BARONE

Posted at 7:34 a.m. ET

If there's one word that can describe Michael Barone perfectly, it's "sober."   Barone is one of our most thoughtful political analysts, and a man not given to exaggeration or lack of discipline.  So this piece is unusual for him.  He tears into Barack Obama and some of the more chilling aspects of Obama's campaign, noting that Obama himself urged his followers to "get in their face": 

Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people's faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

That's what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign e-mails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg's WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama's relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago — papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

Obama fans jammed WGN's phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest e-mails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg's example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.

This was undoubtedly an attempt to enforce national harmony and togetherness.  More:

In September, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce warned citizens that they would bring criminal libel prosecutions against anyone who made statements against Obama that were "false."

I had been under the impression that the Alien and Sedition Acts had gone out of existence in 1801-02. Not so, apparently, in metropolitan St. Louis. Similarly, the Obama campaign called for a criminal investigation of the American Issues Project when it ran ads highlighting Obama's ties to Ayers.

Maybe Obama just wants to be known as the law-and-order candidate.

Congressional Democrats sought to reimpose the "fairness doctrine" on broadcasters, which until it was repealed in the 1980s required equal time for different points of view.

The motive was plain: to shut down the one conservative-leaning communications medium, talk radio. Liberal talk-show hosts have mostly failed to draw audiences, and many liberals can't abide having citizens hear contrary views.

The problem is, they're not liberals.  It's just the name they give themselves.  Real liberals generally don't behave this way.

Then there's the Democrats' "card check" legislation, which would abolish secret ballot elections in determining whether employees are represented by unions. The unions' strategy is obvious: Send a few thugs over to employees' homes — we know where you live — and get them to sign cards that will trigger a union victory without giving employers a chance to be heard.

There were the good old days:

At one time, liberals prided themselves, with considerable reason, as the staunchest defenders of free speech...

...Today's liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that used to pride themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

And that is the key point.  Students today are being taught that it's okay to restrict free speech, all in the name of social goodness and inoffensiveness.  Those students become the government officials of tomorrow, and those notions go with them.

In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see it flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

That is a serious warning from a man who's spent his lifetime studying the history of American politics.  We normally don't think of presidential campaigns as potential threats to our democracy.  Well, start thinking now.

October 11, 2008.