Obama’s Other Mentor

Chicago radical Saul Alinsky had an even greater role in mentoring Obama than either the blasphemous Reverend Jeremiah Wright or Weatherman Underground leader Bill Ayres. Alinsky’s 1971 book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, laid out a prescription for effective action to achieve change in America. He believed that the United States is an oppressive and racist society where most people (the Have-Nots) are the victims of economic injustice with a future of despair.
Alinsky’s son, David, chortled about the fact that Obama was trained in Chicago by the Alinsky organization called Industrial Areas Foundation which was founded by his father in 1940. “All the elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the- rafters crowd, the crowd’s chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people.” Obama learned at the hand of the Alinsky machine how to organize communities and how to put it all together in a new style presidential campaign that decisively defeated the Clinton machine plus the Republican Party in a dramatic one-two punch never before seen in politics.
Alinsky’s organization was based in Chicago, nestled under the protective wing of the corrupt Democratic political machine that rules the roost in that corner of the Midwest. However, his reach extended all over the country from New York to California. Hillary Clinton wrote her Wellesley thesis on Alinsky, who then offered her a job (which she turned down to enroll in Yale Law School).
The word “change” permeates Alinsky’s writings. It is his favorite word. It did not originate with the Obama campaign. Alinsky wanted a radical change of America’s social and economic structure, and he planned to achieve that through creating public discontent and moral confusion. His goal was not to arrive at compromise or peaceful solutions; his goal was to crush the Haves and transform society. He developed concepts to achieve power through mass organization. Organizing was his word for revolution. His 1946 book, Reveille for Radicals, had already made it clear that he wanted to move the United States from capitalism to socialism, where the means of production and distribution would be owned by the government. He, like Lenin, believed in economic determinism and saw unemployment, disease, crime and bigotry as byproducts of capitalism. So he called for massive change.
To achieve this, he sought local community organizers who projected confidence, vision and change. Barack Obama fit the profile. Alinsky didn’t want just talkers; he wanted radicals who were prepared to take bold action to organize the discontented, precipitate crises, grab power, and thereby transform society. He taught these radicals how to infiltrate existing institutions such as churches, like Reverend Wright’s, unions, and political parties, gain influence, and then introduce change. He taught the “Have-Nots” to hate the “Haves” because they have power, money, food, security, and luxury. This is a classic case of encouraging class warfare which has been a no-no in American politics.
Alinsky appears to reject the idea of meritocracy. Accordingly, redistribution of wealth would be a centerpiece of his approach. He was an advocate of doing what you can with what you have while clothing it with moral arguments. He didn’t mean all actions should be moral. He meant that you decide what you want or need to do and then cloak your actions with the language of morality. Phrase your goals in “general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ or ‘Of the Common Welfare,’ ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’ or ‘Bread and Peace,’” reminding us of the Communists’ bastardization of the words “democracy” and “equality” which had no resemblance to the reality of the former Soviet Union. Alinsky sees no place for fair play or compromise.
The qualities Alinsky looked for in a good organizer were ego, curiosity, irreverence (detesting dogma and defying any finite definition of morality), imagination, a sense of humor (“the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule”) and an organized personality with confidence in presenting the right reason for his actions only “as a moral rationalization after the right end has been achieved.”
There are strong indications that Obama used the Alinsky approach in all its details in his campaign. He rejected public campaign financing in favor of the hundreds of millions of dollars his machine could raise, in the eyes of some, simply buying the White House, a rejection of fair play. Alinsky’s word “change” became the buzzword for Obama’s campaign. Perhaps this is a classic case of persuading [Hollywood] millionaires on a Friday to subsidize a revolution on Saturday out of which they could make a huge psychic profit on Sunday, even though they were certain to executed figuratively on Monday [as new constraints were placed on their license to criticize government though their “art.”