Thursday, September 18, 2008

GET OUT OF MY FACE, OBAMA!

Saul Alinsky would be so proud of Barack Obama.

In 1971, Saul Alinsky wrote an entertaining classic on grassroots organizing titled Rules for Radicals. Those who prefer cooperative tactics describe the book as out-of-date. Nevertheless, it provides some of the best advice on confrontational tactics. Alinsky begins this way:
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.

His “rules” derive from many successful campaigns where he helped poor people fighting power and privilege.

For Alinsky, organizing is the process of highlighting what is wrong and convincing people they can actually do something about it. The two are linked. If people feel they don’t have the power to change a bad situation, they stop thinking about it.

According to Alinsky, the organizer — especially a paid organizer from outside — must first overcome suspicion and establish credibility. Next the organizer must begin the task of agitating: rubbing resentments, fanning hostilities, and searching out controversy. This is necessary to get people to participate. An organizer has to attack apathy and disturb the prevailing patterns of complacent community life where people have simply come to accept a bad situation. Alinsky would say, “The first step in community organization is community disorganization.”

Through a process combining hope and resentment, the organizer tries to create a “mass army” that brings in as many recruits as possible from local organizations, churches, services groups, labor unions, corner gangs, and individuals.

Alinsky provides a collection of rules to guide the process. But he emphasizes these rules must be translated into real-life tactics that are fluid and responsive to the situation at hand.

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have. If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do.

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.
The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Rule 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy. “If your people aren’t having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.”

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. When Alinsky leaked word that large numbers of poor people were going to tie up the washrooms of O’Hare Airport, Chicago city authorities quickly agreed to act on a longstanding commitment to a ghetto organization. They imagined the mayhem as thousands of passengers poured off airplanes to discover every washroom occupied. Then they imagined the international embarrassment and the damage to the city’s reputation.

Rule 10: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. Avoid being trapped by an opponent or an interviewer who says, “Okay, what would you do?”

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

According to Alinsky, the main job of the organizer is to bait an opponent into reacting. “The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”

There is no doubt that Obama is following the rules. He's putting Alinsky's methods into action.

LAS VEGAS, (AP) -- Barack Obama sharpened his attacks on John McCain and mocked the Republican's recent calls for reform in two stops in Nevada on Wednesday after days of listening to nervous supporters fret about the Democrat's chances of taking the White House.

"Sen. McCain bragged about how as chairman of the Commerce Committee in the Senate, he had oversight of every part of the economy. Well, all I can say to Sen. McCain is, 'Nice job. Nice job,'" Obama said at a rally at a baseball stadium in Las Vegas. "Where is he getting these lines? The lobbyists running his campaign?"

Obama later added: "I'm not making this up, you can't make this up. It's like a 'Saturday Night Live' routine."

The feistier, more sarcastic tone came as worried Democrats urged Obama to get tougher and show more passion. Obama has tried to assure donors and voters that he's been schooled by Chicago politics.

There's Rule 5: "Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon."

The sarcastic, nasty Obama's guns are blazing.


"I'm skinny but I'm tough," he says.

I guess that's Rule 1: "Power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have."

He wants his opponents to think he's tough even though he's a twig, easily broken.


But many of his supporters are upset that polls show the race is pretty much even, despite Obama running against a Republican who used to brag that he voted 90 percent of the time with the unpopular President Bush. The economy is teetering, and the country is still at war, but seven weeks from Election Day the race is far from the slam-dunk that Democrats dreamed about.

The last sentence of that paragraph is so telling.

The nation's economic troubles and the country at war is what the Dems want to exploit to obtain political power. It's so twisted.

Country first? No way. Not with Obama. Not with his liberal Dem allies.


Obama's remarks Wednesday appeared to show new bite.

In a morning rally in the northern Nevada mining town of Elko, the Illinois senator derided McCain's response to Wall Street's meltdown.

"Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's president he'll take on — and I quote — 'the old boys network in Washington.' I'm not making this up," Obama said. "This is somebody who's been in Congress for 26 years, who put seven of the most powerful Washington lobbyists in charge of his campaign.

"And now he tells us that he's the one who's going to take on the old boys network," Obama said. "The old boys network. In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting. Come on."

Speaking of "old boys network," I wonder what Obama would call the Chicago political machine.

It gave birth to him. The machine owns him.

Here is a MUST READ.

Speaking of lobbyists, Obama is in their pocket, $63,300,000 as of August 18, 2008.


...In Elko, Obama tried to anticipate his critics and called on the crowd of about 1,500 to sharpen their elbows, too.

"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face," he said.

That's Rule 8: "Keep the pressure on."

Obama's telling his followers to not back down, to get in YOUR face.

Of all the rules in Alinsky's playbook, I think "Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it," is the one that best characterizes Obama's campaign and what he's about.

You see that in the merciless, personal attacks on Sarah Palin and in the painting of John McCain as a dishonorable man.

You see that rule put into action through the polarization, class warfare, and race baiting that are the hallmarks of the Obama campaign.

No question about it, Alinsky would be proud of Obama.

Did you know
Alinsky dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer?

Saul Alinsky shows his dark, mischievous sense of humor in his dedication to his own book, Rules for Radicals:
"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer."

Humorous? I don't think so.

What we're seeing from Obama is the incarnation of Alinsky, and it's not funny. It's not pretty at all.

Obama claims to be a transcendent figure. He's supposedly not politics as usual. He's different. He's change.

I'm not buying that tripe, and neither are millions and millions of other Americans.

Get out of my face, Obama.

Get out of my face.

2 comments:

Cindy K. said...

Excellent work.

Mary said...

Thanks, Cindy.

Obama can't have it both ways. He can't claim to be the agent of a new brand of politics and unity when he goes out there and incites his followers to get in people's faces.