Obama ran on a platform of unmitigated optimism - a promise to usher in a brighter day for America. But there could hardly be a greater contrast between his pledge and his performance in office, between his commitment to the nation and his current abandonment of all hope.

Don't ever let anyone tell you that history doesn't repeat. For 70 years, liberals have been spinning the yarn that FDR's New Deal, despite all the evidence that it exacerbated and prolonged the Great Depression, quickened our economic recovery. Indeed, I remember scratching my head when one of my college history professors in the 1970s tried to convince us of that theory and its corollary - an even better howler - that FDR was actually a conservative, because if he hadn't implemented his socialist programs, the republic would have died right there.

Surely people can now see that it is no accident that he, Obama, sat at the feet of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, that he is mother was a leftist activist and cultural Marxist, that his main early mentor was radical Frank Marshall Davis, that he was a member of the far-left New Party in Chicago, that his main vocation in life has been street organizing and agitation and that he didn't think the revolutionarily, transformative Warren court was liberal enough.

Obama's position on marriage is brazenly cynical.

Obama's Marxist mentors - Franklin Marshall Davis, Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers - also understood that you don't build an army of street organizers or a recurring voting constituency by teaching people of the streets to fish. When you 'share wealth around' you make the distributees dependent on your next handout - beholden to your largesse with other's people's money and personally worse off in every respect.

Call me an alarmist, but we are witnessing the beginning of the most frightening period of government tyranny in our nation's history.

In consigning Elian back to slavery without a hearing, this administration is setting back the cause of freedom -- in this country and in Cuba.