Underneath a “Welcome to Camp Obama” banner, a trainer at Obama headquarters in Chicago is seen speaking next to a wipe board with the words “Saul Alinsky” scrawled across it.
Alinsky is the late Chicago socialist and street agitator who is considered the father of community organizing.
Another slide of a camp trainer identified as Mike Kruglik is equally telling. Kruglik happens to be the Alinsky disciple who first taught Obama hardball organizing tactics on the South Side. He was Obama’s boss in the ’80s. Kruglik now works for the Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation, which trains and deploys radicals across the country.
Kruglik once declared Obama “the undisputed master of agitation,” according to David Freddoso, author of the best-seller “The Case Against Barack Obama.”
Obama learned well from the master agitator. Alinsky taught future radicals that bad things are often done for the right reasons, love without power is sentimental mush, power must be taken, and all change comes about as a result of threat and pressure.
Obama calls his Alinskyite experience “the best education I ever had.”
Now he’s passing it on to his groupies. He recently told supporters in Nevada, a state that will be hotly contested, to sharpen their elbows in the final lap of the race. Confront Republicans, he said, and “get in their faces.”
“Be absolutely ruthless,” adds Camp Obama director Jocelyn Woodards, who leads the intensive two-day training course for campers in Chicago.
In the Alinsky model, organizing is code for agitating. For revolution. He had no patience for liberals who merely talked of change.
“Liberals protest,” he wrote in “Rules for Radicals,” while “radicals rebel.” Liberals become “indignant,” while “radicals become fighting mad and go into action.”
“Liberals give and take oral arguments,” Alinsky added. “Radicals give and take the hard, dirty, bitter way of life.”
Alinsky’s paragon of radicalism was Satan, to whom he dedicated the first edition of “Rules”: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”
Dirty street fighting is at the heart of Obama’s organizing. While he stands above the fray, his minions at ACORN are threatening, intimidating, confronting and even committing voter fraud. This is Alinsky’s end-justifies-means morality in action. Whatever it takes to win the revolution.
For more tactics from Saul Alinsky, including demonizing and ridiculing the “enemy,” read this in his own words.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In