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As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama must demonstrate executive experience, but he remains strangely silent about his eight years (1994-2002) as a director of the Joyce Foundation, a billion dollar tax-exempt organization. He has one obvious reason: during his time as director, Joyce Foundation spent millions creating and supporting anti-gun organizations.

In 1999, midway through Obama’s tenure, the Joyce board voted to grant the Chicago-Kent Law Review $84,000, a staggering sum by law review standards. The Review promptly published an issue in which all articles attacked the individual right view of the Second Amendment.

In a breach of law review custom, Chicago-Kent let an “outsider” serve as editor; he was Carl Bogus, a faculty member of a different law school. Bogus had a unique distinction: he had been a director of Handgun Control Inc. (today’s Brady Campaign), and was on the advisory board of the Joyce-funded Violence Policy Center.

All of which points to one simple fact: It is easy to promote a Living Constitution when you are convinced that it is you who controls both the oxygen and the blood supply. And as postmodern pragmatism gains purchase among the academic class (moreso out of its usefulness than out of any profound discovery offered in its description of the world), the justifications and rationalizations for “guiding” policy toward its “appropriate” legislative end is a natural as breathing to those who believe whole-heartedly in their own intellectual entitlement as social engineers.

Obama has show himself again and again to be a man willing to use the press and his followers to “win” debates by anything other than the strength of his ideas in a free marketplace of ideology.

For that reason alone, we should fear his Presidency.

Of course, as a self-styled “progressive,” Obama can really act no other way; for someone who believes he is manipulating history, Obama’s failure to see how his progressive ideology determines his every move is quite sadly ironic.