First Look at Controversial Obama Book

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity & Colmes," July 31, 2008. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: HANNITY: A new book due out tomorrow makes shocking allegations about Senator Obama's background, and it may have made his campaign a bit nervous. From Barack and Michelle's 20-year-long relationship with Trinity Church to Obama's family connections to Kenya to his dealings with, well, Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist, the author aims to expose what he says is the real Obama.

Joining us now, in an exclusive interview, is the author of "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and The Cult of Personality," Dr. Jerome Corsi is with us.

Welcome back.

DR. JEROME CORSI, AUTHOR, "THE OBAMA NATION": Thank you, Sean.

• Video: Watch the interview with Dr. Jerome Corsi | Part 2

HANNITY: Four years ago, 2004, you and John O'Neill launched, right here on this show, your first TV interview.

CORSI: That's correct.

HANNITY: Unfit for command, the Swift Boat Vets for Truth.

CORSI: That's right. It was our first television interview and our first radio also was with you in the afternoon.

HANNITY: And I warned you then, and I'm going to warn you now, all these leftists out there, you know, are going to do what they did the last time and attack you for daring to examine his record. You ready?

CORSI: I'm ready. Sean, if they attack me, they're not answering what's in the book. I've been researching this book since 2006. There's over 300 pages, 700 footnotes, and I'll stand by the truth of every statement in this book.

HANNITY: If I were to break your book into categories...

CORSI: Right.

HANNITY: ... you talk about his background.

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: You talk about his youth.

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: You talk about his radical associations.

CORSI: Right.

HANNITY: And there are many of them...

CORSI: Many of them.

HANNITY: ... which you believe influenced his...

CORSI: His politics, his formative views, and his current position.

HANNITY: And then -- then you move into his current positions and where he stands. And it is a picture that you're painting of a radical leftist socialist, a guy that believes in redistribution, that has basically -- these views have been shaped and formed from his youth.

CORSI: That's right, including being a Saul Alinsky organizer, and Saul Alinsky was a radical leftist organizer who said that his goal was redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots.

HANNITY: Walk us through those three phases, from his family to his radical associations, to his views today.

CORSI: Even in his family, I do a great deal of analysis of the autobiography.

HANNITY: That's his father right there.

CORSI: His father. And his father -- you know, Obama first presents his father as a great hero, and the truth was his father was a polygamist and an alcoholic. He had abandoned the family in Africa when he met Obama's mother in Hawaii. He married Obama's mother without disclosing he had not divorced this African woman.

HANNITY: And by the way, in fairness, you don't -- I would never hold it against him, the actions of his father...

CORSI: I don't either.

HANNITY: But you're giving it historical...

CORSI: First of all, Obama put the issue on the table in analyzing it and making it the corner of his autobiography. And I'm first criticizing that Obama was not straightforward in how he presented, really, a deception about his father as this goatherd who got this chance to go to -- come to study in the United States because of John Kennedy. John Kennedy had nothing to do with his father coming to Hawaii. It was Tom Emboya (ph).

And I tie it to Obama's current politics. Obama is still today involved in the politics in Kenya, supporting Odinga, another radical socialist running for president as recently as December 2007 with Obama supporting him, despite Odinga signing a memorandum of understanding with radical Islamicists in Kenya.

KIRSTEN POWERS, GUEST CO-HOST: You raised just now Saul Alinsky.

CORSI: Yes.

POWERS: Of course, Hillary Clinton famously identified him as somebody who's been very influential to her.

CORSI: Correct. Absolutely.

POWERS: She grew up in the most middle class, sort of normal American family, Republican family, actually. I mean, she's not a radical. Why does it make Obama a radical?

CORSI: Saul Alinsky was a radical.

POWERS: I understand that, but I'm saying you could -- you could actually read Saul Alinsky and not be radical.

CORSI: I don't see how. I mean, here, Saul Alinsky is saying that Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" for the haves to keep what they have, and he wrote "Rules for Radical" for the have-nots to take it away.

POWERS: Right.

CORSI: He dedicated it, "Rules for Radicals," to Lucifer. And Obama taught Alinsky methodology.

POWERS: Do you -- do you believe in Hillary Clinton as a radical?

CORSI: She was in terms of her following of Alinsky. And I think Hillary -- you know, this book is not about Hillary.

POWERS: Right.

CORSI: I think Hillary has moved much more to the center. Obama, I think, at core remains the Saul Alinsky community organizer. His politics are still about redistribution of wealth. And that was the core Alinsky principle.

POWERS: And so when you describe he's a radical leftist...

CORSI: Right.

POWERS: ... what does that mean?

CORSI: It means, you know, the extreme socialist objectives that were, for instance, in Saul Alinsky, or his mentor in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis...

POWERS: In high school.

CORSI: Yes, but it was very deeply influential in Obama's formative years, and he says this at length in his autobiography.

POWERS: But he's probably developed since high school, don't you think?

CORSI: You know, certainly, in college his mentors were Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, a radical anti-colonialist writer.

Then he joins the black liberation theology church. Black liberation (UNINTELLIGIBLE) on this show. Obama's people were -- Reverend Wright was...

HANNITY: The pastor.

CORSI: The pastor was challenging Sean, "You have to have read James Cohen (ph)." Well, I've gone and read James Cohen. I've read James Cohen for a long time. I've been writing about these issues for decades.

And James Cohen's (ph) whole idea was that Jesus Christ historically was black, really an African Palestinian who opposed the colonialists of his day, the Romans who were occupying Israel.

POWERS: OK. We're going to be right back. Coming up, we'll have more shocking revelations from Jerome Corsi's brand-new book, "The Obama Nation".

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

POWERS: And we now continue with Dr. Jerome Corsi.

I was looking at the back of your book, and the blurb on it says after an Obama presidency we would be a militarily weakened and economically diminished nation. And to me that sounds like what happened under George Bush. So, you know, what is Barack Obama going to do? We're already in an economically...

CORSI: Well, for instance, Barack Obama did this short clip in which he said he was going to not invest in new military programs; he was going to have that money go to social causes. He's had this whole idea he was going to disarm with nuclear weapons, yet he has no practical plan except to say we're going to move in that direction.

His pulling out of Iraq. I mean, he boasts that he was the first to want to pull out of Iraq, and that antimilitary type of position is consistent if you look back at his politics even in Illinois, and if you look back at his history.

POWERS: But what you just described seems to me are fairly conventional Democratic positions, and yet, you're casting them as these far left views.

CORSI: Well, I'll agree that most of the Democrats, you know, in Iraq have wanted to pull out. Obama was, you know, viciously opposed to the surge, and Obama was wrong on that.

Again, it was an anti -- the instinctive position of Obama is to be antimilitary, and he's had a history of doing that. And I'm pointing out, for instance, his whole willingness to divert money from military development purposes to social purposes, which is -- I quote this video.

HANNITY: I love this stuff. By the way, you mentioned this show and the interview with Wright, and a number of things because we've been covering this.

You talk at length, and in the short time that we have...

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: ... about the radical associations.

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: Did he lie to America about what he really knew about Ayers and Wright? He praises Malcolm X, blue-eyed devils, white people are. Alinsky. Did he -- did he embrace people that he knew were radical?

CORSI: In a simple word, yes, he lied.

HANNITY: He lied?

CORSI: Yes. He has full and total knowledge of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon. He writes about it at length in his autobiography.

HANNITY: Complimentary.

CORSI: Complimentary. Ayers -- you know, Axelrod is chief strategist, said, well, they live in the same neighborhood and their kids went to school together.

HANNITY: Not true.

CORSI: Not true. Obama's kids are young kids.

HANNITY: Yes.

CORSI: Ayers' kids are grown. Obama chose Ayers knowing he was exactly who he was, a radical terrorist bomber.

HANNITY: You -- you go into Obama's far-left domestic policies, income redistribution, his Global Poverty Act.

CORSI: His support of abortion, even late term.

HANNITY: After a child was born.

CORSI: A child was born...

HANNITY: In Chicago.

CORSI: Obama, in the state senate, wanted the child killed if the mother desired an abortion.

HANNITY: But you talk about how this campaign is being run. The American people -- you call it the cult of personality.

CORSI: Cult of personality.

HANNITY: But are we being victimized by a marketing campaign you say David Axelrod is orchestrating?

CORSI: This is what Axelrod does. He creates a cult of a personality and projects this image so that issues are never...

HANNITY: But he's been particularly successful at it, in spite of his thin resume...

CORSI: Yes.

HANNITY: ... radical associations, poor judgment.

CORSI: And the hope projection. What Axelrod does is he borrows liberally from others. Deval Patrick's campaign up in Massachusetts that Axelrod was one of the -- so this whole just words.

I think, Sean, sometimes that Obama is auditioning for the role of Neo in the next "Matrix" movie. You know, we are the ones, this is the time. It is our destiny.

HANNITY: Slogans, platitudes.

CORSI: That's Cesar Chavez and the -- it's borrowed directly from the organization of the farm workers going back four decades.

HANNITY: Is he going to pull this off? Is he going to be able to successfully pull it off?

CORSI: He's going to lose. And Obama's going to lose, I say in the book, not because of -- the character issues are important, because they shape and inform the policy issues. Our campaigns are about policy issues. And when it gets down to the income redistribution, ending the capital gains tax, all these social issues, the antimilitary issues...

HANNITY: Jerome Corsi.

CORSI: ... these are the policies that the issues will decide on.

HANNITY: We need more detail. We're going to have you on with part two tomorrow.

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