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Revolution You Can Believe In
TUESDAY, 9TH SEPTEMBER 2008

In her game-changing convention speech, Sarah Palin took a swipe at Obama for having been nothing more in his life than a ‘community organiser’.

This prompted the Obama campaign to issue a pained defence of community organisation as a way of promoting social change ‘from the bottom up’. The impression is that community organising is a worthy if woolly and ultimately ineffectual grassroots activity. This is to miss something of the greatest importance: that in the world of Barack Obama, community organisers are a key strategy in a different game altogether; and the name of that game is revolutionary Marxism.

The seditious role of the community organiser was developed by an extreme left intellectual called Saul Alinsky. He was a radical Chicago activist who, by the time he died in 1972, had had a profound influence on the highest levels of the Democratic party. Alinsky was a ‘transformational Marxist’ in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, who promoted the strategy of a ‘long march through the institutions’ by capturing the culture and turning it inside out as the most effective means of overturning western society. In similar vein, Alinsky condemned the New Left for alienating the general public by its demonstrations and outlandish appearance. The revolution had to be carried out through stealth and deception. Its proponents had to cultivate an image of centrism and pragmatism. A master of infiltration, Alinsky wooed Chicago mobsters and Wall Street financiers alike. And successive Democratic politicians fell under his spell.

His creed was set out in his book ‘Rules for Radicals’ – a book he dedicated to Lucifer, whom he called the ‘first radical’. It was Alinsky for whom ‘change’ was his mantra. And by ‘change’, he meant a Marxist revolution achieved by slow, incremental, Machiavellian means which turned society inside out. This had to be done through systematic deception, winning the trust of the naively idealistic middle class by using the language of morality to conceal an agenda designed to destroy it. And the way to do this, he said, was through ‘people’s organisations’.

Community organisers would mobilise direct action by the oppressed masses against their capitalist oppressors. In FrontPageMagazine.Com John Perazzo writes:

These People’s Organizations were to be composed largely of discontented individuals who believed that society was replete with injustices that prevented them from being able to live satisfying lives. Such organizations, Alinsky advised, should not be imported from the outside into a community, but rather should be staffed by locals who, with some guidance from trained radical organizers, could set their own agendas.

The installment of local leaders as the top-level officers of People’s Organizations helped give the organizations credibility and authenticity in the eyes of the community. This tactic closely paralleled the longtime Communist Party strategy of creating front organizations that ostensibly were led by non-communist fellow-travelers, but which were in fact controlled by Party members behind the scenes...

Alinsky viewed as supremely important the role of the organizer, or master manipulator, whose guidance was responsible for setting the agendas of the People’s Organization... Alinsky laid out a set of basic principles to guide the actions and decisions of radical organizers and the People’s Organizations they established. The organizer, he said, ‘must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.’[40] The organizer’s function, he added, was ‘to agitate to the point of conflict’[41] and ‘to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” ‘[42] ‘The word ‘enemy,’ said Alinsky, ‘is sufficient to put the organizer on the side of the people’;[43] i.e., to convince members of the community that he is so eager to advocate on their behalf, that he has willingly opened himself up to condemnation and derision.

Obama’s connection with Alinsky, whom he never met but whom he reportedly idolised, was through two bodies promoting the Alinsky model of community organisation, ACORN and the Gamaliel Foundation.  John Perazzo again:

Obama was trained by the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in Chicago and worked for an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of ‘a more just and democratic society’ is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method. As The Nation magazine puts it, ‘Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing...’  In fact, for several years Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method.

But Obama brought a special slant to Alinsky’s radicalism.Far from being – as he has been painted – a ‘post-racial’ politician, Obama’s politics are all about promoting the cause of black people and achieving ‘reparations’ from white society (a perspective through which his whole welfare redistribution agenda is framed). Accordingly, he saw his three-year role as a community organiser in Chicago as mobilising black people for action against their white oppressors. Finding himself hampered in creating an activist network among black churches, he decided to join such a church to give himself more credibility. That’s why he joined the infamous black-power Trinity Church of Christ – a move, it seems, that had less to do with any spiritual quest than as a radical tactic for mobilising the black proletariat.

According to Stanley Kurtz in National Review (subscription required), as a trainer for Gamaliel and ACORN Obama used his influence to secure a major increase in funding for both groups. Kurtz writes of Gamaliel, one of the least known yet most influential national umbrella groups for church-based community organizers:

Gamaliel specializes in ideological stealth, and Obama, a master student of Gamaliel strategy, shows disturbing signs of being a sub rosa radical himself. Obama's legislative tactics, as well as his persistent professions of non-ideological pragmatism, appear to be inspired by his radical mentors' most sophisticated tactics. Not only has Obama studied, taught, and apparently absorbed stealth techniques from radical groups like Gamaliel and ACORN, but in his position as a board member of Chicago’s supposedly nonpartisan Woods Fund, he quietly funneled money to his radical allies -- at the very moment he most needed their support to boost his political career.

Kurtz also quotes Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts who, in her book Organizing Urban America: Secular and Faith-based Progressive Movements, lays out the strategy of stealth:

Swarts calls groups like ACORN and (especially) Gamaliel ‘invisible actors,’ hidden from public view because they often prefer to downplay their efforts, because they work locally, and because scholars and journalists pay greater attention to movements with national profiles (like the Sierra Club or the Christian Coalition). Congregation-based community organizations like Gamaliel, by contrast, are often invisible even at the local level. A newspaper might report on a demonstration led by a local minister or priest, for example, without noticing that the clergyman in question is part of the Gamaliel network. ‘Though often hidden from view,’ says Swarts, ‘leaders have intentionally and strategically organized these movements that appear to well up and erupt from below.’

Although Gamaliel and ACORN have significantly different tactics and styles, Swarts notes that their political goals and ideologies are broadly similar. Both groups press the state for economic redistribution. The tactics of Gamaliel and ACORN have been shaped in a ‘post-Alinsky’ era of welfare reform and conservative resurgence, posing a severe challenge to those who wish to expand the welfare state. The answer these activists have hit upon, says Swarts, is to work incrementally in urban areas, while deliberately downplaying the far-Left ideology that stands behind their carefully targeted campaigns.

To avoid seeming like radicals or ‘hippies left over from the sixties,’ Gamaliel organizers are careful to wear conventional clothing and conduct themselves with dignity, even formality. Since liberal social movements tend to come off as naïve and idealistic, Gamaliel organizers make a point of presenting their ideas as practical, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. When no one else is listening, Gamaliel organizers may rail at ‘racism,’ ‘sexism,’ and ‘oppressive corporate systems,’ but when speaking to their blue-collar followers, they describe their plans as ‘common sense solutions for working families.’

If anyone should doubt Obama’s debt to Saul Alinsky, they might ponder this encomium from no less an authority than Alinsky’s own son. In a letter to the Boston Globe, L. David Alinsky wrote of his father’s influence at the Democratic Convention:

All the elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situation 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.

Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.

Obama’s questionable links to various radicals are now well-known: the black power racists Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Michael Pfleger, the former Weather Underground terrorism supporters Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. On CNN’s Glenn Beck show a few days ago Jerome Corsi, author of Obama Nation, observed:

Obama began his career, his coming out party in 1995, and Ayers and Bernadine Dorn's home. And then for, you know, some 20 years, Obama has been working with Ayers, certainly since 1995, on a series of foundations: the Annenberg Foundation and the Woods Foundation. The boards of directors together, or in the Annenberg Foundation, Ayers created it, and Obama was on it. And together they spent the money of these foundations to implement their radical socialist agenda.

As EM Forster wrote in a somewhat different context, only connect.

When Hillary Clinton was fighting Obama for the Democratic candidacy, her camp implied that the party would be making a terrible mistake in selecting Obama because, unlike centrist Hillary, he was a left-winger. But Hillary is an even more fervent Alinsky acolyte. In their book The Shadow Party, David Horowitz and Glenn Poe recount how Hillary first met Alinsky through a left-wing church group to which she belonged in high school, and stayed close to him until his death. Indeed, so impressed was she with his beliefs that she wrote a 75-page salute to him in her senior thesis at Wellesley College in 1969, which contained excerpts of the not-yet published Rules for Radicals. She wrote:

If the ideals Alinsky espouses were actualized, the result would be social revolution. Ironically, this is not a disjunctive projection if considered in the tradition of Western democratic theory. In the first chapter it was pointed out that Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared -- just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths -- democracy.

That’s not democracy as we know it, more a Marxist conception of people power. On FrontPage, Perazzo writes:

During her senior year, Hillary was offered a job by Alinsky but chose instead to enrol at Yale Law School. Alinsky’s teachings, however, would remain close to her heart throughout her adult life. According to a Washington Post report, ‘As first lady, Clinton occasionally lent her name to projects endorsed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Alinsky group that had offered her a job in 1968. She raised money and attended two events organized by the Washington Interfaith Network, an IAF affiliate.’

Alinsky was a radical straight out of the Gramsci playbook. In both America and Britain, Gramsci’s acolytes have been conducting a decades-long march through the institutions. In Britain, they have substantially achieved their aim of subverting western morality and changing the face of British society. No political party stands against this. In the US, they have made huge inroads but haven’t yet won. With Palin on one side and Obama on the other, it is now clear that this US presidential election has taken the culture war to the gates of the White House itself.

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BEST OF THE WEB TODAY  

  

Apro Poet
By JAMES TARANTO
September 10, 2008

Oh John, I hear you're livid that I gave that "lipstick" quote
You really made too much of it; I guess I got your goat

Yet though you think I'm nothing but a filthy rotten swine
My motive was not to suggest your running mate's porcine

I don't think Sarah Palin should be locked up in a pen
Or that to roll in mud or feed on slop she has a yen

And though I still deny her presence makes your ticket fresh
If you've an empty barrel, please don't fill it with her flesh

I have to say, my good friend, that I simply don't know how
You could have thought that I would think your VP is a sow

No, Barack Obama did not write this poem. Wouldn't you have more confidence in him if he had the wit?

But wait. Maybe we're being unfair. CBS News reports that "Barack Obama took it up a notch--or two--at a town hall meeting [Monday night] where he used comedy to mock and ridicule the McCain-Palin ticket."

Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present the comedy stylings of Barack Obama:

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"I mean think about it, you guys remember this, it was just like a month ago they were all saying 'experience, experience, experience,' " Obama said as the crowd snickered, "Then they chose Palin and started talking about 'change, change, change'--What happened?" . . .
When discussing McCain's energy plan, Obama poked fun at his line on drilling. "What were the Republicans hollerin', 'drill baby drill'? What kind of slogan is that?! They were getting all excited about drilling!"
He even found a way to make an answer to a question on civil liberties comical. While speaking about the importance of habeas corpus, Obama said, "We don't always catch the right person. We may think this is Mohammed the terrorist, it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You may think it's Barack the bomb thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president." . . .
He got a lot of laughs.

We guess you had to be there.

Comforting the Afflicted
We've long argued (most comprehensively in this 2005 article) that liberal media bias often harms liberal politicians by reinforcing their own prejudices, thereby shielding them from political reality and compounding their strategic mistakes. Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press, who obviously sympathizes with Barack Obama, provides a wonderful example. She justifies Obama's attacks on Sarah Palin in this way:

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With Palin out on the campaign trail every day blasting Obama, it became increasingly clear he had to respond and try to undermine her credibility. He was careful with his approach, declining in an interview on MSNBC's "Countdown" on Monday to respond directly to a question about whether she's too inexperienced to be next in line to the presidency.

As a thought experiment, let's recast that first sentence with the parties reversed:

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With Biden out on the campaign trail every day blasting McCain, it became increasingly clear McCain had to respond and try to undermine Biden's credibility.

No one could write this with a straight face. It would be obvious that McCain was aiming for the wrong target, diminishing himself and elevating Biden. What Pickler wrote is obviously what those in the Obama campaign believe--and now that she has reported it as if it were a fact, it will only become harder to disabuse them of the idea.

At Least They Didn't Call Him Skinny
New York's WCBS-TV reports that New York's Gov. David Paterson is "accusing the McCain campaign of veiled racism":

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At the Crain's Business Forum [yesterday] morning, Paterson drew attention to a phrase used numerous times by speakers at the Republican National Convention to describe Barack Obama's leadership experience: community organizer.
"I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama 'black' in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention – a 'community organizer.' They kept saying it, they kept laughing," he said. . . .
Paterson sees the repeated use of the words "community organizer" as Republican code for "black."
"I think where there are overtones is when there are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people's progress with a subtle reference to their race," he said.

Just one problem: As we noted last month in Denver, it was the Democrats who first "spent four days touting Obama's experience as a 'community organizer' as a central qualification" for the presidency. "Even after listening to those speeches," we wrote, "we're still not sure what a 'community organizer' is."

If Paterson is right, the Democrats were subtly arguing that Obama is qualified to be president because he is black.

The Paper Chase
In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, Lisa Orenstein of Baltimore complains that Sarah Palin isn't educated enough to be vice president:

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Columnist Charles Krauthammer ["Palin's Problem," op-ed, Sept. 5] wrote that Republican nominee John McCain picked Ms. Palin to be a "game-changer" who would fill the campaign with magic. And I wanted Sarah Palin to be a hidden gem, too. But she attended six colleges in six years before receiving her undergraduate journalism degree from the University of Idaho. One of those schools was the obscure North Idaho College. No graduate degrees on her résumé.

By contrast, she notes the advanced degrees held by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Mitt Romney. Curiously, she does not mention George W. Bush's Ivy League credentials (B.A., Yale; M.B.A., Harvard) or John McCain's lack of same (B.S., U.S. Naval Academy; he attended some classes at the National War College but does not seem to have earned an advanced degree). Then she delivers the coup de grace:

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In a country with more than 300 million people, with plenty of accomplished men and women, why would we settle for Ms. Palin's mediocre credentials? Most companies would place her résumé in the reject pile for far lesser jobs.

Lisa, the Obama campaign is way ahead of you! LA Weekly quotes Michelle Obama, speaking just before Palin gave her convention speech last week:

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"What you learn about Barack from his choice [of vice president] is that he's not afraid of smart people," she tells the crowd. Whether intentional or not, a good part of the audience interprets the line as a preemptive strike and chuckles.

Didn't Andrew Jackson say that one man with a Ph.D. makes a majority? As Obama has observed, the American people aren't stupid, and there's nothing they enjoy more than feeling intellectually superior. Obama has a winning strategy here, seeing as how most Americans are above average.

What's that? The numbers don't add up? Oh yeah? Where'd you go to college?

Obama Questions Own Experience

• "My understanding is, is that Gov. Sarah Palin's town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We have got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So, I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute, I think, has been made clear over the last couple of years."--Barack Obama, "Anderson Cooper 360," CNN, Sept. 1

• "But look, the Republicans can't govern but they run smart campaigns."--Barack Obama, "Countdown With Keith Olbermann," MSNBC, Sept. 8


See You in the Funny Papers

• "Watch out Mr. Bush! With the exception of economic policy and energy policy and social issues and tax policy and foreign policy and Supreme Court appointments and Rove-style politics, we're coming in there to shake things up!"--Tom Toles cartoon, Washington Post, Sept. 5

• "John McCain says he's about change too. So I guess his whole angle is: Watch out, George Bush--except for economic policy, healthcare policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics, we're really going to shake things up in Washington."--Barack Obama, Sept. 9


They Beg, but He Won't Bash
Sarah Palin wasn't the first Alaskan in this year's presidential race. That would be Mike Gravel, the former senator (1969-81) who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination with even less plausibility than Joe Biden. What does Gravel think of Palin? The left-liberal Pacifica radio network wanted to find out. No, that's not right. Pacifica didn't want to find out. It wanted Gravel to bash Palin, but it turns out he admires her, though he agrees with her about little.

Blogger John Lott found the audio on YouTube. The whole thing is worth a listen, but we're just going to transcribe a few of the questions to give you a taste of the interviewers' utter lack of fairness and open-mindedness:

• "First tell us what the Republicans are not telling us about Sarah Palin."

• "What do you make of the fact that the Republicans have been trying to beat Barack Obama about the head and shoulders--that he's not ready to lead, that we're in a constant war on terrorism, that who is he, he's a senator who's only been in office a little while--and then we get Sarah Palin, arguably much more of a heartbeat away from the presidency than Joe Biden would be under Barack Obama, we get Sarah Palin, and she might be the chief executive of the United States in this purported war on terror that the Republicans place so much stock in? What do you make of that?" (Gravel responded to this by calling the question "the same old political garbage.")

• "But Mike, even the mainstream media are reporting very much on Troopergate, for example, and there is, of course, a lot of question about her inexperience. There is, I mean, are you saying that McCain made a strategically good choice, or, you know--?"

• "Sen. Gravel, let's turn to another matter, one that's caused a great deal of buzz here in St. Paul today at the Republican convention, and that is the announcement that Gov. Palin's 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, that she is not married to the young man who is purportedly the father, and that this is being brought out now because there was so much buzz around on various blogs that indeed Gov. Palin herself may not have been the mother of a Down syndrome child but it might have been the same daughter that was the mother of that child. Now all of this, as we were saying before, is [a] ridiculous sideshow in American politics that we shouldn't even be discussing, but the fact of the matter is, it's out there now. How do you think it's going to play?"


Interestingly, Gravel's successor in the Senate was Frank Murkowski, who as governor in 2006 lost the Republican primary to Palin. Gravel never faced Murkowski on the ballot, however, as he had lost his 1980 Democratic primary.