Kathryn, the last thing I want to do is to defend Senator Obama, but I have to say that comments like that by Tom DeLay are not the way to go. Let’s leave the hysteria (or, more precisely, the generation of hysteria) to Obama: he’s much better at it, after all. Asking Obama to ‘prove’ he’s not a Marxist just looks desperate and more than a touch HUAC. It’s also pretty unconvincing, to put it mildly. I cannot be sure (can anyone?) about the exact nature of Obama’s ideology, but if I had to guess, it’s a blend of big government leftism and campus-style identity politics, drenched in syrup and, of course, spun with great skill. Look hard enough and, I guess, the origins of some of those ideas can (very) theoretically be traced back to pieces of old Karl’s thinking, but to use that to try to define Obama as a ‘Marxist’ in the traditional white beard/red flag sense is not only a stretch, but futile.