“You know the drill. Expose these folks to public view, release the liberal thugs on them, and then hope the public pressure or the unwanted attention scares them from supporting similar causes down the road.”
John Fund
National Review Online
3/19/2012
Forty years after his death, Saul Alinsky — the father of the community-organizing model that inspired both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — is more politically relevant than ever.
Leading conservatives attempt to tie the Obama administration to Alinsky’s radicalism, with Newt Gingrich declaring that Obama draws his “understanding of America” from “Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America.” For their part, liberals have scrambled to minimize Obama’s affinity for Alinsky and to sand over Alinsky’s sharp edges. A blogger at Britain’s Guardian newspaper claims that Alinsky was merely “what passes for a left-wing radical in American politics, agitating for better living conditions for the poor.” (Liberals have also largely ignored the fact that the subtitle of Hillary Clinton’s honors thesis at Wellesley was “An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”)
Somewhere between Gingrich’s exaggerations and the Left’s whitewash of Alinsky is an explanation of why so many followers of Barack Obama — along with the president himself — draw inspiration from a long-dead radical…
…In her new book on Obama, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor lifted a bit of the curtain on his past. She told the Texas Book Festival:
“The Obamas often don’t mingle freely — they often just stand behind the rope and reach out to shake hands — but he sees Jerry Kellman, his old community-organizing boss, and he is so happy to see him he reaches across and pulls him in. And Obama says, ‘I’m still organizing.’ It was a stunning moment and when [Kellman] told me the story, it had echoes of what Valerie Jarrett had told me once: ‘The senator still thinks of himself as a community organizer.’ . . . I think that plays into what will happen in the 2012 race.”
You can expect that the Obama 2012 campaign and allied groups will be filled with people deeply steeped in Rules for Radicals. That is good reason for conservatives to spend time studying Saul Alinsky. It also explains why liberals are so anxious to sugarcoat Alinsky and soft-pedal his influence on Team Obama.
Read the complete article at National Review Online.
H/T American Thinker , Mark Steyn fillets authoritarian mayors:
…Fund concludes:
You can expect that the Obama 2012 campaign and allied groups will be filled with people deeply steeped in Rules for Radicals. That is good reason for conservatives to spend time studying Saul Alinsky.
As R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. observes in his 2011 book The Death of Liberalism, (p. 161), “there have always been authoritarian currents in Progressivism, the New Deal and Liberalism.”
An understatement, perhaps, but painfully obvious when the mask comes off.
Update: Reward: $50,000 for ‘Khalidi Tape’ of Obama at Anti-Israel Gathering
Breitbart News hereby announces a $50,000 reward to whomever can provide the complete video recording of the 2003 farewell party for radical Palestinian academic and activist Rashid Khalidi, at which then-state senator Barack Obama spoke–and which the Los Angeles Times has refused to release since reporting the event in April 2008.
Update 3: Most important legacy of Obama’s gay marriage switch was freeing Dems to play the “bigot card”
…So long as Obama supported the traditional definition of marriage, Democratic politicians and support groups had to tread carefully in how far their rhetoric and actions went. Once Obama came out in support of gay marriage, Democrats were freed to accuse anyone and everyone who supports the traditional definition of marriage as bigoted and unworthy of a place in their jurisdictions.
Now the “bigot card” is on full display as a centerpiece of Democratic politics…
