regionalist initiatives characteristically do not announce themselves as such, but are buried instead inside of other policies and provisions," from stimulus to health care to climate change. ⁴

In the guise of the "Sustainable Communities Initiative," the administration funds regional planning, in which suburbs would lose their autonomy and their tax dollars to regional entities that would not be accountable to either the states or the local municipalities. ⁵

Obama's "Common Core Initiative" is the basis for federalizing the curriculum, lowering standards and redistributing school funding, ⁶ thereby removing local control and eliminating the incentive to move to the suburbs for better schools.

Spreading the Wealth details the work of several regionalist figures who weave in and out of Obama's political life, including Michael Harrington, who according to Kurtz first came up with the idea of realigning the Democratic party to drive business interests out and poor and minority interests in, thereby dividing the country by class and polarizing the two parties into haves and have-nots. ⁷

Under that strategy, the Democratic party would "inevitably drift toward a more explicitly socialist platform."  The result, according to Kurtz, is a Democratic party and a media who do not separate themselves from the radical left and who enable a candidate like Barack Obama to ascend unvetted to the Presidency.

The regionalist agenda has already taken root in Portland, Oregon, ⁸ and regional tax-base sharing is now a reality in Minneapolis-St-Paul. ⁹

And last month, Mr. Kurtz wrote in National Review about the Ohio regionalist movement that aims to "prop up failing Democratic cities" by "forcibly diverting suburban tax receipts to urban treasuries."  The plan was thwarted two years ago, but an Obama 2012 electoral victory could pave the way for tax-base sharing in Ohio.

As Kurtz observes, "How odd it would be were Ohio's suburban taxpayers to hand Obama the key to their own undoing."

Mr. Kurtz asserts that the country should have the "opportunity to debate" such a transformative plan before the election, and further that Obama simply has not "leveled with the American people" on this part of his agenda. ¹⁰

It is unclear just how far Obama would get in a second term with his regionalist plans, but I am not interested in finding out.

¹ Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, Stanley Kurtz, Sentinel, 2012, p. 59

² Ibid, p. 7

³ Ibid, p. 19

⁴ Ibid, P. 32

⁵ Ibid, p. 33

⁶ Ibid, p.139

⁷ Ibid, p. 168

⁸ Ibid, p. 186

⁹ Ibid, p. 128

¹⁰ Ibid, pp. 71-72