How a Community Organizer Became President -- February 2009 Phyllis Schlafly Report

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How a Community Organizer Became President Community Organizing Continues

VOL. 42, NO. 7	P.O. BOX 618, ALTON, ILLINOIS 62002	FEBRUARY 2009

How a Community Organizer Became President Google Ads are provided by Google and are not selected or endorsed by Eagle Forum In the chapter on Communication, Alinsky teaches his organizers how to direct the thinking of his people while letting them think they are making their own decisions. The organizer should develop skills in the manipulative technique of asking "loaded questions designed to elicit particular responses and to steer the organization's decision-making process in the direction which the organizer prefers." The chapter called In the Beginning describes how to train the community organizer in how to make himself acceptable to the Have-Nots in the local community. "From the moment the organizer enters a community he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. Until he has developed that mass power base, he confronts no major issues." The organizer's "biggest job is to give the people the feeling that they can do something." The organizer's job is "to build confidence and hope in the idea of organization and thus in the people themselves: to win limited victories, each of which will build confidence." The organizer will learn that "Change comes from power, and power comes from organization." "The organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems," and "organizations must be based on many issues." The organizer "must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent." He can provoke class resentment by painting Wall Street as villains. The organizer "begins his 'trouble making' by stirring up these angers, frustrations, and resentments, and highlighting specific issues or grievances that heighten controversy." The organizer must remember that "Organizations need action as an individual needs oxygen. The cessation of action brings death to the organization." At the same time, "The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy.'" Alinsky reminds his organizers that "To attempt to operate on a good-will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet experienced." Alinsky's book is full of examples of issues and organizational victories from the decade of the 1960s (such as the Vietnam War, civil rights litigation, urban renewal, and campus riots) which are not meaningful to younger Americans today. However they emphasize his strategy that organizers must use current issues and "must be aware of the tremendous importance of understanding the part played by rationalization on a mass basis." In the chapter called Tactics, Alinsky reminds his trainees that power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself." He lists some of his recommended tactics: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." "Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions." "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." "Multiple issues mean constant action and life" for the cause. (Obama never harps on one issue as Hillary did with health care. His platform is packed with grievances from "economic justice" to "reproductive justice" to "environmental justice.") "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." Alinsky's advice was to "laugh at the enemy" to provoke "irrational anger." (Obama used the ridicule tactic on John McCain at a rally in Las Vegas. Attacking McCain's chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee, Obama sarcastically said, "Well, all I can say to Senator McCain is 'Nice job. Nice job.'") "A mass impression can be lasting and intimidating." (Obama moved his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention to a football stadium and bused in 55,000 supporters.) "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." "You can club them to death with their 'book' of rules and regulations." That means, taunt them every time they appear to violate their own principles, which Alinsky believes everybody does frequently. A leader may struggle toward a decision and weigh the merits and demerits of a situation, but he must convince the people that "their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil," even though that is a lie because there is "really only a 10 percent difference." Alinsky justifies this lie to achieve the transfer of power. Alinsky describes some of his successful mass demonstrations: Buying 100 tickets to a Rochester symphony concert for 100 blacks, feeding them lots of baked beans beforehand so that they had to get up and go to the restroom during the first musical selection. This created "a combination not only of noise but also of odor, what you might call natural stink bombs." He reminded his readers that there is nothing illegal about needing to rush to the restroom. Tying up all the restrooms at O'Hare Airport by having his demonstrators lock themselves in the toilet booths equipped with a book to read, and then staying there all day. Dropping wads of chewing gum all over the walks on a college campus. Paralyzing a bank by having 100 people show up at once with $5 or $10 to open a savings account (which they would then come back to close the following day). There is nothing illegal about this, but it created chaos for the bank. Alinsky called this "a middle-class guerrilla attack." Engaging in proxy fights with corporations. Alinsky reveals his total contempt for the Haves and their devotion to self interest. He says, "I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday." When Alinsky approached the end of his Rules for Radicals and projected future strategies in the chapter entitled The Way Ahead, he laid out his plan to go after "America's white middle class. That is where the power is." They are the "Have-a-Little, Want Mores." Alinsky boasts that, "With rare exceptions, our activists and radicals are products of and rebels against our middle-class society. . . . Our rebels have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class." Here is where Alinsky's hypocrisy and duplicity become obvious. He had trained his community organizers to adopt a "middle-class identity" and familiarity with their "values and problems" in order to organize his "own people." Now, realizing "the priceless value of his middle-class experience," they will "begin to dissect and examine that way of life as he never has before." "Everything now has a different meaning and purpose." Alinsky instructs his trainees to "return to the suburban scene of your middle class with its variety of organizations from PTAs to League of Women Voters, consumer groups, churches, and clubs. The job is to search out the leaders in these various activities, identify their major issues, find areas of common agreement, and excite their imagination with tactics that can introduce drama and adventure into the tedium of middle class life." And a word of Alinsky caution: "Start them easy, don't scare them off." When Alinsky's community organizer moves from organizing the "poor" to organizing the "middle class," he "discards the rhetoric that always says 'pig.' . . . He will view with strategic sensitivity the nature of middle-class behavior with its hangups over rudeness or aggressive, insulting, profane actions. All this and more must be grasped and used to radicalize parts of the middle class." (Obama never talks like an angry radical. He usually wears a coat and tie, and he speaks in calm, measured tones.) Community Organizing Continues Will the Alinsky strategies that nominated and elected Barack Obama President of the United States be put on the back burner for four years, lying dormant until they are needed to reelect him in 2012? Not likely. Those strategies are available right now to push through the radical legislation and gigantic spending programs that he promised his followers. The pro-Obama New York Times laid out the plan on its January 26 front page under the headline "Retooling a Grass-Roots Network To Serve a YouTube Presidency." Obama's staff has already started "transforming the YouTubing-Facebooking-Texting-Twittering grass-roots organization that put Mr. Obama in the White House into an instrument of government. That is something that Mr. Obama, who began his career as a community organizer, told aides was a top priority, even before he was elected." President Obama's staff has created a group, headquartered in the offices of the Democratic National Committee, called "Organizing for America." Its mission is to "redirect the campaign machinery into the service of broad changes in health care, environmental and fiscal policy. They envision an army of supporters talking, sending e-mail messages and texting to friends and neighbors as they try to mold public opinion." Three days after Obama was sworn in as President, an announcement video was sent to 13 million people. The Obama team understands very well that traditional methods of communicating with voters are being replaced by new channels built around social networking. In the 2008 campaign, liberals dominated conservatives by more than 10-to-1 on the Internet, and the Obama campaign exploited that advantage fully and profitably. This massive Internet advantage enabled Obama and leftists to raise ten times more money than conservatives over the Internet, and to create a climate of extreme bias in the media against conservative candidates. Sarah Palin was savaged on liberal blogs with little resistance from conservatives. This 21st Century use of Internet technology and new-media communication was reflected in Obama's truly incredible record of money-raising. He raised nearly $750 million for his presidential campaign. By contrast, in 2004, George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry together collected less than $650 million. For the general election, Obama had more than three times what John McCain had at his disposal, and Obama still had $30 million in the bank after the election. Obama's technology/Internet superiority continues. DailyKos.com, a liberal blog site, ranks 3,631 in daily traffic out of many millions of internet websites. This is far higher, often by a factor of 100, than conservative sites. Many other liberal websites also outrank conservative sites, such as Moveon.org, a website started a decade ago in defense of Clinton during his scandals. Previous Presidents recorded and released a radio speech every Saturday morning, but Obama instead records a video speech, then posts it on the White House website and YouTube where it can be picked up and forwarded to millions of followers who weren't listening to radio on Saturday mornings. His first speech was a sales talk for his $825 billion economic so-called stimulus package. By Sunday afternoon, more then 600,000 people had viewed it on YouTube. It is virtually impossible for a candidate to win when he is outspent 10-to-1 by the other side. It is essential that conservatives assert themselves on the Internet in order to regain competitiveness in both ideas and in money. Further Reading: "Social Justice"

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