Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said he had an “epiphany” after reading a book in which President Barack Obama is characterized as a Machiavellian radical, David Corn of Mother Jones reported Wednesday.
Sessions made his comments at a February conference hosted by conservative firebrand David Horowitz. The Alabama Republican said that reading Horowitz’s 2012 book, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion, was an eye-opener.
“And recently reading Radicals, I hit the last chapter lying in bed, and I awakened myself and had an epiphany ’cause he was talking about our president,” Sessions said. “And I’ve been wrestling with how do we deal, what is this, how has this been working, and how can we do better, and how can we understand better, how to respond to his quite successful tactics politically. So I was so moved. I called [Horowitz]. He gave me some ideas. He’s written some papers. I passed them around—the draft—a bunch of senators, and shared those thoughts.”
The final chapter of that book, titled “A Radical Machiavelli,” begins with a quote from Obama and links the President to the late community organizer Saul Alinsky. Horowitz wrote that Alinsky’s influence has “captured the heart of the Democratic Party.”
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also speaking at a Horowitz-organized gathering when he said last month that he “can’t tell” if Obama has switched sides in the War on Terror.
