From The Patriot

Benjamin Martin:”I’ve just been in the mind of a genius. Lord Cornwallis knows more about warfare then we could hope learn in a dozen lifetimes.”

John Billings:”Well thats cheerful news.”

I have just been in the mind of a genius. Saul Alinsky had an amazing understanding of effective tactics to bring about “change” and recorded the fundamentals of those tactics in his last book, Rules for Radicals. He was a major influence on at least two effective modern politicians on the Democrat side of the aisle: Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. Because President-elect Obama will be with us for a while, I thought I would read Alinsky’s book to get a glimpse into the mind and approach of President-elect Obama.

When someone is labeled a “radical”, there are pictures that come to mind. You picture sixty’s protests; hippies; Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground bombing buildings and terrorizing the country. But that isn’t what Alinsky was about. Yes, Alinsky was involved in violent or at least distasteful things. But he was far more practical about how to bring about change. He wanted things changed from the inside out.

Alinsky’s model was to use many organizers, who organize many differnet communities who join together in a coalition to bring about “change”. This quickly brings us back to President-elect Obama. We know that he listed as his big qualification for being President was that he had been a community organizer. Does this mean that he is connected to Alinsky? To answer this I turned to a New Republic article, The Agitator, that talks about his time as a community organizer. In partular is this passage after the break:

Not long after Obama arrived, he sat down for a cup of coffee in Hyde Park with a fellow organizer named Mike Kruglik. Obama’s work focused on helping poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side fight the city for things like job banks and asbestos removal. His teachers were schooled in a style of organizing devised by Saul Alinsky, the radical University of Chicago-trained social scientist. At the heart of the Alinsky method is the concept of “agitation”– making someone angry enough about the rotten state of his life that he agrees to take action to change it; or, as Alinsky himself described the job, to “rub raw the sores of discontent.”

On this particular evening, Kruglik was debriefing Obama about his work when a panhandler approached. Instead of ignoring the man, Obama confronted him. “Now, young man, is that really what you want to be about?” Obama demanded. “I mean, come on, don’t you want to be better than that? Let’s get yourself together.”

Kruglik remembers this episode as an example of why, in ten years of training organizers, Obama was the best student he ever had. He was a natural, the undisputed master of agitation, who could engage a room full of recruiting targets in a rapid-fire Socratic dialogue, nudging them to admit that they were not living up to their own standards. As with the panhandler, he could be aggressive and confrontational. With probing, sometimes personal questions, he would pinpoint the source of pain in their lives, tearing down their egos just enough before dangling a carrot of hope that they could make things better.

To understand the political instincts of President-elect Obama, we need to understand his political training at the feet of Alinsky.

Over the next few days I will post several observations of Alinsky’s world view and prescription for Community Organizers that we should be aware of as a President Obama begins his administration. Along the way, we will probably see some things that Republicans and conservatives should be doing over the next couple of years to regain their focus and effectiveness.