Saul Alinsky:The Evil Genius Behind Obama (2 page)

So, the union organizer builds a “power structure” first, before entering into a war between workers and management. The power structure here is a trade union capable of calling a strike that will close down the business until the economic demands of the trade union are met. “No one can negotiate without the power to negotiate,”
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Alinsky concluded, arguing that a community organizer must follow the example of the union organizer: the first job is to raise political consciousness by creating issues of economic unfairness in the minds of the workers; the second job is to create an organization – a trade union or a political party – through which the organizer can take actions that give the organization power, such as calling a strike or calling for a demonstration at City Hall. In other words, it was not enough to call for “change,” the job of an Alinsky organizer was to use class and race resentments to build an organization that could engage in meaningful political action. Alinsky admonished activists and radicals to organize the economically disadvantaged community so their “hope for change” could be realized through the meaningful action of power politics.

Alinsky berated the street radicals of the civil rights movement, charging the theatrics of their street protests and the physical danger inherent in calls to use violence undermined the cause. He famously said Yippie activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman couldn’t organize a luncheon, much less a revolution.
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Alinsky equally became especially uncomfortable as the methodology of the civil rights movement shifted from the nonviolent civil disobedience of Martin Luther King, first to the angry Stokely Carmichael cry for “Black Power,” and then to the anti-white hatred of Malcolm X in his most extreme embrace of Islam as a spokesman for the Black Muslims. For Alinsky, the attraction William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn of the SDS Weather Underground felt for bombs was reminiscent of the attraction World War I-era anarchists felt for bombs, and about as ineffective. In the final analysis, Alinsky taught community organization analytically, more as a social scientist would teach urban sociology.

Fundamentally, however, Alinsky only disagreed with Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and William Ayers on tactics, not on their radical ideology. “Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle class,” Alinsky wrote. “That is where the power is.”
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He taught the obvious: “When more than three-fourths of our people from both the point of view of economics and of their self-identification are middle class, it is obvious that their action or inaction will determine the direction of change.”
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For Alinsky, the “pragmatics of power” meant radicals needed “to realize the value of their middle-class experience,” so they could stop rejecting their middle-class identity to build “bridges of communication and unity over the gaps, generation, values.”
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Alinsky taught organizers to hide their true intentions in the words they spoke. Denying the truth or just plain lying were both acceptable tactics, as long as the cause advanced. He taught organizers to ridicule opponents when the arguments of their opponent could not be refuted by logic, evidence or argument. In the streets, Alinsky had learned the old Communist adage that derision would cause community audiences to laugh at their opponents, rather than listen to what their opponents were saying. Alinsky’s
Rules for Radicals
applied confrontation tactics to the goal of destroying political opponents, regardless of the truth or merit of their arguments. Consider, for instance, that Rule #1 is “Rule #13:
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
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The point was to pick a specific person whose views and actions could be vilified, ridiculed, and demonized. The point was to polarize the argument, such that liberals in the middle class and the news media would want to identify with the “unjust suffering” of the downtrodden, rather than the oppression of the wealthy, the business owners, the capitalists, and the politicians supporting the status quo.

Teaching that “an organizer can communicate only within the areas of experience of his audience,”
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Alinsky advised organizers to learn “the local legends, antidotes, values, idioms,”
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avoiding rhetoric foreign to the local culture, including “worn-out words” like “white racist,” “fascist pig,” and other radical terms which tend to identify the speaker as a “nut.” Instead, the Alinsky-trained organizer learned how to be “honest” by learning how to vocalize discontent, to mobilize the community from within. The essential technique demanded learning how to listen carefully enough so the organizer could use the words and language of the community itself to move the community in the direction the organizer wanted to go. In other words, listening itself was a tactic. Truthfully, the community organizer did not need to listen to the grievances of a community in order to embrace the economic struggle as if it were his or her own. Instead, the community organizer needed to listen to the grievances of a community in order to be more effective in manipulating the community. The goal was not to sympathize with economic suffering, but to utilize economic resentment so the community could be organized for effective actions in the political arena where power and the law of numbers would rule the day.

Fundamentally, Alinsky saw radicals such as himself and Obama as elitists by nature, in their assertion that the leftist social values they sought to pursue justified the use of tactics whose very nature was a lie. The last thing Alinsky wanted was for himself to be middle class. What he sought was to grab the power from the corporate and business elite he reviled. For Alinsky, the middle class was a pawn. As much as he disdained the middle class and wanted to overturn middle class identity and values, Alinsky was smart enough to realize he could only produce his desired “change” by convincing the middle class to side with him in their own destruction. Every bit as much as communists and socialists historically have felt disdain for the “useful idiots” of the liberal middle class they must court in order to gain power, Alinsky resented the middle class he needed to mobilize in order to transform the minority disadvantaged into a majority political power base supporting Alinsky’s goal of “change” – i.e., redistribution of income and wealth from the “haves” to the “have-nots.”

No matter how well intentioned Alinsky’s social methodology may have been, in the final analysis, there is no proof that redistributing income and wealth from today’s “have-nots” from today’s “haves” would accomplish anything but create more economically depressed people than was the case before an Alinsky-style revolution was implemented. Besides, what reason is there to be confident the “have-nots” of today would be as sympathetic with the “have-nots” of the future, once today’s “have-nots” were the beneficiaries of the redistributed income and transferred wealth?

Since President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed the Great Society in the 1960s, the United States has spent several trillion dollars on a wide range of social welfare transfer-payment programs, with little or no resulting reduction in poverty in America. Instead, the United States is on the verge of creating a permanent urban underclass plagued by teenage pregnancy, unwed mothers, children that drop out of school, and unemployable adults who have dropped out of the labor force. Famously, Charles Murray in his 1984 book
Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980
proved that poverty cannot be eliminated simply by providing the poor with money. Testing the proposition that to eliminate poverty “all we need to do is mail enough checks with enough money to enough people,” Murray noted that in the 1970s, the number of checks, the size of the checks, and the number of social welfare beneficiaries all increased. Yet, perversely, the poverty rate began to increase, not decrease.
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Obama Goes to School on Alinsky

When preparing to run for president, Obama did not openly proclaim his association with Saul Alinsky. In his 442-page autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
,
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Obama does not mention Alinsky even once, despite the many pages he devotes to describing in detail the Alinsky-styled job that brought him to Chicago.

In
Dreams from My Father
, Obama told the story of how in 1985, he responded to a job advertisement he saw in the newspaper. According to the story Obama tells, Marty Kaufman, Obama’s fictional name for Jerry Kellman, saw Obama’s job application and responded. Obama said Kellman telephoned him and explained he’d started an organizing drive in Chicago and was looking to hire a trainee. The Calumet Community Religious Conference was trying “to convert the black churches of Chicago’s South Side into agents of social change,” and was looking for a community organizer to run the inner-city arm of the project, the Developing Communities Project, or DCP.
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When Kellman showed up in New York to interview Obama, he offered Obama a job on the spot. The job paid $12,000 a year plus a $2,000 car allowance, enough for an old beat-up automobile. Still, Obama said yes and as a 24-year-old he packed up his meager belongings and head off from the Big Apple to the Windy City.

The story of how he got the job that Obama tells in
Dreams from My Father
has a feel of being too lucky to be true. In the
Audacity of Hope
, Obama mentions in passing that in 1984 he had just graduated from college and was working as a community organizer out of the Harlem campus of the City College of New York.
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This is a job Obama does not mention in his autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
. In the 1980s, Kellman was well known as a Saul Alinsky-trained community organizer. Writing an article entitled “The Agitator” in The New Republic, Ryan Lizza explained Kellman paid a small fortune to run the ad in the
New York Times
. Kellerman was in search of an African-American to help him break through the barriers he was facing in the Chicago African-American South Side. “Kellman and his colleagues couldn’t break through,” Lizza wrote. “Because he and his fellow organizers, Mike Kruglik and Gregory Galluzzo, where white (and two of the three were Jewish), the black pastors viewed them with suspicion and, in some cases, outright disdain.”
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Obama explained in
Dreams from My Father
that he knew Kellman was an experienced organizer, but in the autobiography Obama left out a critical detail: Kellman’s organization was a Saul Alinsky organization. Alsinski died in 1972, more than a decade before Obama moved to Chicago to learn his methods. But since his early efforts to organize the Chicago’s meatpacking Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s, Alinsky was the national figure widely known defined community organization tactics for several generations of American leftists to follow, including Obama. For some three decades before Obama was born, Alinsky had been defining the political meaning of “change” for those radicals he first called forth in his classic 1946 book,
Reveille for Radicals
.
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Even then Alinsky was writing that, “Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action – by using power.”
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In addition to receiving instruction from experienced Alinsky organizers in Chicago including Kellman and his associate Mike Kruglik, who Obama discusses in his autobiography, Obama went to school on Alinsky. Obama advanced to the point where he was able to teach in a classroom setting new organizers associated with the Gamaliel Foundation and the Industrial Areas Foundations, both of which “organize community groups, primarily religious groups, and trace their lineage to Saul Alinsky.”
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Photographs document Obama at a classroom chalkboard drawing his version of the famous Alinsky “power structure schematic,” in which various establishment “power structures” – such as corporations, banks, utilities, and government – are identified in a “power analysis” diagrams to show how relationships among these power structures are developed on a “self-interest” that is best defined by money.

In 1985, Kellman got the $25,000 he needed to hire Obama from Jean Rudd at the Woods Fund, a Chicago foundation that gives grants for community organizing.
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In 1995, when Obama decided to run for the Illinois state senate, he returned to his old friend, Jean Rudd, to ask for help. “That’s a switch,” Rudd told him, surprised Obama wanted to leave community organizing. “Oh, no,” Obama said, “I’m going to use the same skills as a community organizer.” The comment confirmed Obama was staying in community organizing. The only change was his shift to go into politics where he believed he could to organize communities on a grand scale. In a 1995 interview with the
Chicago Reader
, Obama asked, “What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them? As an elected public official, for instance, I could bring church and community leaders together easier than I could as a community organizer or lawyer.”
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How successful Obama was as a community organizer in Chicago is debatable. Rep. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther, who in 2000 defeated Obama for Congress, claims Obama exaggerates the limited success he had working in Chicago as a community organizer. Rush, for instance, has charged that activist Hazel Johnson discovered the asbestos in the Altgeld Gardens housing project, long before Obama latched onto the issue and made it a major part of the community organizing story he told about himself in
Dreams from My Father
.
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