AlinskyDefeater's Blog

An article last week in Investors.com entitled, “CNN Turns Blind Eye to Obama-Alinsky Ties” turns the spotlight on Main Stream Media’s latest attempt to exculpate Barack Obama from his sketchy past. In the article, the author points out that CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien hosted a segment that attempted to put some daylight between President Obama, and community agitator Saul Alinsky. Obama’s links to Alinsky are unmistakable to anyone looking with an open mind, but O’Brien managed to conclude that Newt Gingrich was out of line when he said, “[President Obama] will represent Saul Alinsky (and) European socialism”. In fact, O’Brien’s astounding conclusion was that “President Obama has never said that he was influenced by Alinsky”.

This is the typical parsing of words we get from a Liberal media hell-bent on keeping Obama in office. I’m reasonably certain that there exists no quote from Obama where he claims to have been influenced by Saul Alinsky, but O’Brien was parsing the words to infer that because Obama has never outright stated that Saul Alinsky was an influence on his life, that means that it must not be true. As the author of the article says, “Of course he hasn’t. He’s not stupid enough to publicly link himself to a socialist.”

So, is there evidence that Obama was influenced by Alinsky? Frankly, that anyone would even question this at this point is a little shocking. Let’s examine just a little of the evidence that points to Alinsky’s influence on Barack Obama.

The author of the article offers the following links between Alinsky and Obama:

• In 1988, Obama even wrote a chapter for the book “After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois,” in which he lamented organizers’ “lack of power” in implementing change.

• Gamaliel board member John McKnight, a hard-core student of Alinsky, penned a letter for Obama to help him get into Harvard Law School.

• Obama took a break from his Harvard studies to travel to Los Angeles for eight days of intense training at Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, a station of the cross for acolytes.

• In turn, he trained other community organizers in Alinsky agitation tactics.

• Obama also taught Alinsky’s “Power Analysis” methods at the University of Chicago.

• During the presidential campaign, Obama hired one of his Gamaliel mentors, Mike Kruglik, to train young campaign workers in Alinsky tactics at “Camp Obama,” a school set up at Obama headquarters in Chicago. The tactics helped Obama capture the youth vote like no other president before him.

• Power would no longer be an issue, as Obama infiltrated the highest echelon of the political establishment — the White House — fulfilling Alinsky’s vision of a new “vanguard” of coat-and-tie radicals who “work inside the system” to change the system.

• After the election, his other Gamaliel mentor, Jerry Kellman (who hired him and whose identity Obama disguised in his memoir), helped the Obama administration establish Organizing for America, which mobilizes young supporters to agitate for Obama’s legislative agenda using “Rules for Radicals.”

This is some pretty compelling evidence on its own, but there is much more. I will delve into this in more detail in my upcoming book Rules for Radicals Defeated, A Practical Guide to Recognize, Understand, and Defeat The Alinsky Model, but let me just offer a bit more evidence of the Obama-Alinsky connection here.

David Horowitz

If you’re not familiar with David Horowitz, I would recommend that you get familiar with him, and especially with his Frontpagemag.com and Discover the Networks. The latter is an amalgamation of the interconnectedness of Leftists, Liberals, Communists and others that form a web of treachery that threatens the freedom of America.

Horowitz was raised by Communist parents and was a devout Leftist until the 1980’s. He is now one of the preeminent Conservative authors and speakers in the country.

Most know by now that Hillary Clinton wrote her college thesis on The Alinsky Model. It is entitled, “THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT . . .” An Analysis of the Alinsky Model and you can read it here. Obama’s link to Alinsky is not as direct as that of Ms. Clinton, but it is, if anything, a much stronger connection than Hillary’s.  In Horowitz’ Discover the Networks article on Saul Alinskyauthor John

Hillary Clinton

Perazzo says,

Unlike Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama never personally met Saul Alinsky. By the time Alinsky died in 1972, Obama was only 11 years old. But as a young man, he became a master practitioner of Alinsky’s methods. In 1985 a small group of 20-odd churches in Chicago offered Obama a job helping residents of poor, predominantly black, Far South Side neighborhoods. Accepting that opportunity, Obama became Director of the Developing Communities Project, where he worked for the next three years on initiatives that ranged from job training to school reform to hazardous waste cleanup. David Freddoso, author of the 2008 book The Case Against Barack Obama, summarizes Obama’s community-organizing efforts as follows:

“He pursued manifestly worthy goals; protecting people from asbestos in government housing projects is obviously a good thing and a responsibility of the government that built them. But [in every case except one] the proposed solution to every problem on the South Side was a distribution of government funds …”

Three of Obama’s mentors in Chicago were trained at the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation. (The Developing Communities Project itself was an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation, whose modus operandi for the creation of “a more just and democratic society” is rooted firmly in the Alinsky method.)

One of Obama’s early mentors in the Alinsky method, Mike Kruglik, would later say the following about Obama:

“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.”

For several years, Obama himself taught workshops on the Alinsky method. Also, beginning in the mid-1980s, Obama worked with ACORN, the Alinskyite grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley‘s National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).

In a 2007 Washington Post article authored by Peter Slevin entitled, “For Clinton and Obama, a Common Ideological Touchstone”, there are several nuggets about Obama’s Alinsky ties. Slevin says,

Obama stepped into the Alinsky tradition after deciding “mainly on impulse,” he has said, at age 21 to become a community organizer. His passion ran to romantic visions of the civil rights struggle.

“He wanted to make that kind of contribution and didn’t know how to do it,” said Gerald Kellman, who hired Obama. “There’s that side of him that’s strongly idealistic, very much a dreamer, and this kind of work attracts that kind of person. It isn’t just that we’re going to change things, but we’re going to change things from the grass roots.”

Obama spent three roller-coaster years trying to build a new source of power in the Altgeld Gardens housing project and the Roseland community, maneuvering among neighbors, church leaders and politicians who did not always welcome the encounters.

And,

The Alinsky method, which Obama taught long afterward, is centered on one-on-one conversations. The organizer’s task is to draw out people’s stories, listening for their goals and ambitions — “the stuff that makes them tick,” one of his teachers told him. There he would find the self-interest that would spark activism.

Fellow community organizer Madeline Talbott said Obama mastered the approach. She remembers a successful 1992 voter-registration drive that he ran for Project Vote. [Emphasis Added]

As you can see from my previous entry, “White House Spokesman Asked About Obama’s Ties to Saul Alinsky”, even when confronted head on about Obama’s ties to Alinsky Jay Carney is unable to deny the connection, but instead says the President has been influenced by a lot of people.

If you familiarize yourself with the Alinsky Tactics as explained on this blog, and in other places, you can’t miss the almost constant use of Alinsky tactics by Barack Obama.

In yet another post on this blog, you can see Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention discussing when she and Barack first met. His words were straight from Rules for Radicals.

If that’s not enough to convince you that Obama is heavily influenced by Saul Alinsky, perhaps you would believe Saul Alinsky’s son, L. David Alinsky. He wrote for Boston.com,

Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.

I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.

There is no serious doubt that Barack Obama has been heavily influenced by Saul Alinsky. The Main Stream Media is going to have to work very hard to discredit so many connections corroborated by so many sources. I have no doubt that they will give it their best effort. After all, how often do you hear about Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko, and Bill Ayers anymore?