More Echoes of Alinsky in the President
It’s funny, really.
Spend some time searching for archived articles of Barack Obama throughout the years, and you never know what you’re gonna find. But, interestingly enough, one common theme that always seems to spring up is variations of radical (and Communist) community organizer Saul Alinsky’s ideas and thoughts being shared by President Barack Obama.
For instance, in this bit of apparently opposition research for Hilary Clinton supporters posted to this Lefty website, Dear Leader echoes the pathos of Alinsky pretty much word for word. A 1990 Boston Globe article shares the details:
He says many of his friends were “street urchins,” and it was here, on the outskirts of Jakarta, that he says he became aware of the implications and realities of poverty, of “the gaps between the have’s and have-nots.”
My goodness. That is Alinsky 101. Here’s a refresher, from Rules for Radicals:
On top are the Haves with power, money, food, security, and luxury. They suffocate in their surpluses while the Have-Nots starve. Numerically the Haves have always been the fewest. The Haves want to keep things as they are and are opposed to change. Thermopolitically they are cold and determined to freeze the status quo.
On the bottom are the world’s Have-Nots. On the world scene they are by far the greatest in numbers. They are chained together by the common misery of poverty, rotten housing, disease, ignorance, political impotence, and despair; when they are employed their jobs pay the least and they are deprived in all areas basic to human growth.
And while Alinsky tried to say he wasn’t a Communist by adding an extra element to the Marxist dialectic, just replace the word bourgeoisie where you see “haves” and proletariat where you read “have-nots”. But remember, according to the mostly Leftist media, Alinsky was a heckuva guy, intent on helping the poor and underserved.
Or something.
Now, the next echo of Alinsky comes from this 2008 article from the Times of India about the President giving a speech to people of South Asian descent in San Francisco. We’re bordering on some silly territory, but my intent is not to take it that direction. Here are the President’s words from that 2008 speech:
Desis, say hello to Bharat Obama. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tickled his South Asian supporters at a fundraiser in San Francisco on Sunday using the colloquial Indian term to describe a native to claim that he too is a “ desi ”.
“Not only do I think I’m a desi , but I’m a desi ,” the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Obama as telling a mirthful crowd. “I’m a homeboy.”
Blech. While there’s another segment of anti-Obama folks who would take that and run in a completely different direction, I’m going to take it back to Alinsky. As has been noted in many places, for Alinsky, the effective radical is one who can be a chameleon:
If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair. If I were organizing in an orthodox Jewish community I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich, unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out.
As has been illustrated elsewhere, there is a noted difference each time President Obama is speaking to a particular group. For Latinos, he’ll roll his r’s. For blacks, he drops into a different speech pattern. For whites, he is the prim and proper President.
The perfect radical, according to Alinsky, is willing to tailor his message to his audience, willing to live within any framework in an attempt to advance his vision and increase his power. And also one who believes wholeheartedly in Alinsky’s repackaged dialectic of the Haves vs the Have-Nots.
Bellum letale.
